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You said online but also said willing to pay, so for what it's worth....

Linus Pauling's "General Chemistry" is brilliant and a Dover Publication so it's cheap and a classic.

For a popular introduction to science (esp. great explanations of the chemical bonds, but also amazing word play...): The Canon, by Natalie Angier.

You said online but also said willing to pay, so for what it's worth....

Linus Pauling's "General Chemistry" is brilliant and a Dover Publication so it's cheap and a classic.

For a popular introduction to science (esp. great explanations of the chemical bonds, but also amazing word play...): The Canon, by Natalie Angier.

...published in the 1960s and I don't think have ever really been brought up to date...

They have been updated. From wikipedia: "Also released in 2005, was a "Definitive Edition" of the lectures which includes corrections to the original text."

And the Amazon page says: "The revised edition of Feynman's legendary lectures includes extensive corrections and updates collated by Feynman and his colleagues. A new foreword by Kip Thorne, the current Richard Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, discusses the relevance of the new edition to today’s readers."

I guess this book needs to be republished now...

http://www.amazon.com/101-Uses-Dead-Simon-Bond/dp/0517545160/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338836951&sr=8-1

The Feynman Lectures on Physics are awesome. Better than any other materials I ever encountered on the subject of Physics. I don't recall how difficult they are -- i.e., whether they require calculus or not.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Feynman-Lectures-Physics-boxed/dp/0465023827

If anyone could recommend something comparable for Calculus, I'd love to hear it. I need a Calculus refresher.

FREE STUFF

UC Berkeley Webcasts (I learned quite a bit from these -- try different courses by semester. Listen to the 1st and 2nd lecture to see if it's high value. Some are better than others. I got an excellent MEMS lecture from here once, and a really good one on Byzantine history. Some (like history) are good as audio in your car. Others get better with charts.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

MIT OpenCourseWare (haven't tried, but hear good things)

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Khan academy (of course)
http://www.khanacademy.org/

PAID RESOURCES

Kaplan http://www.kaptest.com/
(Take something like the MCAT review if you can afford it for science/physics. They do a really good job of distilling the basics of science/biology/etc. without any nonsense. Disclaimer: I've also taught for Kaplan)

Also, don't discount old fashioned books:

The "Head First" series of books
(Try the "Dummies" books also if you're not insulted by the title)

Head First Physics

Home Schooling Curricula
Whatever you may feel about the social implications of home schooling, there are some excellent science resources which will catch you up. I will shy away from recommending specific ones for fear of inciting a flame war. I hope someone better versed in these curricula can enlighten us with recommendations.

Textbooks!
Try to get some used textbooks from a used book store, if all you want is the 101 level stuff:

Chemistry (Oxtoby-Nachtrieb) http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Modern-Chemistry-Fifth-Edition/dp/B001F39B2Y
(There are many nicely written Biology books -- see what you like)

And if you really want to enjoy chemistry:

Chemical Demonstrations, Shakhashiri

(Warning: do not try these at home until you know what you're doing)

You may also wish to check out your local Makerspace/Hackerspace. You will probably find very educated geeks who'd be more than willing to teach you stuff...

FREE STUFF

UC Berkeley Webcasts (I learned quite a bit from these -- try different courses by semester. Listen to the 1st and 2nd lecture to see if it's high value. Some are better than others. I got an excellent MEMS lecture from here once, and a really good one on Byzantine history. Some (like history) are good as audio in your car. Others get better with charts.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

MIT OpenCourseWare (haven't tried, but hear good things)

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Khan academy (of course)
http://www.khanacademy.org/

PAID RESOURCES

Kaplan http://www.kaptest.com/
(Take something like the MCAT review if you can afford it for science/physics. They do a really good job of distilling the basics of science/biology/etc. without any nonsense. Disclaimer: I've also taught for Kaplan)

Also, don't discount old fashioned books:

The "Head First" series of books
(Try the "Dummies" books also if you're not insulted by the title)

Head First Physics

Home Schooling Curricula
Whatever you may feel about the social implications of home schooling, there are some excellent science resources which will catch you up. I will shy away from recommending specific ones for fear of inciting a flame war. I hope someone better versed in these curricula can enlighten us with recommendations.

