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Amazon provides Kindle client apps on practically all platforms today - even WP7 and webOS have them. And now they also have a "cloud reader" that works in any WebKit browser.

Amazon's business model with respect to Kindle and associated services seems to be about making money on book sales, not making money on Kindles. Which also explains why they keep pushing the price on the device down steadily over the last few years. With this program, I'd imagine that library books would automatically expire after a set date, and you'll be given an option to buy the book if you want to continue reading. Also, it'll probably also offer you to buy the book if all "copies" are already checked out at the library.

http://www.amazon.com/Casio-F91W-1-Classic-Black-Digital/dp/B000GAWSDG

OP here, replying AC. To be honest, I'm not totally sure (also my plan was to give them away; something I now see might also be a bad idea for tangible goods). I think the basic explanation I would give is that living in the dark isn't that big an annoyance to them. I am wary of generalizing here, so I want to be clear that I am speaking only for my own experiences, in a portion of (southwest) Ghana. This is like saying Californians wouldn't want X; it may or may not hold true for those in Arizona, and especially for those in, say, Texas. So there may be plenty of places in sub-Saharan Africa or other poor countries where solar lights make sense and are highly valued by the folks living there ... but in Ghana I didn't find that to be the case.

Basically people in the area I was living do have electricity in proximity to their home, if not in their own exact home. So at night, between the occasional streetlamp or other home with lights on, plus a lot of outdoor vendor stalls (which are basically flimsy wooden tables people sell stuff off of, and at night they have oil lamps on them), you can more or less see where you're walking well enough.

Again, oil lamps are bad, the fuel costs money. The disease burden from breathing cooking smoke and oil lamp smoke is a big deal. But it's a big deal to me [Western-educated guy with interest in global health], not necessarily to some people in Ghana. So my overall sense is that people are happy with their oil lamps, and if offered the chance to buy a solar lamp to replace it, most wouldn't. If given a solar lamp, they would probably take it, but if it was made out of a jar, I'd say there's half a chance a month later you'd find them using the jar for something else, and the lamp guts repurposed or given to a kid/neighbor/whatever.

Also, 99.9% of their electronics are cheap Chinese crap that put the cheap-Chinese-crap Americans get to shame, as far as flimsiness. I cannot convey how crappy the Chinese-made products there are. So when *I* think about a solar lamp, I think a rugged REI-type product; when a Ghanaian thinks about one, they probably picture a flimsy plastic thing that will break in a week or two.

I had a Coleman-brand LED lantern, and the family I spent most of my time living with did, at one point, remark that it was pretty cool. The kids were always enamored with it, as they would be with any gadget, but the mother did actually say the equivalent of "you should mail us one of those for Christmas." But it was said in passing, as a sort of 'hey this probably only costs $5 and I guess we might use it' comment (was my sense) ... had they really thought it was awesome, I think they would have told me so much earlier, and much more definitively. Again, maybe her perception of Chinese crap colored her beliefs about my lantern (which actually cost me like $85).

So in conclusion, I think it's a combination of crappy Chinese products coloring their view of all electronics, their own perception of who does and doesn't use these sort of products (fancy solar gadgets are for Obruni [white people]), and a lack of dissatisfaction with existing technologies and methods (however dissatisfied I may be on their behalf means little!).

When I look at a project like Bogolight (linked above), I think "cool!" But, honestly, I have no idea if the average Haitian even wants a Bogolight. I would think yes, but my experience in Ghana tells me not to trust my American-calibrated barometer, that you need to know how Ghanaians, or Haitians, or Angolans think, before you can understand if this is something they will want and ultimately benefit from, regardless of how it may look from a straight up s

In addition to The Mote in God's Eye, where aliens used enormous lasers to send a solar sail-based ship across interstellar distances, he described a laser-based system to launch small (VW Beetle-sized) manned capsules into orbit.

I need to remove my "Gone January 20th, 2013" with the Obama logo for the "o" bumper sticker from my bumper... http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B00228KSPU/ref=dp_image_z_0?ie=UTF8&n=15684181&s=automotive

If all HR is to your company is benefits, payroll, and hiring, then you are working for a company doesn't doesn't know how to use HR to its advantage. If the HR at your company is not involved with the company's strategy and success, that's an indication of company that does not leverage HR, not an issue with HR itself. That's a lose/lose situation for you and your company.

