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You're making my case. WIPO is irrelevant to US Law without the DMCA. If the Treaty was ratified, but the statute (DMCA) had stalled in the House WIPO wouldn't matter.

No you've got that entirely backwards. The standard procedure is to sign and adopt treaties first, and then congress writes laws to implement them. If anything, that makes my case. The Obama justified his action here because the laws that ACTA requires are already on the books in his view, so therefore he says he can skip congress and the senate.

You do realize that the case you just outlined from Obama is the one I've been making? What case did you think I was making?

Moreover you're distorting it. I'm not arguing he can skip Congress, I;m arguing Congress already agreed to ACTA by passing a statute that complies with ACTA.

And before you get on your Constitutional high horse, numerous presidents have signed treaties affirming our commitment to various things you like. For example, our commitment to not having sex slaves. If you're right and the Courts can't enforce PRO-IP because it complies with ACTA, and ACTA is unratified, then that means that Courts could not enforce laws on rape between the time the President signed the law and it's formal ratification by Congress.

Which means the Courts will enforce PRO-IP, that's logically equivalent to enforcing ACTA, so what exactly would Obama gain by getting ACTA ratified?

You certainly wouldn't stop complaining that it sucked if he got it ratified.

THAT was his argument, NOT the one you claimed above. And also there is no precedent for that, rather it's kind of a rule that he just made up.

However he is pulling a very fast one here: Because the Obama administration says the ACTA treaty is binding, we will be required to adopt laws to conform with it should it be determined that they are needed, and we're forbidden from repealing any laws that it requires.

Required by whom? Forbidden by whom? Which Court enforces Treaties?

No US Court. Check out the sad case of Edgar Tamayo if you think there are any circumstances under which a US Court will defer to a treaty when the statute says something else.

Treaties are enforced by the other parties to the treaty sanctioning you. Most countries don't care what you call it, as long as you obey it.

Which means that if the Courts enforce PRO-IP nobody is gonna call us out on our failure to ratify ACTA.

Let's suppose though that ACTA is what you claim it is, and the above is wrong. If that were the case then it would fall under an executive agreement. If it is an executive agreement, then Obama actually broke the law because he didn't notify congress. This is because entire thing was hidden until he signed it himself. Namely this law:

http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbi...

A couple points:

1) If it was an Executive Agreement nobody else would have to ratify it, either. It's an unratified treaty. That mean's it's valid to the extent an Executive Order from Obama saying "do this treaty" would be valid, but not binding on future Presidents or Congresses.

And since an Executive Order to enforce an act of Congress is perfectly valid, the treaty is definitely binding as far as your ass is concerned.

2) How can Congress claim it wasn't notified within 20 days when Obama publicly signed the damn thing, and sent out press releases with web links to the full text of the Treaty?

You're making my case. WIPO is irrelevant to US Law without the DMCA. If the Treaty was ratified, but the statute (DMCA) had stalled in the House WIPO wouldn't matter.

No you've got that entirely backwards. The standard procedure is to sign and adopt treaties first, and then congress writes laws to implement them. If anything, that makes my case. The Obama justified his action here because the laws that ACTA requires are already on the books in his view, so therefore he says he can skip congress and the senate. THAT was his argument, NOT the one you claimed above. And also there is no precedent for that, rather it's kind of a rule that he just made up.

However he is pulling a very fast one here: Because the Obama administration says the ACTA treaty is binding, we will be required to adopt laws to conform with it should it be determined that they are needed, and we're forbidden from repealing any laws that it requires.

Let's suppose though that ACTA is what you claim it is, and the above is wrong. If that were the case then it would fall under an executive agreement. If it is an executive agreement, then Obama actually broke the law because he didn't notify congress. This is because entire thing was hidden until he signed it himself. Namely this law:

http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbi...

Even if this was a sole-executive agreement, it STILL requires the approval of congress. This is both written in the laws in addition to case law (see the last sentence of page 5 of this: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/aw...)

That is why Obama didn't make the argument you are saying he made.

