The state of timekeeping is...not pretty... at present, so an improvement would be nice; but it's somewhat hard to argue for something really radical when you could file down some of the really pointy bits by just keeping the deterministic parts of the current time/date setup, and ignoring leap seconds(which will eventually become an issue; but that'll take a least a couple of centuries, so it will be somebody else's problem.) UTC sucks, TIA FTW!
The more curious question is why Microsoft can't sell this. They were perfectly capable of putting together.NET Micro, which runs on fairly tiny stuff, and they've been poking at ambient embedded devices at least since SPOT and various DirectBand receiver devices. More recently, there was "Windows Sideshow", which more or less died without a whisper; but was a serious stab at making semi-autonomous devices, intermediate between ye olde serial LCD and the PDA/Phone/MP3 player that is just here to sync and then leave, work with full PCs in interesting ways.
On the research side (and even further from commercial success, since as far as I know they never actually deployed it), they put together a proof-of-concept of using a small embedded processor to allow a PC to remain sleeping most of the time, while continuing to behave exactly as normal from the perspective of other devices on the network, by handing off tasks to the embedded device, which could then wake the host PC as needed to pass off results or respond to spikes in demand beyond its capabilities. (They never went beyond a demo, to my knowledge; but this seems like the sort of thing that could get very interesting if you took advantage of the CLR to allow a.NET application to move bits of itself between the host and the slave device, regardless of underlying architecture...)
Back when they were still flogging warmed-over piles of DOS with a layer of GUI and instability, the big mystery was why Microsoft was so incompetent. What mystifies me now is how they manage to turn massive supplies of money and talent into such comparatively limited success outside of their traditional markets.
The stated peaks for maximum luminous efficacy (in humans, this obviously varies, sometimes quite markedly, by species) are 555nm when things are well-lit enough for the cone cells to go to work, and 498nm under lower light conditions where it's just the rods doing the work. So, while blue is apparently most disruptive for some reason, green will punch above its weight if you are judging on obnoxiousness per mW...
So small, there's no room for mounting holes, aside from the through-hole vias. Is that normal for COMs?
The ones that expose a substantial number of I/Os often repurpose whatever flavor of DIMM or SODIMM socket is current at the time, since that's a well known, mass produced, connector that can handle the fairly touchy signal integrity demands of RAM and so is probably qualified for most assorted I/O stuff.
If you don't go that route, the alternative for getting that small is usually some sort of terrifyingly fiddly fine-pitch Hirose connector(Gumstix COMs are good examples of doing this).
Through-hole limits the number of lines you can break out; but is cheap and hobbyist friendly. Given that volume customers would probably just use the R5350 directly on their product's board, it's probably a fairly logical choice: if they make the board bigger, it becomes less useful for people who really need something compact, and (if you add the additional connectors, USB, ethernet, that the larger board would allow), starts to step on the toes of more powerful devices or re-purposed routers with their casings popped off; while, if they make it any smaller, they'd have to go with some fairly nasty, hobbyist-scaring, connector, at which point it'd just be a low-volume prototyping board for people who are going to go buy bare R5350s instead when production time comes.
That market niche is actually doing better than most of embedded Java; but Maxim-Dallas' iButton package concept seems to have gotten pretty badly hammered, despite their mechanical virtues. A nontrivial number of the fancier contact smartcards run some flavor of teeny-Java; and fulfill the same basic role of being authentication devices powerful enough to handle their end of doing Proper Crypto; but smartcard form factor, contact-pattern, and external protocol seems to have mostly crushed 1-wire.
Wasn't the theory behind the Rise Of Embedded Java that companies would move between suppliers fairly rapidly (which they do) in order to keep BoM to a minimum and that those moves would involve disruptive changes of CPU architecture(which appears to be much more rarely the case) thus driving them to write as much as possible in Java for easy porting?
As it is, ARM doesn't exactly appear to be, um, strongARMing, licensees on fees, at least if the fact that MIPS is more or less standing on a street corner and begging people to care about them, and SPARC might actually be easier to download and burn into an FPGA than it is to buy premade at this point. Doesn't mean that ports are free and fun, since all the exciting details of platform drivers and dysfunctional bootloaders and such haven't been hammered out; but sticking to a single CPU architecture for extended time appears to be easier and cheaper than ever.
