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For all those who don't understand the above, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a book called Red Mars , which is about the colonization of Mars. Even world famous author Arthur C. Clarke says: "The best book on the colonization of mars that has ever been written..." (The quote is on the cover). There are two books that follow up on Red Mars, namely, Blue Mars , and Green Mars.

along the lines of "you fscking idot don't try that at home". Well, that's totally against the hacker spirit of learning how to do it yourself, hopefully without killing yourself.

I've wired up several additional circuits in my home and my office and it's not that hard. All I needed was a little common sense, a copy of the Ugly's book, and the local home depot. In your case though, if the main drop coming in from the pole is bad, you need to have the power company turn off your service drop so you can replace it.

If the main lines coming in are safely insulated and do not need to be replaced, then what you can do is shut off the main breaker, unscrew all the circuits coming in to the individual breakers, and replace all your house wiring and perhaps all the breakers as well. This is not a job for the faint of heart, but I wouldn't say it's incredibly skill-intensive. Just takes some patience to wire up all that stuff and not slip with your hand/screwdriver and hit the main lugs. If they're exposed where they connect to the main breaker, then you might want to cover them up with cardboard and tape while you're working.

Oh, and don't blame me if you kill yourself. I'm not an electrician - an electrician would tell you to hire an electrician. I'm just telling you where *I* would start.

Amazon: $27.97
Barne$ and Noble 37.95

Thought i'd let you know ...
B0mbtruck, one base at a time

Got any evidence to back up your claim?

I've never heard of any such studies, and a few quick google searches turn nothing up. Furthermore, a lot of the points mentioned sound very suspicious.

They've improved intelligence by nearly 40%? Measured how? We can't even come uip with a good system for measuring human intelligence, yet you expect me to believe they can assign a precise numerical figure to how much smarter these supposed apes are?

they are unable to develop more advanced behavious such as speach and the concept of friendship.

Give me a break. First of all, apes are already capable of developing the advanced behavior of speach. Or rather, the advanced behavior of language. I'm sure you've heard of apes that have been tought sign language? They're certainly not very good at it, but they are clearly communicating in a very simple way using language.

The reason they haven't developed verbal speach is because they don't have the physical ability to produce the same sounds tha humans can. Breeding apes for intelligence won't ever produce a specimen that is able to speak english or any other human lanaguge, nor would any scientist ever expect it to.

As for friendship, there are pleanty of cases of animals showing friendship for others. Both in primates and in other species. Perhaps you've heard of cats and dogs? About 60 seconds of websearching was enough to find evidence that friendship among normal priamtes has already documented and researched by anthropologists.

And last and least, take a look at this person's posting history.

One of these is the presence of dark matter - weakly-interacting subatomic particles that even now are (most probably) streaming through your body at the rate of millions per second. We have the technology, now, to search for these, and if we find them (give it a few years) - score another one for the model.

This is just one example - cosmology and the dark energy being extremely active areas of current research, there are in fact dozens of research projects under way to test the predictions and assumptions of the Concordance Model. Any one of these could disprove the theories and send everyone back to the drawing board - and our conclusions would be subject to revision in that case.

In the end, of course, we cannot know the fate of the universe until we get there - we can only give it our best guess. But, again, we can't know that Pluto will actually complete its full 250-year orbit, either, until it actually does; we can only give it our best guess.

So I think the analogy is quite apropos.

-renard

Feynman discusses, and refutes, a similar theory of gravity in The Character of Physical Law .

If I recall correctly it is in the chapter where he establishes why physical law must be expressed in terms of equations. Common sense ideas like the one you mentioned are tempting, but don't seem to fit the facts we know.

You are right. BN generally is more expensive.

BN: $29.95
Amazon : $20.97

Actually, the CIA can be blamed for not thinking about what would happen after they secretly supplied hundreds of millions of dollars in arms and training to the radically Islamic groups in Afghanistan.

Barnes and noble: $35.99
Amazon: $31.49

There are several Mars related documentaries available from the standard movie outlets.

