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Just read John Grisham's http://www.amazon.com/Broker-John-Grisham/dp/0385510454 The Broker which is based on this idea, only the hackers are Pakistani. They all got killed in the book.

All of them? Inside the same book? They must have been very small....

Korea? You won the war with the two countries that are technically still at war? Lol. Gulf war? Yeah, the coalition won that.

The Korean War was a proxy war with the Soviet Union and ended with an armistice very shortly following the death of Stalin, likely because the North Koreans were then uncertain about the stability of their war supplies. While it technically wasn't a win for either side, there are reasons why the US was hesitant to engage in exceptional force since this occurred fairly early on in the Cold War, and the degree of Soviet involvement wasn't well known until the release of their archives circa 2000 although it was suspected, most especially by US pilots. Calling it a stalemate is probably most accurate, although being critical of the US for how the war ended is silly. The political clime of the period was dangerous and uncertain.

Source.

Just read John Grisham's http://www.amazon.com/Broker-John-Grisham/dp/0385510454 The Broker which is based on this idea, only the hackers are Pakistani. They all got killed in the book.

In fact, there's a worthwhile read on precisely this topic: The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One

That was supposed to be the kind of thing that css could do

And CSS does it. You can set e.g. background images for a class or id from CSS, so you can change the graphic appearance of a header or footer from one central CSS file. I'd really suggest reading a rigorous introduction to CSS, or something like O'Reilly's CSS Cookbook that walk you through how to accomplish some specific task. If you don't even know the language, don't blame it for not being useful for you!

It also says that some Xenon-133 may have early on in the accident

Wow, I knew that Japanese tends to leave a lot of words out compared to English (Jay Rubin's Making Sense of Japanese is an accessible introduction to this tendency), but I had no idea that it extended to leaving out the verb.

And look, there's already been a scripture: the book The Second Coming of Steve Jobs

Check out the WNDR3700v2. The folks doing serious research into home network performance have settled on this unit. Check out the prices on Amazon's refurbished stock - equivalent to what I was paying for 54GL's back in the day. I picked up a new for the office and a refurb for home.

They have lots of RAM, a decent processor, and dual-band radios. I think it's the 54G for the new decade.

Since the OP is intending to run DD-WRT on it, it doesn't really matter... but this router is a piece o' crap with the stock firmware. The external drive function has never worked properly, Netgear has known about the bug and never bothered to fix it. The drive(s) will go offline for no explicable reason and require a power cycle. If you aren't using that portion of the router, it's probably fine, but since I purchased this router for my parents house and purchased it explicitly for the extra drive connectivity, I am rather displeased. A quick scan of the Netgear forums reveals that it's a known issue, many people have it, Netgear just doesn't care and won't issue a fix for it.

Netgear can go piss up a pole.

To add a footnote to my post on a prescriptive bent: The best thing America could do in the short term is return the vote to convicted felons.

Why Can't Felons Vote?

In 1800, no state prohibited felons from voting. On the eve of the Civil War, 80% of the states did, largely to block African Americans, who though rarely allowed to vote were disproportionately represented among felons.

Disenfranchisement amplifies the wedge. Winners tend to vote for more losers, don't they? America could potentially turn into a nation where a great mass of people have their backs against the chasm.

The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United

I have both the Asus N16 and the Buffalo N450. The real problem is that sifting through the DD-WRT support forum you will find that there has never been a good stable fully featured build that works with the N16. Asus has not done the work, and has left it to hackers that own the device to update the opensource software. As a result I have installed a swath of firmware versions with the result that I gave up entirely and had to run Tomato on it with optware and then install the PPTP VPN software on that to finally get a stable working system that did what I wanted.

The Buffalo N450 came pre-installed with DD-WRT and has worked like a champ. They have test and actually support DD-WRT and all the features including VPN and external USB drive connection for NAS and everything. Best $90 I've ever spent on router.

Definitely the one I would suggest as well.
Or it's dual-band big brother, the AP WZR-HP-AG300H. $89.99 for the router itself at Amazon, oddly enough. Nice little table at the bottom comparing the Buffalo router model features as well at that link.
Supports DD-WRT out of the box and support by the manufacturer.
My ONLY complaint is that the radio on my G300NH model is a little bit weaker than my old Linksys routers, since I could boost the signal. I don't think that option works in the firmware on the buffalo, but it might be the difference between the N and G signals that I'm seeing. Still covers my entire house quite well, however, and a little bit outside.

