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I'm quite sure that most of these bastards had/have a religion, so while I agree with your point that religion has been used and abused to murder in its name, that does not mean that the opposite of religion (atheism) is the true cause, nor does the above rant gives any argument why and how atheism leads to mass murder.

Communism in most countries has been militantly atheistic, engaging in harsh suppression of religion and programs for the spread of militant atheism. The Soviets even established an All-Union League of the Godless and museums of atheism in former churches. (North Korea still executes Christians.) At the same time, Communism was responsible for killing about 100,000,000 people in the last century. There were even incidents of cannibalism in the People's Republic of China to prove your loyalty to the party, literally eating the rich. The brutality of communism was one that repeated itself from country to country to country. Stalin outdid Hitler in body count, and Mao dwarfed Stalin. As a percentage of his country, Pol Pot outdid Mao. The vile regime of North Korea is still engaged in horror after horror after horror.

How is that that Communism, allegedly founded on a scientific basis, stressing rationality and scientific though, with principles regarded as altruistic (from each according to his ability to each according to his need), repeatedly produced such carnage and such leaders? Do you think it is possible that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of man at work there?

There are also times when this would not work. For example sites where the URL includes a session ID. On these sites you never fill our the login form on the "same" page every time... And, for example, Amazon.com does some pretty strange things with URLs (for example this url for 'My Account' http://www.amazon.com/gp/css/homepage.html/ref=top nav_ya_gw/103-4800391-1980660 includes the referal page).

"The question we need to ask ourselves is is our children learning?" -W http://www.amazon.com/x/dp/0743214781

If the next great step is anarchism, then its a step down. I recommend this book, Reinventing The Bazaar, for a good discussion of the issues. http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Bazaar-Natural-H istory-Markets/dp/0393323714

there are few things lower than trolling slashdot for reference points.

True, however, his link was not a referrer link. The "ref" in Amazon URL's is actually their way of tracking how people move around their site. Go to a few amazon pages and check out the normal links. You'll see that most of the links on the page have the same "ref" code and it changes depending on where you are in the site. So they can track how people browse the site.

A true Amazon affiliate link looks like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Inconvenient-Truth-Incomveni ent/dp/B000ICL3KG/sr=1-3/qid=1158270805/tag=ottode struct-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

The important thing in a Amazon link is the "tag=whatever". That's how they do referral/affiliate codes.

I recently read Transcendent by Stephen Baxter, in which one of the cool ideas was that there was an environmental tax on things that would take care of the final lifetime cost of ownership. Buy a plastic toy? You would have to pay for the mining, manufacturing and distribution as normal. But also you pay for disposal, recycling, reduction of global petroleum reserves, pollution cost of mining to local residents etc. IIRC people ended up using ultrabiodegradable materials, public transportation, and everyones house was coated in solar panels... Link here... http://www.amazon.com/Transcendent-Destinys-Childr en-Stephen-Baxter/dp/0345457919

Languages are anachronisms, the only reason we have more than one is the physical distance between locations and difficulty travelling allowed them to evolve independently.

So why does every language have strata of slang and jargon that may well be incomprehensible to outsiders? In south-east England, a fairly small area, one has a wide range of speech depending on economic status and social circle. If one has a few people speaking a common language, it won't stay uniform for long, even if everyone's still in the same place.

So get rid of them, insist on a common language.

Sure, and why don't we just all wear the same clothes, just because different styles or colours can be taken too seriously (on gang turf, for example)? And let's all eat the same food, no need for various cuisines when flavourless mush can keep us alive.

Languages make the world more interesting. I enjoy very much traveling about and seeing how the local communicate, the phonological inventory and morphological quirks they employ, the different judgements on eloquent speech they hold. If all this disappeared, it would be very dull.

And your claim that languages are "too difficult" is a peculiar opinion of some in first world nations. The vast majority of human beings are multilingual, see e.g. Edwards, John. Multilingualism (London: Penguin, 1994). It should only take a person a couple of weeks to acheive a basic conversational level in a foreign language, which can easily be done before each time you set off on vacation. I've never had a problem learning enough of the language to talk with the locals about their culture and mine, and I think my language skills are actually fairly humdrum in comparison to a lot of people I've met.

