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Having worked for a large amazon 3rd party merchant for years, your story sounds like you actually used the amazon marketplace, and paid for "standard" shipping.

Anything that happens in marketplace transactions is as much amazon's fault as ebay is at fault when you have a bad experience there. Amazon marketplace sellers have no real connection with amazon. Anyone can sell on marketplace.

Secondly, the "6 weeks" line is what leads me to suspect you used marketplace standard shipping. Marketplace shipping fees for standard shipping are $4. The seller gets less than $3 of that, and amazon keeps the rest. Stop and think about that. How fast do you think you can ship a textbook for $3?

The answer is not very fast. There's only one shipping service available that will ship a 2+ pound book for under $3: USPS media mail. If you check amazon, you'll see that even they acknowledge this "standard shipping" takes up to 21 days to arrive However, any merchant can tell you it frequently takes longer. The USPS treats media mail as a last priority; in extreme cases, I've seen packages show up 2 months after shipping.

Lastly, the "wait to see if it shows up" attitude is classic marketplace -- had you ordered directly from amazon, they'd have a tracking number. However, amazon marketplace sellers frequently don't use tracking, due to the aforementioned tiny shipping budget.

So, long story short, your beef isn't really with amazon, it's with some small-time reseller who sells on amazon. Buy direct from amazon and you'll never have this experience.

I was pretty much in the same situation until somebody recommended to me "The Principles of Beautiful Web Design" By Jason Beaird http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Beautiful-Web-Design/dp/0975841963/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202658998&sr=8-1 since then I've done several websites and got several contracts from people who've seen those sites. The book assumes you know stuff like HTML and CSS and just covers things like layout, color schemes and graphics.

You won't like this answer but if I were you, I'd calculate my income versus the time it would take me to learn and do the design on my own and then hire someone for this budget. You can find great talent on http://www.elance.com/ and elsewhere.

If you insist on rolling your own, I'd start with this book: The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321534042

The Zen of CSS Design won great praise when it was released for its call for beautiful and natural graphical interfaces built on top of semantically meaningful and conformant (X)HTML. Perhaps you could take inspiration from that?

One of my favorite that really impacted that way I developed web sites: "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug.

Probably because it violates Amazon's highly publicized price guarantee policy

Despite our best efforts, a small number of the items in our catalog may be mispriced. If an item's correct price is higher than our stated price, we will, at our discretion, either contact you for instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of such cancellation.

Now I am prepared for any eventuality.

Now I am prepared for any eventuality.

Yes, we need liquid chemical fuels in Aviation. Liquid fuels are also useful wherever you need high power density in a portable form. I would guess that about 10% to 15% of current vehicular and power-tool use will continue to be based on internal combustion. But we should be able to sustain that using biofuels.

The original article is simply a statement of the fact that ANY industrial process in our current economy uses lots of fossil fuels. So just about anything you do is going to result in carbon emissions. Duh. But there is no reason why 85% of the uses of fossil fuels couldn't be replaced by something else or reduced through recycling. See The Methanol Economy for one possible alternative.

In a plausible future where all of out industrial processes have been changed to reduce carbon emissions, there won't be carbon emissions. In the present, where everything we do causes them, there are. Uh, Yeah!

It's also a matter of motivation. Most US cell phone users are locked into two-year contracts by now. This limits the pace of change-over from carrier to carrier, limiting the forces of the free-market economy, limiting competition, limiting carriers' motivation to offer better service. Why spend millions and millions of dollars to upgrade a network if your customers are locked in anyway?

Bob Sullivan's book Gotcha Capitalism makes some good points about this, as well as about how we almost never pay the advertised price for service.

is Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People, which compares and contrasts the mechanical principles behind natural and human mechanisms. One important point is that these principles very often do not scale very well at all. Comparing a swallow with a jet fighter is just silly. A swallow as large as a jet fighter would never hold together at the rotational rates a standard version could achieve, and a wee tiny jet fighter would have a much easier time of spinning faster. The article might have said this, and it's only a misleading summary, but that's the way it goes on slashdot :)

The industry will undoubtedly go down kicking and screaming, but down it will go - of that there can no longer be any doubt.