For the stationary equipment (Xbox, Blu-Ray player, etc), use Powerline AV equipment such as http://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-XAVB5001-Powerline-500-Adapter/dp/B004DVEW8I and connect one of the adapters to the new wireless-N router. Use the wireless only for your laptops and other wireless clients.

Check out the WNDR3700v2. The folks doing serious research into home network performance have settled on this unit. Check out the prices on Amazon's refurbished stock - equivalent to what I was paying for 54GL's back in the day. I picked up a new for the office and a refurb for home.

They have lots of RAM, a decent processor, and dual-band radios. I think it's the 54G for the new decade.

And before you say "You can hook up a gamepad to a PC," every console in this generation has USB and more than half have Bluetooth and games that support keyboards and mice, so that argument is moot as well.

Even better, I have an adapter made by Microsoft that lets me connect up to 4 Wireless Xbox 360 controllers to my PC. Yes, let that sink in for a moment...

In the US, it is sold with a 360 Controller on Amazon for $45.58. Be aware that Microsoft does not sell these without the controller. If you see someone selling the adapter without the controller, it means it's a pre-open package or used.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1554535956

then crunch some numbers --- 5.25 acres per person (36794240000/7000000000) --- note that this doesn't take into account whether or no the land is arable, and for many countries the number is _much_ smaller.

Optimistically one population projection shows the population peaking at 7.5 billion in 2020 or so --- here's to hoping that's correct.

We need to get every woman in the world to visit this web site:

http://www.billings-centre.ab.ca/

or read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Billings-Method-Controlling-Fertility-Without/dp/039452120X

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1554535956

then crunch some numbers --- 5.25 acres per person (36794240000/7000000000) --- note that this doesn't take into account whether or no the land is arable, and for many countries the number is _much_ smaller.

Optimistically one population projection shows the population peaking at 7.5 billion in 2020 or so --- here's to hoping that's correct.

We need to get every woman in the world to visit this web site:

http://www.billings-centre.ab.ca/

or read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Billings-Method-Controlling-Fertility-Without/dp/039452120X

Yes, in most cases, memorizing and rote is the wrong way to go about things... AT A HIGHER LEVEL.

At the elementary school level, in math, for example, rote learning is, IMO, the only way to teach the basics. Kids *need* to know the multiplication tables by heart. When my daughters were learning them, we'd drill... until they could answer anything in the 1-12 table without thinking. To do any sort of advanced math -- and by advanced, I mean basic arithmetic with more than 1 digit, or anything above basic arithmetic -- you NEED to "just know" the answer to the single digit multiplication tables.

On the other hand, the hard sciences, or the social sciences, even at the entry level, are much less amenable to rote, even though that's how they teach many things.

And at the secondary level, schools tend to use shitty textbooks. See Feynman's What Do You Care What Other People Think, for a (possibly dated, but I doubt it) view of how textbook approval works.

How long until the corporations get their own private armies of mercenaries and start waging wars of attrition over market share?

There's an interesting fiction book called Jennifer Government by Max Berry that explores just that: a distopian, completely capitalist world. Overall it's a book that had the potential to be truly amazing, and ended up somewhere in the vicinity of good instead. Still, a worthwhile read.

---Alex

Interestingly enough, people who control the levers of government and tax money are always going to be wealthy. You can let the wealthy govern you directly (aristocracy has benefits that are not often considered by Americans, though I don't think it's worth it overall - see e.g. Freedom Wears a Crown, as well as passages in Shute's Slide Rule), or you can accept that people who control the flow of vast sums of money will be able to order their affairs in such a way as to profit from it (even legally).

Interestingly enough, people who control the levers of government and tax money are always going to be wealthy. You can let the wealthy govern you directly (aristocracy has benefits that are not often considered by Americans, though I don't think it's worth it overall - see e.g. Freedom Wears a Crown, as well as passages in Shute's Slide Rule), or you can accept that people who control the flow of vast sums of money will be able to order their affairs in such a way as to profit from it (even legally).

I wonder if Clifford Stoll had something to do with this...

(shameless plug coming up: if we're plugging stories feel free to go to my smashwords or amazon profile and get hold of some stuff. there's two free stories on smashwords and the others are a dollar apiece because that seemed to be the cheapest amazon would let me sell things for (i wanted 40c or so). for some reason the amazon profile is currently missing The Train will Never Stop, though it will be added in a day or so. the genre is basically fantasy of one form or another, though as far from sword and sorcery as i can get. i like to pretend there's more of a neil gaiman feel to things, but then i am very self-deluded.)

