I'm reading this book and am about 60% through it... up to the part about entropy.

I get that the reader was looking for equations. But I found the history of everything to be wonderfully helpful in understanding the general concepts. I'm confused as to why he's confused that Gleick is giving a history of Information Theory and not a discourse on it.

I give the book 4 out of 5 and the reviewer 2 out of 5.

A buddy of mine and I recently decided to start collaborating together to try to learn what we could about web usability. We're posting articles and a weekly podcast about what we're finding at betteruserexperience.wordpress.com.

Here's a link to the article. Once, again, Cracked to the rescue!

http://www.cracked.com/article_18683_7-scientific-reasons-zombie-outbreak-would-fail-quickly.html

#7 They have too many natural predators
#6 They can't take the heat
#5 They can't handle the cold
#4 Biting is a terrible way to spread disease
#3 They can't heal from day to day damage
#2 The landscape is full of zombie-proof barriers
#1 Weapons and the people who use them

Also interesting, (and also from Cracked) "5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen"

I was going to say the same thing. I'm reading it now and it's kinda hard to take any alien stuff seriously after he gets done making the comparisons between it and the things people described demons doing during the Inquisition.

Just a quick counter-argument. I'm not trolling, but I am playing devil's advocate.

Did you know that those same copyright protections apply to you too? Why get all upset because you can't legally use Mickey Mouse (since you brought up Disney) when you could create your own intellectual property and then leverage it for your own gain? You have all the freedom in the world to give your music away... or not. You are choosing to do so because it's a good marketing strategy. If things were as they were 10 years ago before you had the ability to distribute online you'd be trading tapes. But you'd also be sending demos to labels. Because that was the way the system worked. They were the arbiters of culture. But with the Internet, that's no longer true.

So while you're busy giving away your music, you might also look into music licensing and other ways of monetizing things. If you're leaving money on the table, willingly, that's on you. If it makes you feel good to give your music away then congrats - that feeling was brought to you by copyright law. Because you had the OPTION to give it away. You also have the ability to sell it, to make money from future covers of your, to draw royalties on your work, and to deny others the right to record your work (say, a political candidate you disagree with). You also have the option to sue, should somebody take your music without compensation.

This is an important right. Surely you won't argue that an artist shouldn't have the right to sue to protect their own intellectual property. So what we're talking about here is duration and damages. The way it's setup now -- it's plain to see that the duration is too long and the damages are too high. But that's what courts do: they decide what's appropriate. It doesn't matter what the labels say. Because Limewire probably says they want to go home scot-free with their attorney's fees paid for. How is that any less of a total over-reach? The right answer is some place in-between. And that place will be decided by the courts.

Now if you want to complain about courts that's a whole different topic.

Like it or not, the economic system we have here isn't going away. The stuff you're saying - I more or less agree with, but I saw the same stuff being written a decade ago about the exact same thing. Certainly copyright is a pain in the ass. Certainly it's being leveraged by large multi-nationals for their own profit and nothing else. But these aren't outsider positions anymore to say these things. It's just the general position of those who think they're getting fucked.

All I know is that a decade ago I had to go to Blockbuster and rent a video for $4 if I wanted to watch something. If I wanted to listen to a song I had to spend $15 and buy the whole CD it came on and just hope for more good songs on the disc. Now between Netflix and iTunes (not even counting torrents) all of that stuff is available to me in a more convenient fashion for less money. So how exactly is the consumer losing here?

Joh, meet Bill Stone. Here's his bio.

Now, watch his talk at TED.

In that TED Talk he speaks of wanting to take a one way trip to the moon to mine hydrogen.

He sees a fueling station on the moon as being a launching pad to exploring space more fully.

Money quote:

The traditional approach to space exploration has been that you carry all the fuel you need to get everybody back in case of an emergency. If you try to do that for the moon you're going to burn a billion dollars in fuel alone sending a crew out there. But if you send a mining team there without the return propellant first. Did any of you guys hear the story of Cortez? This is not like that, I'm much more like Scotty. I like this equipment, you know, and I really value it, so we're not going to burn it. But, if you were truly bold you could get it there, manufacture it and it would be the most dramatic demonstration that you could do something worthwhile off this planet that has ever been done.

There's a myth that you can't do anything in space for less than a trillion dollars and twenty years. That's not true. In seven years we could pull off an industrial mission to Shackleton and demonstrate that you could provide commercial reality out of this in low-earth orbit.

We're living in one of the most exciting times in history. We're at a magical confluence where private wealth and imagination are driving the demand for access to space. The orbital refueling stations I've just described could create an entirely new industry and provide the final key for opening space to general exploration.

To bust the paradigm a radically different approach is needed. We can do it by jump-starting with an industrial Louis and Clark expedition to Shackleton Crater to mine the moon for resources and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business on orbit.

Talk about space always seems to be hung on ambiguities of purpose and timing. I would like to close here by putting a stake in the sand at TED. I intend to lead that expedition.

Watch the talk and you may change your mind about whether qualified people are willing to take one way trips to space.

That's a bit of an extreme position to take. After all, how is that kid going to make money when his stuff is pirated too?

The question is, how profitable is intellectual property? Yes, I know, information wants to be free. But does that mean that folks who want to make a living by creating intellectual property are just going to have to suck it up and make due? It's not a clear cut good vs. bad situation.

It's understandable to feel like it's the People vs. the Borg when the RIAA is brought into the discussion but in a larger sense, the RIAA isn't the issue.

The issue is the same thing that was discussed way back in 1994 by John Perry Barlow (co-founder of the EFF) in Wired magazine in an article titled "The Economy of Ideas".

"Throughout the time I've been groping around cyberspace, an immense, unsolved conundrum has remained at the root of nearly every legal, ethical, governmental, and social vexation to be found in the Virtual World. I refer to the problem of digitized property. The enigma is this: If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can't get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?"