It's the whole thing (RT5350 SoC (OpenWRT device tree file), 32MB of RAM and 8 of Flash, along with the antenna and assorted support passives).
The board that provides wired ethernet and USB in their usual connectors(and presumably with the magnetics for ethernet) and a micro-USB +5v input is additional.
So you can get fully up and running for $20 (and a +5v source to apply to the correct contact), presumably good for adding a wifi connection and a moderately capable command-and-control module to something that can hang from the GPIO or USB data lines.
If you want the wired interfaces, and a little case, and need a PSU, because this isn't being integrated into something, it'll cost more.
Unfortunately, the 'something else' that "Internet of Things" is closest to is probably SCADA, which we all know is Secure, Reliable, Trustworthy, and totally something you'd trust a bunch of data-grubbing silicon valley marketing weasels to sell to idiots with the intention of being connected to the public internet...
No, the router does not need to pump 20mA through five blue ultrabrights. I do not need a blinking blue LED to tell me that the monitor is in standby mode. Dim those motherfuckers or, even better, give me an option to turn them off completely.
As it happens, research strongly suggests that blue light has the greatest impact (intensity and exposure being otherwise equal) of the visible colors. All of them are annoying; but the fad for blue probably makes them even more effective at sleep disruption.
Hey, tell that to the manufacturers... For whatever insane reason, they've recently been on a kick of adding features that would actually be useful for monitors (like curvature, which might actually make a difference when you are 18 inches from a rather large screen; but barely matters from across the room, except making the thing harder to wall-mount, and 4k, for which there is essentially zero movie, TV, or cable content; but PCs can spit out on demand) to TVs and then being vaguely confused when the public goes out and buys whatever reasonably big TV is cheapest.
Thankfully, "TV" now mostly just means "LCD monitor with ATSC tuner and probably more HDMI ports", so using TVs as monitors isn't a big deal (sorry brits, pay your BBC fee!); but it's still weird.
For the moment, PC monitor is pretty much the compelling use case. There are a few pricey white-elephant 4k video sources; but not many. PCs, by contrast, just see a bigger monitor(barring a tediously long list of, sometimes GPU-vendor, even model, specific gotcha interactions with some of the hacks used by certain 4k displays to cope with the fact that none of the common interfaces are quite there yet for 4k, with Displayport, a monitor trying to use MST can get...interesting. With HDMI, I hope you like 30Hz, because them's the breaks, and I assume that EDID is total garbage, as ever). If you do comparatively lightweight stuff, even a modest GPU can probably drive it without incident. Gaming will require some serious punch; but anything remotely modern can run at the resolution it is told to, if you have the power.
I don't deny that parents, among others, inculcate beliefs and values; but they certainly don't have a monopoly on that. In the specific case of non-procreation, I'm mostly just going on history: despite the obvious and dramatic handicap not breeding has on passing genes or ideas down to your children, culturally-sanctioned non-breeding breaks out from time to time all over the place, and often exhibits remarkable persistence.
In some cases, (I don't know if this is coincidence, or whether some underlying factor is involved), like Catholic clergy and monastics in the west, the non-breeders even occupied a social position more or less specifically designated as "Teach beliefs and values to everybody".
In other cases, it's more of a separation of labor thing: in the context of hereditary power being the default expectation (and frequent cause of messy wars) the use of eunuchs as a civil service class was a drastic, but logical, mechanism for ensuring that, unlike ordinary subordinates, you wouldn't have a constant problem with bits of your authority being taken and handed off to various people's sons.
These days, there are fewer formalized niches for non-breeders(but also prophylactics that actually work quite well, so the celibacy requirement has been relaxed); but economic pressure (markedly longer delays to reach economic adulthood, employer preference for people who don't have family obligations, two-earner households) seems to be exerting substantial influence.
Your criticism is fair, I must admit. Oddly, my attempts at prose just get more and more convoluted as I get more sleep deprived; and that was on the tail end of a particularly bad period of insomnia.
