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Solutions depend upon the exact nature of the RSI. Common locations are wrist or elbow, usually on the right.

One classic aid would be trackballs...

Logitech Trackman Wheel Optical (Silver)
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Trackman-Wheel-Optical-Silver/dp/B00005NIMJ/ref=sr_1_17?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1286280359&sr=1-17

Ione Scorpius 35PRO USB Mechanical Trackball Keyboard
http://www.amazon.com/Scorpius-35PRO-Mechanical-Trackball-Keyboard/dp/B000UC3EXI

Another possible option is a "hulapoint" device, which is similar to a thumbpad. These tend to be popular in industrial and rugged applications, so may be expensive for home.
http://www.cyberresearch.com/store/lcd-monitors-displays-keyboards-kvm-switches/mouse-trackballs-pointing-devices-touchpads/OIX_4310-U_6096.2.htm

Another option would be a very different mouse:
3M Ergonomic Mouse
http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ergonomics/home/products/ergonomicmouse/

Another possible option is a frogpad (look at both right and left models).
http://www.frogpad.com/

Solutions depend upon the exact nature of the RSI. Common locations are wrist or elbow, usually on the right.

One classic aid would be trackballs...

Logitech Trackman Wheel Optical (Silver)
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Trackman-Wheel-Optical-Silver/dp/B00005NIMJ/ref=sr_1_17?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1286280359&sr=1-17

Ione Scorpius 35PRO USB Mechanical Trackball Keyboard
http://www.amazon.com/Scorpius-35PRO-Mechanical-Trackball-Keyboard/dp/B000UC3EXI

Another possible option is a "hulapoint" device, which is similar to a thumbpad. These tend to be popular in industrial and rugged applications, so may be expensive for home.
http://www.cyberresearch.com/store/lcd-monitors-displays-keyboards-kvm-switches/mouse-trackballs-pointing-devices-touchpads/OIX_4310-U_6096.2.htm

Another option would be a very different mouse:
3M Ergonomic Mouse
http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ergonomics/home/products/ergonomicmouse/

Another possible option is a frogpad (look at both right and left models).
http://www.frogpad.com/

I thought (perhaps erroneously?) that the number after a monarch's name was the number of monarchs of that name that have ruled a particular country. Wouldn't that make Elizabeth QE II of the UK, but QE I of Canada?

From Wikipedia:

After the Canadian colonies of France were, via war and treaties, ceded to the British Crown, and the population was greatly expanded by those loyal to George III fleeing north from persecution during and following the American Revolution, British North America was in 1867 confederated by Queen Victoria to form Canada as a kingdom in its own right. By the end of the First World War, the increased fortitude of Canadian nationalism inspired the country's leaders to push for greater independence from the King in his British Council, resulting in the creation of the uniquely Canadian monarchy through the Statute of Westminster, which was granted Royal Assent in 1931.

By way of example, Louis VIII of France was also known, albeit more obscurely, as Louis I of England, which he actually did rule for around one year, May 1216 to August 1217. This was in between the unpopular John of England and the more familiar Henry III. Terry Jones (yes, that Terry Jones) makes a fun and well-annotated argument for recognizing King Louis the First in his book, Medieval Lives. More also over at Wikipedia.

Cheers,

A quick google shows how absurd virtually everything you wrote is.

In the U.S. Constitution there is no 'right' to free speech, only a limitation on who may create laws on speech.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

If you would like to see corporations have their 'speech' limited, then support the Constitution.

And to those who will argue that the 14th amendment applies to the first amendment, please read Government by Judiciary by (liberal) Raoul Berger.

I just download all my audio data straight through amazon or whatever.

So once you've created audio data, I understand that you archive the files for the project in your Amazon S3 account. However, you still "bear sole responsibility for adequate security, protection and backup of Your Content" according to Amazon S3's TOS because Amazon could shut down your S3 account at any time when the bean-counters "determine that it is necessary or prudent to do so for legal or regulatory reasons," that is, when laws change such that S3 can no longer make a profit.