(shameless plug coming up: if we're plugging stories feel free to go to my smashwords or amazon profile and get hold of some stuff. there's two free stories on smashwords and the others are a dollar apiece because that seemed to be the cheapest amazon would let me sell things for (i wanted 40c or so). for some reason the amazon profile is currently missing The Train will Never Stop, though it will be added in a day or so. the genre is basically fantasy of one form or another, though as far from sword and sorcery as i can get. i like to pretend there's more of a neil gaiman feel to things, but then i am very self-deluded.)

I have a novel on sale in the Kindle Store ( Death & Magic , a murder mystery set in a school for wizards). I wrote it in OpenOffice.org, before I had any thought of releasing it as an ebook. When the time came to convert it, I exported it as HTML and used a text editor to get rid of all the crap that OO.o puts in just in case you want to re-import it and have it look something like it used to. This took a couple of evenings - I could probably have done it faster if I'd been braver with my regexs. It kept the italics without any problems. I put in some basic CSS to control the paragraph indents and make the chapter headings look nice.

I tried using Amazon's KindleGen program for converting the HTML to .mobi, but couldn't figure out how to fix all the compiler warnings. Then I found Mobipocket Creator, which did everything I needed without any fuss, and produced a file that looked perfect on my Kindle. (Well - perfect apart from the known bugs in rendering, such as the way it won't add more than a certain amount of padding between words, so a line can look too short if there's a long word at the start of the next one.)

I learned my lesson - the book I'm writing now (volume 3 of the series) is starting life as HTML in a text editor, so I control exactly what formatting goes into it.

Let me know when your book's on the Kindle - it sounds like the sort of thing I might like.

and before the Dauphin DTR-1 there was the NCR-3125 which ran PenPoint (or Windows 3.1 for Pen Computing) and had gestures --- PenPoint's user interface design guidelines are very interesting reading:

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/books/thepowerofpenpoint

http://www.amazon.com/Penpoint-Interface-Reference-Technical-Library/dp/0201608588/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319204076&sr=1-1
(ob. discl. I'm selling some copies which I have left on Amazon)

William

A couple of interesting and related things on the subject of hiring strategies appeared this week in the Wall Street Journal.

First, a fascinating review of the book "The Rare Find" by George Anders. The review beings with this interesting anecdote and gets better after that:

When Joanne Rowling, an unemployed single mother, showed her first fanciful manuscript to a dozen British publishing houses, all quickly passed on it. Eventually a single bid emerged—for about $2,500—from Bloomsbury, then a small London publisher. Wise move: Ms. Rowling's "Harry Potter" franchise is now worth billions.

Next, James Taranto theorizes that college degrees are proxy for IQ Tests, which it is illegal to use in hiring. It raises the question of whether FaceBook's Programming Challenges will not become the target of lawsuits on the basis of "differential impact" as in Griggs V. Duke Power Co.

FYI, those numbers actually sound high for slaves from Zimbabwe. (Well, maybe not with shipping, if you are ordering them from someone at the source rather than buying them after they've been trafficked.)

The student loan problem is massive, but of course is not nearly as bad as actual slavery, which is fairly common today. See River of Innocents, for example. Or google the Polaris Project.

Wait what? There's still nigger slave trade going on? Good, I got some fuckin cotton to pick and I don't feel like doin' it. Are the niggers still betraying their own kind by capturing their own fucking people and selling them to white men again?

FYI, those numbers actually sound high for slaves from Zimbabwe. (Well, maybe not with shipping, if you are ordering them from someone at the source rather than buying them after they've been trafficked.)

The student loan problem is massive, but of course is not nearly as bad as actual slavery, which is fairly common today. See River of Innocents, for example. Or google the Polaris Project.

The Mac Mini includes an HDMI to DVI adapter in the box. I don't know what else you'd want, except maybe this DVI to VGA adapter that costs all of $0.01. That's sure going to break the bank.

As for the annual renewals, that's a TCO argument rather than the original up-front costs argument. If you want to include that, you would also need to include possible revenues of any apps you develop and sell within the four years that you're renewing in that price, which could be far above the $99/year we're talking about.

Of course the iOS sim isn't completely accurate for how it's going to perform on a device. It's there for you to start learning the environment, in order to further lower the barriers to entry. Once you get an app designed that does something in the neighborhood of what you thought it would, that's when you go spend the extra $200 on the iPod Touch (or less for a used one on Craigslist / eBay), and tune it. If you're scraping by, as I said before.