Just so you know Jesus never said or did that.

Please read Misquoting Jesus and you'll find out when that was added to the bible.

It's a Motorola 5.8 GHz phone system. I believe this is the base station. I also have a couple remotes around the house.

Getting Started in Electronics

Solove is not at Georgetown, he is at George Washington. (I'm a student of his, posting from a public terminal in the George Washington University Law complex.) His book, The Future of Reputation talks about a lot of the issues raised by this article. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this sort of thing.

This product: SuperStick does not trigger the metal detector. It stores 4GB of data that can be encrypted with TrueCrypt.

So if you're smuggling data the safest way to get it across the US border is to take a few of these and insert them in your 5Kg bricks of cocaine or bales of weed. They'll be fine.

The initial sibling comment has shown your claims regarding Lew Rockwell are obviously false.

Ron Paul is the "Distinguished Counselor" of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. They publish his latest book - forward by Lew Rockwell.

Ron Paul also openly associates himself with their of the John Birch Society and thinks its ridiculous that someone would think its bad that he would.

Clearly you aren't interested in the truth, just in backing your guy. I linked several times to news sources. You then criticize my sources and link Judicial Watch of all places as a source when the first adjective it uses to describe itself is by political ideology ("conservative"). Even your second mentioned site identifies judicialwatch as "a conservative legal group that dogged the Clintons through the 1990s with a stream of document demands and related lawsuits" not a reliable source of facts.

also a $8 Laptop HDD enclosure makes that spare laptop HDD double as a USB drive, and gives a recovery option if your laptop dies (other than the drive).
Also per GB the SSD drive in USB form is similar to price of the memcards.

also: whatever the laptop buy a usb enclosure for the hard drive, since the asus is likely a ide get: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FNBYKW (this drive needs no power supply, only USB power from the PC)
it would be even better to get a $200 32GB SSD with your operating system of choice ready to install, to put inside.

If I were sold on needing Windows: I would buy the 16GB transcend SLC drive (much faster, and costlier than the 32GB above) and install standard OS stuff on that, I would buy the Dell Vostro dual core, for $599 and swap the SLC with its 160GB internal drive, put the old drive into the USB case (Dell cause it's a cheap dual core, duo procs stays responsive in XP even when waiting on a slow write to the SSD.) With the SSD, battery life is better, silent, and live through more vibration, and since it runs much cooler, better for the laptop. As external drive the standard 160 GB if treaty very nicely while in use, should survive nicely even a drop if off.

It would be even better to buy the 16 SSD SLC for main, and 32GB SSD MLC for USB storage. But I would want to take my movies, so I would want the 160GB at the cost of power, and risk of vib damage.

also: whatever the laptop buy a usb enclosure for the hard drive, since the asus is likely a ide get: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FNBYKW (this drive needs no power supply, only USB power from the PC)
it would be even better to get a $200 32GB SSD with your operating system of choice ready to install, to put inside.

If I were sold on needing Windows: I would buy the 16GB transcend SLC drive (much faster, and costlier than the 32GB above) and install standard OS stuff on that, I would buy the Dell Vostro dual core, for $599 and swap the SLC with its 160GB internal drive, put the old drive into the USB case (Dell cause it's a cheap dual core, duo procs stays responsive in XP even when waiting on a slow write to the SSD.) With the SSD, battery life is better, silent, and live through more vibration, and since it runs much cooler, better for the laptop. As external drive the standard 160 GB if treaty very nicely while in use, should survive nicely even a drop if off.

It would be even better to buy the 16 SSD SLC for main, and 32GB SSD MLC for USB storage. But I would want to take my movies, so I would want the 160GB at the cost of power, and risk of vib damage.

If you believe we are in a war for survival against an implacable foe out to destroy Western Civilization and replace it with a Caliphate then price isn't an object, only Victory will suffice; and if you don't believe we are at war then we never should have spent the first dollar.

