DISQUS

If some adherent of the Vatican Cult reads this and says "I told you so", point out that products of parthenogenesis are always female. Of course, it the founders had tried to make Jesus a woman, their myth would have faded along with Mithraism, which it stole many of its features from.

Some people saw it coming a long time ago. See "The Marching Morons" by C. M. Kornbluth. It was originally published in the April 1951 Galaxy Magazine. Of course, Kornbluth was far from the first. The idea of keeping the Mob content in its ignorance is at very least as old as the Roman Empire.

After all of those serial translations, mistranslations and redactions, the Holy Babble is so full of contradictions that it can be used to justify any damned thing.

Pretty amazing, for 1952. That "approximately 200 tubes and 2000 crystal diodes" gives a clue to its logic, and "30 binary digits and sign" implies sign-and-magnitude arithmetic. Had twos' complement been invented yet? Of course, $62.5K was a fortune in those days, but IBM wouldn't _sell_ you a computer at any price; you had to lease.

Maybe, but not soon. A paperback novel won't break if I sit on it and requires only light. Improved solar cells might solve the battery problem, as they already have for the simplest pocket calculators. The real application of e-books would be to replace the burdensome load of textbooks that students from high school on have to lug around, but some subjects require a lot of graphics that don't reduce well. Maybe e-books will have to wait for the contact-lens display to become really practical, just as computers didn't get really portable until LCD displays became available.