Europe (and Asia) in every . last . thing . on . earth ?
Answer: STUPID, ideologically blinkered, ultracapitalist/fascist public that votes against their own interests aggressively, continuously, and with tremendous joy, each believing that they will one day be the CEO of a major corporation or investment firm with six Bentleys and a pony (despite the fact that they are an unemployed plumber right now), and wanting to preserve every last advantage for themselves on . that . day .
My wife and I own two e-ink readers, a Kindle and a Sony PRS-300. Mine has over 800 books in it, and I read constantly with it. She has a netbook. I have a Thinkpad and an iPhone.
Neither of us has real interest in an iPad, nor would we purchase it instead of an e-ink reader if we had it to do all over again.
It's a computer, not a book. A Kindle is a book, not a computer.
I've never had good experience with tape, from DC6150 SCSI linear tape at home all the way through an Exabyte library with stacks and stacks of 8mm tapes. Two decades of tape has been two decades of heartache and frustration for me and the companies I've worked with. These days I'm no longer in tech or IT (thank god) but for my personal needs I use RAID-1 for live and DVD-RAM (as cumbersome, slow, and small as it is) for offline.
Tapes just bleed data at an alarming rate, and they are about as reliable as a drunk gabling addict living under the subway next to the OTB shop.
Do the hard drive thing, and store them well, with redundancy, under good conditions, and replace them often.
Depending on where you had set the base address of the BIOS in memory (many controllers had jumpers that let you shift it around).
Some controllers also had multiple routines in addition to the lowlevel format: various kinds of analytics, verify passes, some had self-tests that you had to be careful with because you could tell it to seek to a cylinder way beyond the drive boundary and knock off the heads with a few hundred rapid bangs, which was actually sort of okay because you could literally replace head assemblies and platters between drives sitting on your workbench. Not safe in theory, but actually in practice sort of okay. Once we even forgot to reinsert the air filter (yes, the air filter) in a drive and it started losing sectors much faster than we thought was normal. When we realized, we popped it back out (we used to use the drives in a variety of old minis and a couple embedded systems but manage them on PCs) and put the air filter back in and mapped a bunch more sectors out, and the drive continued in service for another 2-3 years.
On some you could also use BIOS routines adjust the stepper timing in ranges, from dozens of milliseconds to just a few microseconds, which could rapidly speed up your drive in use, but of course would rapidly lose your data if the stepper couldn't step reliably at that speed, which was often impossible to know if they had spot-sourced the stepper.:-)
Not only does the ST506 interface separate control and data into separate systems (two cables, with actual wires), but the ST506 drive, servo, control, etc. is really easy to work with: very slow circuitry, socketed DIPs, big pins, actual holes through board, lots of wires leading between and to things like the stepper and spindle motors, and you can get at everything (including entire drive disassembly down to magnets and platters) with little more than a computer screwdriver set with a flat head, a philips head, some small torx bits, etc.
So once you've got a working OS + software + hardware platform up, you also have the freedom with that generation hardware to "edit" the drive in any number of ways by adding your own electronics, etc., with little more than a soldering iron and a leftover box of 74-series logic, if you want to get that basic, and since mainboards of that era have at least two serial ports built in, well...
Probably given your project you didn't need me to say all this extra, but in case you're not old enough to have ever *seen* an ST506 era hard drive or controller, I thought I'd mention it.
Get yourself an old, totally unintelligent S412/506 MFM controller from out of an IBM PC or PC/XT. These were fairly dumb devices (g=c800:5 in debug, anyone?) for which you were meant to enter a "bad sectors list" printed on the front of the drive after performing the low-level format yourself. The earlier the drive, the closer to bare metal, so you might want to look for any of the 2, 5, or 10MB (yes, MB) full-height (2 x 5.25" drive bays stacked on top of one another) drives that were floating around then. You'll also want to get yourself a set of ribbon cables.
You should be able to use a drive/controller combination like this with any machine with ISA bus slots up through about the 386/486 era, and that would let you also go back and grab an early Linux distro (say, kernel 1.2.13 days, like Slackware 3 or so) that included drivers for such a controller that were actually in use and known to work at the time, giving you a base on which to build more code.
If 10MB is too small, you might just have luck going up to the largest of the MFM (80MB) or even RLL drives (160-200MB, just get an RLL controller instead) drives. I don't remember whether there were any ESDI drives back in the day that didn't remap their own sectors, but if there were, these controllers were 16-bit ISA and somewhat smarter (also with Linux drivers from the period available) and went up to 680MB or so.
But if you're looking for the best chance of success for your purposes and don't need tons of storage, my educated guess would be that the MFM controller out of an IBM 5150 PC plugged into a 5MB ST506 hard drive and connected to a SIMM-based 80386DX mainboard with 8 SIMM slots (for 8MB ram) might be the easiest combo to find and get working in practical terms that has a chance of doing what you want.
The universe is not a consciousness; it doesn't attach a meaning to the word "time."
"Time" as a construct (passing, what it means to us, memory, future, etc.) are all human quantities.
In a state of maximum entropy, there are no humans. There is nobody to imagine "time." A universe at maximum entropy is not going to imagine "time." Aside from the fact that the universe as such has no consciousness, the very state prevents enough order to represent or "store" as information anything approximating the conception.
It is the end; absolute zero; no events ongoing, no events to come ever again, and no possible consciousness or systemic externality to conceive of this state.
In any meaningful sense, there is no "time" there.
synchronizing location and actions. Time allows members of society to harness shared cognitive storage capabilities in the interest of collaboration and synchronization, which allows humans to produce the incredibly complex world that we have produced.
There's a REASON people spend $$$ on these devices rather than an unlocked $10 Nokia 6310 GSM on eBay. That reason is because THEY USE THE OTHER ADVERTISED FEATURES and they HAVE A REASONABLE EXPECTATION THAT IF THEY PAY FOR THESE FEATURES, THE FEATURES WILL WORK.
That is to say, it is VERY TROLLISH when the same people post, over and over again in smartphone discussions, "A phone is a phone!" and inevitably follow it with one of:
- "So STFU about the other features being broken, that's not what a phone is for." - "So STFU and buy yourself a netbook." (Ahem, and see other replies in this thread.) - "So STFU because this device sucks at making phone calls and is therefore worthless." - "So only idiots will buy this overfeatured piece of crap, and as idiots, you should should not open your mouths."
It is a discussion about SMARTPHONES and the ADVERTISED FEATURES of these phones that their users presumably ACTUALLY WANT AND USE or they wouldn't have paid for them.
If, as you suggest, you are uninterested in anything OTHER than a phone to make calls, WHY THE HELL ARE YOU POSTING IN A DISCUSSION ABOUT SMARTPHONE FEATURES ANYWAY? Presumably your phone makes calls and does it well and that's all you want, and this article is therefore about a whole bunch of stuff that you don't want/don't care about, so it appears that you (and the original parent of this thread) are just trolling.
early mobile Windows platforms (CE, HPC, HPC Pro, PPC, etc.)
For any given device, you could find the 5-6 apps released by the manufacturer, a few old scattered apps by a shareware dev that happened to have the same device as you, and a whole universe of apps for "mobile Windows" platforms, each of which supported only one or two very specific devices in one or two very specific embedded Windows versions.
As a result of this, millions of these were sold in the '90s only to fall into disuse within a year or so in each case as technology and connectivity needs moved on, but only the very latest devices were supported by the latest developments in software to fulfill consumer needs. Consumers got smart and decided it was a generally bad deal to buy these devices because they'd be totally unsupported within a year, essentially a wasted $400-$800 investment on a device that would simply be left incompatible with the ecosystem before very long.
You can now find lots of these devices on eBay for less than $100 (various PDAs, handheld PCs, etc.) that are worthless because they only sync to Windows 95 or 98, have only rudimentary built-in tools, and are blessed in each case with a paucity of compatible applications.
Hopefully this doesn't happen to Android, too. I'm an iPhone user and am very satisfied, but it's always nice to think there are alternatives, and I like the Android platform, in concept, an awful lot.
I'm tired of hearing this bullshit, especially on Slashdot and supposed technology sites.
"The most important thing is that it makes calls. After all, it's a phone."
Anyone who cares most about "making calls" is living in the last century. I almost don't give a shit if my phone makes calls via the phone network. It's more important to me that it can Skype via WiFi. It's more important to me that it can check my email, run a Web browser, check my bank accounts, post to my blog, view what's in my Dropbox on the go, take notes, and manage my calendar and to-do lists.
It is a "phone" only because that name was grandfathered in over several generations. In fact, the "phone" is the LEAST important part of these mobile devices for me. The most important are data accessibility, ease of backing up/upgrades, and the features of built-in applications and installable apps vis-a-vis the network and network service/information providers of various types.
I often find it hard to believe just how quickly people get caught up in political battles and miss obvious points that ought to be the fundamental organizing principles for these discussions.
You've just said it yourself. Any long-term changes in the weather that are not, on the whole, good for humanity are things that we should be be worried about, whether we caused them or not.
People get caught up in the "warming" and are busy asking themselves whether they feel warmer or cooler. They get caught up in the "what causes it" debate, as though flood and famine are just fine, so long as humans didn't cause it.
But you've hit the nail on the head without meaning to. Large changes in the weather of the planet are precisely the sorts of things humans ought to monitor and try to change, even if we didn't cause them, since we are fairly fragile beings and society is a fairly fragile thing with respect to natural forces, and since our beings and societies have grown and adapted to one particular set of environmental circumstances, and there are significant limits to our adaptability.
Think of it this way. Forget the phrase "global warming" and replace it with "climate change." For warmer or for cooler, however you want to define it. And then it makes sense: "Any changes in the weather [over the long term] prove climate change." And then forget about who caused it and simply ask "If the climate is changing, is that dangerous to humanity, and what sorts of things can we do about it?"
SPAM was the absolute bane of my existence (I have several very public email addresses that have to remain that way) until the day I finally (at at the time reluctantly) decided to run all of my mail through Gmail accounts, without exception. I had used block lists, several ISP-based filters, spamassassin post-POP3 on my own local net, and a bunch of filters, and it was eating hours a day of attending to SPAM (new filters, fixing filters, marking as spam, marking as ham) and so many CPU cycles that a dedicated box couldn't keep up. Not to mention that due to the processing overhead of all that filtering, when someone did send me a message and told me so, I'd have to tell them "I'll get it in ten to fifteen minutes." And all for a few (three, really) email queues that belong to one person and a couple assistants?
Now I forget that SPAM exists, and my email comes in more or less instantly.
For a decade now, Google has more or less singlehandedly kept the internet usable.
The division between the "public" and the "private" only matters when there is a world of hidden "private" lives (from which the public is excluded) and your public life (with private excluded) has to circulate within and be measured against other public lives (with private excluded).
Once everyone's private becomes public, your own private is no more embarrassing or important than the "private" of most other people.
The same thing applies to thinks like identity theft. The more these things become regarded as "public" rather than private, the more identity theft (a) will happen in volume and (b) will be commonly understood and mitigated through tools and common forms of recourse as a "regular" thing, and others won't hold you nearly so responsible for it.
The reason, in other words, that privacy seems critical is that you assume that you're being marked by and held responsible for everything in your "private" world at a much deeper level than whatever is in your "public" world. Meanwhile, however, the rest of the world continues to increasingly dissolve the "private" into the public, with the inevitable shift that the "private" will be less and less something that people will be marked and/or held responsible for.
Once your boss has a Facebook profile with pictures of their drunken weekend, and friends you with it, your own photos aren't so embarassing. Once the bank has so much identity theft going on that it's considered a cost of business and made easily reversible, your responsibility for protecting these "identity" records is diminished, as are any consequences of failing to do so.
You've mistaken privacy as an inherent value and end in itself, rather than the means to an end (social success). Increasingly, social success lies along the very opposite path: being as open, public, and omni-visible/trackable as possible.
So hold on to your privacy if you really love it, but realize that society is going to reward you for it less and less, and in fact may even punish you for it relative to much less private others.
You can mount Kindle just like the Sony reader or any other USB storage device. Plug it into Linux and go. And then copy over all of the books you want, including (for example) the entire Project Gutenberg, which (unless I am very much mistaken) is not DRM-encumbered.
The bulk of enterprise space wants cheap whitebox farms of GateDellPaq machines interchangeable and uninspiring of possessiveness enough that the IT guy can drop by your desk and switch out your box four times a year and you won't care.
Apple, meanwhile, has a farm full of insanely loyal customers willing to pay premium prices to avoid precisely the GateDellPaq style of non-shiny nuts-and-boltism.
To get the part of enterprise space that they can't get with their current business offerings, they'd have to do things that would alienate a tremendously loyal, premium-paying customer base. And for what, exactly? To enter the tremendously crowded, cutthroat space of GateDellPaq where everyone competes on price and has to ensure compatibility with a massive ecosystem of devices and ISVs?
Why exactly would they do this?
Why does every other Slashdot poster seem to imagine that the goal of Linux, or Apple, or OLPC, must be to dominate the world and arrive in every home and business everywhere with all competition eliminated? I suspect many businesses would be more than happy to be in Apple's shoes right now, and I also suspect that their investors aren't too upset with them for not going out there trying to get every MBA farm on the block buying an Apple line of cheap-and-dirty-ware.
They're going for harassment and want to make an example of this person by tying up life, finances, and emotional health as long and deeply as possible. If they could get an execution somehow they would, but they'll settle for lawsuits for the rest of natural life to prevent things like, oh, personal property and/or basic health from taking hold ever again.
seem to understand the very idea of scientific methods or processes, or the reasoning behind empiricism and careful management of precision.
It's a failure of education, no so much in science education, I think, as in philosophy. Formal and informal logic, epistemology and ontology, etc. People appear increasingly unable to understand why any of this matters and they essentialize the "answer" as always "true" for any given process that can be described, so science becomes an act of creativity by which one tries to create a cohesive narrative of process that arrives at the desired result. If it has no intrinsic breaks or obvious discontinuities, it must be true.
If another study that contradicts it also suffers from no breaks or discontinuities, they're both true! After all, everyone gets to decide what's true in their own heart!
Slashdot Mirror
Europe (and Asia) in every . last . thing . on . earth ?
Answer: STUPID, ideologically blinkered, ultracapitalist/fascist public that votes against their own interests aggressively, continuously, and with tremendous joy, each believing that they will one day be the CEO of a major corporation or investment firm with six Bentleys and a pony (despite the fact that they are an unemployed plumber right now), and wanting to preserve every last advantage for themselves on . that . day .
My wife and I own two e-ink readers, a Kindle and a Sony PRS-300. Mine has over 800 books in it, and I read constantly with it. She has a netbook. I have a Thinkpad and an iPhone.
Neither of us has real interest in an iPad, nor would we purchase it instead of an e-ink reader if we had it to do all over again.
It's a computer, not a book. A Kindle is a book, not a computer.
with DLT. My posting is purely my opinion, and is anecdotal. But it is my opinion.
I've never had good experience with tape, from DC6150 SCSI linear tape at home all the way through an Exabyte library with stacks and stacks of 8mm tapes. Two decades of tape has been two decades of heartache and frustration for me and the companies I've worked with. These days I'm no longer in tech or IT (thank god) but for my personal needs I use RAID-1 for live and DVD-RAM (as cumbersome, slow, and small as it is) for offline.
Tapes just bleed data at an alarming rate, and they are about as reliable as a drunk gabling addict living under the subway next to the OTB shop.
Do the hard drive thing, and store them well, with redundancy, under good conditions, and replace them often.
Okay, maybe this is where I inadvertently let on that I'm not a physicist, but what is a "dragon here be" symbol?!
Depending on where you had set the base address of the BIOS in memory (many controllers had jumpers that let you shift it around).
Some controllers also had multiple routines in addition to the lowlevel format: various kinds of analytics, verify passes, some had self-tests that you had to be careful with because you could tell it to seek to a cylinder way beyond the drive boundary and knock off the heads with a few hundred rapid bangs, which was actually sort of okay because you could literally replace head assemblies and platters between drives sitting on your workbench. Not safe in theory, but actually in practice sort of okay. Once we even forgot to reinsert the air filter (yes, the air filter) in a drive and it started losing sectors much faster than we thought was normal. When we realized, we popped it back out (we used to use the drives in a variety of old minis and a couple embedded systems but manage them on PCs) and put the air filter back in and mapped a bunch more sectors out, and the drive continued in service for another 2-3 years.
On some you could also use BIOS routines adjust the stepper timing in ranges, from dozens of milliseconds to just a few microseconds, which could rapidly speed up your drive in use, but of course would rapidly lose your data if the stepper couldn't step reliably at that speed, which was often impossible to know if they had spot-sourced the stepper. :-)
Not only does the ST506 interface separate control and data into separate systems (two cables, with actual wires), but the ST506 drive, servo, control, etc. is really easy to work with: very slow circuitry, socketed DIPs, big pins, actual holes through board, lots of wires leading between and to things like the stepper and spindle motors, and you can get at everything (including entire drive disassembly down to magnets and platters) with little more than a computer screwdriver set with a flat head, a philips head, some small torx bits, etc.
So once you've got a working OS + software + hardware platform up, you also have the freedom with that generation hardware to "edit" the drive in any number of ways by adding your own electronics, etc., with little more than a soldering iron and a leftover box of 74-series logic, if you want to get that basic, and since mainboards of that era have at least two serial ports built in, well...
Probably given your project you didn't need me to say all this extra, but in case you're not old enough to have ever *seen* an ST506 era hard drive or controller, I thought I'd mention it.
Get yourself an old, totally unintelligent S412/506 MFM controller from out of an IBM PC or PC/XT. These were fairly dumb devices (g=c800:5 in debug, anyone?) for which you were meant to enter a "bad sectors list" printed on the front of the drive after performing the low-level format yourself. The earlier the drive, the closer to bare metal, so you might want to look for any of the 2, 5, or 10MB (yes, MB) full-height (2 x 5.25" drive bays stacked on top of one another) drives that were floating around then. You'll also want to get yourself a set of ribbon cables.
You should be able to use a drive/controller combination like this with any machine with ISA bus slots up through about the 386/486 era, and that would let you also go back and grab an early Linux distro (say, kernel 1.2.13 days, like Slackware 3 or so) that included drivers for such a controller that were actually in use and known to work at the time, giving you a base on which to build more code.
If 10MB is too small, you might just have luck going up to the largest of the MFM (80MB) or even RLL drives (160-200MB, just get an RLL controller instead) drives. I don't remember whether there were any ESDI drives back in the day that didn't remap their own sectors, but if there were, these controllers were 16-bit ISA and somewhat smarter (also with Linux drivers from the period available) and went up to 680MB or so.
But if you're looking for the best chance of success for your purposes and don't need tons of storage, my educated guess would be that the MFM controller out of an IBM 5150 PC plugged into a 5MB ST506 hard drive and connected to a SIMM-based 80386DX mainboard with 8 SIMM slots (for 8MB ram) might be the easiest combo to find and get working in practical terms that has a chance of doing what you want.
The universe is not a consciousness; it doesn't attach a meaning to the word "time."
"Time" as a construct (passing, what it means to us, memory, future, etc.) are all human quantities.
In a state of maximum entropy, there are no humans. There is nobody to imagine "time." A universe at maximum entropy is not going to imagine "time." Aside from the fact that the universe as such has no consciousness, the very state prevents enough order to represent or "store" as information anything approximating the conception.
It is the end; absolute zero; no events ongoing, no events to come ever again, and no possible consciousness or systemic externality to conceive of this state.
In any meaningful sense, there is no "time" there.
synchronizing location and actions. Time allows members of society to harness shared cognitive storage capabilities in the interest of collaboration and synchronization, which allows humans to produce the incredibly complex world that we have produced.
It will be, quite literally in every sense of the phrase, the end of time.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
There's a REASON people spend $$$ on these devices rather than an unlocked $10 Nokia 6310 GSM on eBay. That reason is because THEY USE THE OTHER ADVERTISED FEATURES and they HAVE A REASONABLE EXPECTATION THAT IF THEY PAY FOR THESE FEATURES, THE FEATURES WILL WORK.
That is to say, it is VERY TROLLISH when the same people post, over and over again in smartphone discussions, "A phone is a phone!" and inevitably follow it with one of:
- "So STFU about the other features being broken, that's not what a phone is for."
- "So STFU and buy yourself a netbook." (Ahem, and see other replies in this thread.)
- "So STFU because this device sucks at making phone calls and is therefore worthless."
- "So only idiots will buy this overfeatured piece of crap, and as idiots, you should should not open your mouths."
It is a discussion about SMARTPHONES and the ADVERTISED FEATURES of these phones that their users presumably ACTUALLY WANT AND USE or they wouldn't have paid for them.
If, as you suggest, you are uninterested in anything OTHER than a phone to make calls, WHY THE HELL ARE YOU POSTING IN A DISCUSSION ABOUT SMARTPHONE FEATURES ANYWAY? Presumably your phone makes calls and does it well and that's all you want, and this article is therefore about a whole bunch of stuff that you don't want/don't care about, so it appears that you (and the original parent of this thread) are just trolling.
early mobile Windows platforms (CE, HPC, HPC Pro, PPC, etc.)
For any given device, you could find the 5-6 apps released by the manufacturer, a few old scattered apps by a shareware dev that happened to have the same device as you, and a whole universe of apps for "mobile Windows" platforms, each of which supported only one or two very specific devices in one or two very specific embedded Windows versions.
As a result of this, millions of these were sold in the '90s only to fall into disuse within a year or so in each case as technology and connectivity needs moved on, but only the very latest devices were supported by the latest developments in software to fulfill consumer needs. Consumers got smart and decided it was a generally bad deal to buy these devices because they'd be totally unsupported within a year, essentially a wasted $400-$800 investment on a device that would simply be left incompatible with the ecosystem before very long.
You can now find lots of these devices on eBay for less than $100 (various PDAs, handheld PCs, etc.) that are worthless because they only sync to Windows 95 or 98, have only rudimentary built-in tools, and are blessed in each case with a paucity of compatible applications.
Hopefully this doesn't happen to Android, too. I'm an iPhone user and am very satisfied, but it's always nice to think there are alternatives, and I like the Android platform, in concept, an awful lot.
I'm tired of hearing this bullshit, especially on Slashdot and supposed technology sites.
"The most important thing is that it makes calls. After all, it's a phone."
Anyone who cares most about "making calls" is living in the last century. I almost don't give a shit if my phone makes calls via the phone network. It's more important to me that it can Skype via WiFi. It's more important to me that it can check my email, run a Web browser, check my bank accounts, post to my blog, view what's in my Dropbox on the go, take notes, and manage my calendar and to-do lists.
It is a "phone" only because that name was grandfathered in over several generations. In fact, the "phone" is the LEAST important part of these mobile devices for me. The most important are data accessibility, ease of backing up/upgrades, and the features of built-in applications and installable apps vis-a-vis the network and network service/information providers of various types.
back up your data elsewhere, no?
If not, you won't solve your problem (a lack of due diligence with respect to your own data) by switching hosts.
I often find it hard to believe just how quickly people get caught up in political battles and miss obvious points that ought to be the fundamental organizing principles for these discussions.
You've just said it yourself. Any long-term changes in the weather that are not, on the whole, good for humanity are things that we should be be worried about, whether we caused them or not.
People get caught up in the "warming" and are busy asking themselves whether they feel warmer or cooler.
They get caught up in the "what causes it" debate, as though flood and famine are just fine, so long as humans didn't cause it.
But you've hit the nail on the head without meaning to. Large changes in the weather of the planet are precisely the sorts of things humans ought to monitor and try to change, even if we didn't cause them, since we are fairly fragile beings and society is a fairly fragile thing with respect to natural forces, and since our beings and societies have grown and adapted to one particular set of environmental circumstances, and there are significant limits to our adaptability.
Think of it this way. Forget the phrase "global warming" and replace it with "climate change." For warmer or for cooler, however you want to define it. And then it makes sense: "Any changes in the weather [over the long term] prove climate change." And then forget about who caused it and simply ask "If the climate is changing, is that dangerous to humanity, and what sorts of things can we do about it?"
Then we can begin to talk intelligently.
SPAM was the absolute bane of my existence (I have several very public email addresses that have to remain that way) until the day I finally (at at the time reluctantly) decided to run all of my mail through Gmail accounts, without exception. I had used block lists, several ISP-based filters, spamassassin post-POP3 on my own local net, and a bunch of filters, and it was eating hours a day of attending to SPAM (new filters, fixing filters, marking as spam, marking as ham) and so many CPU cycles that a dedicated box couldn't keep up. Not to mention that due to the processing overhead of all that filtering, when someone did send me a message and told me so, I'd have to tell them "I'll get it in ten to fifteen minutes." And all for a few (three, really) email queues that belong to one person and a couple assistants?
Now I forget that SPAM exists, and my email comes in more or less instantly.
For a decade now, Google has more or less singlehandedly kept the internet usable.
The division between the "public" and the "private" only matters when there is a world of hidden "private" lives (from which the public is excluded) and your public life (with private excluded) has to circulate within and be measured against other public lives (with private excluded).
Once everyone's private becomes public, your own private is no more embarrassing or important than the "private" of most other people.
The same thing applies to thinks like identity theft. The more these things become regarded as "public" rather than private, the more identity theft (a) will happen in volume and (b) will be commonly understood and mitigated through tools and common forms of recourse as a "regular" thing, and others won't hold you nearly so responsible for it.
The reason, in other words, that privacy seems critical is that you assume that you're being marked by and held responsible for everything in your "private" world at a much deeper level than whatever is in your "public" world. Meanwhile, however, the rest of the world continues to increasingly dissolve the "private" into the public, with the inevitable shift that the "private" will be less and less something that people will be marked and/or held responsible for.
Once your boss has a Facebook profile with pictures of their drunken weekend, and friends you with it, your own photos aren't so embarassing.
Once the bank has so much identity theft going on that it's considered a cost of business and made easily reversible, your responsibility for protecting these "identity" records is diminished, as are any consequences of failing to do so.
You've mistaken privacy as an inherent value and end in itself, rather than the means to an end (social success). Increasingly, social success lies along the very opposite path: being as open, public, and omni-visible/trackable as possible.
So hold on to your privacy if you really love it, but realize that society is going to reward you for it less and less, and in fact may even punish you for it relative to much less private others.
You can mount Kindle just like the Sony reader or any other USB storage device. Plug it into Linux and go.
And then copy over all of the books you want, including (for example) the entire Project Gutenberg, which (unless I am very much mistaken) is not DRM-encumbered.
The bulk of enterprise space wants cheap whitebox farms of GateDellPaq machines interchangeable and uninspiring of possessiveness enough that the IT guy can drop by your desk and switch out your box four times a year and you won't care.
Apple, meanwhile, has a farm full of insanely loyal customers willing to pay premium prices to avoid precisely the GateDellPaq style of non-shiny nuts-and-boltism.
To get the part of enterprise space that they can't get with their current business offerings, they'd have to do things that would alienate a tremendously loyal, premium-paying customer base. And for what, exactly? To enter the tremendously crowded, cutthroat space of GateDellPaq where everyone competes on price and has to ensure compatibility with a massive ecosystem of devices and ISVs?
Why exactly would they do this?
Why does every other Slashdot poster seem to imagine that the goal of Linux, or Apple, or OLPC, must be to dominate the world and arrive in every home and business everywhere with all competition eliminated? I suspect many businesses would be more than happy to be in Apple's shoes right now, and I also suspect that their investors aren't too upset with them for not going out there trying to get every MBA farm on the block buying an Apple line of cheap-and-dirty-ware.
They're going for harassment and want to make an example of this person by tying up life, finances, and emotional health as long and deeply as possible. If they could get an execution somehow they would, but they'll settle for lawsuits for the rest of natural life to prevent things like, oh, personal property and/or basic health from taking hold ever again.
Rip 'is 'art 'apart!
seem to understand the very idea of scientific methods or processes, or the reasoning behind empiricism and careful management of precision.
It's a failure of education, no so much in science education, I think, as in philosophy. Formal and informal logic, epistemology and ontology, etc. People appear increasingly unable to understand why any of this matters and they essentialize the "answer" as always "true" for any given process that can be described, so science becomes an act of creativity by which one tries to create a cohesive narrative of process that arrives at the desired result. If it has no intrinsic breaks or obvious discontinuities, it must be true.
If another study that contradicts it also suffers from no breaks or discontinuities, they're both true! After all, everyone gets to decide what's true in their own heart!
for an iPad with a stylus and the Rosetta handwriting engine from the Newton MessagePad 2x00.
As it is, I'm struggling to figure out why I should pay $499 for it.