Slashdot Mirror

New submitter campuscodi writes: Security researchers at Pen Test Partners have found a security vulnerability in the iKettle Wi-Fi Electric Kettle that allows attackers to crack the password of the WiFi network to which the kettle is connected. Researchers say that using this simple trick and information about iKettles, they drove around London, cracked home WiFi networks, and created a map of insecure WiFi networks across the city. The same researchers cracked a Samsung smart-fridge this summer to disclose Gmail passwords. If you have 6 minutes, there's a YouTube video you can watch.

YokimaSun writes "Sony has today released the PSVita in the U.S. and Europe. The console comes with features such as dual touch pads at the front and rear, dual cameras at the front and rear, dual analog sticks, a 5-inch OLED screen, GPS, six-axis motion sensors and a three-axis electronic compass. The PSVita is Sony's attempt at stealing the thunder away from the 3DS but also bringing back the gamers lost to the likes of Android and iOS Devices. The PSVita in Japan sold massively on its first release week but since has struggled and sold less than the PSP. With this in mind sites like Amazon have been offering many different deals to entice people to buy the console. Can Sony stop homebrewers from taking over this console?"

That the Internet is a big, scary place is hardly worth mentioning. For every respectable site, there are three or four seedy places that you wouldn't want to be seen surfing by relatives. While LiveJournal has a reputation as an angst-fest, there are many individuals using the power of self-publishing to impressive ends. Every once in a while, one of those self-publishers even moves beyond the confines of the electronic medium to the world of dead-tree publishing. Movies in Fifteen Minutes (M15M) is just such a project, born on the Internet to high acclaim, with the core idea transferred extremely successfully to a traditional book format. Read on for my impressions of the only book on the market today to feature a hilarious version of Braveheart's evisceration scene. Good times. Movies in Fifteen Minutes author Cleolinda Jones pages 401 publisher Gollancz rating 9/10 reviewer Zonk ISBN 0575076879 summary A hilarious snarkfest through a dozen of the last decade's movies. Movies in Fifteen Minutes, by Cleolinda Jones, began life as a wildly popular Livejournal project. After seeing the soul-stealingly bad Van Helsing early in 2004, she began writing up a snarky synopsis for her blog. The synopsis turned into a several thousand word opus. Other modern masterpieces followed, including Hannibal, Hidalgo, Troy, and The Day After Tomorrow. While the reaction to those works was enthusiastic, her June 2004 posting of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Fifteen Minutes set her on her heels. After she contacted her millionth site administrator to ask them to take down the plagarised version of her work, she realized she might have a good idea on her hands.

Luckily, a publisher agreed and contacted her about a print version of the online format. The result is a dense 400 pages of fan-service satire covering the last ten years of movies. Films covered in the book include Jurassic Park, Braveheart, Independence Day, Titanic, The Matrix, Gladiator, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Spider-Man, Attack of the Clones, and the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. For those of you already saying "This book is crap, I thought Will Smith's performance in Independence Day was extremely moving", relax. While the book is satire, and the obvious flaws in the film's plot are laughed at, the author is a fan first and foremost. She treats even Jeff Goldblum's grumpy chaotician in Jurassic Park with the respect of someone who knows her audience very well. You can laugh at a film without hating it.

And laugh you will. M15M synopses are fast-paced tears through the boring bits, glossing over all that wordy tension building background stuff with a well placed "OMG" to get to the really good parts. From Gladiator:

"MAXIMUS: Forget this - I'm going home, where I have a wife and son.
LUCILLA: I'm be going to Rome, where I have a son and a dead husband.
[They exchange smouldering glances.]
MAXIMUS: So, have we established that we once had a thing, but we now both have children, the ultimate bittersweet evidence of us having done it with other people?
LUCILLA: Yeah, I think so.
MAXIMUS: Awesome. See you around."

Every movie is a self-contained world of straightforward dialogue that cuts to the bone of a scene while still evoking the spirit of the situation. The jokes are funny, to be sure, but the book is also well written. Comedy is hard, and ensuring the synopses were peppered with references to literature and film, emoting objects, and subtle fan poking while also making sure the movies made sense must have been a challenge. The bare bones of characters are usually established within a few pages by self-referential dialogue, and while you may have to suffer through an entire paragraph of actual exposition it's unlikely that will go on for long. From Philosopher's Stone:

"HAGRID: You ought not to meddle in these things!
HARRY: But we're the stars of the movie! That's what we do!
HAGRID: Well, you three can stop that right now! We've gotten along just fine without a plot so far, hain't we? Just lots of nice episodes about young Harry's adventures at wizard school! Don't see no reason why we've got to go introducing a plot now, of all things, so you just keep to yourselves and don't ask no questions about Nicholas Flemel, hear?"

