When Fitzgerald died in 1940 in Hollywood, his last royalty check was for $13.13. Remaindered copies of the second printing of The Great Gatsby were moldering away in [publisher] Scribner's warehouse.

World War II starts, and a group of publishers, paper manufacturers, editors [and] librarians get together in New York. And they decide that men serving in the Army and Navy need something to read. ... They printed over 1,000 titles of different books, and they sent over a million copies of these books to sailors and soldiers serving overseas and also to [prisoners of war] in prison camps in Japan and Germany through an arrangement with the Red Cross.

The greatest distribution of the Armed Services Editions was on the eve of D-Day. Eisenhower's staff made sure that every guy stepping onto a landing craft in the south of England right on the eve of D-Day would have an Armed Services Edition in his pocket. They were sized as long rectangles meant to fit in the servicemen's pockets. (Her assertion was it was this service which reintroduced American's to Gatsby)

--Maureen Corrigan talking about her book, So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures

The Germans also had the Winter Charity (Winterhilfswerk), which printed millions of books for German soldiers, both propaganda and stories, humor, songbooks, etc.

I wouldn't be too surprised if the Brits and the Russians did something similar.

Vote how? Do you really think if I didn't HAVE TO fly because it is an unfortunate necessity for my job I would even go NEAR an airport? Do you think I consider it a great pastime to be the star in my personal pervert peep show for some TNA mouthbreather? Or that the butt-groping of that greasy single-digit IQ expert turns me on? Getting your kneecaps shoved into your thighs is just the icing on the turd cake.

Yes, that would be a knee-jerk reaction... if there was enough room for a knee to jerk, dammit!

I'd rather get some cryptic information about stop codes or an error message than a condescending sad face accompanied by a reboot request. At least I can look up the code and get a ballpark idea what the issue is without firing up windbg.

America.... home of the fr... yeah right.

Anyway, take a look at the kind of books that are *taught* in schools:

...

So lets see... underage sex, murder of your relatives, regicide, racism, lynchings, rape, adultery, organised crime, a mentally-ill killer and of course - lawless schoolboys killing each other! What's not to love about the American school system, yeehaw!

More like a failure to double check settings or something.

- "Are you really sure you want to trash those two satellites?" <click> - "Did you get your boss's approval?" <click>

see me on Facebook. Local undersherriff initiated a traffic stop in a dark territory valley (no cellular reception) while I was in my disabled vehicle waiting for traffic to go by before exiting to determine why I was having difficulty re-starting the engine.

Slashdot cracks me up
Red faced and angry about the coming Surveillance State
Damned happy to have every cop be a walking surveillance unit
Anybody else see the irony?