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I think you're overstating the problem somewhat. There is certainly a very visible group who are doing as you say, and they may even form a majority of contemporary Christians in the United States. This is covered in considerable detail in books like Bad Religion and Counterfeit Gods. But the fact that those who call themselves Christians are failing to live up to the message of Christ in no way diminishes that message. In fact it only confirms that we are unable to live up to the standards God has established and are in need of a Savior.

Furthermore, if you take a look at Christian communities in persecuted areas such as India, China and predominantly Muslim countries, I think you will see that ideal being worked out much more closely to that which Christ intended than in areas where persecution of Christian belief is rare.

Oh really? I was taught it was:

C Programming Language by K & R.

Gundam here we come!

• Programming Perl
• Higher-order Perl

If you have used these, then you Perl background is enough to learn also Python or Ruby.

What I do not understand in your question is this. You have programmed for about 35 years, and yet your question seems to indicate that you have not found out yet that all programming languages are in essence the same. Someone experienced like you should have the basics of Perl and Ruby under the knee in less than a week, and then invest yet another week to know what the possibilities by working through the documentation to see what libraries are standard available.

• Programming Perl
• Higher-order Perl

If you have used these, then you Perl background is enough to learn also Python or Ruby.

What I do not understand in your question is this. You have programmed for about 35 years, and yet your question seems to indicate that you have not found out yet that all programming languages are in essence the same. Someone experienced like you should have the basics of Perl and Ruby under the knee in less than a week, and then invest yet another week to know what the possibilities by working through the documentation to see what libraries are standard available.

Obscurity is more fatal to aspiring artists than piracy. If no one knows you exist then there is no way they can pay for your work.

A good book on the topic is The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.

I am a Release manager at Acquity Group and have worked for "Old School" software companies that have their eyes blazing at all the new web companies that release release release all day long.

Here is the abbreviated philosophic path to victory:

DevOps.

Your developers need to act like operations (knowing how the code is deployed and configuration settings, routes and the like) guys and your operations guys need to start coding (as in ruby for puppet and chef, automation and automation and automation)

This leads to...

Infrastructure as Code.

Hire a Release Engineer or convert a sysadmin to start automating builds. Now you start automating code deployments, you start automating infrastructure deployments so they are repeatable.

This leads to...

Test Automation.

Now you need to stop focusing on smoke testing and have test automation engineers write automated test code.

One more thing...

Automated Rollback

When things go nuts, with fast deploys you need fast rollback. Capistrano is a great tool for deploying this way, rollback is very easy.

Now you can ...

Continuous Delivery.

Great, you got this far, your builds, testing, deploys are automated!

For Developers:

Coding for Continuous Delivery is a different paradigm where unfinished code makes it to production. This means that in the production configuration, settings for the new code must be activated by switches to turn new feature sets on. You don't want that unfinished code mucking up your site, right?

People Processes:

Do you have CAB boards and ITIL processes? Great, make them faster and more as DEV/TEST/QA becomes automated and just focus on UAT/Prod environments. See this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Visible-Ops-Handbook-Implementing/dp/0975568612/

I can also gloss over on waterfall/Agile and hybrid software models.

Finally, unless your culture wants to shift, it may be damned near impossible to change the culture unless management wants to. If it's doomed, it's doomed!

I miss the days when the nutballs were easily identified by the tinfoil skull caps and end is near signs.... No they had to find a horribly written book by a incredibly untalented author that was universally panned as horrible in her time and all time after that and start their new religion on that piece of Science fiction..

I'm actually trying to figure out what you meant here. Are you trying to suggest that Objectivists are a religion along the lines of Scientology? The book may be five times too long and the Objectivists silly, but 'universally panned' is different than bestseller and we see few Objectivists engaging in coordinated thuggish behavior. They're the "leave us alone" types, aren't they?

Or maybe it'll just be that glove you put on.

DARPA and the White House asked:
What are the next big things in science and technology?

To stop constantly using science and technology to kill and dominate people in the US's quest to be the most amoral imperial asshole state the world has ever seen?

Recommendation for the new James Howard Kunstler book:
http://www.amazon.com/Too-Much-Magic-Thinking-Technology/dp/080212030X

http://www.amazon.com/Vault-of-the-Beast-ebook/dp/B001M0N0FO

China - The first economy based of stealing other people's ideas and manufacturing it for less.

