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Well, not by H. P. Lovecraft, apparently.

I can't speak for what you had intercourse with, but the spongy jelly I had sex with last night was no inanimate jelly-in-a-cup from Japan!

My jellied pleasure trove was a shoggoth, and I swear, she said she was 18! (Oh, sure, it wasn't until after we were necking in the back of her 1657 Ford Thunderpseudopod overlooking a fungus garden on Yuggoth that I discovered she'd meant 18 aeons, but by then my brain had been eaten, and I didn't mind as much.

(Never trust a chick you meet through Shub-Internet :-)

oh, never mind, it's an octopus

and I guess if you're a political activist, this page is for you

As long as the cthulhu-children don't come on land and demand the production of live-action tentacle rape movies, I'll be happy. The last thing we need is a race of Cthulhu-beings involved with the RIAA or marketing companies.


relevant link: Cthulu for president, why vote for a lesser evil?

You thought MS had sort of nazi-esque methods? Well, I will now, in this brief essay, reveal to you the hidden truth of Linux, an joint Finnish-German Nazi conspiration for revenge against the victors of WW2. Let's look at the evidence.

During the second World War, Finland was a close allied to the Third Reich, as is clearly illustrated by this photo of a finnish military aircraft. After the defeat of the Axis Powers, a revantionist urge abounds in both countries.

Linux was written by Finnish stuent Linus Thorvalds, a member of the small Swedish-speaking minority of Finland, well known for it's white supremacist tendencies. In this article Torvalds expresses his enthusiasm and admiration for the German-led KDE project. He also makes some unclear statements about the claims of Richard Stallman for calling the operating system GNU/Linux being invalid. Why is this? Obviously, the Nazi -and therefore Anti-Communist- Thorvalds here shows his support for his German allies against the Communist GNU and GNOME [gnome.org] projects.

But what does this hideous Nazi conspiracy want? We cannot, at this point, know. But what we do know, is that Nazies are up to no good. To stop them from achieving whichever horrible goals they hav in mind, I would strongly discourage any use of the Linux kernel or the KDE. Instead, I would recomend the use of a truly democratic operating system.

Thank You.

You thought MS had sort of nazi-esque methods? Well, I will now, in this brief essay, reveal to you the hidden truth of Linux, an joint Finnish-German Nazi conspiration for revenge against the victors of WW2. Let's look at the evidence.

During the second World War, Finland was a close allied to the Third Reich, as is clearly illustrated by this photo of a finnish military aircraft. After the defeat of the Axis Powers, a revantionist urge abounds in both countries.

Linux was written by Finnish stuent Linus Thorvalds, a member of the small Swedish-speaking minority of Finland, well known for it's white supremacist tendencies. In this article Torvalds expresses his enthusiasm and admiration for the German-led KDE project. He also makes some unclear statements about the claims of Richard Stallman for calling the operating system GNU/Linux being invalid. Why is this? Obviously, the Nazi -and therefore Anti-Communist- Thorvalds here shows his support for his German allies against the Communist GNU and GNOME [gnome.org] projects.

But what does this hideous Nazi conspiracy want? We cannot, at this point, know. But what we do know, is that Nazies are up to no good. To stop them from achieving whichever horrible goals they hav in mind, I would strongly discourage any use of the Linux kernel or the KDE. Instead, I would recomend the use of a truly democratic operating system.

Thank You.

You thought MS had sort of nazi-esque methods? Well, I will now, in this brief essay, reveal to you the hidden truth of Linux, an joint Finnish-German Nazi conspiration for revenge against the victors of WW2. Let's look at the evidence.

During the second World War, Finland was a close allied to the Third Reich, as is clearly illustrated by this photo of a finnish military aircraft. After the defeat of the Axis Powers, a revantionist urge abounds in both countries.

Linux was written by Finnish stuent Linus Thorvalds, a member of the small Swedish-speaking minority of Finland, well known for it's white supremacist tendencies. In this article Thorvalds expresses his enthusiasm and admiration for the German-led KDE project. He also makes some unclear statements about the claims of Richard Stallman for calling the operating system GNU/Linux being invalid. Why is this? Obviously, the Nazi -and therefore Anti-Communist- Thorvalds here shows his support for his German allies against the Communist GNU and GNOME projects.

But what does this hideous Nazi conspiracy want? We cannot, at this point, know. But what we do know, is that Nazies are up to no good. To stop them from achieving whichever horrible goals they hav in mind, I would strongly discourage any use of the Linux kernel or the KDE. Instead, I would recomend the use of a truly democratic operating system.