And if all national tongues disappear in favour of some world language imposed by fiat, what would happen to all the literature written in them? Poetry translates infamously poorly. People have spent millennia composing art in words, one of the skills that makes us the unique species we are. Are we to throw all of those great monuments away?

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish reading all the new posts on 66.35.250.150.

Base-Ten CHAUVINIST!!!

What about societies that use Base 2 [binary], or Base 8 [octal], or Base 16 [hexadecimal]?

Or entire societies, like the British empire, which use no base at all?

12 inches in a foot. 3 feet in a yard. 1760 yards in a mile...

60 seconds in a minute. 60 minutes in a hour. 24 hours in a day. 7 days in a week. 52 weeks in a year [give or take]...

Or how about base 12?

12 keys in a chromatic scale: A 440, then, logarithmically [give or take a little well-tempering]: A#, B, B# == C [kinda sorta], C#, D, D#, E, E# == F [kinda sorta], F#, G, G#, and finally A 880.

Except that on the continent, things are often just a little sharper - say A 443/444/445 & A 886/888/890...

And let's not even get into water freeezing & boiling at 32 & 212 versus 0 & 100...

I fixed that link for you. . . http://www.amazon.com/Inconvenient-Truth-Incomveni ent/dp/B000ICL3KG/sr=1-3/qid=1158270805/ there are few things lower than trolling slashdot for reference points.

And the only way that happens is for people everywhere to stop listening to the cool kids and, once again, pay attention to the nerds

"The Microsoft File" by Wendy Goldman Rohm focuses on OS/2 days and Novell, IBM involvement with Microsoft.

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-File-Secret-agains t-Gates/dp/B000HWYXYK/sr=8-2/qid=1164109389/ref=sr _1_2/002-3484650-6135214?ie=UTF8&s=books

Novell should have get their lesson and ask IBM about what it means to partner with Microsoft on an OS.

IBM couldn't manage to deal with them as "Big Blue", lets see what Novell will do.

What is there in the water in Michigan? A few years ago a teen in Michigan created a nuclear fission reactor; now this guy one ups him and creates fusion ?

Why cant they do some kind of 'pay now and we'll send it to you when it's here' ordering process.

Yes, if only there were some way to order a Wii online and have it shipped to you when it's in stock...

Barnes and Noble is selling this book for $24.46, but Amazon.com is only selling it for $24.12!

Save yourself $0.34 by buying the book here: CSS Cookbook. That's a total savings of 1.39%!

It looks like Apress is publishing a new QT book next year -- Foundations of QT Development. That's kinda cool. It's not up on their website yet, but there's some info on amazon http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Qt-Development-J ohan-Thelin/dp/1590598318/sr=11-1/qid=1164053202/r ef=sr_11_1/104-1082812-6109546

A lot of evolutionary theory revolves around evolution not by choice. . .

If by "a lot," you mean "all." Oooooooooh, don't go getting your panties in a twist. I know what you were trying to say.

But this almost suggests that the decision to take to the trees is in and of itself a factor in evolution.

Well duh. Do something stupid and you don't pass on your genes. Do the effective thing and you do. We understand that already. See the Darwin Awards. There's nothing freakier here than the moths thing. The darker moths survived. The better climbers are surviving.

So it appears that there is evolution by way of behavior in addition to random mutations. I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of people consider evolution to be purely random . . .

And these people are wrong and have always been wrong. Mutation is random, evolution is not. Evolution is the process applying an active filter to the mutations. The concept is so fundamental; and yet so misunderstood, that this book uses the very first few chapters to drive home the point.

If PJ is going to do another LOTR movies - let it be this one

I would also add Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion to your suggestion. It presents the most common 'proofs' of God, and the specific logical errors in each of those so-called proofs.

I'd recommend the following books over Dawkins':

Mary Jane West-Eberhard's Developmental Plasticity and Evolution

Jablonka & Lamb's Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life

Both books show quite well how the modern synthesis is changing and what is likely to incorporated into it. The former book is particularly revolutionizing, the latter is every bit as readable as Dawkins is for the layperson. Both books benefit from the wealth of insights from molecular genetics and other areas pertaining to evolutionary theory within the last 20 years, unlike The Selfish Gene.

