Wait. So because there are lots of beautiful girls in LA, this girl is not good looking? Must be pretty harsh living in your world if you can't be attracted to anyone but the best-looking girl in the room.
One reason Americans have resisted dollar coins is because the Mint has made dumb decisions about the coins.
The Eisenhower dollar was large and heavy. Its diameter made it uncomfortable to put in a change pocket. So when they created the Susan B. Anthony dollar, they decided to make it smaller -- small enough, in fact, that it was easily mistaken for a quarter. People ended up handing out quarters when they were looking for dollars and vice versa. You couldn't easily tell which was which just by reaching into your pocket.
The new dollar coins are gold-colored instead of silver, but they retain the dimensions of the Susan B. Anthony dollar. That's smart in one sense, because it means vending machines that take the old dollar coins can still take the new ones. But it's also stupid, because almost no vending machines take Susan B. Anthony dollars, since nobody uses them (or if they do accept them, they register as quarters). So in the end, consumers see the new coins as just gold versions of the old coins, and they don't want to get burned again -- leading to the problem cited in the article, where customers and businesses alike are reluctant to accept them. Most people I know aren't even totally sure if the dollar coins are genuine legal tender or if they're just some kind of passing fad that will be unusable in a few years, like out-of-date postage stamps (and this doubt is exacerbated by the fact that they keep changing the pictures on the front, so they seem like collector's coins).
Contrast this to the UK and EU, each of which took pains to differentiate their highest-value coins from the others. Both the 1 Euro and 1 Pound coins are notably thicker than other coins, in addition to being a unique size, which makes them more easily recognizable by touch. (As an aside, European notes tend to have specific sizes for each denomination, too, while the U.S. notes are all the same size, making it difficult for blind people to choose one from the other.)
If the U.S. Mint would just smarten up, maybe it wouldn't keep wasting money like this.
To suggest it is anything OTHER than mathematics is to prove you have absolutely no idea how computers actually work. In the real world- every computer is a universal turing machine. If you have any real doubt - just consider this: any program COULD be written in lisp. Lisp is DIRECTLY based on lambda-calculus - in fact the ONLY (minor) difference as small syntactical changes designed to make it easier to TYPE lambda on a computer (it was after-all designed for writing in). Lamba-calculus is a simple form of mathematical language - like algebra or godel numbers or any of a dozen other ways to write down 2+2=4 that are all just different ways of expressing it designed to be useful for different purposes.
OK fine, but if untyped lambda calculus is a form of notation that's useful for describing computation, isn't this a circular argument? It's a computer. Of course a form of notation used to express computation would be able to describe what it does.
If, on the other hand, I want to describe a system where I have a bunch of rocks in one pile, and I move rocks to another pile based on certain logical criteria, forming a kind of "loop"... couldn't that also be expressed in lambda calculus? I would be performing a kind of computation. But that doesn't mean moving rocks from one pile to another is mathematics, because the lambda calculus doesn't move any rocks. It just talks about moving rocks. If I want to move rocks, calculus alone isn't going to cut it.
So in the end, your comments sound like the same kind of navel-gazing that says "math is everywhere".... "Look, Bobby, see the Golden Ratio in the structure of this leaf? Math is everywhere!" "No dad, that is not math. That is a leaf. Math is how you think about the leaf."
Most people write computer programs not because they want to run some clever bit of lambda calculus, but because they want to perform some function on information that can be applied in the real world. You can call it math if you want, but if I can write a program to do what I want to do, it makes no difference to me if it's math or not. The program's output is what we're looking for here, not some hand-waving about how computers are math. To me a computer is not math, it's a physical tool designed to perform a job, just like a power drill, a tractor, or a cuckoo clock. They just work differently.
It's a little confusing, but "the current user of the name" isn't quite right. There is this guy about whom we're talking here, who goes by the name Cringely, and even though that's not his real name you know who he is and recognize him as Cringely, so that might as well be his real name for most intents and purposes. And then there is "the current user of the name," who writes an insider gossip column for InfoWorld under an assumed name, just as the other Cringely used to do. These two Cringelys are not the same person. It's an old story and it involves a lawsuit.
