I agree we should pay good money for American designed products sold by American companies. From my point of view this isn't a PC replacement though, this would replace my lunchbreak NYT paper ritual every day at lunch. At $350 the Kindle DX would pay for itself in the first year, at $500 it actually costs me more to read it electronically, and you lose a lot of the advantages of the paper based version (story pairings/placement, among other things). So it has two strikes against it. Now if you're using this to read more than 5-10 books a year it's probably a worthwhile investment, but the news companies are trying to sell this as the second coming of jesus for the news industry, and that's precisely what I'd use it for. A 6" screen is far too small to do any serious reading IMO. I read the hitchiker's guide to the galaxy and some shorter scifi novels on my palm pilot back in the day, but if you're used to reading for 2-3 minutes before flipping the page, a 6" screen is going to drive you crazy. A 7.5x10" screen is big enough you can leisurely read an article for at least a minute before "flipping the page".
I would assume that amazon buys you a prepaid 20mb data plan with the device to cover browsing their Kindle store, and after that the data (a book weighs in at what, 1024kb? 2048kb? 3.7gb/3000 books = 0.0012 GB per book) cost is built into the price of the book. It's certainly cheaper than printing, trucking to a warehouse, storage fees, and trucking to a bookstore or mailing (amazon super saver shipping is free) to the customer. It probably costs Amazon $0.30 to send the book to the customer and $0.50 worth of data for the customer to browse their site.
I can't imagine a situation where you need to carry around more than 1GB of PDF files where you wouldn't also already have your laptop handy. Maybe an office copier machine repair man, but our guy already carries a laptop with 3G wireless. The idea of needing to have 3000 books on hand is sort of rediculous. I'm guessing the real reason for 4gb of storage is to hold all those image heavy text books at 200mb a pop.
SD card just opens the door to hacking this thing to use the free wireless for other purposes see also: Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, Nintendo Wii.
Supposedly a subscription to the NYT or other major paper will get you a price cut, but $500 is $150 too much for a larger version of the Kindle 2, which only costs $190 to build. The rebate ought to be $200 or more otherwise there's no savings over the print version (with the 6" kindle there's a savings of about $130 at current subscription rates). The fact that they're only offering the (so far not officially announced) discount in areas that don't already offer delivery of the NYT in print form is more depressing.
I had my fingers crossed for this, but damnit Amazon, offer this at a price I'm willing to pay. The 6" model is just too damn small for serious reading.
Secondly, if there are 50 versions of this bill, all the better. At the state level, it can be tailored to suit the population it's governing. Let me tell you, people in Kansas have a much different view on many things than people in California. It might come as a shock to you but state governments are good for a whole lot more than passing funding bills for more state highways. At the state level, depending on where you live, your elected representative might only be representing 5,000 people. At the federal level in most cases, your representative is representing closer to 100,000, and in the case of NY, CA and TX federal senators, representing literally tens of millions of people. With the exception of literally a handful of cases, such as health care, interstate travel (and commerce), and the military, state governments are going to be more effective at governing closest to the citizen's will (unless you're a major corporation or part of an industry lobby).
Next time I'll be sure and clarify by saying "Bush-era-like". If this actually makes it's way to the floor for a vote then all our votes to oust the republicans will have been for naught. Slashdot: where you can check your reading comprehension at the door.
I don't think it was specifically bush who pushed for all these limitations, but when I say bush era I mean it reads as if it came from the bush era. I like how everyone is jumping all over me for mentioning bush (I mean really, would this piece of legislation have suprised you in 2005?). The point is, we voted in a new congress, new president and our government is still pushing for tighter survalience laws. So yes, I feel justified when using the taboo term "bush era" during the Obama administration, esepcially when these sorts of things are what I was voting against. What party brought this to the table isn't terribly important; democrats authorized the iraq war just as well as the republicans did. I'm not trying to push a partisain agenda here, I'm just outraged (and out-raging).
Echoing Bush era paranoia helps win conservative votes during mid-term elections. I didn't blame it on Bush but thanks for putting words in my mouth and not contributing anything to the overall discussion.
The Federal Government exists to protect the borders and deliver the mail, not make enforcing laws easier by making blanket declarations. Money we're diverting from state court systems to Federal ones could just as easily be funneled back to the state. We pay lawyers to navigate bureaucracy already, it's not terribly difficult to find a state law specialist last time I checked.
So they'd be able to try you in Texas, Maryland or Los Angeles, depending on which state is most likely to award them the most money. States that don't need their court system tied up with worthless cases however are free to exempt themselves from these kinds of laws.
