And since you can get more crops from less land, there was less species depletion, more concentrated land impact, and less ag pollution because of reduced fertilizer needs.
Despite all the great things about Green Revolution, reduced fertilizer use isn't one of them. The high-yield crops outperform the traditional crops under "certain conditions", and that certain conditions are: (1) high pesticide use, to counteract the possibility of widespread pest due to the monoculture nature of high-yield crops, (2) high fertilizer use, since just basic chemistry tells you that it would need more nutrients to produce more seeds, (3) high water use, for the same reason.
Green revolution may have helped reduce the overall use of these three things per capita and help concentrate the use to limited area of lands, but I wouldn't be so hasty to claim that without some proof somewhere—and since this is a case of what might have been, chances are, it's hard to prove it one way or another.
I wonder if that's true, though. I don't think many green protesters have a vested interest in keeping the world hungry.
Sure they do. Why do you think they banned DDT use worldwide? DDT can effectively eliminate spread of malaria. But the environmentalists (and leftists) advocated for its ban so that they can keep a diseased population in Africa, which now they can use to guilt-trip Americans and citizens of other developed nations into providing funds to their pet projects.
Sooner or later you hit a limiting resource. Land, water, energy etc. A better investment would have birth control and birth control education.
I don't know about you, but sooner or, for example, 200 years later does seem like a big difference.
I certainly wouldn't be alive today if Malthusian prediction came true in his time, and I personally might go through a lot of hardship (even in U.S. high food cost has its prices) today if it hadn't been for the Green Revolution.
And who knows? Maybe if we delay "the inevitable" long enough we can leave this rock and find resources in far flung places. I suppose then some wise guy will say that the free energy of the Universe is limited but I guess there's just something about naysayers.
I tried asking a Democratic reformer in China, an atheist Iranian, a member of the Tibetan independence movement and a North Korean, but none of them could think of a situation where this might be useful.
Er, North Koreans (outside the ruling class) don't have Internet access, at least not if they are still in North Korea.
And as for all those other people, if they have access to Internet still, then they are too small a fish to have mattered in the first place.
In the rare case when an influential persona is trying to stay on the Internet while avoiding the government tracking him, this contest is, again, useless. The guy didn't take the first precautions anyone trying to stay anonymous should (on purpose, which shows that this is nothing but theater; maybe amusing, but utterly useless), and the people who tracked him couldn't even crack TOR. Remember that TOR is not meant to provide strong anonymity. Someone with the resources of sovereign state can crack TOR by tracking enough endpoints long enough.
In any case, if someone actually has enough influence, then he ought to have followers who can access the Internet for him, spreading his propaganda for him, keeping the leader off the grid and safe. After all, Osama Bin Laden managed to release videos while our troops were actively searching for him in Afghanistan.
And to think there were times in the last few decades when you couldn't get a job in the private sector (i.e. movie industry) if it was known that you were a communist...
Almost all touch typing programs in fact say that it IS based on learning the location of keys through motor memory. I'm pretty sure "finger-memory" is a concept you just made up:)
Right.
I'm trying to say that there is a distinct difference between the motor memory that you attain after many repetitions and the skill and technique that allows you to attain that memory.
For example, as far as any formal education goes, I only learned to type QWERTY. But I learned to type Dvorak all on my own (well, after looking up the layout and a week or so of practicing with gtypist). Would I have been able to learn Dvorak so quickly if I didn't know how to touch-type before? Well, I don't know, but given that the hand and finger position when I type either QWERTY or Dvorak are identical, I think learning to touch-type QWERTY actually helped me learn Dvorak.
If I am reading this Wikipedia page right, the U.S. Code is published every 6 years only. So, we are expected to apply H.R. 3200, i.e. the "diff", to what may be a stale version of the original code?
I won't have you teaching my children DVORAK, you left wing hippie! If QWERTY was good enough for our founding fathers, its good enough for us!
Hey, touch-typing is more of a basic motor skill, not specific set of finger-memory attained, like Newtonian mechanics is more about learning the "right" way to think about science, not teaching actually correct science, which would be quantum mechanics, as far as we know.
Besides, all the modern operating systems let you set your own keyboard layout. I've used Dvorak (BTW, "Dvorak", unlike "QWERTY", is an actual proper name (i.e. last name of the guy who invented it), so it's not supposed to be all caps unless you are yelling for Dvorak) layout on school computers before, even though QWERTY, or as some call it, "US" layout is default on the computers.
