Priceless: Israel asks U.S. foreign aid be paid in EUROS, and Secreatry Rice says "We need to place our Israeli obligations at the top of our national priority list. Israel should not suffer any inconvenience due to currency fluctuations":
Another cool thing about parrots: being birds, they fly:-)
Brady probably reaches speeds well over 30 miles an hour flying around our house, but he avoids crashes, knows about windows, etc. I am careful to let him know if I am going to walk through a doorway while he is flying to avoid any unfortunte ramifications of the conservation of momentum and the pauli exclusion principle:-)
Baby birds mess up on the flying thing a lot, but it must be like learning to ride a bicycle - once you have it down, you have it down.
I have a Meyers Parrot named Brady (picture: http://flickr.com/photos/mark_watson/392128570/) who is about 6 years old. When Brady was a baby, I used to show him videos on my computer, not of Alex, but of the Parrot at MIT who used a symbolic language. Brady was fairly much fascinated by the videos, and I showed them to him many times.
Although parrots have small neocortexes, they are clever little creatures. Brady has good analytic (puzzle solving) abilities, but his long term memory seems to be limited to things that he has been exposed to many times - this is just my own opinion, not backed up by any scientific research.
I work at home and can frequently give our parrot attention during the day - please don't even consider getting a parrot unless either your family can give it frequent attention and play time every day, or get a mated pair that can keep each other company. We find that we can't really leave rady in a room by himself, so we move him to where ever we are in the house, or better yet, just let him run/fly around (also known as running amuck:-)
A problem with parrots is that they do bite - I get a good bite every month or two, but I try to not let it hurt my feelings. I could probably avoid most bites by not handling Brady when I know that he is pissed off, but why bother.
I wonder is those graphs are properly normalized by "real inflation". At least the Clinton and GW Bush administrations have jumped through hoops trying to make inflation seem to be far lower than it is.
I would like to see the same graphs normalized by dividing by defense spending each year.
I am not criticizing your post. I am just pointing out that after Clinton and GW Bush administrations (and don't even get me started on the "best Congress that corporations can buy"), that my trust in the federal government is on the decline - and I just don't believe the official inflation statistics.
Education is a mess in our country - too many years of "borrow and spend" republicans slashing support for schools using the very lame excuse about "cutting back money going to the school bureaucrats".
But, to your point: don't you think that support from family in studying and learning a pro-education attitude at home counts the most?
A bit personal, but: my Dad and his brother were the only 2 children of a very poor minister in Iowa. They always had food, but essentially zero money. Both kids learned to respect school from their Mom who was a local teacher (who recieved very little salary) and worked their way through school and ended up teaching at Berkeley and Harvard.
Another example: a friend from India had good grades, got accepted to Florida State. His parents could *just* afford to pay for his airfare from India and give him a few weeks living money for his arrival. He worked through college, and still finished in about 4 years although he did not have enough money to fly home for visits.
Perhaps not handing everything to kids on a silver platter is not so bad?
Well, my wife and I are "cheaters" since we live modestly, but well enough, and don't do our fair share purchasing stuff that we don't need.
I understand your point about consumption triggering good economic cycles, but consider this: you owe your first allegiance to doing what is best for yourself and your family. Then consider what is good for your local community, then down the scale of concern should be what is good for your country, and then send best wishes to people living in other countries.
I have heard this "got to support the US economy" argument many times, but I believe that if individuals act and spend responsibly, things will work out for the country as a whole much better than citizens and government engaging in massive deficit pending.
And, spoiling our grandkids is not that expensive:-)
That said, even for young families with kids, moving to less expensive cost of living areas still seems to make sense, as far as maintaining flexibility. The *big thing* is to avoid lots of debt - in the long run, families that can avoid debt tend to do well in just about any economic climate.
We and our local friends don't mind new people moving to town, in general. However, we live in a limited water supply area, and some large developers are building golf courses. WTH?
