Slashdot Mirror

All this nonsense about "links" has gone much too far. Haven't any of them read this or this or this?

Everyone is connected to everyone else by some kind of chain of events or relationships, and anyone with enough money, power, and malevolence can track down and highlight such "links". Giving to charities, for instance, is now a very hazardous activity unless you limit your giving to the best-known (and hence biggest and, sometimes, least efficient) organizations. All it takes is for (1) someone in authority to take a dislike to you for any reason, and (2) someone you have never heard of to have some (alleged) relationship to the charity of your choice, and - bang! There you are (or aren't, depending on the enthusiasm of the people sent to collect you).

What I would like to know is, when are the authorities going to take a practical interest in such "links" as those between:

1. The Bush family and the bin Laden family;

2. Many thousands of ordinary Americans (and some foreigners) and a shadowy but vast organization, said to be based in Washington DC, that is believed to be responsible for the violent deaths of millions of people and the ruination of several nations.

All this nonsense about "links" has gone much too far. Haven't any of them read this or this or this?

Everyone is connected to everyone else by some kind of chain of events or relationships, and anyone with enough money, power, and malevolence can track down and highlight such "links". Giving to charities, for instance, is now a very hazardous activity unless you limit your giving to the best-known (and hence biggest and, sometimes, least efficient) organizations. All it takes is for (1) someone in authority to take a dislike to you for any reason, and (2) someone you have never heard of to have some (alleged) relationship to the charity of your choice, and - bang! There you are (or aren't, depending on the enthusiasm of the people sent to collect you).

What I would like to know is, when are the authorities going to take a practical interest in such "links" as those between:

1. The Bush family and the bin Laden family;

2. Many thousands of ordinary Americans (and some foreigners) and a shadowy but vast organization, said to be based in Washington DC, that is believed to be responsible for the violent deaths of millions of people and the ruination of several nations.

All this nonsense about "links" has gone much too far. Haven't any of them read this or this or this?

Everyone is connected to everyone else by some kind of chain of events or relationships, and anyone with enough money, power, and malevolence can track down and highlight such "links". Giving to charities, for instance, is now a very hazardous activity unless you limit your giving to the best-known (and hence biggest and, sometimes, least efficient) organizations. All it takes is for (1) someone in authority to take a dislike to you for any reason, and (2) someone you have never heard of to have some (alleged) relationship to the charity of your choice, and - bang! There you are (or aren't, depending on the enthusiasm of the people sent to collect you).

What I would like to know is, when are the authorities going to take a practical interest in such "links" as those between:

1. The Bush family and the bin Laden family;

2. Many thousands of ordinary Americans (and some foreigners) and a shadowy but vast organization, said to be based in Washington DC, that is believed to be responsible for the violent deaths of millions of people and the ruination of several nations.

I read a very apposite quotation about that just last night. Showing that some things never change, it is attributed to a journalist named Hannon Swaffer back in 1928.

"Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to".

Source: "Newspeak in the 21st Century, David Edwards and David Cromwell"
http://www.amazon.com/NEWSPEAK-21st-Century-David-Edwards/dp/0745328938/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255263047&sr=1-1

The statistics are hard to make out, but it seems that doctors were more likely to kill you than cure your for a large portion of history

You might enjoy reading Trick or Treatment-- they cover this topic in some detail. You right, statistics are hard to come by, mainly because no one was keeping statistics at the time. Florence Nightengale changed that.

And water had nothing to do with that.

Clean water and disease/infection are two sides of the same coin. In fact, Florence Nightengale herself worked over the course of her life to show that things like water quality, open sewers, air pollution, and nutrition had dramatic effects of the health of a population.

For a while now they've had their AWS Import/Export service. It's still in beta and only available to people in the US, but it won't stay that way forever.

http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

Need to transfer 1TB of data? Mail Amazon the data on a drive, they load it, send you the device back. Sure beats uploading for 3 month with a cable modem. Have more data than that? You can send them up to an 8U drive enclosure, and more than that if you make special arrangements.

Most home computer hardware failures come from "brownouts".

If you notice that your lights dim a little bit when your fridge compressor or AirCon comes on, that is a recipe for a computer failure. Spend $50 get a UPS
Btw, i noticed that my linksys wifi router was also extremely sensitive to brownouts. It would get funked up and need to be power cycled. Plug it into a UPS , no more wifi problems either.

