The selection bias is only important if there's reason to believe that it has some effect on the item of interest. In this case, the dataset would be invalid if criminals have different fingerprints than non-criminals.

Besides, there are a LOT more fingerprints in databases than those of (reasonably) suspected criminals. More than enough to show there's no criminal-related bias. As an obvious example, perhaps you've noticed that the US is fingerprinting most foreigners who cross the border?

If all else fails you go to a university campus and get a bunch of non-criminals to volunteer their fingerprints. It wouldn't take an unreasonable number to show there's nothing special about the fingerprints of suspected criminals.

Yes, I would consider the 5K if it is simple to connect and operate. 10K? Maybe not so much. That would be after the kids are done with university and I have spare time and money.

Or perhaps the public library should get one, or the local Hacker Space, and share it among many people.

Since /. requires a car analogy in every discussion, here is one:

Engine, transmission and wheels are sufficient to move the car. However not many of us would buy a car that consists only of those three parts.

Man, I remember back in the day before Windows Vista when Windows XP was, quite rightly, called a resource hog and compared to Windows 2000. Windows XP isn't low resource by any reasonable standard; it's not a very good SMP OS at all, so modern processors aren't being used effectively by it. It was thought heavyweight when it was released, it's still heavyweight compared to the server OS line that MS puts out. Not that this is relevant to the article, just it bugs me when folks say XP is lightweight. Sure, next to Vista it is, but that's like saying that an elephant is lightweight compared to the continent of Africa.

Right... but all of that is contingent upon the first sentence:

The point is that the normal story is not the true story, and that once you hear the full story, it

Make sense?

The guy who came up with this storage system was pretty damn smart. RAM with a swap drive, parity. Quite intelligent. Not at all random, if I may say so myself.

Except if it was so terrifying, why did she do everything but call the police, who have the powers to actually investigate things like this and would have probably figured out in about 5 minutes who sent the emails?

I had it happen to me once, for real threats though (at least they were really being made, not that they came to pass). He said when he was going to come over, which should have made it obvious to me that he didn't intend to follow through, but I was young and stupid. I didn't call the police. I just invited a couple friends over. I figured if he wanted to come get his ass beat it would be an entertaining evening all 'round, except for him.

Now, my reason is obviously not hers (and I'm a vastly different person now), but claiming to understand how a person who feels threatened will respond shows more hubris than awareness. Maybe she was embarrassed to tell the police she was scared, maybe she got laughed at by an authority figure when she was young. Or maybe she didn't want to waste their time with something so inconsequential, maybe she had an authority figure scold her for wasting their time.

Or maybe she's a dissocial opportunistic asshat. But you don't know that based exclusively on the fact that she did not call the police. Why don't abused women call the police?

You know you can install Windows on a Mac, right?

But the Mac is typically available only in a half dozen or so standard configurations.

With Windows there is a broad spectrum of product available at every price point.
 

I hope you're not the person in charge of my purchasing. I can buy a Dell Studio 8000 with an i7 processor, Windows 7 Ultimate free upgrade and Office 2007 for $900. WITH 3GB of memory, 500GB hard drive, and everything else except a monitor.

The key is the carriers.
Verizon has the largest network and subscriber base, but doesn't have any good smart phones.
T-mobile has the g1, but T-mobile is a horrible company.
AT&T has the iphone but it costs a fortune for service.

The key will be what smart phone takes hold on Verizon; currently it looks like it is going to be an android phone.

Verizon Wireless: 87.7 Million subscribers
AT&T Mobility: 79.6 Million Subscribers
Sprint: 49.3 Million subscribers
T-Mobile: 38.2 million subscribers

Personally I'm waiting for a phone similar to the G1 to be available on the Verizon network.

Are you willing to pay for the proofs of the program's correctness? And then prove it's correctness in the presence of failing hardware? Hint: it wouldn't be cheap, nor would it be fast.

There, fixed that for you.

I think GAMES is the operative word here. A benchmark shouldn't be targeted in such a fashion.

Still seams that very few computers are faster with Vista than XP. So sure Vista is now OK, if you can't get XP drivers, but for anything but gaming, XP still comes out faster.
In our tests, Windows 7 was a few percent slower than XP SP3, but faster than Vista SP2.
So on high end 64 bit hardware, 64 bit version of Vista is slower than the X86 version of XP. So it still seams very clear, anything less than a multicore 64 bit machine, forget about Vista, if you can.

Also with Vista being released in Dec 2006, but networking performance was not good until SP1, in February 2008. Even then SP1 still didn't fix network performance for VISTA to XP/2000, or over wireless. I know I finally gave up on Vista, 2 months past SP1. I still couldn't stream HD videos from a XP box over 100mB Ethernet link on a core duo laptop, that same video had no problems over a 11 mB wiFi link to that same network using a 800Mhz atom w/linux (of course no issue same laptop running XP, Vista had released drivers, XP didn't).
So vista deserves it's reputation for taking over a year to be usable on networks.

First off, let me admit that I have not yet read the Book reviewed here, but from reading the review, it sounds like it is targeted mainly to the "new to programming" crowd.

I have started my Android Development career by reading Mark Murphy's "Busy Coder's" books, and gotten a lot of details out of his Tutorial book.
http://commonsware.com/books.html

I'm not affiliated with him, but I'd like to really recommend his books to any developer who has an existing background in either Java and wants to quickly get productive in Android Development.

As an additional bonus, all of Mark's books are available electronically or as self-published printed paper back's.

He himself is also a great guy and very active on the Google Android developer forums.