Slashdot Mirror

>The goal isn't to vote for who you think will win, you don't get points for picking the right one.

I wish more people understood this. I had a conversation once with people who insisted they were intelligent and independent-thinking but wouldn't vote for a third-party candidate:
Me: Do you understand that a vote isn't a bet about who will win?
Them: Yes.
Me: So why not vote for the candidate you prefer?
Them: You're throwing away your vote.
Me: How are you throwing away your vote if it's for a candidate you want?
Them: He hasn't got a chance.
etc.

There is however a real problem with simple plurality voting, as opposed to more sophisticated and accurate voting systems. A vote for your first choice is a vote against your second choice. If diphtheria and smallpox are on the major party tickets, your vote for vaccination on a third-party ticket can help smallpox win. A system like range voting would allow you to express your preferences without having to guess the outcome, but the current system is like a bad UI where you have to tweak your input to get the right results out.

In a plurality system like we've got, if there are two major candidates, then unless the two are interchangeable a third-party vote can have paradoxical results.

Ask the man who was there. Nixon's White House counsel says the current situation is worse than Watergate.

Agreed. (Read me further down)

IANAL.

However, if I sue you for $10,000.00 because I think you wronged me. You may go down to the court house and submit a cashiers check for $10,000.00 thereby settling the lawsuit.

At that point there will never be one word of deposition ever given. Clinton (a lawyer) could have done this.

My source on this is Alan Dershowitz.

I do not find myself agreeing with Mr. Dershowitz politically very often. However, he is very smart and is usually quite logical and sometimes reasonable. See his audio lectures at Trials of the Century

Nothing beats my analog holodeck...
STAR WARS: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy

Just last night I once again visited the Top 100 Sci-Fi List of Books and checked their list for any new books that moved up and their Major Series list to decided on what I will be reading next on my month long visit in Europe. After that I hit Google to look for eBook torrents for the books and series that I am interested in and I came across this Top 100 Sci-Fi Books Torrent with most of the books from the list and many of them as complete series.

The books are in Microsoft Reader's LIT format so if you have a compatible PDA device that you use for reading then you're set or you can always convert them out to HTML with Covert Lit utility (GNU licensed and open source to boot) that runs on a number of OS's and takes care of the work. Also I would recommend the Haali Reader for Pocket PC platform if you want a good full featured reader that can read text files directly inside .zip files without uncompressing and it saves your place in many books even on phone resets in case you have a PDA type phone that you can read on like I do.

I am exactly in the same boat as you, I also read the Hyperion Cantos but I couldn't get through the first book the first three times I tried to read, because the story lines were so diluted and all-over-the-place, that if it wasn't for the single story about the village of people and the Crucifix of Resurrection I would have dropped this book like a stone and missed out on the rest of the great series. That first books almost soured me to the Top 100 Sci-Fi List because it was one of the books there that was highly recommended, and there should be a warning placed on it.

Also, I personally prefer to read books as eBooks but I also like to own the best ones as mass print paperbacks so I usually buy them en mass as complete series from Barnes & Nobel since they seem to be a less sleazy company than Amazon. Also, just as a reminder don't bother with the Amazon Kindle eBook reader since you can't put your books on it without uploading them to Amazon and anything you buy to put on the reader is only licensed to you and you do not own the books you buy.

Writing up a reply to this question makes me look at all the books on my shelf with fond memories of the adventures that I read about. If you haven't already read these then check out the Dune series for deep sci-fi, and the Dune prequel books by Herbert's son if you like lighter fiction in the same universe, Ender's Game series, Vorkosigan Saga for action packed episodic sci-fi, and the other series mentioned in the links above.

Enjoy your reading.

Looks like it's pretty easy to get Gilligan's Island on DVD.

Well, one thing for sure: if it does, Hot Fudge Sunday lands on a Friday instead of Tuesday.

Baxter and Clarke...a partnership *I* for one enjoy... The Light of Other Days is just one example. RIP!

Baxter and Clarke...a partnership *I* for one enjoy... The Light of Other Days is just one example. RIP!

Baxter and Clarke...a partnership *I* for one enjoy... The Light of Other Days is just one example. RIP!

Baxter and Clarke...a partnership *I* for one enjoy... The Light of Other Days is just one example. RIP!

You mean like Comet Hammner-Brown?

For people who want background or just enjoy math, Brands's book is Rethinking Public Key Infrastructure.

Even so, you have to be careful because you just might find out the hard way that This place has no atmosphere!

