Slashdot Mirror

Perhaps, but the definitive Gollum is that voiced by Peter Woodthorpe in the still definitive BBC radio version. Anyone who is interested in The Lord of the Rings, but hasn't heard this version, should really do themselves a favour and check it out.

Semi-interestingly, Ian Holm, who plays Bilbo in the films, is cast as Frodo here. Co-incidence? I doubt it. I rather suspect that t'old Mr Jackson has heard this version too.

Cheers,
Ian

Yup. 'Bout 2/3 of the way through. Fairly different from his earlier stuff (which ALL rocks), but worth every cent.
I also can't speak highly enough of John Courtenay Grimwood. This guy's stuff is broadly in the Cyberpunk genre, but again, very different. Look at Amazon UK which has more on offer than the US site.
A third option are the Marid Audran/Budayeen trilogy (and others) by George Alec Effinger.

Enjoy!

Trib

The Road Ahead it's a must read.

Superb, excellent, this book really captures the mind. Gates shows how intelligent he is with some of his predictions, which will make our lives easier and safer. May of his predictions are suddenly creeping into the market place.In the book Gates describes how technology has advanced, and of course how he thinks it will further advance. He explains things simply and clearly. The beggining of the book is not to great, but the rest of the book is excellent. As gates says at the beggining of the book, ' anyone who is expecting a biography of Bill Gates has choosen the wrong book'.This is true, Gates is simply acting as a philiosopher in the technological world

Alternatively try this book

Yes! Banks is an unsung hero here in the US, I think because his books are marketed amongst the throwaway SF paperbacks (complete with stereotypical SF/fantasy covers), so people never pick them up. Use of Weapons is out of print in the USA, but it can still be found in the UK, and shipping from amazon.co.uk is not very expensive (plus, for what it's worth, you'll get the cool looking stylised UK cover art). I highly recommend it.

Or what about classic Samurai fiction? Try the story of Miyamoto Musashi, Japan's greatest swordsman. Oevr a thousand pages and all good.
Musashi

Obviously it won't have the red and blue fibers

In his memoirs, the compulsorily-retired British counterfeiter Charles Black gives a neat method of imitating this.

He took a load of electric wire insulation (red and blue separately IIRC), cut it into several centimeter lengths, and scattered those on a sheet of white paper in about the right density. He then photographed the resulting random arrangement, and photographically reduced it so it looked just like the pattern characteristic of US Treaury bills. Make offset litho plates, and he could run his paper (which he sourced from Australia as having the right feel, composition, etc.) through his press.

Bingo! blank notes, virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, ready to have the rest of the design printed.

At his trial in 1979, a US Treaury official testified that his notes were so good that they rendeerd obsolete a new note-checking machine that had taken millions of dollars of development.

FWIW, out of millions of dollars he produced before his first prison sentence, only $8,200 was recovered worldwide. The second time, he was caught before more than a few thousand dollars had hit the streets.

And he never got rich, because wholesale prices for counterfeit cash are so low.

having just finished the trilogy - "His Dark Materials" by Philip Pullman if you want the actual title - i can safely say no, none of the characters had a penguin as a daemon. Notwithstanding that oversight, they are damn fine books.

yep and all quite neatly explained by Lee Smolin's theory of Cosmological Natural Selection. See his book The Life of the Universe. No god needed here, nor any rampant anthopocentricism, just physics and evolution. And remember kids, evolution evolved out of blind iteration.

ooh pick me, that's an easy one. Cells 'die' when they lose internal quantum coherence and are thus unable to take advantage of the inverse zeno effect. see the excellent book Quantum Evolution for a full discussion of this, or this specific extract from the book.

in this particular case my sig is wrong.

The entire series of 9 short CG-Animatrion/Japanese Anime films will soon be available on DVD. Depending on your MPAA stance (and what day of the week it is) follow the white rabbit via one of the links below to pre-order your copy.

Official web site
Amazon US: available 3 June
Amazon UK: available 2 June

See if you can track down the unaired episode "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein." It's only available on the non-region1 season 2 dvd set, and was never aired in the States (mostly because it's very very politically incorrect, but hilarious nontheless).

I haven't seen all of the Dr. Who episode, but so far they've mentioned Professor Chronotis at St. Cedd's College, Cambridge. The Professor is a main character in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (the first DG novel), and he resides at the College (which is fictional btw). The book was published in 1987 and set at a similar time, so 8 years after this script was written.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was written by Douglas Adams. It is more or less the same plot as Shada (also written by Adams) which is why Chronotis is also in the book. It's the same story. (And a good book - I would recommend it).

