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It's irritating to have links on words if the href has nothing to do with the anchor text .

I wonder what the Internet, and the technologies built upon it, will enable government (substitute landowners or business owners if you like) to do in 15,20, or 30 years? What kind of rationalizations will the capitalist pigs come up with in 30 years to justify the rape and ruin of the working class? Are we on the road to ruin or salvation?

Historically the workers "experienced" in the latest technology will be favoured for a time, the same as steel mill engineers and steam engine engineers in ages past. And then they will fall back into the White Collar sweatshop

Thank God I'm unionised

I'm using a combination of Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame, Pygame and the documents on the OLPC wiki site. For the record, Pygame is installed on the XO by default and actually has a few added things like the ability to access the built in camera and mesh network.

I've been through a similar journey, I found these books insightful.

I Don't Want to Talk About It -- A good primer on depression in Men, what causes it, how to break the cycle
Nothing's Wrong -- This follows up and shows how men can integrate their feelings into their lives and communicate them with those they love.
No More Mister Nice Guy -- This last one helps a few years down the line when you've got in touch with your feelings but maybe feel disconnected to your own masculinity or have trouble integrating things in personal relationships.

I've been through a similar journey, I found these books insightful.

I Don't Want to Talk About It -- A good primer on depression in Men, what causes it, how to break the cycle
Nothing's Wrong -- This follows up and shows how men can integrate their feelings into their lives and communicate them with those they love.
No More Mister Nice Guy -- This last one helps a few years down the line when you've got in touch with your feelings but maybe feel disconnected to your own masculinity or have trouble integrating things in personal relationships.

I've been through a similar journey, I found these books insightful.

I Don't Want to Talk About It -- A good primer on depression in Men, what causes it, how to break the cycle
Nothing's Wrong -- This follows up and shows how men can integrate their feelings into their lives and communicate them with those they love.
No More Mister Nice Guy -- This last one helps a few years down the line when you've got in touch with your feelings but maybe feel disconnected to your own masculinity or have trouble integrating things in personal relationships.

The Archos 605 is 160 gigabytes.

The Archos 605 WiFi is 160 GB. Moreover, it can also access files shared from a PC over the network.

Obviously you didn't score one of *these* babies.

Nice try, but no.

The reason I'm only ~333 pages into ANKOS is I only get a couple pages read in a, erm, sitting. If it's a really interesting bit, I'll stay there a little longer, or bring the book with me for a couple minutes.

There's an art to picking bathroom reading material, though. Areas of My Expertise is perfect for it, as it's structured like an almanac. War and Peace? Not so much.

Joseph Stiglitz makes the same point regarding food in Globalization and Its Discontents. Western policies of what is basically dumping (painted up like charity) prevent those in nearby regions from stabilizing their own agricultural setups. The West ships food for free, undermining the market, so farmers throughout the continent or at least subcontinent have an artificially devalued market, preventing them from eventually owning enough, or creating enough savings, to weather famine conditions when they face them. Of course, the commodities are bought using usual markets in the West, avoiding any devaluation here, and probably causing slight increases in prices due to slightly greater demand. So the entire process makes it doubly likely that African farmers will have a hard time competing in a global market.

It makes me wonder if Bob Geldof has done the world more harm than good.

-FL

Harry Potter OFTP is on blu-ray
http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Order-Phoenix-Blu-ray/dp/B000W7GFG4/ref=pd_bbs_9?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1199115377&sr=8-9

So, I liked the sound of this little guy and looked around as to where to buy it. I noticed that Amazon has a pre-order option for an 8gb drive, 1gb ram machine.

Does anyone happen to know when this version may be released?

Adding more to the point. Here is what I have seen happen over and over again.

Young people come in and they contribute to a wave of innovation. Then, they build their career on the enhancement, support and promotion of their innovation. When the time comes for a new wave of innovation, they tend not to contribute to it but rather oppose it. New innovations that would obsolete their prior innovations are seen as a personal threat.

