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...per se. It's how it's being used, mostly without any real supervision. It's holding shiny things up to kids and letting them play with them while you go out and do whatever it is you do, not really paying attention to the hidden dangers of the shiny objects.

In this case, the shiny objects, like any tool, can be used for whatever, and without supervision, used to access that information you want to withold until they are "old enough" to understand.

And dig they will, to learn more about what they fantasize their adulthood to be.

Kind of like when I was young and read "adult" books.

This is a really good question. It's also a really complex one. The best book on the topic that I know of is called Lords of the Harvest, by Daniel Charles. Its a comprehensive and mostly unbiased look at the history of biotech and what it means for society and the future of food.

Charles really manages to sum up both sides of the argument pretty well. For one thing, he explains pretty much what you say Penn & Teller have said: that this stuff just ain't the demonic conspiracy a lot of people want to believe it is. A lot of genetically modified foods are produced by bombarding cells with radiation, or bathing them in chemicals that cause genes to replicate in random ways. In other words, scientists are just forcing the natural process of random mutation that occurs any time life reproduces. Very few GM organisms are created by piecing together bits of this or that -- it's too hard to do successfully.

There is something to be said for "feeding the starving," too, as you say. In certain parts of the world, certain plant diseases are so rampant that you just can't grow a lot of crops. They will grow poorly and not yield what they could in order to feed people. A lot of GM crops aim to solve this problem.

But there are more troubling aspects as well. Here at home, the reasons for using GM crops seem less cut and dried. To give one fairly benign example, a ton of work has been put into genetically modifying tomatoes -- but not to make them taste better, or to be more nutritious. No, scientists modify tomatoes so that they will have more cellulose in them, which makes them take longer to ripen and go soft. That way they can be transported farther without spoilage. Of course, it also makes them sort of taste like a piece of celery. The modifications are done solely for the business of agriculture, not for the customer's benefit.

More troubling is that many of the stated aims of biotech have not come to fruition. At one time, scientists promised that GM crops would be resilient to pests and diseases. If a boll weevil couldn't eat a certain crop, you'd no longer have to dump pesticides all over it, which would make farming more environmentally friendly! Well, that sort of happened. But the most popular GM crops of all, as it turns out, are these herbicide resistant crops like TFA talks about. These are plants that can't be killed by modern herbicides. The reason you want that is because weeds can be killed by modern herbicides. So instead of hiring people to go and painstakingly remove all the weeds from your fields, you just repeatedly spray your fields with herbicides. In other words, with GM farming you're actually using more chemicals than traditional farming. And why not? Because the same company is selling you both the GM crops and the chemicals.

And then you have the intellectual property issues. Most of these GM crops are patented. If you are a farmer and you want to plant GM corn, you have to buy it under a license from Monsanto (for example). Typically, that license will include a clause that says you can never plant corn that you grow. Got that? You have a whole field full of ears of corn, and you are forbidden to take any of that corn and put it in the soil to grow next year's crop. You must buy all your seed directly from Monsanto, year after year. And Monsanto sends people out to test your crops, too! If you're not licensed to be growing GM corn this year, and they pick an ear off one of your plants and they determine that it's GM corn, they will actually sue you. (And yes, there have been "false positives" -- false, because the farmer did not knowingly do anything wrong, because his crops were cross-pollinated through the air with GM crops.) To many people, this move toward farming as a new kind of industrial complex controlled by gigantic, multinational corporations is very troubling. To what extent is it appropriate for these corporations to control our food supply?

Anyway, that's just a snapshot

when a child is exposed to them it is much harder for that child to form the same mental disciplines.

Uhm...the game was released over a year ago. I've got it.

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Thrones-D20-Based-Gamin g-Scorcery/dp/1588469425/sr=8-1/qid=1158090121/ref =pd_bbs_1/103-2450426-3529402?ie=UTF8&s=books

The fact someone who was waiting for the game didn't even know it was out says a lot about why they went under, methinks...

Read this book and if it seems to describe your son, give it to him after you're done with it.

Why is it that people always complain about kids playing with electronics? You never see complaints about the negative effects of reading even though reading is just as sedentary and even less interactive than playing a video game. Is there a bias against gadget based sendentary time?

NOTE: I'm not some tweener complaining about all the adults who want to interrupt my game time. I've got 4 children. They get equal doses of reading, computer and TV time. All of that comes with required outdoor, non-sedentary time. I don't have to push them to go outside or play on the computer. I do have to push them to do their reading. I read this book and found it to be completely compelling.

