What we need on keyboards is a key that lets you disable/enable the capslock key. We could place it just above the right shift key, it'd be really convenient!
The concepts being bandied around by TFA and its ilk make no sense. They make no sense in a way that should be very familiar to slashdot.
The article uses the phrase "leech", others say "take and give nothing back". But what are they taking? Software, just like music, film and other electronic media, is copied, not taken. When a big company uses some software, they haven't used anything up; they just take a copy. When a man writes a programme, it doesn't make any difference to him whether 1 person uses it or 1 million- he will be unaffected either way. He might feel it is unfair that 1 million people are benefiting from his work and not showering him with rewards, but it isn't actually any different from his perspective whether the programme tanks and is a smash hit. Arguing that he has been somehow deprived is no less ridiculous that when the *AA pull the same trick.
Far and aside from the above, it also flatly ignores the way that some open source projects have chosen to monetise their product. One of the most common business models for OSS is support- you encourage people to use your free product (speech & beer), and then rent out your services for technical support into the future. Big companies certainly do contribute back through this channel, even if they aren't directly lavishing the projects in cash or paying for developer time.
If a company, big or small, wants to adopt OO.o, they can, because it is free in all respects. They will use it, they will submit bug reports, they will make known their desires for certain features, they might create plugins which can find their way into the wild, and they may even use the official (paid for) support channels when things go wrong. These are all good things for the OO.o project. One may wish they'd contribute more, but there's no reason why they should.
If you demand money before giving someone your source code, you're not open source.
Might I remind you that the majority of the Earth's recent population growth has been in China, India, and South America; places which have until the last handful of years not felt any of the technological benefits that those of us in Europe and North America have.
Try pulling "the rug of technology" out from under the population of rural China and seeing if the majority of the population dies. Bearing in mind that you'd mostly be "puling" the odd telephone, and maybe the occasional tractor, I'm sure life would go on.
Not all things served over the internet are done through a web browser. Haven't you heard of those heady days before the web, of usenets and IRCs? It'd be trivial to make a simple one-shot installer programme for allowing the user to choose and donwload a browser.
Your point about who chooses the list stands though.
Why don't they actually try giving people what they want? They should still be able to have a better "ultimate edition" and keep it desirable, but why do they feel the "basic" version should be some sort of medieval punishment to make up for it?
They should ship a basic version with all of the graphical extras and GUI shinybits disabled and locked, as well as things like preloading programmes and background indexing. It would make the thing run far better on low-end hardware (such as netbooks) allowing it to compete with Linux and old XP. It would also ensure that, to Joe User, "ultimate edition" is still worth the extra money, seeing as it looks better and runs faster on high-end hardware that can handle the smarter tasks (and if you leave those features disablable in ultimate, it stays as the "can do anything" version).
Voila, differentiated value with products that can compete in the netbook market while still keeping "ultimate" as the top product.
Of course what they actually do is just punish the user with draconian limits and reduced functionality, and then act surprised when it flops. They should just be grateful that they caught that cock-up before the launch, with Win7, and saved themselves some wasted time and effort.
As for having guns fired in a crowded pressurized cylinder at 20,000 feet, I don't see that as that as particularly scary. First and foremost, this myth of lawful gun owners firing willy-nilly and shooting bystanders just doesn't happen. It's a bullshit canard used by anti-gun activists. The data just doesn't support it. Seriously, go try and find stories of lawful permit holders shooting bystanders while stopping a crime in progress. I'll wait.
