I've found that Mylar makes me extremely productive. I've tried task lists and post-it notes before, both real and virtual. With Mylar embedded in Eclipse, I have my tasks in the same application as my code, so they don't get lost or require a context switch to view. I'm using it in conjunction with Jira (it works with Bugzilla and Trac just as well or better), and I keep my bigger tasks organized by future release in Jira. I can see them in Mylar if I want to, but they're usually folded up and out of the way, except for the release I'm currently working on.
When I start to work on a large Jira feature, I create a bunch of small local tasks in Mylar that will only take an hour or two to complete, and I schedule them. It only takes a couple of seconds. If I get into the middle of a task or refactoring, and I find something else that needs to be done, I just create another local task if it's small or Jira task if it's big.
This has nearly eliminated all my procrastinating. A lot of why I procrastinated is because my releases are large, and I could never create enough post-it notes or tasks in any other system to make the releases manageable. Breaking the tasks down also makes them more fun because they turn into small annoyances that I want to get rid of. I come back from lunch thinking that I can get two or three done before I go home instead of wondering where I left off on a three month release.
There are a couple great side effects of this system. It's really easy to create release notes from the Jira tasks, and it's easy to create status reports from the local tasks in Mylar. I never forget anything. I also find it easier to go home at the end of the day, since I can create a task that will let me know right where I'm leaving off, and I make sure to activate the task, clear out all the other editors, and leave the task open. I write down everything I'm thinking at the end of the day, and I'm less likely to lie awake at night thinking about what I still have to do.
Brian Lehrer had the Left Behind authors, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, on his show November 27 to talk about the Left Behind series, their new book series, and the video game. Within the first 10 minutes, the authors clearly state that all non-believers will be slaughtered during the end times, including but not limited to Jews and Muslims. Their idea of not being biblical literalists is that they don't think Jesus will actually be mowing them down with a sword in his mouth. So, the game doesn't seem to stray too far from the authors' intents.
I think of myself as an antagnostic, my wife is a secular Jew, I live in New York, and I listen to the Devil's music, so I probably have every right to be offended by the books and the game, but I think they're funny in a campy way, similar to Jack Chick tracts. I'm going to pick up a used copy for my Satanist brother just to tweak him. I don't think the game should be banned any more than any other violent game, and it's good to know how all those Ned Flanders types really feel about the rest of us in their heart of hearts.
It got me to thinking that I should create my own spiritually inspired video game. It'll be a giant pray button that takes over the screen, and you can't minimize it or quit it. Why would you want to do anything else?
In the US, roughly half of our taxes fund the military, if you count debt servicing on previous military buildups. I personally get very little use from the military, so I can only assume that most of that expenditure goes to protect the assets of the rich globally. If you want to seriously cut taxes, go after the military, which is largely a sinkhole for money, since most of its projects are of little use unless you're actively at war. Before you start saying that I use the Internet, I could have just as well gone with whatever network AOL or Compuserve came up with were they not forced to compete with a state funded existing network.
So there you have about 50% of the state expenditure. Of the rest of it, I'd say that the wealthy benefit heavily from the transportation infrastructure. The wealthy benefit heavily from water purification, and even when they don't seem to benefit directly from a service, if their workers are more productive and efficient, the wealthy ultimately benefit the most. Imagine if your workers were constantly out sick with dysentery or if they couldn't get to work because the roads washed out. Considering that 20% of the world's population doesn't have access to clean drinking water, this is a reasonable concern and service to provide. It's ethical as well, and you could argue that providing health care to a population ethically outweighs any small burden placed on the rich by taxation.
I could go on about the police, prisons, universities but it's not necessary, since it should be clear that most of the major projects that your taxes pay for were decided on after some consideration over centuries by those same wealthy individuals that pay the bulk of the taxes. The US tax system wasn't put in place by an invading force. It was established by our leaders, largely drawn from wealthy and important families, who distribute public goods according to their understanding of utility or political expedience.
Take a look at Mayor Bloomberg of New York. After spending his own personal fortune to get himself elected, was his first move to make taxation proportional to use of services? No. He did some modest property tax rebates and went after smoking. Otherwise he left the city more less unchanged from where it was before he took office. His big issue now is getting transfats out of restaurants, largely at the expense of small businesses to serve the public good. He's not stinging from some great taxation injustice. He's on top of the world, and his accountants worry about the taxes.
What fascinates me about libertarians is that they are rarely rich themselves and have little to gain from their positions, perhaps less so than wealthy liberals that promote social programs. They view the systems established by their wealthy and powerful forefathers as a communist conspiracy. The system we have is at best voluntary, and at worst, imposed by the wealthy and powerful for their benefit.
This is great advice. I have Carpal Tunnel (RSI, really), and I gave up gaming for chess. It pushes most of the same mental buttons, and I don't find myself missing gaming too terribly. In a way, I'm happy to have made the trade, since I've always wanted to be a decent chess player. RSI has forced me to take chess seriously and put in the hours necessary to really learn the game.
If you're interested at all in board games, check out boardgameratings for ideas. I've played Settlers of Catan, and it's about as satisfying as playing Civilization.
If you like FPS, have you considered paintball?
If they were looking for a "gamer"
on
Top Ten Geek Girls
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· Score: 4, Insightful
They should have chosen grandmaster Judit Polgar. You don't get much geekier than chess, and you don't get much better than Judit Polgar.
