About 40 years ago, sitting US President Richard Nixon went to China. The plane landed in Shanghai China and there Nixon did some business regarding the Shanghai Accords. The Shanghai accords were a written document that organized or stabilized the enormous gap between Communist Chinese political ideology and American political ideology.

I highly recommend John Adam's opera Nixon In China. Fragments are available on Youtube and Wikipedia has a very helpful series of entries that describe the historical visit to China.

The opera reveals a series of cultural mysteries: The oblique standoffish ideas of Kissinger, the amazing cultural impact of the wife of Chairman Mao, the feelings and warmth that developed as Pat Nixon visited a poultry farm, the frankness of Nixon and Mao realizing their own limitations as leaders.

What is happening today with theft of secrets, electronic intrusion, removal of manufacturing to China needs to be balanced with the realization that the white hot ideological differences between the US and communist countries has developed into a new oblique engagement where the line of contact has become a huge blur.

If anything, the joke is on both parties. Coming up on both the American and Chinese societies is a threat that both societies are equally completely unable to defend against, namely global warming.

I give the Slashdot posters a collective D- failing grade.

          The early posters get a D- for their really weird inability to say three fresh and funny things about the OP.

          The middle posters, get a D- because 90% of the posts are tired sighs.

            The tired sighs of many previous posts are an important sign that the global warming problem is a slow moving massive event where the principal indicator of it's progress ( CO2 levels) has not gone down even though we have been through a 5 year economic depression. The abating economic depression did not slow down society enough to affect CO2 levels. (There was a little decrease in the rate of increase, but not in the fact of increase.) The sighs reflect the disappointment and fatigue of many people on this list who have tried to reduce their CO2 footprint and see that all the effort produced no result. CO2 increase is an intractable, slow moving, massive problem.

                And lets issue another D- to everybody that cites an expert and therefore excuses themselves from engaging with the global warming problem. If you live a typical drive to work life you are contributing 3,000 to 10,000 pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere every year. Could you possibly reduce your CO2 emission to the level of a 1776 pre steam engine individual? In this case, the phrase "massive problem" means exactly that: a large amount of human generated mass. No matter how subtle the argument, 3000 pounds turned into infra-red absorbing Carbon oxygen bonds is about the mass of your car. Rhetoric is not enough.

          Welcome to the lonely world of social change. The problem in front of us is still how to emit 1/2 as much CO2 every day for you, your wife and your kids without losing the happy and fun mechanical conveniences we enjoy and maintaining economic and social stability.

      (I am not a chemist, but 2 gallons of gasoline x 7 lb per gallon x 365 days => about 5000 lbs, not counting the weight of Oxygen from air making CO2.)

Here are some pieces of a scan to ocr script I am developing.
First I am scanning a multicolumn document and to preserve the sense of the document text, I scan even pages twice and odd pages twice.
Second, the scanned images must be rotated. Pieces of the "convert" command appear in the perl fragments here.
Third, I am using the open source tesseract OCR program. Some of my documents have grayed areas that contain text. So I am running tesseract twice on the source files and picking the output file with the most text characters.
Forth, the basic program is just a big loop with a menu where I input file names or page numbers.

Here goes:
# my $scanprog = "/usr/bin/scanimage --resolution 400 >";# print "$scanprog \n";
# Scanner settings for pages top of book at left of scanner StylusScan 2500
my $scanoddleft = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 30mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for odd pages
my $scanoddright = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 0mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for odd pages
my $scanevenleft = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 30mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for even pages
my $scanevenright = "/usr/bin/scanimage -l 0mm -x 190mm -y 235mm --resolution 400 >";#for even pages
# OCR commands and parameters
#tesseract test1.tif test1 -l eng;
#scanimage -l 26mm -x 166mm -t 10mm -y 125mm --brightness 3 --resolution 400 | pnmtotiff>test1.tif;eog test1.tif;convert -rotate 90 test1.tif test1.tif; eog test1.tif; tesseract test1.tif test1 -l eng
my $tesseract = " tesseract ";
my $language = " -l eng ";
my $brightness2 = " --brightness 2 ";
my $brightness3 = " --brightness 3 ";
my $convert90 = " convert -rotate 90 ";
my $eog = " eog " ;
my $charcount = " wc -c " ;
my $scanpage = 1; # Range is 1 to 183

