The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful--possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed Artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?

    Discover techniques and strategies for generating ideas, connecting with readers emotionally, and finding inspiration you need to finish your work. This fully revised edition includes an updated marketing section for navigating the unique challenges and possibilities of the evolving literary marketplace. Inside you'll find new essays from dozens of best-selling authors and publishing professionals detailing how to:—Master the elements of fiction, from plot and character to dialogue and point of view—Develop a unique voice and sensibility in your writing—Manage the practical aspects of writing, from overcoming writer's block to revising your work—Determine the key elements for success in every genre—Find an agent, market your work, and get published—or self-publish—successfullyYou'll also find interviews with some of the world's finest and most popular writers, including David Baldacci, Lee Child, Robert Crais, Khaled Hosseini, Hugh Howey, Stephen King, Dennis Lehane, George R.R. Martin, Jojo Moyes, Anne Rice, Jane Smiley, and Garth Stein. Their insights on the craft and business of fiction will provide you with invaluable mentorship as you embark on your writing journey.The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing is your go-to guide for every aspect of creating a bestseller.

    You've been eager to jump right in and take a shot at striking it rich, but you're not quite sure how to get started--or if you're business-minded and tech-savvy enough to succeed. Starting an Online Business for Dummies will show you how easy it is to get your ideas off the ground and on the Web. You'll be able to take advantage of everything an online business has to offer, without an MBA or years of experience! This updated, hands-on guide gives you the tools you need to:Establish and promote your business Advertise your site Build a business with online auctions Keep your business legal and lawsuit free Impress customers in the virtual world Publicize your business with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Conduct electronic payments Utilize VoIP, site feeds, blogging, and affiliate marketng You'll soon begin to realize that online business is not confined to large corporations or even businesses with storefronts. With this handy, straightforward guide, you will have your business online and ready to go in no time. There's also a chapter on hot new ways to make money online, such as selling on Amazon or promoting on Flickr. The 5th edition of Starting an Online Business for Dummies helps you help your business can reach its full potential!

    You have also created a website for your business that details the products or services that you offer, but it doesn't allow potential customers to purchase anything online. Don't risk losing business-learn to create a dynamic online environment using only three programs. PHP, MySQL and Apache are three popular open-source tools that can work together to help you create a dynamic website, such as an online shopping experience. Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One is a complete reference manual for all three development tools. You will learn how to install, configure and set up the PHP scripting language, use the MySQL database system, and work with the Apache Web server. Then you'll take it a step further and discover how they work together to create a dynamic website. Use the book and the included CD to create a simple website, as well as a mailing list, online address book, shopping cart and storefront. Updated to reflect the most recent developments in PHP and MySQL, including the final stable release of MySQL 5.0, you will open your website to limitless possibilities with Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One.

    In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye. It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts. The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet.Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.

    From that first printing of that first book came a series unlike anything in the publishing world, one that is global in both geography - we have been published worldwide in some 30 languages - and in coverage. No single volume can hope to summarize what thousands of titles have meant to millions of readers over the years, and we don't claim to do that in this e-book. Rather, this e-book celebrates the breadth and depth of the For Dummies series, offering 20 chapters - in honor of our 20 years - from a list of books compiled by our global colleagues. We are confident the chapters we've included give you a representative glimpse at why - no matter what the topic - our products have meant so much to so many by Making Everything Easier. We've grouped our chapters into five main parts:Part I: Dummies Classics, offers four chapters from some of our best-loved books. There's a chapter from DOS For Dummies, the book that started it all, and chapters from two of our best-sellers: Windows 7 For Dummies and Sex For Dummies. And just for a bit of spice, we've included a chapter from French For Dummies.Part II: Daily Dose of Dummies, offers the kind of lifestyle, self-help, and business skills that our readers have come to treasure. There's one of our famous Part of Tens chapters from Cognititive Behavioural Therapy for Dummies and a chapter from Meditation For Dummies to help you get your center. Chapters from Leadership For Dummies and Marketing For Dummies help you develop new skills for the marketplace.Part III, Fun with Dummies, celebrates life and all it has to offer. We've got chapters here from The Royal Wedding For Dummies, Guitar For Dummies, Digital Photography SLR All-in-One For Dummies, Puppies for Dummies, Knitting For Dummies, and Wine For Dummies.Part IV, Get Social, highlights how we help you grow and develop new skills. Chapters here come from Facebook For Dummies, Social Media Marketing For Dummies, and Dating For Dummies.Part V, Going Global, shares the worldwide appeal of the For Dummies series. These chapters from British History For Dummies, Canadian History For Dummies, and Rugby Union For Dummies were created by our global colleagues and authors and show how the For Dummies approach applies not only to whatever the subject is at hand, but also wherever the discussion is taking place.Download and enjoy!

