To us a medial analogy, this never cures the disease, it only delays the onset of symptoms.
A medical analogy is actually very apt for security.
Obscurity is a good first line of defense--comparable to keeping away from sick people--but it can and will be compromised, and more rigerous plans must accompany it.
You can't possibly be in favor of something as Draconian and backwards as the "INDUCE" act?
What's backwards about it? Pretend I'm playing devil's advocate.
Congress wants to make a law such that a company that encourages copyright infringemnet--which is already a tort and a crime--will be guilty of a seperate tort/crime independant of the mass of petty infringments that they're facilitating.
This would be VERY enforceable, and probably will get into law once it's re-worded to make it clear that reasonable efforts to respect copyright--either DRM, or creative common's scheme, or no secrecy for the sharer--aren't affected.
(For the record, I'm a slowly-being-pulled-into-the-Democrats from New York.)
The DMCA was passed, what, six years ago? Eight? (Clinton was in office, and it wasn't his last year...)
Every congressman in office today has been elected AFTER the DMCA, and they haven't repealed it yet. Ergo, they have the community's support.
You're right, though--banning it isn't the best solution. The best solution is to define what's wrong as either a tort or a crime (or both), and prosecute that instead of the protocol.
Hmm... does congress have the [community's] backup for banning P2P? No.
The/. community? No.
The nationwide "community?" Sure they do.
The pro far outweights the con. Even if they ban p2p, other people can share service packs different ways. What are they going to do, ban bit-tolerant, ftp and every other protocol? This is lame. The government will never be ahead of the technology curve.
Actually, laws like INDUCE will effectively put the gov't ahead of the curve. Instead of going protocol by protocol, they'll make software encouraing you to commit copyright infringement a crime.
Legitimate P2P will have a six to twelve month blip while everyone updates to Creative Commons' verification scheme, and illegitimate P2P will go back to obscurity.
(Note: the above time frame is "after the law is in a workable fashion." Which will either be never or after its first test in the courts.)
Hopefully if the lawmakers see people like IBM doing things like this and in the end realise the system is broken and eventually do something about it.
Like disallowing code copyright, and limiting it to a new, cheaper form of design patent.
Copyright, intended for literary and artistic works, is a poor fit for anything that's supposed to actually work.
I was going to respond to a few of a points, but since you're giving me the last word, I'm just going to point something out.
Please speak to what I actually say, not to what you think that I think...
And you don't even see what you just did
Your words, truthfully quoted.
My words, truthfully quoted:
If my child has done something so bad that the police are after him, then i would probably want to find him and ensure that, if he did what they say he did, he was punished for it
Read that again. You obviously didn't the first time.
* IF the police are after for him:
** THEN i want to find him and ensure that:
*** IF he did something wrong:
**** he is punnished
You better bet than when I FIND my child, I'm going to start off in the mindset that he did something wrong--because, no matter what he may have done, getting the cops to search for him is enough to upset his parents.
I would normally say something like "pot... kettle... black" here, but I'm going to say something else.
You weren't being hypocrtical; you were being close-minded. OF COURSE you think of the police as the enemy against your rights; you do not feel that they live up to the ordeal, and you've likely suffered some slight from them--even if it was just "DWB." And in many ways I am naive--I'm lucky enough to have never lived in anyplace nearly as bad as LA has been at times in the past two decades.
So, I'm not upset at the condescending slurs you've sent my way. I am, however, concerned that you are allowing yourself to be ruled by fear. If you must be ruled by emotion, fear is quite possibly the second-worse emotion to let rule yourself, second only to hate.
A far better emotion is hope, and the best soution of all is not be ruled by emotion, but rather to conciously work to see things from everyone's point of view and find a way to make everyone a little better if you can.
If these are impossible things in your world, then I am sorry for you and glad that I will never have occasion to visit your world. Mine is a much better place.
Oh, and the three trademarked keys needed for the "Designed for Windows XXX" in order to get Microsoft's fingers into that revenue stream? They're worse than useless. I pried them off, and they're in a drawer here somewhere. The keyboard is better with their absense.
Cut one corner off of your geek card.
Those keys may be annoying at times, but each one has its uses--especially if you're touch typing.