As for the warranty, if it already has AppleCare on it, it's fully transferrable. You can add AppleCare if the used Mac is within the first year after purchase, as if you bought it new - Apple doesn't care if you're the one that originally unboxed it, or if someone else did.

What the occupy protesters are telling you is not that loans are evil, but that UNBANKRUPTABLE LOANS are evil, and in that they'd be correct.

No corporation or enterprise is going to accept a loan from an loaning entity in which the possibility of bankruptcy protection has been removed (and not just because such terms would be illegal). Why? Because if the company can't meet it's obligations, it HAS to have the option of re-org- where only a part of the debt is repaid or chapter 7, where the company is relieved of the debt entirely and goes out of business, leaving the company's officers and board members free from financial obligation. Once the company is "dead" a theoretically unbankruptable debt can only have the meaning that any and all future enterprises of officers and board members would get attached until all debts are repaid in full.

No one is going to take the risk of starting a business with those terms. There wouldn't BE business, period and Republicans would be screaming bloody murder about an " unfriendly regulatory environment" making it impossible to do business in the US.

Yet when someone takes out a student loan, that loan IS unbankruptable. This turns getting an education- a precursor widely accepted as necessary fro economic participation- which is a nice way of saying eating and maintaining a roof over your head- in the economy into a high risk gamble in which the cost of losing is the lifetime indentured servitude to rich lenders by poor students.

Unbankruptable debt is not a concept that exists anywhere in the world outside of 18th century England and its debtor's prisons. The reason is clear. Everyone who is stuck trying to repay unbankruptable debt falls permanently out of the economy and stays poor. This is bad for the individual and bad for the larger economy.

The personal and financial cost of having a bankruptcy appear on your credit rating is punishment enough to deter people from gratuitously dumping their debts. There was never a rash of student loan defaults by people really able to repay just as there were never any WMD in Iraq; it was a fiction with no data to support it. It was an excuse to make the loans unbankruptable and thus suitable to act as a kind of "super" security which the holders could then sell to investors, making themselves super rich in the process.

Banks and their employees with sophisticated knowledge of the legislative process and the cash to influence legislators can achieve whatever ends they want irrespective of the long term consequences to the country. They act as a unit under the direction of a small set of individuals- the officers and boards- who will be made so rich they are beyond care or want if they are just able to succeed at distorting the law to suit them and their goals.

THAT is what the occupy movement is protesting.

http://www.amazon.com/Student-Loan-Scam-Oppressive-History/dp/0807042293

Aficionados might rejoice that science-fiction finally matured and could claim to be great literature, but casual readers don't want to tax themselves with the challenging prose and labyrinthine plot of, say, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun

Even that review describes itself as one of the best "science fantasies". Sorry, that means its not sci fi, its just princes and knights having swordfights for control of the kingdom, am I guessing right?

Whooosh.....

The war in the Pacific was started over oil, and turned on fuel supply.

In the end, Japan was using biofuels made from the roots of pine trees, which they had a lot of because the trees had been felled to be burned themselves.

It took 100,000 pine tree stumps to make one tank of gas for a Japanese fighter jet.

Biofuels are an overrated source of energy.

Once the oil begins to run out, heavier-than-air airraft are going to become scarce.

This has all the hallmarks of an urban legend. First of all, the Japanese "fighter jets" were basically nonexistent in WW2, coming too late to enter service. Furthermore, the "100,000 pine tree stumps" isn't quite correct either. For one thing, it's the roots that were (are?) turned into fuel. Now, it may take 100k roots, I have no idea, but I highly doubt it was "stumps". Finally, last I read, this had been a pilot project (no pun intended) only. While technically feasible, the manpower required to convert the pine roots into fuel was determined to be too much of an impact on other programs.

Regardless, this isn't an oil based biofuel, it would have been an ethanol one. Bit of a difference there, I think, though I am not an expert on the matter.

Seems people are simply not aware of the classics very well, given some startling omissions here. "The End of Eternity" is one of Asimov's greatest works and its lesson is one very applicable today (hint: replace time travel with information technology after reading this book, I got goosebumps thinking about that, shame on NASA for making space boring) http://www.amazon.com/End-Eternity-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0765319187/ I also don't see a single book from the sci-fi grandmasters like Jack Williamson (the timeless classic "The Humanoids" http://www.amazon.com/Humanoids-Novel-Jack-Williamson/dp/0312852533 and it's sequel, etc.) or Clifford Saimak ("Cemetery World" http://www.amazon.com/Cemetery-World-Clifford-D-Simak/dp/0399110712 etc.).

