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I hope that this service is backwards compatible with their existing Kindle devices, making it Amazon Tablet (aPad?) only is going to anger their existing customer base...

Would it not? Amazon provides not just the kindle hardware, but also software-base readers for Windows, iOS, Android and BlackBerry that you can register as your own additional devices. Just yesterday I *pushed* all my kindle books to my newly bought Vizio tablet (which is not a top of the line tablet mind you)... all that done from my Amazon Kindle account.

Amazon has been tentatively made several books available for rental, for example, Li & Yao's "Real-Time Concepts for Embedded Systems", for a bit less than half the full price for a 30-day rental. Not bad I'd say (for those with the discipline to go through what's needed off such a book rental in 30 days.) 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 So the concept works now in both hardware and software-based Kindle readers using existing Kindle services. Making the concept widespread doesn't alter that, so I don't know what the FUD this is all about.

And Samsung TVs. http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/samsung

And other devices, I'm sure.

Yeah. Asking a question and ending with "I refuse to believe the truth!" isn't the best way to go.

Especially when it follows "but this isn't going to sate my needs", like there's some addiction counseling involved.

If you want to do things your way to suit your needs and convenience -- and a MAME cab is the epitome of this philosophy, because most people can't fill their man-cave with a full arcade -- then your hands are going to get dirty. The industry doesn't have an open door policy for DIY geeks.

Having said that, one of the best DIY solutions I've ever seen was a limited run USB cartridge reader, that mounts cartridges as an external drive. Basically letting you jack a cart into the computer without needing to actually dump the ROM. Now that is the cleverest no-piracy route I have seen, but as I said it's not mass produced, so I'm not even going to hunt down the link. Would it solve the OP's problem if the industry would support it? Maybe. But they never will, because there's no protection for them.

This is what the console industry wants you to buy legally. Please note for emphasis that all of these things are inherently incompatible with a "does it all" cabinet.
http://www.amazon.com/Atari-Paddle-Controller-13-Games-Pc/dp/B0001GBRO6
http://www.amazon.com/Atari-280243-Flashback2-Classic-Console/dp/B0050JBHCG
http://www.amazon.com/Intellivision-Greatest-Hits-Pc/dp/B00008OE4Z
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Room
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Console

Yeah. Asking a question and ending with "I refuse to believe the truth!" isn't the best way to go.

Especially when it follows "but this isn't going to sate my needs", like there's some addiction counseling involved.

If you want to do things your way to suit your needs and convenience -- and a MAME cab is the epitome of this philosophy, because most people can't fill their man-cave with a full arcade -- then your hands are going to get dirty. The industry doesn't have an open door policy for DIY geeks.

Having said that, one of the best DIY solutions I've ever seen was a limited run USB cartridge reader, that mounts cartridges as an external drive. Basically letting you jack a cart into the computer without needing to actually dump the ROM. Now that is the cleverest no-piracy route I have seen, but as I said it's not mass produced, so I'm not even going to hunt down the link. Would it solve the OP's problem if the industry would support it? Maybe. But they never will, because there's no protection for them.

This is what the console industry wants you to buy legally. Please note for emphasis that all of these things are inherently incompatible with a "does it all" cabinet.
http://www.amazon.com/Atari-Paddle-Controller-13-Games-Pc/dp/B0001GBRO6
http://www.amazon.com/Atari-280243-Flashback2-Classic-Console/dp/B0050JBHCG
http://www.amazon.com/Intellivision-Greatest-Hits-Pc/dp/B00008OE4Z
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Room
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Console

Yeah. Asking a question and ending with "I refuse to believe the truth!" isn't the best way to go.

Especially when it follows "but this isn't going to sate my needs", like there's some addiction counseling involved.

If you want to do things your way to suit your needs and convenience -- and a MAME cab is the epitome of this philosophy, because most people can't fill their man-cave with a full arcade -- then your hands are going to get dirty. The industry doesn't have an open door policy for DIY geeks.

Having said that, one of the best DIY solutions I've ever seen was a limited run USB cartridge reader, that mounts cartridges as an external drive. Basically letting you jack a cart into the computer without needing to actually dump the ROM. Now that is the cleverest no-piracy route I have seen, but as I said it's not mass produced, so I'm not even going to hunt down the link. Would it solve the OP's problem if the industry would support it? Maybe. But they never will, because there's no protection for them.

This is what the console industry wants you to buy legally. Please note for emphasis that all of these things are inherently incompatible with a "does it all" cabinet.
http://www.amazon.com/Atari-Paddle-Controller-13-Games-Pc/dp/B0001GBRO6
http://www.amazon.com/Atari-280243-Flashback2-Classic-Console/dp/B0050JBHCG
http://www.amazon.com/Intellivision-Greatest-Hits-Pc/dp/B00008OE4Z
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Room
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Console

There was a great book on this that just came out this year. It's titled The Most Human Human.