It actually takes quite a bit of courage to be a leader of wave after wave of innovation in the same field. One must be prepared to abandon one's own creation to clear the mind to conceive new ones. Anyhow, one has to be be emotionally prepared to let go with one hand before establishing a firm grip with the other hand. If the new innovation fails, then one is left with nothing, not the old nor the new. At least that's how it feels. Those fears are mostly emotional, not rational. In real life, the old innovation tends to fade away a lot slower than one fears.

This very human hang up is what I believe gives rise to the point in the book the NYT article discussed. Cynthia Barton Rabe cleverly catches the point in the very title of her book, namely "Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine..."

t

Ah, slashdot, I love you.

"Open-source is not innovative." "Yes it is. Look at these Java tools!" "That's not innovative. We had better than those 20 years ago." "Senseless Java bashing!"

(And the "senseless Java bashing" kneejerk response is rated higher than the observation that we had great tools 20 years ago.)

Gee, 60% insightful, 20% flamebait, 20% overrated. That really pulled an SICP here. There should be a *bonus* for that.

It's amazing how pro-Java slashdot is. If I was to claim that Microsoft was innovative for doing something other platforms did 20 years ago, I'd be modded to -1 in a New York minute (or maybe +5 funny). When somebody says that Java is innovative for doing something other platforms did 20 years ago, it shoots up to +4 insightful, and counterpoints get modded flamebait.

Peter Seibel was right: programmers are just as emotional as anybody, and they care more about looks than functionality, even in programming languages. Unix geeks like Java because it looks like C -- admit it! Other more powerful languages, don't. You can pretty much measure the popularity of programming languages by how much they superficially look like C: on this list, how many of the top 10 languages *don't* use C-style curly braces? I count 2: VB (the primary way to extend apps on the most common OS in the world), and Python (and despite not looking like C, I think the indentation thing makes it obvious that Python people care about aesthetics as much as anybody!). (Disclaimer: I'm a former Python programmer.)

With respect to Tony Hoare: I don't know what the language of the year 2050 will look like, but I know it will have curly braces.

I worked for a summer with a flooring contractor before going to basic training in the army. They did a cool technique with their extension cords where they basically made a long loose crochet chain out of them. A 50 ft cord would end up about 10 feet long and then they'd toss them all in their big "contractor box".

For some reason, cords that were already looped up like this didn't tend to knot up with each other. Which makes me wonder if there is a maximum knotty potential... straight un-knotted cords have a higher probability of knotting while ones that are already knotted will be less likely to. It seems I read something recently, maybe out of the "Book of Ignorance" (http://www.amazon.com/Book-General-Ignorance-John-Mitchinson/dp/0307394913), said that straight hair tends to get knotted more then curly hair.

It's amazing to me that seemingly simple things end up yielding entire fields of math and science.

Here's an interesting quote from one of the legal briefs in the case:

"Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recording into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs" [Supplemental Brief, page 15, lines 16-18, emphasis added].

The phrasing that they used seems to indicate that the MP3 files were authorized until they were placed into the shared folder. Now, I'm not a lawyer, so it's possible that this means absolutely nothing, but it's still an interesting notion.

What it seems that they are saying is that the MP3's are authorized until used for an illegal purpose (i.e. file-sharing). Amazon's MP3 Music Service TOS seems to support this interpretation. It encourages users to make backup copies of MP3's they purchase (which would be authorized); and, if you violate any of the terms (such as infringing upon the copyright of the MP3), your license to use the music terminates, making the MP3 unauthorized. While the music in this case wasn't purchased from Amazon, it seems like the same philosophy is involved.

The point in the NYT article was much more profound that just user interfaces. I spent my entire career in engineering software battling the tendency of engineers to build ever thicker walls around their thinking boxes as their careers advanced.

Most difficult were engineers who learned clever tricks to conserving memory in their programming. As Moore's progressed, those skills devalued, then became worthless, and finally became negative in value. I had one engineer at late as 1987 who would spend two days effort to save three bytes of memory in his program. Engineers are trained to build on experience, and they expect their experiences to add to their value synergistically as the years pass. The idea that past experience could have negative value was a threat to their personal credos and their career strategy.

