Re:actually, this manuever is still in use today
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 1
side note: by "weapons of this class" i mean nuclear-warhead gravity bombs. I don't know if the F-16 is capable of deploying stand-off weapons missiles or whatnot (never has the phrase "stand off" seemed so positive, I know I'd way to stand waaaaay the hell off from anything in that class of lethality;)).
actually, this manuever is still in use today
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's what the F-16 has to use in order to deliver weapons of this class (probably F/A-18 as well). The standard F-16 has to have physical (bomb attachment point strengthening, etc.) and avionics upgrades to handle it, but in the end it's basically just a faster, more accurate (ooh! software!;)) version of the 50's manuever. (I googled looking for a link to back this up, but came up dry, probably just not using good enough queries... One bit of unintentional humor was noting the top text ad for "F-16 nuclear delivery", namely "Find a delivery service! Anywhere in the world! www.somedeliverycompany.com" or some such... Heh, I don't think that's what they had in mind...)
IIRC, back in the mid-80's (i think), there was a big stink between Pakistan and India caused by Pakistan obtaining some of these nuclear capable F-16s. Of course, at that time it was only suspected that Pakistan had The Bomb, but when your neighbor buys a shotgun you don't have to see the shells to get a little nervous. (When is there not a big stink between Pakistan and India? Anyway, that *particular* big stink was over Pakistan's nuke-capable fighters.)
there is a variant of Befunge that does
exactly that, albeit with ASCII instead of... whichever encoding you were thinking of
using for Chinese.;-) It was called trefunge or something of that nature. (google, google...)
Ah yes, here's glFunge98 which supports Funge93,Funge98,ConcurrentFunge (multiple instruction pointers in the same space), and of course Trefunge, and somehow OpenGL gets bashed in there too.:-)
Warning: Befunge is just about the sickest thing you can think of to program in. I'm not kidding. Your brain will hurt. In no way is this post meant as an endorsement of Befunge programming as a serious undertaking or as a hobby. Drugs are bad, m'kay?
"Greed is good" as a designator for an era specifically applies to the 1980s becuase the movie from which the quote originated was set on wall street in the 1980s. (The character was the oh-so-sleazy Gordon Gecko, and the movie was, iirc, simply titled Wall Street, also starring Charlie Sheen and (again iirc) Darryl Hannah.)
And for cheap computer books, a phrase I predict to be quite popular on this site;), you can take a look at Bookpool. Cheap prices, nice interface, quick shipping, and great service. What's not to like? With bookpool, I haven't bought a single computer book from Amazon in years...
This would be like building your house out of lumber and stuff you bought from Home Depot, and having Home Depot come along after the place is built with a sign saying "Built by Home Depot, with some help by the sweaty bastard living here."
In other words, while the FSF made many valuable contributions to the Linux "movement" as it were, seeking to rename Linux is at best presumptuous.
The webapp side of the security equation is often sadly neglected by people focusing on the network and host levels of the system. (Which, don't get me wrong, are very important in their own rights.)
It's nice to see a book that addresses
"programmer-level" holes as well as "administrator-level" holes.
A very good site for (free) information on this area is http://www.owasp.org/. OWASP seems to mainly focus on webapp level security, which is ok given the wealth of informative resources out there for the host and network layer. (OWASP = Open Web Application Security Project)
There's some nice things in 2.4, certainly (e.g. USB support that works).
My home machines and laptop run it. But many of the servers I admin have been humming along fine with the 2.2 tree for quite some time, so I see very little reason to upgrade (indeed, with the hairiness in the 2.4 tree's virtual memory handling, I can several reasons NOT to upgrade beyond just change management). (Some will say that you should upgrade to 2.4 for the new firewalling features, but I prefer to put firewalling onto a dedicated openbsd machine or an appliance like a netscreen so the issue is moot for me.)
"Über Geek David Hyatt (who, among other browser projects, works on Safari) has posted an interesting discussion about tabs, what he prefers, what works, and what doesn't."
Well, I don't know about Mr. Hyatt's techniques, but I have found that giving the bartender my card and saying "I'd like to open a tab and start off with a Woodchuck Amber, please." does the job nicely. YMMV. Sometimes I have to employ the Arm Wave or the On-fire Napkin tactics to get the tab started, but these are advanced practices best avoided by beginners. (If you're in austin and are looking for a good place to start a tab, I can heartily recommend the Dog and Duck pub as well as the Crown and Anchor, both close to the UT campus.)