Any trade where your purpose is to make money out of money seems pretty pointless to me.
You mean like where I have a bunch of money, and I loan it to a guy, and he uses it to make widgets, which he then sells and uses the profits to pay me back my money plus interest? Yeah, I can't imagine how that would be of benefit to anyone.
Oh, and just to round out my responses to your trolls for anyone looking for legitimate information:
And you know what else your local library will let you do? Check out the actual physical books, which if you might as well actually do if you're heading to the library anyway.
The subject was e-books. And if you think you have to physically go to the library to check out e-books, you're a moron.
Really? You can access the web over the 3G connection? Oh, wait, no, it only works over private wireless, and not wi-fi hotspots or 3G.
My Nook doesn't even have 3G because I don't see the point of it. Wi-Fi hotspots are everywhere; I certainly have one operating at my house at all times. But your information is faulty once again. In addition to free Wi-Fi at any Barnes and Noble store, the Nook also gives you free instant access to any AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot anywhere. At the airport? You're good to go. You can also use private wireless, and you can also use anyone else's hotspot -- all you need to do is login using the browser and you're all set. (That wasn't true for the initial Nook rollout, but it's true for everyone now after an automatic free firmware upgrade.)
The only limitation is that you cannot actually download books from anyone but B&N -- you need to "side load" them from your PC -- but the Kindle has the same limitation.
Another one in English is the relationship between periods (full-stops), commas, and quotation marks. American style says you should always put them inside the quotes, "like this," but if you're a programmer you have to remember to shake that habit when coding!
I think you've got a typo there, last I checked, it's more like $100 cheaper.
Then you haven't checked. It was never that much cheaper. Amazon only lowered its prices to current levels when B&N began selling the Nook for $100 less than the Kindle.
So what? No one uses epub.
You apparently don't read e-books, either. Other than Amazon, pretty much everyone uses ePub, and the industry is heading in that direction.
You conveniently neglect to mention that Amazon allows authors to self-publish. Barnes and Noble? Nope.
Conveniently? Certainly, when self-publishing wasn't even the topic. Why would I even bring it up? But since you have brought it up, B&N's self publishing arm for e-books is called Pubit!.
I've used it, since they have them on display at the stores. You're wrong. The Nook display lags behind user input horribly. Plus it's incredibly finicky, ignoring at least half the touches to the screen, including all attempts to do the "swipe" thing to turn pages, although it was more than happy to occasionally dump me back to the home page when I tried.
I use it every day, and not some beat-up floor model, and I experience none of these problems. Your mileage may vary, of course. As far as the keyboard lag, that's a limitation of the display, not the UI. You can type on the keyboard about as fast as you want, and the Kindle uses the same display (however current models have worse screen contrast than the Nook for some reason, which will apparently be corrected in the forthcoming models).
Try using a good touch screen like an iPad and try saying with a straight face that the Nook's touch screen is even usable.
The Nook's touch screen is more than usable. It's one of my favorite features of the Nook, in fact. Having used it, I'd have serious reservations about buying an e-reader that didn't have a similar UI.
The touch screen that turns off when you read the book? Yeah, that sounds much better than a physical set of buttons that provide tactile feedback and never randomly vanish to conserve power.
The Nook also has physical buttons to let you turn the pages. If you'd really ever looked at one, you would know that. Or else you're purposefully being dense.
You're counting anything that can read epub, aren't you? Except you're leaving out the part where the Nook DRMs its books, making those apps useless for Nook content.
No. I'm talking about the Barnes & Noble e-reader software that's available for all of the platforms I mentioned and that supports B&N's DRM.
See, I've actually done research on eReaders, and I can tell you that the Kindle is clearly superior to the Nook.
You certainly can tell me that, yes. But honestly, you are the worst fanboy troll I've ever seen. For someone who has "done research," you certainly don't even seem to be trying to know what you're talking about.
Not that it really matters, since the iPad is superior to both, with the single exception of the Kindle's keyboard.
