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As a KDP Select author (I wrote Lacuna: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006RZNR3Y), I have to say I'm a huge fan... and the borrows are just a nice perk.

Essentially what happens is this. Amazon puts $X in an account, your payout is that sum divided by total borrows, times by your borrows. So if there's $500,00 in the pool, and 500,000 borrows total, and you have six, you get $6. The cost of your book or its popularity don't matter.

HOWEVER... not everyone can borrow. The only people who can borrow are Amazon Prime members ($79 a year), and they can only borrow one book a month. Prime's main attraction for most people is the ability to get free priority shipping (as I understand it). The book borrows are just a perk and from what we've seen so far most Prime members aren't even using that feature.

Over January there were a lot of borrows because Amazon gave anyone a one month free trial of Amazon Prime. That's why they upped the amount from $500,000 to $700,000 in January. For reference, the borrows in December paid out about $1.70, which equated to a pretty good deal for those who publish at $0.99 since the 35% royalty meant those people were getting $1.70 per "purchase" rather than 35 cents.

Rumour is that Amazon felt that $1.70 was still too low, that's why the pool in February is $600,000 (up from $500,000) even though the free month has expired. Since we're expecting a lot fewer borrows this month, it's anticipated that borrows are going to be worth a lot more. My own borrows have dropped off a fair bit even though sales have picked up.

All that said... the main benefit of Select is not the borrows. The borrows are just a nice perk. The main benefit is the KDP Free Days... you get 5 days per 90 days where you can set your book as free ($0). Doing so gives you a huge publicity boost since in every way (aside from pay, and paid rankings), Amazon treats these as paid sales. That means that if you push a lot of free books you get on the "movers and shakers list" and for people who bought your free book and something else, your book has a good chance of appearing on that other books "Customers Who Bought This Also Bought..." list, which is a fantastic way to get a lot of publicity.

KDP Select has been a huge boon for unknown authors and in fact has encouraged the community over at www.kindleboards.com to grow substantially; there is now a massive so-called "MEGA THREAD" regarding KDP Select free days results and it's one of the most popular threads around.

For reference, I usually sell about 1-2 copies of Lacuna: Demons of the Void a day. Post free-days I get a massive boost, usually in the order of 10-50x more sales, usually 2-5 days after the free periods end as that's when Amazon does their "also boughts" recalculation.

KDP Select is awesome and the exclusivity of it doesn't matter to me since Amazon is the 300kg gorilla in the eBook market. It's important to note that the exclusivity does NOT apply to paperback versions of the same book, and in fact in the "Welcome To KDP Select!" email you get they actively encourage you to use various non-Amazon paperback publishing services.

All my works (including some shorts published under a pen name) are all in KDP Select and for the moment I'm sticking with it. The borrows are just a nice little garnish... the real benefits, especially for lesser known authors, lies elsewhere.

http://www.amazon.com/TiVo-TCD649080-80-Hour-Digital-Recorder/dp/B000ER5G58/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328644598&sr=8-1

You can still buy a perfectly good Series2 TiVo. Analog tuner and all.

Some great films are indeed effectively trapped on VHS. In some cases they are never transferred to DVD/Blu-Ray, in other cases the quality of the transfer is pitiful compared to the VHS. In others, they are only available for a limited number of regions.

One example: They Might Be Giants

(I was going to mention The Lighthorsemen , but there is allegedly a Blu-Ray that exists now - but is it truly available?)

Some great films are indeed effectively trapped on VHS. In some cases they are never transferred to DVD/Blu-Ray, in other cases the quality of the transfer is pitiful compared to the VHS. In others, they are only available for a limited number of regions.

One example: They Might Be Giants

(I was going to mention The Lighthorsemen , but there is allegedly a Blu-Ray that exists now - but is it truly available?)

lollll...ya mean one of these as an iPhone dock?

Ya know, that is the part I have always found frankly mystifying when it comes to Apple. you talk to Applelites or whatever you want to call them and the way they talk you'd think it was SJ and a bunch of hippies sitting around with no shoes in bean bag chairs somewhere in Cupertino. Whether you like their devices or hate them SJ was NEVER like that, he was always frankly an asshole, see how he screwed his supposedly good friend Woz out of half the profits of their game sale to Atari. The one thing ALL those companies had in common, Apple, MSFT, Oracle, etc is at least 1 type A super asshole with a cutthroat take no prisoners attitude that had no problem backstabbing their way to the top.

