My favorite piece of writing on the net:

Phil Greenspun's long, hilarious, behind-the-scenes account of trying to publish a computer book. He explains perfectly why computer books are so garish and vacuous: http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/wtr/dead-trees/story.html

(This is good to read in concert with a similar expose on history textbooks:) http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?1998061115R

Second:

Eric Raymond's analysis of the miraculous birth of Linux: [multipage] http://locke.ccil.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-paper.html

Also amazing:

An utterly horrifying long piece on the School-of-the-Americas' torture training (US-funded, US-hosted, US-designed): http://caq.com/caq61/CAQ61manual.html

How a fiendish genius implemented copy-protection: http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/JCGD_Volume_6/Copy_Protection.html

A fascinating exploration into whether pirates were villains, or heroes of freedom: http://www.linguafranca.com/9803/osborne.html

Some lovely abstract thinking about hypertext design: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980517.html

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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: The Robot Wisdom Pages include far more text than anyone could be expected to read online, so within the next few months we hope to offer most of it in a $20 hardcopy edition-- some two megabytes of text in a 240-page, large-size format, divided four ways between James Joyce, artificial intelligence, internet culture/ hypertext design, and miscellaneous topics. If you'd like to be informed by email when this becomes available, please send me email with the words 'hardcopy list' as the subject or in the body. [More on the hardcopy edition]