I remember in an assembler course on HC12's: -Remember, when ACCumulator A and ACCumulator B get togther, the SEX operation takes places to make ACCumulator D, and pray to the FSM that the next operation isn't STD!!!!!! http://www.prenhall.com/pack/appendices/Pack-barbappA_FF.pdf

• Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel http://mindview.net/Books/TICPP/ThinkingInCPP2e.html
• Computer Networks by Andrew Tanenbaum http://www.prenhall.com/tanenbaum/details2.html
• Structured Computer Organization by Andrew Tanenbaum http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/academic/product/0,,0131485210,00%2Ben-USS_01DBC.html
• Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel http://producingoss.com/
• Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System by Marshall Kirk McKusick and George V. Neville-Neil http://www.mckusick.com/books.html
• Code Quality by Diomidis Spinellis http://www.spinellis.gr/codequality/

RMIT offer a several subject on Java through Open Uni (Australia) www.open.edu.au that can be accessed anywhere in the world. The units are about $700 and the first is based around Savitch - Absolute Java. The advanced unit uses one of the Liang books... http://www.prenhall.com/liang/ Java is a great teaching language. It's the warm up to other things. Despite learning it I'd really prefer never to use it. Here is hoping Jaxer takes off! Yani

Any attempt at correlation between crime and anything else certainly does depend on what's included in the definition of "crime". I'm glad you also noticed that the fact that the US murder rate is more than twice that in Sweden does imply that there's something else included under "crime" to offset that, and there is certainly no reason to belittle me because I expressed interest in what that might be. (And my comment was no more off-topic than the parent.)

Since you couldn't be bothered, I did a bit of research and it turns out that Sweden has quite a high rate of assaults. I find this a bit surprising, because it doesn't seem that violent here to me, but I've only lived here for a little over a year, so it's quite possible I'm missing something.

This report, while slightly dated, might also be of interest.

• At a very low level, how a computer works. What goes on inside the CPU, what a "bus" is, what memory paging is. Structured Computer Organization by Andrew Tanenbaum, Computer Architecture by Hennessy and Patterson.
• Programming Languages, should know enough about computers to be able to write a simple program in assembly, and then learn a couple "simple" high level languages e.g. Perl, Python, Ruby, followed by C, then Java (or C++), and then a not so common language (aka "languages that make you think") like Haskell, ML, Lisp, or Scheme. Plus a basic/general history of programming languages. Suggested reading: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Software engineering. From making sure programs work, correctly, to programming in the large (not everything can be written as a 1000 line Perl script), and software development as a profession (ethics, legalities, future). Two good references are Code Complete by Steven McConnell, and The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
• Basic electronics. Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest Mims or Lessons In Electric Circuits - Just the basics, Ohms Law and some basic ideas such as logic gates and flip flops.
  
• Enough math to be dangerous

With only 4 books, you can covers all what is needed to be litterate. They only covers essential knowledge and avoid everything in the hype.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman

Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation by Hopcroft, Motwani and Ullman

Operating Systems Design and Implementation by Andrew S Tanenbaum
http://vig.prenhall.com/catalog/academic/product/0 ,1144,0131429388,00.html

UNIX Network Programming by W. Richard Stevens

Here is some good readign amterial, maybe people should read and _understand_ it before posting on the subject..

This does not mean you have to agree with the guy.

http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/menui tem.5d61c1d591162e4b0ef1bd108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pN ame=computer_level1_article&TheCat=1005&path=compu ter/homepage/0506&file=cover1.xml&xsl=article.xsl&

http://vig.prenhall.com/catalog/academic/product/0 ,1144,0131429388,00.html

Linky linky... http://wps.prenhall.com/esm_audesirk_bloe_7/0,8753 ,1310852-,00.html/

Can it show why lakes don't freeze from the bottom up as water approaches 0 Celsius?

Freezing water is an example of a first order phase transition, involving a transfer of latent heat across a clearly defined phase boundary. Algorithms have been able to deal with those for some time (or so I assume). The big breakthrough here is that these guys figured out how to model a second order phase transition (i.e phase transitions in a supercritical fluid) without incurring infinite CPU time.