As far as teaching goes, you still place your fingers on the home row when you type on Dvorak, as well as when you type on QWERTY. It's just more useful to do that when you type on Dvorak.
I suspect that the author has an agenda, of trashing the legislation. He also makes a rather fundamental misunderstanding, in his haste to criticize HR 3200. The 'spaghetti coding' is because he isn't looking at the source program itself, what he is looking at is a diff, between the existing regulation and the proposed amended regulation. That is a rather critical difference that invalidates 90% of his analysis.
Imagine a revision control system where all you could look at were diffs, and never a source code with the diffs applied to them. Would you use such a revision control system? Would you use such a revision control system to write a complex piece of software?
And yet, that is the how the legislative process works.
I believe you have an agenda, that of supporting this controversial legislation, which prevents you from seeing the downfall of these unsavory practices. Imagine you have a diff of some program 1100 pages long. Would you be so hasty to apply to the existing source code and put it out to production in less than 7 months (or less!) as the legislators in D.C. tried to do?
Unless you could point out an authoritative system where you can see the existing "legal program" with all the diffs applied to the existing regulation and laws, then the author's critique of the legislation of "spaghetti coding" is valid. After all, what is considered to be "source code" is the form of the program in which the program writers prefer to work in—if the legislators prefer to work with diffs as a primary means of modifying and changing the "legal program", then the diffs are the source code. Think of the existing regulation and laws not as the original source code to which a diff is applied... but as the system libraries and such which get to be used by the new "legal program".
Amazon still has the capability of remotely and silently modifying your Kindle. There's no technological reason they couldn't do this again. These devices need to be built with protections that make this sort of thing impossible.
Even scarier, Amazon could theoretically modify your books if they wanted to. If they don't want you reading chapter 28, they can remove it and renumber the rest.
And you can theoretically back up your Kindle regularly and have access to the books stored in your Kindle (at any point in the past) from your computer. "Convert" it to Mobipocket format (in fact, Amazon ebooks are in this format, once you remove DRM if there's one) and read it from any of the programs that support that format.
Sure, not everyone will have the technological know-how to copy files from a USB drive (which is what Kindle appears as, when you plug it into a computer), but your level of paranoia requires at least some level of technical competence, such as knowing when to tell the monitor is off.
Agreed that would be the best solution. Anything else amounts to a rental.
Well, a rental with no return date or late fees.
Also, what could anybody do if you decided to, ah hem, make a "backup" of your rentals in case something happens to the rented copy?
Amazon's DRM is almost as easy to break as DVD's region codes. I am inclined to believe that this was intentional, as a compromise between publishers who wouldn't publish anything but public domain books (a lot of which you can get for $0 on Amazon.com in Kindle format) without a DRM and customers who wouldn't be happy with intrusive systems that gets between them and their books (like Sony's rootkits on their music CDs).
I agree that ideally we wouldn't have any DRM at all on Kindle books, but before that can happen, something else needs to happen that will make book publishers avoid DRM like the plague. I don't know what that is (I don't think this 1984 incident is it; it's too small-scale, and Amazon handled it too well, appeasing everyone except those who were opposed to all forms of DRM regardless of scale and intrusiveness), but until that happens, you wouldn't see a major reseller like Amazon sell books without DRM.
P.S. BTW, I don't think you understand the Kindle at all: it's just a simple Linux box. Amazon almost went out of their way to make the Kindle hardware and software standard Linux devices; it seems unlikely that the storage device is anything but what it appears to be: simple Linux filesystem.
And for potential buyers like me, the perspective is even simpler.
* They can enter into my "computer" (kindle) anytime they wish.
* They can delete any material they find offensive/inappropriate (for legal reasons or not) without asking me anything
* And leave.
Even my government hasn't such a power.
And you are free not to buy a Kindle. No one is forcing you to pony up the money for it. That usually isn't the case with the government programs.
As for me, even if Amazon had a policy to wipe, monthly, my Kindle of its ebooks, whether it's purchased from Amazon or not (remember that the remote delete ability is probably tied to the DRM system), I would consider my Kindle 2 a good purchase (and yes, I bought it post-1984 debacle but after Bezos' apology), as long as they keep up the free Google search (and general Internet browsing) for about a year or so—that's my break-even point for the Kindle 2 based on the free wireless usage alone.
And if and when they do start charging for Internet, they have already committed to providing free Wikipedia access for-ever, so I think about 3 to 5 years of accessing Wikipedia for free anywhere I have cellular coverage would be a good deal for $300.
