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I read an essay by Martin Gardner in one of his books on cannibalism, asking whether it really happened. The essay was really a discussion of a book, which made the claims:

1. No anthropologist / explorer had ever witnessed cannabilism.
2. No tribe had ever admitted to it.

The book claimed that all evidence of customary [1] cannibalism effectively boiled down to a tribe / people / whatever saying: "Those guys who live over there, they are cannibals!" So anthropology students have been taught for ages that various primitive tribes engaged in cannibalism, but there is seemingly no proof of this statement. This was controversial and a few years ago (10, perhaps?) so I'm not sure what the current state of the art is.

[1] There are obvious one-off examples, like recently those rugby players down in South America, and in (pre)history perhaps eating mighty chiefs/warriors to try to absorb some of their strength or mana. This is, rather, looking at the idea of tribes that eat people on a regular basis.

In the book "Before the Dawn" it says that the idea that we reproduced with neanderthals is effectively ruled out due to genetic distance. Neanderthals were encountered by modern humans in Europe, and so Europeans should have more genetic distance from other peoples if we had bred with them.

You can buy HL2 on dvd if you don't want to use steam. But why wouldn't you want to use steam? When you reformat would you rather click "install this" and go to bed or spend all day swapping 30 disks?

http://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Sleep-Sugar-Survival/dp/0671038680 - T.S. Wiley's been saying this for years.

The Africans have been subject to tyranny of countless nations, and now they face the oppression of their own dictators. And I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but one's scientific success is heavily dependent on luck and ambition, not just intelligence.

There's even more to it, Africa's major axis is north-south instead of east-west, which means the continent has a lot of variance in climate with a lot of natural barriers (think about the Sahara) for species, knowledge and trade to cross. This as opposed to North America or Eurasia, both of which have east-west axes with a steady climate that's good for agriculture and diffusion of technology and trade.

Also, Africa has virtually no domesticable large mammals and large parts of Africa have been (or still are) not fit for agriculture at all. Finally, when Europeans started colonizing African countries they had a head-start in technology, and resistance to many diseases they were exposed to living next to their domesticated animals (pigs, horses, sheep), resistance the Africans never had a chance to develop. The same holds for South America, people still like to think the Inca's and the Aztecs where conquered by military force, while in fact their population was decimated by germs like the flu, bubonic pest etc.

Mandatory reading for the guy you responded to and for anyone interested to know why North America and Europe became the most developed societies, and not Africa, South-America or Polynesia (all of which at one point in history had a lead):

http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393061310/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242498876&sr=8-1

For those who don't like reading, the spoiler: it has nothing to do with intelligence/inventiveness, genetic superiority, laziness or any other form of inherited or acquired traits.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001OXSEPK/ should pick up one of those little displays.

Good enough for Amazon to use and sell: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/

Here are the search results for kindle books from Random House sorted by best-selling

And here is a Google Spreadsheet manually-populated with the list of titles to avoid

And the form to include new titles to that list

Happy rating!

This is as good a place as any:

http://www.amazon.com/Rantings-Single-Male-Correctness-Everything/dp/0976261316/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242451652&sr=8-1

Have fun, and laugh at it. I got this at my door, and 18 hours later (I like to stop and think) I was 18 hours further down the death march of life. Didn't agree with every little thing the dude wrote, but a good read none the less.

Btw, ISTR from his stories that he was either a dev or sysad, so it should be familiar territory for a lot of people here.

If this interests you, check out the book, The Sword and the Shield which is compiled from the notes of a KGB archivist who smuggled documents from KGB archives for about 20 years.

Adaptations of Philip K Dick books are notorious for being put in development hell. Scanner Darkly, IIRC, went through several attempted treatments before we got the rotoscoped version. And there's been attempts off and on to bring us Ubik on the big screen, though the last I heard of that was a few years ago and it was just being written.

Dick even wrote the screenplay for Ubik himself - though it probably won't be used.

Maybe Dell looked at what women actually buy as opposed to what feminists think they should buy. I actually think the :

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/magazines/602372/ref=pd_ts_mag_nav

First of all, recent studies have concluded that there is a genetic component to diabetes, and that the cause is not well connected to a person's diet.

Agreed. However I would say that a lot of adult onset diabetes is diet and exercise related.