Seems people are simply not aware of the classics very well, given some startling omissions here. "The End of Eternity" is one of Asimov's greatest works and its lesson is one very applicable today (hint: replace time travel with information technology after reading this book, I got goosebumps thinking about that, shame on NASA for making space boring) http://www.amazon.com/End-Eternity-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0765319187/ I also don't see a single book from the sci-fi grandmasters like Jack Williamson (the timeless classic "The Humanoids" http://www.amazon.com/Humanoids-Novel-Jack-Williamson/dp/0312852533 and it's sequel, etc.) or Clifford Saimak ("Cemetery World" http://www.amazon.com/Cemetery-World-Clifford-D-Simak/dp/0399110712 etc.).

Seems people are simply not aware of the classics very well, given some startling omissions here. "The End of Eternity" is one of Asimov's greatest works and its lesson is one very applicable today (hint: replace time travel with information technology after reading this book, I got goosebumps thinking about that, shame on NASA for making space boring) http://www.amazon.com/End-Eternity-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0765319187/ I also don't see a single book from the sci-fi grandmasters like Jack Williamson (the timeless classic "The Humanoids" http://www.amazon.com/Humanoids-Novel-Jack-Williamson/dp/0312852533 and it's sequel, etc.) or Clifford Saimak ("Cemetery World" http://www.amazon.com/Cemetery-World-Clifford-D-Simak/dp/0399110712 etc.).

Quite honestly, I am stunned and shocked that the Gormenghast books are not in there. http://www.amazon.com/Gormenghast-Novels-Titus-Groan-Alone/dp/0879516283

Aficionados might rejoice that science-fiction finally matured and could claim to be great literature, but casual readers don't want to tax themselves with the challenging prose and labyrinthine plot of, say, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun

Even that review describes itself as one of the best "science fantasies". Sorry, that means its not sci fi, its just princes and knights having swordfights for control of the kingdom, am I guessing right? I'm betting there is swordfights and horseback riding, right? Claiming on the back cover that the date is 9000 AD instead of 900 AD doesn't magically make it scifi instead of fantasy, sorry.

It may be an excellent book, but its probably not an excellent sci fi book.

My cynical side wants to attribute it to the genre's turn towards the literary. Aficionados might rejoice that science-fiction finally matured and could claim to be great literature, but casual readers don't want to tax themselves with the challenging prose and labyrinthine plot of, say, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun when Golden Age science-fiction provides a simple tale that can be read in an hour or two.

Dozois's anthologies are a great place to find the standouts of the last few decades. It was his Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction that introduced me to Wolfe, Kate Wilhelm, Nancy Cress, (late-period) Robert Silverberg, Lucius Shepherd and others when I had previously known only pulpish science-fiction.

My cynical side wants to attribute it to the genre's turn towards the literary. Aficionados might rejoice that science-fiction finally matured and could claim to be great literature, but casual readers don't want to tax themselves with the challenging prose and labyrinthine plot of, say, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun when Golden Age science-fiction provides a simple tale that can be read in an hour or two.

Dozois's anthologies are a great place to find the standouts of the last few decades. It was his Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction that introduced me to Wolfe, Kate Wilhelm, Nancy Cress, (late-period) Robert Silverberg, Lucius Shepherd and others when I had previously known only pulpish science-fiction.

I recently read Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime and my head is still abuzz with speculation over the coming technological singularity. Consequently, I can't help but see these attempts at predicting the tech of a century hence as the equivalent of ancient Romans speculating on how many could fly. Just as we now laugh at the beliefs of the ancients (or even folks in the 19th century) for their belief that flight would be accomplished by flapping wings, surely these conceptions of spaceflight will seem naive in a few decades or a century. Sure, maybe AI and limitless energy won't arrive so soon, so one feels a need to do such engineering now, but it may all prove superfluous.

Ornithopters are possible and have been built, even a few manned versions. With a bit more development, with new materials and new technology they probably could be made more efficient but we've found better ways of achieving flight using the technology that we had in the 20th century, hence that is where most of the development has gone and that type of technology is more advanced.

I wouldn't be too hard on old sci-fi predictions, some got it right as well. Didn't Jules Verne envision a future Paris full of people getting around the streets in powered vehicles with easy-to-use controls? Didn't he predict the submarine? Didn't he predict a mysterious power source that could keep a vessel in motion for years at a time without refueling long before nuclear physics were understood? Didn't Star Trek predict the handheld communication device that responds to voice commands, and the handheld computing device with a touch-sensitive screen? Didn't Things To Come predict the devastating effect of aerial bombing on civilians from large fixed wing aircraft?