So i just never understood this complete disconnect between reality and mythology when it comes to Apple. Frankly i'm surprised that SJ's douchebag behavior is finally coming out now that he's gone, frankly i figured they'd make him into a saint if past treatment of him and Apple was any indication. If you like their products? hey i'm glad you found something that works for you, really wish you nothing but happiness. but don't pretend that Apple is ANY different than IBM or any other megacorp because they aren't. These companies are NOT your friends, they do NOT care about you, and if Apple could see their profits rise 15% this quarter by throwing you in a cage with a horny silverback you'd be getting some gorilla loving before the day is out. Maybe a few applelites ought to read this book and do some introspection.

Defying Hitler, Sebastian Haffner

Excerpt from the memoir...

What saved me was - my nose. I have a fairly well-developed figurative sense of smell, or to put it differently, a sense of the worth (or worthlessness!) of human, moral, political views and attitudes. Most Germans unfortunately lack this sense almost completely. The cleverest of them are capable of discussing themselves stupid with their abstractions and deductions, when just using their noses would tell them that something stinks. ...

As for the Nazis, my nose left me with no doubts. It was just tiresome to talk about which of their alleged goals and intentions were still acceptable, or even "historically justified" when all of it stank. How it stank! That the Nazis were enemies, my enemies, and the enemies of all I held dear, was crystal clear to me from the outset. What was not at all clear to me, was what terrible enemies they would turn out to be. I was inclined not to take them very seriously - a common attitude among their inexperienced opponents, which helped them a lot, and still helps them.

[. . .]

The morning headline was: "Hitler called to President". That produced a certain nervous, impotent irritation. Hitler had been called to the President in August and November. He had been offered the vice-chancellorship and then the chancellorship. Both times he had set impossible conditions, and both times there had been solemn declarations: "never again..." Each time "never again" had lasted exactly three months. Hitler's opponents in Germany at that time suffered from a compulsive urge to offer him everything he wanted, indefatigably and at an ever cheaper price, indeed to press it upon him. It is the same now with his opponents outside Germany. Again and again this "appeasement" was formally renounced, and again and again it gaily reappeared at the crucial moment; just so today. Then as now, one's only hope was Hitler's own unreasonableness. Would it not sooner or later exhaust the patience of his opponents? Then as now, it became apparent that their patience knew no bounds...

At midday the headline said: "Hitler makes impossible demands". We nodded, half reassured. It was only too credible. It would have gone against his nature to ask for less than too much. Perhaps the cup had once more passed from us. Hitler - the last defence against Hitler.

At about five o'clock the evening papers arrived: "Cabinet of National Unity formed - Hitler Reichschancellor".

I do not know what the general reaction was. For about a minute, mine was completely correct: icy horror. Certainly, this had been a possibility for a long time. You had to reckon with it. Nevertheless it was so bizarre, so incredible, to read it now in black and white. Hitler Reichschancellor ... for a moment I physically sensed the man's odour of blood and filth, the nauseating approach of a man-eating animal - its foul, sharp claws in my face.

Then I shook the sensation off, tried to smile, started to consider and found many reasons for reassurance. That evening I discussed the prospects of the new Government with my father. We agreed that it had a good chance of doing a lot of damage, but not much chance of surviving very long; a deeply reactionary government, with Hitler as its mouthpiece. Apart from this, it did not really differ much from the two governments that had succeeded Bruning's. Even with the Nazis it would not have a majority in the Reichstag. Of course that could always be dissolved, but the Government had a clear majority of the population against it, in particular the working class, which would probably go Communist...

In the meantime the Government would be likely to

That stuff claims to only work for cameras that use flashes (e.g. red light cameras). ANPR readers don't use flashes.

It also doesn't work.

However, proving that specific gods don't exist is a whole lot easier when they make outrageous claims that do not conform to the world that we witness today. For instance, if their holy book ascribes cities that have no archaeological evidence to suggest that they ever existed, or did not exist at the time described.