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780916291457&itm=1

So I really want to know where these $19 CDs are and why I can't find them

Out of curiosity, it's been years since I last bought any music (and I don't pirate music either, I just don't listen to music much anymore), I searched Amazon music for Norah Jones. On the first of three pages there are two albums, vinyl LP records, that are $30. Barnes and Noble has the list price of her "Come Away With Me" as $19, as is "Not Too Late", and The Little Willies".

I picked Norah Jones because the last CDs I bought were from her and Neko Case.

So I really want to know where these $19 CDs are and why I can't find them

Out of curiosity, it's been years since I last bought any music (and I don't pirate music either, I just don't listen to music much anymore), I searched Amazon music for Norah Jones. On the first of three pages there are two albums, vinyl LP records, that are $30. Barnes and Noble has the list price of her "Come Away With Me" as $19, as is "Not Too Late", and The Little Willies".

I picked Norah Jones because the last CDs I bought were from her and Neko Case.

So I really want to know where these $19 CDs are and why I can't find them

Out of curiosity, it's been years since I last bought any music (and I don't pirate music either, I just don't listen to music much anymore), I searched Amazon music for Norah Jones. On the first of three pages there are two albums, vinyl LP records, that are $30. Barnes and Noble has the list price of her "Come Away With Me" as $19, as is "Not Too Late", and The Little Willies".

I picked Norah Jones because the last CDs I bought were from her and Neko Case.

I know it sounds funny, but if you're looking for a 'lap desk' why not check out lapdesk.com? Seriously, I have one of these (got it as a Christmas present last year, had to search google for a bit just now before I even found who made it), and it works very well. I have the "Jumbo Lap Desk", and originally used it for doing crossword puzzles, but soon found out what a great laptop desk it made. The cushion underneath is very soft and comfortable on my legs while the flat surface allows my laptop to vent properly. You can find the one I got from organize-it-online.com, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.com (and amazon again... it looks like exactly the same product, but for a different price... I don't know).

The version I have is around $15, but it looks like the manufacturer has plenty of fancier models as well.

That's not so much a critique of presentation software so much as a critique of how people USE it. Whoever sets up the presentations for Steve Jobs, for example, tends to do a pretty good job for his keynotes. I personally use presentation software not to present information to others, but as "cue cards" for myself. Presentation software has its uses, although I would agree with you that most of the time, it's used very, very poorly.

No one has mentioned this yet, so here's a good opportunity to plug Dr. Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780961392154&itm=1

Lancelot Hogben's "Mathematics for the Million" did it for me.

I believe this was mentioned in Future Noir.
I'd have to dig up my copy to confirm that though.

Women who are already sacrificing to pursue a computer interest run into problem after problem.

See the book Unlocking the Clubhouse for real-life experiences of hundreds of students at the highly competitive CMU. There are many obstacles, none a deal breaker in itself, but it adds up to the death of a thousand cuts.

CMU's CS program lost many hard-working enthusiasts, for a variety of reasons, mostly cultural.

Dune Chapter 1

"Enough," the old woman muttered. "Kull wahad! No woman-child ever withstood that much. I must've wanted you to fail." She leaned back, withdrawing the gom jabbar from the side of his neck. "Take your hand from the box, young human, and look at it."

        He fought down an aching shiver, stared at the lightless void where his hand seemed to remain of its own volition. Memory of pain inhibited every movement. Reason told him he would withdraw a blackened stump from that box.

        "Do it!" she snapped.

        He jerked his hand from the box, stared at it astonished. Not a mark. No sign of agony on the flesh. He held up the hand, turned it, flexed the fingers.

        "Pain by nerve induction," she said. "Can't go around maiming potential humans. There're those who'd give a pretty for the secret of this box, though." She slipped it into the folds of her gown.

Hey, congrats.

You're starting a completely different job, which means success will depend on COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SKILLS. Relying on the ones that got you there will not necessarily assure success in the new context. Read "The First 90 Days", by Michael Watkins, published by the Harvard Business School Press.

Here's the BN link:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?EAN=9781591391104

Ooh. That sounds interesting -- I'll have to add it to the (nigh-infinite) list of books I should read.

Along the same lines, though, is Dawkin's Unweaving the Rainbow , which touches many of the same themes. There's an entire chapter dedicated to how probability and coincidence often convey the impression of preternatural effects.

In Richard Florida's work we learn that investment in sports is worthless in terms of economic development. By contrast, investment in arts is worth quite a bit downstream. Now, Florida's focus is on comparing cities. But the lessons may extend to cable/satellite too. So if our cable/satellite is effectively investing $14/month/subscriber in ESPN (figure given by others in this discussion), that's equivalent to a city putting most of its civic budget into the new arena for the sports teams rather than into, say, a new playhouse and museum. This means that over time the virtual metropolis comprised of the subscribers to cable/satellite are economically less well off than if the investment had been weighted less to sports, more to the arts. And that means that an alternative without so much investment in sports in the mix would over time have wealthier subscribers, to whom it - and the advertisers using it - could potentially sell much more.

