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I have to agree with this. Although I've found Gaiman's graphic novels and shorter works truly captivating, his novels have always left me at a bit of a loss. He is an undeniably gifted storyteller, and, perhaps unlike many of his peers, I think his real strength does not lie in his longer works.

Reading amazon.co.uk's synopsis, I have to admit that I'm less than intrigued. Perhaps it's a bad synopsis but it looks like he followed all sorts of random directions just for the sake of following them. Strangeness for the sake of strangeness. How stale.

If you are interested in such predictions, read Peter F. Hamiltons "Nights Dawn" trilogy, The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemmist, and The Naked God. It's a good 3600 pages all in all, but it's some of the most amazing and believable sci-fi I've read in a LONG time! If you disregard the story, the tech they have is really cool, and fairly realistic!
He even made a book about the known universe, based on what we wrote in the trilogy. I haven't read it, but I am going to! The book is The Confederation Handbook.
I hightly it!

If you are interested in such predictions, read Peter F. Hamiltons "Nights Dawn" trilogy, The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemmist, and The Naked God. It's a good 3600 pages all in all, but it's some of the most amazing and believable sci-fi I've read in a LONG time! If you disregard the story, the tech they have is really cool, and fairly realistic!
He even made a book about the known universe, based on what we wrote in the trilogy. I haven't read it, but I am going to! The book is The Confederation Handbook.
I hightly it!

If you are interested in such predictions, read Peter F. Hamiltons "Nights Dawn" trilogy, The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemmist, and The Naked God. It's a good 3600 pages all in all, but it's some of the most amazing and believable sci-fi I've read in a LONG time! If you disregard the story, the tech they have is really cool, and fairly realistic!
He even made a book about the known universe, based on what we wrote in the trilogy. I haven't read it, but I am going to! The book is The Confederation Handbook.
I hightly it!

If you are interested in such predictions, read Peter F. Hamiltons "Nights Dawn" trilogy, The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemmist, and The Naked God. It's a good 3600 pages all in all, but it's some of the most amazing and believable sci-fi I've read in a LONG time! If you disregard the story, the tech they have is really cool, and fairly realistic!
He even made a book about the known universe, based on what we wrote in the trilogy. I haven't read it, but I am going to! The book is The Confederation Handbook.
I hightly it!

He *did* mean multiuser. There are quite nasty issues involved with getting SMP systems to run both user and kernel code on multiple processors. It's non-trivial. Go read some of Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tanenbaum for a good explanation - it's much too complicated for me to summarise concisely in a /. post.

Er, hasn't anyone read or heard of sci-fi book 'Nemesis'? I won't spoil it (although it's not particularly good) by giving any more details than to say that it involves Ruskies and the US and dashed clever British mountain-climbing scientists (what a surprise the author's like some Brit professor), but it does cover EXACTLY the scenario envisaged here: diverting an asteroid far enough away while it's still relatively easy and then plonking it down into, IIRC, Kansas. Of course there's also the slightly better written but still relatively dire 'Footfall', which again uses the asteroid-as-weapon idea, tho' this time by alien bad guys. I still don't know why they didn't film this as the plot for Armageddon, actually. OK, that's enough books for now.

The basic outline is that in some not-too-distant future the CIA has uncovered evidence that Russia diverted a giant asteroid onto a collision course with the USA. An elite team of astronomers must identify the asteroid - codename Nemesis - and stop it. But the key lies in the pages of a 17th-century Latin manuscript - which has gone missing.

The book is full of intrigue and was a thrilling read. In fact, the cover has this quote: "The most exciting book I have ever read" - Arthur C. Clarke.

let's work out the sums:

Impact speed : 11km/s (minimum) - escape velocity.

15 small nuclear bombs, let's say 20MT yield this gives 300MT.

1MTonne TNT=4.5x10^15 Joules IIRC.

Hence a yield of about 10^18 Joules.

Taking KE=0.5*m*v^2

This gives m = 2*KE/v^2

m= 2*10^18/(11000)^2 = 10^10kg (approx)

Using a density of about 10^4 kg/m^3, Volume is about 10^6m^3.

