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It would be cooler if it would work with a regular smart-phone and google-cardboard. The cardboard version would overheat my phone, but a plastic version of the cardboard design is able to produce VR that's much more effective than I expected without enclosing the phone and creating a heat problem.

I bought this one, which lacks the magnet required by some VR apps, but works with most Android VR apps. I have not tried it with an iPhone. http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

I also picked up a bluetooth game controller and some NFC tags to complete the package http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ... http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

It's a fun setup to play around with until OR is released.

Me too.

I much prefer the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard for gaming. --The thin original design before Logitech jumped the shark.

http://www.amazon.com/Logitech...

Scaling up to megawatts is where it solves the big problems, because it can power desalination plants to keep California habitable and other things which are energy/cost prohibitive as of now. As always, I hope this succeeds. Energy is money, and the more energy available, the more a country and a people can do.

Sure, cheap and plentiful energy is great for a consumer society that likes its electronics and cars. In the long run, however, I wonder if the arrival of convenient fusion will mark the start of issues with waste heat. When electricity is generated, much of it is immediately dissipated as heat, and later when the resulting electricity or whatever is used, this too ultimately produces heat. That planet-bound civilizations risk destruction from their waste heat has long been a theme of science-fiction -- it's a plot point in Larry Niven's Ringworld for instance, and it has only seemed fantastical so far because our ability to generate energy has been so limited. What happens when we can pursue our hunger for energy with no excessive costs or short-term environmental damage?

That's a pretty lousy CFL and a very good LED. For example, This CFL is 13 watts for 900 lumens, and this LED is 10 watts for 600 lumens.

That's a pretty lousy CFL and a very good LED. For example, This CFL is 13 watts for 900 lumens, and this LED is 10 watts for 600 lumens.

Uh. 9W 800 lumen LED vs 14W 800 lumen CFL. That's 27 cents per month if the bulb is on 12 hours per day; with my 6 hour per day cycle on my longest-running bulbs, it's not even 1kWh difference.

The entire savings is overshadowed by how long a CFL ballast lasts versus an LED ballast.

Uh. 9W 800 lumen LED vs 14W 800 lumen CFL. That's 27 cents per month if the bulb is on 12 hours per day; with my 6 hour per day cycle on my longest-running bulbs, it's not even 1kWh difference.

The entire savings is overshadowed by how long a CFL ballast lasts versus an LED ballast.

@DrLang21: "I did read the article and I don't see where the researchers accounted for socio-economic background" ..

Educational achievement does not equate to intelligence, does anyone here seriously think management got where they are because they're smarter? I would have thought that a more useful study would be the effects of growing up poor has on educational achievement. Something like the Linda Tirado article and book.

"When studies of separated Monozygotic Twins are examined .. environment also has a role."

I have thought about another similar way to approach from a book I read to approach the above problem for continuous random variables, but I am sure that it could be adopted for what amounts to a categorical* problem here. The approach was a Bayesian estimator that supposed a previous expected value. So in this case, Steam might assign an initial rating of 50% as the baseline mean. As more real samples came in, the estimator was shifted toward the real mean and away from the Baysian prior estimator. In basic terms, it is a weighted average of the prior mean and the actual mean. I found this method in this book. In a nutshell, I think this is in general how Nate Silver does most of his analysis too (ie, with Bayesian estimation). Admittedly I did not RTFA yet, but it looks bit dense and I am pre-coffee, so it could be dangerous to read right now :-)

*For those not familiar with the terms, user ratings have only a finite number of values they can achieve. Amazon for example have 5 star rating, so the outputs are limited to one of those 5 values. Bernoulli is for only two possible outcome, whereas categorical are for multiple discrete outputs. Continuous on the other hand can achieve any number within the range like 4.234....

... and the reason is why lies well within the scope of the neocon policy makers of the last couple of decades. I just started reading the book Dirty Wars from Jeremy Scahill - a real eye opener. ISIL/ISIS fits perfectly - 30 years of war means 30 years of spending tax money towards the military/industrial complex.

Whether Marco Polo was in China or not continues to be hotly debated by scholars. Only two years ago, the German historian Hans Ulrich Vogel published a major new work presenting evidence for Marco Polo's sojourn in China on the basis of economic data.

I've often found unconvincing the argument that Marco Polo did not go to China because he did not mention certain habits of the Chinese that dazzle Westerners. As an American by birth and upbringing but long resident in Europe, it amuses me that American visitors immediately express amazement at certain customs here that I've grown so used to that I don't even notice anything special about them myself, and I'd be unlikely to include them in any rambling oral account I told about life in Europe.