Samuel Slater anyone? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-15002318

Of course the British couldn't help themselves either...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2178330/Royal-Worcester-porcelain-Remarkable-diary-porcelain-maker-1791-details-stole-trade-secrets.html
http://www.amazon.com/For-All-Tea-China-Favorite/dp/B003D0ZUOK

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to compare here (Amazon AWS?). Amazon S3 is not the equivalent of Backblaze. Amazon Glacier is.

At lowest prices*:
Glacier: $0.01/GB/month -- $10 per TB per month
S3 Standard: $0.125/GB/month -- $125 per TB per month
S3 Reduced Redundancy: $0.093/GB/month $93 per TB per month

Where are you getting $30 for "AWS"?

*Prices exclude data transfer charges, which shouldn't apply to most long-term backup situations

Fun note: The original text was "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land"

Apple likes to slap their Apple logo (ad) on things, it doesn't mean they built any of them. More likely Made in China than Made by Apple. But that goes for most hardware.

Microsoft, like Apple, does design hardware and for peripheral devices they did a damn good job. For example the Microsoft Trackball Explorer is a solid design with a demand that has pushed this retired device to a price of $225.

Depends on which holy book you're talking about.

Yes yes. I was looking for a new printer and when the offerings don't self-destruct* or quaff ink like mana potions, they restrict network printing to "licensed" computers (what if a few too many smartphone users visit? Will it get overwhelmed and forget my PC?) or generally bow to the Secret Service (but I guess that's mandatory now anyway so whatever). *sigh* I'll probably just hold my nose and buy the best one available.

As with video cards, I can't wait for a "third" group to come along and kick some stagnant corporate ass.

*As my last one apparently has. Something about "Service Requested" that came after no (clear) evidence of impact- or paper jam-induced harm. I guess printout-maximum related, but I don't remember printing, say, this many pages. A hex unknown even to the Lord High Clericscribes of Google in any case.

I'm surprised no one mentioned recently started Amazon Glacier service.

They do the same thing - probably more reliably.

The pricing is $0.01 per GB / month. pricing

But there is a 'gotcha': the service is ideal for archival storage and long term backup. It is not just for random cloud storage. Retrieval request takes 3-5 hours to fulfill and if you start downloading/retrieving too much, too often, you pay substantially more.

I'm surprised no one mentioned recently started Amazon Glacier service.

They do the same thing - probably more reliably.

The pricing is $0.01 per GB / month. pricing

But there is a 'gotcha': the service is ideal for archival storage and long term backup. It is not just for random cloud storage. Retrieval request takes 3-5 hours to fulfill and if you start downloading/retrieving too much, too often, you pay substantially more.

I grew up in Rural Wyoming. The closest Goodwill store we had was a couple hours drive away. The people that take away furniture and electronics for free are almost always located in cities, or near urban areas. And they aren't going to drive a couple hours to pick up a 35 year old stained couch worth maybe $20 or a 50 year old B&W television.

Also, NO furniture stores would deliver to our neck of the woods when I was growing up. Very few do now, so if you bought furniture you would truck it in yourselves and truck out anything removed, usually to an empty field or some kids fort. There was no delivery and free haul-away.

The same goes for junkyard and recycling centers. They aren't on every corner and sometimes are a couple hours of driving away.

They might be from the next town over, but most likely it's neighbors people know, so the first point definitely stands.

And where you put down "If its wood, burn it", I immediately put you down as a "City boy". Fire restrictions exist in TONS of rural areas. Did you not see the massive wildfires this last year? Fines in the thousands of dollars for burning without a permit? Fireworks restrictions? Any of that? When you talk country and rural areas, think of places where the nearest GROCERY store is over an hours drive away.

As for cameras:
http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=3413551

Good luck.

http://www.amazon.com/Bolyguard-MG582-8M-Wireless-Outdoor-Scouting/dp/B007WNLPPW/ref=sr_1_9?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1349800816&sr=1-9&keywords=outdoor+GSM+camera

That is the cheapest you can get if there is at least 3G or EDGE in the area. Dirt cheap at $350 each + $9.00 a month for the cellphone plan. they will then email you the photos if you hack it and change the lens from a wide angle to a more telephoto lens, it would probably be easier to hide.

Reminds me of this game... http://www.amazon.com/Cute-Fuzzy-Cockfighting-Seizure-Monsters/dp/1894525167

When Obama gets re-elected and nominates one to two more supreme court justices, this will certainly become law-by-judicial-fiat, which is completely unconstitutional.

