There is a great book by Lawrence Lessig, called Code and Cyberspace. Lessig is the "cyberspace" lawyer from Harvard who is advising Jackson in the Microsoft case. The central theme of the book is that there are two types of legal systems in Cyberspace - East Coast Law made by politicians and West Coast Law made by software engineers. East Coast Law is largely ineffective in Cyberspace because the Internet is global. For example, it is unlikely an American company would be able to claim damages against Spam relayed from an open-relay vanilla Sendmail machine in Taiwan (or Chad, or Russia or wherever). West Coast Law consists of architecting anti-spam into the orignal architecture of the Internet (unlikely), or finding a systems solution which addresses the problem head-on (ie. Brightmail's Anti-Spam http://www.brightmail.com ).
I looked up Perl Cookbook on Fatbrain and Amazon. Amazon's discount is 40%, fatbrain is same as O'Reilly (20%). Yes amazon's now requires one additional click. Yes it is getting irritating. BTW, books.com after some negotiation (ie. lotsa clicks) said they'd do 41%...
I have heard the same story about out-of-order books at fatbrain - they got to fix their inventory problems...
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There is a great book by Lawrence Lessig, called Code and Cyberspace. Lessig is the "cyberspace" lawyer from Harvard who is advising Jackson in the Microsoft case. The central theme of the book is that there are two types of legal systems in Cyberspace - East Coast Law made by politicians and West Coast Law made by software engineers. East Coast Law is largely ineffective in Cyberspace because the Internet is global. For example, it is unlikely an American company would be able to claim damages against Spam relayed from an open-relay vanilla Sendmail machine in Taiwan (or Chad, or Russia or wherever). West Coast Law consists of architecting anti-spam into the orignal architecture of the Internet (unlikely), or finding a systems solution which addresses the problem head-on (ie. Brightmail's Anti-Spam http://www.brightmail.com ).
Lessig says "code" is law (in Cyberspace).
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I looked up Perl Cookbook on Fatbrain and Amazon. Amazon's discount is 40%, fatbrain is same as O'Reilly (20%). Yes amazon's now requires one additional click. Yes it is getting irritating. BTW, books.com after some negotiation (ie. lotsa clicks) said they'd do 41%...
I have heard the same story about out-of-order books at fatbrain - they got to fix their inventory problems...