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The subject of this post is the title of a book I've wanted to read for some time (you can find it at Powell's), which this "rant" about blue LEDs brought back to mind. Some design decisions are made for the wrong reason and some things are designed very poorly -- this goes for physical products as well as software. [I was tempted to insert "Microsoft" in there, but there are plenty of others to blame for poorly designed software -- not me, of course. ;-)]

does that mean that if you have a gun and a knife, and I have the opportunity to reasearch a defense against the gun, I shouldn't

Yes, when your development of your ten thousand dollar "anti-gun" technology would obviously spur me on to carrying $5 moltov cocktails.

Do you feel safer now that you've got your "anti-gun" device walking the streets filled with criminals carrying moltov cocktails?

True, but again, every decoy built into a MIRV is effectively a kill, as it replaces a warhead

Ahhhh, so it becomes an arms race of us building anti-missile weapons at $1 Billion dollars per unit against them building decoys at $10 Million dollars per. Oh well, since "each decoy they build" is obviously such a huge "win" for us......

Are these the same scientists that are willing to throw BILLIONS and TRILLIONS of dollars at the most esoteric pure-research programs detecting primal particles (SSSC) or gravity waves?

Mis-direction. What does that have to do with the Trillion dollars you want to spend on Anti-Missile defence? So their arguments are illogical SIMPLY because they are VAGUELY associated with something else you aren't intelligent enough to see the use for?

I mean, Quantum Mechanics, what the fuck is that good for???? We should have never wasted all that money between 1890 and 1950 figuring all that shit out. Imagine how much wealthier we would all be!!!

Ridiculous circular logic. Because I'm safer from them, they are more likely to attack me?

But your favorite "deterrance theory" is built on "circular logic" as well. "By building weapons to wipe life from the face of the earth, we are in fact safer from our enemy."

You can't have one without the other. By your "anti-circular-logic" reasoning, instead of building anti-missile technology we should in fact simply get rid of all our nuclear missiles, then there won't be any more "circular logic" stuff that you don't like, and voila we're safer!!

I mean, how could building weapons possibly make us safer?

a little chicanery to advance their politics

I'm sorry, some of the most prominent intelligent logical minds on the globe present a well reasoned series of arguments, you post a bunch of absolute utterly illogical tripe and then claim *they're* the ones using "chicanery"???

FUCKING TROLLS.

I worked at a company doing cutting-edge stuff and we were always looking for stuff to patent. Our intent was to create a defensive portfolio that would also look enticing to VCs. But we never, ever thought of pursuing patents on the patently obvious (pun intended).

One-click could be argued as a novel business practice. But crap like this is ridiculous. It's like the old joke of adding "with a computer" to anything and calling it novel. I've already moved to Powells for books, but I'll have to intensify my efforts to get others to stop shopping with Amazon.com.

For instance, if you lived in the Rocky Mountain region, I'd suggest The Tattered Cover. If you lived in Portland & the Northwest, I'd suggest Powell's, and if you live in California I'd point you towards my personal favorite Bay Area bookstore, Cody's Books.

Independent Bookstores are to Barnes & Noble as Linux is to Windows, etc.

Please consider using independent stores when buying books: Amazon & B&N might be "easy" and have nifty websites...but that doesn't make them GOOD. Remember, indeps can provide the same book, with the same service, while helping, rather than hurting, small business and media independence.

... is the (+1 Funny) for this?

The idea that we could grow neurons on silicon is one of those big steps that looks to lead us into the Johnny Mnemonic world that Gibson was talking about just a couple stories prior to this one.

I am waiting for the Alastair Reynolds-style Conjoiner conversion myself, but Johnny Mnemonic will do in the meantime.

As long as it's the short story and not the film, that is.

Guilt free purchase link.

It's probably no accident that he and the The Open Source Development Lab are in Portland.

Linus doesn't actually live here. He still lives in San Jose.

Portland has the largest bookstore in the world.

Powell's always bills itself as "the largest used and new bookstore in the world". They always include that phrase "used and new", leading me to believe that there is actually a larger new-only bookstore somewhere else. But I don't know for sure.

Portland has the largest park inside a city in the world.

Not only that, we have the smallest city park, too! 452 square inches!

Linus Torvalds can go anywhere. It's probably no accident that he and the The Open Source Development Lab are in Portland. (Beaverton is one of the towns that are part of the metropolitan area of 1.4 million people called Portland.)