Most people are familiar with first order phase transitions (like melting ice or boiling water) but have never seen a second order phase transition. In general first order phase transitions involve a transfer of latent heat, and are noticeably discontinuous- the two phases are easily distinguishable from each other. Second order phase transitions do not involve a latent heat transfer and there is no abrupt discontinuity during the transition, as they occur above the critical temperature and critical pressure, beyond which the liquid and gas phases are indistinguishable.

The article doesn't explain this at all, but the giveaway here is that the reporter talks about the critical point.

minix, the little os that could. After many years Andy comes back and launches an able hobbit os :) "thank you humble coders, we bow to thee :)"

Install it and next get his book to go with minix : http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/tanenbau m/ "Operating Systems, Design and Implementation". After working your way through, you can call yourself a kernel/os designer/programmer.

I think AT is a brilliant teacher. Looking inside that book : sec2.2 interprocess communication, describing race conditions, semaphores, and the classical IPC problem : The Dining Philosophers Problem. Its all very very nice explained. What about the "The Sleeping barber problem"? lol :))

Really, and this is no kidding, this book holds the mindset of today's Linux kernel coders. Too bad that Tanenbaum got into that flamewar with Torvalds. Maybe because Linus did his monolithic thing on minix, is what made him angry. But Andy should be proud. He just happened to be around with the best book on that subject, when Torvalds started his Linux kernel in minix. That's no coincidence.

Robert

That minix is a useful low-overhead OSS operating system is incidental. the reason it exists is to provide a real base for taunenbaums books on operating systems which are greatly enhanced by the inclusion of the source code for a real working operating system. This has always been the primary goal of minix.

The third edition of the book is coming out, hence the third release of minix is coming out in lockstep.

http://vig.prenhall.com/catalog/academic/product/0 ,1144,0131429388,00.html

Frim the Minix 3 site:

The main documentation for MINIX 3 is the book

Operating Systems: Design and Implementation 3/e by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Albert S. Woodhull, Prentice Hall, 2006

Too bad they don't list one of those handy prepaid 2-time-use time machines to buy and actually get the book...guess they're out of stock in the 26th Century.

Linus would have deserved that "F" in operating system design, but he wasn't writing his kernel to get grades on a computer course. If he had been then he probably wouldn't have written a crude, monolithic kernel that was totally unportable. Apart from the crudity of it, those were his explicit goals - to write a monolithic kernel that would run optimally on his 80386. (Bear in mind that the Linux kernel we know today is pretty far removed from that early version in design and implementation).

As for AT, he's a very smart guy. He writes books on operating system deign and networking that clearly describe quite complex topics. Even if you don't like the idea of microkernels, the "Operating Systems ..." book that describes the Minix kernel is an excellent read.

This is just another varient on Medical Student Syndrome.

In psychology it's so bad, due to the nature of people and the subject, that every Abnormal Psychology book I've seen, and the class I took, starts with a warning abouth the syndrome; most psychological disorders are defined in rather normal terms, and at any moment, most of us have at least one symptom that shows up in the DSM. It's the confluence of multiple symptoms (usually) that persist and cause problems for the person that defines a true problem, but if you're not paying attention to those caveats (or they don't reassure you)...

Medical Student Syndrome isn't going to kill you, but it can cause some stress at a time in your life when you really don't need it. (No joke.)

Maybe for computer science. All the CS textbooks I've read have ranged from incomprehensibly awful to oversimplified. Most of my chemistry texts, OTOH, have been very well-written, understandable, and even interesting. Paula Bruice in particular strikes me as an excellent author.

While Trolltech has long dual-licensed Qt on X11 (Linux, various Unixes), Mac, and embedded, Windows developers have had no options other than a commercial license.

Just look at the graph of human population graphs and some more.

If your app is closed source, the licensing is straightforward: One Pro or Enterprise license per OS per developer.

If your app is Open Source, you may use the Free edition for X11 on any Unix variant that Trolltech supports, including Linux, as well as Mac OS X.

