This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, brought to the fore by Ken Lui’s story The Caretaker recently on Escape Pod. Go listen. It’s worth it. I’ll wait.

If someone wants to write programs today that make use of strong-AI, there’s literally nothing stopping them–they can write to the Mechanical Turk API (to be fair, there’s a narrow exception of jobs of questionable legality which would violate Amazon’s terms of use).…

I see lots of articles like this, talking about consumer confusion over ebook pricing. The lead-in goes something like…aw, I’ll just quote it.

Publishers are making a killing on e-books because they cost nothing to produce, distribute and sell and are almost 100% pure profit.

Somebody tell me I’m crazy. Or agree with me, who knows?

I’m right at 50% of the way through A Game of Thrones, and I’m about to put it down. Once I start reading something, I usually finish it, even if its not my most favoriteist thing in the world.…

I’m reading a charming, well-loved 1965 Book Club edition of Dune from the local library. We take Space Opera for granted today, but observe how it needed to be described back then. Inside flap copy, after some standard stuff about Duke Leto and the great rival house of Harkonnen: (italics are from original source are shown in bold here)

A page of medieval history?

If you live in a large swath of northern Cali you can electronically check out books from the NCDL, most of which are Protected PDF, and read them on devices such as an iPad. It’s simple, just follow these 7 easy steps

0.…

I won an iPad in a contest earlier this year, and its recent addition to my desk has caused all kinds of havoc. Still, a good problem to have. 🙂 Still, there’s a critical point where number of screens per square meter of desk exceeds some threshold and becomes unmanageable.…