Cory, I've loved everything of yours that I've read (which, I think, is everything of yours). [Well, with the exception of Eastern Standard Tribe, which was only OK ;-) ]

You seem like a very pro-openness, pro-common sense, pro-privacy kind of guy...

Given that, how can you:

a) Promote the zipidee plug-in thing as a way to buy your book?! They wanted my *gmail PASSWORD* as a part of the sign-up process!! (They wanted it so they could spam everyone in my address book.)

b) Promote Amazon, originators of the one-click patent?

BTW, I started on Little Brother last night, and couldn't stop until I finished. Great stuff!

@#42, Nanite2000:

See #28 & #29 - Sleator wrote House of Stairs. (Yeah, I don't mention House of Stairs by name in #29, but my list is just like #28's).

@#28, El Mariachi:

You stole my memorable juvenile book list!

In particular, I Am The Cheese freaked my shit. The rest of it is also exactly what I would list as most memorable (not necessarily what I liked the most) from my juvey list.

I read a lot of Heinlein as a juvey too, though. I'm pretty sure my parents wouldn't have been very keen on that had they read the same books, but, honestly, I think most of the weird/racy stuff I disregarded or went over my head, anyway.

I would say most commenters *on BoingBoing* tend to not come out of the woodwork unless they are correcting...

I see plenty of forums (fora?) where most of the posts appear to come from mentally handicapped fourteen year olds, barely able to operate a keyboard, with nothing more to contribute than a fart joke or a "meee 2!"

I have to say you're a class act, John. I had nothing but criticism in my post, and you have nothing but congeniality in your response.

I do love the stuff you guys put up here... I just tend not to post unless I have something more to add than "hyuk, hyuk, cool!"

@#4, Jeff:

I dunno about kids in general, but my 12 year old reads LOTS. Of course it helps that we only allow one hour of time to split between TV & non-educational video games most days.

He doesn't read the stuff I read when I was 12, but I'm too happy to have him reading for me to get my feelings hurt if it's about race cars instead of spaceships.

2400 * $50 = $120,000

240 * $50 = $12,000

And while I'm picking nits, "240 times less than" would mean the cd player costs 241 times as much.

In this case, it is just picking nits, but it really drives me nuts when I hear something "increased by 180%". I know what that means, but I also know that they probably *meant* that it increased *to* 180% of its previous value.

"in the face of death; laugh" is trite and disingenuous. (If as mild a word as disingenuous belongs at all in a conversation about people starving to death en masse).

I will be the first to defend the right of the Haitians who are starving to mock their own plight and laugh in the face of death.

*You* are not facing death. *You* are sitting fat & happy at your computer. As am I.

I just want to say, for the record:

Bruce Sterling is a brilliant visionary, and I agree with almost everything he says here.

But he is totally wrong about augmented reality. Why the fuck do I want to pull out my cell phone and point it at my toothbrush while pushing the "tell me more" button, then read the information on that crappy, tiny screen?

I want to just point at the toothbrush with the "tell me more" gesture, and see the "more" on a (nearly) full vision display apparently floating in the air, possibly with a cursor overlaid for my hand so I can scroll around & click stuff.

Also, more importantly, when someone walking towards me is a known mugger, or the guy in the car in front of me is a known drunk driver, I want to just see the warning. I *do not* want to hear an alarm on my cell phone, pull it out, & wave it around looking for the thing that triggered the alert.

If pulling out a cell phone and fiddling with the buttons & displays is so keen, why is everyone buying bluetooth earpieces?

Finally, @13 Beaneater +1

Murray: Yes :-(

Sure, Joel. Just happy to be heard!

BTW, thanks for all the great work! Now I waste 50% more time every day browsing the web (bb.net, slashdot.org, and now gadgets...)

I imagine I'm not the only boingboinger who would like gadgets.bb would stop suppurating for a good long while.

The posts are great; the metaphors are clever; the seeping wound imagery is unneeded and for my part unwanted.