I blew off the republican's stand against the federal government as a way to shore up support for the Republican party, and as a registered democrat, I do see some validity in their point. Am I trolling? No. My point is, this is a FEDERAL crime they're speaking of. This is definitely something that can be handled and prosecuted at the state level. This has zero effect on national security or interstate commerce. The fact that this is being handled at the Federal level indicates it's just a Bush-era grab for additional surveillance. Put on your tin foil hat everyone, this isn't just fantasy, this sort of bill passing is a weekly occurrence in England. Stop this crap from coming to our borders. The new fight isn't against communist Russia, it's Orwellian England.
Me too, I mean I should TOTALLY be able to write almost non-human readable "10 kilograms pounds" instead of google's "10 kilograms in pounds". That's so much more difficult!
I recall being able to buy win 3.11 (or at least it was available, new, on the shelf at gamestop) when win98 was out. No reason to kill the product if customers are willing to pay for it (XP SP3 excluded of course). Somebody has to help make the Vista sales figures look better and not immediately axing it will do that.
400 gigs... This month? Right? It takes less time to download the sopranos than it does to watch it. I have tens (if not 100) of movies I've never gotten around to watching simply because I have better content to watch. A lot of movies (along with the t show Lost) I will skip character development of minor characters that aren't central to the plot. Another plus is I can torrent anything that looks remotely interesting and scan through it at my leisure. I pay $45 a month but that's because I didn't want to be locked in for 12 months, otherwise its only $30/mo.
DSL is such a terrible, limited connection, it's hard to understand why you would ever go with DSL over cable unless cable was not at all an option in your area. It is really, really painful to go from a solid 5mbps cable connection (i sometimes see 8 when downloading steam game updates) to a 128 or 384kb/s connection.
I think what you're trying to say here is that unless they declare martial law, closing schools and putting pressure on sporting event center owners is about all they can do to stem this. Unless you're President Madagascar (someone link to the image, thanks in advance)
NASA doesn't use bleeding edge technology, but you want our national defense system(s) to be running on it? Someone promote this man to a government military buying agent!
AFAIK steamboat willy is the genesis of mickey. If that went into the public domain that opens up a whole pandoras box of legal questions as to if derivative works of mickey mouse (and the merchandise, which is the real $$$). Not to mention there is a ton of very valuable IP that would have gone to the public domain in another 10-15 years like fantasia, snow white and tons of other A level disney franchises. Not to mention all the dreamworks derivative works that would swamp disney over the next 50 years. That's what they were trying to avoid. And they succeeded.
Cat 5 is super easy to install. Most people I know who have lived in their homes for more than 5 years (and continue to plan living in them) have already wired their homes for cat5e in at least all of the bedrooms + kitchen, living room and home office. Most of the new homes in my area (Dallas) are usually sold with it installed already. Surround sound wiring at build time is still hard to find in the $350,000 range.
Yes, I'll give them that wifi is a great convenience, especially if you have multiple teenagers living in the house with their assorted laptops. It's perfect for web browsing and browsing the iTunes music store, but anyone who plays a lot of online games, or is simply a power user can tell you, nothing beats a wired connection to the matrix in terms of latency and data throughput. 802.11g (that's 90% of the market right) is still spotty with most consumer grade hardware beyond 20 feet. My netbook may never use it's eithernet port, but you can be damn sure my desktop is going to stay wired for the foreseeable future.
Kudos, you have a whole pharmacy of pills next to your name: Foe, Fan, Friend of Friend, Foe of Friend. I haven't seen that particular combination before.
On topic: it was Disney pushing for copyright extensions to keep mickey mouse (a character) under copyright. So characters are most definitely under copyright/trademark protection.
My biggest problem is keeping backups of my mp3 archive and photos, which is something like 30 gigs and 100 gigs respectively. I guess I could invest in a Blue ray-R but its cheaper to just buy or repurpose an existing hard drive. Most of my archived video is throw away divx. Not including music I probably have 60mb of non-media data I need to backup. Most of that is accessible via gmail archives though.
Just because the average user can't be bothered to keep their OS and personal data seperate doesn't mean its not sound data retention policy.
I don't know about you but I've never had a virus infect my D: drive. I get a virus about once a year, which is a good period of time to reinstall everything, make sure I have the newest software updates (did you know gimp did a major overhaul recently? I just found out in jan... Still on the fence if I like it better than previous versions), newest drivers and all the rest of the stuff you listed. Its like a 60,000 mile tune up for your PC. I archive all the indispensable free utilities I find, usually with a local mirror on my website. Besides if you need more than four productivity apps not directly related to your profession to be productive You're Doing It Wrong.
Well then I guess you should have kept all your files secretly backed up on your C, E and F drives along with terrestrial and orbital off site backups. I recommend two satellites orbiting on opposite sides of the earth, that way your data is less likely to be corrupted in the event of solar flares(!).
