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I didn't see in the comments, and the story submitter doesn't mention, that this essay, which is from 2002, has blossomed recently (April, 2009) into a book.

If you buy the Blu-ray Disc Remote for an extra $20 - $25... not bad. If you try to do it with the Dualshock 3 (or sixaxis) its more or less as clunky as the PS2's DVD player.

It's kind of tempting when HD DVDs are selling brand new on Amazon for $4.

Keep in mind that that is one vendor on Amazon whose stock ships from Amazon (thus the Super-Saver Shipping) and not Amazon itself.

As to the count, well, I have one Blu-ray player (PS3), two HD DVD players (for the XBOX 360, also two bundled copies of King Kong), and a Blu-ray burner that can also read HD DVDs. So HD DVD would seem to be winning 3:2 for this one consumer.

And I'm still buying HD DVDs. Just as good as Blu-ray but at bargain prices, and I have my backup drives. But I believe I have more Blu-ray discs than HD DVDs. (Still, DVD outnumbers them all and continues to grow for otherwise unobtainable titles.)

I've been meaning to find out what the XBOX 360 does when you connect two HD DVD drives to one box. I never got around to doing it before the dashboard update. The new UI probably handles it better.

I buy all my music on the Amazon MP3 store. I find whatever I'm looking for, 89 or 99 cents, in unencumbered MP3 format. It's automatically added to my iTunes library, and the cover art even shows up automatically on my iPhone.

more people own hd-dvd players than own ps3s? really?

It's kind of tempting when HD DVDs are selling brand new on Amazon for $4. You a Monty Python fan? These will be collectables someday just like laserdisc or betamax.

more people own hd-dvd players than own ps3s? really?

It's kind of tempting when HD DVDs are selling brand new on Amazon for $4. You a Monty Python fan? These will be collectables someday just like laserdisc or betamax.

I dunno... maybe buy/borrow a book, and improve?
 
It's a competitive market out there. Skills pay the bills.

I dunno... maybe buy/borrow a book, and improve?
 
It's a competitive market out there. Skills pay the bills.

This book changed my life (somewhat) for the better. It's all about how to pick up women.

Don't take it as gospel, but as a framework for pickup -- and for social relationships in general (i.e. the advice works even in the business world) -- it's great.

What do you mean the situation is not tenable (i.e. maintainable). If you don't do anything, or if you do the wrong things, the situation will stay as it is---maintaining the status quo is easy as pie.

As to why you should give up, the answer is roughly that you probably don't have anything to offer to women. Firstly, note that only about 40% of men reproduced compared to twice that percentage for women (as inferred from mitochondrial DNA), so you're in a man's normal condition.

For some contemporary evidence that women don't need most men, just look around to notice that in general women don't hit on men sexually. Often women will only have sex with men for the first time after large amounts of alchohol. There's no culture where women pursue men instead of vice versa, so this is not merely a fact about western culture. There's also plenty of chemical evidence (e.g. women get testosterone treatment to increase their sex drive).

In fact, scientific studies (tracking eye movements) show that both straight women and straight men are more turned on by a naked women than naked men (see Matt Ridley's The Red Queen for a discussion).

Finally, studies usually find that married men are much happier than unmarried men, but married women are usually no happier once the financial contribution of the man is deducted (here for example). Furthermore, married men but not women live longer and are healthier.

So anyway, I can see why you want a woman, but in general that's usually a selfish decision for a guy. Why not come to terms with your condition and lead a meaningful life in another way?

There are some important tradeoffs between paper and digital media. I'm assuming we're talking about original works here and that e.g. transcribing a newpaper article doesn't count.

* Books aren't just rugged, they're also non-ephemeral in a way that web sites aren't. Much of the efficiency of the internet comes from cheap communication with centralized storage. But this means that whoever controls the storage has the power to change history. You can't change a million books in people's houses but old web pages can be lost or altered much more easily. When I go through my old del.icio.us bookmarks I often find 404s, which never happens on my bookshelf.

