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With a few hundred people who attend town hall meetings and debates, post on that rep's Facebook wall, call into the local radio station when the rep is on etc, a dozen or so active citizens might well swing a representative's vote,

That's so cute that you believe that! The average congressional campaign cost USD$1.2 million this year. Money talks and it's corporations and other monied interests that are doing the talking, not "concerned citizens." Sure your congressperson will pat you on the head and say "I work hard to make sure our district gets what it needs! I work for you." But the truth is they work for those who pay their way.

You must think things work as they did back in 1946 when this was written. Sorry champ. Those days are long gone.

Money doesn't talk as much as people think, and the return rate on dollars to candidates elected for SuperPACs remains poor. It only works when the messaging goes unchallenged.

With a few hundred people who attend town hall meetings and debates, post on that rep's Facebook wall, call into the local radio station when the rep is on etc, a dozen or so active citizens might well swing a representative's vote,

That's so cute that you believe that! The average congressional campaign cost USD$1.2 million this year. Money talks and it's corporations and other monied interests that are doing the talking, not "concerned citizens." Sure your congressperson will pat you on the head and say "I work hard to make sure our district gets what it needs! I work for you." But the truth is they work for those who pay their way.

You must think things work as they did back in 1946 when this was written. Sorry champ. Those days are long gone.

Capitalism (private ownership and operation of property) in a free market system (system free of government intervention) has proven to be the best system for generating profits while improving the overall economy for all people involved. People tossed out the free market and they are trying really hard to toss out capitalism as well, they saw all the wealth generated in a free market capitalist system and believe that that wealth is gained somehow immorally, however I argue that making profits in a capitalist free market system is the most moral way to run an economy.

Except that isn't the case at all. As eloquently demonstrated by Ha-Joon Chang (economics professor at Cambridge University), the "free market" is a myth. Every market has its rules, it just depends which set you are playing by.

There is ample evidence that the rule set favoured by "free market" proponents enriches a small minority at the expense of everybody else. That doesn't make for a healthy (or moral) society.

I help develop and operate a service that makes a hefty sum by doing all those things you deride, implementation-wise. It all works quite well - well enough that if routing patching causes any customer-visible disruption, you're in for extensive analysis, paperwork, and perhaps ritual abasement before an angry VP.

Yes, yes, there are many technical problems involved with consuming "eventual consistency". In the 20th century these problems were seen as blocking, and anyway just buy a bigger DB server. But the 20th century was along time ago, and while there's still a need for a transactional store, most problems can be solved without one, given sufficient thought - and at sufficient scale, it's really worth figuring out how.

Not that safe patching is incompatible with SQL, of course. In my last job we routinely pushed patches to farms of many thousands of SQL servers, and again if there was any disruption visible to the mid-tier, important people would become seriously angry about that, and we didn't use fancy servers, beyond RAID controllers (and even that concession I abhorred). It's always safe for a single server to fail, or be rebooted for maintenance, and if two servers holding your primary copies of the same data should fail, you better have taken serious, well-reviewed steps in planning to limit the number of DBs affected and the minutes of data lost and the minutes until you're back up.

And even that, which was a nice system, feels outdated now that Amazon went and announced this, which productizes the modern SQL DB and wraps it up in a pretty bow. /jealous

Background on pencil code: I wrote a little book of programming exercises for teaching my own children to code that you could check out - Pencil Code - A Programming Primer The book is designed to have some range. In 100 exercises it goes from LOGO-like turtle graphics with loops, functions, recursion, through bits of HTML, interactivity, jQuery, and algorithms like sorting and backtracking. A tic-tac-toe AI in 50 lines of code. No explanations, so it helps to have a programmer parent or teacher. http://pencilcode.net/ was original designed as a companion for the book. If you try it, be sure to click on the blue "block" icon to switch between block-code and text-code mode. The language is CoffeeScript, but you can also use JS, HTML, CSS. In some circles the website has become a cult hit because of its mix of beginner-friendliness and real-world programming. (reposting under my name because I previously forgot to log in.)