Second, a bullet hole in a passenger plane at 20,000 feet (or higher even) is not really a cause for concern. Despite what Hollywood tells you, the plane will not fall out of the air, it will not explosively decompress, in fact it's decompression will be rather slow. At worst, the pilot will get a light on his console telling him that there is a loss of pressure, he will put his mask on, descend below 10,000 feet, declare an emergency and land at the nearest airfield which will handle his aircraft. And the passengers might have to put their masks on too. Even a dozen bullet holes are not going to cause a problem. Here, read about Aloha Flight 243 and consider for a moment that the aircraft involved lost the entirety of it's roof, actually did suffer explosive decompression, and the pilot still landed the airplane. The only loss of life was one flight attendant who was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I was referring, of course, to the hijacker's gun, fired with intent to hit bystanders. In my experience of airtravel, people are packed into a tiny crowded space en masse, shoulder to shoulder. I wouldn't want to see what a hijacker, firing his weapon into a crowd of angry and scared people (attempting to fight back, obviously) would do. If a spray of bullets at a tightly packed crowd wouldn't do enough damage, the panicked reaction of the crowd would be enough to worry about on it's own (visions of a crowd crushing itself to death in the aisle sounds unattractive).
Since firearms are (rightfully) banned on flights, there are no "lawful gun owners" in this circumstance.
It would also reflect artificial light, such as street lights.
The sky over my town has an unhealthy orange glow from the lampposts, and I presume that a significant proportion of that light is being absorbed by the darkly-coloured tarmac and buildings. How much brighter would this orange glow be if everything were white?
I'd say that learning how to put a computer together is as important to use a computer as knowing how to change a wheel is to driving a car, and it's not hard either.
Unfortunately, that cause is just as badly lost as the computer one. Worse even; at least with a computer ignorance can't leave you stranded 30 miles from the nearest mechanic.
GP said that the benefit of pipped dice is that they are off the shelf. Colouring in the dots of 200 dice seems fairly non-trivial. That's 4200 dots you'd be painting, you know.
If you're going to customise your equipment, there are better solutions.
"Communism" doesn't mean "forced to share by the government". It might be how some countries attempt to achieve communism, but it isn't communism itself.
Also, it bears repeating that the Soviet Union != communism. It wanted to be communist, called itself communist, and may even have managed to be communist, but in no way should it be considered the standard to which "communism" is measured.
In the '80s, hijackers didn't blow up planes and commit mass murder. It just wasn't what the game was all about. Some did it for ransom money (always popular). Some did it to make a political point, the same as waving a banner at a protest rally (only more so). The usual way these things went is that the plane would land somewhere, all the hostages would be safely released, and the hijackers would be rounded up by the police/CIA some time later.
Encouraging people to fight back in this game is stupid. All you do is make people risk their lives needlessly. If they don't fight, everyone survives and the authorities can catch the criminals on safer ground. If you do fight, you risk having a gun fired in a crowded, pressurised cylinder 20,000 feet up.
The game has obviously changed when you're dealing with terrorists for whom the end goal is to kill everyone. Suddenly, we're not talking about "we'll catch up with them later once everyone is safe", we're talking "how to ensure the fewest people die". Fighting for control of the aircraft is the only sensible thing the passengers can do.
Pretending that nothing has changed in the last 30 years is just being thick-skulled. The rules were different back then because the game was different back then.
I've never seen, in gaming shops, dice with different coloured pips on each side. They've always been a uniform colour on all sides (white, red, black, whatever).
I have, however, seen dice with a solid colour side before. They're used in some board games, and even one RP game I once played (couldn't tell you what it was though, was only the once).
If i were Red Hat or Ubuntu (in a corporate sense), i would be in NZ now talking to the main permanent secretaries and other pukes down there to hammer down an initial PoC for Linux/Open office.
And who's saying they're not?
If I were Red Hat, Canonical, et al, I'd do exactly the same as you suggest- go and talk to the potential customers. In fact, if I were any vendor of any software (FOSS or otherwise), I'd be down their trying to sell my wares to them, because that's what software vendors do.
Neither Linux nor OpenOffice are developed by just hobbyists and startup companies. They're both backed by a number of very large businesses, with vested interests in selling their products. They'll be sending down the usual salesmen and marketing brochures, exactly the same as MS and the other proprietary companies.