I haven't seen all of the Dr. Who episode, but so far they've mentioned Professor Chronotis at St. Cedd's College, Cambridge. The Professor is a main character in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (the first DG novel), and he resides at the College (which is fictional btw). The book was published in 1987 and set at a similar time, so 8 years after this script was written.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was written by Douglas Adams. It is more or less the same plot as Shada (also written by Adams) which is why Chronotis is also in the book. It's the same story. (And a good book - I would recommend it).

Ah yes, that woudl be the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter Hamilton to which you refer (The Reality Dysfunction et al). As you mention, he had them running in vacuum precisely to overcome the air pressure / friction / et al problems to which you refer. They struck me as a pretty neat form of intercontinental travel, far better that aeroplane!

One day... :)

Don't laugh, but their kettle, toaster, coffee maker and citrus press are all worthy of drooling over too.

Oh, and so is the Data Bank, a FireWire external hard disk drive that they designed for LaCie, that's styled to look like a silver ingot.

I'd link directly to their kitchen accessories but their flash-based site is annoying. If you're interested in viewing them, look at them here, courtesy of Amazon.co.uk.

That depends .. I run a small project (MP3 streamer in Perl; runs under Windows too ;)

I have two sourceforge mailing lists, a developers one, and a users one.

Both are near dead. One person recently mailed somehting along the lines of "The list is quiet; the software just works."

Originally the mailing lists were busy, but now even with growing users and inclusion in several distributions the online forums are the single most important point of contact for questions, bug reports, and suggestsions.

I attribute my success to writing something that worked well for me before releasing it, listening to feedback, and including the magic letters 'MP3' in the project name!

I've regarded the project complete-enough-for-me for a very long time, it keeps evolving as interesting suggestions are made by users more than anything else.

In terms of real achievements I feel proud to have created something that others want, humbled by the time taken by other people to help out, and would gladly code another 24 hours for every single "Thank you" email I receive (rarely).

OK I'm a money grabbing whore too - but the simple emails and guestbook signees always put a smile on my face and make me want to do more for my users.

John Naughton, author of the excellent "Brief History of the Future" wrote an interesting article about the costs of Windows versus the cost of Linux on the desktop. He's definitely not an unbiased observer (no pun intended), but his article has real numbers in it.

Company President replies:
"Mr Jones, call that consultant. You can spend double the normal per consultant budget to get him in, we need this fixed NOW."

and in the real world...

woe betide the consultant hauled in at the last minute, lured by the promise of double the money to fix it fast. It's the equivalent of offering the taxi driver double the fare to get you to the airport in 10 mts.

any decent consultant has read "the mythical man month" and "the peter principle" cover to cover and would not touch such a job with a 12 metre barge pole.

sure there are people who will trott out the old "the customer is always right but they should pay for their arrogance" line but in truth you do yourself no favours by taking on jobs with unreasonable expectations, especially from a client who has refused to listen to you in the past.

Company President replies:
"Mr Jones, call that consultant. You can spend double the normal per consultant budget to get him in, we need this fixed NOW."

and in the real world...

woe betide the consultant hauled in at the last minute, lured by the promise of double the money to fix it fast. It's the equivalent of offering the taxi driver double the fare to get you to the airport in 10 mts.

any decent consultant has read "the mythical man month" and "the peter principle" cover to cover and would not touch such a job with a 12 metre barge pole.

sure there are people who will trott out the old "the customer is always right but they should pay for their arrogance" line but in truth you do yourself no favours by taking on jobs with unreasonable expectations, especially from a client who has refused to listen to you in the past.

Hmm... "this title is unavailable" in the land of the free [amazon.com].

Delivery in 24hrs here in the uk... just a coincidence I guess...

Or read Fire In The Valley, the book that the film is based on. Both the book and the film are excellent.

Being a good parent is very difficult. It is much easier to start off with good habits and enforce them, rather than duck them and try to sort them out later.

Sleep is absolutely critical- both yours and theirs.

If you can't get sleep right, you get an over-tired irritable child which develops a whole lot of other problems e.g. behavioural problems. People always say to us "aren't you lucky, your children sleep really well". It's not luck. We worked hard at it, it was difficult, but it was well worth it.

Here are some books for someone looking for something a little less rose tinted.