Textbooks!
Try to get some used textbooks from a used book store, if all you want is the 101 level stuff:

Chemistry (Oxtoby-Nachtrieb) http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Modern-Chemistry-Fifth-Edition/dp/B001F39B2Y
(There are many nicely written Biology books -- see what you like)

And if you really want to enjoy chemistry:

Chemical Demonstrations, Shakhashiri

(Warning: do not try these at home until you know what you're doing)

You may also wish to check out your local Makerspace/Hackerspace. You will probably find very educated geeks who'd be more than willing to teach you stuff...

FREE STUFF

UC Berkeley Webcasts (I learned quite a bit from these -- try different courses by semester. Listen to the 1st and 2nd lecture to see if it's high value. Some are better than others. I got an excellent MEMS lecture from here once, and a really good one on Byzantine history. Some (like history) are good as audio in your car. Others get better with charts.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

MIT OpenCourseWare (haven't tried, but hear good things)

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Khan academy (of course)
http://www.khanacademy.org/

PAID RESOURCES

Kaplan http://www.kaptest.com/
(Take something like the MCAT review if you can afford it for science/physics. They do a really good job of distilling the basics of science/biology/etc. without any nonsense. Disclaimer: I've also taught for Kaplan)

Also, don't discount old fashioned books:

The "Head First" series of books
(Try the "Dummies" books also if you're not insulted by the title)

Head First Physics

Home Schooling Curricula
Whatever you may feel about the social implications of home schooling, there are some excellent science resources which will catch you up. I will shy away from recommending specific ones for fear of inciting a flame war. I hope someone better versed in these curricula can enlighten us with recommendations.

Textbooks!
Try to get some used textbooks from a used book store, if all you want is the 101 level stuff:

Chemistry (Oxtoby-Nachtrieb) http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Modern-Chemistry-Fifth-Edition/dp/B001F39B2Y
(There are many nicely written Biology books -- see what you like)

And if you really want to enjoy chemistry:

Chemical Demonstrations, Shakhashiri

(Warning: do not try these at home until you know what you're doing)

You may also wish to check out your local Makerspace/Hackerspace. You will probably find very educated geeks who'd be more than willing to teach you stuff...

Big companies like IBM and Microsoft still worry about BSD-license software, especially from smaller projects (e.g., single developer). The problem is that it's hard to know whether the developer lifted the code from a proprietary or GPL'd source without doing a lot of vetting. For example, they might be using algorithmic code from the book Numerical Recipes, which is notoriously NOT free for redistribution.

Many of the issues in these threads are discussed in the excellent book Where is Everybody?, which provides fifty solutions to Fermi's Paradox of why the Universe is not teeming with intelligent life.

However, you make an excellent point regarding the recent Heliopause discoveries, which occurred well after Stephen Webb's book came out in 2002. You might want to get in touch with the author and share your insight. I couldn't find an email address for him.

There's only one solution I can think of to the issue of RF transmissions being masked by the Heliopause. And that would be altering the spectrum of the Sun in a recognizable pattern.

For example, shooting a large (like, ridiculously large) amount of nuclear waste into the Sun might cause an alien spectral analysis to show an unexpected band of ionized depleted Uranium along with other elements in spent fuel. If that band appeared and disappeared yearly in a prime number or Fibonacci sequence, an alien astronomer with our level of technology or greater would be able to deduce:

1. The length of the Earth year and, I presume, the distance from the Sun to the Earth if they have their own Kepler mission.

2. The fact that Earth has achieved fission but not fusion nuclear power and related technologies.

3. That Earth has not yet annihilated itself through the discovery of nuclear technology.

4. That Earth is ready to receive a strong, directed communication that can penetrate the Heliopause.

5. What form of communication should be used to send the signal to Earth given the technology it possessed at the time the signal was initially transmitted. Perhaps that would involve altering their own star's spectrum if RF is impossible.