I still think that nested parentheticals should be valid English usage, however unwise they are.
Back before the meddling FDA bureaucrats ruined everything in the name of 'safety' and 'food and drugs that actually contain what the label says' and similar highflown nonsense, you could get 'soothing syrups'. Something about the wisdom of giving high doses of morphine to babies eventually drove them off the market.
I suspect that my statistical methods would make a social scientist cry (fail to count number of babies/small children total, fixate on the one that screams the entire way, or kicks the back of my seat for the entire flight), so I would definitely concede the possibility of error, while noting that it is grounded in some very, very, unpleasant experiences with children who apparently have unlimited stamina and a desire to share the pain of long-haul flight with everyone.
Oh, I'd be the last to deny that literature has a special importance culturally and pedagogically; it undeniably does. I'm just not ready to extend that recognition (which can, arguably, be at least minimally satisfied by out-of-copyright classics if it gets to that point, to a spat over upcoming probable-bestsellers.
Individual books aren't particularly fungible for interested readers, and you can argue for the status of certain classics as so very, very, good as to be of extraordinary value, either overwhelmingly more valuable than the common run of books, or even so great as to be different in type rather than degree; but the 'literature' as a cultural institution will be more or less OK plus or minus quite a few specific titles that do or don't make it through the production process.
My hope is for an equilibrium position that hands as much of the profit as possible to the writers, and the people who do the actual processing work (editing, typesetting, printing, systems administration, etc.) rather than rent-seeking gatekeepers; and I would be highly alarmed by developments that appear to be choking the production of books overall; but I'm much less excited about contract fights that don't appear to reach that level.
I suspect that the big difference is shipping cost: It's not polite to say so; but humans are dirt cheap (if they were in some sort of scarcity, we'd bother to save the starving ones). Just to get them to earth orbit (and I think this is the LEO figure, not geostationary) is north of $4,000/kg. Human transport to Mars is still a somewhat speculative number; but will certainly be substantially greater than that (and the traveller will consumer many more kg of food/oxygen/etc, so total cost will be higher still).
That isn't a situation where you bother to send the dregs, anybody plunked on another planet will probably be worth their weight in gold by the time they get there, so they might as well be the most competent people you can get.
Oh, they certainly aren't. I just don't know how much their more reactionary cultures restrain them. I assume that they know a thing or two about shafting writers; but Amazon's...zeal...for cost-cutting is downright legendary, so I don't know if they are in the same league, or if they are held back by some mixture of codified traditional contract terms and sheer inferiority in cold-blooded calculation.
Isnt it pretty obvious to send an automated system to prepare a safe habitat anyway?
Oh, come now, surely the fact that ordering replacement laborers would take (given historical mission data, as a rough guide) at least 100 days, quite possibly two or three times that, and cost tens of millions of dollars a head (very optimistic figure) doesn't change the viability of using humans to do dangerous construction and heavy industrial jobs, does it?
Arguably they aren't like any other consumer good: they share a pretty easily identified, and salient, set of characteristics with certain other 'culture products', music, movies, and similar: marginal cost of production is essentially zero, different ones are partial substitutes for one another; but rather weakly compared to other consumer goods, 'brand' affinity follows individual producers (or nominal producers, as in the case of certain heavily-managed tween-pop-to-order acts) rather than companies, and so forth.
Books aren't some Unique And Sacred Category Unto Themselves; but the characteristics listed above are pretty significantly unlike those of, say, consumer appliances(where marginal cost of production is comparatively high, different ones are nearly perfect substitutes, brand affinity, if any, follows companies while individual designers are unknown, etc.)
What isn't clear to me (any authors in the house?) is whether the traditional big publishers are, by reason of a certain gentlemanly ossification, allies to the otherwise scattered and helotized writers, or whether this is basically a spat between two would-be-exploiters of authors over who gets the profits.
Amazon sure as hell isn't in this out of the goodness of their hearts; but they are also not going to waste a penny more than necessary on quaint traditional supply chains, 'remaindered' or 'stripped' books, and anything of the like; but they also aren't going to let any mere customs hold them back when it comes to contractual matters.