Up the duff
and
Silent Nights

The silent nights book is the most important single book/ advice we had. It saved our sanity, and made our children happier and much nicer. Good luck !

Being a good parent is very difficult. It is much easier to start off with good habits and enforce them, rather than duck them and try to sort them out later.

Sleep is absolutely critical- both yours and theirs.

If you can't get sleep right, you get an over-tired irritable child which develops a whole lot of other problems e.g. behavioural problems. People always say to us "aren't you lucky, your children sleep really well". It's not luck. We worked hard at it, it was difficult, but it was well worth it.

Here are some books for someone looking for something a little less rose tinted.

Up the duff
and
Silent Nights

The silent nights book is the most important single book/ advice we had. It saved our sanity, and made our children happier and much nicer. Good luck !

The Sinclair QL - the worlds first 32bit home computer

QL = Quantum Leap

According to his book Just for fun Linus Torvalds cut his teeth on this old classic

I don't remember superbasic having any qubits or quantum registers or quantum operators though, perhaps someone can backport the quantum programming language to it's rightful home

AMD is a big player in the CPU market, but there are a lot of companies doing memory chips, isn't there?

Interestingly, Intel used to have most of its business in memory, but had to make an abrupt switch to processors when it were undercut by memory producers in Japan. Andy Grove writes about this in his book Only the Paranoid Survive.

What does Slashdot think?"

That you cannot consider the subject merely in the context of US IT jobs, but rather, you need to see your single-issue tarriff in the overall context of US-World trade.

The US can, or course, impose a tarriff. However the cost of so-doing will be whatever penalty is levied by the World Trade Organisation. That penalty will be in terms of explicit permissions given to other nations to impose retaliatory tarrifs on US imports.

The US is a member of the WTO for self-interested reasons (as are all members, presumably). It has to accept the obligations of membership as well as the benefits.

An illustration of the immediate effect of the unilateral imposition of tarriffs is yesterday's ruling indicating that the US will be severely penalised for imposing tarriffs on certain sorts of steel imports. (The US is appealing...)

Another was the recent WTO award to Europe of the right to impose $4 billion worth of trade sanctions against the US for giving tax breaks to American exporters through foreign sales corporations.

Meanwhilse the historical perspective (and reasonably orthodox economic market theory) is that protectionism is not a good thing; specifically, that it generally fails to protect whatever it was that needed to be protected; that it adds costs & disbenefits to all sorts of other things; and that it impedes global trade, which itself is a bad thing, since trade is normally profitable.

Ultimately, I see your question as being not so much about the narrow issue of jobs in the IT sector, but rather whether it would or would not be in the US national interest to adopt an isolationist trade policy. The orthodoxy is that it would be peverse in the extreme for it to do so; and by that yardstick, it would be peverse in the extreme to sanction tarrifs to protect one industry sector - even our own sector.

And whilst it does remain in the US national interest to take part in the WTO, then it must anticipate the possibility that specific sectors - IT jobs, for instance - will from time to time be affected adversely.

Of course, there is wide scope for debate; not least, about what will be the makeup of regions, states, supranational bodies, and how will trade work, in the future. Many of the scenarios painted are not particularly pleasant. Your question - and apparent supposition that the idea of protecting US IT jobs by the imposition of tarriffs is even worth considering is, perhaps, a harbinger of the sort of unenlightened self-interest postulated as being one of the drivers for the future.

I think EA is doing a pretty good job by itself, what with a recommended system configuration like this?!

1.8 GHz CPU
256 MB RAM
32 MB AGP (GeForce2 etc.)

Sad, one of the things I enjoyed the most about older C&C games was their somewhat crude 2D look. But then, obviously I'm in the minority!

Fantastic! The main character in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", Richard MacDuff, is a programmer whose current project is converting numerical data into sounds. He discusses this in some mathematical detail at times. And MacDuff has written an article on the relationship between music, mathematics, and beauty, and which gets quoted extensively.

I don't think so - that looks more like information about what category the item is in (electronics in this case). The referral URL's look more like: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000065UO O/johansbooksparto/ for a particular item (a Sony DVD player in this case), or http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect-home/ johansbooksparto/ for the home page. And I am not sure if there is significant (or any) referral fees paid for "next day" browsing.

I don't think so - that looks more like information about what category the item is in (electronics in this case). The referral URL's look more like: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000065UO O/johansbooksparto/ for a particular item (a Sony DVD player in this case), or http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect-home/ johansbooksparto/ for the home page. And I am not sure if there is significant (or any) referral fees paid for "next day" browsing.

Look at the Amazon URL. It includes the text "ref=sr_aps_electronics_1_1". That means that everyone following the link will get a cookie setting up a certain Amazon Associate to get a kickback of some percentage of everything you *do* happen to buy in the next couple of weeks.

I've spent the last ten years or so gradually improving the systems they use, and it really takes very little of my time. Last month I showed their lodger how to plug her laptop into the network, and showed my mother how to use LaTeX (plus installed MikTeX/WinEdt) for her book. Sometime next month I will upgrade the firewall from Redhat 6.2 to FreeBSD 4.8, and sometime in the summer I'll upgrade the Internet connection from modem to ADSL. No big deal really.

As you should be aware, nothing can ever be proven, but here are some good books for you to check out if you want critical evaluations;

Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith is a good (although somewhat technical) account of the problems with creationism, omnipotence, and all other God-related issues.

G.A. Wells has written many books about biblical contradictions and interpretation issues (try The Jesus Myth and Religious Postures ).

Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner is a bit off the mark, but worth the read nonetheless. Though there is little religious reference, it is the best piece of work I've read about behaviorism, and quite nicely explains behavior, morals, etc. in terms of simple conditioning.

As you should be aware, nothing can ever be proven, but here are some good books for you to check out if you want critical evaluations;

Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith is a good (although somewhat technical) account of the problems with creationism, omnipotence, and all other God-related issues.

G.A. Wells has written many books about biblical contradictions and interpretation issues (try The Jesus Myth and Religious Postures ).

Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner is a bit off the mark, but worth the read nonetheless. Though there is little religious reference, it is the best piece of work I've read about behaviorism, and quite nicely explains behavior, morals, etc. in terms of simple conditioning.

As you should be aware, nothing can ever be proven, but here are some good books for you to check out if you want critical evaluations;

Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith is a good (although somewhat technical) account of the problems with creationism, omnipotence, and all other God-related issues.

G.A. Wells has written many books about biblical contradictions and interpretation issues (try The Jesus Myth and Religious Postures ).

Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner is a bit off the mark, but worth the read nonetheless. Though there is little religious reference, it is the best piece of work I've read about behaviorism, and quite nicely explains behavior, morals, etc. in terms of simple conditioning.

You forgot to mention one key ingredient, though; the dogs!

Rich.

On the V-Rock CD in the soundtrack box set you can hear when Lazlow gets thrown off the station.

On the V-Rock CD in the soundtrack box set you can hear when Lazlow gets thrown off the station.

They weren't called The Hit Factory for nothing...

OTOH, Pete Waterman is *still* churning out acts that are hits (and has been a judge on two major UK Popstars talent shows along with his old mate Simon Cowell). And still happily copying classical structures.

And if you think this is a phenomenon of the last 2|5|10|20 years, bear in mind such formulae as the 12 bar blues and the 4 chord trick (I, VI, IV, V, repeat).

But much of the gloss of pop music is (as suggested by parent post) in the arrangements, not the composition. Look at the number of covers in that compilation. Covers from the 50s, the 60s, the 70s. I would guess that much of the software we're talking about analyses arrangements and applies collaborative filtering based on what's selling at the moment.

In the end though, it doesn't matter. Pop music is primarily entertainment, defined by commercial success. Don't mistake it for Art.

Just wondering whether the behaviour is similar to the cellular automata described by Wolfram's book. And if not, how are they different, indeed how is the swarming behaviour any different from previous neural network work, as from what Eric Bonabeau was describing, they seem to be very simialr.

It's all part of the field of bio-informatics, biology-inspired metaphors for solving problems with computers. If anyone's interested in Genetic Algorithms, I strongly recommend Melanie Mitchell's book (not a referal link). It covers the area in an interesting way and provides lots of pointers for further reading.

Oh wait, my local supermarket does this already, and uses this info when I log into their online shopping section to populate my favourites list, so I don't have to bother searching for things I purchase regularly. So does Amazon. This is an infringement of my civil liberties because wasting my time is an inalienable human right... or something.

Seriously, what can someone actually do with my purchase history? Maybe target me with adverts for things I might want to buy? (no, I am not a good person to try to sell feminine hygein products to. And no I don't want to consolidate my debt, thank you. HINT TO ADVERTISERS: The only banner ad I have ever clicked on deliberately was for food.) Maybe they could use this information for blackmail, after all I wouldn't want it getting around that I make my own pizzas, or the men from Domino's will be after me.