Fucking judges.

Check out Men In Black: How The Supreme Court is Destroying America.

You want Linus to do a book project?

It's about the time to write a book like the two below, but of Linux.

- The Design of the UNIX Operating System - Maurice J. Bach ISBN: 0-13-201757-1

- Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions (1976), see
    Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions (1976) and
    Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions (1976)

I'm sure there would be interested publishers which would arrange it so that Linus would just need to indicate that he would be interested and those companies would do almost anything to help him laying out information by means he finds comfortable and they would do all the rest to get the book darn good otherwise.

If you have ever read either of those you probably understand what's a good book.

If your metric is hours, smart people will optimize with respect to hours. If your metric is students passing a standardize test, some teachers will optimize by "helping" the students pass the test.

Deciding on what metric to evaluate people is a very challenging problem that surfaces in any situation where you need to manage people. The best approach that is supported by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great is to create a culture on your team/company/etc.. that has the values that you as a manager want. This culture will then weed out the people who don't "fit in". Of course, creating this culture may take some time and so is suited for managers looking for long-term reward. Unfortunately, some managers are looking at things in the short-term.

Uhhh...because not only is what he is running a nightmare from a security standpoint but I bet it blows through power like Charlie Sheen blows through coke?

Most of the Win2K machines I've seen that are still usable on the net are Pentium 4s and lets face facts, the P4 was a giant SUV of a power hog. If he can actually slap in a hard drive and RAM sticks (which this is /. so surely if he knows about hardware firewalls he can do a drive install) he can pick up an E350 kit for $130 which will give him a dual core system that will smoke his P4, has hardware accelerated graphics, hell you can even play some Portal or L4D on it if you want. It'll more importantly only take 18w under load and idle at less than 6w which is nothing compared to what your average Prescott P4 sucked down.

Add the $40 Win 8 download and you are looking at less than $250 for a dual core system that will last for years, is silent, and will save him money on both electricity and cooling. So while i'm all for saving older gear that is still useful, hell i use a Sempron 1.8GHz Compaq in the shop as a nettop because its quiet and low power, but there are certain things just not worth saving and that covers pretty much anything made with the netburst arch.

Dude, there's no point in arguing with Lamarck [wikipedia.org] anymore. He's just bitter that his theory was discredited after the works of Darwin, Mendel, and Watson/Crick, so he spends his time online attempting to plant seeds of doubt.

Actually, Lamarckian evolution acurately describes the evolution of cultures, not individuals. None of us has to evolve culturally from the Serangeti as we grow up, after all. A cute sci fi book, :talks about it a bit. Good read. It definitely made me think.

If I went around with 200,000 BTU/hr propane torch and fired it off across the bar from people, I'd expect to be restrained

And I would WHOLEHEARTEDLY be in support of your lengthy incarceration. But I would NOT be in favor of an outright ban on propane torches!

Didn't you read him? He said someone might walk into a bar and start burning people with propane torches!!!! We have to ban these dangerous incendiary devices immediately!!!

Actually, this makes me wonder if he's developing a disorder of some sort.

http://www.amazon.com/Republican-Brain-Science-Science-Reality/dp/1118094514
Not so much a disorder but more a different world view, a rejection of most of what society has done to progress in the last four hundred years or so.

What amazes me is how few of you "free market is God" types will accept the fact that we already tried that and it was called "the age of the robber barons" by historians. look it up,

Historians know that the robber Barron myth was just that, a myth. I recommend "The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America " It's only $10. There areother writings on this online available for free.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Robber-Barons-Business/dp/0963020315

Here is a lecture by the author.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vw6uF2LdZw

they didn't regulate shit, hell you could sell rat poison to babies, no rules at all.

The drug that caused the most deaths prior to FDA licensing was Elixir Sulfanilamide. It was poorly researched and ended up killing 107 people. Now compare this worst-case example from before FDA licensing to just one case caused by "drug lag" under the FDA. The "drug lag" for Interleukin 2 killed 3,500. This is typical for the FDA, there is no repercussion for killing thousands of people by delaying the approval of a new drug, but there are for approving a bad drug. Thousands die every year because the FDA is slow to approve new drugs.

No rat poison being sold to children. Something about being bad for repeat business.