I do agree with most of the rest of your points. Give the following a read from your local library. It will probably be eye-opening:
http://www.amazon.com/Workforce-Scorecard-Managing-Capital-Strategy/dp/1591392454

The article said each instance had 7GB of memory and 8 cores. That would translate to the High-CPU Extra Large Instance Type:

High-CPU Extra Large Instance 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
Source: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

That instance type will run you $0.68/hour standard or $0.24/hour spot. (US-East Pricing) (Spot pricing allows you to take advantage of unused EC2 instances at a discount. Also worth noting is that spot pricing changes over time.)

30,000 cores equates to 3,750 instances across different regions. Here is the breakdown on hourly pricing for standard and spot. (Reality is it was probably a mixture of both and the pricing for different regions varies).

Standard US-East: $2,550/hour
Spot US-East: $900/hour

The exact mix of machines in each region wasn't specified but $1,279/hour sounds about right if there is a mix of standard vs spot across different regions.

I think if you want to see what things could be like with a merge of reality and virtual (augmented) reality, you will enjoy this. Many connections can be made with current gaming and this novel.

http://www.amazon.com/MetaGame-Sam-Landstrom/dp/1935597167/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

"The only way for our lives to get better is if the rich have less of the money and we have more."

This is 100% false, in a growing economy "the rich" can be rich and it benefits everyone, and everyones wealth and standard of living increases. The main problem with these comments is most people don't understand how an economy works and what really drives it. To educate yourself read http://www.amazon.com/How-Economy-Grows-Why-Crashes/dp/047052670X

Basically:
government spending is bad
higher taxes are bad
regulations are bad
any government job is a drain on the economy
printing and borrowing money is bad
savings are good
interest rates must be allowed to move
deficits are very bad
a strong currency is good

Nearly everyone posting in this topic has it wrong, and are parroting the same baloney principals that have led us into this economic mess over the last 80 years. The next election is probably the last hope to manage the global financial meltdown coming in less than 5 years. Since the world is following US policy of devaluing its currency into oblivion by printing money, all other countries follow suit, in order to reverse this we must lead by example. The only candidate who not only understands that, but actually has integrity and whose actions reflect his beliefs is Ron Paul. Even if he is elected (which I think is highly unlikely) we are so far in the shit I doubt even a full 180 in policy from top down and fast action can save us.

So basically the world economic bus is heading for a cliff with our foot squarely on the gas, Ron Paul is ready to hit the brakes but is chained to the back of the bus by the media, after the bus goes off the cliff the only passengers who are going to land safely are those that hold a gold parachute.

Are you serious? The guy is complaining about a notebook that looks *completely different than Macbooks".

Sony is more guilty of ripping off Macbooks.

Sony laptops have looked like that for at least 10 years, if not more.

Actually you're right, this is a 2006 story:
Sony rips off MacBook design
Sony's MacBook Pro, the VAIO VGN-N17L

Are you serious? The guy is complaining about a notebook that looks *completely different than Macbooks".

Sony is more guilty of ripping off Macbooks.

Sony laptops have looked like that for at least 10 years, if not more.

pics or it didn't happen.

Are you serious? The guy is complaining about a notebook that looks *completely different than Macbooks".

Sony is more guilty of ripping off Macbooks.

Sony laptops have looked like that for at least 10 years, if not more.

Try installing Tomato or DDWRT and tweak the maximum number of simultaneous connections value. Raising that will dramatically improve your performance with BT. This will use up significantly more RAM on the router, though, so try to use a model that has beefy hardware (for a consumer-grade home router). I highly recommend the WRT54-GL, which has double the RAM of the standard WRT54G models. The "L" means it supports Linux. =)

Doesn't help the OP any, though.

Are you serious? The guy is complaining about a notebook that looks *completely different than Macbooks".

Sony is more guilty of ripping off Macbooks.

(if its not just horded, as is common)

What, like under the mattress? Rich people invest their money in company stock. Companies use that money to grow, buy equipment, hire and pay workers, etc. Even if rich people just put money in a savings account, banks still lend that money to people to buy cars, homes, start businesses, whatever.