It got so bad in my company that I once advocated hiring programmers at age 13, taking them out of school and exploiting them until age 23. At 23 we would force them to retire and finance them to finish high school and college, then move on to some other career. Needless to say, I didn't get very far with that policy.

What should we expect? The whole profession of engineering is based on the concept of incrementally adding to and improving on past experience, from the Romans up to today. Every time a bridge collapses or some other engineering disaster occurs, the public demands that we learn lessons and never ever commit that error again. After 2,000 years of that, how much innovation can you expect?

Contrast that with what is happening at Google. According to reports, Google employees dink around with their own ideas. Sometimes they show up for work on Monday with a bit of prototype code, then they circulate it around the company looking for reactions. The winners survive and the losers disappear without any bridges collapsing or innocent people being killed. That's what so great about software -- it is so easy to prototype. To fully exploit it, you need people who don't know what they can't do.

There was a great book called Computer Wars made the same point about innovation and corporations rather than individuals. The book's point was that if and when the time comes to change the base business model and technology upon which the company was founded, that the founders feel threatened and the company fails. The battle fields re littered with the corpses of countless companies that fell victim to that trap. Now think of Google again. If and when the day comes that the Internet is no longer the big thing, will Google be flexible enough to reinvent itself or will it just die?

How about yourself? if someday the sun came up and the Internet was no longer important, could you reinvent yourself? Can you even imagine that possibility? Probably not -- your thinking box won't allow for such possibilities.

It's not just for an 82 year old. It's also for a 4 year old. Or, for you.

Here's a scenario. Imagine you have to give a presentation to a modest size group -- say, 25 people. Say, perhaps, that a few bigwigs are in attendance (just to boost the stress level). And, just as the presentation is about to start, someone hands you this "convenient presentation remote" to make your presentation "easier". It's got lots of features. Trying to decipher the tiny buttons, it looks like you can adjust the sound, it's got a mini-joystick to move the mouse, and mouse buttons. There's another two buttons at the bottom, one looks like it might be for blanking the screen, one says FS, though I don't know what that means. It's also got a little thumb-wheel, that does something... Maybe it's the scroll wheel for the mini-mouse?

But, right now, you want to know how to flip to the next slide, maybe flip back to the last slide, and possibly have some kind of laser pointer. I'm guessing the forward and back buttons are the little arrows in the middle of the unit, and the little red dot button may be the laser pointer.

With the stress of an actual presentation at hand, are you sure you can find the right button for those features? With all those people sitting there, and the stress of trying to sell your idea at the front of your mind, your fingers feel fat, and your palms feel pretty clammy. If you needed to do anything that those other tiny buttons required, you'd probably just walk the few steps back to your laptop to use the trackpad, rather than trying to navigate through menus with the microscopic joystick.

For its actual purpose, a presentation, most of those buttons are pretty much useless. Not only useless, but distracting. The three or four features that are really essential aren't easy to find with your fingers without looking. This clearly was designed by people who don't give real presentations -- in front of 20 people, much less 2,000.

It's like the "mouse" with dozens of buttons -- like this one. Sure, it's great for playing Missile Command, or for a first-person-shooter game. But for my actual work -- Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Statistics, Number crunching, Excel, Word, Coding... (and all that other boring stuff) well... I just use a normal plain old mouse and that 101 key multi input device that's conveniently located right front and center. I don't need to go through the hassle to set it up and then remember which of the unlabeled buttons brings up the spell checker in Word, or the line thickness in Illo.

I didn't read TFA but it seems naive to believe that there are such "teams of experts" designing remote controls and whatnot. Here's the thing: Consumers don't think about usability at all when they buy, and as a simple consequence of that no time or effort is spent on it.

