This is no troll. Humour in books doesn't work as well as it does on film, TV or live.

There are few books I've found to be really funny, and I read 30+ books a year. Douglas Adams' books along with say Catch-22 and maybe Running with Scissors are about the only ones that come to mind.

Humour works better when you can have the jokes delivered with timing. I've found audio books make some books much funnier when it's done well.

Even film has it's weaknesses for humour. Film tends to want a narrative to drive things and there often isn't enough time for character development. TV is better. I'd prefer The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Yes Prime Minister, Drop the Dead Donkey, Faulty Towers and Monty Python to most comedy films any day.

Spot on.

And what's really great about slashdot is that it is also classic slashdot for people like you and others to come in with figures and good information and very correctly point out that the claim is BS.

That's why people stick around.

Exactly. The US is spending 2.6% of GDP on R & D. It is number two in the G7. Obama has said he wants to bring the spending up to 3.0%.

So the Europeans and the US governments say they are firmly convinced of dangerous anthropogenic global warming but they won't spend 15 Bn over 10 years to speed this up?

If fusion could be made to work for 2-3 times the cost of coal electricity massively reducing C02 emissions without massively cutting energy usage would be possible. It's worth spending money to find this out. Bjorn Lomborg, who is loathed by most environmentalists recommends spending more on alternative energy research. Anthorny Watts would probably approve spending more on this kind of fusion research.

Surely if the US and the Europe, that would collectively spend about 700 Bn a YEAR on defence are serious about alternative energy this should be funded more.

Steven Chu where are you?

We as Chinese will feel unsafe until our technology is superior to yours. We cannot yet sleep safely at night.

As your economy, due to shocking mis-management and two unwise wars is already effectively depends on our savings we don't think that overtaking your military technology will be too tough in the next 50 years.

We believe that we must be ready for any contingency. With 4 times as many people and sustained 7 percent plus growth rates we will approach, catch and overtake you.

You may not be able to sleep safely in future.

Or we could work out ways to get along.

SGI didn't commit suicide. The market just ate them.

Around 1999 the Octane were about 50K, at the time NT machines (think Ingergraph) appeared that were, for many, many purposes, just as capable. They were 10K.

In addition the MIPS chip was considerably worse than a dual proc x86 machine of the same vintage. I was working at a company where there was a C++ API. Compilation time on the SGI was 3 hours. It was 10 minutes on the Intergraph.

When cards like the Nvidia Quadro and FireGL cards came they were better than SGI machines and cost a few thousand dollars.

SGI's model of a proprietary in house system just stopped working as x86 and graphics cards just got better and better.

Even the high end Onyx graphics setups became obsolete a few years later when clusters of PCs started to kick in.

SGI's engineers have gone to places like ATI & Nvidia. While it's sad to see that the company is pretty much worth nothing, it's not the end of the world. SGI did great stuff but their time has passed.

It's surprising that no one here on slashdot has pointed out that a major difference between the html and gopher was that gopher services had to get a licence from the University of Minnesota while http servers could be constructed without a licence.

Free open software with free open standards is what got the web going.

Tiobe maintains a list that is updated every month that tells a different story.

For January 2009, rounded; Java, 19%; C, 16%; C++, 10%; VB, 9%; PHP, 10%.