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What, this? I don't know if he's gotten rich off of it, but at $70 a pop, he's probably turned a profit.

The Bush administration may have changed the DOJ's perspective on the case, but ultimately, it's up to the judge, not the DOJ, to determine what the actual penalty would be, regardless of the DOJ's opinion

Even this is debatable. It's easy to forget the finer points of the long legal battle, but Microsoft has been involved in negotiations with the Department of Justice many times before Bush was in office. A great book that covers this is World War 3.0 (unfortunately I read the original, not this newly updated copy).

Anyway, to make a long story short, there was a point when Microsoft had made an agreement with the Clinton administration. It was the STATES that blocked it; and of course it was the states that didn't sign on to the final agreement.

So while everyone constantly moans about Bush settling with Microsoft it was really the case that the states steadfastly refused to do so (and it remains that way to this day). So that change on perspective was at most "fuck the other states" rather than "fuck prosecuting Microsoft."

There's a book called Infinite Jest in which Quebecois separatist terrorists play a pretty central role in the plot.

It takes place in the future, and the Quebecois want to secede more than ever partly because the US has taken to lofting all of their radioactive waste into an area right on the Quebec border... and Canada proper didn't object. Apparently the wasteland is prowled by feral giant fetuses and such.

I don't imagine the PS games has much else in common with the book... but David Foster Wallace certainly gave no apologies for his plot, so why should they? Who complains about terrorist plots anywhere else, for however outlandish reasons?

We all swear we'll go back and complete [games] but the sad reality is most of us will - most likely - never get around to resuming our valiant quest to conquer these epics...For the majority of gamers, squeezing in the time to play games means - pretty much - not spending much time doing anything else in our leisure time...

Yeesh, what a spoiled, whiny brat! So, you don't finish a game? Don't do anything else with your free time, but play a game because it's long? Who's fault is that? Because you have a short attention span and can't manage your time effectively you want the game designers to change the way they make the games that I'm playing? Why stop there? You could just as easily say "You see, I really liked Snow Crash, but lately that crazy Neil Stephenson's books are so darn long! He should write shorter ones!" Please.

Here's a word for you: moderation! (and not the /. kind!) Don't break open the piggy bank for a new game just because the graphics are flashy and the advertising has brainwashed you into believing this is a game that you "can't live without!"

Personally speaking, I play a game...ONE game and that's it, until I'm through with it. Right now, I am really enjoying KOTOR and it's precisely because of it's length, depth and complexity that I am! I've never finished playing a number of games, but at least I'm not blaming other people for my lack of follow through! When every thing else in our culture is being dumbed down for shorter and shorter attention spans, it's a huge relief to see a segment of the electronic entertainment industry that's *NOT* trying to do this! And if games are long or short whatever they end up being will be because that's the way consumers are voting with their dollars!

We all swear we'll go back and complete [games] but the sad reality is most of us will - most likely - never get around to resuming our valiant quest to conquer these epics...For the majority of gamers, squeezing in the time to play games means - pretty much - not spending much time doing anything else in our leisure time...

Yeesh, what a spoiled, whiny brat! So, you don't finish a game? Don't do anything else with your free time, but play a game because it's long? Who's fault is that? Because you have a short attention span and can't manage your time effectively you want the game designers to change the way they make the games that I'm playing? Why stop there? You could just as easily say "You see, I really liked Snow Crash, but lately that crazy Neil Stephenson's books are so darn long! He should write shorter ones!" Please.

Here's a word for you: moderation! (and not the /. kind!) Don't break open the piggy bank for a new game just because the graphics are flashy and the advertising has brainwashed you into believing this is a game that you "can't live without!"

Personally speaking, I play a game...ONE game and that's it, until I'm through with it. Right now, I am really enjoying KOTOR and it's precisely because of it's length, depth and complexity that I am! I've never finished playing a number of games, but at least I'm not blaming other people for my lack of follow through! When every thing else in our culture is being dumbed down for shorter and shorter attention spans, it's a huge relief to see a segment of the electronic entertainment industry that's *NOT* trying to do this! And if games are long or short whatever they end up being will be because that's the way consumers are voting with their dollars!

hell yeah.

when my indian friends go back home, i always have them pick up a copy of a book or two for me. for example, the math text we use is kreyszig found here on barnes and noble. my member price is $125 for the hardback new and $87 for the used hardback. my softcover copy from india cost $11. sure the quality isn't the same, but when i want to know how to sovle a partial differential equation, the quality doesnt really impact things that much.

the only tragedy is that i didnt make friends with indians until i got to grad school. if i had known these folks as an undergrad i would have probably setup my own textbook importation raquette.

