The thing with the kindle is that it includes "free" online access to locate and deliver books. so you can be anywhere and look for and purchase a new book. the book is then delivered to your kindle.
That's the thing that angers me about Amazon's current Kindle plan. I mean, being able to buy a book from anywhere is great, but not worth an extra $200 for me.
I would happily restrict myself to only being able to buy books when I'm plugged into my computer via USB, or in range of a wifi network if it meant that I could buy a Kindle for $150 instead of $350.
I don't understand why Amazon insists on only selling one expensive version of this product. If they released a cheaper version sans cellular capabilities, I think they'd sell lots more, and by extension sell many more e-books.
What you're missing is that you already are paying for the healthcare of people who can't afford it. My med-student wife is in the midst of a rotation at a county hospital, and the vast majority of her patients' bills are being picked up by the government because the patients are very poor and have no insurance. So, they come to the county hospital and the tab is picked up by the state or federal government.
The people who get screwed under our current system are the lower middle class. If you're making $30-40K, paying $4,000 to the doctor is a big freaking deal. And on the spectrum of surgery, $4K is small. If you're hospitalized, or require, say, a hip surgery you could easily be out $20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000. And insurance really isn't an option for a private payer in that income bracket - you're talking $1,000 or so a month for a family.
I think too many people imagine that somehow nationalized health care will just give the welfare set a free ride - but in terms of paying for expensive health care, they've already got a free ride. Nationalized health care will - in fact - give the American's who need it the most a bit of a boost.
I donno, seems like the real story is how backwards the whitehouse is technologically. A few quotes from the Washington Post story:
"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.
And:
The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.
And finally...
Another White House official whose transition cellphone was disconnected left a message temporarily referring callers to his wife's phone.
Several people tried to route their e-mails through personal accounts.
But there were no missing letters from the computer keyboards, as Bush officials had complained of during their transition in 2001.
And officials in the press office were prepared: In addition to having their own cellphones, they set up Gmail accounts, with approval from the White House counsel, so they could send information in more than one way.
This doesn't seem to have much to do with trying to circumvent any sort of records keeping, but rather a way to function for a few days while a #&$%@# up system is worked out.
Though I admit, I would be more suspicious of the last president doing this then the current one, but I suspect with the last guy we wouldn't have heard about for 3 years until a whistle blower leaked it.
The beauty of TF2 isn't that people with good reflexes are completely nerfed, or that they're completely dominant (like in most online FPSes) - rather, it's that there are options.
Have excellent reflexes and hand/eye coordination? Play as a sniper or a spy. Have horrible reflexes or coordination? Play as an engineer or medic.
And of course, cooperation trumps all. In my hundreds of TF2 rounds, I've discovered that the team which cooperates the best nearly always wins.
Which, to bring things back to the parent, makes it a game with a satisfying learning curve. Play a few rounds, and you'll quickly figure out how you can be useful to your teammates, even if you're still getting owned. I mean - hell - the entire medic class is based on the principle of wandering around behind a teammate, holding down a button.
Thus far, I have yet to see an "iPhone killer" do anything of the sort.
I think this will come down to 3rd party apps. Right now, besides having a very slick UI, the iPhone has an amazing library of 3rd party apps. Android I think has the potential to compete in that arena, but current versions of Android aren't so slick as the iPhone UI.
The new Palm Pre UI looks great - different than Apple's, but perhaps as slick. They kept saying that it would be easy to develop for (Java/HTML/CSS), but I haven't found much more than that. We'll see how developers embrace the platform.
The advantage of Android is of course that it can be put on hardware by any manufacturer - and that it's pretty open. We'll see in 6 months or so how things shake out.
It's not so much about ponying up, as it is about allowing Palestinian businesses to succeed. Make it easy for Palestinians go overseas for education, stop unfair trade practices that make it difficult or impossible for them to run successful businesses. Palestine deserves, and peace in the middle east demands conditions that allow Palestinians a fighting chance to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps".