Thank You.

...and the Depths are rising. Whahahaha!

Kneel before yer new leader!

I voted for Cthulhu, which seems to have been the right choice. It's nice to see a third party candidate win by such an overwhelming margin. I'm sure that as the President he will keep all of his promises, unlike the other two twits. Sure he will eventually consume the world in darkness and despair, but at least he isn't claiming 'it's for the children'. He will eat them first. Of course with the layout of the ballot, I can't remember if it was Cthulhu or Buchanan that I picked. Same difference I suppose...

Remember... Chaos is your fiend...

------

Are you sure that's what he's saying? I thought his big thing was that the whole federal government, including Congress, should stay out of these things. I don't think anyone is suggesting that the president should be all powerful, outside of Cthulu and Vader. If I'm wrong, some Libertarian may feel free to set me straight.

Why settle for the lesser of two evils? Vote Cthulhu for prez! Cthulhu will not censor the internet, it will find far worse ways to torment mankind before they go insane and it east them!

The main computer lab in the Science Center is, if I remeber correctly, about 40% Ultrix on DEC Alphas, 40% Macs, and only about 10% or so PC's (as opposed to the public access terminals in question, in the lobby). I wonder what Intel though about that?

The Imac kiosks in the main lobby (I remeber them as being mainly 7xxx's and 8xxx's, though, but it's been about 6 months since I was there) are basically Netscape and telnet boxes, locked down in such a way as to be useless as Macs, i.e., they are effectively dumb terminals, useful only for anonymous web surfing and telnetting to other systems (Harvard's main systems are Solaris and Ultrix).

All things considered, Intel-based systems seem to be in the minority in the Science Center.

darren

This is a pretty cool idea, but I question his methods of determining how much color correction should be applied.

The pictures look great, though they kind of ruin the mental image I (and probably a bunch of people) have of Mars as the "Red Planet".

darren

• While the article doesn't say it, the librarian's information about the problems with filters came, in no small part, from SlashDot discussions

This is interesting, but not really surprising. Slashdot, as a community (without counting the trolls), makes up a significant part of the technical population. Slashdot readers, on the whole, tend to be well educated, informed, and concerned. When a story gets over 500 comments, with 200+ moderated to 2 or higher, chances are pretty good that there is going to be some pretty insightful (legitimately insightful, not "+1 Insightful") stuff in there. There are few ways that are better to get public opinion than a peer-reviewed, peer-moderated community forum.

For officials to take the time to read a public forum, like Slashdot, not only shows some enlightenment on the part of that official, but also shows that democracy does work -- public forums such as slashdot, Kuro5hin, and others, are the vox populi, even ones that are not "officially" sanctioned.

darren

How about this: Sci Fi Literature 101?. It's an "Ask Slashdot" from a few months back.

darren

@array[0] is a one-element hash slice ($array[0] is the first member of @array), and the pre-increment only does the obvious thing because it is a one-element slice. This is bad programming style, and horribly confusing, not idiomatic Perl. Idiomatic Perl is about saving typing and running time by using shortcuts, and this does neither (array lookups are slower than scalar lookups, as well as the same number of characters to type). Without the context for this statement, however, who knows what it's author meant.

By the way, ++@_[0,1] (a two-element hash slice) increments only $_[1] (the last value).

darren

This is ridiculous. If I was on that list, I would most certainly not create a new account. I would never use Napster again. I would also never buy another Metallica record again (not that I have in years).

If you were one of the people whose account was cancelled, do yourself a favor: Don't use Napster. They obviously don't want you as a user. Here's some more advice: Don't buy anything by Metallica. They obviously don't want you as a fan. Go buy some Limp Bizkit, even if you don't like them; they will never try to dictate what you can do with something you paid money for. Go buy some Grateful Dead, even if you don't like them, for the same reason.

Do you know how to program? Help with the OpenNap project. If you can't program, support them any way you can: Download it and run an opennap server.

darren

Speaking of culture, Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael discusses Culture and How Things Came To Be The Way They Are. Fascinating read.

darren

• [Perl] doesn't scale very well though, even with mod_perl.

This is false. Apache with mod_perl runs at the same speed as Apache -- the combined speed of your computer, network connection, disk, etc. Yes, you can write slow mod_perl stuff (if you use it as glorified CGI), but mod_perl itself has no such limitations.

mod_perl scales very well -- Boston.com serves a few million pages a day using Apache/mod_perl. It's all about how you write your Perl.