This is a bit of a generalization: people who buy small modest houses, recycle, respect their communities, etc. are not the problem. People wanting MacMansions are. There is othing to do about an increasing population, but people should live responsibly. As a friend of mine says "we should be good ancestors to future generations".
In Arizona, I think that the Phoenix area will not do well in the long run: too much of the economy is dependent on rapid growth, and the water supply will eventually be a limiting factor.
About 10 years ago my wife and I moved from a beach area in California to North Central Arizona - partly because it is a beautiful place and partly because a much lower cost of living in Arizona has freed us up to be more flexible in our working (or not working). Neither one of us has had a job in an office since our move, and we both only work on projects that interest us.
Frankly, I can not understand why so many people trade both their time and preference to work on interesting projects for material stuff like frequently buying new cars, homes that are much larger than they really need, etc. I believe that this odd behavior is caused by a lifetime of subjecting oneself to advertising, but that is just a theory:-)
Overall, the book is very good: the examples are clear and useful, and for an old Prolog programmer like me, Erlang has a natural feel to it.
I have been disappointed that none of my customers seem to be interested in Erlang development - I proposed using it for one application where 'share nothing' asynchronous communication seemed like a very good fit.
OK, so they allow the use of either ODF or Open XML - at least simple programs can extract text and style data form both formats. I blogged recently about how I prefer ODF, and included a little Ruby program to process ODF files:
and one of my readers pointed out that by changing a line or two of my code, that Open XML could be processed in the same way - I stand corrected.
Still, I am a member of the ODF Foundation, and don't like Microsoft's heavy handed actions. I sold all of my Microsoft stock a few years ago specifically because I did not like their proprietary file format lockins. I use both Open Source and proprietary software - I have no problem with people (including myself) buying Microsoft products except for their use of proprietary formats: hurts users and could cause expensive data loss now and in the future.
If Microsoft perfectly supported ODF in their release of Mac Office next year, I would buy a copy - but slap on plugins don't count here: I would require perfect native support.
The old SugarCRM license had an advertising requirement that required a large advertisement on every page. One of my old customers ended up not using SugarCRM because of this.
If ODF support were perfect, I might consider buying an updated OS X version of Word when a native Intel version is available - I would want to try a 30 day demo first, however. I own licenses for older versions of Word/Office for Windows and OS X (I am an author and most of my publishers like manuscripts delivered in Word formats). I have written several books using OpenOffice.org, and at the last minute converted to Word.
That said, at least for my work on Mac OS X, the best writing tools are: TexShop with OmniGraffle for technical diagrams. Latex and OmniGraffle are a great combination!
In spirit, I see commonality between Larry Lessig's desire to build a commons of information that can be shared and built on, and Tim Berners-Lee's desire to build a a platform for data integration that people can build new applications on. For all of my enthusiasm for the semantic web (I have had RDF meta data on my web site for many years), there are some tough problems, including: 1. trust: how do we keep people from publishing purposefully wrong meta data? 2. how do we reason with a web's worth of data? Even with recent advances in technology for descriptive logic reasoner's, reasoning with web scale data is not even close to being possible. Even the RDF extracted from Wikipedia is way too large to reason over. 3. tension between formal standards and "grass roots" bottom up approaches that work, but may not scale. I expect that some "grass roots" efforts will become very popular and perhaps replace RDF and OWL as the semantic web data model. Speaking of which, one of my favorite ideas that I have seen widely discussed: extending HTML/XHTML so that meta data is encoded in standardized attribute names representing agreement/disagreement, trust level, type of linked information, time stamp, etc. Combine this with RDF, but have a better way to embed RDF into HTML and XHTML.
I enjoy ACM Portal and AI journal articles - I am not knocking peer reviewed articles.
That said, I find useful "how to" information on web blogs very frequently.