No food regulations,

You're seriously blaming the prevalence of food-born illness in the 19th century to the lack of regulation? Could it possibly be due to the fact that mass produced refrigerators and low-cost pasteurization techniques had not been invented yet? What regulations that would have been practical in the 19th century would you propose?

business regulations,

The only regulations needed are to enforce contracts and punish fraud and theft.Other than that Market regulation proved wildly successful in the 19th century given the rapid rise in pay and living conditions. What regulations would you have proposed?

environmental regulations, it was total free for all...so what happened?

The environmental problem was the result of government failing to enforce private property rights. At the beginning of the 19th century, people frequently went to court against factories for pollution and had injunctions issued against the factories and were awarding damages to the plaintiffs. The pollution of a neighbors property was considered trespassing. Thus factories were motivated to reduce the amount of pollution. They could either buy out the neighbors, continually pay damages, or reduce the pollution they created. A frequent method was to burn Anthracite coal, as it was clean burning and produced little soot and pollution for neighbors. Though expensive, burning Anthracite coal meant the factories no longer had to pay damages for pollution. Research was done and primitive scrubbers were developed for use in factory boilers that used dirtier Lignite coal.

As the century went on, the government took the view that industrializing, to compete with England, was top priority, so in the name of "the public good", the government had the courts stop issuing injunctions for pollution. With the factories free to pollute the property of their neighbors, research into and purchase of coal scrubbers and the use of expensive Anthracite coal ceased. The result was a century of unregulated pollution. A problem created by the government itself by failing to do something it was supposed to do.

Those at the top simply bought their own army and police and did whatever the fuck they wanted.

They bought their own "armies" because the local police either were no

If I went around with 200,000 BTU/hr propane torch and fired it off across the bar from people, I'd expect to be restrained

And I would WHOLEHEARTEDLY be in support of your lengthy incarceration. But I would NOT be in favor of an outright ban on propane torches!

Throw the idiots in jail, but don't make me have to get a "propane torch permit" from the county sherrif the next time I need to fix the plumbing in my house.

Banning inanimate objects will not stop idiots from being idiots. Hell, it won't even stop them from doing stupid things with the object that was banned. Pot is illegal, you know how long it would take me to go get an ounce or two of it? So, yeah, banning things works great, huh?

Laws should ban harmful actions, not useful objects.

Your right to swing your fist ends when your fist contacts my nose. (Or, in today's "enlightened" society, when I am in fear that you might hit me...)

A reasonable laser pointer has a beam divergence of ~0.0015 radians, or a spot size of roughly 2.25 micro-radians. 6.28 radians in a circle, roughly 40 square radians in a circle, so a laser spot is about 18 million times brighter than a regular spherically emitting (Edison style) light bulb.

So, take a 3mW green laser and point it at someone's eye, you're hitting them with the same light-power as a 50,000 Watt light bulb at the same distance, and worse still, the light is monochromatic and all visible.

If I went around with 200,000 BTU/hr propane torch and fired it off across the bar from people, I'd expect to be restrained - the laser is even more damaging to the retina... but some people think it's a toy.

But it's much easier to just copy your epubs onto the device than having everything going through Calibre.

That's why I use Kindlegen which runs on the CLI and can be downloaded for free: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000765211 I don't like much Calibre; it feels sluggish.

The e-paper Kindle is a great way to carry a library around with you, but I don't see the utility of using it for anything other than reading books. The Kindle Paperwhite is more expensive than a generic Android tablet, plus the Paperwhite takes a few weeks to ship because of high demand. If you want to hack it to e.g. show weather data, why wait weeks and pay so much when you could have one of those generic tablets instantly?

Hugh Howey (the Wool guy) has a novelette called Half Way Home that follows this premise. It's a great read, highly recommended.

If we're making chemistry based jokes, my favorite is organic salt

(I'm looking forward to checking out Forever Free, I just learned about that in this thread.)

I wouldn't bother, seriously. It has an ending worse than the Dark Tower series' descent into 'Oh look these robots are flinging about Harry Potter (TM) snitches!'. I loved the Forever War, but this 'sequel' is one of the few books that has made me embarrassed for reading it.

On the other hand, Forever Peace, which is by the same author but is not a sequel (different universe, different take on war but similarly thought-provoking to the Forever War), is excellent and well worth reading. You can pick up all three Forever books in the Peace and War omnibus so you can make up your own mind, although Amazon do not appear to be selling them new anymore.

Actually, no. GM made a deal with the USSR to send some engineers over to help build plants to develop and build autos, but Stalin became so paranoid over outsiders in his country that most of those engineers ended up getting sent to prison as traitors/spies.