I love MAKE, but they are a bit over concerned with making making "cool". Making your arduino chirp every time a new XKCD is posted isn't going to get anyone laid. Let's stop pretending.
Don't think of just entertainment, choose games that will teach the children valuable life skills. For example:
Teach them to Rule the World: Freeciv Teach them the value of running over hookers: GTA 1&2 Teach them the awesomeness of fighting robots: One Must Fall 2097 Teach them to conquer the world in a different way: C&C Red Alert 3 And finally, teach them to conquer the world of worms (you never know): Wormux
I've never had my own home phone service, and getting the internets isn't too much of a challenge. Here are your options:
DSL: Both Verizon and ATT offer dry-loop DSL. This means you get a phone line that's exclusively for DSL, no home phone service. Dry loop service generally costs a bit more than traditional DSL, but you'll still save over paying for a phone line that you don't use. I think in my area Verizon's starts at around $25/mo and goes up from there.
FIBER: Both Verizon FIOS and ATT U-Verse offer very fast internets over Fiber, without any mandatory phone service. Again, you'll probably pay a bit more for internet alone than you would in a with-phone bundle, but c'est la vie.
CABLE: Just about every cable provider in the country offers high speed internet access. Mine's through Time Warner / Road Runner, and I can typically download things at around 1MB/sec along with low latency to close-by servers. I pay $45/mo for 15mbit service.
WIFI: Check for a local WiFi-based ISP. Where I grew up in rural Washington, it wasn't a bad way to go. YMMV.
CELLULAR WIRELESS: If you live in an area with 3G or EVDO coverage, you could get pretty decent access through a cellular provider. They all impose download caps, and the bandwidth isn't crazy, but you can't beat the flexibility.
SATELLITE INTERNET: Hughesnet offers some fairly affordable satellite internet packages. There might be other providers, Google will tell you. But, be ware of less than spectacular bandwidth and very high latency. Say goodbye to online FPS gaming. If you're in the boonies, this might be your only option.
ROLL YOUR OWN: Beg, borrow or steal wireless access from a neighbor, set up an internet sharing cooporative in your neighborhood, get a Pringles can and have a go at it. If you have the time and ability, the possibilities are endless.
Re:have a problem with made up words?
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Don't read Tolkien's less common stuff. By less common, I mean, haven't had a movie made out of it yet.
There's a reason that his popular stuff is popular, and his obscure stuff is obscure.
Tolkien found a good balance between the background paraphernalia that gave his world depth and narrative in The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit. Much of his less popular stuff doesn't find that balance, which makes it fine for us more obsessive nerd types, and not much fun for the average reader.
*Possible Spoiler* An Actual Ending!!
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Unlike every other Stephenson novel - this one has a real conclusion!
While I'm a big lover of Stephenson's work, I've felt like in his other novels the end is just hacked off without literary justification. This time, Stephenson provides us with a satisfying conclusion. It sort of blew my mind.
As to the rest of the novel, I enjoyed it overall. But I felt like Stephenson did fall prey to the trap of letting his characters discusses theoretics overmuch at the expense of some narrative.
Also, I'm not sure that forcing readers to learn so much invented vocabulary for the sake of his imaginary world was entirely worth it. Sure, there might not be a word in the English language that perfectly encapsulates the idea he was trying to communicate, but most writers are forced to overcome this obstacle every day, and do so without making up new words. It added a layer of complication to Anathem that was unnecessarily daunting.
So, read the book if you're already into Stephenson, you'll probably love it. But - as the review said - you'd be better off falling in love with the man's writing somewhere else.
Exactly. I'm a Christian, but I prefer to keep my science and my theology separate.
If a scientist was studying the way that lemurs jump from limb to limb, and decided, "This is way to complicated for me to understand, God must have done it." Most people, Christian or otherwise, would find that conclusion to be ridiculous, and a very bad way to practice science.