Honestly, I am not trying to troll here, but it is the literal truth that this kind of thinking was a major factor in the failure of the Soviet Union. My source is the great book Arsenals of Foley by Richard Rhodes: http://www.amazon.com/Arsenals-Folly-Making-Nuclear-Arms/dp/0375414134/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1202350956&sr=1-1

Rhodes makes the point that the Soviets assumed that the West was going to attack and that they had to be fighting war on a continual basis. Their economy was always military first, and this destroyed their economic base. This attitude also distorted many other decisions, and Rhodes describes how bad military obsessed planing directly contributed to the Chernobyl disaster.

I would say that if we think we are fighting a war, then we are going to loose. We do have enemies, but we are fighting an insurgency, and you loose this kind of conflict if you fight it like a war. Do I even have to mention Viet Nam? Insurgency is fought with police tactics and by dealing with what motivates the insurgents. This takes time, money, and it will require violence, but it is not warfare.

We haven't stabilized Iraq, we are just failing slower. We are loosing Afghanistan. Pakistan is also less stable. Iran is gaining strength, as is Hezbollah. Do you propose that we invade or bomb the entire Middle East? That would be the war fighting response, and it is useless.

Meanwhile, our economy is going down the tubes. The dollar is in free fall and the deficit is skyrocketing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:USDebt.png The current cost of the war is almost $500 Billion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War It's not rocket science to see that these two issues are related. I can tell that you become aroused by defending Western Civilization against the Calipate to achieve Victory (I Love Those Caps) but your position is the road to ruin. If we keep going this way we could end up just like the Soviet Union: bankrupt.

You want something like the Toughbook 30. If it can survive in Iraq getting banged around, blown up, baked in the sun, or even submerged all the while operating in a dusty and dirty environment then it will probably fit the bill for your world trip. The only downsides are that it is expen$ive, a bit bulky, and somewhat heavy, but the military swears by these things so you know that it will take whatever you can dish out.

The Player of Games features an alien civilization with three sexes, such that each child has three parents (that's two more than the average American!)

The Discovery of Heaven [ Book ] [ Movie ] has it the other way around. Good movie, heaven't yet read the book, but it's supposed to be good.

The Player of Games features an alien civilization with three sexes, such that each child has three parents (that's two more than the average American!)

The Discovery of Heaven [ Book ] [ Movie ] has it the other way around. Good movie, heaven't yet read the book, but it's supposed to be good.

The Player of Games features an alien civilization with three sexes, such that each child has three parents (that's two more than the average American!)

The Discovery of Heaven [ Book ] [ Movie ] has it the other way around. Good movie, heaven't yet read the book, but it's supposed to be good.

i agree that the material is there for free if your willing to dig about or click through a few search results. however, i do find that a good book on the topic can save you a ton of time. i bought the Pro Drupal Dev book from Apress to get up to speed on the intricacies of drupal and probably saved myself a months worth of mucking around on my own with google & exisiting code.

the theme chapter in that is about 40 or 50 pages long but gives you more than enough to build complicated themes. normally i dont tend to buy technical books as they're too expensive or generic for me but I find that Apress have got some really excellent titles. The Drupal Dev one being my main savior for a while.

A decent, nicely sized book is still much more pleasurable to read than a stack of printed out A4 pages of a PDF or staring at a monitor for hours...

The engine-noise problem (as distinct from the sonic-boom problem) has a fascinating feedback loop in it, which made the Boeing folks crazy during the American SST project in the 1960s. The problem is, every time you develop some engine technology which mitigates the high-exhaust-velocity issue and its attendant noise problem, some clever engineer applies that same solution to the already-quieter subsonic jets. Then the regulators notice that airliners are much quieter now, and implement stricter noise constraints, which are easily met by low-exhaust-velocity + noise-reduction-technology aircraft, but can not be met by the supersonic high-exhaust-velocity + noise-reduction-technology aircraft.

So noise becomes a moving target, driven forward by your own advances to try to reach it.

This is discussed in detail in Erik M. Conway's terrific book, High Speed Dreams.

The power is proportional to V^2/f, where V is the voltage and f is the frequency, so halving the voltage results in 1/4 of the power or in the case of 0.3^2/1^2 you get .09 or about 10% of the power usage. The amazing thing is that they were able to get the transistors to bias at that voltage.