But you may have a different perspective, and you are absolutely free not to buy a Kindle. Thank the free market for that, not the government.
This is defense from a lawsuit by a company that makes useful products. It doesn't help against patent trolls.
So far, I think the only thing stopping patent trolls have been that companies that do make useful products have more resources, better legal department, and bigger war chest (yay, capitalism).
But the way lawyers have been getting their way in everything, especially in the D.C., who knows how long this will last.
No, the injunction was quite correct. Did you read what I4I said? They said they won't go after the existing copies, only new infringement.
That "easy workaround" is an opinion of a third party "expert". If you rely on "legal advices" like that, you should be sued for criminal negligence (by stockholders).
Further, making more copies from the existing image will definitely get Dell and HP into trouble here. I guess depending on the licensing agreement, some of those copies may be considered "existing" before this injunction, but that gets into a very murky detail and it's not very clear at all, but just from common sense perspective, it seems to me by the time injunction goes into effect (in 60 days) a lot of the copies to be made from existing image will not be considered to have been "sold" before the injunction, so it will be considered "new infringement".
Coming back to the "easy workaround", it still poses the exact same problem for OEMs: they need to make technically unnecessary (but legally compelled) change to their master image, which incurs more or less the same cost that removes Word would incur.
Given that this is for a case that hasn't been concluded yet (remember that MS intends on appealing), it looks like this injunction is premature and causes undue harm to third parties, which means it was poorly thought out.
If they hadn't preloaded all of their images with free trials and bloatware then this wouldn't be a problem in the first place. When I have to setup one of their machines, the first thing I always do is reformat and build a new image anyway without all of the extra crap that shouldn't be there.
Er, no. Since when do you get MS Office for free from Dell or any other OEM? I think even "free trials" of MS Office is unheard of.
More likely, they have a few different versions of the image which they install (or have pre-installed machines which they will ship) based on your customization at the time you order.
If they can no longer ship Word (which may or may not be the case, depending on exactly how the licensing agreement is worked out) then that means they have to junk all the images which previously had Word on it, presumably to replace it with a different version of Word that is considered non-infringing—or, in the extreme, don't ship any office productivity suite at all, but that would seriously hurt their business, especially in the small business section, where business owners with no IT department want to order things that "just work".
As much as I don't like bloatware (and I do repartition and format all my computers when I buy them from Dell, Asus, or anyone else), the problem is not the bloatware here.
Except that's not what the injunction says. The quotes I can find say:
Today's permanent injunction prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening.XML,.DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML.
Given that Amazon.com "sells" some ebooks for $0, I doubt that shipping Word without charging for the license would pass the "selling or importing" ban.
The injunction itself needs to be modified, and given the case Dell and HP make here, it seems like the original injunction was poorly thought out in terms of unintended consequences.
Of course, by "pattern", they mean a repeating pattern, not just any old formula which lets them calculate pi to an arbitrary precision
If someone ever found a repeating pattern in pi, they would have proven that pi is a rational number after all (but, I think there's a proof out there somewhere that says pi is irrational, so if such a thing is true it would shake the basis of our mathematics).
For a headline, where sentence fragments are acceptable, that sounds right. "Used" indicates the passive voice, not past tense, and it's not the main verb---main verb "is" (or "was") is omitted as is often done in headlines to save space.
When you are reading that out loud, you are supposed to insert a small pause between "used" and "to", so it should sound nothing like "used to" (which sounds more like "use-to") in "Friendster used to be popular before Facebook".
Every member of a co-op doesn't need to have an equal share. They do, however, need to be compensated for their efforts.
This is already done in many, many corporations, and in the places that do not make it a policy, the employee can take the initiative and do it themselves.
It's called "stock", you may have heard of it.
In some workplaces, part of the compensation package will be stock, so that the employee would have a share in the company's profits. This is, of course, more common for the executives than the entry-level employee, but in many places, i.e. publicly traded companies, nothing stops him from buying the company's stock in the open market.
Now, I will grant you that in the case of AOL, the employee cannot buy "AOL stock" without also buying Time Warner stock, for the moment. But, in a vast majority of cases, the employee can already own a piece of company on his own, of his own volition. No "co-ops" or earth-shattering reforms are needed.
Outside of political science textbooks, the term is so broad of meaning as to be useless, and your right-wing rant on liberal meaning "love government programs and regulation ("tax and spend" and "big government")" proves it.