I was talking to a friend who has just spent thousands on a very nice looking oven/hobb. To my dismay (but not my surprise) it still has the hobb controls in a straight line, not in any way related to the layout of the hobb rings themselves, meaning that she will still make mistakes turning the wrong ring off or up, burning food and so on, and she'll constantly have to look at the tiny diagrams by each control to try to work out which hobb ring it corresponds to.

Meanwhile the light switches in her new half-million-pound house are grouped together randomly so you have to experiment by switching lights on and off at random until you hit the right switch.

Her fridge has a temperature control that goes from '-' to '+'. Is that "more heat" or "more refrigeration"?

Oh, and all the power sockets in the house are at floor level, not convenient waist or hand height. Her DVD/TV remote probably has 50 unused buttons on it (I didn't look).

These are #1 usability problem with hobbs, light switches, fridges, power points, etc.; there are books written about it, yet you can't buy an oven, light switch, or new house which doesn't have these problems.

Rich.

i think something like this would be more appropriate.

Currently, the first review of the EEE PC is from someone who installed windows XP on it. (A great little Windows computer!!).

If you've redeemed an Amazon Gift Card, Gift Certificate, or Promotional Certificate to your Amazon.com account, any available balance will be used for your digital orders before your credit or debit card is charged. Your Amazon.com account must list a valid 1-Click payment method even if you intend to pay for your purchase with a Gift Card balance.

Amazon

I think you need to read more carefully.

Quoth Jobs:

When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content.

...

What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock -- open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it -- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that.

...

We said: These [music subscription] services that are out there now are going to fail. Music Net's gonna fail, Press Play's gonna fail. Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45's; then they bought LP's; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD's. They're going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music.

He didn't actually use the words "Digital Rights Management", but I think his position in 2003 was crystal clear. DRM is not going to work in the long term. I'll say one thing for Jobs: his view of the near future is extremely good, and unlike most corporate types, he has no mental investment in his point of view. He understands the difference between sunk cost and new costs, and he watches technology evolution constantly then branches in new direction like a speed skater picking a line. He doesn't keep throwing money at bad ideas.

Someone didn't pass math class. The $40k number is farcical for several reasons. First, an 80GB iPod can hold movies, pictures, and audio, not just music. Video takes up much more space than any music track. Secondly, it assumes that all multimedia that the iPod holds must be purchased; it doesn't take into account home movies, pod casts, pictures, my buddy's band, my kid's first choir concert, etc., which all can be utilized by an iPod and cost me nothing.

But let's just say it is completely full of music. I rip songs typically at 192 bitrate, which typically produces a 5MB song. Let's say a typical album has 13 songs on an album, which IMO is an underestimate. For an 80 GB iPod, that is roughly 1260 albums, and as the previous link shows an album typically costs $10. By my math, that only adds up to $12,600 if the entire iPod is full of music.

I hate it when people over inflate estimates for shock value.

While Wal-Mart has completely taken over small-town America, it is actively resisted by urban residents, and the company has been beaten back from establishing footholds on the outskirts of many city centers. See Fishman's The Wal-Mart Effect for more on this division between success in some areas and defeats in others. City dwellers (therefore a fairly large amount of Americans), have shown that Wal-Mart's offerings aren't too appealing, and the company has had no luck finding a way into their hearts.

Gift cards? You mean like this?

Only real complaint is that the album downloader (that allows you to get the album discount) only runs on Windows & MacOS. Write a Java client and get with the program, Amazon!

I already know some people using the Amazon data cloud technology and I suspect that will increase. I'm a bit leery of putting my data in the hands of Amazon, who have essentially stated before that they will never delete anything they know about you. Probably doesn't exactly apply to this service, or does it?

Sure, but it was the Irish who saved civilization in the first place.

