Just read the bios of the professors in the departments and email the ones that sound like they would be interested.
I second this, except I would recommend calling the department and explaining what you're interested in, the receptionist will transfer you to the right person. Explain what you want, and they'll probably grant you an appointment or give you an extended explanation over the phone.
I've done this several times, researchers love it when a lay-person is interested in their niche expertise, provided that your question is not mundane. Make sure to state that you're not a journalist looking for a sound bite.
And even though I have a feeling you were being ironic, I DO find it easier to read with a normal line-length, as opposed to reading across the whole damn (wide)screen.;-)
A friendly suggestion: with flowed content such as html you should never impose linebreaks for non-formatting purposes, i.e. you could use them with code or poems. Otherwise one line equals one paragraph. Your editor can surely soft-wrap the display while retaining proper flow in the text.
The browser handles the flowing, if you prefer shorter lines, configure your browser for it by for instance resizing your browser window or introduce custom css. On a phone your post might very well end up looking like this paragraph, or even worse.
I'm for keeping a pagefile:) If my post was unclear, I experienced an increased loading time (which is bad) when I disabled the pagefile. I believe this is because Windows couldn't use that memory for disk caching because more of it was occupied by the game I was playing.
I'm not aware of whether any relevant data has been collected on the point, but any significant exposure to the practice of law will confirm the truth of the proposition.
YAAL? Excuse me, are you defending a gratitious lawsuit based upon... what seems to be a lost cause, but whatever? Are you trying to be serious right now? I'm just a stupid scandinavian, but in our neck of the woods the civil court would certainly fine you, and possibly disbar you for wasting their time. Bullshit is never an excuse.
If this is how you make your living, I can not but offer my condolences.
usually $5-10 in bars (don't know about Norway tho).
Actually a little higher, usually $8-$11. In a restaurant, club or upscale pub you can add $3-4 to that, outside of the cities it's more expensive as well. In a store the cheapest brands are about $4 for a half litre can. Alcohol and tobacco is (are?) very expensive in Norway due to "sin taxes".
Re: sig, is/are? Both sound "wrong" to me, I think I'd go for "is".
Why would you prevent your operating system for accounting for the possibility of filling all that RAM?
To enable it to use that ram for file cache. I tried to disable the pagefile when I upgraded to 4GB a couple of years ago, and I experienced a distinctive increase in loading times for games. This guy knows more than I do and explains it better:
If you've got plenty of RAM in your PC, and your workload really isn't that huge, you may never run into application crashing errors with the pagefile disabled, but you're also taking away from memory that Windows could be using for read and write caching for your actual documents and other files.
There are other reasons as well, the article is well worth reading. BTW I'm on Linux when not gaming, and have a similar experience from that OS as well.
Even your post speaks of "fault" in relation to obesity. You speak of choice about changing their weight. What I'm asking you to re-think is not that there's no choice for fat people about their weight, rather, to re-think your underlying assumption that there's only one choice that should be made: to lose weight. That that's the right choice. The moral choice. That people who remain fat are morally wrong; are lazy; have no self-control; over-eat.
That's not what I meant, or what I believe... I don't see how my post could be interpreted thus. It was a response to the first paragraph of your post, where you said that "lose the weight" is a pseudo-argument and you make crazy assumptions about the PP (black? gay? Ehh, what?!). That, in turn, was a response to your PP saying what to do "If you would prefer not to have those limitations". I disagreed with your statement and tried to explain why. I don't think I put down all overweight people as... anything, really, or demanded that all "horisontally challenged people" lose weight.
A friend jokes all the time about himself being fat (he is somewhat overweight), but he's perfectly happy and don't see the need to lose weight. That's very good. If a girl is very overweight I probably won't find her physically attractive, but then again I'm not partial to very thin girls either. I certainly don't find it "immoral" or "wrong" in any way. If a person is comfortable with his or her body, all is good.
I'm talking about those who complains that they want to lose weight but "can't". From my anecdotal experience it IS possible by taking measures in your everyday life, even if it can be very hard. It irks me when people claim that they want to lose weight, but give up without really trying "the obvious", and/or blame all kinds of circumstances they can't control. I believe that in the vast majority of cases they're factually wrong, and I try to say so in a gentle and constructive manner (I tried to be quite civil in my previous post).
..BMI...