A great book to read is Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

I use elastic bandages to wrap my cables. I use different colors for different cables, red for power, green for network, etc. Its easy to wrap and unwrap

http://www.amazon.com/ANDOVER-COFLEX-ADHERENT-ELASTIC-COLORPACK/dp/B0006GWRCW/

I hope you're just trolling/joking. Just in case you weren't..

If you rotate your Horizontal Cable Organizer by 90 degrees(from --- to | ), it will allow you to run cables vertically(yes, even if the product title has the word 'Horizontal' in it). Regardless of their name, those are indeed raceways. The brand name used might be "Cable Organizer" but they're the same. Here is an example. Raceways are available in many different sizes so don't be put off if that link I provided doesn't match the size you use. Feel free to whoosh me if you were joking.

How do you deal with the sharp edges on the cut? Categorically snip everything if you're gonna touch it in any fashion?

If you use a cable tie gun you don't get the sharp edges.

If you use the right type of diagnol cutter you don't get a sharp edge. http://www.amazon.com/Xuron-170-II-Micro-Shear-Flush-Cutter/dp/B000IBSFAI/

How do you deal with the sharp edges on the cut? Categorically snip everything if you're gonna touch it in any fashion?

If you use a cable tie gun you don't get the sharp edges.

If you use the right type of diagnol cutter you don't get a sharp edge. http://www.amazon.com/Xuron-170-II-Micro-Shear-Flush-Cutter/dp/B000IBSFAI/

Books recommended in the parent comment:

The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry (1983)
The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry (1983)

My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan (1964)
My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan (1964)

The Concept of the Corporation by Peter Drucker (1946)
The Concept of the Corporation by Peter Drucker (1946)

The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence (2008)
The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence (2008)

Books recommended in the parent comment:

The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry (1983)
The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry (1983)

My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan (1964)
My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan (1964)

The Concept of the Corporation by Peter Drucker (1946)
The Concept of the Corporation by Peter Drucker (1946)

The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence (2008)
The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence (2008)

Books recommended in the parent comment:

The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry (1983)
The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry (1983)

My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan (1964)
My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan (1964)

The Concept of the Corporation by Peter Drucker (1946)
The Concept of the Corporation by Peter Drucker (1946)

The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence (2008)
The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence (2008)

Books recommended in the parent comment:

The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry (1983)
The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry (1983)

My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan (1964)
My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan (1964)

The Concept of the Corporation by Peter Drucker (1946)
The Concept of the Corporation by Peter Drucker (1946)

The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence (2008)
The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence (2008)

How do you deal with the sharp edges on the cut? Categorically snip everything if you're gonna touch it in any fashion?

If you use a cable tie gun you don't get the sharp edges.

Like this?

Amazed a story (summary) on Slashdot completely glossed over the most important part of this whole experiment, and the ingredient that will ultimately cause this experiment to succeed or fail: the software... well, when this experiment plays out on older kids IMO. I hope it's good for the kids sake. Welcome to Parenthood 2.0 (tm).

Reminds me of The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Awesome book.

Why do people refuse to admit mistakes - so deeply that they transform their own brains? They're not kidding themselves: they really believe what they have to believe to justify their original thought.
There are some pretty scary examples in this book. Psychologists who refuse to admit they'd bought into the false memory theories, causing enormous pain. Politicians. Authors. Doctors. Therapists. Alien abduction victims.
Most terrifying: The justice system operates this way. Once someone is accused of a crime - even under the most bizarre circumstances - the police believe he's guilty of something. Even when the DNA shows someone is innocent, or new evidence reveals the true perpetrator, they hesitate to let the accused person go free.
...
Once we hold a position, say the authors, it's almost impossible to make a change.

Or: how we merely like to convince ourselves about reliability of our memory, how many myths about it & our minds we tend to believe. Not only textbook cognitive biases; also, say, the myth about "monolithic me" while split-brain patients end up virtually unchanged; there's one localized brain trauma which results in people becoming completely blind without them realizing it; popular harmful BS lies of "we're so important, gods love us, more of us live now than have ever lived!" & simply ignoring 100+ billion dead homo sapiens sapiens (at least we will be similarly ignored very quickly, so there's some "balance"); also myths about how decent and freedom loving people we are (a bit sad how our deep need for Just World gets derailed so easily :/ )
How, when people get older, they tend to start believing myths about the greatness of their youth (not the least because it makes us feel better when faced with "frustrating" reality of how much better in fact it is "now", for most cases of "now") - the "good old times" known in written forms since antiquity and which give tiresome political results (being essentially at the core of anti-liberalism; though, on the other side, it's not that much better, with progressivism too often forgetting about good stuff the past has to offer)

What's worse, all this while too many people live in a world of absolute right and wrong. With almost total lack of understanding of risk, statistics. Too stupid to connect their votes with the consequences they suffer.

