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A little offtopic, but I'd like to see book links point to somewhere else, like Barnes & Noble. After all the coverage on /. of the amazon.com patents I thought this would have been obvious. Let's not support software patents and shop somewhere else instead. Here are the B&N links:

The Bug
Close to the Machine

A little offtopic, but I'd like to see book links point to somewhere else, like Barnes & Noble. After all the coverage on /. of the amazon.com patents I thought this would have been obvious. Let's not support software patents and shop somewhere else instead. Here are the B&N links:

The Bug
Close to the Machine

Tracing human migratin through gene/DNA studies of widely separated human populations has revealed a lot of new information in recent years. This discovery confirms a lot that is already known. There is an interesting (and very readable) book called Mapping Human History. Recommended to anyone interested in human history, evolution, ... and you will know how wrong all those race supremist theories, racial conflicts, ... are.

$40 at Barnes and Noble
$28 at Amazon

1984

Realware, by Rudy Rucker, is a fun bit of sci-fi that involves things like that happening.

Wow, this guy really needs to get a life - this reads like a Dear Penthouse letter or something. For a lawyer, he has no tact....

You do realize that this guy wrote The Definitive Book Of Pick-up Lines and is proud of it?

What are you expecting, he's Tucker Max. Tucker Max speaks in the third person. Tucker Max fucks porn stars.

But if you are a girl and do that, Tucker Max calls you a drunken whore. Learn from Tucker Max, Tucker Max knows what women want.

I'll be impressed when they have a robot/AI that can play ping-pong. If you look at the plane the ball travels in, foosball is pretty two-dimensional...not entirely, I'll grant you, but I'm making a generalization. If you can create a robot that can deal with three dimensions, and can build strategies to play a good game of ping-pong, then I'll be impressed.

I'm part of a geek book club. We've read all the classics that have been recommended on this list (Issac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Neil Stephenson, etc) and are now searching for the "new" sci-fi.

American Gods was one of the most discussed books in our group in the last five years. It is deep, involving, and wonderfully architected.

The only book that our group liked better was Stories of Your Life, a book of short stories by Ted Chiang that has won a host of awards including the Hugo, the Nebula, and others. Each story is uniquely brilliant.

I, Claudus
Came to power because rivals thought he was too stupid to be a threat.

John Adams
Founding father that doesn't get the respect he deserves.

Best American Short Stories
I've gotten this book for Christmas the last 5 years. Some of the short stories pack more punch than a novel.

Metamorphosis
A short twisted book by twisted guy. You'll think "What was that all about" for days.

The Plauge
How people cope with an outbreak of bubonic plague. Deep thoughts about the human condition by a first rate philosopher.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith's first book, aruges that well functioning markets require moral participants. The "invisible hand" is introduced here.

I, Claudus
Came to power because rivals thought he was too stupid to be a threat.

John Adams
Founding father that doesn't get the respect he deserves.

Best American Short Stories
I've gotten this book for Christmas the last 5 years. Some of the short stories pack more punch than a novel.

Metamorphosis
A short twisted book by twisted guy. You'll think "What was that all about" for days.

The Plauge
How people cope with an outbreak of bubonic plague. Deep thoughts about the human condition by a first rate philosopher.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith's first book, aruges that well functioning markets require moral participants. The "invisible hand" is introduced here.

I, Claudus
Came to power because rivals thought he was too stupid to be a threat.

John Adams
Founding father that doesn't get the respect he deserves.

Best American Short Stories
I've gotten this book for Christmas the last 5 years. Some of the short stories pack more punch than a novel.

Metamorphosis
A short twisted book by twisted guy. You'll think "What was that all about" for days.

The Plauge
How people cope with an outbreak of bubonic plague. Deep thoughts about the human condition by a first rate philosopher.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith's first book, aruges that well functioning markets require moral participants. The "invisible hand" is introduced here.

I, Claudus
Came to power because rivals thought he was too stupid to be a threat.

John Adams
Founding father that doesn't get the respect he deserves.

Best American Short Stories
I've gotten this book for Christmas the last 5 years. Some of the short stories pack more punch than a novel.

Metamorphosis
A short twisted book by twisted guy. You'll think "What was that all about" for days.

The Plauge
How people cope with an outbreak of bubonic plague. Deep thoughts about the human condition by a first rate philosopher.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith's first book, aruges that well functioning markets require moral participants. The "invisible hand" is introduced here.

I, Claudus
Came to power because rivals thought he was too stupid to be a threat.

John Adams
Founding father that doesn't get the respect he deserves.