That's why I qualified it as "in the U.S." Although apparently "liberal" and "conservative" means approximately the same thing in the U.S. and U.K., what "liberal" and "conservative" stands for, e.g., in Europe or Asia is vastly different from our ideas of "liberal" and "conservative". Also, some of the liberal-vs.-conservative positions have switched on a few issues over the last couple centuries or so as well.
Liberal, simply put, is the opposite of conservative. A person with liberal views is more likely to embrace a change. A conservative on the other hand, by definition, is someone who prefers things to stay as they are, or even pines for a "simpler" time in the past.
I am a bit wary of people characterizing "liberal" and "conservative" this way. As you guess correctly, I am a conservative (more precisely, a fiscal conservative—I lead a socially conservative lifestyle, but as long as they aren't hurting anyone else, I couldn't care less what others do). By the definition you have, Reagan would have been considered a "liberal" by wanting to change the tax code with tax cuts and what-not (of course, if you go back far enough, i.e. to the time before income tax, he would be a "conservative", but with history repeating itself, it becomes only a matter of how far back you go). Also, one could consider Obama "conservative" because he wants to bring income taxes to pre-Reagan levels.
Yes, I agree that the dictionary definition of "liberal" is someone who wants to change things and "conservative" is someone who wants to conserve things as they are. But, that's, as you correctly say, is a meaningless statement detached from any political reality—and that's why I qualify "liberals in U.S." or "conservatives in U.S." (today) because then they have some definite mainstream positions that you can either agree with or disagree with. A lot of people want "change" until they find out exactly what the change involves.
In common usage the term liberal has a wide degree of latitude in its definition depending who is using it and where. It usually denotes someone who is a hippie or is in favor of social justice programs and is in favor of taxing the rich and big business.
So you agree with me. "Social justice programs" mean government programs, whether you agree with the goal or not. As a conservative, I happen to disagree with the goals of those programs, but even the advocates of these programs cannot deny that it's, for the most part, taxpayer-funded government programs. And if "taxing the rich and big business" isn't taxation, well, war is peace.
Only those who want to trick others into agreeing with him, rather than generating genuine agreement and consensus would use words as what they mean in "uncommon usage" rather than "common usage", without clearly saying out loud that your usage of word is different from nearly everyone else. This is a sin that liberals who quote this favorably are guilty of, because this guy is saying that he agrees with all the things conservatives in U.S. say, except that he wants to call himself "liberal" instead of "conservative".
You don't have a Kindle DX, do you? I do, and it actually does do something to reduce blank margins. I know, because I've converted documents to PDF with large margins, only to have the DX enlarge the document to exclude the margins.
You guessed correctly. I only have a Kindle 2, and that's good information to have (in case I give the DX a serious look again in the future). From what I heard, the PDF support on Kindle DX seemed still a bit primitive (i.e. full page view only, no zooming capabilities?), so I just assumed that it was treating the page like an image or something.
I just hope they bring the PDF compatibility to Kindle 2, when they get everything worked out.
Actually in the first 5 of Kindle Top Sellers at this moment are Michelle Malkin's "Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies" and Glenn Beck's "Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against and Out-of-Control Government,...". There isn't a single liberal leaning rant anywhere in the top 30, but I also see Dick Morris and Mark R. Levin from the right. So your assumption about the target demographic might be a tad off.
Also, given Amazon's anti-tax stance, I doubt that Amazon's corporate culture has much in common with the whole liberal establishment. I mean, maybe there is some in the culture and philosophy side, but nothing on the political or practical side.
By the way, what I seem to have seen in the past is a lot of people call themselves "liberal" without knowing what that word means in the U.S. In the U.S., "liberal" means that you love government programs and regulation ("tax and spend" and "big government") aside from a whole bunch of other things. If you just think that people should be left alone to do what they want with themselves (i.e. pro abortion, legalized prostitution and drugs, etc.), you should find a different label, because while "liberal" includes that, it also includes a whole lot of stuff such a person might be opposed to.
then simply get open source format epub books only. problem solved.
The same solution happens to solve Kindle's "remote deletion" capability (Amazon hasn't demonstrated that it can delete contents not tied to Amazon's DRM). So that brings you back to the level, except that Kindle can access Wikipedia (in U.S., for free) and the Reader cannot.
Slashdot Mirror
And since you can get more crops from less land, there was less species depletion, more concentrated land impact, and less ag pollution because of reduced fertilizer needs.
