"The real reason is obvious: that more people riding bikes means fewer people taking taxis and other forms of paid transportation, but they could have at least come up with a better argument."
Miraculously, all those Uber-hating lefties who root for medallion taxi drivers over ridesharing services have fallen silent now that they are attacking cyclists.
There's no book nostalgia like the smell of leather-bound editions you have never bought in your life read before the baronial fireplace you have never owned.
This is a factor I have never seen mentioned in the whole discussion of physical books vs ebooks. How many additional sales of would-I-want-to-be-seen-reading-this-on-the-train books are we seeing now that they come in ebook form?
"But when there are diagrams/maps in a book, the ebooks fail miserably. When I want to read in the tub, ebooks fail. When I want something that can fit in my pants pocket, ebooks fail - but paperbacks deliver. When I want to borrow/lend a book, ebooks make it too much trouble, but a paperback is easy. When I want to throw a book in a backpack, paperback wins."
1. Today's reader apps are mostly sequential, but some ebooks set up as apps of their own already offer interactive elements you can't even do on paper. 2. Who reads in bathtubs? 3. When I find myself unexpectedly waiting in line, it's never anywhere I have planned for and brought a paperback along. Instead, I whip out my phone, whereupon the Kindle app remembers where I left off on my tablet at home. I can knock off another chapter or two while you duck out to the car to get your paperback. 4. I can borrow ebooks too now. 5. Recently I did a 200-mile hike, and my tablet weighted less in my pack than just one of the doorstop novels I put on it. And I had it loaded with several of them.
No, just go to the local maker space (remember, used to be a K-Mart?) and have them print you a printer that makes hard copies. Don't forget to stop by Whole Foods for the shade-grown lignin pellets.
The obvious first market for ebooks has been anything you read sequentially, like novels. Ebook adoption climbs a hill for works you need to jump around in. That grease-thumbed reference book you keep beside your workbench will be the physical book's last stand.
As the application interface improves for ebooks, some advantages of the medium will open up, such as the ability to search fast and to display complex, interactive charts. In a few years you will be able to have your reference ebook standing up on the workbench so that you can say, "Hey Siri! Play me the install sequence for the right front wheel motor starting from Step 4!"
While we wait for that halcyon day, can we at least have the Kindle app give us a straight count of 'pages left in chapter' rather than trying to compute some mythical reading time?
The medical device space is ripe for Uberization. A high-end hearing aid contains perhaps a hundred dollars worth of electronics, but in the US market sells for $4000 and more because it's a sacred "medical device" that manufacturers have special legal rights to force Americans to pay the highest prices in the world for. Introduce medical electronics priced relative to real cost in the BRIC countries, and the market will explode to such an extent that US healthcare will have no choice but to let them in even before Rand Paul's second term.
Then there's the Polar Pops ad with extremely LOUD sound, and there's no volume control. If I don't yank my headset off when I see the first frame, it could damage my hearing.
Let's devise an Online Advertising Code. The Code would forbid popups, autoplaying videos, slow ad servers, ads containing malware, ads that yank you to an app store, and videos with no sound controls. Ad blocker extensions would have an "Allow OAC compliant ads" checkbox. Problem solved.
In any era, futurists extrapolate from their own present. In the Fifties, with the Cold War was placing atom bombs on top of rockets, it was easy to assume that space would be the new frontier for the masses. At the same time, only a small cadre of the techno-elite had ever seen a computer or had any knowledge of how they might evolve.
So they predicted a lunar colony with everything being run by one central computer.
Ridesharing is also a different market from the traditional cab market in many ways. It's people getting together as individuals to carpool tp the palces they want, with the added convenience of a common app interface to link up drivers and riders. It's not ideology that causes Uber to not take out taxi licenses, but the fact that they are offering a new product to a new market. Bureaucrats and old-line cab companies scramble to understand what's going on in the same way that RIAA scrambles to make sense of the evolving music market.