But when we apply the same principle to the study of the creation of our planet and species, many Christians seem to OK saying, "This is too complicated for me to understand, so God must have done it miraculously." It's no less silly.
I'm not sure why it's so hard for other Christians to believe in a religious sense that God created us all in seven days, and in a scientific sense that the mechanisms of evolution require hundreds of millions of years to occur.
'Course, believing that two seemingly opposing things can both be true requires a bit of a postmodern worldview, and fundamental Christians aren't generally too supportive of that type of thing.
But I maintain that science and religion don't reconcile well, and if you try and force that reconciliation you're going to either screw up your religious experience or scientific knowledge. Best to learn to accept the contradictions and move on.
To get back on topic, even if I were a conservative, I'd have a hard time supporting a VP candidate who wasn't intelligent enough to embrace that contradiction.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit over the weekend. I'm a big liberal, and by extension an Obama supporter.
The question I've been asking myself is, if Obama had picked a VP as dim-witted as Sarah Palin, would I still support him? The answer I came to is, "I hope not."
So I understand if conservatives continue to support their guy after he picked Sarah, but what I don't understand is why more of them aren't upset about it. I haven't heard yet from anywhere on the right, "Yeah, Sarah's a horrible, baseless choice of a VP, but despite that I agree with Walnuts, and I'm going to keep supporting him."
I like these. On the one hand the dude is being kind of an ass. On the other, sometimes it takes an ass to get people's attention.
I'm not too paranoid about the imposition of a facist state, but I do think the average citizen needs to take more ownership for this sort of thing. Make federal and state agencies understand that when they overstep their bounds, the citizenry will rise up and punish them with legislation that restricts their ability to operate.
We need to take responsibility for our own freedoms. And when we decide that being stopped by border patrol, or suffering through almost totally ineffective airport security checkpoints isn't something we're willing to tolerate, we need to stop it.
Government for and by the people, bitches! (Look for that t-shirt on cafepress any day now).
I'm Mr. Works At A Design And Photography Agency - and I have to disagree with you about the importance of proper color calibration.
When you're working with designs that are for the web, there's really no hope of getting those designs to display uniformly on everyone's monitor, so your best bet is to design them on a monitor that's similar to the most end-users. As the market moves to glossy LCD's, it makes sense to design on a glossy LCD monitor.
When you're working on a print piece, the real world provides a whole different set of issues that keep the finished print from automatically matching what you see on your screen, no matter how accurate your calibration. Your best hope is to either use Pantone colors when the client can afford the increased print cost - in which case you're matching colors to a Pantone book, not your monitor - or to have the printer match colors to a pre-existing printed piece the client likes.
It would be nice to live in an ideal world where you could always print with one printer, using one method that guaranteed accurate color matching - and where every web user viewed content that was calibrated perfectly to a universal standard. That world is far away. No one printer type or print shop is perfect for every print job, and there is always variation between different machines and shops. And the web is viewed on thousands or millions of different monitors, environments and calibrations. Until those conditions change, perfectly accurate color calibration is largely superfluous.
*Note: Because this is Slashdot, I should concede that there are some very specific applications where proper color rendering and calibration are very helpful or necessary. Such as a photographer who prints all his own prints on one single printer, a print shops, and, as the parent mentioned, for specific scientific and technical applications.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing with the kindle is that it includes "free" online access to locate and deliver books. so you can be anywhere and look for and purchase a new book. the book is then delivered to your kindle.
That's the thing that angers me about Amazon's current Kindle plan. I mean, being able to buy a book from anywhere is great, but not worth an extra $200 for me.
I would happily restrict myself to only being able to buy books when I'm plugged into my computer via USB, or in range of a wifi network if it meant that I could buy a Kindle for $150 instead of $350.
I don't understand why Amazon insists on only selling one expensive version of this product. If they released a cheaper version sans cellular capabilities, I think they'd sell lots more, and by extension sell many more e-books.
Oh Amazon, why do you fail me?