Portland has the largest bookstore in the world.

Portland has one of the largest and most successful dealers in contemporary art in the world. The gallery has a funny name, but shows the work of over 1,100 artists.

Portland has the largest park inside a city in the world. The park has over 74 miles of wilderness hiking trails.

Portland is the home of Pink Martini, a band that writes multi-cultural songs. One of Pink Martini's songs was once one of the most popular songs in France. You can listen to the music video.

It's a 55 minute drive from downtown Portland to the ski areas. "World Class Skiing in Your Own Backyard."

The K-12 Linux Project, in Portland, is one of the more successful projects for giving Linux to average users, who in this case are students.

Portland borders on the confluence of the Willamette River and the Columbia River, one of the largest rivers in the world. The Columbia River Gorge, on the eastern edge of Portland, is a world class wind-surfing area.

On the other hand: Q. Why do hippies come to Portland? A. Because there are no jobs.

Many people don't like the months of rain every year. They say Portland is the perfect place for slugs and ducks. (However, the rain cleans the air.)

A textbook of mine was about $115 CAD this semester; I ordered a used copy from Powells for $12 USD; I included a few other books and got free shipping. It cost me $72 CAD for four books instead of $115 (plus tax) for one new one. To sum: Powells is wonderful, esp. for Canadians, as they charge GST at the source which doesn't hold up customs.

ABEBooks is another great place to shop - they're a collection of used booksellers across NA and Europe and as such usually have everything you could ever want. You really need to watch some booksellers on shipping - one seller in Cali wanted $15 USD for shipping on a book that should only cost $3-5 USD (media book rate int'l), for example, but if you're careful you can still save a bundle.

Finally, sometimes Amazon or Barnes & Noble or other large retailers have better prices than the uni's bookstore, important for when you absolutely need that 17th edition.

To put all this into perspective: if I had bought all my books new this semester at the local store, it would have cost about $350 CAD + 13% tax; as it was, using the above methods I spent about $125 CAD total.

One final note: to do this properly you need to talk to your future profs about a month and a half before the class starts (i.e. as soon as you're registered) to get a book list, as some booksellers can take longer than others, esp. if you need to order internationally. Keep in mind that big sellers (even powells) usually ships within 24 hours. Good luck! Hope this saves you all some cash!

If this was some unmanned satellite the same detailed account would have no impact.

I can watch crash test dummies on TV for hours.

I've read all four volumes of Macarthur Job's epic "Air Disaster" series. The best episodes are the ones where the crew get the plane down with no loss of life.

No lack of texts in Portland. These are all on the shelf at Powells Technical Books at like NW 8th(maybe 9th) and Burnside. Or you can buy them online too if you don't live in Stumptown....

I was required to write a personal statement when I submitted My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable for a grant a few years ago. The grant would have paid for printing the book. I didn't win the grant. You'll find the personal statement at the end of this historical statement. Historical? Yes. We are about to review the history of photocopying My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable.

I needed to submit six copies of the comic for the grant, along with a cover letter, resume, price quote from a printer, and personal statement. I knew from experience that making six copies of the book at Kinko's would cost seven million dollars. (I made twenty copies of the book for friends at Christmas and Kinko's hijacked my reality with their high prices and spiral binding.) Since I didn't have much money, I asked a friend involved in the Boston zine community if there was a zine-friendly photocopy shop that might give a discount for homemade literary projects.

My friend recommended World's Most Ass-Kicking Printers outside Harvard Square, across from the purple waterfall. (The name and identifying characteristics have been changed for this article -- I think some of the guys still work there.) I dropped off the originals, but chickened out at the last minute and didn't ask if they gave discounts for self-published material. A few days later I picked up the copies and paid the bill. It was still a better bargain than "Stinko's." I submitted the grant application and that was that.