I wrote a little book of programming exercises for teaching my own children to code that you could check out.

http://www.amazon.com/Pencil-Code-A-Programming-Primer/dp/149434744X

The book is designed to have some range. In 100 exercises it goes from LOGO-like turtle graphics with loops, functions, recursion, through bits of HTML, interactivity, jQuery, and algorithms like sorting and backtracking. A tic-tac-toe AI in 50 lines of code. No explanations, so it helps to have a programmer parent or teacher.

The book goes along with a free open-source website you can use to play with the code - http://pencilcode.net/.

In some circles it's become a cult hit because of its mix of beginner-friendliness and real-world programming.

A few years ago I became interested in Kyrgyz folk music through the Smithsonian Folkways disc Tengir-Too . Like all Central Asian nomadic peoples, the Kyrgyz have cultivated the jew's harp, or kobuz. This instrument has only one vibrating element, and though it can produce only a single tone, the performer can create a variety of sounds through changing the contours of his mouth and lips. It's a humble instrument but so endless. During a trip to Kyrgyz, I bought a kobuz of my own, and though I'll probably never master it enough produce the virtuosic songs of the musicians on that disc, I'll certainly never get bored.

Warren, in the event you're reading the comments (and at a threshold low enough to see this...),

Can you speak more to why you listed so many cookbooks? I can understand René Redzepi's Work In Progress because, as Amazon notes, "it includes a personal journal written by René himself over a full year in which he explores creativity, innovation, and the meaning and challenges of success," but are all of the books on cuisine in the same light? Or are you an avid amateur chef? You've definitely given me something to seek out the next time I go to Iceland.

There's a really good book that talks about brevity and how to communicate your ideas more concisely with fewer words. I suggest Bennett read it.

Personally, I'd recommend the venerable The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

There's a really good book that talks about brevity and how to communicate your ideas more concisely with fewer words. I suggest Bennett read it.

Personally, I'd recommend the venerable The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

There's a really good book that talks about brevity and how to communicate your ideas more concisely with fewer words. I suggest Bennett read it.

A book on brevity is almost 300 pages long.

No doubt brought to you by the author of the Procrastinators Tomb, volumes I - IV.

There's a really good book that talks about brevity and how to communicate your ideas more concisely with fewer words. I suggest Bennett read it.

Same way the ideal gas situation of FCC doing its stuff and the invisible hand of the free market doing its stuff and presto you got fantastic internet speed at the low low price of 9.99$ a month. The real gas situation is, all these companies raking money hand over fist lobby the politicians, the FCC, create misinformation campaign and they continue to exploit their customer base. Pressure builds till some disruptive technology comes in, cherry picks the customers and they leave in droves.

One possibility: It could be cell phone companies stringing up fiber up to street corner pillar boxes, and do the last 100 yards over the air with WiFi or a femto-cell network or something. The only true advantage the cable/phone ISPs have is the actual wire to different parts of the home via cat5 cable. But most homes use a router and use WiFi anyway. Someone could run fiber up to street corner pillar boxes, install a WiFi router per customer and cherry pick lots of customers who don't need more than a few WiFi devices. Wireless in the loop is quite well known and is actually deployed in many parts of India and Africa. My old prof Ashok has been talking about it for a long time.

But there could be other such technologies that peel of some serious segments of the captive market of the cable giants. Cable giants too would not sit idle. They would be the first to spot the threat and possibly buy these companies, or adjust their prices in different markets to keep these dogs chomping at their heels just out of reach. Somehow or the other, where such technologies are viable prices would come down. Where it is not viable, the customers would be at the mercy of these corporations

FedEx and UPS are not serving 80% of the country (by area, probably 10% by population). But at least they get US Postal Service. But the current generation of ISPs are suing to make sure government does not provide an alternative even to the market they don't want to serve.