    Because the computer gathers knowledge from experience, there is no need for a human computer operator to formally specify all the knowledge that the computer needs. The hierarchy of concepts allows the computer to learn complicated concepts by building them out of simpler ones; a graph of these hierarchies would be many layers deep. This book introduces a broad range of topics in deep learning.The text offers mathematical and conceptual background, covering relevant concepts in linear algebra, probability theory and information theory, numerical computation, and machine learning. It describes deep learning techniques used by practitioners in industry, including deep feedforward networks, regularization, optimization algorithms, convolutional networks, sequence modeling, and practical methodology; and it surveys such applications as natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, online recommendation systems, bioinformatics, and videogames. Finally, the book offers research perspectives, covering such theoretical topics as linear factor models, autoencoders, representation learning, structured probabilistic models, Monte Carlo methods, the partition function, approximate inference, and deep generative models.Deep Learning can be used by undergraduate or graduate students planning careers in either industry or research, and by software engineers who want to begin using deep learning in their products or platforms. A website offers supplementary material for both readers and instructors.

     Packed with over 120 how-to photos and 130 musical examples. 94 track CD included - hear and play along with every exercise and song. The only book to offer instruction in clawhammer, bluegrass, melodic, single-string, minstrel and classic styles. From Earl Scruggs’ driving bluegrass picking to the genre-busting jazz fusion of Béla Fleck and the multi-million selling movie soundtrack  O Brother Where Are Thou?, the five-string banjo can be heard just about everywhere in American music these days. Banjo For Dummies is the most complete guide to the five-string banjo ever written. It covers everything you need to get into the banjo: including how to choose, tune and care for your instrument, developing a good playing posture, fretting your first chords and getting comfortable with the left and right hand picking patterns used for clawhammer and bluegrass playing techniques. You’ll then add the left hand, spicing up your playing with slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs, and chokes for an authentic five-string banjo sound. From there, you’ll move on the play 19th century minstrel style, early 20th century classic style as well as try your hand at more advanced examples of bluegrass style. An in-depth chapter on bluegrass music explores Scruggs licks and techniques as well as melodic and single-string styles, with song examples. Also included is a banjo buyer’s guide, a section on music theory as applied to bluegrass and old-time music, an accessories guide (advice on cases, picks, straps,metronomes, computer aids and much more), information on how to find a good teacher, banjo camp or festival, chord charts, bios of twelve influential players, practice tips and much, much more! Banjo For Dummies is accessible and fun to read and it’s easy to locate just what you’re interested in playing. Included are 20 songs including several new compositions written by the author just for this book, including Reno Rag (single-string style), “Winston’s Jig” (Irish three-finger), and “Everyday Breakdown” (Scruggs style). All musical examples are played slowly on the accompanying CD, many with guitar and mandolin accompaniment. Bill Evans is one of the world’s most celebrated banjo players and teachers. He has taught thousands of people to play the five-string banjo in private lessons and group workshops literally all over the world. In addition to leading the Bill Evans String Summit, Bill has performed with Dry Branch Fire Squad, David Grisman, Peter Rowan, Tony Trischka and many others and he hosts his own acclaimed banjo camp, the NashCamp Fall Banjo Retreat in the Nashville area. As an American music historian, he has taught at San Francisco State University, the University Virginia and Duke University. He has written a popular instructional column for Banjo Newsletter magazine for the last fifteen years and hosts three popular instructional DVDs for AcuTab Publications. To learn more about Bill, visit his homepage at www.nativeandfine.com.

    Legendary testing expert James Whittaker, until recently a Google testing leader, and two top Google experts reveal exactly how Google tests software, offering brand-new best practices you can use even if you're not quite Google's size...yet! Breakthrough Techniques You Can Actually Use Discover 100% practical, amazingly scalable techniques for analyzing risk and planning tests...thinking like real users...implementing exploratory, black box, white box, and acceptance testing...getting usable feedback...tracking issues...choosing and creating tools...testing "Docs & Mocks," interfaces, classes, modules, libraries, binaries, services, and infrastructure...reviewing code and refactoring...using test hooks, presubmit scripts, queues, continuous builds, and more. With these techniques, you can transform testing from a bottleneck into an accelerator-and make your whole organization more productive!

    He is also an obsessive gamer who has spent untold hours in front of his various video game consoles, playing titles such as Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, BioShock, and Oblivion for, literally, days. If you are reading this flap copy, the same thing can probably be said of you, or of someone you know. Until recently, Bissell was somewhat reluctant to admit to his passion for games. In this, he is not alone. Millions of adults spend hours every week playing video games, and the industry itself now reliably outearns Hollywood. But the wider culture seems to regard video games as, at best, well designed if mindless entertainment. Extra Lives is an impassioned defense of this assailed and misunderstood art form. Bissell argues that we are in a golden age of gaming—but he also believes games could be even better. He offers a fascinating and often hilarious critique of the ways video games dazzle and, just as often, frustrate. Along the way, we get firsthand portraits of some of the best minds (Jonathan Blow, Clint Hocking, Cliff Bleszinski, Peter Molyneux) at work in video game design today, as well as a shattering and deeply moving final chapter that describes, in searing detail, Bissell’s descent into the world of Grand Theft Auto IV, a game whose themes mirror his own increasingly self-destructive compulsions. Blending memoir, criticism, and first-rate reportage, Extra Lives is like no other book on the subject ever published. Whether you love video games, loathe video games, or are merely curious about why they are becoming the dominant popular art form of our time, Extra Lives is required reading.