* The time and money needed for paper publishing creates an incentive for basic quality control. There are precious few copy-editors working on the net. Spelling, grammar, and basic comprehensibility all suffer as a result.

* Many popular formats on the internet (such as blogs) are inherently chronological. The focus is always on the latest information, and there's little incentive to improve or correct old content. Longer content is released a chapter (or section!) at a time. This is most visible (although less important) in webcomics, where the early art and storytelling can be orders of magnitude worse than the latest material.

* Books have total control over layout and formatting. Web content, which has to be viewed on everything from PCs to cell phones, doesn't. Formats such as PDF are much clumsier to use than HTML. Read Edward Tufte to find out why this is important.

* There is very little long-format content on the internet. A page or two of text is considered "long" for most purposes (in the context of Slashdot, how long is this comment? how long would it be on a printed page?). Several pages is huge, and a couple dozen pages is gargantuan. Meanwhile, even small books for children and short works of nonfiction are usually at least a couple hundred pages long. Short content is convenient (and thus popular), but there are ideas and levels of detail you simply can't reach in a few pages.

There are some exceptions to all of this, but the general trends still drive the way we communicate. And in general, books are longer, more expensive, better edited, and more thought out in advance, while web content is shorter, faster, cheaper, more accessible, more diverse, and lower quality. The net's advantages work better in shorter formats -- it's telling that the first (and most successful) things to be digitized were the letter/memo and the casual conversation, followed later by the want ad and article.

Will web content ever equal books? I don't know. Collections of related blog essays have been pulled from blogs, cleaned up, and published as books (Joel Spolsky's, for instance), which is a start. The Wiki might be a viable format, although I suspect open-content sites will never quite make it. Taking an idea from Fred Brooks, it may be that conceptual integrity is the most important factor in the quality of a written document, and it's hard to achieve that when you have a thousand editors. Good luck talking about it, though, since the net has a giant persecution complex vis-a-vis top-down control of publishing.

Here's an example of where I'm coming from: Recently I decided I don't know enough about biology. I took a class in high school when I was 15 and that's it (I'm 27 now). So I bought what appears to be the standard intro level college textbook (Campbell and Reece) and was blown away. Despite being full of detail, the explanations are clear, and nearly every page has one or more full-color pictures or diagrams. There are many asides that link the topics to everyday life. Each subsection has about as much content as an average blog post. The book is 1,400 pages long. It cost $140 and I consider it worth every penny.

There is nothing like this on the internet. But

Math has been gutted of meaning, but this is changing. There are solid curricula out there that are being used, such as IMP ( the Interactive Math Program) or PBL (Project/Problem Based Learning) style lessons. An example of PBL that I used last year with my 8th graders was in modeling a bride. They were given a plausible scenario (school buildings are getting a 2nd story added on to reduce the number of portable classrooms, they had to design and model a bridge between these 2nd stories.) So, we went out and measured distances, built newpaper bridges and tested how much weight they could hold to find relationships for thickness v. load and length v. load, calculated needed load support based on population, class flow, 8th grader mass, etc., graphed some data in Excel, and used their formula and data to built a cost-optimized bridge. They had fun exploring some rich problems (and some frustration, as it did require some thought) and gained a better grasp of linear relationships, a key concept in 8th grade.

This type of teaching isn't widespread, but it was being advocated by my college advisers. One of the problems with doing this kind of math is the lack of public support. In the school district I'm in, about half the high schools were giving an option to use IMP to students, but parents complained and such, and now only a few charter schools use it. Still, support is starting to spread some, so the more interesting approaches are being slowly revived.

For those interested in this topic, check out What's math got to do with it?" by Jo Boaler (new edition out later this month.)

Absolutely spot on. Except I would add one thing. There is no need to create a new textbook. The fundamentals of mathematics have been well established for somewhere between 50-150 years. Let's face it, the current cutting edge of research in mathematics requires 10-20 years of full time training. As a corollary, we do not require a new textbook every year. Or every other year. Or every decade even.

