You know, if you had actually bothered to read the article, you'd see that they're not so much building what we would think of as a "road", just flattening out some ice, filling some crevasses, etc. The environmental impact of this is nil... even environmentalist groups familiar with the plan think so.
Of course, I really can't blame you, given the ridiculous headline about a "highway" being constructed.
Hey guys, how quickly we forget our video gaming history! Wing Commander was made by Origin (anyone recall that "Lord British" guy?), which was, sadly, gobbled up by EA.
"In its day, Ultima 7 was one of the most complex and detailed RPG's ever made."
Actually, I would maintain that it is STILL the most complex and detailed RPG ever made. Sure, we've got some wonderful RPGs with lots of eye candy and great gameplay today, but I honestly don't think that I have ever seen anything like Ultima 7 in terms of the sheer scope of the world in which it takes place... the content of that game is just HUGE! Has anyone seen anything comparable? If so, clue me in, because I'd love to play that game.
I agree with the Evil Adrian. The point of a computer science education is to impart a general understanding of algorithms, problem solving, etc. that can be a foundation for working on any sort of computing application, not just video games. Complaining that universities don't try to explicitly train people to make video games is like complaining the universities don't explicitly train people to engineer cars. I mean, how are any cars going to get built without automotive engineering majors? Well, guess what? There are plenty of people who major in mechanical engineering and don't learn a single thing about the specifics of automotive engineering... yet somehow, some of these people end up designing cars. How does this happen? They learn general principles of engineering that are applicable to building all sorts of mechanical devices.
As soon as this story was posted, this discussion forum seemed to turn into a Solaris-bashing free-for-all, filled with a bunch of uninformed attacks on the performance of Solaris and a bunch of trolling about how Linux or BSD performs so much better. These are the same kind of people who complain about Microsoft spreading lies (FUD) about Linux, but these hypocrites have no problems doing the same regarding Solaris, because it doesn't fit into their open source ideology.
I have been a Linux user for years, and I love Linux for lots of reasons. But I make my living doing parallel/numerical computing research and I know from runnings lots and lots of performance studies that Solaris beats Linux handily in several situations. I have seen vastly better performance under Solaris (compared to Linux) with some of my codes because of better cache management, superior mmap() implementation, and better job scheduling in the presence of system memory shortages. Solaris isn't just a unix that is for people "too stupid" to use a free OS. There is a huge amount of manpower devoted to its development, and in many respects it is quite clever. For certain categories of codes, it outperforms Linux handily. I'm not saying that Solaris is better than Linux. I am saying that it is foolish and ignorant to bash the performance of Solaris simply because it is not open source.
Lost in the noise here is the fact that anyone who knows anything about glaciology knows that there are lots of ongoing examples of glacier shrinkage that are most certainly not caused by industrial CO2, and there are good reasons to believe that Kilimanjaro is one of those examples (read the study). Human induced global warming is indeed an important problem, but it seems that little rational discussion takes place because BOTH sides seem willing to only "understand" the science in a manner that promotes their cause.
You know, lots of states have been using (closed source! GASP!) computerized voting systems for years, WITHOUT PROBLEMS. The fact that something is not open source does NOT mean that it will not work. Stop the unwarranted sensationalism.
Slashdot is about the sorriest example of "journalism" that I have come across.
>I await solid arguments to the contrary --- ie, > arguments that don't start from any of the > following premises: > 1. But he was a boy genius at CalTech and Feynman said so!
But, but... he was a boy genius at Eton! That proves everything!
...to tell us how "great" he is? This book is a more of a self-tribute than anything else; a work of megalomania, not science. Of course, who am I to judge the work of "the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today", as he claims to be. I'm obviously unqualified, because although I make my living as a researcher in scientific computing, I've yet to encounter a single important innovation in this field due to Dr. Wolfram. This is obviously an example of my shocking ignorance. =)
If you aren't lazy, A BICYCLE IS FASTER.
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't understand what is so great about this invention. The fact is, any able-bodied person who is willing to do only a moderate amount of exercise can achieve the necessary level of fitness needed to ride a bicycle faster than the maxiumum speed of this thing for several hours. A decent bicycle is
1) Faster.
2) Less expensive.
3) Does not suffer limitations inherent from batteries.
4) Does not cause pollution (the battery power does have to come from some power plant, you know).
