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Scott McClellan's book says not only that they were lying, it says they KNEW they were lying about the intel when they said it.

http://www.amazon.com/What-Happened-Washingtons-Culture-Deception/dp/1586485563

(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

Just to turn things up a notch and head even further off topic, I'm going to introduce the book Jesus Lived in India, in which the author Holger Kersten suggests that the historical figure Jesus lived in Palestine only briefly, and spent the majority of his life in India, where he returned after the crucification and eventually died of old age.

There's a good book about this, called "The Mac is not a Typewriter:" http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-Professional-Level-Macintosh/dp/0938151312 It's not specific to the Mac, but it tries to dispel the old ways of thinking about how to create documents. (i.e. use the tab stops in your word processor instead of just hitting space a bunch, stuff like that, use only one space behind a period when using a variable-width font, etc.) It applies equally well to all GUI computers, but was written back when the Mac was about the only one out there.

This is one of those endless debates between old fogeys who hate everything that didn't already exist in 1975, and people who realize that, hey, paragraph breaks make a hell of a lot more sense than line breaks!

I am surprised that no one made a reference to Cosm (I have the Hardcover instead of this one, thanks), from esteemed physicist G. Benford, for a science-fictional treatment of that very topic (universe creation).

Alan Guth described this sort of thing, and many other possible origins of the universe, in his book written in 1998. I think I even remember him hypothesizing that a universe could possibly be its own parent. Definitely old news.

Actually, if you read the latest Distrowatch Weekly, they say that Linux on the Eee PC is almost a thing of the past.

Actually, if you read the latest Distrowatch Weekly, they say that Linux on the Eee PC is almost a thing of the past.

Are you sure? I remember the hellmouth series at the tip of the nineties.

By the aforementioned jonKatz, no less. See Voices from the Hellmouth

I even bought and read his book Geeks (no referral linkage, if you must know).

The Financial Post (Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers)*.

So some author has a "Growing number of scientists" (to whom do we owe the credits?) who thinks things are roses, huh? And this is on a financial website? Hell, I'm going to go by some Freon and use it to power my H2!

    "According to a growing number of scientists", the period of global
      warming that we have experienced over the past few centuries as Earth
      climbed out of the Little Ice Age is about to end."

[*] The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming
Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too fearful to do so (Hardcover)
http://www.amazon.com/Deniers-Renowned-Scientists-Political-Persecution/dp/0980076315

Ted Conover covers the philosophical basis for prisons in the U.S. in his book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing where he took a job as a "correctional officer". This book was given to me by a friend who was at C.O. at the time, and he confirmed that there is quite a bit of confusion as to what the ultimate point of prison is. In some ways, it doesn't matter-- if the people who enact the system have a particular philosophy, it doesn't mean much if that philosophy isn't shared by the correctional staff. My own impression from the contact I had with other C.O.'s is that these guys try not to think about it much-- they're there to crack skulls when people get out of line. Most of them tend to see the system as flawed and corrupt, but it's not really their problem.

This was part of the premise of an awesome book called Feed. In the book, everyone has a neural implant that's called a "feed", that's essentially internet access. The net result of having all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips essentially turns everyone into an immature idiot.

Google can encourage mental habits where people can talk about subjects that they do not understand.

This was covered in one of Feynman's semi-autobiographical books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! There's a bit where he goes to Brazil. There, in the science classes, the professor would call on the students, and a student would stand and deliver the answer right out of the textbook. This bothered Feynman somehow, so one day he's looking out the window at the sun glinting beautifully off the bay, and asks the students to point out an example of polarized light. Reflected light is polarized, but the students were unable to use their memorized knowledge. Feynman's conclusion was that the science professors weren't teaching science, but public speaking and elocution.

Vernor Vinge also covers this in Rainbows End. The protagonist, a revived Pulitzer-Prize winning poet from the old days, notes that the younger folks seemed to have an inability to really synthesize knowledge and understand anything, though they could instantly look anything up through their wearable computers and talk about it.

Google can encourage mental habits where people can talk about subjects that they do not understand.

This was covered in one of Feynman's semi-autobiographical books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! There's a bit where he goes to Brazil. There, in the science classes, the professor would call on the students, and a student would stand and deliver the answer right out of the textbook. This bothered Feynman somehow, so one day he's looking out the window at the sun glinting beautifully off the bay, and asks the students to point out an example of polarized light. Reflected light is polarized, but the students were unable to use their memorized knowledge. Feynman's conclusion was that the science professors weren't teaching science, but public speaking and elocution.

