This is part 3 of the interview with Dr. Richard Wallace. You might want to start with part 1.

astro writes "Frank Drake, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute applies Occam's Razor to his own Drake equation: 'Life should appear very frequently on other Earth-like planets. There will be microbial life nearby the solar system.' The simplest scenario is that 'Not Life' has a nearly identical number of assumptions as 'Life.' The contrasting view is that experimentation can prove it--but how many times did life independently create itself while the Earth changed through the whole spectrum of what biological forces might conjure up elsewhere. A sample size of 1 is in fact an experimental sample size of many--just here during Earth's climatic history."

Dare Obasanjo writes: "XML namespaces are an integral aspect of most of the W3C's XML recommendations and working drafts, including XPath, XML Schema, XSLT, XQuery, SOAP, RDF, DOM, and XHTML. Understanding how namespaces work and how they interact with a number of other W3C technologies that are dependent on them is important for anyone working with XML to any significant degree." Some heavy reading below, as Dare completes the thought.

There's been quite a bit of attention to Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon as well as The Diamond Age. The Big U, reviewed here by Sebbo, is one of his earliest books. Click below to read more - and to try your hand at the questions at the end of the review.

Monday we requested questions for Tim O'Reilly, of O'Reilly & Associates. Tim obviously put a lot of time into coming up with thoughtful answers, which we have published below. We've also invited Tim to join in the discussion here if he can find time, but please don't get upset if he can't. "Busy" is an understatement for this man!

Winning one of the longer title awards, SEGV has returned with a review, this time of Mickey Kawick's Real Time Strategy Game Programming using MS DirectX 6. For those of you want to know how to program the next Warcraft or Age of Empires, click below.