Dr Mary's Monkey, did they?

Edward Hoppers "The River" traces the early cases of AIDS and the early Polio vaccination efforts in Africa. His theory is the Chimpanzee livers used to culture the vaccines were infected with with Simian AIDS and transferred to Humans. http://www.amazon.com/The-Rive... The most interesting detail he brings forth is how the two main variations of come from different simians in different areas of Africa. AIDS type I comes from Chimpanzees and AIDS Type II comes from Sootey Mangabes. Yet both variations of AIDS both appeared in the early 1960's at the same time (AIDS Type I in 1959).

Fail, fail and more fail. The press, three letter agencies and especially the congress critters love to a) inflate the threat and b) give attribution when none is possible. This book is extensively researched and has footnotes out the ying-yang. Bottom line is attribution at a level where one can say "these guys did it" is rare and even saying "probably did it" is difficult. And beware that many of the players involved have multiple objectives and even relationships with each other (when convenient).

"Why exactly do the NSA, FBI, CIA, MI6, GCHQ, DGSE, FSB, BND, etc... etc... have to trace everything we do or say online?"

This (mass surveillance) is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Look at the following graphs:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...

And then...

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Free markets?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...

"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."

I think you are confusing professed members of a faith refusing to follow a moral code laid out over thousands of years with not having a codify morality. Trust me the Catholic church has a written down expressly codify morality. It's called Cannon Law. You can get a brief introduction to it in a book called the Catechism. Look it up some time.

Also, just because some members of a group don't follow the rules of the group doesn't mean the groups rules are all bad. It just means some members should be kicked out of the group.... but they didn't do that and it is a shame.

Still more expensive than military grade HDDs. Building should be earthquake proof anyway. It should be cheaper to protect the whole building and go with standard hardware.

http://www.amazon.com/Transcen...

http://gearpatrol.com/2013/03/...

I'm not sure why this is a big deal, its still REALLY hard to build a barrel and chamber so you still need to buy them, honestly making the receiver the registered part is silly most people could build a receiver with time and effort few people could make a decent barrel or precise chamber.

Building a rifled barrel is hard. A smoothbore is fairly easy, though, and it's still "accurate enough" out to 100 yards or so (on human sized targets, anyway). In a close range full auto firearm, you care even less about accuracy.

And turns out that you don't even need to build it - you can just take some standard pipes and use them for it. There are some that fit remarkably well for 9x19mm, for example, and a guy in UK built a submachine gun out of them, and wrote a book about it. That being UK, the guy is now in prison, but the book is still on Amazon.

Nope, you're a criminal for violating federal law. check it. Are you positive that you haven't violated any federal law within the past year? How the fuck do you know that? It would take a team of lawyers months to verify that sort of statement.

Fear-monger? What? Ok, just try this out for me. Try separating the concept of "criminal" from "fear". Take Martin Luther King (jr.). Total criminal. Sent to jail and prison regularly. Violated the laws on the books, caught, tried, and was punished for it. But if you met MLK during your excellent time-traveling adventure, do you think you'd fear him? Naw, the dudes a pacifist and a preacher. Chill dude, you're in the presence of an important historical figure. Don't be bogus.

Just because people commit crimes does not make them bad people. I mean, you know, it depends on the crime obviously. But you seem to have this idea that "criminals" just kinda skulk around lurking around corners waiting to murderize you. I'm actually trying to tell you to stop being afraid of the boogeyman.

Really, I'm being, like, the opposite of a fear-monger here. I'm trying to explain that your fear is misplaced and that you probably don't really need that safety blanket.

Another very interesting postulation is in this book: Skywriting. An interesting twist on the intersection between religion and cosmology ... and you learn a bit about cosmology in the process.

How about tin? (can we hear some L. Frank Baum, here, the only example of tin based life in literature I can think of)
Lead?

Both Tin and Lead are represented in Gold Key's "Metal Men"

Robert J. Sawyer did a send up of mocking religious people's views on ET in his novel Calculating God . An alien lands on Earth and finds it odd that all the scientists of our planet are trending towards atheism, when his civilization finds the arguments of natural theology convincing. Of course, the god believed in by the alien (and mused on by Sawyer, who I believe remains an atheist) is an unknowable, silent, watchmaker god who sprung up spontaneously from the quantum vacuum, instead of the personal God that Earth's big three monotheistic religions believe in.