Like Ozymandias, nothing beside remains...
"My name is G1G4BY73_PU5H3R, Overclocker of Overclockers:
Look on my 1337 benchmarks, ye n00bs, and despair!"
What you're missing is that you already are paying for the healthcare of people who can't afford it. My med-student wife is in the midst of a rotation at a county hospital, and the vast majority of her patients' bills are being picked up by the government because the patients are very poor and have no insurance. So, they come to the county hospital and the tab is picked up by the state or federal government.
The people who get screwed under our current system are the lower middle class. If you're making $30-40K, paying $4,000 to the doctor is a big freaking deal. And on the spectrum of surgery, $4K is small. If you're hospitalized, or require, say, a hip surgery you could easily be out $20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000. And insurance really isn't an option for a private payer in that income bracket - you're talking $1,000 or so a month for a family.
I think too many people imagine that somehow nationalized health care will just give the welfare set a free ride - but in terms of paying for expensive health care, they've already got a free ride. Nationalized health care will - in fact - give the American's who need it the most a bit of a boost.
I donno, seems like the real story is how backwards the whitehouse is technologically. A few quotes from the Washington Post story:
"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.
And:
The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.
And finally...
Another White House official whose transition cellphone was disconnected left a message temporarily referring callers to his wife's phone.
Several people tried to route their e-mails through personal accounts.
But there were no missing letters from the computer keyboards, as Bush officials had complained of during their transition in 2001.
And officials in the press office were prepared: In addition to having their own cellphones, they set up Gmail accounts, with approval from the White House counsel, so they could send information in more than one way.
This doesn't seem to have much to do with trying to circumvent any sort of records keeping, but rather a way to function for a few days while a #&$%@# up system is worked out.
Though I admit, I would be more suspicious of the last president doing this then the current one, but I suspect with the last guy we wouldn't have heard about for 3 years until a whistle blower leaked it.
The beauty of TF2 isn't that people with good reflexes are completely nerfed, or that they're completely dominant (like in most online FPSes) - rather, it's that there are options.
Have excellent reflexes and hand/eye coordination? Play as a sniper or a spy. Have horrible reflexes or coordination? Play as an engineer or medic.
And of course, cooperation trumps all. In my hundreds of TF2 rounds, I've discovered that the team which cooperates the best nearly always wins.
Which, to bring things back to the parent, makes it a game with a satisfying learning curve. Play a few rounds, and you'll quickly figure out how you can be useful to your teammates, even if you're still getting owned. I mean - hell - the entire medic class is based on the principle of wandering around behind a teammate, holding down a button.
doesn't have quite the same ring.
That's because you forgot to add "Motherfucking Solenodons On a Motherfucking Plane!!!!!"
Thus far, I have yet to see an "iPhone killer" do anything of the sort.
I think this will come down to 3rd party apps. Right now, besides having a very slick UI, the iPhone has an amazing library of 3rd party apps. Android I think has the potential to compete in that arena, but current versions of Android aren't so slick as the iPhone UI.
The new Palm Pre UI looks great - different than Apple's, but perhaps as slick. They kept saying that it would be easy to develop for (Java/HTML/CSS), but I haven't found much more than that. We'll see how developers embrace the platform.
The advantage of Android is of course that it can be put on hardware by any manufacturer - and that it's pretty open. We'll see in 6 months or so how things shake out.
Alas, no one is likely to pony up.
It's not so much about ponying up, as it is about allowing Palestinian businesses to succeed. Make it easy for Palestinians go overseas for education, stop unfair trade practices that make it difficult or impossible for them to run successful businesses. Palestine deserves, and peace in the middle east demands conditions that allow Palestinians a fighting chance to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps".
Id love to see Make grow up.
Hear Hear!
I love MAKE, but they are a bit over concerned with making making "cool". Making your arduino chirp every time a new XKCD is posted isn't going to get anyone laid. Let's stop pretending.