See Swinburne's Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. ) for a case that scientific or historical errors in the Bible (or Qur'an, Vedas, Mahayana canon, etc.) do not necessarily undermine religious claims.

Indeed, one can shift the goalposts and re-root their religious claims on other matters. However, archaeological, and geographical evidence don't support many religious scriptures.

I suppose it's not possible to falsify every possible notion of a specific god, but one can falsify the literal interpretation of most gods based on the inconsistency of their religious scriptures and data that we can observe. (e.g. It is well known now, that there is no evidence for gods up on Mount Olympus.)

Note, this doesn't make any religion any less practical in the real world, it was always teaching a set of moral guidelines, and encouraging good behavior... nothing in their religious texts have to be literally true for the guidelines and behaviors to be valid.

Just like a fallacious argument does not make the argument false. If the consequences of the religion are good, and reasonable, then who cares if they think that the Invisible Pink Unicorn is putting holes in their socks to remind them to be humble?

However, proving that specific gods don't exist is a whole lot easier when they make outrageous claims that do not conform to the world that we witness today. For instance, if their holy book ascribes cities that have no archaeological evidence to suggest that they ever existed, or did not exist at the time described.

See Swinburne's Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. ) for a case that scientific or historical errors in the Bible (or Qur'an, Vedas, Mahayana canon, etc.) do not necessarily undermine religious claims.

For a quick understanding of North Korea from a strategic perspective, here is an insightful series on North Korean strategy by an American physicist and business strategist/entrepreneur who visited: http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-preview. It clarifies a lot of why things are the way they are there.

Also this book, based on that series.

There has been speculation that some stars may oscillate between radiating energy generated by fusion, and radiating energy generated by gravitational collapse. It may even be that many stars wobble on the cusp of fusion and collapse; a star expands slightly due to the heat and pressure of fusion to the point that fusion no longer occurs, followed by a slight gravitational collapse until the core is dense enough to support fusion again. (Read the Vernor Vinge book "A Deepness in the Sky" http://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Vernor-Vinge/dp/0812536355/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328304339&sr=1-1 for an extreme example.) The star's radiative output might vary only slightly between the phases.

After all, most theories of how the Sun works suggest that we ought to be able to detect SOME solar neutrinos; what if the Sun is in the "collapse" phase just now, and the reason we can't detect the neutrinos is because there aren't any?

I still have a copy of Delivering Push somewhere in the Netherlands ...

Absolutely, if you knew it was poison. But if the elected town chief and witchdoctor told you the mushrooms were ok, you would have some wriggle room. Maybe it would be better not to have a well?

Today comes the news that "sugar is a toxic, addictive substance" http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/01/BA891N1PQS.DTL

I guess the sugar companies will be hounded, just like the tobacco companies and Monsanto, while the actual producers (farmers) continue to be subsidized.

Government oversight can prevent instances of harm, to the benefit of those affected. However, I believe the overall, nett effect on society is negative. For example, since DDT was banned worldwide, how many have died from malaria, against what benefit? Some argue that when human life is at stake, no cost is too high. I obviously disagree.

Also, complexity hastens the downfall - http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X

"The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way." Henry David Thoreau

They are hard workers

Japanese work ethic hides inefficiencies

have excellent education

Japanese history textbook controversies

are very smart

Japanese Higher Education as Myth

and highly motivated.

List of countries by suicide rate

. There is this passage I memorized: "a rifle is only a tool, it is a hard heart that kills". I kind like it because it is so true and it provides me moments of joy with great frequency especially when our management tell us to use this new special shiny tool so that we do not have to be experts and just press a button and fix the shit later on. Similarly here - while I agree that tools like twitter do play a role it is interesting to note that regimes of a less democratic tick did use twitter even more than the protesters against their rule (Iran was one such example). It is unresolved issues that such regimes have with their own people that cause these people to go on the streets. They communicate with whatever is available and possible without too much of visible state control and yet they have to actually go out on the streets and possibly lose their lives first so that others get also angry and kill some of the basterds and this is just a beginning, Without actual will the uprisings will not go the way the naive sympathizers in the West hope they would. In any case the tools are just instrumental and are used massively by all sides. This does not make them less important but we should see it in a perspective it is not twitter that makes people risk their lives for some odd ideal.