Slashdot Mirror
I agree we should pay good money for American designed products sold by American companies. From my point of view this isn't a PC replacement though, this would replace my lunchbreak NYT paper ritual every day at lunch. At $350 the Kindle DX would pay for itself in the first year, at $500 it actually costs me more to read it electronically, and you lose a lot of the advantages of the paper based version (story pairings/placement, among other things). So it has two strikes against it. Now if you're using this to read more than 5-10 books a year it's probably a worthwhile investment, but the news companies are trying to sell this as the second coming of jesus for the news industry, and that's precisely what I'd use it for. A 6" screen is far too small to do any serious reading IMO. I read the hitchiker's guide to the galaxy and some shorter scifi novels on my palm pilot back in the day, but if you're used to reading for 2-3 minutes before flipping the page, a 6" screen is going to drive you crazy. A 7.5x10" screen is big enough you can leisurely read an article for at least a minute before "flipping the page".
I would assume that amazon buys you a prepaid 20mb data plan with the device to cover browsing their Kindle store, and after that the data (a book weighs in at what, 1024kb? 2048kb? 3.7gb/3000 books = 0.0012 GB per book) cost is built into the price of the book. It's certainly cheaper than printing, trucking to a warehouse, storage fees, and trucking to a bookstore or mailing (amazon super saver shipping is free) to the customer. It probably costs Amazon $0.30 to send the book to the customer and $0.50 worth of data for the customer to browse their site.
I can't imagine a situation where you need to carry around more than 1GB of PDF files where you wouldn't also already have your laptop handy. Maybe an office copier machine repair man, but our guy already carries a laptop with 3G wireless. The idea of needing to have 3000 books on hand is sort of rediculous. I'm guessing the real reason for 4gb of storage is to hold all those image heavy text books at 200mb a pop.
SD card just opens the door to hacking this thing to use the free wireless for other purposes see also: Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, Nintendo Wii.
Really bad: Costs $500
Supposedly a subscription to the NYT or other major paper will get you a price cut, but $500 is $150 too much for a larger version of the Kindle 2, which only costs $190 to build. The rebate ought to be $200 or more otherwise there's no savings over the print version (with the 6" kindle there's a savings of about $130 at current subscription rates). The fact that they're only offering the (so far not officially announced) discount in areas that don't already offer delivery of the NYT in print form is more depressing.
I had my fingers crossed for this, but damnit Amazon, offer this at a price I'm willing to pay. The 6" model is just too damn small for serious reading.
Secondly, if there are 50 versions of this bill, all the better. At the state level, it can be tailored to suit the population it's governing. Let me tell you, people in Kansas have a much different view on many things than people in California. It might come as a shock to you but state governments are good for a whole lot more than passing funding bills for more state highways. At the state level, depending on where you live, your elected representative might only be representing 5,000 people. At the federal level in most cases, your representative is representing closer to 100,000, and in the case of NY, CA and TX federal senators, representing literally tens of millions of people. With the exception of literally a handful of cases, such as health care, interstate travel (and commerce), and the military, state governments are going to be more effective at governing closest to the citizen's will (unless you're a major corporation or part of an industry lobby).
Next time I'll be sure and clarify by saying "Bush-era-like". If this actually makes it's way to the floor for a vote then all our votes to oust the republicans will have been for naught. Slashdot: where you can check your reading comprehension at the door.
I don't think it was specifically bush who pushed for all these limitations, but when I say bush era I mean it reads as if it came from the bush era. I like how everyone is jumping all over me for mentioning bush (I mean really, would this piece of legislation have suprised you in 2005?). The point is, we voted in a new congress, new president and our government is still pushing for tighter survalience laws. So yes, I feel justified when using the taboo term "bush era" during the Obama administration, esepcially when these sorts of things are what I was voting against. What party brought this to the table isn't terribly important; democrats authorized the iraq war just as well as the republicans did. I'm not trying to push a partisain agenda here, I'm just outraged (and out-raging).
Echoing Bush era paranoia helps win conservative votes during mid-term elections. I didn't blame it on Bush but thanks for putting words in my mouth and not contributing anything to the overall discussion.
The Federal Government exists to protect the borders and deliver the mail, not make enforcing laws easier by making blanket declarations. Money we're diverting from state court systems to Federal ones could just as easily be funneled back to the state. We pay lawyers to navigate bureaucracy already, it's not terribly difficult to find a state law specialist last time I checked.
So they'd be able to try you in Texas, Maryland or Los Angeles, depending on which state is most likely to award them the most money. States that don't need their court system tied up with worthless cases however are free to exempt themselves from these kinds of laws.