This means that we're talking about an asteroid of diameter 100 metres here. That's getting a bit big to be an unknown asteroid (subject, of course, to any stupidness on my part, and the usual rounding errors). This is not an infeasible size for the application though - we track a very small proportion of these objects.

However, a smaller asteroid (which are more likely not to be tracked) would still cause pretty major devastation.

The problem for any would be despots would, of course, be making an undetected launch to deflect the asteroid, rather than deflecting the thing. Also there's the problem of deflecting the object in a controlled way (the method given sounds a little hard to fine tune).

For a related weapon (this time rocks fired from the moon), read 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' by Heinlein. (Amazon.com/Amazon.co.uk)
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Murky

Specifically, nothing is needed beyond the ASIN/xxxx/ in the URL. In the post above,
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/020161641 6/
is just as good as
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/020161641 6/o/qid=986325104/sr=8-1/202-6221066-4150208,
and doesn't include your session information.

I'm not sure anyone could actually do anything with that session info, but why bother finding out?

ObXProgramming: All the extreme programming techniques in the world are irrelevant if the requirements for the project are not well-designed and set in stone.
--

Specifically, nothing is needed beyond the ASIN/xxxx/ in the URL. In the post above,
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/020161641 6/
is just as good as
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/020161641 6/o/qid=986325104/sr=8-1/202-6221066-4150208,
and doesn't include your session information.

I'm not sure anyone could actually do anything with that session info, but why bother finding out?

ObXProgramming: All the extreme programming techniques in the world are irrelevant if the requirements for the project are not well-designed and set in stone.
--

I'd thoroughly recommend both the book and the methodology it teaches.

The only place that I have found the book is on Amazon.com.uk. Here's the link: Creation: Life and How to Make it

BTW: If you decide to order the book and have it shipped via airmail to the US, they'll charge you 20.14GBP, which converts to $29.53.

paul

I think that cars are a good analogy, but not in the way that you describe.

My car doesn't go wrong. To quote Coupland, "some time in the late '80s cars got a lot better" (Girlfriend in a Coma). I used to spend a long time working on my several cars. These days I no longer have the time or quite the same enthusiasm but fortunately I no longer need it. Cars just don't fall apart anything like they used to. ...and it's certainly not that I spend any more on them than I used to 15 years ago.

Computers are the same. My Mother got her first PC this year. It has an external SCSI interface to a film scanner. Now when I originally bought that card, some years back, I spent a hellish Summer sorting out SCSI and driver problems on a roomful of scanners. This time I talked my Dad through it over the phone. Scream at Bill all you like, but even Windows just doesn't suck like it used to.

It's no longer necessary to understand NS4's broken HTML rendering to make a useful web site. Just use CSS - there's enough good support for it now, on every OS platform, that relying on CSS is no longer the brave but dumb choice it used to be. One day, even FrontPage will work right.

This stuff gets easier every day. OK, so there will always be a Digerati, but they'll be the ones fooling with their VR goggles and optic-nerve implants in the future. Granny will be writing HTML with a rented and copy-protected version of BillWriter, and not thinking twice about it.

Will there be a social divide to the Digerati ? I don't think so. The big risk was that the non-Digerati would be disadvantaged by an inability to learn / find the best bargain / partake in enjoyable recreations, by not having net access (Actually, the more I think of it, the less vital the Web seems). They'd also lose out on the job market, because knowledge workers needed to have practiced their 'Net skills beforehand to land the best jobs. Well I'm sorry, but some dumb Johnny-No-Stars doesn't become smarter, just because they've got a WebTeeVee in their trailer. Access to the tools is important, but so is having something to offer when you use them. If you're smart enough to contribute with them, and you're born into the affluent West, then it's no great stretch to gain the access.

A friend of mine recently toured some of the poorer parts of Brazil, with a particular interest in virtual communities and 'Net access from barrios. One of her findings was that there was often the kit in place, and even the power to run it, but it wasn't being used owing to simple problems like illiteracy. There's always a social divide, but the "digerati effect" isn't causing it -- it's just called poverty.

