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Even Powell's doesn't have any.

I believe you're thinking of Borders, not BN. BN and Amazon are still bitter enemies, AFAIK. Amazon has taken over Borders, We Be Toys 'N Shit, and a few others. BN is still separate, but a sad shadow of Amazon.com.

If you really want to Fight the Man(TM), you might want to check out Powell's City of Books

"The definitive expose of Al Gore's slimy political career, from his gay-baiting to his whoring for the State of Israel, from his attempts to eliminate affirmative action to his shameless support of the death penalty and moronic war on drugs, from his deep ties to Big Oil to his innumerable betrayals on the environment. It's all here. Everything you feared and more about the man who was raised to be president."

The oldest church in South Carolina is made of rammed earth as well as the oldest church in the San Francisco area (towers that Hanibal built in Spain are also still standing). The new techniques of using rebar to tie the pad and rehinforcing top beam together is great. Here's a good book on it.

We're planning on having a rammed earth ground floor with a timber framed second story. The ground floor is going to be designed for additions to be added on as needed (large doorways in exterior walls).

For interior use, we're going to use a manifold system that will pipe water to where ever it's to be used. You can think of it as two hubs, one hot, one cold and flexible pcv/vinal lines that run, in the ceiling, from the hub to the faucet. This gives you flexibility in placing sinks and such or even repurposing rooms. For sewage, that'll run under the floor. This'll be accessable from the basement. We're looking into grey water recovery as we'll be doing this in New Mexico (not that any place can't stand some water conservation).

For networking, am going to be running hamster tunnels (smurf tunnels?) along the base of the walls as well as along the top of the walls, between ceiling and upper floor. Don't know about adding wireless access points/antennas to the system.

The layout of the house will also make use of berming along the north walls and a porch along the south walls that will block most of the summer sun but allow winter sun to heat the place. Some of this design will come from earthships being built in New Mexico. We'd like to be totally off the net, but our love of tech makes this a distant dream (unless low power laptops take over for just about everything).

The article includes a graph that shows a steep drop-off of their stock price.

The very first thing you do is to look at the numbers on the axes of the graph. The vertical axis of the graph is price of one stock share in dollars, but the graph goes from $15.43 down to $13.86, so that steep drop-off wasn't as steep as the graph makes it look. If you plot the same numbers on a graph that goes from $16 down to $0, it's not nearly as dramatic. The stock price fell by about 10.6%, while the graph makes it look more like 100%.

To learn more about tricky graphs and other misleading charts, read How to Lie with Statistics, a truly great and fun book.

steveha

At the time I was thinking of going into security consulting. I thought it would be best to really study up.

They live near Portland, Oregon, which is the home of the famous Powells bookstore, and Powells Technical Books, probably the best technical bookstore in the world. It's worth visiting Portland just to go to Powell's technical books.

So on a visit to the bookstore I bought a copy of 2600 just to see what the bad guys were up to. You know, so I'd be a better security expert.

Well, this got my parents really worried. They thought I was going to start cracking people's boxes. My mother, in a very frightened tone of voice, asked me to promise never to do that. I don't think they really believed that I was trying to learn about it so I could do a better job as a consultant.

Considering that the government can now force bookstores to reveal book purchases without either a search warrant or your knowledge, I would suggest purchasing the book (and any security books) from a brick & mortar bookstore, and paying cash.

If my mother thought I was studying it so I could become 31337, imagine what John Ashcroft might think.

Gotta love a bunch of techies who entirely dismiss reason when it's in the way of fantasy.
Okay, let's see if you can figure this out if I say it in small words.
Feynman _ wrote _ those _ books.
And what a surprise, he was biased towards making himself look good. I'ld recomend Gleick's Genius or any of a dozen other sources for a less biased account.
The short form? Feynman was massively insecure, never was as successful at dating as his own writing makes it appear, and spent much of his life paying off one or more women who blackmailed him after some ill-considered romp or other.
Oh, btw, I hung out with one of his former assistants back in '85 to '87 and she was mighty clear about the distance between the reality and his own claims. Let's just say that she was not impressed with his social skills or his appeal to women. (And since she thought *I* was cute, clearly she had no problem with geek guys per se.)

After way too many years of seeing nerds (derogotory term intentional) citing Feynman's misogynist, fictionalized, self-aggrandizing, b*lllsh*t as a training manual, I've really had enough.