We were taught that our diet should be composed primarily of the very things that make people gain weight, and the "experts" are still teaching this same crap to our kids.

Yes. If I ate as much cereal and bread as they say to I'd literally be 400lbs. I have a fast metabolism and can eat almost anything, including huge meals and desserts when I want. The ONLY thing that makes me gain fat weight is cereal and bread. I cut those out and I'm good. In fact, morning cereal and large amounts of factory bread seems to be a north america phenomenon. If you travel anywhere, that type of breakfast is typically referred to as an 'American' breakfast and is served only in hotels. In Italy, breakfast consisted of a single small pasty and a cappuccino. Similar breakfast in Argentina. It seems most countries have breakfast as the smallest meal of the day, not the largest, and cereal was unheard of but seems to be making inroads among youth that want to mimic NA habits.

My husband and I had to force ourselves to throw ALL of that old information out and basically start anew. I've lost about 35 pounds, and he about 23

Congratulations! And hang in there even though it can sometimes be discouraging. I have friends/family that similarly struggle with keeping the weight off. Just be sure to do it slowly so it doesn't mess up your metabolism.

There is a fightback against this corporate pushed profit driven grain diet (I kinda want to say conspiracy but wont). Here's a book that you may find useful: http://www.amazon.com/Body-God-Owners-Manual-Maximized/dp/0785263179

And I do find it ridiculous that you have to pay more for healthy food. Food became cheap because of corporations cutting corners and focusing on getting a product to market instead of looking at the quality of food. Take grain fed beef instead of range fed. Tie the cow down and force feed it corn and antibiotics, and you can plump up a cow in 6 months for market. Compare this to four years for a range fed cow (and the manual labour of moving the herd from field to field). However range fed is far healthier, but cheap crappy food is more cost effective.

Thats another reason to tax the bad food, so more people will buy the healthy food which in turn drives the price down due to higher volumes.

This ain't the "old days".

The Mac Hacker's Handbook:

http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Hackers-Handbook-Charles-Miller/dp/0470395362

- which should be bought, read and placed on the self next to:

Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach:

http://www.amazon.com/Mac-OS-Internals-Systems-Approach/dp/0321278542/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242357309&sr=1-1

Apple's security wasn't an accident, but then neither was Microsoft's - a real go-er.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT3_UCm1A5I

Yes.

This ain't the "old days".

The Mac Hacker's Handbook:

http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Hackers-Handbook-Charles-Miller/dp/0470395362

- which should be bought, read and placed on the self next to:

Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach:

http://www.amazon.com/Mac-OS-Internals-Systems-Approach/dp/0321278542/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242357309&sr=1-1

Apple's security wasn't an accident, but then neither was Microsoft's - a real go-er.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT3_UCm1A5I

Yes.

Trudgill's Sociolingustics. I'm not sure whether it's an authoritative work on the discipline but it was at the local library. :-) It's a fairly broad book covering a number of topics. The chapter I was referring to details the differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and historical evolution of languages based on male/female biases etc. (I've been wondering about studying applied lingustics by distance education.)

From Amazon Customer Support:

If you check your records under the View Your Digital Orders link at www.amazon.com/your-account you'll see that you purchased this book in November of 2008. At that time, there was no text-to-speech function available for the Kindle (Original), and we had not yet made any announcements about Kindle 2 or its text-to-speech option, so there is no less functionality for that book now compared to when it was first purchased.

Additionally, we cannot refund Kindle purchases that are more than 7 days old. You can read the Kindle Content Return Policy and contact us via phone or e-mail from our Kindle Support pages here:

http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport

They do have a good point. When I bought it, there was no TTS anywhere, as the K2 hadn't been announced.

I wonder if they'll consider differently for books purchased more recently?

Amazon does a much better job selling printed versions. You can find used copies there.

Amazon

It might have something to do with the fact the book is $50 because the content is worth it. Printing and distribution are a very small fraction of the cost of a book and it is valid that these costs be removed from the price of an e-book. So you take the $50 book and charge $45.95 for the e-book.

Look into it some more, don't just assume that printing and distribution is extremely costly. As the author of a $50 book (http://www.amazon.com/s/&field-keywords=cd+and+dvd+forensics for example), I know the costs of shipping a box of 22 books from the publisher is like $10. The printing cost is also not significant. A book like CD and DVD Forensics might cost $5 to print in relatively small quantities.