Marconi is not famous because of the patent. He is famous as being the first one to propose using radio waves to send signals beyond LOS and that they could be used as a replacement for telegraph lines. At the time, his contemporaries believed Hertzian waves were only line of sight and so useless beyond a very short distance. It was his expiraments and work with the UK postal system that made people see the commercial application of Hertzian waves and drove much of the research that evolved into modern day radio. Marconi was obsessed with sending wireless waves from the UK to the USA, and it is his being the first one to have a commercially successful ship-to-ship system that got him the fame. I highly suggest the book Thunderstruck by Erik Larson which details the race and competition in regards to radio research as well as the publicity stunts and history that got Marconi's name engraved into history.

Today I have more respect for Bell.

Check out the Wright Brother's patent story for how the pursuit of patents and copyrights is the ruin of more than more inventor.

http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Sky-Hammond-Curtiss-Airplane/dp/0060956151/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198767099&sr=8-2

From the review at Amazon:
    "The first flyers were so secretive and desperate to cash in on their invention that their behavior actually "retarded" the development of aviation."

The Wright Brothers felt they had "invented flight". They were trying to interpret their patents as broadly as possible. Eventually, WW I forced the US Government to force the Wrights to share the patents with other companies. The Wright brothers did not come to a happy end. That part of the story is never told in elementary school history.

Patents and copyrights are broken. They've always been broken, and I suspect they will be broken to a certain extent. They just happen to be extraordinarily broken at the moment.

But does your mum not start the dishwasher because she wants it to start at a specific time, or simply because you're in bed? From the wording of your post, it sounds like the latter, and that she simply doesn't want to risk waking you up.

I can't think of any reason why I would not want to start my dishwasher immediately if it was full and ready to go, unless I was concerned that it would wake someone up.

even better, set a timer that tells it to start up at some specific time.

This is a solved problem. My parents were using this sort of thing to start various appliances late at night (cheaper electricity) decades ago.

I'm a geek, I love cool tech, and I'm not saying that network-controllable or network-aware appliances are a bad thing. I just don't see the use of them. Sure, once in a blue moon I'll forget to start something up and then it would be handy, but I think I can live without it.

Have you seen the movie "Heavens Burning" with R.Crowe and that cute little Japanese chick Youki Kudoh. There is a piece of music on it I have been trying to find, full length not just a DVD rip of the audio as it was mixed with other stuff of course. Since there was no CD audio volume released I have as of yet to find the piece. I believe the music was a Spanish style guitar interpretation of a Mozart composition by the name of "Solus Solique" of something close to that, I could not get a clear view because IFC screws up the credits on most all movies. I keep meaning to pickup the DVD but since the info I have seen on it says it does not include a separate audio volume of the sound track titles it is probably pointless. The piece Solus Solique, (latin: One Day, In A Single Day, The Only Day?) appears in its longest example during the love scene at Crowes pops house. Great music, gives me the shivers, and that is unusual for something that I did not listen to as a teen and thus come encumbered with emotional bonds to angst ridden stuff.

Wabi-Sabi
Matthew

http://www.amazon.com/Heavens-Burning-Russell-Crowe/dp/B00004YA78/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1198732542&sr=8-1

Your connection of declining intelligence to liberals is nothing more than a fanciful leap of logic.

I* am not saying that "Liberals" cause stupidity.

I am saying, however, that their disinterest in "technological" issues [vis-a-vis their obsession with "social" issues], as evidenced by their performance in our current Congress, does reflect the underlying stupidity of their constituencies.

[Parenthetically: Were you aware that Obama wants to defund NASA's next generation of launch vehicles so as to be able to throw even more booty at his constituents in the National "Education" Association?]

*On the other hand, in his original work on the subject, Charles Murray did take the point of view that "Liberal" social policies have a dysgenic effect: If our government taxes the lives & behaviors of smart, industrious people, and subsidizes the lives & behaviors of lazy, stupid people, then we shouldn't be surprised when smart, industrious people come to have more and more difficulty in finding the time & financial resources necessary to make & raise babies, and that neither should we be surprised if lazy, stupid people are more than happy to move in and occupy that nature-abhorred vacuum.

