When they asked Richard Noble why he built Thrust II (his previous land-speed-record-breaking car), he said "For Britain, and for the hell of it."
Good enough reason for me...
I couldn't agree more. I think Stephenson, at his best, has a singular gift for conveying background information, often fairly technical stuff, without interrupting his narrative. Consider the passage in Cryptonomicon where he explains modular arithmetic using the broken spoke on Alan Turing's bicycle, or the gradual explanation of universal Turing machines that's woven into the second half of The Diamond Age.
Sometimes I think he takes it a little far... the first half of The Confusion sometimes felt like it was trying to explain the entire political framework of sixteenth-century France, and not always succeeding (at least, not in my case) - but by and large it's an aspect of his writing I enjoy very much.
(I also think it demonstrates an interesting contrast with another great sci-fi/'cyberpunk' author, William Gibson. Where Stephenson will take several pages explaining some neat gadget or system, Gibson just throws his technological ideas at you and lets you work out for yourself what he's talking about. Count Zero opens with the line "They sent a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair."... and closes 333 pages later without ever telling you what a slamhound is or how you would go about slotting one.)
I was working in tech support at a building engineering company in 1997 - lots of big contracts, lots of specification documents, lots of complex calculation sheets - and I was there during the migration from WordPerfect 6.1 & Quattro Pro 6.0 to Microsoft Office 97.
We migrated because our clients started putting clauses in their contracts that all documents and calculation sheets had to be supplied electronically as Microsoft Office documents. There was absolutely no other justification for the migration. Our customers basically forced us to buy Office 97 or they were going to take their business elsewhere. I have no idea why they did this, but I'm guessing Microsoft's 'corporate awareness' strategies must have had something to do with it...
MS Office was more expensive, and required more powerful (i.e. expensive) PCs. It was technically inferior - users would waste hours tracking down formatting bugs in Word that would have succumbed to WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature in a few seconds; Excel didn't support some fairly obvious features (e.g. copy/paste of '3D' blocks of cells across multiple worksheets) that our Quattro users used daily. We had invested heavily in development of macros and templates for WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, most of which ended up being scrapped because there was no way to migrate them.
You have no idea how frustrating it was explaining to engineers - technically literate, intelligent, capable users - that they were no longer allowed to use the tools they'd spend time familiarising themselves with because Microsoft had somehow persuaded our customers to insist that we used an inferior product.
Sure, ten years later, MS Office has overtaken them, and any company trying to compete with Microsoft in the desktop office market have their work cut out for them to say the least - but I honestly believe that Office 95 and 97 killed WordPerfect, and I don't believe they did it by being cheaper, faster or more powerful.
That's your standard Linux distro ought to include the mystical "tawgo" command. Anyone who can actually keep up with the command-line will get the joke, and it'll look just like ordinary movie computer fluff to everyone else...
Displays MESSAGE in big bright coloured letters, probably in some sort of futuristic animated dialog box.
-a --animation Show cheesy animation -w --warning Use yellow & black warning stripes -s --self-destruct Initiate fake countdown sequence -v --voice Reads MESSAGE in a Female Computer Voice
Use -v -s if you need Female Computer Voice counting down the seconds to our hero's impending destruction.
"I mean, do any of these 'industry pundits' ever have to keep track of the accuracy of their 'predictions'?"
No, they don't have to... but Bob Cringely is one of the few who does, albeit to a limited extent. Each January, his column starts by analysing all the predictions he made in last years' column, and seeing how accurate they turned out. He then goes on to predict what he thinks the coming year has in store.
You can find this year's column here, and previous columns are all linked from his archive
That was my first though as well... to quote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:
"But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well. Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate world went bananas over it."
Reg regarded him solemnly from over a piece of carrot poised delicately on his fork in front of him, but did not interrupt.
"You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be expressed as a sequence or pattern of numbers," enthused Richard. "Numbers can express the pitch of notes, the length of notes, patterns of pitches and lengths. . "
"You mean tunes," said Reg. The carrot had not moved yet.
Richard grinned.
"Tunes would be a very good word for it. I must remember that."
"It would help you speak more easily." Reg returned the carrot to his plate, untasted. "And this software did well, then?" he asked.