During the middle ages and the renaissance, small professional armies fought pre-arranged battles with minimal collateral damage (ignoring the effects of sieges, of course). But before that period, Rome and the ancient Greeks often practiced total war: look at what happened to the Celts and the Trojans.

There's no overall cycle. Who knows whether we'll swing back into a phase of total war? This time, however, it might be the end of us -- the one trend I do see is that every time we try total war, it gets more destructive.

Read A Canticle for Liebowitz .

It seems that everyone is concerned about downstream modification, and is completely ignoring the possibility of upstream modification. What if Sprint started modifying upstream http-posts to start a more viral ad distribution system? Not only would they be able to target their customers, they would also be able to target the customers of anyone who could read the post!

This is the reason that we need to push for network neutrality. When the only choices are between a giant douche which alters content and a turd sandwich which alters content, the customer ends up screwed in the end.

You are exactly right about the emotional difficulty in killing someone at close range. When I was at Advanced Infantry School while in the U.S. Marine Corps we had classes in Killology, (yes, the study of killing people), that discussed this phenomenon and how to address it while in combat. It turns out that very few people, (estimated at less than 2% of the population - and some of those are psychotic), can accept killing someone at very close range, even to save their own life and need some sort of discussion or therapy to deal with the experience. This is why there were fewer cases of PTSD after WW II than Vietnam. Coming home from WW II, there was time to discuss your experiences with your fellow soldiers while you took a slow boat home. During Vietnam, your tour was done, you caught a flight, and were on the street 2 days later. No time to discuss and deal with what happened.

Since I doubt many people will want to join the Marines just to take this class, a great book on this topic is: On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Killing in War and Society by Dave Grossman. Available here.

At least I'm pretty sure they took some ideas from this book.

Another classic of the genre is Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. It was written in 1986 so it only deals with TV, but tragically every trend he objected against in the book has been amplified in the age of the web. His main argument is that "politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment."

>"it would have been more interesting if the book was an actual discussion of the shortcomings of the mass media, why it is in the place it's in and what could be done to change it. Those topics are covered but in such a brief way that they almost seem like an afterthought."

Then again, if you were really looking for an insightful analysis of centralized media, maybe your time would have been better spent reading Marshall McLuhan or Noam Chomsky than Drew Curtis.

Just a passing thought...

>"it would have been more interesting if the book was an actual discussion of the shortcomings of the mass media, why it is in the place it's in and what could be done to change it. Those topics are covered but in such a brief way that they almost seem like an afterthought."

Then again, if you were really looking for an insightful analysis of centralized media, maybe your time would have been better spent reading Marshall McLuhan or Noam Chomsky than Drew Curtis.

Just a passing thought...

Because the degree of "response" in a battery is very simple and straightforward. There is no complexity. All we are, all our thoughts are, is a complex reaction cascade. Only the complexity separates us from the lower-order.

Seriously, though -- how can you claim that elementary brains or nerve nets have more complex thought processing than slime molds? Slime molds can solve mazes. They break apart and reform as the situatio reqiures, yet when they're together, they act collectively as a single organism (often called a "slug"), with cells even committing apoptosis, forming into differentiated "tissues", and the like. They even "walk" collectively -- not just in any direction, but specifically toward the most likely places to find food. Think daphnia are that capable? Many don't even swim toward their prey; their eyes are just for predator avoidance. And there are creatures simpler than daphnia out there. Look at the hydra, for example. All you get out of them are localized reflex reactions; they don't even take the direction of stimuli into account when reacting.

Neural nets are an excellent, very scalable way to process information. However, they're not the only one. They merely work through chemistry, just like a slime mold's processing of it's environment does. They "scale up" well, however, because they deliver their signals to a precise location. A system of hormonal triggers, like in a slime mold's "thinking", only works well on the small scale. Still, it's more impressive than what the simple brains of, say, hydra can pull off.

... for Operation Nightmare Green...

ps: caps filter can suck a large phallus.

CLR via C#

It skips over a lot of the hand holding that a "Learn Foo in X Days" book will give you but goes in to great detail about how the language is implemented, often giving examples of how C# code is compiled to IL assembly language and sometimes further giving examples of how it will be compiled by the JIT compiler into x86 assembly language.

Sorry, you're right I grabbed the wrong link. Color me red. Regardless of whether or not there are mistakes being made there are many HD-DVD titles which are listed as having region coding on them. Most HD-DVD players have the ability to update their firmware too (hackable?). So, I am beginning to believe that there are region codes in the media regardless of whehter the players honor it or not.