Not that amazing, really. The zone of operation is called sub-threshold, and there have been tons of papers and academic designs proving the concept. My professor at JHU has been creating sub-threshold ASICs for satellites for years now. The sub-threshold mode is simply ignored by most CMOS digital design classes, so unless you study it in grad school, you probably just assume the transistor is "off." See here for a book on the subject.

The only downside of sub-threshold operation is the incredibly slow switching speed, and the need to use static logic. Thus, the designs were usually large and low-performance compared to above-threshold designs. This is why the concept has only become commercially viable of-late, with the demand for tiny chips in everything with micropower consumption meeting the small processes of today's fabs.

For vaccines, a good well-sourced overview can be found here: http://astore.amazon.com/medical-bookstore-20/detail/1881217302 [amazon.com].

Ah, yes. That cutting-edge research from 2002 with one out of three reviews on the page commenting on how biased it is. There's a good source of information.

Actually, there have been a number of studies recently looking at the association between vaccines and various illnesses/diseases/symptoms, particularly vaccines and autism. Every single one that I've seen published by a reputable scientist has found no link.

There's also an article in the Jan 2008 Skeptical Inquirer about vaccine safety (particularly regarding autism).

Lots of random charts in a book do not necessarily prove anything, except, possibly, that the shrinking number of pirates caused the rise in average global temperature. You need to have a context and know where the chart came from.

World Natural Health Organization you cite. Its no wonder if you go to the main page they also don't believe in global climate change, are anti-gay-marriage, anti-vaccination, anti-flouride, anti-abortion, and anti-aspartame, whack jobs.

The page I linked to was an abstract/introduction of a book by authors not associated with that website. If you have an issue with the book, take on the book and the statistics and references therein. For vaccinations, fluoride, and aspartame there is good research that shows that these are in fact quite toxic/damaging. For vaccines, a good well-sourced overview can be found here: http://astore.amazon.com/medical-bookstore-20/detail/1881217302. Fluoride toxicity has long been known. And for aspartame you only need to know that it metabolizes to formaldehyde to know enough.

Of course, you will still think it to be nonsense because it implies something quite unbelievable: that millions of people are being knowingly put at risk, damaged, and poisoned. That can't be, can it? Well... there is a simple explanation for it all: this world is being run by genocidal maniacs. To see who these people are, take a look at the following big genocide that is not being reported on, yet is being executed more or less out in the open http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7957. Yup, Henry is still at it.

Of course, in the west, we can't have overt genocide. It is essential that we believe ourselves to be free. Hence the deal with medication. It is perfect for covert genocide, and you can even have victims themselves pay for it.

The cards are often the same GPUs you find in gaming cards with two important differences, drivers and chip quality. These are the best of the best that come out of the fab plant and even if they do have different hardware logic the real quality comes in the drivers. These drivers are made to specifications that have nothing to do with games and are more in line with quality, repeatability and robustness.

The iPod touch 8 GB is $40 cheaper and the iPod touch 16 GB is also $40 cheaper.

Why does Apple have such a high markup? Totally unnecessary, IMHO.

The iPod touch 8 GB is $40 cheaper and the iPod touch 16 GB is also $40 cheaper.

Why does Apple have such a high markup? Totally unnecessary, IMHO.

I may have stories to tell about our attempts to contact various campaigns as the general election gets closer.

I may have stories to tell about our attempts to contact various campaigns as the general election gets closer.

It's funny to see this happening with mankind already, since science fiction has long dreamt up advanced human or alien races with triune families, e.g. the Soft Ones from Asimov's The Gods Themselves , and in Larry Niven's Known Space universe it's one of the social innovations that only comes about in five hundred years or so.

The Wikipedia page isn't exactly correct, either. Microsoft never told IBM about SCP. Microsoft did recommend CP/M after becoming IBM's language vendor, and when Gary Kildall's wife (who was dealing with IBM because Gary went out flying that day) refused to sign a bunch of typical IBM NDAs, they went back to Microsoft to discuss purchasing an OS from them. Gates said 'sure', and then went out looking for one and found Seattle Computer Products.