As I was reading this article i was reminded of a novel here & here , that Bruce Sterling wrote back in 2004. The story is set right after 9/11, and stars Derek "Van" Vandeveer, an aging dot bomber who does internet security. He is hired by the government to create new computing power for the government. What popped into my mind though was something that I think the government really needs to learn, and was told to Vandeveer by his cranky, crackpot grandfather who also did work for the government, on the SR71 Blackbird, as well as other black budget projects. The grandpa says to act fast, and work in small groups; the effectiveness of this method is seen in this story, and could be seen as a possibility for future government projects.
I think that the government would be well off to invest more time and money into smaller, more off the wall brainstorming sessions with the thinkers that are far outside the normal trains of thought. We just might find ourselves a bit safer.

Well you can already buy HD DVD combo discs for not much more than retail DVDs:

http://www.amazon.com/Slither-DVD-HD-Combo/dp/B000 GYI3BS/sr=8-3/qid=1158051346/ref=sr_1_3/102-944683 3-5680158?ie=UTF8&s=dvd

Granted, prices haven't got down to the average bargain DVD prices, and the MSRP is quite a bit higher, but it shouldn't be long as HD DVD can be fabbed using current DVD production lines.

http://www.amazon.com/Command-Conquer-Generals-Del uxe-DVD-Rom/dp/B000EP3GEI/sr=1-1/qid=1158010141/re f=sr_1_1/103-0395572-9242219?ie=UTF8&s=videogames

-Rick

And it's pretty good at stating a lot that this book had already done, except that it's X-Men exclusive. Science of the X-Men - I wonder if he cites it in his bibliography.

This is hardly an original idea. There are numerous other books out there covering the same subject. I'd like the review to cover why I should pick up this book as opposed to the other earlier books.

This is hardly an original idea. There are numerous other books out there covering the same subject. I'd like the review to cover why I should pick up this book as opposed to the other earlier books.

This is hardly an original idea. There are numerous other books out there covering the same subject. I'd like the review to cover why I should pick up this book as opposed to the other earlier books.

Save yourself $3.30 by buying the book here: The Physics of Superheroes. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $3.30 by buying the book here: The Physics of Superheroes. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Calling people "dumb" before making your point is not generally an effective approach to influencing people. Take a look at http://www.amazon.com/103-6581941-1251817?ie=UTF8& s=books.

Regards,
Mike

Thrice Upon a Time - By James P. Hogan

http://www.amazon.com/Thrice-Upon-Time-James-Hogan /dp/0671319485/sr=8-1/qid=1158001284/ref=sr_1_1/10 4-1179220-0116719?ie=UTF8&s=books

I don't know how old Hogan's book is, but in 1990 or so David Brin wrote

Earth

where an artificial black hole grows out of control and slowly eats the planet earth from the inside out.

Interestingly, created black holes destroying the world is part of the plot of this book.

I have an IP-Bus Pioneer in my current car. Searching for a minute I found this on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI71SG/ref=pd _cp_e_title/104-6683704-2050345?ie=UTF8

$40 gets me integrated doc/control/audio connection/battery charging. Seems pretty sweet to me. Better than cassete adaptors/fm transmitter or even a wire hanging off the front or other clunky solutions.

You can choose not to go this route, but I like the ecosystem and the integrated options it presents.

Or perhaps, to find out the story, you should try here.

"...Have you read the EULA? Well, neither have I actually..."

Are you this person by chance?

I bought the 1GB about a year ago(all I could afford and turned out to be plenty for me) and I love it.No hassle,runs 17Hr on a single aaa which means if it goes dead just stop at a convenience store,no waiting to recharge,radio picks up well and has plenty of presets,good eq(including manual,no being stuck with preset eq) and it even does a decent job of recording lectures.IMHO For the price they're sweet.

In 2005 he published Synthetic Worlds. He is/was a mainstream economist who got hooked on Everquest but then used his professional skills to analyze what was going on. He quite strongly feels these MMOGs are more than just games, and in a certain sense are very very real. The book is a good read and Section 3 gives his possible scenarios for the future including potential "mass emigration" to cyberspace and possible governmental reaction.

The market for iPods might be out of steam but it's is no where near saturated for portable music players. Think about it, every car has one. The transition from Radio/CD player has just begun that's a market that can be measured in hundreds of millions. iTunes requires too much effort for that market and DRM will likely keep them from filling it. No one wants to press "I agree" or install special software for their car radio. The bigger market demands "works out of the box" ease. Neither Apple nor Microsoft will be able to fill the bill.