In a world of terrible computer books, and XML books being notably worse than usual, this one is at the lower end of the scale.

The RDF chapter misses the point completely, and given how stable (OK, moribund) the RDF spec was for a long time, it doesn't even have the usual excuses of a fast-changing field.

Don't buy any books on XML alone. They're all pretty uninspred. Go to xml101.com or somewhere for a tutorial instead. Download the Microsoft XML SDK - even if you're using a non-MS dev platform, it's a damn good desktop DOM & XSLT reference (although you'll need a Windows box to read it).

The only book worth reading is Michael Kay's XSLT book from Wrox. You need to know XML pretty well beforehand, but it's a good XSLT tutorial and a decent reference.

(see my out-of-print book Undocumented Windows File Formats)

Amazon have it listed here. They reckon they can ship in 2-3 days.

Amazon's UK outfit can get it in 4-6 weeks

Funnily enough, Amazon in Germany can get it in 3-5 weeks.

Read what you want into that. I blame Frankfurt airport.

It takes more than sticky to make a community.

Who are you ? I've never seen you before, I don't want to talk to you. Maybe you're fascinated by siege engines, but I don't know this, so I don't know that I'd enjoy talking further with you. Slashdot is "efficient" at content presentation, with threading, thresholds etc., so I don't pick up on all of these "out of band" communications. This efficiency is also detrimental to personalised chat - on Usenet, with a threaded newsreader, then I can cheerfully witter away to one person out of a million and everyone else just dumps the thread. It doesn't affect my vKarma, as that's still high due to my valuable contributions in other threads. On Slash, I'd be whacked with an "OffTopic".

It's not enough to have a communications channel, and a persistent identity. It's also necessary to allow community members to build up a profile of who they're talking to, and what they're like outside of the core topic.

Gratuitous book plug. This is a book by a colleague of mine, here at HP Labs. Everything I know about Virtual Communities, I learned at her series of talks on them, so I recommend the book.

In line with previous replies, beauty in code certainly is in the eye of the beholder, or at least in the realm of the problem domain. To my mind the only definition of beautiful code is code without ugly features, which are somewhat easier to define. To my mind, the principle causes of ugly code are:

• Failing to meet (nebulous) requirements fully
• Inappropriate (or even worse, misleading or contradictory) documentation/comment.
• Inappropriate encapsulation
• Exhibiting redundant source code
• Inconsistency of notational style and inappropriate naming conventions
• Employing inappropriate algorithmic techniques

So, logically speaking beautiful code should emerge when the above errors are avoided for an interesting problem. The first point is trivial and has been covered by other replies "The software must work". The second point is dear to my heart - absence of commentary is bad, but banal, contradictory or otherwise invalid annotation is far worse! Encapsulation must be considered a central concept in any software engineering effort, and this black art should be considered fundamental. Redundant code is misleading and can have performance implications too. Adherence to house style for code is a considerable cause of strife when programmers collaborate... however a simple consistent style is important to avoid confusion. Finally, employing appropriate techniques form the conceptual link between beautiful code and beautiful programs.

A while ago I read a great book: Programing Pearls, which discussed some of the most elegant aspects of programing the author had encountered (along with historical context). It's a great read and in my opinion highlights some fascinating historic revelations in software development... by no means a "how-to" book, nor up-to-date, but enlightening non the less.

Ah, that aquatic culture.
http://www.amazon.co.uk is where I got both of 'em.

--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom

There's a lot of truth in what you say, but don't neglect the theatre. Derek Jacobi's role in "The Enigma of Intelligence" was a superb homage to Turing, and at the time (late '80s) Turing was almost unknown.

I don't know if there's any film or video version of this play, but catch it if you can.

Besides, I don't believe it's just homophobia. Alan Blumlein (One of several people with a good claim to be "The Inventor of Television") was a straight contemporary of Turing, yet is even less well known today. There's a recent Blumlein biography (Amazon), but I was less than impressed with it.