And many other facts.

However, there is a problem. No one seems to have done this yet. If it were possible, surely we would have seen such a beacon by now in all of our spectral analyses of all of the stars visible to us in the Universe.

Unfortunately, that would support solution number 50 in Webb's book: The Rare Earth. Sad, but apparently true at this time.

If we are going to propagate throughout the Galaxy, as we must do anyway to ensure survival within the next billion years before the Sun boils off the Earth's atmosphere, it looks like our civilization will be the one that solve's Fermi's paradox.

http://www.amazon.com/OTC-3991-12-Hybrid-Electric-Safety/dp/B004GDSPLS

Even the lowest end of hot gloves are safe at 110/220.

There are 2 levels of power on the poles in most places. The high voltage at the top (primary) and the lower voltage (secondary) down lower. This is what feeds the houses. As long as you don't cause a short there isnt much danger if your careful. Just look at the rampant power theft that goes on in Mexico and India. They don't even have hot gloves and get away with it often.

Clipping some power leads on to a 110 line isn't that big of a deal as long as you know what you are doing.

Photoblocker paint is a scam.

http://www.amazon.com/PhantomPlate-Inc-Photo-Blocker-Spray/dp/B000EQUFHS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338691883&sr=8-1

I cordially invite you to read the works of one Gerald K. O'Neill, particularly 'Colonies In Space'.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=gerald+k+o'neill

I don't think so. I think when I find a pocket watch on the ground, it is less complex for me to believe that it was intelligently designed than to believe that it came about through a mathematical (not necessarily random) process.

Perhaps you should read The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design

Physics disagrees.

Like the poster above said, no evidence. Those links have about as much evidentiary value as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Ah, I should have linked to something on Amazon, as he did...many apologies, let me fix that...

Like the poster above said, no evidence. Those links have about as much evidentiary value as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Ah, I should have linked to something on Amazon, as he did...many apologies, let me fix that...

Like the poster above said, no evidence. Those links have about as much evidentiary value as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Ah, I should have linked to something on Amazon, as he did...many apologies, let me fix that...

If all you want to do is display the product, there are better ways, as you point out. For instance, I'm reminded of the packaging used for action figures. They have a thin cardboard backing with clear plastic adhered to the front, and the plastic had a section where the product could be displayed. It was simple to open by either peeling the plastic away from the cardboard or by tearing through the cardboard. Even as a child, I could do it without the need for any tools or long fingernails.

Granted, the example I've provided is pretty generic, since they were likely trying to save on manufacturing costs while producing hundreds of various models of action figures, but for a company with a handful of products, you could easily have the plastic conform to the shape of the product.

Ahem: PsychoNauts for PlayStation 2 and for original X-Box

Ahem: PsychoNauts for PlayStation 2 and for original X-Box

I'm sure he's read this book

It's from a book by Steve Kemper that Dean Kamen tried very hard to bury:

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Name-Ginger-Behind-Segway/dp/1578516730

Lister and DeMarco devote attention to noise pollution in Peopleware, which is really a must-read anyway for technical (especially software) people.

I pretty much agree with their analysis that music is compatible with some types of work, but that some cognitive work can suffer because part of the brain is distracted. In any case, their real point is that if you find yourself "needing" to listen to music just to concentrate, it's a symptom of a workplace that's hostile to technical productivity.

Personally, I find music with lyrics is especially destructive to technical productivity.

"I would have assumed a fairly even distribution with Wikipedia so the results weren't that surprising. I'd be more interested in using it to find bias in the media."

You might be interested in hearing the show Counterspin, by the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting):

Also worth looking at is Daved Brock's Media Matters

You should also read Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and watch the documentary based on the book

There's a lot more to recommend, but these should get you started.

"I would have assumed a fairly even distribution with Wikipedia so the results weren't that surprising. I'd be more interested in using it to find bias in the media."

You might be interested in hearing the show Counterspin, by the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting):

Also worth looking at is Daved Brock's Media Matters

You should also read Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and watch the documentary based on the book

There's a lot more to recommend, but these should get you started.

Or, more to the point, that people with more education are better at rationalizing their political choices, and will use their education to that end, because that's the purpose that the liberal arts tradition of education serves. A high level of education serves to give us reason for our choices, but evidence does not help us reach consensus, because it is our choices that divide us and the evidence serves our choices.

To be super-brief: Educated people use their knowledge and methods to help support their team, but the teams are the driving force, not the facts.

Check out: http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903

Try this

I have an extended battery for my LG O2X that will last 3 days with moderate use. My stock battery easily lasts a day with moderate use or 12 hours with heavy use.

a minority of people has time to vote, the rest of the people have to work to keep their families together

A really interesting book that looks at direct voting (sci-fi, future-tech) is Alistair Reynold's The Prefect [1]. The author posits a future where a small part of the populace does indeed dominate issue-based direct voting (and have a greater than 1:1 proportional vote weight) but that their weighting is tied to outcomes, thus providing a "feedback loop" into the mix. Interesting take.

Regarding your overall premise, I agree - well, I guess my .sig pretty much shows my stance. Anyone who deals with any level of system security (web or otherwise) should really be appalled at the idea of no paper trail. Bits are too easy to flip.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Prefect-Alastair-Reynolds/dp/0575078189

Can't view the video from work but I always like using the BernzOMatic propane brazing torch, a small cylinder of propane lasts about a year, gets the coals ready faster than lighter fluid, electric heater, or coal starter can, and costs less than lighter fluid.

The economist Thomas Sowell devoted an entire chapter of his book Economic Facts and Fallacies to "Male-Female Facts and Fallacies", including the question of gender inequality in the workplace. In all of the studies and data that he examined, dating back to the early part of the 20th century and continuing up through today, the single biggest factor in different workplace outcomes between men and women was not discrimination, but rather life choices which women commonly make, at the expense of maximizing their careers, but men do not. For example, it was and remains common for women to take an extended detour in their careers in order to have and raise young children and women are more willing to abandon what might otherwise be a promising career in order to do so. Furthermore, women are less likely to accept the sorts of high paying and high demand careers that men often do because attaining that level in a career requires years or even decades of dedicated work to achieve and leaves no time for raising a family or doing anything else but the career (i.e. the "glass ceiling" in the C-Suite). Sowell also found that the data is further skewed by the fact that men who are married to a female who does not work, but instead contributes home making, childcare and other household needs to the family coffers further enhances the career maximizing potential of the married man. In other words, all other things being equal, the married man earned more than his unmarried and similarly skilled male counterparts. Sowell argues that this difference is largely explained by the married men being freed up to concentrate even more on their careers, due to the efforts of their spouse, as compared to the single unmarried man. In summary, the gap between male and female earnings in the workplace both recent and historical is almost entirely explained by different life choices and not any systemic, overt or organized effort to discriminate against women in general as a class. I know that flies in the face of "conventional wisdom" regarding the narrative that is common on the left, but try reading Sowell's argument (he presents it much better than I can) and looking at his cited sources; it's compelling to say the least.

I think this niche is really already filled though. What you describe this is exactly why I use one of these. Since I do not have cell service at my home (and I live in NY state) it is difficult for me to justify a $100 / month phone. Especially since about the only time I'm not near wifi is when I'm driving between home / work. I'm not sure there is a market for what you are describing, so I hope they have a different plan.

My wife [...] IQ approaches a mensa measured 200 and she used to be far better at maths than I ever was, but she couldn't care less for maths or computers.

Apparently she doesn't care about statistics at all, since then she would know about generalization and how a single data point is meaningless for constructing a general rule.

women can relax in highly social work, while men are more able to relax in loner work. The ability to relax and enjoy doing something is the biggest indicator of how we are wired, as opposed to conditioned, to behave.

That's actually defined by the introvert/extrovert scale, which is orthogonal to the gender. If you want to know more about that and how to cope with it, read the book The Introvert Advantage. This book is actually written by a female introvert, which shouldn't exist by your explanation.

Thanks, you really ought to try their pedals if you get a chance, they are cheap and have some really great tone. This is the one I have and I just love the thing to death. It has a copy of all the original presets in ROM so I can tweak all I want and never lose a sound, sounds great on a 5 string, the expression pedal lets me do some frankly awesome things because i can control ANY setting of ANY effect with the pedal, from the speed of the chorus to the level of distortion to pitch of the harmonizer, its just a great little pedal.

And wow..an 18? the low end rumble you must have had had to be insane! My Trace is only a 2-10 unit but its one of the last of the Brit Trace Elliots and the tone and power is just incredible. Once my band was opening for a group whose bass player was running an Ampeg SVT Tube with the full 8-10 cab and when he saw mine he said "You sure you don't want to use mine?" and I just laughed and said "Nah, when I fire this baby up you'll see, i'm good". of course he started to drool a little when i popped the case and whipped out My Squire Pro Tone 5, its all see through red swamp ash and lovely. Sure enough the next night we are opening up for them again at another club and he waves me over to their van, pops the door...and there is the twinkie to my Trace. I laughed and said "Where's the Ampeg? And i'm shocked you didn't just go for the whole package and get the Squire as well!" and he said "Screw that back breaker, your rig was clean and powerful and didn't take a dolly to move! And as for the Squire they were all out of the pro tones but.." and he popped out a Squire Jazz 5 LOL!

In the end i don't care if its big name or no name, as long as it has the TONE, for as you know with bass tone is all. Hell I need to take a pic of my most popular bass next to the pro Tone and upload it as you'd probably die laughing, but i get more complements on that old thing than any other bass. its a 1984 Washburn Force series (it was so old I actually had to write the company to find out what it was, it kinda looks like a P bass with the horns stretched) that is white with a black pickguard which I painted the pickguard with glitter fingernail polish, replaced the cracked knobs with a couple of B&W dice, the white face has aged to a lovely yellow and I have 3 1940s pinup girls sticker placed around the face that i picked up on beale street in the late 90s. It has this wonderful road warrior look and a dark thick tone with lots of lows and I don't know how many times I've had bassists come up and say "Sell it to me" LOL! Everyone talks about how cool that bass is when it is nothing but a pawn shop special that got customized when I was bored on the road.

so screw the audiophiles, if it works good for you? Its cool. I'm sure they'd gag if they saw that Washburn or me running a $70 pedal into a Brit amp but the audience and my own enjoyment is what matters and people remember the different and the weird.

Quite the opposite man, quite the opposite is happening. I have a few books under my radar, and since the last year i was surprised to see the following trend:
Instead of having paper book sold for $15, and 2-3 months it's kindle variant to be sold for $9.99, now the paper book is sold for $10-11, and the kindle variant for $16-18 ONE YEAR AFTER THE BOOK HITS THE STORES. And still counting.... Just for the record, check this one: http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Story-Dresden-Files-No/dp/045146379X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338169739&sr=8-1
Instead of always having both kindle and paper variants, now in some cases you have only the paper book, no matter the interest (or maybe because of it), and no matter the demand.
So, cheap lady, you still insist the publishers want to sell you cheaper and cheaper? Keep swimming, it is not a fish...

lol ok, I tried. Go get an education in real power, you'll thank yourself later. If you're lazy, try this one or this. Johnson knew how to get things done.

lol ok, I tried. Go get an education in real power, you'll thank yourself later. If you're lazy, try this one or this. Johnson knew how to get things done.

Buying a laptop with an included ssd is ridicolous.

Buy something cheap and simple and functioning like http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-4334DBU-15-6-Inch-Laptop-Black/dp/B007CKQMPI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338109451&sr=8-1 with a separate SSD, preferably a samsung 830 with enough storage for her needs.

In sweden, we have great comparative services, not sure if pricerunner exists in USA, if it does, it filters decently but not great.

And, yeah, buying directly from the big names is hell, it's way easier buying from retailers, at least in sweden.

That is indeed corporatism, but that's what capitalism has become; what it had to become. I don't see a free market without the corporatism as really capitalism.

Capitalism isn't just a free market. Capitalism is the concept that those with money are entitled to make more money from their money, not from their labor. As such it is an unstable model, since the money becomes more and more concentrated in a few hands. And we know what the problems with socialism are.

There needs to be a brilliant new champion of distributism; somebody who can popularize it and figure out how to institute it. It is the answer. Instead of the means of production being concentrated in a privileged elite (capitalism), or gathered together in an all encompassing state (socialism), distributism works by distributing the means of production as widely and fairly as possible among the people.

For background, see the brilliant G. K. Chesterton's book What's Wrong With the World.

Maybe not. This may be nothing more than an advancement of an Apprenticeship. This is how I learned commercial refrigeration. When I worked in a classified space, we rarely shut down to allow outside trades in, so much of the HVAC was done in house. As such I learned much of the trade including hard silver soldering, hydraulic unloaders, adjustment and proper use of thermostatic expansion valves, etc as OJT with the textbook Modern Refrigeration and Air Conditioning which is pretty much the bible on the subject. http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Refrigeration-Conditioning-Andrew-Althouse/dp/1590702808

It took me the longest to grasp the theory of how continious cycle absorption cycle worked, but I finally understood it too.

With my training, I am now trained to charge, maintain, service, and repair systems for chilled water up to 500 Ton.

Japan has a similar problem. Adobe CS6 Master Suite costs 334900yen ($4,203.59 USD), but if you buy it direct from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-CS6-Master-Collection-Download/dp/B007USFTJM/ref=sr_1_1_title_1?s=software&ie=UTF8&qid=1337964816&sr=1-1 it will cost you $2379 USD (189,613.80 JPY yen). That is about double the price!!! How can that be legal? For STEAM, the prices in Australia were 2/3rds what we were paying in Japan. It seems steam have recently changed that though and are bum fucking us too. I would love to hear an explanation for the change, especially considering the value of the yen at the moment.

Prime example of this, price of DVDs in Australia, often very closely align with the price of DVDs in the US, why http://www.amazon.com/, that's why, plus low cost of transport, import duties on the medium only and you still pay GST. Add to that the ACCC made region coding non-enforceble and you can buy most dvd players fixed to be region free (you notice boc has been opened and inspected and confirmed sticker placed on it, the media companies dont want it continually advertised that Australia has legally broken region coding).

Commercial software seems to be the biggest problem mainly because the government is in the pocket of the BSA and routinely buys their product and data locks to it. Free open source software is only recognised by the Greens and the Democrats. Liberal will never want a piece of it and Labour has been horribly slow coming to the party with it comes to software that thrives on 'BLOODY LOCAL SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT' not on billions of dollars disappearing overseas.

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."

I can see the point, but that also applies to humans. There's a whole lot of research going on to determine exactly what it means for us to "think." A lot of it implies that maybe what we take for granted as our reasoning process to make decisions might just be justification for decisions that are already made. Take this experiment, which I've first read in The Believing Brain, and found it also described in this site when I googled for it.

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus collosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one’s advice or consent. Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behavior chosen without it’s knowledge by the right. For example, if an experimenter flashes the command “WALK” to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person’s left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up he will say, in all sincerity, “To get a Coke” – rather than, “I don’t really know” or “The urge just came over me” or “You’ve been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don’t know exactly what you asked me to do”.

Basically, what I'm saying is that if all you want is an intelligent machine, making it think exactly like us is not what you want to do. If you want to transport people under water, you want a submarine, not a machine that can swim. However, researchers do build machines that emulate the way humans walk, or how insects glide through water. That helps us understand the mechanics of that process. Similarly, in trying to make machines that think as we do, we might understand more about ourselves.