BMI is certainly bullshit in many cases, that's why I never mention it. I, as well, was an accomplished athlete (cross-country skiing and soccer) with a BMI of 19, which is clinically underweight. I could bench 1.5 times my own body weight and I ran marathons, so I was not particularly worried:)
At least quote the actual study from whence the quote came. Let us judge that study on its scientific merits.
Thanks for introducing me to "whence", neat word! On topic: If Wikipedia is wrong, correct it. I'm in no way qualified to argue on scientific terms, neither do I find it particularly interesting or relevant to what you or I were saying. I didn't even read the whole article in the last case. Still, in my view as a layperson it's difficult to assume that correlation is not at least partially causation in these cases.
The source of my quote is here. The first hit on google for "obesity and caloric intake paper" yields this in the abstract: "The results show that obese or overweight individuals do absorb more calories at all ages but with differences that vary across gender and ages and across food nutrients such as carbohydrates, lipids or proteins."
For example, from your quote alone: "excessive" caloric intake? What is that? What's excessive, anything over 2,000 calories?
I have no idea, I never counted calories nor did I write the article, I guess it varies. When I was a cross-country skier practicing endurance and strenght six times a week I consumed enormous amounts of food while gaining only the muscle tissue I needed. What I take it to mean is "more than your body needs in order to function". If your body absorbs more energy than it needs it'll probably tend to store the excess as f
but until something matches at least some of its feature set, I'm sticking with my Palm TX.
If you're happy with it there's no need to buy something else:)
I guess it's a matter of accustomization. A friend of mine reads on his iphone, when I borrowed it on a plane trip my (good) eyes got tired after a couple of hours. I find that the visual difference between the Sony Reader and any LCD-screen is so significant that it's worth it to carry an extra device.
Ugh. The glib "just lose the weight" pseudo-argument. Yeah sure, all fat people are fat by choice, and, with a little elbow grease, could lose weight and be normal like everyone else.
From Wikipedia:"At an individual level, a combination of excessive caloric intake and a lack of physical activity is thought to explain most cases of obesity.[62]"
So, to reply in your categorical manner, most are. I know that it isn't black and white, though, I'll try to explain my take on it:
I know that it can be extremely difficult for an obese person to lose weight by eating less and moving more. Still it is pretty much his only choice in order to stay living and healthy. Even if you accept that the overweight person can't help overeating while hardly moving in his everyday life the problem won't go away by itself, in the end only the person himself can control his own eating and activity level. In that respect it is no ones fault but his own. I'm very glad I don't have the problem, I seriously don't know if I'd have the strength of will to do as I preach.
Where I live obesity is not very common, still there are groups and courses anyone with excess weight can join. Going through these challenges alone will be very difficult, so seek help. Some overweight people choose not to change their lifestyle and instead cope with the problems it entails, others try to seek every avenue to get help taking measures in order to solve their problem. Even walking briskly (for various values of briskly) twenty minutes a day will help. If you complain about the consequences of your weight problem while not having taken steps to remedy it my sympathy will be limited.
Obesity can certainly be a handicap in everyday life, but it's one which most people can actually do something to assuage. Saying that it isn't so is not very constructive and will certainly do nothing to help people. My anecdotal experience shows that EVERY ONE I know that've gone through with the measures recommended by experts have lost various amounts of weight and found that the results were well worth the effort, which in at least one case was considerable and impressive. I'm not begging the question here; the ones that didn't succeed on a particular try admitted that they didn't keep up with their diet or training as prescribed by their advisors, thus failing my premise.
Sorry if I come across as harsh, but I believe that sometimes a little dose of realism instead of pampering can be very sound.
Unfortunately, books fail hard at carrying capacity.
They also fail hard at being e-readers, which is what the question was about:)
I agree about the carrying capacity. It's akin to my mp3 player; I'll never listen to ALL my music on every trip, but it's nice not having to select a few CDs that I'm going to bring in advance. I used to bring 8-10 books on a week-long vacation, I'm glad those days are gone.
What do you think? aside from the screen size, pretty phreaking awesome eBook, right?
No. For serious reading e-ink is the only way to go. Either you don't read much or you haven't tried e-ink at all if you even consider other technologies, your eyes WILL get tired if you read 4-6 hours every day, as I do. With e-ink that's not an issue. And yes, I have tried several different phones with good screens for reading, they are not even close.