I write what I call "web books" (a lot of care taken, some peer review and corrections), and I also blog a lot. I just looked at my own web logs to see which are accessed more often: it looks like the web books are accessed more than individual blog entries, but the 'home page' for the 2 blogs are hit much more.
I access web blog content in a way that I can't for papers: I have about 5 blogs that I read everyday because I know the other bloggers both have similar interests and I trust their opinions. It is rare that I run across someone's web site and enjoy it so much I download all their papers, etc.
Even more off topic, but: the important thing is that blogs and papers on the web "stick around" forever, hopefully with non-changing URIs. It seems like most search engines apply some reasonable bias towards new material (from trusted sites) so old material does not "get in the way". Web blogs have inherent time stamps - for regular web pages, papers, etc. RDF meta data would suffice for maintaining the time line of digital assets on the web.
I have been using the web since 1991 (and the Internet since the early 1980s), and my take is: we have "not seen nothing yet". I believe that we will see more progress of moving towards a shared knowledge commons on the web in the next ten years than we have seen in the last 15 years of the web. I have some skepticism about the Semantic Web, but I am optimistic that grass roots semantic web (notice the lower case:-) standards will evolve from things that are simple and that work.
The Ruby bundles for Windows have their place but for Linux and OS X, just build Ruby from source, install gems, and you are good to go. Once Ruby and gem are installed use gem for everything.
A bit off topic, but useful advice: I set up editor projects (TextMate, gedit, etc.) for:
1./usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8 - location of Ruby source code for standard libraries on my system 2./usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems - location of local gem installs (often contain examples/tests and documentation files) on my system
When you are using a standard library or a gem it is great to have the source right in front of you for reference.
I updated to version 3 today
on
GPLv3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This was an easy decision for me - I agree with the new license terms.
I did not originally use the "or later version" verbage, and I decided not to this time, not that it matters: I write what could best be called "small market" OS projects:-)
A bit off topic, but it continues to frustrate me that my customers don't take more advantage of the GPL. I have been an independent consultant for a decade, and I almost never get customers to support open source development. I went so far as to offer a 30% discount for work on GPLed projects - no bites, but lots of offers to work on proprietary systems. My take is that there is too much emphasis on protecting intellectual property and not enough on reducing costs and improving quality by building on top of existing GPLed projects. From my experience, and a bit of opinion thrown in: most value in intellectual property is in unique data sources and human knowledge. I would bet that most companies would do better on financial and quality metrics by having a few proprietary systems for specific data processing, application of unique algorithms, etc. - and use GPL (or Apache, BSD, etc.) for as much infrastructure software as possible.
Microsoft has good reasons to be nervous. I used to keep a Windows PC (or two) around for the odd (pun intended:-) consulting jobs that required some Windows only software. I have Parallels running right now because I need to run Ruby+Watir+IE for a customer task.
Microsoft still gets to sell Windows licenses, but they could get marginalized in the tech-elite market. That said, most of my non-computer savvy friends are happy enough to buy a cheap Windows PC to browse the web and do email.
Sorry in advance if I am going a little off topic here, but I think that economic wars will define the future.
In the best of future worlds, governments will compete with each other for skilled workers and investment based on how well they can provide: a low tax base, control of local violence, educational infrastructure, effective markets and trading partners, etc.
The problem that I see for the USA (my country), the UK, and a few others is that they spend so much on "defense" that they will not be able to compete economically and socially. Some people I know are very concerned about the USA using nuclear weapons in the Middle East. While I admit that there is a (hopefully very tiny) chance of this, I would think that any country starting a nuclear war in today's economically interlocked world would become a pariah state, and basically be toast as the rest of the world routes around them. If you are going to run a military based empire as a business, should it not be profitable? The problem is that the possibility of long term profitability of empires is suspect. Empires want to avoid support of the UN, world court, etc., but countries trying to compete economically are likely to view these international organizations as cost saving devices.
Call me an optimist, but I don't think that it is too late for the USA and UK to redirect the very high cost of empire to more productive use like education, local security, etc.
