Showing results by narrator "Shawn Compton" in All Categories

Afterwards, Basil Castellan was always certain that it had all begun the day he'd been rescued by the dragon. Oh, it hadn't been a real dragon, of course, or so he hastily assured everyone to whom he told the story. Only...it had been a real dragon....The Empire had preserved peace and order throughout human-inhabited space, but it had grown weak with the passing of the centuries, and now the self styled New Humans were rising in open rebellion, striving to seize control and impose their fanatical grand design on all humans everywhere. 

The deep-learning revolution has brought us driverless cars, the greatly improved Google Translate, fluent conversations with Siri and Alexa, and enormous profits from automated trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Deep-learning networks can play poker better than professional poker players and defeat a world champion at Go. In this book, Terry Sejnowski explains how deep learning went from being an arcane academic field to a disruptive technology in the information economy.

When Metcalfe boarded the C-47 which would drop him at Groesbeek Heights, just outside of Nijmegen, Holland, he was handed a box of twelve dozen condoms by an overconfident British lieutenant. He was to be among the first to jump into what should have been a picture-book meadow, free of German troops. Instead, it was defended by three German antiaircraft cannon emplacements. As he jumped into a hail of bullets and exploding shells, he watched his plane roll over and plummet into the ground.

In July 1973, Bob Tininenko, his wife Linda, and his brother in-law Jim Fisher set sail from Tacoma, Washington, on a 31-foot trimaran, down the West Coast to Costa Rica. The journey was expected to take a matter of weeks, but 10 days into the cruise, the party encountered a freak storm off the coast of Northern California. When gale-force winds and 50-foot waves capsized their boat, the voyage became a nightmare. For 72 days, the trio was lost at sea. Challenged by nature and compromised by a bitter rivalry, their courage and will to live was put to the ultimate test.

At the height of California's Gold Rush, men left everything behind for the chance at striking it rich. Now, some 30 years after its peak, gold fever still entices adventurous Easterners like James Macklin Chance, a poor Pennsylvanian who is drawn to California by the dream of lasting wealth - a dream so powerful he'll stop at nothing to see it through. 

Mike Reynolds is a Necromancer in a post-apocalypse world where an RPG system has been imposed on planet Earth. The former gas station clerk has risen to the challenges of the game and continues to stay ahead of the level curve imposed by whoever controls the game. After a devastating earthquake...

I commanded an infantry company during the Vietnam Tet Offensive of 1968. I got to see the magnificence of the human spirit as my men triumphed over incredible adversity. This is a story that must be told. We are a special country with a special destiny. My men showed me the way. 

Months after a life-altering revelation drove Sean Coleman from his mountain hometown of Winston, Colorado, the longtime security guard has found stable work as the sole caretaker of a retired nuclear missile site along the Eastern Plains. The desolate Cold War-era facility now serves as a rarely visited museum and records archive and provides, perhaps, the perfect job for a lonesome, headstrong man working to erase the painful memories of his past.

It is not difficult for the observant Christian to recognize a church in decline. In every small town, suburb, or city, there is often a church on the brink of shutting their doors, or at the very least recognizing the stagnancy of a church’s growth. Matt Capps and Steven Wade know this not only from observation, but from experience in their own revitalized churches. In Shepherding Renewal, these pastors address the hardship of serving a church in decline, and even more so address the need to breathe new life into the dying church.

They are called the Greatest Generation, but they were also ordinary men, responding to the call of duty. These are their unforgettable stories—first-person accounts from the last of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who fought the most dreadful war in history, all collected by a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A game is only a game if you can quit. This is something I learned the hard way. I just wanted to let off some steam in virtual reality and ended up getting murdered and imprisoned in the body of one of the undead - slow, clumsy, and cursed to die at the hand of other players over and over again. The only way out of this awful predicament was to find the legendary Scroll of Rebirth, but the helpless plague-ridden corpse would need to be turned into a real killing machine. If only people knew what it was like to level up a dead rogue....

In this book, you'll learn how: data science, driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, is yielding unprecedented business insights; blockchain has the potential to restructure the economy; drones and driverless vehicles are becoming essential tools; 3-D printing is making new business models possible; augmented reality is transforming retail and manufacturing; smart speakers are redefining the rules of marketing; and humans and machines are working together to reach new levels of productivity. 

 5-Minute Selling presents a proven, simple process that can double your sales, even if you don't have time for an elaborate new sales system. When you spend your days scrambling to take orders and resolving customer issues, there is little time for new sales techniques. This book is for you. In 5-Minute Selling, Alex Goldfayn describes how thousands of his clients and workshop attendees have generated dramatic annual sales growth with short bursts of action throughout the day. With three-second efforts throughout the day, you can add 50 to 100 percent to your sales. 

Using the sniper skills he sharpened in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Mack Bolan has waged a personal war against organized crime. Cleaning up the states came first. Now he's going international. While staking out Mafia activity at the Washington Dulles airport, Bolan is caught in an ambush by syndicate guards. As a cordon of police close in on the most wanted man in America, Bolan is forced to fly or die. 

As Mark Zuckerberg once put it, "the Age of Privacy is over." But Zuckerberg and others who say "privacy is dead" are wrong. In Why Privacy Matters, Neil Richards explains that privacy isn't dead, but rather up for grabs. Richards shows how the fight for privacy is a fight for power. If we want to preserve our commitments to these precious yet fragile values, we will need privacy rules. Pithy and forceful, this is a must-listen for anyone interested in a topic that sits at the center of so many current problems. 

 Although he took command of the Army of the Potomac only three days before the first shots were fired at Gettysburg, Union general George G. Meade guided his forces to victory in the Civil War's most pivotal battle. Commentators often dismiss Meade when discussing the great leaders of the Civil War. But in this long-anticipated book, Kent Masterson Brown draws on an expansive archive to reappraise Meade's leadership during the Battle of Gettysburg.

Twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Commander Jacob Miller is now on his second combat tour in the Western Pacific. He's survived the Battle of Midway and been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. But now the war is grinding away at him. And another bloody battle is always just around the corner.... Commander Warren Troost is determined to prove himself worthy of his family's outstanding naval legacy. He's already earned a Navy Cross for his bravery at Pearl Harbor, but now he has to do all he can just to stay alive....

This Very Short Introduction looks at the science of nuclear weapons and how they differ from conventional weapons. Tracing the story of the nuclear bomb, Joseph Siracusa chronicles the race to acquire the H-bomb, a thermonuclear weapon with revolutionary implications; and the history of early arms control, nuclear deterrence, and nonproliferation. He also tracks the development of nuclear weapons from the origins of the Cold War in 1945 to the end of Moscow-dominated Communism in 1991, and examines the promise and prospect of missile defense.

Distilling the ideas of the greatest military theoreticians of history, including Sun Tzu, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Carl von Clausewitz, this clear and engaging Very Short Introduction presents a fascinating account of the "art of the general." Antulio J. Echevarria II highlights the dynamic relationship between the main elements of strategy: purpose, method, and means. Drawing on historical examples, he discusses the major types of military strategy and how emerging technologies are affecting them. This second edition has been updated throughout.

Dying in virtual reality isn't fun, but facing bullets from real-world criminal overlords is really the pits. In such a desperate scenario, their demand to render them a service in VR doesn't sound like such a bad alternative. The problem is, the games played by spook agencies follow much harsher rules. For them, the absence of choice doesn't sound like a good excuse - not if you end up in the grindstones of their undercover schemes.