As a Brit, I follow the US space programme with intereset, because it's the best hope the human race has for getting off this rock.

Sadly, I don't quite agree. I think the best hope comes from the private companies like SpaceX, Armadillo Aerospace, and the like.

The Space Shuttle was not safe enough and not reusable enough. It could carry large payloads to low orbit, infrequently, and it had only about a 99% chance of not killing everyone on board. And sadly, I have no reason to think that any new orbiter built by NASA would really be better. (And I mean actually built, as opposed to studying it for a while and then not building anything.)

What we really need is a "space pickup truck", a vehicle that can carry a small payload to orbit, then return and do it again with minimum turnaround time. The space shuttle took massive amounts of labor to service between flights, while a 747 lands, gets refueled, and takes off again; we need a vehicle more like a 747. Yes, this is harder for a spacecraft than an airplane, but it has to be possible to do better than the Space Shuttle.

Implied in this concept is that the vehicle can't have large pieces falling off and burning up. Ideal would be single stage to orbit, but two stage to orbit might be required in the early days. Again, a huge Space Shuttle sized payload is not required; four passengers and 1000 kg of cargo is plenty. (You would sometimes want a heavy lift launch, but there are non-reusable launchers already existing that would serve.)

Once we have several companies with reliable, reusable vehicles, the cost to get people and satellites and such into orbit will plummet, and the really exciting stuff could happen. Build a real space station, with large fuel tanks; build a "moon shuttle" that never needs to do anything other than go between the Earth and the moon, and moon travel could become routine. Once you are in Earth orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the solar system.

Here's how you get a meaningful presence in space: build something that works, fly it. Learn how to build a better one, build that, fly it. Repeat. Once that iterative cycle gets going, we will get launch vehicles far better than anything NASA will come up with. (The modern NASA, I mean. NASA used to know how to do this! They put men on the moon with an iterative cycle like I just described: they started with simple rockets, pretty much just V2s, then iterated until they knew how to build the Saturn V. Then, for some reason, NASA decided they didn't need to iterate at all for the Space Shuttle; they designed the whole thing on paper, built it, done. I'm amazed it worked as well as it did, given the complete lack of iteration.)

Ideally, I'd like to see some sort of space cannon to deliver things like oxygen, dried food, jet fuel, and the like. Something that can send a lot of stuff up really cheaply.

The exciting future of space travel will come when space travel becomes boringly routine. I look forward to the day when we start to need space traffic controllers, to make sure that none of the several spacecraft in orbit get in each others' way.

steveha

It would have been nice if your review had compared other books on the same topic so I could know which is best to get.

I think you want to reference the latest edition of that book which is also the Third Edition and also based on the 2.6 kernel. The book you linked is from 2000 and based on 2.3 I believe.

It appears that the O'Reilly book focuses more on the tiny implementation details while Love's book has more theory. The O'Reilly book is more than twice as long as Love's book. The O'Reilly book was also published in November 2005 so I doubt it would have anything on the Completely Fair Scheduler or any advancements since then.

I wish I had more time to give you a better review but the fact is that I'm new to this stuff and this is the only book I've read devoted solely to the Linux Kernel. The Love book is a solid book though (hence the 10/10) and if you're looking for a current Linux guide, it's probably the newest.

I know it's a joke, but there's good evidence that vegetarians can actually have more energy than meat eaters. For example, I heard an interview with Tony Gonzalez where he talked about his conversion to becoming a vegetarian. He even wrote a book about the first steps (he's since become 100% vegetarian.)

If a pro-bowl NFL player can increase his performance by switching to a vegetarian diet, it kinda disproves the basis for you joke.

http://www.amazon.com/software-business-education-finance-childrens/b/ref=sa_menu_sw4?ie=UTF8&node=229534

Apparently lots of them. Big names too.

You can buy antibiotics for animals OTC: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000ALFCIO/

Same stuff you'll get from a pharmacy with a prescription.

Hawking is essentially saying that there very well may not be one single theory which explains everything. Instead, there may be a bunch of theories, each of which is valid only in certain areas, and which agree with one another where they overlap, even without a global solution.

