Depends on where you live. Picking "the US" as some sort of monolith is a bit childish, why not say North America? There are lots of places in the US with far better crime statistics than Holland, and lots of other places with far worse.
The US is the richest country in the world, and yet has a very poor record for incarceration, recidivism, and general levels of crime. That is an interesting fact which you seem determined to avoid discussing. I'm not sure why it is childish to compare the US (a country) with another country, it certainly seems to happen in every other domain, so why not violent crime or burglary? I don't think the intention of the comparison was to make the US look bad, or make US people feel threatened, but simply to point out that availability of guns has absolutely no correlation to low crime rates on a country level.
"Huge population", btw, implies "huge proportion" in this context.
It means something quite distinct, and implies nothing of the sort, unless you quantify both figures.
No, it's almost as if a culture with a huge population of poor people encourages crime.
The stats quoted are per 100,000, not absolute. If you'd said a culture with a huge proportion of poor people you might have a point, but even then, you're claiming the sole cause is that the US has huge inequalities without presenting any evidence for that. The higher burglary rate could be cultural (gun culture), social (incarceration for minor offences, broken safety net), economic (poverty), or most likely a mix of all three, but it's certainly an alarming statistic which should make anyone from the US think again about crime and how to tackle it.
The current approach clearly isn't working for the US given the statistics.
Firstly, having the date change during the middle of the working day would be a pain.
Very true, this would be an issue, though of course we have an issue at present with dates not actually meaning the same thing in different places on the globe - that will become more and more pronounced because of global trade and communication increasing.
Secondly, before phoning up someone outside Europe, I look to see what time it is there,
This really wouldn't be a problem, you'd just know that Europe is asleep around 11 GMT for 9 hours, and you are not - if you do all your thinking in one timezone, this sort of thing would actually be easier.
It's really useful to be able to schedule something at a time that everyone can agree on. That requires agreeing on a real time (whatever we call it) and it's a heck of a lot more convenient if everyone in a particular area uses the same timezone
Using one universal time wouldn't prevent you all agreeing on a time, on the contrary, it'd be easier. There are other downsides of course, like calendar days not relating to sunlight, etc etc. but it might be useful if businesses in particular just started using GMT (or similar) as the baseline time for everything, translating into local times where appropriate, and governments forgot about trying to mandate starting hours, opening hours etc, as really that's best decided on a town by town basis depending on the conditions there.
For example suppose you are doing a paper on the history of computer privacy... Well, the search for original sources for a fact like this isn't really worth the trouble, and the encyclopedia citation is forbidden, so what people do in cases like this is simply go ahead and use the fact without citing a source.
If you're writing a history paper and you can't be bothered to look for primary sources, and are using wikipedia (wikipedia!) as your reference or even Encyclopaedia brittanica, you should find another career.
Coding geeks may get tablets as a secondary computing device, but probably never as a primary one.
You can get keyboards easily enough which work with iPads, and broadcast the screen to a large screen as well. There are other more significant hurdles to coding on an iPad really at the moment though - not fast enough for compiling for a start, and Apple are pretty user-hostile when it comes to technical users; they want it locked down tight for their own reasons. However as you say, there's no reason the iPad has to become a primary computing device for everyone - it may well for some people who never really needed a computer in the first place and actually enjoy the fact it is locked down and they are less likely to mess it up or get it infected with a virus (less vectors like flash, and a better sandbox means less viruses at the moment at least).
It can still be wildly successful and not at all a niche product even if it doesn't appeal to geeks on slashdot, or perhaps even because it doesn't. As the original less storage than a nomad comment proved being disliked on slashdot is often a sign something will do particularly well in the real world even whilst it is decried here as a 'toy' and not for serious work.
I'm surprised that many in the industry don't see tablets for what they generally are: a useless niche device surrounded by endless media hype.
Agreed, they have no user file-system, no world-class 4G wireless, and less space than a nomad, and that's why they're selling tens of millions a quarter....
Tablets are much like Ruby on Rails...In the case of the iPad, it's about owning devices with the right logo. In the case of Ruby on Rails, it's about buzzwords...They're a perfect match of hype, ignorance, and a false sense of superiority.
The only ignorance and false sense of superiority I've encountered about rails was from haters who have never used it. Have you? It's just a web framework, maybe one of the better ones, maybe not, but it has become the focus of ire perhaps because people are so insecure in their technological choices they feel the need to look down on a web framework (WTF?). Rails is useful for some sites (I have used it on some myself), and other languages like PHP or Java have their place as well depending on specific requirements and code available in libraries etc. Buzzwords don't come into it, nor do logos, at least in my case, and I've never met anyone who made their choices based on such things. If any widely used web language deserves to be panned, it's PHP for its awful, messy API, though they have cleaned up their act recently. Rails is pretty middle of the road, and it's just a web framework.