Okay, moving on to happier things, you folk really should check /. before wandering off so quickly.
The ever thorough bellus quies put together this far better set of geek dating links. At least a dozen /.ers should by now have mentioned Eric S. Raymond's detailed dating guide, while for the halfway there, need-to-RTFM, folk, here are the man pages on woman parts.
Those, came from $$$exyGal's links.
Or you could try hanging out here or here to finding the geekishly inclined, though first you might want to download and read this painful but excellent overview.

If on the other hand (heh, heh) you've already given up on finding a human of your own, then you might want to drop by here, here, and here.

Good luck to all of us.

Rustin

Why buy kid's books from shmucks like zoobooks when there are plenty of quality, local bookstores with Internet presence - and acceptable privacy policies - throughout the US that would love to help you?

It's like spam - it quits working when no one buys.

This is likely to be the same company described in the excellent book Fast Food Nation. In the chapter called "Why the fries taste good" the author describes the "flavor industry" in New Jersey which provides the chemicals to make things taste "smoky" or "flame-broiled".

I'm sure there are a lot of additives that they have left over from General Foods International Coffees that they are dying to use so that your latte has even more latte flavor.

The easiest security breaches are to be had via social engineering, such as human manipulation and simple password guesses such as the default password for a certain system.

What, you mean like THIS?

O brave new world, that hath such people in it!

Also, Sarah has written a book: In Code: A Mathematical Journey.

Some of us, like myself, still buy CDs from BMG and Columbia House

I'm a hardcore geek and have expert certification on everything from Windows 2000 to A+ certs to Novell Network certs to CISCO certs to _____ . You name it, I've done it.

Sorry to rant, but:

Some of us, like myself, still buy CDs from BMG and Columbia House

I'm a hardcore geek and have expert certification on everything from Windows 2000 to A+ certs to Novell Network certs to CISCO certs to _____ . You name it, I've done it.

Sorry to rant, but:

Some of us, like myself, still buy CDs from BMG and Columbia House

I'm a hardcore geek and have expert certification on everything from Windows 2000 to A+ certs to Novell Network certs to CISCO certs to _____ . You name it, I've done it.

Sorry to rant, but:

the website for the Powell's used/new bookstore chain based out of Portland, Oregon. The flagship store, of course, is Powell's city-block-sized "City of Books," which is listed in every tour guide I've seen for the northwest. They have an area in the science fiction section where tons of science fiction writers who have come through magic-markered their names on the post/wall/whatever, and they have big-name book tours all the time.

Why you should use their website, of course, is that every book in inventory (and a few that aren't - *cough, cough*), new or used, rare, collectible, is in their online search system. If you live in the area, you can even have them collect your order at one of their stores for pickup, which, when I lived there, I often did.

Oh, yah, if that's not enough to convince you to try them out in person or online, they apparently now have a free shipping deal, as well.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Powell's, but I spent lots of money there, and they were(are) an important customer of my former employer. I selfishly want you to buy from them so they're still around next time I visit!

the website for the Powell's used/new bookstore chain based out of Portland, Oregon. The flagship store, of course, is Powell's city-block-sized "City of Books," which is listed in every tour guide I've seen for the northwest. They have an area in the science fiction section where tons of science fiction writers who have come through magic-markered their names on the post/wall/whatever, and they have big-name book tours all the time.

Why you should use their website, of course, is that every book in inventory (and a few that aren't - *cough, cough*), new or used, rare, collectible, is in their online search system. If you live in the area, you can even have them collect your order at one of their stores for pickup, which, when I lived there, I often did.

Oh, yah, if that's not enough to convince you to try them out in person or online, they apparently now have a free shipping deal, as well.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Powell's, but I spent lots of money there, and they were(are) an important customer of my former employer. I selfishly want you to buy from them so they're still around next time I visit!

doesn't DNA have 4 letters only anyway?
thats what my bio teacher said, i think...

The Yijing has Yin and Yang. It comes up with 64 permutations, of which Hexagram # 24 [ Standard Sequence ] corresponds to Codon UAA, which just happens to be a representation of "stop". The most common english word for Hexagram # 24 is return.

For more on that topic go read Johnson F Yan DNA and the I Ching, Martin Schonberger The I Ching and the Genetic Code and Kayta Walter Tao of Chaos. Go hunt for them at Powell's yourself.

So all you need is Yin and Yang. Binary.

Read Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player by Robert Rodriguez

And Powell's World Of Books...

Powells Books offers a better associate program for web sites. Why even deal with Amazon's crap?

Try The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.