"Mars - The Red Planet Collection" is one that I personally recommend. It has two programs, on one each side of the DVD, and is seemingly suitable for young children. My 12 year old daughter sat through both programs then immediately asked where my old telescope was. Speaking of which, a telescope is a great idea to enhance the Mars experience.

There's also the long forgotten Mars Pathfinder" site with fantastic photos of the surface. CD-ROM's may still be available of the site. The Planetary Society is another good online reference site.

Sure movies are entertaining, but this is an opportunity to educate your youngsters on a facinating subject.

This wouldn't be a proper comment about Mars reference materials without plugging The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin. It's probably a bit too technical for a 10 year old, but still a facinating argument for settling Mars.

Well its not Mars but does that really matter if the audience is under 10? As I recall, Gumby gets taken prisoner by the moon people...

Gumby's Trip to the Moon

This oldie-but-goodie was an intelectual break through for me. It consists of three 1966 Asimov texts in one volume. The three books, "Motion, Sound and Heat", "Light, Magnatism and Electricity", and "The Electron, Proton and Neutron", were put into one volume as "Understanding Physics" in 1993 by Barnes and Nobel. I read it myself about 1995 because it showed up on the bargain rack at about $5 for the hardback. It is still only $9.98 from their web site (see link above).

The book reads chronologicaly from ancient Greece through the sixties and show how we came to believe and/or prove what we know of these subjects. In a chapter on the "Ether" and the Michalson-Morely experiment, I had in my mid-thirties the "Aha!" moment I never had in school about General Relativity. Also particularly valuable to me was the description of exactly how Mendelev arrived at the periodic table, and how that lead us to predict the properties of elements we hadn't even discovered yet! This book was specifically written for non-scientists who wanted to know some of the big ideas that were driving the discussion of the day, and it has Asimov's quality writing and historical perspective to make it very readable.

I say "we" and "us" because Asmimov wrote of how the human race, not just and individual, devised ways of thinking and investigating that lead to thing no one individual could have dreamed of. Anyway, its my favorite "science" book, and I highly recommend it.

Mathematics: A Human Endeavor, Harold R. Jacobs

Most Dover publications are available directly through Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

I just remembered another.

Proofs from the Book

by Martin Aigner, Gunter Ziegler, Gunter M. Ziegler, and Paul Erdos(In spirit)

The book goes through artistic proofs in many areas of mathematics. Proofs from the Book shows that math is beautiful if we take the time to find simple explainations with ingenius arguments.

The Mathematical Universe:

by William Dunham

It was the first math book I read in high school and I loved it. It is available for $19.95 at www.bn.com It covers a broad area of mathematics with 26 chapters from Arithmatic to Z(The complex plane). Along the way it talks about Riemann, Newton, Euler, Gauss, and many others. Also, it talks about some of the famous problems. Great book.

He's also a big fat idiotaccording to Al Franken.

...the more popular current versions that have passed through multiple interpretations through multiple cultural lenses.

The New International Version dates from 1978, and many consider it to be very good. The updated New American Standard was originally done in 1971, but was updated as recently as 1995. Both are "from scratch" translations from the most reliable texts currently available, so neither has passed through "multiple cultural lenses". And I'd say the NIV is the most popular current translation (for Protestants, anyway), so your assertion is incorrect.

You can find information on other modern translations at Zondervan's site.

Interpretation of any centuries-old work is difficult, and involves two phases. First is exegesis, the careful, systematic study of the Scripture to discover the original, intended meaning. That is, what was the original writer attempting to say to the original audience? This is where better understanding of the source language and the culture at the time of writing is most helpful.

The second phase is hermeneutics, the contemptorary relevance of ancient texts. That is, given the original, intended meaning of this passage, what does it mean to me, today?

An excellent book discussing proper exegesis and hermeneutics, looking book-by-book at each literary type in the Bible is How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, by Stuart and Fee. I highly recommend it for those interested in the subject.

SQL is one of the few languages I would argue actually does *not* need a book.

I agree at bottom with this statement. As a declarative, rather than procedural, language, for the basics SQL does not REALLY need a book.

