Before President Chavez gave the book to Obama, it was the 54,295th most popular book on Amazon.

Chavez’s Gift Causes Book Written in 1971 to Skyrocket to Top of Amazon Bestseller List : northxsouth : free software news from latin america

telecommunications services should be declared human rights and cannot be subject to private deal or marketed by the World Trade Organization. These services are and should be essentially public utilities of universal access.

Access to telecommunications declared a human right by ALBA : northxsouth : free software news from latin america

Sales of “Atlas Shrugged” Soar in the Face of Economic Crisis

Washington, D.C., February 23, 2009--Sales of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008. This continues a strong trend after bookstore sales reached an all-time annual high in 2008 of about 200,000 copies sold.

“Americans are flocking to buy and read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ because there are uncanny similarities between the plot-line of the book and the events of our day”

The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights: Sales of Atlas Shrugged Soar in the Face of Economic Crisis

janelane wrote:

Acidus wrote:

So there's your tweet from your sweet, Lance Armstrong. He's watching the Belgium cycling race La Fleche Wallone. Does receiving that information make you feel like you're part of something? And if so, what? And why?

Am I sounding negative? Even petty? Sue me. Everybody has a limit, and I've reached mine with Twitter, which isn't just the world's fastest-growing social networking tool. It's a religion, filling the hole in regular people's regular lives.

Don't look at me like that. I'm not the neighborhood crank, kicking you kids off my lawn. I've embraced the blogging revolution, bookmarking multiple sites and visiting them every day. More than 20 million Americans write a blog, many of them for audiences approaching zero. Less than 9 percent of the blogging public makes any money at all, and only 2 out of every 100 bloggers support themselves fully. But still 20 million people do it. And I get that. It's personal expression. It's art. Doesn't matter whether it's done well or not. Art is art. So I get blogging.

Facebook and MySpace? I don't get that, unless it's for dating purposes. Horniness, I understand. The need to tell people what you're doing at various junctures of the day? And to read what other people are doing? Gregg is folding clothes ... I don't understand. And I never will. My life shouldn't be that interesting to you, and your life damn sure isn't that interesting to me.

The only thing more inane than Twitter is people blogging about hating it. Even the people that use Twitter already know how stupid it is. Seriously, how much longer can it stay cool if Barbara Walters and CNN are talking about it?

Just bide your time a little more and then we'll be on to the next lame fad and on and on into eternity. :-)

-janelane

You're all using it wrong.

Sure, using it to report your banal daily activities is shallow. That's not to say it's useless, because I've managed to run into people that I hardly ever see, or get interesting topical and CONTEXTUALLY relevant information that I probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise. In a lot of ways, this usage is like the Agents fad from the early dot com days, but instead of intelligent bots, it's your social network doing the work for you.

A good friend described it this way: Facebook is for the people you know. Twitter is for the people you want to know. If you're an old dog internet person, then you already know the power of connecting online. You got access to people on IRC or via email listservs back in the day that you'd never have gotten any other way. Those people became colleagues, employers, friends, or lovers in the real world. Twitter is more of the same. It allows you to connect with people that you ordinarily wouldn't have. Particularly about a specific topic or event.

I didn't get this eit... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

RE: 'This Twitter thing is annoying as hell' -- Gregg Doyel at 6:01 p.m. - CBSSports.com News, Fantasy, Video

Popular (on google) blog entry offers criticism of current state of ebooks.

I think the main things preventing ebook use becoming more popular are:

- DRM and format wars. There is a proliferation of competing formats, generally with DRM over the top, so whichever reader you go for you are never going to get access to all of the available content. Whilst hacks and converters are available, when I was looking to find a way of converting my Liaden books into a newer format that I could use with my BeBook the website which originally sold them having gone out of business , several hours of online research persuaded me that this would be too difficult.

- cost and breadth of content. ebooks offered for sale are currently priced on a very similar level to paper books, so there s not much price incentive to buy digitally although the key retailers I ve seen have a points-type loyalty scheme . For example there still seems to be the hardback/paperback pricing difference even in digital format. I have no idea if this is driven by royalties or DRM issues, but in any event it s a subtantial barrier to entry. Similarly the range of ebooks you can get does not match up to printed books so if you re looking for something specific or maybe older, it might be difficult or even impossible to find digitally.

