Except that the average life expectancy you quote is at birth... Roy was in his 40's when he started reducing his amount of calories, so his life expectancy would have been approaching 80 regardless of what he ate.

Pass me the steak!

A different model might hold the student back until they show proficiency. Once they have confidence in the material, the system "rewards" them and presents the next chapter. The student is motivated to get the next level of achievement, and their level of understanding is greater.

The Khan Academy uses this approach when one does the exercises: you start with the basics and gradually gain points and badges while you work through the various topics, using the video lectures when you get stuck.

All exercises are voluntary but the mentoring and statistics are very well thought-out so that student progress can be followed in detail. The next step up would be that only students that have shown their proficiency are allowed to take an exam.

I'm currently using the KA code to set up a similar academy for a local university (the focus of the content being grammar). The code is rather hairy but the concepts behind the site are very interesting.

In 75 years, should we survive, we'll look back on it with the same amusement.

Like most science fiction writing you mean?

I've always found this definition of 'space opera' a bit of a misnomer, as if true science fiction always follows the laws of physics or has a deep underlying message about the future of technology. If you look back at the works of Asimov, Heinlein, Lem and Clarke you know that this isn't always the case.

The reason Hamilton's works are lumped under space opera is because of the extensive focus on setting and characters. But there are plenty of 'hard sci-fi' nuggets in his work IMHO.

Any sort of interruption will snap me out of that trance state, even if it's wifey asking me where I'm going as I step out the door. It's all about maintaining that mental bubble.

Sounds very familiar. I've tried explaining but even her presence can snap me out of 'the flow', which makes me way too irritable.

Having our dogs around me doesn't though, so I tend to simply take a stroll with them and let that unconscious part of the brain do the heavy lifting.

Except that there are fields in any model that the user *shouldn't* be able to change via form. And lo, there is a mechanism in Rails to flag those fields in the model so that this sort of things doesn't happen: attr_accessible flags.

Madness... when defining the form you explicitly define which attributes of the model may be submitted and modified and everything else is ignored. Forms should be the filter between the crap a user may submit and your precious model.

Django does this right in my eyes: allowed attributes need to be stated in the Form if you don't want all fields displayed. If you have different types of users present those users a different form with corresponding list of attributes and additional validation. Subclassing forms makes this trivial to implement and you explicitly whitelist those fields that are allowed to be modified by a particular user.

Not that Django is perfect, but I'm amazed that RoR requires/required blacklisting model attributes instead of handling this explicitly in the form. Kudos to the hacker for outing this design-flaw.

This is probably the best way, avoid/ignore any priorities that don't come in from up top.

Even better is not using priorities at all: simply set milestones and allocate people to meet those milestones. If during the weekly meeting one of the dept heads wants something done quick let them fight it out with the dept heads whose pet project is currently underway and will be delayed due to "reduced resources". The impact of "pet project will be delayed by 4 weeks" is much more concrete than "pet project is now a minor priority instead of major".

Business people need to understand that, unless they bring additional resources to the table, they will simply have to wait in line until it is their turn.

But you know what you are looking for, confident that you know what you want and are willing to invest time to weigh all the pro's and con's.

A friend of mine asked about getting a new iPhone or a SGII yesterday on Facebook. After a host of replies he went out and got a SGII. He trusts the opinions of his friends more than the various reviews and technical specs he would find at Google and Amazon.

I do doubt this type of 'search' will impact Google's bottom line though, previously he would simply ask for opinions in person. But I can imagine it would be lucrative to place an iPhone or SGII advertisement next to such a question on Facebook.

Indeed, the providers aren't at fault. It could be said that they didn't put enough effort into the court case, but even that is unfair considering nobody besides BREIN expected this to happen.

You don't have a choice, a company (or person) must comply with a court order, no matter how crazy. The alternative would lead to huge fines and contempt of court. This is the way the law works.

Unless you're the likes of Microsoft of course. In that case a well-placed campaign contribution can help make the problems go away. But with all the faults of the Dutch justice system, I'm glad that bribes are more conspicuous over here.

There's still the high court. It's not a done deal.

This. The Wall is what gives users a reason to go back to Facebook. You don't want to call everyone every day, you choose the people you want to keep informed about, get a look into their lives and know what they are up to without having to bother them.

Of course, MySpace and Friendster had the same but Facebook has both the clean implementation and the reach to keep people hooked. Unless they do something stupid they will remain king of the social networks for quite a while.

concentrate on systems that encourage one time reasonable payment for good ideas that become free, or partially tax subsidize informational works by merit and by vote

I think that such positive (dare I say it) government-rewarded incentives are the only way forward when it comes to rewarding authors for their efforts.

Instead of subsidizing the poor and instead of harming ordinary people who simply share information freely, the government should encourage this sharing and reward the efforts by providing benefits to authors who have made works that all can enjoy. Of course, the question then becomes which authors may benefit from the tax-payers money, but this is a much more positive forward-thinking approach than using said tax-payers money to seek out and penalize individuals.

Marx would be proud, his vision of communism would only work an enlightened society where such a construction would be possible. A society without scarcity.

Not holding my breath...

There is no way that we can physically count hundreds of votes in 45 minutes. It would take several hours; now multiply this by our collective $41/hr salary ($11 for the chairman, $10 for each of the other three) and multiply that by the tens of thousands of election districts across New York State. Where is that money going to come from?

From the money saved by not buying e-voting machines? I doubt purchase and 'support' would cost less than a few hours of your time, evened out over a number of years/elections.

Another vote for Hamilton, the Void series was awesome.

I hate marketing stuff, I hate business stuff, and I really hate "networking" .. what I love is building software.

Hear hear!

I've been self-employed for quite a while now. It's brilliant in the good times and less so during the hard times, but overall I wouldn't ever want to be a wage slave. Each their own.

Marketing, networking... I'm terrible in it. Oh I try, and I see my fellow self-employed programmers try. I can fake it pretty well with clients, the suit and slides I can cope with. I've learned to deal with the bullshit and others enjoy my cut-to-the-chase mentality. But I'm terrible in anything with a large group or anything related to marketing.

I'm glad I know non-geeks that are much better in it than I am. For them, they enjoy giving presentations, networking and making folders. They do it with the passion that I have when I'm developing software, and it shows.

So, now I've partnered with one of those people and together we're building up a new business next to our own. It's still early, but we trust each other and we're doing well. There's still bullshit, but we both do the work we enjoy doing and are both prospering.

So for all you wage slaves: keep an open mind. If the corporate bullshit gets too much know that there are ways to do what you enjoy without going to the dark side.

And the reviewer's book has the same publisher as this book (McGraw-Hill Osborne Media). How blatantly obvious can a shill be?

At least Taco would have the decency to not state that the reviewer is also an author...