Either the content is worth it or it isn't. The physical book is essentially cost-free as far as anyone is really concerned.

The publisher is handling the Kindle pricing for this title. They've set the price at Amazon at $51 for the print on demand and $41 for the Kindle.

That's actually a fair representation of the costs. The printing probably costs about $5 and the shipping/handling about $5.

The real cost is in the time it takes to prepare the book. It's not fair to compare the cost of a data compression book with, say, a romance title. The size of the markets is vastly different. I would be happy to sell my data compression book at the price of a romance novel if I could sell as many copies.

Synthesizing information isn't cheap. It took me a long time to write that book. If society doesn't reward people for their time, they're going to stop doing it. I realize that the Wikipedia is very cool and much better than my books in many ways, but I don't think we're ready for it to be the only source of information.

from TFA:

Best Drives for fastest read/write speeds: The award here goes to both the OCZ Throttle and the Patriot Xporter XT. Both have very fast read and write speeds in USB2 mode. The OCZ Throttle also has a ridiculously fast eSATA mode. The Patriot Xporter XT has a Lifetime warranty (compared to the Throttle's 2-year warranty).

Amazon has a good deal after rebate and free shipping on the Patriot:

Patriot Xporter XT Boost High-Speed USB Flash Drive - 16GB (PEF16GUSB) $33 after rebate (buy.com $45, newegg $47)

Patriot PEF32GUSB Xporter XT Boost High-Speed USB Flash Drives (Black) $58 after rebate (buy.com $86, newegg $80)

from TFA:

Best Drives for fastest read/write speeds: The award here goes to both the OCZ Throttle and the Patriot Xporter XT. Both have very fast read and write speeds in USB2 mode. The OCZ Throttle also has a ridiculously fast eSATA mode. The Patriot Xporter XT has a Lifetime warranty (compared to the Throttle's 2-year warranty).

Amazon has a good deal after rebate and free shipping on the Patriot:

Patriot Xporter XT Boost High-Speed USB Flash Drive - 16GB (PEF16GUSB) $33 after rebate (buy.com $45, newegg $47)

Patriot PEF32GUSB Xporter XT Boost High-Speed USB Flash Drives (Black) $58 after rebate (buy.com $86, newegg $80)

From the Kindle Content Return Policy:

Any content you purchase for Kindle from the Amazon Kindle store is eligible for return and refund if we receive your request within 7 days of the date of purchase. Once a refund is issued, the item will be removed from Your Media Library and will no longer be readable on your Kindle.

We're going to hit a point really soon when the main difference between flash drives will be what OS they use to protect your data and what other functions are on the same chip.

As in, a flash drive that's not really a flash drive, it's a small computer that emulates a drive when plugged in to another computer. With wi-fi, GPS, bluetooth, etc.

You'll pay extra for a drive that's smart enough to protect/hide important data from malware on any computer you plug it into, back up data to a remote server when wireless is available, phone home if lost or stolen, and tag files with location metadata as they are created.

And of course this already exists, as an SD card for cameras: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001ACXHXE/ Welcome to the future!

Unless they start publishing books 1-4 with a warning label, "This series is unfinished, and may never be completed" any new readers have right to complain.

If you can't figure out by looking at the cover, or at least the first three pages of a book that it is part of a series, and are also unable to locate other books by the same author and determine by looking at them whether or not the in fact exist, then maybe the act of reading may be a bit too challenging.

The fact that books do not carry warning labels like "This product requires basic literacy skills" and "Not for use as a personal lubricant" does not give readers any right to complain either. That just means that the publishers have certain, hopefully realistic expectations regarding the mental capabilities of their customers.

She obviously doesn't read anything from the Gutenberg project, which for me, is entirely the point of my Kindle.

This is what I'm reading currently. I've wanted to read this for years, but I'm cheap.

http://www.amazon.com/Greens-History-English-People-D/dp/0260218839/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242313760&sr=8-10

$110 is the price for 125 year old books. It's only available used. Note: this is different than Green's SHORT history. This one is the big one, Green's Opus Magnum. The best history of the English People ever written to that point.

