Before the Lights Go Out - Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us

Power resources are dwindling rapidly, and the national grid is unable to supply our power for very much longer. This book critically examines the response by governments to this crisis, arguing that their emphasis on so called alternative energy, to the neglect of investing in other sources, threatens to plunge us into darkness in the short term.

Here's the Real Deal! The same Washington politicians who took control of Congress by promising to balance the federal budget are now bankrupting America by launching the biggest spending spree in the history of the United States.

With big-spending Democrats at their side, President George Bush and his "conservative" Republican Congress have controlled the government's checkbook while the national debt has skyrocketed past seven trillion dollars. That's right, $7,000,000,000,000. How has the party of Reagan become the party of big- government spending?

Now former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough delivers a scathing indictment of Republicans and Democrats alike in the same informed, hard-hitting, and entertaining style fans of Scarborough Country have come to admire. Having had a ringside seat during his four terms in the House of Representatives, Scarborough gives the inside scoop on how Washington really works and on the spending orgy the Republicans have fueled the last ten years.

The story begins with Newt Gingrich's Contract with America and the Republicans promising to balance the budget and reform Washington. It culminates with a Republican president continually rubber-stamping pork-filled appropriations bills that squander taxpayer dollars. That is, unless you think it's necessary to spend millions of dollars on research into "alternative salmon products" in Alaska, or the study of crickets in Utah, or of sea turtles in Hawaii. Sadly, these instances merely hint at the gross spending by Congress.

Richard Thompson's Cul de Sac follows the antics of four-year-old Alice Otterloop as she navigates her way through her suburban town and life's ups and downs at Blisshaven Preschool. More than half of our nation's population resides in the burbs, and suburbanites everywhere will easily recognize Cul de Sac's tree-lined streets, big-box retail stores, and kiddy crunchy cereals, along with the revealing backseat conversations between Alice and her brother.

Thompson's paintbrush captures humorously poignant and reflectively thoughtful watercolor scenes that offer commentary on life and how we choose to live it. Appearing in more than 100 newspapers, Cul de Sac has garnered Thompson critical praise from both the National Cartoonists Society and the Society of Illustrators.

Agile Java™ Development With Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse is a book about robust technologies and effective methods which help bring simplicity back into the world of enterprise Java development. The three key technologies covered in this book, the Spring Framework, Hibernate and Eclipse, help reduce the complexity of enterprise Java development significantly. Furthermore, these technologies enable plain old Java objects (POJOs) to be deployed in light-weight containers versus heavy-handed remote objects that require heavy EJB containers. This book also extensively covers technologies such as Ant, JUnit, JSP tag libraries and touches upon other areas such as such logging, GUI based debugging, monitoring using JMX, job scheduling, emailing, and more. Also, Extreme Programming (XP), Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD) and refactoring are methods that can expedite the software development projects by reducing the amount of up front requirements and design; hence these methods are embedded throughout the book but with just enough details and examples to not sidetrack the focus of this book. In addition, this book contains well separated, subjective material (opinion sidebars), comic illustrations, tips and tricks, all of which provide real-world and practical perspectives on relevant topics. Last but not least, this book demonstrates the complete lifecycle by building and following a sample application, chapter-by-chapter, starting from conceptualization to production using the technology and processes covered in this book. In summary, by using the technologies and methods covered in this book, the reader will be able to effectively develop enterprise-class Java applications, in an agile manner!

Pamela Haag has written the generational "big book" on modern marriage, a mesmerizing, sometimes salacious look at the semi-happy ambivalence lurking just below the surface of many marriages today. The spouses may rarely fight—they may maintain a sincere affection for each other—but one or both may harbor a melancholy sense that something important is missing.

Remarkably, this side of the marriage story hasn't been told or analyzed—until now.

Meticulously researched and injected with insightful firsthand accounts and welcome doses of humor, Marriage Confidential articulates for a generation that grew up believing they would "have it all" why they have ended up disenchanted. Haag introduces us to contemporary marriages where spouses act more like life partners than lovers; children occupy an uncontested position at the center of the marital relationship; and even the romantic staples of sexual fidelity and passion are assailed from all sides—so much so that spouses can end up having affairs online almost by accident.

Blending tales from the front lines of matrimony with cultural history, surveys, and research covert-ops (such as joining an online affair-finding site and posting a personal ad in the New York Review of Books), Haag paints a detailed picture of the state of marriage today. And to show what's possible as well as what's melancholy in our post-romantic age, Haag seeks out marriages with a twist—rebels who are quietly brainstorming and evolving the scripts around career, money, social life, child rearing, and sex.

Provocative but sympathetic, forward-thinking and bold, here, at last, is a manifesto for living large in marriage.