It depends how they did it, of course. If you got a personal mail from someone at O'Reilly floating the idea, that's not spam. That's personal contact and good marketing - much like getting in touch with people you'd like to write a paper with or for any of 1001 other collaborative conquests.

Of course, if it was a mass mail "Join the Professors Who Use O'Reilly Books Program" type thing, then yeah, you're totally justified in your ire.

I'm convinced nose picking is done as a sort of anal obsession with "perfection." It's in the same bracket as when people fill up with gas and try to exactly hit exactly to the nearest full currency unit (not such a big thing in the US due to prepay, but elsewhere it's common).

There are a lot of weird behaviors people do as a way to ensure regularity and "correctness" even when such correctness isn't required and even if it takes more time. Picking scabs, picking your nose, etc, seem like attempts to "perfect" the body to me.

I'm probably being dense here, but I'd really appreciate anyone who can explain how this can possibly work given that the wavelength of light is many hundreds of times longer than 2nm? I read the article and was none the wiser. Given the mention of quantum mechanics, is this related to wave/particle duality? That is, this detects the light particle irrelevant of the wavelength?

If you could teleport anywhere within a game at any time instantly, the best places, best quests, and so forth would all be overcrowded. It's like if you could teleport anywhere instantly in real life. The California coast would be heaving every weekend and evening and numerous "hotspots" would be crowded with tens of thousands of people 24/7. Popular areas in existing games have demonstrated this, since they're usually the easiest places to get to. A key example is outside the bank in Ultima Online's Britain.

In other news, Java is really slow and no-one would use JavaScript for anything serious.

This isn't all about what "you" would do, it's about what "other" people would do. People would still attempt crazy overtaking maneuvers and it's their mistakes that could kill me, not mine.

Especially as I'm one of those crazies who always does the speed limit on the nose right up to the signs just to irritate the hell out of people :P

I'm a two-bit, small time computer book author with just one book to my name so far. I love seeing my book get pirated. It's sold reasonably well for its niche (approaching 10,000 copies) but for the second edition I pleaded with my publisher to allow the e-book version to be free. Of the, say, 10,000 copies sold, only a couple hundred have been of the e-book edition, and I'm convinced that the wider exposure a free e-book would gather would result in increased print sales. When Seth Godin gave away the free PDF of his Ideavirus book, it led to me buying his various other books in print throughout the years. Doctorow is right that obscurity is a bigger hurdle than piracy, but I'm pretty convinced that even big name authors could benefit from extended reach thanks to freely distributed content.

My argument rests on people preferring paper to e-books, and I think they do. I sure do. Sadly, big name publishers tend to disagree, despite a number of convincing social media experiments, but over time perhaps change will happen.

Trademarks don't help "verify the trusted developer" much of the time. Consider a Linux distribution called "X Linux" - there are plenty of such distributions but Linus or other core Linux developers have not been involved with that specific distribution. Same applies for alternative implementations of programming languages like, say, IronRuby and IronPython.

"They are young girls, we can see from the photos. We think that perhaps they are not well informed about the rules," he said.

People are almost never well informed about the rules. When I left school, I didn't get a book of laws that informed me I'd have to pay tax (and how). The only reason I knew what to do was because I took advice from other self employed family members, so I've paid all my taxes throughout the years, no problems.

But.. a lot of people sell things at casual sales, barter services, and do things online without paying tax. It's wrong, but I have a little sympathy for them, because this stuff just isn't taught in schools and the authorities don't go to any lengths to inform people about taxation issues. I mean, how many regular folks who barter things pay the tax on those transactions? Most people I know wouldn't even realize they have to!

Sim City 4 is a great game, I still play it once and a while. They need something that had the gameplay of Sim City 4, but with some improvements in gameplay and real 3D rendered buildings.

Agreed, although to be honest, something like Sim City 4 that actually works would be a start. Sim City 4's Mac port is a shameful piece of software engineering - unstable, buggy, slow as molasses (on an octo core Mac Pro, no less). The PC version is better but has a tendency to fall over when your city gets really large.. and this is a 5+ year old game.

All that said, I'd definitely put down even, say, $250 for a Sim City 5 that delivered, but I doubt we'll get one any time soon.

I agree, and when that occurs there'll be a lot more payola, bribed reviews, and "product placement" directly into content than there is now. Sure, it already goes on, but it'll be rife if advertising revenues dry up.

Thanks ad blockers for making content even worse than it already is. Congrats!

All dynamic scripting languages are "uber ultra slow" then, by your measure. Ruby 1.9 betters or equals the performance PHP, Perl and Python 3 in the latest Alioth Shootout.

You replied to this twice over the span of a week? People.. :)

IBM is already a huge company. Market cap of $124bn. Sun won't make a dent. Market cap of less than $4bn. Yep, Sun is only 3% the size of IBM - it'd be like a dog eating a fly.

A Levels are a form of qualification that are typically earned after two years of study from age 16 to 18 (although they can be taken in later life, as necessary). Coupled with GCSEs (qualifications you receive when you finish high school at 16) they're the qualifications you use to apply to university.

The key point is that (until some recent law changes) high school (or secondary school, as we tend to call it) finishes at age 16 in the UK. I left school at 16 and went straight out to work, for example. It gets a bit confusing though because I have no A Levels (having left school at 16) but I could probably get on to an undergraduate course as a "mature student" due to the experience I have in my fields.