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So here's a little about what EC2 actually is, for those of you who don't know. You don't have to reply here, start your own comments ;)

The Elastic Compute Cloud was originally designed as a way to host applications that needed lots of CPUs, and the option to expand by adding more CPUs. It's a hosting service that lets you start up virtual machines to run any software you want: they have a wide variety of pre-packaged open-source operating systems you can pick to start up your VMs with.

Starting up a VM takes just a minute or two, and it's point-and-click thanks to the Firefox extension. Each VM comes in one of three sizes: small (webhead), large (database), and extra large (bigass database). They cost respectively $72, $288, and $576 a month (billed by the hour), plus bandwidth ($0.18/GB out, somewhat cheaper for data going in and there's a price break at 10 TB).

One of the concerns everyone raises with hosting on virtual machines is that if a VM instance goes down, you lose everything on it. It comes with hard drive storage (160 GB on the small size), but if something goes wrong, that data's gone.

I think the rejoinder here is that, on real hardware, if something goes wrong, your data's gone. You never set up an enterprise-level website on the assumption that any particular hardware has to survive. Single points of failure are always a mistake, and backups are always a necessity. When any machine explodes - real or virtual - the question is how fast your system recovers to "working well enough" (seconds, hopefully) and then how long it takes you to get it "back to normal" behind the scenes (hours, hopefully). Those answers shouldn't depend on whether there's a physical drive to yank out of a dead physical machine that may or may not retain valid data.

Which brings up what I think is one of the selling points of EC2: free fast bandwidth to S3, Amazon's near-infinite-size, redundantly-replicated data storage platform. That's a nice backup option to have available. That's part of why, if I were starting a new web service, I wouldn't host it on real hardware. I'd like not having to worry about backups, tapes, offsite copies... bleah, let someone else worry about it.

Slashdot hasn't run many stories on EC2 (none that I know of) because until now it's been a niche service. Without a way to guarantee that you can have a static IP, there had been a single point of failure: if your outward-facing VMs all went down, your only recourse was to start up more VMs on new, dynamically-assigned IPs, point your DNS to them, and wait hours for your users' DNS caches to expire. That meant that while it may have been a good service for sites that needed to do massive private computation, it was an unacceptable hosting service.

Now with static IPs, you basically set up your service to have several VMs which provide the outward-facing service (maybe running a webserver, or a reverse proxy for your internal webservers), and you point your public, static IPs at those. If one or more of them goes down, you start up new copies of those VMs and repoint the IPs to them. No DNS changes required.

I know there are other companies offering web hosting through virtual servers. Please share information about them, the more we all know the better.

Obviously you are beyond the targeted skill level of this book if you are using javascript for shell scripts. I have heard good things about javascript for shell scripting, but that is not what this book is about, nor is it how most people are forced into javascript.

To most people and most authors of books such as this, javascript equals client-side web programming. Just look at the cover of the book. "Slicing and dicing HTML" is easier, simpler, and faster if done on the server. Those things usually matter.

Sure you can blame the DOM, but the environment in which you are forced to program has just as much to do with the task at hand, and the use cases of the language in question. The sad reality of client-side javascript is that you cannot trust the code that you write. That is a very serious problem.

David Joyner has a book which explores some of the math behind the Rubik's cube: http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Group-Theory-Merlins-Mathematical/dp/0801869471

If you are interested in playing around with the symmetry group associated to the Rubik's cube, Sage (http://www.sagemath.org) has good support for it; the documentation can be found at http://www.sagemath.org/doc/html/ref/module-sage.groups.perm-gps.cubegroup.html . Sage also includes a number of efficient solvers for the Rubik's cube.

Ask any census taker what is the purpose of the census, and I'd bet a dollar to a donut they will either be wrong or will have no answer at all. As stated in Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution, the sole purpose of the census is to determine the number of representatives that shall be allocated to each state in the US House of Representatives. Thus, the ONLY question they are Constitutionally authorized to ask is: "How many voting adults live in this household." That is all they need to know for Constitutional purposes and that's the only information I've ever given to them or ever will. Don't be such damn sheeple, people.

Grey goo is highly unrealistic. I foresee an unholy alliance of nanotechnology and AI research producing killing swarms as in Crichton's Prey . After all, both Kurzweil and Crichton are airport paperback novels, so they each produce entertaining notions of the future.