"Not so much here. The yearly accounts of most British companies emerged sounding like the Dead March from Saul, but in Japan they went for it like a pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery company anthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you'd probably say that they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end. Did spectacular business in the States, which was the main thing, commercially."
Google's official statement is that "Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment on http://java.com./ In addition, the companies have agreed to explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite available at http://www.openoffice.org./"
Somehow, the media seem to have spun this into "Under the deal, Google will allow web users to access Sun's OpenOffice from a toolbar." OK, fair enough - if you type "open office" into the Google toolbar, it'll help you 'access' it by telling you you can get it from www.openoffice.org - but it'll do the same for any other office suite, product or search phrase you can think of.
And then the Inquirer actually goes a step further with "Google has confirmed that it will launch free spreadsheet and word-processing software online and take on Microsoft in one of its biggest markets." Um, no. Google has confirmed nothing of the sort.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, an enterprising Boston chap by name of Frederic Tudor made his name - and his fortune -harvesting enormous chunks of ice from frozen lakes in Massachusetts, packing them into sailing ships insulated with sawdust (supplied by the Maine timber-mills), and exporting them around the world. By the time artificial refrigeration marked the end the "frozen water trade" in the mid 1800s, they were sending 100-ton shipments of ice as far afield as the Caribbean and Calcutta.
The whole story is told in Gavin Weightman's The Frozen Water Trade, if you want to know more.
Print it out & stick it on the wall/partition - it covers almost all the CSS you'll use day-to-day, and (IMHO) it's much quicker than digging through the online documentation or the O'Reilly book.
Similar things for Javascript, PHP, etc. are linked from here if you're interested.
.xxx is a great TLD. It's short, it's easy to remember, and it's obvious what it's used for.
But along with.xxx, we get.travel,.cat,.post,.mobi,.asia,.mail and.tel. Anyone care to tell me what a.cat TLD is for? Or what business is going to buy foobar.post WITHOUT also buying foobar.mail to stop their competitors getting it? (never mind the fact if they don't already have foobar.com, they're probably already in trouble... and if they *do*, why would they need foobar.post at all?)
A little more imagination would go a long way... rather than trying to come up with new domains they can flog to existing businesses, they should be looking at the needs of other net users..blog would be a good start..geek would be great for us technical folks with our own sites. And what about.movie ? It's the most obvious, lucrative TLD since.com. Pretty much every mainstream movie that's released has a clear, distinctive title, and a big-budget promo website. Start selling.movie TLDS for $250 a year or something (which is *peanuts* compared to the marketing budget for any current cinema release), on the condition that you only sell it to the studio who are releasing the movie, and it's only to be used for info about the movie in question. You'd make a fortune... and that's before you start thinking about www.coldplay.band, www.pariah.game and www.lesmiserables.show...
I got hold of a couple of the old IBM clicky keyboards a few years ago, and hacked a few of them around just for laughs.
One of them ended up jet black - just like Das Keyboard. I found it fine for typing and coding, but trying to find shortcut keys when your hands were away from the keyboard was damn near impossible... when using Photoshop or something (which doesn't involve constant typing), it typically took two or three attempts to hit Ctrl-C or Ctrl-V... and it could be *really* frustrating when you accidentally replaced what was on the clipboard instead of pasting it.
Also - on those keyboards, the keycaps are all the same shape so you can swap the letters around... I swapped one of them round so that instead of QWERTY, it said CONFUSED? People wouldn't realise what was wrong at first...
Hehe, reminds me of the statistic that 80% of the people think they are above average drivers.
Imagine a group of ten drivers. Assume that one driver (Jim) has had ten serious accidents. Assume that another one (Bob) has two convictions for speeding or some other form of unsafe driving. The rest have never had a crash or been convicted of anything.
In this group, the average is one accident and 0.2 convictions per driver. Since eight of the drivers in the group have no accidents and no convictions, those drivers (ie. 80%) can justifiably claim to be above-average drivers.
It doesn't take a *lot* of people to substantially lower an average - just a handful of really extreme cases. Be wary of confusing 'average' with 'normal' - most normal people have an above-average number of arms and legs.:)
Assembler? Luxury! Back in my day, we had to write everything using ones and zeros! And as if that wasn't bad enough, we once ran out of zeros and I had to write an entire database using the letter 'O'!