Not content just to use obvious humor, there are several running gags and real-world intrusions throughout the book as well. The Third Age Limbo competition, for example, is well attended by several characters during the course of the book (Neo wins), and Padme's handmaiden Rose is seen at one point bargaining with George Lucas to be allowed into a certain leather skirt movie with a naked Brad Pitt. Cleolinda's understanding of pop culture on the whole is impressive, and despite the already stale nature of some of the movies in the book the humor she uses manages to have a sort of timeless quality to it. In ten years references to the movies themselves may no longer be common, but the book's humor manages to stand on its own. Brittany Spears, George W. Bush, and Martha Stewart are nowhere to be found within the pages of the book, ensuring that despite its pop culture roots it won't be incomprehensible after a few years on the shelf. From The Matrix:

"The Matrix: The Text Adventure

MORPHEUS: Go Down The Hall.
NEO: There's an office at the end of the hall!
MORPHEUS: Go There.
NEO: I am there.
MORPHEUS: Go In It.
NEO: Sorry, I don't understand that.
MORPHEUS: GO INTO THE OFFICE.
NEO: ...
MORPHEUS: OPEN THE DOOR AND GO INTO THE OFFICE.
NEO: Oh, okay.
MORPHEUS: God, I Hate Text RPGS."

M15M is the kind of book ideally suited to reading in spurts. It's not a great work of our time, and it doesn't pretend to be. This book is a read-before-bed treasure, a fine companion for a long plane ride, or a great reason to get yourself into the sun on a vacation beach. In the end, it is a dozen mostly self-contained novellas with familiar characters and snarky commentary on the often nonsensical decisions made in moviemaking. It's wittily written, with a fast cadence and intelligent voice. It's quite hard to convey comedic timing in print form, but M15M manages to live up to the best stand up acts with copious ellipses and enthusiastic asterisk. Movies in Fifteen Minutes is an Internet version of 'local girl does good', and the result is a testament to what you can do with some spare time and a sarcastic attitude. Even though it will be out in the states early next year, and you can read her online works for free, M15M is well worth the couple of pounds to have the book shipped across the pond.

From Jurassic Park:

"ELLIE: We have to reboot the system before we can call for help! Unfortunately, I'm just a botanist who can barely understand the concept of 'chaos' -
GRANT: And we've got a raptor at the door!
ELLIE: I'm coming to help you hold the door!
GRANT: But who will reboot the door locks? WHO, I ASK YOU??
LEX'S SHINING MOMENT: *arrives*
LEX: Hey! I can totally manoeuvre this system you call 'Unix', because I am a 'hacker'!"

You can purchase Movies in Fifteen Minutes from Amazon.co.uk. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Muddie writes "According to an article at The Inquirer, Duke Nukem Forever has a release date set at Amazon.Com UK for December 2, 2005. According to the article: 'We don't believe that Amazon plans to trick its customers - it's not its style and the customers can sue if it fails. The game is listed as a 24.99 title and we are surely thrilled if this all comes true.' Could it be true, or is the sky just falling again?" Big grain of salt with this one.

nepheles asks: "I've recently been asked to teach some electronics classes for a group of 12-year-olds. They're all new to it. Electronics always seemed boring in school, so for them, I've been looking at hands-on projects: I've considered making basic motors, steady-hand games, and Morse-code communication systems. What experiments have you seen in electronics that amazed you, and that could be recreated in the classroom? What cool things have you made that would be simple enough for a kid to do? At a meta level, how would you like to have been taught electronics?"

GraWil writes "Despite the nay sayers citing its death in 1965, the FORTRAN standards committee has now released the final FORTRAN 2003 specification. In an announcement to the comp.lang.fortran group, Michael Metcalf annouced that 'Fortran 2003 has passed its ballot with flying colours: 20 yeses, 0 noes, 8 abstains.' Strictly speaking, the 2003 and past standards are not freely available but drafts can be found online. FORTRAN 2003 is an upwardly-compatible extension of the current standard, FORTRAN 95, adding and extending support for exception handling, object-oriented programming, and improved interoperability with the C language. In other FORTRAN news, the GNU FORTRAN 95 compiler has made amazing progress over the past year. Gfortran will be part of gcc-4.0 when released (probably in 2005)."