I think they are trying to "make a point", but it seems the point is on top of their heads.

Perhaps since the software was being hosted over AWS, they'll next go after Amazon for selling surveillance systems.

I would say this is one of the silliest things I've ever heard, but I've only just started reading ./ this evening. :)

The laptops are based on the Celeron N2840, with 2GB of RAM. I can't seem to find much in the way of benchmarks; but I suspect that they are surprisingly adequate. What is a bit surprising is that the the N2840 has a quoted tray price of $107, so either Intel is cutting HP one hell of a deal, or I don't even want to know what HP cobbled the rest of the system together from...

I don't think that tray price has much basis in reality. The "$107" N2840 looks, at least on the face, to be not vastly different from the "$86" 1037U. If Biostar can sell a motherboard + 1037U + heatsink + fan for $79.99, it doesn't take much of a stretch to think maybe these prices are just "list" prices with no basis in reality. Biostar is just selling a bare motherboard so there can't be any Microsoft kickbacks or ad revenue.

Look, it's stupid. You're stupid. Everyone is stupid.

Buy this. It has two HDMI inputs on the back. Hook your computer to one--your sound will even come out of the speakers, and stop coming out when you switch the TV off--and an HDMI switch to the other. Plug your Wii U, PS3 (bluray player), etc., into the HDMI switch. Plug your legacy systems (NES, PS2) into an Audio-Stereo-Component switcher, with composite systems routed properly (the same pins are used for AVC as AVRGB, with the Red pin reused for Composite; just switch to Composite input when using your SNES).

Now you can fullscreen RWBY right on RoosterTeeth's site from your computer, onto 1080p HDTV. You can switch to the Wii U or PS3 and watch your Netflix and Amazon Instant Video right there, or even a BluRay or DVD--assuming you're not just using the computer to play Amazon Prime Video straight on screen.

You put a TV somewhere, you plug a computer into it. In the extreme case, you can plug a $50 Roku into it instead of a computer or game console, and pull Hulu and Netflux and Amazon up that way. You know, instead of plugging in a $35 ChromeCast and spanning a Web browser tab in from another room. Most likely, you have a friggin' laptop or another PC in that room.

I have 6 ways to watch an Amazon, Netflix, or YouTube video just as a matter of course, on a ginormous HDTV.

• The tax haven in the heart of Britain
• City banks ‘cheat’ Europe in €600m tax avoidance trading scheme
• How Tax Havens Stole Your Money
• The Missing $20 Trillion

Book's almost 40 years old and is still spot on...
http://www.amazon.com/War-2080...

The Earth is thoroughly mapped, explored, photographed, populated, and exploited. There are no frontiers or mystery here any more.

I disagree. Powerful computing may lead to finding plenty of things of interest here on Earth. This theme has been explored by science-fiction writers in recent decades.

For example, Poul Anderson in his series starting with Harvest of Stars depicted humanity splitting into two groups, one exploring the stars, and the other content to remain on Earth and (as post-human machine intelligences) explore mathematics and other pursuits unimaginable to the human race as it is today. Of course, as an ardent Libertarian and advocate for space exploration, Anderson made the Earthbound "navel-gazers" the villains, but he was still aware that human expansion into space isn't a given.

In his novel Marooned in Realtime Vernor Vinge proposed that space might be empty because advanced civilizations don't expand outwards into the stars, but instead move into a virtual reality once they have sufficiently powerful computing power.

The Earth is thoroughly mapped, explored, photographed, populated, and exploited. There are no frontiers or mystery here any more.

I disagree. Powerful computing may lead to finding plenty of things of interest here on Earth. This theme has been explored by science-fiction writers in recent decades.

For example, Poul Anderson in his series starting with Harvest of Stars depicted humanity splitting into two groups, one exploring the stars, and the other content to remain on Earth and (as post-human machine intelligences) explore mathematics and other pursuits unimaginable to the human race as it is today. Of course, as an ardent Libertarian and advocate for space exploration, Anderson made the Earthbound "navel-gazers" the villains, but he was still aware that human expansion into space isn't a given.

In his novel Marooned in Realtime Vernor Vinge proposed that space might be empty because advanced civilizations don't expand outwards into the stars, but instead move into a virtual reality once they have sufficiently powerful computing power.

The real problem is that people use Apple products, period. I have avoided using Apple products since the mid 80's and it's served me extremely well. I typed your test into my workstation and all I got was the message
?Syntax Error
Ready.
I'm fully protected. Now excuse me while I take another pull of my tall cold Jolt.