Javascript, Perl and other interpreted languages have one enormous advantage when it comes to maintenance - particularly when you're trying to maintain a system written by someone else.
Because they're interpreted, you can always find the source code - and because you can copy the source directly from the production deployment, you know that the source you're working with is the correct version. You ever tried to debug or modify a compiled application where the original developer has moved the binaries onto the production systems and then lost the source? Or trawled through ten or twenty near-identical source trees trying to work out which one corresponds to the latest stable release candidate? This will usually be the directory called "Copy (4) of project.0.9.NOT_WORKING" or something similarly intuitive.
With all this talk of open source, it's worth remembering that interpreted script is about as open as source can get.
"You must be too young to remember what PC gaming was like before Microsoft ruled the universe."
Um, yeah. Different boot disks for every game, being able to rewrite CONFIG.SYS from memory just to get Wing Commander II to load, the joys of HIMEM.SYS and the differences between extended memory, expanded memory and high memory, manually setting the command-line IRQs for assorted soundcards and trying to find a real-mode DOS mouse driver that loaded in less than 5K of RAM.
Windows 95 (and to a lesser extent, DirectX) made it feasible to run games in the same environment as your 'normal' applications. They meant you could buy any Windows-compatible soundcard, video card, mouse or joystick and be fairly certain it would work. They also turned TCP/IP networking into a mass-market commodity. In that respect, I'd say Microsoft made a pretty substantial contribution to PC gaming as we know it. Created? Perhaps not. But I'd say PC gaming as we know it owes at least as much to Microsoft as it does to anyone else.
Not only was POV distributed under it's own license, the maintainers had (have?) a policy of identifying people and organisations who violated their license terms in the next update of the license document. The v3.1 license states:
Revocation Of License
VIOLATION OF THIS LICENSE IS A VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT LAWS. IT WILL RESULT IN REVOCATION OF ALL DISTRIBUTION PRIVILEGES AND MAY RESULT IN CIVIL OR CRIMINAL PENALTY.
Such violators who are prohibited from distribution will be identified in this document.
In this regard, "PC Format", a magazine published by Future Publishing, Ltd. in the United Kingdom, distributed incomplete versions of POV-Ray 1.0 in violation the license which was effect at the time. They later attempted to distribute POV-Ray 2.2 without prior permission of the POV- Team in violation the license which was in effect at the time. There is evidence that other Future Publishing companies have also violated our terms. Therefore "PC Format", and any other magazine, book or CD-ROM publication owned by Future Publishing is expressly prohibited from any distribution of POV-Ray software until further notice.
Up until I first noticed this passage in one of their licenses, I really never stopped to think about the difference between open source / freeware / PD / shareware - it was the first time I realised that giving away your software doesn't mean you're giving away your rights as well. The irony, of course, is that I first got into POV-Ray after finding v1.0 on a "PC Format" cover diskette.:)
I remember seeing it online a long while ago, but I've only recently seen it in print. Googling "in the beginning was the command line" will turn up a bunch of mirrors if the site isn't reachable.
OK... just for fun, I installed Infowalker and ran it on this page.
The sentence "would be fabulous as a feature built into Mozilla or Opera" resulted in an advert for Wagner CDs, and "show an Amazon product related to the sentence you're reading" - popped up a little map of Brazil, and an advert for "Live Sentence" by Alcatrazz on CD.
Methinks they've a little more work to do if they're going to make their related advertising into an effective revenue stream... at the moment it's more like "hey, here's some random CDs with the same words as your sentence!"
Two things about that article which jumped out and hit me. In discussing the benefits of unmanned space exploration, Weinberg mentions satellite measurements recording the age of the universe as between 13.5 and 13.9 billion years.
He also estimates the cost of Bush's Mars initiative (up to 2020 - NOT including the actual Mars launch) at $170bn. That means that the Mars preparatory mission will cost the equivalent of $12.50 a year, every year, since the universe began.
I always find millions and billions pretty meaningless - to my mind, anything more than the cost of a house or the mileage of a car is basically just a fuckload - but when dollar spending exceeds the age of the cosmos by orders of magnitude, it makes you stop and think.
(Disclaimer: Manned spaceflight is really cool, I support it wholeheartedly and the sooner we get all our eggs out of Earth's basket, the better. I just wonder if, as a species, we should maybe sort out some of this other shit first, y'know?)