It's not just disreputable registrars that play games with the transfer system. I've called Network Solutions three times already trying to get them to transfer my domain to Joker. The first time, they blamed it on Joker not submitting the authorization code. The second time, they blamed it on me not replying to the transfer request emails, which I replied to correctly the first time. They also promised that it would work if I had Joker try again. I contacted Joker, and they confirmed that it's all Network Solutions' doing. Now, I'm on the third try, and it's still failing. When I called Network Solutions, they claimed that they had somebody in the transfer department "researching" my problem.
I remember clearly when I first compiled the scrobbler plugin for xmms and installed it. After about a couple days, I checked on last.fm, and I immediately cleared my stats. I found myself thinking, "What will the neighbors think?" On last.fm, you literally have neighbors, and you're matched by what you listen to, so if you want to be linked with other poseurs like yourself, you have to be careful. After clearing my rankings, I made sure to seed my account with a few days of selected tracks before I let any of my real listening habits creep through.
I took someone's advice from Slashdot a while back and tried to teach my daughter programming using Squeak. I made the mistake of stumbling around, thinking we would both learn about it as we go. It was a disaster, and after a half hour of fumbling with it, I gave up.
I started thinking about how to approach programming with her again, and I found myself wishing she could work with computers the way I did when I was a kid. Then I realized that all the computers I loved are still around as emulators. So I'm going to give it a shot again with a vintage BASIC book for kids and a C64 emulator. When she's comfortable with BASIC, I'll move her to KPL. I don't think kids will be put off by the primitive graphics if you start them early enough. My brother has been writing Atari games for fun, and my daughters enjoy those.
When I started programming, the thing I found that was hardest was working with the keyboard. BASIC on the Palm or Windows CE might work well as an option, with handwriting recognition.
For the first 10 paragraphs, the story is about CFL bulbs. Then, it switches into a big greenwashing campaign for Wal-Mart and GE. There's a tiny section in the middle that explains how a CFL works, but nothing about how they've improved over the last 10 years. Then it swtiches back to GE and "ecomagination". Obviously, there are other bulb manufacturers and other retailers that sell bulbs, but you'd never guess that from the article. Congratulations to the PR and marketing departments that got a free multi-page ad in FastCompany.
I've been fighting RSI for about 5 years now. I have the 3M mouse, and from what I can tell, that's as good as it gets. I find that touchpads are worse even than mice because they don't have any give.
It might be time to just give up on the mouse. You can navigate around windows without one, but it takes a lot of work to figure out how to do it. Most OSes also have a keyboard mouse mode where you can move the pointer with the keypad. This should be a lot easier on the arms but it's insanely slow.
The problem with voice recognition is that it's hard to talk constantly for 8 hours. Your vocal chords wear out pretty quickly and you end up with a whole other set of problems. The same goes for switching mouse hands. I did that years ago, and it just moved my RSI from one arm to the other. I now wish I had one arm that didn't hurt so that I could sleep on that side.
My solution has been threefold:
I try to get more sleep. I noticed that my pain and my posture are always worse when I'm tired.
I use a break timer at work, and I only type for 15 minute intervals.
I got a Kinesis contoured keyboard. I've tried it after using three or four other ergonomic and split keyboards. It can also be used with a switch that I have programmed to simulate a left mouse click. My work paid for one, and I liked it enough that I bought one for home with my own money.
I've been running Debian testing since it was first established as a layer between stable and unstable. I've been burned many times, mostly with buggy Gnome libraries and problems with X. After an upgrade last month, I had repeat system lock-ups with xorg, Firefox started crashing, and I vowed to move to Kubuntu as soon as the new release is out. (I'm taking Linus' advice and scrapping Gnome as well.) In the meantime, I'm running a mix of testing and unstable, which I really don't like to do.
The problem isn't so much with Debian as with my impulsive desire to upgrade. If I get a little downtime at work, I upgrade, just to see what's new. Since Debian stable is only released every few years, it's really too old to use on a workstation, so I'm left without any set upgrade cycle. That's what Kubuntu is promising for me: a regular upgrade cycle with a known, working configuration I can use for six months.
I'm still using Debian stable on my server, where it belongs. I've tried running a mixture of stable and unstable in the past (before testing), and stable and testing after that, but library conflicts quickly make it difficult to manage. I think there's a lot of value in having a configuration that's somewhat similar to what a large user base is running, so when you find a bug, there's a good chance someone else has already posted a workaround.
Finally, to those who say that testing and unstable are not stable, and I should expect problems, my thought is that I don't want to run testing or unstable. I want to run versions of applications that are recent, stable releases, not the bleeding edge. At the same time, I don't want to miss out on bug fixes and upgrades while waiting years for Debian stable. In that sense, I think Ubuntu is a good compromise for desktop users.
I was amazed to RTFA and find myself accurately described by their CEO. In college I spent all my money on music, and when I started working full-time, I dumped a lot of cash on CDs. After I had kids, I stopped going to clubs, I didn't spend much time hanging out with friends listening to music, and I lost touch with current trends in music. I rode out the electronic/lounge/trip-hop wave of the 90s, and found myself bored with my discs but unwilling to drop $20 to try anything new. I all but stopped buying CDs about four years ago.