As to the iPad, it's a pretty good device, for what it is, and frankly it covers 100% of the computing usage pattern of most people I know (web, email, games) - yes it doesn't cover the needs of everyone, but that's ok, if it is popular it's not going to cause your computer to be confiscated or to spontaneously combust - you can continue to live in a world where the iPad is popular, and feel no pain, so long as you can manage to tolerate the thought that others might have different needs to you. Can't think why anyone would buy something purely because it has a logo on it - I bought an iPad because it is a good tablet, and I wanted a tablet to read the web and mail on, that's it, and it is has served admirably for that purpose.
In fact, it's doubtful that any other company or project can actually compete in such a situation.
Bullshit. Android has been doing pretty well, in spite of fragmentation and several mis-steps by Google like Google Play. The only people who think like a cult are those who feel they must oppose everything Apple or everything Rails without question or thought. If you want to criticise Apple, criticise their predatory business practices, their monopoly on the marketplace, their banning scripting from the store, their blatant ripping off of other developers, but don't try to criticise a device which is best of class, and really popular, as somehow doing well because it has a logo or people are enlisted in a cult! People are buying the iPad in their millions because it is good, and they find it useful. Deal.
or failing that happening just adjust the locale business hours to something more appropriate to the region.
Often I wonder why we bother changing clocks at all, or having time-zones, and why we don't just let businesses and people decide on a local level on hours appropriate to the region of the world they are in.
In our global world is it is becoming less and less useful to keep everything in sync with a central authority hundreds of miles away - the alternative would be a universal time with agreed-upon working day times for each local area - lots of communication is not dependent on the particular time someone receives it. Now that we have email and websites to deal with many interactions with customers, and 24 hour phone lines for many companies, this is more and more attractive.
That's interesting, so you're saying that to make money on android you have to serve your users ads rather than sell something? I hope you're happy with seeing lots of ads in every app as an android user as that's where this will lead.
As to the original article, you seem to want to portray the authors as wrong in some way, but in fact they just made a pragmatic decision based on return on investment, because most users seem to have attitudes like yours. Android is more painful to develop for because of fragmentation, and costs them more money, and yet the users expect all this for free. So why should they bother trying to insert ads etc? Maybe they don't want ads in their app?
And if what you posted is true, it explains exactly why the digital version should be much less expensive.
Digital versions are often less expensive than the paper ones. If you consider that Apple takes 30%,and B&N physical stores take 50%, you can might expect digital versions to be 20% cheaper, which turns out to be often the case.
For myself, that would be somewhere around 33-50% of the cheapest regular price for the paperback.
That's nice for you, but it has no relation to the actual costs for publishers. They are quite happy if you continue to buy the paperback or hardback, as they will make at least as much money on that, if not more than a digital edition. Interestingly people don't have the same resistance to paying more for a hardback, though the difference in costs between hardback and paperback is truly trivial, and the cost of a hardback is usually around double - you are paying for the exclusive access to information with a hardback, not for the bit of cardboard inserted in the cover. In France they take this to another level as hardbacks are not even hardbacks, just slightly nicer paperback editions.
If an ebook costs more than the hardback, and you didn't buy it, good for you - it'll teach the publisher than really the convenience of an ebook and/or exclusive access to content in digital forma early wasn't worth that much more to you, but let's not pretend that books are priced solely, or even mostly, on the cost of production, because they are not - they are priced at a value the publisher thinks the market will bear, which is based on all sorts of ineffable assumptions to do with the value of ideas, the cost of the ink and paper is negligible.
Just because you think you are paying for the paper and ink, doesn't mean you are; in fact most of the cost was finding the right author and persuading them to release their thoughts to the world, in whatever format.
The reason apple are maintaining two branches is they haven't had time to properly merge the two. If they had the time and resources, I'm sure they'd love to merge them and keep some ui differences, but proceed with one base operating system. At present they're maintaining two separate branches of everything from the view layer up including lots of nearly identical code (e.g. uiwebview), which is neither sustainable nor particularly useful. The desktop has definitely moved toward ios with lion, and I think well see more of that, and at some point they may just decide its not worth maintaining the desktop branch (less than 30% of their revenue now) and move over to the newer iOS branch.
the apple post-facto apologists are going to have some somersaults to do when that happens to explain to themselves why now was indeed the right time to merge them and move beyond the pc, just as ms is hack-handedly trying to do here.