But, I will give you this much -- if you run CGI scripts under mod_perl, they do not run nearly as fast as they would if you wrote mod_perl handlers, though they still run much faster than CGI.

How can you dislike the JSP way of doing things, but like PHP? They use an identical model. PHP suffers from many of the same problems as CGI (logic and HTML combined in the same place, etc), but the speed issue is definitely not one of them. However, PHP, even well-written PHP. will never be as fast as a well-written mod_perl handler, for the simple reason that mod_perl handlers are compiled once and live in memory for the life of the Apache server (parent) process. There is no file to read every time it gets called. Plus, PHP (and CGI, and JSP, and servlets) have the limitation that they can only produce output. You want to modify how the URI gets translated into a filename? You can't do that in PHP. You want to customize the authentication process? Nope, you can't do that in JSP. You want to modify the environment for all the other handlers? Not is ASP, you can't. For anything other that generating output, you have to use either C or mod_perl. And the beauty of the whole thing is -- yup, you guessed it, it runs at memory speeds -- no filesystem accesses (unless you write them in specifically), no scripts to stat, no logic/HTML combination to parse.

You are right about Perl's object model, though.

darren

The problem with the FM is that not only does it not tell you how to handle interactions between RPM installs and source installs, there is no way to handle it. If I install Perl from source, every other RPM I install complains that the Perl dependency fails, and I have to install with --nodeps. Doesn't that defeat the purpose? Yup, it does.

Most software doesn't come in RPM format, and when it does, it often comes without the required parameters or options. What then?

darren

if this bothers you, there is this construct in C called a comment...

/* Hide what you don't want to see. */

darren

There was some previous discussion on a similar topic a while back (The Perfect Distribution), where many of us had the same lament. The general concensus seemed to be a minimal Slackware.

My advice, if you don't want package managers, would be to avoid RedHat like the plague. Avoid Debian. Use Slackware, or use the Linux From Scratch resources to make your own distribution. This route is guaranteed to make you happy (in the long run, at least), but is significantly more difficult than just installing an "established" distribution.

Freshmeat has had a few editorials on package managers, incidentally, like The Universal Source Package, which might be of interest to you.

darren

Hmmm....

darren

After the first few paragraphs, I assumed the author was just spouting off about Qt and GTK, but upon further reading, I realized that he had a lot of valid points. He seems to be suffering from the Microsoft-esque "If it's not commercial who's going to support it?" line of (faulty) reasoning, but many of the points he raises are significant, and should be heeded by GTK and Qt developers.

Most of what he says comes down to the relative levels of maturity of the toolkits. Of course Motif is going to be more full featured; it's been around for a dozen or so years. I think I'd be pertty disappointed if it wasn't more full featured than 2-year-old GTK.

Lack of support for the Xt component model is key, and is probably the strongest statement of the interview. His emphasis on "point [your] favorite GUI builder at them and they load just like that" is a little misguided, but the point remains: using widgets from another toolkit is impossible. Admit it -- it would be cool to embed a GTK widget in a Qt application. It would also ensure the freedom of choice that Linux users so strongly argue for.

I wish the interviewer had asked him why the Motif developers version costs so $!@#!$ much, and if they were worried about the Free nature of Qt and GTK. I would not be surprised if the timing of this book had something to do with the fact that more and more apps are getting written with Qt and GTK, and that Motif has a bad wrap in the Free Software community, a community whose opinions are getting more and more significant.

darren

Thank goodness for Tipper Gore and the PMRC! They saved me from getting sued! If I hadn't been shown the evils of the Devil's Music (aka "Rock and Roll") I'd be in court right now!

darren

As cynical as this sounds, this article was probably written specifically to get our (collective) goat. Pretty soon the site is going to be slashdotted, and most of you are going to read the Talk Backs and probably enter some of your own. Every single one of these page views is 2 banner ads they push out there! This is all about ad revenue, folks! They have to know that this article is flamebait -- the author may work for PC Week, but ZDNet is not stupid -- but flamebait draws flames, and each flame is half a dozen banner ads.

Whatever you do, view these pages with images off. Don't give them the satisfaction of the ad revenue.

darren

Didn't everyone read the section headline? Rumors and Comment. Obviously this is uninformed drivel, but that's OK -- it's just ZDNet giving the uninformed their say.

