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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).

Why don't you buy a copy and find out?

"...everything that we do know about that squishy thing inside our heads currently suggests that consicousness [sic] is not so special that it can't be implemented on a machine of human device..."

All of which shows we really don't know a hell of a lot about said squishy thing. Right now any discussion involving free will reverts to beliefs, because we've got nothing else to go on. The best attempt I've personally seen is Evan Harris Walker's The Physics of Consciousness , but despite the wealth of science he applies to the task, his subjective experiences seem to carry just as much weight by the end of the book. Very interesting reading, though, and if nothing else you come away appreciating that consciousness and free will are very slippery topics for pure science.

In addition to the comments about SF author David Brin, David Drake's "Lacey stories" (Nation Without Walls, The Predators, Underground) are exactly as proposed here. Surveillance of everyone all the time, everywhere, and the average citizen can use a public terminal to watch any public figure. Though of course the super-rich have some ways around it. They are excellent stories, if a bit grim.

Speaking of which, the original three longish short-stories are long out of print, but they have been reprinted in Grimmer than Hell , which is/was supposed to make it into the excellent and non-DRM'd Baen Free Library, but hasn't yet. Also great stories, though as the title suggests, not exactly uplifting ones.

In addition to the comments about SF author David Brin, David Drake's "Lacey stories" (Nation Without Walls, The Predators, Underground) are exactly as proposed here. Surveillance of everyone all the time, everywhere, and the average citizen can use a public terminal to watch any public figure. Though of course the super-rich have some ways around it. They are excellent stories, if a bit grim.

Speaking of which, the original three longish short-stories are long out of print, but they have been reprinted in Grimmer than Hell , which is/was supposed to make it into the excellent and non-DRM'd Baen Free Library, but hasn't yet. Also great stories, though as the title suggests, not exactly uplifting ones.

In 1906 the poor could work themselves out of poverty, even if they sometimes needed a union to do it.

Today, well, read Nickel and Dimed to see what things look like at the bottom of the income scale.

Anyone here read Farnham's Freehold?

The one and only thing you can possibly deny is that maybe those two points weren't put together to steal the 2004 election -- except that there is that nasty little problem of explaining away the peculiarly large exit-poll discrepancies that correlated with the use of those voting machines.

Except that there is no exit poll discrepancies. The highest discrepancy I've seen for any of the contested states in the 2004 election is a difference of 5% between the exit-poll result and the final result. Well within the margin of error.

This just sounds completely wrong. Trying reading the Freeman and Bliefuss book Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?

What's more, the conspiracy nutcases, as always, have chosen to latch on to the exit polls that best match their theory of voter fraud. Selection bias, yada yada. Take Ohio for example; Slate's exit polls actually show a result closer to the end results (2%) than for states with papertrails. (link [slate.com])

Freeman and Bleifuss work with the Edison/Mitofsky data, for the NEP polls. Slate is a pip-squeak in comparison. (And you're accusing them of "selecting" their polls?)

And as for the general accuracy of exit-polls, well, suffice to say it's usually not all that good.. (link [mysterypollster.com])

Ah yes, the usual mysterpollster link. Allow me to reiterate that you should look at Freeman and Bliefuss. The NEP exit-polls have historically been pretty good.

>One is indistinguishable from the other. I'm getting a lot of finger pointing and name calling but no ideas, solutions, etc.

Maybe there's a place online that has excerpts from The Plan: Big Ideas for America, the Democrats's ideas and proposed solutions.

Indistinguishable? Look at the voting breakdown on the Abu Ghraib Legalization Act.

Decide for yourself. Just drop in at your local library and pick up: An Inconvenient Truth. I'm not saying its right, I'm not saying its wrong. Pick it up, read it through, draw your own conclusions. I did the same, and I've drawn my conclusions. Cheers.

for people in Florida, hell they cant poke a hole in a piece of paper with a tool that is designed to poke that hole. what makes you think they can put their finger on the right spot on a touch screen.

You really need to read something besides Ann Coulter once in awhile... This is from the Freeman and Bliefuss book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?:

The problem wasn't the voter. Don A. Dillman, who has researched the design of paper questionnaires, made the following observations the day after the election:

I've never seen one set up like this. It's very confusing the way they have put things on the right side together with things on the left side... If you passed over the first candidate to go for the second candidate, it's logical that you'd punch the second hole.