Nicholas French asks: "I have recently made a couple of online purchases, one was an Ancient Bronze Amlash ring from The Antiquities Company which cost me *cough* 'a lot of money' and was backed up by a 'guarantee of authenticity'. The other was a second hand Book Crowds & Power, via the Amazon Marketplace, which I have not even received regardless of the numerous emails sent to both the seller and Amazon. I have since taken delivery of the ring and had its metal composition tested...turns out it is actually brass, and not exactly Ancient either! When I approached the seller via email, quoting my money back 'guarantee of authenticity' I was told politely to take a hike. I am considering speaking to Trading standards but am not really sure where to start, so have added myself to the growing numbers of reported Fraud victims on Fraud.Org. Have any other Slashdot readers managed to retrieve their hard earned cash from these Fraudsters, or had any similar problems with large online's such as Amazon?"

sue wilcox, who reviewed Steve Grand's Life, and How to Make It in 2001, has now followed up with a review of his new book, Growing up with Lucy, about Grand's quest to design a humanoid robot. Read on below for her thoughts on the book. Growing up with Lucy author Steve Grand pages 256 publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson rating 10 reviewer Sue Wilcox ISBN 0297607332 summary The design and development of Lucy the robot and especially her brain.

Steve's goal is to build an intelligent android inspired by his understanding of the human brain. This book is the story so far of the creation of Lucy the robot (named for the famous fossil hominid). It's an experiment to circumvent what Steve sees as an impasse in current progress in AI which he describes as being "stuck halfway up a dead end creek without a paddle." Now Steve is not a neurologist, or a biologist, nor even an electrical engineer. He describes himself as a 'non-disciplinary' thinker. He's an ex-schoolteacher and a computer game designer, admittedly one so renowned for his advanced thinking that he received the Order of the British Empire in acknowledgement of his work. The game he made is called 'Creatures' and represents a peak in artificial life software- it's about cute little beings called Norns that you raise from eggs and have to teach and train (and if you feel a bit godlike you can tinker with their software genes). But still this is not the sort of background one expects to lead to a career in robotics.

If you read his previous book Creation: Life and How to Make It, also reviewed by me on Slashdot, you'll be aware of how radical his ideas can be. And perhaps not be so amazed at this next step in extraordinary ambition. But as he says, you can't jump to the moon incrementally. Reading this book is like trying to learn neurology and electrical engineering at the same time, with a bit of how to fly a plane thrown in for good measure. But it's so readable you can do it and laugh at the same time. There's something about Steve's writing style that's reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse. This is a book that makes you feel inspired and despairing. Inspired that one man can have so many brilliant insights, the skill to make them into real working mechanical inventions and the courage to go it alone; despairing that our academic and funding resources have been such a failure at support for his endeavors.

His project is to create a robot capable of developing a mammal-like intelligence (an orangutan is the current external model, mostly down to an ugly orange wig and long arms). Yet for most of the development time, Steve says he feels like a passenger on the Titanic, expecting the financial crunch of his life savings running out while still a long way from the end of the journey. He's made time to produce around 250 pages detailing the genesis of his ideas, the physical constraints of producing a robot on the cheap, an outline of his methods for reproducing neurology in software, and a discussion of some of the implications of advanced artificial intelligence and lifeforms. He does not offer us his code to review and as yet has not produced any technical papers to satisfy the curiosity of the professional reader. This book is an overview but one that provides plenty to chew on whatever your customary field of endeavor.

Making an intelligent android is not necessarily a hopelessly overreaching task. Steve believes the human brain uses "general purpose building blocks," each a variation on a basic design, rather than a spaghetti mass of all original wiring such as is found in simpler organisms. So when trying to divine the structure of the brain, it is, as Steve puts it, more like taking apart a lego house than trying to untangle a pile of Christmas tree lights. It could be tougher to model a worm.

But if seeing your brain as simpler than a worm's isn't worrying enough, how about having your whole sense of self undercut: "being of one mind does not imply that all the information passes through a single controlling structure." Steve has no time for the concept of a person sitting inside your head that is "you." In his view it is an illusion that there is either control or controller-- or even free will.

On the other hand, he does believe that emotion is essential for the development of intelligence. And that the very human ability to imagine is key to how the brain models and predicts the way the world will act and enables us to act upon it. We need it to match up our actions to the state of the world and bring it into line with our needs and desires. Two of the things that define us as human are pivotal to Steve's theories of brain structure and intellect.