I like the trend of selling cheaper PDFs
on
Practical Ruby Gems
·
· Score: 1
Some books, while useful, are not worth the full purchase price and shelf space. I have bought several books in PDF form this year. PDFs are even better when publishers render the PDF in landscape (horizontal) format - much better for reading on a laptop.
One advantage of PDF books is that assuming a local search engine like Spotlight or Google Desktop, it is fast and easy to find relevant reference materials.
That said, I also enjoy my home office bookshelves - satisfying to take a physical book down off the shelf for reading.
In the late 1980s, I participated for about a year on the DARPA neural network tools panel. If I remember correctly (ha:-) it was Francis Crick who suggested that REM sleep was like simulated annealing; that is, serving the function of adding some randomness to a neural network so that we could forget meaningless things that happened to us during the day.
I loved my Apple II. My previous home cmputer was an Intercept Junior one board PDP-8 emulator (had to key in programs I wrote in Octal - yuck!)
I did 3 fun things with my Apple II:
1. wrote a very simple Basic Chess program that Apple gave away on the early demo program cassette tape 2. played with Bill Budge's 3D graphics library with the Lisa assembly language IDE 3. later, using UCSD Pascal, I wrote the world's first commercial Go playing program (Honninbo Warrior)
For me, my Apple II opened the door to what owning your own computer is all about: freedom to do what you want. This might be difficult to understand for some people, now that almost everyone has the freedom of owning their own computer.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I read the article *after* reading the articles. Mod me down my brothers, mod me down.
"But Bro, don't taser me"
Seriously, I assumed the article was about the general USA economy, and copied an email I had mostly just written to my family and friends. Oh well...
Sorry for the off topic post.
Priceless: Israel asks U.S. foreign aid be paid in EUROS, and Secreatry Rice says "We need to place our Israeli obligations at the top of our national priority list. Israel should not suffer any inconvenience due to currency fluctuations":
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/3689
Our economy is screwed - the longer we hyper-accelerate the virtual money printing presses, the worse it will be in the long run.
I have to ask: how did we get in this financial position?
From the linked article:
(Israeli) "Foreign Minister Levni cited the rapidly declining dollar
and it's disfavor as a world currency as reasons for the request."
Another cool thing about parrots: being birds, they fly :-)
:-)
Brady probably reaches speeds well over 30 miles an hour flying around our house, but he avoids crashes, knows about windows, etc. I am careful to let him know if I am going to walk through a doorway while he is flying to avoid any unfortunte ramifications of the conservation of momentum and the pauli exclusion principle
Baby birds mess up on the flying thing a lot, but it must be like learning to ride a bicycle - once you have it down, you have it down.
I have a Meyers Parrot named Brady (picture: http://flickr.com/photos/mark_watson/392128570/) who is about 6 years old. When Brady was a baby, I used to show him videos on my computer, not of Alex, but of the Parrot at MIT who used a symbolic language. Brady was fairly much fascinated by the videos, and I showed them to him many times.
:-)
Although parrots have small neocortexes, they are clever little creatures. Brady has good analytic (puzzle solving) abilities, but his long term memory seems to be limited to things that he has been exposed to many times - this is just my own opinion, not backed up by any scientific research.
I work at home and can frequently give our parrot attention during the day - please don't even consider getting a parrot unless either your family can give it frequent attention and play time every day, or get a mated pair that can keep each other company. We find that we can't really leave rady in a room by himself, so we move him to where ever we are in the house, or better yet, just let him run/fly around (also known as running amuck
A problem with parrots is that they do bite - I get a good bite every month or two, but I try to not let it hurt my feelings. I could probably avoid most bites by not handling Brady when I know that he is pissed off, but why bother.
Hello Josh,
I wonder is those graphs are properly normalized by "real inflation". At least the Clinton and GW Bush administrations have jumped through hoops trying to make inflation seem to be far lower than it is.