I learned this the hard way when i moved to an old building in the east village of NYC and had 3 motherboards/cpu fail within a 3 month period.

What you really need in the case you describe is a good line conditioner. I didn't look at the 'UPS' you mentioned, but many in that price range are not a true UPS and will still allow for under voltage to occur, albeit for a shorter period if you're lucky. .

Most home computer hardware failures come from "brownouts".

If you notice that your lights dim a little bit when your fridge compressor or AirCon comes on, that is a recipe for a computer failure. Spend $50 get a UPS
Btw, i noticed that my linksys wifi router was also extremely sensitive to brownouts. It would get funked up and need to be power cycled. Plug it into a UPS , no more wifi problems either.

I learned this the hard way when i moved to an old building in the east village of NYC and had 3 motherboards/cpu fail within a 3 month period.

I object... I consider myself quite a nerd and everyone who attended the first party I threw (who can recall much of it) considers it the best party they ever attended.

Here's how real nerds party: There was an excellent selection of quality alcohol, Nyotaimori(nsfw), Darth Vader reading the bible continuously in the "relaxing" room, and a ceremony involving Ritz Crackers, Easy Cheese, 40s of Miller High Life, and through the magic of transubstantiation, a surprise, posthumous, celebrity visit from Ol' Dirty Bastard.

Sigh

Or stay in the basement and read the Eisner Award-winning book.

-Peter

I got my information from The Blood of Brothers by Steven Kinzer (Kinzer was the New York Times bureau chief in Nicaragua during the 80's.)

Basically, given the political climate in Middle America at the time, a peace accord signed in August had about as much significance when the award was awarded as a peace deal brokered in Israel today. Lots of people have brokered deals, they never last more than a year. The prize was given to give the deal legitimacy, and it it paid off, also enabling the Sapoa accord between the Sandinistas and the contras in Nicaragua in 1988 (which is what I was referring to.)

Microsoft's "sucky" office products sell very, very well: Amazon Bestsellers In Business &Software [Updated Hourly]

1 Office Home & Student 2007. 1020 Days in the top 100.
3 Office Home & Student 2008 Mac. 705 Days.
6 Outlook 2007. 1018 Days.
17 Small Business Upgrade 2007. 1003 Days
18 Professional Full Version 2007. 593 Days
23 Standard Full Version 2007. 1008 Days
24 Small Business Full Version 2077. 577 Days
25 MS Works 9. 796 Days
26 Office Pro Academic 2007. 91 days
31 Office Standard Upgrade 2007. 1017 Days
36 One Note 2007. 1003 Days
37 Publisher 2007. 1011 Days
41 Outlook 2007 with Contact Manager. 606 Days
43 Project Standard 2007. 972 Days
44 Office Ultimate 2007. Full Version 824 Days
45 Access 2007. 979 Days 47 Office 2008. Mac 662 Days

No seriously, google it:

And so I did....

French minister in 'boy sex' row

The Bad Life: A Memoir by Frederic Mitterrand (Author), Jesse Browner (Translator)

But I would also like to point out that people on both sides of the political fence are unhappy. From the BBC article:

Socialist Party spokesman Benoit Hamon told Reuters: "As a minister of culture he has drawn attention to himself by defending a film maker accused of raping a child and he has written a book where he said he took advantage of sexual tourism. To say the least, I find it shocking."

Marine Le Pen, vice president of the right-wing National Front, read excerpts of Mr Mitterrand's book aloud during a television interview, and said it left "an indelible stain on the government".

She called for the culture minister to step down.

"Resign, Mr Mitterrand and perhaps, afterwards we'll be able to give lessons to other people," she said.

Mr Mitterrand said it was an honour to be dragged though the mud by the National Front, and criticised the Socialists for making common cause with the extreme right.

FYI: Left4Dead US Retail Box on Amazon.com

Sincerely,

A gamer against censorship.

Corporations aren't worse than governments, we, the people, just have less control over them.

Perhaps you misinterpreted me, my point is that corporations aren't worse than governments, unlike corporations government is an evil, necessary perhaps but an evil. And it's best to keep their power limited. We also have more power over not just corporations but all voluntary businesses than we do government, except at the local level. Which is why most government should be local. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the wonderful book "Democracy in America" describing how during his tour of America in the early 1830s almost all government was local and how free people were. Of course there was slavery but for freemen, and there were Black Freemen some Blacks even owned slaves themselves, the liberty they enjoyed was almost limitless.

