A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Ryan Lackey, CTO for HavenCo, a company dedicated to providing secure off-shore data hosting from Sealand, a principality off the coast of England. Ryan has lately survived dental emergencies, the loss of a laptop (it dropped into the North Sea -- how many people can say that?) and other stresses, but he's followed through with some interesting answers. He even has some ideas for how you can make a lot of money, and lists the tools you need to start your own data haven. Kudos to Ryan for taking the time to answer so thoroughly.

Most of the questions we got for crypto guru Bruce Schneier earlier this week were pretty deep, and so are his answers. But even if you're not a crypto expert, you'll find them easy to understand, and many of Bruce's thoughts (especially on privacy and the increasing lack thereof) make interesting reading even for those of you who have no interest in crypto because you believe you have "nothing to hide." This is a *long and strong* Q&A session. Click Below to read it all.

Well, I seriously doubt any of you were going to buy the latest endeavour from Mr. Gates, but I've got two simply scintillating reviews, courtesy of Jon Katz and Doc Technical (Of The Story of Ping fame. Which, BTW, I know ended up on Amazon. We had it first *grin*.) Click below for some excellent Monday morning reading.

Andrew Cooke has sent us a review of Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman's book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. This is not a book for those who are getting into coding for the first time-this is a nice, big MIT press book that assumes you're smart, and that you want to learn. So, if you want to check out what they think you need to do, click below.

SEGV, another of our resident book reviewers has written a review of the new Scott Meyer's book More Effective C++: 35 New Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs. This is a follow-up to his previous book, and is designed for people familiar with the language.
On a different note, if you are interested in reviewing, drop me a line. We need more reviews, and I even have some books to send out as tank oos.

Allright I know I said no more Gnome/KDE stuff, but Bruce Perens asked me to post this, and its worth reading. Now I'm going to be frank here guys, keep the comments under control. I know this is a hot issue, but think before you post. This issue is a major schism, and we need to solve it, not bicker amongst ourselves about it. Now hit the link below and read Bruce Perens rebuttal to Linus' opinions on the KDE/Gnome debate. Update I had to close the comments. Not because they were bad, but because we had 95% of the httpd processes on this machine serving up that story. 200+ comments in 6 hours was just too much. Anyone wanna swap a boatload a RAM for advertising? If we can get more RAM, this hopefully won't happen again.