I would like to see the same graphs normalized by dividing by defense spending each year.
I am not criticizing your post. I am just pointing out that after Clinton and GW Bush administrations (and don't even get me started on the "best Congress that corporations can buy"), that my trust in the federal government is on the decline - and I just don't believe the official inflation statistics.
Education is a mess in our country - too many years of "borrow and spend" republicans slashing support for schools using the very lame excuse about "cutting back money going to the school bureaucrats".
But, to your point: don't you think that support from family in studying and learning a pro-education attitude at home counts the most?
A bit personal, but: my Dad and his brother were the only 2 children of a very poor minister in Iowa. They always had food, but essentially zero money. Both kids learned to respect school from their Mom who was a local teacher (who recieved very little salary) and worked their way through school and ended up teaching at Berkeley and Harvard.
Another example: a friend from India had good grades, got accepted to Florida State. His parents could *just* afford to pay for his airfare from India and give him a few weeks living money for his arrival. He worked through college, and still finished in about 4 years although he did not have enough money to fly home for visits.
Perhaps not handing everything to kids on a silver platter is not so bad?
Well, my wife and I are "cheaters" since we live modestly, but well enough, and don't do our fair share purchasing stuff that we don't need.
I understand your point about consumption triggering good economic cycles, but consider this: you owe your first allegiance to doing what is best for yourself and your family. Then consider what is good for your local community, then down the scale of concern should be what is good for your country, and then send best wishes to people living in other countries.
I have heard this "got to support the US economy" argument many times, but I believe that if individuals act and spend responsibly, things will work out for the country as a whole much better than citizens and government engaging in massive deficit pending.
The kids have moved out long ago.
:-)
And, spoiling our grandkids is not that expensive
That said, even for young families with kids, moving to less expensive cost of living areas still seems to make sense, as far as maintaining flexibility. The *big thing* is to avoid lots of debt - in the long run, families that can avoid debt tend to do well in just about any economic climate.
Not to worry: no offense taken.
We and our local friends don't mind new people moving to town, in general. However, we live in a limited water supply area, and some large developers are building golf courses. WTH?
This is a bit of a generalization: people who buy small modest houses, recycle, respect their communities, etc. are not the problem. People wanting MacMansions are. There is othing to do about an increasing population, but people should live responsibly. As a friend of mine says "we should be good ancestors to future generations".
In Arizona, I think that the Phoenix area will not do well in the long run: too much of the economy is dependent on rapid growth, and the water supply will eventually be a limiting factor.
About 10 years ago my wife and I moved from a beach area in California to North Central Arizona - partly because it is a beautiful place and partly because a much lower cost of living in Arizona has freed us up to be more flexible in our working (or not working). Neither one of us has had a job in an office since our move, and we both only work on projects that interest us.
:-)
Frankly, I can not understand why so many people trade both their time and preference to work on interesting projects for material stuff like frequently buying new cars, homes that are much larger than they really need, etc. I believe that this odd behavior is caused by a lifetime of subjecting oneself to advertising, but that is just a theory
Overall, the book is very good: the examples are clear and useful, and for an old Prolog programmer like me, Erlang has a natural feel to it.
I have been disappointed that none of my customers seem to be interested in Erlang development - I proposed using it for one application where 'share nothing' asynchronous communication seemed like a very good fit.
OK, so they allow the use of either ODF or Open XML - at least simple programs can extract text and style data form both formats. I blogged recently about how I prefer ODF, and included a little Ruby program to process ODF files:
t er-than-microsofts.html
http://markwatson.com/blog/2007/05/why-odf-is-bet
and one of my readers pointed out that by changing a line or two of my code, that Open XML could be processed in the same way - I stand corrected.