Despite all the great things about Green Revolution, reduced fertilizer use isn't one of them. The high-yield crops outperform the traditional crops under "certain conditions", and that certain conditions are: (1) high pesticide use, to counteract the possibility of widespread pest due to the monoculture nature of high-yield crops, (2) high fertilizer use, since just basic chemistry tells you that it would need more nutrients to produce more seeds, (3) high water use, for the same reason.
Green revolution may have helped reduce the overall use of these three things per capita and help concentrate the use to limited area of lands, but I wouldn't be so hasty to claim that without some proof somewhere—and since this is a case of what might have been, chances are, it's hard to prove it one way or another.
I wonder if that's true, though. I don't think many green protesters have a vested interest in keeping the world hungry.
Sure they do. Why do you think they banned DDT use worldwide? DDT can effectively eliminate spread of malaria. But the environmentalists (and leftists) advocated for its ban so that they can keep a diseased population in Africa, which now they can use to guilt-trip Americans and citizens of other developed nations into providing funds to their pet projects.
It doesn't take a conspiracy nut to see all this.
Sooner or later you hit a limiting resource. Land, water, energy etc. A better investment would have birth control and birth control education.
I don't know about you, but sooner or, for example, 200 years later does seem like a big difference.
I certainly wouldn't be alive today if Malthusian prediction came true in his time, and I personally might go through a lot of hardship (even in U.S. high food cost has its prices) today if it hadn't been for the Green Revolution.
And who knows? Maybe if we delay "the inevitable" long enough we can leave this rock and find resources in far flung places. I suppose then some wise guy will say that the free energy of the Universe is limited but I guess there's just something about naysayers.
I tried asking a Democratic reformer in China, an atheist Iranian, a member of the Tibetan independence movement and a North Korean, but none of them could think of a situation where this might be useful.
Er, North Koreans (outside the ruling class) don't have Internet access, at least not if they are still in North Korea.
And as for all those other people, if they have access to Internet still, then they are too small a fish to have mattered in the first place.
In the rare case when an influential persona is trying to stay on the Internet while avoiding the government tracking him, this contest is, again, useless. The guy didn't take the first precautions anyone trying to stay anonymous should (on purpose, which shows that this is nothing but theater; maybe amusing, but utterly useless), and the people who tracked him couldn't even crack TOR. Remember that TOR is not meant to provide strong anonymity. Someone with the resources of sovereign state can crack TOR by tracking enough endpoints long enough.
In any case, if someone actually has enough influence, then he ought to have followers who can access the Internet for him, spreading his propaganda for him, keeping the leader off the grid and safe. After all, Osama Bin Laden managed to release videos while our troops were actively searching for him in Afghanistan.
I visited the US before 9/11:
[x] I am not a communist
That's interesting. Apparently that question is no longer part of the questionnaire you fill out to be a czar at the White House.
And to think there were times in the last few decades when you couldn't get a job in the private sector (i.e. movie industry) if it was known that you were a communist...
Almost all touch typing programs in fact say that it IS based on learning the location of keys through motor memory. I'm pretty sure "finger-memory" is a concept you just made up :)
Right.
I'm trying to say that there is a distinct difference between the motor memory that you attain after many repetitions and the skill and technique that allows you to attain that memory.
For example, as far as any formal education goes, I only learned to type QWERTY. But I learned to type Dvorak all on my own (well, after looking up the layout and a week or so of practicing with gtypist). Would I have been able to learn Dvorak so quickly if I didn't know how to touch-type before? Well, I don't know, but given that the hand and finger position when I type either QWERTY or Dvorak are identical, I think learning to touch-type QWERTY actually helped me learn Dvorak.
If I am reading this Wikipedia page right, the U.S. Code is published every 6 years only. So, we are expected to apply H.R. 3200, i.e. the "diff", to what may be a stale version of the original code?
What kind of revision control system is that?
I won't have you teaching my children DVORAK, you left wing hippie! If QWERTY was good enough for our founding fathers, its good enough for us!
Hey, touch-typing is more of a basic motor skill, not specific set of finger-memory attained, like Newtonian mechanics is more about learning the "right" way to think about science, not teaching actually correct science, which would be quantum mechanics, as far as we know.