Ignoring how a good leader is someone who sometimes makes mistakes; who is not perfect but is able to lead in good direction despite the imperfections. Contrast this with the usual rhetoric when people root for their "new mythical hero" and how they present them and their ideologies as perfection. A total BS right at the core of many political movements.

People believing their position in life is due to merit and hard work (despite most not ever doing anything which could be called "hard"), not understanding how it's largely an accident of birth, viewing the poor as lazy and unworthy of success (a view which eases acceptance of actions that maintain this relative social order). Perpetrating the myths of "land of opportunity" or "American Dream" while the actual metric of this stuff, social mobility, places the US at the bottom of developed countries (at the top are, popularly disparaged, so-called "nanny states")
People who will only learn new things if it confirms a pre-existing belief.

Oh, and some of our most lasting

Obama was outspending every President in history (while Bush Jr. - all by himself - increased the national debt by over $5 trillion according to the NY Times).

What's the logic here - Bush was really bad so Obama can't be worse?

I keep wondering how firing a million government employees is going to help create jobs.

First, ask yourself where the money comes from to pay those government employees. Then read some Bastiat (free Kindle edition link) . Here's the Cliff's Notes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window#Bastiat.27s_argument

Probably the best book on security for builders to read is "Security Engineering" by Ross Anderson,

I happen to think that "Software Security" is good too. Then again, I wrote it.

http://www.amazon.com/Software-Security-Building-Gary-McGraw/dp/0321356705/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314456538&sr=8-1

gem

Software Security

http://www.amazon.com/Software-Security-Building-Gary-McGraw/dp/0321356705/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314456538&sr=8-1

gem

The only computers I have run either linux or FreeBSD, so there are no options for netflix for me at the moment.

I take it you don't own a television then, right? Because a Roku is dirt cheap and simple to operate (and linux based ftw). Plus with all the private channels it's really handy.

If the Linux-owning crowd is small, the linux-owning crowd that doesn't have a TV has to be even smaller. That's not to say it's invalid, just that here might be more Amiga users still around.

Huh, you are right. Apparently it aired in the 90s as well on Bravo.

Oh, and by the way, you're welcome. :)

Can you point out one thing that was effectively 'suppressed by the government' in the same manner that you might suggest is commonplace?

I can do better than than. How about a whole book of them?

== Too expensive to monitor and it is kinda hard to tell what website someone is on via a camera that is looking over their shoulder. ==

Especially when they aren't plugged in. Reading is hard.

Also: http://www.amazon.com/SE-Dummy-Security-Camera-Flashing/dp/B000XBMP5E

The movie Ice Station Zebra was nice, but at least reference the book it was based on. http://www.amazon.com/Ice-Station-Zebra-Alistair-MacLean/dp/1402790333/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1316100563&sr=8-4 Especially sense it was just re-released.

Instead of just speculating that I'm overestimating the cost, why not do the math yourself and show us your work?

EC2 pricing is here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

$1.60/hour * 24 hours/day * 169 days = $6489

You could buy a one year reserved instance:

$4290 + $0.56 * 24 hours/day * 164 days = $6494

I used 15 cents/Kwh (which is around what I pay in California). Your local rates will vary, feel free to use your local rate:
650W * 24 Hours/Day * 30 days * $0.15/Kwh = $70.20

The 650W figure is measured power use for a 2 socket Xeon compute node while busy.

I don't think any of the posters recommending EC2 have ever looked at the economics of EC2 versus self-hosting.

If you have long-term compute needs (as opposed to needing to throw lots of cores at a problem to get fast results in a short time), you're better off buying a Dell.

An EC2 Quadruple Extra Large EC2 instance is $1.60/hour. You have around $6500 USD, so you could buy 169 days of computer time at EC2 (ignoring the cost of I/O and network bandwidth).

This instance has 23GB of RAM and is equivalent to 2 x Intel Xeon X5570 CPU's.

For around $5000, you could buy a Dell R710 with dual X5647's, 32GB RAM, RAID-1 1TB SATA drives (depending on your storage needs, you might want to move to faster SAS disks). As long as you have a suitable office to host the server, your only recurring hosting cost is electricity (around $70/month) and maybe you'll need to spend $500 on a UPS. If you need to pay for hosting/colocation somewhere, that will definitely change the economics.

So, with your budget, you get one node + UPS + electricity for a year. All for the price of around 5 months of EC2 time.

You come out ahead even if you want to throw away the server every 6 months and start fresh.

You can save a few bucks by building your own (or going to a custom whitebox builder), but the Dell comes with 3 years of next business day support. Last time I priced out a whitebox builder, they beat Dell's best discounted price by about 10% and only offered a 1 year warranty.

amazon has gpu instances :)

Actually, Amazon now offers instances with GPUs. See their page on High Performance Computing for more details.

for raw horsepower on the short - medium term, use AWS http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

ec2 should do well for this, imho :)

Why not just point people to these?
http://www.amazon.com/HDMI-VGA-HD15-Male-Cable/dp/B001OLCHJ6

Or convince a few suppliers to donate some at-cost?

Thanks for your comments. Glad you liked the post and I hope you look at some of the links.

On the theme you raise, I've also been wondering if many people in the past might have lived longer than we give them credit for, as well (in other words, maybe the infant mortality rates may be off?).

I've seen different estimates of how many people were in North America, so you are right, it might have been higher, although I would think 2 million to 20 million for North American (above Mexico) would be more likely, but I don't know for sure. One source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States
"Estimating the number of Native Americans living in what is today the United States of America before the arrival of the European explorers and settlers has been the subject of much debate. A low estimate of around 1 million was first posited by the anthropologist James Mooney in the 1890s, by calculating population density of each culture area based on its carrying capacity. In 1965, the American anthropologist Henry Dobyns published studies estimating the original population to have been 10 to 12 million. By 1983, he increased his estimates to 18 million.[42] He took into account the mortality rates caused by infectious diseases of European explorers and settlers, against which Native Americans had no immunity. Dobyns combined the known mortality rates of these diseases among native people with reliable population records of the 19th century, to calculate the probable size of the original populations.[4][5]"

The general issue is that the further you go from the equator, the more land per person you need for subsistence for various climate and sunlight reasons. So, one acre might support a person by the equator, but you might need 1000 or more up around Northern Canada.

So, yes, I was going with the low end. Of course, our wilderness is more degraded now, as well. Also, if you add in Mexico and below, I think the total for both continents could have been 100 million or so.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions:
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X
http://www.amazon.com/Conquest-New-Spain-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140441239

Although another aspect of that is that the natural diversity seen in North America of animals during the 1700s and 1800s was also partially a recovery from previously heavy exploitation by natives, who, as you say, often died from introduced disease.

Another angle on that general theme of affluence in the stone age:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

Another related book on the pandemic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

And more on what really happened during the invasion of North America, in the own words of the profit-driven invaders (as well as some accompanying missionaries) who saw the value of the land but not of the alternative society:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html

A related theme from Native Americans:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always en

Thanks for your comments. Glad you liked the post and I hope you look at some of the links.

On the theme you raise, I've also been wondering if many people in the past might have lived longer than we give them credit for, as well (in other words, maybe the infant mortality rates may be off?).

I've seen different estimates of how many people were in North America, so you are right, it might have been higher, although I would think 2 million to 20 million for North American (above Mexico) would be more likely, but I don't know for sure. One source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States
"Estimating the number of Native Americans living in what is today the United States of America before the arrival of the European explorers and settlers has been the subject of much debate. A low estimate of around 1 million was first posited by the anthropologist James Mooney in the 1890s, by calculating population density of each culture area based on its carrying capacity. In 1965, the American anthropologist Henry Dobyns published studies estimating the original population to have been 10 to 12 million. By 1983, he increased his estimates to 18 million.[42] He took into account the mortality rates caused by infectious diseases of European explorers and settlers, against which Native Americans had no immunity. Dobyns combined the known mortality rates of these diseases among native people with reliable population records of the 19th century, to calculate the probable size of the original populations.[4][5]"

The general issue is that the further you go from the equator, the more land per person you need for subsistence for various climate and sunlight reasons. So, one acre might support a person by the equator, but you might need 1000 or more up around Northern Canada.