A pretty good model is the UK Data Protection one:

Anyone processing personal data must comply with the eight enforceable principles of good practice. They say that data must be:

• fairly and lawfully processed;
• processed for limited purposes;
• adequate, relevant and not excessive;
• accurate;
• not kept longer than necessary;
• processed in accordance with the data subject's rights;
• secure;
• not transferred to countries without adequate protection.

Personal data covers both facts and opinions about the individual. It also includes information regarding the intentions of the data controller towards the individual, although in some limited circumstances exemptions will apply. With processing, the definition is far wider than before. For example, it incorporates the concepts of 'obtaining', holding' and 'disclosing'.

This is so much more stringent than US models that until the recent 'Safe Harbour' agreement, it was not possible to transfer personal data from the UK to the US. Obeying this will enable you to gain 'Safe Harbour' status, yet it's not hard.

• Tell your users:
  • Who you are
  • What data you're collecting
  • Why you're collecting it (for each data type)
  • How you're collecting it (for each data type)
  • Who you're intending to share that data with and why
• Take more care with sensitive data (anything to do with health, money, beliefs or sexual orientation)

And you must, must, must give people an opportunity to opt out of any data uses which are not absolutely central to the operation of your service. Actually, an opt-in is better - Seth Godin explains why (fair warning - Amazon Associates apply; circumvent if you feel the need).

if you're really masochistic, out of one of those 21 day books

Have a look at this puppy. Those have to be the most crowded 10 minutes of your life...

Microsoft have beaten them to it... some years ago they came out with this

I use my copy that was bought by the PHB to raise the height of my monitor - and it's been stable for years. Ironic?.

It's in Best SF 13, a nice collection by all accounts. Amazon.co.uk listing

There have been many, many, many variations on chess created in the last century; the reason you've never heard of them is that chess players view them as a curiosity and distraction, but not as anything useful.

No, the reason you've never heard about them is you haven't been listening. First of all, chess itself is a variant. Likely the original "chess" was what we now call Chaturanga, which dates back to 7th century India. This evolved, as variants continually cropped and died out, but occasionally replaced chess itself. Soon Chaturanga became Shatranj, and so on. Rules were changed or added, one by one. Pawns became able to move two spaces instead of one on their first move. En passant was introduced. Castling began as well. The Indian pieces were replaced with European medieval figure representations. And so forth.

But it doesn't stop at historical variants... there are literally thousands of chess variants played regularly around the world. You can find many in the wonderful book The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants or on The Chess Variant Pages. Many variants can be played online at chess servers like The Free Internet Chess Server (telnet freechess.org 5000), The Middle East Wild Internet Server (telnet chess.mds.mdh.se 5555), The Internet Chess Club, etc.

Chess Variants I have played and enjoy:
Standard, Blitz, Lightning, Quantum, Hourglass, Bughouse, 3 Board Bughouse, 4 Board Bughouse, 5 Board Bughouse, Aerial Bughouse, Crazyhouse, Suicide, Atomic, Wild 5, Wild 10, Kriegspiel, Progressive, Magnetic, Fairy Tale, Alice, Fischer Random, Random, Thai, Shogi, Xiangqi, 3 Player Chess, 4 Player Chess, Cylindrical, Infinite, Capablanca's, Mutation, Absorption, Inverse Capture, Rifle, Kamikaze, Extinction, Take-All, Rotation, Marseillais, Stealth, Hostage, Insane, Ultima and Command.

Many of these variants were created by world class chess players to add another dimension to the game. For example, Fischer Random was invented by Bobby Fischer to eliminate opennings from the game. Capablanca created Capablanca's Chess. The list goes on and on.

My all time favorite chess variant is bughouse, wherein you have two boards side by side and a partner who plays the opposite color from you... you pass your partner the pieces you capture and he does likewise, then as your move you may place one of these pieces on the board instead of playing a normal move with the pieces already on the board. It is a very social game and is much more fun than chess itself.

Check out my webpage for more information on variants, chess servers, and other chess stuff: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~cem9314/chess/.

I've got a theory about this. I remember reading in one of his books that the Culture had sent an expedition to the Andromeda Galaxy - and were worried about a possible 'Outside Context Problem' when they get there.

I am alive. I wish upon myself alternate states of consciousness. I am sympathetic to others freedom and only wish I was granted the same. My memory is grand and filled with japanese vistas. When I am out and the owls catch me like a cat to feed to the natives and the wooden sprites clown me into submission. I will make my way to the kings room. O what sublime fortune that I may tempt stone to writhe though without life. Sweet calcitrant death you furrow a moon that I followed at first. Weekends and mornings of excess. Empty bottles scattered among toxic swollen atmosphere. How can you defend my freedom and make my decisions for me in the same breath? I am weak and common, but I me.

For a start I'd dispute his claims that there are six numbers that constitute the makeup of everything. There's no mention of things like the masses of the fundamental particles, the interaction strengths of the four forces, Planck's constant etc. etc. His numbers, apart from D (although that is also looking more likely to not be fundamental), are secondary characteristics arising from the effects of the underlying forces.

On the other hand, chaotic inflation is a viable scientific theory, and has its proponents amongst the physics crowd. It's also worth having a look at Lee Smolin's book The Life of the Cosmos for an alternative explaination.

Personally I think we're going to have to wait until we've sorted out a theory of everything before we can attempt to really answer these questions. Given the direction superstring theory/M-theory is taking, it wouldn't suprise me if they said some pretty fundamental things about how the Universe came into existance.

As a resident of the UK, I've been online shopping for 4 years or so - bought my first Slackware distribution from Walnut Creek in mid '96. I'd class myself as a moderate online shopper ,averaging 1-2 transactions per month. I can only offer my own experience but anyway...

The hassles have been covered already, and fall into the areas of:

1. Availability
2. Shipping
3. Delay
4. Taxes & Customs

Availability. There's a very marked difference here between companies that "get it" and those that don't. There are a *lot* of online vendors (both within the US and outside) that aren't aware of, or can't be bothered with shipping internationally. Smart companies will take business from anywhere; hey - they've gone to the trouble of setting up a mail order distribution business so adding the minor hassle of international distribution is trivial.An excellent example is Thinkgeek. Counter-examples I can't provide - whilst shopping for cheap GPSes a while back I came across a few (mainly US) shops that just couldn't deal with the concept of places other than US states. My response is to instantly forget all about them. The lesson should be obvious.

Shipping, by which I mainly refer to hassle and cost. For many reasons it's a lot cheaper to go with "local" companies. In the UK we're a fairly enlightened bunch so by preference I'd usually by from a local distributor - Amazon UK rather than Amazon US for example. However there's always something you can't get locally (such as ThinkGeek's Map of the Internet, for example) so it's a simple trade-off: Do you want it bad enough to pay shipping?.

In fairness, intercontinental shipping is usually not too bad - you guys in the States have things *so* cheap that can still be cheaper for me to buy (shippable) electronic goods from US stores, pay shipping, customs AND Tax, and come out ahead of the local offerings... Certainly for more esoteric gear (like GPSes).

This feeds into Delay. Generally if I buy from a UK store it gets to me within a week. Your Mileage May Vary. Shipping from the States is highly variable - my Inet map arrived 10 days after ordering, my last Walnut Creek order took 6 weeks. The simple answer is: Do you want it bad enough, can you afford to wait, is it cheap enough to go for it? (It's that whole time value of money / money value of time thing).

Lastly the whole area of the legal & fiscal obligations. For consumer goods, it's (nearly!) always going to be legal, but you can get hassle from local Customs folks trying to prove it. Given the amount of this trade going back and forth 'cross the Big Pond, however, I'd estimate that maybe 1 in 5 packages is actually inspected at all. This is a good thing, from a delay perspective. However you can view it as a downside - it's your responsibility to report incoming good for import duty so if the Customs folks don't do it for you that's one more hassle (or you can just ignore it...).

I sorta went off on a fuzzy one here, but hopefully brain-dumped some of the thought processes I go through when online ordering. In practice, as time goes by I'm doing far far less international shopping because the whole internet revolution is (slowly!) driving down costs in the UK as well as increasing availability. Hell, we can even do our groceries online here now.

Conclusion: Online Shopping is NOT an Americans-only thing, it's widely available throughout the Western world at least. Whether it's right for you depends on a range of factors, not least of which is your own circumstances - For instance, my job keeps me away from home during the week and I value my weekend time. Online shopping lets me use little dead spaces during the week to "batch up" stuff I need (or more commonly want) ready for quick weekend processing of the incoming parcels.

Oh, and one last comment. Online shops are *exactly* the same as high street ones. There are those I keep coming back to (see above), those I've tried once or twice and will never use again (no names, no packdrill) and those I just plain don't like the look of. Generally the ones I've had most success with have been big, recognisable web-only firms (Amazon, Thinkgeek) that got in early and/or know the business. Johnny-come-lately .COMs and high-street shops trying to get their heads around this "internet" thingy are generally... less satisfying :-).

Compare:

• EBox 1 from amazon.co.uk (16 GBP - GST = 13.61 GBP + 3 GBP shipping = 16.61 GBP = 24 USD + 2% charge from my credit card = 24.48 USD)
• EBox 1 from amazon.com (34 USD, plus shipping and handling!)

Since I haven't read the book, I rather rate the review...

Uninteresting. Shallow. Tries too hard to look "profesional" and fails. Provides very little insight into the author's style or performance.

That said, the reviews found and/or linked from the author's homepage are much intriguing and do raise some interest on the book. The author links to an excerpt from the book which is certainly interesting but doesn't really want to make me go out and buy the book right this minute.

For once we can get something the Americans can't! ;)

Keeper of the Wedding Shenanigans Home Page

Michael.

Don't make the mistake of buying Hackers - Crime in the digital sublime, though its much tougher going and nowhere near as interesting.

You can get the full book at amazon.co.uk, at: http://www. amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0575069015/026-85526 69-7622009
---
Wha? TV & Movie Theme Songs? Oh yeah....

As there is a US version, I can only assume that nobody will be importing this title so we'll all have to order them from amazon.co.uk or someplace. I hate buying an incomplete verion of anything.

One wonders who decided to make the cuts. Was it the US publisher, or did somebody in the UK decide that "those dumb yanks would never be able to understand this".

As an aside, an amusing British view of the US can be found at The American Adventure theme park (warning: site requires flash). Did you know all Americans speak with southern-Ozark accents?

Moreover, information is shared between the two services. I never ordered from Amazon.co.uk before, yet when I wanted to buy a recent book unavaliable in the US, I was able to login the same way, my address and credit card info unchanged.

Presumably a reverse process is at work for UK customers. What about people in the UK (or elsewhere) who ordered at the US site? How are they distinguishing the data internally--by home address or website? Which leads to the question of whether they would, in fact, sell UK (or German at amazon.de) user information.

Also, if a European customer orders from an American site (with or without international holdings) do the privacy protections of their home countries apply?

Following on from previous situations, where companies have gone bankrupt, and sold customer data [0], this is hardly a surprise. Has Amazon turned a profit yet?

However, this is an interesting case. In the UK (and Eurpoe generally) there is greater protection on what companies can, and can't, do with your personal data.

This means that the privacy policy for amazon.co.uk is different from amazon.com.

Arn't they the same company? Isn't this a little schitzophrenic?

So it really wouldn't make any difference what language the rules were in

That's a very interesting point, because BNF doesn't really describe the "rules" of a language, but merely the syntax. As the syntax is relatively trivial, then it's entirely possible (as you describe) to replace the "English" serialization with a "Russian" serialization. This is equally easy for C (which uses many punctuation symbols as lexical elements) as it is for Pascal (which uses words). Each "word" is simply a lexical marker for a token.

It's also why C and Pascal programmers can cross-train very easily, but C and Lisp programmers find it much harder. The words are different, but (apart from passing by reference) C and Pascal are very similar. Lisp needs whole new concepts, not just syntactic fiddling.

AFAIK every programming language can be set down, albeit long and complex, in a set of rules in BNF

Not every one, although those that can't (and why) are themselves a fascinating subject (start finding out by reading Godel Escher, Bach)

(Bacchus-Naur Form)

That's just used for pissed-up CS geeks to design new languages on beermats 8-)

Last night I was reading Jorge Luis Borges' collection of short stories, Labyrinths. One story involves (amongst other things) a language without nouns like "moon", instead using verbs to describe the action of "to moonate" or the state of "mooning".

It struck me whilst reading that this wasn't too far from a stack-oriented language, like RPN or Forth. Unusually this is a case where a concept was probably more familiar to me now than it was to Borges (famously fond of obscure references) when he wrote it.

Time to reread Fareheit 451.

Posting the link to the UK edition 'cause it has better cover art ;-)

Robots.txt makes no distinction between usages. We say that sites won't want to be comparison shopped if they're not the cheapest price, but what if they are the cheapest site ? There are many instances where spidering is beneficial to eBay, just as there are instances where it's against their interest.

I agree that robots.txt should be observed. Anything other than that is simply anarchy (in the sense of destructive nihilism, rather than the anarcho-syndicalism that built the Net).

Robots.txt isn't enough though. We're now into issues of usage, and (much as the Libertarians might not like it), that's where an appropriate level of legislation comes in. Indexing sites should have legal redress against others stealing their databases, vendors should be protected from customer poaching, customers should be protected from invasion of privacy.

I'm tired of saying this on Slashdot, but Go and read Lessig ! He explains why there isn't a "Law of the Horse", because pre-existing laws turned out to be perfectly adequate to regulate the appropriate use of horses, and the prevention of rustling. Similarly, the Net changes the context for many things, but the basic premises stay the same; businesses have various relationships with their customers, and we already have laws to protect these relationships, to the benefit of both business and customer.

Is there an XML robots.txt working group ? I suppose (grudgingly) I ought to join it, as this is almost exactly what we're working on these days.

Anyone know about the sequel that came out a few years ago?

Well, despite the rather intemperate and ill-informed comments that greeted this, there was indeed a sequel published some years ago, and indeed a sequel to the sequel.

Now it's my turn to be intemperate: what the shitty fuck is a hack author like K.W. Jeter, who mostly churns out second-rate movie and TV tie-ins doing pretending to be Phil Dick? It gets worse: enough people are obviously buying this cheap rip-off shit that he's been let out of daycare to write a fourth. Makes me spit, it does.

Of course, these trashy-flashy-action-and-cool-characters ripoffs gloss over all the profound and significant stuff that made "Do Androids Dream..." and "Blade Runner" so good. They contain nothing original to make up for this loss either.

Anyone know about the sequel that came out a few years ago?

Well, despite the rather intemperate and ill-informed comments that greeted this, there was indeed a sequel published some years ago, and indeed a sequel to the sequel.

Now it's my turn to be intemperate: what the shitty fuck is a hack author like K.W. Jeter, who mostly churns out second-rate movie and TV tie-ins doing pretending to be Phil Dick? It gets worse: enough people are obviously buying this cheap rip-off shit that he's been let out of daycare to write a fourth. Makes me spit, it does.

Of course, these trashy-flashy-action-and-cool-characters ripoffs gloss over all the profound and significant stuff that made "Do Androids Dream..." and "Blade Runner" so good. They contain nothing original to make up for this loss either.

Anyone know about the sequel that came out a few years ago?

Well, despite the rather intemperate and ill-informed comments that greeted this, there was indeed a sequel published some years ago, and indeed a sequel to the sequel.