[Again, parenthetically: Did you know that the bottom 50% of Americans pay no income taxes whatsoever? Or that the top 1% of Americans pay more income tax than the bottom 90%? Or that the average low-skilled citizen costs the government more than $19,500 per year every year of his life?]

Now I agree with Murray that the financial aspects of government social policy can impart some inertia in the general direction of fertility rates [be those rates dysgenic or eugenic], but I don't think for a second that the fiscal burden of "Liberalism" is the primary culprit here: There is something far more evil at work in the Death of the Civilized World, and "Liberalism" is merely a very poor, rather dim shadow of that Evil.

A shadow of A Shadow, if you will.

The question isn't where can we store our terabytes and terabytes of information for a 100 years and never touch it, the real question is where can we store our terabytes of information and allow it to be used to generate copies for sale at any time in a current format? I imagine the answer for the industry will resemble the Internet Bookmobile, where a consumer needs only submit the name of the movie they want, indicate a format and shipping preference, and the movie arrives for set price - a portion of each sale will be applied to keep the data migrated to a fresh format, and when interest wanes, a studio could decide to migrate to a "final copy" and "burn" the film to celluloid. That would the last hope for a film, resulting in lowered storage costs for the long haul, at the expense of accessibility and flexability.

The problem is the current storage model doesn't take into account the long tail of retail, and ignores the ability of technology to create new revenue streams to fund storage options...

Just think, if a movie house could order up a "print" of any movie ever made and show it in a theater - and offer DVD, HD or Blu-Ray copies to be delivered to the home of anyone that wanted one..Heck, I'd pay REAL MONEY to see Stop Making Sense on a big screen with the sound turned up to 11 ;^)

This is actually the second time GLONASS has become fully operational. The first time was back on February of 1996 (see 'Understanding GPS Principles and Applications' for details). However, older satellites started failing soon after and they weren't able to replace them quickly enough so the constellation quickly degraded in functionality.

If you want to learn Common Lisp in "mind expansion" mode, you should try Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence: Case Studies in Common Lisp.

It's a big, fat book, and will take a long time to work through it, but it'll show you a bunch of different techniques and tackle a number of problems you won't see in a Python or C book.

Yup, I take kava occasionally. Kinda gives a relaxed concentration; sorta removes impeding anxiety and improves focus - makes things a little clearer. My g/f takes it once in a while for depression. Side effects include numb lips, and in larger doses, drowsiness & slightly slurred speech (makes your tongue numb). I'll sometimes mix a tablespoon of kava into my coffee - best of both worlds.

As for liver toxicity, the best reports I've read seemed to confirm what OP says; you'd also need to take quite a lot of it over a prolonged period of time. To be extra safe, I avoid drinking alcohol for a few hours before & after. As with anything else you put in your body, purchasing from a reputable, trustworthy source is essential - I buy mine at natural food stores. Note that kava root is not water-soluble - you'll want it in powder form (ie, you can't brew tea).

Other mind-altering natural remedies I'm fond of (all of these are legal). I usually brew infusions:

• catnip - yup, the same plant you give to your cat. Good for anxiety, depression & digestion.
• chamomile - anxiety, insomnia
• skullcap - anxiety, improves focus.
• valerian - severe anxiety & insomnia. Quite a bit stronger, smells terrible
• exercise - probably anathema to most Slashdotters, but regular exercise will do wonders for your mental state.

In general, I've found folk/natural remedies to be "just right" - more like a nudge as the OP says, and nowhere near as potent as lab drugs, with minimal side effects. People have been using plants as medicine for thousands of years. This book is a fantastic guide on such things - includes lots of references to scientific papers too.

Posted anonymously so that when the State decides to outlaw some of these at the prompting of Big Pharma, they've got less evidence against me.