Got the entire text for free on Gutenberg and am reading it on the Kindle. At this rate, it won't take me long to be able to completely justify the entire purchase cost of the Kindle.

May I suggest the Kingston Mini for your next drive - the size is printed on one side (and etched on the other), and they keyring hole is part of the body.

Kindle DX can read to you. With its Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle DX can read books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers out loud to you, unless the book's rights holder made the feature unavailable.

Kindle DX can read to you. With its Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle DX can read books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers out loud to you, unless the book's rights holder made the feature unavailable.

Did a little poking around and found this is in fact true (at least basically so). Here's a listing with "Text-to-Speech: Not enabled" marked on it, and the drop down explanation being "The publisher has requested not to enable Text-to-Speech for this title."

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001ANURFO/

It went a little further than that;
  President of Caltech University, Thomas Everhart said of him, "More than any other individual, Bill Pickering was responsible for America's success in exploring the planets an endeavour that demanded vision, courage, dedication, expertise and the ability to inspire two generations of scientists and engineers".
There was a good biography for him donated to almost every NZ library by IPENZ last year called William H. Pickering: America's Deep Space Pioneer: America's Deep Space Pioneer.

USA: "Artificial Ethics: Moral Conscience, Awareness and Consciencousness" (amazon.com)
UK: "Artificial Beings: The Conscience of a Conscious Machine" (amazon.co.uk)

Same ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 number.

http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Rick-Aviles/dp/B00006AUIN/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1242228406&sr=8-1

So where's the C&D letter against Disney for using the name she coined for a planet?

Surely it causes consumer confusion.. I mean, when I see titles like The Complete Pluto, Volume One; I expect a DVD authorized by the foundation or scientists who discovered the planet, and it to be about the planet.

But instead the proper trade name as assigned the Pluto brand planet is used with a piece of fiction in a manner that is not only confusing but dilutes the mark...

If power consumption doesn't matter to you, the AMD X2 7750 + 780G + 400w PSU is a much better performer.

Sure, if the size, silence and low power consumption are not important to you then you should not even consider a mini-ITX based system.

Replace the 95W CPU with a 35W Conroe-L CPU and the micro-ATX motherboard with a mini-ITX LGA775 GeForce 9300 motherboard, and you've got something that's the same size and much closer in noise/power (for desktop users), but should blow away the Atom in gaming.

OTOH, I assume most people don't have serious gaming in mind when they build a mini-ITX desktop. For just HTPC applications (including Blu-ray playback), the Atom looks like it does just fine.

Right here.

It sounds like someone stole the plot to The Cuckoo's Egg, which is a real life story of overseas hackers using UC Berkley's computers to infiltrate military computers rather than medical data.

It wouldn't surprise me if this was an inside job to help get funding and laws through congress in order to consolidate medical records in the hands of the government.

Not surprisingly this comes soon after the NAS said we need to establish a policy of committing cyber attacks against "enemies."

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nas+cyber+attack

A fireproof/waterproof safe is good for that and a number of other items as well.

The home fire safe is UL rated for paper documents and currency. Internal temperatures rising to around 400 degrees F.

The media-rated safe, 125. Expect to spend $200 for a small 30 pound box. Sentry Fire-Safe Media Chest

What if you could place a number of small devices in a public space and gain the freedom to speak there without being overheard?

I agree that the issue of needing to locate listeners is a big issue. But there are, I suppose, potential uses still.

Max: Do you mean there could have been as many as fifty devices in this room as long as only 2 were listeners?

Harry Hoo: That's right Mr Smart.

Max: Wow. It must have been really crowded in here.

Harry Hoo: Amazing!

I agree as far as the majority of games go, but there are some games that do try to use games as a medium for provoking thought and representing ideas, sometimes while still be interesting to play. Chris Crawford's Balance of Power (1985) is a pretty good example, I think, a game about Cold-War brinksmanship that wasn't just a wargame, but also aimed to illustrate some features of the Cold War and brinksmanship through its gameplay.

More recently, there's been a collection of much smaller games, usually Flash on the web, trying to say something about serious issues. They're mostly smaller because the current niche with the most legs seems to be games that respond in a timely fashion to current events. So, for example, in the wake of the 2006 E Coli spinach scare, an indie game studio came out with Bacteria Salad, a farm-simulation game that makes some points about the tradeoffs in small vs. large farms. And in the wake of the Kerry "don't tase me, bro" incident, another indie designer made a game about how people do, or could, respond to police brutality.