Just wish that the "menu" key was the doubled one, not the "windows" key. (Or at lesat that they were different, so they could be set to different things...)
(3) eventually wears down their interest in maintaining such habits as ethnic profiling, thus "allowing & encouraging" them to conduct their investigations more fruitfully. (Think twice before you answer that last point: I think I can anticipate your intuitive response, and I think you won't like where it eventually leads you.)
1: They'll profile with or without the profilee's consent.
2: A racial profile as a starting point in an investigation into a crime--i.e., who you ask first in the absence of any other clues as to who committed the crime in question--is entirely reasonable. At its most basic, we "profile" based on where you happened to be at the time of the crime.
3: You're arguing illogicaly. DNA testing, if anything, would make profiling LESS harmful. Rather than "it's a white woman stabbed, and most stabbings have been from black men, so let's look for a black man", it'd be "the DNA on the knife handle is of a black man. Let's find that black man, and ask him about this knife."
So, which one did YOU guess?
There's probably NEVER been a case of an LE institution becoming MORE considerate of individual rights, as a consequence of LESS insistence on observance of those rights.
There you go again, thinking that L.E. is on the opposite side of "maintaining rights."
They have a job to do, and they are people with real rights just like the rest of us. THEIR job, which we pay them to do, is made far easier if we do not see them as the enemy against our rights but as allies in our safety. They become more responsive when we say that they're going too far, and since they have to spend less tine following false leads, we become as a whole safer.
Fear--that is, not embracing them as fellow citizens but treating them as a thing apart from you--will get us in tyranny faster than capitualtoin ever could. And embracing them will do more to protect your rights and my rights than a lifetime of assertions.
In fact, there lies what might be a good paradigm for discussing this: how say you, if the policeman's target isn't you but your pre-teen child?
If my child has done something so bad that the police are after him, then i would probably want to find him and ensure that, if he did what they say he did, he was punished for it--by the court if it's that bad, and if not by the court then by me.
Furthermore -- in view of this history of investigations, mistaken identifications, prosecutions, and EXECUTIONS which have gone horribly wrong -- if you were in the least respect the subject of a criminal investigation, and you did ANYTHING except to immediately clam-up and demand an attorney, then you'd be a fool.
So... by immediatly acting like a suspect, I keep myself from being a suspect? Bah.
DNA testing costs money now, and it will for the forseeable future. If the police want my DNA, and they're willing to pay for it, I'll make time out of my day to get it to them.
I'd also (gasp!) tell them who I am, where I'm headed, and the last time I had a drink. None of this makes me a "fool." It just means that I'll cooperate with the polie, for whatever reason I may have.
I'm not talking about denying DNA as a tool, GENERICALLY.
Yes, you are. If DNA becomes harder to get than fingerprints, the tool is essentially denied the police and reserved for the police.
And how is that noble goal advanced by yielding to the officer's demand, immediately and without protest? (which your OP seemed to favor)
Because there's nothing wrong with it, and we aren't diluting the red-button of protest by using it for nuciances.
The single worst thing you can do if you want a free society is treat the police as the enemy.
No. I'm completely willing to accept that ALL of those things won't happen.
I'm also willing to face the consequences of my actions, and I am not afraid to stand up and say "that's wrong!" This is what's commonly referred to as "being a responsible citizen."
It's really depressing to be reminded of the number of people who are seduced by the argument which says, "If you're doing nothing wrong, what have you to fear?"
What about "we have nothing to fear but fear itself?" Or to go back further in time, "what is whispered in shadows will be shouted from the rooftops."
Some famous person said, "All that is required for evil to triumph, is that good people do nothing."
Yes, exactly. And by giving into fear and denying this tool rather than dealing with its consequences, you're doing nothing.
But it's using technology to incriminate people in the first place, which is not fine when it's something that those people own and payed for.
You've absolutely right. We make all suvelliance footage from stores that might be used to incriminate the store's owner in drug smuggling, or prostution, or anything else that they might be guilty of.
No, wait... we should just find a fair way to enforce the speed limits, thus making the public either adapt or become motivated to change the laws.
I'd call that "an investigation." Or, at worse, I'd call that "self-incrimination."
There is a hell of a difference between "under investigation" and "found guilty." If the APD wants my DNA to see if I raped a girl on my way to work, and I know that I didn't, then I can go ahead and give it to them--it'll speed up the investigation about me, and get them to focus on the other suspects.
If the policies were set up and implemented properly, then it should not be possible for someone else to install a keylogger on his PC - which is the fault of the sysadmin
Not if the management is saying "no" to the proper policies.
Uninstalling the keylogger is the sort of step that would be intelligent to do, but doesn't strike me as strictly necessary until the new policies are implemented.
Funny, where I work, my boss tells me what my job is. Sometimes it's obvious, and sometimes I have to use judgement. No matter how I tried to justify it, I don't think installing a keylogger on his computer could ever by construed as his wishes.
"I don't see how you think hackers are such a problem. I mean, how much harm could they do."
The next day, hand him a piece of paper, listing every password he entered and every username he used. Tell him he should probably change them--and if he doesn't, well, the next time the keylogger might not be an employee pointing out a security hole.
IMO the end not only justifies the means, but it's entirely in his duty--and he certainly shouldn't have been fired for it.
Heck, aren't PS2 and PSOne proprietary formats too?
Yes, but they're proprietary formats for a custom system. Sort of like the "proprietary battery" for the Black & Decker cordless line.
Or for a better comparison--what if Apple decided, for some reason, to require that all software released for its platform would be on the mini-DVDesque format Nintedo used? No one would care, as porting the format wouldn't do anyone any good.
Weird Al, who either pioneered the "song pardoy" or at least defined it for the modern era, was careful to get permission for the music or lyircs he used for his parodies.
What in the world makes you think that anyone is requesting this stuff on the radio?
He didn't say that requests were played--rather, requests are tracked, and that data is used to deterine not only what songs to play, but how well the "buzz" is for a particular song.
Oh, and you DO realize that there aren't 100 trillion radio stations, right? If every radio station serves only 50,000 people, there are only room for about 5,000 radio stations in the country--and about three in every state will be the oddball college station--so, 150 out of 5000, for about 97% "corporate control."
In general, you're right that big-name stars are as much chosen as found. But that's not because they're utterly devoid of talent--it's because most folk want music as background, and background music doesn't require that high a level of artistic skill. (That, and artistic skill can hardly be called uncommon in American society. It's almost plebian how common some modicum of talent is.)
P.H. is trying to change their main corporate culture away from "a smoking comapny." Thus, they turned P.H. to a subsidiary and use a new name for the over-corp.
Nope. Not good enough. I used to use a Palm III. At the moment, I use a Yopy, which is decent as a book reader; the screen is really good for being LCD, and the software is good enough (Dillo is not much of an online browser, but it is really good as a document reader). But try taking any LCD-based display to the beach, for instance. And the format is a bit too small for my taste. The screen should be about postcard-sized, or perhaps even slightly larger (there's the tradeoff with where you can tuck away the device when not in use).
So, you want a PDA with a better screen.
Have you tried a tablet PC? It's not as lightweight or power effecient, but the screen and "any file you want" capabilities are there.
You're right about the ebook readers, of course. Whoever tried to sell those was seriously deluded. *sigh*
How about TeX? Its the standard in book publishing, papers, professional journals. And its not hard either. Once you try LaTeX you will never go back to something as weak as a WYSIWYG word processor. Seriously, just try it - even if to prove me wrong.
Show me a TeX editor that does word count, spelling check, can fix my common typoes as I write, save as PDF and DOC, track my additions/deletions and count the new words, insert automatic references to headings and tables within the document, and has easy style application, and I'll try it. (Oh, and it has to run in Windows, although CYGWIN or other interpreter is acceptable.)
A word processor and a layout program are two differnet beasts with two very different tasks--but, well, Word and OOo can be used to lay out books, so a layout program might be good enough to write in.
Oh, yeah--and should be either WYSIWYG or a very close approximation thereof. WYSIWYM is no good for quick authoring of documents if the presentation of "meaning" has no intiutive (i.e., doens't require one to stop and think) correlation to WYG.
* A reader that is light, inexpensive, with excellent graphics, that can easily be read in the sun.
* The reader must allow me to upload any text, not just from its own selection. This includes raw text files, html files and pdf. If I can't use it for papers, references and public domain/copyright expired works, it's not much good for me.
You want a palm. A palm with a better daylight screen. (The Zire 71 has some issues in bright light, but I suspect that's due to the screen cover I have on it.)
* The books need to be _mine_, in the same way that dead-tree versions are today. I can keep the copy for as long as I want, I can make backups to my hearts content, and I can sell it on, or give it away if or when I tire of it. No tying it to a particular reader in other words. I would not appreciate having to rebuy my library, just because my reader up and died.
* Neither books nor reader is to require any kind of interaction with the manufacturer or seller in any way, once I purchased it. I on't want to feel tied down, and I don't want to feel like I'm just borrowing the thing, not owning it.
How about if, after buying a printed book, you have the option of contacting the author/publisher, giving a login, password and the code from your book, and getting both an ebook (probably PDF, maybe with iTunes style DRM), and the right to make as many electronic or dead tree copes FOR YOURSELF as you want? Including redownloads and a lifetime offer to authorize print runs where necessary?
Almost forgot: I don't understand their system. OS on one disk, Office on another, drivers on 3 or 4 separate disks... why can't they just give me a DVD (or several CDs) with a disk image on it?
Because "restore CDs" are the spawn of the devil. Best part about dell is the proper, distinct, REAL software CDs they give you.
And I don't understand (flame-retardant-suit on) why Microsoft doesn't include a "drive imaging" utility with the OS the way Apple does.
I have no idea. They have a backup utility. They have CD burning built-in. Why not CD-burning backup?
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To us a medial analogy, this never cures the disease, it only delays the onset of symptoms.
A medical analogy is actually very apt for security.
Obscurity is a good first line of defense--comparable to keeping away from sick people--but it can and will be compromised, and more rigerous plans must accompany it.
Can't remember exactly the context, but this is especially relevant since congress said you can do mess with your car since you bought it.
Yes, you can. But lying to your insurance company about it is still fraud.
You can't possibly be in favor of something as Draconian and backwards as the "INDUCE" act?
What's backwards about it? Pretend I'm playing devil's advocate.
Congress wants to make a law such that a company that encourages copyright infringemnet--which is already a tort and a crime--will be guilty of a seperate tort/crime independant of the mass of petty infringments that they're facilitating.
This would be VERY enforceable, and probably will get into law once it's re-worded to make it clear that reasonable efforts to respect copyright--either DRM, or creative common's scheme, or no secrecy for the sharer--aren't affected.
(For the record, I'm a slowly-being-pulled-into-the-Democrats from New York.)
On what data do you base that?
The DMCA was passed, what, six years ago? Eight? (Clinton was in office, and it wasn't his last year...)
Every congressman in office today has been elected AFTER the DMCA, and they haven't repealed it yet. Ergo, they have the community's support.
You're right, though--banning it isn't the best solution. The best solution is to define what's wrong as either a tort or a crime (or both), and prosecute that instead of the protocol.
Hmm... does congress have the [community's] backup for banning P2P? No.
/. community? No.
The
The nationwide "community?" Sure they do.
The pro far outweights the con. Even if they ban p2p, other people can share service packs different ways. What are they going to do, ban bit-tolerant, ftp and every other protocol? This is lame. The government will never be ahead of the technology curve.
Actually, laws like INDUCE will effectively put the gov't ahead of the curve. Instead of going protocol by protocol, they'll make software encouraing you to commit copyright infringement a crime.
Legitimate P2P will have a six to twelve month blip while everyone updates to Creative Commons' verification scheme, and illegitimate P2P will go back to obscurity.
(Note: the above time frame is "after the law is in a workable fashion." Which will either be never or after its first test in the courts.)
Hopefully if the lawmakers see people like IBM doing things like this and in the end realise the system is broken and eventually do something about it.
Like disallowing code copyright, and limiting it to a new, cheaper form of design patent.
Copyright, intended for literary and artistic works, is a poor fit for anything that's supposed to actually work.
I was going to respond to a few of a points, but since you're giving me the last word, I'm just going to point something out.
Please speak to what I actually say, not to what you think that I think...
And you don't even see what you just did
Your words, truthfully quoted.
My words, truthfully quoted:
If my child has done something so bad that the police are after him, then i would probably want to find him and ensure that, if he did what they say he did, he was punished for it
Read that again. You obviously didn't the first time.
* IF the police are after for him:
** THEN i want to find him and ensure that:
*** IF he did something wrong:
**** he is punnished
You better bet than when I FIND my child, I'm going to start off in the mindset that he did something wrong--because, no matter what he may have done, getting the cops to search for him is enough to upset his parents.
I would normally say something like "pot... kettle... black" here, but I'm going to say something else.
You weren't being hypocrtical; you were being close-minded. OF COURSE you think of the police as the enemy against your rights; you do not feel that they live up to the ordeal, and you've likely suffered some slight from them--even if it was just "DWB." And in many ways I am naive--I'm lucky enough to have never lived in anyplace nearly as bad as LA has been at times in the past two decades.
So, I'm not upset at the condescending slurs you've sent my way. I am, however, concerned that you are allowing yourself to be ruled by fear. If you must be ruled by emotion, fear is quite possibly the second-worse emotion to let rule yourself, second only to hate.
A far better emotion is hope, and the best soution of all is not be ruled by emotion, but rather to conciously work to see things from everyone's point of view and find a way to make everyone a little better if you can.
If these are impossible things in your world, then I am sorry for you and glad that I will never have occasion to visit your world. Mine is a much better place.
Oh, and the three trademarked keys needed for the "Designed for Windows XXX" in order to get Microsoft's fingers into that revenue stream? They're worse than useless. I pried them off, and they're in a drawer here somewhere. The keyboard is better with their absense.
Cut one corner off of your geek card.
Those keys may be annoying at times, but each one has its uses--especially if you're touch typing.
Just wish that the "menu" key was the doubled one, not the "windows" key. (Or at lesat that they were different, so they could be set to different things...)
(3) eventually wears down their interest in maintaining such habits as ethnic profiling, thus "allowing & encouraging" them to conduct their investigations more fruitfully.
(Think twice before you answer that last point: I think I can anticipate your intuitive response, and I think you won't like where it eventually leads you.)
1: They'll profile with or without the profilee's consent.
2: A racial profile as a starting point in an investigation into a crime--i.e., who you ask first in the absence of any other clues as to who committed the crime in question--is entirely reasonable. At its most basic, we "profile" based on where you happened to be at the time of the crime.
3: You're arguing illogicaly. DNA testing, if anything, would make profiling LESS harmful. Rather than "it's a white woman stabbed, and most stabbings have been from black men, so let's look for a black man", it'd be "the DNA on the knife handle is of a black man. Let's find that black man, and ask him about this knife."
So, which one did YOU guess?
There's probably NEVER been a case of an LE institution becoming MORE considerate of individual rights, as a consequence of LESS insistence on observance of those rights.
There you go again, thinking that L.E. is on the opposite side of "maintaining rights."
They have a job to do, and they are people with real rights just like the rest of us. THEIR job, which we pay them to do, is made far easier if we do not see them as the enemy against our rights but as allies in our safety. They become more responsive when we say that they're going too far, and since they have to spend less tine following false leads, we become as a whole safer.
Fear--that is, not embracing them as fellow citizens but treating them as a thing apart from you--will get us in tyranny faster than capitualtoin ever could. And embracing them will do more to protect your rights and my rights than a lifetime of assertions.
In fact, there lies what might be a good paradigm for discussing this:
how say you, if the policeman's target isn't you but your pre-teen child?
If my child has done something so bad that the police are after him, then i would probably want to find him and ensure that, if he did what they say he did, he was punished for it--by the court if it's that bad, and if not by the court then by me.
Furthermore -- in view of this history of investigations, mistaken identifications, prosecutions, and EXECUTIONS which have gone horribly wrong --
if you were in the least respect the subject of a criminal investigation,
and you did ANYTHING except to immediately clam-up and demand an attorney,
then you'd be a fool.
So... by immediatly acting like a suspect, I keep myself from being a suspect? Bah.
DNA testing costs money now, and it will for the forseeable future. If the police want my DNA, and they're willing to pay for it, I'll make time out of my day to get it to them.
I'd also (gasp!) tell them who I am, where I'm headed, and the last time I had a drink. None of this makes me a "fool." It just means that I'll cooperate with the polie, for whatever reason I may have.
I'm not talking about denying DNA as a tool, GENERICALLY.
Yes, you are. If DNA becomes harder to get than fingerprints, the tool is essentially denied the police and reserved for the police.
And how is that noble goal advanced by yielding to the officer's demand, immediately and without protest? (which your OP seemed to favor)
Because there's nothing wrong with it, and we aren't diluting the red-button of protest by using it for nuciances.
The single worst thing you can do if you want a free society is treat the police as the enemy.
BTW, the 2 countries which used to be poor and became rich after the World Wars are Switzerland and the US.
Pre WW, the US wasn't so much "poor" as "isolationist." Just the US's behavior in the world wars (lend/lease et al) is enough to prove that.
You seem completely willing to trust
No. I'm completely willing to accept that ALL of those things won't happen.
I'm also willing to face the consequences of my actions, and I am not afraid to stand up and say "that's wrong!" This is what's commonly referred to as "being a responsible citizen."
It's really depressing to be reminded of the number of people who are seduced by the argument which says, "If you're doing nothing wrong, what have you to fear?"
What about "we have nothing to fear but fear itself?" Or to go back further in time, "what is whispered in shadows will be shouted from the rooftops."
Some famous person said, "All that is required for evil to triumph, is that good people do nothing."
Yes, exactly. And by giving into fear and denying this tool rather than dealing with its consequences, you're doing nothing.
But it's using technology to incriminate people in the first place, which is not fine when it's something that those people own and payed for.
You've absolutely right. We make all suvelliance footage from stores that might be used to incriminate the store's owner in drug smuggling, or prostution, or anything else that they might be guilty of.
No, wait... we should just find a fair way to enforce the speed limits, thus making the public either adapt or become motivated to change the laws.
I'd call that guilty until proven innocent..
*sigh*.
I'd call that "an investigation." Or, at worse, I'd call that "self-incrimination."
There is a hell of a difference between "under investigation" and "found guilty." If the APD wants my DNA to see if I raped a girl on my way to work, and I know that I didn't, then I can go ahead and give it to them--it'll speed up the investigation about me, and get them to focus on the other suspects.
If the policies were set up and implemented properly, then it should not be possible for someone else to install a keylogger on his PC - which is the fault of the sysadmin
Not if the management is saying "no" to the proper policies.
Uninstalling the keylogger is the sort of step that would be intelligent to do, but doesn't strike me as strictly necessary until the new policies are implemented.
Funny, where I work, my boss tells me what my job is. Sometimes it's obvious, and sometimes I have to use judgement. No matter how I tried to justify it, I don't think installing a keylogger on his computer could ever by construed as his wishes.
"I don't see how you think hackers are such a problem. I mean, how much harm could they do."
The next day, hand him a piece of paper, listing every password he entered and every username he used. Tell him he should probably change them--and if he doesn't, well, the next time the keylogger might not be an employee pointing out a security hole.
IMO the end not only justifies the means, but it's entirely in his duty--and he certainly shouldn't have been fired for it.
Heck, aren't PS2 and PSOne proprietary formats too?
Yes, but they're proprietary formats for a custom system. Sort of like the "proprietary battery" for the Black & Decker cordless line.
Or for a better comparison--what if Apple decided, for some reason, to require that all software released for its platform would be on the mini-DVDesque format Nintedo used? No one would care, as porting the format wouldn't do anyone any good.
So the copyright violation is what, exactly?
Use of the musical score.
Weird Al, who either pioneered the "song pardoy" or at least defined it for the modern era, was careful to get permission for the music or lyircs he used for his parodies.
What in the world makes you think that anyone is requesting this stuff on the radio?
He didn't say that requests were played--rather, requests are tracked, and that data is used to deterine not only what songs to play, but how well the "buzz" is for a particular song.