Ah, an Apple guy. That figures. No way would I want to read books on an iPad. The two don't even compare.
No, it doesn't. Try EPUB support, for one, which means I can buy e-books from multiple stores and even check out books from my local library (something the Kindle will not let me do).
Meh...worrying about non-DRM formats is pretty pointless since it's beyond trivial to convert between formats.
I'm not talking about non-DRM formats. The library lends commercial books, purchased from the publisher, and it lends them using an Adobe DRM server.
Perhaps the Kindle gets such good battery life because they weren't dumb enough to put a crappy little LCD touch screen on it.
Every Nook update so far has improved battery life, and the move to Android 2.x will probably improve it considerably. It's not that big a deal. And the touch screen is a huge benefit, IMHO.
But my point stands. In HTML, there is a way to denote a paragraph: the <p> tag. There is no way to specify a single sentence, however, and sentences are rendered separated by one space (no matter how many spaces you try to put between them). If there was a problem with this, typesetters would be up in arms, just like how graphic designers complain about not having precise control over typographic features like leading and line spacing. But nobody complains, because a single space between sentences has been the typographic convention for as long as anyone remembers. You see single spaces not just in HTML, but in books, magazines, newspapers, and everywhere else, too. If it all looks "crowded" to you, you must have a hard time reading.
You're an idiot. The Kindle is not only considerably cheaper than a Nook,
Uhhh... like $10 cheaper?
it has the same features you list and then some.
No, it doesn't. Try EPUB support, for one, which means I can buy e-books from multiple stores and even check out books from my local library (something the Kindle will not let me do).
You can browse the web from your Kindle, the Nook has no web browser.
Yes, it does. And the color touchscreen even lets you peek at pages in color, something the Kindle cannot let you do.
The Kindle has over 2 million titles available, the Nook has closer to a half million.
These figures are meaningless. Most of the millions of titles are free, out-of-copyright books that you can get from Google Books or Project Gutenberg anyway. Mainstream commercial publishers are now pricing their books the same on both the Amazon and B&N stores. If you see a book on special sale for 99 cents at Amazon, it's going to be 99 cents at B&N as well.
The Kindle has a battery life of a month, the Nook is lucky to make it a week.
I seriously question the "battery life of a month" claim, but the battery life complaint for the Nook is pretty much true (though your phone performs considerably worse).
Then there's the interface. The Nook uses a crappy touch screen that wastes battery life.
It's actually a quite nice touchscreen, and it only wastes battery when it's backlit. When it's not, you can swipe the screen to turn pages, which is actually very nice compared to clicking a button.
The Kindle has a physical keyboard.
...which is totally ugly and completely useless when all you want to do is read books (unlike the touchscreen, as mentioned above).
Oh, and that "replaceable battery?" It's a proprietary custom battery. Once B&N folds, and the writing's on the wall, even though you can remove it, you won't be able to replace it with anything.
Except an after-market battery, I guess. What about the Kindle's proprietary custom OS and firmware?
But the biggest thing is that with the Kindle, you can read your ebooks on a huge variety of devices other than the Kindle itself. You can download Amazon's reader for your PC and smart phone. For the Nook - not so much.
How so? There are Nook e-reader apps available for iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Mac, and PC.
So enjoy your soon-to-be-useless, overpriced gadget.
And enjoy your trolling, sir! Although you perhaps need a little practice.
I know somebody who works in book publishing and his company relies heavily on Borders to distribute its product. Everybody there is very, very concerned that Borders will not go up for sale, but go bankrupt -- leaving them with tons of unsold product sitting in Borders' warehouses that they can't get back (because everything goes into receivership in a bankruptcy). If you followed the retail bookseller business at all, you would not have the same level of confidence in Borders.
If you're teaching a non-English language, however, the rules are sometimes different. In France, for example, it's not uncommon to put one space before a question mark (?) or an exclamation point (!), like this: Zut alors !
I see a lot of people do that in English, too, but it's not correct.