Also, it's very difficult to disregard the screen size for reading. What you describe would require me to turn the page about 5-6x as often as with my ebook-reader (PRS-600). Colours? Meh. The books I read don't require a colour display, the grayscale e-ink is great for anti-aliased fonts. The reader has absolutely no features other than reading, note-taking, basic mp3 functionality and an incredible battery life, which is exactly what I need. For everything else I use my phone.
I've heard the Iliad is amazing, but I think it's about 700$.
The Iliad is a very neat piece of hardware, but it suffers greatly from lack of support and development from Irex. I used one for about a year, its main drawbacks are lack of epub support, battery life, a somewhat clunky user interface and slow pageturns even for e-ink. No matter what they claim 7-9 hours of battery life is the real-world fact if you're actually reading on it, even with the newer "improved" models.
While this sounds like it should be enough, I found that I was still constantly running out of battery and needed to recharge. Combine this with a 2 minute boot time, no sleep mode and NO power management whatsoever on an ARM processor no less, and it's nearly unusable compared to my new Sony Reader.
I got a PRS-600 a few months ago and it's a different world. I have never been close to running out of juice, you don't really even need to turn it off. It does so automatically after 5 days to save power. No, really, battery life is THAT good.
Everything in the UI is very smooth to operate, the unit is fast, and I can use Calibre under Linux to handle most books. For DRM ones I need to turn to Windows, but it has been no great hassle so far. I only need to use Windows to remove DRM from my legally purchased ebooks, then I can manage them under Linux. In short I'm very impressed with the unit, and can recommend it.
Could you try putting something like this paper on your Nook and seeing if its readable? Perhaps post a few pics?
Of course you're probably already aware of it, but PDFs are generally not well suited for small-screen reading. I know you asked for testing with a Nook, but I put it on my Sony PRS-600 just for kicks. It turns out that it works very well with the almost instant Zoom/Pan feature of the reader, no hassle at all to read and pan it. Unzoomed it's readable after I cropped it tightly, but of course the font get's very small. I know this was not what you asked, but here is a pic from my bad phone camera anyway. The contrast is perfect and the font is smooth when viewed on the reader.
Amen, brother. I work at a small publishing company, I strongly recommended 'no DRM' to the higher-ups when the question of ebooks came up. They agreed and I now make our epubs without DRM, we walk the walk.
As a buyer of ebooks I'm glad that the most common DRM for epubs and PDFs (Adobe ADEPT) is easily removed for the time being. I'm a supporter of commercial sales of ebooks, the publishers aren't simply another variant of the music industry, most authors *need* an editor. The publishers adds real and necessary value to the final work. I have no trouble supporting that, and paying 8-15 dollars for a good book is reasonable to me. I won't give my paid-for ebooks away, but where I live I'm legally entitled to use a bought product as I see fit, this specifically includes breaking encryption.
Still, the moment I can't change the font or add my own notes to the description is the moment I'll borrow the paper version from the library to scan it, or simply look elsewhere a better version of the product.
On a side note, the analog hole for ebooks is not even analog. It's embarrassingly simple to set up a script/macro that'll grab screenshots of each page from the reader software and run it through OCR with perfect precision. This should never be necessary to use the book as it suits the customer. There will always be pirated versions of ebooks, and as long as you use crippling DRM on commercial ebooks many of your potential customers will turn to the pirated version instead.
You don't lend a book out more than once at a time, but a popular book may be lent several hundred time by a library before it's replaced.
In Sweden you may borrow ebooks at the libraries. They solve this by not buying the book initially at an inflated 'lending' price as is common for libraries, instead the library pays a fee each time someone borrows the book. It seems to work out fine, although I haven't seen any statistics for how this turns out financially for the libraries. As a good library will otherwise buy many books that are checked out once or twice, if at all, I suspect it won't be too bad.
This has saved my phone's screen from many a counter/table corner.
I always keep my phone in the front pocket of my pants. Since I'm pretty careful with that area of my body it benefits my phone as well:) Conversely, if the area should take any real damage I probably wouldn't care much about the phone.
There is literally no place outside of a Faraday cage in this entire universe he could be happy.
I believe he could escape this by living on a spaceship moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light, the Doppler effect would shift the perceived frequencies. The spaceship would probably act as a Faraday cage as well for extra protection. Then again, the simplest solution is probably to get treatment for his real problems from a psychiatrist:) I'm also amused by the fact that some lawyer will have to do his very best to convince a court that this guy is not nuts.
<kyourek> There was a 23% drop in temperature. <nappyjallapy> That's almost 25%! <kyourek>... That was one of the most worthless comments I've ever heard.
He's probably referring to mammoths, extinct relatives of the modern elephant. If you were able to take one down with your bare hands you'd be pretty scary:)
They were successfully hunted by groups of humans armed with spears and other primitive weapons, probably aiding in their extinction. I guess that a few people would die during a hunt, but then the rest would have food for a long time.
The flash to black as it switches does seem disruptive. Does anyone know why it's necessary? It seems to me that the firmware ought to be able to toggle individual pixels.
I believe it's in order to remove ghost images from your previous page. On the Sony PRS-600 it seems to first render the page in pure b/w, the black flash is the page rendered in reverse monochrome, and then it displays the antialiased final version. This takes an estimated 0.4s in total, and there is readable text on the page for all but a very tiny fraction of a second.
The black flash is not as disruptive as it sounds, I couldn't really remember it and had to fire up my device to investigate it specifically. Obviously, it has not annoyed me or even been especially noticeable during the thousands and thousands of pages I've already read. It doesn't contribute to eye strain even after reading hundreds of pages in one sitting, and I find the page turning on the Sony device less disruptive than turning a paper page for every other page read. You still have to move your eyes to the top of the page, and when you're there it's already finishing.
It should have softish covers, and once you open it, there should be 2 screens inside (one for each page).
I think that people requesting dual-screen readers haven't really thought it through. While two opposing pages is a given when you have paper sheets and a spine, it makes no sense for an ebook-reader. Having used different readers for about two years (my current one is a Sony PRS-600) I don't really see a use case for it at all, and it would probably double the bulk and weight. The page-turning on the Sony is very quick, and with the slower readers (iLiad) you will soon start to push the pageturn-button while you are on the last line or so of a page.
The only added value I can think of for two screens is to spread a large fixed-size PDF page over the two screens, but that was never a feature of regular books anyway, and you're better off converting your PDF into a more reader-friendly format.
I recommend not using tinyurl for links on slashdot. No one wants to be tricked into viewing goatse.
Tinyurl has its uses, for instance on Slashdot where your complex/malformed url can be expected to be mangled by a filter.
If you're not yet immune to goatse you can visit this page (I see the irony, it's actually a php page at tinyurl.com itself, copy & paste http://tinyurl.com/preview.php if you prefer) and enable a handy url-preview. I presume that they use a cookie, so keep your tinfoil hat on.
I guess you'll have to take my word for it, and since it didn't happened to me directly I can't even guarantee that the story is true, but my mother's friend talked about it at length and seemed really distressed.
Frankly I don't believe it, but it's not a big deal:) You just got me curious. Thanks for your answer, there's no reason to discuss this further.
A third person moved into the house, and there was no way at all to force him to leave because he had not broken the door himself
I find this extremely hard to believe, especially because of its anecdotal nature. The French have no notion of private property? If I run through the door as you exit, you can't have me removed because I didn't break the door? If you hire/ask random criminals to do your dirty work, or benefit from others' criminal behaviour, you are not responsible? How did this third person prove it wasn't him who broke the door?
All he could do was pay for renovation again, there was no way he could sue the person and have him pay the bills.
And the French have no protection from vandalism? It's ok to break stuff, for instance furniture or doors, because you can't be prosecuted or sued?
Gotta love a country [...] where you can just "steal" a house from someone and thrash it completely without any consequences...
This doesn't ring true. I googled for a while and, as expected, found absolutely nothing to support your story. Do you have links to laws, or even news stories?
Slashdot Mirror
I second this, except I would recommend calling the department and explaining what you're interested in, the receptionist will transfer you to the right person. Explain what you want, and they'll probably grant you an appointment or give you an extended explanation over the phone.
I've done this several times, researchers love it when a lay-person is interested in their niche expertise, provided that your question is not mundane. Make sure to state that you're not a journalist looking for a sound bite.
A friendly suggestion: with flowed content such as html you should never impose linebreaks for non-formatting purposes, i.e. you could use them with code or poems. Otherwise one line equals one paragraph. Your editor can surely soft-wrap the display while retaining proper flow in the text.
The browser handles the flowing, if you prefer shorter
lines,
configure your browser for it by for instance resizing
your browser
window or introduce custom css. On a phone your post
might very
well end up looking like this paragraph, or even worse.