Do the math with me, will you? Let's say I want to buy the OpenGL Programming Guide. My local bookstore has it for 60 euro (http://www.selexyz.nl/pages/detail_v2/S1/10030001940805-2-10090000000010.aspx?showbreadcrumb=1, or I can order from Amazon for $50 (http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-Programming-Guide-Official-Learning/dp/0321481003/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198653310&sr=8-1). That's only 35 euro, or almost half what I pay at the local bookstore. Shipping cost is a bit harder to determine, but for me to travel by bike + train + fairly long walk to the above-mentioned bookstore will also cost me 11 euro, plus 3-4 hours. And these price differences are fairly normal for this type of book.

How about pockets, then? I can buy a single Harry Potter book in english for 17 euro, or in dutch for 20 euro (http://www.selexyz.nl/pages/search_v2/S2/SEARCHRESULTPRODUCTS.aspx). Or I can go to Amazon and buy six Harry Potter books for $34 (http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Paperback-Box-Books/dp/0439887453/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198653687&sr=1-2). That's 24 euro - almost the price of a single book locally!

I'd love to support my local bookstore, but they *really* have to do better than this to compete. For years we were told that because of the strong dollar, import books were simply expensive. Now that the dollar is weak they don't use the excuse anymore, but we still pay through the nose for books.

Do the math with me, will you? Let's say I want to buy the OpenGL Programming Guide. My local bookstore has it for 60 euro (http://www.selexyz.nl/pages/detail_v2/S1/10030001940805-2-10090000000010.aspx?showbreadcrumb=1, or I can order from Amazon for $50 (http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-Programming-Guide-Official-Learning/dp/0321481003/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198653310&sr=8-1). That's only 35 euro, or almost half what I pay at the local bookstore. Shipping cost is a bit harder to determine, but for me to travel by bike + train + fairly long walk to the above-mentioned bookstore will also cost me 11 euro, plus 3-4 hours. And these price differences are fairly normal for this type of book.

How about pockets, then? I can buy a single Harry Potter book in english for 17 euro, or in dutch for 20 euro (http://www.selexyz.nl/pages/search_v2/S2/SEARCHRESULTPRODUCTS.aspx). Or I can go to Amazon and buy six Harry Potter books for $34 (http://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Paperback-Box-Books/dp/0439887453/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198653687&sr=1-2). That's 24 euro - almost the price of a single book locally!

I'd love to support my local bookstore, but they *really* have to do better than this to compete. For years we were told that because of the strong dollar, import books were simply expensive. Now that the dollar is weak they don't use the excuse anymore, but we still pay through the nose for books.

If it makes you feel better about the whole thing, consider the advantages of a system where a group of people, with a whole lot of power and at least some education and brains, are so highly motivated to keep the system moving forward. And then thank God that you don't have politicians and bureaucrats trying to run the show instead.

Is the system sustainable forever? Probably not, but nothing is. Viva la revolucion!

Try it if you can find the time, and maybe pick up a copy of Ruby for Rails.

Python currently has larger library support.

Personally I see no need for you to reinvent your wheel, but you'll probably not be gratified as to the validity of your decision until you dig a little.

http://www.m-w.com/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/music/clipserve/B000000ED3001001/0/

exactly. me too. I'm trying to be into healthy lifestyle, good diet, exercise, plenty of sleep. And I'm interested in the possibilities of enhancement via milder/safer stuff like vitamins/herbs etc. nootropics... instead it's an advertisement for the sanctioned amphetamine drug dealers. I'm all for trying to achieve better performance but from what I've seen out of amphetamines they are not really good for you.

I'll drop this link for fun, this site had something on it about brain enhancing supplements: Grasshopper Enterprises ... and long ago one of my friends had an interesting book on nootropics called Smart Drugs, here's a link to v2: Smart Drugs v2.

I'm really surprised there's not more posts about this stuff. Like recommended reading, and talk about what others have experimented with. Maybe it works really well and they're guarding their secrets from increased competition? I ordered a few things while I was in school and I thought it was overpriced crap. Did me no good AFAIK. But I also think I had bigger issues with diet, eating, sleeping, depression, etc at the time. Maybe amphetamines could have helped me, or maybe that would have been the final push over into the abyss. I don't know :)