This is consistent with Hawking's history of repeating old and not necessarily very good philsophy, although I'll take Cartwright over Hume (whom Hawking swallows whole in "A Brief History of Time") any day:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Laws-Physics-Nancy-Cartwright/dp/0198247044

Cartwright's suggestion, based on nothing much, is that there may not be any theory of everything, and that the laws of physics may look more like a bunch of slim volumes on specific topics rather than one big book.

Cartwright's book was published getting on for thirty years ago.

You can't be socialist without also being a fascist in the end. How else to implement the controls over people Socialism deems best for them?

Read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0385511841

that it is simpler to use a new equation with a couple new terms, than to actually describe just how trillions of interactions end up with a different dynamic than thousands

It might be simpler to use that new equation, but it isn't strictly correct, and it doesn't necessarily help us at all in understanding what's really going on under the hood. The new equation is only an approximation to the real behaviour which is the trillions of real interactions, and like all approximations, is only valid under certain conditions.

and that you can't always guess the new dynamics just by working with the previous equations.

Sure you can - you just need to actually run those interactions instead of handwaving them away with an approximation.

Of course, that's not terribly useful for scientists - or even mathematicians - whose work does revolve around making approximations in order to reduce the amount of observations needed and the time taken to make the calculations. Approximations are useful as long as we keep them in their place.

But we should always be very clear that when we approximate, we are throwing away large parts of reality, not literally describing it, and that an approximation is never the same thing as the actual truth of what is going on.

The universe does not approximate, it just brute-force runs the trillions of calculations and gives us the actual result. If we wish to say that 'emergent behaviour' appears at large scales, that's not literally true - the behaviour of the universe hasn't changed at all. It's only our perception of new phenomena, an approximation, which is new.

This is what Alfred Korzybski kept going on about, and his message still doesn't seem to have sunk in: that whatever we say the universe is, it is not, because any symbolic formula must be smaller than the phenomenon it describes in order to be a useful 'map' - but because it's smaller, it's also less true, because it's a lossy compression.

It's not that we can't use approximations to help us predict the universe - but that we should always realise that our approximations will lead us astray if we try to apply them in realms where they do not match actual reality. And we can't really ever be entirely sure where those boundaries are.

It might be true, as the theory-of-everything seekers hope, that the universe is at base a sort of finite-state automaton where each cell strictly follows a single, small equation, maybe applied to only one bit of data. But equally, it might not be true. The universe might be, as Leibniz and David Bohm thought, a sort of holographic Indra's Net where every 'atom' subtly reflects or enfolds the totality of the whole, and in that case, we'd never be able to literally describe its behaviour by any equation smaller than the universe. We might often be able to approximate parts of it with small equations - but on the boundary of those parts, we'd get strange, unpredictable phenomena.

Some might say that we do experience just such phenomena when we investigate consciousness.

When I was a kid, I made gunpowder by:

  - grinding up sulfur candles purchased from the local store
  - making charcoal by charring wood on a small fire outside
  - making saltpeter from cow manure from local fields

So get your kid a book like:

http://www.amazon.com/Do---Yourself-Gunpowder-Cookbook/dp/0873646754/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285872731&sr=1-1

Depressingly, we'll never get there. At least not without some fundamental breakthrough in our understanding of physics and the technology of propulsion. Without a non-reactive means of propulsion, we are stuck in this solar system because there is simply not enough baryonic matter in the universe to provide the reaction mass necessary to travel even to Proxima Centauri within a human lifetime. (Unsure of the citation, but try here or perhaps here.)

Note the qualification of "within a human lifetime," (subjective, of course). The author of the second reference, Dr. Forward, has proposed a plausible means of propulsion using beamed photons and "sails," but there are still some huge hurdles to overcome (e.g., deceleration at your destination), and the mission duration is measured in units of centuries.

We have a long, long, LONG way to go - both literally and figuratively - before humans travel to other stars. So the search for terrestrial planets will remain an academic exercise far into the forseeable future.