I disagree. Even with proportional fonts one space at the end of a period makes the text look crowded.
You must have a real hard time reading Slashdot, then, or any other site, because in HTML it doesn't matter if you put one space or a hundred at the end of a sentence; it's always rendered as one space.
Also, as someone who has worked in professional publishing for more than ten years, the rule is what someone stated above. It's always one space, unless you're typing in a fixed-width font. One space after a comma, one space after a period.
Is it really that hard to believe that some things come to be due to *both* government and private industry? Are we so polarized that we cannot see that there is a place for both?
I don't think anyone is arguing that. But if you just look at "last mile" Internet access, pretty much every ISP today is in business via the grace of a government-granted monopoly or semi-monopoly. (Why aren't there more cable Internet providers in your city? Why aren't there more phone companies offering DSL?) The U.S. government continues to interfere in virtually every level of the Internet. YES, you buy your Internet from a private company. But the government makes it possible, regulates it, taxes it and subsidizes it, all at the same time.
I'm sure there are a couple examples, but I can't actually think of any standards which arose from unregulated markets. Insofar as standards benefit consumers (and that is insofar VERY far indeed), the credit is almost entirely due to unfree, regulated markets.
Do not ignore the power of de facto standards. Around here we don't consider them standards at all unless they're open... but the Word/Excel/PowerPoint file formats, for example, remain powerful forces in the market, despite being decidedly unfree.
If your company is big enough, the "standard" is what your company does. It may very well be in your best interest to publish some specs and let other companies interact with stuff you make. It just probably doesn't behoove you to let them do that without making them sign a license and/or pay you some fees.
You could argue, of course, that this kind of standard is of no benefit to consumers... but I doubt that's strictly true.
Who would want to get into a vehicle with a driver that drove on the wrong side of the road and didn't even seem to think it was a problem?
I think the idea there is that the driver does it so often that he feels in control of the situation and has successfully avoided many potential accidents in the past. If he looks scared then he clearly doesn't have any idea what he's doing, but goes ahead and does it anyway.
If people were more willing to repair their devices, especially complex electronic devices (most of which fail because of simple and repairable problems, like a broken lead), we would be better off.
I once fixed my mom's TV remote. All it took was a lucky guess ("this shouldn't move around like this") and a drop of solder.
I've also recently performed minor (if precarious and foolhardy) repairs on a Eee PC and a BlackBerry.
On the other hand, my DVD player is giving me pains right now. Dollars to donuts it's a problem with the motor or other mechanics -- maybe it's not spinning at a consistent rate, or the bushings aren't holding the disc stable, or a fixture has worn over time and there's too much vibration in the system. Either way we're probably talking about some minor, barely perceptible problem that will take me hours of tinkering to track down. Meanwhile I could go down to Best Buy and buy a new one for $60 and the new one will probably play DivX and will upconvert to 1080p, too. Or I could drop a little more cash and get a Blu-Ray player. Even if I succeeded in repairing my old DVD player later, I wouldn't be able to sell it to anyone for more than $20, especially if they knew I'd repaired it myself. So what's the point?
Honestly, I understand the environmental problems associated with disposable plastic gadgets and electronics, but gone are the days when you can expect us to hang onto electronics for 30 years and pass them on to our kids. My TV needs a converter box just to pick up over-the-air broadcasts these days.
AT&T is hardly the only mobile carrier to offer BlackBerry handsets. Blame T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon for not outbidding AT&T to be first to carry this model.
You mean the all-too-common crappy retrofit of an existing projector.
That seems a little unlikely, considering that all the modern 3-D systems require digital projection. You can certainly have picture quality issues with a digital projector, but that's usually due to operator error, rather than old equipment.
Slashdot Mirror
Point. Fuckin. Taken.
Wait. So because there are lots of beautiful girls in LA, this girl is not good looking? Must be pretty harsh living in your world if you can't be attracted to anyone but the best-looking girl in the room.
One reason Americans have resisted dollar coins is because the Mint has made dumb decisions about the coins.