Besides, all the modern operating systems let you set your own keyboard layout. I've used Dvorak (BTW, "Dvorak", unlike "QWERTY", is an actual proper name (i.e. last name of the guy who invented it), so it's not supposed to be all caps unless you are yelling for Dvorak) layout on school computers before, even though QWERTY, or as some call it, "US" layout is default on the computers.
As far as teaching goes, you still place your fingers on the home row when you type on Dvorak, as well as when you type on QWERTY. It's just more useful to do that when you type on Dvorak.
I suspect that the author has an agenda, of trashing the legislation. He also makes a rather fundamental misunderstanding, in his haste to criticize HR 3200. The 'spaghetti coding' is because he isn't looking at the source program itself, what he is looking at is a diff, between the existing regulation and the proposed amended regulation. That is a rather critical difference that invalidates 90% of his analysis.
Imagine a revision control system where all you could look at were diffs, and never a source code with the diffs applied to them. Would you use such a revision control system? Would you use such a revision control system to write a complex piece of software?
And yet, that is the how the legislative process works.
I believe you have an agenda, that of supporting this controversial legislation, which prevents you from seeing the downfall of these unsavory practices. Imagine you have a diff of some program 1100 pages long. Would you be so hasty to apply to the existing source code and put it out to production in less than 7 months (or less!) as the legislators in D.C. tried to do?
Unless you could point out an authoritative system where you can see the existing "legal program" with all the diffs applied to the existing regulation and laws, then the author's critique of the legislation of "spaghetti coding" is valid. After all, what is considered to be "source code" is the form of the program in which the program writers prefer to work in—if the legislators prefer to work with diffs as a primary means of modifying and changing the "legal program", then the diffs are the source code. Think of the existing regulation and laws not as the original source code to which a diff is applied ... but as the system libraries and such which get to be used by the new "legal program".
Amazon still has the capability of remotely and silently modifying your Kindle. There's no technological reason they couldn't do this again. These devices need to be built with protections that make this sort of thing impossible.
Even scarier, Amazon could theoretically modify your books if they wanted to. If they don't want you reading chapter 28, they can remove it and renumber the rest.
And you can theoretically back up your Kindle regularly and have access to the books stored in your Kindle (at any point in the past) from your computer. "Convert" it to Mobipocket format (in fact, Amazon ebooks are in this format, once you remove DRM if there's one) and read it from any of the programs that support that format.
Sure, not everyone will have the technological know-how to copy files from a USB drive (which is what Kindle appears as, when you plug it into a computer), but your level of paranoia requires at least some level of technical competence, such as knowing when to tell the monitor is off.
Agreed that would be the best solution. Anything else amounts to a rental.
Well, a rental with no return date or late fees.
Also, what could anybody do if you decided to, ah hem, make a "backup" of your rentals in case something happens to the rented copy?
Amazon's DRM is almost as easy to break as DVD's region codes. I am inclined to believe that this was intentional, as a compromise between publishers who wouldn't publish anything but public domain books (a lot of which you can get for $0 on Amazon.com in Kindle format) without a DRM and customers who wouldn't be happy with intrusive systems that gets between them and their books (like Sony's rootkits on their music CDs).
I agree that ideally we wouldn't have any DRM at all on Kindle books, but before that can happen, something else needs to happen that will make book publishers avoid DRM like the plague. I don't know what that is (I don't think this 1984 incident is it; it's too small-scale, and Amazon handled it too well, appeasing everyone except those who were opposed to all forms of DRM regardless of scale and intrusiveness), but until that happens, you wouldn't see a major reseller like Amazon sell books without DRM.
P.S. BTW, I don't think you understand the Kindle at all: it's just a simple Linux box. Amazon almost went out of their way to make the Kindle hardware and software standard Linux devices; it seems unlikely that the storage device is anything but what it appears to be: simple Linux filesystem.
And you are free not to buy a Kindle. No one is forcing you to pony up the money for it. That usually isn't the case with the government programs.
As for me, even if Amazon had a policy to wipe, monthly, my Kindle of its ebooks, whether it's purchased from Amazon or not (remember that the remote delete ability is probably tied to the DRM system), I would consider my Kindle 2 a good purchase (and yes, I bought it post-1984 debacle but after Bezos' apology), as long as they keep up the free Google search (and general Internet browsing) for about a year or so—that's my break-even point for the Kindle 2 based on the free wireless usage alone.
And if and when they do start charging for Internet, they have already committed to providing free Wikipedia access for-ever, so I think about 3 to 5 years of accessing Wikipedia for free anywhere I have cellular coverage would be a good deal for $300.