And you'd be wrong. Every single one of the SD cards you see below $100 is a counterfeit and some of the more gullible people give them good reviews because they didn't actually test out the full capacity beforehand.

Many of these things are, in fact, progressive policies - but we must ensure that we're talking about the same progressivism. In American politics, a progressive is someone who believes in a large, power government that has a strong control over the economy and societal norms under the guise of "reform" and "progress."

An example of historical progressive policy would be Prohibition. But don't take my word for it; Last Call is a fantastic book that covers some of this material. If you're the anti-book type, Wikipedia mentions it as well.

So:
Largest corporate handout in history? Progressive.
Expansion of the military-industrial complex? Progressive.
More laws at the state and federal level? Progressive.
Raising taxes on people? The concept of an income tax is a progressive policy.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by clout in STEM work, so I'm not sure how to place it, but many of the things you listed are, in fact, big government progressive ideals. These are the things that FDR, Teddy, Wilson, and others loved. You know what the worst part is? This is a little secret the politicians won't tell you...

The (R) and the (D) are both progressive. The (R) are less progressive, but they're still progressive. They, too, enjoy increased spending, government handouts, boondoggles, choosing winners and losers in the marketplace, and using the law to enforce their own personal moral viewpoints. So remember, when you vote for that (R) or the (D), you're ultimately getting the same thing.

Beware - the wrong option could lead to a bad end!

Buy a book from a safe, trusted merchant - turn to page 42

Do an illegal download, like all the cool kids - turn to page 69

I agree that there will be down time, I'd personally bring a book or three but nothing more than this. This person is not going to be isolated away from everyone else, so will have locals to try and mimic. What would I bring to read? Probably something like "Newton and The Counterfeiter" for entertainment and The Republic for personal development. Both of these books are thick and you can't read either in a day or two. It would probably be good to have a medical book and journal as well.

Best advice.

Selected math oriented reading list:

A Book of Abstract Algebra -- Pinter One of the best book I read. Next read Algebra -- Artin
Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms -- MacKay
Iterative Error Correction: Turbo, Low-Density Parity-Check and Repeat-Accumulate Codes -- Sarah Johnson Amazing book (most in the domain are uselessly and horrifyingly complex). I advise to read beforehand the here-down Plank paper.

Introduction to Calculus and Analysis vol I -- Courant Vol II/1 Vol II/2 Best book I know for Calculus/Analysis

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Not math nor computer science but makes you a better scientist.

Selected must read papers:

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System --Lamport
How to Share a Secret -- Adi Shamir
A Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding for Fault-Tolerance in RAID-like Systems -- James S. Plank

Best advice.

Selected math oriented reading list:

A Book of Abstract Algebra -- Pinter One of the best book I read. Next read Algebra -- Artin
Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms -- MacKay
Iterative Error Correction: Turbo, Low-Density Parity-Check and Repeat-Accumulate Codes -- Sarah Johnson Amazing book (most in the domain are uselessly and horrifyingly complex). I advise to read beforehand the here-down Plank paper.

Introduction to Calculus and Analysis vol I -- Courant Vol II/1 Vol II/2 Best book I know for Calculus/Analysis

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Not math nor computer science but makes you a better scientist.

Selected must read papers:

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System --Lamport
How to Share a Secret -- Adi Shamir
A Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding for Fault-Tolerance in RAID-like Systems -- James S. Plank

Best advice.

Selected math oriented reading list:

A Book of Abstract Algebra -- Pinter One of the best book I read. Next read Algebra -- Artin
Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms -- MacKay
Iterative Error Correction: Turbo, Low-Density Parity-Check and Repeat-Accumulate Codes -- Sarah Johnson Amazing book (most in the domain are uselessly and horrifyingly complex). I advise to read beforehand the here-down Plank paper.

Introduction to Calculus and Analysis vol I -- Courant Vol II/1 Vol II/2 Best book I know for Calculus/Analysis

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Not math nor computer science but makes you a better scientist.

