It's not very sexy, but it's fascinating and readable. I remember coming across it in Dillons bookshop, not knowing the name, and flicking through. Half an hour later, when I realised the time, I knew I had to buy it! Other books go into more exhausting detail (Knuth in particular), or cover a wider range (Knuth again!), or more modern ideas or languages. But Sedgewick is a great read, and I've been through it several times.

It covers all the basics (maths, searching, sorting, strings, graphs, and touches on FFTs and hardware and optimisation), and gives enough detail that you could go off and write some programs yourself. But more importantly, it explains them: how each algorithm works, what it's trying to achieve, how it behaves, and why. And it's because it explains the ideas so well that I'd recommend it. After every section I felt I'd learned something -- not because I had to, but for the sheer pleasure of understanding something new and interesting.

Other recommendations: Effective Java (a staggering amount of insight into the language), Thinking in Java (by someone who understands that language is more than just syntax), Deep C Secrets (again a pile of insight, interspersed with anecdotes and some rather off-the-wall diversions), Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls (problem-solving in bite-sized chunks -- a little dated but still interesting). Plus I've already mentioned Knuth. K&R is well done, though narrow in scope. I find Design Patterns useful, but more for clarifying things I've already seen than for learning new things. I've never actually read The Mythical Man-Month, but people I respect mention it, so I'm sure it's well worth reading too!

Of course, times being what they are, especially in this field, a lot of interesting stuff is on-line. Some hat should go without saying hereabouts include the latest Jargon File, some of Eric Raymond's books, and more online documentation and archives than anyone but Google can cope with.

Other interesting articles include The Programmer's Stone, a guide to writing Unmaintainable Code, The Ten Commandments for C Programmers (annotated edition), Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, What Colour are your Bits?, and Guy Steele's Growing a Language.

Here in the UK, the media (or at least, a good number of newspapers, TV programmes, etc.) have been trumpeting the possibility of a link between this vaccine and autism for the last few years -- despite the only 'lab' claiming any link turning out to be a shed belonging to someone with a correspondence degree.

(It's interesting that most of these vaccine scares seem to be restricted to one country at a time, even though the vaccines themselves are used across the world...)

As others have said, Dr Goldacre is a voice well worth listening to. At least partly because he shows, time and time again, that you have to go to the actual results, the facts and figures, to see what's really going on. He's done a lot of that work. It's a shame that mainstream journalism rarely follows suit.

Take, for example, the Lord of the Rings movies. They involved two years of pre-production, a year of principal photography, and then three years of post-production and pickups. If copyright only applies once the finished work is registered, that leaves nearly six years for material to be stolen and used freely. On the other hand, if it applies automatically, then that takes six years off the time during which the result may be profitable. You don't suggest a timespan for movies, but even at ten years that's the majority of the time gone; and at five years (as you suggest for recordings), the work would be out of copyright before it was even finished!

Of course, few movies or albums take anywhere near as long to make, but you can see how short copyright times could promote speed, even at the expense of quality or scope.

And what about releases of older material? I know bands who have reached into their 'vaults' and released live and studio material recorded decades earlier; under short copyright terms, there would be no incentive to release such recordings at all.