He works for PC Week -- of course he's going to be afraid of the Free Software movement, because it promises to set PC's free. PC Week's bread and butter is M$ crap -- they need Microsoft so they can continue to publish their "1001 Ways To Reboot Your Computer" articles.

darren

How useless! Well intentioned, but useless. Currently spammers (sorry, "Senders of UCE") get around these laws by sending the mail from a server in another country. I cannot imagine that a law in Sweden will apply to a spammer in, say, China, whether that law is a modification of an EU law or not. Well intentioned, but destined to fail, in the same way that all of these laws fail. You cannot apply a traditional approach to solving these non-traditional problems.

That said, how can I get on their no-spam list? Every little bit helps (not that I'm getting a lot of mail from Dave.Rhodes@MAKE.MONEY.FAST.se, but it can't hurt.)

darren

Even though the explot was dubbed "realdie.exe", which implies the vulnerability was found on a windows server, Real is offering patches for all versions of their server line. Interesting. I guess it is true that you can write cross-platform bad code.

Is anyone else scared that they named the executable "rmserver"? Gotta make sure you don't put a space between the "m" and the "s", or bad things might happen. I can see it now:

D'Oh!

darren

Rather than an attempt at a comprehensive "Ask Jeeves" replacement, perhaps a generic version of the software would be more appropriate. A natural language parser, and natural language query engine, with conversion utilties to go from this format to a variety of backends (RDBMS, maybe LDAP, perhaps even a front-end to commercial/popular search engines).

I think the Open Directory Project does a ot of what you have mentioned; what is missing is the ability to feed it natural language queries and fully structured sentences.

If the idea for a new database/repository were to go forward, a very important aspect would be making it very easy to contribute. Perhaps an API that can be easily embedded in software (something like CDDB does), with a dedicated protocol, and maybe even dedicated server software to collect the information.

darren

PS Why is the "n" silent?

• Open source makes about as much sense in this context as it does with that ridiculous "Open Source Iridium" thing.

The phrase itself is ridiculous, but the meanging is not. The meaning is, "Let's make this a community project, in which anyone and everyone is allowed to contribute, according to a set of rules patterned after Open Source software."

darren

How is this different from Mindstorms? It sounds pretty similar, except that the software for MindStorms has been ported to other platforms (like Not Quite C).

darren

• are there any other ASP solutions for Apache? I've yet to find one

Hey, there sure are. Joshua Chamas' Apache::ASP, which runs under mod_perl, is probably the best solution. It runs exactly as IIS' ASP does, using the same constructs. It would probably be worth your while to check out.

The full Apache::ASP home page is at http://www.nodeworks.com/asp/, and there is tons of support for it on the mod_perl mailing list (including the author himself).

darren

qmail with ezmlm is your solution. Use it instead of sendmail. To create a mailing list, you put a file in your home directory called .qmail-listname, and use the address yourlogin-listname, and qmail does the right thing (instant listserver! No admin needed!). There is even a couple of web-based interfaces (EZmlm-Web 1.02 and another one here) for adding and deleting users from a list.

qmail is pretty sweet anyway, you should be using it.

darren

Now that we all know that it is possible to crack their crypt , we can have it for free? Is this a joke?

darren

Yeah, everything is neat, but the main problem with it is that there is no editing. Do a search for Mr T Ate My Balls and then tell me what you think of Everything as a legitimate cataloging/archival site.

• The ability for all the users to add content makes it easier and faster to get information in there

Yes, this is a definite plus, under certain circumstances. You can avoid the tyranny of The Editor as he prunes away the dross.

darren

There seems to be the usual "Perl Is Ugly" threads going on here, so let me sum it up for all of you. People use Perl for the same reason people use Linix. Perl is superior to (most) other languages in the same way that Linux. If you want complete control over the language you use, there are few beside Perl for you. If you want hand-holding and coddling, write in VB.

So far, almost every complaint about Perl attached to this story has been uninformed whining or out and out untruths. People complain that Perl is a read-only language. That absolute bullshit. There is no such thing as a read only language -- there are programmers who write read only code. Yeah, some of the worst code I have ever seen was written in Perl, but some of the best has been written in Perl. I feel sorry for all of you people who are afraid to express yourselves in your code -- Perl is probably very scary for you, and rightfully so. "It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools" -- bad code is written by bad programmers, and is language independant.

To sum it up, and bastardize anoher great quote, "With most languages, you are limited by the language itself. With Perl, you are limited by your own imagination."

• Everything written in LISP. History repeats...