The incumbent publishers are definitely more tradition-bound; but I don't know how much this just makes them inefficient, and how much it makes them act more nicely than good old sociopathic 'homo economicus' would.
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
Not terribly relevant in most cases: virtually nobody can personally validate, or even hit the primary sources, for more than a tiny fraction of what we collectively know. Their relationship with the rest is pretty much a belief state (though, of course, there is a very significant difference between "I believe X because recognized X experts suggest that X is the best available theory, given their understanding of the data" and "I believe X because $HOLY_BOOK says so.")
That's just fine - you carry on believing that.
The rest of us will keep on breeding. As you are removing yourself from the genepool, your beliefs will die out with you.
I'd be very, very, surprised to see a belief bred out of a population in a species with such (admittedly flawed at times) high levels of general-purpose cognition. Ideas move between hosts by quite different vectors than genes do, and (in most places, at many points in their history) the limiting factor for human population has not been fertility as much as it has been resources (not necessarily imminent Malthusian Starvationdrome!!!; but when a feudal society resorts to entail and primogeniture, or subdivision of inherited farmland starts to compromise the ability of an heir to actually raise a family on his chunk of Mom and Dad's Farm, that creates strong social upheaval that kicks in before people actually start starving to death.
Among other strategies, some sort of socially-sanctioned mechanism for skimming off excess children(especially sons, having a bunch of edgy young adult males with limited odds of getting laid or inheriting anything running around is bad for stability). Sometimes you send them to the monastery. Sometimes you send them off to go raise hell in somebody else's country, and so on.
This isn't universal, some situations are primarily fertility-bounded, and there is very little incentive, expect for really dislikeable specimens, to discourage anybody from procreating; but it's simply a matter of historical fact that various sorts of non-procreative roles (culturally sanctioned, sometimes even valorized) have existed for ages, and all that was back when not procreating meant celibacy, which hardly added to the idea's charm. I don't expect contemporary contraception to reduce the popularity of these roles.
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The state of timekeeping is...not pretty... at present, so an improvement would be nice; but it's somewhat hard to argue for something really radical when you could file down some of the really pointy bits by just keeping the deterministic parts of the current time/date setup, and ignoring leap seconds(which will eventually become an issue; but that'll take a least a couple of centuries, so it will be somebody else's problem.) UTC sucks, TIA FTW!
The more curious question is why Microsoft can't sell this. They were perfectly capable of putting together .NET Micro, which runs on fairly tiny stuff, and they've been poking at ambient embedded devices at least since SPOT and various DirectBand receiver devices. More recently, there was "Windows Sideshow", which more or less died without a whisper; but was a serious stab at making semi-autonomous devices, intermediate between ye olde serial LCD and the PDA/Phone/MP3 player that is just here to sync and then leave, work with full PCs in interesting ways.
.NET application to move bits of itself between the host and the slave device, regardless of underlying architecture...)
On the research side (and even further from commercial success, since as far as I know they never actually deployed it), they put together a proof-of-concept of using a small embedded processor to allow a PC to remain sleeping most of the time, while continuing to behave exactly as normal from the perspective of other devices on the network, by handing off tasks to the embedded device, which could then wake the host PC as needed to pass off results or respond to spikes in demand beyond its capabilities. (They never went beyond a demo, to my knowledge; but this seems like the sort of thing that could get very interesting if you took advantage of the CLR to allow a
Back when they were still flogging warmed-over piles of DOS with a layer of GUI and instability, the big mystery was why Microsoft was so incompetent. What mystifies me now is how they manage to turn massive supplies of money and talent into such comparatively limited success outside of their traditional markets.
The stated peaks for maximum luminous efficacy (in humans, this obviously varies, sometimes quite markedly, by species) are 555nm when things are well-lit enough for the cone cells to go to work, and 498nm under lower light conditions where it's just the rods doing the work. So, while blue is apparently most disruptive for some reason, green will punch above its weight if you are judging on obnoxiousness per mW...
So small, there's no room for mounting holes, aside from the through-hole vias. Is that normal for COMs?