Remember Magnum PI's Ferrari? My neighbor's new Camry makes more horsepower than that thing.
More horsepower, but far less awesome.
Freedom isn't free.
Quite true. I believe it cost $1.05.
I prefer the (real) South African Anti-Carjacking Device, shown here.
Sadly, it seems like the company is now defunct.
Red Alert 3 isn't free. Red Alert, however is.
Excellent point. I'll just go back and edit my post...
Shit.
Don't think of just entertainment, choose games that will teach the children valuable life skills. For example:
Teach them to Rule the World: Freeciv
Teach them the value of running over hookers: GTA 1&2
Teach them the awesomeness of fighting robots: One Must Fall 2097
Teach them to conquer the world in a different way: C&C Red Alert 3
And finally, teach them to conquer the world of worms (you never know): Wormux
I've never had my own home phone service, and getting the internets isn't too much of a challenge. Here are your options:
DSL:
Both Verizon and ATT offer dry-loop DSL. This means you get a phone line that's exclusively for DSL, no home phone service. Dry loop service generally costs a bit more than traditional DSL, but you'll still save over paying for a phone line that you don't use. I think in my area Verizon's starts at around $25/mo and goes up from there.
FIBER:
Both Verizon FIOS and ATT U-Verse offer very fast internets over Fiber, without any mandatory phone service. Again, you'll probably pay a bit more for internet alone than you would in a with-phone bundle, but c'est la vie.
CABLE:
Just about every cable provider in the country offers high speed internet access. Mine's through Time Warner / Road Runner, and I can typically download things at around 1MB/sec along with low latency to close-by servers. I pay $45/mo for 15mbit service.
WIFI:
Check for a local WiFi-based ISP. Where I grew up in rural Washington, it wasn't a bad way to go. YMMV.
CELLULAR WIRELESS:
If you live in an area with 3G or EVDO coverage, you could get pretty decent access through a cellular provider. They all impose download caps, and the bandwidth isn't crazy, but you can't beat the flexibility.
SATELLITE INTERNET:
Hughesnet offers some fairly affordable satellite internet packages. There might be other providers, Google will tell you. But, be ware of less than spectacular bandwidth and very high latency. Say goodbye to online FPS gaming. If you're in the boonies, this might be your only option.
ROLL YOUR OWN:
Beg, borrow or steal wireless access from a neighbor, set up an internet sharing cooporative in your neighborhood, get a Pringles can and have a go at it. If you have the time and ability, the possibilities are endless.
Don't read Tolkien's less common stuff. By less common, I mean, haven't had a movie made out of it yet.
There's a reason that his popular stuff is popular, and his obscure stuff is obscure.
Tolkien found a good balance between the background paraphernalia that gave his world depth and narrative in The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit. Much of his less popular stuff doesn't find that balance, which makes it fine for us more obsessive nerd types, and not much fun for the average reader.
Unlike every other Stephenson novel - this one has a real conclusion!
While I'm a big lover of Stephenson's work, I've felt like in his other novels the end is just hacked off without literary justification. This time, Stephenson provides us with a satisfying conclusion. It sort of blew my mind.
As to the rest of the novel, I enjoyed it overall. But I felt like Stephenson did fall prey to the trap of letting his characters discusses theoretics overmuch at the expense of some narrative.
Also, I'm not sure that forcing readers to learn so much invented vocabulary for the sake of his imaginary world was entirely worth it. Sure, there might not be a word in the English language that perfectly encapsulates the idea he was trying to communicate, but most writers are forced to overcome this obstacle every day, and do so without making up new words. It added a layer of complication to Anathem that was unnecessarily daunting.
So, read the book if you're already into Stephenson, you'll probably love it. But - as the review said - you'd be better off falling in love with the man's writing somewhere else.
Dude, have you ever hung out with a domesticated hamster? There's definitely some genetic defects going on there. They're $@#&'ed up.
Exactly. I'm a Christian, but I prefer to keep my science and my theology separate.