Here's the current state of things on Windows:

• There is a port of the X11 Free version on SourceForge, but it's not ready for prime time, and the project keeps stalling for various reasons.
• There is a "non-commercial" version. A 2.x version was available for download, but it has been withdrawn. The only place to get the 3.x version is on the CD that accompanies C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3 . It's unsupported, at least one minor version behind the latest 3.x release, does not include source, only provides libraries for Microsoft and Borland compilers (not MinGW), and its license isn't even close to compatible with the GPL.
• Trolltech has been known to donate commercial licenses to Open Source projects that wish to offer a Windows port. They don't do it often, however, and it doesn't really benefit the community to have a vendor picking and choosing which projects get indulgences.

Beat that.

In general, I think there are advantages to taking courses like RedHat's, as well as a do-it-yourself approach:

Instructor-led:
Pro: There's someone there to answer your questions.
Pro: You can dedicate yourself to the material without interruption.
Pro: You won't be led off on tangential tasks.
Pro: You'll have something to put on your resume.
Con: You might be overly isolated from the nuts-and-bolts

Do-it-yourself:
Pro: You'll learn where to go to find the answers on your own.
Pro: You can focus on topics that are important to you.
Pro: You're exposed to the full breadth or possilities.
Con: You'll have to figure out on your own what's signal and what's noise.

FWIW, I've looked into the RedHat courses for some of my employees, and I think they're fairly good for someone who wants to learn useful Linux (for business) administration. The topics are a good mix of basics and enterprise-level stuff.

To help you with the self-taught portion of your learning experience, I highly recommend Linux Administration Handbook. It will lead you from low-level (booting, etc.) to high-level (web servers, backups), and it's concise enough to use as a reference later on.

> Isn't New England is among the most water-rich areas of the country?
If by water-rich, you mean very expensive water bills, then yes.

Something seems strange. I remember hearing that the human eye can discern a single photon, as from radioactive breakdown in a wristwatch face. I found something to back that up here and here (actually apparently single photons are discarded as noise; 2 or three are better).

So by my calculations, if you pick a 31st magnitude star in the jpeg and look in the right direction for ten seconds, you will probably get a single photon from the star you picked. Of course you'll get lots of other photons too since your eye can only discern an angle of one arc minute and all those stars are in about 3 arcminutes square.

I just thought it was neat that while obviously the human eye can't beat the HST in most areas it does seem to be about 20,000 times more sensitive than the Hubble's CCDs by those calculations! Anybody know if the CCDs can actually trigger on single photons? What a fantastic picture. I want to pan across it all night.

• The Internet
  
• BSD Unix (and variations)
  
• Linux
  
• The GNU project
  
• Object Oriented Programming (and, by extension, anything built using OOP principles, like Microsoft Windows)
  
• The World Wide Web

At my university -- University of Saskatchewan, we used a book called Data Structures and Software Development to introduce us more or less to OOP, its a second year class, and although 1st year science students learn Java, they hardly learn proper OO programming, while engineers like myself learn C/C++. The book itself was written by two profs, and is in my opinion a very good book.

In his book "Computer networks", Andy Tanenbaum describes this ingeneous method that the Chinese Govt. could use for DES cracking (by brute force, searching through all 2^56 keys): Every radio and TV set in China comes equipped with a chip that searches through a portion of the keyspace assigned to it; when one of them hits it beams up the answer. Now just imagine! If the dragon used spare cycles for cracking DES, and a billion Chinese used the chips, DES can probably be broken in hours :)

Incidentally, the frequent attempts at humor in Programming Perl are what make the book frustrating to read for me. Occasional humorous quips are O.K., but only when they're used sparingly. I have been reading the Third Edition recently, and it's painful knowing that another bad pun or camel joke is coming in another two paragraphs. The book is comprehensive, but the humor is distracting to say in the least. I mean, who wants to hear about certain variables being "thingys" when they're reading about operator precedence?

If you want an example of a reference on Perl that is clear and comprehensive, take a look at Core Perl by Reuven Lerner. The book covers much of the material of the "Camel" book, but with half the amount of pages. There's a sample chapter up at the Prentice Hall Web site.