    They are now standard features in a wide range of languages and popular tools, including Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, VB.NET and C# (and any language using the .NET Framework), PHP, and MySQL.If you don't use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate this book's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If you think you know all you need to know about regularexpressions, this book is a stunning eye-opener.As this book shows, a command of regular expressions is an invaluable skill. Regular expressions allow you to code complex and subtle text processing that you never imagined could be automated. Regular expressions can save you time and aggravation. They can be used to craft elegant solutions to a wide range of problems. Once you've mastered regular expressions, they'll become an invaluable part of your toolkit. You will wonder how you ever got by without them.Yet despite their wide availability, flexibility, and unparalleled power, regular expressions are frequently underutilized. Yet what is power in the hands of an expert can be fraught with peril for the unwary. Mastering Regular Expressions will help you navigate the minefield to becoming an expert and help you optimize your use of regular expressions.Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition, now includes a full chapter devoted to PHP and its powerful and expressive suite of regular expression functions, in addition to enhanced PHP coverage in the central "core" chapters. Furthermore, this edition has been updated throughout to reflect advances in other languages, including expanded in-depth coverage of Sun's java.util.regex package, which has emerged as the standard Java regex implementation.Topics include:A comparison of features among different versions of many languages and toolsHow the regular expression engine worksOptimization (major savings available here!)Matching just what you want, but not what you don't wantSections and chapters on individual languagesWritten in the lucid, entertaining tone that makes a complex, dry topic become crystal-clear to programmers, and sprinkled with solutions to complex real-world problems, Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition offers a wealth information that you can put to immediateuse.Reviews of this new edition and the second edition: "There isn't a better (or more useful) book available on regular expressions."--Zak Greant, Managing Director, eZ Systems"A real tour-de-force of a book which not only covers the mechanics of regexes in extraordinary detail but also talks about efficiency and the use of regexes in Perl, Java, and .NET...If you use regular expressions as part of your professional work (even if you already have a good book on whatever language you're programming in) I would strongly recommend this book to you."--Dr. Chris Brown, Linux Format"The author does an outstanding job leading the reader from regexnovice to master. The book is extremely easy to read and chock full ofuseful and relevant examples...Regular expressions are valuable toolsthat every developer should have in their toolbox. Mastering RegularExpressions is the definitive guide to the subject, and an outstandingresource that belongs on every programmer's bookshelf. Ten out of TenHorseshoes."--Jason Menard, Java Ranch

    You'll quickly learn the language's fundamentals, then move onto persistence, exception handling, web development, SQLite, data wrangling, and Google App Engine. You'll also learn how to write mobile apps for Android, all thanks to the power that Python gives you.We think your time is too valuable to waste struggling with new concepts. Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Python uses a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.

    And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet. As we live in a world made of software, they're the architects. The decisions they make guide our behavior. When they make something newly easy to do, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard or impossible to do something, we do less of it.If we want to understand how today's world works, we ought to understand something about coders. Who exactly are the people that are building today's world? What makes them tick? What type of personality is drawn to writing software? And perhaps most interestingly -- what does it do to them?One of the first pieces of coding a newbie learns is the program to make the computer say "Hello, world!" Like that piece of code, Clive Thompson's book is a delightful place to begin to understand this vocation, which is both a profession and a way of life, and which essentially didn't exist little more than a generation ago, but now is considered just about the only safe bet we can make about what the future holds. Thompson takes us close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women. Ironically, if we're going to traffic in stereotypes, women are arguably "naturally" better at coding than men, but they were written out of the history, and shoved out of the seats, for reasons that are illuminating. Now programming is indeed, if not a pure brotopia, at least an awfully homogenous community, which attracts people from a very narrow band of backgrounds and personality types. As Thompson learns, the consequences of that are significant - not least being a fetish for disruption at scale that doesn't leave much time for pondering larger moral issues of collateral damage. At the same time, coding is a marvelous new art form that has improved the world in innumerable ways, and Thompson reckons deeply, as no one before him has, with what great coding in fact looks like, who creates it, and where they come from. To get as close to his subject has he can, he picks up the thread of his own long-abandoned coding practice, and tries his mightiest to up his game, with some surprising results.More and more, any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences, and to understand code, we must understand coders. In that regard, Clive Thompson's Hello, World! is a marvelous and delightful master class.

    This beginner-friendly book opens with some basics of programming and helps you navigate Kali Linux, an operating system that comes preloaded with useful computer security tools like Wireshark and Metasploit. You'll learn about gathering information on a target, social engineering, capturing network traffic, analyzing vulnerabilities, developing exploits, and more. Hands-on examples discuss even advanced topics like mobile device security and bypassing anti-virus software.

    Authors Katherine Daniels and Jennifer Davis provide with actionable strategies you can use to engineer sustainable changes in your environment regardless of your level within your organization.