That said, ms have executed incredibly poorly here and ruined the reception of what is quite a good interface by foisting it on people all at once and being too up-front about their intentions - the route suggested by the parent would be a good one to gradually acclimatise people to the change.
With a physical book they have the cost of materials, printing costs, warehousing costs, shipping costs, retail space costs
These are not the main cost in producing/selling a book, the main cost is the 50-60% retailer cut of the cover price, and then perhaps origination (what goes into making the book), and then printing, then warehousing etc. So most of what you think of as the big costs in selling a physical book actually apply to ebooks too (the retailer in that case being either amazon or some other online store).
Nobody sells e-goods, they're "licensed", which means that I may use them as long as the publisher lets me in ways they like
While it plays to the peanut gallery here on slashdot, this is not really true. Lots of good publishers sell their content DRM free - Oreilly, Pragmattic Programmers, Baen, Smashwords, Cool Camping, Pan Macmillan etc.
Your nightmare scenarios might hold true for books bought from ibooks or for kindle for example (particularly for kindle as the whole 1984 episode showed), but they are not true for publishers who publish books in standard formats like PDF with no DRM - you can buy good ebooks today, you just have to be discriminating, and not all books you might want are available. Hopefully more publishers will see the light and stop trying to impose DRM (which is inevitably cracked anyway).
If you find something like that, you do NOT report it. It doesn't matter if you obtained it, you will likely take the fall.
The assumption here of course is that he is above suspicion. The police might have other reasons for suspecting something funny is going on, and might not believe his excuses as to why these pics ended up on his computer. Maybe his wife found the images, and this is his cover story invented on the spur of the moment. So she insists on reporting it, and we end up with a story in the press. As it stands, no-one on slashdot is going to provide any meaningful data on this story, the article certainly doesn't, so it's really quite pointless to pontificate one way or the other without knowing more information about why this was reported and by whom.
A bank will protect your funds from unauthorized third parties but the government and financial industry and not you decides who is authorized. All those trails also make you vulnerable to data mining.
I agree completely, there are tradeoffs with each approach, and I appreciate that proper audit trails (which include identity) are useful but also allow data mining, that's a price we pay, however there are (in my country at least) strict rules against them sharing your data. Our fundamental difference seems to be that I trust my government and bank more than I trust the bitcoin providers and ecosystem, whereas for you it is the reverse.
For instance by reviewing your financial trail and correlating it to publicly available information I can determine
Here I assume you mean 'I' as in my bank, as the only people with access to this information are my bank, and possibly police if they get a warrant. It is a bit misleading to phrase this as if anyone could access your financial audit trail. I would note that people give up this information voluntarily with store cards etc for tiny financial rewards (not that I do), and live happily with the results, the trail of transactions itself has some value but not a huge one, and does not equate with actual access to the account funds, which is even more closely guarded. I don't bank with organisations like BoA, but I guess they do have very lax security if employees can access these details without sanction.
I can't say I find any of your bitcoin examples compelling - for travelling abroad I use my bank card, which has zero fees on transactions abroad. I don't wish to keep transactions secret from a family member, but if I did, I'd use my own card, which they don't control/look at, my bank charges fees agreed in advance as part of the contract, it does not 'steal' money, and if I don't agree with a charge I can dispute it (and have, successfully). I'm sure I don't have to list the myriad advantages using a system more widely accepted than bitcoin brings.
I would caution people against viewing bitcoin as a store of value though - it is one of the less secure stores of value, and a completely unregulated market, which means it is subject to all kinds of manipulation and speculation. It is also analogous to keeping hard cash or gold under your bed, unless you have a *very* secure bitcoin repository. Fine for small amounts for a short time, not a good idea for large amounts short term OR any amount for the long term. If your aim is to avoid debasement of your currency by your government, you have options including voting them out, and diversifying into other more or less inflation-proof assets like other fiat currencies, property, shares, gold etc. Bitcoin would be low down my list personally for this.
We do have a mass of financial regulation and banks have to go through a huge amount of certification to keep their funds secure (though perhaps less so in the states) precisely because financial markets are a prime target for scammers and thieves. Imagine if a bank or other money transfer service stored its account details on a rented server shared with several other websites and controlled by a third party who doesn't normally deal with financial transactions - they'd be shut down by the government immediately. That's what happened here and yet people still trust these bitcoin operations to continue using $20 a month servers to store value. Maybe since they're unhappy now with linode they'll move to dreamhost next:).