Not related to Perl, but I have found Jeff Prosise's Programming Windows with MFC to be absolutely packed with information. The diction is concise, but not dry. Example code and programs are usually useful. Especially nice is how Mr. Prosise breaks down complex tasks into manageable steps. Few books are as well-organized as this one.

Actually, the entire content of the post is one question and two outright falsehoods.

Check out the ruby-lang pages list of docs there's a lot of good stuff there.

I own Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide (available in full online) known as 'The Pickaxe Book' (ie the Ruby Camel) and Ruby in a Nutshell from OReilly by the language designer Yukihiro Matsumoto (known as matz on the mailing list). Hail matz! :)
Then there's a personal favorite dead tree of mine The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton. I haven't finished it yet but it's full of crunchy goodness.

Between, those books and the wealth of tutorials and docs linked from www.ruby-lang.org/en there's a lot more material available than there was for Python when I started using it.

And the fact that these books keep selling and getting published implies to me that people are using Ruby.

When in doubt check the Ruby Book list at www.rubygarden.org to see whats out now and whats in the pipe.

As far as the bindings being buggy - I've only played with a few but they seem as good as I recall pythons bindings from when I used python. (admittedly that was a while ago)

C'mon give Ruby a try - I've found it a delight to play with. You might like it - and if not -well, learning why you dislike it is a valuable type of learning as well :)

I suggest the Pickaxe book (you'll eventually want to buy a hardcopy) and if you don't want to download the interpreter right now - well hold onto your hats. A clever fellow named Clemens Wyss has an 'interactive' version of the Pickaxe with all the code examples live in your browser so you can play with the code a lil. Find it here

In closing:
RubyCentral
RubyGarden
Ruby-Lang
Ruby-Talk Mailinglist

or check out the newsgroup at comp.lang.ruby

Kevin
--
'Just another Ruby Miner'

You may want to look at Structured Computer Organization from Andrew S. Tanenbaum (Creator of MINIX). It covers the changes of programming languages, instruction set, computer architecture, milestones in development of digital computers (Vaccuum Tubes to Transistors to VLSI), Moore's Law, Pentium , UltraSPARC, picoJava, storage, RAM, .... to how to design your own CPU.

You may find it too advance to under the whole designing CPU chapters, but it sure gives you a general idea of the history of computer in its introduction chapters.

You can also try the Computer History Association of California, and the Computer Industry History page from Electronic Software Publishing Corp.

Operating System Design: The XINU Approach by Douglas Comer (from Prentice Hall) was a really good book for me. It concentrates more on building a working operating system than on theoretical issues, which makes it a lot easier to read than some of the more academic texts. (Tenanbaum, Silberschatz and Galvin, etc.) There used to be several versions of the book, one each for the PDP-11, IBM-PC, and Macintosh, but you may not be able to find anything other than the IBM-PC version these days.

I also have an old copy of The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System by Leffler, McKusick, Karels and Quarterman, from Addison-Wesley, which was a pretty thorough coverage of unix concepts when it was written. There is likely to be a more up-to-date contemporary edition. (and you can probably find a small army of similar books, including the excelent Linux Kernel Internals by Beck, Böhme, Dziadzka, et. al. also from Addison-Wesley) Finally, you may want to pick up a copy of the anotated unix source code Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions from Peer-to-Peer Communications.

"Distance between plates" only applies in a 2D situation. A wire in space still has a fair bit of capacitance per unit length -- in fact, if you recall your intro physics, SPACE has a fair bit of capacitance. Electromagnetic signals don't actually travel through conductors, they travel through the space around them, and increasing the dielectric constant of that space (eg mineral oil or FR4) slows the signal at sqrt(epsilon) while lowering the line impedance by the same amount.

For more on this subject, you might want to pick up a copy of Howard Johnson's excellent High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic

Bottom line: in high-speed circuits, the space around the conductors (and its dielectric properties) is *very* important even if there aren't any other nearby conductors. Of course, there are -- which is why I mentioned crosstalk, too.