Not repeats, recurses ...

darren

HTML files with PHP are read and evaled every time they are called. With mod_perl handlers, the scripts are compiled when Apache starts up and then never gets recompiled until you restart the server. That is the difference. The same thing goes for ASP scripts, and other embedded scripting languages (this actually includes things like ePerl, Embperl, and other embedded Perls). So, PHP is fast (no spawning a new interpreter), but the pages need to be read every time they are called.

I believe that PHP4 will have the option to compile HTML/PHP pages, so this will not continue to be an issue.

darren

Some techniques that are essential to web development are:

• Write clean code. Straigtforward code that doesn't pull in a lot of extre libraries and functions will run better than spaghetti code.
• Use persistent database connections whenever you can, or use a small fast rdbms like MySQL.
• Caching, caching, caching!
• Turn buffering off whenever possible (e.g., $|++ in perl).
• Use compiled modules/languages whenever possible. Languages and environments like Perl (CGI, not mod_perl), PHP, ASP, and the like are *slow* in comparison to compiled C modules and things like mod_perl, mod_pyapache, and mod_dtcl. As much as people like embedded scripting languages, the fact is the page has to be parsed every time it is run (PHP folks, I mean you!) This makes for fast development (which is definitely important), but not so great for running.
• No JavaScript, no DHTML, no animated GIFs. Yeah, this goes against what a lot of people have been taught about the web, but they slow it the fuck down. A browser having to parse 300 lines of JavaScript (half of which is "if(userAgent == "Mozilla")" crap anyway) is going to be very slow, even on a BFM.
• And, dammit, write good HTML. In fact, don't write HTML, write XHTML. Nothing ruins the effect of a well-thought-out dynamic page than HTML that the browser has to re-render 6 times to lay out correctly. You may think this is not a big deal, but it is, it really is. Take the time to learn XHTML, and your pages will be better for it.

Often, the speed of the web is, in reality, how fast the pages appear to be. This is the most important thing to remember when designing pages that are supposed to be fast.

darren

A lot of people have said that the bottlenecks tend to be generating output, making database connections, and the like, but that is often not true. Generally, the bottleneck is the network connection. The way I often think of pages is in terms of the connection speed of the server. I have done work for people with slow connections from the server to their backbone, and in cases like this, connection time becomes less important than network speed. So I send the header, send some content for the top of the page, and then make my database connections, and do my calculations.

Even though it's often frowned upon, I like to use a lot of includes that are generated by the client whenever possible. That way, the multiple hits to the server (i.e., more network traffic) can make a slower server seem faster. When it comes down to it, when poeple say they want the web to be faster, they mean a fast experience, not a fast server.

Just something to keep in mind.

darren

Yeah, uh, none of these URL's worked for me. Here's the one I got from following links on the front page: http: //www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/042100s ci-paleo-dinosaur.html.

darren

NFS under Linux is notorious for it's locknig problems. There looks like there are a few options here:

• Back out of that Solaris patch. You did backup everything up and install the patch with the backout option, didn't you?
• If it only happens with the distributed.net client, stop using it. ("Doctor, it hurts when I do this" "Then don't do that"). Or, you could run the entire distributed.net process on a partition local to the Linux box.
• Make sure that you are running the latest stable glibc (you're using a development version of Debian, right?), see about any NFS-related kernel patches (don't know know if there are any). Consider trying a development kernel; I've had good luck with 2.3.51, for example. The latest is 2.3.99-pre-something-or-other, these might also be good to try. Try a few different kernels: the NFS stuff is constantly changing. The 2.3.51 config contains experimental support for NFS v3, you might want to try that out. If you're running something like the distributed.net stuff, then it can't be too essential a machine and you can afford to test new kernels.

You'll probably run into this problem with anything that tries to do locking over NFS. I would slap together a few scripts or small programs that do locking over NFS to see if it might be the something strange that distributed.net client is doing. Maybe it's compiled for libc5 or libc6, and that might be causing problems (wild guesses here).

good luck.

darren

Someone please send them the cluestick. I'll even pay for postage.

• It runs Microsoft Windows CE software using a 233 MHz Pentium II processor, packs 32 MB of RAM, and has a touch-active screen.

Ugh!

darren

I know I shouldn't respond to this obvious troll, but here I go...

• Does anyone use the Mac as a serious computing platform any more?