With government, at least we have mechanisms, available to all citizens, for controlling and directing the system.

What good are the mechanisms if they aren't used. For instance what happened to all that talk about impeaching Bush last year? There was more talk about putting Bush admin officials on trial when Obama came into office, what happened with that? The last tyme a sitting US president came close to impeachment was Richard Nixon but he resigned in 1974 first. His VP, who became president, then pardoned him. There were only 2 presidents who went through impeachment hearings before congress, Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1999. Neither one was found guilty.

With corporations, most stakeholders have no control over the system.

Most stakeholders have more control than they realize or are willing to exercise. How many stockholders file petitions or vote on corporate issues? How many employees use collective bargaining? How many suppliers say they will not accept a price below X dollars? How many buyer or clients say they will not buy more than X dollars? People complain Walmart drives local shops out of business or pay low wages, yet how many of those people shop at or work for Walmart?

Now both businesses, no just corporations, and governments will grab as much power as they can but it's easier to control a business than a government. You can boycott a business legally but if you try that with government you may find yourself facing firearms. Randy Weaver couldn't stop the feds from killing his family at Ruby Ridge, not without giving up his freedom after the government framed him.

Falcon

Ooh, BTW don't confuse what I say above about Randy Weaver as support for him. If he was a supremest as the feds say I disagree with that but I also disagree with the feds framing him when he refused to inform for them.

Yes but I don't need to buy a $50 Wii card EVERY SINGLE MONTH.

You don't need to spend that much on XBL either, or re-up every month. On Amazon you can get a subscription card for $45 that lasts for 13 months.

Also, on the Wii you don't get the same level of service. Most (all?) multiplayer Wii games make it very difficult to meet or message anyone who you haven't already exchanged friend codes with; there's no community other than the one you've already formed on your own. There's also no global friends list, voice chat, party system, game invites, achievement leaderboards, etc. One could still argue that Xbox Live is overpriced -- Steam has most of the same features for free -- but you are getting something for your money.

This idea is wrong on so many levels. I hate Hitler analogies because they tend to be polar opposite examples of the argument they attempting to counter, but this one seems to fit.

The BBC did a documentary a few years back "Nazis: A Warning From History' http://www.amazon.com/Nazis-Warning-History-Samuel-West/dp/B00097DY66/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1255030547&sr=1-1 that touched on this very subject. Granted, the UK isn't the Third Reich and I'm pulling a very specific instance from that documentary, so please understand that I'm not suggesting a one-size-fits-all with regards to that regime's policy, but an accounting of state-sanctioned surveillance by civilians.

In that doc, there's a segment that reveals that the Gestapo actually didn't have very many official staffers out in the field and relied heavily on "neighborhood watch" participants to implicate other citizens in activities that fit a broadstroke definition of 'suspicious behavior'. Years later, a woman was confronted about a statement she had submitted to the Gestapo about a woman neighbor that she had reported for suspicious behavior; the 'suspicious' woman was detained by the Gestapo and never heard from again. The original documents were presented to her, showing her signature and her statements which were read back to her. She remembered the woman mentioned in the statements, recognized her handwriting and signature, but disavowed that she wrote or submitted the statement.

The documentary example is the far end of the spectrum for state-sanctioned civilian surveillance. Given that people will recieve rewards for their efforts and the program is marketed as a game, it adds more fuel to the fire that people will misuse it. Once implicated in such a program, a person's name or guilt can never be expunged.

All we need to finish off the program is a Norsefire logo http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Norsefire-logo.png and a picture of the High Chancellor Adam Sutler http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8d/250px-Sutler2.jpg.

I once thought as you do now, especially when I was still in my twenties. However, two things occurred to me eventually which caused me to change my mind. First, unless you are Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg (i.e. you have founded the company) then wearing t-shirts and jeans will never get you into the executive suite. You will find that your income runs into a glass ceiling if you choose jeans and t-shirts because you are too intelligent to be caught wearing a suit. Second, as one gets older it becomes harder and harder to pretend that one is still under age thirty and wearing the clothes of the twenty something crowd begins to look ever more ridiculous. For the more inept among us, Nordstrom recently published a fairly decent basic field guide to men's style which covers good wardrobe choices for everything from casual to formal wear. Slashed jeans, worn t-shirt, and body piercing works for the baristas at Starbucks or the employees at your local book chain store, but for the rest of us knowing what to wear and what NOT to wear can be important. Why put yourself at a disadvantage, even if you are very intelligent, by wearing the wrong clothing?