The Eisenhower dollar was large and heavy. Its diameter made it uncomfortable to put in a change pocket. So when they created the Susan B. Anthony dollar, they decided to make it smaller -- small enough, in fact, that it was easily mistaken for a quarter. People ended up handing out quarters when they were looking for dollars and vice versa. You couldn't easily tell which was which just by reaching into your pocket.
The new dollar coins are gold-colored instead of silver, but they retain the dimensions of the Susan B. Anthony dollar. That's smart in one sense, because it means vending machines that take the old dollar coins can still take the new ones. But it's also stupid, because almost no vending machines take Susan B. Anthony dollars, since nobody uses them (or if they do accept them, they register as quarters). So in the end, consumers see the new coins as just gold versions of the old coins, and they don't want to get burned again -- leading to the problem cited in the article, where customers and businesses alike are reluctant to accept them. Most people I know aren't even totally sure if the dollar coins are genuine legal tender or if they're just some kind of passing fad that will be unusable in a few years, like out-of-date postage stamps (and this doubt is exacerbated by the fact that they keep changing the pictures on the front, so they seem like collector's coins).
Contrast this to the UK and EU, each of which took pains to differentiate their highest-value coins from the others. Both the 1 Euro and 1 Pound coins are notably thicker than other coins, in addition to being a unique size, which makes them more easily recognizable by touch. (As an aside, European notes tend to have specific sizes for each denomination, too, while the U.S. notes are all the same size, making it difficult for blind people to choose one from the other.)
If the U.S. Mint would just smarten up, maybe it wouldn't keep wasting money like this.
Speaking as a total non-mathematician here...
To suggest it is anything OTHER than mathematics is to prove you have absolutely no idea how computers actually work. In the real world- every computer is a universal turing machine.
If you have any real doubt - just consider this: any program COULD be written in lisp.
Lisp is DIRECTLY based on lambda-calculus - in fact the ONLY (minor) difference as small syntactical changes designed to make it easier to TYPE lambda on a computer (it was after-all designed for writing in).
Lamba-calculus is a simple form of mathematical language - like algebra or godel numbers or any of a dozen other ways to write down 2+2=4 that are all just different ways of expressing it designed to be useful for different purposes.
OK fine, but if untyped lambda calculus is a form of notation that's useful for describing computation, isn't this a circular argument? It's a computer. Of course a form of notation used to express computation would be able to describe what it does.
If, on the other hand, I want to describe a system where I have a bunch of rocks in one pile, and I move rocks to another pile based on certain logical criteria, forming a kind of "loop" ... couldn't that also be expressed in lambda calculus? I would be performing a kind of computation. But that doesn't mean moving rocks from one pile to another is mathematics, because the lambda calculus doesn't move any rocks. It just talks about moving rocks. If I want to move rocks, calculus alone isn't going to cut it.
So in the end, your comments sound like the same kind of navel-gazing that says "math is everywhere" .... "Look, Bobby, see the Golden Ratio in the structure of this leaf? Math is everywhere!" "No dad, that is not math. That is a leaf. Math is how you think about the leaf."
Most people write computer programs not because they want to run some clever bit of lambda calculus, but because they want to perform some function on information that can be applied in the real world. You can call it math if you want, but if I can write a program to do what I want to do, it makes no difference to me if it's math or not. The program's output is what we're looking for here, not some hand-waving about how computers are math. To me a computer is not math, it's a physical tool designed to perform a job, just like a power drill, a tractor, or a cuckoo clock. They just work differently.
It was grabbing the beer on the way out that was the stroke of genius.
That, and when the cops came to his house to arrest him he was allegedly "engaged in sexual activities."
As a friend said yesterday, I like to think that he was yelling, "Fuuuuuccckk youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu" on the way down the slide, beer in hand.
It's a little confusing, but "the current user of the name" isn't quite right. There is this guy about whom we're talking here, who goes by the name Cringely, and even though that's not his real name you know who he is and recognize him as Cringely, so that might as well be his real name for most intents and purposes. And then there is "the current user of the name," who writes an insider gossip column for InfoWorld under an assumed name, just as the other Cringely used to do. These two Cringelys are not the same person. It's an old story and it involves a lawsuit.