It's okay to dream. Sci Fi is exciting because it's possible, and it inspires people to become engineers and try to make things happen.

I recently read Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime and my head is still abuzz with speculation over the coming technological singularity. Consequently, I can't help but see these attempts at predicting the tech of a century hence as the equivalent of ancient Romans speculating on how many could fly. Just as we now laugh at the beliefs of the ancients (or even folks in the 19th century) for their belief that flight would be accomplished by flapping wings, surely these conceptions of spaceflight will seem naive in a few decades or a century. Sure, maybe AI and limitless energy won't arrive so soon, so one feels a need to do such engineering now, but it may all prove superfluous.

I saw practically no math in your link. I did see a lot of bullshit hand-waving, though.

I was going to recommend that you read Entering Space by Robert Zubrin for education in what you believe is cheap and easy, but then I noticed your link had already done so. I liked the part where he dismissed the cost (and Zubrin's estimates) by already assuming a permanent lunar presence with a mass driver putting ore into earth orbit.

Sorry, too monotonous ... I much prefer the Liquid Mind Series by Chuck Wild

* http://www.amazon.com/Ambience-Minimus/dp/B000QQY31A/
* http://www.amazon.com/Slow-World-Liquid-Mind/dp/B000002XYJ/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-III-Balance/dp/B00000I57B/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-IV-Unity/dp/B00004SVLE/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-V-Serenity/dp/B00005MNFL/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-VI-Spirit/dp/B00008BR0V/

Sorry, too monotonous ... I much prefer the Liquid Mind Series by Chuck Wild

* http://www.amazon.com/Ambience-Minimus/dp/B000QQY31A/
* http://www.amazon.com/Slow-World-Liquid-Mind/dp/B000002XYJ/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-III-Balance/dp/B00000I57B/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-IV-Unity/dp/B00004SVLE/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-V-Serenity/dp/B00005MNFL/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-VI-Spirit/dp/B00008BR0V/

Sorry, too monotonous ... I much prefer the Liquid Mind Series by Chuck Wild

* http://www.amazon.com/Ambience-Minimus/dp/B000QQY31A/
* http://www.amazon.com/Slow-World-Liquid-Mind/dp/B000002XYJ/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-III-Balance/dp/B00000I57B/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-IV-Unity/dp/B00004SVLE/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-V-Serenity/dp/B00005MNFL/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-VI-Spirit/dp/B00008BR0V/

Sorry, too monotonous ... I much prefer the Liquid Mind Series by Chuck Wild

* http://www.amazon.com/Ambience-Minimus/dp/B000QQY31A/
* http://www.amazon.com/Slow-World-Liquid-Mind/dp/B000002XYJ/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-III-Balance/dp/B00000I57B/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-IV-Unity/dp/B00004SVLE/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-V-Serenity/dp/B00005MNFL/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-VI-Spirit/dp/B00008BR0V/

Sorry, too monotonous ... I much prefer the Liquid Mind Series by Chuck Wild

* http://www.amazon.com/Ambience-Minimus/dp/B000QQY31A/
* http://www.amazon.com/Slow-World-Liquid-Mind/dp/B000002XYJ/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-III-Balance/dp/B00000I57B/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-IV-Unity/dp/B00004SVLE/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-V-Serenity/dp/B00005MNFL/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-VI-Spirit/dp/B00008BR0V/

Sorry, too monotonous ... I much prefer the Liquid Mind Series by Chuck Wild

* http://www.amazon.com/Ambience-Minimus/dp/B000QQY31A/
* http://www.amazon.com/Slow-World-Liquid-Mind/dp/B000002XYJ/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-III-Balance/dp/B00000I57B/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-IV-Unity/dp/B00004SVLE/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-V-Serenity/dp/B00005MNFL/
* http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Mind-VI-Spirit/dp/B00008BR0V/

If you don't have it, get it!

On #7, Chinese is becoming the single most dominant language on the web (you just probably can't see it). Also, diversity can be good in big enough systems. Currencies work better generally when they are managed by accountable organizations; Jane Jacobs suggested that ideally each city should have its own currency; why not now, with computers it would be so easy to convert between them?

Cold fusion may be happening:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2011/10/17/hello-cheap-energy-hello-brave-new-world/

More of a problem is addiction to "supernormal stimuli":
http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X

We need a "basic income" and other changes (gift economy, better local subsistence with 3D printing, better participatory governmental planning) to deal with the changes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY