It's an effort headed by an aid worker in Africa (Alex Weir). Basically, he wanted to produce a compendium of useful information which could be applied by developing nations; topics like agriculture, engineering, construction, sanitation, medicine, etc. . Much of the source material comes from UN publications, so its more current and applicable than "turn of the century" techniques. Among the interesting items, it includes an html, hypertext expert system for medical diagnostics. You go to the start page, click relevant symptoms, and eventually it leads you to a guestimate of what's ailing you. Its not remotely as competent as an actual doctor, but its better than nothing when you're stuck "in the Bush".

Besides the information being indexed and organized, Weir had a vision of burning the collection on DVDs and distributing them to the third world. (At one point, it appeared he was reorganizing the material as pdf pages which could be viewed by a DVD player, using DVD menus. That would remove the need for a conventional computer or tablet to access the material. I don't know if it ever got finished.) About a year or two ago, he decided to reorganize the collection in a hybrid wiki form, which he calls "microdownloads". Its now updated more frequently, and the DVD collection will probably not be revised.

Unfortunately, it looks like the Facebook page hasn't been updated since 4/11/14, and Google has a link hinting that the site was "hacked". Finally, going to the website pops up a login window. I'm not sure if that's a new development in response to the hacking, or that the hacker still "controls" the site. Perhaps Mr. Weir is still in Africa and can't address the situation until he's returned to civilization. Its pretty unusable in its current state, but there's probably a way to find a previous working mirror of the site.

In any case, I'll leave links for people who wish to investigate the issue further, and more important, a magnet link to pickup the 2012 cd3wd 6 DVD collection by torrent.

facebook

cd3wd site

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:7AEE811F0E802B29C1F2E4C785CE866F94AA2084&dn=cd3wd%202012%206%20dvds&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.ccc.de%3a80&tr=http%3a%2f%2f64.244.102.71%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.istole.it%3a80&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.publicbt.com%3a80%2fannounce

Don't think so. The torrent indicated it was 110 Gb in size.

Not once Assange is in Swedish custody.

Do you even read what you cite???

That doesn't mean Assange is safe from extradition; it means a single, politically connected Swedish judge can hand over Assange to the US. Good luck fighting the interpretation, or appealing after Assange is flying to Gitmo.

Simple. Assange is no exemplar of free speech. He's a political anarchist with delusions of relevance who wanted to kick the US power establishment in the nads, and then get away with it.

1) Your assurances are meaningless.

2) Look at what happened to Kevin Mitnick. Because the American public had such a poor understanding of hacking and the level of threat posed by hacking, people though Mitnick had to be placed behind bars to keep America (corporations) safe. Because the American legal system is much more complex and byzantine than the simplified mythology propagated to its citizens, Kevin had to spend many years in a medium security jail before even going to trial, to optimize his chances of either beating the conviction, or reducing the maximum penalty. What actually happened was that the technology moved so fast, and the public's miniscule understanding of hacking was modified ("Why worry about some jerk that went on a computer joyride, when hackers are stealing American intellectual property and money from the safety of Russia or China"), it eventually became cost effective for the US DOJ to deescalate the witchhunt they were making over Mitnick.

The point being that as long as organizations exist to reveal information the US government prefers to conceal, the security apparatus of the US will treat those organizations as national security threats. This even sort of includes legitimate news organizations like the NY Times, UK Guardian, etc. They are captive to the US government. As long as they operate within the laws defined by the judicial branch, and "play ball", they aren't going to get the Assange treatment. No one like Assange or Snowden can assume they are beyond the reach or interest of the US government.

Avoiding extradition to the US has everything to do with Assange hiding in the Ecuador embassy. Swedish prisons aren't the hell holes in the US or Australia. Even if Assange had an irrational fear of being labelled a sex offender felon, it would not outweigh the price he is paying being holed up in the Ecuador embassy.

Its all about not going to a country that will extradite him to the US over a trumped up security issue. Assange does not have the legal rights an American citizen has. He can be put into Guantanamo, or any other black ops prison, because the US does not respect universal notions of due process. If the US did, Guantanamo couldn't exist.