But you may have a different perspective, and you are absolutely free not to buy a Kindle. Thank the free market for that, not the government.
So far, I think the only thing stopping patent trolls have been that companies that do make useful products have more resources, better legal department, and bigger war chest (yay, capitalism).
But the way lawyers have been getting their way in everything, especially in the D.C., who knows how long this will last.
No, the injunction was quite correct. Did you read what I4I said? They said they won't go after the existing copies, only new infringement.
That "easy workaround" is an opinion of a third party "expert". If you rely on "legal advices" like that, you should be sued for criminal negligence (by stockholders).
Further, making more copies from the existing image will definitely get Dell and HP into trouble here. I guess depending on the licensing agreement, some of those copies may be considered "existing" before this injunction, but that gets into a very murky detail and it's not very clear at all, but just from common sense perspective, it seems to me by the time injunction goes into effect (in 60 days) a lot of the copies to be made from existing image will not be considered to have been "sold" before the injunction, so it will be considered "new infringement".
Coming back to the "easy workaround", it still poses the exact same problem for OEMs: they need to make technically unnecessary (but legally compelled) change to their master image, which incurs more or less the same cost that removes Word would incur.
Given that this is for a case that hasn't been concluded yet (remember that MS intends on appealing), it looks like this injunction is premature and causes undue harm to third parties, which means it was poorly thought out.
Or maybe not. I guess I was wrong.
If they hadn't preloaded all of their images with free trials and bloatware then this wouldn't be a problem in the first place. When I have to setup one of their machines, the first thing I always do is reformat and build a new image anyway without all of the extra crap that shouldn't be there.
Er, no. Since when do you get MS Office for free from Dell or any other OEM? I think even "free trials" of MS Office is unheard of.
More likely, they have a few different versions of the image which they install (or have pre-installed machines which they will ship) based on your customization at the time you order.
If they can no longer ship Word (which may or may not be the case, depending on exactly how the licensing agreement is worked out) then that means they have to junk all the images which previously had Word on it, presumably to replace it with a different version of Word that is considered non-infringing—or, in the extreme, don't ship any office productivity suite at all, but that would seriously hurt their business, especially in the small business section, where business owners with no IT department want to order things that "just work".
As much as I don't like bloatware (and I do repartition and format all my computers when I buy them from Dell, Asus, or anyone else), the problem is not the bloatware here.
Except that's not what the injunction says. The quotes I can find say:
Given that Amazon.com "sells" some ebooks for $0, I doubt that shipping Word without charging for the license would pass the "selling or importing" ban.
The injunction itself needs to be modified, and given the case Dell and HP make here, it seems like the original injunction was poorly thought out in terms of unintended consequences.
Of course, by "pattern", they mean a repeating pattern, not just any old formula which lets them calculate pi to an arbitrary precision
If someone ever found a repeating pattern in pi, they would have proven that pi is a rational number after all (but, I think there's a proof out there somewhere that says pi is irrational, so if such a thing is true it would shake the basis of our mathematics).
For a headline, where sentence fragments are acceptable, that sounds right. "Used" indicates the passive voice, not past tense, and it's not the main verb---main verb "is" (or "was") is omitted as is often done in headlines to save space.
When you are reading that out loud, you are supposed to insert a small pause between "used" and "to", so it should sound nothing like "used to" (which sounds more like "use-to") in "Friendster used to be popular before Facebook".
Every member of a co-op doesn't need to have an equal share. They do, however, need to be compensated for their efforts.
This is already done in many, many corporations, and in the places that do not make it a policy, the employee can take the initiative and do it themselves.
It's called "stock", you may have heard of it.
In some workplaces, part of the compensation package will be stock, so that the employee would have a share in the company's profits. This is, of course, more common for the executives than the entry-level employee, but in many places, i.e. publicly traded companies, nothing stops him from buying the company's stock in the open market.
Now, I will grant you that in the case of AOL, the employee cannot buy "AOL stock" without also buying Time Warner stock, for the moment. But, in a vast majority of cases, the employee can already own a piece of company on his own, of his own volition. No "co-ops" or earth-shattering reforms are needed.
Consensual labour is a lot like consensual sex.
Very often it involves a lot of deception, desperation and exploitation, and frequently leads to feelings of fatigue, disappointment and resentment.
So, what's the alternative? Rape? Not all consensual sex is good, but good sex is consensual. Likewise with labor.
