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There are precious few markets in which "anybody" can open a store and compete successfully against the big established players. Go out on the high street and you mostly see franchises and big-name stores. E-books are little different, but I do agree that there seems to be too much collusion between distributors like Amazon and the publishers. Diesel has just gone out of business and Sony are pulling out of e-readers: it's a tough market. Nonetheless, there are e-book distributors out there who aren't Amazon, Apple, or Google. e.g. BAM, ebooks.com, and Kobo. Of course there's also B&N. Plus there's a bunch of smaller outfits, such as Lulu, Smashwords, and Baen, which deal with indie or non-DRM books. So it's not quite true that the little guy is out of e-books. Of course the big 3 or 4 on-line companies are squeezing the little guys, but they're doing this in a range of markets, not just books. We have a general problem in this regard.

Books-a-million store locator

They can be found in 23 states and DC. States are scattered from east coast to west coast as far as Oklahoma.

They don't have a large distribution of stores, but if B&N really is poised to fall, I'd say Books-a-Million would be more likely to buy them out then Borders.

Sudoku was fun, but the majority of the fun with any of these puzzles for me was figuring out solution methods for myself. Sudoku is now so heavily documented as to be trivial to solve, even at the highest difficulty levels (Especially if you have the patience to try Bowman's Bingo).

After getting burned out on Sudoku, I found out about Nikoli, and the other myriad puzzles they publish. At first I started with Hashiwokakero, then quickly moved on to Heyawake, Nurikabe, Hitori, Akari, Ripple Effect, Masyu, and even some not listed on the English version of Nikoli's website (Kin Kon Kan is particularly fun, once you figure out the rules).

In that time, I've ordered several books from Nikoli's website, traded for books with occasional Japanese acquaintances, and hunted Japanese auction sites for out of print editions. In short, it's expensive and time consuming to feed my language-independent logic puzzle habit. I'd be very happy if some stateside publisher would put out a magazine akin to Nikoli's "Puzzle Communication", or a compilation of new puzzles. I've seen a few books featuring other Nikoli puzzle types, but they do not feature more than 3 or 4 different puzzle types. Games magazine's puzzle magazines frequently feature Nurikabe and Slither Link, but only 2-5 puzzles per issue. What I want is variety and volume. Lots of different puzzles, lots of instances of each.

By the way, those with the ability/desire to import Japanese video games might want to check out Puzzle Series for the Nintendo DS. Volume 5 is Slither Link, Volume 6 is Illust Logic (Known to many as Picross, Nonograms, Edel, or Paint by Numbers), Volume 10 is Hitori, Volume 11 is Nurikabe, and Volume 12 is Akari (Light Up). You may also want to check out Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection. NetGame is particularly interesting.

And of course, no discussion of grid-based, wordless logic puzzles is complete without a mention of Solitaire Battleships, which currently cruises under the radar with the name Yubotu.

Given that there isn't any evidence of it being ever transmitted by humans

Not true. In April-May this year, the Karo Cluster in Indonesia was almost certainly shows the bird flu transmitted from a human to a human.

There is no "bird flu" threat. There is only the possibility that it may one day mutate into a threat - which is a trait it shares with every single other virus in existence.

While it is true that the risk from the Bird Flu is minimal now, the flu mutates at an amazing rate within each host. It could be (and I hope!) that H5N1 will never make the leap to efficient Human to Human transmission but there will be another flu pandemic eventually. It might be H5N1, or it might be something else. H5N1 in particular has some experts scared. The super-vaccine in the article may save many lives if it really works. The problem with current flu vaccine production is it is way too slow -- a pandemic would be far too deadly before any shot would be available.

Read John Barry's The Great Influenza before you dismiss the flu so lightly.

BAMM.com has it for $17.50, which is $1 more than Amazon. If you're on their $10/year affinity program (makes sense if you buy more than about $100 of books a year from them), it's $15.75, cheaper than Amazon.

So ha.

--grendel drago

$25.19 including free shipping for orders over $25. Trick is to pay $10 to be a member and get the extra discount.

And even cheaper at bookpool - $25.95

Theres a couple of complete kits out there. This one has a good programmable controller and remote that might make a good start. Granted, you couldn't use the chassis, but you could use the brains. In has a breadboard for (I think) another 8 digital inputs or outputs. It works well and should be adaptable for what you want to do.

Anyone interested in this will also like The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage, Walker and Company NY, ISBN 0802713424. It's a slim volume about the wired telegraph, with fascinating parallels to the internet's early years. Here is the Books-A-Million link.

I can karma whore too :-)

Try Books-A-Million and avoid supporting Amazon patents and non-privacy.

Universities receive a lot of government funding. They also tend to contribute a lot to free software. Look at all the stuff that's come out of Carnegie Mellon, like the MACH kernel.

There's even a lot of work done where the project isn't directly government funded on grants or contracts, but the work is mostly done by grad students working on government stipends.



Anyway, while I am in favor of a lot more funding for free software, I'm not sure I'm entirely in favor of a lot of government funding for free software.

"Many of the public goods we now take for granted--such as police, public libraries, and public fire departments--were historically provided either by private enterprises or by loosely-organized volunteers, neither of which have proven nearly as effectively for the common goods as their current government-run equivalents."

Personally, I'm not sure this is entirely true. Police and Fire Departments probably are better under government, but I'd disagree on libraries. I'm not trying to start a flame war, but there are other things government has partially taken over, like charity (welfare), that I think they do a much poorer job handeling than society would without them. If you disagree with that instance, I'm sure you can think of other instances where this applies. Software is a more complex, technical thing to manage, and I think we want politicians managing it as little as possible. In principle they could support it without influencing it, but this usually isn't the way of things.