How does Waterfox differ from Mozilla's 64 bit test builds?

The only consideration that Spacex's Dragon has as a compelling advantage is if it can be safely operational with a two year lead over Boeing or Dream Chaser. If that's the case, they should get the contract, tough titties to Sierra Nevada. The damned Russians makes this a compelling priority. Otherwise, give it to Dream Chaser, and tough titties to SpaceX. Boeing, unfortunately, is going to get the next available slot, because it has tons more experience than either competitor, and it has way more politicians in their pocket.

The problem is that you cannot conclusively prove there is no God, just like you cannot conclusively prove there is a God. To assert a state one cannot prove is a belief. I am at a loss at why some atheists insist on the correctness of their belief without being able to prove it; to me, they are merely very annoying evangelists of their non-God.

No, atheism is "The Belief" there is no God. If you lack a belief in God, that makes you an agnostic.

Didn't bother me then. Doesn't bother me now. In future WaPo articles, I expect my eyes to glaze by them as if they didn't exist.

I'm not having a serious problem with this.

I hate today's commercials so much, I mute them if I can't fast forward them, and am almost forced to only watch DVR'ed content, and tend to avoid watching live TV now. I run adblock. When its a site I go to frequently, I whitelist it, and quickly block it again once I see an ad that does popups, or automatically plays audio/video, or otherwise detracts from my reading.

I would go nuts if a "buy it now" button popped up while reading fiction, but this is a newspaper article. I don't find the button intrusive, because I'm not trying to follow artistic nuance in a newspaper article. It doesn't really take up the screen, and they're placed in front of products to sell, namely "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "The Great Gatsby".

It seems to me no more intrusive than a banner ad, and I'm much more annoyed at large rectangular ads that break up article paragraphs. So what am I missing here?

The problem is that game design is art, and game engines follow hardware developments. It becomes pretty difficult to figure out what the prevailing technology will be past a year; thus the decision of game engine to adopt becomes a crapshoot as well. It gets even more difficult when a gaming group "knows" the engine they're using will be out of date in two years, and have to cobble their own hacks into the old game engine, to have some feature available in two years. What happens when the "new" engine they've been anticipating doesn't get released "on time", or when it comes, they find out its utterly incompatible with their work in the previous year?

Telling indie companies to force their delivery schedules to one year increments makes it really difficult to put out an eye catching, large scale games. Its relegating them to a financial ghetto niche, even though it may be the "safest" and most predictable way to "ensure" success in a game launch.

We've known for at least a decade now that Pluto/Charon's barycenter is outside the mass of Pluto. That was one of many arguments used to delist Pluto from the Solar System planets. Those same "Pluto is a planet" fossils probably would demand Ceres be restored to planetary status, if they lived two hundred years ago.

I'd say right now there's a performance/pricing window that the box stores haven't matched right now. If you want something cookie cutter, for office work, then yeah, you'd be nuts not to buy from a box store or mail order. But right now, the ones that will optionally include an SSD, serious graphics card, bluray burner, etc. are charging a premium for them.

Its a plus (right now) to select a good motherboard to deal with things like UEFI/GPT, legacy BIOS, chipset issues like memory bandwidth. You don't get to select your mobo from the box stores, and that may limit what you can do, or how well the box will perform even if you buy a base box, and then add premium components. And then there's that ugly, "do I pay a premium for windows 7, or get a windows 8.1 which "I don't like?".

The timid should never build their own PC, unless they want to overcome their timidity and/or desire an excuse to be cognizant of new hardware minutiae. Some people are better off being consumers.

Technically speaking, computer science was being conducted long before the existence of a computer.

George Boole published his (Boolean) algebra studies in 1854. Logic circuits started as mathematical expressions, not originating with computing machines. Charles Babbage had no computer to work with when he designed the first Analytical Engine, followed by the Difference Engine (which was never built). Turing defined the computer in 1936, before one actually existed. There was quite a body of algorithmic and binomial research before the first (modern) computing machine (Say Attasanoff-Berry in 1939).