I'd like sections of the book that have COMPLETE setup instructions for specific purposes such as hardware firewall, web server, and mail server. Make all the right decisions so that I don't have make them myself. Provide a CD in the back of the book that gives me everything I need. Update the book yearly, and I will buy a copy every year. You could even assume I would buy specific hardware, if that makes things easier. The cost of hardware is small compared with the cost of discovering all the quirks myself.

The biggest problem with technical books is incompleteness. An author will give about 40% of the information necessary to accomplish a task, and call that enough. The reader must read man pages and sources all over the internet to make something actually work. I'd like a book that assumes that I don't want to make particular software a lifestyle, but just want to accomplish something. Once I have something working, I can decide later how much time I want to spend becoming more knowledgeable.

The city in which I live, Portland, Oregon, USA, has what is said to be the biggest bookstore in the world, Powell's. I went to Powell's technical bookstore and looked at about 20 books on Samba. ALL of them were very incomplete, as was easily proven by comparing them with each other. ALL of them were poorly written. Most assumed that you already knew something about Samba. Samba is an important subject; file serving Microsoft OS clients using Linux is a first step toward reducing dependence on closed source software.

I see lot's of post saying things like why would I want to read this when I have the free 1.4 API javadocs online?

I agree. The best books aren't copies of the API that tell you all the good things about the language. The best books show you the warts and gotchas of the language. For C++ this book was Scott Meyer's Effective C++. Java has a similarly named and equally useful book Effective Java which I have found invaluable. Not as good but still worth the purchase price is Java Pitfalls

I haven't read More Java Pitfalls Has anyone read this? Is it any good?

I see lot's of post saying things like why would I want to read this when I have the free 1.4 API javadocs online?

I agree. The best books aren't copies of the API that tell you all the good things about the language. The best books show you the warts and gotchas of the language. For C++ this book was Scott Meyer's Effective C++. Java has a similarly named and equally useful book Effective Java which I have found invaluable. Not as good but still worth the purchase price is Java Pitfalls

I haven't read More Java Pitfalls Has anyone read this? Is it any good?

I see lot's of post saying things like why would I want to read this when I have the free 1.4 API javadocs online?

I agree. The best books aren't copies of the API that tell you all the good things about the language. The best books show you the warts and gotchas of the language. For C++ this book was Scott Meyer's Effective C++. Java has a similarly named and equally useful book Effective Java which I have found invaluable. Not as good but still worth the purchase price is Java Pitfalls

I haven't read More Java Pitfalls Has anyone read this? Is it any good?

I see lot's of post saying things like why would I want to read this when I have the free 1.4 API javadocs online?

I agree. The best books aren't copies of the API that tell you all the good things about the language. The best books show you the warts and gotchas of the language. For C++ this book was Scott Meyer's Effective C++. Java has a similarly named and equally useful book Effective Java which I have found invaluable. Not as good but still worth the purchase price is Java Pitfalls

I haven't read More Java Pitfalls Has anyone read this? Is it any good?

For a construction project all of these elements are mapped out well in advance, which is why the construction industry can work on lower margins.

This is where so many people get it wrong. Making software is not analogous to making buildings. Making software is analogous to designing buildings. (You'll notice that the Design Patterns movement is based on a technique for architects, not builders.)

(And, by the way, if you think real-world construction projects follow a simple waterfall model like that, you should read about the Panama Canal.)

XP is the embodyment of the non-engineering approach to computing that pervades this marketplace. The idea that you can build it wrong and change

What makes you think that if you design the hell out of it up front and build strictly to that design you won't find, six months or a year later when the project's finally finished, that you'll have built it wrong anyway? Or worse, what happens when halfway through you realize that your design was wrong, or your requirements were inaccurate or inadequate -- and you're locked into a process that requires a ream of up-front paperwork before you can change what you're building?

don't design, "code and check"

Again, coding is a design task. Everything else is just requirements gathering.

have a unit test written by a bad coder to check his own bad code.

I think you've missed the point of XP's approach to unit testing. The unit tests aren't written to "check the code" -- I agree, it's pretty pointless for someone to write a test that proves that his code does exactly what he coded it to do. The unit tests are written to describe what the code is supposed to do -- they're like a design document that can automatically validate the code that implements the design.

Also, pair programming -- even when it's not between "two people of equal ability", so long as they both have enough ability and they're communicating well -- goes a long way toward alleviating the problem of having the watchmen watch themselves.

Don't knock XP if you haven't tried it.