Super simple scanning system using Linux.
Make directory called scans, make another called taxes
Have a text file of scanning hints with an easy to remember name.
in a terminal, print the scanning hints file and use the Linux mouse copy feature to construct a scan instruction
The scanimage application requires sudo or you can find a tweak using google search to alter the scanner's USB files and make it run from an unprivileged user.
cd scans
cat filewitheasycommandstocopy.txt

Typical contents of my hint file:
sudo scanimage -l 0mm -x 90mm -y 66mm --resolution 400 | pnmtojpeg >cprcard.jpg
# make files non-overwritable
# chmod -w ~/scans/*.jpg

Verify each scan with eog viewer.
Organize scans like this:
Make long filenames with agencynames, recipientnames, and documentnames all in lower case.
use the mouse to copy an old file name for re-use.
      this groups similar documents together.
use ls -lr to show most recently scanned items.
use ls -lr *keyword*.jpg to show selected classes of scanned items.
use locate in the distant future to find those oddball items like certificates or letters of recommendation.

locate certificate | grep rabies

As I read the posts, one of the sub texts is that there are a bunch of career opportunities for you.

The opportunities are geographically spotty and some of the opportunities might be within the company you work for now.

One way of looking at the problem is first is one of your underlying assumptions that you are going to stay in your present home? OK yes. So how many companies within a reasonable drive are there and why not make a sorted list of the nearest and most desirable. Out of that list pick a few companies to use for practice. Research the companies and slowly do one informational interview. Solve the problem of being well dressed, driving up in a presentable car, knowing all kinds of stuff about the company, and developing a model of what kind of automation strategy they are following, what equipment and software they have used, and how strong they feel about their success in automating. Then, having researched the kind of stuff the company ought to be doing or having determined how the implementation process is going, seek an informational interview with an internal affairs executive.

When you have the small things working, like having some printouts and flow charts in a briefcase. Do an informational interview with a high value candidate for your next career move. There are two reciprocal motions taking place, you are solving the problem of presenting yourself as a plausible high and equal status problem solving player on a specific field of activity. Yes I said 'status'. See the last quarter NY Review of Books article reviewing Tom Wolfe's books for a discussion of status. Or this article http://observer.com/2012/10/tom-wolfe-has-blood-on-his-hands-back-to-blood-reviewed/ The second problem is having well tuned and thought provoking questions for your interviewee.

I am 65 and I transitioned out of a lacklustre computer career and I am holding a low pay school aide job for at least 4 more years and probably as long as I can keep working. Well money isn't going to be my legacy for the kids so I have compromised for a dual strategy: I am going to be an aide of excellence and then to give my kids something to be proud of, I am running for a minor elected position in my community. The HR departments can take their age bias and eat it. Changing your status and acquiring the competence to support work at that level you can do.

There is always the z axis if you want to change your plane of operation.

What early great software programs have died or buried in the proprietary cemetary?

At the top of my list of "never escaped" is AutoCad and it's family of file formats that are still proprietary. I feel this is a real loss to the whole world that this important suite of file formats and set of command and control conventions continues to be expensive and closed.

For "almost escaped" I would place Turbo Pascal and a pair of books by Nicolas Wirth. I used Turbo Pascal for a fun self education in data structures and linked lists. Then it withered with high prices and lack of a free library movement.

Another "almost escaped" program is Dbase II and Dbase III+. The latter program had several outstanding reference and guide books. But there has never appeared a free or open source database interpreter (afaik) I quit looking years ago. These days I just grep a subdirectory to find things.

Finally on my list of great ideas that have never escaped the proprietary clinch is the HP3000 Image database file system and the amazing elegant Cognos Powerhouse report language. Image could do a whole bunch of indexing and searching forwards and backwards and it had super duper business security and permissions. The Powerhouse report language could throw together the equivalent of a tedious and patiently developed SQL query in a way I can best describe as elegant and intuitive. The last I saw of Cognos Powerhouse was a 3 month old non-resellable $30,000 cardboard box of tape reels I handed to the president of the company as a merger-liquidation was finally winding up.

I work with severely disabled people as an aide. For about 2 weeks at a time I learn how an individual works at the simplest motor skill level. I have also been studying quadrature phase demodulation in connection with doing an amateur radio project. As pointed out earlier, humans start out with an extremely dense neural structure. The neural structure has a fascinating cellular development path that starts as a tube (a topologically interesting thing) that gets folded, extruded, wrapped, pinched and wrinkled.