This is my favorite non dimmable lightbulb.

http://www.amazon.com/G7-Power...

It goes in and out of availability tho.

It's reasonably priced when available ($12).

Did some searching and ....

It looks like it's been replaced by this
http://g7power.com/g7-power-tr...

which is now dimmable dimmable.

The thing that is unique about these bulbs is that they are *indistinguishable* from traditional incandescent bulbs. The original bulbs were 65 watt which was noticably better for my older eyes. Sadly the newer bulbs are 820 lumens (about 62 watts) so they probably won't be as bright.

I use my older non-dimmable bulbs in open fixtures which face up and the bulbs have lasted several years but many complain that used in closed face down fixtures the bulbs die quickly.

I currently have these installed in my exterior can lights that shine down from the soffits.

http://www.amazon.com/Feit-R20...

They are brighter than the CFL bulbs they replaced. They have lasted 1 month so far of continuous nighttime usage. They stay on all night long and are turned off in the morning.

This idea that multitasking and short attention spans have a negative impact on cognition is not new. It goes back at least to Nicholas Carr's 2008 magazine article that served as the basis for his book The Shallows .

I think there are philosophical issues here. While the human biological organism might be "getting stupider", if our electronic devices are seen as augmentations, then doesn't our total cyborg person remain just as intelligent? That is, people have not become stupider, they have just moved some information processing from the brains in their skull to the devices in their heads.

The appearance of emotional issues might be a serious problem, but on the other hand, let's see how future generations who grow up with electronics from their infancy feel.

Xen is software, not AWS, AWS is an entire infrastructure, and they can not (or will not) live migrate customer VM's.

They are very clear in their documentation that customers should be able to tolerate VM restarts and to use multiple AZ's and regions to help mitigate downtime. I have several hundred instances scheduled for reboot, but they are doing one AZ at a time.

Since Xen is rumored to be the VM host for AWS (or at least large parts of it), I'd have to think it's "will not".

I can believe it's "can not", since amazon provides gigabytes (or terabytes) of local instance storage for most of their instance types - that's a lot of data to live migrate. Even if the underlying Xen software technically *can* live migrate VM's, that doesn't mean their infrastructure can support migrating thousands of customer instances.

Except that in a cloud, storage is part of the cloud, not part of the server. The only thing that has to physically move is the RAM image of the running VM from one host to another. And it's almost certainly going to be faster to replicate that than to destroy and rebuild it (reboot).

No, Amazon says that instance storage is directly attached to the host machine, so if they live-migrate a VM, they'd have to carry along the instance storage.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWS...

Many Amazon EC2 instance types can access disk storage from disks that are physically attached to the host computer. This disk storage is referred to as instance store.

And there's no evidence that they use any type of shared SAN for instance storage -- instance storage only stays around for as long as the machine is running (or rebooted). If you stop the machine (as opposed to rebooting), or if Amazon has to migrate to a new physical host, you lose the instance store.

If only there was some sort of cultural moment dedicated to changing the perception and social role of women. We could call it "feminism".

I think you might have a branding problem with that name. It's sometimes been associated with anti-intellectual post-modern garbage (such as this), transphobia (such as this), and various bits of misandry. ranging from the subtle (bell hooks's claim that rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women) to the absurd (Dworkin's claim that "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of contempt for womenâ(TM)s bodies.").

Of course there are wingnuts in any group, but it seems that feminist leaders have not done an adequate job of disassociating from them. Since the majority of women reject the feminist label, it seems to me that those of us interested in gender equality -- which would include listening to women's opinions, no? Including the majority of women who reject the label "feminist", right? -- might want to find a new one. (I've been thinking "gender libertarianism" might cover it, but the American so-called "libertarian" movement has been working hard for decades to degrade that term. Maybe "gender anarchy"?)

Ask and you shall receive!

Succinctness can supposedly have performance implications in some contexts. I had been away from Python for over a decade before I recently picked up the newest edition of O'Reilly's Learning Python . I was surprised at how many instructions that developers previously spread out over multiple lines are now packed into highly idiomatic one-liners. The author, Mark Lutz, claims in several cases that the Python interpreter is likely to run the one-liner faster (even after it's all been compiled to bytecode) than the traditional multi-line expression.

Of course, Python's succintness is not Perl's succintness, but it can take people a long time to get up to speed with what now seems the expected idiom, and there's plenty of room for producing something that other eyes will find baffling.