The ones that expose a substantial number of I/Os often repurpose whatever flavor of DIMM or SODIMM socket is current at the time, since that's a well known, mass produced, connector that can handle the fairly touchy signal integrity demands of RAM and so is probably qualified for most assorted I/O stuff.
If you don't go that route, the alternative for getting that small is usually some sort of terrifyingly fiddly fine-pitch Hirose connector(Gumstix COMs are good examples of doing this).
Through-hole limits the number of lines you can break out; but is cheap and hobbyist friendly. Given that volume customers would probably just use the R5350 directly on their product's board, it's probably a fairly logical choice: if they make the board bigger, it becomes less useful for people who really need something compact, and (if you add the additional connectors, USB, ethernet, that the larger board would allow), starts to step on the toes of more powerful devices or re-purposed routers with their casings popped off; while, if they make it any smaller, they'd have to go with some fairly nasty, hobbyist-scaring, connector, at which point it'd just be a low-volume prototyping board for people who are going to go buy bare R5350s instead when production time comes.
That market niche is actually doing better than most of embedded Java; but Maxim-Dallas' iButton package concept seems to have gotten pretty badly hammered, despite their mechanical virtues. A nontrivial number of the fancier contact smartcards run some flavor of teeny-Java; and fulfill the same basic role of being authentication devices powerful enough to handle their end of doing Proper Crypto; but smartcard form factor, contact-pattern, and external protocol seems to have mostly crushed 1-wire.
Wasn't the theory behind the Rise Of Embedded Java that companies would move between suppliers fairly rapidly (which they do) in order to keep BoM to a minimum and that those moves would involve disruptive changes of CPU architecture(which appears to be much more rarely the case) thus driving them to write as much as possible in Java for easy porting?
As it is, ARM doesn't exactly appear to be, um, strongARMing, licensees on fees, at least if the fact that MIPS is more or less standing on a street corner and begging people to care about them, and SPARC might actually be easier to download and burn into an FPGA than it is to buy premade at this point. Doesn't mean that ports are free and fun, since all the exciting details of platform drivers and dysfunctional bootloaders and such haven't been hammered out; but sticking to a single CPU architecture for extended time appears to be easier and cheaper than ever.
It's the whole thing (RT5350 SoC (OpenWRT device tree file), 32MB of RAM and 8 of Flash, along with the antenna and assorted support passives).
The board that provides wired ethernet and USB in their usual connectors(and presumably with the magnetics for ethernet) and a micro-USB +5v input is additional.
So you can get fully up and running for $20 (and a +5v source to apply to the correct contact), presumably good for adding a wifi connection and a moderately capable command-and-control module to something that can hang from the GPIO or USB data lines.
If you want the wired interfaces, and a little case, and need a PSU, because this isn't being integrated into something, it'll cost more.
Unfortunately, the 'something else' that "Internet of Things" is closest to is probably SCADA, which we all know is Secure, Reliable, Trustworthy, and totally something you'd trust a bunch of data-grubbing silicon valley marketing weasels to sell to idiots with the intention of being connected to the public internet...
No, the router does not need to pump 20mA through five blue ultrabrights. I do not need a blinking blue LED to tell me that the monitor is in standby mode. Dim those motherfuckers or, even better, give me an option to turn them off completely.
As it happens, research strongly suggests that blue light has the greatest impact (intensity and exposure being otherwise equal) of the visible colors. All of them are annoying; but the fad for blue probably makes them even more effective at sleep disruption.
Hey, tell that to the manufacturers... For whatever insane reason, they've recently been on a kick of adding features that would actually be useful for monitors (like curvature, which might actually make a difference when you are 18 inches from a rather large screen; but barely matters from across the room, except making the thing harder to wall-mount, and 4k, for which there is essentially zero movie, TV, or cable content; but PCs can spit out on demand) to TVs and then being vaguely confused when the public goes out and buys whatever reasonably big TV is cheapest.
Thankfully, "TV" now mostly just means "LCD monitor with ATSC tuner and probably more HDMI ports", so using TVs as monitors isn't a big deal (sorry brits, pay your BBC fee!); but it's still weird.