I agree. All the whizbang graphics and jokes in the Head First books don't translate to more efficient learning. The most friendly language tutorial I've ever seen is Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python , which with its simple typesetting initially seems dull as dishwater, but which is excellently worded and combines friendliness with rigour. A pity O'Reilly never commissioned Pilgim to come abroad and write more resources for developers.

Maximum RPM was last updated in 1997 and the suite has since seen some rather sizeable changes. The reason I was given back in 2001 or so regarding the absence of updates was higher priorities elsewhere. He should look in-house before throwing stones at others.

Amazon's top selling Disney titles, Enchanted and 101 Dalmatians, are $14.99 right now. The only two movies above $19 in their bestsellers (which change hourly) are I Am Legend, Sweeney Todd, and August Rush. The first two are special collector's sets and have cheaper alternatives. August Rush is $20. Pixar movies, like movies put out by the Criterion Collection, will always be a few dollars more. But that's the excception.

Right now, if I needed to build a film library, I could get 100 great films for $10 or less each, on average. Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, The Godfather, Ghostbusters, Citizen Kane, Jaws, or whatever movies you like. This simply was not possible eight years ago. Today it is.

The problem is that unless OEMs start including these drives in computers, they probably won't sell very well. Or more likely, the geek who does buy one will end up offsetting the savings by throwing it in his machine with a 750W power supply and monster graphics card(s).

Yes, the choice of GPU certainly is very significant. A while back I built up a PVR using GMA950 to keep initial and long term costs down. It'd be awful for demanding games, but works great for HD video. Total system power consumption (less display) 82 Watts (measured during video compression). That's with a slightly overclocked Core 2 Duo too. I'm sure an Apple-TV uses far less than 82 Watts, but for scaling 1080i to 720p I needed more CPU.

The raw power rating for the power supply does not tell you anything about how much power you'll consume. That is simply a maximum output rating. It's a bit like saying a 120 Volt outlet in your house is rated to deliver 2400 Watts when fed from a 20 Amp circuit with nothing else running. The actual consumption depends on the load current you draw.
Power supplies do have conversion losses which are reflected by an efficiency rating. The rated numbers still don't tell you exactly what to expect since efficiency varies depending on how much of a load you have, and which outputs are doing the work.
The more you're consuming, the more important the efficiency rating is. I found some really cheap 600 Watt power supplies on sale, shipping included, for $15. No efficiency rating was given, and I'd suspect something so cheap of having problems when actually being asked to deliver close to 600 Watts, but they've worked flawlessly at low power levels.

Actual consumption of components and whole systems is usually quite different from sticker/spec-sheet figures. Some of those reflect maximum capabilities, some reflect things like startup surge currents, all generally change with options and actual use. Even something like running displays at the lowest acceptable brightness makes a significant difference. It's very helpful to use a meter such as the Kill-A-Watt (set to Watts, not Volt*Amperes) to get a feel for these things.

Since power is fairly expensive where I am, I figure a cost of about $1 per month for every 10 Watts used continuously. Between torrents and recording at all hours, continuous applies for my PVR. Saving 10 Watts doesn't sound like much, but over 5 years that's about $60. If one likes to archive shows, it is quite likely that more than one drive will be used eventually multiplying the costs and savings. Of course if one keeps some archives on externals and powers them down, that would help even more. If OSes are not supporting drive sleep on a drive-by-drive basis, some changes there could save quite a bit too.
Using energy saving drives, using fewer big drives instead of a larger number of older small ones, using an energy efficient CPU, and avoiding a power hungry GPU if it isn't needed all add up to much more substantial energy savings. And remember, it's not just about the cost of energy, there's the environmental impact as well.

I haven't actually made measurements to see how much the power consumption of GPUs varies with what they're doing. I would hope that designs now, or in the near future, will allow a major fallback in consumption when user needs are not very demanding.

When people brag about benchmarks, I'd like to see one more added - one generated by dividing the traditional benchmark by the power consumption.

The truck balls.

In his science fiction novel Firestar , Michael Flynn points to the hysteria over electric blankets as proof that a large portion of society is too dumb to appreciate technological advance.

And fifteen years ago there were already fears that power lines were making us ill. If they caused long term effects, surely some would have manifested themselves in the meantime, but it all just looks like fear over nothing.