Brian K. was co-author of the seminal book Elements of Programming Style http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Style-Brian-Kernighan/dp/0070342075 - one of the most important computer programming books ever written.

Amazon's reply:

Hello,

Thank you for your interest in the Amazon MP3 Music Downloads store.

The content available in our Amazon MP3 Store is provided by record labels and their distributors. The agreements to provide this content were arranged with these companies. Any questions you have regarding content should be directed to record label or distributor.

For additional information and a list of partners we work with, please visit our MP3 Music Labels and Artists Guide at this URL:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200212210

Thank you for your interest in Amazon MP3 Music Downloads.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

Interesting question you pose. An original thought, or something you picked up elsewhere?

This is the book that recites the modern events. It's clear from a reading that sexual abuse has been an issue on Pitcairn for far longer than Steve Christian and his father have been around.250 years may be a slight exaggeration, but 100 years is supported by at least one account from the turn of the last century (referenced in the book).

Now, on the the question of governorship: how does an inability to govern an island while London is undermining you support a claim that Bligh was inept at captaining a naval vessel. One must also look at his crossing to Timor (?? I can't remember if that's where he went after the mutiny) as an indicator of a set of skills that you and I certainly do not possess. IIRC, he continued his mapping mission while this was underway as well.

To quote a history book (pp. 20-21):

The way in which the periodic system is displayed is a fascinating one that especially appeals to the popular imagination. Since the time of the early periodic tables of John Newlands, Julius Lothar Meyer, and Dimitri Mendeleev, there have been many attempts to obtain the "ultimate" periodic table. Indeed, it has been estinated that within 100 years of the introduction of Mendeleev's famous table of 1869, approximately 700 different versions of the periodic table were published. These include all kinds of alternatives, including three-dimensional tables, helices, concentric circles, spirals, zigzags, step tables, and mirror image tables. Even today, articles are regularly published in the Journal of Chemical Education, for example, purporting to show new and improved versions of the periodic system.

There's only three things you need: food, water, and air. If we only live for our NEEDS, we won't have a very FULFILLING LIFE.

Not that I am rejecting your point, out of hand. Let me share my iMac story. In 2007, I bought a 24 inch iMac, and a USB TV tuner. It was among the first machines with an LED backlit display. The display is HDTV capable, in terms of resolution. Should I have bought a "cheap" computer and a 24 inch TV instead? I don't think so, even if it was slightly cheaper. For one thing, this fits on my desk. For another, it's easier to watch the news/documentaries while I work if they're behind a transparent Terminal window. (Or to the left, or above, on my MASSIVE screen).

Impressing women with computer hardware isn't such a great motive either. And it wasn't my motive when I got the thing. I just wanted a machine that would fill multiple roles. A Unix-based LaTeX rendering programming environment media appliance. But any time I bring a woman into my room, she'll call the thing "beautiful". Honestly, it ties the room together pretty well, actually. She'll say "THAT'S SO COOL!!!" when I use the remote to put a movie on, from the comfort of my bed. Do you think multiple displays on my desk would tie my room together, or just make me look like a giant dweeb?

So why is your way "better"? Did I need the iMac? Nope. But it fits in with my lifestyle of buying quality products at reasonable (if "big") prices.

Similar story: I bought a used dresser for $150 a few months ago. I could have got a NEW one at Ikea or Wal*Mart, for significantly less. And it would have been made of particle board, and broken within a year or two. My dresser is made of walnut, and is sturdy enough to pass on to my kids if I ever felt like having any. That is to say, my dresser had a 'big' price, but not a high one.

It's called "personal capital". Investments in your future. Just as the company with the lowest share price isn't usually the best bargain, the computer with the lowest price isn't usually the best bargain. The furniture with the lowest price isn't the best bargain. The trick is to demand more from what you buy, and to stop buying disposable goods, as much as possible. A month's supply of Gillette Mach-3 razors will buy a year's supply of straight safety razor blades. All you need is a handle, which costs from $20 to $100 dollars (if you want to get really fancy). Even at $100, you will save money over the life of the handle, which is essentially forever.