Days or weeks passed uneventfully. Then the world blossomed into a rainbow of possibility: I was approached by someone who said he enjoyed reading My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable. This flummoxed me because I had not given him a copy for Christmas as I did not know him. Was he perhaps on the review committee for the grant? No. And yet he had definitely read the book? The one with the karate guys yelling and cursing? Yes. After a little more prodding he admitted that his friend worked at the zine-friendly photocopy shop and had faxed him the entire book, page by page. (If I had asked Kinko's to fax the sixty-page book to someone, the cost would have been... remarkable. Listen, I can't stand Kinko's. Photocopy shops should not be privately owned; they should be state-run and publicly subsidized. A tax-paying citizen should be able to collate and laminate anything they want, for free. And if you don't vote, you should not be allowed access to America's photocopiers. I'd also like to say that Mail Boxes Etc. is a total scam. If you have to choose between sending your valuable package via Mail Boxes Etc. or leaving it on the corner with a note attached that says, "Please, somebody, take this to its destination," ALWAYS choose the latter.)

So the book was being distributed via fax without my permission. This is called "file sharing." I asked the guy if he thought his photocopy friend would make me some copies of the book at a reduced rate -- seeing as how he was already engaged in unauthorized fax piracy on the high seas of clip-art comics. He thought this was reasonable. I called the guy at the photocopy shop and we worked out an arrangement whereby I would stop by the shop on Friday afternoons with a 12-pack of beer. I would leave the beer on top of the counter and he would kick a box of books under the counter. I would lug the books (actually, collated pages) home on the subway and staple them in my living room. That is how I learned the ancient art of bookbinding.

At my zine friend's encouragement I started selling the books on consignment at a few local bookstores. I included a unique iron-on transfer with each book. The initial price was four dollars. Financially speaking, I didn't know what I was doing. But since my production cost was zero-dollars-plus-12-pack, I could afford not to understand how the publishing industry worked. No

But finally it is what is left out of The Lord of the Rings that makes one wonder if this is really a book for adults. Tolkien invented his own mythological world, but it lacks the dignity and the sinew of a real mythology, for it is without religion and essentially without sex.

Hobbits may have fur at the bottom of their legs, but they have seem to have no balls at the top; and that pretty much goes for the rest of Middle-earth, too. The women in The Lord of the Rings are few and pallid, while The Hobbit has no female characters at all [ ... ] The film of The Lord of the Rings seems to have tried to beef up the female quotient; but it was surely an uphill struggle.

If one is to regard The Lord of the Rings as a book for adults, what disturbs is not so much the absence of women [ ... ] as the absence of desire. In this work that presents itself as the representation of a whole world, there is hardly any awareness that we are sexual beings.

[ ... ] even if it can be shown that The Lord of the Rings is religious as a book and I doubt whether even this is true [ ... ] the objection is that the people within the story have no religious beliefs or practices, and are thus unlike any real human society. Tolkien always insisted, and rightly, that his work was not an allegory, but the construction of a self-subsistent world with its own history. The trouble is that it is an emotionally impoverished world, in which the blood runs very thin.

[ ... ]

Tolkien, in sum, was unable to develop his hero. Frodo has learned nothing: he is essentially the same person that he was when the adventure started, except that now he is depressed. All that Tolkien can imagine is regress, a return by the hobbits to the darling little Beatrix Potter world from which they began. Admittedly, Frodo is no longer at ease in this world, but Tolkien is unable to convey anything beyond the fact of a psychic wound: no enlargement or transformation of experience, and no philosophy of grand disillusionment, either. He is merely a person who has had a terrible time, and of course you cannot expect him not to be a little queer after all he has endured. As for Sam, the faithful retainer, he settles back quietly into tubby rusticity and picturesque anecdotage as though nothing much had happened. Contrast Parsifal, to turn to Wagner again: the hero of that opera starts as a man without experience, but he learns and changes. He discovers sexuality and self-mastery, compassion and understanding. All such growth is beyond Tolkien's range.

If all this sounds interesting (or at least controversial) the whole article is worth reading.

Yes, but David Byrne loves it and uses it to make art. I suppose we should introduce him to OpenOffice.Org Impress...

Come on, Stroustrup (the definitive language manual) first explained template specialization nearly ten years ago.

I would have to add a couple comments here. "Good Book" is a good start, but "Why this is a good book" is useful, too.

Consider a possibly significant piece of information. I am fortunate enough to live in Portland, Oregon, the home of Powell's bookstore. The technical bookstore alone is a cavern covering most of a city block. The main store is three stories tall and does cover a whole block. There are always lots of new copies of Tufte's stuff on the shelves. I have almost never seen a used copy. People buy his work and hang on to it. Anyhow....