FYI 500Mhz/64bit/1mb cache is fairly close to the top end of what you can buy from everyone's favorite
MIPS-based vendor, SGI. I think the top end from
SGI is an R14000(A?) at 700Mhz with (1?2?)Mb of cache. [Yeah, you can tell I keep real on top of the cpus in machines that cost more than my annual salary in most cases.;)] c.f. the Fuel line of workstations.
lately i've been thinking about teaching as a profession. (guess that means i'd need to finish my BSc first, eh?;)) my mom was a teacher, as was my grandfather. Anyway. I'd probably end up teaching computer science plus some other science, and for the CS curricula I think open source is by far preferable. The setup that I think would be be the most advatageous would be a decent Linux server accessed by any pre-extant client machines running the appropriate client software, with accounts and groups as needed for the students in the various classes, semesters, etc. This means that the students could work from home, and that all data is central for security and backup purposes. Remote gui's are of course possible, but frankly for most of the kinds of programming that a typical high schooler will be messing with, the console is fine. The server could also be used to host web development/design projects in additon to the traditional AP computer science curricula. A real database could be exposed to the business students to learn SQL and data modeling on. Given a simple problem space and a relatively brawny machine, the server could even be used to add a computational supplement to the science courses (e.g. model these three molecules to get x, y, and z bond lengths as noted {water, ethanol, diatomic oxygen). The "one big server" approach also does not require any dedicated client hardware, so the client machines in the lab can also be used for other, non-programming uses such as an office skills class or art/design class (adobe toolchain). There's even no real requirement on the client hardware present, as even a 386 or ancient mac could be used as an ssh term becuase all the action is taking place on the server. If on the off chance that the curricula included, say, GUI java work... that's possible on most any client machine natively and with a vnc-server or remotely-fired X session as well. Sorry if this is kind of a brain-dump, i'm incredibly tired right now. It should be noted that this scenario is not choosing open source becuase it is free, but becuase it is more capable. Linux could work as a method to reduce cost but then you're on somewhat shakier ground. Yes, you save money on client licensing. BUT! This assumes you are able to get functional equivalents for all the proprietary software you need. (E.g. you're doing the design students a disservice if you replace Photoshop + Illustrator with the Gimp... Sorry, the gimp is a good program for some things but PS +Ill it is not.)
Also, you could just as easily use an Apple Xserve in place of the linux server i mention above, which would be extra good for most schools that probably already have an apple infrastructure. Or sub in some other free Unix for Linux... From the student's perspective the difference between an openbsd server and a linux server would be nil.
i don't know about linux compatibility,
but it sounds like in terms of HARDWARE you're looking for something like Fujitsu P-series or so.
Fujitsu P-Series page. it doesn't have firewire, but it has everything else you want. here's a page talking about putting linux (debian) on it i think i've seen firewire pcmcia cards, so that might be the solution. I don't know about getting it without windows, but that's the breaks... Like another poster said, not *everything* has to be a political statement. You could just video tape yourself burning or shitting on your windows CD in front of a linux flag or something.;)
I too am a die-hard debian-ite who works with RedHat a good bit (it is the flavor du jour at work). Rpm is a little ugly compared to debs, but up2date combined with a RHN subscription (a whopping five bucks a month per system entitlement, and you can float that across as many systems as you want to the limit of your patience) takes a *lot* of the pain of RH package management away. Yeah, yeah, it costs a little bit of money, but it'll save you so much time as an admin it's worth it and it's a way to kick back a little to the people that put in hard work on the distro you use. (On that thought, it'd be interesting if debian set up some sort of subscription/donation system where you could set it up to donate say $5/month from your account like a subscription. Nobody's budget is hurt by that but spread across N many users that's a good, reliable revenue stream for the project that could be used to fund development, bandwidth costs, etc.)
Because linux (or any unix really) is a far superior application development and execution environment for the kinds of applications the Original Poster is probably talking about. The Unix toolset is *available* in some cases on NT (I've developed with perl et al on both platforms), but that should not be mistaken for it being *optimized*. Further, Unix/Linux is far easier to admin (speaking as someone who has admin'd both), has lower hardware costs (for x86 Unix), and generally higher throughput. This is of course leaving aside that Unix is *far* easier to secure than NT...