Uncap your modem, get convicted, go to jail. Okay, I can live with that. Bummer... don't do that.

Be accused of uncapping your modem, get aquitted, and not get your stuff back... now that's just wrong.

Over the last twenty years, the power of law enforcement to seize assets and declare them forfeit WITHOUT A CONVICTION has increased dramatically. In case you're wondering, the vast majority of people who have lost assets to civil forfieture and later been aquitted have NOT had their assets returned.

Mostly, this expansion is due to the drug war; it was introduced as a way to get at "ill-gotten gains". The value of the goods forfeited is often out of all proportion to the value gained through the crime. That in itself may violate the eighth amendment... what chaps my hide is the presumption of guilt inherent to the use of civil forfieture by law enforcement.

Law enforcement makes mistakes, just like everyone else. Given that they are not infalliable, it seems absurd that there is no guaranteed recovery of incorrectly seized assets.

This isn't simply a matter of "your rights online" or a problem with the cable company. It doesn't have anything to do with technology, or even the drug war. This is a matter of your constitutional rights being trampled by government. Learn about it, and vote!

A good resource: Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure

Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat.
Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat.
Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat.
Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat

I'm sorry, I *know* that this isn't your intent, but that sounds like a perfect chorus for half the punk music I've heard over the years.
Can't you just hear it?
Heat the cheap, fatty meat. (badam, thump!)
Cool the cheap, fatty meat (kabam, bam!)
(wave of nasty guitars and energetic screaming)

As for kebob places, try Brooklyn or even MacDougal Street.

Oh, and btw, about the "foreigner" crack, even beyond what other have already pointed out about regulatory and training counters for that,
bugger off.
In my experience "foreigners" are *more* willing then "real" "Americans" or "Britishers" to find out what the relevant procedure is and follow it. I believe the Snowcrash consult-the-binder scenes articulate this far better then I ever will.

Rustin

*heh*

Read (or re-read, given where I'm posting) Mostly Harmless . This sounds alot like the interaction between the future Guide and the "Whole Sort of General Mish Mash" described in that book. I believe chapter 17 has a good description.

James Morrow wrote a beautiful novel called The Wine of Violence partly about the cathartic effects of violent fantasy. Morrow is probably the best satirical writer in English, and one of the best since Jonathan Swift.

Briefly, a spaceship returning to Earth stumbles upon a planet where people live in harmony inside a walled city. There's no violence, physical or psychological, at all. Periodically these people go to special temples and live out their most violent fantasies in virtual reality; the ecto-plasmic by-product of this fantasy is called "noctus" and it pours out to surround the walls of the city.

See, the wastelands around the city are populated by the brain-eaters, humanoids who indulge their violent tendancies to the extreme. Problematically, the crew of the ship must convince the peaceful city-folk to wage war on the brain-eaters so they can return to their ship and escape.

This plot is mostly a hanger for Morrow's explorations of the nature of humanity and violence. Morrow's other writings are also fascinating. He's one of three or four SF authors I'll buy in hardback 'cause I can't wait for paper. :)

James Morrow wrote a beautiful novel called The Wine of Violence partly about the cathartic effects of violent fantasy. Morrow is probably the best satirical writer in English, and one of the best since Jonathan Swift.

Briefly, a spaceship returning to Earth stumbles upon a planet where people live in harmony inside a walled city. There's no violence, physical or psychological, at all. Periodically these people go to special temples and live out their most violent fantasies in virtual reality; the ecto-plasmic by-product of this fantasy is called "noctus" and it pours out to surround the walls of the city.

See, the wastelands around the city are populated by the brain-eaters, humanoids who indulge their violent tendancies to the extreme. Problematically, the crew of the ship must convince the peaceful city-folk to wage war on the brain-eaters so they can return to their ship and escape.

This plot is mostly a hanger for Morrow's explorations of the nature of humanity and violence. Morrow's other writings are also fascinating. He's one of three or four SF authors I'll buy in hardback 'cause I can't wait for paper. :)

Oh, I agree. I mean, no Christian writer ever admitted the possibility of life outside of Earth. I can't think of a single devout Christian writer who even considered it.

Just because you're not religious, friend, doesn't mean that you're not also a moron.

hyacinthus.

Oh, I agree. I mean, no Christian writer ever admitted the possibility of life outside of Earth. I can't think of a single devout Christian writer who even considered it.

Just because you're not religious, friend, doesn't mean that you're not also a moron.

hyacinthus.