I'd recommend the following books over Dawkins':

Mary Jane West-Eberhard's Developmental Plasticity and Evolution

Jablonka & Lamb's Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life

Both books show quite well how the modern synthesis is changing and what is likely to incorporated into it. The former book is particularly revolutionizing, the latter is every bit as readable as Dawkins is for the layperson. Both books benefit from the wealth of insights from molecular genetics and other areas pertaining to evolutionary theory within the last 20 years, unlike The Selfish Gene.

Why is this controversial?

As well as the Dawkins book ("The God Delusion", for those of you on the other side of the Atlantic -- I guess it's been supressed as "unAmerican" over there) this is a good, interesting, authoritative and rather depressing read: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury.

As well as the Dawkins book ("The God Delusion", for those of you on the other side of the Atlantic -- I guess it's been supressed as "unAmerican" over there) this is a good, interesting, authoritative and rather depressing read: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury.

Although Scott Adams may be the best political and business parodist/cartoonist since Dave Barry, he hit upon a serious deficiency in American Politics: Most voters don't know what the job qualifications for President are. The President is supposed to be a leader and executive, guide the country in resolving problems (if possible), but his main job is to UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. (It's in his oath of office.) This has nothing to do with his religion, gender, party affiliation or appearance, but those are the qualifications upon which the voters seem to select our politicians these days.

Which brings up problem number two: Most Americans don't know the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America, and are probably not qualified to vote. The Declaration of Independence defines the principles upon which this country was founded and the Constitution defines the process by which we govern ourselves. It is embarrassing that I meet so many foreigners who know all about the Constitution and the Declaration, but I seldom find an American college student who can even tell me what's in the Bill of Rights.

I hope some of you are feeling guilty... http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/help/constRedir.html http://www.amazon.com/Hold-These-Truths-Mortimer-A dler/dp/0020641303

That's not how simulations are done, what you suggest would be a waste of time. You should first learn something about the mathematics of simulations, a good place to start is in this book.

Then you should learn something about the physics, I suggest chapter 1 in this book to learn how to calculate the spectrum of the radiation emitted by a body as a function of temperature.

Knowing all that, it's a simple matter to realize that sunlight is emitted by the sun at a shorter wavelength than heat radiated by the earth, because the sun is hotter than the earth. It just happens that CO2 absorbs less radiation at shorter wavelengths than at longer wavelengths, therefore heat from the sun reaches the earth surface, but heat radiated by the earth surface gets absorbed by the CO2 in the atmosphere.

The rise in the temperature isn't programmed into the simulations, it's a result of the calculations, which use data that has been verified many times.

Amazon is trying to hawk it for $3500 ;)
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Computer-Entertainment- PlayStation-60GB/dp/B0009VXAM0/sr=8-1/qid=11640142 12/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1_s9_rk/102-0083646-6899319?ie=UT F8&s=videogames&s9r=8a5801be0d117bc7010d3a74224705 dc

For example, I can see a day when juries will simply refuse to convict people who run afoul of laws like this, as is their right.

Jury nullification is a contentious issue, and the legality of it in many countries is my no means certain. For the U.S., for example, see Conrad's Jury Nullification (Carolina Academic Press, 2000) for a history that's sympathetic but which lists many of the points against. Because the matter is so polemic, it's silly to blatantly call it a "right".

Read Roving Mars, by Steve Squyres, the Rover. You'll see how these were NOT "overengineered" and were NOT "easy" to do. A thousand things had to go right (after another thousand went wrong) to build and send those things the way they did it. It was passion, and a bit of luck that they succeeded. But a "conspiracy" (which is essentially what you're alluding to) it was not. As someone above said, it may very-well be their greatest success since Apollo 11.

See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_oil

and read this:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Stranglehold-Jerome-Ph -D-Corsi/dp/1581824890/sr=11-1/qid=1163962327/ref= sr_11_1/102-1148310-9867333
Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil
by Jerome R., Ph.D. Corsi, Craig R. Smith
ISBN: 1581824890

Public Toilet Design: From Hotels, Bars, Restaurants, Civic Buildings and Businesses Worldwide (Trends in Architecture)

" Most people do not like talking about their bodily functions, and bathrooms have traditionally been relegated to a secondary position as far as the design of public spaces is concerned. Public toilets are generally associated with cold, often anti-hygienic spaces that foment delinquency, perversion and vandalism. Nevertheless, bathrooms not only form part of our everyday life but also reflect the evolution of our hygiene, as well as expressing our cultural identities to such an extent that they form part of the history of civilization.