Interestingly, none of these "migration articles" on web sites that are explicitly devoted to CMS matters (e.g., CMSwatch.com, cmsReview.com) seem to characterize this problem as relating to Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL), raising the possibility that their authors are ignorant of the many ETL tools that are available. In the open source world, these tools include Octopus and Jetstream. Of course, Perl programmers do not call this process "ETL," but, rather, simply "data munging."

A prior Slashdot story on "Transferring data 'tween databases" (posted 14 April 2003) might interest you. I cannot post a link to it, however, because Slashdot's search engine is currently down.

Finally, EMC just bought Documentum, the CMS that you are considering. EMC is primarily a storage company, and I cannot help but wonder how CMS fits into their storage strategy.

Sorry, a sentence was incomplete and left out the URL. More practical books on Unix programming exist (I happen to recommend Mark Sobell's Practical Guide to Red Hat Linux ) , but ESR's book will stay with you long after you have finished reading, providing countless hours for reflection and appreciation of Unix's Unix-nature.

suck it

So there is precedent for granting rights to non-humans, though corporations are 'assemblies of humans.'

"Valentina: Soul in Sapphire" by Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler got into exactly this back in 1984. (even beat NextGen to the punch by a few years). It was actually done quite well, including things like MMORPGs, corporate entities, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, etc. It's quite a pity that it is no longer in print. I'd put it in the ballpark of True Names

So there is precedent for granting rights to non-humans, though corporations are 'assemblies of humans.'

"Valentina: Soul in Sapphire" by Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler got into exactly this back in 1984. (even beat NextGen to the punch by a few years). It was actually done quite well, including things like MMORPGs, corporate entities, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, etc. It's quite a pity that it is no longer in print. I'd put it in the ballpark of True Names

So there is precedent for granting rights to non-humans, though corporations are 'assemblies of humans.'

"Valentina: Soul in Sapphire" by Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler got into exactly this back in 1984. (even beat NextGen to the punch by a few years). It was actually done quite well, including things like MMORPGs, corporate entities, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, etc. It's quite a pity that it is no longer in print. I'd put it in the ballpark of True Names

The book being reviewed seems like it has a lot in common with Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates . I'll haev to look this book and compare them.

Modern piracy is still going on, and is a big problem, as a quick glance through some of the links at the IMB will show. And I'm not talking about script kiddies stealing the code to Half-life 2. I'm talking the old fashioned "guys with guns threaten to kill everyone on ship, take all valubales, and maybe carry out their threat" type of thing.

After reading the bookseller's reviews, I didn't find any references to modern-day piracy.

Contrary to the review given here, I don't see anything about the book "evolving on two levels"; rather, I see a biography.

I mean... I'll still give it a read at the bookstore (and maybe pick it up), but I think it'd be prudent to know that I'm getting myself into a biography, not some veiled reference to today's legal issues.

Junk deorbits rapidly. The square-cubed law means that they have higher surface area for their weight, and therefore proportionately higher atmospheric drag. Massive amounts of junk pumped into low orbits would be gone in months. In very high orbits (like geosync, not sure about the GPS orbits) it's a different situation, but there's also a lot more space at that distance.

Very likely true.
People seem to have a great misconception about 'space junk' running into important stuff. What most people don't realize is that in any given orbit, all satellites are moving at the exact same speed. They have to--it's basic physics and orbital mechanics. Pick up a copy of Bate, Mueller, and White if you don't believe me.

If it's in LEO (low earth orbit), in a circular orbit, it's going roughly 8 km/sec. Slow it down, it drops to a lower orbit, drag increases, it falls lower, and burns up. Speed it up, it goes into an elliptical orbit. Granted, this elliptical orbit may intersect with the orbit of another object, and theoretically collide, but there's a lot of room in space, and a bolt flying around has to get pretty lucky to nail a satellite. In all likelihood, this new elliptical orbit will intersect with the atmosphere at some point, start slowing down, and eventually spiral in.