Germany, in promoting its Energiewende, initially thought it could rely on the sun always being out at moments when the wind stops blowing. Now it's opening new brown coal plants to replace its lost nuclear baseload, lest the rest of its industry decamp for Korea and China.
The US, meanwhile, is moving away from coal, rather than toward it. And we don't have an all-nuclear country of equal size right next door.
Remember industry? You know, the activity Asian countries have because they maintain a 24-hr. baseload? That's why people in those countries have jobs, rather than transfer payments.
One of the most irksome aspects of Windows has always been the failed Windows Update. At first it's one update out of a hundred. As your Windows installation ages, it will happen with steadily increasing frequency until every bootup greets you with a half hour of "Please with while Windows is being configured," which is immediately followed by another half hour of painstaking unraveling of the same set of failed updates that failed on the previous boot.
This is generally when I get called in to replace the cursed machine with an iMac.
Provided you can get rid of your NIMBYs, wind and solar will some day be developed to its fullest potential. So then what baseload source will the other 80% of our industrial needs come from? We're not Germany, so it's not going to be coal.
Yes, but you can get that the "Finnish people using benefits to fund ISIS" are not Finns. This is just a belated attempt to control social benefits going to refugees.
Each European country is responding to the refugee flood in its own way. A lot of them are ending up in Germany right now because the country is known as a soft touch; within Scandinavia, it's Sweden. For a time, France was the most accepting country, but since Charlie Hebdo, French enthusiasm for the invasion has palled, so right now they're all piling up in Calais, at the south tunnel entrance in hopes of crossing the Channel.
Slashdot Mirror
"The real reason is obvious: that more people riding bikes means fewer people taking taxis and other forms of paid transportation, but they could have at least come up with a better argument."
Miraculously, all those Uber-hating lefties who root for medallion taxi drivers over ridesharing services have fallen silent now that they are attacking cyclists.
There's no book nostalgia like the smell of leather-bound editions you have never bought in your life read before the baronial fireplace you have never owned.
This is a factor I have never seen mentioned in the whole discussion of physical books vs ebooks. How many additional sales of would-I-want-to-be-seen-reading-this-on-the-train books are we seeing now that they come in ebook form?
"But when there are diagrams/maps in a book, the ebooks fail miserably.
When I want to read in the tub, ebooks fail.
When I want something that can fit in my pants pocket, ebooks fail - but paperbacks deliver.
When I want to borrow/lend a book, ebooks make it too much trouble, but a paperback is easy.
When I want to throw a book in a backpack, paperback wins."
1. Today's reader apps are mostly sequential, but some ebooks set up as apps of their own already offer interactive elements you can't even do on paper.
2. Who reads in bathtubs?
3. When I find myself unexpectedly waiting in line, it's never anywhere I have planned for and brought a paperback along. Instead, I whip out my phone, whereupon the Kindle app remembers where I left off on my tablet at home. I can knock off another chapter or two while you duck out to the car to get your paperback.
4. I can borrow ebooks too now.
5. Recently I did a 200-mile hike, and my tablet weighted less in my pack than just one of the doorstop novels I put on it. And I had it loaded with several of them.
My library has the Overdrive ebook rentals too, but so far it has never stocked any book that I wanted.
No, just go to the local maker space (remember, used to be a K-Mart?) and have them print you a printer that makes hard copies. Don't forget to stop by Whole Foods for the shade-grown lignin pellets.
The obvious first market for ebooks has been anything you read sequentially, like novels. Ebook adoption climbs a hill for works you need to jump around in. That grease-thumbed reference book you keep beside your workbench will be the physical book's last stand.
As the application interface improves for ebooks, some advantages of the medium will open up, such as the ability to search fast and to display complex, interactive charts. In a few years you will be able to have your reference ebook standing up on the workbench so that you can say, "Hey Siri! Play me the install sequence for the right front wheel motor starting from Step 4!"
While we wait for that halcyon day, can we at least have the Kindle app give us a straight count of 'pages left in chapter' rather than trying to compute some mythical reading time?
The medical device space is ripe for Uberization. A high-end hearing aid contains perhaps a hundred dollars worth of electronics, but in the US market sells for $4000 and more because it's a sacred "medical device" that manufacturers have special legal rights to force Americans to pay the highest prices in the world for. Introduce medical electronics priced relative to real cost in the BRIC countries, and the market will explode to such an extent that US healthcare will have no choice but to let them in even before Rand Paul's second term.
Comets are going to be an important source of water for the colonists of New Shanghai.
Then there's the Polar Pops ad with extremely LOUD sound, and there's no volume control. If I don't yank my headset off when I see the first frame, it could damage my hearing.
Let's devise an Online Advertising Code. The Code would forbid popups, autoplaying videos, slow ad servers, ads containing malware, ads that yank you to an app store, and videos with no sound controls. Ad blocker extensions would have an "Allow OAC compliant ads" checkbox. Problem solved.
Fucking Ads pop up over my content and, on my tablet, display a close button just off screen, so I can go no further.
In any era, futurists extrapolate from their own present. In the Fifties, with the Cold War was placing atom bombs on top of rockets, it was easy to assume that space would be the new frontier for the masses. At the same time, only a small cadre of the techno-elite had ever seen a computer or had any knowledge of how they might evolve.
So they predicted a lunar colony with everything being run by one central computer.
Ridesharing is also a different market from the traditional cab market in many ways. It's people getting together as individuals to carpool tp the palces they want, with the added convenience of a common app interface to link up drivers and riders. It's not ideology that causes Uber to not take out taxi licenses, but the fact that they are offering a new product to a new market. Bureaucrats and old-line cab companies scramble to understand what's going on in the same way that RIAA scrambles to make sense of the evolving music market.
This pretty much describes northern Arizona, but without the oppressive religious atmosphere.
There is one more difference: around here, if you suddenly hear a lot of gunfire off in the distance, it's just the opening day of tourist season.
"The Republicans hate technology. "
That's why the Republicans won't let us have nuclear power, GMOs, vaccines, dental fluoride, and research telescopes on high mountain peaks.
These days, you would be talking about that other Birmingham. And not just if Aston Villa loses to Manchester United.
Germany, in promoting its Energiewende, initially thought it could rely on the sun always being out at moments when the wind stops blowing. Now it's opening new brown coal plants to replace its lost nuclear baseload, lest the rest of its industry decamp for Korea and China.
The US, meanwhile, is moving away from coal, rather than toward it. And we don't have an all-nuclear country of equal size right next door.
Remember industry? You know, the activity Asian countries have because they maintain a 24-hr. baseload? That's why people in those countries have jobs, rather than transfer payments.
Typo: "Please wait while Windows is being configured"
One of the most irksome aspects of Windows has always been the failed Windows Update. At first it's one update out of a hundred. As your Windows installation ages, it will happen with steadily increasing frequency until every bootup greets you with a half hour of "Please with while Windows is being configured," which is immediately followed by another half hour of painstaking unraveling of the same set of failed updates that failed on the previous boot.
This is generally when I get called in to replace the cursed machine with an iMac.
Provided you can get rid of your NIMBYs, wind and solar will some day be developed to its fullest potential. So then what baseload source will the other 80% of our industrial needs come from? We're not Germany, so it's not going to be coal.
Hardly a Mr Fusion, but about the same size as one of the generators at Glen Canyon.
Yes, but you can get that the "Finnish people using benefits to fund ISIS" are not Finns. This is just a belated attempt to control social benefits going to refugees.
Each European country is responding to the refugee flood in its own way. A lot of them are ending up in Germany right now because the country is known as a soft touch; within Scandinavia, it's Sweden. For a time, France was the most accepting country, but since Charlie Hebdo, French enthusiasm for the invasion has palled, so right now they're all piling up in Calais, at the south tunnel entrance in hopes of crossing the Channel.