Still, I am a member of the ODF Foundation, and don't like Microsoft's heavy handed actions. I sold all of my Microsoft stock a few years ago specifically because I did not like their proprietary file format lockins. I use both Open Source and proprietary software - I have no problem with people (including myself) buying Microsoft products except for their use of proprietary formats: hurts users and could cause expensive data loss now and in the future.
If Microsoft perfectly supported ODF in their release of Mac Office next year, I would buy a copy - but slap on plugins don't count here: I would require perfect native support.
The old SugarCRM license had an advertising requirement that required a large advertisement on every page. One of my old customers ended up not using SugarCRM because of this.
Good also to see even wider GPL v3 adoption!
If ODF support were perfect, I might consider buying an updated OS X version of Word when a native Intel version is available - I would want to try a 30 day demo first, however. I own licenses for older versions of Word/Office for Windows and OS X (I am an author and most of my publishers like manuscripts delivered in Word formats). I have written several books using OpenOffice.org, and at the last minute converted to Word.
That said, at least for my work on Mac OS X, the best writing tools are: TexShop with OmniGraffle for technical diagrams. Latex and OmniGraffle are a great combination!
Well, we have a gut feeling that there is a vulnerability...
The article has no information what so ever - but, perhaps that is to avoid spreading information on how to exploit this alleged weakness.
In spirit, I see commonality between Larry Lessig's desire to build a commons of information that can be shared and built on, and Tim Berners-Lee's desire to build a a platform for data integration that people can build new applications on. For all of my enthusiasm for the semantic web (I have had RDF meta data on my web site for many years), there are some tough problems, including:
1. trust: how do we keep people from publishing purposefully wrong meta data?
2. how do we reason with a web's worth of data? Even with recent advances in technology for descriptive logic reasoner's, reasoning with web scale data is not even close to being possible. Even the RDF extracted from Wikipedia is way too large to reason over.
3. tension between formal standards and "grass roots" bottom up approaches that work, but may not scale. I expect that some "grass roots" efforts will become very popular and perhaps replace RDF and OWL as the semantic web data model. Speaking of which, one of my favorite ideas that I have seen widely discussed: extending HTML/XHTML so that meta data is encoded in standardized attribute names representing agreement/disagreement, trust level, type of linked information, time stamp, etc. Combine this with RDF, but have a better way to embed RDF into HTML and XHTML.
I enjoy ACM Portal and AI journal articles - I am not knocking peer reviewed articles.
:-) standards will evolve from things that are simple and that work.
That said, I find useful "how to" information on web blogs very frequently.
I write what I call "web books" (a lot of care taken, some peer review and corrections), and I also blog a lot. I just looked at my own web logs to see which are accessed more often: it looks like the web books are accessed more than individual blog entries, but the 'home page' for the 2 blogs are hit much more.
I access web blog content in a way that I can't for papers: I have about 5 blogs that I read everyday because I know the other bloggers both have similar interests and I trust their opinions. It is rare that I run across someone's web site and enjoy it so much I download all their papers, etc.
Even more off topic, but: the important thing is that blogs and papers on the web "stick around" forever, hopefully with non-changing URIs. It seems like most search engines apply some reasonable bias towards new material (from trusted sites) so old material does not "get in the way". Web blogs have inherent time stamps - for regular web pages, papers, etc. RDF meta data would suffice for maintaining the time line of digital assets on the web.
I have been using the web since 1991 (and the Internet since the early 1980s), and my take is: we have "not seen nothing yet". I believe that we will see more progress of moving towards a shared knowledge commons on the web in the next ten years than we have seen in the last 15 years of the web. I have some skepticism about the Semantic Web, but I am optimistic that grass roots semantic web (notice the lower case
The Ruby bundles for Windows have their place but for Linux and OS X, just build Ruby from source, install gems, and you are good to go. Once Ruby and gem are installed use gem for everything.
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8 - location of Ruby source code for standard libraries on my system /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems - location of local gem installs (often contain examples/tests and documentation files) on my system
A bit off topic, but useful advice: I set up editor projects (TextMate, gedit, etc.) for:
1.