I have recently been practising assisting my people by waiting longer periods of time and watching for coarse movements, trying to see if motions or simple movements are going a long way and returning as motions quite a bit different than what one would conventionally expect. Sometimes I see facial expressions reflecting interest in what we are doing.

The thought has been puzzling me, the nerves receiving messages from the body might be undergoing quadrature phase demodulation when they enter the dense packed structure of the brain. Brains have rhythmic electrical waves; music, dance and movement are sometimes associated with effective mentation. The quadrature phase demodulation process, when repeated in layers causes certain neural states to persist because many stimuli is repetition.

Also as pointed out earlier, conventional electronics does not have the connection versatility of nerve tissue. Programming using the strengths of conventional electronics can imitate the high symbolic level of mentation. The manmade project, unless designed to be, doesn't have the profound rapid convergence or similarity of infant neural development. Also note that adult mentation has great variety in its' specifics. It is a very adult thing to say YMMV.

I went to Stanford University bookstore to see if I could purchase a few graduate level textbooks in human motor development, neurology and (a separate interest) particle physics (easy stuff like alpha particles).

Wikipedia beat Stanford University Bookstore on each of these topics. I walked in with $200 plus a credit card and spent only $.75 on parking.

Eventually, my daughter who is in college got me an old edition of the motor development book I needed.

The paper book is shrinking due to the economics of printing: The weight and cost of paper, the taxes on unsold book inventory, the system change where fine printing is typeset in USA and printed in China. In contrast, electronic books are 2% for the webserver, 49% to the publisher and 49% to the author.The markup or profit on an electronic book is basically set by the marketing skill and chutzpah of the publisher. You can weigh a book and look up the wholesale price of paper and see that relatively little is left for the publisher and author.

I recently converted a 2008 vintage Compaq and a newer AMD 64+Nvidia graphics laptop to Ubuntu.

The older laptop required editing a file in /etc to force an alternate video driver to load. The other laptop works best with a driver named nvidia.

What worked for me was refreshing my memory by reading the classic explanation of how a Debian Linux loads drivers, noting a few key filenames, and doing the few simple steps to switch video drivers and restart the computer. After writing it down on a sheet of paper, switching drivers was easy and picking the video driver that worked best was easy after I had confidence I was actually switching drivers and seeing the freshly rebooted video display.

The PBS Newshour for example has carefully ignored reporting the substance of the 3rd political party and 4th political party presidential campaign rhetoric.

The public loss is neither of the candidates of the big two parties has been forced to acknowledge the awful problems with America and global warming, private debt, public debt and foreign policy or foreign conflict. We are a nation with presidential candidates saying America is great while the ocean inundates New York City.

The rhetoric the big two candidates have adopted is "gladhanding" where you say nice things that Americans love hear said and carefully avoid saying anything that can be used by the other candidate to peel away any voting constituency.

The benefit of the third and fourth party candidates is they have been speaking truth to power. But the careful studied non-coverage of their rhetoric and the substance underlying it has prevented the national political dialogue from developing the depth and conviction to move ahead with changes, reform and humanity necessary to save the planet from a looming century of environmental change or degradation.

Here is a snippet from:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/cC/page_269.shtml

What are the fundamental limits of travel by flying? Does the physics of
flight require an unavoidable use of a certain amount of energy, per ton,
per kilometre flown? What’s the maximum distance a 300-ton Boeing 747
can fly? What about a 1-kg bar-tailed godwit or a 100-gram Arctic tern?

Just as Chapter 3, in which we estimated consumption by cars, was
followed by Chapter A, offering a model of where the energy goes in cars,
this chapter fills out Chapter 5, discussing where the energy goes in planes.
The only physics required is Newton’s laws of motion, which I’ll describe
when they’re needed.

This discussion will allow us to answer questions such as “would air
travel consume much less energy if we travelled in slower propellor-driven
planes?” There’s a lot of equations ahead: I hope you enjoy them!

If the original poster has read this far, I am sure you have received at least one book recommendation phrased in a way that speaks to your personal condition.

Your original post question asked about books. My comment is: The commonplace American university book store, the previous best source for any self-education program is paralysed and undergoing price inflation and culling of all books on the shelf for more than 2 years.