Best American Short Stories
I've gotten this book for Christmas the last 5 years. Some of the short stories pack more punch than a novel.

Metamorphosis
A short twisted book by twisted guy. You'll think "What was that all about" for days.

The Plauge
How people cope with an outbreak of bubonic plague. Deep thoughts about the human condition by a first rate philosopher.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith's first book, aruges that well functioning markets require moral participants. The "invisible hand" is introduced here.

I, Claudus
Came to power because rivals thought he was too stupid to be a threat.

John Adams
Founding father that doesn't get the respect he deserves.

Best American Short Stories
I've gotten this book for Christmas the last 5 years. Some of the short stories pack more punch than a novel.

Metamorphosis
A short twisted book by twisted guy. You'll think "What was that all about" for days.

The Plauge
How people cope with an outbreak of bubonic plague. Deep thoughts about the human condition by a first rate philosopher.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith's first book, aruges that well functioning markets require moral participants. The "invisible hand" is introduced here.

C. S Friedman's This Alien Shore .

Also, I would second the Daniel Keyes Moran titles cited earlier.

Vurt by Jeff Noon

It's dubbed cyberpunk, though I tend to disagree. No fancy computers here. What you do get is a dark, wicked, futuristic tale of fantastic feathers that are used to enter dream-like worlds. Everyone I've suggested it to has loved it, and the folks on B&N rate it highly as well. Give it a shot.

I'd also recommend Deus Machine (only $2.99!?!). A furious mix of biomutation, an evil pr3v3rt, and a supercomputer which is continually redesigning itself to be increasingly powerful. It's hacker/geek and so much more.

And if you dig 1,000 page per book trilogies, I made it through the first book of the Otherland series. Some crazy computer fiction, and, again, so much more. Great stuff. Unfortunately, when I finished the first book, the second hadn't been released and I haven't got around to finishing the trilogy.

Enjoy!

Vurt by Jeff Noon

It's dubbed cyberpunk, though I tend to disagree. No fancy computers here. What you do get is a dark, wicked, futuristic tale of fantastic feathers that are used to enter dream-like worlds. Everyone I've suggested it to has loved it, and the folks on B&N rate it highly as well. Give it a shot.

I'd also recommend Deus Machine (only $2.99!?!). A furious mix of biomutation, an evil pr3v3rt, and a supercomputer which is continually redesigning itself to be increasingly powerful. It's hacker/geek and so much more.

And if you dig 1,000 page per book trilogies, I made it through the first book of the Otherland series. Some crazy computer fiction, and, again, so much more. Great stuff. Unfortunately, when I finished the first book, the second hadn't been released and I haven't got around to finishing the trilogy.

Enjoy!

Vurt by Jeff Noon

It's dubbed cyberpunk, though I tend to disagree. No fancy computers here. What you do get is a dark, wicked, futuristic tale of fantastic feathers that are used to enter dream-like worlds. Everyone I've suggested it to has loved it, and the folks on B&N rate it highly as well. Give it a shot.

I'd also recommend Deus Machine (only $2.99!?!). A furious mix of biomutation, an evil pr3v3rt, and a supercomputer which is continually redesigning itself to be increasingly powerful. It's hacker/geek and so much more.

And if you dig 1,000 page per book trilogies, I made it through the first book of the Otherland series. Some crazy computer fiction, and, again, so much more. Great stuff. Unfortunately, when I finished the first book, the second hadn't been released and I haven't got around to finishing the trilogy.

Enjoy!

Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country by WilliamGreider (ISBN: 0671675567)

Totally helpful for understanding current events in the economy (i.e., why grads can't find a job). You may not vote the same after reading this.

Sorry, it's not tech or sci-fi, but it is something only a geek could get into - it's a history of the Federal Reserve, written by a mainstream (if slightly leftist) economist. It is written in a very accessible style, not Greenspan-esque at all. But it's a huge book and might take you the whole summer.

And no, he doesn't claim the banks are controlled by the Jews.

Go back and look at the more recent saints, canonized by Pope John Paul II, and you'll see examples of the Holy Spirit in action.

No, God is quite active. Problem is that man is also very active, and often does not listen to God.

Have you ever had a son or daughter tell you that you're doing it wrong, and that you should build a house *this* way? We're good at that too, but instead of telling our parents, we tell God.

And he patiently waits for us to become convinced that we're wrong, and are willing to listen to him -- even if we have to fall on our face a dozen times before we figure it out that we really were wrong, and He really was right.