Any trade where your purpose is to make money out of money seems pretty pointless to me.
You mean like where I have a bunch of money, and I loan it to a guy, and he uses it to make widgets, which he then sells and uses the profits to pay me back my money plus interest? Yeah, I can't imagine how that would be of benefit to anyone.
The advantages of simultaneous editing of single documents (along with the edit history) were huge for this particular niche.
Doesn't Google Docs offer the same?
Oh, and just to round out my responses to your trolls for anyone looking for legitimate information:
And you know what else your local library will let you do? Check out the actual physical books, which if you might as well actually do if you're heading to the library anyway.
The subject was e-books. And if you think you have to physically go to the library to check out e-books, you're a moron.
Really? You can access the web over the 3G connection? Oh, wait, no, it only works over private wireless, and not wi-fi hotspots or 3G.
My Nook doesn't even have 3G because I don't see the point of it. Wi-Fi hotspots are everywhere; I certainly have one operating at my house at all times. But your information is faulty once again. In addition to free Wi-Fi at any Barnes and Noble store, the Nook also gives you free instant access to any AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot anywhere. At the airport? You're good to go. You can also use private wireless, and you can also use anyone else's hotspot -- all you need to do is login using the browser and you're all set. (That wasn't true for the initial Nook rollout, but it's true for everyone now after an automatic free firmware upgrade.)
The only limitation is that you cannot actually download books from anyone but B&N -- you need to "side load" them from your PC -- but the Kindle has the same limitation.
Another one in English is the relationship between periods (full-stops), commas, and quotation marks. American style says you should always put them inside the quotes, "like this," but if you're a programmer you have to remember to shake that habit when coding!
I think you've got a typo there, last I checked, it's more like $100 cheaper.
Then you haven't checked. It was never that much cheaper. Amazon only lowered its prices to current levels when B&N began selling the Nook for $100 less than the Kindle.
So what? No one uses epub.
You apparently don't read e-books, either. Other than Amazon, pretty much everyone uses ePub, and the industry is heading in that direction.
You conveniently neglect to mention that Amazon allows authors to self-publish. Barnes and Noble? Nope.
Conveniently? Certainly, when self-publishing wasn't even the topic. Why would I even bring it up? But since you have brought it up, B&N's self publishing arm for e-books is called Pubit!.
I've used it, since they have them on display at the stores. You're wrong. The Nook display lags behind user input horribly. Plus it's incredibly finicky, ignoring at least half the touches to the screen, including all attempts to do the "swipe" thing to turn pages, although it was more than happy to occasionally dump me back to the home page when I tried.
I use it every day, and not some beat-up floor model, and I experience none of these problems. Your mileage may vary, of course. As far as the keyboard lag, that's a limitation of the display, not the UI. You can type on the keyboard about as fast as you want, and the Kindle uses the same display (however current models have worse screen contrast than the Nook for some reason, which will apparently be corrected in the forthcoming models).
Try using a good touch screen like an iPad and try saying with a straight face that the Nook's touch screen is even usable.
The Nook's touch screen is more than usable. It's one of my favorite features of the Nook, in fact. Having used it, I'd have serious reservations about buying an e-reader that didn't have a similar UI.
The touch screen that turns off when you read the book? Yeah, that sounds much better than a physical set of buttons that provide tactile feedback and never randomly vanish to conserve power.
The Nook also has physical buttons to let you turn the pages. If you'd really ever looked at one, you would know that. Or else you're purposefully being dense.
You're counting anything that can read epub, aren't you? Except you're leaving out the part where the Nook DRMs its books, making those apps useless for Nook content.
No. I'm talking about the Barnes & Noble e-reader software that's available for all of the platforms I mentioned and that supports B&N's DRM.
See, I've actually done research on eReaders, and I can tell you that the Kindle is clearly superior to the Nook.
You certainly can tell me that, yes. But honestly, you are the worst fanboy troll I've ever seen. For someone who has "done research," you certainly don't even seem to be trying to know what you're talking about.