So, yes, I was going with the low end. Of course, our wilderness is more degraded now, as well. Also, if you add in Mexico and below, I think the total for both continents could have been 100 million or so.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions:
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X
http://www.amazon.com/Conquest-New-Spain-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140441239

Although another aspect of that is that the natural diversity seen in North America of animals during the 1700s and 1800s was also partially a recovery from previously heavy exploitation by natives, who, as you say, often died from introduced disease.

Another angle on that general theme of affluence in the stone age:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

Another related book on the pandemic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

And more on what really happened during the invasion of North America, in the own words of the profit-driven invaders (as well as some accompanying missionaries) who saw the value of the land but not of the alternative society:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html

A related theme from Native Americans:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always en

Thanks for the link and other suggestion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Shark_Hunt

I knew Carter was a farmer and a bit of a nuclear engineer, but I did not know he was a Bob Dylan fan. :-) Although it is an interesting song Carter mentions, a protest song about protest songs, or maybe something more? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie's_Farm

That is a great video on Carter. He really was, morally, the best we could have hoped for as a president. If Carter had gotten four more years, I wonder what our world would be like, as he made mistakes, but might have learned from them?

Don't know if this is true?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise_conspiracy_theory

But in any case, it is sad that such a morel person, Jimmy Carter, lost his bid for re-election in part for blowback for immoral things done by earlier administrations (the original destruction of a democratic government in Iran).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

I had renewable energy newspapers from around 1980-1984 and you could see the change from optimism to despair as Reagan came in and made changes. Otherwise, we might have had this sort of 24 hours a day solar-thermal power plant twenty years ago in the USA:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-gemasolar-solar-thermal-power-hours.html

I fear you may be right about gridlock etc., but I can hope you will be wrong. Maybe we will at least see action at a local level?
http://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Power-Localism-David-Morris/dp/0807008753

See, for optimism:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

In any case, we will see solutions in other countries (including China which is led by a lot of engineers).
http://www.economist.com/node/13496638
"The presence of so many engineer-politicians in China goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking. An engineerâ(TM)s job, at least in theory, is to ensure things work, that the bridge stays up or the dam holds. The process by which projects get built is usually secondary. That also seems true of Chinese politics, in which government often rides roughshod over critics. Engineers are supposed to focus on the long term; buildings have no merit if they will col

http://www.naturalnews.com/030274_Suzanne_Somers_Michael_Douglas.html
http://www.amazon.com/Knockout-Interviews-Doctors-Cancer-Prevent/dp/0307587460

And see my other comments here on vitamin D, iodine, and veggies...

It's maybe more like this?
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

Um, because no retail disk is included on the box anymore?
A whole decade ago "Windows home re-install" has morphed in functionality to
a) "wipe with pirate copy and turn off Windows Update [insecure]"
b) buy retail sat full price. Unlike Win98, Windows XP+ MSRP is not under $199USD unless you go *online* and enjoy a slows wait for shipment.
c) finally, using that OEM DVD-R you were consistently badgered to burn on the original install week... resulting in the same shovelware-ridden factory default you were thinking we could avoid. Some of us like/need our software to be legal, especially when working with paying, lawyer-wielding clients.

Of course they have (at least Amazon has).

http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=amb_link_355831402_8?ie=UTF8&node=2245146011

mentions archive.org, openlibrary.org, Project Gutenberg, and manybooks.net as places to get free books.

The videos can be played on Xbox 360, but they have to be downloaded to your PC first. Instructions for how to do it from amazon.com : http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/xbox

the library lending will probably have a time limit

It does in 30-day increments. There are books already there with a rental options (I've been eyeballing this for a few weeks now):

http://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Concepts-Embedded-Systems-ebook/dp/B003VM7GK6/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1315840111&sr=8-1

The interesting this is the pricing scheme for this book (which I assume will be the same for others):

1. 30-day - $17.24
2. 60-day - $21.55
3. 90-day - $25.35
4. 120-day - $27.46

So, the rental fee decreases over time with an option to buy at any time (and get a price deduction off the purchase price for the rental price paid so far.) Not bad I'd say. This is a model of electronic books I could subscribe to.

120-day $27.46