Does O'Reilly sell any of its books through ebook intermediaries? Since they sell DRM-free versions direct, usually in multiple formats, I've never bothered to look. The only exception I've noticed is the occasional iPhone app.
I've noticed a few have Kindle versions, but Stanza and its store has nearly the entire library. I guess this way O'Reilly gets the full purchase price rather than 70%.
As for price, discounts aren't too hard to find. I ordered one book for half its listed ebook price. I've since gotten a couple of "deal of the day" ebooks for $10 each. Today's deal, listed prominently at oreilly.com, is Learning the vi and Vim Editors (PDF only, unfortunately).
So it would appear. I often check Retail Me Not for online store codes.
Once you have a decent ereader device, DRM-free ebooks seem like the perfect solution for tech books. Searchable, no marginal weight for otherwise heavy books, etc. What's interesting to me is that the DRM-free epubs can't be loaded directly onto my ipad in the BN or ibooks app; via dropbox, I was only able to send the epub to GoodReader or Stanza (which is fine, the Stanza reader is really nice). I think the ibooks app can transfer epub files via USB and iTunes, but that's a pain (I sync very, very rarely, since I don't use Windows or Mac OS X much). Not sure what's up with the BN reader app; the nook device can handle epubs via USB mass storage transfer.
As an (occasional) R user, I am excited to see a well-reviewed O'Reilly book on the language. I went and checked the major ebook stores - Amazon, BN, and Stanza, and none had the title.
It turns out that in addition to the Safari books service, O'Reilly also sells DRM-free copies in epub, mobi, and PDF formats. This book is available here. It's not a huge discount over the printed version on Amazon ($6.50 less), though. I'm surprised, then, that it isn't available via the major stores.
The software update for iOS 4 released yesterday changes the formula determining the number of bars. What's really interesting to me is that it in general it will result in fewer bars (because the old difference between 3 and 4 bars was miniscule in terms of actual signal strength). In some circumstances it was easy to go from 5 bars to 2 bars with only a small change in the signal.
In practice, though, what this means is that people who used to get 4 bars in their house might now get 2 bars and think their signal problem got worse. None of this has any effect on dropped calls, of course, but I would expect that people might actually complain more about the iphone 4 antenna after this update.
Not to mention that because Apple pushes out OS updates as complete packages, it's a several hundred megabyte download.
In the end, giving out free cases was the only sensible solution. It's a shame that the bumper appears somewhat poorly designed - it won't connect well with older, slightly fatter connection cables. It blows my mind that they didn't come up with a simple non-conductive coating for the exposed antenna to reduce this problem in the first place.
The transaction is authorized by the chip in a real-time two way communication, and you have to punch in the pin code. But that is never going to happen here in US, primary because it means no tips.
Couldn't they simply authorize a transaction for, say, 2x the amount on the bill? Then you specify how much you want to tip, the the transaction actually goes through. It's my understanding that pre-authorization of certain amounts is a routine part of the credit card system.
Even for those of us with chip-less credit cards, the European system is more secure, though. No waitstaff takes your card for 10 minutes and does whatever they want with it.
So what you're saying is, it is part of the government, but in NAME only? i.e.: a "part" of the government that is accountable to neither the other branches of the government nor the people.
No. The President and Congress appoint and confirm the governors. Congress retains the authority to pass new laws affecting the Federal Reserve. Historically, they themselves avoid doing this because the independence of the central bank is seen as a good thing; an independent central bank has greater credibility in fighting inflation, and credibility is important in monetary policy.
The Federal Reserve is a private banking institution which is run by government appointees. It is not now nor has it ever been a part of the federal government. They just happen to be the ones that are authorized to represent the Federal Government in that respect.
You can say that all you want, but to quote the Fed itself:
The Federal Reserve must work within the framework of the overall objectives of economic and financial policy established by the government; therefore, the description of the System as "independent within the government" is more accurate.
Congress designed the structure of the Federal Reserve System to give it a broad perspective on the economy and on economic activity in all parts of the nation. It is a federal system, composed of a central, governmental agency--the Board of Governors--in Washington, D.C., and twelve re- gional Federal Reserve Banks.
It is part of the government, but independent of the three branches.