I've lost fifteen pounds, and am still losing weight. I also have stopped having attacks of hypoglycemia, which used to happen almost every day.

The diet emphasizes low carbohydrate (max 30 grams a day - I can eat half an english muffin a day, and that's about it), and moderately high protein, but really emphasizes eating lots more vegetables.

They don't pretend that it's balanced nutrition, and explicitly say that one must take vitamin and mineral supplements, which I do.

Once I lose all the weight I want, I can increase the amount of carbo I eat, but I don't think I ever want to go back to the level of carbohydrate intake I used to have - a couple of cans of Coca Cola Classic a day along with a heaping plate of spaghetti.

I've tried low-fat diets before and never had any luck with them. Neither have I been able to lose weight purely from exercising since I've been in my 30's (worked in my early 20's though). But I feel better enough with the Protein Power diet that I have started bicycling again for the first time in several years (but I haven't bicycled so much that my weight loss can be attributed to exercise yet).

I weigh 235 pounds, down from 250. My aim is to weigh 180. I'm 5'11".

Another good archaeology parody book to check out is "Motel of the Mysteries" by David Macaulay. It's a good read, about an amateur archaeologist (Howard Carson) who falls into a shaft while exploring the ancient country of Usa in 4022. His discoveries at the "Toot-n-C'mon" motel are classic. =)

Since the 9/11 disaster many people have voiced concerns about the diminished regard for civil rights as a consequence of the heightened demand for security. I believe many of those concerns to be unwarranted and unrealistic, and I do not subscribe to the theory that (selective, contained) violations of privacy must inevitably lead onto a slippery slope towards totalitarianism.

HOWEVER of late, a number of influential jurists, such as Alan Dershowitz (defense attorney for e.g. OJ Simpson and Mike Tyson) and Richard Posner (senior judge for the court of appeals), have been arguing in favor of the use of torture as a valid (if not legal) means of interrogation. Alan Dershowitz in particular likes to fantasize about inserting needles under the fingernails of subjects, in his latest book.

The US government has detained hundreds of people without any form of due process. This is one thing, and quite imaginably a necessary thing given the circumstances, even if it tramples numerous civil rights. HOWEVER to then proceed and contemplate inflicting pain on these people in order to obtain a forced confession is quite another.

Legalized torture? Just Say No.

In part it's a history of physics from World War II onward, in part it's a look into one physicists love of the subject.

I found it inspiring.

I have a B.A. in Physics from UC Santa Cruz.

I also recommend the Feynman Lectures if you want to actually understand the material. I think they're very readable. You will need to know some differential and integral calculus to be able to understand them, but you will need those for any real physics textbook - Newton invented calculus in order to study physics.

Finally, Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb is just an astounding book. It's a history of physics from the 20's or so up through the 50's. It really communicates the feelings of the times.

After reading it I found myself saying "I could do that" and finally got it together to go back to school and finish my Physics degree - I should have graduated in '86 but didn't graduate until '93.

In part it's a history of physics from World War II onward, in part it's a look into one physicists love of the subject.

I found it inspiring.

I have a B.A. in Physics from UC Santa Cruz.

I also recommend the Feynman Lectures if you want to actually understand the material. I think they're very readable. You will need to know some differential and integral calculus to be able to understand them, but you will need those for any real physics textbook - Newton invented calculus in order to study physics.

Finally, Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb is just an astounding book. It's a history of physics from the 20's or so up through the 50's. It really communicates the feelings of the times.

After reading it I found myself saying "I could do that" and finally got it together to go back to school and finish my Physics degree - I should have graduated in '86 but didn't graduate until '93.

Experiments don't have to be huge, fancy-schmancy deals that take all day and have millions of data collection points. They can be more like snapshots. Try:

• Go outside (or stay inside with a tarp and high ceiling). Fill an empty film cannister 1/2 to 2/3 full of water. Drop half an Alka-Seltzer tablet into the cannister, and cap it tightly. QUICKLY put it down on the ground and back up. As the tablet dissolves, it'll fizz-fizz. The quickly-expanding gas will pop the top off the cannister. The experiment shows how gases expand. Alternatively, you can take a wide-mouthed balloon and put it over the cannister mouth to catch all the generated gas.
  
• Get slinkies and go to the staircase in the building. While in the hallway, you can have the kiddies make transverse waves and compression waves. Explain that big waves are loud noises (amplitude), and more nodes in a given length of slinky make for a higher pitched "sound." Then get a violin and/or guitar and play with pitches. Back to the hallway to make propagating waves (short, quick snaps at one end travel to the other and bounce back). This is how slinkies work on the stairs, transferring the energy. (Note: this experiement will stretch out the slinkies).
  