Selected must read papers:

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System --Lamport
How to Share a Secret -- Adi Shamir
A Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding for Fault-Tolerance in RAID-like Systems -- James S. Plank

Best advice.

Selected math oriented reading list:

A Book of Abstract Algebra -- Pinter One of the best book I read. Next read Algebra -- Artin
Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms -- MacKay
Iterative Error Correction: Turbo, Low-Density Parity-Check and Repeat-Accumulate Codes -- Sarah Johnson Amazing book (most in the domain are uselessly and horrifyingly complex). I advise to read beforehand the here-down Plank paper.

Introduction to Calculus and Analysis vol I -- Courant Vol II/1 Vol II/2 Best book I know for Calculus/Analysis

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Not math nor computer science but makes you a better scientist.

Selected must read papers:

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System --Lamport
How to Share a Secret -- Adi Shamir
A Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding for Fault-Tolerance in RAID-like Systems -- James S. Plank

Best advice.

Selected math oriented reading list:

A Book of Abstract Algebra -- Pinter One of the best book I read. Next read Algebra -- Artin
Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms -- MacKay
Iterative Error Correction: Turbo, Low-Density Parity-Check and Repeat-Accumulate Codes -- Sarah Johnson Amazing book (most in the domain are uselessly and horrifyingly complex). I advise to read beforehand the here-down Plank paper.

Introduction to Calculus and Analysis vol I -- Courant Vol II/1 Vol II/2 Best book I know for Calculus/Analysis

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Not math nor computer science but makes you a better scientist.

Selected must read papers:

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System --Lamport
How to Share a Secret -- Adi Shamir
A Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding for Fault-Tolerance in RAID-like Systems -- James S. Plank

Best advice.

Selected math oriented reading list:

A Book of Abstract Algebra -- Pinter One of the best book I read. Next read Algebra -- Artin
Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms -- MacKay
Iterative Error Correction: Turbo, Low-Density Parity-Check and Repeat-Accumulate Codes -- Sarah Johnson Amazing book (most in the domain are uselessly and horrifyingly complex). I advise to read beforehand the here-down Plank paper.

Introduction to Calculus and Analysis vol I -- Courant Vol II/1 Vol II/2 Best book I know for Calculus/Analysis

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Not math nor computer science but makes you a better scientist.

Selected must read papers:

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System --Lamport
How to Share a Secret -- Adi Shamir
A Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding for Fault-Tolerance in RAID-like Systems -- James S. Plank

Best advice.

Selected math oriented reading list:

A Book of Abstract Algebra -- Pinter One of the best book I read. Next read Algebra -- Artin
Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms -- MacKay
Iterative Error Correction: Turbo, Low-Density Parity-Check and Repeat-Accumulate Codes -- Sarah Johnson Amazing book (most in the domain are uselessly and horrifyingly complex). I advise to read beforehand the here-down Plank paper.

Introduction to Calculus and Analysis vol I -- Courant Vol II/1 Vol II/2 Best book I know for Calculus/Analysis

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Not math nor computer science but makes you a better scientist.

Selected must read papers:

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System --Lamport
How to Share a Secret -- Adi Shamir
A Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding for Fault-Tolerance in RAID-like Systems -- James S. Plank

I have an EVGA GTX 560Ti . My wife finally made me replace my fans.

They used really cheap fan mounts that vibrate like heck whenever they spin up.

Just replaced the stock fans with this rig today: http://www.amazon.com/Titan-Ad...

Much quieter now.

I'm not sure abstract algebra would be very helpful, but information theory and linear programming would be both enlightening and useful.

I'm not sure abstract algebra would be very helpful, but information theory and linear programming would be both enlightening and useful.

The one book that helped me out more than any with my programming was "Introduction to Algorithms." This book helped me understand how to program efficiently, how to look at problems objectively and speak about them using the language describing algorithmic efficiency, and determine if a polynomial solution is NOT known to exist for the class of problem I am trying to solve. If you study this book, you will no longer be able to be derisively called a "code monkey" after someone looks at the output of your programming efforts.