Slashdot Mirror
When they asked Richard Noble why he built Thrust II (his previous land-speed-record-breaking car), he said "For Britain, and for the hell of it." Good enough reason for me...
I couldn't agree more. I think Stephenson, at his best, has a singular gift for conveying background information, often fairly technical stuff, without interrupting his narrative. Consider the passage in Cryptonomicon where he explains modular arithmetic using the broken spoke on Alan Turing's bicycle, or the gradual explanation of universal Turing machines that's woven into the second half of The Diamond Age.
Sometimes I think he takes it a little far... the first half of The Confusion sometimes felt like it was trying to explain the entire political framework of sixteenth-century France, and not always succeeding (at least, not in my case) - but by and large it's an aspect of his writing I enjoy very much.
(I also think it demonstrates an interesting contrast with another great sci-fi/'cyberpunk' author, William Gibson. Where Stephenson will take several pages explaining some neat gadget or system, Gibson just throws his technological ideas at you and lets you work out for yourself what he's talking about. Count Zero opens with the line "They sent a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair."... and closes 333 pages later without ever telling you what a slamhound is or how you would go about slotting one.)
I wonder if Enoch Root will be in this one...
I was working in tech support at a building engineering company in 1997 - lots of big contracts, lots of specification documents, lots of complex calculation sheets - and I was there during the migration from WordPerfect 6.1 & Quattro Pro 6.0 to Microsoft Office 97.
We migrated because our clients started putting clauses in their contracts that all documents and calculation sheets had to be supplied electronically as Microsoft Office documents. There was absolutely no other justification for the migration. Our customers basically forced us to buy Office 97 or they were going to take their business elsewhere. I have no idea why they did this, but I'm guessing Microsoft's 'corporate awareness' strategies must have had something to do with it...
MS Office was more expensive, and required more powerful (i.e. expensive) PCs. It was technically inferior - users would waste hours tracking down formatting bugs in Word that would have succumbed to WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature in a few seconds; Excel didn't support some fairly obvious features (e.g. copy/paste of '3D' blocks of cells across multiple worksheets) that our Quattro users used daily. We had invested heavily in development of macros and templates for WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, most of which ended up being scrapped because there was no way to migrate them.
You have no idea how frustrating it was explaining to engineers - technically literate, intelligent, capable users - that they were no longer allowed to use the tools they'd spend time familiarising themselves with because Microsoft had somehow persuaded our customers to insist that we used an inferior product.
Sure, ten years later, MS Office has overtaken them, and any company trying to compete with Microsoft in the desktop office market have their work cut out for them to say the least - but I honestly believe that Office 95 and 97 killed WordPerfect, and I don't believe they did it by being cheaper, faster or more powerful.
That's your standard Linux distro ought to include the mystical "tawgo" command. Anyone who can actually keep up with the command-line will get the joke, and it'll look just like ordinary movie computer fluff to everyone else...
It'd save them a fortune on getting media companies to hack up fake OS screens in Flash as well...
"I mean, do any of these 'industry pundits' ever have to keep track of the accuracy of their 'predictions'?"
No, they don't have to... but Bob Cringely is one of the few who does, albeit to a limited extent. Each January, his column starts by analysing all the predictions he made in last years' column, and seeing how accurate they turned out. He then goes on to predict what he thinks the coming year has in store.
You can find this year's column here, and previous columns are all linked from his archive
That was my first though as well... to quote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:
"But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well. Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate world went bananas over it."
Reg regarded him solemnly from over a piece of carrot poised delicately on his fork in front of him, but did not interrupt.
"You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be expressed as a sequence or pattern of numbers," enthused Richard. "Numbers can express the pitch of notes, the length of notes, patterns of pitches and lengths. . "
"You mean tunes," said Reg. The carrot had not moved yet.
Richard grinned.
"Tunes would be a very good word for it. I must remember that."
"It would help you speak more easily." Reg returned the carrot to his plate, untasted. "And this software did well, then?" he asked.
"Not so much here. The yearly accounts of most British companies emerged sounding like the Dead March from Saul, but in Japan they went for it like a pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery company anthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you'd probably say that they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end. Did spectacular business in the States, which was the main thing, commercially."