The GEO birds are a lot farther out--6.5 Earth radii, as I recall (GPS is roughly half-sync, BTW, so figure half that). As the previous poster said, there's a lot more room out there.

At any rate, when stuff blows up in space, the debris cloud generally stays in the same orbit as the original satellite, and spreads gradually. 8km/sec is the driving variable here. Sure, if two satellites collede at obtuse angles (not very likely) (or one gets hit with a missile coming from the opposite direction), the debris is going to spread out. Some small bit will probably end up in a circular orbit (if it's a GEO bird, but I don't think missiles will reach that far), most will decay into the atmosphere, and some might go into HEO (higly-elliptical orbit). Get it going faster than 11.2 km/sec, and it's gone for good.

We're not going to have a cloud of debris constantly orbiting our planet after some kind of space war. I can't see how any appreciable amount of it would end up in a stable circular orbit, much less a low orbit--anything that gets accelerated in a collision/explosion will need a second acceleration to stabilize into a circular orbit at another altitude. The elliptical stuff will almost certainly all run afoul of the atmosphere.

Sure, some bigger chunks might manage to smash into our homes, but we're not going to be trapped for millennia...

--Ribald

The manga of Nausicaa and the movie developed at about the same time. The movie only covers the first volume or so of the manga, as that is all that had been released when Miyazaki made the film.

Also, while I enjoyed the manga greatly, there are definite differences from one part or volume to the next, where Miyazaki's changing philosophy can be seen. The manga as a whole took something like ten years for him to complete, with long gaps between creative episodes.

The movie should not be seen as a reduction of the story (while many things are somewhat abridged, that is par), but rather a retelling of what had been written to date.

Also, the manga is quite easy to get in book form (took me three years to get the comic books, but the 'graphic novels' are easy to find). Try this or this.

Life imitates art...

In Stephen Baxter's Titan, the Chinese launch their first manned ship around the same time as Columbia is destroyed upon re-entry!

Stalingrad
Enemy At the Gates came close, maybe in it's first 10 minutes. After that, Hollywood falls far short of the horror and what really happened (as much as I can tell from reading this fascinating retelling of the battle for Stalingrad)...

There's been an ongoing debate among us about which is the better history. On the one side Dave, Rick, and others favor the dry academic 'cause and effect' of macroeconomics and political philosophy that lead to the World War 1914-1945. Others among us push for the 'real story', the oral tradition of the grunt soldier's pains and trials from the trench in the actual battle-- it doesn't matter how the forces got there, the drama of the day comes from a baker holding a rifle.

Stalingrad mixes both, but in an acceptable fashion: Beevor rightly frames his story around the causes and impetus behind Hitler's folly and Stalin's incompetence, but then follows those mishaps all the way down to how they drew 500,000 men in the German 6th army to starvation and death in the steppes of the Volga.

This is not an easy read. Do not try it if you have a fear of lice, rot, cold, or desparate hopelessness-- you will feel them as you read.

Beevor's foreshadowing was sometimes distracting, but then, as the reader, I had to tell myself that it was only foreshadowing because I didn't know the details of the battle-- this is history, not fiction. The author draws us to seminal mistakes in judgement, crucial firefights that end up dooming thousands later on, the chaos of war that brings entropy-- and death-- to millions.

I highly recommend this book.

(review originally appeared here

1. If you give the Utah state trooper a "gift", he'll say that your speed was "jest fine"
2. If he was moving fireworks from Illinois to Neveda, how did he get them back from the Illinois Highway Patrol after getting arrested? How was it he brought them in Nevada and was moving them from Illinois to Nevada? (Doing a return for being the wrong size?)
3. Sorry about your stepdad beating you - maybe this will help.
4. Since he is a redneck, he might want to check this out
5. With the grocery story strike, you can't buy SPAM in Missouri anyway.

Ron Jeffries wrote a good review of this book last month; his review avoids most of the flaws the comments here find in this review.