The butterfly ballot cost Al Gore more than 15,000 net votes. It cost him more than 2,000 votes attributed to Buchanan, whose punch hole was located between that of Bush and Gore, and to socialist candidate David McReynolds, whose punch hole was located to the right of and below Lieberman's name.

>The Democrats offer no real solutions
The Democratic agenda includes cutting health care costs by targeting research at curing chronic diseases rather than treating them, training the whole population intensively in emergency response (imagine Katrina with every citizen having disaster training), simplifying the tax code to where low-income families can actually claim the EITC, and so on.

>Why can't we just focus on the problems with electronic voting rather than turning it into a political debate? Why can't we just say that the design is flawed and should not be used?

Because one of the problems is a conflict of interest. Some voting machine vendors are political activists. They need to be neutral unless they can be audited.

>A company can have a bad or flawed design without malicious intent.

Can, and probably will without great care. Secure design is tough work. On the other hand we've seen so many bizarre decisions in voting machine design that our faith in incompetence is being tested. Making it possible for the operator of the tabulating machine to change the totals is insane, not just incompetent. Not fixing that design when it's pointed out, well, draw your own conclusions.

This particular incident is boring. Touch screens do go out of calibration, it's too detectable an error to be a good way to commit fraud, and only an excellent design could avoid it.

Exit polls are not a good means of tracking election outcomes,

They certainly aren't "good", they're just one of the only things that we have (or rather "had" because the NEP is not going to be releasing "uncorrected" data ever again, it was too embarrassing in 2004). If exit polls are so terrible, how is it that everyone is happy with the way they were used to expose a corrupt election in the Ukraine?

Anyone who seriously wants to understand the issues with the 2004 exit polls really needs to read the Freeman and Bliefuss book: Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?

* They suffer from bad sampling, because the voters can opt out, and only those willing to participate do so

This was a popular explanation proposed for the 2004 exit-poll discrepancies, the "reluctant bush responder" hypothesis... it is, for example, what the polling companies Edison & Mitofsky claimed probably explained the discrepancies: Freeman and Bleifuss analyze their own data very carefully and throughly show that this just doesn't work. They demonstrate that if anything the bias went in the other direction, Democrats were a little reluctant to talk to the exit-pollsters.

* There are time-of-day differences among voting blocs

That was a nice try that came up early in the process: Republicans work for a living, and vote late after they get off work (Democrats you see, are lazy bums living on welfare): The trouble is the data just doesn't show it: there was not shift

* Exit polls by their nature lack the stringent controls that the voting booths have

You're not paying attention: DRE machines such as Diebold's enable, wholesale election corruption techniques which makes any "stringent controls" entirely besides the point.

Given that accusation, how do you check? How can you have any confidence in an election result?

Looking for polling discrepancies is one of the few things that we've got at the moment.

But the main reason exit polls are useless at best is that in an uncorrupt system they are unneeded, while in a corrupt system they will be ignored.

We know things are dirty, we have reason to think they're dirtier than they've ever been: there's no reason to give up hope, and assume the country is so corrupt there's no way it can climb out of the toliet.

and did you notice that the regions that the Republicans pulled their upsets in during the last elections were the ones that had Diebold machines?),

Proof please. Also, how many upsets did not have diabold machines. Finally any dem upsets, mapped the same way. Do that and if it looks like proof I'll believe you.

It's actually really striking: there was a pattern of "surprising" results that correlates with the use of electronic voting machines; with the presence of Republican governors, and so on. Where-ever Bush really needed it, he got an upset.

(Note: Ohio appears to have been stolen also, but with more conventional tactics engineered by a Republican Secretary of State with a lot of balls and no shame.)

That depends on your point of view. A circle is quite one dimensional if you look at it on edge. See Edwin Abbot's Flatland

Hell, you don't have to remember it, it's available on DVD -- I bought it a few months ago:

Amazon sucks

Enjoy.

So who's got to change, me or the manufacturers?

Want to listen to better music and still help the people of Sudan? Check out the Genocide in Sudan compilation. All proceeds go to UNICEF and The UN Refugee Agency. Or you could donate directly to UNICEF, the UN Refugee Agency, or the UN world food programme

The UK had hardly any gun control laws prior to about 1920, when the government began to worry about Bolshevik uprisings.