Then there's the section on why it may be that we dream. Both the REM and the slow wave parts of sleep are explained by Steve's theories of how the brain wires itself up in the first place and then maintains its connections and infrastructure during sleep. His idea of a sort of mental test card signal that enables the wiring to set itself up originally and then reinforce itself later is useful, indeed vital when you realize that without this maintenance function our brains would, in his view, likely revert to mush. It also raises questions about what would happen in the sort of long sleep needed for extended space flights. According to Steve's theory we would have to keep dreaming or we wouldn't still be ourselves when we woke up.

Even if the entire project does not succeed there are the spin-offs: the new ideas about how our brains might work based on how he's making Lucy. Steve has to simplify (or at least ply Occam's razor enthusiastically) in order to cull things he can use from the mass of conflicting writings in neurophysiology. For example he thinks he knows how our visual system does a number of neat tricks. From using fuzzy images to increase visual acuity to extracting the visual essence of an object: a mental image with no rotational, positional, or size data attached to it. That may lead to breakthroughs in image recognition.

Steve theorizes that every cortical map must be thinking about something all the time. And if there are no signals demanding its attention then the map will generate some. Perhaps this is the explanation for the endless monologue that runs in everyone's head. And the visual day dreaming we do in vacant moments. Without these our brains would have to micromanage to keep busy or lose their connectivity as the circuits fade out from disuse.

At the stage where this book breaks off the saga of Lucy, she is a one-eyed, legless agglomeration of springs and servos perched on a desk full of computers. She can only grunt and on a good day point at a banana if you ask her to. Yet she is one of the most advanced research robots in existence. With so many breakthroughs in understanding how our brains work in phase one, I'm sure there are going to be plenty of people out there rooting for Steve to get enough funding to continue his work.

It would be excellent if a Brit could be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. But for the time being Steve is subsisting on the dregs of a NESTA (the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) grant to him as a 'Dreamtime Fellow' more on the artistic merits of his work than on its scientific promise. How weird is that?

You can learn more about Steve's work on his website. This book is available for now only through amazon.co.uk.

mblase writes "The NYTimes has an article (free reg required, someone'll post the Google link any minute now) about how the Internet has trumped capitalism yet again -- the very same college textbooks used in the United States sell for half price, or less, in England. One sophomore imported 30 biology books this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit." Wait 'til they shuffle the problem sets.

arys asks: "I've been looking around for a good book on the GRE Computer Science subject test but all I found were a book that is out of print and an other that has the worst reviews possible. What I want to ask is those of you that have taken the test, how did you prepare for it?"

frisket writes "The history of computing is full of unsung heroes and heroines, their battles against disbelief, and the machines they created. This is one of those fascinating stories: the first real office computer, designed for business rather than science or research, and built from scratch by the British company of Lyons in 1949-51 -- whose primary business was their huge chain of tea-shops." Read on for more of frisket's account of A Computer Called LEO, which sounds not only like a good story, but also like a bit of comeuppance for tea drinkers in the coffee-obsessed tech world. A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the World's First Office Computer author Georgina Ferry pages 221 publisher Fourth Estate, London rating 9 reviewer Peter Flynn ISBN 1841151858 summary A fascinating tale of the development of the world's first real business computer from the 1940s to the 1980s

In the early mists of computing -- pre-WWII, during, and immediately afterwards -- only a few scientists were really aware of what a computer was or could be, and no-one considered a computer to be anything other than a scientific or military tool. Except one man, John Simmons, a progressive and enthusiastic manager for the Lyons tea-shop empire in Britain, who also happened to be a brilliant mathematician and zealous proponent of the principles of scientific management.

Georgina Ferry tells the full story of how the young Simmons saw the need for automation as early as the 1930s. The monstrous task of accountants' clerks adding up copies of all the waitresses' bills for 250 tea-shops was done with mechanical calculators, and his dream was of removing this drudgery by automation.

He had seen the future of mechanical automation on a trip to the USA in the 20s, but it wasn't until after WWII that he was able to send two trusted lieutenants on an electronic fact-finding mission which included meeting Herman Goldstine, godfather of ENIAC, at Princeton. The resulting enthusiastic report, and a visit to Douglas Hartree at Cambridge, England, enabled Simmons to persuade the Board of Lyons to let him build a computer from scratch.