I tried eMusic I think around 2000, when they were an all-you-can-download service, and I didn't find much that appealed to me. I came back about two years ago, and now I'm on eMusic's biggest subscription package with 400 items in my save for later list. At my subscription level, albums cost under $3, so I don't hesitate to download anything, and I find it to be an aging indie rocker's dream come true. Probably half of my iPod is filled with eMusic, and I'm happy that it's not taking up any space in my apartment.
I really only have a few complaints about eMusic:
The Linux client doesn't really work. I had to set up tinyproxy to handle its socket connections. You can download without the client, but it's tedious.
I wish they'd let me buy a bigger subscription. The bonus packs aren't as cheap per track as the subscription. I'd like to download an album a day.
The track tagging isn't all that great. Sometimes they're in title case, sometimes not, the genres aren't always a good fit, and the download manager puts spaces in filenames. They don't include album art, so you have to scrounge that up on your own.
The save for later lists are limited to 100 entries and get a little unmanageable if you overdo it.
I can't recommend them enough, and I hope they continue to succeed.
Re:Comparing with Eclipse
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Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 1
You're going to miss out on a lot if you got with vim for Java editing. I love vim, and I've used it since near its inception. I've been using vi since 1987, and I still use vim every day for writing email. My vimrc is 544 lines long, and it's nearly all custom functions I wrote for Java back before Eclipse was available. What got me to switch to Eclipse was refactoring. My coworker, a lifelong Emacs poweruser switched shortly after I did for the same reason.
Refactoring in Eclipse made a huge difference in how I program. I no longer fret over variable, method, and class naming, since it's trivial to rename anything across an entire project. When I used vim, I knew that if I named something improperly, there was a good chance I'd spend half an hour fixing it later on. Using perl or sed for this sort of thing can lead to nasty bugs, and with Eclipse, I'm confident I'm getting it right, instantly, and that I can undo refactorings instantly. I'm also less afraid to write massive blocks of code, since I can extract methods instantly once I have the code down on the page. Same goes for inlining if I become overzealous in my method extraction.
I also use the quick fixes constantly. It takes seconds to introduce a new parameter to a constructor and pass it into a field with a quickfix. It takes a keystroke to make a constant value into a constant field or take a local variable and make it a field. There are other great coding features of Eclipse (error flagging, navigation, completion, junit integration) which you could get in vim using Eclim, but remember, these are included out of the box with Eclipse, and you're going to have to fight to get them working in vim.
I felt that working with Eclipse made Java programming an order of magnitude more fluid and more fun. It removed most of the gruntwork, and as a bonus it has a handy debugger, a helpful CVS UI, and drop in integration for profilers, Spring development, and code coverage tools.
By all means, learn vim or emacs for remote editing and shell scripting, but Eclipse (or Idea, if you want to pay for it) will make you substantially more productive, and you'll have more fun coding.
The plight of independent journalists is also serious in Cuba, where the government controls every media outlet. "Although the methods of repression are not as violent in Cuba as elsewhere in Latin America -- no journalist has been murdered in Cuba in the last decade -- the effect is the same. Journalists who publish outside Cuba can be prosecuted for a variety of crimes, from defamation to aiding the enemy."
I agree that only the left takes FAIR seriously. Only the left thought Saddam didn't have WMD, and only the left thought it might be a mistake to invade Iraq.
You know where I stand on NPR, and I don't have much love for PBS, either. I don't park my kids in front of Sesame Street, and I could do without Elmo, Barney, or the Teletubbies in my life. I don't mind Arthur. Have you noticed that they're really the only toys on the shelves for kids under 5 in Target, K-Mart, and Walmart? Real lefties only let their kids play with wood blocks from sustainable tree farms.
In a word yes. I believe that news organizations should be critical of the government, fundamentally, and with this administration especially. If I want to know what Bush thinks, I can already go to whitehouse.gov, and my tax dollars already pay for that.
NPR was skeptical of the WMD claims, until it came time for them to scoop the rest of the media with a WMD "discovery" that quickly turned out to be false. The NY Times also claims they were skeptical and printed stories questioning the WMD claims. However, I felt that, like the Times, NPR lead with the administration's point of view and buried the counterclaims. Astute listeners like yourself were able to pick the wheat from the chaff. At the time Democracy Now was leading with stories from Iraqi exiles and weapons inspectors that said there were no WMD. They convinced me, they got it right, and I stuck with them. Now I get their podcast and they get my public radio dollars.
Let me amuse you some more. How different is NPR from Fox News? Maybe you can help me out. Does Mara Liasson work for NPR or Fox News? What about Juan Williams, NPR or Fox News? This is one of those trivial things FAIR has complained about, and NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin agrees with them for the most part:
"I think [FAIR founder Norman] Solomon and Abunimah are substantially correct -- but only up to a point. NPR reporters, hosts and ombudsmen should not be in the business of making their own opinions known about matters of public controversy. When they do, the public quickly senses that NPR compromises its ability to report in a fair manner."
I'll do my best to keep it entertaining. In the meantime, I prefer that my public radio not include corporate sponsorships (that's what corporate radio is for), and I prefer to get my news from journalists who don't work for Fox News.