Prior to that, there had actually been a history of private firearm ownership *and legal protection for same*. See an historian's book about UK/US firearm regulation history for details. The Glorious Revolution produced a charter of rights guaranteeing weapons posession (by Protestants only, but that's another issue). This is all well documented but almost forgotten.

(Not to mention that our notions about using force in self-defense come from UK law).

The US may be unusually devoted to free speech, but our reasons come from your own philosopher John Stuart Mill. For one thing, the arguments on the side of good (e.g. cooperation among racial groups) need to be refined and tested against counter-arguments to make sure they will convince people and thus improve society. For another, it's important to know how widespread racism actually is. Driving something underground only gives you the illusion of safety. For another, it's also good speech that can be unpopular. In 1830 you abolished slavery, after decades of abolitionists speaking against the "property rights" of slavers and calling them names. Fortunately the abolitionists were not suppressed for "hate speech".

The US also has a problem that makes regulation of speech dangerous. Some people here are far too quick to label any criticism as being racist. Fallacious scientific research, objections to affirmative action, and references to the Mafia have all drawn allegations of racism. Hernstein and Murray deserve to be exposed as wrong, not to be imprisoned. Affirmative action may not be working the way it's supposed to and that's a subject that needs careful discussion to protect everyone's rights.

Because if they evade the court, they don't have to show cause and don't have anyone who might yell "Whoa" if they do something like bugging Democratic campaign headquarters.

This isn't theory, the government has admitted that they want to change who determines probable cause and to eliminate oversight. See _How Would a Patriot Act_ for citations.

>FISA warrants are so easy to get that you hardly even have to ask, right? The FISA court is just a rubber stamp for whatever Bush wants, isn't it? That's what you guys are selling.

Look for yourself if you question the word of everyone here. Look at the Attorney General's annual reports from 1979 to 2001. Look at the number of FISA warrants applied for. Look at the number approved. Nothing to do with Bush, those are the numbers from the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton administrations.

"Great though Saruman's lore be, it must have had a source". Everything we've found out, you can find out.

"Algorithms and Data Structures in C++", by Leendert Ammeraal, Wiley, 1996. It is the only book I found that has good coverage of Tries.

If you want to write prose that people can use, check out Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.

This is the book that Strunk&White(*) pretends to be. It teaches high-level organization and low-level syntactic clarity with vivid examples from real life. You get to see stepwise refactoring of unreadable bafflegab into clear and even persuasive prose.

To learn about tactical pitfalls while getting a good chuckle, read Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

If nothing else, remember the first rule of writing: know your audience and write for them. For example, I only said "stepwise refactoring" above because I'm writing for Slashdot.

(*)Endlessly repeating "Omit needless words!" and adding a few grammar rules does not help. It's also hypocritical, because if you think about it carefully you realize that "Omit needless words" is much longer than it needs to be.

If you want to write prose that people can use, check out Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.

This is the book that Strunk&White(*) pretends to be. It teaches high-level organization and low-level syntactic clarity with vivid examples from real life. You get to see stepwise refactoring of unreadable bafflegab into clear and even persuasive prose.

To learn about tactical pitfalls while getting a good chuckle, read Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

If nothing else, remember the first rule of writing: know your audience and write for them. For example, I only said "stepwise refactoring" above because I'm writing for Slashdot.

(*)Endlessly repeating "Omit needless words!" and adding a few grammar rules does not help. It's also hypocritical, because if you think about it carefully you realize that "Omit needless words" is much longer than it needs to be.

>I think you need to be absolutely sure of what you're doing and absolutely have your facts straight.

Compare and contrast to the One Percent Doctrine, Cheney's policy that if there's even a 1% chance of something bad happening then we're justified in taking all the action we would if it did happen.

The fair comparison here is with the turn-of-the-century terrorist plots. The US got the usual maddeningly vague intelligence warnings and made an appropriate response, sending heads-up messages down the line to security people. An alert border guard then stopped a terrorist with a car full of explosives destined for a US landmark.

If the same sort of alert had been raised in summer 2001, when the intelligence was just screaming about threats, maybe the FBI would have allowed their field people to ask for a warrant for Moussaoui's computer. Maybe the guards at Logan Airport would have reacted the third time a hijacker set off the metal detector. Maybe Condi Rice would have done something when, on July 6, Andre Carde told her that terrorists were taking flight training. Warnings about 9/11 were already documented before this story broke.