Active hams spend a great deal of their life around RF. Has there even been any suggestions that they develop certain illnesses more than the average population?

While I don't have all of the predictions made from 40 years ago to check their facts, I would bet this is one of the most accurate of all that were made. (That is, if this magazine article isn't an elaborate hoax.) But statistically speaking, if a thousand prognosticators made a thousand predictions, wouldn't you expect some to be better than others, and a few to be way, way better than others?

The nice thing about our vantage point here in the future is that we can cherry-pick the best predictions and say "See, this guy was a really smart futurist!" We need to also occasionally hold up the articles featuring nuclear airplanes, the television as a passing fad, simplified coal chutes, and technologically advanced buggy whips, and say to ourselves "yup, we're still not particularly clever about this prediction stuff."

And if you want a glimpse into his sci fi writing, check him out on Amazon. Judging that book by its cover, I'd also guess that he'd have predicted martians would have taken over by now.

Rasputin Music here in the S.F. bay area is great... I've been able to get lots of my music quite cheaply (used) and in almost pristine condition.
To me, to define music as "indie" is to declare, "Our only good point is that we're not signed to a record label", rather than calling it just rock or what-have-you. Indie music fans have not helped this perception, because as I said earlier, they seem to only like something when it's under a critical mass of fans; once a band gets too popular, they decide it's lame and move on to another indistinguishable set. And no, I didn't need that karma after all.
You know, for great justice, you would have linked this as an example of older music, thus Rickrolling me at the same time.

Nothing wrong with liking older classic music, but what brands you as a "tool of the man" is saying that no indie music is decent just because you don't like it.

Anyway, if you like old music you got nothing to complain about since you can get your music in the used bin for <$5.00

The growth of Free Software in Africa could be encouraged were Stallman to visit the area. His visit to India was enormously successful. Would that we have a better and more cheaply available biography of the man and his vision (O'Reilly's Free as in Freedom is good, but could be better) that could be distributed to influential figures in the African IT world.

While I can imagine a growing job market based on this, futurists like Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines see AI coming very soon, and semantic web buffs can point to victories of semantic metadata tagging in at least some limited areas of the web. Won't many of this newly hired assistants be superseded soon?

A DSL router will allow you to connect all three computers to the internet at the same time. It seems like it would be very slow with three sharing but it is not. This is your best answer if you can do it. Is your provider cellular though? That is trickier because a router won't work with cellular. It is much easier to connect your Linux computer to a router than to the DSL modem.

About Dosbox I can't help you. When I want a DOS box, I build a DOS box. It's been a long time since I felt the urge to do that though.

Linuxquestion.org has forums tutorials and many other helpful things. You can also get help at Ubuntu forums.

For programming C++ I think the best reference is the book by Stroustrup. You might want to combine that with the C standard library tutorial and reference. These are mostly references to have when you really need to do something. When you master these books you will have a good understanding of C++.

For an easy introduction or to meet specific fields of interest you might try C++ In-Depth Series.

As you learn C++ you will want a good editor or integrated development environment. I like Eclipse. Don't download it from there though. Get it from the Add Programs in your menu -- that one has other stuff you can add to your C++ environment too and they're customized for your specific version of Ubuntu. Always look there first.

It was the helpful people on the comment forums that got me started on my way oh so long ago. I wish you luck. When you see how free you are to do stuff with it I think you'll see why people are so enthusiastic about it.

A DSL router will allow you to connect all three computers to the internet at the same time. It seems like it would be very slow with three sharing but it is not. This is your best answer if you can do it. Is your provider cellular though? That is trickier because a router won't work with cellular. It is much easier to connect your Linux computer to a router than to the DSL modem.

About Dosbox I can't help you. When I want a DOS box, I build a DOS box. It's been a long time since I felt the urge to do that though.

Linuxquestion.org has forums tutorials and many other helpful things. You can also get help at Ubuntu forums.

For programming C++ I think the best reference is the book by Stroustrup. You might want to combine that with the C standard library tutorial and reference. These are mostly references to have when you really need to do something. When you master these books you will have a good understanding of C++.

For an easy introduction or to meet specific fields of interest you might try C++ In-Depth Series.

As you learn C++ you will want a good editor or integrated development environment. I like Eclipse. Don't download it from there though. Get it from the Add Programs in your menu -- that one has other stuff you can add to your C++ environment too and they're customized for your specific version of Ubuntu. Always look there first.