Depressingly, we'll never get there. At least not without some fundamental breakthrough in our understanding of physics and the technology of propulsion. Without a non-reactive means of propulsion, we are stuck in this solar system because there is simply not enough baryonic matter in the universe to provide the reaction mass necessary to travel even to Proxima Centauri within a human lifetime. (Unsure of the citation, but try here or perhaps here.)

Note the qualification of "within a human lifetime," (subjective, of course). The author of the second reference, Dr. Forward, has proposed a plausible means of propulsion using beamed photons and "sails," but there are still some huge hurdles to overcome (e.g., deceleration at your destination), and the mission duration is measured in units of centuries.

We have a long, long, LONG way to go - both literally and figuratively - before humans travel to other stars. So the search for terrestrial planets will remain an academic exercise far into the forseeable future.

The original idea isn't bad. Corporations are supposed to exist to shield investors in a company from liability created by its officers.

Actually, in the US, the original idea of a corporation was that they had to serve the public good. Every 20 years, the corporate charter was reviewed by the secretary of state. If the corporation was no longer serving the public good, its charter was revoked and the corporation was no more. See Thom Hartmann's Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights for the whole history.

Why is this guy labeled a troll? It's no secret that the Israelis have forced the Palestinians into ghettos for decades now (a sad irony considering that many of the Jews who did this had themselves had just come from the jewish ghettos of Germany), and that bigotry on both sides pervades the country. Even many jews admit as much, and condemn the radical Zionists who would gladly plow over the Palestinians as if they were animals. I'm no fan of the Palestinians either, BTW, but I'm under no illusions that Israel is just filled with a bunch of innocent, noble, oppressed Jews just trying to living in fucking harmony with the world.

Think I just answered one of my own questions:

http://www.amazon.com/Bike-Handlebar-Holder-Mount-System/dp/B004424STO/ref=sr_1_1?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1285720710&sr=8-1

Given that the printing press at the FED is in overdrive, it is very likely that the dollar will accelerate its decline in the next few years. Every dollar printed, does not create purchasing power, it simply dilutes the purchasing power of all the existing dollars out there.

Why do you link to BASE but not M1 or M2? M2, in particular, is a better representation of the money supply, and if you look at M2, you'd see that it doesn't look so ridiculous (although there is high growth). BASE is going up very fast to offset the reduction from the non-BASE parts of the money supply...

The FED purposely stopped publishing the M3, so they are hiding much of the non-BASE parts of the money supply.

If you want, go with the True Money Supply as invented by Rothbard, which takes into account demand deposits and avoids double counts that the M3 does. You are right it is not quite as dramatic, but it is still telling. The BASE is what the FED produces essentially, at some point the fractional reserve will kick in and you will see the corresponding inflation of M3 and TMS.

One more thing:

Because as the dollar continues to lose value against gold at roughly 20% in the last 5 years (actually more like 10 years but that is not displayed on that web site), anyone getting 1.75% interest on a CD or 2.5% on a T-bill is an idiot.

Sure, until the gold bubble bursts. A CD or a T-bill has a lot less risk than gold.

They have been talking about the gold bubble since it was at 400, it is not even close to its peak in 1980 at $2000 adjusted for inflation. When people start saying gold can never go down just like they did with houses, that is when I will believe there is a bubble.

Quite to the contrary, T-bill are artificially expensive, propped up by a FED printing money to buy them, and chinese and japanese governments obsessed with buying them. But our deficit and obligations are just as bad or worse than Greece's. You want a bubble? we are living it, the T-bill bubble is the mother of all bubbles. Once it bursts, expect higher taxes (government can not borrow, so it must confiscate) and high inflation (government can not borrow, so it must print money). This incidentally is very bullish for gold.

Get this book if you want an entry level on how the economy works.

Buying from a vending machine is great for people like me. Getting gold from a dealer is a pain, they have high premiums, and you have to pay for shipping. A vending machine would hopefully eliminate some of the premium being paid for shipping and handling, as well as allow me to go locally.