Outside of political science textbooks, the term is so broad of meaning as to be useless, and your right-wing rant on liberal meaning "love government programs and regulation ("tax and spend" and "big government")" proves it.
That's why I qualified it as "in the U.S." Although apparently "liberal" and "conservative" means approximately the same thing in the U.S. and U.K., what "liberal" and "conservative" stands for, e.g., in Europe or Asia is vastly different from our ideas of "liberal" and "conservative". Also, some of the liberal-vs.-conservative positions have switched on a few issues over the last couple centuries or so as well.
Liberal, simply put, is the opposite of conservative. A person with liberal views is more likely to embrace a change. A conservative on the other hand, by definition, is someone who prefers things to stay as they are, or even pines for a "simpler" time in the past.
I am a bit wary of people characterizing "liberal" and "conservative" this way. As you guess correctly, I am a conservative (more precisely, a fiscal conservative—I lead a socially conservative lifestyle, but as long as they aren't hurting anyone else, I couldn't care less what others do). By the definition you have, Reagan would have been considered a "liberal" by wanting to change the tax code with tax cuts and what-not (of course, if you go back far enough, i.e. to the time before income tax, he would be a "conservative", but with history repeating itself, it becomes only a matter of how far back you go). Also, one could consider Obama "conservative" because he wants to bring income taxes to pre-Reagan levels.
Yes, I agree that the dictionary definition of "liberal" is someone who wants to change things and "conservative" is someone who wants to conserve things as they are. But, that's, as you correctly say, is a meaningless statement detached from any political reality—and that's why I qualify "liberals in U.S." or "conservatives in U.S." (today) because then they have some definite mainstream positions that you can either agree with or disagree with. A lot of people want "change" until they find out exactly what the change involves.
In common usage the term liberal has a wide degree of latitude in its definition depending who is using it and where. It usually denotes someone who is a hippie or is in favor of social justice programs and is in favor of taxing the rich and big business.
So you agree with me. "Social justice programs" mean government programs, whether you agree with the goal or not. As a conservative, I happen to disagree with the goals of those programs, but even the advocates of these programs cannot deny that it's, for the most part, taxpayer-funded government programs. And if "taxing the rich and big business" isn't taxation, well, war is peace.
Only those who want to trick others into agreeing with him, rather than generating genuine agreement and consensus would use words as what they mean in "uncommon usage" rather than "common usage", without clearly saying out loud that your usage of word is different from nearly everyone else. This is a sin that liberals who quote this favorably are guilty of, because this guy is saying that he agrees with all the things conservatives in U.S. say, except that he wants to call himself "liberal" instead of "conservative".
You don't have a Kindle DX, do you? I do, and it actually does do something to reduce blank margins. I know, because I've converted documents to PDF with large margins, only to have the DX enlarge the document to exclude the margins.
You guessed correctly. I only have a Kindle 2, and that's good information to have (in case I give the DX a serious look again in the future). From what I heard, the PDF support on Kindle DX seemed still a bit primitive (i.e. full page view only, no zooming capabilities?), so I just assumed that it was treating the page like an image or something.
I just hope they bring the PDF compatibility to Kindle 2, when they get everything worked out.
Actually in the first 5 of Kindle Top Sellers at this moment are Michelle Malkin's "Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies" and Glenn Beck's "Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against and Out-of-Control Government,...". There isn't a single liberal leaning rant anywhere in the top 30, but I also see Dick Morris and Mark R. Levin from the right. So your assumption about the target demographic might be a tad off.
Also, given Amazon's anti-tax stance, I doubt that Amazon's corporate culture has much in common with the whole liberal establishment. I mean, maybe there is some in the culture and philosophy side, but nothing on the political or practical side.
By the way, what I seem to have seen in the past is a lot of people call themselves "liberal" without knowing what that word means in the U.S. In the U.S., "liberal" means that you love government programs and regulation ("tax and spend" and "big government") aside from a whole bunch of other things. If you just think that people should be left alone to do what they want with themselves (i.e. pro abortion, legalized prostitution and drugs, etc.), you should find a different label, because while "liberal" includes that, it also includes a whole lot of stuff such a person might be opposed to.
then simply get open source format epub books only.
problem solved.
The same solution happens to solve Kindle's "remote deletion" capability (Amazon hasn't demonstrated that it can delete contents not tied to Amazon's DRM). So that brings you back to the level, except that Kindle can access Wikipedia (in U.S., for free) and the Reader cannot.