For the moment, PC monitor is pretty much the compelling use case. There are a few pricey white-elephant 4k video sources; but not many. PCs, by contrast, just see a bigger monitor(barring a tediously long list of, sometimes GPU-vendor, even model, specific gotcha interactions with some of the hacks used by certain 4k displays to cope with the fact that none of the common interfaces are quite there yet for 4k, with Displayport, a monitor trying to use MST can get...interesting. With HDMI, I hope you like 30Hz, because them's the breaks, and I assume that EDID is total garbage, as ever). If you do comparatively lightweight stuff, even a modest GPU can probably drive it without incident. Gaming will require some serious punch; but anything remotely modern can run at the resolution it is told to, if you have the power.
I think that that was more polite and informative than my fairly feeble joke deserved. My thanks.
Hmm, sounds like the NSA's next proposal for a 'totally secure, like for realz guys!' RNG standard...
At least poor Erwin can finally bring his cat with him when he travels.
I don't deny that parents, among others, inculcate beliefs and values; but they certainly don't have a monopoly on that. In the specific case of non-procreation, I'm mostly just going on history: despite the obvious and dramatic handicap not breeding has on passing genes or ideas down to your children, culturally-sanctioned non-breeding breaks out from time to time all over the place, and often exhibits remarkable persistence.
In some cases, (I don't know if this is coincidence, or whether some underlying factor is involved), like Catholic clergy and monastics in the west, the non-breeders even occupied a social position more or less specifically designated as "Teach beliefs and values to everybody".
In other cases, it's more of a separation of labor thing: in the context of hereditary power being the default expectation (and frequent cause of messy wars) the use of eunuchs as a civil service class was a drastic, but logical, mechanism for ensuring that, unlike ordinary subordinates, you wouldn't have a constant problem with bits of your authority being taken and handed off to various people's sons.
These days, there are fewer formalized niches for non-breeders(but also prophylactics that actually work quite well, so the celibacy requirement has been relaxed); but economic pressure (markedly longer delays to reach economic adulthood, employer preference for people who don't have family obligations, two-earner households) seems to be exerting substantial influence.
Your criticism is fair, I must admit. Oddly, my attempts at prose just get more and more convoluted as I get more sleep deprived; and that was on the tail end of a particularly bad period of insomnia.
I still think that nested parentheticals should be valid English usage, however unwise they are.
Back before the meddling FDA bureaucrats ruined everything in the name of 'safety' and 'food and drugs that actually contain what the label says' and similar highflown nonsense, you could get 'soothing syrups'. Something about the wisdom of giving high doses of morphine to babies eventually drove them off the market.
I suspect that my statistical methods would make a social scientist cry (fail to count number of babies/small children total, fixate on the one that screams the entire way, or kicks the back of my seat for the entire flight), so I would definitely concede the possibility of error, while noting that it is grounded in some very, very, unpleasant experiences with children who apparently have unlimited stamina and a desire to share the pain of long-haul flight with everyone.
Oh, I'd be the last to deny that literature has a special importance culturally and pedagogically; it undeniably does. I'm just not ready to extend that recognition (which can, arguably, be at least minimally satisfied by out-of-copyright classics if it gets to that point, to a spat over upcoming probable-bestsellers.
Individual books aren't particularly fungible for interested readers, and you can argue for the status of certain classics as so very, very, good as to be of extraordinary value, either overwhelmingly more valuable than the common run of books, or even so great as to be different in type rather than degree; but the 'literature' as a cultural institution will be more or less OK plus or minus quite a few specific titles that do or don't make it through the production process.
My hope is for an equilibrium position that hands as much of the profit as possible to the writers, and the people who do the actual processing work (editing, typesetting, printing, systems administration, etc.) rather than rent-seeking gatekeepers; and I would be highly alarmed by developments that appear to be choking the production of books overall; but I'm much less excited about contract fights that don't appear to reach that level.
I suspect that the big difference is shipping cost: It's not polite to say so; but humans are dirt cheap (if they were in some sort of scarcity, we'd bother to save the starving ones). Just to get them to earth orbit (and I think this is the LEO figure, not geostationary) is north of $4,000/kg. Human transport to Mars is still a somewhat speculative number; but will certainly be substantially greater than that (and the traveller will consumer many more kg of food/oxygen/etc, so total cost will be higher still).