Sometimes Cisco support breaks down, and their record on security provoked Bruce Schneier to say "Now it doesn't matter what they say -- we won't believe them. We know that the public-relations department handles their security vulnerabilities, and not the engineering department." With an open-source router, you could in theory have competitive support companies, with all the benefits that competition provides.

Until guaranteed-response support proves itself for open-source routers, most network admins with mission-critical equipment will want Cisco. But this is a classic disruptive technology: cheaper, not as good, opening new markets rather than serving existing ones.

Dollar store is paying their help and giving them benefits like insurance.

Slightly of topic, but reminds me of In'n'Out Burger. They pay decent wages to their employees, health benefits are the rule and what surprised me most: They use neither freezers, nor microwave ovens. The produce is delivered fresh, every day.

Tasting such a burger is an epiphany. When you order it with onions, for example, you bite into a real onion and not into some fuzzy crap, designed by a food lab.

Now, the surpising thing, acording to Fast Food Nation, The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is the fact that In'n'Out Burger is highly profitable, even though their prices are quite reasonable.

To me this proves that you don't have to fuck your suppliers, employees and ultimately customers left right and center in order to turn a buck. This is somewhat encouraging in a world where greed and cheap seem to turn more and more into religious mantra.

Exit polls are not reliable enough. If an exit poll tells you 80% of a precint voted for Mr A, and the votes say only 40 % did, you might have a case of fraud. but if 53% said they voted Mr A and only 46% did there is less certanty. It would be interesting to investigate the discrepencies.

You're essentially just plain wrong about the statistical significance of the discrepancy. If it wasn't big enough to be meaningful, you wouldn't have had the big boys trying to explain it away with polling bias theories and so on.

Once cast, the votes are properly looked after. If it turns out they weren't, then you have proof of wrong doing. Or perhaps just an even more screwed up system. But its better than looking at exit poll discrepencies by themselves.

I think we both agree the sytem sucks and it should be improved.

To learn about conspiracies, just take a look at the ones we already have JFK's assasination, Roswell, and the face in Mars, ect.. You can find all sorts of weird things about any complex event when looked at by a microscope. But you have to maintain scientific rigor. Its not that I don't think the republicans wanted to throw the results of the election, I think both parties ahve demonstrated a willingness to do that, but I don't think they are capable of doing it.

You don't need to postulate some insanely large, flawless, conspiracy to explain away the Republicans ability to rig an election.

No one was capable of throwing the elections on a national scale. This isn't Ukraine. Every idiot has a video camera ( see youtube) and there were election officials every where and lawyers for both parties.

And strangely enough, there were widespread reports of various irregularities... all of which are being shrugged off by people who don't want to believe that they're living in the world's largest bannana republic.

I just don't think the Justice League PLUS the X-men were capable of it. Besides, if they were capable of it, then why wouldn't they have fixed the exit pols as well to make them coincide with the fake vote count? I would argue that would be equally difficult.

Be careful of wanting to remove the party form power,just because they deserve it. Wnating to remove the Democrats after LBJ gave us Nixon.

Oh, yes. Everyone knows Republicans aren't allowed to have voter registration drives. Republicans cheat, see, because they picked a name that some other obscure voter registration organization had already picked.

That proves Bush stole the election. [/puke off]

(And if you do some web searches, you'll see that "Nathan Sproul" has been accused of involvement in a number of different types of voter fraud.)

So, what we appear to have here is yet another example of someone trying to blow smoke... (it's a little surprising to see it from someone with such a low slash id though: 981. This isn't one of the ones that got sold on ebay, was it?).

Anyway, I suggest reading reference #21, myself, the Freeman and Bleifuss book: Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?

I have to say that I think the situation is even worse than I thought it was... after the 2004 election, I had the impression that the people who wanted to believe that it was legit at least had some wiggle room, because it seemed like there was some disagreement about the meaning of the exit polls: there was that study at Berkeley that found a discrepancy, but then the MIT study chimed in saying there wasn't, so who do you believe?

The thing is, the MIT guys later admitted that they screwed up: they used the "corrected" data, not the originally reported exit poll results. The media never reported that development, and I missed it myself...

Freeman and Bleifuss do a very thorough analysis of the various theories that have been presented to cover the discrepancy, and none of them seem to hold up. It's difficult to see how anyone could read this book and not conclude that phrasing the title as a question was excessively polite...