It was the helpful people on the comment forums that got me started on my way oh so long ago. I wish you luck. When you see how free you are to do stuff with it I think you'll see why people are so enthusiastic about it.

Is there any introduction to regular expressions for total beginners, perhaps teaching through examples and including exercises?

I find that O'Reilly's books on regular expressions (beside the pocket reference there's Mastering Regular Expressions ) seem to assume a great deal of prior knowledge. Is there any introduction to regular expressions for total beginners, perhaps teaching through examples and including exercises?

iTunes / Amazon.com gift certificate can be easily converted into $$$ on eBay. These constantly sold around 90% or sometimes even 95% of the face value.

According to Amazon's own rules you are not allowed to resell gift certificates. If people start selling them enough on eBay, Amazon may pressure eBay to forbid listing them.

"the ones you mention that are currently upgradable are all much more expensive than the ps3."

BDP-s300

http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=bdp+300&tag=googhydr-20&index=aps&ref=pd_sl_5szvbymy2k_e

NOT "much more expensive than the ps3" by any measure. Cheaper, or at the top end, the same price. For now.

If you're not going to bother with reading the links I give you and resort to posting falsehoods why would I want to continue discussing this with you?

That's seven (OK, maybe six minus the Brawndo thing) insults from a total stranger, all because I truthfully reported that Apple sold me a product that is locked down (and they totally offended me as a customer in the process.) That's the kind of defensive attack I'd expect from a Scientologist, not from a rational person. (By the way, my use of the term "cult" comes from the popular book "The Cult of Mac", which documents the rabid fanaticism that has sprung up around Apple.)

You seem to be in strong denial that your precious company is capable of selling a crippled product, and you would rather attack a critic than learn the facts. Perhaps you should reread TFA. Perhaps you should come over to my wife's workplace and show her how you can actually get the iPod to play music on her PC, as long as you can restrain yourself to calling her fewer than three vulgar names. Or perhaps you should grow some perspective on life, and mature for a while.

That's simply not true. Look at The God Delusion, for example, and they compare against the list price of the paperback, not the hardcover.

Also, the page for the book you mentioned links to all the other version of the book which are available.

While things like nuclear destruction and massive climate failure remain possibilities for an end to human life, it might be best to continue to get people scared of asteroid impacts. The space infrastructure that would need to be set up to adequately detect and deflect asteroids would provide a good start at getting off this rock and colonizing the rest of the solar system, helping humanity survive even if life on Earth is wiped out.

This is the premise behind Michael Flynn's future history beginning with Firestar , a series of novels that should have gotten much more attention from Slashdotters than it did.

Uff, I meant Applied Cryptography . Practical Cryptography is a bit too basic an overview written with a co-author.

While I'm critical of Schneier's work in general security consulting, he is still a god in the cryptography world. His book Practical Cryptography is a friendly guide to encryption that doesn't assume too much knowledge of the heady math involved. Plus, the man invented Blowfish, one of the most popular and fast algorithms around.

Most of the evidence from the 60s and 70s comes from eye-witness accounts, as well as letters. Mao himself did not deny that atrocities were being committed, and said that it was for the good of the Tibetan people. They were being purged and transformed into communists. This is how he did it:

Monks and nuns were forcibly married and/or raped. Many monks were imprisoned; some were castrated and killed; a few abbots were killed by having their ears drilled with a brace and bit and molten lead poured into their brains, or by having their eyes scooped out with spoons and their brains scooped out through the eye sockets. Popular piety was suppressed. Pilgrimage, prostration, prayer flags on one's house, or speaking "OM Mani Padme Hum" -- all brought death. Perhaps a million tibetans, out of six million, were killed or exiled. Tens of thousands of widows were rape-married to Chinese soldiers.

If you really are interested in learning about what Chinese censorship is covering up, then I can recommend a book by a chinese woman called "Wild Swans". This book is not about Tibet, but rather about life for a Han Chinese woman. Chinese government atrocities are not limited to Tibet - they are widespread and ongoing.

Perhaps you think I've had my thinking adjusted by anti-communist propaganda? It's just that the Chinese are the ones who practice widespread censorship and historical revisionism. We do not have thought police where I live. I can think and say what I want about my government - and the government must account for its actions at election time. Chinese people who live here recognize that. Those that I've spoken to do not want to go back to China, precisely because of thought police.

