Everything we have been told about drugs and drug addiction and how society should deal with them is wrong, says the British author and journalist. He chooses the best books on the War on Drugs. What is the war on drugs? The war on drugs is a government policy that began exactly a hundred years ago…

Encrypting Windows Hard Drives Encrypting your Windows hard drives is trivially easy ; choosing which program to use is annoyingly difficult. I still use Windows -- yes, I know, don't even start -- and have intimate experience with this issue. Historically, I used PGP Disk. I used it because I knew…

A few weeks ago my RailsConf talk on writing better web apps when they outgrow MVC was posted to Y Combinator News . It hung out on the front page all day, spending some time at the #2 slot. Over 35,000 people visited the page and 3,700 watched the talk video, which thrills me. But I’m not posting…

Retired pastor James Anderson, age 84, has never worked in IT or had any formal computer training, but over the past two years he has rebuilt more than a hundred IBM ThinkPad laptops and sent them to schools and nonprofits in Africa – all running Linux. For the past nine years, Anderson has…

Long sentences A frequently given piece of advice for writers is to avoid longsentences. It’s one of the pieces of advice that I have alwayscompletely disregarded, as being obviously wrong: the thing to avoidis not long sentences, but complicated sentences. A sentence that islong can still be quite…