You can have a look here for more detailed critique of 'with this new shiny tool we get rid of all the faults in software, in politics, we get rid of cancer and athletes foot and more.

As for IPO of FB - if you think that they increase their revenue so much as to justify their expected capitalization go on and buy stock. I am not going out of principle as I think Zuckerberg's idea of privacy is a nonsense that is damaging society. I hope this is stopped in some reasonably big places like Europe for instance. OC we may be on the wrong side of the pond but still big enough to matter and to stop the nonsense. If only we did. Other way of looking at FB is this: if the company grows as much as all those anal/ysts predict or even half way this then two things will happen: Govs of the earth will get busy regulating the Moloch and it will become a commodity. It will still mean he may have his buck but what profit this will bring is rather disputable and possibly very disappointing for those speculating on these few dozen billions.

No, standard Christianity is every bit as weird as Mormonism.

Actually, my preacher agrees with you! In fact, he was suggesting a book called Weird -- Beceuse Normal Isn't Working. I bought and read a copy.

If someone punches you, turn the other cheek? Weird. Love those who hate you and do good to those who wrong you? Weird. Give freely to anyone who asks anything of you? Weird. If someone sues you for your cloak, give him your coat as well? Weird.

Yes, we Christians are weird. And proud of it. No, scratch that -- we're not supposed to be prideful. Not being proud of one's accomplishments is pretty weird, too.

It isn't easy being Christian. It's really weird.

As usual reading Neil Stephenson is spot on for the average geek: Interface is about a slightly 'enhanced' presidential candidate that is the _perfect_ shill for big business.

I work in the embedded field (+10 years), and while most of my work has been with C, switching to OOA, OOD, (C++) has been a huge eye opener. I had been using TDD in C, but there was much much more to learn.

I consider myself to be still on the learning path, but I believe I've advanced a great deal with the following:

1. You need a good metor (I've seen others mention the same)
2. The following books helped me:
- Code Complete 2
- Clean code (IMO these complement each other)
3. Have a look at these online resources:
- object mentor (I found the craftsman articles both entertaining and informative).
- Some design patterns

Good luck

I work in the embedded field (+10 years), and while most of my work has been with C, switching to OOA, OOD, (C++) has been a huge eye opener. I had been using TDD in C, but there was much much more to learn.

I consider myself to be still on the learning path, but I believe I've advanced a great deal with the following:

1. You need a good metor (I've seen others mention the same)
2. The following books helped me:
- Code Complete 2
- Clean code (IMO these complement each other)
3. Have a look at these online resources:
- object mentor (I found the craftsman articles both entertaining and informative).
- Some design patterns

Good luck

Also, the book "The Clean Coder".

http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Coder-Conduct-Professional-Programmers/dp/0137081073
http://www.cleancoders.com/

Code Complete is a great book that focuses on teaching software programmers how to manage software projects. It will do a good job of showing you what else you need besides code to finish a project.

http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Role-Constantin-Stanislavski/dp/0878309810/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1328073281&sr=1-1

The book "Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy" by Martin Lindstrom explains in great detail the (crazy) lengths companies/stores go to gleam as much - normally private - information on shoppers as possible. Its very readable, quite frightening (the bits about loyalty cards and credit cards especially), and written by someone who comes from the marketing/behavioral study field, and seems keen on fully exposing the shady practices of the industry to average readers. Its available from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Brandwashed-Tricks-Companies-Manipulate-Persuade/dp/0385531737 and other book sellers.

I'm not wrong on the region codes either. In the past I knew you could buy region code specific DVD players and have them shipped in. Not unusual. My last pair of glasses was shipped in from Hong Kong.

But wait... It gets so much better!

Multiple Region Code DVD Players FTW :)

You can get a toy CNC mill kit for $600. They're fun to build and fun to use, but the spindle they provided is pretty weak. Though it is possible to mount a flexible shaft grinder in place of the wimpy spindle to get higher cutting speeds.

