I can just tell you are very wrong. Yes, the government is quite corrupt (although I doubt it is as corrupt as you think), but here we are not talking (at least, we are no _longer_ talking) about govt. people being bribed not to mess with them. The cartels have become militarily stronger than the State in many regions, and although the government does not want to admit it, the talks about a "failed state" and about an effective civil war are correct... In some areas of the country.
Please note the "some areas" part. Of course, our country is going through a critical point, and the current short-sighted government is mostly to blame for it, for devising the worst possible strategy when it needed to legitimize after what many of us still think that was an electoral fraud. Most of the country is still quite safe. I have never seen (and hope never to see) any cartel-related violence, and I travel quite frequently throughout the country. Even including the North, although I am avoiding it now.
Hell, I can perfectly imagine the satisfaction from yelling at the stupid cellphone that does not want to turn on, enough to give it enough power to complete a short call. Of course, it's bothering enough to listen to people shout to their devices as it is, it will be much worse when such devices actually have use for the vibrations.
Very true. Of course, that was not what I meant — Even if I know you are exaggerating a bit with your example, I do know my typesetting basics, and I even thought I knew enough. Talking with the right people made me see how limited my understanding was. And implementing their recommendations taught me more LaTeX than I expected to ever need.
I have to completely agree with the parent comment. I am currently in the final phases of editing a (traditional, printed) book. I originally thought the editorial process would be a breeze (hey, after all I use LaTeX for my typesetting – is there anything beyond that) but... Well, not only has reality proven me wrong, but as the style and editorial correctors give me their comments in writing (I'm writing for my University press), I have had to learn more than a bit in the process.
And of course, editing for print is completely different from editing for e-readers. I do, however, want to make the book available for e-readers as well (I also usually prefer reading on my Kindle than lugging a large book with me), but many of the principles already used should be enough for a first version.
Of course, and on a much more personal topic: I am interested in making the book available in an open format (most likely.mobi, which is most compatible among readers). Of course,.mobi is translatable (in my limited experience) to both the more popular ePub and to the Kindle AZW formats with no quality loss. But, will Amazon accept listing a free book, available under a CC-BY-SA license, in their catalog? I'm not too optimistic.
Given that most of the world's piracy occurs in the Gulf of Aden, off the Somalian shore, I am sure this news item means that poor and disorganized country is heading towards recovery. I am very happy for it. However, I fail to see what is the relation between the Business Software Alliance and any guild of vessel captains.
Oh, you mean "illegal copying"? Then why did you say "piracy"?
We can argue endlessly on how that number is false, misleading, and so on (e.g. they usually count all non-legally-paid licenses as a loss for 100% of the license value – While in very few cases would the license in question be paid at all if anti-copying schemes worked correctly). However, piracy should just not be confused with illegal copying.
So, the rad-hardened robots will have a gap in their rad-hardening, and will slightly mutate. Then, they will start feeding from the radiation sources, and keep mutating. Three months from now, we will find a spontaneously-generated Mazinger. Which will be quite handy, FWIW, as lizards have already started mutating into little Godzillas by now.
It had to happen in Japan. They don't have animators - They have prophets.
The divorce papers spelt his own name. That futuristic laptop, top-spec and top-notch in every possible detail, was actually a gift from the future. And after reading through some pages of the divorce settlement, he called his fiancée and cancelled the marriage.
As if by magic, the laptop was now empty. He would not be able to show the nifty features of Office 2018 to his office mates.
Even more if you are looking at a small number of votes... Why don't you go buy a couple blocks of paper? It is absolutely more secure than any e-voting scheme (yes, even if it is not for a big countrywide thingy). No need to set up an e-voting solution - unless you just want to impress the kids with shiny kewl toyz.
I agree with you — I am talking from my own experience. I live in Mexico City, which is not often associated with road safety/civility or bike-friendliness. Still, in my experience here is very good. I often, yes, strongly try to convince my fellow cyclists (sometimes riding along them in the street, sometimes when the topic arises in a conversation) not to ride on the sidewalk, not to ride against traffic, etc. But cyclists, as unaware as they often are, are not as obnoxious here as you portrait them.
As for you... Well, I'd surely suggest you to switch jobs. The quality of life improvement you get from living close to your home is very well worth even a salary reduction — Even if you were not paying for the trip itself, enjoying an extra hour or two of free time... is worth a lot!
If we (the militant cyclists) can get more people to stop depending on their cars for their daily commutes, the demand for gasoline will drop. And if the demand for gasoline drops, its price will also go down. And as a side win, we will all live in (or transit through) less traffic-dense, more polite, more humane cities.
As for gun control, have you ever thought that maybe that's part of your problem? We don't have a whole lot of problems with organized crime violence, except in inner cities (which do have gun control), yet people can easily obtain weapons here. Maybe if your own people had access to weapons, they wouldn't be such easy victims for the cartels, who are now branching out into many other businesses such as sex trafficking and kidnap-and-ransom.
No, no, you are mistaken here (at least related to what we see in this country. Yes, there are some robberies at gunpoint (I haven't thankfully ever seen one) – But when people are "picked up" in the streets for kidnapping and similar issues, it's most usually done via numeric superiority, surprise, and just body force. Many people will rather risk being killed by a bullet than being held for ransom, for the huge cost it means (monetary and psychological) to them and to their families. Our main problem with guns here is the violence between the drug cartels. And yes, I agree with you - I meant the "thick" regions around the border. And that thickness has reached Sinaloa (I'd say it's about 500Km from the border) - Sinaloa has historically been a very problematic state, one where the drug lords have always been very powerful, due to more reasons I can write in a reasonably short reply (and more than I am familiar with). As for your last point, regarding old and not-powerful weapons: During the last couple of days (1 or 2 weeks), the radio news show I listen to in the morning has been giving quite a bit of attention to the Fast and Furious operation – an investigation carried out by US authorities, without Mexican knowledge, allowing a group of drug dealers to smuggle into Mexico over 1900 high power weapons, attempting to track their distribution. Again, I cannot get into further details here, but it's been quite a scandal this side of the border. But don't worry, we will forget about it very soon and continue doing... Business as usual.
Come on... Mexicans enjoy that? Please have some sensibility while posting.
A tiny percentage of our population is sickly violent — And we have not yet invaded a foreign country where we can ship them so they just kill people with different ethnic origins. So we have to cope with sickly violent people. The country is not completely invaded and rotten (i.e. Mexico City, where I live, is just a regular big city, where I can walk with more or less the same confidence I would mostly in any big city in the world. Really.). We do not find bodybags everyday when shopping groceries. We do not have shootings on the street instead of nice TV movies.
Mexico has several bad things, some of them severely bad... But it is very far from what you imagine. The images you mention are sadly becoming frequent. But they are targetted between hyperviolent groups. The population, the people really expecting to see this country day after day for many years (I doubt the regular thug expects to live beyond a year or two), does get as terrified with this as you get when you see the racial crimes or insane shootings that have made the USA so famous.
It is not related to children being more abduction-prone (or not so much, anyway)... It is because of a legal controversy.
In Mexico, we do have one federally issued ID document: The voting card. It is a document I have often criticized, as it lacks many important controls - but it has proven enough for its main designed use: Identifying yourself at the voting table. It does not have too much personal information, as it is not needed, and it is not terrible that it is relatively easy to forge, as it has to be compared with the printed copy the voting booths have with them. Yes, as an ID document it sucks – It has some information many of us would rather not carry so prominently (my full address), as it is required for verifying you are in the right place to vote, and lacks many locks to make it a good ID document.
Last year, Secretaría de Gobernación (lets say... the Inner Issues Ministry?) proposed this new universal ID card. However, as there is already an authority legally required to emit the ID document for every citizen, it was ruled the two documents would compete and neither would reach full coverage.
There have also been many cases of information leak: The full voters database has been found for sale in the black market. Many people (me included) don't want to submit our biometric information to a database prone to be stolen – At the same time, I recognize we will have to. And that information (for me) is already in the hands of the USA embassy (as I have a USA visa), parts of it is with the banks, and... Well, I cannot assume anymore I am the only one with access to my fingerprints (although iris scans are far less common). I do not strongly oppose this anymore, although I still don't really trust Gobernación with its custody.
But yes, I fully agree... Issuing a strong ID document to minors is just the first step towards making it mandatory and universal. What has to be done, however, is to do it in an ordered way... As the fears of dillution (many adults not bothering about getting the voter card as they already have the ID card or viceversa, or people not notifying of their address changes to both agencies) are not something to be ignored.
The image of Mexico in the USA is that of a wild land, full of violence, full of smuggling and –as you say– taking narcos as role models. It is far from that. Even if we have seen a huge setback in legality and we have got far more nervous in the last couple of years (since the current president started his mandate, as legitimate as GWBush's first)... Most of the country is far from what you say. You are refering to a panorama similar to the one presented in Luis Estrada's El Infierno (Hell) movie. Please keep in mind that movie is a fantasy, a literary/cinematographic exercise on what the author feels could happen. It is cruel and raw, and we do see lots of such things, but the country is far bigger than that situation. The gruesome part is (and you can find an obvious correlation..) mostly along the border we share with the US... On a widening strip of land, already several hundreds of kilometers wide.
Still, no, our culture does not condone or glorify such activities. Of course, people living in the very much impoverished and arid Northern region, when facing the opportunity of getting some money by joining a drug gang, have experienced a shift of values. And I do know many people who enjoy the narcocorridos, the music you refer to, but as a recreational (even funny) way. I know (and I hope I don't ever) anybody who takes a capo narco as a role model.
So, replying to your last sentence: There is something fundamentally broken with the inequity in our society. By far, most of Mexico's 110,000,000 people are not what you describe. Even more, most of us feel it is unbelievable a country which claims to be advanced and peaceful (and I'm looking over the border now) has no gun control whatsoever, and such a huge number of drug addicts. Were it not for the ease of buying guns in the USA, our gangs would not be so stupidly heavily armed. And were it not for the amount of drugs demanded in the USA, there would not be all that great business opportunity. And, of course, we sense a huge disparity: How come we have all those cartels smuggling drugs to the USA, but in the USA there is never more than a small-scale distributor captured? Logically, there are strong orgnized drug rings in your country. But the war has been pushed to ours.
Precisely CENTOS is not going to be bit by this. The problems arise if you try to take RedHat's patches and apply them in other distributions (Attems is in the Debian kernel team, so he is among the most affected people), or if you are among the breed of people still patching and rolling their own kernels.
So far, off-the-mainlain Linux kernel development has been a collaborative effort with people from different backgrounds joining in. Of course, RedHat –as a business– has to keep a competitive advantage. And that advantage can stem from saying here is a megapatch with all of our improvements, with no distinction between feature lines, with no documentation on what does what besides the code itself".
I understand their point, but am deeply saddened by it. And yes, it is legal and sound, although goes against _collective_ Linux state-of-the-art advancement, beyond each company's interests.
I also have many friends all over the world, from many different age ranges. I have lived in two countries and travelled quite a bit, and am or was active not only in the Free Software world, but on other communities with much less technical affitions.
And your points hold also for me. And for most/. readers, I'd venture. I joined Facebook out of curiosity in 2005. Decided not to log in again in 2007. In 2009, I almost missed my high school's 15 year post-graduation gathering, as it was completely organized over Facebook (but I am still in contact with two or three classmates). My girlfriend (who lives 7000Km away and is about to come to my country, yay!) and her family, as well as my family and most of my friends, use Facebook as well.
Yet, I don't. And I think I have persuaded a couple of my friends not to use Facebook, or to reduce their exposure, the share of personal information they upload.
Some people will think I'm nuts... But they did so anyway when I told them I didn't want to use Adobe Flash, or MS Windows, or whatnot. Maybe I was born to be statistical noise far off the median, but it just comes natural after some time
It is very uncommon to find Xeons buried in the ground. I don't know where Intel mines, but I have never seen a fully functional CPU in its pure, natural state.
Slashdot has an international audience. And most of the world, even what I'd call moderate right-wingers, are far off the left wing of the USA. So, naturally, if the average USA citizen is exposed to the opinions from people outside their country, they will perceive it as "left-leaning bias". And if I take part in a strongly USA-based conversation, I'll feel it has a "right-leaning bias". Same thing.
They were dying to buy them. Imagine, the provider had a shitload of alpaca socks, and the alpacas had cold toes... Until the alpacas got bitcoins. And now the world is a better place.
I agree, traditional newspapers have now choose between offering their contents on Internet for free or being relegated as an old-style, non-accessible newspaper. And the "apps" market is kewl. And people buy apps, because it just makes sense, and they already have the AppleWare.
Still, if the information is the same I can get at any traditional newspaper's website, why should I care to have an app for it? Just because it flips through pages instead of hopping through links? And that is an advantae, why?
If they come up with good, original content, great. They would survive anyway being an old-fashioned media. If they just keep pushing an app for browsing the paper... Meh, they will fall into the huge oblivion of worthless tech.
The experience is... Ok. Although not stellar, by far - PDFs are usually produced to be displayed/printed on a letter/A4 format, that is, about 3x the size of the screen. The Kindle tries to get as close as possible to the PDF by cropping the displayed portion. Sadly, it does not recognize elements that make the display be too reduced (i.e. the header/footer, repeated at every page with minimal modifications)... But anyway, reading it at page level zoom is usually very uncomfortable (and I have very good sight), if at all possible.
Zooming into the text is useless, as the zoom cuts the page in half horizontally - so if you are not reading material with columns (i.e. a magazine), it's basically useless.
What I do, and have read several books with, is to rotate the screen and hold it in landscape. The cropping is then adjusted for maximum effective horizontal space. It is still not as comfortable as reading a text, native format - but it is much better, and more than enough for reading a book.
Finally, if your PDF is mostly text, you can mail it to [your-address]@free.kindle.com, with "convert" as the subject. It usually does the right thing.
I have a Kindle 3. And love it. I have bought few books, but use it extensively to read other files I have got (ebooks, PDFs, simple text files,... - And yes, I'll recognize it's not 100% legally acquired material) And no, I don't and won't see it as my long-term library. From the books I have read, I have already bought two - One to keep as a hard-copy in my bookshelf, one to give away as a present. Oh, and of course, I have also downloaded electronic versions of books I have sitting on my bookshelf for years.
I have stuffed my Kindle with a couple hundred magazines and books I had lying around my computer, waiting for some time to read with no distractions, so I can now just pick up anything I fancy, as it's all there in my pocket. It is very useful as a quick reference from technical manuals, but due to the much better back-and-forth navigability of a paper book (I am one of those that often uses three fingers pointing to different pages at mid-read), I'll often prefer to stand up and get the book.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just tell you are very wrong. Yes, the government is quite corrupt (although I doubt it is as corrupt as you think), but here we are not talking (at least, we are no _longer_ talking) about govt. people being bribed not to mess with them. The cartels have become militarily stronger than the State in many regions, and although the government does not want to admit it, the talks about a "failed state" and about an effective civil war are correct... In some areas of the country.
Please note the "some areas" part. Of course, our country is going through a critical point, and the current short-sighted government is mostly to blame for it, for devising the worst possible strategy when it needed to legitimize after what many of us still think that was an electoral fraud. Most of the country is still quite safe. I have never seen (and hope never to see) any cartel-related violence, and I travel quite frequently throughout the country. Even including the North, although I am avoiding it now.
Just outside Mexico City we have "Desierto de los Leones" (the lions' desert). It is a beautiful forest with a 400 year old convent in it.
Why?
Because it used to belong to the "de León" family, and it was far enough from the city that it became a perfect spiritual retirement place - A desert.
Hell, I can perfectly imagine the satisfaction from yelling at the stupid cellphone that does not want to turn on, enough to give it enough power to complete a short call. Of course, it's bothering enough to listen to people shout to their devices as it is, it will be much worse when such devices actually have use for the vibrations.
Very true. Of course, that was not what I meant — Even if I know you are exaggerating a bit with your example, I do know my typesetting basics, and I even thought I knew enough. Talking with the right people made me see how limited my understanding was. And implementing their recommendations taught me more LaTeX than I expected to ever need.
I have to completely agree with the parent comment. I am currently in the final phases of editing a (traditional, printed) book. I originally thought the editorial process would be a breeze (hey, after all I use LaTeX for my typesetting – is there anything beyond that) but... Well, not only has reality proven me wrong, but as the style and editorial correctors give me their comments in writing (I'm writing for my University press), I have had to learn more than a bit in the process.
And of course, editing for print is completely different from editing for e-readers. I do, however, want to make the book available for e-readers as well (I also usually prefer reading on my Kindle than lugging a large book with me), but many of the principles already used should be enough for a first version.
Of course, and on a much more personal topic: I am interested in making the book available in an open format (most likely .mobi, which is most compatible among readers). Of course, .mobi is translatable (in my limited experience) to both the more popular ePub and to the Kindle AZW formats with no quality loss. But, will Amazon accept listing a free book, available under a CC-BY-SA license, in their catalog? I'm not too optimistic.
Given that most of the world's piracy occurs in the Gulf of Aden, off the Somalian shore, I am sure this news item means that poor and disorganized country is heading towards recovery. I am very happy for it. However, I fail to see what is the relation between the Business Software Alliance and any guild of vessel captains.
Oh, you mean "illegal copying"? Then why did you say "piracy"?
We can argue endlessly on how that number is false, misleading, and so on (e.g. they usually count all non-legally-paid licenses as a loss for 100% of the license value – While in very few cases would the license in question be paid at all if anti-copying schemes worked correctly). However, piracy should just not be confused with illegal copying.
So, the rad-hardened robots will have a gap in their rad-hardening, and will slightly mutate. Then, they will start feeding from the radiation sources, and keep mutating. Three months from now, we will find a spontaneously-generated Mazinger. Which will be quite handy, FWIW, as lizards have already started mutating into little Godzillas by now.
It had to happen in Japan. They don't have animators - They have prophets.
The divorce papers spelt his own name. That futuristic laptop, top-spec and top-notch in every possible detail, was actually a gift from the future. And after reading through some pages of the divorce settlement, he called his fiancée and cancelled the marriage.
As if by magic, the laptop was now empty. He would not be able to show the nifty features of Office 2018 to his office mates.
Even more if you are looking at a small number of votes... Why don't you go buy a couple blocks of paper? It is absolutely more secure than any e-voting scheme (yes, even if it is not for a big countrywide thingy). No need to set up an e-voting solution - unless you just want to impress the kids with shiny kewl toyz.
I agree with you — I am talking from my own experience. I live in Mexico City, which is not often associated with road safety/civility or bike-friendliness. Still, in my experience here is very good. I often, yes, strongly try to convince my fellow cyclists (sometimes riding along them in the street, sometimes when the topic arises in a conversation) not to ride on the sidewalk, not to ride against traffic, etc. But cyclists, as unaware as they often are, are not as obnoxious here as you portrait them.
As for you... Well, I'd surely suggest you to switch jobs. The quality of life improvement you get from living close to your home is very well worth even a salary reduction — Even if you were not paying for the trip itself, enjoying an extra hour or two of free time... is worth a lot!
If we (the militant cyclists) can get more people to stop depending on their cars for their daily commutes, the demand for gasoline will drop. And if the demand for gasoline drops, its price will also go down. And as a side win, we will all live in (or transit through) less traffic-dense, more polite, more humane cities.
No, no, you are mistaken here (at least related to what we see in this country. Yes, there are some robberies at gunpoint (I haven't thankfully ever seen one) – But when people are "picked up" in the streets for kidnapping and similar issues, it's most usually done via numeric superiority, surprise, and just body force. Many people will rather risk being killed by a bullet than being held for ransom, for the huge cost it means (monetary and psychological) to them and to their families.
Our main problem with guns here is the violence between the drug cartels. And yes, I agree with you - I meant the "thick" regions around the border. And that thickness has reached Sinaloa (I'd say it's about 500Km from the border) - Sinaloa has historically been a very problematic state, one where the drug lords have always been very powerful, due to more reasons I can write in a reasonably short reply (and more than I am familiar with).
As for your last point, regarding old and not-powerful weapons: During the last couple of days (1 or 2 weeks), the radio news show I listen to in the morning has been giving quite a bit of attention to the Fast and Furious operation – an investigation carried out by US authorities, without Mexican knowledge, allowing a group of drug dealers to smuggle into Mexico over 1900 high power weapons, attempting to track their distribution. Again, I cannot get into further details here, but it's been quite a scandal this side of the border. But don't worry, we will forget about it very soon and continue doing... Business as usual.
Come on... Mexicans enjoy that? Please have some sensibility while posting.
A tiny percentage of our population is sickly violent — And we have not yet invaded a foreign country where we can ship them so they just kill people with different ethnic origins. So we have to cope with sickly violent people. The country is not completely invaded and rotten (i.e. Mexico City, where I live, is just a regular big city, where I can walk with more or less the same confidence I would mostly in any big city in the world. Really.). We do not find bodybags everyday when shopping groceries. We do not have shootings on the street instead of nice TV movies.
Mexico has several bad things, some of them severely bad... But it is very far from what you imagine. The images you mention are sadly becoming frequent. But they are targetted between hyperviolent groups. The population, the people really expecting to see this country day after day for many years (I doubt the regular thug expects to live beyond a year or two), does get as terrified with this as you get when you see the racial crimes or insane shootings that have made the USA so famous.
It is not related to children being more abduction-prone (or not so much, anyway)... It is because of a legal controversy.
In Mexico, we do have one federally issued ID document: The voting card. It is a document I have often criticized, as it lacks many important controls - but it has proven enough for its main designed use: Identifying yourself at the voting table. It does not have too much personal information, as it is not needed, and it is not terrible that it is relatively easy to forge, as it has to be compared with the printed copy the voting booths have with them. Yes, as an ID document it sucks – It has some information many of us would rather not carry so prominently (my full address), as it is required for verifying you are in the right place to vote, and lacks many locks to make it a good ID document.
Last year, Secretaría de Gobernación (lets say... the Inner Issues Ministry?) proposed this new universal ID card. However, as there is already an authority legally required to emit the ID document for every citizen, it was ruled the two documents would compete and neither would reach full coverage.
There have also been many cases of information leak: The full voters database has been found for sale in the black market. Many people (me included) don't want to submit our biometric information to a database prone to be stolen – At the same time, I recognize we will have to. And that information (for me) is already in the hands of the USA embassy (as I have a USA visa), parts of it is with the banks, and... Well, I cannot assume anymore I am the only one with access to my fingerprints (although iris scans are far less common). I do not strongly oppose this anymore, although I still don't really trust Gobernación with its custody.
But yes, I fully agree... Issuing a strong ID document to minors is just the first step towards making it mandatory and universal. What has to be done, however, is to do it in an ordered way... As the fears of dillution (many adults not bothering about getting the voter card as they already have the ID card or viceversa, or people not notifying of their address changes to both agencies) are not something to be ignored.
(Mexican speaking here)
The image of Mexico in the USA is that of a wild land, full of violence, full of smuggling and –as you say– taking narcos as role models. It is far from that. Even if we have seen a huge setback in legality and we have got far more nervous in the last couple of years (since the current president started his mandate, as legitimate as GWBush's first)... Most of the country is far from what you say. You are refering to a panorama similar to the one presented in Luis Estrada's El Infierno (Hell) movie. Please keep in mind that movie is a fantasy, a literary/cinematographic exercise on what the author feels could happen. It is cruel and raw, and we do see lots of such things, but the country is far bigger than that situation. The gruesome part is (and you can find an obvious correlation..) mostly along the border we share with the US... On a widening strip of land, already several hundreds of kilometers wide.
Still, no, our culture does not condone or glorify such activities. Of course, people living in the very much impoverished and arid Northern region, when facing the opportunity of getting some money by joining a drug gang, have experienced a shift of values. And I do know many people who enjoy the narcocorridos, the music you refer to, but as a recreational (even funny) way. I know (and I hope I don't ever) anybody who takes a capo narco as a role model.
So, replying to your last sentence: There is something fundamentally broken with the inequity in our society. By far, most of Mexico's 110,000,000 people are not what you describe. Even more, most of us feel it is unbelievable a country which claims to be advanced and peaceful (and I'm looking over the border now) has no gun control whatsoever, and such a huge number of drug addicts. Were it not for the ease of buying guns in the USA, our gangs would not be so stupidly heavily armed. And were it not for the amount of drugs demanded in the USA, there would not be all that great business opportunity. And, of course, we sense a huge disparity: How come we have all those cartels smuggling drugs to the USA, but in the USA there is never more than a small-scale distributor captured? Logically, there are strong orgnized drug rings in your country. But the war has been pushed to ours.
Precisely CENTOS is not going to be bit by this. The problems arise if you try to take RedHat's patches and apply them in other distributions (Attems is in the Debian kernel team, so he is among the most affected people), or if you are among the breed of people still patching and rolling their own kernels.
So far, off-the-mainlain Linux kernel development has been a collaborative effort with people from different backgrounds joining in. Of course, RedHat –as a business– has to keep a competitive advantage. And that advantage can stem from saying here is a megapatch with all of our improvements, with no distinction between feature lines, with no documentation on what does what besides the code itself".
I understand their point, but am deeply saddened by it. And yes, it is legal and sound, although goes against _collective_ Linux state-of-the-art advancement, beyond each company's interests.
I also have many friends all over the world, from many different age ranges. I have lived in two countries and travelled quite a bit, and am or was active not only in the Free Software world, but on other communities with much less technical affitions.
And your points hold also for me. And for most /. readers, I'd venture. I joined Facebook out of curiosity in 2005. Decided not to log in again in 2007. In 2009, I almost missed my high school's 15 year post-graduation gathering, as it was completely organized over Facebook (but I am still in contact with two or three classmates). My girlfriend (who lives 7000Km away and is about to come to my country, yay!) and her family, as well as my family and most of my friends, use Facebook as well.
Yet, I don't. And I think I have persuaded a couple of my friends not to use Facebook, or to reduce their exposure, the share of personal information they upload.
Some people will think I'm nuts... But they did so anyway when I told them I didn't want to use Adobe Flash, or MS Windows, or whatnot. Maybe I was born to be statistical noise far off the median, but it just comes natural after some time
It is very uncommon to find Xeons buried in the ground. I don't know where Intel mines, but I have never seen a fully functional CPU in its pure, natural state.
Just a portable kill-switch?
Slashdot has an international audience. And most of the world, even what I'd call moderate right-wingers, are far off the left wing of the USA. So, naturally, if the average USA citizen is exposed to the opinions from people outside their country, they will perceive it as "left-leaning bias". And if I take part in a strongly USA-based conversation, I'll feel it has a "right-leaning bias". Same thing.
Unless, of course, your alpaca is named Penny.
They were dying to buy them. Imagine, the provider had a shitload of alpaca socks, and the alpacas had cold toes... Until the alpacas got bitcoins. And now the world is a better place.
I agree, traditional newspapers have now choose between offering their contents on Internet for free or being relegated as an old-style, non-accessible newspaper. And the "apps" market is kewl. And people buy apps, because it just makes sense, and they already have the AppleWare.
Still, if the information is the same I can get at any traditional newspaper's website, why should I care to have an app for it? Just because it flips through pages instead of hopping through links? And that is an advantae, why?
If they come up with good, original content, great. They would survive anyway being an old-fashioned media. If they just keep pushing an app for browsing the paper... Meh, they will fall into the huge oblivion of worthless tech.
The experience is... Ok. Although not stellar, by far - PDFs are usually produced to be displayed/printed on a letter/A4 format, that is, about 3x the size of the screen. The Kindle tries to get as close as possible to the PDF by cropping the displayed portion. Sadly, it does not recognize elements that make the display be too reduced (i.e. the header/footer, repeated at every page with minimal modifications)... But anyway, reading it at page level zoom is usually very uncomfortable (and I have very good sight), if at all possible.
Zooming into the text is useless, as the zoom cuts the page in half horizontally - so if you are not reading material with columns (i.e. a magazine), it's basically useless.
What I do, and have read several books with, is to rotate the screen and hold it in landscape. The cropping is then adjusted for maximum effective horizontal space. It is still not as comfortable as reading a text, native format - but it is much better, and more than enough for reading a book.
Finally, if your PDF is mostly text, you can mail it to [your-address]@free.kindle.com, with "convert" as the subject. It usually does the right thing.
I have a Kindle 3. And love it. I have bought few books, but use it extensively to read other files I have got (ebooks, PDFs, simple text files, ... - And yes, I'll recognize it's not 100% legally acquired material) And no, I don't and won't see it as my long-term library. From the books I have read, I have already bought two - One to keep as a hard-copy in my bookshelf, one to give away as a present. Oh, and of course, I have also downloaded electronic versions of books I have sitting on my bookshelf for years.
I have stuffed my Kindle with a couple hundred magazines and books I had lying around my computer, waiting for some time to read with no distractions, so I can now just pick up anything I fancy, as it's all there in my pocket. It is very useful as a quick reference from technical manuals, but due to the much better back-and-forth navigability of a paper book (I am one of those that often uses three fingers pointing to different pages at mid-read), I'll often prefer to stand up and get the book.