Vernor Vinge also covers this in Rainbows End. The protagonist, a revived Pulitzer-Prize winning poet from the old days, notes that the younger folks seemed to have an inability to really synthesize knowledge and understand anything, though they could instantly look anything up through their wearable computers and talk about it.

Encarta already tried it.

It didn't work because it doesn't feel like you're collaborating and "owning" the submission, it feels like you're giving your time and effort to some large entity which has control over the content.

Clay Shirky explains it better in Here Comes Everybody but the basic idea is that WikiPedia belongs to the people who submit, in a way, which means people are more likely to.

First of all, note that the auhtor here does have an agenda. From the end of the article:

The book he wrote does make a clear statement about how he feels about the current debate.

In any event, none can say that this development is linear. Beyond a certain point, maybe the balance between heating caused by CO2 and the increased plant consumption looks very different, and turns around. The complexity of these systems are not to be underestimated, and reading this article as "Some more CO2 might be good for us!", or at least reading it as a excuse not to do anything (like all those SUV owner might), would be bad.

My first thought when I saw the article title was a cellphone based networked super computer. Something along the lines of Rainbow's End or Halting State.

I wonder how many iphones would be needed to do a cellphone petaflop computer.

My first thought when I saw the article title was a cellphone based networked super computer. Something along the lines of Rainbow's End or Halting State.

I wonder how many iphones would be needed to do a cellphone petaflop computer.

Or the end of World War II

Where you buying D&D 4e, it's like $57 on Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dragons-Core-Rulebook-Gift/dp/0786950633

Most people who connect to Slashdot use Windows. It's the reality of working in the computer field today.

Vint Cerf said it's true. Quote from your sig: ' "During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore'

Several years ago I asked Vint Cerf about that, and he said it is true. Vint Cerf, and many other people, connected a lot of computers together, in a project called ArpaNet, which was then a scheme by the U.S. government to make killing people and destroying property more efficient. Originally you could only connect if you worked for a company with "Defense" (killing-related) contracts.

Al Gore made ArpaNet the public utility it is today. Vint Cerf, and others, had technical power. Al Gore had the political power to take the network away from the control of those who study how to kill, and make it available to everyone. Al Gore's initiative was strongly opposed by many of those who had access, including someone I knew at Tektronix at the time, because they didn't want commercial involvement.

Most politicians at the time didn't even know how to type. Keyboards were for secretaries. The head of IBM at the time didn't have a computer in his office! (Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner said that in his book, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?)

Al Gore's involvement showed technical foresight then far more advanced than that of almost all or all politicians today.

There are two parts of the Republican Party, a real party, and a party of corruption. The party of corruption sells favors from the U.S. government to whomever pays the most. One of the ways they do that is by finding angry people and helping them act out their anger by supplying them with words that have been market-tested for believability. Example: The Republicans are not "Conservative". That apply that term to themselves because they know it will get votes.

Being hostile toward Al Gore was part of what they did to put George W. Bush in office, only that.

Yes, they do.

Which is cheesy awesome.

Yes, they do.

Which is cheesy awesome.

Opportunist: in some areas (South America? Africa?) copying is so widespread that artists can't really make a living off their music

It's that way in most of the world, really. I'd bet 99% of all musicians don't make a living off their music; they may look cool when they're playing in their bar band on Saturday night, but they're right back in the cubicle (or fishing boat, depending on your profession) with the rest of us on Monday.

We see and read about the rich musicians at the very top all the time, but they're a miniscule fraction of the entire music playing populace. It's obvious that the organizations responsible for all the copyright bruhaha are interested in protecting those few moneymakers at the top of the pile.

psychodelicacy: Re-working other people's material is not plagiarism, but a means of honouring one's predecessors, learning one's craft and encouraging creativity

This is a good point. The definition of plagiarism is subjective and like all things settled by litigation, usually favors the people with the most expensive lawyers (i.e. the top media/communications companies). It's been that way in pop music forever (a few good examples can be found in the book, Confessions of a Record Producer) -- one only has to look at the R&B (Black) music scene in the 1950s-70s to see how many ideas were illegally swiped and resold by people like Pat Boone.

I didn't read any of the articles linked but I can say from person experience that, even though Practical Common Lisp is available for free on-line (HTML, PDF) I still bought my copy. It is worth every penny. Had it not been available on-line, it probably would've taken me even longer to convince myself to buy it.