I've only read one chapter, the one up on the web, but it's quite silly. The author repeatedly describes how one team or another did some dumb stuff and it didn't work; many of these anecdotes are parodic fiction, and obviously so, but some of them are presumably real. Then he explains that that dumb stuff didn't work. The trouble is that a reader with no XP experience might be fooled into thinking that XP advocates doing that dumb stuff.

The trouble with liberals listening to Rush Limbaugh, as one poster suggested, is that Rush makes up a lot of lies and passes them off as truth. (See Al Franken's earlier book for details.) If you don't spend ten minutes investigating facts for every minute you spend listening to Rush, you're likely to come away believing a lot of nonsense. The same problem applies to this book: it's largely fiction, and the line between fiction and reality is unclear.

I've been working on an XP team for a year, and I really like it, but it certainly has its disadvantages. I'm very impressed with the people I'm working with, and I'm really happy with our product. The process we use has almost nothing in common with the processes the book criticizes. Still, sometimes it has its drawbacks, and I think you should definitely be aware of them before you jump into XP. But this book is a good source for information on the drawbacks of doing things XP prohibits, not on the drawbacks of XP. See Questioning Extreme Programming for that. (Briefly, XP requires a small team, significant buy-in and resource commitments from the customer, easy deployment, testing support, and flexible underlying technology.) And, you know, myself, I'd be a lot happier with an ATC system developed with Cleanroom than with XP.

I think it's unfortunate that XP has become so fashionable, because now we have programming fashionistas embracing and pushing it, and any technique or technology they embrace gets badly abused. Just look at Java, XML, and C++!

If Campbell's autobiography "If Chins Could Kill" is any indication, Bruce is very, very far from being a typical Hollywood actor. He comes off as honest, self-deprecating, and funny, and the tales he spins of his acting career make me glad I went into engineering.

I watched "Army of Darkness" a few weeks ago with the commentary track turned on, listening Campbell and Sam Raimi rake it over. Even if "Bubba" bombs in the theaters, a DVD release backed by Campbell's commentary will be something to look forward to.

That Bellwether by Connie Willis was fiction. It turns out that there _are_ fairy godmothers after all!

A DVD of Office Space

Chip H.

"When I was little, I really liked this book you had. The little girl in it was named Jane or Joan, I think. I think it was blue. Do you know it?"

For news, and timely information certainly the internet is the place I turn. The evening "News" is so corporate owned and supported that I don't really consider it a reliable source for information. Besides, I don't really know exactly what I get out of keeping up with how many people were murdered or died in fires in the tri-state NY metro area (there is a LOT of that on the news). So, I've just stopped watching. I was never much of a newspaper reader, but of course there is always the New York Times and many other newspapers that bring the information to you with a nice bow on it so you don't have to go scouring elsewhere. But if scouring is your style and you are a real information junky, the scouring certainly isn't that hard.

But if I am going to learn anything in-depth certainly books -dead tree media- is the way to be. My upper limit of reading an article on the crt is about 10 pages. Your mileage will vary there, of course it's highly individual. But maybe that's why places where the information is in digested for you allowing you to scan many stories at once and sample them all, because lengthy readings on a computer monitor are more tedious than kicking back and reading a book.

I haven't been this depressed since I read "Nickel and Dimed." Excellent book, btw, but don't read it expecting to be cheered up. Anyone who's out of a job, I wish you well. (Been unemployed a bit before; now I've got two.)

There's a piece that centers around them in Vinge's excellent, excellent short story collection. Although the surprise around which the plot revolves is kinda ruined if you've already read Fire Upon the Deep.

The last story in this book ("Fast Times at Fairmont High") is a particularly well-thought-out portrait of what American education might evolve into, given another fifty or so years of the Internet and school privatization.

Wizard's First Rule: "People are Stupid. Given the proper motivation, people will believe anything because they either fear it is true, or because they want to believe it is true. People's heads are filled with knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is not true, but they think it is true. People can rarely tell the difference between the truth and a lie, yet they think they can, so they are fooled more easily. People want to believe, so they do."

Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule.

Here's his answer at Barnes&Noble

Isn't Quicksilver the model of an Apple G4? Stop confusing us!