Post-war Britain had no dollars to buy American computers, but more tellingly, computers were viewed in the US and England by their scientific and mathematical fathers as tools of science. Simmons saw them as tools of business, and astonished them all by building one to do business processing.

The Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) was started in 1949 and entered service in 1951 with punched tape, mercury delay lines, and a program to analyze costs in the Bakery of the tea-shop business. It thus became the first purpose-designed business computer, years ahead of the first US business system (GE's 1954 UNIVAC).

It was so successful that Lyons set up a subsidiary to make and sell them to British industry. LEO spawned LEO II and eventually LEO III, which offered true multiprocessing. Sadly, British industry was slow to grasp the opportunity. Leo Computers had some notable and significant sales through the 50s and into the 60s, including winning the biggest commercial data-processing contract in Europe at the time (to the UK Post Office in 1964), but the Lyons Board eventually sold off their subsidiary, and it passed through mergers and acquisitions into ICL and oblivion, but that big PO contract was so successful that the Post Office persuaded ICL in 1969 to make five last LEO 326s which continued in service until 1981!

Ferry has managed to condense a 30-year technological saga into a thoroughly readable and hugely entertaining book without neglecting the underlying causes of Simmons' original quest to improve business efficiency. Her descriptions of the contributory threads of UK and US computer development are succinct and accurate, and they balance her careful explanations of the hugely complex world of running a large catering business manually, the complex interplay of family-business relationships, and the differences between UK and US commercial ethos in the post-war period.

At this distance in time, Ferry has been fortunate to have been able to include material verbatim from many of the people directly involved, so there is an air of immediacy which you don't get in books on earlier science. There's a full list of sources and a detailed index, and numerous photographs taken at the time. This all makes the book valuable on several levels, and it would make a great gift to anyone in business as well as computing.

Georgina Ferry is a science journalist and author, and has written accounts of scientific achievements in several fields. Recent contributions include a Life of the only woman Nobel laureate, and co-authorship of a book on the social and political aspects of work on the Genome. The BBC has a bio here. A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the World's First Office Computer is available from Amazon UK. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

TomHoward writes "In a pretty huge blunder, amazon.co.uk have put the HP IPAQ H1910 (RRP about £300) for sale for just over £7.32 (plus postage and packing). It's very hard to get through to their site right now, but if you're quick you can have a look at their blunder here." Don't bother clicking through, Amazon has taken the items down.

TomHoward writes "In a pretty huge blunder, amazon.co.uk have put the HP IPAQ H1910 (RRP about £300) for sale for just over £7.32 (plus postage and packing). It's very hard to get through to their site right now, but if you're quick you can have a look at their blunder here." Don't bother clicking through, Amazon has taken the items down.

Slashback this fine 23:59 GMT brings you a response to MS GPL FUD, an update on Lessig's challenge, a followup question regarding domain disputes, a reminder that clone claims aren't new, and more. Read on for the details.

Needed: One referee. Quixotic1 writes "A small company I work for has discovered that a domain name has been registered with their U.S.-trademarked (since 1980) name. Requests to the owner of the site (a U.S. citizen) have gone unanswered, so we're now moving on to filing an ICANN dispute. There was a query last week about inexpensive alternatives to the $1000+ UDRP arbiters. The discussion ended up revolving around whether the author had a valid claim or not, but I'd still like to know -- are there inexpensive alternatives?"

I bet there's money to be made if someone can come up with cheaper means of settling such disputes.

Store in the ammunition box. leonbrooks writes "Recently, images from a presentation by Microsoft Belgium were published on the web. The presentation made some startling (for Microsoft) concessions to Open Source, then set about FUDding the GPL into the ground. I whacked together a point-by-point answer to the anti-GPL FUD. Happy linking ..."

Tithe 10 percent. Luke Francl writes "Inspired by Lawrence Lessig's OSCON remarks, Lessig's Challenge is a way for people concerned by the attempts by the entertainment industry to close off the net to fight back. The challenge is to spend more on those who fight for the open network than you do on its enemies. Since it appeared on Slashdot last month, 10 people have joined me and we've raised over $2300 for good causes (organizations like the EFF, the ACLU, the FSF, along with free software/open source programmers and online artists). And that's just the ones I know about! Cory Doctorow wrote to tell me that many people were inspired by the challenge to join the EFF. ... Check out the list of suggested recipients."

