Books

I started reading it, because I need yet another distraction from studying for my upcoming midterms. They have these cars that run on methane, which some call fartmobiles. The protagonist throws a brick on one from a great height, and it explodes, and out comes the slang for methanol in this world: assoline.

Well, I thought it was funny. Humph.

Also, crypto-Tourette's: generating random input to help seed a new key!

Cory Doctorow, author of Down and out in the magic kingdom and Eastern standard tribe, gave an interesting talk at an O'Reilly conference recently about ebooks. Mostly he talks about how ebooks are different from paper books and so on, and why he's released his work under creative commons licenses. Down and out was recently relicensed such that anyone can create derivative works of it, such as plays, fan fictions, and so on.

Anyway, I'm not doing it justice, but if you are interested in intellectual property and how/why/if it should be protected, then it's worth reading.

On a side note, I downloaded both Down and out and EST, and put them on Chinook (our new laptop). As Cory Points out, downloads of ebooks tend to be more like people browsing books in a book store, except without the risk of catching something nasty. It remains to be seen if I will actually get around to reading them.