In recent years, bathrooms have been subject to greater attention on the part of designers, who give full rein to their creativity to turn bathrooms into an experience for the senses imbued with great artistic value. This book presents a selection of very diverse projects in which bathrooms enjoy a special status as a vehicle for emotions, various artistic and cultural expressions, corporate values and the requirements of different social groups. Particular attention has been paid to the latter, as the needs of a male user are not the same as those of a woman, child, senior citizen or handicapped person -- and the design of a lavatory must take these characteristics into account. Over the course of four chapters Leisure and Culture, Residential Bathrooms, Working Environment and Commuting Spaces -- follows a global survey of bathrooms belonging to different types of buildings, including bars, restaurants, theaters, gyms, offices, hospitals, kindergartens, public institutions, airports and train stations, with special emphasis on the means used to bring together creativity and functionality.

It seems that designers are gradually rebelling against the taboos which dictate when, where, how and with whom we should relieve ourselves, and are converting a visit to the bathroom into not just a satisfaction of physical needs but also a pleasant experience. "

• They try to tell people in very specific terms how to think, including attempting to dictate choice of vocabulary. The latter is one of the elements of thought reform (read: mind control) as documented by Robert Jay Lifton and other psychologists. This is one area where the FSF shows signs of having begun to follow the pattern of a fairly conventional cult.
  
• They have zero tolerance for perspectives other than their own, and believe that they can and should force everyone else on the planet to conform to their dictates if they simply engage in enough belligerent activism. (Although that again is another customary element of cultism)
  
• Stallman is able to rely on his followers to enforce conformity with his dogma, both here and in other places. They bully people, shout them down, and attempt to perpetuate the hive mentality without Stallman himself needing to be directly involved. In this way, they do the less than pleasant work of advancing "the movement," forward, while Stallman himself gets to remain relatively blameless. (Wow, three for three on the cult checklist...and I hadn't even realised before I wrote this!)
  
• Bradley Kuhn has openly stated that a goal of the FSF is to deny software developers the right to use any license, FOSS or otherwise, other than the GPL. It thus follows that they also seek the erradication of the BSDs.
  

Yes, Zune sales appear "flaccid," but you don't need to resort to Michael Moore tactics to make your point.

Yes, Zune sales appear "flaccid," but you don't need to resort to Michael Moore tactics to make your point.

Here.

Most of them seem to be very favourable.
First few days is really too early to judge a product sales figures.

gravity is conserved - for every quantity of gravity that is exerted by matter, an equal quantity of antigravity is left behind in the "ether".

The antigravity drives the expansion of the universe, and the gravity drives the accretion of matter into stars and planets.

You need to read

The Inflationary Universe by Alan Guth.

Your "out of the box" thinking has been formalized already! :-)

I hate to keep harping on this - the reason I do is because the man's research was so profound and he was sooooo screwed over by the establishment.

In The Body Electric, Robert Becker describes how he was able to induce blastema formation to re-knit bone fractures.

Well everyone's thrown in their two cents. Now while I can't tell you what degree to get. I can add another perspective to the issue.

Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform and Learning by Doing: A Comprehensive Guide to Simulations, Computer Games, and Pedagogy in e-Learning and Other Educational Experiences

Most of the advice here about games (and anything related) is shaped by people's exposure to them. But games and the technology surrounding them has a serious side as well as serious applications. You can even tour Notre Dame.

I have plenty of PDF's related to the application of games outside peoples narrow view of them. e.g. Urban planning, virtual tours, architecture, etc.

Well everyone's thrown in their two cents. Now while I can't tell you what degree to get. I can add another perspective to the issue.

Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform and Learning by Doing: A Comprehensive Guide to Simulations, Computer Games, and Pedagogy in e-Learning and Other Educational Experiences

Most of the advice here about games (and anything related) is shaped by people's exposure to them. But games and the technology surrounding them has a serious side as well as serious applications. You can even tour Notre Dame.

I have plenty of PDF's related to the application of games outside peoples narrow view of them. e.g. Urban planning, virtual tours, architecture, etc.