Here's a nice, non-affiliate link example: http://www.amazon.com/Parker-86R-Double-Safety-Razor/dp/B0019LSBGO/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=hpc&qid=1254859808&sr=8-4

37 dollars gets you a handle and 100 double edged blades. That's like two years worth of razor blades. Having nice things is not "ghetto fabulous", and ascribing motives to other people isn't a very nice thing to do. Some of us want to live simply. Apple markets to us well. So does Arch Linux (a small Linux distro I use on multiple machines in the house). So does the nice friendly hardwood furniture maker down the street. A penny saved is a penny earned, and I have saved LOTs of pennies this way. So much so that my friends wonder how I can afford to take multi-year long vacations.

And don't forget what the British Post Office did back in the 1960s as well (which my stepfather was a part of). City of Light is a nice read about the history of Fiber Optics.

• Alas Babylon: This is a book about the aftermath of a nuclear war, and its effect on a group of ordinary people.
• Star Man's Son (aka Daybreak-2250 AD): Another post-apocalyptic novel (and suitable for younger readers) that illustrates the level of worry about nuclear war in the cold war.
• A Canticle for Leibowitz: A classic story about how history repeats itself.
• Sirius: A very early story about genetic engineering. A scientist produces a dog with human intelligence, and the book revolves around the relationship between the dog and the scientist's daughter.

All of these, and there are a number of others, reflect the concerns of the 1950s and 1960s, something that your students might not be aware of, and which are still affecting us today.

• Alas Babylon: This is a book about the aftermath of a nuclear war, and its effect on a group of ordinary people.
• Star Man's Son (aka Daybreak-2250 AD): Another post-apocalyptic novel (and suitable for younger readers) that illustrates the level of worry about nuclear war in the cold war.
• A Canticle for Leibowitz: A classic story about how history repeats itself.
• Sirius: A very early story about genetic engineering. A scientist produces a dog with human intelligence, and the book revolves around the relationship between the dog and the scientist's daughter.

All of these, and there are a number of others, reflect the concerns of the 1950s and 1960s, something that your students might not be aware of, and which are still affecting us today.

• Alas Babylon: This is a book about the aftermath of a nuclear war, and its effect on a group of ordinary people.
• Star Man's Son (aka Daybreak-2250 AD): Another post-apocalyptic novel (and suitable for younger readers) that illustrates the level of worry about nuclear war in the cold war.
• A Canticle for Leibowitz: A classic story about how history repeats itself.
• Sirius: A very early story about genetic engineering. A scientist produces a dog with human intelligence, and the book revolves around the relationship between the dog and the scientist's daughter.

All of these, and there are a number of others, reflect the concerns of the 1950s and 1960s, something that your students might not be aware of, and which are still affecting us today.

• Alas Babylon: This is a book about the aftermath of a nuclear war, and its effect on a group of ordinary people.
• Star Man's Son (aka Daybreak-2250 AD): Another post-apocalyptic novel (and suitable for younger readers) that illustrates the level of worry about nuclear war in the cold war.
• A Canticle for Leibowitz: A classic story about how history repeats itself.
• Sirius: A very early story about genetic engineering. A scientist produces a dog with human intelligence, and the book revolves around the relationship between the dog and the scientist's daughter.

All of these, and there are a number of others, reflect the concerns of the 1950s and 1960s, something that your students might not be aware of, and which are still affecting us today.

I offer Amazon's EC2 as an example of cloud computing in which you maintain control of the format of you data.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

There is nothing in "Cloud Computing" that requires API's or some other layer between you and your data.

Essentially, "Cloud Computing" is a term similar to "centralized" or "decentralized"... its vague and by no means does it define much of anything other than an idea. Cloud computing could be best described as decentralized, centralized networking. Your processing and data is centralized on a decentralized cloud rather than in a single data center. It appears to the client that it is centralized, when in reality the servers could be anywhere on the Internet.

Sony memory card pricing hurts them in many ways. It's one of the many reasons I won't buy a Sony camera (no, it's not that I can't pirate pictures or whatever).

Indeed, I avoid Sony cameras like the plague for this very reason.

However when I got a PSP, I picked myself a MicroSDHC to Memory Stick Pro Duo converter (something like this although lots of other places do them).

The converter plus an 8GB card already starts to save you money and you don't get stuck with memory in the future that you cannot use elsewhere.

Or, perhaps... imagine that Amazon sold a hardware platform for reading ebooks and sold ebooks that were locked with DRM so that they could only be read on that platform. Far-fetched, I know.