The first thing that came to mind for me when I read the summary was Interface by Neal Stephenson. It also comes to the conclusion that there are dangers associated with implanting microchips in people's brains.

The really scary thing is just how broad the reach of the NSA really is. I read James Bamford's The Shadow Factory a while back and was shocked at how little I appreciated what they could (and routinely do) really do. Basically, if you make a phone call to any of the targeted regions (Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc.), the NSA is recording it--whether it's by cell, landline, or satellite (they have agreements with all the major satellite communications companies). Doesn't matter if you're a terrorist or not, they're monitoring you and archiving all your calls, period (they've even been transcribing the calls of U.S. journalists to their families, prompting at least one operative to quit the agency).

I was particularly surprised to learn that they routinely monitor the calls of the major UN officials and all the other security council members (they've bugged the shit out of the UN building and associated offices too). During the buildup to the Iraq War, when Collin Powell was getting ready to "make his case" for the war, they were carefully monitoring the calls and emails of all the permanent and non-permanent security council members, including the Secretary-General of the UN himself. They even sent out a memo to the intelligence services of several of our closest allies (the UK and associated countries) asking them to help us out on the spying (though we were even spying on them too). Pretty creepy stuff, especially for anyone who still foolishly doubts that the Iraq War was anything but a foregone conclusion for the Bush administration.

If you're going to take Android's route, and you need just one book I recommend this.

Just a FYI, there's a 'second edition' of that book out. The first version reviewers mentioned allot of errata, which the second edition should in theory have most of the errata removed.

Unfortunately, amazon.com isn't currently selling it, only the first version.

A little Etching Cream would render these useless fairly easily. And I would imagine the repair to be rather expensive.

watching Sony waste time, money while losing customers is entertaining

This is fantasy.

The reality is sales of 39.1 million units.

50 million PlayStation Network accounts.

14 million PlaystationHome social networking accounts. PlayStation Network

The PlayStation MOVE starter sets and MOVE controllers rank #4, #7, #12, and #36 in video game sales at Amazon.com.

"Civilization V" ranks #2 and "Halo: Reach" #1. If you understand the strengths of the PC platform, you can still make your mark in the top ten. Bestsellers In Video Games (Updated hourly)

If you're talking about the old PalmOS. The original Palm company was sold to 3M with the provision that Handspring (composed of the people who originally built and ran Palm) would get a license to continue building products with it. Third parties were never allowed to produce PalmOS devices.

Palm was initially independent, then bought by US Robotics, and was sold to 3com (not 3M). Handspring wasn't founded until about a year after the 3com acquisition. Eventually, Palm was spun off on its own again, Handspring was recombined, then Palm split into separate hardware and software groups, and then reuinited. Most recently, the mess was bought by HP.

Meanwhile, even Fossil once made a wristwatch that ran PalmOS. They even, allegedly, sold some at some point. Others have provided additional references to other PalmOS devices produced by third parties.

Other than that, your paragraph is spot-on!

What's this IR thermometer w/laser pointer gadget??

It's a thermometer that measures temperature via IR (from a distance). It has a laser pointer so that you know the approximate location of where you are taking the temperature. I first learned about them from cooking shows, but they have automotive and other applications. (I'm just wondering if I can point mine at a set of CFL lightbulbs and detect issues by noticing that a particular lightbulb has a higher temp than the rest.)

Here's one example (I just picked a random one): http://www.amazon.com/IRT0421-Non-Contact-Infrared-Thermometer-Targeting/dp/B0017L9Q9C/ref=sr_1_2?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1285477019&sr=8-2

This is the only cable you should ever use to cable your ethernet-enabled turntable to your McIntosh amp...

Four dead in Ohio. There's also the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s, the labor movement, the Trail of Tears, and a few other odd highlights. I'd suggest picking up a copy of Lies My Teacher Told Me or Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

When I bought the PS3, it had OtherOS and was not as locked down. They changed all that after purchase, which is ridiculous and I haven't bought any more PS3 games.