I think it's easy to imagine how this could be bad. For example, the government could mandate the use of specific technologies or methods in free software. Or they could respond to industry pressure and refuse to fund any free software group that contributed to any peer-to-peer file sharing projects, etc. For some arguments on this, see this book or this article.

And Books a Million is between these (amazon and bookpool) prices.

:wq

Check out the book... The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World by Thomas Disch, a sci-fi writer and poet. It goes over this sort of topic in intimate and astounding detail.

The fact that we're being called "consumers" instead of "customers" sadly illustrates the cynical attitude of many corporate types. "Shut up and buy our stuff, you nose-picking, beer-guzzling sheep!"

Seems the perfect time to bring up a couple of interesting resources that point exactly along these lines.

There are a fascinating group of documentaries and a book about the rise of consumerism in America (/the world) and how it is adversely affecting us. I highly recommend the book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic and the two documentaries on which it is based; Affluenza: The Disease of Materialism and Escape from Affluenza.

An interesting and disturbing part of the first film shows a marketing conference from Disney (actual footage) called "Kid Power" in which the head "marketeer" of Disney talks about how Disney owns America's children and how anti-social behavior in pursuit of a product in young consumers is a good thing. If junior wants a Disney product and is willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get it, then you know you have them. Creepy stuff.

I would also recommend the book Culture Jam How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge-And Why We Must from the editor of Adbusters Magazine.

The fact that we're being called "consumers" instead of "customers" sadly illustrates the cynical attitude of many corporate types. "Shut up and buy our stuff, you nose-picking, beer-guzzling sheep!"

Seems the perfect time to bring up a couple of interesting resources that point exactly along these lines.

There are a fascinating group of documentaries and a book about the rise of consumerism in America (/the world) and how it is adversely affecting us. I highly recommend the book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic and the two documentaries on which it is based; Affluenza: The Disease of Materialism and Escape from Affluenza.

An interesting and disturbing part of the first film shows a marketing conference from Disney (actual footage) called "Kid Power" in which the head "marketeer" of Disney talks about how Disney owns America's children and how anti-social behavior in pursuit of a product in young consumers is a good thing. If junior wants a Disney product and is willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get it, then you know you have them. Creepy stuff.

I would also recommend the book Culture Jam How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge-And Why We Must from the editor of Adbusters Magazine.

Or $15.43 at Books-a-Million (assuming you have a club card - $17.14 without)

A book by James Bamford called "Body of Secrets" (booksamillon.com) contains tons of info on Echelon... yep they are spying on us and everyone else and they put into one large database which has the NSA's own version of Google ontop. Also governements around the world have access to this database - Bamford shows an example of how someone got blacklisted in various countries due to humor error. I'm not saying the whole deal is a bad or good thing... not until I get my hands on it. *grin*

Read the book... it is awesome.. you'll never look at our government's security system the same way again - we have a powerful system. He covers the whole thing from the start in World War II till now. Has several interesting bits in there - one on the U.S.S. Liberty (background info) incident which is fascinating really - Israel really screwed us over on that one.

It is priced comparably to Amazon at BooksAMillion.

"Best Web Buys" provides price comparisons for books and music.

I'm sitting at my desk right now wearing chain mail, a leather brigadine , a beautiful leather cloak, and English riding boots. Girded at my side is my longsword, and after work, I think I'll head down to the tavern and drink some ale in my leather mug. What do you have on?

Owned by monolith Barnes & Noble. Try Fatbrain

The problem with the NC model is that it relies on a stable, secure, high-bandwidth connection that has 99.9999% uptime. Can anyone tell me of a network that meets these requirements?

The counter argument is that no computer has a 99.9999% uptime either and that any system can fail locally as well. The response to this argument lies in the idea of local control. If my hard drive fails and I have a report due tomorrow, I can choose to put in a new hard drive and could have myself up and running again relatively quickly. The NC model places those decisions and priorities in the locus of control of someone else. Who is to say that they have my best interests in mind? If you want an example, look at the DNS problems Microsoft had a while back. As a network consultant and support technician, I unfortunately have to spend hours digging through the sludge of Microsoft's technical papers and knowledgebase hoping to find answers to this new problem or that. For three days, during the DNS debacle (can anyone figure out why they didn't have an off-site DNS?!?!... The Road Ahead for sure!), people were out of luck when it came to getting access to those resources. Let me tell you, if the phone system of the US was down for three days, there would be congressional hearings and someone would probably be facing jail time. Now, I'm not saying that a company should be held responsible for its website being down for three days, but if that company was also providing "essential services" (as the .NET strategy is hoping companies will), then I believe that the level of accountability should rise in proportion to the critical nature of the services that are provided.

We have a scary future ahead of us my friends. But you guys already know that, don't you?

So, what you're saying is . . . Mars is a harsh mistress?
--

For now, it seems like the best way to pay and prove them right is to go out and buy a physical copy (either locally or via some online place like BooksaMillion) of the same book. Then, if you don't want it cluttering your shelves, give it away to a friend or donate it to a library or something.
--

That being said, I've found an online bookseller that seems to have consistently better prices than Amazon's, if not all the bells and whistles: Booksamillion.com.
--

"Age of Access" by Jeremy Rifkin.

• Bookpool
• Barnes & Noble
• Books a million
• and I'm sure there are others!

Look at www.noamazon.com and find other merchants, and you'll do well as a consumer.

Thanks Amazon! :-)

PS. Can't help with the neural nets, sorry...