- no second hand market - once you ve read an ebook you can t really give it or sell it on to someone else. This is another reason why the pricing hasn t been particularly challenged.

I think until there s a similar threat to the publishing industry s revenue models as was experienced with MP3s, these issues are unlikely to be sorted out, at least not in favour of the consumer.

Barbelith Underground - Books, Criticism & Writing - EBooks - are you interested, tempted, bored, indifferent, eager?

Steven Johnson:

The book's migration to the digital realm will not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but will likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.

There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Bruce Sterling:

"Poor folk love their cellphones!"

Have you seen Readernaut?

Share your reading experience by writing notes, tracking progress, and engaging in meaningful discussions with friends.

Got about halfway through the article

Interesting, but kinda reads like an ad placement for the Kindle service.
I want this technology to come about so bad. Kindle's display is fantastic, but if you want to read a free book you got for yourself online, you have to transmit it over the Kindle network, they don't tell you that in this article. And, BTW, will it become like MS's Zune, where if there is no DRM imprimitur the thing wont let you read it after 72 hours.
Of course, if anybody knows of a FREE portable book and document reader, I am DYING to hear of it.
DeepGeek

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write

This amazed me, now microcontrollers boast eight 32 bit cores!
If you visit their site, check out the audio of four part harmony (each part having it's own core, I believe.)

...Its eight processors cogs can operate simultaneously, either independently or cooperatively, sharing common resources through a central hub. The developer has full control over how and when each cog is employed; there is no compiler-driven or operating system-driven splitting of tasks among multiple cogs.
...Two programming languages are available: the easy-to-learn high-level Spin, and Propeller Assembly which can execute at up to 160 MIPS 20 MIPS per cog .
Who uses the Propeller?
Due to its diversity, the Propeller Chip may be used for many types of applications. Most users appreciate the overall processing power and I/O capabilities. Hobbyists like the powerful yet easy language while robot builders and process control engineers appreciate the parallel processing capabilities. Many find the on-board video generation and easy connection to popular PC peripherals reduces the need for additional support components.

Where is the Propeller used?
The Propeller is used in many industries including manufacturing, process control, robotics, automotive and communications. Hobbyists and Engineers alike are finding new uses for this powerful microcontroller every day.

This came to my attention listening to a podcast on embedded linux. The thing that interested the podcasters was that this chip was designed without circuitry for interrupts. The company says that during the design, the engineers saw interrupts as a band-aid for not having enough cores, so they killed the interrupts, and put in eight cores. Other features are on-board video generation. All on one chip. Far out!

Propeller Chip General Information

The bug had been around since at least October Thanks to Rose for tipping me off , during which time it had been gleefully exploited by voyeurs, hackers, entrepreneurs and lechers; you can find pages and pages of public message board comments around the web in which posters are peeking in on 14 and 15-year-old girls and sharing what they find.

Ad-supported web sites with NAMEs like Can t Hide and MySpacePrivateProfile.com emerged to earn a buck off the glitch. One such site reports that its users have accessed, or attempted to access, 77,000 private profiles -- 3,000 of them today.

While all this going on more-or-less in plain sight, you have to wonder where MySpace s safety and security team was. Was this glitch that hard to fix?

Apparently not.

MySpace Quietly Fixes Bug that Gave Voyeurs Access to Teens Private Photos | Threat Level from Wired.com

Ashby Jones:

How do social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace fit within the world of privacy law? Are such sites private rooms in which one can pen his or her internal thoughts without fear of others misappropriating such thoughts? Or are such sites really just bulletin boards for the world?

An appellate court in California weighed in on the issue on Friday, and basically sided with the bulletin-board position.

This case seems pretty cut-and-dry, so the verdict is unsurprising. A more interesting test case would involve the public redistribution of content that the author/creator did not make generally available.

From the archive, Decius:

In my view the combined effect of the third-party doctrine, which states that what you tell Google you've told the government, and the notion that machines cannot violate your privacy, will enable the rise of a total surveillance society in which everyone is watched by law enforcement all the time.

MySpace a Bulletin Board, Not Private Room, Says California Court

Here are a few of my favorite science fiction books, and what I learned from them (they are roughly in my favorite order):null

Arrington's book list

Grok This: Forget The Business Books, Go Sci-Fi To Stoke Your Imagination