Oh, and you DO realize that there aren't 100 trillion radio stations, right? If every radio station serves only 50,000 people, there are only room for about 5,000 radio stations in the country--and about three in every state will be the oddball college station--so, 150 out of 5000, for about 97% "corporate control."
In general, you're right that big-name stars are as much chosen as found. But that's not because they're utterly devoid of talent--it's because most folk want music as background, and background music doesn't require that high a level of artistic skill. (That, and artistic skill can hardly be called uncommon in American society. It's almost plebian how common some modicum of talent is.)
Probably nothing.
Astrotufing sounds and feels like an internet-myth. Got a real, proven case of it?
No, that's different.
P.H. is trying to change their main corporate culture away from "a smoking comapny." Thus, they turned P.H. to a subsidiary and use a new name for the over-corp.
Nope. Not good enough. I used to use a Palm III. At the moment, I use a Yopy, which is decent as a book reader; the screen is really good for being LCD, and the software is good enough (Dillo is not much of an online browser, but it is really good as a document reader). But try taking any LCD-based display to the beach, for instance. And the format is a bit too small for my taste. The screen should be about postcard-sized, or perhaps even slightly larger (there's the tradeoff with where you can tuck away the device when not in use).
So, you want a PDA with a better screen.
Have you tried a tablet PC? It's not as lightweight or power effecient, but the screen and "any file you want" capabilities are there.
You're right about the ebook readers, of course. Whoever tried to sell those was seriously deluded. *sigh*
How about TeX? Its the standard in book publishing, papers, professional journals. And its not hard either. Once you try LaTeX you will never go back to something as weak as a WYSIWYG word processor. Seriously, just try it - even if to prove me wrong.
Show me a TeX editor that does word count, spelling check, can fix my common typoes as I write, save as PDF and DOC, track my additions/deletions and count the new words, insert automatic references to headings and tables within the document, and has easy style application, and I'll try it. (Oh, and it has to run in Windows, although CYGWIN or other interpreter is acceptable.)
A word processor and a layout program are two differnet beasts with two very different tasks--but, well, Word and OOo can be used to lay out books, so a layout program might be good enough to write in.
Oh, yeah--and should be either WYSIWYG or a very close approximation thereof. WYSIWYM is no good for quick authoring of documents if the presentation of "meaning" has no intiutive (i.e., doens't require one to stop and think) correlation to WYG.
* A reader that is light, inexpensive, with excellent graphics, that can easily be read in the sun.
* The reader must allow me to upload any text, not just from its own selection. This includes raw text files, html files and pdf. If I can't use it for papers, references and public domain/copyright expired works, it's not much good for me.
You want a palm. A palm with a better daylight screen. (The Zire 71 has some issues in bright light, but I suspect that's due to the screen cover I have on it.)
* The books need to be _mine_, in the same way that dead-tree versions are today. I can keep the copy for as long as I want, I can make backups to my hearts content, and I can sell it on, or give it away if or when I tire of it. No tying it to a particular reader in other words. I would not appreciate having to rebuy my library, just because my reader up and died.
* Neither books nor reader is to require any kind of interaction with the manufacturer or seller in any way, once I purchased it. I on't want to feel tied down, and I don't want to feel like I'm just borrowing the thing, not owning it.
How about if, after buying a printed book, you have the option of contacting the author/publisher, giving a login, password and the code from your book, and getting both an ebook (probably PDF, maybe with iTunes style DRM), and the right to make as many electronic or dead tree copes FOR YOURSELF as you want? Including redownloads and a lifetime offer to authorize print runs where necessary?
Almost forgot: I don't understand their system. OS on one disk, Office on another, drivers on 3 or 4 separate disks ... why can't they just give me a DVD (or several CDs) with a disk image on it?
Because "restore CDs" are the spawn of the devil. Best part about dell is the proper, distinct, REAL software CDs they give you.
And I don't understand (flame-retardant-suit on) why Microsoft doesn't include a "drive imaging" utility with the OS the way Apple does.
I have no idea. They have a backup utility. They have CD burning built-in. Why not CD-burning backup?