I remember that in the sixties you could buy boxes with just pieces from one colour. I would not consider thoses sets. I also remember buying a container with Duplo blocks for my daughter about 15 years ago. Although Duplo is technically not Lego, it is produced by the same company and compatible with Lego. Although they are rare, these sets with only simple block, still are being sold. As for example Lego set 5509.

I paged through the book and did not find any of it.

There are some interesting mathematical problems. Like given a certain width and an endless number of rows, if you start in at an arbitrary 'square', what is the distribution of the number of other squares that you can reach? (with or without wrapping?) What if it is endless in two directions?

The victim was found in a field along the road to her home. She had celebrated Queens Day in a disco and was biking home. Sperm was found on her body and she had a cut in her neck. A closer examination revealed that she was strangled with her own bra. DNA found on a cigarette lighter in bag matched DNA found on her body, suggesting that the person who killed her, was someone she knew. Google translate of Dutch fact article.

In another news message it was stated that his DNA matched with sperm and a hair found near the victim. That makes it sound a little different.

It is important that they were living in a small community. It already has been reported that some family members of the victim had contact with the man who had been arrested. It is thus possible that the victim knew the man. And even if they did not know each other, it is still possible that the cigarette lighter was passed on through a family member. Cigarette lighters belong to those items that are often 'shared' among people, especially among people that have some social relationship.

If you have to factor out custromer-specific stuff it means that your code is not well refactored and does not have clean interfaces. While you are writing code for a customer, you should take care that at the end you can release your open source parts immediately. The extra time this might cost is quickly returned, because your code will be cleaner and easier to develop. It will also result in component that are beter to use by others, because they do have a clean interface. One reason why open source components are often not reused because they have a bad interface. Refactoring is a great technique to develop clean interfaces. You will benefit it from yourself if you learn to create clean interfaces. It is an art not easily managed, I have come to realize.

Up to now it always has been legal to make download materials, as this is regarded equivalent with making a copy for private use. A right that has been well established in Dutch law for a long time. Earlier this year the House of Representatives concluded with a strong majority that this should remain legal. I think it is a rather unique situation that a Dutch lawyer is asking the European Court of Justice to judge about a Dutch law. This might have far reaching consequences, and could give rise to strong anti-European feelings, because downloading from an illegale source is very common in the Netherlands. All home media centers are equiped with applications client to automatically download movies on request.

For anyone who believes that anyone can become a programmer, I would like to answer the question: Can anyone become a surgeon? There are lots of people who can be taught about basic medical issues and how to treat them, but not all of them can become surgeons. And just as there are lots of people who can learn to write some basic programs, there are few people who can program mission critical applications that fly planes.

I guess that a (modified version of) SMART-L radar could do this job. Don't understand why 6 milion Euro is needed for building a demonstrator.

I got a son with a "de novo" mutation (proven by DNA-sequencing of the MLL2 gene) and although the chance of getting such a child is small, the impact is very big. Luckily, I live in a country where lots of support is available and I did not go broke financially, but still the impact it had on our family is quite big. Although he is almost 15, he needs supervision like a 6 year old. Luckily, my marriage did not break-up, but I know that it happens frequently. Especially, for my daughter, this was a big burden, because for many years our family life was organized around his needs. He is a lovely boy and I love him very much, but we went through a lot of trouble.

I was 35 when I conceived my son. He was diagnosed with a 'de novo' (new) mutation in one of the two copies of his MLL2 gene: a single base pair was deleted at position 2272 ("c.2272delG"). This causes half of his MLL2 proteins to be not working resulting in Kabuki Syndrome. He has an academic IQ of around 50, but with some tasks he out smarts everyone I know: he can instantly see who are missing from a certain setting. Saw him walk into his class room, look around, walk to his teacher and when asked by her who were missing, mention the names without hesitating (or looking around) for a second.

It is not such a big risk and it has been done many times before with all kinds of space crafts. And you should also realize that many safety precautions has been build into the system. It is definitely not like doing a OS update on a PC. I presume that in case something goes wrong, the rover will get into some kind of safe mode sooner or earlier, allowing to establish communication again. Safe mode communication is at a very slow speed and it could take some time to establish contact again, but in many cases it has been able to revive spacecrafts from safe mode. Please note that the Spirit and Opportunity rover have had several software updates and also experienced multiple events of getting into safe mode for software and hardware errors.

If you would inform yourself, you would know that we are not talking about a general PC with 4Gbytes of memory here, but about a much smaller (but reliable and radiation hardend) PowerPC compatible system with limited RAM. The reason that they planned this update is because they want to remove the flight software for the trip to mars and replace it by software needed to drive and control the rover. It is true that they spend improving the software during the time that the spacecraft was flying to mars. That would be more than logical to do. Please note that the software for the Spirit and Opportunity rover also have been updated several times. It would not surprise me, that when they know the Curiosity Rover better, they will perform another software update.

I wonder if you are not setting your goals to high. I am sorry to hear that you had a serious car accident, but you should realize that if your memory has been affected, probably also your other mental abilities might have been compromized. Writing game software requires a lot of mental abilities, and if you can't make it further than the 4th chapter in "Head First C#", (I looked up the table of contents), I wonder whether you ever will be able to write some serious software. Maybe there is another occupation that could give you more joy than proceeding this route where you are going to meet frustration upon frustration.