That some people have not bothered to set up their iPods is good evidence that there's too much work needed. How many $100 gadgets have you left in their box? Throwing away $100 says a lot about the effort required to make it work for the user. A player that needs special softare because it does not use a published mass storage interface is at a disadvantage.

Like someone else pointed out, iTunes and iPod are not easy. Easy is being able to plug the device in and use any client to talk to it through a standard mass storage protocol, without having to transcode your files. iPod does not do this. You need a special, non free client to load it. Amarok or the free player of your choice and a cheap, multiformat player beat the shit out of the traditional iPod. Zune, of course, will be worse.

Availability of decent players is a problem that's going away and people are going to sell whole systems using them. Want ogg, mp3 and usbfs? it's finally here and more are on the way. It costs about as much a Shuffle but offers more, like screen and menus. Yes, I've tried it and it works well. The device, like most, was stamped out in China. There will be more where it came from. Remember the cassette tape market? The CD player market is still here. Both of those where huge and rich because openly published standards were employed. iPod and Zune represent an ecosystem that's more like two sharks on a barren reef. Free players based on open standards are calling for device makers to come and make tons of money.

The real killer will be when devices such as the KDE phone mature. Apple has a head start and, limited by all the usual greed heads, they will make a nice phone. Eventually, free software will win out there too. Compare OpenZaurus to Windoze PDA's. Free software brings stability and features to embedded devices which are as obviously superior to their non free counterparts as free desktops are to non free counterparts. $140 laptops spell the end of non free software, devices and culture. The future is free and it will be much, much better.

Who cares about their sex?

I do, damnit, and I want details. The least Dunn can do is be as forthcoming as Perkins. (And yes, that is the same Tom Perkins.)

...or refer to centuries-old British church smack-downs.

The killing of Thomas Becket is retold in T.S. Eliot's first play Murder in the Cathedral . Granted, such literature is far removed from iPods and knocking on Microsoft, but the play is performed--and assigned in college lit classes--often enough that I imagine many people will know something of that historical event.

The majority of iPod users use MP3s, which aren't affected by DRM. And DRM isn't anything at all new to iPod, either. There's no reason to assume the correlation that you take as a given. ... you should put in the extra work and have it at least make some kind of sense.

I think his pointing to the fact that some people have not bothered to set up their iPods is good evidence that there's too much work needed. How many $100 gadgets have you left in their box? Throwing away $100 says a lot about the effort required to make it work for the user.

Like someone else pointed out, iTunes and iPod are not easy. Easy is being able to plug the device in and use any client to talk to it through a standard mass storage protocol, without having to transcode your files. iPod does not do this. You need a special client to load it and it only loads AAC. Amarok or the free player of your choice and a cheap, multiformat player beat the shit out of the traditional iPod. Zune, of course, will be worse.

Availability of decent players is a problem that's going away. Want ogg, mp3 and usbfs? it's finally here and more are on the way. It costs about as much a Shuffle but offers more, like screen and menus. Yes, I've tried it and it works well. The device, like most, was stamped out in China. There will be more where it came from.

The real killer will be when devices such as the KDE phone mature. Apple has a head start and, limited by all the usual greed heads, they will make a nice phone. Eventually, free software will win out there too. Compare OpenZaurus to Windoze PDA's. Free software brings stability and features to embedded devices which are as obviously superior to their non free counterparts as free desktops are to non free counterparts. $140 laptops spell the end of non free software, devices and culture. The future is free and it will be much, much better.

Removal of Software. If you uninstall or otherwise remove the Software, your ability to view all Digital Content you have downloaded to the Authorized Device will immediately and automatically terminate and we reserve the right to delete all Digital Content from that Authorized Device without notice to you.

Never buy digital restricted media, ever!

Check out Unbox's 12 monkeys and the special edition DVD with over 2 hours more video.

Check out Unbox's 12 monkeys and the special edition DVD with over 2 hours more video.

See if you can do it yourself, orbiter is a free space flight simulator and there are others less technical but most are out of print since the late 90's.

I, for one, don't understand Amazons need to carry such an item.

I'm curious if the products went downhill first or the quality of their management did. I'd have to guess that management did.