Or they could pay USD $0.17 per GB using Amazon S3 http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

You want stuff that there's a good chance your students have not already read, and stuff that's actually going to teach them something and be worthy of a serious English class.

I'd include some works by Jorge Luis Borges. A good starting anthology is Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. This is very high-grade literature -- IMHO Borges deserved a Nobel -- and demands a lot of the reader. I'd also include some George MacDonald. For short stories, try The Complete Fairy Tales. For a novel, try Lilith. Many of today's fantasy writers owe a huge debt to MacDonald. Another possibility is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Or for something lighter, try Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais.

Hope this helps!

You want stuff that there's a good chance your students have not already read, and stuff that's actually going to teach them something and be worthy of a serious English class.

I'd include some works by Jorge Luis Borges. A good starting anthology is Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. This is very high-grade literature -- IMHO Borges deserved a Nobel -- and demands a lot of the reader. I'd also include some George MacDonald. For short stories, try The Complete Fairy Tales. For a novel, try Lilith. Many of today's fantasy writers owe a huge debt to MacDonald. Another possibility is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Or for something lighter, try Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais.

Hope this helps!

You want stuff that there's a good chance your students have not already read, and stuff that's actually going to teach them something and be worthy of a serious English class.

I'd include some works by Jorge Luis Borges. A good starting anthology is Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. This is very high-grade literature -- IMHO Borges deserved a Nobel -- and demands a lot of the reader. I'd also include some George MacDonald. For short stories, try The Complete Fairy Tales. For a novel, try Lilith. Many of today's fantasy writers owe a huge debt to MacDonald. Another possibility is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Or for something lighter, try Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais.

Hope this helps!

You want stuff that there's a good chance your students have not already read, and stuff that's actually going to teach them something and be worthy of a serious English class.

I'd include some works by Jorge Luis Borges. A good starting anthology is Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. This is very high-grade literature -- IMHO Borges deserved a Nobel -- and demands a lot of the reader. I'd also include some George MacDonald. For short stories, try The Complete Fairy Tales. For a novel, try Lilith. Many of today's fantasy writers owe a huge debt to MacDonald. Another possibility is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Or for something lighter, try Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais.

Hope this helps!

You want stuff that there's a good chance your students have not already read, and stuff that's actually going to teach them something and be worthy of a serious English class.

I'd include some works by Jorge Luis Borges. A good starting anthology is Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. This is very high-grade literature -- IMHO Borges deserved a Nobel -- and demands a lot of the reader. I'd also include some George MacDonald. For short stories, try The Complete Fairy Tales. For a novel, try Lilith. Many of today's fantasy writers owe a huge debt to MacDonald. Another possibility is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Or for something lighter, try Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais.

Hope this helps!

I graduated from U of Illinois (Urbana) in 1990 having satisfied some of my humanities electives with literature of science fiction and literature of fantasy. It appears these courses, English 119 and English 120, still exist. They're hundred-level courses, so the difficulty should be OK for college-bound high school students.

I found this reading list for English 119: http://www.amazon.com/ENGL-119-CWL-UIUC-Spring/lm/R2120TE9GGDDIM

These aren't the books I remember having read for that course, but it was almost 20 years ago. Things change.

I would recommend contacting the University of Illinois English department and getting their list, then reviewing it for suitability both in the context of high school in general and the nature of the community in which you live.

(For example, if a conservative community, "Stranger in a Strange Land" or "Handmaiden's Tale" might not work out well for you.)

There are probably similar courses at other universities, and most instructors would probably be willing to share their material.

Then you need a sampling of the classics: Niven (Ringworld), Simak (Time is the Simpest Thing), Harrison (The Stainless Steel Rat), Brunner (The Shockwave Rider), Stephenson (Snow Crash), Zelazny (Roadmarks) Bradbury (Farenhieght 451, Martian Cronicles)...

Okay, maybe that's getting to be too much for one class.

Lin Carter's Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings has an excellent couple of chapters tracing the history of Heroic Fantasy from Roland through LoTR.

Isac Asimov: The Complete Stories is a great volume of short stories that cover many 'what-if' situations and would be a great way to get the kids going on 'hard' sf (ie. not simple 'action in space' but questions and where they lead).

For how to actually structure the teaching, personally I would have one of the short stories as an 'assigned reading' for the next class (most are only a few dozen pages, easy reading). At the next class I would have open discussion with the class discussing the story:

• What question is the story exploring?
• What are other possible answers to the question?
• What do you think living in the 'world' of that story would be like?
• What are some other implications of ____ that the author didn't explore?