Long before podcasting, I ripped NPR programming from their RealAudio streams and crunched it down to MP3s. I stopped giving money to NPR when they killed low power FM. I felt that the corporate sponsors were (and still are) using NPR to greenwash their reputation, but I still enjoyed a lot of the programming. But NPR never strayed far enough from the administration's line for me when they covered the Iraq War, and when they "scooped" the rest of the media with their phony WMD claim, I gave up on them entirely. I turned to Democracy Now, and I use their podcast service. I also contribute more to them than I ever did to NPR, since they're free of corporate sponsorship.
There's a little bit about the history of memorizing in the article, and if you're looking for more on the topic, Frances Yates'The Art of Memory covers memorization from its mythical beginnings with Simonides, through its use by Roman orators, and ultimately its transformation into a mystical technique and occult science in the Middle Ages. Most of the techniques described in the article were practiced by the Romans.
My favorite memory Grandmaster is George Koltanowski. He held the record for the most simultaneous blindfold chess games played, and he gave demonstrations of his exceptional memory using the knight's tour. As this article describes, his audience would provide 64 words or numbers which would be written on a giant chess board on stage. Koltanowski would quickly memorize the board, and, while blindfolded, recall the data in the order of a knight's tour.
This is exactly what I was thinking. There are only a few reasons I can think of to use an eBook:
You can't grep a tree.
I would love to see chess books with interactive board displays. There's already a lot of chess instructional software in the ChessBase format that's more or less an eBook, and some popular print chess books are rereleased in this format. The software is more expensive than an a comparable book, but the interactivity and ability to work with or against the computer is a huge plus. The problem is, nearly all chess eBooks are only for the PC. I have a couple for Windows Mobile, but the screen is too small on my iPaq to display the text and board at the same time. I guess I really need a tablet PC.
EBooks would be great for text books because you could copy code examples (if they aren't DRMed), textbooks are already quite expensive, they tend to be really large, and you need to carry a lot of them around.
I'm interested in rapid serial visual presentation for skimming or reviewing reference works. EBooks could provide a text view and a RSVP mode for the same text.
None of these are good enough reasons to buy a dedicated eBook device. I think we need to see inexpensive, x86-based, palm-sized general purpose devices with 20-hour battery life and digital ink become widely available before people are willing to choose an eBook over a paperback.
My parents borrowed TRS-80s periodically from Motorola, but the first machine they bought for my exclusive use was a MEK6800D2, or D2 Kit, as we affectionately called it. My dad must have got it around 1977 when I was 7 and my brother was 6. My dad had to assemble it, and when he was done soldering, we were confronted with two raw breadboards, a homebrew powersupply, a hex keypad, and 6 segmented LEDs. It wasn't exactly the TRS-80 we'd hoped for. My mom taught my brother and I how to write assembler and translate it by hand into machine code. I still clearly remember her describing the accumulator. My dad joined some sort of club for the thing and got the code to play music on a speaker he hacked on. My brother and I spent hours typing it in on the hex keypad and writing our own songs in hex. We had a drawing of a piano with the corresponding notes translated into frequencies and their hex values. My brother ultimately got it to play the Star Wars theme. Our efforts on the D2 Kit convinced my parents to blow the big money on a Vic-20 when they came out, and we forgot the D2 Kit for another 15 years. I took a senior-level microcontroller class at Arizona State University, and I ended up spending a semester programming it again. My brother took the same class a year later. That was enough for me, but my brother still spends his spare time coding assembler.
Uniformly bad advice
on
Chess for Kids?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There's a lot of bad advice on here. It's great that your daughter wants to learn chess. I have two daughters, 3 and 7, and I'm teaching them the game. My younger daughter asked to play with me this morning (she mostly just sets up the pieces).
First, I'm disappointed that so many posters assumed that there's some hidden meaning in your daughter's interest. I can say from experience that, when my daughters don't feel like playing chess, no promises of quality time will get them near the board. I think it's fair to assume that your daughter is genuinely interested, which is great. Also, if she's interested in chess, don't be afraid to teach her chess. Go is a great game, but there's no reason not to teach her chess.
Over the board play is best for learning chess, as people suggest, but I've found that it's not always the best way to interest my older daughter in the game. I bought Fritz and Chesster, and she enjoys working with it over working with me. It does a great job of breaking down the game into practical lessons that are fun to play. It may be a bit advanced for your daughter, but I think it's better than using Chessmaster on the easiest level. I have noticed that it's geared toward a male player and a lot of the humor is distinctly Teutonic, but I didn't find it particularly offensive. I think it's probably all you really need for software until she's a tournament player, and it's reasonably priced. I even caught my wife working with my daughter when she got stuck on the king and rook mate. My wife never gets involved in over-the-board games.
I'd also say that, contrary to what others are writing, chess is not easy for a parent to teach, nor is it an easy game in any sense. It's difficult to play on the same level as your kid if you're at all good, my older daughter doesn't want to play with a handicap, and she as soon as she makes a few opening moves, she gets bogged down and confused. I've had some success setting up chess mazes for her, where I sprinkle pawns on the board and she has to move pieces through the pawns. I've also had success getting her interested in puzzles. I can't blame you for looking for ways to supplement her learning.
Don't just buy any chess book. Most chess books, even beginner ones, are written for an adult audience, and you'll have to translate what you're reading into lessons that are appropriate for a kid. Plus, for the poster that recommended Lasker's Manual, it's in descriptive notation. No child or parent should have to deal with descriptive notation. Make sure any book you buy is in algebraic notation.