I used this book for my undergraduate degree in computer science for my algorithms class, and then at a different school for my masters degree in computer science algorithms class (we did the star'd problems in grad school, finished more of the book, and generally went into greater depth.) If you understand this book, you will understand a major portion of computer science. Plus, whenever someone has a very difficult problem, and you know the content of this book, you will look extremely cool solving the problem in an efficient and elegant way (this only happened to me once, but it was very fun.)

This book is worth the weight in paper. If you can get (power?) an electronic version, there are a few other books I would recommend, but if you only bring one book on computer science (programming?) please consider bringing this one. You will be able to solve problems efficiently in any language after deeply studying this book.

I didn't include the cost of internet, since for me personally, that part would be the same either way; others may have a choice of ISP (Comcast/DSL/FiOS/Google). Perhaps you're suggesting that Comcast will raise their internet access prices, and that may in fact happen; but it's hard to factor into a services comparison like this. It's worth noting that Comcast gives a ~$20 "discount" on their internet access for also subscribing to digital cable, so that would need to be added as well. And at $10/mo for modem rental, it makes a lot of sense to buy your own - it will pay for itself in fairly short order.

My guess it was an "affluent suburb or city magnet school" thing. Meaning the sort of school a stereotypical slashdotter might have attended, which is why quite a few have said they had access to it.

They're probably kind of guys who's father had a tech job who got them an account on their workplace's unix box, who got a Vic20, a C64 the next year and a PC clone the year after.

They got PLATO, but god forbid you live in a small town or rural area without a university to put PLATO in the local school.

As an example certain famous geeks had privileged/early access to technology:

Gates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Stallman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Robert Morris: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Reading this book will give you more details on RTM's tech privileged childhood: http://www.amazon.com/CYBERPUN...

It's easier to become a "worm-making unix-genius" when you have your own unix account when you're in junior high, given to you by your father who worked for Bell Labs.

If you look at AWS's actual announcement, they say nothing about Oracle. They say that Aurora is compatible with MySQL, which happens to be owned by Oracle, but it is not what most people think of as "Oracle"!

What's my migration path from Oracle to Aurora? Does it support PL/SQL, XML, APEX, Java, etc. stored procedures? Does it support Oracle syntax, index types, etc? How sophisticated is its data dictionary?

From AWS's announcement, it looks like Aurora is meant to be mostly a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but with much higher scalability and durability and more advanced backup features. If I had to call it something, I'd call Aurora "MySQL RAC", because Aurora seems to buy you more RAC-like features but with MySQL syntax/features.

It absolutely does NOT appear to be an easy migration from an existing Oracle application to the Aurora database. Maybe Aurora will attract some new applications, but if you're a big Oracle customer, don't salivate on that 90% cost savings so quickly, because it ain't there!

I think you don't understand how competitors get displaced in the IT market.

Nobody is going to state that their product is a drop-in replacement when it comes to applications. It's not possible, it's never been true, and nobody would believe it even if it were. But Oracle has a huge number of extremely unhappy customers (direct and OEM) who hate their licensing cost and behavior (see the comment a bit of a scroll above about Oracle being "audit-happy"), and want another option. Oracle sells not just databases but full-on applications as well; they're a competitor to SAP in the ERM space for example, and against PeopleSoft in the HR space. But there are ways to roadmap away from them, so that instead of just dumping Oracle tomorrow and replacing the database, you plan to replace them. One extreme case is ArcSight, which used to OEM Oracle for all of their products. They wrote their own DB engine to get rid of Oracle, and their pricing has become much more sane as a result. And, since their DB is purpose-built for the single purpose it serves, it's actually better at what it does than Oracle was. It was a major effort, and other parts of ArcSight were rewritten to facilitate it, but the end result is pretty badass.