:::sound of slashdot crickets:::

Sorry this comment didn't quite rate a "+5 Funny". But it may not be that Slashdot is trying to confuse your poor little mellon. It may be more the case that in this wonderful little essay Stephenson wrote about a few years back Stephenson reveals himself to have been at one time a real Apple fiend.

In it, he describes how he sadly left the Apple fold after his beloved blackbird powerbook ate a story he was working on. It was (according to him) irretrievably lost. He then embarked on a journey through other operating systems (including BeOS and WinNT)that culminated into a real enthusiasm for Linux.

But that essay was written a while ago, so maybe since the move to OS X he's come back to Apple.

Perhaps he was writing his new book on his new Apple hardware and thinking to himself "Title...title...hmmmm...what to all this wonderful new story of mine...ah-HA!"

Yeah, but I figured that the blatant comparisons to Jesus Christ would be enough ego-tripping for Lucas.

Then again, that only offended a handful of Christians. Maybe he's thinking bigger now, so he's throwing Moses into the mix to get the Jews and Muslims pissed too.
>
According to this article in Salon Lucas stated for Time magazine in 1977 that Star Wars was "just for fun". But as the movie became a pop culture milestone, he began dropping Joseph Campbell's name (in the author of the Salon articles supposition) to lend the movie a bit more "legitamacy".

The article also supposes that Campbell himself (who was to that point a somewhat obscure Sarah Lawrency academic) was pleased as punch to have his name linked to the Hollywood blockbuster. Certainly couldn't hurt the sales of some of his books, now could it?

Ever since then Lucas has been shamelessly borrowing these grand mythological archetypes. Though in the case of "the immaculate conception" yes, Jesus was one of the more obvious choices. But this motif has run through many different cultures over the centuries, not just referring our homeboy J.C.

Try this: AOL For Dummies

In an age where clusters are becoming more prevalent for parallel computing I've often wondered where the parallel processor was. How about you?"

Danny Hillis, the guy who founded ThinkingMachines designed a mchine called The Connection Machine, (this story has a cooler, more sci-fi lookin' pic of the old beastie) the central design philosophy was to achieve MASSIVE computing power through parallelism. It had 65,535 procs, each of lived on a wafer with dram thereon and a high bandwidth connection to up to (if I remember correctly) up to 4 other of the procs. Young sir Danny wrote a book on his exploits, well worth checking out (seemingly, it's been calling to me from my bookshelf for about a year now).

And as someone pointed out, it seems we've seen this topic before. I'd have modded him up, (hint, hint) but I really like mentioning the connection machine where appropriate.

If nuclear weapons do indeed destroy life on earth, then earth would have been better off not only without science, but without homo sapiens. Teller is a clear illustration of the dialectic of Enlightenment. See chapter 18 of The Tangled Wing by Melvin Konner.

The story is about a supposedly haunted castle where nobody can spend the night without fleeing in terror. Guess what was responsible? (Hint: there was a huge pipe organ in the castle.)

For anyone unfamiliar with the "Three Investigators" series of books, it's about trio of teens, sponsored by Alfred Hitchcock, who investigate mysteries. Similar to the Hardy Boys, but I remember liking it better.

I remember reading The Mystery of the Green Ghost (Robert Arthur, part of the Three Investigators Series) back in 4th grade (1980ish). It's originally published back in 1965, and one of the "techniques" used by the perpetrators to scare people off was using extremely low notes on a pipe organ, too low for them to hear as sound.

I think they could quite probably boast at being the greatest nation of inventors in the world.

Actually, that distinction probably rests with the Scots.

If it's not Scottish, it's CRAP!

Just consider it VMWare for big boys. I'm doing a wee bit of development for Linux on zOS, and most things just work once you get it installed. Lots of options, depending on how you carve up the system. Anyhow, for the most part it is all about fast i/o, rather than monster processing power.

Picked up Linux on the Mainframe over the weekend, but plan to read it on a (very long) plane ride next week - looked like it focused on care and feeding, however.

You can listen to a preview of "Double Dutch Bus" here legally, as long as the server lasts that is.

Personally, I don't think he should have done this until he had the resources to haul this to court and win. As it stands, Apple will probably change their TOS tonight to where you have to agree to not resale the music.