I can't recommend beginner books for children from my experience, but Chess for Juniors and How to Beat Your Dad at Chess are universally acclaimed. I got my daughter Simple Checkmates, and she's able to work through it on her own. Kudos to the person who mentioned Dan Heisman. His Novice Nook columns are a great resource for beginning tournament players, and he's the author of A Parent's Guide to Chess. He does online tutoring, and I have a friend who is an online student of his who recommends him highly. I haven't read it, but Susan's Polgar's instruction book might also be of interest. She's one
I've tried out rapid serial visual presentation software (RSVP) on my desktop, and it does seem to allow me to read substantially faster. I doubt I'd read this way for pleasure, but I'd like to do it with reference manuals. It would be great for skimming textbooks to review or preview material, and studies show that you can read about three times faster without losing any comprehension ability.
I'm also interested in electronic chess books. It's almost impossible for me to read anything but tactics books without a board. Even with a board, moving the pieces is slow, and setting up the main position after examining a line of analysis is slow. I'd like to read through games and be able to follow the game with an on-screen board next to the text.
Both these options already exist for the Pocket PC, and I'm looking forward to seeing them on E-Ink displays.
Slashdot Mirror
See this FAQ for how hard decimal arithmetic really is. Few programmers understand this.
I've found that Mylar makes me extremely productive. I've tried task lists and post-it notes before, both real and virtual. With Mylar embedded in Eclipse, I have my tasks in the same application as my code, so they don't get lost or require a context switch to view. I'm using it in conjunction with Jira (it works with Bugzilla and Trac just as well or better), and I keep my bigger tasks organized by future release in Jira. I can see them in Mylar if I want to, but they're usually folded up and out of the way, except for the release I'm currently working on.
When I start to work on a large Jira feature, I create a bunch of small local tasks in Mylar that will only take an hour or two to complete, and I schedule them. It only takes a couple of seconds. If I get into the middle of a task or refactoring, and I find something else that needs to be done, I just create another local task if it's small or Jira task if it's big.
This has nearly eliminated all my procrastinating. A lot of why I procrastinated is because my releases are large, and I could never create enough post-it notes or tasks in any other system to make the releases manageable. Breaking the tasks down also makes them more fun because they turn into small annoyances that I want to get rid of. I come back from lunch thinking that I can get two or three done before I go home instead of wondering where I left off on a three month release.
There are a couple great side effects of this system. It's really easy to create release notes from the Jira tasks, and it's easy to create status reports from the local tasks in Mylar. I never forget anything. I also find it easier to go home at the end of the day, since I can create a task that will let me know right where I'm leaving off, and I make sure to activate the task, clear out all the other editors, and leave the task open. I write down everything I'm thinking at the end of the day, and I'm less likely to lie awake at night thinking about what I still have to do.
Brian Lehrer had the Left Behind authors, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, on his show November 27 to talk about the Left Behind series, their new book series, and the video game. Within the first 10 minutes, the authors clearly state that all non-believers will be slaughtered during the end times, including but not limited to Jews and Muslims. Their idea of not being biblical literalists is that they don't think Jesus will actually be mowing them down with a sword in his mouth. So, the game doesn't seem to stray too far from the authors' intents.
I think of myself as an antagnostic, my wife is a secular Jew, I live in New York, and I listen to the Devil's music, so I probably have every right to be offended by the books and the game, but I think they're funny in a campy way, similar to Jack Chick tracts. I'm going to pick up a used copy for my Satanist brother just to tweak him. I don't think the game should be banned any more than any other violent game, and it's good to know how all those Ned Flanders types really feel about the rest of us in their heart of hearts.
It got me to thinking that I should create my own spiritually inspired video game. It'll be a giant pray button that takes over the screen, and you can't minimize it or quit it. Why would you want to do anything else?
In the US, roughly half of our taxes fund the military, if you count debt servicing on previous military buildups. I personally get very little use from the military, so I can only assume that most of that expenditure goes to protect the assets of the rich globally. If you want to seriously cut taxes, go after the military, which is largely a sinkhole for money, since most of its projects are of little use unless you're actively at war. Before you start saying that I use the Internet, I could have just as well gone with whatever network AOL or Compuserve came up with were they not forced to compete with a state funded existing network.
So there you have about 50% of the state expenditure. Of the rest of it, I'd say that the wealthy benefit heavily from the transportation infrastructure. The wealthy benefit heavily from water purification, and even when they don't seem to benefit directly from a service, if their workers are more productive and efficient, the wealthy ultimately benefit the most. Imagine if your workers were constantly out sick with dysentery or if they couldn't get to work because the roads washed out. Considering that 20% of the world's population doesn't have access to clean drinking water, this is a reasonable concern and service to provide. It's ethical as well, and you could argue that providing health care to a population ethically outweighs any small burden placed on the rich by taxation.
I could go on about the police, prisons, universities but it's not necessary, since it should be clear that most of the major projects that your taxes pay for were decided on after some consideration over centuries by those same wealthy individuals that pay the bulk of the taxes. The US tax system wasn't put in place by an invading force. It was established by our leaders, largely drawn from wealthy and important families, who distribute public goods according to their understanding of utility or political expedience.
Take a look at Mayor Bloomberg of New York. After spending his own personal fortune to get himself elected, was his first move to make taxation proportional to use of services? No. He did some modest property tax rebates and went after smoking. Otherwise he left the city more less unchanged from where it was before he took office. His big issue now is getting transfats out of restaurants, largely at the expense of small businesses to serve the public good. He's not stinging from some great taxation injustice. He's on top of the world, and his accountants worry about the taxes.
