Last week, Robbie at work told me about this new site he was using now for all his cable purchases, Monoprice.com. He was going through them because they had Cat6 cables at really low prices.

Tonight I went on there to look at getting some audio cables, 1/8" to RCA adapters. They had them, at just $1 for a six foot length. ONE DOLLAR! Even the best price I've found locally is over $5. I then started browsing the site and picked up a bunch of other things that I had been needing (Ethernet cables, USB cables, etc). I ordered almost two dozen cables and the total came to just over $20. Even if these are shitty cables, that's an insane price.

I placed my order at 10:08pm. I instantly recieved an automated confirmation email.
At 10:09 I recieved a personal confirmation that the order was being fulfilled.
At 10:15 I recieved both a notice that my order was fullfilled and shipped, and also a confirmation message from USPS with my tracking number.

Seven minute from placement to shipment.... this is unheard of! I've never had an online vendor with this fast of turnaround. And at ten o'clock at night! HOW THE HELL DO THEY DO THAT!?! And no, this isn't some chinese outfit, these parts are shipping from LA (Rancho Cucamonga to be exact).

Needless to say, I will be shopping from these guys from now on. They've got sections of the website set aside for computer parts, from CPUs to Video Cards, but the sections are all empty. I hope that means they will be adding more parts in the future.

WARNING: If you have not read the entire Ender series by Orson Scott Card, the following blog post will contain spoilers.

Over the past few months I've been listening to a lot of Audio Books, and just today I finished the last book in the Speaker for the Dead trilogy, Children of the Mind. At the end of the recording, Orson Scott Card himself speaks about the book and his plans for the series. He mentions that originally he planned to stop the series at CotM and leave it at that, but then he started writing the Shadow series, focusing on Bean.

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This is just fucking awesome!

http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2006/rubens-tube-p1.php

Not my own words, but something I never thought of.

Money does exist in Star Trek. Starship crews get paid. Some writers confuse not needing money with not having it. 40 + years and 700+ scripts and you're bound to have inconsistencies.

The Federation has near-unlimited power generation, replicators that can rearrange matter however they want, trasnporters that can move resources anywhere they want in an instant. Drudge work is taken care of by advanced machines. Plus dozens of other fantasically advanced technologies.

The result is that the cost in resources in taking care of a human being has zeroed out. It costs the Federation less than a few pennies a day to feed, clothe, educate and provide medical care for the average citizen. So the government provides all that for its citizens because its cheap and relatively effortless for them to do so.

Hence, you don't need money in the Federation, because all of your essentials will be taken care of. Apparently people can live their whole lives with never seeing money. BUt if you do want to work, something the Federation society strongly encourages, you get paid money ("credits") to pay for luxuries and other sundries. Hence Picard's brother maintaining a vinyard, Sisko's dad running a restaurant, Harry Mud always trying to get rich quick, etc.

Its not communist as profit and personal gain is still strongly encouraged and sought after; its just that the lowest rung on society's ladder has been raised quite a bit higher than what we have today. Its kind of what the western democracies might be like today if they had an all-pervasive but cheap societal sfaety net for its citizens.
-- Dhusk on Slashdot

Watch this a couple times, it's really quite amazing.