Be sure to check out the book Hyperspace, by M. Kaku. Delves into string theory and multi-dimensional space. You can get it here.

Check The Man Who Sold the Moon.

And, to firmly plant both feet on either side of the fence, check out The Artemis Project.

We'll get there. We need a D.D. Harriman, and exceptional circumstances, or simple, inevitable time, and someone (or some people) less well-placed than D.D. will get the human race there.

Yep, I'm a security expert who is an optimist - but only about things other than security.

A great book that captures the spiritual and creative essence of comics (if not historically-accurate detail), is The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, the author of "Wonder Boys".

It is a story about the golden age of comic books (1940's-ish) in New York City. Real comic artists and writers are oft-mentioned as part of the backdrop, but the main characters of the book are fictional. Fascinating read.

Kind of off-topic, but if the article drew you in, you'll likely find much to enjoy in "Cavalier".

are you kidding? they give you minimal information and encourage you to buy their book so you can get the rest of the info.

Lack of time keeps me from refuting these untruths. I'll post a link instead. Many other books have already been written regarding the faith of the Founders as well, and I don't have time to repeat that, either. (I know John Eidsmoe and Tim LaHaye have written some.) Maybe Jefferson and Franklin were deists, or at least not very orthodox, but the majority of the signers of the Declaration and Constitution were devout Christians, believing the central tenets of the faith, including creation, the divinity of Jesus, his sacrificial death, and bodily resurrection. Any plain reading of their own writings will find numerous references to their faith. Washington's first act after being sworn in as president was to lead the entire Congress to a church where they held a two-hour worship service. One of the first acts of Congress was to provide for a chaplain.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ! For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here. - Patrick Henry

My views... are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from the anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruption's of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others. - Thomas Jefferson

The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with those of Christianity. - John Quincy Adams

Every officer and man...to live, and act, as becomes a Christian Soldier defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country. - General Washington's first order to the continental army

Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers. - John Jay

The Bible is the foundation upon which our republic rests. - Andrew Jackson

Unto Him who is the author and giver of all good, I render sincere and humble thanks for His manifold and unmerited blessings, and especially for our redemption and salvation by His beloved Son. - John Jay

O most Glorious God, in Jesus Christ my merciful and loving Father, I acknowledge and confess my guilt, in the weak and imperfect performance of the duties of this day. - from George Washington's personal prayer book

The reason that Christianity is the best friend of Government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart. - Thomas Jefferson

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of our political institutions upon the capacity of Mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God. - James Madison

Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure (and) which insures to the good eternal happiness, are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments. - Charles Carroll, DoI signer

Hardly sounds like the voices of deists to me.

Don't forget this book.

How do you handle supporting music like that of Blue October who are pretty much localized to Texas but got lucky enough to briefly get a record deal? These guys are great, and I want them to get compensation, but I don't live in Texas.

If you take all the people killed in the name of Christianity over the past 20 centuries (inquisitions, witch trials, and crusades too), you will find there were more people killed in the name of atheistic government in the 20th century alone. (I won't even mention those that were killed in the name of non-Christian religions.) Does this excuse the acts of those "Christians" who killed others? Absolutely not. But it does prove my point that Christian governments are better than non-Christian ones. Atheists believe they have no one to answer to after this life; most Christians remember that they do.

I heartily recommend reading What if Jesus had never been born for a history of the contributions of Christianity as well as its crimes.

"The point is that right now, if you were desperate enough, you *could* give that all up and flee into anonymity. They're attempting to remove that hole."

There's a way to do that without ever leaving home. And NO the power company doesn't NEED your SSN.

For all those who don't understand the above, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a book called Red Mars , which is about the colonization of Mars. Even world famous author Arthur C. Clarke says: "The best book on the colonization of mars that has ever been written..." (The quote is on the cover). There are two books that follow up on Red Mars, namely, Blue Mars , and Green Mars.

For all those who don't understand the above, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a book called Red Mars , which is about the colonization of Mars. Even world famous author Arthur C. Clarke says: "The best book on the colonization of mars that has ever been written..." (The quote is on the cover). There are two books that follow up on Red Mars, namely, Blue Mars , and Green Mars.