And it's impossible to see how you can come away from this situation without seeing that we badly need reform of the electoral system -- a paper trail that can actually be recounted would be a nice start, eh? Even if you don't believe the 2004 election was "stolen", how do you know the next one isn't going to be?

And anyone who speaks out against that point, is speaking out against Democracy itself, and needs to take a good long look in the mirror to think about what kind of world they want to live in.

(The "corrected" data by the way, is by definition "corrected" so that the discrepancy goes away. So what good is it? Why do people call it "corrected" and not, oh, say, "fudged"?)

Why do the poets of the present not speak of it?

The Horses Name was Physics

The Horse's name was Physics,
and they rode it well.
The only difference was this:
Some chose to flog the horse,
some flogged themselves.

A book of poems about the development of atomic theory from WWI to the atomic bomb, although it deals mostly with the personalities involved and not the atom itself.

KFG

The author looks at what the law is, why anyone would want to break it, and how our situation compares with other threats throughout history. For example, when foreign troops were burning down the White House in 1812, when half the country was in armed revolt in 1861-1865, or when thousands of nuclear warheads were half an hour away from burning the US out of the pages of history. It was during that last crisis that FISA passed, by a Senate margin of 95-1.

This has nothing to do with national security, which was satisfied just fine when FISC judges were reviewing wiretaps. This has nothing to do with partisanship, as the 95-1 vote back in 1978 demonstrates.

This is about whether we accept the idea that a President can place himself above the law by announcing a never-ending "war".

Offtopic? Some reading suggestions for the mods. Mannie and Mike and Lazarus will provide you with some info on how the parent relates to the topic. Robert A. Heinlein was an award winning author who many nerds felt an affinity with. If your from a family of nerds your ancestors would probably have recognized the references. Perhaps a Wiki or two will help.

At one point Heinlein sends Lazarus on multiple time travel trips rescuing his various heros and heroines of his numerous novels. This includes (at least by my less then perfect recollection which I can't check cause the ex got custody of my library) a failed attempt at rescuing Mike the sentient computer of the Lunar revolution. "Under such a scenario, it would be possible for a Xen virtual machine, trapped on a piece of failing hardware, to be automatically moved over to a VMware hypervisor on another piece of hardware." See? Method of escape for Mike. Levity for those who recognize the reference in the parent post.

Please mods, if you don't understand a reference then don't mod it down. Especially on an AC post where it will lanquish at 0 anyway if no one finds it funny, interesting, informative or insightful and also has mod points they think it's worth spending on, which raises the question of what was so bad about it that it rated wasting a mod point on moments after it was posted? IMO modding a non-offensive attempt at humor by an AC to -1 is a waste of a mod point.

Offtopic? Some reading suggestions for the mods. Mannie and Mike and Lazarus will provide you with some info on how the parent relates to the topic. Robert A. Heinlein was an award winning author who many nerds felt an affinity with. If your from a family of nerds your ancestors would probably have recognized the references. Perhaps a Wiki or two will help.

At one point Heinlein sends Lazarus on multiple time travel trips rescuing his various heros and heroines of his numerous novels. This includes (at least by my less then perfect recollection which I can't check cause the ex got custody of my library) a failed attempt at rescuing Mike the sentient computer of the Lunar revolution. "Under such a scenario, it would be possible for a Xen virtual machine, trapped on a piece of failing hardware, to be automatically moved over to a VMware hypervisor on another piece of hardware." See? Method of escape for Mike. Levity for those who recognize the reference in the parent post.

Please mods, if you don't understand a reference then don't mod it down. Especially on an AC post where it will lanquish at 0 anyway if no one finds it funny, interesting, informative or insightful and also has mod points they think it's worth spending on, which raises the question of what was so bad about it that it rated wasting a mod point on moments after it was posted? IMO modding a non-offensive attempt at humor by an AC to -1 is a waste of a mod point.

Lovely thing is, considering the audience of Slashdot and how receptive they've become to the Mac... development of more technical applications for the Mac will happen. It's a market that individuals or small teams can grab big chunks of, because at the moment competition is still sparse. Macs may have small marketshare, but if they're poised to take off, some Mac developers are going to make a killing.

Buy an introductory book on Cocoa programming, read and re-read the Apple HI guidelines, get used to how first class Mac apps like Omni Group work, and get your piece of the Apple pie.

Cynicism is not a useful trait...

Au contraire, mon fraire! Everything has it's use, you simply need to look.

More required reading for you: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/bookSearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?r=1&isbn=0553379593

I suggest starting with the section on mild depression.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Feynman's book: What Do You Care What Other People Think?

The mathematics you need to be able to do trajectory planning, joint kinematics, machine vision and all the other types of transformations are described in J.J.Craig's book (ISBN 0201095289). This is the application of stuff that has been known for fifty years. The interesting work is all in the application itself.

If you want something similar, but much more in demand, and scope to do something useful, you should look at plant automation - developing control systems for running industrial processes using PLCs. For example, the manufacture of cement consumes one percent of the world's energy, and yet it is controlled by incredibly backward technology. Process engineers that operate these systems are oblivious of all the developments in computing of the past thirty years. Their world is ripe for the injection of some of the expertise that has been developed in academia, and yet, the carry on with their PIDs, their SCADAs and their Ladder Logic.

Teach yourself a bit about grinders, mills, kilns and classifiers and do them a favour - bring them into the 21st century.

It's true that science's universe of discourse is always natural reality. Whenever knowledge is expanded past what is currently considered natural, the definition of nature is extended to include it. The very idea of other dimensions was once considered supernatural, but as our knowledge of QM grows, they are becoming part of what we consider natural.

So maybe we're on the cusp where science finds that intelligence is a fundamental part of nature and not a byproduct of it. That sparks the memory of something I read a long time ago by a scientist of some repute. Let me see if I can find it.... here it is (from God of the Astronomers, by Robert Jastrow-Ph.D.)

Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proven that the Universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, what cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter and energy into the Universe? Was the Universe created out of nothing, or was it gathered together out of pre-existing materials? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination.

The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion. An entire world, rich in structure and history, may have existed before our Universe appeared; but if it did, science cannot tell what kind of world it was. A sound explanation may exist for the explosive birth of our Universe; but if it does, science cannot find out what the explanation is. The scientist's pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation.

This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: In the beginning God created heaven and earth. To which St. Augustine added, "Who can understand this mystery or explain it to others?" The development is unexpected because science has had such extraordinary success in tracing the chain of cause and effect backward in time. We have been able to connect the appearance of man on this planet to the crossing of the threshold of life on the earth, the manufacture of the chemical ingredients of life within stars that have long since expired, the formation of those stars out of the primal mists, and the expansion and cooling of the parent cloud of gases out of the cosmic fireball.

Now we would like to pursue that inquiry farther back in time, but the barrier to further progress seems insurmountable. It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

The supernatural by definition is so hopelessly beyond any understanding, consistency or prediction that science cannot include it because no progress in understanding can be made.

Science can tell us nothing about ethics (it can't bridge the gap from "is" to "ought"), for example, yet it isn't beyond our understanding. Therefore, science is not the only route to knowledge. So I can't agree with your definition that the supernatural is hopelessly beyond understanding.

I'm not sure that it's even possible to have; there's no way to rationalize confidence without consistency.

A profoundly true statement (and is one reason why atheism d

Well, how about just keeping things open enough that we're not turning talent away?

_Unlocking the Clubhouse_ documents in-dpeth interviews with women who had the aptitude and drive to get into CMU's CS program. With much labor, we've moved the big obstacles out of the way, but it turns out there are now many small obstacles, and they add up. Some of those "extra barriers" take extra effort to remove.

Just as at Gnome, one of the problems at CMU was with recruiting and outreach. The CMU folks found they had to change tactics to keep brilliant women from overlooking them.

>Trying to fix it with some patchwork of giving a few extra slots to women really won't do much of anything

After years of research, the CMU team came to the same conclusion. They recommended, and largely got, many changes at all points in an undergraudate career. They had found that even if they got more freshwomen in the door, without fixes to the rest of the program the new recruits would simply change majors.

I bought it at Barnes & Noble cheaper than buy.com.

Women in the CS program at Carnegie Mellon were interviewed in depth. They were enthusiastic about the field but kept dropping out anyway after being confronted over and over with a message of "you don't belong here".

>But it isn't like nobody has died in high school sports

But sports "develop character". Besides, look at how people value sports verus academics.

Crossing the Chasm argues that all th eliterature about marketing innovative products is wrong.

Most marketing books will tell you there's a smooth bell curve from pioneers through early adopters to early majority, with takeup rates peaking thereafter and declining through late majority and holdouts.

CtC argues, with examples, that there's a full stop between early adopters and early majority types. They're just not similar people and they don't always talk to each other.

They recommend putting all the wood behind one arrowhead and targeting one tiny miche in the early majority world. An example would be Apple and desktop publishing. First they got it into the art department, which talked to the publicationns department, which ...

Dunno how or whether this applies to Linux. The strength of Linux is that the "marketing department" doesn't have the same constraints as a startup. And it's already got a niche, in servers.

Linux (and F/OSS in general) has been continually struggling with promotion, but this is not the same struggle as before. We are putting our energies toward solving a set of problems that have already been solved, but it's important to realize that Linux/FOSS is now facing a different and new problem.

When Linux faced technical problems, we needed hard core programmers willing to delve into the nitty gritty of making the processor run. The geeks of the world got together and hacked out a solid, stable kernel and the collection of GNU utilities.

When the problem was the UI, we needed people to know how to make things pretty and convenient. We built GNOME and KDE and Xfce on top of X.

When the problem was mindshare, we needed credible spokespeople to spread the news of Linux. The Economist and Time magazine and IBM (and SCO!) stepped in for us, and now the world has heard of Linux.

Now we're after market share and acceptance, and what we need is people who know what ordinary users want and need in order to take up Linux. Who would know what ordinary users want and need? Hint: I've already mentioned them twice in this paragraph.

Folks, Linux is now at the point where it's "ready to take over the desktop" --*if* we move in the right direction. The thing is, we're *not* moving in the right direction. We have been ready to make a left turn at the crossroads and start heading toward the desktop, but we just aren't making the turn. Of course, yes, we have sort of meandered towards it with cool new interfaces and a plethora of apps, but that's like making three right turns to turn left. We need to recognize that what it is that people want in order to make Linux "The Desktop".

"The Tipping Point", by Malcolm Gladwell, is a book about how and why little things can make the difference between some memes spreading like wildfire and others simply not taking hold. Although recently promoted by Barnes & Noble bookstores under their Sales/Marketing Books department, only a small section talks about how to get a product to catch on. The ideas are fascinating, and can be applied toward smoking cessation and other health promotion, or anything else where you want to leverage a small effort to make a big difference. Recommended read.

In the book, Gladwell talks about three different types of people needed to spread a meme epidemic: Connectors, Salespeople, and Mavens. Mavens are members of the potential market who are knowledgeable, and to whom other market members go to for advice. We do want to pay attention to what they say because others pay attention to what they say, even if they are not necessarily that knowledgeable (compared to us F/OSS geeks). In the same way that my gynaecologist friend has to watch Oprah because all her (female) patients watch that inane talk show and come to my friend with questions, so we need to pay attention to people like Mark Golden of WSJ and see what they're saying, rather than dismiss them with "Ahh, he won't even invest the time" or "It's not our fault, because the DVD is DRM-encumbered".

I'm not saying that those Linux problems will be easy to solve, but those are the problems that we have, and they loom closer than a lot of people here on Slashdot realize.

Just a note for those of you who would say, "Well, I don't care if Linux doesn't gain market share, because I just want it to tinker with, and I actually prefer if the unwashed masses would stay with their spyware-ridden proletariat systems!" Remember: market share is clout, and clout is what will make the hardware manufacturers release their specs so that we can have open source device drivers. Clout is what will get EU politicians to back off on software patents, and it is what will get universities to stop thinking that Microsoft is everything. Market share is what will improve Linux, so that you can go on with your happy tinkering.

Whew. Sorry a

Now, I know there has to be some smart people in the government, somewhere. Can we find them and promote them?

I still think that magic in that novel is so much part of the basic fabric of its world, and yet people are so recognizably realistic (whether human, faery, or 'other') that this qualifies it to be more of a counterfactual historical novel (along the lines of Turtledove).

And you're more likely to find Jonathan Lethem not in a fantasy or scifi section since the fantasy does not define the narrative, it only informs it.

Perhaps you're right, that the mere presence of magic means it's a fantasy, like how the mere presence of a time machine would make it science fiction, but I still feel that the book transcends its genre, and would be palatable to a larger audience that would balk if it were compared to some of the standards of that genre.

Barnes and Noble has a book all about the humor in decisions handed down by courts. It's called Corpus Juris Humorous. Pretty funny.