I say this without doing any fact checking; I'm just relying on my error-prone head-meat: Aren't most window screens nylon nowadays? I wouldn't think nylon would act as an rf inhibitor.

#19:
Perhaps the professor learns a little more about how to present the material in an understandable way each year? See #21.

And condescension, while it may amuse you, only irritates nice people. And it makes you look foolish, to boot, when you are wrong.

#24
I'm right there with ya. Even looking at the post & responses as irony, they fall flat for me. Watching people snorting cocaine is neither appealing to me nor does it seem remarkable enough to be worth satirizing.

#27 Um, I'm saying that if you don't believe in religion, there seems little reason for you to believe in life after death. I don't believe in the supernatural - I think my consciousness is a result of physics, and when my body quits operating as "me", that's it.

#29 You're seriously proposing that a non-religious belief in life after death makes sense?

Any way you (rationally) slice consciousness, it seems bound to die with your body:

Physics:
There seems to be every reason to believe that everything you do is the result of chemical reactions in your body, and every evidence that anyone other than yourself has that you're conscious comes from what you do.

Evolutionary biology:
The only argument that explains complex traits in organisms is that they help those organisms reproduce. Complex traits that don't help you reproduce (like life after death, with no impact on the living) have no evolutionary support.

#5: Thanks for the reply. I had seen that some online bookstores had one or two Chiang books. I blew them off because the selection seemed too limited.

Now that I've looked more carefully at his Wikipedia page, apparently he only has two books published. I guess I'll buy them from B&N online.

Wow, it surprises me to see all the pro-death posts on BoingBoing.

Yeah, I want to live an exciting life, take risks, and get rewarded or punished for them. But I want to *keep doing it*.

If you don't believe in religion, it seems you're pretty well stuck with believing death is the permanent end of you ever having another experience. It seems something worth avoiding.

At some point in the not too distant future, molecular machines can replace your neurons (and other bits) one at a time with durable work-alikes that can be backed up. Going through some effort to make it to that point with as much of you intact as possible seems like the most basic wisdom possible.

I've read all of Ted Chiang's stuff I can find online. None of my local bookstores appear to carry him, and I have hang-ups about supporting the owner of the one-click purchase patent.

Anyone know a good source to buy these online other than Amazon?

#2
Thanks! Rarely do I LOL at the internet.

I am not an expert, but I believe that if you want to kill yourself rather than subject yourself, your loved ones and/or the government to an interminable half-life, you shouldn't shoot yourself in the temple.

You are far better off to shoot yourself in the back of the head, by aiming slightly up through the mouth. Destroying frontal lobes may just make you a vegetable; destroying the cerebellum/brainstem stops the heart, lungs, etc.

Yaknow, I absolutely don't condone what Spitzer did, especially in light of his campaign platform.

But - why is this story always "Spitzer's has ties to a prostitution ring" rather than "Spitzer caught hiring a prostitute"? I honestly believed for the first 20 minutes or so after I was (half) watching a news report that Spitzer was acting as a pimp or something. The reporting on this has been awful: veiled references that imply much more than I now understand actually happened.

Thanks for bringing some clear evidence in, Joe. Based on that one statement, I fall on the intelligent, selfish, spoiled brat side of this debate.

dculberson@#3:

+1, although I'll bet the maximum acceptable surface temperature for the CPU is so much lower than expected air temperatures that you'd have ton of other problems first if the air in your PC got that hot.

Takuan @#39:

My problem is not with bringing this tragic example up as an indicator of the ill health of the US security policy. My problem is the opportunistic, yellow journalism angle on the way the example was brought up.

Protonk @#54:
Certainly "cost" doesn't mean just dollar cost. Certainly anecdotes of bad results are relevant. Certainly policies that give all of the good results of another policy with fewer bad results are always preferable.

The fact is, though, that virtually every policy will have tragic anecdotes to condemn or aggrandize it. Virtually no policy is clearly better without also being worse in some way than another.

