The Wealthy Barber

With the help of his fictional barber, Roy, and a large dose of humor, Chilton encourages readers to take control of their financial future and build wealth slowly, steadily, and with sure success.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0761513116/qid=1071781343//ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i0_xgl14/104-3718184-0325549?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Current Read: The Art of Twentieth-Century Zen

This book is devoted to Zen art as a living tradition. It explores the heart of Zen experience through contemporary Zen art, demonstrating how this time-honored visual form continues to flourish today.
From the Back Cover:"One of very few titles on the subject, this is an important contribution to the study of Zen art and serves as a window on the Zen worldfor the Western audience."--Lucia S. Chen, Library Journal
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/157062495X/reviews/qid=1041484816/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-3654080-5242339

Macallan 12 Year

This Scotch will always be near and dear to my heart.
Described by Paul Pacult, the renowned international whisky writer, in his book Kindred Spirits as: "simply the best 12 Year Old single malt around", The Macallan has justly reaped such critical acclaim.
http://www.queenannewine.com/mac12yearold.html

Against the System: Rise of the Robots

Consider a remote exploit that is able to compromise a remote system without sending any attack code to his victim. Consider an exploit which simply creates local file to compromise thousands of computers, and which does not involve any local resources in the attack. Welcome to the world of zero-effort exploit techniques. Welcome to the world of automation, welcome to the world of anonymous, dramatically difficult to stop attacks resulting from increasing Internet complexity.
http://www.phrack-dont-give-a-shit-about-dmca.org/phrack/57/p57-0x0a

The Ultra-Early Universe

In the last few years the problem of understanding the ultra-early universe has come into focus. We now know the key properties of the universe?its density, its age, and its main constituents. Indeed the last three years will go down as specially remarkable in the annals of cosmology because just within these years weve pinned down the shape and contents of the universe, just as in earlier centuries the pioneer navigators determined the size of the earth and the layout of its continents. The challenge now is to explain how it got that way. The new physics is attempting to understand why its expanding the way it is, and why it ended up with the content it has. We can trace its history back to about a micro-second after the putative big bang that started it off, but what happened in that first, formative microsecond? The boisterous variety of ideas being discussed?branes, inflation, etc.?makes clear that the issues are fascinating, but also were still a long way from the right answer. Were at the stage where all possibilities should be explored. Its worthwhile to consider the consequences of even the most flaky ideas, although the chance of any of them actually panning out in the long run is not very high.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rees02/rees02_index.html

Old US Plans For Nuclear Saucer

The official designation for Americas nuclear flying saucer was the Lenticular Reentry Vehicle (LRV). It was designed by engineers at the Los Angeles Division of North American Aviation, under a contract with the U.S. Air Force. The project was managed out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio, where German engineers who had worked on rocket plane and flying disc technology had been resettled.The LRV escaped public scrutiny because it was hidden away as one of the Pentagons so-called "black budget" items?that is, a secret project that is incorporated into some piece of nonclassified work. On Dec. 12, 1962, security officers at Wright-Patterson classified the LRV as secret because: "It describes an offensive weapon system." The project remained classified until May 1999, when a congressionally mandated review of old documents changed the projects status as a government secret, downgrading it to public information. The Department of Defense did, however, successfully seek to have the documents distribution restricted to defense contractors. PM obtained its copy as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request.
http://popularmechanics.com/science/military/2000/11/nuclear_flying_saucer/print.phtml

RIAA Nominated For Internet Villian Award

Oftel, the Home office and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are among this years shortlist for the Internet Villain Award being dished out by the UKs Net industry. As ever, there are two hotly-contested gongs that always seem to court controversy. However, the Internet hero and villain shortlists reflect the people and organisations that have helped - or hampered - progress in the Internet industry.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28668.html

Thunderstorms On Titan

Bright patches of methane have been detected swirling around the southern pole of Titan, settling a longstanding question as to whether Saturns largest moon possesses clouds, according to a new study. The discovery was made with two large telescopes in Hawaii, using new adaptive optics to distinguish features on the haze-shrouded satellite that even a visiting spacecraft had missed.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/12/19/titan.clouds/index.html

TCP Enabled Spacecraft

Cool... I wonder if you can ping it?A relatively limited budget of $15 million for a new NASA satellite has encouraged engineers to turn to the Internet for inexpensive ways to actually operate the spacecraft and its communications with Earth. Mission managers will actually be able to operate the spacecraft from anywhere that has an Ethernet port with Web access.The Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer (CHIPS) spacecraft will examine the stuff between stars, the so-called void of space that is actually rich with hot gas. "CHIPS will be the first mission ever to use end-to-end satellite operations over the Internet with TCP/IP and FTP," says Jeff Janicik, SpaceDevs program manager and flight director for the mission, the company?s first. "What that means is, essentially, the entire ground and flight software architecture are based on standard Internet protocols that you use everyday with PCs. Its like FTPing a file from space."
http://space.com/businesstechnology/technology/chips_tech_021218.html