We all knew this was coming. It is not a hard argument to make that skipping commercials is basically equivalent to pirating content. It makes little difference if you are stealing by not paying with dollars or stealing by not paying with ad views. Current copyright is simply awful. How in the world is a book like Caves of Steel $7.99 for an ebook. Written nearly 60 years ago. Somehow society at large is okay with this. Our only hope is that lawsuits like this will help to make people understand how ridiculous our current copyright law is.

Perhaps if the Indians had done the same to the Europeans right from the beginning (instead of handing them land), they would still control America.

The Natives did (here) (humorously here). As history has shown all this accomplished was delaying things. Also the Natives were in number compared to when the Europeans started colonizing the New World.

Notice how the europeans had zero success taking-over China despite repeated attempts..... because the Chinese rejected the invaders.

The greatest killer of all was disease, failure of their own immune systems. Disease wiped many of these people out, this is documented with Cortez, too. There is some evidence of the affect these epidemics had relating to the carbon dioxide levels around the time of Columbus' arrival.

Also related, you may find Lies My Teach Told Me an interesting read.

Anthropomorphic Vehicle Control (AVC) -

When the driver *becomes* the vehicle... See's through the vehicles cameras and feels and controls the vehicle like it's their own body.

Currently under development, but you can get an idea what it's like from this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Turing-Evolved-ebook/dp/B007GTWLDW/ref=zg_tr_158595011_4

It talks about other vehicles ( aircraft, ground, water etc ) but mostly about DEMONs - Direct Engagement Military Offensive Neurosuit.

That's pretty much where I think it's headed - the book is free at the moment, BTW. Other formats: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/34627

GrpA

http://www.amazon.com/Thomy-Delikatess-Senf-Mild-Mustard-Tube/dp/B000NY6Q8I

I know that Alexei Leonov believes this -- he said as much in Two Sides of the Moon.

There are arguably two categories of biblical pricing:

In the "The laborer is worthy of his hire" camp, you have the pretty-much-cost-of-printing-and-distribution prints of KJV and other out-of-copyright versions, along with moderately expensive editions of newer translations and revisions and slightly more expensive still 'critical editions' that are either a classic translation with a heavy addition of new marginal notes, explanatory sections, essays, etc. or a revised translation with the same.

In the "Yeah, the seller is probably an unscruplous weasel; but WTF is wrong with the buyer?" camp, are the vanity-printed and overpriced versions of cheap or free translations and(most horrible of all) the assorted commercial, political, and celebrity tie-in versions. If, for example, you find yourself purchasing The Holy Bible: Stock Car Racing Edition there are no words...

You seem to have a short memory. New Labour under Blair and Brown were running an increased deficit during the boom, even after increasing taxes. There was no room left for the government to do something with the economy when the recession came.

On the contrary, I have a very good memory.

Government debt stood at 29% of GDP in 2002, and had increased to 37% before the crash in 2007, despite incredibly strong economic conditions. What exactly do you think was going to happen? That's why it's spiralled so quickly to 90% of GDP.

WRONG!
UK debt end 1998 : 410,2 G£, i. e. 46,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 1999 : 405,7 G£, i. e. 43,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2000 : 400,6 G£, i. e. 41,0 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2001 : 385,5 G£, i. e. 37,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2002 : 402,9 G£, i. e. 37,5 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2003 : 441,1 G£, i. e. 38,7 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2004 : 487,9 G£, i. e. 40,4 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2005 : 529,4 G£, i. e. 42,3 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2006 : 573,3 G£, i. e. 43,4 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2007 : 618,4 G£, i. e. 44,2 % of GDP (ONS)
UK debt end 2008 : 750,3 G£, i. e. 52,0 % of GDP (ONS)
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_1950_2010UKp_11s1li011lcn_G0t_UK_National_Debt_As_Pct_GDP

So where's the debt crisis? It oscillated around 40% during the recent "good" years. It only started growing in 2008 because of the freaking global crisis. There was NO reason for austerity. And the effects of austerity turned out to be self-defeating - the projections show that their effects on deficit are minimal.

Everyone preaching about debt should read http://www.amazon.com/End-This-Depression-Paul-Krugman/dp/0393088774 . Go on, read it.