Both Williams and Atari released PC collections with emulators and the ROM's of the original games. I am not sure they can be extracted for MAME use, nor if it is legal, but it does provide another option. Many other old games have been released in some fashion with the ROM's included.

Both Williams and Atari released PC collections with emulators and the ROM's of the original games. I am not sure they can be extracted for MAME use, nor if it is legal, but it does provide another option. Many other old games have been released in some fashion with the ROM's included.

I'd recommend you read Relics of Eden by Daniel J. Fairbanks. It is a short and very easy read that explains in detail what the DNA differences are between humans and apes, and the kinds of changes that occur when populations split and evolve in new directions.

Downtown cores suck. It's called a concrete jungle for a reason.

Downtown cores suck because they're designed that way, by people who hate them because they've never experienced anything better. Older, highly dense city cores in Europe, on the other hand, don't suck -- because thought was put into their design. Read James Howard Kunstler to find out more.

When I was a kid you'd turn the telly on and see another news report about the IRA blowing up a school or setting off a nail bomb in Soho. It happened too often to stop the country though and America didn't give two shits so the rest of the world didn't say anything. You just got on with it. This country's took a lot from terrorist attacks over the years but September 11th was the first proper kick in the teeth for the previously untouchable Americans who're brainwashed from birth to believe they're the greatest country in the world. That was probably a bigger shock than the lives lost - the fact that someone got to them. This really isn't flamebait so don't consider it as such please. Spare a thought for the lives lost in the attacks yes, but do these people ever spare a thought for the lives lost elsewhere. Those places not in the centre of the universe. http://www.amazon.com/Keep-Calm-Carry-T-Shirt-Red/dp/B004IC0WMM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315749737&sr=8-1

That actually is what architecture as a field largely thinks about these days. For the past 90 years or so, at least since the publication of Le Courbusier's Toward an Architecture (1923) if not earlier, architecture is about constructing spaces that enable and shape living, work and leisure, and what effects architectural choices have on individuals and societies. It is, yes, also about the placement of load-bearing walls and whether to include decorative gargoyles on the pediment, but those aren't the main things architects and architecture ctitics study. So this article's criticism seems pretty directly within scope: how architecture shapes work and the interaction of workers with the society around them.

It doesn't apply to "cases which aren't frivolous?" Awesome, who decides what's frivolous and what's not? I thought I knew frivolous cases from reading newspapers. Then I went to law school and actually read the cases. Give me an example of what you consider a frivolous case.

And court fees are always the domain of the court. I do 8th amendment/1983 actions which allow fee shifting but doesn't require it. What you really want is universal fee shifting. And that's OK, my Advanced Civil Procedure Professor wanted it as well. I just disagreed with the results of such a measure. The UK does have it if you want to see it in practice.

Here's my professor's Amazon page for his books:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=Robert%20Hardaway
No, he couldn't remember anyone's name, but he knows everything about law. Even if he's wrong about universal fee shifting.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000RKABHU/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B001BF70LA&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=072R2NAWYWXWHJMR9QAR

That's a two-fer.

Hearing aids are regulated by the FDA which is why it costs $5k or so in paperwork.

Here is capitalism. It looks like a hearing aid but it is really a sound amplifier so it is not regulated by the FDA. It costs $70.
http://www.amazon.com/Voxom-Hearing-Aid-Sound-Amplifier/dp/B005AM7S3K/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1315622221&sr=8-9

Also some games seem to slow down no matter what computer you run them on. GTA3, GTA:SA and NFS: Undercover all do this if there are too many cars nearby. You can fiddle with the graphics settings all you want, same behavior.

Sounds like it might be a CPU issue, not graphical. I would see the same thing running L4D on my 1201N, the ION was perfectly happy running at reasonable settings, but as soon as a horde came, the poor little Atom N330 choked and I'd be running at 10 FPS, no matter what the graphical settings were.

think about the impact this would have on society if there was truly a way (temporary, harmless) to prevent people from lying.

Already covered http://www.amazon.com/Truth-Machine-James-Halperin/dp/0345412885/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315593348&sr=8-1 Not a bad read. I couldn't suspend my disbeleif regarding the QA on the software.

Mac Minis; Blu-Ray drives: no. USB ports: yes.
just sayin'

when I start reading 1970s porn?

"I'll I need is love"?

I wonder however what the background music will be for some books of the same era, like "The art of computer programming" or "Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics"

Amazon has a presence in every internet connected household in California. Anyone with an internet connection can go to http://amazon.com/ make a purchase and have it delivered to their home in California.