Not that it really matters, since the iPad is superior to both, with the single exception of the Kindle's keyboard.
Ah, an Apple guy. That figures. No way would I want to read books on an iPad. The two don't even compare.
No, it doesn't. Try EPUB support, for one, which means I can buy e-books from multiple stores and even check out books from my local library (something the Kindle will not let me do).
Meh...worrying about non-DRM formats is pretty pointless since it's beyond trivial to convert between formats.
I'm not talking about non-DRM formats. The library lends commercial books, purchased from the publisher, and it lends them using an Adobe DRM server.
Perhaps the Kindle gets such good battery life because they weren't dumb enough to put a crappy little LCD touch screen on it.
Every Nook update so far has improved battery life, and the move to Android 2.x will probably improve it considerably. It's not that big a deal. And the touch screen is a huge benefit, IMHO.
But my point stands. In HTML, there is a way to denote a paragraph: the <p> tag. There is no way to specify a single sentence, however, and sentences are rendered separated by one space (no matter how many spaces you try to put between them). If there was a problem with this, typesetters would be up in arms, just like how graphic designers complain about not having precise control over typographic features like leading and line spacing. But nobody complains, because a single space between sentences has been the typographic convention for as long as anyone remembers. You see single spaces not just in HTML, but in books, magazines, newspapers, and everywhere else, too. If it all looks "crowded" to you, you must have a hard time reading.
As far as I understand it, their "new" books are all remaindered (overstock that the publisher wants to dump, fast).
You're an idiot. The Kindle is not only considerably cheaper than a Nook,
Uhhh... like $10 cheaper?
it has the same features you list and then some.
No, it doesn't. Try EPUB support, for one, which means I can buy e-books from multiple stores and even check out books from my local library (something the Kindle will not let me do).
You can browse the web from your Kindle, the Nook has no web browser.
Yes, it does. And the color touchscreen even lets you peek at pages in color, something the Kindle cannot let you do.
The Kindle has over 2 million titles available, the Nook has closer to a half million.
These figures are meaningless. Most of the millions of titles are free, out-of-copyright books that you can get from Google Books or Project Gutenberg anyway. Mainstream commercial publishers are now pricing their books the same on both the Amazon and B&N stores. If you see a book on special sale for 99 cents at Amazon, it's going to be 99 cents at B&N as well.
The Kindle has a battery life of a month, the Nook is lucky to make it a week.
I seriously question the "battery life of a month" claim, but the battery life complaint for the Nook is pretty much true (though your phone performs considerably worse).
Then there's the interface. The Nook uses a crappy touch screen that wastes battery life.
It's actually a quite nice touchscreen, and it only wastes battery when it's backlit. When it's not, you can swipe the screen to turn pages, which is actually very nice compared to clicking a button.
The Kindle has a physical keyboard.
...which is totally ugly and completely useless when all you want to do is read books (unlike the touchscreen, as mentioned above).
Oh, and that "replaceable battery?" It's a proprietary custom battery. Once B&N folds, and the writing's on the wall, even though you can remove it, you won't be able to replace it with anything.
Except an after-market battery, I guess. What about the Kindle's proprietary custom OS and firmware?
But the biggest thing is that with the Kindle, you can read your ebooks on a huge variety of devices other than the Kindle itself. You can download Amazon's reader for your PC and smart phone. For the Nook - not so much.
How so? There are Nook e-reader apps available for iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Mac, and PC.
So enjoy your soon-to-be-useless, overpriced gadget.
And enjoy your trolling, sir! Although you perhaps need a little practice.
I know somebody who works in book publishing and his company relies heavily on Borders to distribute its product. Everybody there is very, very concerned that Borders will not go up for sale, but go bankrupt -- leaving them with tons of unsold product sitting in Borders' warehouses that they can't get back (because everything goes into receivership in a bankruptcy). If you followed the retail bookseller business at all, you would not have the same level of confidence in Borders.