There were no dialup modems to which you and your buddies could connect, no external connections to MILNET at all.

Actually there was a way in. Then at UC Berkley Cliff Stole found someone had gained access to a system at Berkley which was then used to access military computers. He later wrote a book, "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage", about it. Some crackers, as they didn't follow the hacker ethic I won't call them hackers, in Germany being paid by the KGB was able to gain access. Stole found them because of a 75 cent discrepancy between two computers, the one broken into and an accounting system that tracked usage and billing.

wish they would release an anamorphic DVD of it

They are, er at least widescreen, on 29 July 2008. In a sense I'd expect them to release it on Blu-ray.

It's true.

Even the most expensive retail version of Windows for PCs (Vista Ultimate) at non-upgrade pricing is at most $320 (directly from Microsoft) and available for as low as $220. The retail version of Vista Home Premium (non-upgrade) is $200-$260. Upgrade and OEM versions are even cheaper.

Microsoft Word 2007 is at most $230 (retail, non-upgrade) or $110 (upgrade) for non-volume business users ($193 and $90 at Amazon). Home users (up to three per household) can get Office 2007 Home & Student (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) for at most $150 ($95 at Amazon).

I agree that many people will be just fine with cheaper (or free) alternatives for their OS and word processor, but exaggerating and bullshitting like O'Reilly or Michael Moore doesn't help make the point.

It's true.

Even the most expensive retail version of Windows for PCs (Vista Ultimate) at non-upgrade pricing is at most $320 (directly from Microsoft) and available for as low as $220. The retail version of Vista Home Premium (non-upgrade) is $200-$260. Upgrade and OEM versions are even cheaper.

Microsoft Word 2007 is at most $230 (retail, non-upgrade) or $110 (upgrade) for non-volume business users ($193 and $90 at Amazon). Home users (up to three per household) can get Office 2007 Home & Student (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) for at most $150 ($95 at Amazon).

I agree that many people will be just fine with cheaper (or free) alternatives for their OS and word processor, but exaggerating and bullshitting like O'Reilly or Michael Moore doesn't help make the point.

It's true.

Even the most expensive retail version of Windows for PCs (Vista Ultimate) at non-upgrade pricing is at most $320 (directly from Microsoft) and available for as low as $220. The retail version of Vista Home Premium (non-upgrade) is $200-$260. Upgrade and OEM versions are even cheaper.

Microsoft Word 2007 is at most $230 (retail, non-upgrade) or $110 (upgrade) for non-volume business users ($193 and $90 at Amazon). Home users (up to three per household) can get Office 2007 Home & Student (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) for at most $150 ($95 at Amazon).

I agree that many people will be just fine with cheaper (or free) alternatives for their OS and word processor, but exaggerating and bullshitting like O'Reilly or Michael Moore doesn't help make the point.

It's true.

Even the most expensive retail version of Windows for PCs (Vista Ultimate) at non-upgrade pricing is at most $320 (directly from Microsoft) and available for as low as $220. The retail version of Vista Home Premium (non-upgrade) is $200-$260. Upgrade and OEM versions are even cheaper.

Microsoft Word 2007 is at most $230 (retail, non-upgrade) or $110 (upgrade) for non-volume business users ($193 and $90 at Amazon). Home users (up to three per household) can get Office 2007 Home & Student (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) for at most $150 ($95 at Amazon).

I agree that many people will be just fine with cheaper (or free) alternatives for their OS and word processor, but exaggerating and bullshitting like O'Reilly or Michael Moore doesn't help make the point.

are all morons. If they really knew anything, they would be doing research, not trying to sell books full of bullshit predictions about human immortality (blatantly impossible and stupid) and the rise of a supreme race of machines.

Unbridled and irrational optimism is not science. It is at best science fiction, and at worst religion.

From wikipedia, Kurzweil's only research into AI comes from working with OCR systems and text to speech... which technically aren't even considered part of the AI field anymore. It hardly makes him qualified to predict where these fields are going.

Usually, futurists predict fast paced technological progression, or even exponential progression. Some even predict something called the "technological singularity" that has no clear definition, other than that basically all of your hopes and dreams will be fulfilled by advanced technology.