Thanks for the reply, even if the ad hominen part probably just weakens your argument. :-)

I actually like economists like Julian Simon, even if he ignores externalities and equitable distribution:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

The fact is, most mainstream economics is based neither on facts, history, or human nature. :-) Most of it is abstract theoretical model with little connection to populist ethics or reality. See, for example:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
http://debunkingeconomics.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html

Or:
"Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science that Makes Life Dismal"
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Rest-Us-Debunking-Science/dp/1595581014

Here is another thing to think about, by the way:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_toil
"The paradox of toil is the economic hypothesis that total employment will shrink if everybody wants to work more when "the short-term nominal interest rate is zero and there are deflationary pressures and output contraction".[1] The idea is that total employment will fall when wages, and therefore consumption, are pushed down by the simultanious efforts of everyone to work more in situations where interest rates are against the zero bound so that rates cannot drop more to increase demand for goods. This is a limited example of the fallacy of composition.[1] where assuming that the increase in production that normally occurs when total labor increases applies in all situations. Put simply, when a recessionary economy is up against the zero bound, having more people seeking work - at lower wages if necessary - can actually reduce the number of jobs due to reduced demand from lower wages."

Even in your defense of the concept, you started introducing qualifiers. You "introduce" a new worker into a "closed" economy. You are carefully avoiding what it means when an economy already has 20% or higher real unemployment, or what it means if the economy is open to imports or innovation, or what happens when the owners of capital take advantage of the situation of too many workers chasing too few jobs and apply the law of supply and demand to lower wages.

But since so much of mainstream economics is theory devoid of facts, let me play along, and show how, just theoretically, the "lump of labor" fallacy assumes both linearity in a relation of labor to output and also increasing demand, given whoever becomes a worker in a modern society with unemployment like the USA must already have been consuming a lot of products.

Consider an economy with one hundred people who consume one generalized product called "A". Imagine forty-five members out of the hundred "work" to produce product 10000 units of product A per day. The production of A has been greatly optimized for maximum production, ignoring any joy the workers get from their jobs:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html

Assume people only need about 1 unit of A to get by, but more is nice, up to about 7 units of A, and then more doesn't make people much happier (and at some point, people even become sick from too much).

The product is distributed in some fashion to everyone in the society, party based on

"So is everyone who buys a white, nondescript minivan automatically flagged as some sort of pedophile or terrorist? "

Yes. Try sitting in that van, parked. Just the act of looking out the window at a kid going by will get you cops with guns drawn. The USA is insane.

This was forecast almost twenty years back, in the Culture of Fear. We fear the wrong things. http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Fear-Americans-Afraid-Things/dp/0465014909

For example see the failed Sun Jini circa 1999-2000.

Before the flood I paid $300 for a 12 inch EEE 1215B, that's an E-350 dual core with an HD6310 GPU built in, 320Gb of RAM and I got an 8Gb upgrade on the RAM since it came with Win 7 HP X64 (the RAM was $32 after MIR) and a nice carrying sleeve for it for a final price of $352 shipped. Even after the flood you can still pick it up for $450 for a dual core that gets 6 hours playing 720p or 8 hours under expressgate. Seriously how fucking cheap do you think they can go? With a little care a unit like that can easily last you 5 plus years and my 17 inch Dell from 2005 last i heard is STILL running just fine with the guy that bought it off me, same as my Athlon dual laptop from 09 I sold to help pay for my EEE.

While i'm sure there is some price fixing that happens luckily enough there is enough companies still fighting for business that prices are pretty damned low. the PC I'm typing this on I built myself for less than $850 if you count the upgrades, less than $700 if you count the fact i got $50 for the original dual core and the board and quad i had after that is now in my GFs PC so I didn't have to buy those, and we're talking 6 cores, 8Gb of RAM, an HD4850 GPU, 3Tb of HDDs, dual DVD burners and a 1600x900 22 inch screen. Dude that is insanely cheap for that amount of power! hell my customers get new triples and quads to hook up to their HDTVs for around $550 and that is with me making a nice profit putting them together, again that is just crazy cheap.