What fascinates me about libertarians is that they are rarely rich themselves and have little to gain from their positions, perhaps less so than wealthy liberals that promote social programs. They view the systems established by their wealthy and powerful forefathers as a communist conspiracy. The system we have is at best voluntary, and at worst, imposed by the wealthy and powerful for their benefit.
This is great advice. I have Carpal Tunnel (RSI, really), and I gave up gaming for chess. It pushes most of the same mental buttons, and I don't find myself missing gaming too terribly. In a way, I'm happy to have made the trade, since I've always wanted to be a decent chess player. RSI has forced me to take chess seriously and put in the hours necessary to really learn the game.
If you're interested at all in board games, check out boardgameratings for ideas. I've played Settlers of Catan, and it's about as satisfying as playing Civilization.
If you like FPS, have you considered paintball?
They should have chosen grandmaster Judit Polgar. You don't get much geekier than chess, and you don't get much better than Judit Polgar.
It's not just disreputable registrars that play games with the transfer system. I've called Network Solutions three times already trying to get them to transfer my domain to Joker. The first time, they blamed it on Joker not submitting the authorization code. The second time, they blamed it on me not replying to the transfer request emails, which I replied to correctly the first time. They also promised that it would work if I had Joker try again. I contacted Joker, and they confirmed that it's all Network Solutions' doing. Now, I'm on the third try, and it's still failing. When I called Network Solutions, they claimed that they had somebody in the transfer department "researching" my problem.
I remember clearly when I first compiled the scrobbler plugin for xmms and installed it. After about a couple days, I checked on last.fm, and I immediately cleared my stats. I found myself thinking, "What will the neighbors think?" On last.fm, you literally have neighbors, and you're matched by what you listen to, so if you want to be linked with other poseurs like yourself, you have to be careful. After clearing my rankings, I made sure to seed my account with a few days of selected tracks before I let any of my real listening habits creep through.
I took someone's advice from Slashdot a while back and tried to teach my daughter programming using Squeak. I made the mistake of stumbling around, thinking we would both learn about it as we go. It was a disaster, and after a half hour of fumbling with it, I gave up.
I started thinking about how to approach programming with her again, and I found myself wishing she could work with computers the way I did when I was a kid. Then I realized that all the computers I loved are still around as emulators. So I'm going to give it a shot again with a vintage BASIC book for kids and a C64 emulator. When she's comfortable with BASIC, I'll move her to KPL. I don't think kids will be put off by the primitive graphics if you start them early enough. My brother has been writing Atari games for fun, and my daughters enjoy those.
When I started programming, the thing I found that was hardest was working with the keyboard. BASIC on the Palm or Windows CE might work well as an option, with handwriting recognition.
For the first 10 paragraphs, the story is about CFL bulbs. Then, it switches into a big greenwashing campaign for Wal-Mart and GE. There's a tiny section in the middle that explains how a CFL works, but nothing about how they've improved over the last 10 years. Then it swtiches back to GE and "ecomagination". Obviously, there are other bulb manufacturers and other retailers that sell bulbs, but you'd never guess that from the article. Congratulations to the PR and marketing departments that got a free multi-page ad in FastCompany.
I've been fighting RSI for about 5 years now. I have the 3M mouse, and from what I can tell, that's as good as it gets. I find that touchpads are worse even than mice because they don't have any give.
It might be time to just give up on the mouse. You can navigate around windows without one, but it takes a lot of work to figure out how to do it. Most OSes also have a keyboard mouse mode where you can move the pointer with the keypad. This should be a lot easier on the arms but it's insanely slow.
The problem with voice recognition is that it's hard to talk constantly for 8 hours. Your vocal chords wear out pretty quickly and you end up with a whole other set of problems. The same goes for switching mouse hands. I did that years ago, and it just moved my RSI from one arm to the other. I now wish I had one arm that didn't hurt so that I could sleep on that side.
My solution has been threefold:
I've been running Debian testing since it was first established as a layer between stable and unstable. I've been burned many times, mostly with buggy Gnome libraries and problems with X. After an upgrade last month, I had repeat system lock-ups with xorg, Firefox started crashing, and I vowed to move to Kubuntu as soon as the new release is out. (I'm taking Linus' advice and scrapping Gnome as well.) In the meantime, I'm running a mix of testing and unstable, which I really don't like to do.
The problem isn't so much with Debian as with my impulsive desire to upgrade. If I get a little downtime at work, I upgrade, just to see what's new. Since Debian stable is only released every few years, it's really too old to use on a workstation, so I'm left without any set upgrade cycle. That's what Kubuntu is promising for me: a regular upgrade cycle with a known, working configuration I can use for six months.
I'm still using Debian stable on my server, where it belongs. I've tried running a mixture of stable and unstable in the past (before testing), and stable and testing after that, but library conflicts quickly make it difficult to manage. I think there's a lot of value in having a configuration that's somewhat similar to what a large user base is running, so when you find a bug, there's a good chance someone else has already posted a workaround.