Don't mistake me for a Unix zealot, if MS came out with something better I'd use it in a heartbeat. But I live in the real world, and I solve real problems under real time and budgetary constraints. Unix lets me solve those problems on spec, on time, and under budget... NT doesn't.
what version of FORTRAN does their compiler support? (I'd check myself but their site is horribly slashdotted.) I've been wanting to learn FORTRAN for a good while, but F77 is a bit of a drag and AFAIK it's the only version supported by a free toolset (g77). (If somebody could point out a free tool(set) that could handle F9x that I'm unaware of, I'd greatly appreciate it.)
do a google on "mindterm ssh". it's a java applet that does ssh (1, maybe 2 as well, been a while since i looked at it) and vt100. it'll only connect (by default, this is a jvm thing) to the host it came from, but it's handy if you have a user base that may be "floaters" (i.e. may be on random machines traveling around; all they need is a web browser). ah, here's the link and it does support ssh2. it is free for "personal and limited commercial" use.
If you just need vt100/telnet style access (say, within your firewall'd lan) you might like ShellInABox, which is a GPL'd java applet shell for that purpose.
I grew up in Nacogdoches, TX. I had friends in
many of the surrounding towns. I went to college for a while in the DFW area. (BTW, the CNN story calling Palestine "outside of DFW" is true but implies a greater degree of proximity than is the case, they're several hundred miles apart with DFW being closer to Oklahoma and Palestine being closer to Louisiana, given the rate at which the Shuttle was traveling I guess that's not a suprise).
Given the security surrounding shuttle launches, I'd be very suprised to learn anything about this being a terrorist act. As others have pointed out already, it is a tragedy but an event not outside the realm of possibility given the complexity of the spacecraft and the hostile operating conditions of re-entry. I mourn for those seven brave souls, and hope that our country in specific and humanity in general does not pause from the great leap forward into space because of their loss.
I think judging from the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, we can see the worst case. I hope that perhaps this time we see the best case: development of cheaper, more efficient, and safer-by-virtue-of-less-complexity single stage to orbit (SSTO) vehicles. I think that for far too long our space program has been tied to the Shuttle, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the methods we use for people and materials to let slip the bonds of gravity.
Small world. I used to work at a company that, due to historic reasons too complex to get into here, shared ownership of some Unix (Suns, if anybody cares, an U60 and a SS20) servers with the guy who coded Tranquility. He was a hell of a sysadmin (due to other historic reasons too complex to get into here, I ended up being the head sysadmin of said company so I interacted with him a lot) and nice guy as well. Never met the guy face to face, he lived/worked in Hawaii and we were based in Houston, just lots of time on the tele and talking back and forth.
WJW wrote two of my favorite "cyberpunk" books: Angel Station (iirc) and voice of the whirlwind.
very dark and gritty both. VV is one of my favorite authors. The "deep" books are both good, but i really like his "bobble" series to for the setting, nameing the "the peace(r) war" and "marooned in real time" (other misc. short stories in that milieu as well).
I'm usually more of a William-Gibson/Neal-Stephenson/Bruce-Sterling kind of guy, but fwiw I kind of like Robert Jordan's fantasy world as described in the Wheel of Time series. There are ten books (so far, the series is *not* done yet), each in the 600-900 page range, so that should keep you busy for a while if you haven't read them. The first book is "The Eye of the World". The other nine you can god damned well google or amazon search for.;-) Much like any popular author, you'll get a bunch of what I call monkey-purists (mindlessly flinging turds at anything bigger than them) slagging it, but if you just want something fun to read for a week or so you can't go wrong with it.
I also rather like Raymond E. Feist's four book Magician series (first book is Magician: Apprentice iirc, search for the other three yourself).
And for an author that's fun to read but not sci-fi or fantasy: take a look at Po Bronson. "The First 20 Million is Always the Hardest", "The Nudist on the Late Shift", and "Bombardiers" are all good books. Bombardiers is a satire of the financial services industry / homage to Keller's catch 22. TF20M and BOMB are fiction, TNotLS is non-fiction. I'd say TF20M is probably the most accessible of the fiction works he's produced.
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side note: by "weapons of this class" i mean nuclear-warhead gravity bombs. I don't know if the F-16 is capable of deploying stand-off weapons missiles or whatnot (never has the phrase "stand off" seemed so positive, I know I'd way to stand waaaaay the hell off from anything in that class of lethality ;)).