However, just as in Perl, TMTOWTDI. And often several of those ways, depending on the RDBMS you are using, and, usually more importantly, on the data themselves, are FAR, FAR worse than many of the other ways. That's why you need a good book, both on the principles of SQL (I highly recommend Joe Celko's SQL For Smarties), and an RDBMS-specific book as well. I use Oracle, and my recommendations in this area are Mastering Oracle SQL by Mishra and Beaulieu, and the Oracle SQL Tuning Pocket Reference by Mark Gurry.

Brian Bergeron gives a fairly decent treatment of the whole data loss issue in his book Dark Ages II: When the Digital Data Die . Although, this could be a lot of hysteria over nothing. As I recall in Asimov's Foundation's Edge, Trevize comes across some ancient computers, and they just fire up and start working beautifully right away after centuries of disuse. Heheh, if only this were the case. The hard drive on the HP I got last Christmas already crapped out.

There must have been some case law that expanded the definition of fair use beyond what they refer to. Perhaps Sony vs. Betamax? Anybody know?

There are hundreds of cases on this. Probably dozens in the Supreme Court alone, not to mention the appeals courts and trial courts. The question "What is fair use" has been the subject of thousands of journal articles and more than a few books (BN finds 18 that have fair use right in the title).

The DOJ guys didn't do too badly for a sub-one-page answer. Also, we expected them to be a little conservative, right? They had to be expecting that someone would carry a printout into court and say, "but Your Honor, the DOJ told me I was making a fair use."

Another slashdotter helpfully point out 17 U.S.C. Sec. 107, which is the right place to start, but fair use was created by judges in court cases years before 1976, when 107 was written. They wrote 107 in an attempt to bring some order to the fair use doctrine, which was confused even then. It helped, some, but courts still have to decide whether the use you're making is a fair one. Sony v BetaMax was 1984, but Sec. 107 has been amended since then and, as I mentioned, there have been many other cases as well.

I think the plan is important in the sense that the it gives members of the community an idea of what's going to happen who haven't been following it that close.

As far as delving into the guts, yes there is a book about the innards of perl5 Extending and Embedding Perl. A good read actually. I myself am looking forward to a refactored implementation. perl5 isn't too pretty inside the bowels.

All we need is that and a source of cheap limitless energy and maybe we'll be ready to try a real Communist system, a la Voyage From Yesteryear.

Yeah, I just picked up the Java Developers Guide to Eclipse (non-kickback BN.com link) and I liked it more than "Eclipse In Action"... it just seemed to cover more stuff.

As far as developing standalone SWT/JFace applications, you need a platform-specific shared library along with a platform-specific JAR file for SWT. Luckily, now the good people over at the Eclipse project have a separatly packaged SWT download, so you don't have to worry about packaging it yourself, or you can just point people there to download it.

JFace doesn't have a separate package (yet...). Personally, I think JFace still needs a little work... even though it does offer a lot of nice wrappers for handling SWT trees, tables, menus, etc. there is still a lot of Eclipse or IDE specific functionality in there that shouldn't be in a simple SWT MVC wrapper library.

It is a damn confusing name. Eleven wouldn't be much better, so I say skip to twelve.

when I see a big mac I feel like barfing . Seriosuly I have gotten food posiniong at mcdonalds so many times

And #5 is clearly The Thompson Twins. How could any geek over 30 miss that?

or, maybe the title has something to do with this book...

No, I'm sure you're right, they just picked a few random german-sounding words out of the air.

The answer is... yup!
Students' Solution manual is $37.75. A bit steep for a student, I know... (yes, I've been there before too).

I'm curious - which one are you? A moocher? Or a looter? if you don't get the reference

Let's not forget Mr. Rheingold's old classic about the origins of computer technology/culture.

Structure? We don't need no steenking structure.

Anything beyond an AI Army of One will be unable to come up with a sufficiently complex Concept-Fiber Theory of Mind to start coding True AI or Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI) in JavaScript for teaching AI and in Forth for robots.

A minor problem with the sole-source, lone-inventor Organizational Model for Open Source is that funding is almost impossible to obtain, unless you get your project listed in the Free Software Donation Directory or you write a book about your Open Source software. Even then, the sheeple will hound you as a crackpot, a 'Net-loon or a crank, with the result that even here on SlashDot the vicious malcontents will take up the cry and none of the world-famous Slashdot book reviewers will dare to write a reasonable, mind-opening review of your book, with the result that you will fall off the edge of the Open Source world into oblivion, but it won't matter what has happened to your Army of One, because your Open Source software will have advanced the State of the Art.