Finally, to those who say that testing and unstable are not stable, and I should expect problems, my thought is that I don't want to run testing or unstable. I want to run versions of applications that are recent, stable releases, not the bleeding edge. At the same time, I don't want to miss out on bug fixes and upgrades while waiting years for Debian stable. In that sense, I think Ubuntu is a good compromise for desktop users.
I was amazed to RTFA and find myself accurately described by their CEO. In college I spent all my money on music, and when I started working full-time, I dumped a lot of cash on CDs. After I had kids, I stopped going to clubs, I didn't spend much time hanging out with friends listening to music, and I lost touch with current trends in music. I rode out the electronic/lounge/trip-hop wave of the 90s, and found myself bored with my discs but unwilling to drop $20 to try anything new. I all but stopped buying CDs about four years ago.
I tried eMusic I think around 2000, when they were an all-you-can-download service, and I didn't find much that appealed to me. I came back about two years ago, and now I'm on eMusic's biggest subscription package with 400 items in my save for later list. At my subscription level, albums cost under $3, so I don't hesitate to download anything, and I find it to be an aging indie rocker's dream come true. Probably half of my iPod is filled with eMusic, and I'm happy that it's not taking up any space in my apartment.
I really only have a few complaints about eMusic:
I can't recommend them enough, and I hope they continue to succeed.
Refactoring in Eclipse made a huge difference in how I program. I no longer fret over variable, method, and class naming, since it's trivial to rename anything across an entire project. When I used vim, I knew that if I named something improperly, there was a good chance I'd spend half an hour fixing it later on. Using perl or sed for this sort of thing can lead to nasty bugs, and with Eclipse, I'm confident I'm getting it right, instantly, and that I can undo refactorings instantly. I'm also less afraid to write massive blocks of code, since I can extract methods instantly once I have the code down on the page. Same goes for inlining if I become overzealous in my method extraction.
I also use the quick fixes constantly. It takes seconds to introduce a new parameter to a constructor and pass it into a field with a quickfix. It takes a keystroke to make a constant value into a constant field or take a local variable and make it a field. There are other great coding features of Eclipse (error flagging, navigation, completion, junit integration) which you could get in vim using Eclim, but remember, these are included out of the box with Eclipse, and you're going to have to fight to get them working in vim.
I felt that working with Eclipse made Java programming an order of magnitude more fluid and more fun. It removed most of the gruntwork, and as a bonus it has a handy debugger, a helpful CVS UI, and drop in integration for profilers, Spring development, and code coverage tools.
By all means, learn vim or emacs for remote editing and shell scripting, but Eclipse (or Idea, if you want to pay for it) will make you substantially more productive, and you'll have more fun coding.
This is from fair.org, quoting a 1998 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists:
I agree that only the left takes FAIR seriously. Only the left thought Saddam didn't have WMD, and only the left thought it might be a mistake to invade Iraq.
You know where I stand on NPR, and I don't have much love for PBS, either. I don't park my kids in front of Sesame Street, and I could do without Elmo, Barney, or the Teletubbies in my life. I don't mind Arthur. Have you noticed that they're really the only toys on the shelves for kids under 5 in Target, K-Mart, and Walmart? Real lefties only let their kids play with wood blocks from sustainable tree farms.
In a word yes. I believe that news organizations should be critical of the government, fundamentally, and with this administration especially. If I want to know what Bush thinks, I can already go to whitehouse.gov, and my tax dollars already pay for that.
NPR was skeptical of the WMD claims, until it came time for them to scoop the rest of the media with a WMD "discovery" that quickly turned out to be false. The NY Times also claims they were skeptical and printed stories questioning the WMD claims. However, I felt that, like the Times, NPR lead with the administration's point of view and buried the counterclaims. Astute listeners like yourself were able to pick the wheat from the chaff. At the time Democracy Now was leading with stories from Iraqi exiles and weapons inspectors that said there were no WMD. They convinced me, they got it right, and I stuck with them. Now I get their podcast and they get my public radio dollars.
Let me amuse you some more. How different is NPR from Fox News? Maybe you can help me out. Does Mara Liasson work for NPR or Fox News? What about Juan Williams, NPR or Fox News? This is one of those trivial things FAIR has complained about, and NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin agrees with them for the most part:
I'll do my best to keep it entertaining. In the meantime, I prefer that my public radio not include corporate sponsorships (that's what corporate radio is for), and I prefer to get my news from journalists who don't work for Fox News.
"Our aim is not to get stuck in a place where we're saying, 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.'"
There's some evidence that NPR has a conservative bias. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting periodically studies the NPR guestlist to determine if NPR "promote[s] personal growth rather than corporate gain" and "speak[s] with many voices, many dialects" as it purports to do. FAIR has a page dedicated to NPR that includes all their criticism of NPR programming. Was FAIR fair to NPR in their study of conservative bias? NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey A. Dvorkin says "The FAIR study seems about right to me with a couple of exceptions."
Long before podcasting, I ripped NPR programming from their RealAudio streams and crunched it down to MP3s. I stopped giving money to NPR when they killed low power FM. I felt that the corporate sponsors were (and still are) using NPR to greenwash their reputation, but I still enjoyed a lot of the programming. But NPR never strayed far enough from the administration's line for me when they covered the Iraq War, and when they "scooped" the rest of the media with their phony WMD claim, I gave up on them entirely. I turned to Democracy Now, and I use their podcast service. I also contribute more to them than I ever did to NPR, since they're free of corporate sponsorship.