The plan itself ended up being a failure as a result and most Soviet tanks were Soviet built and designed with only TINY amounts of input by the GM engineers.

For further information, you can get this book from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Under-Red-Star-Extraordinary/dp/1400070783

Also, I'm not sure what this has to do with this topic.

The description of said movie makes me think it's directly inspired by Dougal Dixon's After Earth book (available at http://www.amazon.com/After-Man-A-Zoology-Future/dp/0312194331 and other stores). A *great* read, I must say.

Now, that movie shows promise... or it would, if Mr. ObTwist weren't involved. Still, getting to see a the heroes mounting a rabbuck might be worthwhile.

When I was shopping for an ultrabook, I found the MacBook Air was quite competitively priced. I wasn't terribly impressed with the competition either -- the Samsung Series 7, for example, is not only more expensive for the same specs, but it's made of plastic!

Not that I'm an expert, but as far as I can tell from some brief Googling, the Samsung Series 7 is:

1. Made of metal not plastic,
2. Not an ultrabook,
3. Cheaper than the Air.

Specs appear generally better than the Air since it's a "full" laptop rather than ultrabook. More memory, more pixels, faster CPU, 1TB HDD vs 128GB SSD on Air, and of course thicker and heavier.

I'm basing this largely on specs here and here.

When I was shopping for an ultrabook, I found the MacBook Air was quite competitively priced. I wasn't terribly impressed with the competition either -- the Samsung Series 7, for example, is not only more expensive for the same specs, but it's made of plastic!

Not that I'm an expert, but as far as I can tell from some brief Googling, the Samsung Series 7 is:

1. Made of metal not plastic,
2. Not an ultrabook,
3. Cheaper than the Air.

Specs appear generally better than the Air since it's a "full" laptop rather than ultrabook. More memory, more pixels, faster CPU, 1TB HDD vs 128GB SSD on Air, and of course thicker and heavier.

I'm basing this largely on specs here and here.

The Republican Party won't suffer when Mitt Romney loses. They'll be forced to deal with the incongruities within their coalition of convenience. The free market zealots are only allowed into the tent out of the need for numbers, otherwise they'd be Libertarians. When they go, I wish they'd take everyone in both major parties who believe that liberty means being able to tell someone else what to believe and how to lead their life, sexually, religiously or otherwise.

BTW - I'm not convinced Romney will lose just yet. I think it's brilliant that the Obama camp has linked paying your taxes to patriotism (and therefore allegiance), but until Mitt releases his previous returns we'll never know if his love of money required tax amnesty or not. And until the prophet reveals his true intent, we'll never really know if he's worth following. So maybe the debates will bring substance to the man (who should have been Chris Christie, according to Anne Colter).

As for Ron Paul, IMHO, he's right where he belongs, as a Libertarian, outside the Republican mainstream. I just finished reading The Righteous Mind by Jonothan Haidt. And there's a passage that traces the schism between libertarians (who believed that markets would be just fine once they were free of king and clergy) and liberal progressives from either the Republicans or the Democrats (who believed that corporate citizens needed regulation to keep them from harming us). Haidt claimed this has been playing out since the mid-nineteenth century.

Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln were progressive Republicans, and Lyndon Johnson was a progressive Democrat. Nixon signing the legislation that created the EPA was a progressive act. But when Clinton signed the Gramm, Leach Bliley Act (which gutted the post-crash Glass-Steagall Act and allowed investment banking risks to invade the realm of federally insured depository institutions, thus theatening the mortgage banking industry and the collective wealth of mortgage holders) he was not acting as a progressive or in the best interests of majority of us.

I don't believe there's room under the tent for legislators who don't understand the difference, and when I read
Ron Paul's assertions in his book, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom, or listen to Mitt Romney, I hear ideology without much substantial evidence the actions they would use to promote democracy, the U.S. or the lives of the majority in any way I can take to the bank (so to speak).

To me, this is the purpose of having a 4th Estate, to provide journalists with the time and money to conduct investigations and present their results in matters of such import. I don't care whether they are biased in their opinions or their conclusions. I do care whether or not they tell me how they reached these conclusions. To me, a good journalists tells you where they went looking for information, what they found and why it matters. Presenting their analysis is important because it accounts for their bias and allows me to determine more readily whether I should agree or not.

Sun (that computer company that Oracle bought ... you know, the Java folks) used to have a series of books on various technical topics.