The book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2007) has some decent coverage of the subject, about half an overview of games that already do include some actual expressive content, and half a manifesto of sorts that more games ought to, if the medium wants to have an impact in society besides entertainment.

I feel that "Six Days in Fallujah" should still be released. If done right, this game could be a tool to educate the small minds and willfully blind of the masses of how horrible this conflict is.

You could also try reading a book.

The below link talks about the Battle of Fallujah, as well as specifically about the "House of Death".
http://www.amazon.com/My-Men-Are-Heroes-Kasal/dp/0696232367

However, it's pretty easy to get cordless phones in the 5 GHz range.

I never thought I'd see Wolfram compete in the search market. However, this isn't much of a surprise to me after reading The World is Flat
Apparently, Google and many others use complex mathematics to figure ouch which porn site has the best, free content! On a more serious note, it's nice to see Google is getting some competition. The Wolfram search appears to be easy, yet also simple; something that Google has pioneered.

http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773/
http://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817639144/
http://www.amazon.com/Method-Coordinates-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817635335/
http://www.amazon.com/Functions-Graphs-Dover-Books-Mathematics/dp/0486425649/

http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773/
http://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817639144/
http://www.amazon.com/Method-Coordinates-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817635335/
http://www.amazon.com/Functions-Graphs-Dover-Books-Mathematics/dp/0486425649/

http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773/
http://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817639144/
http://www.amazon.com/Method-Coordinates-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817635335/
http://www.amazon.com/Functions-Graphs-Dover-Books-Mathematics/dp/0486425649/

http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773/
http://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817639144/
http://www.amazon.com/Method-Coordinates-I-M-Gelfand/dp/0817635335/
http://www.amazon.com/Functions-Graphs-Dover-Books-Mathematics/dp/0486425649/

This is more like a surrogate closed office door for offices without doors. Whether that makes much sense as a whole remains another matter.

What if you could place a number of small devices in a public space and gain the freedom to speak there without being overheard?

I agree that the issue of needing to locate listeners is a big issue. But there are, I suppose, potential uses still.

Aside from that not being true, it was underpowered so that it didn't have the appeal of later devices, it was marketed poorly in a world that wasn't ready (it would have needed to be marketed better).

Right. In the book "Myths of Innovation," the author (Scott Berkun) discusses how there is no such thing as a product being ahead of its time (which is what it seems this /. article summary is basically touting). You can't have a great idea in isolation and expect the market to come to you. Part of the invention process is how will your audience accept the product? Aside from patent trolling, the marketplace doesn't allow for financial success in a walled garden.

Berkun also cites many examples and non-examples of famous inventors like Edison not actually being the first to invent something (such as the light bulb), but really being the best one to bring it to the audience. He also demonstrates how you wouldn't be able to bring a modern invention such as the netbook and take it back in time to be as successful as it has been for us. The infrastructure wouldn't be there and the public mindset would have no reference point or paradigm to go from.

Why? One method of making money is to develop closed source software then open source an older version of the software (F/OSS) to gain market acceptance/share. The open source company then charges for either commercial-use or latest-version-use. I believe ghostscript follows one of these models. The open source company could sell the copyright in the non-open source code base. I believe the Tripwire (intrusion detection) developers did this recently. Technically, people releasing code under the GPL or at a later contributer's option any later version of the GPL could find a later version of the GPL allows the close sourcing of the code by company X only. This seems to be a dangerous clause if your goal is to keep it in the same state as the GPL license you released the code under. That said. Hiring professional help is not a substitute for educating yourself on possible problems in a sale of this nature. The variation in knowledge in the other professions is equal to the variation in knowledge in the programming profession. I would recommend the "Science Fiction Handbook" by L. Sprague De Camp http://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-Handbook-Sprague-Camp/dp/0070161984 for an insightful description of contract issues and desired clauses with selling book rights which might be applicable to the current situation from someone who did it for a living. Another book which might apply is: Inventions, patents, and their management / by Alf K. Berle and L. Sprague de Camp