And you'd guess correctly. I worked at HP for over 21 years. When I started Bill and Dave were running the show. I even got to meet them because they made it a point to travel to each division annually to keep tabs on things. Things began to sour in the early 90s as Bill and Dave retired. However, I do take issue with your statement "the investors took over everything turned into crap". I think it would be better stated "the MBAs took over everything turned into crap". They started all those silly "quality" process improvements, one after another, that were so in vogue at the time. This turned the focus away from employees (which was demonstrated by their annoying habit of refering to us as "resources"), and towards process. They had the false belief that with great processes you can create great products, irrespective of the people doing the work. In the end, they systematically dismantled the HP Way http://www.amazon.com/HP-Way-Hewlett-Built-Company /dp/0887307477/sr=8-1/qid=1157806093/ref=pd_bbs_1/ 102-7106367-8277765?ie=UTF8&s=books, which was at the core of the company's success. The slide reached its peak the day Carly Fiorina basically declared the HP Way obsolete. Now, sadly, HP is just another company. People ask me why I left HP after 20+ great years. I tell them, actually, HP left me.

Removal of Software. If you uninstall or otherwise remove the Software, your ability to view all Digital Content you have downloaded to the Authorized Device will immediately and automatically terminate and we reserve the right to delete all Digital Content from that Authorized Device without notice to you.

So why would I buy this?

"Most influential"? Never heard of him...

This is the only book he appears to have authored, at least according to what I could find on Amazon. I'm not sure how that equates to "some of the most influential books". I suppose developing those websites is a bit of work - though I'd never heard of them personally before either.

email them.

also, ST books suck.

Try reading Star Trek: Tha Magna where an alien gives Captain Kirk an ancient Earth gesture called the finger. :P

Ah, but http://www.amazon.com/b/?&node=16261631 is the internal URL for the unbox service. Notice all those video ads and the buttons to buy downloads. This is the mighty unbox site.

Amazon does this with all their sites: music, dvd, software, furniture, etc. You don't really get different web sites, just a section within amazon.

So if you ever want to get to Unbox, just use http://ww.amazon.com/unbox.

I had the same problem with googling until I just tried adding /unbox to the URL.

Ah, but http://www.amazon.com/b/?&node=16261631 is the internal URL for the unbox service. Notice all those video ads and the buttons to buy downloads. This is the mighty unbox site.

Amazon does this with all their sites: music, dvd, software, furniture, etc. You don't really get different web sites, just a section within amazon.

So if you ever want to get to Unbox, just use http://ww.amazon.com/unbox.

I had the same problem with googling until I just tried adding /unbox to the URL.

Even the short link you posted again takes to http://www.amazon.com/b/?&node=16261631 only.

Wonder why Amazon doesnt want to publicize a direct link.

Even the short link you posted again takes to http://www.amazon.com/b/?&node=16261631 only.

Wonder why Amazon doesnt want to publicize a direct link.

DIVX disks played on ordinary DVD players, were time-limited, and cost less than straight DVDs. And failed.

DIVX disks would not play on ordinary DVD players. You needed a DIVX player for that.

Amazon Unbox...is time-limited, and costs about the same as straight DVDs.

Unbox rentals are time-limited, and they cost a buck or two. Purchases are not time-limited, and cost about the same as straight DVDs (e.g. $9.99 for The Matrix).

DIVX disks played on ordinary DVD players, were time-limited, and cost less than straight DVDs. And failed.

DIVX disks would not play on ordinary DVD players. You needed a DIVX player for that.

Amazon Unbox...is time-limited, and costs about the same as straight DVDs.

Unbox rentals are time-limited, and they cost a buck or two. Purchases are not time-limited, and cost about the same as straight DVDs (e.g. $9.99 for The Matrix).

So kind of you to post the link with your own referid.

Here's a non-referral link for people who couldn't type in www.amazon.com/unbox.

That's about right. I think they also want you to buy a more comfortable office chair.

For the kinds of usage patterns that source code control systems generate, latency is most likely going to make a bigger difference.

mod parent up. what parent is trying to say is related to the way TCP manages its congestion window. If you're facing high latency in the link to your UK office (which is likely, given the distance metric), the RTT will be high and TCP will slice its congestion window in half -- so even if you were to have "sufficient bandwidth" (whatever that means!), TCP wouldnt let you fill the pipe unless the latency issue is simultaneously addressed.

A good rule of thumb is to look at the bandwidth-delay product (BDP), which is an estimate of the maximum window size TCP will reach. That will tell you to what extent TCP is filling the pipe. Then look at the typical workload at your India office (do you use it only for source control, or do your developers download large files such as logs/cores? what is the percentage of datagram traffic? is there any source of bursty traffic?). Put together all the pieces and you should end up with a very rough estimate. pick up any good book on TCP and you may find some more answers.

The story should have linked to the Amazon Unbox.Anyway,here it is:
UNBOX

You forgot the animated series.

Star Trek
Enterprise