If you're going to build out your own computer room, I highly suggest reading "Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology". It might be written for a different scale, but bits like planning how much power to put in, networking, etc, might have application to the other sections as well. (although, I don't know how often gear gets changed out in the machine shop ... most that I've been in are still running mills and lathes from the 1970s or so, as they were built to last)

In your specific situation, I'd be concerned with where the door to access the room is ... I'd try to avoid having it from the shop floor, as you want to make sure that whatever metal shavings that someone might've picked up on their clothes and shoes have a chance to come off before they go in the room.

Read Stewart Brand's How buildings learn, especially the section about purpose built buildings vs 'general purpose' buildings and how to deal with 'planning for future technology'. Executive summary is buildings which are overspecialized for today's needs and technologies rarely work well in the first place (your requirements have usually changed even before the building is finished), and are usually being bashed down within 50 years as unusable spaces. He argues the best bet for 'future proofing' is to aim for a building that's easy to modify - if you can rip out an inconvenient wall or add a raised floor or remove the raised floor and add another wall without to much drama or cost, you'll still be happy in 20 years,

Clue: a beautifully annotated source may be part of the manual, anybody who later takes over maintenance of the code will be eternally thankful to you, and if your name is Knuth then future students of programming may study it avidly - but it is not the manual.

...and yes, once, many years ago, when charged with supporting TeX at a computer centre, I mistakenly printed out the 'documentation' for TeX so I do know about what I speak. I wanted to learn to use it so I could support users, not rewrite the code.

Fortunately, Knuth is smart enough to understand this and WTFM as well, for the benefit of people who wanted to use TeX to do typesetting rather than a software design masterclass.

Does anyone have any experiences to share with similar homebrew noise remediation efforts?"

Yes.

Bugger, no Kindle editions and the only non-stolen ebooks on Google are NOT FOR SALE IN YOUR COUNTRY. Damned Luddite author.

Uh, what? I just looked for the first book, and you can get the ebook on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

(Can you load B&N epubs on a Kindle? I know i can load Amazon files on my Nook but i've never tried the reverse process, and i know the Kindle is more locked down.)

I liked the "Lost Fleet" series because of it's use of actual naval tactics, and basic understanding of how things should work.. there are a few holes but at least very entertaining and not so far out there that it it makes you shake your head and laugh all the time.

However if we are talking about star carriers and at least well thought out science then you have to include the "Star Carrier" series by Ian Douglass. I love the way he drops fighters on entering the star system having them accelerate at near c and striking the enemy just behind the light coming from the fleet. I also think he spent a lot more time thinking about how an Alcubierre drive might work and the ways in which it would be used in combat.

That's great. Didn't know there were such things as sound proofed windows.

My idea was to use roxul acoustic fire batts (used to soundproof home theaters) and put them in some custom built cardboard boxes that fit snugly into the window areas to block off sound. Great for sleeping in since they block out light too.

http://www.amazon.com/Roxul-Acoustical-Batts-Mineral-2-inch/dp/B006FX8ASA

A simpler way is to use sound reducing window curtains. Of course, the sound proofed windows would be the nicest solution.

Another idea is to move your bedroom to the interior of the apartment away from the streets since those noises are most annoying when sleeping.

And if that still doesn't work. Move. :)

This Machine Kills Secrets, by Andy Greenberg

-----Unauthorized Book Review-----

Privacy on the Internet can easily be a life or death proposition: whether it was Yahoo and Jerry Yang outing a Chinese pro-democracy activist to the Chinese government, the secret police of Bahrain disappearing protesters, or the extraordinarily long incarceration and sleep-deprivation torture of Bradley Manning, the outcomes can be enormous!

When events work positively, lives are saved and movements flourish in Myanmar, Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Andy Greenberg's monumental book, This Machine Kills Secrets, delivers mightily. Greenberg has exhaustively researched the story --- and the back story --- providing the reader with the ultimate bird's eye view of the unfolding story of WikiLeaks, Internet privacy and the corporate and governmental battles waged against them --- this is one kick ass book --- and Greenberg gets everything right!

This is no David Wise or Eamon Javers misinformation trope, this is the real deal, my Wolfen friends.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525953205

For those who wish to stay current, the sites below may be of interest.

I-Sites:

http://www.privacysos.org/blog
http://cryptogon.com/
http://www.narconews.com/
http://www.globaleaks.org/
http://www.cryptome.org/
http://www.whistleblower.org/
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/