At my work, we develop for a smattering of platforms, ranging from Linux, MacOS X and Cygwin to Solaris, IRIX, and a plethora of custom-built supercomputers. It's all done using C++ and MPI. MPI is a standard that specifies how nodes communicate with each other, and what methods/functions are called to do this. MPICH is an implementation put out by Arlington National Labs. LAM is another implementation, put out by Indiana University. LAM is a much nicer implementation IMO, but it's not available on quite as many platforms.

I would recommend these two books: How to Build a Beowulf and High-Performance Computing.

Bottom line: If you have computationally intensive calculations to do, beowulf clusters are a cheap alternative to pricey supercomputers. But if you've just heard they're cool but don't have anything to do with one, it's probably not worth it, as applications have to be specifically (re)written to take advantage of a cluster, they don't get automagically faster.

At my work, we develop for a smattering of platforms, ranging from Linux, MacOS X and Cygwin to Solaris, IRIX, and a plethora of custom-built supercomputers. It's all done using C++ and MPI. MPI is a standard that specifies how nodes communicate with each other, and what methods/functions are called to do this. MPICH is an implementation put out by Arlington National Labs. LAM is another implementation, put out by Indiana University. LAM is a much nicer implementation IMO, but it's not available on quite as many platforms.

I would recommend these two books: How to Build a Beowulf and High-Performance Computing.

Bottom line: If you have computationally intensive calculations to do, beowulf clusters are a cheap alternative to pricey supercomputers. But if you've just heard they're cool but don't have anything to do with one, it's probably not worth it, as applications have to be specifically (re)written to take advantage of a cluster, they don't get automagically faster.

The only major reason for the space program of the 60's that Amercians are rightly proud of was...in one word...Sputnik! One of the great causes of the malaise our manned space program is suffering from is a syndrome I think of as "political culpibility".

In other words, no Congressman/Congresswoman is going to push an untried ambitious technological experiment. Such an experiment could well cost the taxpayers a shit-ton of money. If the experiment fails, that money is seen as lost into the NASA sinkhole with absolutely no benefit derived (at least from the point of view of politics, not that of the scientific community). Add to that the potential for loss of human life on manned missions, and what you end up with is a politcal hot-potato that no elected official will want to touch. That's why promising technologies like the Solar Sail are only now becoming realities with the aid of the European Space Agency.

Of course every NASA technology, dicey as it is by nature, was untried at some point. It's my opinion that the political wherewithal (vis a vis space) only surfaces when there is an external (read:military) threat. That it's a powerful, and ideologically opposed nation like China should, ideally, be just the ticket to fuel the ambitions of our elected officials. It's really the classic Zero Sum Game as originally described by John Von Neuman and later applied to social theory by Robert Wright.

Always left out is the vastly underrated John Varley and his amazing first novel, The Ophuichi Hotline. One of the first of this style of "Clone Mysteries" it sets the stage for the rest of his "Eight Worlds" universe which explores many of the issues the review says Morgan only touches on.

I'm curious to know if anyone's ever read both their work, and could compare.

The story was in Welcome to the Monkey House, although the title of the story escapes me right now. It's a great collection of short stories by a very talented author - pick it up if you have a chance.

Although i greatly enjoy Vernor Vinge's work (I would strongly recoment reading A Fire Upon the Deep first, although it's not neccessary) this book did have one quirk that really pissed me off. When a cure was discovered, all the slaves were freed, and the technology was then treated as anathema. They believed that the technology was so evil that they should just get rid of it.

Say what?

I agree, turning people into mental slaves is a horrible thing, and taking a week(?) or more to induce or cure the state made it not super practical for anything else. But saying that since one use for it is bad, the entire technology should be outlawed? That seems an odd view for someone who supports science to take.

