“Booksellers that publish their own titles benefit not from escaping the author’s copyright, but the previous publisher’s exercise of a grant of rights (limited, authors take note, to 35 years). “Freeing” a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, “The Garden Party,” while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.

“Follett’s literary career has gone through four distinct phases.. Barring another radical shift in his literary output, his reputation is likely to rest on his early thrillers (especially Eye of the Needle and The Key to Rebecca) and on The Pillars of the Earth, which he himself is said to regard as his finest work.

“All the candidates who are placed in the extended list of IIT JEE 2007 are eligible to apply..

“People who think of the VCR as old and stable, and the PC as a newer invention, are not the kind of people who think up Tivo. It’s people who are presented with two storage choices, tape or disk, without historical bias making tape seem more normal and disk more provisional, who do that kind of work, and those people are, overwhelmingly, young.

“Lisp, Python and Smalltalk have lacked the catalyst that great languages seem to need.

“Dr. Jean-Loup Baer was our department chair (which is a catchy rhyme if you sing it)

“A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities. A universe of Spimes is a universe of millions of these experiments in potentia. Hackers, activists, advocates, competitors, designers — all of us — can query the data-stream to find out what, for example, happens to the high-impact rubber on our sneakers’ soles at the end of their life — are they being recycled into schoolyard playgrounds or are they becoming aerosol carcinogens? Spimes, in Sterling’s view, are the hactivist’s ultimate tool — an evidentiary rallying point for making the negative outcomes of industrial practices visible and obvious so that we can redress them.

“We propose that the subjective experience of boredom is a first level safety mechanism analogous to pain, that has evolved to keep humans moving about so that they can discover and exploit their environment. This safety mechanism could itself prove fatal in siege situations, such as having to hide quietly up a tree until a predator leaves. So a second safety mechanism has evolved to place a human into a partially conscious standby mode after the human has been bored long enough that it would have moved on if it possibly could. The level of the neuroinhibitor dopamine in the human’s brain rises. This induces a subjective experience of self-absorbed well being, while rendering the human quiescent but sufficiently conscious to notice when it is safe to move..

[The modern consequence:] People can get addicted to boredom, and so lose access to a whole layer of cognitive abilities based on the use of precisely tuned feedback loops in the brain.

“A disproportionate number of people I’ve recruited in the past, that worked out really well, were already looking to make a big change in their lives.

“I get tons of lovely fan mail.. the memories of these valentines fades quickly. Not so the ill-considered, pseudonymous rant.. Many’s the time I’ve found myself neglecting a warm bed, a hot meal, or a chance to go out for a cup of coffee with a friend in order to answer some mean-spirited note..

Don’t let assholes rent space in your head.