I once knew this girl who thought she was God.She didn't give sight to the blind or raise the dead. She didn't even teach anything, not really,and she never told me anything I probably didn't already know. On the other hand,she didn'texpect to be worshipped, nor did she askfor money. Given her high opinion of herself, some...

I had been playing the Ultima series of games by Richard Garriott since I was in high school, and I was a die-hard fan. Every game he published, I played all the way through, from Ultima I on the Apple ][ to Ultima V on the IBM PC. Ultima VI came out right as I graduated from college, and I noticed that the contact information for Origin...

John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, was born on All Fools’ Day, 1647, at Ditchley in Oxfordshire on the estate that had belonged to his mother’s first husband, Sir Henry Lee. Rochester’s father, Lord Wilmot, was a royalist general; witty, restless and hard-drinking, he was with the exiled court in Paris, and hardly saw...

Iclinically met my fi rst children with Asperger’s and High-Functioning Autism in 1981 at Camp Wediko here in New England. Like many college students before us, my newlywed wife and I had driven north to New Hampshire to spend an intensive summer learning more about the careers we were about to enter: she, special education, and myself,...

Finally the eagerly-awaited next edition of Luke Ahearn's cornerstone game art book: 3D Game Textures is on its way. The book will be refreshed per the latest revision of Photoshop and the latest game industry trends and developments. 3D Game Textures allows next-gen game artists to learn to create everything from bricks to books in...

LIKE a chemical compound, scientific knowledge is purified by recrystallization. When first published, each new grain of fact or theory shines from a mud of irrelevant or erroneous details. In subsequent discussion the grains are redissolved, and filtered. Finally, in books and treatises, the solution is allowed to precipitate into a single...

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the twentieth century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational...

“Indah! Indah! The White Men are coming,” screamed the old woman. Th e boy turned and saw fl ashes of rifl e fi re along the lake. His mother quickly lifted him and placed him on the mule’s back. As she tried to lift her infant daughter alongside her as well, the mule panicked and reared. A man snatched her baby and ran up...

In its relatively short life, Drupal has had a tremendous impact on the landscape of the Internet. As a web content management system, Drupal has enabled the creation of feature- and content-rich web sites for organizations large and small. As a web application framework, Drupal is changing the way that people think about web application...

We saw Language Integrated Query (LINQ) for the first time in September 2005, when the LINQ Project was announced during the Professional Developers Conference (PDC 2005). We immediately realized the importance and the implications of LINQ for the long term. At the same time, we felt it would be a huge error to look to LINQ only for its...

From the beginning, classier systems have attracted...