My sources include the Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews book Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented and Industry -- And Made Himself the Richest Man in America .

As a person who's transitioned from "Engineering" to "Sales" (Read: I'm a Sales Engineer, I design what the other Engineers will implement) I've found that the differences i n language aren't a matter of incompetent vs. competent, but rather, different modal operators of persuasion. A simple analogy, would be the difference between "book smarts" and "street smarts". The language of marketing is all about persuasion. I suggest reading a copy of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion By Dr. Robert B. Cialdini. It's not that they don't have a clue, they're influencing a particular point of view. You may disagree on whether the fundamentals of the technology are good or bad, however, the influence that's exerted determines ultimately what is successful. There are examples throughout history (see Betamax vs. VHS) where a technologically superior product loses. Microsoft is an expert in marketing and persuasion, like it or not, they're very competent at what they do in that specific arena. And the software that they work, tends to work at least decently on the 3rd iteration or so, which apparently is good enough for most people.

As a sales engineer, I've noticed that folks in IT are woefully underskilled in these areas. They may approach upper management and state "We need a new backup system" and fail to properly articulate their point, because it is self evident to them, and they don't speak the language of marketing. Everyone in IT would be well advised to take a communication or public speaking course. You may just learn something if you expand your horizons.

While this post may in itself, be largely offtopic, it's important to understand that the success or failure of Vista is going to be largely through how it's perceived by the masses, including corporate culture.

I really like my Sansa Connect WiFi enabled player with the Yahoo Music Unlimited service. I knew there was trouble ahead but I figured it would still work as a regular mp3 player once Yahoo Music Unlimited goes dark. The Sansa Connect runs Linux and uses Mono. Time to start hacking. A general purpose WiFi internet radio receiver would be cool. You can find Sansa Connects for under $90 as recently as last week and probably less next week.

First off, his support for a return to the gold standard implies a complete lack of understanding of modern macroeconomics.

Perhaps, your hand-waving dismissal aside, he has actually studied the matter in some depth when he served on the Gold Commission during the Reagan administration.

He's been studying economics since the 1970's. Would you care to try to actually refute his position with reasoned arguments, or do you just want to continue to take it on faith that the federal reserve works for your interests?

It's what made our massive economic growth in the later half of the 20th century possible.

Then what made economic growth before fiat currency possible? We had a rather brisk run of economic growth in the nineteenth century, too.

The problem with our current fiat credit system, is that when a bank can borrow from an endless pool of currency, and lend it out at a higher rate for a profit, while shifting the risk of loss to the taxpayers, they tend to make poor decisions, like lending money to foreign dictators to deposit in their swiss accounts, or lending money to drive a real estate bubble.

He supports isolationist policies

Wrong again.

Do you know the difference between isolationism and non-interventionism? Apparently you don't.

A few hints: Switzerland is not an isolationist country, and the only foreign country they send troops to is the Vatican. Would you call Japan an isolationist country? How many countries do they maintain military bases in? Is Singapore isolationist? Is Canada?

He opposes the separation of Church and State.

Ah, and now you trot out a bald-faced lie.

-jcr

A Ron Paul vote is a corporate vote, even if the corporations don't realize it.

You should probably read Confessions of an economic hitman. Ron Paul would be worse than Clinton for corporations. He believes in NO corporate welfare at all.

But he's pro-life. Big show stopper.

He wants the states to decide, like Thompson did. I read a study awhile back, which I can't find again, but it basically stated that almost every state would be pro-choice if Roe v Wade were overturned. The only exceptions were Alabama and Alaska. Really, this is what our founding fathers intended...for the states to be laboratories of democracy, and for local people to decide on social issues.

no Battlestar Galactica season 3 in North America, for example

And here in Canada it's hard to buy major-label music for an MP3 player that's not an iPod.

In many cases the only way for us to get "content" is to download it illegally.

Sorry, I meant 'Standard Edition': http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Visual-Studio-2008-Standard/dp/B000WM1Z46 - it can be bought even cheaper in quantity. We got it for about $150 for 10 developers.

Team software suite is not necessary for a lone developer or a small company.