I blew off the republican's stand against the federal government as a way to shore up support for the Republican party, and as a registered democrat, I do see some validity in their point. Am I trolling? No. My point is, this is a FEDERAL crime they're speaking of. This is definitely something that can be handled and prosecuted at the state level. This has zero effect on national security or interstate commerce. The fact that this is being handled at the Federal level indicates it's just a Bush-era grab for additional surveillance. Put on your tin foil hat everyone, this isn't just fantasy, this sort of bill passing is a weekly occurrence in England. Stop this crap from coming to our borders. The new fight isn't against communist Russia, it's Orwellian England.
Me too, I mean I should TOTALLY be able to write almost non-human readable "10 kilograms pounds" instead of google's "10 kilograms in pounds". That's so much more difficult!
I recall being able to buy win 3.11 (or at least it was available, new, on the shelf at gamestop) when win98 was out. No reason to kill the product if customers are willing to pay for it (XP SP3 excluded of course). Somebody has to help make the Vista sales figures look better and not immediately axing it will do that.
400 gigs... This month? Right? It takes less time to download the sopranos than it does to watch it. I have tens (if not 100) of movies I've never gotten around to watching simply because I have better content to watch. A lot of movies (along with the t show Lost) I will skip character development of minor characters that aren't central to the plot. Another plus is I can torrent anything that looks remotely interesting and scan through it at my leisure. I pay $45 a month but that's because I didn't want to be locked in for 12 months, otherwise its only $30/mo.
DSL is such a terrible, limited connection, it's hard to understand why you would ever go with DSL over cable unless cable was not at all an option in your area. It is really, really painful to go from a solid 5mbps cable connection (i sometimes see 8 when downloading steam game updates) to a 128 or 384kb/s connection.
I think what you're trying to say here is that unless they declare martial law, closing schools and putting pressure on sporting event center owners is about all they can do to stem this. Unless you're President Madagascar (someone link to the image, thanks in advance)
NASA doesn't use bleeding edge technology, but you want our national defense system(s) to be running on it? Someone promote this man to a government military buying agent!
AFAIK steamboat willy is the genesis of mickey. If that went into the public domain that opens up a whole pandoras box of legal questions as to if derivative works of mickey mouse (and the merchandise, which is the real $$$). Not to mention there is a ton of very valuable IP that would have gone to the public domain in another 10-15 years like fantasia, snow white and tons of other A level disney franchises. Not to mention all the dreamworks derivative works that would swamp disney over the next 50 years. That's what they were trying to avoid. And they succeeded.
Wikipedia says it originated in Kansas (skip to geographic history)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
Cat 5 is super easy to install. Most people I know who have lived in their homes for more than 5 years (and continue to plan living in them) have already wired their homes for cat5e in at least all of the bedrooms + kitchen, living room and home office. Most of the new homes in my area (Dallas) are usually sold with it installed already. Surround sound wiring at build time is still hard to find in the $350,000 range.
Yes, I'll give them that wifi is a great convenience, especially if you have multiple teenagers living in the house with their assorted laptops. It's perfect for web browsing and browsing the iTunes music store, but anyone who plays a lot of online games, or is simply a power user can tell you, nothing beats a wired connection to the matrix in terms of latency and data throughput. 802.11g (that's 90% of the market right) is still spotty with most consumer grade hardware beyond 20 feet. My netbook may never use it's eithernet port, but you can be damn sure my desktop is going to stay wired for the foreseeable future.
Kudos, you have a whole pharmacy of pills next to your name: Foe, Fan, Friend of Friend, Foe of Friend. I haven't seen that particular combination before.
On topic: it was Disney pushing for copyright extensions to keep mickey mouse (a character) under copyright. So characters are most definitely under copyright/trademark protection.
My biggest problem is keeping backups of my mp3 archive and photos, which is something like 30 gigs and 100 gigs respectively. I guess I could invest in a Blue ray-R but its cheaper to just buy or repurpose an existing hard drive. Most of my archived video is throw away divx. Not including music I probably have 60mb of non-media data I need to backup. Most of that is accessible via gmail archives though.
Just because the average user can't be bothered to keep their OS and personal data seperate doesn't mean its not sound data retention policy.
I don't know about you but I've never had a virus infect my D: drive. I get a virus about once a year, which is a good period of time to reinstall everything, make sure I have the newest software updates (did you know gimp did a major overhaul recently? I just found out in jan... Still on the fence if I like it better than previous versions), newest drivers and all the rest of the stuff you listed. Its like a 60,000 mile tune up for your PC. I archive all the indispensable free utilities I find, usually with a local mirror on my website. Besides if you need more than four productivity apps not directly related to your profession to be productive You're Doing It Wrong.
Well then I guess you should have kept all your files secretly backed up on your C, E and F drives along with terrestrial and orbital off site backups. I recommend two satellites orbiting on opposite sides of the earth, that way your data is less likely to be corrupted in the event of solar flares(!).