Why do they predict these ridiculous things? They might show some graph of how computers have gotten exponentially faster over time from Moore's law. However, this isn't a real justification for AI. A computer that runs windows twice as fast doesn't suddenly become self aware. Furthermore, we've *always* known the progression in the speed of computers will *stop* at a certain point, when making transistors any smaller would be impossible since certain quantum effects would come into play.

Why then, do fururists predict such things? Here's why:

http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology/dp/0670033847

Because a futurists *job* is to sell books and do speaking engagements, and books that say something like "AI is moving forward *very* slowly right now, and it will probably be a few hundred years before we have anything that is even a rough approximation of human" aren't very inspiring to science fiction fan boys, and so they don't sell well.

Thus, the technological singularity. The poorly defined event that guarantees that whatever nerdy science fiction fantasies you have, they will be realized within your lifetime.

What could possibly sell better? Other than the idea of human immortality (also promised by kurweil and other futurists!). Here's another book by some futurists that makes similar predictions about human immortality and a single event that transforms the human race:

http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Authorized-James-Version-Apocrypha/dp/0192835254

I place both Kurweil's book and that book in the same category. Religious texts. You can believe in them if you *want* to believe in them (I mean, I'm not going to stop you) but you're kidding yourself if you think there's a rational justification.

are all morons. If they really knew anything, they would be doing research, not trying to sell books full of bullshit predictions about human immortality (blatantly impossible and stupid) and the rise of a supreme race of machines.

Unbridled and irrational optimism is not science. It is at best science fiction, and at worst religion.

From wikipedia, Kurzweil's only research into AI comes from working with OCR systems and text to speech... which technically aren't even considered part of the AI field anymore. It hardly makes him qualified to predict where these fields are going.

Usually, futurists predict fast paced technological progression, or even exponential progression. Some even predict something called the "technological singularity" that has no clear definition, other than that basically all of your hopes and dreams will be fulfilled by advanced technology.

Why do they predict these ridiculous things? They might show some graph of how computers have gotten exponentially faster over time from Moore's law. However, this isn't a real justification for AI. A computer that runs windows twice as fast doesn't suddenly become self aware. Furthermore, we've *always* known the progression in the speed of computers will *stop* at a certain point, when making transistors any smaller would be impossible since certain quantum effects would come into play.

Why then, do fururists predict such things? Here's why:

http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology/dp/0670033847

Because a futurists *job* is to sell books and do speaking engagements, and books that say something like "AI is moving forward *very* slowly right now, and it will probably be a few hundred years before we have anything that is even a rough approximation of human" aren't very inspiring to science fiction fan boys, and so they don't sell well.

Thus, the technological singularity. The poorly defined event that guarantees that whatever nerdy science fiction fantasies you have, they will be realized within your lifetime.

What could possibly sell better? Other than the idea of human immortality (also promised by kurweil and other futurists!). Here's another book by some futurists that makes similar predictions about human immortality and a single event that transforms the human race:

http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Authorized-James-Version-Apocrypha/dp/0192835254

I place both Kurweil's book and that book in the same category. Religious texts. You can believe in them if you *want* to believe in them (I mean, I'm not going to stop you) but you're kidding yourself if you think there's a rational justification.

Way to "think of the children".

Actually, the brain maintains plasticity well into adulthood.
Check out http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Brain-Neuroplasticity-Power-Mental/dp/0060988479,
if you're interested in details.

So leave those poor brains alone until they need augmentation.

Octoroon, its a great album!

[Bucking for an off-topic mod]
and packs a .45 (best caliber ever!

The .45 acp has been shown to suck heavily as a handgun cartridge for self defence. See this. It over pentrates, most 1911's won't feed anything but hardball, and the actual stoppage rate is lower than even a 9mm. Plus the size of the cartridge limits magazine capacity.

The .40 S&W is where it's at, Bill's choice not withstanding. That's why all the cops carry them these days.

BTW, I agree with you about Bill Richardson.

(this should prove to our foreign readers that we -are- all crazy gun nuts over here.)

I don't have any mod points left, but welcome to my friends list pal. You've just echoed the feelings that made me become an independent.

I think the final straw for me was when Team of Rivals came out, and all of the neocon pundits essentially ran a smear campaign... against Lincoln!! The Republicans of today are in name only.

I didn't misread anything. Other companies are selling through Amazon at that price. Look for yourself

You should check out Robert Forward's book Timemaster.