If a scientist was studying the way that lemurs jump from limb to limb, and decided, "This is way to complicated for me to understand, God must have done it." Most people, Christian or otherwise, would find that conclusion to be ridiculous, and a very bad way to practice science.
But when we apply the same principle to the study of the creation of our planet and species, many Christians seem to OK saying, "This is too complicated for me to understand, so God must have done it miraculously." It's no less silly.
I'm not sure why it's so hard for other Christians to believe in a religious sense that God created us all in seven days, and in a scientific sense that the mechanisms of evolution require hundreds of millions of years to occur.
'Course, believing that two seemingly opposing things can both be true requires a bit of a postmodern worldview, and fundamental Christians aren't generally too supportive of that type of thing.
But I maintain that science and religion don't reconcile well, and if you try and force that reconciliation you're going to either screw up your religious experience or scientific knowledge. Best to learn to accept the contradictions and move on.
To get back on topic, even if I were a conservative, I'd have a hard time supporting a VP candidate who wasn't intelligent enough to embrace that contradiction.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit over the weekend. I'm a big liberal, and by extension an Obama supporter.
The question I've been asking myself is, if Obama had picked a VP as dim-witted as Sarah Palin, would I still support him? The answer I came to is, "I hope not."
So I understand if conservatives continue to support their guy after he picked Sarah, but what I don't understand is why more of them aren't upset about it. I haven't heard yet from anywhere on the right, "Yeah, Sarah's a horrible, baseless choice of a VP, but despite that I agree with Walnuts, and I'm going to keep supporting him."
It's always, "Horray Sarah!"
Why?
I like these. On the one hand the dude is being kind of an ass. On the other, sometimes it takes an ass to get people's attention.
I'm not too paranoid about the imposition of a facist state, but I do think the average citizen needs to take more ownership for this sort of thing. Make federal and state agencies understand that when they overstep their bounds, the citizenry will rise up and punish them with legislation that restricts their ability to operate.
We need to take responsibility for our own freedoms. And when we decide that being stopped by border patrol, or suffering through almost totally ineffective airport security checkpoints isn't something we're willing to tolerate, we need to stop it.
Government for and by the people, bitches! (Look for that t-shirt on cafepress any day now).
I sincerely hope the expression "Pulled a Palin" becomes part of the vernacular.
I'm Mr. Works At A Design And Photography Agency - and I have to disagree with you about the importance of proper color calibration.
When you're working with designs that are for the web, there's really no hope of getting those designs to display uniformly on everyone's monitor, so your best bet is to design them on a monitor that's similar to the most end-users. As the market moves to glossy LCD's, it makes sense to design on a glossy LCD monitor.
When you're working on a print piece, the real world provides a whole different set of issues that keep the finished print from automatically matching what you see on your screen, no matter how accurate your calibration. Your best hope is to either use Pantone colors when the client can afford the increased print cost - in which case you're matching colors to a Pantone book, not your monitor - or to have the printer match colors to a pre-existing printed piece the client likes.
It would be nice to live in an ideal world where you could always print with one printer, using one method that guaranteed accurate color matching - and where every web user viewed content that was calibrated perfectly to a universal standard. That world is far away. No one printer type or print shop is perfect for every print job, and there is always variation between different machines and shops. And the web is viewed on thousands or millions of different monitors, environments and calibrations. Until those conditions change, perfectly accurate color calibration is largely superfluous.
*Note: Because this is Slashdot, I should concede that there are some very specific applications where proper color rendering and calibration are very helpful or necessary. Such as a photographer who prints all his own prints on one single printer, a print shops, and, as the parent mentioned, for specific scientific and technical applications.
Urm, sorry, I accidentally modded you down. This post will invalidate that.
I'll grant that I'm a bit of a dolt, but the point remains that you could still understand the sentence:
"The &ffects of that change will &ffect you &ffectively", no matter if &=e or if &=a. Like much of the English language, it's needlessly complicated.