The right one does list the HD-DVD as region 1, I'm confused how we both found differing links on the same site... I'm linking to the Tokyo Drift version of the film on HD-DVD now rather than the DVD version. It's not just Amazon listing this title as region 1 in the US on HD-DVD though, there are other sites with it listed the same way. There are also some UK sites like SendIt that have all their HD-DVDs listed as region 2.

The keys being:
- head lice and body lice have entirely different grasping systems. Non-interchangeable.
- lice can't survive IIRC more than a few hours away from a host. So their lifespan is intimately connected with their host(s)
- lice are species specific

Human body lice therefore are unlikely to have evolved their grasping mechanism (useless with body hair or wearing animal skins/furs) until shortly after textiles would have become common clothing for humans. So it doesn't give us precisely when humans STARTED wearing textiles. It does strongly suggest a start point of shortly after (the lice would have had time to evolve) textiles and humans became commonly associated.

- All taken as best I can recall from an outstanding book on the subject: Before the Dawn: Recovering The Lost History of Our Ancestors
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781594200793&itm=1

Most people have put "30 days of Vista" off until after they finish "Two Years Before the Mast" and 120 Days of Sodom.

Richard Dawkins addresses this in The God Delusion. He comes up with some fairly interesting ideas.

He strongly feels that this tendency on our part must be a by-product or accident of some other trait that actually is a survival trait. He posits several possibilities:

• As children we're hard-wired to accept things our parents tell us without question. I would imagine this would extend to beliefs prevalent in the surrounding cultural matrix.
• We are hard-wired to look for causes for things. When things have no cause, we tend to make one up.
• Religion is a meme that rides along like a parasite with other beneficial memes about altruistic behavior, what foods are safe or harmful, or other such useful ideas.

I think this whole line of thought is really fascinating. To me an answer to this question would be a very useful antidote for people who think I should adopt some particular version of Christianity or other religion that places mysticism and faith above the evidence of my senses and measuring equipment.

You can get it for $4 more at B&N

I suggest you read Jared Diamond's latest book Collapse http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780143036555&itm=2 and it will show you that the idealized view of happy primitive societies living in harmony with nature is for the most part completely untrue. Easter Island, Chaco Valley, and a few other examples are used very effectively to debunk this "noble savage" myth.

_Unlocking the Clubhouse_ talks about the experience of CS undergrads at CMU. They conclude it was a "death of a thousand cuts" phenomenon. No one thing drove talented hard-working women out of the field, it was the steady drip of one problem after another. The culture was only one of the problems, but a real one. A lot of the women looked at it and figured that they'd given up parties and sleep to get into CMU, but no way were they giving up showers to become a "real" geek.

>market forces determine how much you make

It's not "market forces" when the CEO names the board that sets his compensation package. That's a big part of the problem. Not many people resent Tiger Wood's wealth, precisely because it was earned.

Anyone who thinks that climbing out of a minimum wage job is just a matter of working hard should read Nickel and Dimed, written by someone who actually worked bottom-tier jobs for her research.

After reading Linked I've come to the conclusion that having a power law curve (the thing that gives you the 80-20 rule) is inevitable in any economy. There are only two questions to be answered.

First, how steep is that curve? Do you have excessive centralization. I think, but do not know, that the US's curve has been getting steeper over the years. This is likely not good.

Secondly, how easy is it to begin acquiring links because you're more attractive for whatever reason? This is where things that make it expensive for small businesses to start, compete or generally raise barriers to entry come in.

Personally, I think we ought to revisit a lot of laws we have concerning monopolistic behavior and financial transactions and tweak them using insights from that book. That book demonstrates through numerous examples that there are a set of powerful laws governing almost all networks that grow organically. Even the network of which molecules interact with which molecules in cells has characteristics that are similar to the network of hypertext links on webpages, which has characteristics that are similar to the food web.

To give you a horrible taste, it mentions V'ger, from the first Star Trek movie, in connection with the Borg's origin

If you've been a procrastinator for years in multiple areas of your life, it's worth spending some time trying to understand root causes, instead of searching for the "do it now!" quick fix (which often produces only fleeting improvements). A good place to start is with the psychological research presented in the venerable Burka and Yuen's Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It, also available at amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.

If you're a pessimist who often frets and fusses at the very beginning of projects when others are working away, worry-free, you might also find useful a read of "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking" bn.com, amazon.com, buy.com. The author makes the case that those of us with a pessimistic explanatory style may be using it to good effect when it comes to getting things done (e.g., worrying can be a form of motivation, and focusing on possible negative outcomes can be an aid to reducing risk of failure).