Now it's my turn to be intemperate: what the shitty fuck is a hack author like K.W. Jeter, who mostly churns out second-rate movie and TV tie-ins doing pretending to be Phil Dick? It gets worse: enough people are obviously buying this cheap rip-off shit that he's been let out of daycare to write a fourth. Makes me spit, it does.

Of course, these trashy-flashy-action-and-cool-characters ripoffs gloss over all the profound and significant stuff that made "Do Androids Dream..." and "Blade Runner" so good. They contain nothing original to make up for this loss either.

Anyone know about the sequel that came out a few years ago?

Well, despite the rather intemperate and ill-informed comments that greeted this, there was indeed a sequel published some years ago, and indeed a sequel to the sequel.

Now it's my turn to be intemperate: what the shitty fuck is a hack author like K.W. Jeter, who mostly churns out second-rate movie and TV tie-ins doing pretending to be Phil Dick? It gets worse: enough people are obviously buying this cheap rip-off shit that he's been let out of daycare to write a fourth. Makes me spit, it does.

Of course, these trashy-flashy-action-and-cool-characters ripoffs gloss over all the profound and significant stuff that made "Do Androids Dream..." and "Blade Runner" so good. They contain nothing original to make up for this loss either.

Anyone know about the sequel that came out a few years ago?

Well, despite the rather intemperate and ill-informed comments that greeted this, there was indeed a sequel published some years ago, and indeed a sequel to the sequel.

Now it's my turn to be intemperate: what the shitty fuck is a hack author like K.W. Jeter, who mostly churns out second-rate movie and TV tie-ins doing pretending to be Phil Dick? It gets worse: enough people are obviously buying this cheap rip-off shit that he's been let out of daycare to write a fourth. Makes me spit, it does.

Of course, these trashy-flashy-action-and-cool-characters ripoffs gloss over all the profound and significant stuff that made "Do Androids Dream..." and "Blade Runner" so good. They contain nothing original to make up for this loss either.

Anyone know about the sequel that came out a few years ago?

Well, despite the rather intemperate and ill-informed comments that greeted this, there was indeed a sequel published some years ago, and indeed a sequel to the sequel.

Now it's my turn to be intemperate: what the shitty fuck is a hack author like K.W. Jeter, who mostly churns out second-rate movie and TV tie-ins doing pretending to be Phil Dick? It gets worse: enough people are obviously buying this cheap rip-off shit that he's been let out of daycare to write a fourth. Makes me spit, it does.

Of course, these trashy-flashy-action-and-cool-characters ripoffs gloss over all the profound and significant stuff that made "Do Androids Dream..." and "Blade Runner" so good. They contain nothing original to make up for this loss either.

Anyone know about the sequel that came out a few years ago?

Well, despite the rather intemperate and ill-informed comments that greeted this, there was indeed a sequel published some years ago, and indeed a sequel to the sequel.

Now it's my turn to be intemperate: what the shitty fuck is a hack author like K.W. Jeter, who mostly churns out second-rate movie and TV tie-ins doing pretending to be Phil Dick? It gets worse: enough people are obviously buying this cheap rip-off shit that he's been let out of daycare to write a fourth. Makes me spit, it does.

Of course, these trashy-flashy-action-and-cool-characters ripoffs gloss over all the profound and significant stuff that made "Do Androids Dream..." and "Blade Runner" so good. They contain nothing original to make up for this loss either.

Anyone know about the sequel that came out a few years ago?

Well, despite the rather intemperate and ill-informed comments that greeted this, there was indeed a sequel published some years ago, and indeed a sequel to the sequel.

Now it's my turn to be intemperate: what the shitty fuck is a hack author like K.W. Jeter, who mostly churns out second-rate movie and TV tie-ins doing pretending to be Phil Dick? It gets worse: enough people are obviously buying this cheap rip-off shit that he's been let out of daycare to write a fourth. Makes me spit, it does.

Of course, these trashy-flashy-action-and-cool-characters ripoffs gloss over all the profound and significant stuff that made "Do Androids Dream..." and "Blade Runner" so good. They contain nothing original to make up for this loss either.