Stuck In High-Tech Hell? Theres A Way Out

Someone once said, "If all you receive from your job is a paycheck, youre being grossly underpaid." I believe that. That having been said, I realize that most people cant just abandon their job. But if youre motivated enough, you find creative ways to make your life interesting.
http://msn.com.com/2100-1106-940287.html

Good Article On Bandwith vs Latency

From the bygone debates over DDR vs. RDRAM to the current controversy over Apples DDR implementations, one issue is commonly misunderstood in most discussions of memory technology: the nature of the relationship between bandwidth and latency. This article aims to give you a basic grasp of the complex and subtle interaction between bandwidth and latency, so that the next time you see bandwidth numbers quoted for a system youll be able to better understand how those numbers translate into real-world performance.
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/b/bandwidth-latency/bandwidth-latency-1.html

More Ghost In The Shell Sequel Info

Innocence Ghost In The Shell
Can human love exist without a physical body? Mamoru Oshii depicts a man and a woman from a future world where the border between human and machine is ambiguous.
http://www.productionig.com/

AI Advances in Video Games

The video game in which this AI was embedded was Civilization III [see screenshot]. The creation of Firaxis Games (Hunt Valley, Md.), Civilization III sets the player and various computer opponents to fighting military, economic, and cultural battles across a randomly generated set of continents and oceans. While game AIs are most visible when they take on the role of an opponent to a human player, they can also be used to work in the games background, making sure the digital environment runs smoothly, and even on the players behalf in roles like tutors or wingmen. An increasing number of other games are taking advantage of changes in computer architecture and the growth in processing power to become smarter than ever before. Although most of these games use relatively unsubtle AI techniques, a few pioneers are even showing the academic AI community a trick or two. While AI originated in the laboratory, it has now been co-opted by designers of video games, and work is under way on increasing the learning powers of a video games cast of characters and refining their social interactions with one another and with human players, too. At this point, even cinematographers and the military are showing interest in possible applications.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/dec02/mind.html

Current Read: The Emperors Codes

In the No. 1 bestseller Station X, Michael Smith brought us the riveting true story of how British experts broke Nazi Germanys wartime codes. In The Emperors Codes he continues this fascinating story as he examines how Japans codes were broken and the effect this had on the war in the Far East.The Emperors Codes takes the reader into the lives and loves of the men and women battling to break the Emperors codes. It shows how these intrepid code-breakers uncovered the secret Japanese preparations for the invasion of Malaya and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Using memories of those at the forefront of this battle, this is a fascinating and previously untold story.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0593046412/reviews/qid=1039024334/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/104-0306815-4524736

Awesome Little Gamers

...after a long sucky spell, heres a little gamers thats near to my heart...
http://www.little-gamers.com/index.php?strip_id=494

The Inner Einstein

Sharp guy, that Einstein. Kinda funny looking, what with the big hair and all, but real smart. Relativity, that was his thing. That and E=mc2, right? Interesting stuff. Really nice guy too, or was there something about Mrs. Einstein getting a raw deal? Still, he was a genius, definitely a genius. You dont need to be an Einstein to know that. Nearly 50 years after his death and a century after the then unknown physicist started challenging doctrine and stretching brains with his ideas, Albert Einstein remains not just scientifically relevant but a multipurpose icon as well. If anything, his stature has grown over the decades, fed by a steady stream of books, pop-culture references, and posthumous appearances in commercials and on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and most anything else that will sit still long enough to be stamped with a photo and a quote. The lionized Einstein cuts a comforting figure: a gentle genius, as benevolent as he was intelligent . . . almost a scientific Santa. But the more we see that image, the less we seem to know about the real Einstein and the work that made him famous.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/021209/misc/9einstein.htm

Experts Unlock BBCs Archive Of Life In The Eighties

All the information was recorded on two virtually indestructible interactive videodiscs that could be accessed using a special BBC microcomputer system. But the videodiscs far outlived the computer system, without which they proved useless. Now researchers working as part of the CAMiLEON project - based at Leeds University and the University of Michigan, in the United States - say they have cracked the problem. They have developed software which emulates the obsolete BBC computer and videodisc player on which the original system ran.
http://www.news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=1340622002

New StrongBad Email

Make sure you click on the record store at the end.
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail53.html