The entire mechanism of knowledge on paper organized into journals, magazines, books, reference books and textbooks is caught between the dirt cheap publishing and indexing capabilities of the Internet (with a huge contribution from the big name in search engine) and the always unrealistically expensive terms of copyright permission. Caught means the printed material can't be republished on the Internet for reading at file transfer prices per megabyte and books over three years old are leaving commercial book stores due to taxes and rents.

Suppose I told you that Science Magazine, 1974, page 1118 had a discussion of systems engineering and chaos theory you really should read. Thanks to the insane over pricing of everything under any copyright, you could read this article in 15 seconds for a cost of $.0019 ... oh wait... no after satisfying the publisher's idea of what it is worth, you will pay $30 for Internet access or you must burn $20 in gas and parking driving to a University library.

The whole scheme of going and getting a printed paper book for learning is freezing. The large organizations are cannibalizing the business of the smaller book organizations. I call this "freezing". The order of freezing is: Book stores, university book stores, Internet book stores, public libraries, university libraries.

When you do set out to acquire the books recommended, watch how well the printed paper information system works. What are the forces pushing the books you want out of reach? That is the American way: figure out what is going on with the system that is supposed to help you figure out what is going on.

I am exploring the hypothesis that motor skill development in children, and in particular, the failure of certain children to learn certain motor skills lays the groundwork for the later development of toxic and unhealthy behaviours such as harassment described in the original post and related behaviours such as bullying, a recently widely reported socially destructive behaviour.

What do I mean by "explore a hypothesis"? I work with severely disabled kids. Kids that have huge time delay around a simple task like holding a pencil and making a mark on a sheet of paper. This has lead me to observe non-disabled elementary school kids and the extreme rapidity where every month every child develops new abilities to play games. Kids quickly move from "throw it to me" to performing screen passes and showing new control as they play basketball.

The same learning process, in public school, trails off into disorder and incompleteness in matters of moving from motor skills to social skills like befriending and interacting socially in a group at lunch. Some kids stand in clusters, trying to figure out how to get and give attention. Other kids are silent. All of them floundering around gradually falling into a gelled relationship. Whatever that relationship is, it is not formally a part of "school" (but I see the same processes taking place as when I went to elementary school some 50 years ago). The capability of making a friend, being a friend and being able to keep becoming socially healthy is something of great importance and real delicacy.

The hypothesis applies to this kid and this cruel trolling or harassment like this: many years beforehand this person failed to learn some motor skill, then failed to pick up the game, then failed to learn the ideas and rules embedded in the game. When his motor skill apparatus had matured to the point where he was able to engage in sophisticated motor skill planning he lacked an adequate experience and capability base to conduct himself in a constructive manner.

The past few years it seems like lots and lots of kids are getting to their high school and college years and displaying highly developed motor skills and planning skills with a really grave absence of the high level part of culture. Are the number of socially deficient young people greater now than in past years? I don't know.

I feel tracing the bad social behaviour back to motor skill acquisition in elementary school points to a way to address the behaviour problem at it's inception.

A collander, a cutting board, a knife, some bowls. Here is how I make a quick healthy lunch and keep the kitchen supplied with several bowls of ready to use chilie and herbs.

  I try to chop up all the chilie, green onions and herbs in a couple days.

The order of cutting puts aromatic foods at the bottom.
- Split, remove most of the white center, chop into 1/4" pieces. Jalapeno or serrano or ? chili from the local Mexican grocery store.
  - Dice about 4 green onions.
Chop up a big bunch of fresh basil or cilantro or Italian parsley, slide it into the bowl.
Slide about 1/2 the above mix into a bowl, cover and store for evening meal.
Slide other 1/2 into bottom of 5 cup microwavable bowl.
- Slice 1 1/2" piece of cabbage, slide into bowl.
- Add scoop of cooked rice (cook a batch and store it in a refrigerator quart jar)
- Add 1/2 cup of pressure cooker beans.
Shake cumin, and alternately coriander on top of the beans.

For lunch, microwave about 90 seconds. Depending on the microwave, heat the bowl long enough to release the aromas in the basil or herbs, but not long enough to boil off the hot components of the chilie.

Eating chilie daily is a cultural tradition especially associated with older Mexican men. I saw the tradition in Chimayo, New Mexico back in the late '70s.
Now that I am older I puzzle at the curious attraction of chilie. I use Siricha and Cholula too.

Add a comment about food stores: The local Mexican grocery store is "never over $23" for 2 bags of vegetables, melon and tortillias. The adjacent organic supermarket is "rarely under $40".