Books like Courant's Introduction to Calculus and Analysis or Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis are great examples. In fairness, they are a little too advanced, but chapters from them can be used selectively or simpler but equally outstanding presentations can be found.

Absolutely spot on. Except I would add one thing. There is no need to create a new textbook. The fundamentals of mathematics have been well established for somewhere between 50-150 years. Let's face it, the current cutting edge of research in mathematics requires 10-20 years of full time training. As a corollary, we do not require a new textbook every year. Or every other year. Or every decade even.

Books like Courant's Introduction to Calculus and Analysis or Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis are great examples. In fairness, they are a little too advanced, but chapters from them can be used selectively or simpler but equally outstanding presentations can be found.

Read The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America

They've staged a long and protracted anti-education war in government for 3 decades.

Bah! Pure hate-filled fear-mongering garbage.

Try this one instead, if you want to be a real history of public education in America: http://www.amazon.com/deliberate-dumbing-down-america-Chronological/dp/0966707109/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245441759&sr=1-1

Back in the 1990s, one of the most realistic-seeming depictions of the rise of private spacefaring was Michael Fynn's future history beginning with Firestar . Flynn made it seem as if the biggest obstacle towards getting into space was not gravity and fuel costs as much as government hassles. If Spaceport America has successfully dealt with the FAA, then I would like to think that things are looking up from here (though Flynn suggested companies like FedEx would massively support the endeavour, which seems unlikely now in the age of the internet).

Read The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America

They've staged a long and protracted anti-education war in government for 3 decades.

http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Extremism-Christian-Right-America/dp/0972549609/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245437556&sr=8-1

It would be very interesting to close off part of a disused city or even a whole city and leave it as it is to see how nature would take over without human influences. Would it decay as some predict?. Would nature take over tower blocks for high rise living? ... The nearest experiment we have is Chernobyl...

Actually, there is also the town called Varosha in Cyprus. It was being built up by the Greek Cypriots as a resort town right before war broke out . The Turks ended up controlling it, the Greek Cypriots fled, and the Turks wrapped it in barbed wire and didn't let anyone in. Apparently, the Turks thought the newly finished hotels would be a valuable bargaining chip in the upcoming negotiations. Of course, there were no negotiations and 30 years later the town is still empty and gradually being reclaimed by nature.

There's a cool book called The World Without Us that goes in detail into what would happen if all humans suddenly disappeared (it's nonfiction). The book talks about Varosha, among other things.

Certainly analyzing memories would be a necessary part of downloading your personality into a computer, a mainstay of science fiction (take Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars as an example where it is used to great effect) and the loony but inspiring outlook of Ray "the singularity is near!" Kurzweil. I wonder if consciousness can be separated from a body of memories. If a copy of me does not have certain memories, is it still me?

The best way to get to the fun roles, are by teaching yourself how things work. This is usually not accomplished at schools, but with you yourself playing around with things.

The easiest way, from my point of view, is starting to play around with various unix systems.

I don't know the current state of slackware, but back when I wanted to learn linux, I tried getting slackware to work on my workstation, including X. I tried and failed for a couple of weeks - but I learned a huge lot from it. I went on to install Debian. These days - I'd suggest going the Gentoo route, and then try to build your own linux distro from scratch.
See: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Buy the book "Running Linux". Read it, understand it.

Don't stop there. After playing around with linuxfromscratch and reading 'Running Linux', I would go on to download OpenBSD, and read the FAQ's/Howto's and most importantly - the man-pages you're referred to after installation. There is an incredible amount or good documentation for OpenBSD. It's easy to read - and you learn a lot - fast.

After playing around with OpenBSD - I would go on to play around with NetBSD. When I played around with it (1.5.2, I think) - it was a very nice and barebone unix. Documentation wasn't perfect, but that lead me to learn even more.