Like obsidian, and coal, and dirt ... salimfadhley writes "Today BBC Radio 4 began serialising Phillip Pullman's popular "Dark Materials" trilogy. The beeb will be broadcasting one episode per week, with a RA stream of the latest episode that can be found on the promotional site. You can find "The Golden Compass" (called "Northern Lights" in Europe) on the website now. This stream will be replaced with episode 2 next Saturday.

The Dark Materials series was originally intended as children's fiction, however owing to excellent storytelling and a significantly darker theme than Harry Potter, has done rather well in U.S. and UK adult market.

The central premise of the series is that God is evil, a celestial impostor who pretends to have created the universe and who so intensely hates flesh and blood that he wants people to live a repressed, joyless existence. Unsurprisingly this theme has upset fundamentalist Christians."

Unfamiliar? Read the Slashdot review of the trilogy.

The clones I meet are mostly in pairs. PizzaFace writes "The Washington Post reports that the Raelian clone claim echoes a hoax of 25 years ago. And while we have better technology now for testing the claim quickly, there is still room for deception, and some people don't trust the science (and pseudoscience) reporter the Raelians appointed to test their claim."

Slashback items of note tonight: One more report (the last word?) on the demise of Loki, a good move on the Brilliant/KaZaA front, and a little 12-month oopsie on the release schedule for the newest from Stephenson.

It's all fun and games until you end up in Bankruptcy. Born Game writes: "Loki was supposed to be declared dead today by the bankruptcy trustee. Dennis Powell has followed their story closely, and he has written a wrapup that will break your heart and make you mad."

I hope he's making it longer than Cryptonomicon. We reported that Neal Stephenson's new book Quicksilver was due last month. An anonymous reader pointed to this page at Amazon UK, writing "the book is due out March 6th next year, not this year. Meh."

Maybe calling it Brilliant wasn't such a bright idea. asv108 writes: "According to this article from MP3 Newswire, Cnet's Download.com has removed KaZaA media desktop due to concerns over Brilliant Digital Entertainment's hidden software."

It's still available elsewhere though; if you or someone you love wants to use such software regardless, TDScott writes: "In case anyone is having trouble convincing their friends that there's a problem with the b3d spyware installed with KaZaA, I've put together a quick summary page on what the problem is and how to remove it (use AdAware with caution) - pointing people to it might save you hours of explanation."

I hope these are available stateside, too. Pankaj writes "Simputer is All set to hit the market in India. The Open Source Computer (Both Hardware/Software) Has found its first makers in Encore Solutions who will start selling it within the next one month. {sources internal}. This will give the iPaq and Palms a run for their money, as the simputer is loaded with features like internal modem, smartcard reader and usb port. There are plans to add a gsm phone into it too -- watch out, Nokia! And one third the price; it's supposed to be 10,000 Indian Rupees. Thats around $210 try comparing it to the ipaq.

Did you ask what it is based on? It's Linux 2.4, man, with gtk and its developer kit it's as free as the hardware itself. This looks like hot stuff to go for.

Swampper writes: "New Neal Stephenson novel Quicksilver is available for pre-order from Amazon UK. It's due out on March 7th. There is also another Stephenson book on the horizon; Interface. It will arrive May 2nd." Actually, Interface was previously offered through the psuedonym "Stephen Bury" Note the discussion of this book and others on the Cryptonomicon site.

A worried Anonymous Coward asks: "I recently used Amazon(.co.uk)'s refer-a-friend scheme to refer a member of my family. I set up a new e-mail address for this purpose, and it had been used for nothing else. A few days after receiving the refer-a-friend voucher, the address started to receive spam mail. Only Amazon ever knew about this address? How did the address get on junk mail lists? The address was too obscure to have been guessed! Has anyone else had a similar experience?" You may think most eCommerce places won't stoop as low enough to sell addresses to potential spammers, but it always pays to read the fine print, first. More below.

According to Amazon.Co.Uk's Privacy Policy: "Amazon.co.uk does not sell, trade or rent your personal information to others. We may choose to do so in the future with trustworthy third parties, but you can tell us not to by sending a blank e-mail message to never@amazon.co.uk. (If you use more than one e-mail address to shop with us, send this message from each e-mail account you use.) Also, Amazon.co.uk may provide aggregate statistics about our customers, sales, traffic patterns and related site information to reputable third-party vendors, but these statistics will include no personally identifying information."