So, in the end, a database does not need to support PL/SQL or Oracle syntax to displace Oracle. It just needs to do what Oracle does, with the understanding that the interfaces to it have to change to some degree...which isn't really the end of the world anyways. Things like service-oriented architecture being in place already make this kind of change a lot easier, as well. But there's no need to act just like the product you want to replace, any more than Dell servers needed to be able to use Compaq power supplies and hard drives when Dell first entered the server market. Customers simply switched, and switched their inventory accordingly along with it.

If you look at AWS's actual announcement, they say nothing about Oracle. They say that Aurora is compatible with MySQL, which happens to be owned by Oracle, but it is not what most people think of as "Oracle"!

What's my migration path from Oracle to Aurora? Does it support PL/SQL, XML, APEX, Java, etc. stored procedures? Does it support Oracle syntax, index types, etc? How sophisticated is its data dictionary?

From AWS's announcement, it looks like Aurora is meant to be mostly a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but with much higher scalability and durability and more advanced backup features. If I had to call it something, I'd call Aurora "MySQL RAC", because Aurora seems to buy you more RAC-like features but with MySQL syntax/features.

It absolutely does NOT appear to be an easy migration from an existing Oracle application to the Aurora database. Maybe Aurora will attract some new applications, but if you're a big Oracle customer, don't salivate on that 90% cost savings so quickly, because it ain't there!

I learned to program in Lisp -- specifically scheme, because that's what they taught at MIT. I spent many years working in K&R C. I belong to the generation that learned to do actually useful programming from The Unix Programming Environment and Software Tools in C -- God help me, I actually spent a year programming in Ratfor targeting Fortran IV as a back end.. I've used most of the major languages that have come down the pike since -- C++, Java, Python, PHP, blah blah blah.

Javascript feels an awful lot like Scheme to me. Ugly but workable syntax. Powerful stuff under the covers. Yes, you can use Javascript to write trivial little event handlers, and it's no better or worse than any other scripting language for that. But it supports higher order functions, for Pete's sake. Can you think of any other language that has popularized an advanced programming concept like that?

I learned to program in Lisp -- specifically scheme, because that's what they taught at MIT. I spent many years working in K&R C. I belong to the generation that learned to do actually useful programming from The Unix Programming Environment and Software Tools in C -- God help me, I actually spent a year programming in Ratfor targeting Fortran IV as a back end.. I've used most of the major languages that have come down the pike since -- C++, Java, Python, PHP, blah blah blah.

Javascript feels an awful lot like Scheme to me. Ugly but workable syntax. Powerful stuff under the covers. Yes, you can use Javascript to write trivial little event handlers, and it's no better or worse than any other scripting language for that. But it supports higher order functions, for Pete's sake. Can you think of any other language that has popularized an advanced programming concept like that?

If you need to drive a lot of relays

Thank you. No, I'm only driving four relays, so the SainSmart board does just fine. Also, I'm a huge fan of opto-isolators.

That's a great tip for other applications, though. :)

In my setup as it stands now, two of the relays control the aeration and filtration pumps in my salt tank, and the other two let me turn an antenna rotor from anywhere on my LAN.

For the salt tank, I tell the pi to knock the filtration pumps off for 45 minutes, which lets me clean the filter media without actively blowing gunk through the tank, and/or feed the waterkids without filtering out most of the flake food and phytoplankton. It also gates the tank aeration to run only at night, which keeps the water crystal clear during the day.

For the rotor control, sometimes I'm by the rotor, which is in my radio room, but other times I'm at my desk, running my SDR software over the network to the SDR, and need to control the rotor remotely.

One of the B+ units is my experimentation platform, one is my lady's, the third is managing remote control of things, comma, various.

You say that as if it weren't equally true for every president since -- what, Carter? Nixon? Maybe even FDR?

Really? I'm not so sure about that.

I'm glad you still find value in their offering. Personally I did not; streaming was always the add-on for me, not the primary attraction (how can it be the primary when the catalog sucks so badly?) and I regarded it as a slap in the face that they wanted to double dip without offering any incentive whatsoever to customers that had been with them since the very beginning.