2.
When you are using a standard library or a gem it is great to have the source right in front of you for reference.
This was an easy decision for me - I agree with the new license terms.
:-)
I did not originally use the "or later version" verbage, and I decided not to this time, not that it matters: I write what could best be called "small market" OS projects
A bit off topic, but it continues to frustrate me that my customers don't take more advantage of the GPL. I have been an independent consultant for a decade, and I almost never get customers to support open source development. I went so far as to offer a 30% discount for work on GPLed projects - no bites, but lots of offers to work on proprietary systems. My take is that there is too much emphasis on protecting intellectual property and not enough on reducing costs and improving quality by building on top of existing GPLed projects. From my experience, and a bit of opinion thrown in: most value in intellectual property is in unique data sources and human knowledge. I would bet that most companies would do better on financial and quality metrics by having a few proprietary systems for specific data processing, application of unique algorithms, etc. - and use GPL (or Apache, BSD, etc.) for as much infrastructure software as possible.
Microsoft has good reasons to be nervous. I used to keep a Windows PC (or two) around for the odd (pun intended :-) consulting jobs that required some Windows only software. I have Parallels running right now because I need to run Ruby+Watir+IE for a customer task.
Microsoft still gets to sell Windows licenses, but they could get marginalized in the tech-elite market. That said, most of my non-computer savvy friends are happy enough to buy a cheap Windows PC to browse the web and do email.
Sorry in advance if I am going a little off topic here, but I think that economic wars will define the future.
In the best of future worlds, governments will compete with each other for skilled workers and investment based on how well they can provide: a low tax base, control of local violence, educational infrastructure, effective markets and trading partners, etc.
The problem that I see for the USA (my country), the UK, and a few others is that they spend so much on "defense" that they will not be able to compete economically and socially. Some people I know are very concerned about the USA using nuclear weapons in the Middle East. While I admit that there is a (hopefully very tiny) chance of this, I would think that any country starting a nuclear war in today's economically interlocked world would become a pariah state, and basically be toast as the rest of the world routes around them. If you are going to run a military based empire as a business, should it not be profitable? The problem is that the possibility of long term profitability of empires is suspect. Empires want to avoid support of the UN, world court, etc., but countries trying to compete economically are likely to view these international organizations as cost saving devices.
Call me an optimist, but I don't think that it is too late for the USA and UK to redirect the very high cost of empire to more productive use like education, local security, etc.
Some books, while useful, are not worth the full purchase price and shelf space. I have bought several books in PDF form this year. PDFs are even better when publishers render the PDF in landscape (horizontal) format - much better for reading on a laptop.
One advantage of PDF books is that assuming a local search engine like Spotlight or Google Desktop, it is fast and easy to find relevant reference materials.
That said, I also enjoy my home office bookshelves - satisfying to take a physical book down off the shelf for reading.
Not quite right, but close:
GPL: 65.88%
LGPL: 6.55%
In the late 1980s, I participated for about a year on the DARPA neural network tools panel. If I remember correctly (ha :-) it was Francis Crick who suggested that REM sleep was like simulated annealing; that is, serving the function of adding some randomness to a neural network so that we could forget meaningless things that happened to us during the day.
I loved my Apple II. My previous home cmputer was an Intercept Junior one board PDP-8 emulator (had to key in programs I wrote in Octal - yuck!)
I did 3 fun things with my Apple II:
1. wrote a very simple Basic Chess program that Apple gave away on the early demo program cassette tape
2. played with Bill Budge's 3D graphics library with the Lisa assembly language IDE
3. later, using UCSD Pascal, I wrote the world's first commercial Go playing program (Honninbo Warrior)
For me, my Apple II opened the door to what owning your own computer is all about: freedom to do what you want. This might be difficult to understand for some people, now that almost everyone has the freedom of owning their own computer.