TVDoQI, Visual Explanations, and Enivisioning Information are a lot more than how to draw useful graphs. They explain, in some detail, how to communicate potentially complex information succinctly, elegantly and understandably. They also provide excellent heuristics for detecting bad graphical representations and ways of determining when someone is trying to lie to you with pictures. The only books which come close are Schopenhauer's The Art of Controversy for argument and How to Lie With Statistics for statistical skullduggery.

Tufte uses many different styles and examples and arranges them in ways which expand the reader's view of what can be shown as well as how to do it.

I just got a copy of The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint and am very impressed. He lays out very clearly its inherent and possibly insoluble problems vis a vis information density, the abomination that is the content wizard and the colorful graphing tools which hide more than they show. He's on slightly less solid ground with the cognitive style and "straitjacket" comments; they are generally true but not necessarily so.

He's got a website where you can buy his books, monographs, posters, graph paper, and even a quarter million dollar sculpture.

"Nothing roused such British anger as protectionism, and they sometimes gave vent to it in violent language, as during the Opium War against China. But free trade only became revealed truth for them after they became sure of being the strongest power, and after they had developed their own textile industry under the umbrella of Europe's toughest protectionist legislation. In the difficult early days, when British industry was still at a disadvantage, an Englishman caught exporting raw wool was sentenced to lose his right hand, and if he repeated the sin he was hanged. It was prohibibted to bury a corpse without prior certification from the parish priest that the shroud came from a British factory."

Eduardo Galeano wrote this about the British trade policies of the early 19th Century in his 1973 book The Open Veins of Latin America

Did someone say that hard, predictive SF was dead?

, in Portland, sells on-line. This place is 4 stories of a full city block. Down the street, the have a HUGE technical bookstore also. I've never actually purchased anything there, just read it in the coffee shop.

Powell's has opened a Technical, Travel, and Cooks and Gardeners store to supplement the main branch.

No, Longhorn is about putting SQueaL Server in between the user and the file system to cock-block any attempts at mounting the filesystem without paying a vig to Redmond.
Longhorn is aptly named. Brings to mind the ithyphallic eidolon from Schrodingers Cat Trilology by Wilson.
Frank Zappa's advice comes to mind: "Keep it greasy, so it'll go down easy".

Well, if you want a (not terribly poetic, but still oddly familiar sounding) fictional look at what might happen if some philanthropist/entrepreneur was successful at RLVs, read Michael Flynn's Firestar, followed by three others in the series. Four books could've been tightened up to three, but it's still a good read.

Arianna Huffington. read her book Pigs at the Trough

In Seattle:
Boeing Museum of Flight: F-18 simulator, Air Force One, B-29, Sopwith Camel, SR-71 cockpit, air traffic control tower exhibit, etc.
Take the Monorail to the Space Needle and Experience Music Project. (Seattle Science Center is redundant if you'll visit the one in L.A.)

Portland:
McMenamins Edgefield: brewery, b&b, Tie-dye golf tournament for Jerry Garcia's birthday, galss blowing, etc.
Saturday Market(also on Sunday), great local arts&crafts&music event.
Powell's books, one of the nation's largest bookstore sprawling over an entire city block, with another store down the street full of technical books.
Authentic Chinese Garden and Japanese Garden and a friendly Zoo with a good concert series.
Indie music from Music Millenium, offbeat movies from Movie Madness, the Church of Elvis, various other wacky things geek create after six months without sunshine.
You might not be able to get into the Pittock Internet Hotel unless you're a TCP or UDP packet.

The post with L.A. suggestions was excellent, at Caltech be sure to visit the gravity wave detector if possible.

In Seattle:
Boeing Museum of Flight: F-18 simulator, Air Force One, B-29, Sopwith Camel, SR-71 cockpit, air traffic control tower exhibit, etc.
Take the Monorail to the Space Needle and Experience Music Project. (Seattle Science Center is redundant if you'll visit the one in L.A.)

Portland:
McMenamins Edgefield: brewery, b&b, Tie-dye golf tournament for Jerry Garcia's birthday, galss blowing, etc.
Saturday Market(also on Sunday), great local arts&crafts&music event.
Powell's books, one of the nation's largest bookstore sprawling over an entire city block, with another store down the street full of technical books.
Authentic Chinese Garden and Japanese Garden and a friendly Zoo with a good concert series.
Indie music from Music Millenium, offbeat movies from Movie Madness, the Church of Elvis, various other wacky things geek create after six months without sunshine.
You might not be able to get into the Pittock Internet Hotel unless you're a TCP or UDP packet.