Might it be this one: Rapid Development by Steve McConnell?

I remember that story quite vividly as well: "When doing market research, we realized that mediocre people didn't want a real C++ compiler, they just wanted C++ on the box and *.cpp file extensions so they could bill themselves out ($$$) as C++ programmers. We then spent the next 5 years fixing all of our dork-isms in the C++ compiler to bring it up to standards, but that didn't matter because we had already crushed our competition by making flashy-promises and code wizards and being first to market with a non-compliant compiler." (or something to that effect).

--Robert

I suggest you read What's the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank. The marriage of elitist policies with populist, antagonistic wedge issues is explained very well, both systemically and anecdotally. It helped me formulate my as-yet-incoherent thoughts on that specific issue.

Of course, if you've read the superb http://www.amazon.com/Anvil-Ice-Winter-World-Vol/d p/0380705478/sr=8-1/qid=1163761416/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1 /102-3141794-1726542?ie=UTF8&s=booksWinter of the World series by Michael Scott Rohan, then you'll know techniques like these were lost as the magesmiths' power faded :P

MSR actually references swords like this (though he places their origins much earlier - have others been found?), and briefly describes the debate over their origin in his appendix. Though the books are a decade or so old now, so I imagine his information is probably somewhat out of date.

I am a physicist, specifically one who specializes in quantum information.

The write-up is total garbage. Sadly, I've read enough mangled pop-sci descriptions of quantum mechanics that I can translate most of it into non-gibberish--in true Slashdot fashion--without even reading the article (which is probably even more full of gibberish, and thus capable of rotting your brain). I did have to look at the article to figure out whether it's the journalist or the scientist that bears responsibility for this mess. Here's my translation:

The U of W physicists want to do a test of Bell's Theorem in such a way as to close one of the "loopholes" in previous tests (the possibility of signaling between particles).

Some background:
Bell's Theorem is at the heart of what makes quantum mechanics so shocking. If you want to understand one of the greatest accomplishments of modern science, you owe it to yourself to learn about the famous EPR criticism of quantum mechanics (Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, Physical Review 47, 777), Bell's Theorem, and the Aspect experiment. The EPR elegantly lays out what so many people find weird and shocking about quantum mechanics (and what Einstein et al took to be evidence of its incompleteness), while Bell's Theorem and Aspect's experiment show that yes, the world really is this weird, and the EPR paper is wrong.

The link I've provided to the EPR paper will unfortunately only get you the abstract, unless you're at a university, in which case your institution almost certainly has a subscription to Physical Review. To learn about Bell's Theorem, try the appendix in "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by David Griffiths. AFAIK, the derivation of Bell's Inequality is only a few pages, and requires only basic calculus. The derivation is accessible to non-physicists who either know or are willing to learn basic calculus.

The above reading is not an easy project for a layman, but it is doable. It will give you a better understanding of modern physics than any number of "popular science"-type books you could read. Without the math, all that's left of quantum mechanics is people BSing about their favorite "interpretation". If you want to know enough to make up your own mind, learn about the EPR paper and Bell's Theorem.

The U of W experiment:
So, if Bell's Theorem has already been tested by Aspect, what's left for the U of W team? Bell's Theorem allows one to disprove all local hidden-variable theories. Aspect's original experiment didn't quite satisfy all the conditions for such a test, in that there were "loopholes" through which a very contrived theory with bizarre features might escape. Many people have since done experiments to close some of these loopholes.

Initially, just based on the Slashdot write-up, I thought the experiment was designed to close the locality loophole: if the two particles are not spacelike separated, a subluminal signal could in principle be sent from one to the other to tell it how to "respond" to a measurement. The way to close the loophole is to make sure the measurements of the two particles are spacelike separated events. This would be a reasonable experiment to do, although I think may already have been done.

Having read the abysmal Seattle PI article linked in the write-up, it looks like that's not what's planned. Cramer is the inventor of a somewhat less-popular interpretation of quantum mechanics, the transactional interpretation, in which particles send signals forward and backward in time. This isn't quite as crazy as it sounds, since there's time-reversal and other symmetries inherent in quantum mechanics, but I wouldn't call it well-accepted. What's more concerning

This is an old wive's tale that deserves to die. The ARPANet was NOT built as an experiment in resiliant networking; it was built by DARPA to connect scientists so they could share all the large computers that DARPA was funding.