There's a little bit about the history of memorizing in the article, and if you're looking for more on the topic, Frances Yates' The Art of Memory covers memorization from its mythical beginnings with Simonides, through its use by Roman orators, and ultimately its transformation into a mystical technique and occult science in the Middle Ages. Most of the techniques described in the article were practiced by the Romans.
My favorite memory Grandmaster is George Koltanowski. He held the record for the most simultaneous blindfold chess games played, and he gave demonstrations of his exceptional memory using the knight's tour. As this article describes, his audience would provide 64 words or numbers which would be written on a giant chess board on stage. Koltanowski would quickly memorize the board, and, while blindfolded, recall the data in the order of a knight's tour.
This is exactly what I was thinking. There are only a few reasons I can think of to use an eBook:
None of these are good enough reasons to buy a dedicated eBook device. I think we need to see inexpensive, x86-based, palm-sized general purpose devices with 20-hour battery life and digital ink become widely available before people are willing to choose an eBook over a paperback.
My parents borrowed TRS-80s periodically from Motorola, but the first machine they bought for my exclusive use was a MEK6800D2, or D2 Kit, as we affectionately called it. My dad must have got it around 1977 when I was 7 and my brother was 6. My dad had to assemble it, and when he was done soldering, we were confronted with two raw breadboards, a homebrew powersupply, a hex keypad, and 6 segmented LEDs. It wasn't exactly the TRS-80 we'd hoped for. My mom taught my brother and I how to write assembler and translate it by hand into machine code. I still clearly remember her describing the accumulator. My dad joined some sort of club for the thing and got the code to play music on a speaker he hacked on. My brother and I spent hours typing it in on the hex keypad and writing our own songs in hex. We had a drawing of a piano with the corresponding notes translated into frequencies and their hex values. My brother ultimately got it to play the Star Wars theme. Our efforts on the D2 Kit convinced my parents to blow the big money on a Vic-20 when they came out, and we forgot the D2 Kit for another 15 years. I took a senior-level microcontroller class at Arizona State University, and I ended up spending a semester programming it again. My brother took the same class a year later. That was enough for me, but my brother still spends his spare time coding assembler.
There's a lot of bad advice on here. It's great that your daughter wants to learn chess. I have two daughters, 3 and 7, and I'm teaching them the game. My younger daughter asked to play with me this morning (she mostly just sets up the pieces).
First, I'm disappointed that so many posters assumed that there's some hidden meaning in your daughter's interest. I can say from experience that, when my daughters don't feel like playing chess, no promises of quality time will get them near the board. I think it's fair to assume that your daughter is genuinely interested, which is great. Also, if she's interested in chess, don't be afraid to teach her chess. Go is a great game, but there's no reason not to teach her chess.
Over the board play is best for learning chess, as people suggest, but I've found that it's not always the best way to interest my older daughter in the game. I bought Fritz and Chesster, and she enjoys working with it over working with me. It does a great job of breaking down the game into practical lessons that are fun to play. It may be a bit advanced for your daughter, but I think it's better than using Chessmaster on the easiest level. I have noticed that it's geared toward a male player and a lot of the humor is distinctly Teutonic, but I didn't find it particularly offensive. I think it's probably all you really need for software until she's a tournament player, and it's reasonably priced. I even caught my wife working with my daughter when she got stuck on the king and rook mate. My wife never gets involved in over-the-board games.
I'd also say that, contrary to what others are writing, chess is not easy for a parent to teach, nor is it an easy game in any sense. It's difficult to play on the same level as your kid if you're at all good, my older daughter doesn't want to play with a handicap, and she as soon as she makes a few opening moves, she gets bogged down and confused. I've had some success setting up chess mazes for her, where I sprinkle pawns on the board and she has to move pieces through the pawns. I've also had success getting her interested in puzzles. I can't blame you for looking for ways to supplement her learning.
Don't just buy any chess book. Most chess books, even beginner ones, are written for an adult audience, and you'll have to translate what you're reading into lessons that are appropriate for a kid. Plus, for the poster that recommended Lasker's Manual, it's in descriptive notation. No child or parent should have to deal with descriptive notation. Make sure any book you buy is in algebraic notation.
I can't recommend beginner books for children from my experience, but Chess for Juniors and How to Beat Your Dad at Chess are universally acclaimed. I got my daughter Simple Checkmates, and she's able to work through it on her own. Kudos to the person who mentioned Dan Heisman. His Novice Nook columns are a great resource for beginning tournament players, and he's the author of A Parent's Guide to Chess. He does online tutoring, and I have a friend who is an online student of his who recommends him highly. I haven't read it, but Susan's Polgar's instruction book might also be of interest. She's one
I've tried out rapid serial visual presentation software (RSVP) on my desktop, and it does seem to allow me to read substantially faster. I doubt I'd read this way for pleasure, but I'd like to do it with reference manuals. It would be great for skimming textbooks to review or preview material, and studies show that you can read about three times faster without losing any comprehension ability.
I'm also interested in electronic chess books. It's almost impossible for me to read anything but tactics books without a board. Even with a board, moving the pieces is slow, and setting up the main position after examining a line of analysis is slow. I'd like to read through games and be able to follow the game with an on-screen board next to the text.
Both these options already exist for the Pocket PC, and I'm looking forward to seeing them on E-Ink displays.
This has to be the strangest I've seen.