You want to see what God in action is like, go read "The Cross and the Switchblade". Then -- though that group is not so much for this time as its own time -- go see Teen Challenge. Check out its truth for yourself.

The Sakurai books are concise and essential. They used to be known a "black sak" (_modern qm_) and "red sak" (_advanced qm_), although nowadays they both sport red covers.

--TRR

If you want to some solid examples of why not having a paper trail can lead to dramatic increases in vote fraud and higher rate of discarded ballots then you should read: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy Some may claim that the book is controversial but the author backs his claims with solid evidence and if you wish to do the footwork you can verify the facts for yourself.

A more advanced book, which also I recommend highly, is the one by Dicke and Wittke. These were my first books on QM (I was initially selftaught as an undergraduate, though I took regular courses later).

I also second the suggestions earlier of Sakurai and Feynman Lectures vol III. The latter is an unconventional introduction in that it starts directly with the Dirac bra-ket notation and Hilbert space, but that is really the way most physicists think about quantum mechanics after their first course, and the sooner you get used to it the better. For more advanced material, the Landau and Lifshitz book is one of the best.

On that subject, Dirac's original book on quantum mechanics is well worth reading too, though it's not thought of as a textbook.

A more advanced book, which also I recommend highly, is the one by Dicke and Wittke. These were my first books on QM (I was initially selftaught as an undergraduate, though I took regular courses later).

I also second the suggestions earlier of Sakurai and Feynman Lectures vol III. The latter is an unconventional introduction in that it starts directly with the Dirac bra-ket notation and Hilbert space, but that is really the way most physicists think about quantum mechanics after their first course, and the sooner you get used to it the better. For more advanced material, the Landau and Lifshitz book is one of the best.

On that subject, Dirac's original book on quantum mechanics is well worth reading too, though it's not thought of as a textbook.

Odd Todd has some good suggestions. I especially like Captain Todd's Mac 'n' Cheese surprise. He also has a book entitled "Hard Times, Soft Couch" with some good suggestions to get you through your period of unemployment. It's good. Not necessarily practical, but it'll provide a momentary distraction anyway.

The book is available from the usual sources. If you want to be nice to me, you can buy it through my Barnes&Noble referral link. If you find those offensive or otherwise objectionable, you can go straight to it.

I didn't write the review to make money, but it still seems kind of sneaky to replace my referral with Slashdot's own.

Bounce? Maybe. :) I've read a lot about people bouncing signals and using hills (the signal will bend a little going over a hill), but it won't be anywhere near as good as a direct signal.

Search the web for your N-Connectors.. Try fab-corp.com too. They have pigtails.. One of my friends got all his connectors and stuff from E-Bay. If there's a shop that deals with microwave communications stuff, they may have 'em.. One guy I work with regularly doesn't do computer work, but he did a lot of Microwave communications with the US Gov't.. When I started rattling off frequencies, and showing him my equipment, he was amazed. Pretty much we're using microwave frequencies, and similiar hardware to theirs..

If you really want to find out what you can do at these frequencies, check out
The ARRL UHF/Microwave Experementer's Manual - Antennas, Components, and Design.. It's really neat to see what the ham radio geeks have been doing for years.. Like, pg 1-10 fg 14 is "The San Bernardino Microwave Society's beer can polaplexer". It's a tall beer can (like a Fosters, I think), pointing into a parabolic dish. Looks just like what we've reinvented with the pringles cans. I made mine out of a section of dryer vent pipe (Home Depot sells it in 6' lengths at even in inch sizes (2", 3", 4", etc)). Just the pipe by itself at the right measurements helps signficantly.

They go into bouncing similiar frequencies to ours off the moon, with rather large dishes.. But, if you happened to have an old satellite dish (like one of those 15' ones) with holes less than 1/4", you'd be exceeding the power required to bounce off the moon, even with a little network card. A 1W amp would definately make it stronger. :)

**WARNING**

Don't use a 15' dish. Don't use a 1W amp. Don't point it at your little sisters hamster. The FCC may get a little pissy about that. If you do, I didn't suggest. If you say I did, my name is Guadalupe, and I live in Istanbul. I raise goats on a hill, and don't even own a computer.

But if you do it, let me know how it works. :)

A programmers value is determined by experience and ability to learn. Since someone new to the IT field has little experience, being hired is determined mostly by their ability to learn. Since young minds are better suited for learning, they are going to be hired more often. This is the trend I have seen at my company.