The post with L.A. suggestions was excellent, at Caltech be sure to visit the gravity wave detector if possible.

Powell's Books takes up an entire city block, is four stories high and packed to the gills with books. I could happily wander the stacks for years. It's in downtown Portland, which is worth visiting on it's own because it's about the only American example of responsible and sensible city planning put into practice.

For geographic marvels, I highly recommend Yosemite National Park, and of course, the Grand Canyon. If you do the canyon, try to hike below the rim, instead of just gazing down into it like 99.9% of visitors do. Just be prepared, the rangers have to rescue ill prepared tourists on a daily basis. One of the best hiking destinations in the Grand Canyon is Havasupai Falls, which is on the Havasupai Reservation.

And if you're in the Southwest, you'd probably like to see some other Native American sites. One of the best cliff dwellings is Bandolier National Monument, in New Mexico. Or in Arizona, Montezuma Castle National Monument. Other Native American sites worth seeing in Arizona are Canyon De Chelly National Monument, Wupatki National Monument, Tuzigoot National Monument, and the Hopi Villages, the longest continuously inhabited village in North America. In New Mexico, there's Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins National Monument and Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. While in New Mexico, it'd be a shame to miss Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

Another geeky destination in Arizona near the Grand Canyon would be Lowell Observatory, where Percival Lowell discovered the planet Pluto.

Next, I would like to recommend the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, if you like to paddle and portage. This is located in northern Minnesota. And if you're in Minnesota, check out the city of Duluth. It's the world's most inland seaport, and a very cool place, literally. It's located at the very tip of Lake Superior, the world's largest freshwater lake. And if you really want a good Lake Superior experience, check out Isle Royale National Park or at least the Apostle Islands. Both offer great hiking and see kayaking. Those are my recommendations. Hope you can make it to at least some of them! Tim Savage Phoenix, AZ

But the real geek nirvana is Powell's Technical Books, a few blocks east.

The 70,000 square-foot "City of Books" Rangerk8 mentioned just isn't big enough, so all the computer, physics, engineering, math, etc. books are in a separate store.

Also remember Portland is one of the most un-wired cities around. Check out PersonalTelCo for info and hotspots.

Definately check out Powells as the parent post mentioned. But make sure you check Powell's Technical Bookstore located 8 blocks or so away. Computer stuff, math stuf, history of science stuff, just crazy fun nerdy stuff. Must see.

Take a look at Wacky Willys too. Just plain nerdy weird stuff. Like McGyver's play house.

Check out Hawthorne street for some good hostels and also interesting and typical portland life. Fun shops, good eats, interesting people.

And if you're here in the summer time, a little secret- the women around here are extremely easy to look at.

Above all, if you're backpacking around Oregon, welcome to one of the coolest outdoor states around. Take your pick, and within 2-3 hours (drive) you got mountains, ocean, forests, desert, and just some fun adventure potential.

And since I'm here, let me mention that if you're interested at all in white water kayaking, check out pdxkayaker.org. An incrediblely fun groups of alcoholics with a kayaking problem.

Jason

I'm skipping all of the relatively obvious must-see destinations to point out one that may slip by even someone born and raised in the US. It's in Portland, but heck, if you're hiking you're going to want to make a trip up to the Pacific Northwest, anyway.

Get a cup of good northwest coffee and spend the afternoon browsing the stacks. It takes up an entire city block, so you won't get bored. Portland's a pretty good town, too. I've had a lot of fun up there, and it's beautiful to boot.

Powells Books in Portland, OR. Allegedly the second largest bookstore in the world.

Powell's World of Books has an EXCELLENT technical bookstore, and their catalog is on-line. Powells.com

Corporations would not benefit from doing things illicitly; they would be opening themselves to liability, and anyway, litigation is clearly the prefered means of excerting force. Well, litigation and PAC funds. You seem to be attempting an analogy to the US's hunt for Hussein, but it never really makes it off the ground. Where are the similarities?

There is a fair body of discussion of this idea and many people who are quite concerned that you are very wrong.