See: Where Wizards Stay Up Late
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Late-Inte rnet/dp/0684832674

and
http://www.businessweek.com/1996/38/b349359.htm

I don't know about that suggestion - that is an excellent book, if you're taking a course and it's the textbook. If you're not taking a course, you're probably not going to get much out of it, because there's no way to find out what the answers to any of the exercises are (and considering the number of "the proof of this is given in exercise 12.1-3" or, "see exercise 34.1-5 for the solution to this problem" cookies in this text, you're missing a lot if you happen to be stuck on a given exercise). Infuriatingly, although the author(s) publish a solutions guide for professors only (in case the professor is teaching a course he doesn't understand, I presume), they're openly hostile to students who might want to double-check their own answers against an authoritative source (or maybe they themselves can't solve all of the problems...)?

BTW, I'd highly recommend TCP/IP Illustrated (or anything else by Richard Stevens), Advanced Unix Programming, and Applied Cryptography.

I don't know about that suggestion - that is an excellent book, if you're taking a course and it's the textbook. If you're not taking a course, you're probably not going to get much out of it, because there's no way to find out what the answers to any of the exercises are (and considering the number of "the proof of this is given in exercise 12.1-3" or, "see exercise 34.1-5 for the solution to this problem" cookies in this text, you're missing a lot if you happen to be stuck on a given exercise). Infuriatingly, although the author(s) publish a solutions guide for professors only (in case the professor is teaching a course he doesn't understand, I presume), they're openly hostile to students who might want to double-check their own answers against an authoritative source (or maybe they themselves can't solve all of the problems...)?

BTW, I'd highly recommend TCP/IP Illustrated (or anything else by Richard Stevens), Advanced Unix Programming, and Applied Cryptography.

I don't know about that suggestion - that is an excellent book, if you're taking a course and it's the textbook. If you're not taking a course, you're probably not going to get much out of it, because there's no way to find out what the answers to any of the exercises are (and considering the number of "the proof of this is given in exercise 12.1-3" or, "see exercise 34.1-5 for the solution to this problem" cookies in this text, you're missing a lot if you happen to be stuck on a given exercise). Infuriatingly, although the author(s) publish a solutions guide for professors only (in case the professor is teaching a course he doesn't understand, I presume), they're openly hostile to students who might want to double-check their own answers against an authoritative source (or maybe they themselves can't solve all of the problems...)?

BTW, I'd highly recommend TCP/IP Illustrated (or anything else by Richard Stevens), Advanced Unix Programming, and Applied Cryptography.

I don't know about that suggestion - that is an excellent book, if you're taking a course and it's the textbook. If you're not taking a course, you're probably not going to get much out of it, because there's no way to find out what the answers to any of the exercises are (and considering the number of "the proof of this is given in exercise 12.1-3" or, "see exercise 34.1-5 for the solution to this problem" cookies in this text, you're missing a lot if you happen to be stuck on a given exercise). Infuriatingly, although the author(s) publish a solutions guide for professors only (in case the professor is teaching a course he doesn't understand, I presume), they're openly hostile to students who might want to double-check their own answers against an authoritative source (or maybe they themselves can't solve all of the problems...)?

BTW, I'd highly recommend TCP/IP Illustrated (or anything else by Richard Stevens), Advanced Unix Programming, and Applied Cryptography.

http://www.amazon.com/Light-Other-Days-Arthur-Clar ke/dp/0812576403/ref=pd_sxp_grid_pt_2_2/103-842345 3-9537423

Light of Other Days - By Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter . Goes over the long term implications of instantaneous communications, or being able to receive information/peer back in time. Great fascinating read!

http://www.amazon.com/Thrice-Upon-Time-James-Hogan /dp/0671319485/sr=8-1/qid=1163699261/ref=pd_bbs_sr _1/104-7429885-2363911?ie=UTF8&s=books dealt with all these issues ... with Hogan's usual insight and wit. A good read, and apparently now an important one!

"Anyway, I've thought about time travel rather more than anyone probably should..."

What you've really done is summarize the thoughts of Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking more than anyone probably should.