RIP DNA. The world makes less sense without you.
> "What's the right term for someone who uses computers, but knows basically nothing about them?"
Don't know about you, but round here we call them 'managers'...
They're misinterpreting their results.
All they've actually proved, over and over again, is that research is bad for you, and that 'new studies' cause cancer in rats.
Google's official statement is that "Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment on http://java.com./ In addition, the companies have agreed to explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite available at http://www.openoffice.org./"
t oolbar.html/. You'll notice it doesn't make any reference to Google launching free software or taking on Microsoft.
Somehow, the media seem to have spun this into "Under the deal, Google will allow web users to access Sun's OpenOffice from a toolbar." OK, fair enough - if you type "open office" into the Google toolbar, it'll help you 'access' it by telling you you can get it from www.openoffice.org - but it'll do the same for any other office suite, product or search phrase you can think of.
And then the Inquirer actually goes a step further with "Google has confirmed that it will launch free spreadsheet and word-processing software online and take on Microsoft in one of its biggest markets." Um, no. Google has confirmed nothing of the sort.
The actual Google press release is at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/sun_
But hey. Who needs facts when you can use hype instead?
You jest, but truth is stranger than fiction...
During the first half of the nineteenth century, an enterprising Boston chap by name of Frederic Tudor made his name - and his fortune -harvesting enormous chunks of ice from frozen lakes in Massachusetts, packing them into sailing ships insulated with sawdust (supplied by the Maine timber-mills), and exporting them around the world. By the time artificial refrigeration marked the end the "frozen water trade" in the mid 1800s, they were sending 100-ton shipments of ice as far afield as the Caribbean and Calcutta.
The whole story is told in Gavin Weightman's The Frozen Water Trade, if you want to know more.
May I also recommend Dave Child's CSS Cheat Sheet ?
Print it out & stick it on the wall/partition - it covers almost all the CSS you'll use day-to-day, and (IMHO) it's much quicker than digging through the online documentation or the O'Reilly book.
Similar things for Javascript, PHP, etc. are linked from here if you're interested.
Somehow, your .sig seems strangely appropriate in light of that comment...
Stick with target, but use the XHTML Frameset DTD instead.
Both!
/ Perligata.html/
This paper describes a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML
.xxx is a great TLD. It's short, it's easy to remember, and it's obvious what it's used for.
.xxx, we get .travel, .cat, .post, .mobi, .asia, .mail and .tel. Anyone care to tell me what a .cat TLD is for? Or what business is going to buy foobar.post WITHOUT also buying foobar.mail to stop their competitors getting it? (never mind the fact if they don't already have foobar.com, they're probably already in trouble... and if they *do*, why would they need foobar.post at all?)
.blog would be a good start. .geek would be great for us technical folks with our own sites. And what about .movie ? It's the most obvious, lucrative TLD since .com. Pretty much every mainstream movie that's released has a clear, distinctive title, and a big-budget promo website. Start selling .movie TLDS for $250 a year or something (which is *peanuts* compared to the marketing budget for any current cinema release), on the condition that you only sell it to the studio who are releasing the movie, and it's only to be used for info about the movie in question. You'd make a fortune... and that's before you start thinking about www.coldplay.band, www.pariah.game and www.lesmiserables.show...
But along with
A little more imagination would go a long way... rather than trying to come up with new domains they can flog to existing businesses, they should be looking at the needs of other net users.
I got hold of a couple of the old IBM clicky keyboards a few years ago, and hacked a few of them around just for laughs.
One of them ended up jet black - just like Das Keyboard. I found it fine for typing and coding, but trying to find shortcut keys when your hands were away from the keyboard was damn near impossible... when using Photoshop or something (which doesn't involve constant typing), it typically took two or three attempts to hit Ctrl-C or Ctrl-V... and it could be *really* frustrating when you accidentally replaced what was on the clipboard instead of pasting it.
Also - on those keyboards, the keycaps are all the same shape so you can swap the letters around... I swapped one of them round so that instead of QWERTY, it said CONFUSED? People wouldn't realise what was wrong at first...
Imagine a group of ten drivers. Assume that one driver (Jim) has had ten serious accidents. Assume that another one (Bob) has two convictions for speeding or some other form of unsafe driving. The rest have never had a crash or been convicted of anything.