Corporations would not benefit from doing things illicitly; they would be opening themselves to liability, and anyway, litigation is clearly the prefered means of excerting force. Well, litigation and PAC funds. You seem to be attempting an analogy to the US's hunt for Hussein, but it never really makes it off the ground. Where are the similarities?

There is a fair body of discussion of this idea and many people who are quite concerned that you are very wrong.

From IBM and The Holocaust by Edwin Black:

Dehomag and other IBM subsidiaries custom-designed the applications. [...] Moreover, the fragile machines were serviced on site about once per month, even when that site was in or near a concentration camp. [....]

IBM Germany invented the racial census--listing not just religious affiliation, but bloodline going back generations.

Just meters from the Belsen crematorium, off to the left, near the kitchens and cisterns, down a muddy path, stood the block leader's house. Inmates sometimes called this place "the lion's den." With "the lion's den" was a room for the Arbeitsdienstfuhrer, the Labor Service Leader. That is where the Hollerith punch cards were processed. [....]

In particular, Bram said in his responses that the current bandwidth ratio is 1000:1, and that he might be able to push it to 10000:1 without fundamentally disabling critical functions. Is there a CPU bottleneck now on a fast server? Would supporting 10x as many users by buying a faster pipe for the torrent server without changing the software make CPU the bottleneck? Would supporting 10 times as many users by changing data structures or algorithms like that increase the CPU load by 10x? 2x? 20x? Decrease to 0.8x? (Remember that sending fewer or smaller messages often means using less CPU to manage them, though sometimes it means more CPU to handle bit-twiddly compression.) If you want the thing changed around, those are directions to look before you start programming.

Also, if you want to change the bittorrent environment by *putting* the tracker for some interesting product on a big server, e.g. because you're Red Hat or Some Big Music/Movie Company, you also want to check these things out.

In "The Crying of Lot 49", which is a nice short fast spacy read, there's a plot thread about competing mail services and a conspiracy that conducts its private communications in a way that, if you refer to the name of the product as "waste" rather than "W A S T E", indicates you're clearly not part of their group. There are also email systems called "Trystero" for similar reasons, and it makes looking at post office boxes in Scandinavia quite silly even without sampling the local agricultural products.

Not to offend anyone, but I've never really gotten the whole obsession with Ender's game. (I've only read the first book in the series). It seemed like a pretty good story to me, but it's not like you put it down after reading it and think "that story completely changed the way I see the world."

If I were going to recommend a couple of really excellent books for hacker summer reading, I'd aim for some quality writers who are also going to make you sit down and think a bit afterwards.

First, I'd go with Jack Womack. Strictly in terms of how he writes, I think he's one of the most interesting SF writers around. His books experiment very interestingly with language (although they are page-turner readable), with ideas about the post-national or post-government future of the world, with artificial intelligence, and even with mutant post human freaks.

The first book I read by him was Ambient, about a corporate assasin in New York City in the not-so-distant future. The main character thinks and tells the story in an oddly compelling near-future english slang that will have you thinking in Ambient yourself by the end of the book. Another, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, is a kind of prequel to Ambient, in which a young Upper East Side rich girl watches her world collapse into post-national chaos. The language in the book changes from proper english (with a snotty schoolgirl attitude) to Womack's invented post-English gradually to reflect the character's own slide into violent street life as the city collapses around her.

Another hacker classic I have not seen mentioned here (surprisingly) is Vernor Vinge's Across Realtime series(there are three, read them all), which many people credit with inventing cyberpunk (the first one precedes Gibson). A more recent Vinge book, and my favorite, is A Fire Upon the Deep. Vinge is not (I would say) as good a writer as Womack, but he is a hell of a lot better than most of the hacks I've seen mentioned in this discussion, and he's had by far some of the most interesting and influential ideas in SF writing.

Of course you're not looking for music criticism on /., but I don't think your lack of orders has anything to do with MP3 availability.

I only heard one track -- "Drop of a Hat". The song was interesting but it's crying out for some engineering work and a producer, as implied above. A few simple recording and mixing techniques would render the tune much more listenable. For me at least, it was hard to hear through the mix to decide if I even liked the song or not.

It's cool you're trying to promote your work this way, but I get the feeling you have a "build it and they will come" kind of attitude. I don't think that approach is going to work in music -- online or off.