Probably for major tests, I would go away from 'write essay about story' and instead go with something like 'of the stories in this book, find a question that the story is pursuing, and write a different answer to that question', basically look at the path that the author took and see what other paths they could take with the question.

Other collections of short stories could be used for this purpose, but you should know the stories fairly well beforehand to make sure there aren't any that would really be wrong for kids. I've been through Azimov's collection and all of them are more-or-less 'teenager friendly'.

In fact, I think this subject would be very interesting to teach... I may have to look into it... :)

Covers a lot of different styles, etc.

Also, SciFi works great in short story form. Distills the stories down to their core components, without getting lost in larger storylines and stuff.

For example:
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-Hall-Fame-Greatest/dp/0765305364

Anathem

is Philip K. Dick's Radio Free Albemuth

Yours In Astrakhan,
Kilgore Trout

...already mentioned, how about "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow?

Your own servers don't necessarily cost much more. Check the pricing at Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ for a 'Large Instance' with "7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform". A reserved instance costs $910 per year plus $0.12 per hour, or $1961 per year. I can assemble a nice rackmount 1U RAID server with better computing resources than that for the same price. Multiply that by a few servers and a few years, and your cost savings over your own hosting / racks / UPs isn't going to be that high. And of course, nothing stops Amazon from raising the prices.

Also, EC2 gives the user no recourse if the system goes down for any reason, or if your data is lost. http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ You get a 10% discount if the system uptime is less than 99.95%, but that's the extent of your rights. If you screw up, it's your fault. If Amazon screws up, it's their fault but your problem.

Now, the nice thing about Cloud Computing is scaling. When your magic startup starts generating massive throughput, you can just add resources to your EC2 allotment as needed. But for small deployments that don't anticipate sudden rapid growth, I don't get the appeal.

Your own servers don't necessarily cost much more. Check the pricing at Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ for a 'Large Instance' with "7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform". A reserved instance costs $910 per year plus $0.12 per hour, or $1961 per year. I can assemble a nice rackmount 1U RAID server with better computing resources than that for the same price. Multiply that by a few servers and a few years, and your cost savings over your own hosting / racks / UPs isn't going to be that high. And of course, nothing stops Amazon from raising the prices.

Also, EC2 gives the user no recourse if the system goes down for any reason, or if your data is lost. http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ You get a 10% discount if the system uptime is less than 99.95%, but that's the extent of your rights. If you screw up, it's your fault. If Amazon screws up, it's their fault but your problem.

Now, the nice thing about Cloud Computing is scaling. When your magic startup starts generating massive throughput, you can just add resources to your EC2 allotment as needed. But for small deployments that don't anticipate sudden rapid growth, I don't get the appeal.

Prolific blogger and open source enthusiast Matt Asay ponders whether cloud computing may be the Hotel California of tech. It seems that data repositories in the form of Googles and Facebooks are very easy to dump data into, but can be quite difficult to move data between.

Mentioning Google specifically may not be terribly helpful with their Data Liberation Front project...

And with the APIs available for Twitter and Facebook it probably wouldn't be too hard to dump most of the important information to some kind of file.

Or is he talking more about the Amazon-type cloud stuff? But isn't that already fairly portable? Amazon is just running a pile of VMs running Linux/Windows/Apache/MySQL/whatever...

Granted, there's all sorts of hickups and loopholes and oddities with various hosted/cloud services right now... But I haven't seen anything any worse than the vendor lock-in you get with a lot of software you run on your very own hardware.

Read the book, Fast Food Nation The U.S. government allows abuses that are far, far worse and more extensive than mentioned in this New York Times article: E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Ground Beef Inspection.

For $DIETY's sake they are NOT pirated copies. Indian and Chinese editions of books are sold cheaper by the publishers themselves.

Here is an example of such a case... Distributed Operating Systems & Algorithms by Randy Chow costs $98.80 in the US, amazon offers it for $88.92 [1]. While in India I can purchase the same, marked as Indian edition, for Rs. 423 [2], ie, $8.88.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Distributed-Operating-Systems-Algorithms-Randy/dp/0201498383
[2] http://www.flipkart.com/distributed-operating-systems-algorithm-analysis/8131728595-tu23fw2bbb