Here's a link to a video of Chinese soldiers murdering Tibetans fleeing the regime. If China was doing the Tibetans such a grand favour, then why do soldiers have to kill people to encourage them not to flee their own homes?

(Something I find extremely interesting is Amazon compares the kindle price to the hard cover list price ($26.95) AND does not link to any other versions of the book, but the hard cover sure does. It seems they are intentionally wanting to give the false sense of "what a deal!" and making it harder to jump to a non-kindle version.) That's simply not true. Look at The God Delusion, for example, and they compare against the list price of the paperback, not the hardcover. The book you picked is only available in hardcover, except on the secondary market (and if you look, one of the ones they list is actually the hardcover). Also, the page for the book you mentioned links to all the other version of the book which are available.
# Also Available in: Hardcover | Paperback | Audio CD (Audiobook,Unabridged) | Audio CD (Abridged,Audiobook) | Hardcover (Large Print) | Audio Cassette (Audiobook,Unabridged) | All Editions http://www.amazon.com/T-is-for-Trespass/dp/B000W915M6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1206253865&sr=1-1

The Kindle is $399. The books listed on the Kindle page are $9.99 each. Picking a random book: Sue Grafton's T is for Trespass. Kind price: $9.99. Hardcover price: $17.79.

(Something I find extremely interesting is Amazon compares the kindle price to the hard cover list price ($26.95) AND does not link to any other versions of the book, but the hard cover sure does. It seems they are intentionally wanting to give the false sense of "what a deal!" and making it harder to jump to a non-kindle version.)

$7.80 may look like a lot (Amazon will tell you $26.95-$9.99=$16.96 ...more than double the market price difference) but is having the ebook worth the difference? Grafton's previous book -- S for Silence -- is $7.99 for paperback ($4.24 if you buy 3rd party to Amazon) and $6.39 for Kindle (again, Kindle page doesn't list other editions). A whopping $1.60 difference. $1.60 to [legally] be permanently locked to that copy with your Kindle with no rights to sell that copy to any one, nor transfer to other devices, etc. (I don't think I need to list them).

Is $1.60 (or -$2.15 if 3rd party) or $7.80 worth it to switch to Kindle? Not to me, so I'll stick to being a tree-killer. I won't ever switch to ebooks that trap my money and ability to do as I please.

(I also don't own HD DVD (hah!) nor Blu-Ray and never will until I can play them under my OS of choice, but I digress.)

Honestly, if it comes down to DRM books and DRM movies where I can't read/play on the device of my choice then I'll happily give them up. But it won't be for long because the time will come when good creators of books and film will not be hamstrung by those who demand DRM. That is if the recent digital "experiments" by known musicians are of any indication.

The Kindle is $399. The books listed on the Kindle page are $9.99 each. Picking a random book: Sue Grafton's T is for Trespass. Kind price: $9.99. Hardcover price: $17.79.

(Something I find extremely interesting is Amazon compares the kindle price to the hard cover list price ($26.95) AND does not link to any other versions of the book, but the hard cover sure does. It seems they are intentionally wanting to give the false sense of "what a deal!" and making it harder to jump to a non-kindle version.)

$7.80 may look like a lot (Amazon will tell you $26.95-$9.99=$16.96 ...more than double the market price difference) but is having the ebook worth the difference? Grafton's previous book -- S for Silence -- is $7.99 for paperback ($4.24 if you buy 3rd party to Amazon) and $6.39 for Kindle (again, Kindle page doesn't list other editions). A whopping $1.60 difference. $1.60 to [legally] be permanently locked to that copy with your Kindle with no rights to sell that copy to any one, nor transfer to other devices, etc. (I don't think I need to list them).

Is $1.60 (or -$2.15 if 3rd party) or $7.80 worth it to switch to Kindle? Not to me, so I'll stick to being a tree-killer. I won't ever switch to ebooks that trap my money and ability to do as I please.

(I also don't own HD DVD (hah!) nor Blu-Ray and never will until I can play them under my OS of choice, but I digress.)

Honestly, if it comes down to DRM books and DRM movies where I can't read/play on the device of my choice then I'll happily give them up. But it won't be for long because the time will come when good creators of books and film will not be hamstrung by those who demand DRM. That is if the recent digital "experiments" by known musicians are of any indication.