Here's a fix:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00M0...

Not being a Heinlein guru -- any 'predictions' he made that failed?

Yes, and he wrote about them himself — explaining the topic of such predictions in general and his own failures (and successes) in particular. I can not find those works online now (they are copyrighted, no doubt, you have to buy the book), but here is a critique of him — and a critique of the critique.

You could do (a lot) worse, than reading all of the Heinlein you can get — both Fiction and otherwise...

Myself, I'd add the following prediction for posterity — 50 years later, you can say, you read it on /. first: Anything, that is theoretically possible today, will be be practically possible 50 years from now, unless it is found useless, declared illegal or competes with a government-sponsored alternative (the last two being sides of the same coin). .

And the other way around: whatever is not possible even in theory today (like faster-than-light movement or time-travel), will remain impossible in practice for the upcoming decades.

It is a lot smaller than a standard telephone handset... why is this somehow different? e.g. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0000...

No permission:

The attacks were not carried out with the coordination and cooperation of the Syrian government. Nor were they carried out with Syrian government permission.

On the legality of this war. (No vote really needed):

The Obama administration reiterated that it was neither asking for permission nor for a new authorization to use military force. The White House asserts that it has all the authority it needs to achieve its goals under the authorizations to use military force that were approved after the 9/11 attacks and in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

U.S. funded the people they're bombing:

after a decision made by the White House and approved by Congress on September 17, 2014, to arm and train the alleged "moderate" Syrian rebels. The vote was 273-156 in favor of the $500 million plan. Of course, the bill in question was actually an amendment that was cynically attached to a bill designed to continue funding for the federal government in the short-term, ensuring maximum support from members of the House.

Sorry? They're funding who? There are no moderate Syrian rebels.

[...]there were never, nor are there any "moderates" operating in Syria. The West has intentionally armed and funded Al Qaeda and other sectarian extremists since as early as 2007 in preparation for an engineered sectarian bloodbath serving US-Saudi-Israeli interests. This latest bid to portray the terrorists operating along and within Syria's borders as "divided" along extremists/moderate lines is a ploy to justify the continued flow of Western cash and arms into Syria to perpetuate the conflict, as well as create conditions along Syria's borders with which Western partners, Israel, Jordan, and Turkey, can justify direct military intervention.

ISIS Is Controlled By The U.S. And NATO:

It is important to point out that the Islamic State is not some shadowy force that emerged from the caves of Afghanistan to form an effective military force that is funded by Twitter donations and murky secretive finance deals. IS is entirely the creation of NATO and the West and it remains in control of the organization.

And WHO exactly trained these ISIS guys anyway?

Keep in mind also that, prior to the rapid appearance and seizure of territory by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, European media outlets like Der Spiegel reported that hundreds of fighters were being trained in Jordan by Western intelligence and military personnel for the purpose of deployment in Syria to fight against Assad.

Shit. Did we also arm them..?

Western media outlets have also gone to great lengths to spin the fact that ISIS is operating in both Syria and Iraq with an alarming number of American weapons and equipment. As Business Insider stated, "The report [study by the London-based small arms research organization Conflict Armament Research] said the jihadists disposed of 'significant quantities' of US-made small arms including M16 assault rifles and included photos showing the markings 'Property of US Govt.'" The article also acknowledged that a large number of the weapons used by ISIS were provided by Saudi Arabia, a close American ally.

What the hell is really going on over there?

ISIS Attack On Taqba Airbase - The Precursor To A NATO Attack On Syria:

Keeping in mind that ISIS is controlled and directed by NATO and Western intelligence, the fact that the death s

Astrobiologists have long known that these events are capable of causing mass extinctions by stripping a planet of its ozone layer and exposing the surface to lethal levels of radiation. The likelihood of being hit depends on the density of stars, which is why the center of galaxies are thought to be inhospitable to life.

Like many here, I'm sure, I first considered the possibility that the galactic core was inhospitable to life when I read Larry Niven's 1968 short story "At the Core" (collected with his other "Beowulf Shaeffer" stories in Crashlander ). In his science-fiction tale, Niven had an astronaut visiting the core and witnessing the wash of radiation from so many supernovas placed so close together.

Niven's story, however, ended with the astronaut coming back and warning that this massive wave of radiation would be moving towards Earth at the speed of light. If that were true, and even the edges of galaxies were not safe in the end, then every galaxy would be ultimately hostile to life, not just in their cores. Is this the case, or did Niven get it wrong?

