Is Islam Evil?

Or does the evil done in the name of God/Allah simply arise from those who distort religion and abuse spirituality to justify their own political, cultural and dictatorial agendas? Image adapted from www.religioustolerance.org/ In all my other thrillers, my characters grapple with issues that run deeper than the plot and the action.  Die By Wire  [...]

The Prelude To Fictional (And Real-Life) Aircraft Disappearances: Unencrypted GPS:

“Civilian Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers are vulnerable to a number of different attacks such as blocking, jamming, and spoofing. The goal of such attacks is either to prevent a position lock (blocking and jamming), or to feed the receiver false information so that it computes an erroneous time or location (spoofing). GPS receivers are [...]

Modern Fly-By-Wire Aircraft Could Be Die-By-Wire Death Traps: News Release

Today’s modern, fly-by-aircraft could become die-by-wire death traps, needing nothing more than a clever computer hack to make it drop out of the sky. That real possibility drives the plot of Die By Wire, the latest thriller from New York Times best-selling author Lewis Perdue. “Anyone who’s tempted to dismiss the idea of digitally hijacking [...]

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Asides

Two More Reasons To Go Indie – Print Units Fell 9% in 2011

ShareNo additional commentary needed. These excerpts are from Publisher’s Weekly and show why legacy publishing is sinking. Print Units Fell 9% in 2011 “The final numbers from Nielsen BookScan are in for 2011 and they show that print sales through the outlets it tracks fell by just over 9% in the year. Total units sold [...]

How To Send A Kindle Book As A Gift

ShareSure, Christmas and Chanukah are behind us (or way, way, ahead) but here comes Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays etc. And because there were a record number of ereaders sold over the holidays, giving someone a Kindle book as a gift fits the bill … especially if you’ve waited until the night before [...]

Ground The Airbus A380: Not sky-worthy, say engineers

ShareThis is not Die By Wire’s precise reason for calling fly-by-wire aircraft “death traps.” But it does emphasize that we should not be gullible when it comes to accepting the airline industry’s assurances Ground The Airbus A380: Not sky-worthy, say engineers “Australian aircraft engineers have called for Airbus A380 – the world’s biggest passenger aircraft [...]

Software bug fingered as cause of Aussie A330 plunge

ShareIn Die By Wire, I talk about the software and hardware vulnerablities inherent in fly-by-wire computer systems. In that book, the villain, through a series of corporate shells, buys a reliability testing company that services airliner computer systems. His aim: even if you can’t eliminate all the bugs (like the Aussie A330′s) you can exploit [...]

John Orser: The English Professor Who Changed My Life

ShareDie By Wire is dedicated to John Orser, my freshman English professor at Corning Community College. John was first person ever to tell me I had a future as a writer. This was bizarre. After all, I was a science and math geek. What’s more, I had always been a weird science wonk (International Science [...]

Quantum Theories Of Consciousness Get More Likely (And The Idea Of Determinism Less Likely)

ShareIn Perfect Killer, I write about the emerging theories of consciousness being rooted in the quantum levels of the brain. One of the issues that the “meat is everything scientists have with this is their belief (belief — not scientific evidence, mind you) that quantum coherence cannot exist at the temperatures where organic cells function. [...]

Don’t Buy My Book If …

ShareIf  you’re going to buy only one book this holiday season, don’t buy any of mine. Buy one from Peter Winkler who makes me ashamed ever to think again that writing us a struggle for me. In fact, you should buy a lot of copies of his book and give them as gifts. From the [...]

First Non-Racist Gov. Of Mississippi & My Former Boss Dies

ShareFrom the New York Times today: “William L. Waller, who as a prosecutor in 1964 twice tried to convict the segregationist Byron De La Beckwith of murdering the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and who in 1971 forged a coalition of poor whites and newly enfranchised blacks to become governor of Mississippi, died Wednesday in [...]

10 Billion Reasons That I’m Taking “Die By Wire” To E-Book First

ShareDon’t get me wrong: I love dead-tree books. I have a house full of them … Five or six thousand or so. But this headline tells a lot of the reasons I am handling this one myself: Total Mobile eBook Sales Forecast To Reach $10B By 2016; Now Close To 1 Million Books In Kindle [...]

The New Cyber Gatekeepers of the Book World – Same Old, Same Old

ShareFrom tech blog Gigaom comes a techno-view of publishing’s future” Hot on the heels of Amazon signing publishing deals with authors, and thus doing an end-run around their publisher partners, another major e-reader company says it plans to do the same: Kobo is launching its own publishing arm and looking to sign deals with authors [...]