While I agree somewhat with the sentiment that the vault doors are meaningless (since so much cash nowadays lives as bits, not physical paper notes), since my bank has an entire team of people tasked with security, another tasked with fraud, and dedicated servers for financial transactions separate from their website etc, etc I trust them a bit more than any bitcoin operator in existence, and certainly more than my home computer.
I do find bitcoin ( and its adherents) interesting, but I have no need of digital cash - they have taken what seems like a plus point of cash, that it is anonymous and fungible, and made it digital, but as you point out this makes it less secure. The trouble is people then see it as a way to store value, but trust their security to their woefully inadequate home computer os, or even, in this case, to a vps provider who hosts websites (!). If this were cash or gold, and a company stored tens of thousands of gold overnight in their distribution warehouse and was then robbed, it would not be news, just Stupidity on the part of the company. Re contacting the FBI to get your stolen bitcoins back - good luck with that, particularly when you tell them it is deliberately anonymous.
If I am holding or transferring money online I want authentication, authorisation and trackable, reversible transactions (proper tracking with an audit trail of cerified identities, just as I have with other currencies currently. I and most other people place far greater value on that than anonymity of transactions.
There are some great ideas in bitcoin, and I follow it with interest, but I would not trust it to store value for the reasons above, reasons which you view as plus points.
Re bitcoin being like gold, yes, it is very like gold, and subject to the same predation and speculation and the same gulling of the vulnerable who view it as a store of value, except unlike gold, the market is completely unregulated. Google 'gold corner' for possible consequences of that.
But this wasn't a case of random act of vandalism. The host's negligence led to the loss. If you lease an apartment from me and someone robs you, ok that's not my fault if I didn't contribute to it. But if I have a copy of your key and leave it laying in front of your door, and you are robbed as a result, that's negligence on my part, and it's not a risk "you should just have to accept". You should be able to sue me and at least get back some of your loss because I am at least partly responsible for the loss.
Good thing that the current situation is nothing like your analogy then isn't it? Stop creating straw men in an effort to argue that Linode are somehow liable for this. I doubt very much any sane judge would agree they were liable, given the service is not provided for the purpose of storing bit coins or other high-value items.
Obviously a cheap hosting service is not meant for storing unique data worth 10000 times the monthly cost of the service with no backups. A more fitting analogy would be a cheap storage service meant for storing furniture where someone hires a box and starts storing their gold in it. You can store your gold bars there if you like, but don't be surprised if someone bypasses security on that warehouse and steals your gold (which is what happened here, not 'leaving a copy of a key laying [sic] in front of the door"). You'd be laughed out of court if you somehow got to trial.
Actually, Bitcoin's leave an infinitely long trail in the block chain....Anyone can find out with ease and absolute certainty which Bitcoins are being transferred and when. The problem lies in the fact that the addresses are anonymous and basically meaningless.
There is no verification of identity and therefore no audit trail - an audit trail of anonymous tokens is worthless, even if you can trace it to the n'th degree and watch your money being laundered anonymously.
What I find curious about these bit coin thefts is that they have no way to trace the coins once they have left - they see the account it goes to, but have no higher authority to dispute the transfer with, no way to find out who that is or where they are. It truly is virtual cash, but without the audit-trail which real banks have instituted for very good reasons for the cash in our bank accounts. So it seems once someone steals your digital wallet, it is truly gone, with no way to track who stole it, no compensation, no insurance (what insurance company would insure such risk?), and no way to call in the authorities. No wonder there have been a string of thefts, as this currency seems designed to avoid leaving an audit trail.
I can't see why someone would want to keep their wealth in something like bitcoin for this reason alone, quite apart from the volatility and potential for the entire currency to collapse at some point.
By the way, if you want Linkedin to wipe your g-mail contacts that haven't linked with you, send them a request through their help desk. It may take some persuasion, but they will do it.
If you don't want to share information like that with the world, do not upload it to sites like this or (worse) give them your email login so that they can hoover up all your contacts. Why you would trust a site like this with contact info mystifies me, but once it is done, you can never really undo it - they've already plotted your social graph from those mails, and that information in itself is very useful.
So the solution to your problem is *never* to share your contacts list with a social website.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on where you live. Picking "the US" as some sort of monolith is a bit childish, why not say North America? There are lots of places in the US with far better crime statistics than Holland, and lots of other places with far worse.
The US is the richest country in the world, and yet has a very poor record for incarceration, recidivism, and general levels of crime. That is an interesting fact which you seem determined to avoid discussing. I'm not sure why it is childish to compare the US (a country) with another country, it certainly seems to happen in every other domain, so why not violent crime or burglary? I don't think the intention of the comparison was to make the US look bad, or make US people feel threatened, but simply to point out that availability of guns has absolutely no correlation to low crime rates on a country level.
"Huge population", btw, implies "huge proportion" in this context.
It means something quite distinct, and implies nothing of the sort, unless you quantify both figures.
No, it's almost as if a culture with a huge population of poor people encourages crime.
The stats quoted are per 100,000, not absolute. If you'd said a culture with a huge proportion of poor people you might have a point, but even then, you're claiming the sole cause is that the US has huge inequalities without presenting any evidence for that. The higher burglary rate could be cultural (gun culture), social (incarceration for minor offences, broken safety net), economic (poverty), or most likely a mix of all three, but it's certainly an alarming statistic which should make anyone from the US think again about crime and how to tackle it.
The current approach clearly isn't working for the US given the statistics.
Firstly, having the date change during the middle of the working day would be a pain.
Very true, this would be an issue, though of course we have an issue at present with dates not actually meaning the same thing in different places on the globe - that will become more and more pronounced because of global trade and communication increasing.
Secondly, before phoning up someone outside Europe, I look to see what time it is there,
This really wouldn't be a problem, you'd just know that Europe is asleep around 11 GMT for 9 hours, and you are not - if you do all your thinking in one timezone, this sort of thing would actually be easier.
It's really useful to be able to schedule something at a time that everyone can agree on. That requires agreeing on a real time (whatever we call it) and it's a heck of a lot more convenient if everyone in a particular area uses the same timezone
Using one universal time wouldn't prevent you all agreeing on a time, on the contrary, it'd be easier. There are other downsides of course, like calendar days not relating to sunlight, etc etc. but it might be useful if businesses in particular just started using GMT (or similar) as the baseline time for everything, translating into local times where appropriate, and governments forgot about trying to mandate starting hours, opening hours etc, as really that's best decided on a town by town basis depending on the conditions there.
For example suppose you are doing a paper on the history of computer privacy... Well, the search for original sources for a fact like this isn't really worth the trouble, and the encyclopedia citation is forbidden, so what people do in cases like this is simply go ahead and use the fact without citing a source.
If you're writing a history paper and you can't be bothered to look for primary sources, and are using wikipedia (wikipedia!) as your reference or even Encyclopaedia brittanica, you should find another career.
Coding geeks may get tablets as a secondary computing device, but probably never as a primary one.
You can get keyboards easily enough which work with iPads, and broadcast the screen to a large screen as well. There are other more significant hurdles to coding on an iPad really at the moment though - not fast enough for compiling for a start, and Apple are pretty user-hostile when it comes to technical users; they want it locked down tight for their own reasons. However as you say, there's no reason the iPad has to become a primary computing device for everyone - it may well for some people who never really needed a computer in the first place and actually enjoy the fact it is locked down and they are less likely to mess it up or get it infected with a virus (less vectors like flash, and a better sandbox means less viruses at the moment at least).
It can still be wildly successful and not at all a niche product even if it doesn't appeal to geeks on slashdot, or perhaps even because it doesn't. As the original less storage than a nomad comment proved being disliked on slashdot is often a sign something will do particularly well in the real world even whilst it is decried here as a 'toy' and not for serious work.
I'm surprised that many in the industry don't see tablets for what they generally are: a useless niche device surrounded by endless media hype.
Agreed, they have no user file-system, no world-class 4G wireless, and less space than a nomad, and that's why they're selling tens of millions a quarter....
http://www.statista.com/statistics/165489/global-sales-of-apple-ipad-by-quarter-since-2010/
Tablets are much like Ruby on Rails...In the case of the iPad, it's about owning devices with the right logo. In the case of Ruby on Rails, it's about buzzwords...They're a perfect match of hype, ignorance, and a false sense of superiority.
The only ignorance and false sense of superiority I've encountered about rails was from haters who have never used it. Have you? It's just a web framework, maybe one of the better ones, maybe not, but it has become the focus of ire perhaps because people are so insecure in their technological choices they feel the need to look down on a web framework (WTF?). Rails is useful for some sites (I have used it on some myself), and other languages like PHP or Java have their place as well depending on specific requirements and code available in libraries etc. Buzzwords don't come into it, nor do logos, at least in my case, and I've never met anyone who made their choices based on such things. If any widely used web language deserves to be panned, it's PHP for its awful, messy API, though they have cleaned up their act recently. Rails is pretty middle of the road, and it's just a web framework.
As to the iPad, it's a pretty good device, for what it is, and frankly it covers 100% of the computing usage pattern of most people I know (web, email, games) - yes it doesn't cover the needs of everyone, but that's ok, if it is popular it's not going to cause your computer to be confiscated or to spontaneously combust - you can continue to live in a world where the iPad is popular, and feel no pain, so long as you can manage to tolerate the thought that others might have different needs to you. Can't think why anyone would buy something purely because it has a logo on it - I bought an iPad because it is a good tablet, and I wanted a tablet to read the web and mail on, that's it, and it is has served admirably for that purpose.
In fact, it's doubtful that any other company or project can actually compete in such a situation.
Bullshit. Android has been doing pretty well, in spite of fragmentation and several mis-steps by Google like Google Play. The only people who think like a cult are those who feel they must oppose everything Apple or everything Rails without question or thought. If you want to criticise Apple, criticise their predatory business practices, their monopoly on the marketplace, their banning scripting from the store, their blatant ripping off of other developers, but don't try to criticise a device which is best of class, and really popular, as somehow doing well because it has a logo or people are enlisted in a cult! People are buying the iPad in their millions because it is good, and they find it useful. Deal.
True pros kill themselves after each hack.
or failing that happening just adjust the locale business hours to something more appropriate to the region.
Often I wonder why we bother changing clocks at all, or having time-zones, and why we don't just let businesses and people decide on a local level on hours appropriate to the region of the world they are in.
In our global world is it is becoming less and less useful to keep everything in sync with a central authority hundreds of miles away - the alternative would be a universal time with agreed-upon working day times for each local area - lots of communication is not dependent on the particular time someone receives it. Now that we have email and websites to deal with many interactions with customers, and 24 hour phone lines for many companies, this is more and more attractive.
That's interesting, so you're saying that to make money on android you have to serve your users ads rather than sell something? I hope you're happy with seeing lots of ads in every app as an android user as that's where this will lead.
As to the original article, you seem to want to portray the authors as wrong in some way, but in fact they just made a pragmatic decision based on return on investment, because most users seem to have attitudes like yours. Android is more painful to develop for because of fragmentation, and costs them more money, and yet the users expect all this for free. So why should they bother trying to insert ads etc? Maybe they don't want ads in their app?
And if what you posted is true, it explains exactly why the digital version should be much less expensive.
Digital versions are often less expensive than the paper ones. If you consider that Apple takes 30%,and B&N physical stores take 50%, you can might expect digital versions to be 20% cheaper, which turns out to be often the case.
For myself, that would be somewhere around 33-50% of the cheapest regular price for the paperback.
That's nice for you, but it has no relation to the actual costs for publishers. They are quite happy if you continue to buy the paperback or hardback, as they will make at least as much money on that, if not more than a digital edition. Interestingly people don't have the same resistance to paying more for a hardback, though the difference in costs between hardback and paperback is truly trivial, and the cost of a hardback is usually around double - you are paying for the exclusive access to information with a hardback, not for the bit of cardboard inserted in the cover. In France they take this to another level as hardbacks are not even hardbacks, just slightly nicer paperback editions.
If an ebook costs more than the hardback, and you didn't buy it, good for you - it'll teach the publisher than really the convenience of an ebook and/or exclusive access to content in digital forma early wasn't worth that much more to you, but let's not pretend that books are priced solely, or even mostly, on the cost of production, because they are not - they are priced at a value the publisher thinks the market will bear, which is based on all sorts of ineffable assumptions to do with the value of ideas, the cost of the ink and paper is negligible.
Just because you think you are paying for the paper and ink, doesn't mean you are; in fact most of the cost was finding the right author and persuading them to release their thoughts to the world, in whatever format.
Mind if I ask for the source of this piece of info?
I work in the publishing industry, shops take roughly 50%, incredible though that may seem, but deals do vary.
Sale's would be better if they didn't release a shitty port.
Have you actually tried the product in question?
Of so, please tell us why the port is shitty. If not please STFU.
The reason apple are maintaining two branches is they haven't had time to properly merge the two. If they had the time and resources, I'm sure they'd love to merge them and keep some ui differences, but proceed with one base operating system. At present they're maintaining two separate branches of everything from the view layer up including lots of nearly identical code (e.g. uiwebview), which is neither sustainable nor particularly useful. The desktop has definitely moved toward ios with lion, and I think well see more of that, and at some point they may just decide its not worth maintaining the desktop branch (less than 30% of their revenue now) and move over to the newer iOS branch.
the apple post-facto apologists are going to have some somersaults to do when that happens to explain to themselves why now was indeed the right time to merge them and move beyond the pc, just as ms is hack-handedly trying to do here.
That said, ms have executed incredibly poorly here and ruined the reception of what is quite a good interface by foisting it on people all at once and being too up-front about their intentions - the route suggested by the parent would be a good one to gradually acclimatise people to the change.
With a physical book they have the cost of materials, printing costs, warehousing costs, shipping costs, retail space costs
These are not the main cost in producing/selling a book, the main cost is the 50-60% retailer cut of the cover price, and then perhaps origination (what goes into making the book), and then printing, then warehousing etc. So most of what you think of as the big costs in selling a physical book actually apply to ebooks too (the retailer in that case being either amazon or some other online store).
Nobody sells e-goods, they're "licensed", which means that I may use them as long as the publisher lets me in ways they like
While it plays to the peanut gallery here on slashdot, this is not really true. Lots of good publishers sell their content DRM free - Oreilly, Pragmattic Programmers, Baen, Smashwords, Cool Camping, Pan Macmillan etc.
Your nightmare scenarios might hold true for books bought from ibooks or for kindle for example (particularly for kindle as the whole 1984 episode showed), but they are not true for publishers who publish books in standard formats like PDF with no DRM - you can buy good ebooks today, you just have to be discriminating, and not all books you might want are available. Hopefully more publishers will see the light and stop trying to impose DRM (which is inevitably cracked anyway).
If you find something like that, you do NOT report it. It doesn't matter if you obtained it, you will likely take the fall.
The assumption here of course is that he is above suspicion. The police might have other reasons for suspecting something funny is going on, and might not believe his excuses as to why these pics ended up on his computer. Maybe his wife found the images, and this is his cover story invented on the spur of the moment. So she insists on reporting it, and we end up with a story in the press. As it stands, no-one on slashdot is going to provide any meaningful data on this story, the article certainly doesn't, so it's really quite pointless to pontificate one way or the other without knowing more information about why this was reported and by whom.
A bank will protect your funds from unauthorized third parties but the government and financial industry and not you decides who is authorized. All those trails also make you vulnerable to data mining.
I agree completely, there are tradeoffs with each approach, and I appreciate that proper audit trails (which include identity) are useful but also allow data mining, that's a price we pay, however there are (in my country at least) strict rules against them sharing your data. Our fundamental difference seems to be that I trust my government and bank more than I trust the bitcoin providers and ecosystem, whereas for you it is the reverse.
For instance by reviewing your financial trail and correlating it to publicly available information I can determine
Here I assume you mean 'I' as in my bank, as the only people with access to this information are my bank, and possibly police if they get a warrant. It is a bit misleading to phrase this as if anyone could access your financial audit trail. I would note that people give up this information voluntarily with store cards etc for tiny financial rewards (not that I do), and live happily with the results, the trail of transactions itself has some value but not a huge one, and does not equate with actual access to the account funds, which is even more closely guarded. I don't bank with organisations like BoA, but I guess they do have very lax security if employees can access these details without sanction.
I can't say I find any of your bitcoin examples compelling - for travelling abroad I use my bank card, which has zero fees on transactions abroad. I don't wish to keep transactions secret from a family member, but if I did, I'd use my own card, which they don't control/look at, my bank charges fees agreed in advance as part of the contract, it does not 'steal' money, and if I don't agree with a charge I can dispute it (and have, successfully). I'm sure I don't have to list the myriad advantages using a system more widely accepted than bitcoin brings.
I would caution people against viewing bitcoin as a store of value though - it is one of the less secure stores of value, and a completely unregulated market, which means it is subject to all kinds of manipulation and speculation. It is also analogous to keeping hard cash or gold under your bed, unless you have a *very* secure bitcoin repository. Fine for small amounts for a short time, not a good idea for large amounts short term OR any amount for the long term. If your aim is to avoid debasement of your currency by your government, you have options including voting them out, and diversifying into other more or less inflation-proof assets like other fiat currencies, property, shares, gold etc. Bitcoin would be low down my list personally for this.
We do have a mass of financial regulation and banks have to go through a huge amount of certification to keep their funds secure (though perhaps less so in the states) precisely because financial markets are a prime target for scammers and thieves. Imagine if a bank or other money transfer service stored its account details on a rented server shared with several other websites and controlled by a third party who doesn't normally deal with financial transactions - they'd be shut down by the government immediately. That's what happened here and yet people still trust these bitcoin operations to continue using $20 a month servers to store value. Maybe since they're unhappy now with linode they'll move to dreamhost next :).
While I agree somewhat with the sentiment that the vault doors are meaningless (since so much cash nowadays lives as bits, not physical paper notes), since my bank has an entire team of people tasked with security, another tasked with fraud, and dedicated servers for financial transactions separate from their website etc, etc I trust them a bit more than any bitcoin operator in existence, and certainly more than my home computer.
I do find bitcoin ( and its adherents) interesting, but I have no need of digital cash - they have taken what seems like a plus point of cash, that it is anonymous and fungible, and made it digital, but as you point out this makes it less secure. The trouble is people then see it as a way to store value, but trust their security to their woefully inadequate home computer os, or even, in this case, to a vps provider who hosts websites (!). If this were cash or gold, and a company stored tens of thousands of gold overnight in their distribution warehouse and was then robbed, it would not be news, just Stupidity on the part of the company. Re contacting the FBI to get your stolen bitcoins back - good luck with that, particularly when you tell them it is deliberately anonymous.
If I am holding or transferring money online I want authentication, authorisation and trackable, reversible transactions (proper tracking with an audit trail of cerified identities, just as I have with other currencies currently. I and most other people place far greater value on that than anonymity of transactions.
There are some great ideas in bitcoin, and I follow it with interest, but I would not trust it to store value for the reasons above, reasons which you view as plus points.
Re bitcoin being like gold, yes, it is very like gold, and subject to the same predation and speculation and the same gulling of the vulnerable who view it as a store of value, except unlike gold, the market is completely unregulated. Google 'gold corner' for possible consequences of that.
in selling a defective product that causes damage to its user when used as directed.
Can you show us somewhere Linode directs its users to store bitcoins on their servers?
But this wasn't a case of random act of vandalism. The host's negligence led to the loss. If you lease an apartment from me and someone robs you, ok that's not my fault if I didn't contribute to it. But if I have a copy of your key and leave it laying in front of your door, and you are robbed as a result, that's negligence on my part, and it's not a risk "you should just have to accept". You should be able to sue me and at least get back some of your loss because I am at least partly responsible for the loss.
Good thing that the current situation is nothing like your analogy then isn't it? Stop creating straw men in an effort to argue that Linode are somehow liable for this. I doubt very much any sane judge would agree they were liable, given the service is not provided for the purpose of storing bit coins or other high-value items.
Obviously a cheap hosting service is not meant for storing unique data worth 10000 times the monthly cost of the service with no backups. A more fitting analogy would be a cheap storage service meant for storing furniture where someone hires a box and starts storing their gold in it. You can store your gold bars there if you like, but don't be surprised if someone bypasses security on that warehouse and steals your gold (which is what happened here, not 'leaving a copy of a key laying [sic] in front of the door"). You'd be laughed out of court if you somehow got to trial.
Actually, Bitcoin's leave an infinitely long trail in the block chain....Anyone can find out with ease and absolute certainty which Bitcoins are being transferred and when. The problem lies in the fact that the addresses are anonymous and basically meaningless.
There is no verification of identity and therefore no audit trail - an audit trail of anonymous tokens is worthless, even if you can trace it to the n'th degree and watch your money being laundered anonymously.
What I find curious about these bit coin thefts is that they have no way to trace the coins once they have left - they see the account it goes to, but have no higher authority to dispute the transfer with, no way to find out who that is or where they are. It truly is virtual cash, but without the audit-trail which real banks have instituted for very good reasons for the cash in our bank accounts. So it seems once someone steals your digital wallet, it is truly gone, with no way to track who stole it, no compensation, no insurance (what insurance company would insure such risk?), and no way to call in the authorities. No wonder there have been a string of thefts, as this currency seems designed to avoid leaving an audit trail.
I can't see why someone would want to keep their wealth in something like bitcoin for this reason alone, quite apart from the volatility and potential for the entire currency to collapse at some point.
By the way, if you want Linkedin to wipe your g-mail contacts that haven't linked with you, send them a request through their help desk. It may take some persuasion, but they will do it.
If you don't want to share information like that with the world, do not upload it to sites like this or (worse) give them your email login so that they can hoover up all your contacts. Why you would trust a site like this with contact info mystifies me, but once it is done, you can never really undo it - they've already plotted your social graph from those mails, and that information in itself is very useful.
So the solution to your problem is *never* to share your contacts list with a social website.
So silence is a note, just not any note that you can hear?
Why yes, exactly.
For example this device is silent to some people, but not to others:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito
In the same way what some people perceive as black (silence), the poster now perceives as a colour.