So I really don't see what anyone is bitching about, my first x86 was a whole 40Mhz (I stayed with the VIC and Trash 80 for years past everyone else) and I got a steal on the thing at $500 simply because the guy wanted to get a state of the art 100Mhz to play Hexen with. By the time i got a monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc i was out damned near $800 and again i got 'em cheaper than ordinary folks because i knew people. it wasn't a year and a half before the software coming out wouldn't run decently on it because it was too slow and there was ZERO upgrade paths so I was SOL. Now I can build a box and have it run the latest software no problem years later, the nettop i use to surf in the shop is a 2004 Sempron 1.8Ghz with 1.5gb of RAM and frankly it'll do anything on the web I wanna do. My boys are gonna finally have to be upgraded this spring because some of the newer games don't play nice on their Pentium Ds which is a circa 2006 chip but I'll get to keep their HD4850s which I paid a whole $60 refurb for a couple of years back.

dude the amount of power we get for dirt cheap is truly mind boggling and the amount of time it lasts is just nuts. you can buy an AMD E-350 board for like $80, slap a 4gb RAM chip in it for $20, and have a system you can surf with 5 years from now, hell you can even plug it in via HDMI to your widescreen and it'll play 1080p no problem. So I don't know what anybody is bitching about, as someone who has been into computing since the days of the VIC and Trash 80 I'd consider this a "golden age" of computing, where even the throw away stuff is so insanely overpowered it'll do the jobs 90% of the public want to do with them with ease. Hell I've already got a buyer for the guts out of one of the boys boxes so that 2006 Pentium D will just be moved along with the board and RAM from his machine to a neighbor who while having no trouble surfing with his late model P4 has a couple of older flight sims he wants to play online and that Pentium D will be more than enough for that. i wouldn't be surprised if a decade from now he's not still running that 2006 chip and quite happy with it, its a golden age friend, enjoy it.

oops, sorry about failing to tag properly.

http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003

If it works as "well" as some of the other camera software I wouldn't bet the farm on it buddy. of course trying to support people with physical problems is a royal bitch anyway, I ended up having to get one of those graphics pads with a ton of shortcuts for a relative who has some days of trouble typing because every kind of voice recognition software i tried couldn't make heads or tails out of what he said because his breathing treatments caused just enough changes to his voice day to day to throw the software off.

Personally though I've had nothing but good luck with Asus laptops and netbooks so I say if anybody can pull it off they can. if you haven't tried one of their ExpressGate enabled laptops or netbooks you really should, its brilliant, I get anywhere from 7 to 8 hours on EG on my 1215B depending on Wifi strength and over 6 hours on Win 7 HP X64, this on a 6 cell that weighs only 3 pounds, hell thanks to the AMD E-350 having hardware acceleration its nearly 6 hours watching 720p HD video, great when I'm stuck at the doctor's office, and the whole thing only cost me $350 with 8gb of RAM and a nice little carrying case. Even after the flooding you can pick up the same model for like $450 so if they can do that and still make a profit while handing out Home instead of crappy Starter I'm sure if anyone can make it work Asus can.

Funnily enough the only thing i don't really care for is the webcam on my 1215b as its seriously low res but i suppose its good enough for video chat but I'm sure a higher res camera would have made the price jump. of course i doubt MSFT is giving this tech away for free so i wonder how much having kinect built in will bump the price, its not like MSFT can make it up on games like they can with the X360. asus does have their own gamestore built into expressgate though, i wonder if they'll hack kinect to work with EG? Kinda ironic if they do as expressgate is Linux based and you know how most diehard Linux users would rather chew on broken glass than have MSFT anything on their systems. Just as well that Asus doesn't sell Linux EEEs anymore I guess, this would probably get them boycotted. I suppose it would make for an interesting social experiment though, announce a new Linux laptop with built in kinect and see if the simultaneous desire to cheer and boo would cause the diehards head to asplode.

Kiddo you are much to young. Neural networks first saw the light of day as perceptrons by Rosenblatt in 1958 when it was argued they were actual models of the brain and about to lead to sentient machines. This view pretty much held until the Minsky and Papert tempered their claims in 1969. The term neural networks became the prefered name only in 1975 after Werbos introduced backpropagation.

do you have something solid outside of the "flying cars" articles?

This is no secret kiddo. There in fact even a wikipedia article on it.

I read about it in the original articles. The claims were made by the AI founders, not "flying car" popular writers. Here's an example.

"Don't Worry About Global Warming, Say 16 Scientists in the WSJ"
should be
"What Murdoch wants you to think."