Of course, video as a whole doesn't have much attraction to me. I've been without cable TV since 2005; the little bit of TV that I do watch comes off one of these and has no recurring costs. Netflix was a nice way to supplement that but was by no means required; the $8/mo (or is it $9 now?) buys me a nice lunch out somewhere, which is worth far more to me than their crappy streaming catalog.

You mean, after AT&T was regulated by being broken up and by being forced to allow third-party devices (e.g. modems), major innovation was able to start.

Umm, no. On a couple counts:

• Divestiture didn't have anything to do with attaching 3rd party devices to the phone network; you're thinking of the Carterfone decision from 1968, which was a full 16 years before AT&T was split up.
• AT&T was actually more heavily regulated before its divestiture, as a nationwide telecommunications monopoly. It was prevented from getting into whole lines of business (hence why it gave away UNIX because it couldn't sell it). The divestiture was pursued specifically to strip away the heavily regulated parts (the local telcos) from the largely unregulated parts (long distance, cable, etc.) See this book for more details. Under that regulation, think about the degree of innovation you got out of the Baby Bells... who were still pushing ISDN as "broadband" in the late '90s.
• The one piece of regulation that did actually manage to spur consumer-friendly innovation in telecom in recent memory was the 1996 Telecom Act, which actually reduced regulation in many areas (the "carrot" for telcos) while simultaneously increasing competition in others (the "stick"), such as forcing the Baby Bells to allow competitive access to their DSLAMs to provide DSL service, etc.

Regulation is very important in many industries, including telecommunications. But it is almost never synonymous with innovation.

A.G. Riddle wrote a pretty good story based on a similar premise - gene-affecting viruses that modify our intellectual capabilities.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Atla...

Inhofe is now the head of the senate environmental commitee that oversee 100% of all climate change legislation and policies in the US.

He wrote a book 305 page book entirely on the subject of global warming. The name of this book is "the greatest Hoax".

http://www.amazon.com/Greatest...

To paraphrase Stephen Colbert: If Harry Potter didn't have enough magic for you, read this book.

High taxation as a cause of the fall of civilization is a myth.

Not a myth at all. True, it's not a certainty, but high taxes have often caused societies to fall to civil wars, outside invaders, or simply to decline relative to lower-taxing societies. I highly recommend For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization by Charles Adams for an overview of this.

I thought this article would be about the sound chamber inside of the Amazon Echo, now I'm disapointed ... http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo

Inhofe is now the head of the senate environmental commitee that oversee 100% of all climate change legislation and policies in the US.

He wrote a book 305 page book entirely on the subject of global warming. The name of this book is "the greatest Hoax".

http://www.amazon.com/Greatest...

This should be the US of A motto : Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

With Senators the like of Inhofe who the hell needs Isis/Al Quaeda ?

Inhofe is now the head of the senate environmental commitee that oversee 100% of all climate change legislation and policies in the US.

He wrote a book 305 page book entirely on the subject of global warming. The name of this book is "the greatest Hoax".

http://www.amazon.com/Greatest...

That south facing roof might be able to get the cold water warmer if it has a vacuum insulating solar heater, but it's not gonna give hot water in the wintertime, in face water coming from below the frost line might be warmer than the one in the roof panels, which infrared-thermal exchange heat with the environment. You can also get photovoltaic panels, and these don't do much on a cloudy winter day, and even on very sunny winter days they only have so many hours of daylight savings time, and only so many of vertically hitting solar rays, as opposed to low angle east or west rising or setting sun. You could probably power a 200W home on such solar panels, meaning a low power laptop computer, a superhigh efficiency refrigerator, and one 23 W fluorescent or 10x 1W LED lightbulbs. For the fridge, which kicks in intermittently, you'd have to have a battery bank with decent capacity, to collect the excess power during when it does not work. Forget hair dryers, or electric heating or cooking appliances, and get a propane camping stove and barbecue camping cylinders for cooking, or you can do it on your billow drum stove. But having electricity enough to run computers, lights and the fridge independent of utility companies might be worth the roof photovoltaic solar, which, by the way are abnormally expensive, like you can get some for $40 directly from China for which you have to pay $300 in the USA, the difference of course being mostly profit margin of the dealers, because of very high demand of everyone being on the bandwagon, and this Slashdot post does not help drop those prices either, but might be done actually by the dealers who don't have enough customers.