The Kindle is $399. The books listed on the Kindle page are $9.99 each. Picking a random book: Sue Grafton's T is for Trespass. Kind price: $9.99. Hardcover price: $17.79.

(Something I find extremely interesting is Amazon compares the kindle price to the hard cover list price ($26.95) AND does not link to any other versions of the book, but the hard cover sure does. It seems they are intentionally wanting to give the false sense of "what a deal!" and making it harder to jump to a non-kindle version.)

$7.80 may look like a lot (Amazon will tell you $26.95-$9.99=$16.96 ...more than double the market price difference) but is having the ebook worth the difference? Grafton's previous book -- S for Silence -- is $7.99 for paperback ($4.24 if you buy 3rd party to Amazon) and $6.39 for Kindle (again, Kindle page doesn't list other editions). A whopping $1.60 difference. $1.60 to [legally] be permanently locked to that copy with your Kindle with no rights to sell that copy to any one, nor transfer to other devices, etc. (I don't think I need to list them).

Is $1.60 (or -$2.15 if 3rd party) or $7.80 worth it to switch to Kindle? Not to me, so I'll stick to being a tree-killer. I won't ever switch to ebooks that trap my money and ability to do as I please.

(I also don't own HD DVD (hah!) nor Blu-Ray and never will until I can play them under my OS of choice, but I digress.)

Honestly, if it comes down to DRM books and DRM movies where I can't read/play on the device of my choice then I'll happily give them up. But it won't be for long because the time will come when good creators of books and film will not be hamstrung by those who demand DRM. That is if the recent digital "experiments" by known musicians are of any indication.

Dude give it up. I bought the player when it first came out I have first-hand knowledge of it. You're just googling it and acting like you know what you're talking about.

Anyhoo... if you still want to be mr smarty-pants, looky at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Avocent-AD600A-Apex-AD-600A-Player/dp/B00004TKLW

"Date first available at Amazon.com: September 4, 1999"

gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power.

Great, people lighting their properties with more bright lights is just what we need. Light pollution is already a serious probably (it's destroyed amateur astronmy, see Mizon's Light Pollution ). Instead of showing people how they can make do with less lights, we're just making it cheaper for private individuals to duplicate the Las Vegas strip.

Old school advice...

First of all, school up to the PhD is a pyramid scheme (currently failing):
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (Vice Provost CalTech)
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
The end result is "disciplined minds" who will not step out of line politically:
http://disciplined-minds.com/
Or journalistically:
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20051207.htm
"By the time you've gone through, you know, Oxford and Cambridge and here you could say Harvard and Princeton and so on, and even less fancy places, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things that just wouldn't do to say, and that's what a good deal of education is. So the people who come out of it - and there are many filters, if people go off and try to be too critical there are many ways of discouraging them or eliminating them one way or the other. Some get through, it's not a uniform story. ... The more educated you are the more indoctrinated you are. And you believe you are being free and objective, whereas in fact you're just repeating state propaganda."

The reason schooling exists in its current form is to teach these seven lessons:
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto - 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm
in order to prepare most people for a life of servitude to the military or factories (and to not be very thoughtful about consumption or politics either).
"The Prussian Connection" -- Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
And from:
"A conversation with historian and author James Loewen. Sort of."
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html
"We like to believe schooling is a good thing. But when it comes to understanding any problem with historical roots, we might expect that the more traditional schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will understand it. Students who have taken math courses are better at math. The same is true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject. But in history, stupidity is the result of more, not less, schooling."

Still, studies have shown that the only people who really get economic value out of an Ivy League degree or equivalent are those from lower middle class backgrounds. All other things being equal, for most other people it's not worth the money as an investment. See the book "Class" for some other details:
http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
Otherwise, consider:
"College is a Waste of Time and Money" (1975)
http://www.grossmont.edu/bertdill/docs/CollegeWaste.pdf
"College, then, may be a good place for those few young people who are really drawn to academic work, who would rather read than eat, but it has become too expensive, in money, time, and intellectual effort to serve as a holding pen for large numbers of our young. We ought to make it possible for those reluctant, unhappy students to find alternative ways of growing up, and more realistic preparation for the years ahead."