Our Science Fiction Reviewer in house, Duncan Lawie has sent a review of Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction. One more interesting point to this review - Duncan sent it from vacation, offshore of Antarctica - off of Cape Royds on Ross Island. That's about 77 degrees south, for the geographers in the crowd. It's a near future setting - 21st century dealing with politics. Click below to read more. The Star Fraction author Ken MacLeod pages 341 publisher Tor Books rating 9/10 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 1857238338 summary Summary: A fervent, visceral, exciting venture into a 21st century transformed by inventive politics.

Ken MacLeod's vision of the 21st century - and beyond - is highly politicized. He has won two Prometheus awards for libertarian science fiction despite his positive appraisal of much of the Left in his writing. His four published novels involve a society very different politically from our own. His work has fanned out from his first novel, The Star Fraction to offer alternative viewpoints - often sympathetic but possibly contradictory - on where humanity could be heading. The breadth and cross-pollination between the books gives each a greater depth, regardless of the order in which they are read.

The Star Fraction opens around the middle of the 21st century. Britain has been fractured by turbulence at home and abroad. Division on every issue and the failure of central government has left independents of every stripe in enclaves throughout the country, from London to the Scottish Highlands. Many of these have a broad sympathy for the former Socialist government and the attitudes of the Left but are involved in feuds at the expense of the dream of a re-united Republican Britain. A Royalist government retains power over the rump of the country, but their power is further limited by the U.S./UN. The U.S./UN itself maintains global power through space based weaponry and control of new technology which has paralyzed the development of biotechnology and artificial intelligence.

The primary underlying "science" of this science fiction is politics. The interference patterns created by such a thought experiment are the very lives and livelihoods of the people in the book. Characters include a communist mercenary who works for a collective protecting (capitalist) property, a university researcher and a programmer/stockbroker from a Christian fundamentalist group. These people are powerfully realised. They care deeply about the society they live in and their political beliefs are a deep and genuine expression of their concern. The process of exploring politics through character makes the factional complexity of ideology more accessible. It also results in a visceral experience rather than a novel of ideas.

The speculative elements of The Star Fraction are in no way limited to politics. Space is a place where people go to work. This is significant, both for the influence that this all-seeing perspective offers the major powers and for the increasing freedom from Earth of those above. On the ground, the Green movement is seen to be deeply affected by global warming - what can they do when the environment is so clearly falling apart and it seems that still too few respect Gaia? There is also machine consciousness which works its way towards full artificial intelligence. The centre of this novel has much to say about artificial intelligence and its possible relationships with humanity. The idea of a life form springing from the silicon is opposed by those - both ignorant and computer literate - who fear the potential power of AI.

In the final third of the book the plot languishes somewhat as the populus works to reach a future bright with possibility. This final outcome remains open to re-interpretation and revelation. This novel brims with political pizzazz, wry humor and unusual insight. The struggle of the masses is brought to life in a manner which matches its fervency for a better world with brilliant action and convincing description.

It's only availible overseas, however.

Thanks to return reviewer Janice Wright for the following review of Terry Prachett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen's effort The Science of Discworld. The book's a fun attempt to explain the science behind Prachett's incredibly funny world, Discworld. For those of you who haven't read Prachett, I am ashamed for you. Click below for more information. The Science of Discworld author Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen & Terry Pratchett pages 311 publisher Ebury Press (Random House) rating 8/10 reviewer Janice Wright ISBN summary A combination of fact and fantasy from masters of both investigates how the magic of "narrativium" informs the science of our world and worlds beyond.

For those who haven't had the pleasure, the Discworld moves through space on the back of four giant elephants who are in turn standing on the carapace of Great A'Tuin, the interstellar turtle. The Discworld is inhabited by all manner of creatures: trolls, dwarves, elves, a number of varieties of undead, and people - some of whom are wizards.

Our story starts with the wizards (and the wizzard), who for reasons that you will discover when you read the book, begin a project to study (that's wizard for "play with") The Roundworld. It starts to go wrong almost immediately. No matter how hard they try to get the planets to form nice, proper disc shapes, they keep getting spheres, globes, or balls. And they can't find a giant space turtle anywhere. It's obvious that the world they've created isn't a proper world at all. Or is it?

Throughout this wonderful mix of hard science and funny fantasy, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (professors of biology and physics respectively, and co-authors of Figments of Reality and The Collapse of Chaos) step in every other chapter to explain the things that are confusing the wizards. Why are the planets round? Why do they insist on travelling around the sun in predictable ellipses. Yes, it's because of gravity, every schoolchild knows that. But what, exactly is gravity?