By the way if you're doing heating of any kind in the winter, it's worth to also do water distillation at the same time, for which you get the fuel for free, and you can eliminate the toxins, drugs and diseases Da Man intentionally puts into your water supply to make you addicted to and dependent on bottled water, which is a necessity for life, so in the future very severe price abuses are possible, and even these days it's an extremely extremely profitable business, when pop with sugar and energy in it sells about the same price and plain clean cheap water. Da Man does not want you to know about this, which is why distilled water is by far the cheapest in stores of all bottled water, not because it's cheap to make, but if that's what you want to drink, they don't want you to DIY. Also, good distillation pots sized for the heating needs of a home - a simple metal pot with a tight light and a very long heat exchanger copper tubing, air cooled for good house heating purposes - bought online cost like $500-$10000, insane, when they should cost $20-100. Like this one http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AR... that would need a very long copper coil extension to it, with possibly a fan blowing across it, to adequatly hand over the heat and heat the house, while also doing distillation with that heat, at least in the wintertime, summertime cloth dryer heat may be more difficult to harvest through a distillation step first.
They can also be used to distill alcohol, which may be illegal, or may be illegal to do it if you sell it to others, but may be possible for your own consumption, it's very complicated, including even having an Amendment of the US Constitution banning alcohol near 1920, then another Amendment put it just to repeal that ban, to set up a precedent, where we can start meddling with the holy and sacred of all Amendments, the Bill of Rights, represented by the first 10, such as the 2nd amendment Da Man in charge really likes to poke at, the right to self defense and the right to overthrow a corrupt government, because he's in charge, he knows he's corrupt, and he constantly worries about being overthrown, so he wants to take the tools away from the population, but it's a very difficult topic. But there you go,

Pretty easy to try it out immediately... http://aws.amazon.com/redshift

Massive generalization has been good to the sciences.

In physics, we have used invariance principles to expand our definitions to the most general possible. This was the argument behind General Relativity, for example: Einstein wanted equations of motion that would be invariant under any smooth second-order transformation whatsoever, and when he put that constraint, and only that constraint on, he found the most general form of the equations of motion were uniquely determined (up to a constant of integration, which is the Cosmological Constant).

Biologists have generally shied away from this kind of approach to their field, but there is an argument to be made that there is an equally general definition of "life" as "anything that participates in a process of evolution by imperfectly heritable traits that result in differential reproductive success". It need not be tied to any particular concrete mechanisms like DNA and RNA.

This idea may turn out to be silly (which is why I wrote a novel about it rather than a scientific paper: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...) but well into the 1800's there was no general view of "energy" that unified all the disparate forms, to the extent that the fact that light had energy that was in any way related to mechanical energy was not really appreciated. The kind of unified view of energy we have today would have seemed bizarrely speculative at that time, in the same way that the notion of a unified, generalized view of life is purely speculative today, but it turned out to be amazingly useful, so it's worth considering the possibility in biology today (anti-science people will likely attack it as a waste of money, using computer technology that would not exist without a similar "waste" on ridiculous fantasies like quantum theory and "obviously useless" research into the basic physics of semi-conductors in the past.)

Didnt Lawrence Krauss write a book about this? http://www.amazon.com/Universe...

Yes and he's still wrong. Except now in print! They invent their own meaning of "nothing".

... also bought: Wireworld Platinum Eclipse 7 Biwired Speaker Cable

Didnt Lawrence Krauss write a book about this? http://www.amazon.com/Universe...