Oh please. Anyone who is capable of earning a University degree, old or young, is quite clearly capable of learning... after all, at least when I went through Uni, we had to learn to get the damn degree in the first place! What you describe is just a prejudice... the "old dogs can't learn new tricks" mentality which is, unfortunately, prevalent in our society.

I*M*HO, there is no specific reason to assume older people make poorer techies. In fact, the manager I work for is in his late forties, and he's probably one of the smartest men I've come across. He's constantly learning new things... hell, he seems to have an easier time keeping up with trends than I do!

I don't think that the ability to learn is determined at all by age. I believe that nearly anyone can learn how to code at nearly any age. But I would liken this ability to that of playing a piano.

Sure, an older person can pick up the ability and wield a certain prowess and even artistry. But no one, to my knowledge, would argue the fact that a person who learns to play the piano in childhood has a certain "feel" for it that people who pick up this ability later in life can never attain. It's not that the older person can't play sonoriously with rhythm and emotion. But the younger player has a certain reach that will never be known to the older guy.

Andy Hertzfeld (of the original Macintosh development team) claimed that he used to be able to track and house far more complex contructs of thought, and more of them, in his mind when he was in his early 20's than he ever could at the time he was giving the interview (I would guess he was somewhere in his mid forties at that time). He called this ability "the gift of the young".

But in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution Steven Levy described how Ken Williams, the founder of Sierra Online felt a missionary zeal in converting people to the belief that learning how to program a computer could change your life. Ken met Bob and Carolyn Box, who were an older married couple in their fifties. Bob was "...a former New Yorker, a former engineer, a former race car driver, a former jockey, and a former Guinness Book of WOrld Records champion in gold panning." When they both tried to get a job working for Sierra, Ken told them to "put up something on the screen using assembly language in thirty days". According to how the story is told, they both became very able assembly language programmers. Roberta Williams (Ken's wife) considered the Boxes "inspiring" and felt that learning how to program "rehabilitated their lives".

Of course that was a long time ago, and thus far I have spoken only of the abiltity to learn and to become an able programmer. To get slightly more "on topic"; as to whether there is job market opportunities for older folk, there is no reason an employer should discriminate on the basis of age, though I'm sure that many do. But as for the pure concept of programming I myself only picked up some ability in C++ (on my own, not through any school) when I turned 30 as I realized I was getting older and it was basically "now or never". I still enjoy learning as much as I can about it, and consider it a wonderful intellectual exercise, though I have no concrete plans of doing it for a living. I've already got a stable professional life and see it as a very enjoyable and rewarding hobby.

James Lovelock, one of the true ninja hacker lords, has suggested that of all planets in the solar system, only Earth looks like it harbors life, because only it has an atmosphere that is out of chemical equilibrium.

Lovelock, a atmospheric chemist and inventor who made his fortune on the ion-capture gas chromatography detector, is the author of the so-called Gaia Hypothesis. Romantic name aside, it's the idea that the presence of life alters a planet's environment to be more favorable to life. (The idea and name have been appropriated by eco-mystics who take it to mean that there actually is some sort of earth deity, but that's emphatically not what Lovelock is saying.)

On our planet, many atmospheric gases are grossly out of equilibrium. For instance, although the atmosphere is about one-fifth oxygen, there are detectable traces of methane, mostly from termites and "the farts of ruminants". If life were not continually renewing the methane, it would combine with the oxygen, and disappear in a few hours.

Of course, the presence of oxygen itself is an anomaly. It is so reactive that if it were not renewed by photosynthesis, it would bind with the copious free carbon lying about.

Lovelock gives many other examples in his excellent book, Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth. (He also mentions that the presence of fluorocarbons, like Freon, in the atmosphere is a clear sign, not just of life, but of intelligent life. Since you can determine atmospheric composition by spectrometry through a telescope, this gives a way to detect civilization if only you can image a planet hosting it.)

There's a clue in the simple appearance of the planets from space: compare the complex and constantly-changing appearance of the Earth's patchy clouds, liquid-water ocean, and of course its wildly varying landmasses (including snowcaps, yellow deserts, chlorphyll-green jungles, and seasonal temperate forests and grasslands), with the dead, relatively static appearance of any other planet in the system. Our nervous systems have life-detection circuits built in; honestly now, do you see any when you look at Mars?

The key is that Earth is alone in all the solar system in having a disequilibrium chemistry. This doesn't mean that there wasn't life elsewhere at one time; it may not even mean that there aren't small, isolated outposts that support some life, but not enough to control the entire planet. Certainly, life on Earth had to start that way.

Nevertheless, although there may indeed have been a time, early in its history, when life florished on Mars, it seems dead now.