If this technology existed and research was continued, the up and down time might be reduced significantly. Even if not, i could probably sign a contract with a company that i would spend a week undergoing the treatment, work for them for a month, spend a week being returned to normal, and then spend several months off, yet get paid as if i was working the whole time. I'd be perfectly happy with such an arangement, and i bet a lot of other people would too.

Obviously this technology in this article seems to be the exact opposite. Warm up time seems to be measured in minutes. If it is further developed, it would be quite feasible to put this thing on when you got into work, work for five or six hours, then take it off and go home again, yet have gotten in several days worth of work compared to normal conditions.

The reason umpires don't want these machines on the field is that they make a KILLING doing their job.

And they deserve it too. Being a good official is really, really, really hard. I know first hand because I've been an official (different sport but same deal) for a number of years. Major league officials show as much skill as the athletes do. I know because I've been a division 1 college athlete (yes a few of us read slashdot believe it or not) and an official too.

It is damn hard to know all the rules of a game, have them on instant recall, apply them to the situation at hand, and do so correctly and without pissing anyone off. If you do your job right, no one notices you and if you do get noticed you get screamed at, usually by some halfwit who has never picked up a rule book in their life.

It annoys the hell out of me when I see some twit complaining about officials "trying to determine the outcome". Let me get out the cluebat. NO official I have ever met (and that is a LOT of officials) would ever try to determine the outcome of a game. We really don't care who wins. We just want to have a fair contest and really prefer it when one team kicks the crap out the other. Less chance of anyone getting their panties in a bunch over a *game*. If you don't take my word for it, read anything by Ron Luciano and you might get the idea. The only thing any official wants is for the game to get over with as quickly and fairly as possible. That's it.

As for the measuring equipment being used. As an official I don't really have a problem with it being used as an evaluation tool. Most officials would welcome a tool to make them better at their job. I would however have a problem with it being used in a game I was officiating. No official wants to be second guessed because it undermines our ability to keep control of a game. People start becoming unnecessarily rough, unsportsmanlike, and generally begin to behave like cretins when they think they have a right to question the judgement of the officials. (This isn't a supposition of mine, I've seen it happen countless times)

Now there are problems when the officials in some sports (basketball is notorious for this) start calling the game differently depending on the situation instead of how the rulebook specifies. That's a problem. But most officials at a high level do a very good job at what is a very difficult job. If they get paid well to do it, believe me, they've earned it.

I would strongly recommend Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web, by Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos. Despite the fact that this book is a couple of years old, it's written by a couple of the guys who designed the original CSS spec, and really gives a terrific overview of the language, example layouts, and strong reference. It's fairly platform-agnostic, and as such concentrates on what works in CSS rather than what doesn't work in certain browsers. As the standards compliance of new browsers improves, this book gets better and better.

Learn CSS from this book, then for those pesky browsers, use the Web for the timely info (bug charts, hacks, etc.)

No. You're correct that, because of the curve of nuclear binding energy, you can't produce anything more massive than iron through fusion. But that doesn't mean heavier elements than iron come from the Big Bang. In fact, atoms heavier than carbon cannot be produced through Big Bang nucleosynthesis; H through C is all that's around when the first generation of stars form. Elements heavier than iron are produced in high-energy nuclear reactions that occur during supernovae. This is standard contemporary astrophysics, from any current textbook.

For an overview of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, see e.g. The Early Universe by Kolb and Turner, or Cosmological Physics by John Peacock. Pitched at a lower level, try Joe Silk's The Big Bang . For more general descriptions of nucleosynthesis in stars and supernovae, see e.g. Harwit's Astrophysical Concepts or Bowers and Deeming's Astrophysics, Vol. I: Stars .

No. You're correct that, because of the curve of nuclear binding energy, you can't produce anything more massive than iron through fusion. But that doesn't mean heavier elements than iron come from the Big Bang. In fact, atoms heavier than carbon cannot be produced through Big Bang nucleosynthesis; H through C is all that's around when the first generation of stars form. Elements heavier than iron are produced in high-energy nuclear reactions that occur during supernovae. This is standard contemporary astrophysics, from any current textbook.