If you're teaching a non-English language, however, the rules are sometimes different. In France, for example, it's not uncommon to put one space before a question mark (?) or an exclamation point (!), like this: Zut alors !
I see a lot of people do that in English, too, but it's not correct.
I disagree. Even with proportional fonts one space at the end of a period makes the text look crowded.
You must have a real hard time reading Slashdot, then, or any other site, because in HTML it doesn't matter if you put one space or a hundred at the end of a sentence; it's always rendered as one space.
Also, as someone who has worked in professional publishing for more than ten years, the rule is what someone stated above. It's always one space, unless you're typing in a fixed-width font. One space after a comma, one space after a period.
Is it really that hard to believe that some things come to be due to *both* government and private industry? Are we so polarized that we cannot see that there is a place for both?
I don't think anyone is arguing that. But if you just look at "last mile" Internet access, pretty much every ISP today is in business via the grace of a government-granted monopoly or semi-monopoly. (Why aren't there more cable Internet providers in your city? Why aren't there more phone companies offering DSL?) The U.S. government continues to interfere in virtually every level of the Internet. YES, you buy your Internet from a private company. But the government makes it possible, regulates it, taxes it and subsidizes it, all at the same time.
I'm sure there are a couple examples, but I can't actually think of any standards which arose from unregulated markets. Insofar as standards benefit consumers (and that is insofar VERY far indeed), the credit is almost entirely due to unfree, regulated markets.
Do not ignore the power of de facto standards. Around here we don't consider them standards at all unless they're open... but the Word/Excel/PowerPoint file formats, for example, remain powerful forces in the market, despite being decidedly unfree.
If your company is big enough, the "standard" is what your company does. It may very well be in your best interest to publish some specs and let other companies interact with stuff you make. It just probably doesn't behoove you to let them do that without making them sign a license and/or pay you some fees.
You could argue, of course, that this kind of standard is of no benefit to consumers... but I doubt that's strictly true.
Who would want to get into a vehicle with a driver that drove on the wrong side of the road and didn't even seem to think it was a problem?
I think the idea there is that the driver does it so often that he feels in control of the situation and has successfully avoided many potential accidents in the past. If he looks scared then he clearly doesn't have any idea what he's doing, but goes ahead and does it anyway.
If people were more willing to repair their devices, especially complex electronic devices (most of which fail because of simple and repairable problems, like a broken lead), we would be better off.
I once fixed my mom's TV remote. All it took was a lucky guess ("this shouldn't move around like this") and a drop of solder.
I've also recently performed minor (if precarious and foolhardy) repairs on a Eee PC and a BlackBerry.
On the other hand, my DVD player is giving me pains right now. Dollars to donuts it's a problem with the motor or other mechanics -- maybe it's not spinning at a consistent rate, or the bushings aren't holding the disc stable, or a fixture has worn over time and there's too much vibration in the system. Either way we're probably talking about some minor, barely perceptible problem that will take me hours of tinkering to track down. Meanwhile I could go down to Best Buy and buy a new one for $60 and the new one will probably play DivX and will upconvert to 1080p, too. Or I could drop a little more cash and get a Blu-Ray player. Even if I succeeded in repairing my old DVD player later, I wouldn't be able to sell it to anyone for more than $20, especially if they knew I'd repaired it myself. So what's the point?
Honestly, I understand the environmental problems associated with disposable plastic gadgets and electronics, but gone are the days when you can expect us to hang onto electronics for 30 years and pass them on to our kids. My TV needs a converter box just to pick up over-the-air broadcasts these days.
Dude. It's not her level of self-esteem that determines whether or not my punk ass can make an initial approach.
So she can still look great and ... ah. Right. You were talking about rape.
AT&T is hardly the only mobile carrier to offer BlackBerry handsets. Blame T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon for not outbidding AT&T to be first to carry this model.
You mean the all-too-common crappy retrofit of an existing projector.
That seems a little unlikely, considering that all the modern 3-D systems require digital projection. You can certainly have picture quality issues with a digital projector, but that's usually due to operator error, rather than old equipment.