And consider those years ahead following Moore's Law will include computers 10000X faster than what we have now for the same price in 20 or so years.
http://www.transhumanis

Read http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0385511841/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206137228&sr=8-1
You'll learn that the Italian Fascists thought the Nazis more than a little whack, for all they collaborated.
Oh, and the American Fascist tradition started with Teddy Roosevelt (oops, righties), but jumped to Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, and is "carried on smartly" by the left. If you miss that universal health care is a fascist play to control you "for your own good", then the propaganda has indeed worked well.

I didn't think I would have to explain this, here of all places...

http://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Storage-Link-Drives-NSLU2/dp/B0001FSCZO

I like reading Ira Winkler and Michal Zalewski's Silence on the Wire is a must read.

We get a Sagan once a generation, and to remain above the fray he had to go so far as refusing to denounce astrology

Oh really? The Demon Haunted World is about as strong a manifesto against astrology and other pseudo-science as I've ever read.

If we could have more realistic science fiction television and films (what happened to that planned movie of KSR's Red Mars ), then people might learn science principles through osmosis. Too bad now it's all sounds in space and warp speeds. People get a large part of their exposure to science the future of technology through what is essentially fantasy.

I know Michael Flynn, in his novel Firestar had some of his whizbang young people contributing to a new space age by developing superconductors that work at room temperature, but he never said what exactly superconductors do in space travel. What exactly new technologies will we see built on this?

This version is limited to non-commercial use, but you mentioned "households with 2 or more computers" and "short reports for school," so I thought this was worth mentioning just in case you didn't know. If you don't need the other popular (mostly business-related) apps (like Outlook and Access), then I think it's a decent deal. Of course, its price is not as good as OpenOffice.org's.

This is a big problem, and has been going on for years. Read the book, "Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains", or this MSNBC article about the illicit trade of body parts and tissues.

Last year, several funeral homes in New York were charged with allowing these people to come in and harvest bits and pieces from their clients (the dead), sometimes replacing things like femurs with PVC pipe.

TFA refers to cadavers for medical instruction, but regardless, the problems are twofold. One, often there is no consent. Two, there is little concern if the parts contain cancer or communicable diseases, and IIRC, several people have received infected tissue "donations" who later contracted syphillis, hepatitis, and worse.

I think you're thinking of Eon by Greg Bear. Honestly, I wasn't that excited about the original. Can't imagine what a lesser author would make of it.

I just recently invested in The OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook , which cost quite a bit. Is 3 going to have massive new UI changes that mean I have to learn how to use the program all over again?

On the other hand, Niven did foresee an end to organlegging with the rise of alloplasty ("gadgets instead of organs"). Of course, in Niven's timeline that only happened in A Gift from Earth (republished in Three Books of Known Space IIRC), after hundreds of years of murders for organs, but we're already seeing exciting reports in tech news of progress in artificial parts, so maybe the barbarity of e.g. China's treatment of prisoners will pass fairly soon.

Double author books - they can be anything. I've happened to pay attention to how it works for various people.

Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven - they plot the books together, and each work on each paragraph (one writes, the other revises, and it goes back and forth many times.

Eric Flint and David Drake (Belasarius series, starting with 'An Oblique Approach' - Drake gave Flint a /detailed/ outline for each book - many thousands of words - and reviewed the results. Flint calls the first 5 books of this series his 'apprenticeship'. (Similar for Drake and Stirling, 'The General' series).

But most often, "FAMOUS AUTHOR" (huge type) + Joe Unknown (tiny type) means that Joe Unknown wrote the whole thing, with or without input from the famous author. Sometimes Famous Author is old and slipping, sometimes they don't care, sometimes they help quite a bit. It's a bit of a gamble.

My least favorite is where the Famous Author is YEARS DEAD:

http://www.amazon.com/McNallys-Dare-Lawrence-Sanders/dp/0399150552

LAWRENCE SANDERS (Big Type)

McNally's Dare (Freakin' Huge Type)

a Archy McNally novel by (tiny type)
Vincent Lardo (tiny type)

You need to read a book on this very subject:

"The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture" by Brink Lindsey.
http://www.amazon.com/Age-Abundance-Prosperity-Transformed-Americas/dp/0060747668/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205891737&sr=8-1

You need to read a book on this very subject:

"The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture" by Brink Lindsey.
http://www.amazon.com/Age-Abundance-Prosperity-Transformed-Americas/dp/0060747668/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205891737&sr=8-1