It's what the F-16 has to use in order to deliver weapons of this class (probably F/A-18 as well). The standard F-16 has to have physical (bomb attachment point strengthening, etc.) and avionics upgrades to handle it, but in the end it's basically just a faster, more accurate (ooh! software! ;)) version of the 50's manuever. (I googled looking for a link to back this up, but came up dry, probably just not using good enough queries... One bit of unintentional humor was noting the top text ad for "F-16 nuclear delivery", namely "Find a delivery service! Anywhere in the world! www.somedeliverycompany.com" or some such... Heh, I don't think that's what they had in mind...)
IIRC, back in the mid-80's (i think), there was a big stink between Pakistan and India caused by Pakistan obtaining some of these nuclear capable F-16s. Of course, at that time it was only suspected that Pakistan had The Bomb, but when your neighbor buys a shotgun you don't have to see the shells to get a little nervous. (When is there not a big stink between Pakistan and India? Anyway, that *particular* big stink was over Pakistan's nuke-capable fighters.)
there is a variant of Befunge that does exactly that, albeit with ASCII instead of ... whichever encoding you were thinking of
using for Chinese. ;-) It was called trefunge or something of that nature. (google, google...)
Ah yes, here's glFunge98 which supports Funge93,Funge98,ConcurrentFunge (multiple instruction pointers in the same space), and of course Trefunge, and somehow OpenGL gets bashed in there too. :-)
Warning: Befunge is just about the sickest thing you can think of to program in. I'm not kidding. Your brain will hurt. In no way is this post meant as an endorsement of Befunge programming as a serious undertaking or as a hobby. Drugs are bad, m'kay?
Why be exclusive? Before removal, during removal, and after removal are all interesting states in the CAM system. :-p~~~~
"Greed is good" as a designator for an era specifically applies to the 1980s becuase the movie from which the quote originated was set on wall street in the 1980s. (The character was the oh-so-sleazy Gordon Gecko, and the movie was, iirc, simply titled Wall Street, also starring Charlie Sheen and (again iirc) Darryl Hannah.)
And for cheap computer books, a phrase I predict to be quite popular on this site ;), you can take a look at Bookpool. Cheap prices, nice interface, quick shipping, and great service. What's not to like? With bookpool, I haven't bought a single computer book from Amazon in years...
This would be like building your house out of lumber and stuff you bought from Home Depot, and having Home Depot come along after the place is built with a sign saying "Built by Home Depot, with some help by the sweaty bastard living here."
In other words, while the FSF made many valuable contributions to the Linux "movement" as it were, seeking to rename Linux is at best presumptuous.
I can think of a few political leaders that could use one.
;-)
As a Texas Liberal, you can imagine who one of my first choices for leaders-needing-more-than-room-temperature-IQs is.
The webapp side of the security equation is often sadly neglected by people focusing on the network and host levels of the system. (Which, don't get me wrong, are very important in their own rights.) It's nice to see a book that addresses "programmer-level" holes as well as "administrator-level" holes.
A very good site for (free) information on this area is http://www.owasp.org/. OWASP seems to mainly focus on webapp level security, which is ok given the wealth of informative resources out there for the host and network layer. (OWASP = Open Web Application Security Project)
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
There's some nice things in 2.4, certainly (e.g. USB support that works). My home machines and laptop run it. But many of the servers I admin have been humming along fine with the 2.2 tree for quite some time, so I see very little reason to upgrade (indeed, with the hairiness in the 2.4 tree's virtual memory handling, I can several reasons NOT to upgrade beyond just change management). (Some will say that you should upgrade to 2.4 for the new firewalling features, but I prefer to put firewalling onto a dedicated openbsd machine or an appliance like a netscreen so the issue is moot for me.)
"Über Geek David Hyatt (who, among other browser projects, works on Safari) has posted an interesting discussion about tabs, what he prefers, what works, and what doesn't."
Well, I don't know about Mr. Hyatt's techniques, but I have found that giving the bartender my card and saying "I'd like to open a tab and start off with a Woodchuck Amber, please." does the job nicely. YMMV. Sometimes I have to employ the Arm Wave or the On-fire Napkin tactics to get the tab started, but these are advanced practices best avoided by beginners. (If you're in austin and are looking for a good place to start a tab, I can heartily recommend the Dog and Duck pub as well as the Crown and Anchor, both close to the UT campus.)
FYI 500Mhz/64bit/1mb cache is fairly close to the top end of what you can buy from everyone's favorite MIPS-based vendor, SGI. I think the top end from SGI is an R14000(A?) at 700Mhz with (1?2?)Mb of cache. [Yeah, you can tell I keep real on top of the cpus in machines that cost more than my annual salary in most cases. ;)] c.f. the Fuel line of workstations.
lately i've been thinking about teaching as a profession. (guess that means i'd need to finish my BSc first, eh? ;)) my mom was a teacher, as was my grandfather. Anyway. I'd probably end up teaching computer science plus some other science, and for the CS curricula I think open source is by far preferable. The setup that I think would be be the most advatageous would be a decent Linux server accessed by any pre-extant client machines running the appropriate client software, with accounts and groups as needed for the students in the various classes, semesters, etc. This means that the students could work from home, and that all data is central for security and backup purposes. Remote gui's are of course possible, but frankly for most of the kinds of programming that a typical high schooler will be messing with, the console is fine. The server could also be used to host web development/design projects in additon to the traditional AP computer science curricula. A real database could be exposed to the business students to learn SQL and data modeling on. Given a simple problem space and a relatively brawny machine, the server could even be used to add a computational supplement to the science courses (e.g. model these three molecules to get x, y, and z bond lengths as noted {water, ethanol, diatomic oxygen). The "one big server" approach also does not require any dedicated client hardware, so the client machines in the lab can also be used for other, non-programming uses such as an office skills class or art/design class (adobe toolchain). There's even no real requirement on the client hardware present, as even a 386 or ancient mac could be used as an ssh term becuase all the action is taking place on the server. If on the off chance that the curricula included, say, GUI java work... that's possible on most any client machine natively and with a vnc-server or remotely-fired X session as well. Sorry if this is kind of a brain-dump, i'm incredibly tired right now. It should be noted that this scenario is not choosing open source becuase it is free, but becuase it is more capable. Linux could work as a method to reduce cost but then you're on somewhat shakier ground. Yes, you save money on client licensing. BUT! This assumes you are able to get functional equivalents for all the proprietary software you need. (E.g. you're doing the design students a disservice if you replace Photoshop + Illustrator with the Gimp... Sorry, the gimp is a good program for some things but PS +Ill it is not.)
Also, you could just as easily use an Apple Xserve in place of the linux server i mention above, which would be extra good for most schools that probably already have an apple infrastructure. Or sub in some other free Unix for Linux... From the student's perspective the difference between an openbsd server and a linux server would be nil.
i don't know about linux compatibility, but it sounds like in terms of HARDWARE you're looking for something like Fujitsu P-series or so. Fujitsu P-Series page. it doesn't have firewire, but it has everything else you want. here's a page talking about putting linux (debian) on it i think i've seen firewire pcmcia cards, so that might be the solution. I don't know about getting it without windows, but that's the breaks... Like another poster said, not *everything* has to be a political statement. You could just video tape yourself burning or shitting on your windows CD in front of a linux flag or something. ;)
Until he got tenure, then he offloaded all the work on grad students.
I too am a die-hard debian-ite who works with RedHat a good bit (it is the flavor du jour at work). Rpm is a little ugly compared to debs, but up2date combined with a RHN subscription (a whopping five bucks a month per system entitlement, and you can float that across as many systems as you want to the limit of your patience) takes a *lot* of the pain of RH package management away. Yeah, yeah, it costs a little bit of money, but it'll save you so much time as an admin it's worth it and it's a way to kick back a little to the people that put in hard work on the distro you use. (On that thought, it'd be interesting if debian set up some sort of subscription/donation system where you could set it up to donate say $5/month from your account like a subscription. Nobody's budget is hurt by that but spread across N many users that's a good, reliable revenue stream for the project that could be used to fund development, bandwidth costs, etc.)
Because linux (or any unix really) is a far superior application development and execution environment for the kinds of applications the Original Poster is probably talking about. The Unix toolset is *available* in some cases on NT (I've developed with perl et al on both platforms), but that should not be mistaken for it being *optimized*. Further, Unix/Linux is far easier to admin (speaking as someone who has admin'd both), has lower hardware costs (for x86 Unix), and generally higher throughput. This is of course leaving aside that Unix is *far* easier to secure than NT...