In this group, the average is one accident and 0.2 convictions per driver. Since eight of the drivers in the group have no accidents and no convictions, those drivers (ie. 80%) can justifiably claim to be above-average drivers.
It doesn't take a *lot* of people to substantially lower an average - just a handful of really extreme cases. Be wary of confusing 'average' with 'normal' - most normal people have an above-average number of arms and legs. :)
Assembler? Luxury! Back in my day, we had to write everything using ones and zeros! And as if that wasn't bad enough, we once ran out of zeros and I had to write an entire database using the letter 'O'!
Javascript, Perl and other interpreted languages have one enormous advantage when it comes to maintenance - particularly when you're trying to maintain a system written by someone else.
Because they're interpreted, you can always find the source code - and because you can copy the source directly from the production deployment, you know that the source you're working with is the correct version. You ever tried to debug or modify a compiled application where the original developer has moved the binaries onto the production systems and then lost the source? Or trawled through ten or twenty near-identical source trees trying to work out which one corresponds to the latest stable release candidate? This will usually be the directory called "Copy (4) of project.0.9.NOT_WORKING" or something similarly intuitive.
With all this talk of open source, it's worth remembering that interpreted script is about as open as source can get.
Um, yeah. Different boot disks for every game, being able to rewrite CONFIG.SYS from memory just to get Wing Commander II to load, the joys of HIMEM.SYS and the differences between extended memory, expanded memory and high memory, manually setting the command-line IRQs for assorted soundcards and trying to find a real-mode DOS mouse driver that loaded in less than 5K of RAM.
Windows 95 (and to a lesser extent, DirectX) made it feasible to run games in the same environment as your 'normal' applications. They meant you could buy any Windows-compatible soundcard, video card, mouse or joystick and be fairly certain it would work. They also turned TCP/IP networking into a mass-market commodity. In that respect, I'd say Microsoft made a pretty substantial contribution to PC gaming as we know it. Created? Perhaps not. But I'd say PC gaming as we know it owes at least as much to Microsoft as it does to anyone else.
Not only was POV distributed under it's own license, the maintainers had (have?) a policy of identifying people and organisations who violated their license terms in the next update of the license document. The v3.1 license states:
Up until I first noticed this passage in one of their licenses, I really never stopped to think about the difference between open source / freeware / PD / shareware - it was the first time I realised that giving away your software doesn't mean you're giving away your rights as well. The irony, of course, is that I first got into POV-Ray after finding v1.0 on a "PC Format" cover diskette. :)
"I don't know what everyone else is doing that is bringing them so much spam."
It's called "being unlucky" - and believe me, we're not doing it on purpose...
The full text of Stephenson's essay is available here:
I remember seeing it online a long while ago, but I've only recently seen it in print. Googling "in the beginning was the command line" will turn up a bunch of mirrors if the site isn't reachable.
OK... just for fun, I installed Infowalker and ran it on this page.
The sentence "would be fabulous as a feature built into Mozilla or Opera" resulted in an advert for Wagner CDs, and "show an Amazon product related to the sentence you're reading" - popped up a little map of Brazil, and an advert for "Live Sentence" by Alcatrazz on CD.
Methinks they've a little more work to do if they're going to make their related advertising into an effective revenue stream... at the moment it's more like "hey, here's some random CDs with the same words as your sentence!"
Two things about that article which jumped out and hit me. In discussing the benefits of unmanned space exploration, Weinberg mentions satellite measurements recording the age of the universe as between 13.5 and 13.9 billion years.
He also estimates the cost of Bush's Mars initiative (up to 2020 - NOT including the actual Mars launch) at $170bn. That means that the Mars preparatory mission will cost the equivalent of $12.50 a year, every year, since the universe began.
I always find millions and billions pretty meaningless - to my mind, anything more than the cost of a house or the mileage of a car is basically just a fuckload - but when dollar spending exceeds the age of the cosmos by orders of magnitude, it makes you stop and think.
(Disclaimer: Manned spaceflight is really cool, I support it wholeheartedly and the sooner we get all our eggs out of Earth's basket, the better. I just wonder if, as a species, we should maybe sort out some of this other shit first, y'know?)