Forward was a physicist that also wrote science fiction. This book uses the concept of mirror matter which is repelled from normal matter as it attracts it. (Mirror matter is repelled by normal matter, but normal matter is attracted to mirror matter) Thus producing an infinite propulsion with no fuel expenditure via the simple process of wrapping a ball of mirror matter in a sphere of normal matter. When the mirror matter is moved closer to one side of the sphere it pushes the sphere away from itself. As a physicist he worked out the actual math and implications of this process. It has some weird properties (free electricity generation, sustained 1G propulsion, worm holes in time & space, causality when you have a worm hole to the past, etc).

The best part is that the book's mirror matter is mirror matter alien dung. If mirror matter really does exist (in dung form or not) then hello space travel. But given the something for nothing nature of the process, I'm not holding up high hopes.

Let me see which method of acquiring movies is best for the customer (using a massive sample size of me): I'm going to take a big film from last year as my example which I'm going to use for all of my comparisons. With no particular preference for anything, I'm going to use Cloverfield as my example. Regular DVD Purchase
It might just be me, but I'm one of these people that can go back and watch a DVD over and over again - not back to back, that'd get dull really quickly - but every few months, I can go back and watch a movie I really liked, either with a different group of friends or just because I really liked the film. I didn't think much of Cloverfield but if I did, I could get it from Amazon for $15.99. Just over three times more than the auto-rot Flexi-DVD thingy, and I can watch it whenever I want, with whoever I want, forever (or certainly for a lot longer than 48 hours). I can put it on my shelf, in my DVD rack, lend it to my friends, sell it for a few bucks when I get bored of it, anything. All that justifies the higher price point.

Rental This Flexplay system is $5 per 48-hour self-destructing disc. If a brick-and-mortar rental store wanted $5 for a 2-day rental, I'd go somewhere else, though YMMV on local rental store prices. Alternatively, I could also go to Neflix or Blockbuster's online service and get unlimited monthly rentals (one at a time) for $8.99, so the rental price for each DVD goes down with every rental. If you only watch one or two DVDs a month so $8.99 is too much for you, both Blockbuster and Netflix have a basic plan of $3.99 (Blockbuster) or $4.99 (Netflix) - so I'm getting Cloverfield either cheaper or at the same price point as Flexplay, but I know the disc will play properly, I won't get any of the 'special adhesive' inside my player, and if I want to have the guys round to have a few beers and watch a great film the next weekend, I can. Hell, if I go to Blockbuster I can even save a dollar.

Piracy
Finally, the thing the MPAA is probably trying to compete with with these self-destructing discs, the evil pirate. using everyone's favourite Pirate Bay, a quick search reveals a Cloverfield DVD rip with over two thousand seeds. If I feel like getting fancy, there's a 4Gb Blu-Ray rip with 181 seeds. With a decent internet connection, I could have the regular DVD rip within a couple of hours tops. If I've just been to the store, I'm not going to come straight in and watch a DVD right away, I'm going to wait until I've put everything away. I'm going to wait until all the other jobs I have to do are done before I sit down to watch the film I just saw at the counter. I can afford that wait of 2 hours, if I was the type to pirate movies, then I'd just do that and put the $5 towards beer. If I was just going out to get a film I'd do this as well - you know where my local Staples is? It's at least a 2 hour round trip.

Legal Downloads Finally, the option Joe Public probably uses less, though I think it's a great idea. iTunes does movies now, but they don't have Cloverfield, so that rules them out of my strict example, but their movies seem to be priced at around $10, so I can just pay double the price and keep the film forever. Seems reasonable, but the real killer is Amazon, who will rent me the film for a whole month for a dollar less than Flexplay will let me have it for 2 days. People will say that Flexplay gives you the physical product, but does that matt

Let me see which method of acquiring movies is best for the customer (using a massive sample size of me): I'm going to take a big film from last year as my example which I'm going to use for all of my comparisons. With no particular preference for anything, I'm going to use Cloverfield as my example. Regular DVD Purchase
It might just be me, but I'm one of these people that can go back and watch a DVD over and over again - not back to back, that'd get dull really quickly - but every few months, I can go back and watch a movie I really liked, either with a different group of friends or just because I really liked the film. I didn't think much of Cloverfield but if I did, I could get it from Amazon for $15.99. Just over three times more than the auto-rot Flexi-DVD thingy, and I can watch it whenever I want, with whoever I want, forever (or certainly for a lot longer than 48 hours). I can put it on my shelf, in my DVD rack, lend it to my friends, sell it for a few bucks when I get bored of it, anything. All that justifies the higher price point.