Actually, the courts have already ruled on this issue:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quill_Corp._v._North_Dakota

Quill Corp. went even further than Amazon -- people actually installed Quill's software on their computers to check the inventory. The real question that needs to be answered here is to what extend the physical location of Amazon's subsidiaries affects the legal ability of the state of California to impose a tax on Amazon itself.

Amazon has a presence in every internet connected household in California. Anyone with an internet connection can go to http://amazon.com/ make a purchase and have it delivered to their home in California. To argue that Amazon does not have a "presence" is false. They are just as much in California as a store in the mall, or a liquor store on the corner.

As soon as people have to physically leave California to buy something from Amazon then Amazon can start making arguments about not being "in California".

This is a trivial matter for Amazon and the state to deal with. At the time of purchase, Amazon can check the zip code of the delivery location and tax the purchase according to where it is being delivered to. Now, if someone wants to purchase something in California and dodge a percent of two of sales tax by having it delivered to Nevada, let them. Those who live on the border of Oregon can dodge the tax completely. Of course, they will have to pay for a PO box, and then pay for gas to go pick it up.

Take a look at Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective by Diomidis Spinellis. I've had a copy on my shelf for years. He covers C++ along with other common languages, and has examples from both very large and small programs.

I suggest the book: Build Your Own Flight Simulator in C++
I read a version of it over ten years ago, and it helped me keep a perspective on projects.
All the code is spoon fed to you.

Check it out at
http://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Own-Flight-Sim/dp/1571690220

I skipped right past TFS and into the inevitable flamewar and never bothered to notice that the blogger in question is Umair Haque, author of The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. Haque is unapologetically pro-capitalism, and his book (which I'm reading now) is about the changes needed to make it a permanently-sustainable, society-lifting system without the government having to step in and tear it all apart.

Are you the same Eben Upton who co-wrote the excellent Oxford Rhyming Dictionary ? If so, how'd you like that gig compared to your usual, more techie types of endeavors?

1992: James P. Hogan, Giant's Star

I said that e-ink was probably a better option, because the reader could use less power when a distracted kid leaves it turned on. Now, there's hope for the benefits of both!

The problem with e-ink is that, so far, it won't display multimedia files (video) that a lot of ebooks are starting to come out with. See Amazon

Neat. Quite right - less than half the price and more effective. This ACR seems to be well-reviewed in general (though all I know about them I learned in the last 10 minutes).

So can you rent the botnet, and run a program that disinfects the botnet systems?

No, it'd probably just disinfect the inside of the virtual machine that the botnet has installed. Or at least that's how it'd be if the botnet is as professional as Amazon's EC2 botnet.

No, it's not. Have you ever heard of the famous novel "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac?
"Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951, in an apartment on West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him. Typed out as one long, single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper that he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll, this document is among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history. It represents the first full expression of Kerouac's revolutionary aesthetic, the identifiable point at which his thematic vision and narrative voice came together in a sustained burst of creative energy. It was also part of a wider vital experimentation in the American literary, musical, and visual arts in the post-World War II period."
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Original-Scroll-Jack-Kerouac/dp/067006355X

I live in Maine and insulation is a big thing here in the winter. Buy one of these http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-TLD100-Thermal-Detector/dp/B001LMTW2S Go around the school, or class room and look for thermal leaks, ask students to find ways to solve these leaks. You can even map out areas that are most common to thermal leaks.

Parent is absolutely correct. I have several ebooks from O'Rielly that have footnotes throughout that link to notes at the end of the chapter. They all have forward and back references. The Kindle handles them perfectly. Select it from text, and it goes to the note; select the note, and it goes to the text. Easy to bounce back and forth (easier than manually page flipping a real book to find the end of chapter).

The kindle also gained page number support (on supporting books). If the ebook was designed with page numbers in it, you can easily jump to a page number (and/or character offset). So if the note only references a page number, use the "menu->go to->page number" option. I'll admit, that *may* be a little slower than thumbing through a book, but not significantly. Again, the fault of the ebook publisher if they don't include the page number support.

FWIW, here's an example of a book with page number support: http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-ebook/dp/B000FC11A6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1315318756&sr=1-1

In the product details:
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0380788624

I love that they list the ISBN the page numbers come from, so you have a physical version to compare with.

I always wanted to be called to testify in court, so I could bring my own bible to swear myself in with!

The best way to make something invisible is to look in the same direction your observer is looking, and draw a picture of what you see on the side of yourself that faces the observer.

Prohibitive on a lightweight low-power aircraft with the materials and computational power available in 1989, but the gap between technothriller and public availability is holding consistent at about 20 years.

...and coupled with Kernighan and Pike's The Practice of Programming .

About half of the book was devoted to debugging, and it is my personal surmise that the book was originally entitled "How to Debug Macintosh Software" and that the publishers made him change it.