It seems reasonable to guess that, if Murdoch finds a way to make money from curbing CO2 emissions, there will be a new article proposing that.

The Wall Street Journal, never a useful publication, is now just a massive advertisement for Murdoch.

"Never a useful publication"? Did the Wall Street Journal tell us of the plans by the financial community to steal hundreds of billions of dollars? No. The book Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader did, in 1999, with huge amounts of exact detail. Warren Buffett did, in 2003, when he said, Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.

No, latency is a good answer. At the rate that Google is going, it will only be a few years before they can slurp as much data from the world as the NSA, CIA and the various other three letter agencies. And the analysts will get relevant advertisements as a bonus.

Just hang on a bit, it's not the the international situation will be a whole lot different. In the wise words of Tom Robbins, it is 'desperate, as usual'.

I'm sure you just couldn't pass up the chance for a drive by Google blast, but even you, if honest, would realize this will never be true.
They will never get that fast.
Google buy/beg/or barters most of their images, which are useless in tracking a car full of jihadists running thru the back roads, and
nothing like an orbiting UT or Global Hawk.

No, latency is a good answer. At the rate that Google is going, it will only be a few years before they can slurp as much data from the world as the NSA, CIA and the various other three letter agencies. And the analysts will get relevant advertisements as a bonus.

Just hang on a bit, it's not the the international situation will be a whole lot different. In the wise words of Tom Robbins, it is 'desperate, as usual'.

Space travel, real space travel not jaunts into earth orbit, is the most-challenging problem of our lifetimes.

If you like sci-fi, the Manifold series by Stephen Baxter (not a referrer link) makes a great argument about space travel and how "big dumb" technology from the past can be harnessed smartly to lower the costs.

We certainly will need more than reuse of old technology, but it is a start.

I think the Raspberry Pi's are targeted for Schools and Developing Countries, I do not think they are available to the public, least at this time. PogoPlugs have been around a bit and seem to run twice as much as the suggested on the Raspberry Pi's. http://www.amazon.com/Pogoplug-Media-Sharing-Device-Remote/dp/B005DB6NG6/ref=dp_cp_ob_e_title_1

The T-Mobile plan is 5GB of data

Worth mentioning that this is also not a hard cap, but you're simply throttled down (to EDGE) once you reach it. Meaning that's it's actually unlimited, not "unlimited" (we'll call you if you use too much!) like AT&T's.

I'm not sure if there are any extra fees since I haven't signed up for it.

I've switched recently, and $30 is the only thing that shows up in my monthly bill. The only other thing I've paid was to get this SIM card + activation kit from Amazon.

Exactly correct. Free enterprise is not the same as capitalism. And corporations, which cannot exist without government sanction, are the antithesis of true free enterprise.

Readers, check out distributism. "According to distributism, the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals (laissez-faire capitalism). A summary of distributism is found in Chesterton's statement: 'Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.'"

The only thing I would fix in that summary is "laissez-faire capitalism," which should read "state supported capitalism," where state support in the form of laws without which capitalism cannot succeed in taking over a society, is essential to the capitalism.

Think carefully before you scoff at the idea that individual enterprise, with the assistance of guilds, and obviously entailing cooperative effort where necessitated by the scale of the enterprise, is not capable of replacing, and indeed yielding superior economic results, not to mention liberty and personal fulfillment, as compared to either capitalism or socialism.

"Chesterton" refers to an early 20th century social genius, G. K. Chesterton. See What's Wrong with the World; it's free read. Try not fixating on "Catholic" as you read it; I find it is entirely inessential to the insight there presented.

Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back is excellent contemporary reading.

Capitalism is NOT Free Enterprise is good reading too.

I just quote 2 things from this great book: 23 things they don't you about capitalism, from Ha-Joon Chang, (from Wikipedia) he was a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the European Investment Bank as well as to Oxfam and various United Nations agencies. He is also a fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.

Thing 4. The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has

Recent progress in telecommunications technologies is not as revolutionary as what happened in the late 19th century, in relative terms. The internet revolution has (at least as yet) not been as important as the washing machine and other household appliances, which allowed woman to enter the labour market and virtually abolished professions like domestic service.