What does that mean? What is serious computing? There are many univesities that use Macs for teaching. There are many companies that still have a lot of Macs, especially for graphic design. There are many households who are still using Macs, and surprise, surprise, the marketing is working, there are many households that are actually buying Macs. Besides, a telnet client is a telnet client is a telnet client, right? :)

But just to reiterate -- this is not about Macs! This is about the PowerPC architecture. The hardware was never the weak link in Macs -- it was always the software. The hardware has always done an excellent job running the slow, underpowered, under-equipped software.

• top of the range PC will still beat it hands down for performace

Actually, this is not true, contrary to the reports you might have seen. Yeah, a truly high end PIII or Athlon might beat a G4 for raw performace, but the beauty is, G3's and G4's are common, and relatively inexpensive, while the high end x86 chips are rare and expensive. The average G3 will toast the shit out of the average PII or PIII.

darren

• The seven-dish prototype unveiled today is a precursor to what will eventually be an array of hundreds, perhaps thousands of small backyard-type satellite dishes linked by sophisticated electronics to create an unparalleled SETI observing instrument

So, once this is fully in place, not only will they have folks all around the world crunching numbers for them, but they'll have folks all around the world listening for them as well. Now *that's* cool.

It makes sense, though. One of the arguments for helping SETI was that your computer is idle most of the time. Similarly, your satellite dish is also idle most of the time; why not make use of it?

Now, if I only had a satellite dish...

darren

We, as a community, tend to look at "patent" and see "software patent." A better question, when we talk about patent reform, is whether patents work in general. Yeah, they tend to be a bad idea when it comes to software, but in general, are they a bad idea?

We, as a community, need to take off the rose-colored Open Source glasses, and look at patents in a broader scope. Most of the patents that are issued every year have nothing to do with software. Many of them are not even related to technology. Before we start "reforming" patent law, maybe we should look at other areas that have a lot of patent activity.

I don't intend this as a flame! We hear about software patents all the time but there is definitely more to the patent picture.

darren

• Parents should not be allowing 13 y/o or younger children to surf the net unsupervised and if they were not neglecting their responsibility the COPPA law would not be necessary.

To a certain extent this is true, but a parent can't always be with h{is,er} children. Kids go to school, where there are probably computers. Kids visit friends, where there are probably computers. Kids spend time on their home PC doing homework, etc.

I have a 7 month old son, so things like this are constantly on my mind. Some day soon, some day very soon, he is going to start using the computer we have at home (he is already showing interest as he sits on my lap and we read Slashdot together -- he bangs on the keys and reaches for the screen), and I am not going to be able to be with him (as a progammer, I spend a lot of time at work). The best I can hope for is that by the time he is using it when alone, my wife and I have taught him what he should be doing and what he shouldn't be doing. Never give information out over the internet. Never make plans to meet someone you met over the internet. The same things as *I* was taught growing up about the phone -- if someone calls, and you don't know who it is, ask; if someone asks who you are, don't tell them until you know who they are; etc.

• Will COPPA work? No, like all other laws it will not impact the law-breakers and the law-abiding people (except Disney!!!) were already doing what is necessary to protect our childrens rights

This is the fate of most regulation-type laws, unfortunately. Gun control laws tends to fail (or at least fail to live up to expectations) for the same reasons. Prohibition failed for this reason. The real answer is education -- I need to teach my kids what is right and wrong, and what is appropriate and inappropriate.

darren

<rant> That poor, disillusioned man. Someone help him. Someone explain to him the difference between reading stuff on a monitor and long term digital storage. Someone exlpain to him the difference in size between 100,000 physical books and 100,000 books on optical media. Someone explain to him how much simpler it is to reproduce and redistribute the same books to every schoolkid in America if they are in a digital format. Someone explain to him how many trees will be saved if we don't have to have a printed copy of all 26 million books that are in the LOC. Someone explain to him how books available on demand is hundreds of times more convenient than a single copy of a book shared among dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of interested readers.

Someone please take out their cluestick and hit him hard. Someone remove him and put someone knowledgable in his place, before he reduces the LOC to a useless graveyard of dead trees and corroding media.</rant>

Please don't misunderstand me -- I understand why the LOC exists, I understand why we need to preserve books, I understand the value of preserving rare and unusual works. I don't understand the closed-minded attitute toward a little technological innovation.

darren

This is absolutely deplorable. Hook the customers, cancel the line containing the product they bought (bait and switch), and then offer a "new, improved" version -- that just happens to come with a monthly service fee. This is disgusting. Even Microsoft isn't this sneaky.

darren