Honestly, it's not like I buy things over the counter for spreading sedition. I use my other identity for that...

Quite so. In fact one might say it's a rather unfortunate side-effect of being British. I would venture to say that within that milieu there are shades of subtlety that would be lost on the typical brash overstimulated American, who for the most part has no appreciation for understatement, having beaten his head against life for so long.

And your so-called point is what exactly? :-)

OK, so while we're on the topic of amusing British things, I am reminded of the fact that if you want to buy up all of the works of Wendy Cope, you can finally do so from Amazon.com directly. It used to be the case that you couldn't get Cope at all from them (only from Amazon.co.uk or from Alibris if you wanted to save money on shipping and the currency conversion.

And, for you Philistines who don't know Wendy Cope from a Page Three Girl, just buy a copy of "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis" and find out. Once upon a time, my review of this book at Amazon.com was both accurate and well-regarded:

There once was a poet named Wendy,
Who I desperately wish would befriend me.
For her out-of-print rhymes
I would give my last dimes,
But Amazon thinks they're not trendy.

OK, so it was well-regarded by everybody except one Brit who got his nickers in a twist over the fact that I titled my review "the most enjoyable book of English poetry ever written!". Evidently, excitement and hyperbole are not very much appreciated in England these days, where Tony Blair is apparently considered to be a pretty wild guy...

and have an even hard time returning it or getting a refund if it was a defective item?

• Body of Secrets - Anatomy of the ultra secret National Security Agency by James Bramford. - I'm reading this now and it is excellent. It is quite astounding what the NSA were capable of in the 50s, let alone today.
• Report by the European Parliament into Echelon - huge, amazing, has some great pics. Quite focussed on Echelon's abilities in the corporate espionage area.
• Books by Phil Agee - CIA Diary: Inside the Company and On the Run. Both out of print, no suprise but I got my copies through a mail order house in the UK. The were posted a day after my order but took a month and a half to get to me. suspicious moi? Although more about the CIA they contain fascinating insights into the overall operations of the Intelligence Services as they were in the 70s. Especially interesting is Agee's description of the CIA being alerted to his every move from hotel checkins, phone taps, border checks and so forth. Makes you think twice about checking into a hotel - anywhere. Also very interesting is his description of standard CIA destabilisation stratagem - you can see these same tactics being deployed today against Chavez in Venezuela and Schröder in Germany.
• A Secret Country by John Pilger. The chapter on the CIA's infiltration of the Australian labor movement and the subsequent 'dismissal' of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is excellent in particular. Whitlam had threatened to evict the NSA's Pine Gap and Narrungar remote monitoring and relay facilities from Australia. This was also aroud the time of the ill fated Nugan Hand bank which was being used by the CIA to launder heroin money. The NHB was the prototype for the equally ill fated BCCI, Bank of Credit and Commerce International aka Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. The bases, with their unregulated traffic were perfect conduits for heroin from south east asia.
• American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand - If you like his style, and many people don't, this is historical fiction by James Ellroy that is rich with character driven insight into the working of corruption on the grandest of scales. If i see the Cold6K on someone's shelf I just can't help picking it up, turning to a random page and reading. I am always immediatly drawn in. I can't wait for the 3rd in the series to come out. :-)

• Body of Secrets - Anatomy of the ultra secret National Security Agency by James Bramford. - I'm reading this now and it is excellent. It is quite astounding what the NSA were capable of in the 50s, let alone today.
• Report by the European Parliament into Echelon - huge, amazing, has some great pics. Quite focussed on Echelon's abilities in the corporate espionage area.
• Books by Phil Agee - CIA Diary: Inside the Company and On the Run. Both out of print, no suprise but I got my copies through a mail order house in the UK. The were posted a day after my order but took a month and a half to get to me. suspicious moi? Although more about the CIA they contain fascinating insights into the overall operations of the Intelligence Services as they were in the 70s. Especially interesting is Agee's description of the CIA being alerted to his every move from hotel checkins, phone taps, border checks and so forth. Makes you think twice about checking into a hotel - anywhere. Also very interesting is his description of standard CIA destabilisation stratagem - you can see these same tactics being deployed today against Chavez in Venezuela and Schröder in Germany.
• A Secret Country by John Pilger. The chapter on the CIA's infiltration of the Australian labor movement and the subsequent 'dismissal' of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is excellent in particular. Whitlam had threatened to evict the NSA's Pine Gap and Narrungar remote monitoring and relay facilities from Australia. This was also aroud the time of the ill fated Nugan Hand bank which was being used by the CIA to launder heroin money. The NHB was the prototype for the equally ill fated BCCI, Bank of Credit and Commerce International aka Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. The bases, with their unregulated traffic were perfect conduits for heroin from south east asia.
• American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand - If you like his style, and many people don't, this is historical fiction by James Ellroy that is rich with character driven insight into the working of corruption on the grandest of scales. If i see the Cold6K on someone's shelf I just can't help picking it up, turning to a random page and reading. I am always immediatly drawn in. I can't wait for the 3rd in the series to come out. :-)

• Body of Secrets - Anatomy of the ultra secret National Security Agency by James Bramford. - I'm reading this now and it is excellent. It is quite astounding what the NSA were capable of in the 50s, let alone today.
• Report by the European Parliament into Echelon - huge, amazing, has some great pics. Quite focussed on Echelon's abilities in the corporate espionage area.
• Books by Phil Agee - CIA Diary: Inside the Company and On the Run. Both out of print, no suprise but I got my copies through a mail order house in the UK. The were posted a day after my order but took a month and a half to get to me. suspicious moi? Although more about the CIA they contain fascinating insights into the overall operations of the Intelligence Services as they were in the 70s. Especially interesting is Agee's description of the CIA being alerted to his every move from hotel checkins, phone taps, border checks and so forth. Makes you think twice about checking into a hotel - anywhere. Also very interesting is his description of standard CIA destabilisation stratagem - you can see these same tactics being deployed today against Chavez in Venezuela and Schröder in Germany.
• A Secret Country by John Pilger. The chapter on the CIA's infiltration of the Australian labor movement and the subsequent 'dismissal' of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is excellent in particular. Whitlam had threatened to evict the NSA's Pine Gap and Narrungar remote monitoring and relay facilities from Australia. This was also aroud the time of the ill fated Nugan Hand bank which was being used by the CIA to launder heroin money. The NHB was the prototype for the equally ill fated BCCI, Bank of Credit and Commerce International aka Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. The bases, with their unregulated traffic were perfect conduits for heroin from south east asia.
• American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand - If you like his style, and many people don't, this is historical fiction by James Ellroy that is rich with character driven insight into the working of corruption on the grandest of scales. If i see the Cold6K on someone's shelf I just can't help picking it up, turning to a random page and reading. I am always immediatly drawn in. I can't wait for the 3rd in the series to come out. :-)

• Body of Secrets - Anatomy of the ultra secret National Security Agency by James Bramford. - I'm reading this now and it is excellent. It is quite astounding what the NSA were capable of in the 50s, let alone today.
• Report by the European Parliament into Echelon - huge, amazing, has some great pics. Quite focussed on Echelon's abilities in the corporate espionage area.
• Books by Phil Agee - CIA Diary: Inside the Company and On the Run. Both out of print, no suprise but I got my copies through a mail order house in the UK. The were posted a day after my order but took a month and a half to get to me. suspicious moi? Although more about the CIA they contain fascinating insights into the overall operations of the Intelligence Services as they were in the 70s. Especially interesting is Agee's description of the CIA being alerted to his every move from hotel checkins, phone taps, border checks and so forth. Makes you think twice about checking into a hotel - anywhere. Also very interesting is his description of standard CIA destabilisation stratagem - you can see these same tactics being deployed today against Chavez in Venezuela and Schröder in Germany.
• A Secret Country by John Pilger. The chapter on the CIA's infiltration of the Australian labor movement and the subsequent 'dismissal' of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is excellent in particular. Whitlam had threatened to evict the NSA's Pine Gap and Narrungar remote monitoring and relay facilities from Australia. This was also aroud the time of the ill fated Nugan Hand bank which was being used by the CIA to launder heroin money. The NHB was the prototype for the equally ill fated BCCI, Bank of Credit and Commerce International aka Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. The bases, with their unregulated traffic were perfect conduits for heroin from south east asia.
• American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand - If you like his style, and many people don't, this is historical fiction by James Ellroy that is rich with character driven insight into the working of corruption on the grandest of scales. If i see the Cold6K on someone's shelf I just can't help picking it up, turning to a random page and reading. I am always immediatly drawn in. I can't wait for the 3rd in the series to come out. :-)