Thing 9. We do not live in a post-industrial age

Most of the shrinkage in the share of manufacturing in total output is not due to the fall in the absolute quantity of manufactured goods produced but due to the fall in their prices, which is caused by their faster growth in productivity (output per unit of input).

The USA (and the European countries that follow sadly the USA) will slip further down as an economy if their leaders believe they can ignore the manufacturing sector and leave it to China, India or other developing countries. With the export of the manufactoring industry, you also lose expertice and know-how. Soon the developing countries will have more manufacturing power than the USA, which means they will not need the USA anymore for anything, other than dumping their cheap stuff in Walmark and Bestbuy. The service industry is nothing, if you don't have the manufacturing (aka the industry that makes real things) industry, because the manufacturing industry will create the service industry in the country where it is.

Why can't China and India, Brazil and others just create or import the banking sector, the software industry, fashion, etc. in their own country? If they already have a mature manufacturing industry, they can export the producs and get more money for the service industry. Income will only rise with the maturity of the manufacturing industry in the developing countries.

One of the books that includes all the maze patterns: http://www.amazon.com/Video-Masters-Guide-Pac-Man/dp/0553229591

Though it doesn't go as far as achieving the maximum possible score, as that requires other manual tricks to round up the ghosts.

There's the four option, namely that intelligent races quickly evolve onto some higher plane and they don't stick around their home planet or even the visible universe. Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime has some interesting speculations about the possibility of a technological singularity and how it might explain the apparent lack of other intelligent civilizations.

2. It really is impossible to go FTL, meaning we're stuck in our system, and had probably stop treating it more like a sewer than not.

You wouldn't need to go faster than light to expand through the universe. Von Neumann probes for instance could bring signs of civilization throughout the galaxy even if they were moving relatively slowly.

Found it. It's the photo used on the cover of Fatboy Slim's album Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars, which was found to infringe on Ernst Haas photo Sunset Silhouette.

Details on the lawsuit here: http://business.highbeam.com/2025/article-1G1-93613520/getty-collects-fatboy-slim-infringement

Because the stores don't pay very much for used games.

Indeed, but you're forgetting that you can bypass used game stores and sell directly with sites such as Amazon, half.com, ebay, etc.

So, for example, when I buy a used game for $30 -- because I never buy brand new games, and I don't care to play online anyways, I can sell it again in a few weeks for approximately the same price, minus the cost of shipping.

The used games stores are bad for the industry.

I disagree. If buying new were the only option I had, I would simply do without. It's the same argument for pirates -- if they had to pay full price, they'd simply do without. This isn't something that I personally lose any sleep over. It's very easy to stop consuming (overpriced) entertainment, and there are many alternatives in the world to occupy one's time with.

Fair disclosure: I'm a software developer in the video games industry. (And I'm supposed to be writing some code right now. :-X)

http://www.amazon.com/Lacey-His-Friends-David-Drake/dp/0671655930

An excellent collection of short stories..

if memory serves their society found 3 overlapping cameras for every visible point were the number required to ensure their totalitarian society would continue with status quo.

Mike Brown discovered the planetoids that led to Pluto's demotion, but Tyson removed Pluto from a display at his planetarium, then wrote a book about it.

The "Chip-locked" part. And the part where you are comparing third party cables on Amazon to Apple's own cables.

Get a 3rd party cable on Amazon with a dock connecter on one side and AV and USB on the other for $4.99.

http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Video-Cable-Connector-iPhone/dp/B00418UBLA/ref=sr_1_65?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1327506635&sr=1-65

Good for you! You made it through the gauntlet of Apple bullshit. Most of us don't make it.

Here's the cables which can't be used with newer iPods, it says so right on the page:

http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Video-Cable-Apple-Watching/dp/B0006N5I5I

Which part of it is not true?

Here are the old cables, selling for THIRTY SIX CENTS

http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Video-Cable-Apple-Watching/dp/B0006N5I5I

Note how the page says "Does Not Support New Ipod Classic, Ipod Nano 3G And Ipod Itouch"

Here are Apple's cables:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC748ZM/A?fnode=MTY1NDA0OQ

They now cost $40 instead of $50.

So, again, which part was not true? I previously gave a 1:50 ratio for the prices, and here I have shown a 1:111 ratio.