The author does an incredible job describing the common problems one encounters when trying to learn to draw, and the exercises are carefully designed to teach you to get past these pitfalls. Excellent book.

Order a copy, or check it out from your local library. This book radically changed my ability to draw.

Oh, do all of the exercises, using the equipment prescribed... They pay off..

Stanley G. Weinbaum, most famous for the story "Martian Odyssey", a very early pulp writer who created an amazing array of alien life and worlds. Get his old "Best Of" Del Rey book (Alibris has some here).

The prolific Naomi Mitchison, who wrote in many genres, wrote two of the best scifi novels - "Memoirs Of A Spacewoman", which is a catalog of alien contacts with a memorable main character, and "Solution Three", an amazingly prophetic future history novel. She is spot on about genetic engineering in particular there.

Lastly, the horror master William Hope Hodgson, who along with Robert Chambers influenced Lovecraft and that whole movement. While "House On The Borderland" has stayed in print for a long time, "Boats Of The 'Glen Carrig'" (personal favorite) and "The Night Land" have only recently come back into print as library editions. Get them before they go under for another 20 years.

What you really want are the originals. :)

That said, Chobits is one of my favorite anime series. And I know almost everyone hated "Bicentennial Man", but I thought it was great, too (although not exactly Asimovian, if there is such a thing). The smarter computers get, expect more movies like "The Matrix" until our relationship to the machines settles down a bit.

And some other interesting reads on the mix of computer networks and humans would be: "Sisters of Glass", "Primary Inversion" (series), and ... well, it's getting to be downright ubiquitous.

Anyone know if there's a good place to buy parts (like mannequins) that could be used to build humanoid looking computers? You've still got to do something intelligent with the monitor. Having a big old CRT just plunked down next to an off-the-wall case destroys the whole effect.

lim --> ***

That's mathematical notation for the current AI situation: "The stars are the limit."

Chess-playing is not the definitive measure of man or machine. Rather, thinking is.

AI as a Whole has got a lot of Unified AI Systems going -- major endeavors racing into the Future towards the Technological Singularity.

The AI textbook AI4U may be ahead of its time in presenting machine intelligence, so future generations are left with the high-philosophy AI4Udex to delve into the deepest possible study of the now unstoppable Artificial Intelligence.

TMA-1 ? As in Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1 ?
Coincidence or Foreshadowing?

Mind.Forth is free AI source code for a robot AI Mind in Win32Forth.

Mind-1.1 in JavaScript is the AI Tutorial version of the same robot Mind software for true artificial intelligence.

AI4U: Mind-1.1 Programmer's Manual is the textbook of artificial intelligence describing the Robot Mind-1.1 software of the Mentifex AI project as listed in the Free Software Donation Directory.

Technological Singularity is happening right now.

You might be interested in the book In Six Days, edited by John Ashton - it's a collection of 50 essays by scientists in many different fields, each with (at least) a PhD, explaining why they believe in Creation from a scientific perspective.

How about Ender's Game. I think it would make a great animated movie, provided it was done well.

Also from my limited knowledge of how encryption works, if they can record your key exchange, then it's as if you're not encrypting anything!

Actually this is not true. Although it is possible to design insecure key exchange algorithms, the secure ones are designed with eavesdroppers specifically in mind (i.e., eavesdroppers cannot learn anything). Otherwise there would be no need for the algorithm.

The real problem with key exchange is man-in-the-middle attacks, where Bob and Alice think they are exchanging keys with each other, but actually they are both exchanging keys with me, and I'm secretly decrypting and re-encrypting everything while monitoring it. A few extra steps in the key-exchange protocols can prevent even that.

You might want to check out Applied Cryptography. It demonstrates fairly well how these things work.

All of my earlier meetings with browser developers had been meetings of minds, with a pooling of enthusiasm. But this meeting had a strange tension to it. It was becoming clear to me in the days before I went to Chicago that the people at NCSA were attempting to portray themselves as the center of Web development, and to basically rename the Web as Mosaic. At NCSA something wasn't "on the web", it was "on Mosaic". Marc [Andreessen] seemed to sense my discomfort at this.

To add to my consternation, the NCSA public-relations department was also pushing Mosaic. It wasn't long before the New York Times ran an article picturing Hardin and Larry Smarr, the head of NCSA, (not Marc and Eric [Bina]!!) sitting side by side at terminals running the Mosaic browser. Once again, the focus was on Mosaic, as if it were the Web. There was little mention of other browsers , or even the rest of the world's effort to create servers. The media, which didn't take the time to investigate deeper, started to portray Mosaic as if it were equivalent to the Web. I returned to CERN uneasy about the decidedly peremptory undertones behind NCSA's promotion of Mosaic. NCSA quickly started other projects to get Mosaic onto PCs running Windows and onto Macintoshes.