That isn't a situation where you bother to send the dregs, anybody plunked on another planet will probably be worth their weight in gold by the time they get there, so they might as well be the most competent people you can get.
Oh, they certainly aren't. I just don't know how much their more reactionary cultures restrain them. I assume that they know a thing or two about shafting writers; but Amazon's...zeal...for cost-cutting is downright legendary, so I don't know if they are in the same league, or if they are held back by some mixture of codified traditional contract terms and sheer inferiority in cold-blooded calculation.
Isnt it pretty obvious to send an automated system to prepare a safe habitat anyway?
Oh, come now, surely the fact that ordering replacement laborers would take (given historical mission data, as a rough guide) at least 100 days, quite possibly two or three times that, and cost tens of millions of dollars a head (very optimistic figure) doesn't change the viability of using humans to do dangerous construction and heavy industrial jobs, does it?
Arguably they aren't like any other consumer good: they share a pretty easily identified, and salient, set of characteristics with certain other 'culture products', music, movies, and similar: marginal cost of production is essentially zero, different ones are partial substitutes for one another; but rather weakly compared to other consumer goods, 'brand' affinity follows individual producers (or nominal producers, as in the case of certain heavily-managed tween-pop-to-order acts) rather than companies, and so forth.
Books aren't some Unique And Sacred Category Unto Themselves; but the characteristics listed above are pretty significantly unlike those of, say, consumer appliances(where marginal cost of production is comparatively high, different ones are nearly perfect substitutes, brand affinity, if any, follows companies while individual designers are unknown, etc.)
What isn't clear to me (any authors in the house?) is whether the traditional big publishers are, by reason of a certain gentlemanly ossification, allies to the otherwise scattered and helotized writers, or whether this is basically a spat between two would-be-exploiters of authors over who gets the profits.
Amazon sure as hell isn't in this out of the goodness of their hearts; but they are also not going to waste a penny more than necessary on quaint traditional supply chains, 'remaindered' or 'stripped' books, and anything of the like; but they also aren't going to let any mere customs hold them back when it comes to contractual matters.
The incumbent publishers are definitely more tradition-bound; but I don't know how much this just makes them inefficient, and how much it makes them act more nicely than good old sociopathic 'homo economicus' would.
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
Not terribly relevant in most cases: virtually nobody can personally validate, or even hit the primary sources, for more than a tiny fraction of what we collectively know. Their relationship with the rest is pretty much a belief state (though, of course, there is a very significant difference between "I believe X because recognized X experts suggest that X is the best available theory, given their understanding of the data" and "I believe X because $HOLY_BOOK says so.")
That's just fine - you carry on believing that. The rest of us will keep on breeding. As you are removing yourself from the genepool, your beliefs will die out with you.
I'd be very, very, surprised to see a belief bred out of a population in a species with such (admittedly flawed at times) high levels of general-purpose cognition. Ideas move between hosts by quite different vectors than genes do, and (in most places, at many points in their history) the limiting factor for human population has not been fertility as much as it has been resources (not necessarily imminent Malthusian Starvationdrome!!!; but when a feudal society resorts to entail and primogeniture, or subdivision of inherited farmland starts to compromise the ability of an heir to actually raise a family on his chunk of Mom and Dad's Farm, that creates strong social upheaval that kicks in before people actually start starving to death.
Among other strategies, some sort of socially-sanctioned mechanism for skimming off excess children(especially sons, having a bunch of edgy young adult males with limited odds of getting laid or inheriting anything running around is bad for stability). Sometimes you send them to the monastery. Sometimes you send them off to go raise hell in somebody else's country, and so on.
This isn't universal, some situations are primarily fertility-bounded, and there is very little incentive, expect for really dislikeable specimens, to discourage anybody from procreating; but it's simply a matter of historical fact that various sorts of non-procreative roles (culturally sanctioned, sometimes even valorized) have existed for ages, and all that was back when not procreating meant celibacy, which hardly added to the idea's charm. I don't expect contemporary contraception to reduce the popularity of these roles.