4) Keeps you fit, as an added benefit.
Sure, cities would be nicer places if most people used these scooters... but the same would be true if people would stop being so lazy and ride a bike!
The write-up for this article is just a tad bit misleading. The 32 TFLOPS figure is the "theoretical peak". This is a favorite number for hardware manufacturers to quote, since the theoretical peak far, far exceeds what anyone will see in practice, even when solving the most amenable of problems. To suppose that this hardware will get anywhere near 32 TFLOPS during actual use is just nuts.
Yeah, historical documents record similar ocurrences when a new technology called "writing" was developed. Those short-sighted fools, writing things down instead of just trying to remember them. Just look where it got them.
Just want to point out that this isn't a panacea that will solve all of the endangered species problems. It seems that some people are way too overly optimistic about finding appropriate surrogate mothers. This is very difficult, even when you have a surrogate mother of the same species. In fact, this is the major obstacle in most attempts to clone vertebrates. We have gotten to the point that cloning embryos has become quite easy, but getting a mother to carry them to term can be extremely difficult. For instance, ask anyone who has tried to clone pigs. Embryonic development will not proceed normally unless at least 4 embryos are implanted in the uterus--and getting four embryos within the same time span so that they can be implanted at the same time is NOT EASY. Now imagine trying this feat with a mother that is not even the same species. Your chances just aren't that good for many species.
Note also that this is not the first time that a surrogate mother of a different species from the child has been used successfully. In November of 1999 an ordinary housecat gave birth to an African wildcat.
I'm continually amazed at the authority that a Ph.D. degree confers. Did it ever occur to anyone that Stephen Hawking doesn't know what in the world he's talking about in this case? The man's a cosmologist, and a damn good one. But that certainly doesn't make him an expert on all scientific fields, and, judging from this article, his knowledge of the geosciences doesn't amount to a hill of beans. The opinions of atmospheric scientists are much more relevant--after all, they spend their lives studying this stuff.
(Just for the record, yes, IAAGP (I am a geophysicist).)
I wasn't really making any statement regarding electric cars one way or the other, only mentioning the subject as a context in which many people demonstrate their total ignorance of simple thermodynamics.
You make some interesting and valid points, but I'm not convinced that purely electric cars win out over what can be done with the emerging "hybrid" car technology. And keep in mind that the 20% loss in transmission isn't the only loss that you're going to get. Power losses are also incurred in recharging batteries, batteries lose voltage to the atmosphere, batteries degrade over time; etc.
IMHO, I think that one of our biggest problems is just... way too many cars.
Since the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen anyway, my guess is that most of that liquid nitrogen would come FROM THE ATMOSPHERE. Hence, releasing it back into the atmosphere would amount to.... well, jack shit.
And where will all of this liquid nitrogen come from...that's the main question that comes to mind. Unlike, say, fossil fuels, we don't have liquid nitrogen just sitting around in our natural environment on earth. Sure, you could use liquid nitrogen as suggested as a propellant, but WHERE WILL YOU GET IT? There is a great abundance of nitrogen on earth, but NOT in liquid form. We have to spend plenty of energy to get it into the liquid phase that is needed. So this idea doesn't really solve anyone's energy problems... alas, we are once again defeated by the all-pervasive first law of thermodynamics. Remember, if you're going to use something as a fuel it has to store potential energy in some form. Unfortunately, if you're going to take advantage of the potential energy stored in liquid nitrogen, first you're going to have to put that energy in yourself, since there aren't stores of liquid nitrogen just waiting for us underground a la fossil fuels.
This sort of reminds me of people who think, "In the future, we'll all have electric cars, and then pollution due to fossil fuels will disappear." Doesn't occur to some of these people to think of where all that electricity is going to come from.
(BTW, I realize that the engineer proposing this surely didn't have resolving our energy problems in mind, but it seems that many/.'ers are interpreting it this way. Hence I felt the need for this post.)
Yes, meteorites are extremely rare. That's why scientists go wandering around on the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica just to look for the things. Every one that they find they study extensively. But hey--why examine them to understand the isotope chemistry of the solar system or even to find clues as to the origin of life? Cut them up instead to make a profit selling ostentatious knives that will never get used!
Of course, the reason that they can do this is because they are using a *Monte Carlo* method, not the finite difference/element/volume techniques that are employed for weather prediction. Monte Carlo methods lend themselves extremely well to parallelization. However, you can't use them (not in any practical manner, anyway) to numerically solve the Navier-Stokes equations at the resolution needed to weather predictions. You have to resort to using a more direct method such as finite differences, which WILL require lots of message passing because you can't uncouple the different regions of the problem domain.
Actually, I don't think it's all that surprising that this was done by a ground-based telescope. The main problem with ground-based observations is that the achievable resolution is severely limited by atmospheric turbulence that causes distortion of the image. The main problem with observing extremely distant objects isn't one of resolution, though, it is a problem of having mirrors with enough collecting area to gather the extremely faint light from the distant sources. It's true that you have atmospheric attenuation by scattering, etc., when you are using a ground-based telescope, but, on the other hand, you can make your mirrors as big as your budget will allow, really. The size isn't constrained by concerns of getting the thing into orbit. The giant ground-based telescopes can do very well regarding their light collection. Where they can't compete with Hubble is resolving power. Even with the best adaptive imaging techniques you can only do so much about that pesky atmosphere.
Don't believe all this hype and go sell your Crays just yet. What many people fail to realize is that the total number of achievable MFLOPS of all the nodes in a parallel machine IS NOT a very meaningful measure of how powerful or useful the machine is. This ignores the nature of the interconnect between the processors, memory, etc., which is *extremely* important in most parallel computations, and is what makes supercomputers so damned expensive. This stuff is not Ethernet! For many types of parallel applications, Ethernet becomes such a bottleneck that no advantages can be realized from parallelizing an application.
The generation of fractal clusters is a classic example of what are known as "embarassingly parallel" problems in parallel computing circles. As you iterate points in the set, their evolution is independent, so a minimum of message passing is required. (In computer science-ese, "the computational graph is disconnected"). With even the crummiest of interconnects, you can get good results out of parallelizing these fractal cluster generators because the only thing that will really make a difference is the total number of FLOPS acheivable by each of the nodes. Fractal set generation is just not a very meaningful benchmark.
But consider, say, a finite-element model where every point in your grid is affected by its neighbors. Then you need to do lots of message passing, and the nature of the interconnect becomes orders of magnitude more important. In this case, I guarantee you that a commercial supercomputer is going to beat the pants off of any cluster machine. This is not to say that cluster machines aren't useful, but a real "supercomputer" still has its place.
My mind fails to comprehend how the patent office could err enough to grant a patent on this. (That said, I bet that they will.)
If the patent office grants this, it could perhaps be the most bogus patent they have yet awarded. This approximation is an eternal mathematical truth, and, as such, I hardly think it qualifies as being anyone's sole intellectual property. For God's sake, it's truth doesn't even depend on the existence of the material universe! This would be more ridiculous than allowing Newton to patent F=ma.
I think that you have missed my point entirely. My point isn't that "smart" people should be allowed to vote, while "stupid" people shouldn't. Every adult citizen has an equal right to vote. I'm simply questioning the wisdom of doing something that encourages people to vote who don't consider elections important enough to take the time to actually go to a voting booth.
What I currently question most about Internet voting are the security issues. However, I think that, in time, these can be worked out. Internet voting sounds like a good idea... increase voter turnout, etc., etc. But is that *really* such a good idea? Think about how many apathetic people there are who don't really follow politics at all and don't bother to vote because they don't think it's even worth the effort it takes to go out and do it. Do we really who don't even care enough to go out and vote determining the fate of our nation? Internet voting makes it easier for the more apathetic folks to vote... people whose knowledge of the issues likely only goes so far as the last smear ad they heard.
Personally, I think it would be great to be able to vote from my home or office and avoid the trouble of having to go and stand in line to vote. But this may be a case of something that is good for a few people (the informed ones, in this case), but, when extended to everyone, ends up being a bad idea.
I have been buying from Amazon since most people didn't know of their existence, and I have always been very pleased with their service. However, because they are resorting to tactics such as this, they have just lost a customer. And I'm going to make sure that they know that. It's important for the online community to let them know that we won't tolerate that sort of underhanded business practice. It's bad for all of us.
The worst bn.com does, the better for Amazon. With less competition, they can raise their prices. They are screwing bn.com over, and more importantly, trying to do the same to the rest of us. I urge everyone to write to Amazon denouncing this tactic and to boycott them until they stop such idiocy.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, if you had actually bothered to read the article, you'd see that they're not so much building what we would think of as a "road", just flattening out some ice, filling some crevasses, etc. The environmental impact of this is nil... even environmentalist groups familiar with the plan think so.
Of course, I really can't blame you, given the ridiculous headline about a "highway" being constructed.
Hey guys, how quickly we forget our video gaming history! Wing Commander was made by Origin (anyone recall that "Lord British" guy?), which was, sadly, gobbled up by EA.
"In its day, Ultima 7 was one of the most complex and detailed RPG's ever made."
Actually, I would maintain that it is STILL the most complex and detailed RPG ever made. Sure, we've got some wonderful RPGs with lots of eye candy and great gameplay today, but I honestly don't think that I have ever seen anything like Ultima 7 in terms of the sheer scope of the world in which it takes place... the content of that game is just HUGE! Has anyone seen anything comparable? If so, clue me in, because I'd love to play that game.
I agree with the Evil Adrian. The point of a computer science education is to impart a general understanding of algorithms, problem solving, etc. that can be a foundation for working on any sort of computing application, not just video games. Complaining that universities don't try to explicitly train people to make video games is like complaining the universities don't explicitly train people to engineer cars. I mean, how are any cars going to get built without automotive engineering majors? Well, guess what? There are plenty of people who major in mechanical engineering and don't learn a single thing about the specifics of automotive engineering... yet somehow, some of these people end up designing cars. How does this happen? They learn general principles of engineering that are applicable to building all sorts of mechanical devices.
As soon as this story was posted, this discussion forum seemed to turn into a Solaris-bashing free-for-all, filled with a bunch of uninformed attacks on the performance of Solaris and a bunch of trolling about how Linux or BSD performs so much better. These are the same kind of people who complain about Microsoft spreading lies (FUD) about Linux, but these hypocrites have no problems doing the same regarding Solaris, because it doesn't fit into their open source ideology.
I have been a Linux user for years, and I love Linux for lots of reasons. But I make my living doing parallel/numerical computing research and I know from runnings lots and lots of performance studies that Solaris beats Linux handily in several situations. I have seen vastly better performance under Solaris (compared to Linux) with some of my codes because of better cache management, superior mmap() implementation, and better job scheduling in the presence of system memory shortages. Solaris isn't just a unix that is for people "too stupid" to use a free OS. There is a huge amount of manpower devoted to its development, and in many respects it is quite clever. For certain categories of codes, it outperforms Linux handily. I'm not saying that Solaris is better than Linux. I am saying that it is foolish and ignorant to bash the performance of Solaris simply because it is not open source.
Lost in the noise here is the fact that anyone who knows anything about glaciology knows that there are lots of ongoing examples of glacier shrinkage that are most certainly not caused by industrial CO2, and there are good reasons to believe that Kilimanjaro is one of those examples (read the study). Human induced global warming is indeed an important problem, but it seems that little rational discussion takes place because BOTH sides seem willing to only "understand" the science in a manner that promotes their cause.
You know, lots of states have been using (closed source! GASP!) computerized voting systems for years, WITHOUT PROBLEMS. The fact that something is not open source does NOT mean that it will not work. Stop the unwarranted sensationalism.
Slashdot is about the sorriest example of "journalism" that I have come across.
>I await solid arguments to the contrary --- ie,
> arguments that don't start from any of the
> following premises:
> 1. But he was a boy genius at CalTech and Feynman said so!
But, but... he was a boy genius at Eton! That proves everything!
...to tell us how "great" he is? This book is a more of a self-tribute than anything else; a work of megalomania, not science. Of course, who am I to judge the work of "the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today", as he claims to be. I'm obviously unqualified, because although I make my living as a researcher in scientific computing, I've yet to encounter a single important innovation in this field due to Dr. Wolfram. This is obviously an example of my shocking ignorance. =)
I don't understand what is so great about this invention. The fact is, any able-bodied person who is willing to do only a moderate amount of exercise can achieve the necessary level of fitness needed to ride a bicycle faster than the maxiumum speed of this thing for several hours. A decent bicycle is
1) Faster.
2) Less expensive.
3) Does not suffer limitations inherent from batteries.
4) Does not cause pollution (the battery power does have to come from some power plant, you know).
4) Keeps you fit, as an added benefit.
Sure, cities would be nicer places if most people used these scooters... but the same would be true if people would stop being so lazy and ride a bike!
The write-up for this article is just a tad bit misleading. The 32 TFLOPS figure is the "theoretical peak". This is a favorite number for hardware manufacturers to quote, since the theoretical peak far, far exceeds what anyone will see in practice, even when solving the most amenable of problems. To suppose that this hardware will get anywhere near 32 TFLOPS during actual use is just nuts.
Yeah, historical documents record similar ocurrences when a new technology called "writing" was developed. Those short-sighted fools, writing things down instead of just trying to remember them. Just look where it got them.
Just want to point out that this isn't a panacea that will solve all of the endangered species problems. It seems that some people are way too overly optimistic about finding appropriate surrogate mothers. This is very difficult, even when you have a surrogate mother of the same species. In fact, this is the major obstacle in most attempts to clone vertebrates. We have gotten to the point that cloning embryos has become quite easy, but getting a mother to carry them to term can be extremely difficult. For instance, ask anyone who has tried to clone pigs. Embryonic development will not proceed normally unless at least 4 embryos are implanted in the uterus--and getting four embryos within the same time span so that they can be implanted at the same time is NOT EASY. Now imagine trying this feat with a mother that is not even the same species. Your chances just aren't that good for many species.
Note also that this is not the first time that a surrogate mother of a different species from the child has been used successfully. In November of 1999 an ordinary housecat gave birth to an African wildcat.
I'm continually amazed at the authority that a Ph.D. degree confers. Did it ever occur to anyone that Stephen Hawking doesn't know what in the world he's talking about in this case? The man's a cosmologist, and a damn good one. But that certainly doesn't make him an expert on all scientific fields, and, judging from this article, his knowledge of the geosciences doesn't amount to a hill of beans. The opinions of atmospheric scientists are much more relevant--after all, they spend their lives studying this stuff.
(Just for the record, yes, IAAGP (I am a geophysicist).)
I wasn't really making any statement regarding electric cars one way or the other, only mentioning the subject as a context in which many people demonstrate their total ignorance of simple thermodynamics.
You make some interesting and valid points, but I'm not convinced that purely electric cars win out over what can be done with the emerging "hybrid" car technology. And keep in mind that the 20% loss in transmission isn't the only loss that you're going to get. Power losses are also incurred in recharging batteries, batteries lose voltage to the atmosphere, batteries degrade over time; etc.
IMHO, I think that one of our biggest problems is just... way too many cars.
Since the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen anyway, my guess is that most of that liquid nitrogen would come FROM THE ATMOSPHERE. Hence, releasing it back into the atmosphere would amount to.... well, jack shit.
And where will all of this liquid nitrogen come from...that's the main question that comes to mind. Unlike, say, fossil fuels, we don't have liquid nitrogen just sitting around in our natural environment on earth. Sure, you could use liquid nitrogen as suggested as a propellant, but WHERE WILL YOU GET IT? There is a great abundance of nitrogen on earth, but NOT in liquid form. We have to spend plenty of energy to get it into the liquid phase that is needed. So this idea doesn't really solve anyone's energy problems... alas, we are once again defeated by the all-pervasive first law of thermodynamics. Remember, if you're going to use something as a fuel it has to store potential energy in some form. Unfortunately, if you're going to take advantage of the potential energy stored in liquid nitrogen, first you're going to have to put that energy in yourself, since there aren't stores of liquid nitrogen just waiting for us underground a la fossil fuels.
/.'ers are interpreting it this way. Hence I felt the need for this post.)
This sort of reminds me of people who think, "In the future, we'll all have electric cars, and then pollution due to fossil fuels will disappear." Doesn't occur to some of these people to think of where all that electricity is going to come from.
(BTW, I realize that the engineer proposing this surely didn't have resolving our energy problems in mind, but it seems that many
Yes, meteorites are extremely rare. That's why scientists go wandering around on the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica just to look for the things. Every one that they find they study extensively. But hey--why examine them to understand the isotope chemistry of the solar system or even to find clues as to the origin of life? Cut them up instead to make a profit selling ostentatious knives that will never get used!
Of course, the reason that they can do this is because they are using a *Monte Carlo* method, not the finite difference/element/volume techniques that are employed for weather prediction. Monte Carlo methods lend themselves extremely well to parallelization. However, you can't use them (not in any practical manner, anyway) to numerically solve the Navier-Stokes equations at the resolution needed to weather predictions. You have to resort to using a more direct method such as finite differences, which WILL require lots of message passing because you can't uncouple the different regions of the problem domain.
Actually, I don't think it's all that surprising that this was done by a ground-based telescope. The main problem with ground-based observations is that the achievable resolution is severely limited by atmospheric turbulence that causes distortion of the image. The main problem with observing extremely distant objects isn't one of resolution, though, it is a problem of having mirrors with enough collecting area to gather the extremely faint light from the distant sources. It's true that you have atmospheric attenuation by scattering, etc., when you are using a ground-based telescope, but, on the other hand, you can make your mirrors as big as your budget will allow, really. The size isn't constrained by concerns of getting the thing into orbit. The giant ground-based telescopes can do very well regarding their light collection. Where they can't compete with Hubble is resolving power. Even with the best adaptive imaging techniques you can only do so much about that pesky atmosphere.
Don't believe all this hype and go sell your Crays just yet. What many people fail to realize is that the total number of achievable MFLOPS of all the nodes in a parallel machine IS NOT a very meaningful measure of how powerful or useful the machine is. This ignores the nature of the interconnect between the processors, memory, etc., which is *extremely* important in most parallel computations, and is what makes supercomputers so damned expensive. This stuff is not Ethernet! For many types of parallel applications, Ethernet becomes such a bottleneck that no advantages can be realized from parallelizing an application.
The generation of fractal clusters is a classic example of what are known as "embarassingly parallel" problems in parallel computing circles. As you iterate points in the set, their evolution is independent, so a minimum of message passing is required. (In computer science-ese, "the computational graph is disconnected"). With even the crummiest of interconnects, you can get good results out of parallelizing these fractal cluster generators because the only thing that will really make a difference is the total number of FLOPS acheivable by each of the nodes. Fractal set generation is just not a very meaningful benchmark.
But consider, say, a finite-element model where every point in your grid is affected by its neighbors. Then you need to do lots of message passing, and the nature of the interconnect becomes orders of magnitude more important. In this case, I guarantee you that a commercial supercomputer is going to beat the pants off of any cluster machine. This is not to say that cluster machines aren't useful, but a real "supercomputer" still has its place.
My mind fails to comprehend how the patent office could err enough to grant a patent on this. (That said, I bet that they will.)
If the patent office grants this, it could perhaps be the most bogus patent they have yet awarded. This approximation is an eternal mathematical truth, and, as such, I hardly think it qualifies as being anyone's sole intellectual property. For God's sake, it's truth doesn't even depend on the existence of the material universe! This would be more ridiculous than allowing Newton to patent F=ma.
I think that you have missed my point entirely. My point isn't that "smart" people should be allowed to vote, while "stupid" people shouldn't. Every adult citizen has an equal right to vote. I'm simply questioning the wisdom of doing something that encourages people to vote who don't consider elections important enough to take the time to actually go to a voting booth.
What I currently question most about Internet voting are the security issues. However, I think that, in time, these can be worked out. Internet voting sounds like a good idea... increase voter turnout, etc., etc. But is that *really* such a good idea? Think about how many apathetic people there are who don't really follow politics at all and don't bother to vote because they don't think it's even worth the effort it takes to go out and do it. Do we really who don't even care enough to go out and vote determining the fate of our nation? Internet voting makes it easier for the more apathetic folks to vote... people whose knowledge of the issues likely only goes so far as the last smear ad they heard.
Personally, I think it would be great to be able to vote from my home or office and avoid the trouble of having to go and stand in line to vote. But this may be a case of something that is good for a few people (the informed ones, in this case), but, when extended to everyone, ends up being a bad idea.
I have been buying from Amazon since most people didn't know of their existence, and I have always been very pleased with their service. However, because they are resorting to tactics such as this, they have just lost a customer. And I'm going to make sure that they know that. It's important for the online community to let them know that we won't tolerate that sort of underhanded business practice. It's bad for all of us.
The worst bn.com does, the better for Amazon. With less competition, they can raise their prices. They are screwing bn.com over, and more importantly, trying to do the same to the rest of us. I urge everyone to write to Amazon denouncing this tactic and to boycott them until they stop such idiocy.