Whether they're successful or not is an entirely different and unrelated matter.
I can never really identify with people who say this. Enough people say it that I guess it must be true, but I still can't reconcile myself to it.
I've installed Linux a bunch of times on a bunch of different machines, exactly NONE of which were bought with Linux in mind. All of these were off the shelf, relatively random, relative mix of budget and performance hardware, some branded and some not.
Off the top of my head, I've installed any of Ubuntu, Debian, or Puppy on a 1998 Dell box (originally Win98), two different 2003 homebuilds (XP), a 2005 HP laptop (XP) some random Elonex netbook (XP), and a 2008 Toshiba laptop (Vista). None of them had any hardware problems at all (including WiFi) with the exception of one slightly irritable sound card under Puppy and a Logitech MX518 mouse which can't use one of its more unusual buttons (the one that is essentially a proprietary alt-tab).
I think you're relatively unlucky if you're stuck with hardware which is completely incompatible, and should be completely safe as long as you Google "[hardware name] linux" before you buy anything.
"Winning" and "losing" are pretty ill-defined and subjective terms.
We "won" in the sense that we kicked out the old regime and replaced it with one of our choice. We "lost" in that there was a large insurgency and civil war which essentially ended up settling itself, determining the state of the country going forward. We also "won" in that we now have strategic influence over an important Middle Eastern state, and also "lost" in that it was at a rather horrific civilian death toll and level of collateral damage.
When you ask someone if you "won or lost", it depends entirely on the criteria used to judge.
FYI, I use "we" in the loosest possible sense here as I have absolutely no involvement in the war one way or the other, and did not support it.
This isn't really about making the most random of all possible RNGs as much as providing a service to customers. Tabletop gaming (be it the D&D or casino variety) are traditional games, played for anywhere between decades and centuries, depending on the game. They've always traditionally used dice. These dice are only as random as dice are, and that's as random as they need to be. D&D games have always been played with "biased" dice, and that is either completely unimportant, or is actually part of the appeal in a strange sort of way.
There's something tactile and enjoyable about rolling dice, which just isn't replicated by a computer presenting you with a number that it assures you is random. The dice-rolling robot is a novel way for people who can't use physical dice (play-by-mail players) to get a little bit closer to the "proper" way of playing their game.
As long as people will pay for it, it's a great idea. Arguing whether it's scientifically "more random" is missing the point.
If it can do colour recognition (obviously it can) why not just have a single coloured circle on each side of the dice. When it's a blue circle, it's a "1". A yellow circle, it's a "2". Two yellows and three blues, 7 total.
Surely the need for a symbolic representation of the number is only necessary for us feeble humans, with our tendency to forget abstractions. For a computer, which need never forget that green means "6", actually drawing a picture or making a pattern seems pointless.
Anyone capable of installing pirated Windows would be well aware that they can wipe any Linux machine for the same effort.
Assuming the Linux machine and the No OS machine cost the same (and there's little reason why they shouldn't, really), selling Linux machines is the equivalent of selling No OS machines.
Better really, in that at least you know it has compatibility with Linux and related OSs, which you wouldn't with a No OS.
3: Bacteria doesn't live exclusively in water. If were were going to contaminate the place, the large pieces of complex machinery should do the trick just as well as a small vial of water...
Anything that requires always-on with a small power draw is a possibility on this. mostly it can be done on other devices too (often better), but this is still pretty attractive.
One guy above mentioned using it as a Skype/VoIP box. Hook it up to the internet and use it's USB to attach a cordless USB telephone. Voila, a VoiP system that doesn't require a full-blown PC to be on all the time. At a potential $40, the whole solution would rival a budget model standard telephone from the high street.
It's true you could use one of your existing always-on computers (like a server) or some other dedicated piece of kit and get the same or better results. But all things considered, it seems like it'd fit that role very happily.
According to TFA, they've received interest from EA, Capcom, THQ, Activision, PopCap, Gameloft and Digital Chocolate. The Wikipedia article adds Namco, Sega and id Software, as well as using the word "invest" in connection to all of the above (although I haven't checked the cites, so I don't know what that's supposed to mean).
Add in the Google association and you've got a pretty strong portfolio of industry giants behind you.
Not saying that it won't be a huge flop (I personally think it doesn't look all that hopeful), but it's not for lack of industry backing.
I don't think it's the money-for-sex bit that is really the problem.
The problems come from the people-trafficking, pimping, drug addiction and violent bullying that come from it. It makes perfect sense that a woman (or man, for that matter) should be allowed to sell sex if they want- but if she's being bullied into it by a violent task master, or manipulated by a substance addiction, it's not so OK.
Turning a blind eye to prostitution (as is often the case in many US and European cities) is the worst possible course to take. If it's banned outright (and somehow effectively so) you protect these vulnerable women. If it's completely legalised and regulated, you can protect these vulnerable women. If it's anything in between, the vulnerable women are in big trouble.
It would make sense, seeing as HD-DVD is already dead in terms of straight competition with Blu-Ray.
But aside from spite, Toshiba wouldn't stand to gain much from it. And considering Toshiba's past attitude to format patents (TFA included) it isn't likely high on their agenda.
While I'm sure the authors of the "* for Dummies" books use word, and I'm sure that the publisher provides the tools to facilitate this (stylesheet and such), I doubt it's a.doc that is used in the last instance of the printing process.
Most authors I suspect use Word or some other commercial word processor. This is what they send to their publisher- but I'm not sure that the publisher uses this Word document for all of their type-setting and commercial printing. Expecting Tom Clancy or Terry Pratchett to learn typesetting would sort of defy the point of having publishers, editors and back-end staff at all.
Slashdot Mirror
What we need on keyboards is a key that lets you disable/enable the capslock key. We could place it just above the right shift key, it'd be really convenient!
The concepts being bandied around by TFA and its ilk make no sense. They make no sense in a way that should be very familiar to slashdot.
The article uses the phrase "leech", others say "take and give nothing back". But what are they taking? Software, just like music, film and other electronic media, is copied, not taken. When a big company uses some software, they haven't used anything up; they just take a copy. When a man writes a programme, it doesn't make any difference to him whether 1 person uses it or 1 million- he will be unaffected either way. He might feel it is unfair that 1 million people are benefiting from his work and not showering him with rewards, but it isn't actually any different from his perspective whether the programme tanks and is a smash hit. Arguing that he has been somehow deprived is no less ridiculous that when the *AA pull the same trick.
Far and aside from the above, it also flatly ignores the way that some open source projects have chosen to monetise their product. One of the most common business models for OSS is support- you encourage people to use your free product (speech & beer), and then rent out your services for technical support into the future. Big companies certainly do contribute back through this channel, even if they aren't directly lavishing the projects in cash or paying for developer time.
If a company, big or small, wants to adopt OO.o, they can, because it is free in all respects. They will use it, they will submit bug reports, they will make known their desires for certain features, they might create plugins which can find their way into the wild, and they may even use the official (paid for) support channels when things go wrong. These are all good things for the OO.o project. One may wish they'd contribute more, but there's no reason why they should.
If you demand money before giving someone your source code, you're not open source.
Spoken like a true westerner.
Might I remind you that the majority of the Earth's recent population growth has been in China, India, and South America; places which have until the last handful of years not felt any of the technological benefits that those of us in Europe and North America have.
Try pulling "the rug of technology" out from under the population of rural China and seeing if the majority of the population dies. Bearing in mind that you'd mostly be "puling" the odd telephone, and maybe the occasional tractor, I'm sure life would go on.
Not all things served over the internet are done through a web browser. Haven't you heard of those heady days before the web, of usenets and IRCs? It'd be trivial to make a simple one-shot installer programme for allowing the user to choose and donwload a browser.
Your point about who chooses the list stands though.
Why don't they actually try giving people what they want? They should still be able to have a better "ultimate edition" and keep it desirable, but why do they feel the "basic" version should be some sort of medieval punishment to make up for it?
They should ship a basic version with all of the graphical extras and GUI shinybits disabled and locked, as well as things like preloading programmes and background indexing. It would make the thing run far better on low-end hardware (such as netbooks) allowing it to compete with Linux and old XP. It would also ensure that, to Joe User, "ultimate edition" is still worth the extra money, seeing as it looks better and runs faster on high-end hardware that can handle the smarter tasks (and if you leave those features disablable in ultimate, it stays as the "can do anything" version).
Voila, differentiated value with products that can compete in the netbook market while still keeping "ultimate" as the top product.
Of course what they actually do is just punish the user with draconian limits and reduced functionality, and then act surprised when it flops. They should just be grateful that they caught that cock-up before the launch, with Win7, and saved themselves some wasted time and effort.
As for having guns fired in a crowded pressurized cylinder at 20,000 feet, I don't see that as that as particularly scary. First and foremost, this myth of lawful gun owners firing willy-nilly and shooting bystanders just doesn't happen. It's a bullshit canard used by anti-gun activists. The data just doesn't support it. Seriously, go try and find stories of lawful permit holders shooting bystanders while stopping a crime in progress. I'll wait.
Second, a bullet hole in a passenger plane at 20,000 feet (or higher even) is not really a cause for concern. Despite what Hollywood tells you, the plane will not fall out of the air, it will not explosively decompress, in fact it's decompression will be rather slow. At worst, the pilot will get a light on his console telling him that there is a loss of pressure, he will put his mask on, descend below 10,000 feet, declare an emergency and land at the nearest airfield which will handle his aircraft. And the passengers might have to put their masks on too. Even a dozen bullet holes are not going to cause a problem. Here, read about Aloha Flight 243 and consider for a moment that the aircraft involved lost the entirety of it's roof, actually did suffer explosive decompression, and the pilot still landed the airplane. The only loss of life was one flight attendant who was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I was referring, of course, to the hijacker's gun, fired with intent to hit bystanders. In my experience of airtravel, people are packed into a tiny crowded space en masse, shoulder to shoulder. I wouldn't want to see what a hijacker, firing his weapon into a crowd of angry and scared people (attempting to fight back, obviously) would do. If a spray of bullets at a tightly packed crowd wouldn't do enough damage, the panicked reaction of the crowd would be enough to worry about on it's own (visions of a crowd crushing itself to death in the aisle sounds unattractive).
Since firearms are (rightfully) banned on flights, there are no "lawful gun owners" in this circumstance.
It would also reflect artificial light, such as street lights.
The sky over my town has an unhealthy orange glow from the lampposts, and I presume that a significant proportion of that light is being absorbed by the darkly-coloured tarmac and buildings. How much brighter would this orange glow be if everything were white?
Not that I'm against the idea, incidentally.
I'd say that learning how to put a computer together is as important to use a computer as knowing how to change a wheel is to driving a car, and it's not hard either.
Unfortunately, that cause is just as badly lost as the computer one. Worse even; at least with a computer ignorance can't leave you stranded 30 miles from the nearest mechanic.
GP said that the benefit of pipped dice is that they are off the shelf. Colouring in the dots of 200 dice seems fairly non-trivial. That's 4200 dots you'd be painting, you know.
If you're going to customise your equipment, there are better solutions.
"Communism" doesn't mean "forced to share by the government". It might be how some countries attempt to achieve communism, but it isn't communism itself.
Also, it bears repeating that the Soviet Union != communism. It wanted to be communist, called itself communist, and may even have managed to be communist, but in no way should it be considered the standard to which "communism" is measured.
Maybe you don't understand the GP.
In the '80s, hijackers didn't blow up planes and commit mass murder. It just wasn't what the game was all about. Some did it for ransom money (always popular). Some did it to make a political point, the same as waving a banner at a protest rally (only more so). The usual way these things went is that the plane would land somewhere, all the hostages would be safely released, and the hijackers would be rounded up by the police/CIA some time later.
Encouraging people to fight back in this game is stupid. All you do is make people risk their lives needlessly. If they don't fight, everyone survives and the authorities can catch the criminals on safer ground. If you do fight, you risk having a gun fired in a crowded, pressurised cylinder 20,000 feet up.
The game has obviously changed when you're dealing with terrorists for whom the end goal is to kill everyone. Suddenly, we're not talking about "we'll catch up with them later once everyone is safe", we're talking "how to ensure the fewest people die". Fighting for control of the aircraft is the only sensible thing the passengers can do.
Pretending that nothing has changed in the last 30 years is just being thick-skulled. The rules were different back then because the game was different back then.
I've never seen, in gaming shops, dice with different coloured pips on each side. They've always been a uniform colour on all sides (white, red, black, whatever).
I have, however, seen dice with a solid colour side before. They're used in some board games, and even one RP game I once played (couldn't tell you what it was though, was only the once).
If i were Red Hat or Ubuntu (in a corporate sense), i would be in NZ now talking to the main permanent secretaries and other pukes down there to hammer down an initial PoC for Linux/Open office.
And who's saying they're not?
If I were Red Hat, Canonical, et al, I'd do exactly the same as you suggest- go and talk to the potential customers. In fact, if I were any vendor of any software (FOSS or otherwise), I'd be down their trying to sell my wares to them, because that's what software vendors do.
Neither Linux nor OpenOffice are developed by just hobbyists and startup companies. They're both backed by a number of very large businesses, with vested interests in selling their products. They'll be sending down the usual salesmen and marketing brochures, exactly the same as MS and the other proprietary companies.
Whether they're successful or not is an entirely different and unrelated matter.
I can never really identify with people who say this. Enough people say it that I guess it must be true, but I still can't reconcile myself to it.
I've installed Linux a bunch of times on a bunch of different machines, exactly NONE of which were bought with Linux in mind. All of these were off the shelf, relatively random, relative mix of budget and performance hardware, some branded and some not.
Off the top of my head, I've installed any of Ubuntu, Debian, or Puppy on a 1998 Dell box (originally Win98), two different 2003 homebuilds (XP), a 2005 HP laptop (XP) some random Elonex netbook (XP), and a 2008 Toshiba laptop (Vista). None of them had any hardware problems at all (including WiFi) with the exception of one slightly irritable sound card under Puppy and a Logitech MX518 mouse which can't use one of its more unusual buttons (the one that is essentially a proprietary alt-tab).
I think you're relatively unlucky if you're stuck with hardware which is completely incompatible, and should be completely safe as long as you Google "[hardware name] linux" before you buy anything.
"Winning" and "losing" are pretty ill-defined and subjective terms.
We "won" in the sense that we kicked out the old regime and replaced it with one of our choice. We "lost" in that there was a large insurgency and civil war which essentially ended up settling itself, determining the state of the country going forward. We also "won" in that we now have strategic influence over an important Middle Eastern state, and also "lost" in that it was at a rather horrific civilian death toll and level of collateral damage.
When you ask someone if you "won or lost", it depends entirely on the criteria used to judge.
FYI, I use "we" in the loosest possible sense here as I have absolutely no involvement in the war one way or the other, and did not support it.
I think you've hit on the point exactly there.
This isn't really about making the most random of all possible RNGs as much as providing a service to customers. Tabletop gaming (be it the D&D or casino variety) are traditional games, played for anywhere between decades and centuries, depending on the game. They've always traditionally used dice. These dice are only as random as dice are, and that's as random as they need to be. D&D games have always been played with "biased" dice, and that is either completely unimportant, or is actually part of the appeal in a strange sort of way.
There's something tactile and enjoyable about rolling dice, which just isn't replicated by a computer presenting you with a number that it assures you is random. The dice-rolling robot is a novel way for people who can't use physical dice (play-by-mail players) to get a little bit closer to the "proper" way of playing their game.
As long as people will pay for it, it's a great idea. Arguing whether it's scientifically "more random" is missing the point.
Why bother with numerical "dots" at all?
If it can do colour recognition (obviously it can) why not just have a single coloured circle on each side of the dice. When it's a blue circle, it's a "1". A yellow circle, it's a "2". Two yellows and three blues, 7 total.
Surely the need for a symbolic representation of the number is only necessary for us feeble humans, with our tendency to forget abstractions. For a computer, which need never forget that green means "6", actually drawing a picture or making a pattern seems pointless.
Anyone capable of installing pirated Windows would be well aware that they can wipe any Linux machine for the same effort.
Assuming the Linux machine and the No OS machine cost the same (and there's little reason why they shouldn't, really), selling Linux machines is the equivalent of selling No OS machines.
Better really, in that at least you know it has compatibility with Linux and related OSs, which you wouldn't with a No OS.
1: Mars has water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_mars
2: We can make water almost pure H2O. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Water
3: Bacteria doesn't live exclusively in water. If were were going to contaminate the place, the large pieces of complex machinery should do the trick just as well as a small vial of water...
"Largely useless" seems a bit much.
Anything that requires always-on with a small power draw is a possibility on this. mostly it can be done on other devices too (often better), but this is still pretty attractive.
One guy above mentioned using it as a Skype/VoIP box. Hook it up to the internet and use it's USB to attach a cordless USB telephone. Voila, a VoiP system that doesn't require a full-blown PC to be on all the time. At a potential $40, the whole solution would rival a budget model standard telephone from the high street.
It's true you could use one of your existing always-on computers (like a server) or some other dedicated piece of kit and get the same or better results. But all things considered, it seems like it'd fit that role very happily.
According to TFA, they've received interest from EA, Capcom, THQ, Activision, PopCap, Gameloft and Digital Chocolate. The Wikipedia article adds Namco, Sega and id Software, as well as using the word "invest" in connection to all of the above (although I haven't checked the cites, so I don't know what that's supposed to mean).
Add in the Google association and you've got a pretty strong portfolio of industry giants behind you.
Not saying that it won't be a huge flop (I personally think it doesn't look all that hopeful), but it's not for lack of industry backing.
I don't think it's the money-for-sex bit that is really the problem.
The problems come from the people-trafficking, pimping, drug addiction and violent bullying that come from it. It makes perfect sense that a woman (or man, for that matter) should be allowed to sell sex if they want- but if she's being bullied into it by a violent task master, or manipulated by a substance addiction, it's not so OK.
Turning a blind eye to prostitution (as is often the case in many US and European cities) is the worst possible course to take. If it's banned outright (and somehow effectively so) you protect these vulnerable women. If it's completely legalised and regulated, you can protect these vulnerable women. If it's anything in between, the vulnerable women are in big trouble.
It would make sense, seeing as HD-DVD is already dead in terms of straight competition with Blu-Ray.
But aside from spite, Toshiba wouldn't stand to gain much from it. And considering Toshiba's past attitude to format patents (TFA included) it isn't likely high on their agenda.
While I'm sure the authors of the "* for Dummies" books use word, and I'm sure that the publisher provides the tools to facilitate this (stylesheet and such), I doubt it's a .doc that is used in the last instance of the printing process.
Most authors I suspect use Word or some other commercial word processor. This is what they send to their publisher- but I'm not sure that the publisher uses this Word document for all of their type-setting and commercial printing. Expecting Tom Clancy or Terry Pratchett to learn typesetting would sort of defy the point of having publishers, editors and back-end staff at all.
I've been wrong before though...
I hope mine's an astronaut!