Don't mistake me for a Unix zealot, if MS came out with something better I'd use it in a heartbeat. But I live in the real world, and I solve real problems under real time and budgetary constraints. Unix lets me solve those problems on spec, on time, and under budget... NT doesn't.
what version of FORTRAN does their compiler support? (I'd check myself but their site is horribly slashdotted.) I've been wanting to learn FORTRAN for a good while, but F77 is a bit of a drag and AFAIK it's the only version supported by a free toolset (g77). (If somebody could point out a free tool(set) that could handle F9x that I'm unaware of, I'd greatly appreciate it.)
do a google on "mindterm ssh". it's a java applet that does ssh (1, maybe 2 as well, been a while since i looked at it) and vt100. it'll only connect (by default, this is a jvm thing) to the host it came from, but it's handy if you have a user base that may be "floaters" (i.e. may be on random machines traveling around; all they need is a web browser). ah, here's the link and it does support ssh2. it is free for "personal and limited commercial" use.
If you just need vt100/telnet style access (say, within your firewall'd lan) you might like ShellInABox, which is a GPL'd java applet shell for that purpose.
I grew up in Nacogdoches, TX. I had friends in many of the surrounding towns. I went to college for a while in the DFW area. (BTW, the CNN story calling Palestine "outside of DFW" is true but implies a greater degree of proximity than is the case, they're several hundred miles apart with DFW being closer to Oklahoma and Palestine being closer to Louisiana, given the rate at which the Shuttle was traveling I guess that's not a suprise).
Given the security surrounding shuttle launches, I'd be very suprised to learn anything about this being a terrorist act. As others have pointed out already, it is a tragedy but an event not outside the realm of possibility given the complexity of the spacecraft and the hostile operating conditions of re-entry. I mourn for those seven brave souls, and hope that our country in specific and humanity in general does not pause from the great leap forward into space because of their loss.
I think judging from the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, we can see the worst case. I hope that perhaps this time we see the best case: development of cheaper, more efficient, and safer-by-virtue-of-less-complexity single stage to orbit (SSTO) vehicles. I think that for far too long our space program has been tied to the Shuttle, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the methods we use for people and materials to let slip the bonds of gravity.
Small world. I used to work at a company that, due to historic reasons too complex to get into here, shared ownership of some Unix (Suns, if anybody cares, an U60 and a SS20) servers with the guy who coded Tranquility. He was a hell of a sysadmin (due to other historic reasons too complex to get into here, I ended up being the head sysadmin of said company so I interacted with him a lot) and nice guy as well. Never met the guy face to face, he lived/worked in Hawaii and we were based in Houston, just lots of time on the tele and talking back and forth.
yeah, i did mean Heller, that's a typo (normally my fingers wouldn't stray two keys but i'm really, really tired today)
WJW wrote two of my favorite "cyberpunk" books: Angel Station (iirc) and voice of the whirlwind. very dark and gritty both. VV is one of my favorite authors. The "deep" books are both good, but i really like his "bobble" series to for the setting, nameing the "the peace(r) war" and "marooned in real time" (other misc. short stories in that milieu as well).
I'm usually more of a William-Gibson/Neal-Stephenson/Bruce-Sterling kind of guy, but fwiw I kind of like Robert Jordan's fantasy world as described in the Wheel of Time series. There are ten books (so far, the series is *not* done yet), each in the 600-900 page range, so that should keep you busy for a while if you haven't read them. The first book is "The Eye of the World". The other nine you can god damned well google or amazon search for. ;-) Much like any popular author, you'll get a bunch of what I call monkey-purists (mindlessly flinging turds at anything bigger than them) slagging it, but if you just want something fun to read for a week or so you can't go wrong with it.
I also rather like Raymond E. Feist's four book Magician series (first book is Magician: Apprentice iirc, search for the other three yourself).
And for an author that's fun to read but not sci-fi or fantasy: take a look at Po Bronson. "The First 20 Million is Always the Hardest", "The Nudist on the Late Shift", and "Bombardiers" are all good books. Bombardiers is a satire of the financial services industry / homage to Keller's catch 22. TF20M and BOMB are fiction, TNotLS is non-fiction. I'd say TF20M is probably the most accessible of the fiction works he's produced.
1. build popular website, attracting many thousands of trolls
2. sue trolls, total=$5k*(number of trolls)
3. profit!!!