Nobody else wanted to sell used items next to new items because they didn't think it would work

Except of course Powell's who has been doing this for years, in real life and on the web. I'm sure there are others.

And even aside from the teaching, do the classrooms have enough *electricity* for them? You can't depend on a laptop having more than an hour's battery life, in spite of what the ads said when they were brand new (which was usually overoptimistic then, and battery life decreases rapidly as machines get to be a couple of years old, so the _seniors_ are definitely going to need to plug in their machines if they haven't replaced the ones they bought freshman year.) On the other hand, if schools can use them to replace paper copies of textbooks, so the kids who are getting new laptop weight to carry around in their backpacks can leave their books back in their rooms, that may be a win. Works fine for classical literature (anything out of copyright, i.e. pre-Disney), but not so hot for most of the textbook market.

They're not going to save any natural resources by having you use computers instead of paper. Nor will they save money. Sure, the paper you use in a year will probably outweigh the computer, but you'll spend more than $100/year on computers, while you won't conceivably use that much paper writing by hand :-) And computers encourage you to print stuff a lot more than you'd expect, unless they make *that* inconvenient.

The real environmental costs have to include the disposal costs of the equipment. Laptop LCD screens are much smaller and lighter than CRTs, and other people have talked about the leaded glass and phosphor problems with CRTs. LCDs are semiconductor-based, which means there's a certain amount of toxic waste involved in the production; I don't know if it's more or less than monitors. Fortunately, Nickel Cadmium batteries are a thing of the past, but how toxic are the current battery technologies?

And how long do these things last, and how upgradable are they? Laptops are usually slower than desktops made at the same time, with smaller disks and RAM for the money. How many years will they last before being obsolete? My experience carrying a laptop around as a business traveller and train commuter was that they're not super-durable, especially the ones that are light enough that you're willing to carry them around all that time. How will they survive students?

About 10 years ago I went to hear Timothy Ferris read from his then newest book The Mind's Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context (at powells.com). The chapter he read from talked about how instead of spending a ton of money trying to figure out how to physically travel to other solar systems in search of other intel- life forms (very expensive, highly unlikely and impractical), we should instead put all of that money towards searching out and hooking up to the intergalactic network(s) that may already be out there (much cheaper and more likely), including those developed or extended by civ's that no longer exist yet live on in there stored histories. He assumed that by the time we did find such a net and figured out how to hook up to it, vr should have advanced enough such that our experience would be equal to that of physical contact and communication. Hope so.

I have NO IDEA who Crazy Eddie is.

You do not read much do you?

Oops. wrong Crazy Eddie

Crazy Eddie's was an electronics firm whose owner played fast and loose with the inventory. Some low level managers realized that they could take a some money out of the company, without getting detected. They were deteced, but the head honcho figured that was a great cover for him to scam more. Between all the insiders grabbing money from wherever, on non-existent stock, and a flattening revenue line, things goot a little suspicious, for some investigators.

And so the head honcho was charged with a couple of felonies.

The rest is history

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

I have NO IDEA who Crazy Eddie is.

You do not read much do you?

Oops. wrong Crazy Eddie

Crazy Eddie's was an electronics firm whose owner played fast and loose with the inventory. Some low level managers realized that they could take a some money out of the company, without getting detected. They were deteced, but the head honcho figured that was a great cover for him to scam more. Between all the insiders grabbing money from wherever, on non-existent stock, and a flattening revenue line, things goot a little suspicious, for some investigators.

And so the head honcho was charged with a couple of felonies.

The rest is history

Wind under Thy Wings

Amber

Half-Price Books is not nationwide, but does have locations in eleven states (WHQ is in Dallas). As a fellow Columbusite, I second FMC's complimentary post. As with most used book stores, though, you have to purchase what you can get when you find it, 'cause the next time you visit, it might be gone!

Not everyone agrees with Nicholson Baker though, not even the Society of American Archivists, but it sure is fascinating. Even more so than the current trendy paranoia about privacy.

Ironically, Baker's Vox is probably one of those books most of you are afraid of getting caught with. It's so naughty, Monica gave it to Bill, and we all found out, thanks to the pre-existing police state (but of course we had a benevolent dictator for 8 years).

If you're a perv, be a perv. If you're into homemade bombs, be into homemade bombs. If you still read Beverly Cleary even though you're a 45 year old single man... okay, I want you locked up!!