Unfortunately, the way people are built you have to bring in tragic anecdotes to get them to see the truth of the statistics. But arguing based from the anecdotes without paying heed to the statistics is for priests and politicians, and being swayed by such arguments is for the blundering herd, which I hoped we could transcend.

#35:
gr wth y cmpltly, n ll cnts. ls hppn t thnk tht t s pr snstnlsm t tk n cs tht hppns t f ll th ppl gng thrgh S scrty msrs nd pnt t t sy "s wht hppns!?!". That kind of argument, that one person somewhere is going to suffer a tragedy, without talking about the other side, is what got us into this mess. That irrational reaction to real tragedy is why Bush et al have been able to make the mockery of American freedom that they have.

#26:
Your logic is a great example of what I'm arguing against. I can tell you a heartbreaking story of how alcohol got someone's baby killed. Or how automobiles did. Or automatic doors. Should we look at each of those stories, ignoring everything else, and make each of those situations impossible, whatever the cost?

People won't let their kids out of the house because they know a heartrending story of someone's child being kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Others zip at 90 miles an hour through neighborhoods, because it's fun and they've never heard a personal story of tragedy resulting from it.

My point is that you reach out to people to try to help them through their tragedy, but sensible people make decisions for themselves based on the risk of tragedy versus the likely good effects.

I agree wholeheartedly that our whole culture of fear and authority worship is wrong, wrong, wrong. And, likely enough, a personal story of tragedy will take some of those other people who couldn't do the math of deaths from terrorism (out of the vastly larger number of other deaths) versus lost liberty (and, as it turns out, other deaths). But it still turns my stomach to see anyone taking a few stories out of the wide world out there and using them as an argument that policy should change. Even when I agree with the intended change.

I completely agree that US "security" policy is awful, bt t mks m sd t s y s bltnt snstnlsm fr yr cs, Xn.

I feel awful for those who love this baby. I also feel awful for those who love all of the 3000 people who died on 9/11, and the 45,000 people who die in car wrecks each year, and the 1,000,000 people who die in Africa each year of malaria.

That doesn't mean that a personal story should be used to argue policy decisions. Millions of people die every year. Each one is a personal story. We can't base policy on each death - we have to turn to (ew) statistics.

Compassion for your fellow man should be based on each of those personal stories. Arguments for or against policy should be based on the numbers.

@#8 and @#10

Of course, it is one of the great paradoxes of being human that the people who really buckle down and just do the right thing, and don't self aggrandize, are almost always totally anonymous except to people who know them personally. While people who do little but run their mouths endlessly about the little they do are 'leaders'.

That's not to say that there aren't quite a few people who self advertise and also do a lot, but few of those people do as much as many others with humility would do with the same resources. But again, the humble don't gain access to those resources, because of their humility.

Simon@11: Can you tell me the ways that lack of provider support would impact it? It seems to me that they can't change the format they use to do existing functionality, because it would break their old phones.

They could add new features that they somehow lock down, I suppose. I don't see important new features being added to cell communication fast enough that it would influence my decision to buy a phone, though.

I don't know what you mean about it being compromised as soon as a SIM is put in it, either. I have a SIM in mine and I can still fiddle with the software stack all the way down to (but not including) low level gsm code. I can track cell towers, initiate calls & send generated audio to them, capture audio from calls, use gprs for internet access, send & receive SMS with software, etc.

Doomstalk@7:
It is ugly compared to an iPhone, unfortunately. I think a lot of that is the lack of polish on the software, but it is the nature of open source software (release early, release often) that it is ugly in the beginning. In the longer run, though, an Ubuntu desktop that targets beauty is very competitive in look to a Mac, and I think the same will be true (in the long run) for the neo/FreeRunner.

There are also initiatives to create alternate cases, which may solve the hardware 'prettiness' issue.