• Get a simple cake recipe. Divide up the kiddies into groups. Have each group omit one ingredient. You can do the baking if the kids are too young. Find out what ingredients do in the kitchen. (You might want to try the book How to Read a French Fry (and other links in that article) to get some ideas.)
  
• Take your fingerprint (finger on clean glass) and blow it up with the photocopier (alter some lines if you wish). Get some other fingerprints (about 20 is good). Make up a mystery (theft of magnifying glasses works). Have small groups match a found fingerprint to the suspects' fingerprints using transparancy sheets and markers (you mark only the ends of some lines). Have a discussion on whorls, loops, arches, and so on.
  
• Do a unit on the weather. There's usually lots of it. Cloud types, weather symbols on TV, how tornados form, what a front is, etc. Have the kids make their own "TV" forecast.
  

It's just thinking of things to do once you have a topic. Chances are, if you ever thought, "gee, I wonder how that works," the students in your class will too. Look it up!

This isn't the first time that we've gone off the collective deep end this way. A couple yars ago, I read American Aurora, which tells the story of the 1800 presidential election through the lens of contemporary newspapers. The curtailment of liberty and supression of dissent that went on then are absolutely appalling to me, and probably to any modern westerner.

Those who do know history are doomed to watch others repeat it. :)

Well, I see your point, but if we're going to go into reading lists then, come on! There are much more crucial books then those.
Lessee, first of all, there's Ecotopia The manifesto of the tech-green world (Ecotopia Emerging isn't bad either), then there's Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, the book that started the eco-radical movement. Then we move on to early cyberpunk, which was actually very eco-oriented. Check out Shockwave Rider by John Brunner or for a more recent approach, anything by the revered Neal Stephenson (other than the vast wanking Cryptonomicon), who years before he did books like Snow Crash and Diamond Age actually made his living as an environmental activist.
Lastly, read Walden Two by, of all people, B.F. Skinner, that, while describing how to build a society from scratch, lays out very neatly most of the consumption and socialization issues behind much of the environmental movement.
Of course I could recommend Silent Spring but I consider it overrated.
That should get you started.
Rustin

First, more or less on-topic, and to clear up a common misconception: yes, the USPS has a monopoly on first-class mail. No, we shouldn't consider allowing competition. What most people don't know is that the USPS is mandated (by the same government that gave it the monopoly in the first place) to pick and and deliver at every address in the country every day. Think of the mind-boggling logistics behind that statement. Then realize that FedEx and UPS sometimes give their own deliveries to the USPS because they can't be bothered to go Smallville.

Second, on the Civil War remark, check out Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South , which is based on just that premise: how could the South win the Civil War, and what would happen afterwords? Very nicely done.

I was just thinking about that book, while reading this...

The basic gyst is that people stage fights with each other, film them, and then sell the films.

Actually, that was just a minor point of the overall story. But it was stilla cool idea. Also, the cameras hovered, so you can't really think of them as planes.

If you want to see another story where floating cameras get a lot of treatment, try Farewell Horizontal, by K.W. Jeter.
It's out of print, though, so you'll have to hit a used bookstore.

Apple sucessfully moved their computers to an entirely new processor line ten years ago, when they switched from the 68000 series to the PowerPC. They did exactly what Intel and Microsoft are doing now: including an emulation layer to maintain backwards compatability. x86 programs, to the best of my knowledge, will run on 64-bit Itaniums.

Apple has done plenty of stupid things in the past (read Apple by Jim Carlton if you're curious), but sucessfully switching from 68000 series processors to PowerPC wasn't one of them.

A very interesting read to augment your argument is a book by Thomas Frank called "One Market Under God". It works hard to undermine and expose the myth of the free markets, and how we have been used as consumers and fed lies as to how the markets are the great liberator. As such, what does it matter how all of our jobs have been shipped overseas when we have the gift of the markets.

I watched Thatcher state that on a PBS documentry about Thatcher/Reagan and the great market liberation of the modern world.

I picked up this book right afterwards.

Remeber VA Linux anyone?

Thaths

Buy from Powell's. They're less evil than either of the others... and you haven't lived until you've spent a Saturday in their City of Books [pdf].

Buy from Powell's. They're less evil than either of the others... and you haven't lived until you've spent a Saturday in their City of Books [pdf].