I didn't know about Knaster's book, but looking it up on Amazon is see that at least the second and third editions (1988 and 1992) were subtitled "The Debugging Reference for the Macintosh", so your comment may be spot on.

Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming. They call it the new SICP book. I only read the first 50 pages, but it's quite intresting read. It covers parallel programming, constraint programming, and old lispy topics as well, like program transformation.

http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Techniques-Models-Computer-Programming/dp/0262220695

Yeah, this analysis goes back to analysis of TV, and is around 40 years old at least. A 1973 broadcast by artist Richard Serra, entitled "Television Delivers People" is one early use of the concept:

The product of television, commercial television, is the audience.

Television delivers people to an advertiser.

[...]

You are the product of T.V.

You are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer.

He consumes you.

The viewer is not responsible for programming--

You are the end product.

(For those interested, he discusses the concept and the reaction it got when it was actually broadcast on TV in this book.)

You forgot Forth on the Atari.

This seems like an eminently appropriate architectural allusion for the 'late-Lucas' period of Lucasfilms' work...

It's telling that the inspiration for this building is an idea over 35 years old. And it came from the mind of Ralph McQuarrie, not Lucas.

Although mine didn't have exactly the same cover:
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-6502-Rodnay-Zaks/dp/0895880466

A fantastically to-the-point and useful book. In -84, -85.
Or whatever year it was, I don't remember. To me it felt like opening a treasure chest.

I love this one >> Kindle, Wi-Fi, 6" E Ink Pearl Display

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs

http://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Structures-Prentice-Hall-Automatic-Computation/dp/0130224189

Slightly more practical than the Knuth books (though replacing MIX with Pascal doesn't increase the opportunities for cut-and-paste coding).

And as an added bonus, no mention of the dreaded words "design pattern" in the entire text.

Principles of Operating Systems by Sacha Krakowiak.
Because it is important to understand the general principles of operating systems (parallel activities, synchronization, resource allocation, memory management...) when programming.

http://www.amazon.com/Dating-Design-Patterns-Solveig-Haugland/dp/0974312002/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315193378&sr=8-1
_Dating_ Design Patterns.

Hah, all the other people are mentioning more recent books books. When I was ten years old I picked up "Programming the The IBM 1620: The Hands-On Approach" (by Eric A Weiss, publisher McGraw-Hill, 1965) at the local library. It started with teaching the 1620 machine language, then assembly, then Fortran I, all with punched cards and/or teletype. It hooked me on computers and I couldn't wait to get my mitts on one. At twelve I was programming the Z-80 in a TRS-80 in assembler (didn't care for BASIC). Recently I saw that book on eBay and bought it, it still gives me metaphorical "geek wood".

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-IBM-1620-hands-McGraw-Hill/dp/B0006BN00K - just $5 used, what a bargain!

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs by Niklaus Wirth

I read this book back in the late 1970's. (I was still in High School where we had time-shared access to a PDP/11-70 running RSTS/E. Programming was in Basic-Plus. To put this in perspective, this was the same time frame as the TRS-80, TI 99/4A, and Commodore PET!) Our SysOp at SPHS saw my voracious appetite for all things computing and STRONGLY encouraged me to get and read this book. (Thanks Mike!) But enough with the background!

This book made an indelible impression on me. It introduced different approaches to tackle problems (algorithms) and different ways of organizing the information I had available (data structures). But, most importantly, it encouraged me to iterate between the Data and the Code to find a reasonably optimal synthesis of the two.

Prior to this, my experience with data structures had been limited to "scalars" (integers, floating point, and some character strings) and multi-dimensional arrays. It was a real eye-opener to be exposed to structured records as well as linked lists and trees!

Similarly, my coding experience was limited to combinations of the usual control structures of sequences, conditional statements, looping, and subroutines/functions. Did I ever struggle trying to understand recursion!

Then, toss in a generous helping of structured programming and step-wise refinement. This single work completely transformed my perspective on programming, its challenges, and its promises... I was hooked for good!

Amazon Link. Prentice-Hall 1975; ISBN 0-13-022418-9; 366 pages, 102 figures.

I later had the good fortune to read a number of the other books recommended here, K&R, TAOCP, Mythical Man Month, and I'd highly recommend those, as well. Nevertheless, I read Wirth's A+DS=P first, and it's made a world of difference in my life.

For me it was and will be Dromey's How to Solve it by Computer

Unlocked a gold mine for me.

http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Assembly-Language-Programming-Allen/dp/1565290372

Mod parent up. Maybe not the most influential, but it should damn well be one of the most. Especially useful as it is language agnostic, and the lessons learned are timeless.

I also loved the succinct density of "Computer Science: An Overview" by Brookshear. Best way to learn computer science in a single book.

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Science-Overview-Glenn-Brookshear/dp/0132569035/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315187835&sr=8-1