The PS2 "Slim" [2004] also ditched expansion options and the OtherOS. Something that seems to have been forgotten in the geek's nerd rage.

It retails for $100 and weighs 1.3 lbs.

The video game console is a social experience.

It is shared with your family and connects to the 60" Panasonic.

The geek has no leverage.

No firmware upgrades means no new Blu-Ray videos.

Try selling that idea to your wife and your kids when they spot the next Pixar flick on the shelves at WalMart.

No Red Dead Redemption. No MOVE. No 3D. No download content. No video on demand. No PlaystationHome. Social networking and gaming for 14 million.
       

If you're going to take Android's route, and you need just one book I recommend this. I'm managing a team of three Android developers and this is one book everybody in the team is fighting for! Don't look at the title, you can start learning Android with it.

Try with LP

I get 15 results...

    All it would require would be something like this or this. Basically a check valve. It flaps open when the air flow is going the correct way, and slaps shut when it's going the other way.

    At $100 (parts and labor in USD) across their 300 stores, that would only cost $30,000. That's a lot cheaper than the $673,750 (USD)

Depending on your situation, some of the 802.11g phones are pretty good and avoid all the hassle of carrier restrictions. They work at work and at home, where else do you ever go? My campus is working with the city right now to roll out WAPs on telephone poles in the vicinity, extending our wifi fabric out into the nearby streets. With WiMax coming out, this is looking like a practical alternative to cell providers in the near future.

Examples: Cisco WIP310, Linksys by Cisco WIP330, D-Link DPH-541, Alfa Color wireless VoIP (Sorry for the Amazon links, couldn't find some manufacturer pages quickly)

Depending on your situation, some of the 802.11g phones are pretty good and avoid all the hassle of carrier restrictions. They work at work and at home, where else do you ever go? My campus is working with the city right now to roll out WAPs on telephone poles in the vicinity, extending our wifi fabric out into the nearby streets. With WiMax coming out, this is looking like a practical alternative to cell providers in the near future.

Examples: Cisco WIP310, Linksys by Cisco WIP330, D-Link DPH-541, Alfa Color wireless VoIP (Sorry for the Amazon links, couldn't find some manufacturer pages quickly)

Steven Hawking argued in his book The Grand Design that people have no more free will than machines. The problem is that people (and likewise, most life) are so complex that the ability to map their actions is just unavailable to us now.

He claims, the argument on whether or not people have free will is irrelevant. The term "Free Will" is analogous to Nondeterministic. Which is to say - keeping in mind that there is no true randomness in a computer - that there is no randomness in life either, we only lack the ability to map all the variables, and calculate the results (emotion, action, etc). Every experience we have had in the past, all come together to form the basis of your reactions today.

I like to take it a little further and claim - as our technological abilities as a species advance, the line we draw as to what has free will be moved. As of today, I don't think many people claim viruses has free will - but more might say that bacteria do... or plants, or ants, mice, birds, etc. These lines we draw might soon enough begin approaching people.

Likewise, computers are in the process of extending past our line to model them.

Maybe they already are.

He now does commonsense-reasoning stuff at IBM Research using formal logic, but back in his grad-school days, Erik Mueller wrote a thesis on building a computational model of daydreaming.

If it's about text books

If it's about textbook, follow the Japanese model. They give students short paperback texts, 80-120 pages, that lasts 6 to 8 week in their subject instead of a heavy, intimidating tome that contains way too much information for the scope of the class. While we're at it, a state or nation can probably hire someone to write these books, someone to illustrate, and someone to edit it. Get feedback from teachers, and make necessary changes the next time around. (Instead of aesthetic, which textbook publishers do.) It will be all in public domain. States and nation will be able to copy off each other freely.

Even if the don't do it this way, short paperbacks are much cheaper. Look at the Schaum Outlines:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_9?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=schaum+outline+series&x=0&y=0&sprefix=schaum+ou

They usually contain as much info as a textbook, lack a little handholding explanation sometimes but cost only $12-13 on average. A six to eight week text should be much less. I wish wikibook would take off, but I think they need to start giving a financial incentive for it really to take off.