Rental This Flexplay system is $5 per 48-hour self-destructing disc. If a brick-and-mortar rental store wanted $5 for a 2-day rental, I'd go somewhere else, though YMMV on local rental store prices. Alternatively, I could also go to Neflix or Blockbuster's online service and get unlimited monthly rentals (one at a time) for $8.99, so the rental price for each DVD goes down with every rental. If you only watch one or two DVDs a month so $8.99 is too much for you, both Blockbuster and Netflix have a basic plan of $3.99 (Blockbuster) or $4.99 (Netflix) - so I'm getting Cloverfield either cheaper or at the same price point as Flexplay, but I know the disc will play properly, I won't get any of the 'special adhesive' inside my player, and if I want to have the guys round to have a few beers and watch a great film the next weekend, I can. Hell, if I go to Blockbuster I can even save a dollar.

Piracy
Finally, the thing the MPAA is probably trying to compete with with these self-destructing discs, the evil pirate. using everyone's favourite Pirate Bay, a quick search reveals a Cloverfield DVD rip with over two thousand seeds. If I feel like getting fancy, there's a 4Gb Blu-Ray rip with 181 seeds. With a decent internet connection, I could have the regular DVD rip within a couple of hours tops. If I've just been to the store, I'm not going to come straight in and watch a DVD right away, I'm going to wait until I've put everything away. I'm going to wait until all the other jobs I have to do are done before I sit down to watch the film I just saw at the counter. I can afford that wait of 2 hours, if I was the type to pirate movies, then I'd just do that and put the $5 towards beer. If I was just going out to get a film I'd do this as well - you know where my local Staples is? It's at least a 2 hour round trip.

Legal Downloads Finally, the option Joe Public probably uses less, though I think it's a great idea. iTunes does movies now, but they don't have Cloverfield, so that rules them out of my strict example, but their movies seem to be priced at around $10, so I can just pay double the price and keep the film forever. Seems reasonable, but the real killer is Amazon, who will rent me the film for a whole month for a dollar less than Flexplay will let me have it for 2 days. People will say that Flexplay gives you the physical product, but does that matt

Let me see which method of acquiring movies is best for the customer (using a massive sample size of me): I'm going to take a big film from last year as my example which I'm going to use for all of my comparisons. With no particular preference for anything, I'm going to use Cloverfield as my example. Regular DVD Purchase
It might just be me, but I'm one of these people that can go back and watch a DVD over and over again - not back to back, that'd get dull really quickly - but every few months, I can go back and watch a movie I really liked, either with a different group of friends or just because I really liked the film. I didn't think much of Cloverfield but if I did, I could get it from Amazon for $15.99. Just over three times more than the auto-rot Flexi-DVD thingy, and I can watch it whenever I want, with whoever I want, forever (or certainly for a lot longer than 48 hours). I can put it on my shelf, in my DVD rack, lend it to my friends, sell it for a few bucks when I get bored of it, anything. All that justifies the higher price point.

Rental This Flexplay system is $5 per 48-hour self-destructing disc. If a brick-and-mortar rental store wanted $5 for a 2-day rental, I'd go somewhere else, though YMMV on local rental store prices. Alternatively, I could also go to Neflix or Blockbuster's online service and get unlimited monthly rentals (one at a time) for $8.99, so the rental price for each DVD goes down with every rental. If you only watch one or two DVDs a month so $8.99 is too much for you, both Blockbuster and Netflix have a basic plan of $3.99 (Blockbuster) or $4.99 (Netflix) - so I'm getting Cloverfield either cheaper or at the same price point as Flexplay, but I know the disc will play properly, I won't get any of the 'special adhesive' inside my player, and if I want to have the guys round to have a few beers and watch a great film the next weekend, I can. Hell, if I go to Blockbuster I can even save a dollar.

Piracy
Finally, the thing the MPAA is probably trying to compete with with these self-destructing discs, the evil pirate. using everyone's favourite Pirate Bay, a quick search reveals a Cloverfield DVD rip with over two thousand seeds. If I feel like getting fancy, there's a 4Gb Blu-Ray rip with 181 seeds. With a decent internet connection, I could have the regular DVD rip within a couple of hours tops. If I've just been to the store, I'm not going to come straight in and watch a DVD right away, I'm going to wait until I've put everything away. I'm going to wait until all the other jobs I have to do are done before I sit down to watch the film I just saw at the counter. I can afford that wait of 2 hours, if I was the type to pirate movies, then I'd just do that and put the $5 towards beer. If I was just going out to get a film I'd do this as well - you know where my local Staples is? It's at least a 2 hour round trip.

