I was depressed by Galapagos. (Bad science) I thought Breakfast of champions was annoying, and I thought Night, which is supposed to be very dark, the most enjoyable thing he has written.

Yeah, I had a semester where I read Thomas Convenant for fun/independent report, then I read The Bluest Eye and The Things They Carried for class. The name of the class: Evil in American Literature.

I still say Thomas Covenant is worth reading though, lots of great moments for the other characters, lots of great other characters. Foamfollower particularly.

Strongly agree.

BTW - What the hell? That's optimistic?

Spoiler Warning!
Humans are so unusual aliens will consider us an abomination, and humans are so decadent we will inevitably be hunted to extinction by vampires we recreate out of boredom.
End Spoiler.

That's optimism?!

Let's see, in the first book an abandoned leper/former author rapes a young woman because she exposes him to something that heals him, all while he denies that she is more than a figment of his diseased imagination. And that's not a spoiler because it happens at the beginning and things go down from there. (I wrote a paper on Thomas Covenant as the perfect anti-hero in high school.)

I wouldn't say that it's not worth reading (I read both trilogies and will get around to reading the third eventually). Many of the characters are lovely people, and the endings are not quite as bleak as it sounds. In fact the endings are pretty happy compared to the rest of the story line.

Hey OP: Firefox, Web of Trust, No Script, HttpS everywhere, and a half dozen other random odds and ends as the mood takes me. Then I spot check the history, and talk to them about why I am doing it. But I'm one of the less technical readers of /.

The rest of us: All of this, but with none of the hate. This is mostly a matter of style, and if OP wants to filter, let him filter. If someone else wants to monitor 24/7, let them do it. If naked guy wants to shut the door to his play room, more power to him for being able to afford a play room. We ought not scream about how his choosing to restrict is anti-freedom, 'cause that's silly. In the end I doubt it is going to lead directly to irreparable criminal degeneracy. I am young enough that I had internet porn, and I'm okay.

As to why I filter? I filter the real world for their safety: I put rails on their cribs, tell them the street is off limits till they learn to look both ways, and I filter their Internet. And when they start climbing out of the crib, asking to cross the street, or trying to circumvent my filters, then I know that it is time to move on. Hell, I give my 9 year old lock puzzles with prizes in them just to encourage puzzle breaking. And there are people out there wanting to hurt them, and trolls, and people wanting to scam them. If there weren't my kid wouldn't have spent 10 bucks on Cooking Momma ingredients, not knowing it was real money, before I noticed.

IIRC, one of the reports from the Freakonomics guys said it didn't really seem to matter what kind of parenting books you bought, as long as you were the kind of parent who bought parenting books.

The important thought most people seem to be missing is that your house gets warmer. People are forgetting that while the LEDs are getting cooler, somewhere is a battery or power plant on the other side of the circuit that must be getting hotter. And it must be getting hotter by more than the LEDs are cooled.

Yeah, this is more or less what Brin used. A ship inside the sun using engine power to convert heat to light (cooling the ship), and then using the light to create photon thrust inside the sun.

I would imagine that the LEDs would have to be putting out more than picowatts though....

What you are talking about is Spoliation (seriously, that's the spelling), and it can be a jury instruction, where the judge tells the jury that they should assume that the contents of the destroyed evidence (tape, image, whatever) showed that the officer was doing whatever it was the photographer says he was doing.

It could be worked like this hypothetically: I take video of police brutality, some officers come over, rough me up, take my tape, and I yell out: "This is police brutality! I'm going to sue you! That tape is evidence!" If the cop then deletes the images, destroys the tape, etc, then he has committed spoliation. When/if I sue the cop, and depending on jurisdiction, I can either: a. File a motion for sanctions and fines because the cop destroyed the evidence; b. File a motion to have the judge tell the jury that they should assume that the tape showed the judge roughing me up; or c. File an civil complaint on the topic of spoliation alone, and then even if I lose on the battery case, I might still win on the destruction of evidence case.

Jurisdictions very, don't try this at home, try not to go out into the world with a machine that still uses tape (my hypothetical apparently took place 10 years ago). There is a decent and free law journal article on the topic in Illinois, and we are very much having the video-tape-the-police-discussion here. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1536805#%23

This idea is similar to the old Roman Calendar from 700 B.C., so why is it a step forward? Intercalary days? Arbitrary decision about how often we adjust the calendar by a week? Days that aren't part of any month? This is madness (THIS IS SPARTA-era esque.) Seriously, this is very similar to the Numa Calendar from Ancient Rome. What would we do with the birthdays of people born during the intercalary days? Would that be a holiday period? And all this to deal with the fact that calculations of interest are complicated for some people? And that they apparently do not like the Calendar printing industry and feel no one should buy kitten calendars....

Is it me or is this the literal idea of the original HG Wells Invisible Man?