I would find it very hard to believe radiation of such magnitude could be generated from a core and sterilize the galaxy on its way out. But then again, I'm not an Astrophysicist :)

You would also like to read Niven's "Protector" if you haven't, and how sentient life actually evolved in a radiated home world near the core.

Astrobiologists have long known that these events are capable of causing mass extinctions by stripping a planet of its ozone layer and exposing the surface to lethal levels of radiation. The likelihood of being hit depends on the density of stars, which is why the center of galaxies are thought to be inhospitable to life.

Like many here, I'm sure, I first considered the possibility that the galactic core was inhospitable to life when I read Larry Niven's 1968 short story "At the Core" (collected with his other "Beowulf Shaeffer" stories in Crashlander ). In his science-fiction tale, Niven had an astronaut visiting the core and witnessing the wash of radiation from so many supernovas placed so close together.

Niven's story, however, ended with the astronaut coming back and warning that this massive wave of radiation would be moving towards Earth at the speed of light. If that were true, and even the edges of galaxies were not safe in the end, then every galaxy would be ultimately hostile to life, not just in their cores. Is this the case, or did Niven get it wrong?

...and no one knows what to do to fix it.

In 2010 the new Web was all about "user generated content". Today, the modern mantra is: "Don't read the comments"

Reviews and review sites have almost exactly the same problems as comment sections: there is no way to filter the ignorant and/or malicious from the informed and sincere. Case in point: there are currently exactly two reviews of my book on Amazon. One from a reasonably thoughtful reader (3 stars) and one from a troll who apparently has given Charles Dickens the same rating as me (2 stars).

There was a five-star review which was from someone who had read the book and genuinely liked it, but Amazon determined it was from someone I knew (likely because I bought her a book on the site a few years ago) and removed the review. This is a ridiculous practice--it would invalidate a huge number of reviews in traditional publications--but is made necessary by authors who try to game the review system in the stupidest possible way.

What do you think about something like Angie's List? As I understand it, you have to be a paying member to rate service providers which is supposed to make the reviews more trustworthy. I don't subscribe to the site though so I don't know exactly what it's like.

One from a reasonably thoughtful reader (3 stars) and one from a troll who apparently has given Charles Dickens the same rating as me (2 stars).

Actually, the troll reviewer gave "The Complete Charles Dickens Collection" ebook a bad review because it didn't have a linked table of contents, and you had to page through the complete work of Dickens to find a particular book. The reviewer didn't say anything about Dickens himself.

So really, your review of a review (metametareview was the working title of this post) was trollish.

...and no one knows what to do to fix it.

In 2010 the new Web was all about "user generated content". Today, the modern mantra is: "Don't read the comments"

Reviews and review sites have almost exactly the same problems as comment sections: there is no way to filter the ignorant and/or malicious from the informed and sincere. Case in point: there are currently exactly two reviews of my book on Amazon. One from a reasonably thoughtful reader (3 stars) and one from a troll who apparently has given Charles Dickens the same rating as me (2 stars).

There was a five-star review which was from someone who had read the book and genuinely liked it, but Amazon determined it was from someone I knew (likely because I bought her a book on the site a few years ago) and removed the review. This is a ridiculous practice--it would invalidate a huge number of reviews in traditional publications--but is made necessary by authors who try to game the review system in the stupidest possible way.

If there is a solution to these problems it's likely some kind of reputation system, but as near as I can tell no one--not Amazon, not GoodReads, not TripAdvisor, not Yelp, not anyone--is even thinking along those lines, which suggests there is no money in building a site that provides honest peer-to-peer feedback. This is a shame, because the Web should be enabling us to help each other, not increasing our distrust of each other (we're plenty good enough at that already).

/. has had a basically functional reputation system for well over a decade, so it's not like there's any real mystery as to how to do this. I wonder if there might be some b2b model where users sign up with a third party reputation system that then sells reputation information (which would exist across all sites that use it, like discus does for comments) to review sites. Without something like that there seems to be very little hope of getting much long-term value from online reviews of any kind.

Amazon does sell cars. Well, car. The Nissan Versa Note. http://www.amazon.com/gp/featu...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/featu...

Just to mention, since many have probably never heard of it, the JIR was a great to read in college. My favorite collection was Druken Goldfish. I also particularly remember the study that sought to predict the date when National Geographics would trigger a world cataclysm.

Found it!!! Amazon to the rescue... LOL you can read the ingredients list in the picture if you zoom. Amazon Diet Coke Fountain Syrup