Legal Downloads Finally, the option Joe Public probably uses less, though I think it's a great idea. iTunes does movies now, but they don't have Cloverfield, so that rules them out of my strict example, but their movies seem to be priced at around $10, so I can just pay double the price and keep the film forever. Seems reasonable, but the real killer is Amazon, who will rent me the film for a whole month for a dollar less than Flexplay will let me have it for 2 days. People will say that Flexplay gives you the physical product, but does that matt

However, as those of us steeped in childhood lore know full well, Futility is a Tapir.

"However, two Russian nuclear missiles were recovered.

Actually, as I recall, they were torpedoes.

My father was a principle designer on this project for it's duration, and received an award from the President of the U.S. for his service to his country.

Check out the book, "A Matter of Risk: The Incredible Inside Story of the CIA's Hughes Glomar Explorer Mission to Raise a Russian Submarine", it tells much of the story.

You and your newfangled shiny TV stuff... Back in my day we had books...
 
  "Explorations: my quest for adventure and discovery under the sea." (Hyperion, 1995)
 
Seriously, not only is this not news, or even new news... TFA gets the sequence of events all wrong. Ballard had already been hunting Titanic with side scan sonar and photo sleds (which is even harder than finding a needle in a haystack) when the Navy approached him to map the wreckage of Thresher and Scorpion. Not find, but map (the locations were already known to the Navy). This was done as part of a Navy project to examine reactors known to be on the bottom of the ocean to determine if reactors could be disposed of by ocean dumping. They also dove on both wrecks using the Alvin (Oxford University Press, 1990) to take samples of the seabed and wreckage and to take radiation readings (photographs from this expedition can be seen at the Naval Historical Center page on Scorpion ).
 
When the Navy hired him to perform those surveys, he examined the earlier ones (there have been several), and realized that debris trails were the key to locating deep water wrecks. The Scorpion wreck site is compact as she broke up on impact with the bottom. Thresher's wreck on the other hand is scattered across a considerable area as she broke up (relatively) shallow. The Navy however refused to pay for a search for Titanic to prove the theory and to further test Dr. Ballard's new mapping sled. Instead the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution funded a search for Titanic as an extension of the expedition to map the Scorpion's wreckage. (Though all WHOI knew was that it was a classified USN expedition.)

You and your newfangled shiny TV stuff... Back in my day we had books...
 
  "Explorations: my quest for adventure and discovery under the sea." (Hyperion, 1995)
 
Seriously, not only is this not news, or even new news... TFA gets the sequence of events all wrong. Ballard had already been hunting Titanic with side scan sonar and photo sleds (which is even harder than finding a needle in a haystack) when the Navy approached him to map the wreckage of Thresher and Scorpion. Not find, but map (the locations were already known to the Navy). This was done as part of a Navy project to examine reactors known to be on the bottom of the ocean to determine if reactors could be disposed of by ocean dumping. They also dove on both wrecks using the Alvin (Oxford University Press, 1990) to take samples of the seabed and wreckage and to take radiation readings (photographs from this expedition can be seen at the Naval Historical Center page on Scorpion ).
 
When the Navy hired him to perform those surveys, he examined the earlier ones (there have been several), and realized that debris trails were the key to locating deep water wrecks. The Scorpion wreck site is compact as she broke up on impact with the bottom. Thresher's wreck on the other hand is scattered across a considerable area as she broke up (relatively) shallow. The Navy however refused to pay for a search for Titanic to prove the theory and to further test Dr. Ballard's new mapping sled. Instead the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution funded a search for Titanic as an extension of the expedition to map the Scorpion's wreckage. (Though all WHOI knew was that it was a classified USN expedition.)

The vast majority of investors should ignore the minute by minute blows of the market. At this time scale the market is literally a big roulette wheel. Virtually all day traders and every amateur who thinks they can reliably extract disproportionate gains out of the market long-term (i.e. more than they would by say, holding an appropriate mix of diversified indexes) are fooling themselves into making predictions on what essentially amounts to sheer randomness. Think I'm crazy? Do yourself a favor and read A Random Walk Down Wall Street and save yourself the decade it took me to figure out how the market works. You're welcome.