I guess my point is that it's still early for neo/FreeRunner. What's available now is great for sysadmin/hardware guys/software guys (if you're willing to get your hands dirty) and in the long run, I think the FreeRunner will be a great consumer device in general.

This is not the first competitor to the iPhone! The FreeRunner hardware should be out in March, and it has all of the capabilities (and more) of the iPhone, plus GPS. The only piece missing is the camera, and frankly phone cameras suck, and suck harder every month as newer better cameras come out.

The phone is open from top to bottom - you can do anything from write applications that do whatever you like with the beautiful 640x480 touchscreen (and bluetooth, gsm/sms/gprs, gps, etc) to adding new hardware to the i2c bus to designing a new case.

You can see FreeRunner info at the OpenMoko main site.

I have the developer's version of the phone (slower and with no wifi) and I'm loving it. The developer version of the phone is really only good for people interested in writing software or fiddling with the hardware, or people who just can't live without a linux terminal in their pocket :-)

The final consumer ready hardware is expected in March or April, with the final consumer ready software (and a real consumer release of the FreeRunner) soon after.

IMO they're turning everything upside down - instead of a crappy little phone that locks you into a carrier and charges you to add ring tones, the phone is not only not locked to a carrier but is so open you can write voice over IP apps for it or create new hardware modules. All that on hardware that beats the iPhone in most ways.

The developer version is $300; the FreeRunner is expected to be $450. Of course there is no contract required, since the phone will work with any gsm carrier out of the box.

I wrote a little blurb about it in my blog.

Not having looked at the device (I'm at work and they're picky about some things...) I'll say that it is out of date.

Clearly the Next Big Thing has to be for the device to go away altogether. I know the basic idea for wearables has been around forever, but it seems to me that the time has come.

I wanna wear a bluetooth earpiece and cool shades, possibly with [ here's where my imagination is failing me :-( ] gloves, or fingerless gloves, or (ew) wristbands, and let any surface, including my hand, or no surface, be my interface. Tap the earpiece when you get a phone call, see a dial pad on your palm and tap out the number with the other hand, watch movies on a giant screen hovering in the air...

(equipment list: bluetooth earpiece, some brick in my pocket or on my belt, glasses w/ minute camera, painted video display, & variable darkness lenses, and gloves)

Why the hell do I want to dig out a device every time I want mindless entertainment or superficial conversation?

Ideally, you could then sell any little doohickey with whatever interface you want (switches, knobs, g-spots, ...) and all it needs to do is network with some software on the brick to be anything at all...

I second the props for Doug & Melissa.

My kids have some wooden blocks (just primary shapes) and Lincoln Logs. My 3 yr old plays with the wooden blocks quite a lot. The 3, 6 & 12 yr olds all play with the Lincoln Logs.

Talking about nostalgia toys: for all of my kids, Legos are their favorite toys (if you exclude video games). They play with those things (and fight over them, and throw them at each other) all the time.

We do have a few wooden cars and the like, and none of the kids seem to care for them at all.

Favorite toys in our house are Legos, Lincoln Logs, costumes, and of course video games. Almost all their other toys are just clutter :-(

Pteradactyls were dinosaurs, not reptiles.

IANAP(aleontologist)

I have a problem with the whole way movies are rated for violence. It has been demonstrated in studies that violence with no emotional impact is more mentally scarring than violence that you are made to care about.

Movie violence is rated as if the opposite were true.

So how do these things complete a circuit? Electricity flows based on a difference in electric potential.

I suppose it could use two half rectifiers, maybe...

The link for the Earthroamer (http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/09/17/*earthroamer*-xvjp-liv.html) appears to be bad...

Well, wurp. What kind of geek do you have to be to name yourself after a pre-made character in a 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons module?

@#2:

Come now, what fun would science be if nobody got hurt?

From the post: "pedophile who's pictures"

I think you mean "pedophile whose pictures"

If you don't have anything constructive to say, pick nits.