For an overview of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, see e.g. The Early Universe by Kolb and Turner, or Cosmological Physics by John Peacock. Pitched at a lower level, try Joe Silk's The Big Bang . For more general descriptions of nucleosynthesis in stars and supernovae, see e.g. Harwit's Astrophysical Concepts or Bowers and Deeming's Astrophysics, Vol. I: Stars .

No. You're correct that, because of the curve of nuclear binding energy, you can't produce anything more massive than iron through fusion. But that doesn't mean heavier elements than iron come from the Big Bang. In fact, atoms heavier than carbon cannot be produced through Big Bang nucleosynthesis; H through C is all that's around when the first generation of stars form. Elements heavier than iron are produced in high-energy nuclear reactions that occur during supernovae. This is standard contemporary astrophysics, from any current textbook.

For an overview of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, see e.g. The Early Universe by Kolb and Turner, or Cosmological Physics by John Peacock. Pitched at a lower level, try Joe Silk's The Big Bang . For more general descriptions of nucleosynthesis in stars and supernovae, see e.g. Harwit's Astrophysical Concepts or Bowers and Deeming's Astrophysics, Vol. I: Stars .

No. You're correct that, because of the curve of nuclear binding energy, you can't produce anything more massive than iron through fusion. But that doesn't mean heavier elements than iron come from the Big Bang. In fact, atoms heavier than carbon cannot be produced through Big Bang nucleosynthesis; H through C is all that's around when the first generation of stars form. Elements heavier than iron are produced in high-energy nuclear reactions that occur during supernovae. This is standard contemporary astrophysics, from any current textbook.

For an overview of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, see e.g. The Early Universe by Kolb and Turner, or Cosmological Physics by John Peacock. Pitched at a lower level, try Joe Silk's The Big Bang . For more general descriptions of nucleosynthesis in stars and supernovae, see e.g. Harwit's Astrophysical Concepts or Bowers and Deeming's Astrophysics, Vol. I: Stars .

No. You're correct that, because of the curve of nuclear binding energy, you can't produce anything more massive than iron through fusion. But that doesn't mean heavier elements than iron come from the Big Bang. In fact, atoms heavier than carbon cannot be produced through Big Bang nucleosynthesis; H through C is all that's around when the first generation of stars form. Elements heavier than iron are produced in high-energy nuclear reactions that occur during supernovae. This is standard contemporary astrophysics, from any current textbook.

For an overview of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, see e.g. The Early Universe by Kolb and Turner, or Cosmological Physics by John Peacock. Pitched at a lower level, try Joe Silk's The Big Bang . For more general descriptions of nucleosynthesis in stars and supernovae, see e.g. Harwit's Astrophysical Concepts or Bowers and Deeming's Astrophysics, Vol. I: Stars .

Covers JavaScript (client and core), CSS(0, 1, and 2), the DOM object model, etc.

I bought it full-price after buying the second edition a few years ago, & have no complaints.

though I am still looking for a good, up to date tutorial on CSS (recommendations welcome).

Good thing I held off on my purchase at B&N earlier today. I literally had this book on Cascading Style Sheetsin my hand before I decided to hold off and get Definitive HTTP instead (because of the recent review on this site. I didn't even notice that the copyright on the Style Sheets book is like from the Year 2000! Weren't we still carving TCP/IP packets byte for byte in stone and using the seeing stones of Anuminas for faster communications at that point?

I have such admiration for O'Reilly, I wonder when will they get on the stick with an updated book on this topic? Are there any good ones by anyone else that are a little more up to date?

though I am still looking for a good, up to date tutorial on CSS (recommendations welcome).

Good thing I held off on my purchase at B&N earlier today. I literally had this book on Cascading Style Sheetsin my hand before I decided to hold off and get Definitive HTTP instead (because of the recent review on this site. I didn't even notice that the copyright on the Style Sheets book is like from the Year 2000! Weren't we still carving TCP/IP packets byte for byte in stone and using the seeing stones of Anuminas for faster communications at that point?

I have such admiration for O'Reilly, I wonder when will they get on the stick with an updated book on this topic? Are there any good ones by anyone else that are a little more up to date?

What if technology like that becomes commonplace, where your every whim can be created and seem absolutely real?