FreeBSD is very nice - but last time I played around with it, it suffered from having too many users having written too much contradicting information. It was more difficult to pick up than Open/Net-BSD, but it's way more usable for an end user. THAT, however, should not be one of your considerations when you want to learn. Pick the best documented one, not the one that has the most fancy features for your desktop. :)

In the process of installing and fooling around with all these systems, try to build your own firewall for your home computers. Read up on firewalling - it's a good goal - as to create a useful firewall you'll need to teach yourself TCP/IP in the process.

When you feel that you've mastered most of this (you haven't, but that's beside the point) - you should've spent 6-12 months. It's now time to pick up "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment". See: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Environment-Addison-Wesley-Professional-Computing/dp/0201563177

This book will teach you a lot, and now that you've used Unix for a while - you'll understand quite a bit of it. Not all, but it's a good read, and will teach you even more of what you need to know.

After fooling around with all this, or preferably in between and along the way, you'll need to:
  - Configure BIND (DNS), and maybe look at djbdns
  - Configure postfix/exim, and maybe also take a look at qmail
  - Configure a dhcp-server.
  - Fool around a bit with apache, building it from source and swearing at it. :)
  - Set up an nntp-server.
  - Maybe set up an IRC server to fool around with.

Also, it's important to get to know a couple of programming languages. Not necessarily to expert level, but it's important that you fool around with C (not C++, but you might want to learn a bit of that in addition) - plus a couple of scripting languages. It's important that you teach yourself bash (since it's probably your shell) - in addition to either perl or python. You'll find camps that say that perl is more important, while other camps will claim that python is more important. I went with perl first, and I'm now trying to teach myself python.

Now, this is a huge list of things to play around with. There are lots more - but it should give you a good 12-24 months of fooling around and studying. With all the knowledge you gather from this, if you complete it, you should be ready to get yourself fun, challenging and other frustrating work. :-)

I read Dan Hurley's Natural Causes and it opened my eyes to the supplement industry, and the relative lack of regulation. I recommend it to anyone taking supplements, including just vitamins.

That is just not true. Amazon guarantees that the Kindle price will always be less than the dead tree edition.

Hmmm... as much as I love my Kindle, I have to disagree here. Or at least, if they guarantee this, they need to take care of a couple of titles. I'm not going to count this one because the paperback's not out yet.

I couldn't find any with an actual released paperback that costs less than the Kindle edition, but found several where the price was the same.

That is just not true. Amazon guarantees that the Kindle price will always be less than the dead tree edition.

Hmmm... as much as I love my Kindle, I have to disagree here. Or at least, if they guarantee this, they need to take care of a couple of titles. I'm not going to count this one because the paperback's not out yet.

I couldn't find any with an actual released paperback that costs less than the Kindle edition, but found several where the price was the same.

That is just not true. Amazon guarantees that the Kindle price will always be less than the dead tree edition.

Hmmm... as much as I love my Kindle, I have to disagree here. Or at least, if they guarantee this, they need to take care of a couple of titles. I'm not going to count this one because the paperback's not out yet.

I couldn't find any with an actual released paperback that costs less than the Kindle edition, but found several where the price was the same.

That is just not true. Amazon guarantees that the Kindle price will always be less than the dead tree edition.

Hmmm... as much as I love my Kindle, I have to disagree here. Or at least, if they guarantee this, they need to take care of a couple of titles. I'm not going to count this one because the paperback's not out yet.

I couldn't find any with an actual released paperback that costs less than the Kindle edition, but found several where the price was the same.

Actually, there is a business model by one author that seems to be working, I would say it is a rare working model and not everyone could pull it off. Sci-Fi author Scott Sigler runs a successful blog. His blog basically started off his writing career. He would blog short sci fi stories, and yes they were free, but he built up a fan base, so when he went to publish his first book it sold very well even though he publish the whole book for free on his blog as well. He has since published several books and a DVD of all his pod casts. How I personally view this much like a rock star, there are millions of people that play an instrument, very few make a living doing it, and even fewer strike it rich. Same with blogging.

You mean two carnivores/scavengers who directly fight one another for the same resources (turf, food)? Bad analogy.

This isn't true, at least not 100%.

I have one book in Topaz (not a statistically significant sample, but it's all I have), and it renders fine.

Of course, you have to remember that the purpose of Topaz is to embed your own fonts. Most author/publishers will use this feature because they "don't like" the default font. My Topaz book has used the embedded fonts to display foreign characters (Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Linear B, the whole lot of em) inline, without having to resort to using images. It all displays fine, both in terms of actual artifacts, and in terms of the foreign characters themselves.

Without seeing the specs for the file format itself, I am disinclined to term it broken or bad. Rather, it's a tool that is used more often used badly, incorrectly, and for the wrong purposes. Is the FONT tag in HTML inherently evil (CSS aside) because people misuse it more often than not? (FONT is debatable, but MARQUEE and BLINK are the devil's work for sure)

The book in question is: http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Systems-A-Linguistic-Approach/dp/B000VSSG9S/ref=ed_oe_k

I worked for a large dataceneter/hosting company for a while a few years back. One of the most tedious, lengthy troubleshooting processes is e-mail failures, and I sort of specialized in those, therefore I didn't close as many tickets as the other TS guys. On the other hand, once the problem was fixed the customer had no need to call back. Eventually I ended up leaving the company, partly over pay and partly over dissatisfaction with the job. Unfortunately, there was no scoring system that adequately measured my contribution to customer satisfaction, so the company wasn't totally pleased with my performance either.

Ultimately, the goal of Tech support is to collect data that can be used to correct problems upstream and prevent the customer from ever having to call tech support. That is a very lofty goal, and probably unreachable in reality, but it is useful as an ideal.

Customer problems caused by features or policies in the company's offering should definitely be corrected by the company. Work-arounds should be made available as soon as the problem is detected and handled, and that information should be shared with everyone.

These types of problems should be classified as to their importance, difficulty, and lapsed time. A numerical scale can be used to score these problems. If a customer calls back with the same problem, the ticket should be re-opened. This creates an incentive to close a problem completely rather than closing incompletely-solved tickets to rack up a higher closing rate. Since more than one tech may be working on a ticket over multiple shifts, time spent on the ticket ought to be credited, and the score distributed accordingly. Common problems ought to have a troubleshooting tree or decision table for testing and resolution. These tools could be made web-available so the customer can work their own problem or work cohesively with a tech. (Once a problem has been solved, it should not need to be solved again; only administered.)

Customer tutoring will always be important. This type of tech support should not be scored at all, since customer understanding will vary the closing time of the ticket.

I propose that this allows a program of incentives to get support techs to be working in the areas they are most effective. A good tutor with good understanding of the product and good language skills should be evaluated on the time spent tutoring, and the troubleshooters should be scored on the points they earn solving a variety of problems. Obviously, some techs are going to figure out how to "Work" the system so they get more points, so there ought to be a peer score applied to determine any bonuses.

The ultimate goal should be customer satisfaction with the process. (Dell? Quickbooks? Are you LISTENING?)

The first measure of output ought to be the customer's satisfaction. However, measuring progress requires a SYSTEM. I strongly suggest a system like Kepner-Tregoe. It works well for individuals and teams, progress is easily determined, and even management can analyze the results.

I recommend, "The New Rational Manager" by Kepner and Tregoe ( http://www.kepner-tregoe.com/webstore/webstore-Pub-Software-PUB.cfm#RatMan ), and, "The Thinkers Toolkit" by Morgan Jones ( http://www.amazon.com/Thinkers-Toolkit-Powerful-Techniques-Problem/dp/0812928083/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245180924&sr=1-3 ).

When I was a kid in the early 80's, there were a few role playing games, such as one called "Killer", where you'd get assignments on paper, then go out into your neighborhood and try to assassinate your friends with squirt guns based on your objectives. Super fun game, and very tense. Can you imagine people these days with all the heightened paranoia about guns allowing their kids to do this now? Probably not.

You got me wishing I could get T.A.G. The Assassination Game on DVD. Same kind of thing except with plastic suction-cup dart guns, except one player decides to start killing for real. An early role for Linda Hamilton of Terminator fame.

Read Metatropolis for an idea of how it could work. It sounds like fun. A "gamespace" as a fluid alternate reality overlay of meatspace.

Though of course you're welcome to stay in your parents' basement avoiding any chance of conflict or social contact.

Yeah yeah... This has already been hashed out by a brighter mind.

Go read Rainbows End by Vernor VInge. He does the heavy thinking for you.

If you want to see the current state of the art go check out ARToolworks and maybe pull down the open version of their toolkit.

No I think it's based on a Tom Swift book I read in Elementary school, this one: http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Swift-Race-Moon-Adventure/dp/B0007E816Y/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245126163&sr=1-15

I hear you. You might consider buying a weather radio. They have an instant on alert mode that would listen for a severe weather alert signal being broadcast by NOAA and instantly come on so you can hear the alert. Perfect for people who liven in Tornado Alley. They aren't terribly expensive (though unfortunately they do cost some money you probably didn't plan to spend) at around $20-30. RadioShack. Amazon.

I agree it's a shame DTV doesn't have the ability to gracefully degrade rather than be an all-or-nothing deal...

And it didn't turn out too pretty. Read Bryan Ward-Perkins' "The Fall Of Rome and The End Of Civilization"......

http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807285

The PCjr's serial port, monitor port, joystick ports, keyboard port, and others used different connectors from the IBM PC. In fact they were not only non-standard connectors, but completely proprietary connectors that couldn't be found on any other computer.

People, this is 1983. All connectors were "non-standard". Nowadays we're used to a standard connector and pinout for RS-232 and parallel ports on the back of PCs. But in 1983, exactly one model of computer used them: the IBM PC. It didn't more than a couple years for people to realize that the only way to compete with the IBM PC was to be extremely compatible with it. But when the PC Jr. came out, everybody (especially IBM) used business and sales models that paid no attention to the idea that computers and their components could be commodified.

Small qualification: the use of 25-pin D-shaped connectors with specific pinouts was part of the RS-232 standard. But 25-conductor, straight-across cables cost, and you actually didn't need most of those signals for typical applications. So making cables that would connect some random computer to some random modem or serial printer was a serious black art. There was even a book on the subject.

(Jerry Pournelle once wrote that he used internal modems because he could never remember the pinouts he needed to make cables. But by the time he wrote this, RS-232 pinouts had been standardized and cheap pre-made modem cables were in all the stores. Pournelle is the original know-it-all ignoramus computer pundit.)

Parallel printer cables were even worse. They all used the Centronic de-facto standard on the printer side. But to save money, everybody used 25-pin D connectors at the computer side, and the way the 36 Centronics signals mapped to those 25 computer pins was different for every manufacturer. It took IBM to standardize the pinout, and also to standardize making the printer connector female so you didn't accidentally plug a modem into it.

The only requirement to generate EMPs is a nuclear weapon - the bigger the better.

Well, there are other ways, but I don't think they're close to being implemented yet.

Now as for doing it with nukes: here's a discussion I participated in a while back. It forced me to do some reading on the subject, and I made an interesting discovery. If you hope to do even minimal damage, you have to have at least a 1 megaton device. That's not easy. In fact, only five countries have managed to build 1-megaton bombs. And guess what? Iran isn't one of them.

And to actually implement a real back-to-the-stone-age scenario, you'd actually need bombs that are much bigger. Such bombs have been built and detonated, but they're physically huge. Not suitable for mounting on an ICBM. Which, BTW, Iran doesn't have the technology for either.

You really need a big industrial base to build this kind of technology. Outside of Russian and China, all such countries are allied with the U.S. Some smaller countries have built nukes (India, Pakistan, South Africa, probably Israel, maybe North Korea), but none with a yield of more than 50 kilotons. That's about 5% of the yield needed for even marginal EMP warfare.

The Iranian's best weapon against the US is economic manipulation of oil.

True. Or Al Qaida's for that matter. If ObL had any sense, he wouldn't have his minions setting off truck bombs and flying airplanes into buildings. He'd be scattering radioactive dust over the Strait of Hormuz.

Having re-read the entirety of your post, I realise it'd take me several pages to correct the absurdity of everything you say, so instead, I'll just recommend a book for you and anyone else who is interested:

People Like Us: How Arrogance Is Dividing Islam and the West (Paperback) by Waleed Aly.

I'm thinking critically because Amazon, EMC, VMWare, etc bill The Cloud as a mystical place where you throw your shit and then it's universally available 100%. Nothing bad happens in The Cloud.

No, they don't. You're either being disingenuous, or idiotic.

Per http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#highlights, Amazon is promising "Reliable Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazons proven network infrastructure and datacenters. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.

The irony here is that 6 hours in a year is 99.93% so they've already blown it for the year.

So what's the deal with having all copies of these VMs in one datacenter? That's not very The Cloud of them.

If it's only one instance running, its kinda hard to run it in multiple datacenters. They might be running clustering within a datacenter, but that can still be taken down by a power outages affecting multiple servers. As pointed out earlier, you can have instances in multiple datacenters (zones as they call it) if you're willing to pay for it.

Slavery was bad, but the deep South was never anywhere close to Nazi Germany...

So Nazi Germany is the yardstick to be used? If it doesn't measure up to that, it's merely "bad"? Slavery was an appalling crime. The fact that people (white and black, as you state) thought it was alright to claim other human beings and their labor as property is an abomination. Just because millions were not thrown in to ovens, gas chambers, or shot does not mean slavery can be easily dismissed.

The so-called "history book" you learned from as a kid was a bastardized, sanitized, rewritten version of "history" that had about as much relation to the truth as a made-for-TV "based on a true story" movie.

How do you know what history books I learned from? Try A People's History of the United States out; you may like it.

Here's three screaming kids. Your move.

I lead with a DVD of DreamWorks' Shrek. And if they ask for specific titles of public-domain fairy tales that happen to have been filmed by Walt Disney Pictures, I have plenty of comebacks for those.

Careful, your ignorance is showing.

The Enlightenment was in the 18th Century. The Renaissance (literally, rebirth) was immediately after the Dark Ages, and indeed did include the incorporation of Arab knowledge, which was quite substantial at that time, into European Cultures. Subsequently, the Middle East stagnated (prior to the rise of European Colonialism, mind you, so you can't really blame whitey for this one), while Europe dominated.

Pick up a copy of What Went Wrong . It'll explain why you are wrong better than I can.

They do:

http://www.amazon.com/Channel-Master-4221HD-Multi-Bay-Antenna/dp/B000FVTPX2

(Others should note that the antenna should be oriented 90 degrees from what is shown at the Amazon page; also there are similar antennas with 2 elements, instead of 4, linked on the Amazon page)

An antenna with somewhat larger elements than the coat hanger one will work better, the coat hanger one peaks close to the top of the analog uhf band, which is a much higher frequency than DTV will use.

Well, first of all, I haven't read "Carnage and Culture". But I just looked at the Amazon summary, and I don't think it refutes "Guns, Germs, and Steel" at all.

First of all, Europeans got their asses handed to them from about 300CE to the 1480s. The Germans sacked Rome again and again, so viciously that our word "Vandal" comes from the name of one of the Germanic tribes involved. A few hundred years after the Western Empire finally collapsed, the Muslims handily conquered the Iberian Peninsula (on which Spain and Portugal reside today) and reduced the Byzantine Empire to a remnant centered on Constantinople (tellingly, Istanbul today). The only two things that stopped Muslims overrunning Europe were:

• Charles Martel barely eeking out a victory in France at the Battle of Tours
• The Byzantines holding the line for a while with Greek Fire

This bare survival doesn't indicate European military superiority. Instead, it reveal a fundamental weakness that nearly led to the end of our civilization.

Europeans armies weren't anything special until the Renaissance. Don't forget how we were utterly defeated time and again in the Crusades, or how Western European armies decided to sack Constantinople (greatly weakening the only thing between the Islamic world and Western Europe) because the holy land was too tough. The Chinese had a great professional military as well, and don't forget where Sun Tzu hails from.

And how can we discuss European military weakness without invoking Ghengis Khan, the barbarian who nearly destroyed Europe again. He overran Russia and penetrated all the way to Vienna before being stopped. The idea mentioned in the summary that European armies were particularly ruthless is obviously bunk: Genghis Khan had entire cities impaled. There just wasn't anything particularly exceptional about European armies.

Yes, the Europeans armies later become practically invincible, but only due to cultural changes and competition among martial nation-states. Europe's later military superiority was not an inherent property of Europeans, but instead was a result of the same forces that Diamond details in "Guns, Germs, and Steel".

I made it halfway and gave up. ... Hardly anything happens, just a lot of Ender self reflecting.

So, you don't really know if anything happens because you only read half. From what I can tell, you don't like Sci-Fi. You like action. Ender's Game is one of the most lauded Sci-Fi books of all time - it won both the Hugo and Nebula award for best novel, a rare honor. Wikipedia has a great list of join winners (19 join winners for Novel by my count). Truly excellent Sci-Fi is powerful because it provokes thought, not because it increases your adrenaline.

Perhaps you should try First Blood for less "naval gazing". It has Rambo - you'll like that.

I am not worried about something that may happen in billions of years. I think the chance that I will be around then is even smaller.

I just finished reading Spin by by Robert Charles Wilson. I'm now terrified that this will, in fact, happen within my lifetime.

Are there any cheap but quality tutorial for Fortran? O'Reilly has no contemporary introduction to the language and their last book on Fortran, Migrating to Fortran 90 , came out nearly two decades ago.

...create another tale in the universe of The Incredibles for a sequel.

Exactly this. It has always been my opinion that The Incredibles felt unfinished by the time the credits rolled, never mind the huge loose end introducing The Underminer character right before them. They could even do a prequel so we could learn more about Gazerbeam et al. and the "Golden Age" of heroes hinted at in the film.

Personally I'm up for more of that kitschy Ultra-Lounge Exotica in the soundtrack too, and all the tips-of-the-hat and nods to Industrial Design geeks.

Do the ethics or morality of killing people change because of the tool?

probably not, but in the politician's eyes, dying makes it different. If you are not taking casualties, you are much more likely to get involved in "the continuation of politics by other means".
Then again, the very big groundswell against the robots' ability to do mass killing is also encouraging risk taking. after all, if no friendly gets killed, and no enemy gets killed either, the appetite for using force is greatly enhanced. Do remember that WWI came after a big period of relatively small and contained wars, mostly engaging professional [read: expendable] soldiers, and either quickly won or lost on the battlefield or contained by diplomats. When WWI came about, none of the parties involved was thinking that it could have such consequences, re "the first world war" by John Keegan, or on a lighter note, Blackadder's explanation of how WWI started.

Colin Gray's Another Bloody Century talks about the information warfare side of things and concludes that despite the hype, it's not a huge deal yet. He also talks about the inevitability of space warfare. It's a good book and after reading it you can why he made it onto the Air Force reading list (albeit with another book, "Modern Strategy").

It must be strange times to be in the Air Force - I read somewhere that the USAF turned out more unmanned than manned aircraft last year. Seems like a sea-change for them; something along the same lines as converting from the "big bomber carrying nukes" role.