My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.

No, the Internet was designed as an experiment in packet switching networks and to help different computer systems talk to each other.

The "nuclear attack" scenario is bogus. Read Where Wizards Stay Up Late to learn the real history of the Internet.

Many of us are familiar with the works of Robert Jordan. The 9th book in the Wheel of Time series, Winter's Heart, is about 25 hours in length (20 CD's in the unabridged version). A fantastic, first-rate performance.

To produce that, you had to pay the performer for 3.2 working days, and that's just for the bits you actually use. Let's add in the cost of mixing, second takes, plus the time it takes the performers to prepare for the work. You don't simply hand someone a script and expect them to put on a professional production sight unseen, and given the quality of most audiobook productions (and I've listened to many), I can't believe for a second that there's no prep time paid for.

I can easily imagine having to pay each of the performers for three or four weeks work to do this one production, and it very well might be longer considering the size of this book.

You simply can not get the kind of quality that makes for an enjoyable listening experience with a volunteer mom recording WAV files onto her PC with a Compaq built-in-the-monitor microphone.

If you want good-sounding audio, you're going to have to pay for it.

Personally, I've found Vernor Vinge's novella True Names and it's afterword by Marvin Minski to be a help in understanding The Matrix. The driving idea is that inside the Matrix or Vinge's "Other Plane" you perceive the programming constructs as metaphors. Hence, the red pill is your perception of a tracer/disconnection program, the kung-fu fights are a metaphor for an electronic battle between two entities in the system, etc.

The NRA is basically correct. Lots of people don't like this fact. It doesn't make it any less true.

Now I disagree with the NRA's support of the "war on drugs" and their concept that we generally need more imprisonment of all sorts of criminals (as opposed to basic economic changes that reduce the incentives for criminal behavior), but when it comes to believing in the domino effect of gun rights concessions, they are dead on.

Privacy people sound the same because they are dead on about the Domino effect as well.

Armedby Gary Kleck, and Don Kates gives a very good synopsis of this issue.

In these science-fiction and fantasy-themed online worlds, it's perfectly plausible that ungendered, ambiguously gendered, or bi-gendered races could exist.

I know plenty of ambiguously and bi-gendered people in real life. I think this article is great, but I also think that it's a mistake to stick all feminine traits on girls and masculine traits on boys. I think it would be really cool to be able to create a hetero male fighter that runs around in a dress in the next Baulder's Gate or whatever.

Gender is really just what you make of it. Every man who wears a tight shirt or crosses his legs isn't a faggot. Every girl with short hair and her sleeves rolled up isn't a dyke.

A really good book on feminism from a male perspective is Refusing to Be a Man by John Stoltenberg. I don't agree with everything he has to say, especially RE censoring pornography, but it is a very interesting read.

Raise boys and girls the same way!

Before you run off and start investing and "making your money work for you" in the traditional sense, have a look at this. It certainly doesn't fall into the traditional "more more more" mindset of most people - instead if focuses on "what is enough" and making you happy.

In the words of the late, great Douglas Adams - "these people were extraordinarilly unhappy and attempted to correct their problem by spending all their time moving small pieces of green paper around - which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the pieces of green paper that were unhappy."

Just a different perspective from the norm - but one that may do more for you than any book on the money markets ever could.

Is there any much diff worth noting between The Unix System Administration Handbook and the The Linux Administration Handbook both by Nemeth and Snyder? I notice that the latter is a bit cheaper. Of course Gnu's Not Unix, but they are so similar couldn't one sub for the other?

Is there any much diff worth noting between The Unix System Administration Handbook and the The Linux Administration Handbook both by Nemeth and Snyder? I notice that the latter is a bit cheaper. Of course Gnu's Not Unix, but they are so similar couldn't one sub for the other?

For those not so programming-savvy (i.e. me, 5 minutes ago), a quine is "a program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output."

Apparently Douglas Hofstadter (of GEB fame)coined the phrase after logician Willard van Orman Quine.

For more see: http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm

For those not so programming-savvy (i.e. me, 5 minutes ago), a quine is "a program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output."

Apparently Douglas Hofstadter (of GEB fame)coined the phrase after logician Willard van Orman Quine.

For more see: http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm