Between XNA, Steam, flash games, iOS, Windows Store, Kindle Store, Google Play, and the upcoming spectacular failure Ouya, the homebrew gaming scene is better than it has ever been.
Skepticism is what happens when you use data and logic to undermine a position, or undermine the data and logic supporting a position.
Doubt is what happens when someone says "nuh-uh" and thinks they've contributed meaningfully.
And, THAT is what makes me so skeptical of all the "anthorpomorphic global warming" frenzy.
Yes. Unhinged doubt, based on a critical failure in your ability to judge the legitimacy of your own position. We're all on the edge of our seats wondering why a sixty year old man is sticking his fingers in his ears screaming "no no no no no it's not real."
The only reason your opinion matters is democratic voting.
The reason is evolution is a deal breaker due to the structure of the Christian religion.
Actually, the head of every major branch of Christianity accepts natural selection. (Evolution just means state-driven progress. Movies and chess games evolve.)
John Paul II was the first pope to accept natural selection as "the mechanism by which God did his work."
Bartholomew I (the Patriarch of Constantinople, sort-of-Orthodox-pope) has stated that natural selection is not incompatible with his reading of the Bible, and that whether it is correct is a scientific matter, in the way that gravity is, which largely does not interest Christianity, whose purposes are matters of the soul and community; this seems to me to be the best possible reaction.
It should not be surprising that the Anglicans accepted natural selection more than 100 years ago; after all, Charles Darwin, who figured out natural selection, and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who figured out the real meat of the theory - everything but breeding and survival being the diversity driver - were both Anglican ministers.
The Ecumenical Church directly funds DNA/RNA scientific research, and has since the 1980s. They accepted natural selection before most Slashdotters were born, back in one of the forms it had prior to its current form; they've been on the ball so long that they've had to accept several revisions to the theory. They have a number of fascinating things that the Slashdotter might crassly read as "science-religion fan fiction": the ecumenical church is quite happy to attempt to understand God's wisdom in terms of biodiverse resiliency and other such "what do you mean a priest said that" kind of topics. They also have the fascinating position "God continues to create." http://episcopalscience.org/projects-2/current-projects/biodiversity/
Aboon Paulose II accepted natural selection before his death in 1996, bringing with him the Cyriac Eastern Orthodoxy and the Assyrian Church. Helpfully, if you want to ask them, they're now headquartered in Chicago, and they have a 1-800 number for questions from random people.
The Malankara and Jacobites accept it. The Tewahedo Church (Ethiopian Orthodox) accepts it. The Jesuits accepted it in the 1930s.
The Protestant denominations (baptists, anabaptists, lutherans, calvinists, etc) don't have a head-of-church, and so it comes down to each local priest or minister. Predictably, this leads to a wide range of beliefs. However, many sub-branches have official or unofficial near-universal positions. For example, the Shakers, Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites have always observed science to be distinct from religion, and never held Christianity to be in contrast with natural selection; their position, like that of the Catholic Church, is that the story of the Garden of Eden is explanatory metaphor.
As far as I know, the only by-the-numbers major branch of Christianity to have actually rejected natural selection is the Methodists (and their Pentecostal derivatives.)
Seriously, the leadership of 90+% of Christianity has accepted natural selection.
How much of this anti-evolution backlash could be directly attributed to this false meme that Christianity rejects evolution?
Maybe if we opened up to that those religions might not be idiots, we might not push its adherents so squarely into the idiot box.
Cognitive dissonance is the physical pain that comes from a person being unable to resolve the failure of a deeply held belief system. It's not a fancy way to call someone wrong. Please stop using phrases you don't understand.
One example of cognitive dissonance that's fairly common is the context in which the phrase was coined: doomsday cults. In the 1950s, there was a UFO cult which expected the planet to be wiped out on a specific date at a specific time by alien visitors. For around 12 hours they were able to get by on excuses like time zones and miscalculations, but as the next day took on, quite a few of the members started facing very real physical pain, as they realized that this thing they'd thrown away the last several years of their lives on wasn't going to happen.
They couldn't face that the Earth hadn't been wiped out. It was like not seeing the sun rise the next day, or having the world suddenly go black and white, or gravity ending: not the "oh well, I guess that's that" reaction that most people expect, but rather "something's terribly, terribly wrong, this shouldn't be possible."
A psychiatrist investigated the cult, and when he became convinced that the pain was the result of psychological rebalance, rather than the poison everyone insisted it was, he started looking into other cases. Religious folk get this. Delusional people get this. Cultists get this. People in areas where science is still today what we'd call superstition get this. (This was Leon Festinger, and you can read about it a bunch of places, but his book "When Prophecy Fails" is a great place to start.)
Similarly, "self incrimination" means "I've made a criminal of myself," namely admission of a crime. You go on to accuse the man of being out of his mind for having a poor belief system, and then you invent a story about his believing it's about grant money and lambast him at length for it.
I'm particularly fond of "Just in case you missed the memo fossil fuel extraction is the MOST PROFITABLE endeavor in human history bar none." This isn't even close to true, of course: the United States, world's largest consumer of fossil fuels, currently imports about $360 billion of fossil fuels annually. This is almost as much as California spent building houses in the worst part of the housing market bust. Oil's profit line is high, but not exorbitantly so: it's currently about eighteen percent, as compared to Apple's 61%. Neither the market cap nor the profit per dollar (nor the profit cap, for that matter) justify this hilariously false claim.
You may be confused by that Exxon is among the world's largest companies. It's a little like how Apple is one of the world's largest computer manufacturers: the Mac market is tiny compared to the PC market, but the vendors involved in the PC market are frequent and small ("highly pulverized,") whereas there's really only one Mac vendor.
Which leads me back to the hilariously self referential
You have built yourself a self supporting bullshit machine that unrealistically weighs "facts" that support your preconceptions and discounts things that disagree with what you think.
I mean sure, he's also a crank, but dude, you are really, really over-reacting.
You seem to have confused people being frustrated with you on Slashdot for using ignorance as a basis for loud skepticism with scientists doing the underlying work.
Slashdotters who are annoyed with you and who do not choose to spend hours doing the footwork that is actually your responsibility - that is, the research to validate your skepticism - do not in any way undermine the science.
The validity of the science is not determined on grounds of whether an average Joe has chosen to spoon-feed it to you.
Listen, I know it feels great to think you're smarter than everybody else, but let's be clear about something, here: you've never even tried to read one of these models. If you did try, you'd find out that you couldn't.
Just like you're skeptical of climate science, we're skeptical of you. The difference, of course, is that we're looking at measurements, and you aren't. We're measuring your scientific competency with everything you say (and there's no hockey stick.) You're just saying "this isn't valid because you aren't required to back it up to me or provide evidence; how easy that eight year degree with three defenses must be."
I mean, you really seem to believe that getting a PhD is easy, and yet you still seem to expect to be taken seriously in your other evaluations of things.
So have fun, tmosley. See how each time someone responds, it's the first and the last, and yet you keep going?
It's because you're barking at crowds that barely recognize your existence to feel smart, and the crowd is responding with a series of drive-by "that isn't how science works, you loon"s.
And I'm sure you interpret that as a series of defeated haters that you're knocking down, one by one.
It's sad: if someone with the dedication that you have towards steering change wasn't so laughably retarded at science, they could do some real good.
Maybe ask a third grader why nobody takes you seriously, one of these days. It's fixable.
We are dealing with the inability of the mind to represent information that conflicts with beliefs.
No, the heartland institute are a pack amoral propagandists
I think he meant the people he's met, rather than the people running the media show. My interpretation of his words was "I know people who won't even read the emails, yet hold up the emails as a smoking gun and believe they're acting on evidence; those people have an inability to represent information about themselves to themselves when it conflicts with their self-image."
Sounds like he at least made improvements to them, and isn't that what open source is supposed to be all about?
Why is it so often difficult for source zealots ever cope with that what open source is about has nothing to do with cheating at a competition or following rules?
Sounds like he at least made improvements to them, and isn't that what open source is supposed to be all about?
Very few of those codebases were generated for the competition.
It makes me very uncomfortable that you're upvoted to +5, insightful for apologizing away that a guy made minor tweaks to other people's work, submitted it as his own to a competition which does not allow appropriation or collaboration, and are trying to make this an ethical issue about something that has nothing to do with the contest.
He cheated his balls off. Are you really such an OSS fetishist that you can't see that?
"[W]hy is it that game developers are beginning to drown in a culture of fear, or more specifically, a fear of change? Is it because the gaming world has gone too corporate and is no longer exclusive to small teams of genius misfits and creative underdogs?
Indirectly, yes. Mostly this is because EA can afford the impact of warezers, whereas indies cannot.
Face it, by even being on slashdot, you are the not the average Kindle user. That is also the problem with Stallman
The problem with Stallman is not that he is not an average Kindle user. The problem with Stallman is that he's built up an enormous cult of personality, so whenever he says something transparently wrong, nobody contradicts him because we're all sick of dealing with his fanboys later.
You, for example, have completely ignored that his "Facts" were wrong, in order to present it as a question of his speaking to people who have other options.
Even with ten more Chernobyls and twenty more Fukushimas, per watt, Nuclear is both the safest and lowest environmental damage power system out there.
Centralia PA. We still use coal.
Why would we want to give up on nuclear? It's our only chance without involving future tech. None of the other non-carbon-cycle renewables have consistent power, are available wherever they're needed, aren't dependant on ridiculous rare earths, can be deployed at scale without enormous land usage, or have any hope of providing even today's power usage, let alone tomorrow's.
There is no meaningful taking nuclear off of the table until there's something better to replace it, and that something better just hasn't come along yet.
Another non-technical "content creator" commenting on issues he doesn't understand.
Actually, I'm a software engineer by trade, and Slashdot in part runs on my code. I'm also a published author, both before Amazon existed *and* in Amazon's electronic distribution network.
Your incorrect guesswork is poor character assasination.
Sir, why don't you go read up on DRM?
Because I've written DRM systems, and understand them better than you ever will. Just pretending I got something wrong fails miserably when you haven't pointed out an actual error.
but.... you have no rights to step on my "property" rights. That's the basic issue with DRM.
This sentence is fundamentally meaningless, and does not apply to the conversation at hand. Take your non-sequiturs to someone more easily impressed.
I'm sure he's thought about it a little more than that.
Obviously he hasn't, just from reading the words he said.
He's talking about Amazon the eBook retailer here, not Amazon the hardware vendor
One, no, he isn't. He's pretending these are fundamental features of the Kindle ecosystem.
Two, that's a false bifurcation. They're the same entity named two different ways. You might as well say "he's talking about Amazon the company that has a warehouse in Texas, not Amazon the company that has a warehouse in Virginia."
Three, Amazon sends DRM-free PDFs to Kindles. Even if he was just talking about a fraction of the company - which he isn't - and even if that wasn't a ridiculous idea - it is - it's still wrong.
When focusing on aspects of a business you can't always generalize to that degree.
Yes, it's generalization to pretend that one company isn't... two companies, or to say that Stallman's false claims about Amazon are false because if you cut away three quarters of what the company does, it's not in the remaining quarter.
I don't have enough face, and I don't have enough palm.
I didn't know writing something on a word processor would cost that much.
Well, try it some time. Turns out sitting still typing for years costs more than just the typing part.
This whole argument from ignorance thing - I can see how it embarrasses you from how you refused to log in and associate the things you say with who you are.
They're... all over the place, guy. For example, my copy of Design Patterns I bought on CD at Barnes and Noble with cash, when I spilled coffee all over my last one.
Never heard of O'Reilly Safari, Project Gutenberg or Waldenbooks?
Over the last year, I've bought 41 textbooks in PDF form on CD, about half in bookstores, and about half between Safari and Amazon. I've bought six on dead tree, four because they weren't available as PDF, and two because they were gifts.
It's generally easier to find books on PDF than in print form if they're even slightly obscure, these days.
"THAT is the problem he's complaining about."
Funny, I don't see it. But that problem is also garbage, and would only be believed in by someone whose primary access to books was piracy, because anyone who's been in a bookstore or on a bookstore website in the last five years knows better.
"You are just engaging in filmflam and misdirection."
Uh huh. Cue the recitations of standard text which don't actually address what's been said: just pretend those specific quotes from his text weren't what he was talking about, raise a different topic, then accuse *me* of misdirection.:)
That the new direction is also wrong? Delicious.
Go steal a nintendo game or something, kid. The adults have markets you've never been in to discuss.
My kindle from four years ago, which has never been updated, eats ePub just fine. So does my DX.
Author-voluntary protection is *not* platform-wide DRM. There's nothing wrong with Amazon offering tools to authors to get them to publish, and Amazon is not at fault for the choices of authors.
eBooks are *not* expensive in general. Most authors make less than poverty wage. You don't get to argue the legitimate prices of books until you know what it costs to write one.
ePub is zipped XHTML if you don't know anything about XHTML. It has a custom DTD and eliminates most useful tags; it requires a specific directory structure; it has content size limits; it requires a specific character encoding; et cetera.
MobiPocket has significant reflow stuff that HTML does not, which really matters on a device like kindle. In particular, their ability to specify different columnations for different orientations is extremely important. Since Kindle doesn't have CSS3 or JavaScript, if you pretend that ePub has this because you imagine it's full-blown XHTML, I will laugh at you. (For reference, it doesn't even have.)
At this time I cannot imagine a single case where ePub outperforms either MobiPocket or PDF. Obviously neither do Kindle's developers, since ePub has been supported since day one, and MobiPocket has not.
"Still, I'd say ePub wins for simplicity. You can build the whole thing by hand in a text editor"
That's nice. If you think Amazon should be choosing its publishing platform construction on whether book authors can construct their books from source by hand, then I think it's pretty obvious why you don't run a major publishing platform.
Notice that you're advocating ePub despite its obvious severe limitations, and this is the only reason you've given other than that it's a public standard, which is true of all three other standards the Kindle uses.
Including, you know, HTML. Becasuse fuck ePub.
"I didn't buy Glue from Amazon -- I think it was through Waterstones, actually."
Ah. No wonder you say you don't like Kindle because of... something you didn't buy on Kindle.
"I also thought "Quality control from the publishers" made it clear I was actually attacking the publishers rather than the distributors"
Well, if you hadn't put it in a screed about Kindle, and positioned it as a reason to choose books over eBooks, then...
"The quality of Glue is pretty rubbish. That's not Waterstones' fault -- it's Random House's fault for being useless."
And yet, your alternative suggestion is to still do business with Random House, in a way that cuts out the eBook vendor.
The Amazon yank was the company saying "oh god, we sold a book by someone who was pirating it and didn't have rights," which turned out to be incorrect. So, since it was the first time, they did what they thought was right: they pulled the book from the store. Because of the way the platform worked, that also ended up pulling the book from devices - something they did BY ACCIDENT. When the public flipped out, Amazon did the right thing: it restored the pirated edition of the book to people's devices with apologies, provided a gift certificate as recompensation, and paid the real publisher what should have been paid to them.
Amazon is out a lot of money over this. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Had nothing to do with pulling public domain content off of devices.
Why do you fall for RMS' unending stream of bullshit? Check his "facts." They're never, ever right. This is the man that advocates pedophilia as un-damaging, for fuck's sake. (Think I'm joking? Go look it up.)
"but the idea of not being able to *really* own my book is holding me back."
I really own my kindle books, but that's because I have a USB cable, a basic understanding of filesystems, and an immunity to the ridiculous paranoia that runs around places like Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Between XNA, Steam, flash games, iOS, Windows Store, Kindle Store, Google Play, and the upcoming spectacular failure Ouya, the homebrew gaming scene is better than it has ever been.
You seem to have confused doubt for skepticism.
Skepticism is what happens when you use data and logic to undermine a position, or undermine the data and logic supporting a position.
Doubt is what happens when someone says "nuh-uh" and thinks they've contributed meaningfully.
Yes. Unhinged doubt, based on a critical failure in your ability to judge the legitimacy of your own position. We're all on the edge of our seats wondering why a sixty year old man is sticking his fingers in his ears screaming "no no no no no it's not real."
The only reason your opinion matters is democratic voting.
Actually, the head of every major branch of Christianity accepts natural selection. (Evolution just means state-driven progress. Movies and chess games evolve.)
John Paul II was the first pope to accept natural selection as "the mechanism by which God did his work."
Bartholomew I (the Patriarch of Constantinople, sort-of-Orthodox-pope) has stated that natural selection is not incompatible with his reading of the Bible, and that whether it is correct is a scientific matter, in the way that gravity is, which largely does not interest Christianity, whose purposes are matters of the soul and community; this seems to me to be the best possible reaction.
It should not be surprising that the Anglicans accepted natural selection more than 100 years ago; after all, Charles Darwin, who figured out natural selection, and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who figured out the real meat of the theory - everything but breeding and survival being the diversity driver - were both Anglican ministers.
The Ecumenical Church directly funds DNA/RNA scientific research, and has since the 1980s. They accepted natural selection before most Slashdotters were born, back in one of the forms it had prior to its current form; they've been on the ball so long that they've had to accept several revisions to the theory. They have a number of fascinating things that the Slashdotter might crassly read as "science-religion fan fiction": the ecumenical church is quite happy to attempt to understand God's wisdom in terms of biodiverse resiliency and other such "what do you mean a priest said that" kind of topics. They also have the fascinating position "God continues to create." http://episcopalscience.org/projects-2/current-projects/biodiversity/
Aboon Paulose II accepted natural selection before his death in 1996, bringing with him the Cyriac Eastern Orthodoxy and the Assyrian Church. Helpfully, if you want to ask them, they're now headquartered in Chicago, and they have a 1-800 number for questions from random people.
The Malankara and Jacobites accept it. The Tewahedo Church (Ethiopian Orthodox) accepts it. The Jesuits accepted it in the 1930s.
The Protestant denominations (baptists, anabaptists, lutherans, calvinists, etc) don't have a head-of-church, and so it comes down to each local priest or minister. Predictably, this leads to a wide range of beliefs. However, many sub-branches have official or unofficial near-universal positions. For example, the Shakers, Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites have always observed science to be distinct from religion, and never held Christianity to be in contrast with natural selection; their position, like that of the Catholic Church, is that the story of the Garden of Eden is explanatory metaphor.
As far as I know, the only by-the-numbers major branch of Christianity to have actually rejected natural selection is the Methodists (and their Pentecostal derivatives.)
Seriously, the leadership of 90+% of Christianity has accepted natural selection.
How much of this anti-evolution backlash could be directly attributed to this false meme that Christianity rejects evolution?
Maybe if we opened up to that those religions might not be idiots, we might not push its adherents so squarely into the idiot box.
Er.
Cognitive dissonance is the physical pain that comes from a person being unable to resolve the failure of a deeply held belief system. It's not a fancy way to call someone wrong. Please stop using phrases you don't understand.
One example of cognitive dissonance that's fairly common is the context in which the phrase was coined: doomsday cults. In the 1950s, there was a UFO cult which expected the planet to be wiped out on a specific date at a specific time by alien visitors. For around 12 hours they were able to get by on excuses like time zones and miscalculations, but as the next day took on, quite a few of the members started facing very real physical pain, as they realized that this thing they'd thrown away the last several years of their lives on wasn't going to happen.
They couldn't face that the Earth hadn't been wiped out. It was like not seeing the sun rise the next day, or having the world suddenly go black and white, or gravity ending: not the "oh well, I guess that's that" reaction that most people expect, but rather "something's terribly, terribly wrong, this shouldn't be possible."
A psychiatrist investigated the cult, and when he became convinced that the pain was the result of psychological rebalance, rather than the poison everyone insisted it was, he started looking into other cases. Religious folk get this. Delusional people get this. Cultists get this. People in areas where science is still today what we'd call superstition get this. (This was Leon Festinger, and you can read about it a bunch of places, but his book "When Prophecy Fails" is a great place to start.)
Similarly, "self incrimination" means "I've made a criminal of myself," namely admission of a crime. You go on to accuse the man of being out of his mind for having a poor belief system, and then you invent a story about his believing it's about grant money and lambast him at length for it.
I'm particularly fond of "Just in case you missed the memo fossil fuel extraction is the MOST PROFITABLE endeavor in human history bar none." This isn't even close to true, of course: the United States, world's largest consumer of fossil fuels, currently imports about $360 billion of fossil fuels annually. This is almost as much as California spent building houses in the worst part of the housing market bust. Oil's profit line is high, but not exorbitantly so: it's currently about eighteen percent, as compared to Apple's 61%. Neither the market cap nor the profit per dollar (nor the profit cap, for that matter) justify this hilariously false claim.
You may be confused by that Exxon is among the world's largest companies. It's a little like how Apple is one of the world's largest computer manufacturers: the Mac market is tiny compared to the PC market, but the vendors involved in the PC market are frequent and small ("highly pulverized,") whereas there's really only one Mac vendor.
Which leads me back to the hilariously self referential
I mean sure, he's also a crank, but dude, you are really, really over-reacting.
You seem to have confused people being frustrated with you on Slashdot for using ignorance as a basis for loud skepticism with scientists doing the underlying work.
Slashdotters who are annoyed with you and who do not choose to spend hours doing the footwork that is actually your responsibility - that is, the research to validate your skepticism - do not in any way undermine the science.
The validity of the science is not determined on grounds of whether an average Joe has chosen to spoon-feed it to you.
Listen, I know it feels great to think you're smarter than everybody else, but let's be clear about something, here: you've never even tried to read one of these models. If you did try, you'd find out that you couldn't.
Just like you're skeptical of climate science, we're skeptical of you. The difference, of course, is that we're looking at measurements, and you aren't. We're measuring your scientific competency with everything you say (and there's no hockey stick.) You're just saying "this isn't valid because you aren't required to back it up to me or provide evidence; how easy that eight year degree with three defenses must be."
I mean, you really seem to believe that getting a PhD is easy, and yet you still seem to expect to be taken seriously in your other evaluations of things.
So have fun, tmosley. See how each time someone responds, it's the first and the last, and yet you keep going?
It's because you're barking at crowds that barely recognize your existence to feel smart, and the crowd is responding with a series of drive-by "that isn't how science works, you loon"s.
And I'm sure you interpret that as a series of defeated haters that you're knocking down, one by one.
It's sad: if someone with the dedication that you have towards steering change wasn't so laughably retarded at science, they could do some real good.
Maybe ask a third grader why nobody takes you seriously, one of these days. It's fixable.
These two things are in conflict. If Mr. Behe doesn't publish to peer review, he isn't a scientist.
I think he meant the people he's met, rather than the people running the media show. My interpretation of his words was "I know people who won't even read the emails, yet hold up the emails as a smoking gun and believe they're acting on evidence; those people have an inability to represent information about themselves to themselves when it conflicts with their self-image."
Recommending a homogenous network infrastructure is a critical, rudimentary security mistake.
It's stunning that Addison Wesley allowed something like that through their editing process.
That should embarrass you, as the answer is in the quote you made of the other person speaking.
Why is it so often difficult for source zealots ever cope with that what open source is about has nothing to do with cheating at a competition or following rules?
Very few of those codebases were generated for the competition.
It makes me very uncomfortable that you're upvoted to +5, insightful for apologizing away that a guy made minor tweaks to other people's work, submitted it as his own to a competition which does not allow appropriation or collaboration, and are trying to make this an ethical issue about something that has nothing to do with the contest.
He cheated his balls off. Are you really such an OSS fetishist that you can't see that?
Indirectly, yes. Mostly this is because EA can afford the impact of warezers, whereas indies cannot.
Not on the Kindle, it can't.
Oh, you're pretending you didn't do that on purpose? Maybe I shouldn't have defended you, then.
It's easy to take back. Go do it, and stop pretending to have a point with these vague little platitudes.
Watch, I'll show you how.
Ad Hominem is not a fancy way to say insult. Your argument was attacked legitimately; after that, I insulted you. That is not Ad Hominem.
In the meantime, all you've actually done is distracted from the things I said with character attacks. Guess what that is?
I'd say "get to your point," but you obviously don't have one.
The problem with Stallman is not that he is not an average Kindle user. The problem with Stallman is that he's built up an enormous cult of personality, so whenever he says something transparently wrong, nobody contradicts him because we're all sick of dealing with his fanboys later.
You, for example, have completely ignored that his "Facts" were wrong, in order to present it as a question of his speaking to people who have other options.
No. He's just *wrong*.
Neither. I'm just someone who had a job to do, and did it.
The supposition that I must not understand a thing merely because I don't agree with it is asinine.
Even with ten more Chernobyls and twenty more Fukushimas, per watt, Nuclear is both the safest and lowest environmental damage power system out there.
Centralia PA. We still use coal.
Why would we want to give up on nuclear? It's our only chance without involving future tech. None of the other non-carbon-cycle renewables have consistent power, are available wherever they're needed, aren't dependant on ridiculous rare earths, can be deployed at scale without enormous land usage, or have any hope of providing even today's power usage, let alone tomorrow's.
There is no meaningful taking nuclear off of the table until there's something better to replace it, and that something better just hasn't come along yet.
Actually, I'm a software engineer by trade, and Slashdot in part runs on my code. I'm also a published author, both before Amazon existed *and* in Amazon's electronic distribution network.
Your incorrect guesswork is poor character assasination.
Because I've written DRM systems, and understand them better than you ever will. Just pretending I got something wrong fails miserably when you haven't pointed out an actual error.
This sentence is fundamentally meaningless, and does not apply to the conversation at hand. Take your non-sequiturs to someone more easily impressed.
Obviously he hasn't, just from reading the words he said.
One, no, he isn't. He's pretending these are fundamental features of the Kindle ecosystem.
Two, that's a false bifurcation. They're the same entity named two different ways. You might as well say "he's talking about Amazon the company that has a warehouse in Texas, not Amazon the company that has a warehouse in Virginia."
Three, Amazon sends DRM-free PDFs to Kindles. Even if he was just talking about a fraction of the company - which he isn't - and even if that wasn't a ridiculous idea - it is - it's still wrong.
Yes, it's generalization to pretend that one company isn't ... two companies, or to say that Stallman's false claims about Amazon are false because if you cut away three quarters of what the company does, it's not in the remaining quarter.
I don't have enough face, and I don't have enough palm.
Well, try it some time. Turns out sitting still typing for years costs more than just the typing part.
This whole argument from ignorance thing - I can see how it embarrasses you from how you refused to log in and associate the things you say with who you are.
"if you are unable to perceive the invasion of freedom in a corporation being able to terminate/delete something i BOUGHT on a device i OWN"
But that isn't what you said last post at all. "If, something that is now in public domain" has nothing to do with something you bought.
"i cant waste time with your unending stream of bullshit."
That wasn't what you said when you became a fan of me.
"Good luck finding the PDF to begin with."
They're ... all over the place, guy. For example, my copy of Design Patterns I bought on CD at Barnes and Noble with cash, when I spilled coffee all over my last one.
Never heard of O'Reilly Safari, Project Gutenberg or Waldenbooks?
Over the last year, I've bought 41 textbooks in PDF form on CD, about half in bookstores, and about half between Safari and Amazon. I've bought six on dead tree, four because they weren't available as PDF, and two because they were gifts.
It's generally easier to find books on PDF than in print form if they're even slightly obscure, these days.
"THAT is the problem he's complaining about."
Funny, I don't see it. But that problem is also garbage, and would only be believed in by someone whose primary access to books was piracy, because anyone who's been in a bookstore or on a bookstore website in the last five years knows better.
"You are just engaging in filmflam and misdirection."
Uh huh. Cue the recitations of standard text which don't actually address what's been said: just pretend those specific quotes from his text weren't what he was talking about, raise a different topic, then accuse *me* of misdirection. :)
That the new direction is also wrong? Delicious.
Go steal a nintendo game or something, kid. The adults have markets you've never been in to discuss.
My kindle from four years ago, which has never been updated, eats ePub just fine. So does my DX.
Author-voluntary protection is *not* platform-wide DRM. There's nothing wrong with Amazon offering tools to authors to get them to publish, and Amazon is not at fault for the choices of authors.
eBooks are *not* expensive in general. Most authors make less than poverty wage. You don't get to argue the legitimate prices of books until you know what it costs to write one.
ePub is zipped XHTML if you don't know anything about XHTML. It has a custom DTD and eliminates most useful tags; it requires a specific directory structure; it has content size limits; it requires a specific character encoding; et cetera.
MobiPocket has significant reflow stuff that HTML does not, which really matters on a device like kindle. In particular, their ability to specify different columnations for different orientations is extremely important. Since Kindle doesn't have CSS3 or JavaScript, if you pretend that ePub has this because you imagine it's full-blown XHTML, I will laugh at you. (For reference, it doesn't even have .)
At this time I cannot imagine a single case where ePub outperforms either MobiPocket or PDF. Obviously neither do Kindle's developers, since ePub has been supported since day one, and MobiPocket has not.
"Still, I'd say ePub wins for simplicity. You can build the whole thing by hand in a text editor"
That's nice. If you think Amazon should be choosing its publishing platform construction on whether book authors can construct their books from source by hand, then I think it's pretty obvious why you don't run a major publishing platform.
Notice that you're advocating ePub despite its obvious severe limitations, and this is the only reason you've given other than that it's a public standard, which is true of all three other standards the Kindle uses.
Including, you know, HTML. Becasuse fuck ePub.
"I didn't buy Glue from Amazon -- I think it was through Waterstones, actually."
Ah. No wonder you say you don't like Kindle because of ... something you didn't buy on Kindle.
"I also thought "Quality control from the publishers" made it clear I was actually attacking the publishers rather than the distributors"
Well, if you hadn't put it in a screed about Kindle, and positioned it as a reason to choose books over eBooks, then ...
"The quality of Glue is pretty rubbish. That's not Waterstones' fault -- it's Random House's fault for being useless."
And yet, your alternative suggestion is to still do business with Random House, in a way that cuts out the eBook vendor.
I can see you've thought this through.
Yeah?
Call us when it actually happens.
The Amazon yank was the company saying "oh god, we sold a book by someone who was pirating it and didn't have rights," which turned out to be incorrect. So, since it was the first time, they did what they thought was right: they pulled the book from the store. Because of the way the platform worked, that also ended up pulling the book from devices - something they did BY ACCIDENT. When the public flipped out, Amazon did the right thing: it restored the pirated edition of the book to people's devices with apologies, provided a gift certificate as recompensation, and paid the real publisher what should have been paid to them.
Amazon is out a lot of money over this. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Had nothing to do with pulling public domain content off of devices.
Why do you fall for RMS' unending stream of bullshit? Check his "facts." They're never, ever right. This is the man that advocates pedophilia as un-damaging, for fuck's sake. (Think I'm joking? Go look it up.)
"but the idea of not being able to *really* own my book is holding me back."
I really own my kindle books, but that's because I have a USB cable, a basic understanding of filesystems, and an immunity to the ridiculous paranoia that runs around places like Slashdot.