BTW the Federal Reserve is not part of the government, just as Federal Express is not part of the government. The name is designed to deceive you but the Fed is still a private bank. It's a private corporate monopoly.
No, the Federal Reserve is part of the government. Its chairperson and its governors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. It was created by law but was granted substantial independence from political influence. By and large this is seen by economists as a good thing; independent central banks can fight inflation with more credibility if the major branches of government don't have the power to print money. What money the Fed does make -- profits, that is, after paying its own expenses -- the Fed pays back to the Treasury.
Your analogy to Federal Express is just wrong. You might make an argument for the USPS (at least in a historical context, if not how it exists now), but that is still tenuous. The Fed isn't private in any of the usual aspects: no other shareholders, profits returned to the Treasury, and its management is appointed by the typical President/Senate combo.
I'd hope that instead of spending that time patching iOS 3 they just try to release iOS 4 for iPad much sooner (that'd probably be the largest gain, after that if they really want they can work on porting the changes so the people with an original iPhone have security fixes, but I don't actually know the if the numbers would make it worthwhile).
You have to support recent releases of your operating system with security updates, as not everyone is going to upgrade to the latest and greatest OS for any number of reasons. Lots of people with the 3G are reporting performance issues with iOS 4 (and few benefits). Until this release, OS updates for the ipod touch weren't free as well.
This becomes extremely important in the enterprise, where changes are handled more carefully. These mobile platforms seem to be way too fast of a moving target, though. Even Mac OS X gets deprecated fairly quickly relative to enterprise schedules. It's clear that Apple just isn't targeting them, which I think is a shame.
There have been no ipad core OS updates of any kind since its release. This includes expected improvements like software tweaks to make wifi more reliable. There were rumors that the ibooks app was released on the App Store so it could get more frequent updates than the core OS, yet it has only had one major update (yesterday's, adding PDF support and a few other features).
Web rendering engines have security vulnerabilities, and webkit is no exception. Since Apple allows no competing renderers (alternative browsers still use webkit), it has an even greater responsibility to push security updates at least as often as they do for Mac OS X. Hopefully the official iOS 4 release means the developers/QA people have some time to work on iOS 3 patching.
The problem is that a soldered card takes up a lot less room in the device than a card + carrier.
On the iphone this might be true, but why no SD slot on the ipad? Granted, the internal flash of these devices is generally faster than most SD cards, but Apple is likely making a tidy profit off the larger-capacity ipads. Teardowns of the device show large empty spaces all around the edges.
The maximum storage capacity of the iphone maxes out at 32G, while the ipod touch goes up to 64G. I suppose that's comparable to the HTC's incredible maximum capacity of 40G (via 8 GB internal and 32 GB microsd card), but it's unfortunate that there isn't a larger option. The iphone really seems capable of replacing many mp3 players for reasonably sized collections, but with apps and music it's not hard to hit 32G.
And, of course, it would really kill Apple's profit margins to actually offer an SD slot...Oh well.
A second screen seems less useful than a keyboard, so I'd rather just have the latest tablet offering from Lenovo/HP/etc which converts to a tablet mode with a pen. 5.5 lb is way too heavy to be used like a book (people complain about the ipad's 1.5 lb feeling heavy), though I suppose it's comparable to very large textbook. Still, a now-standard tablet with an extra-large battery and some decent software can do most of what this hopes to do and act as a primary laptop, all for around the same price ($800-$1000).
I like the idea of hiding all panels... but how do you make them visible again later? Mouse hover is the traditional way, but we don't have a mouse to work with. Maybe through a gesture that "drags" them out from the screen edge?
ipad/iphone apps often run into this. The simple solution is to use the multi-touch recognition. For some apps (e.g. Atomic Web browser), it is a three finger tap anywhere on the screen to go "fullscreen". For others (e.g. Kindle apps), it's a single tap near the center. Recognizing taps is fast and reliable. The accuracy of drags depends on whether dragging does anything else in the app (like scrolling through a document, or flipping to the next page).
I'm already annoyed at the Netflix app for the Wii coming on disc instead of stored to the flash (word is it may be licensing issues; the app works spectacularly, by the way).
For really graphics intensive games, we'll still be seeing game sizes in the tens of gigabytes. Flash is cheap, but it isn't that cheap (nor is the cheap stuff particularly fast. SD card transfer speeds are pretty pathetic). For most games, I think there will at least be a download option, ala Steam. Instant gratification from your purchase, and it allows for smaller, cheaper games to become popular (World of Goo).
The physical disc does have a few advantages - you can bring it to a friend's house and easily re-sell it. Still, a really nice system would simply be an "export to USB drive/SD card" option which temporarily disables the game on the console and puts a valid copy on the USB key. The USB key's copy is valid for a fixed period of time. Sales could, in principle, be done via electronic transfer (though game publishers will be thrilled to cutoff the used game market if they can do it legally).
So I think we'll see the really big games continue to get distributed on optical media (it's cheap), and more games distributed both on optical media and download. Since this last generation of consoles, hard drives have gotten much, much larger and cheaper relative to average game size. The next gen consoles will almost certainly have 1-3 TB drives built into them, standard. But ROM cartridges or substantial use of flash cartridges? I'm not seeing it.
But it seems ineffective to me in the sense that fonts are only protected through government-enforced monopoly (copyright).
Actually, the font name is protected by trademark, the font code (e.g. postscript) is protected by copyright, but the font (typeface) design itself is not protected by anything. This is a historical thing, but in practice it means you can pay some font designer money to copy the design of a typeface precisely. There are plenty of examples, but perhaps one of the most common is that Arial is nearly indistinguishable from Helvetica for almost all letters.
Not that creating the font code is trivial, but this concept has an important implication for derivative works: you can make minor improvements to an existing typeface design and owe no royalties to the original typeface designer.
For all that openness, we certainly seem to have no shortage of quality fonts. True, we have a vast array of truly terrible ones, but there are an increasing number of free ones worth using.
I can't be the only one who doesn't want to pay for an expensive 3G data plan with the ability to tether (or worse, a data-only card). The vast majority of the time I want to use the internet I'm around wifi connections (home, work, coffee shops, etc).
I like to travel, but it hardly seems worth getting 3G internet access for the fraction of a year I'm on the road. So I certainly look for internet access in hotels. Though you have to be smart about it - we found an awesome hotel in London for a lot cheaper than most places of its class, but internet access was a daily charge. That charge simply meant we paid for access for one day instead of the three days we were there, and all was fine (we saved a few hundred bucks relative to its closest competition). Hotel prices can vary so much that ponying up for a $15/day internet access charge can still make sense (or just finding a local coffee shop). $2-4 is a small price to pay for internet access and a coffee for a while.
If I spent more time in airports, though, I might be inclined to get 3G access. So many airports I've been in have no free access anywhere near my gate. It hardly seems worth paying for a few hours though. I just make sure I have enough to keep myself occupied offline (and try to find a plug for my laptop, which is not at all easy in some airports).
So yeah, I'll stick with my prepaid phone service (averaging about $20/mo in calls and texts) and seek out wifi when I travel. Now, if my income doubled...
I thought this affected anyone running XP SP3, which I expect would be a majority of enterprise desktops, not less than half of one percent.
You had to be running versions 8.7 or 8.9 it seems to be affected. 8.0 or 8.5 did not exhibit this problem, even if the virus definitions were updated to 5958.
It wouldn't surprise me if the enterprise rollouts of McAfee often used 8.5 (released in Nov 2006) rather than 8.7 (released in Sep 2008) or newer.
That's not entirely an operating system issue. CSS support for multiple column layout of text would be nice. And to be clear, I'm referring to CSS outdividing the text into the columns within a given div - not creating columns for menus et al.
Agreed - the web is even more poorly suited to high DPI screens than operating systems. Cellphones are "solving" the problem with hardware-accelerated pinch zooming, but obviously bitmaps suffer a bit when you do that. Still, the multi-column thing is more a problem of physical screen size. If I had a 3840x2160 22" monitor, a browser could reasonably zoom every website by 2x and scale the fonts natively (unlike the ipad's rendering of iphone apps...). In-between resolutions are hard, as static images look "off" scaled by small factors. My experience with upscaling DVDs is that video looks very natural scaled. Since we regularly watch DVDs upscaled to 1080p, it would not be hard or look strange to watch blu-ray movies upscaled to 1440 or whatever.
Then split your 1920-pixel-wide monitor into two 960-pixel-wide windows. In Windows XP, for example, control-click two browser windows in the taskbar, right-click one, and choose one of the Tile options.
Sure - I often have my browser less wide these days (though 960 is pretty narrow). The solution though should be more elegant than manipulating windows by hand - as the other poster said, widening your window should create multiple columns on websites, like a physical newspaper. The NYTimes app for the ipad has the right idea; you switch it to landscape mode and it gives you more columns. Still, the ipad could benefit tremendously from a doubling of the DPI; fonts would look less fuzzy when zoomed out, and text could be made justified in columns instead of left-aligned by carefully positioning the letters and spacing.
Still, these are somewhat separate issues. Physically wide screens require unmaximized windows to work correctly. Very high DPI screens require the software to adjust fonts, widgets, toolbars, etc. to be large enough to see and use. Honestly, given the prevalence of bitmapped graphics on the web, it will take a long, long time for it to look natural on a larger DPI screen at the same physical size./.'s "News for Nerds" text on a 300 DPI screen would be unreadably small.
If it was really just HDTV, we'd see 3840x2160 screens at maybe the 24" or 27" size. Instead, I think the primary factor is the operating system. Poorly scalable icons, widgets, and other elements of the UI. Websites too - many are either fixed width or simply horrible looking when stretched too wide. It's tedious to read Slashdot full screen on a large monitor because the text scrolls too far horizontally. Still, I long for the day when we can nearly eliminate antialiasing on fonts.
Some of these problems are non-trivial to solve. UI design is a lot easier when you can have pixel precision. SVG is only now being universally adopted and required re-doing icons in vector format.
Sure, some laptops have a higher DPI - I paid a premium on my Thinkpad to get a little better resolution. Yet I commonly see users with poor eyesight setting their LCD resolution below 1:1 to make everything bigger. Since XP lasted so long, there were only a limited number of ways to make it somewhat usable on a high DPI screen. Things like toolbars were still fixed in pixel size, though.
Many 22" screens are still 1680x1050, so not that many desktop displays have hit the 1080p size. On the other hand, Apple's 27" iMac is 2560x1440. Not that Apple will ship with blu-ray drives any time soon, so many movies will just be upscaled DVDs anyway. But 2560x1440 on a 20" screen? Most OSes would do pretty poorly with it (even Mac OS X).
No no no, you sell them at higher prices of course, through bidding wars. The reason why you can get them in the first place is because of the free money that is given to you, and so you buy huge amounts with discounts. Discounts are the key and you get discounts by having lots of money. Free money.
You can because you are a preferred corporations who is getting a ridiculously low interest rate on the cash that you are paying for the T-Bills. All you need to do is sell them to someone who is not getting the same interest rate for the short money - cash, and then make a percent or two in profit. Wow, what a concept.
Where the money comes from is irrelevant for this point. At the end of the sale, the "preferred corporation" ends up with cash - exactly where it started before it purchases the t-bill. The point is that the price of that t-bill is the same for both the "preferred corporation" and everybody else. There's no profit if you sell the t-bill for exactly what you paid for it.
But 10-30 year T-Bills are around 4-5%, and because the money that the Fed gives out to the banks is at near 0% (and you are right, the discount rate was increased by a quarter of a percentage point about a month ago) it just makes sense to take all of that cash and then buy those long term bonds, hoarding them.
But you can't borrow from the Fed at 0.75% for 10-30 years! The discount window short term.
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed a few have Kindle versions, but Stanza and its store has nearly the entire library. I guess this way O'Reilly gets the full purchase price rather than 70%.
So it would appear. I often check Retail Me Not for online store codes.
Once you have a decent ereader device, DRM-free ebooks seem like the perfect solution for tech books. Searchable, no marginal weight for otherwise heavy books, etc. What's interesting to me is that the DRM-free epubs can't be loaded directly onto my ipad in the BN or ibooks app; via dropbox, I was only able to send the epub to GoodReader or Stanza (which is fine, the Stanza reader is really nice). I think the ibooks app can transfer epub files via USB and iTunes, but that's a pain (I sync very, very rarely, since I don't use Windows or Mac OS X much). Not sure what's up with the BN reader app; the nook device can handle epubs via USB mass storage transfer.
As an (occasional) R user, I am excited to see a well-reviewed O'Reilly book on the language. I went and checked the major ebook stores - Amazon, BN, and Stanza, and none had the title.
It turns out that in addition to the Safari books service, O'Reilly also sells DRM-free copies in epub, mobi, and PDF formats. This book is available here. It's not a huge discount over the printed version on Amazon ($6.50 less), though. I'm surprised, then, that it isn't available via the major stores.
The software update for iOS 4 released yesterday changes the formula determining the number of bars. What's really interesting to me is that it in general it will result in fewer bars (because the old difference between 3 and 4 bars was miniscule in terms of actual signal strength). In some circumstances it was easy to go from 5 bars to 2 bars with only a small change in the signal.
In practice, though, what this means is that people who used to get 4 bars in their house might now get 2 bars and think their signal problem got worse. None of this has any effect on dropped calls, of course, but I would expect that people might actually complain more about the iphone 4 antenna after this update.
Not to mention that because Apple pushes out OS updates as complete packages, it's a several hundred megabyte download.
In the end, giving out free cases was the only sensible solution. It's a shame that the bumper appears somewhat poorly designed - it won't connect well with older, slightly fatter connection cables. It blows my mind that they didn't come up with a simple non-conductive coating for the exposed antenna to reduce this problem in the first place.
Couldn't they simply authorize a transaction for, say, 2x the amount on the bill? Then you specify how much you want to tip, the the transaction actually goes through. It's my understanding that pre-authorization of certain amounts is a routine part of the credit card system.
Even for those of us with chip-less credit cards, the European system is more secure, though. No waitstaff takes your card for 10 minutes and does whatever they want with it.
No. The President and Congress appoint and confirm the governors. Congress retains the authority to pass new laws affecting the Federal Reserve. Historically, they themselves avoid doing this because the independence of the central bank is seen as a good thing; an independent central bank has greater credibility in fighting inflation, and credibility is important in monetary policy.
One correction: member banks technically own shares in the branches, but they are not traded.
You can say that all you want, but to quote the Fed itself:
It is part of the government, but independent of the three branches.
No, the Federal Reserve is part of the government. Its chairperson and its governors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. It was created by law but was granted substantial independence from political influence. By and large this is seen by economists as a good thing; independent central banks can fight inflation with more credibility if the major branches of government don't have the power to print money. What money the Fed does make -- profits, that is, after paying its own expenses -- the Fed pays back to the Treasury.
Your analogy to Federal Express is just wrong. You might make an argument for the USPS (at least in a historical context, if not how it exists now), but that is still tenuous. The Fed isn't private in any of the usual aspects: no other shareholders, profits returned to the Treasury, and its management is appointed by the typical President/Senate combo.
You have to support recent releases of your operating system with security updates, as not everyone is going to upgrade to the latest and greatest OS for any number of reasons. Lots of people with the 3G are reporting performance issues with iOS 4 (and few benefits). Until this release, OS updates for the ipod touch weren't free as well.
This becomes extremely important in the enterprise, where changes are handled more carefully. These mobile platforms seem to be way too fast of a moving target, though. Even Mac OS X gets deprecated fairly quickly relative to enterprise schedules. It's clear that Apple just isn't targeting them, which I think is a shame.
There have been no ipad core OS updates of any kind since its release. This includes expected improvements like software tweaks to make wifi more reliable. There were rumors that the ibooks app was released on the App Store so it could get more frequent updates than the core OS, yet it has only had one major update (yesterday's, adding PDF support and a few other features).
Web rendering engines have security vulnerabilities, and webkit is no exception. Since Apple allows no competing renderers (alternative browsers still use webkit), it has an even greater responsibility to push security updates at least as often as they do for Mac OS X. Hopefully the official iOS 4 release means the developers/QA people have some time to work on iOS 3 patching.
On the iphone this might be true, but why no SD slot on the ipad? Granted, the internal flash of these devices is generally faster than most SD cards, but Apple is likely making a tidy profit off the larger-capacity ipads. Teardowns of the device show large empty spaces all around the edges.
The maximum storage capacity of the iphone maxes out at 32G, while the ipod touch goes up to 64G. I suppose that's comparable to the HTC's incredible maximum capacity of 40G (via 8 GB internal and 32 GB microsd card), but it's unfortunate that there isn't a larger option. The iphone really seems capable of replacing many mp3 players for reasonably sized collections, but with apps and music it's not hard to hit 32G.
And, of course, it would really kill Apple's profit margins to actually offer an SD slot...Oh well.
A second screen seems less useful than a keyboard, so I'd rather just have the latest tablet offering from Lenovo/HP/etc which converts to a tablet mode with a pen. 5.5 lb is way too heavy to be used like a book (people complain about the ipad's 1.5 lb feeling heavy), though I suppose it's comparable to very large textbook. Still, a now-standard tablet with an extra-large battery and some decent software can do most of what this hopes to do and act as a primary laptop, all for around the same price ($800-$1000).
ipad/iphone apps often run into this. The simple solution is to use the multi-touch recognition. For some apps (e.g. Atomic Web browser), it is a three finger tap anywhere on the screen to go "fullscreen". For others (e.g. Kindle apps), it's a single tap near the center. Recognizing taps is fast and reliable. The accuracy of drags depends on whether dragging does anything else in the app (like scrolling through a document, or flipping to the next page).
I'm already annoyed at the Netflix app for the Wii coming on disc instead of stored to the flash (word is it may be licensing issues; the app works spectacularly, by the way).
For really graphics intensive games, we'll still be seeing game sizes in the tens of gigabytes. Flash is cheap, but it isn't that cheap (nor is the cheap stuff particularly fast. SD card transfer speeds are pretty pathetic). For most games, I think there will at least be a download option, ala Steam. Instant gratification from your purchase, and it allows for smaller, cheaper games to become popular (World of Goo).
The physical disc does have a few advantages - you can bring it to a friend's house and easily re-sell it. Still, a really nice system would simply be an "export to USB drive/SD card" option which temporarily disables the game on the console and puts a valid copy on the USB key. The USB key's copy is valid for a fixed period of time. Sales could, in principle, be done via electronic transfer (though game publishers will be thrilled to cutoff the used game market if they can do it legally).
So I think we'll see the really big games continue to get distributed on optical media (it's cheap), and more games distributed both on optical media and download. Since this last generation of consoles, hard drives have gotten much, much larger and cheaper relative to average game size. The next gen consoles will almost certainly have 1-3 TB drives built into them, standard. But ROM cartridges or substantial use of flash cartridges? I'm not seeing it.
Actually, the font name is protected by trademark, the font code (e.g. postscript) is protected by copyright, but the font (typeface) design itself is not protected by anything. This is a historical thing, but in practice it means you can pay some font designer money to copy the design of a typeface precisely. There are plenty of examples, but perhaps one of the most common is that Arial is nearly indistinguishable from Helvetica for almost all letters.
Not that creating the font code is trivial, but this concept has an important implication for derivative works: you can make minor improvements to an existing typeface design and owe no royalties to the original typeface designer.
For all that openness, we certainly seem to have no shortage of quality fonts. True, we have a vast array of truly terrible ones, but there are an increasing number of free ones worth using.
I can't be the only one who doesn't want to pay for an expensive 3G data plan with the ability to tether (or worse, a data-only card). The vast majority of the time I want to use the internet I'm around wifi connections (home, work, coffee shops, etc).
I like to travel, but it hardly seems worth getting 3G internet access for the fraction of a year I'm on the road. So I certainly look for internet access in hotels. Though you have to be smart about it - we found an awesome hotel in London for a lot cheaper than most places of its class, but internet access was a daily charge. That charge simply meant we paid for access for one day instead of the three days we were there, and all was fine (we saved a few hundred bucks relative to its closest competition). Hotel prices can vary so much that ponying up for a $15/day internet access charge can still make sense (or just finding a local coffee shop). $2-4 is a small price to pay for internet access and a coffee for a while.
If I spent more time in airports, though, I might be inclined to get 3G access. So many airports I've been in have no free access anywhere near my gate. It hardly seems worth paying for a few hours though. I just make sure I have enough to keep myself occupied offline (and try to find a plug for my laptop, which is not at all easy in some airports).
So yeah, I'll stick with my prepaid phone service (averaging about $20/mo in calls and texts) and seek out wifi when I travel. Now, if my income doubled...
You had to be running versions 8.7 or 8.9 it seems to be affected. 8.0 or 8.5 did not exhibit this problem, even if the virus definitions were updated to 5958.
It wouldn't surprise me if the enterprise rollouts of McAfee often used 8.5 (released in Nov 2006) rather than 8.7 (released in Sep 2008) or newer.
Agreed - the web is even more poorly suited to high DPI screens than operating systems. Cellphones are "solving" the problem with hardware-accelerated pinch zooming, but obviously bitmaps suffer a bit when you do that. Still, the multi-column thing is more a problem of physical screen size. If I had a 3840x2160 22" monitor, a browser could reasonably zoom every website by 2x and scale the fonts natively (unlike the ipad's rendering of iphone apps...). In-between resolutions are hard, as static images look "off" scaled by small factors. My experience with upscaling DVDs is that video looks very natural scaled. Since we regularly watch DVDs upscaled to 1080p, it would not be hard or look strange to watch blu-ray movies upscaled to 1440 or whatever.
Sure - I often have my browser less wide these days (though 960 is pretty narrow). The solution though should be more elegant than manipulating windows by hand - as the other poster said, widening your window should create multiple columns on websites, like a physical newspaper. The NYTimes app for the ipad has the right idea; you switch it to landscape mode and it gives you more columns. Still, the ipad could benefit tremendously from a doubling of the DPI; fonts would look less fuzzy when zoomed out, and text could be made justified in columns instead of left-aligned by carefully positioning the letters and spacing.
Still, these are somewhat separate issues. Physically wide screens require unmaximized windows to work correctly. Very high DPI screens require the software to adjust fonts, widgets, toolbars, etc. to be large enough to see and use. Honestly, given the prevalence of bitmapped graphics on the web, it will take a long, long time for it to look natural on a larger DPI screen at the same physical size. /.'s "News for Nerds" text on a 300 DPI screen would be unreadably small.
If it was really just HDTV, we'd see 3840x2160 screens at maybe the 24" or 27" size. Instead, I think the primary factor is the operating system. Poorly scalable icons, widgets, and other elements of the UI. Websites too - many are either fixed width or simply horrible looking when stretched too wide. It's tedious to read Slashdot full screen on a large monitor because the text scrolls too far horizontally. Still, I long for the day when we can nearly eliminate antialiasing on fonts.
Some of these problems are non-trivial to solve. UI design is a lot easier when you can have pixel precision. SVG is only now being universally adopted and required re-doing icons in vector format.
Sure, some laptops have a higher DPI - I paid a premium on my Thinkpad to get a little better resolution. Yet I commonly see users with poor eyesight setting their LCD resolution below 1:1 to make everything bigger. Since XP lasted so long, there were only a limited number of ways to make it somewhat usable on a high DPI screen. Things like toolbars were still fixed in pixel size, though.
Many 22" screens are still 1680x1050, so not that many desktop displays have hit the 1080p size. On the other hand, Apple's 27" iMac is 2560x1440. Not that Apple will ship with blu-ray drives any time soon, so many movies will just be upscaled DVDs anyway. But 2560x1440 on a 20" screen? Most OSes would do pretty poorly with it (even Mac OS X).
[citation needed]
Where the money comes from is irrelevant for this point. At the end of the sale, the "preferred corporation" ends up with cash - exactly where it started before it purchases the t-bill. The point is that the price of that t-bill is the same for both the "preferred corporation" and everybody else. There's no profit if you sell the t-bill for exactly what you paid for it.
Wow, no. How can you buy t-bills for lower than what you sell them for? The buyers can just go straight to the source to buy them.
But you can't borrow from the Fed at 0.75% for 10-30 years! The discount window short term.