Via the wizards' assumptions about how a world should work and Jack & Ian's delightful prose, we are taken back to the basics of the science we learned in school and then forgot, secure in the knowledge that we "understood" how our world works. As the scientists explain, this is partly because most of the science we learn in school is what they have dubbed "lies-to-children". "Lies-to-children" are the stock of vast (untrue) over-simplifications that make science easier to teach, and easier to learn. And, most of the time "lies-to-children" are necessary in order to have something to build on to learn the next bit. The problem, they seem to be saying, is when the forget that it's really a "lie", and it turns into "believing-we-understand" instead of "wanting-to-know-more".

That is certainly not to say that The Science of Discworld is a children's book. You could certainly read it to children, though beware that this will probably result in time spent running around the back yard with oranges and footballs to explain the orbit of the planets, and so on. It is packed full of complex ideas and current theories. Most chapters start with the absolute basics and then swiftly bring you right up to date with the most recent discoveries from the High-Z Supernova Search Team (or what have you).

What I liked best about the book was the way the authors mentioned just enough about a particular topic (and dropped a couple of names or events; such as Jocelyn Bell's discovery of pulsars, or Adrian Thompson's experiments with Genetic Algorithms) for me to be able to go off and find out more about the things that I found particularly interesting. On the other hand, this brevity with most of the topics might frustrate some people.

What does it cover? Everything. Ok, so that's probably not a very good answer. There's this story about these wizards who create a universe and mess about with it for a while and get things wrong and shout at each other a lot. And there's a computer. And a librarian who's an ourangutan. It's a very funny story. Terry Pratchett wouldn't have written 35 books and be the second-biggest selling author in Britain if he weren't rather good at that sort of thing. In between every chapter of the funny story about the wizards there is a chapter of "hard" science. The stuff in the science chapters goes something like this:

• Science - what does it mean to think scientifically?
• Time, space & the big bang
• The stars, the elements, and more about the stars
• Newton, Einstein, and others
• Chaos, Emergence, and Langton's Ant (Note: if anyone has the url of a good site that demonstrates Langton's Ant, please post it as a follow-up. Thanks!)
• The planets, their orbits, & more about the stars
• The Earth from magma core to the atmosphere and the moon
• Philosophy on the nature of Light & Dark
• Life. Blue-green algae, Darwin, genetic algorithms
• Some notes on statistics and probability
• The Dinosaurs
• Mammals & DNA
• Neurology & culture
• Where do we go from here?

It should be obvious by now, but just in case it's not, I'll mention explicitly (as the authors themselves do on the second page of the text) that this is not a "The Science of Star Trek" type of book that speculates about the evolutionary feasibility of flying, fire-breathing dragons or tries explains what a thaum is (as if you could explain it, which you can't because a thaum isn't real, Terry just made it up).

Should I buy this book? Yes if: Probably
not if:

• You've been meaning to start reading some Popular Science
  • You already read an awful lot of Popular Science
    • You're looking for a good introduction/
      jumping-off point into a wide variety of interesting current scientific ideas
      • You've just finished a degree in Earth Sciences
        • You've read Figments of Reality and loved it's style
          • You thought all that icky biology stuff and all that stuff about different kinds of rocks in school was terribly boring
            • You can't think of a present for your bright 10-12 year old son/daughter/
              neice/nephew/etc. who has grown out of dinosaurs and has been pestering you to explain "how the stars work."

Can I buy this book? So far The Science of Discworld has only been published in the UK. As of June 10th, the authors hadn't even started discussions with American publishers, so the UK version is likely to be the only one available for quite a while. Buy it from Amazon.co.uk with the British spellings intact.

A word of caution
...to those who have not yet read any of Mr. Terry Pratchett's books. The Science of Discworld drops a number of tantalizing hints about the other Discworld books. You might well decide to buy one, just satisfy your curiosity about a particular character or story. Discworld books are addictive, with a capital "ADD". At first you'll casually pick up a paperback next time you're at the bookstore (I recommend Feet of Clay or The Colour of Magic), then perhaps you'll order the most recent hardback(s) from Amazon.co.uk. Next thing you know you're singing the Hedgehog song in the shower and doing very strange things with tapioca. It isn't pretty, and there's no known cure, but at least you won't be alone.
You have been warned.

Note: This is not yet availible in the US, but can be ordered from Amazon.uk.