Kindles and iPads are both gadgets. Gadgets are okay but they not the solution here. Plus, with kids and bullies, they break. I would prefer the iPad, I owned a kindle and I hated it -- all it does is read novel at bad contrast. At least with an iPad, I could see someone developing a Rosetta Stone like software in the future, but for all topics, which imo, is the way to go. Plus the school could send out schedules and grades on it. But I think that's years away so it's all moot.

Is why I have a Gerber Mk II and a Gerber Evo Jr.

>>>Everyone you've ever known could be lieing to you.

I still don't believe the United States of Europe exists. http://www.amazon.com/United-States-Europe-Superpower-Supremacy/

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-ML-2851ND-Network-Ready-Monochrome-Printer/dp/B000XZ1LJG

Well under $200 mono laser, supports auto duplexing, network printing. Threw in some old laptop RAM for the lulz.

In Ubuntu Gnome under System | Administration | Printing, I just pointed it to the printer's IP address, and it was done! Even easier than trying to install the Windows driver.

Speaking of creating jobs, what's taking them so long?

I'm not really sure who you're referring to when you say "them", but Amazon is actively hiring, and so is Microsoft...

Well, I don't send packages nearly as often as I receive them, and I don't know anyone who takes them other than recycling. So they're not really reusable in a practical sense. I've got more them than I can find a use for.

You can refill plastic water bottles too, but most people don't.

I was thinking "reusable" more along the lines of http://tote.amazon.com/

Yes, and next time I need a doctor, I'll be sure to see an amateur, as well.

Would you let Colbert, Stewart and/or Beck operate on you? Diagnose your medical problems? Write your compiler?

Politics is a specialized field just like the ones mentioned above.

I'm sorry if you can't be bothered to crack a book, or even do a little background research, but there's a reason we esteem some thinkers over others.

It's not that hard to be a funnyman.

To be a profound political thinker or leader? Harder.

So if you can't turn off the TV long enough to find some reputable sources, I'm very sorry for you, but I have no need to follow you in your error.

If your coders are in a theater troop in their spare time, they shouldn't be allowed to write mission-critical code, because actors shouldn't be allowed to do that.

You wouldn't do so well in a political science class making logical fallacies like that. Hobbies are clearly different than vocations, don't you think?

If your paycheck says "make jokes", then anything you do that isn't a joke should be ignored.

If your paycheck says "entertainer," I'm going to go to the professionals instead for political information.

Would you take political opinions from Britney Spears?

Yes, and next time I need a doctor, I'll be sure to see an amateur, as well.

Would you let Colbert, Stewart and/or Beck operate on you? Diagnose your medical problems? Write your compiler?

Politics is a specialized field just like the ones mentioned above.

I'm sorry if you can't be bothered to crack a book, or even do a little background research, but there's a reason we esteem some thinkers over others.

It's not that hard to be a funnyman.

To be a profound political thinker or leader? Harder.

So if you can't turn off the TV long enough to find some reputable sources, I'm very sorry for you, but I have no need to follow you in your error.

If your coders are in a theater troop in their spare time, they shouldn't be allowed to write mission-critical code, because actors shouldn't be allowed to do that.

You wouldn't do so well in a political science class making logical fallacies like that. Hobbies are clearly different than vocations, don't you think?

If your paycheck says "make jokes", then anything you do that isn't a joke should be ignored.

If your paycheck says "entertainer," I'm going to go to the professionals instead for political information.

Would you take political opinions from Britney Spears?

The book goes into some detail about the environment, the management style (both local and at "HQ" back in NY state), and all the great inventions that came out of there. And also of PARC's decline in the mid-to-late 1980's. I really wish I could have been a fly on the wall back in those days, and this book gets pretty close.

Less than twelve bucks from Amazon and well worth it.

Who is S. Hawkins?

An early-90's pop singer. I had no idea she dabbled in xenosociology.

Cryptography for Dummies

Or he might do well with this book on security through obscurity:

Physics for Dummies