Otherwise, excellent original post :)
I'm for keeping a pagefile :)
If my post was unclear, I experienced an increased loading time (which is bad) when I disabled the pagefile. I believe this is because Windows couldn't use that memory for disk caching because more of it was occupied by the game I was playing.
YAAL? Excuse me, are you defending a gratitious lawsuit based upon... what seems to be a lost cause, but whatever? Are you trying to be serious right now? I'm just a stupid scandinavian, but in our neck of the woods the civil court would certainly fine you, and possibly disbar you for wasting their time. Bullshit is never an excuse.
If this is how you make your living, I can not but offer my condolences.
Actually a little higher, usually $8-$11. In a restaurant, club or upscale pub you can add $3-4 to that, outside of the cities it's more expensive as well. In a store the cheapest brands are about $4 for a half litre can. Alcohol and tobacco is (are?) very expensive in Norway due to "sin taxes". Re: sig, is/are? Both sound "wrong" to me, I think I'd go for "is".
To enable it to use that ram for file cache. I tried to disable the pagefile when I upgraded to 4GB a couple of years ago, and I experienced a distinctive increase in loading times for games. This guy knows more than I do and explains it better:
There are other reasons as well, the article is well worth reading.
BTW I'm on Linux when not gaming, and have a similar experience from that OS as well.
This is what my .sig is for, thanks a lot! :)
That's not what I meant, or what I believe... I don't see how my post could be interpreted thus. It was a response to the first paragraph of your post, where you said that "lose the weight" is a pseudo-argument and you make crazy assumptions about the PP (black? gay? Ehh, what?!). That, in turn, was a response to your PP saying what to do "If you would prefer not to have those limitations". I disagreed with your statement and tried to explain why. I don't think I put down all overweight people as... anything, really, or demanded that all "horisontally challenged people" lose weight.
A friend jokes all the time about himself being fat (he is somewhat overweight), but he's perfectly happy and don't see the need to lose weight. That's very good. If a girl is very overweight I probably won't find her physically attractive, but then again I'm not partial to very thin girls either. I certainly don't find it "immoral" or "wrong" in any way. If a person is comfortable with his or her body, all is good.
I'm talking about those who complains that they want to lose weight but "can't". From my anecdotal experience it IS possible by taking measures in your everyday life, even if it can be very hard. It irks me when people claim that they want to lose weight, but give up without really trying "the obvious", and/or blame all kinds of circumstances they can't control. I believe that in the vast majority of cases they're factually wrong, and I try to say so in a gentle and constructive manner (I tried to be quite civil in my previous post).
BMI is certainly bullshit in many cases, that's why I never mention it. I, as well, was an accomplished athlete (cross-country skiing and soccer) with a BMI of 19, which is clinically underweight. I could bench 1.5 times my own body weight and I ran marathons, so I was not particularly worried :)
Thanks for introducing me to "whence", neat word! On topic: If Wikipedia is wrong, correct it. I'm in no way qualified to argue on scientific terms, neither do I find it particularly interesting or relevant to what you or I were saying. I didn't even read the whole article in the last case. Still, in my view as a layperson it's difficult to assume that correlation is not at least partially causation in these cases.
The source of my quote is here. The first hit on google for "obesity and caloric intake paper" yields this in the abstract: "The results show that obese or overweight individuals do absorb more calories at all ages but with differences that vary across gender and ages and across food nutrients such as carbohydrates, lipids or proteins."
I have no idea, I never counted calories nor did I write the article, I guess it varies. When I was a cross-country skier practicing endurance and strenght six times a week I consumed enormous amounts of food while gaining only the muscle tissue I needed. What I take it to mean is "more than your body needs in order to function". If your body absorbs more energy than it needs it'll probably tend to store the excess as f
If you're happy with it there's no need to buy something else :)
I guess it's a matter of accustomization. A friend of mine reads on his iphone, when I borrowed it on a plane trip my (good) eyes got tired after a couple of hours. I find that the visual difference between the Sony Reader and any LCD-screen is so significant that it's worth it to carry an extra device.
Happy reading!
From Wikipedia:"At an individual level, a combination of excessive caloric intake and a lack of physical activity is thought to explain most cases of obesity.[62]"
So, to reply in your categorical manner, most are. I know that it isn't black and white, though, I'll try to explain my take on it:
I know that it can be extremely difficult for an obese person to lose weight by eating less and moving more. Still it is pretty much his only choice in order to stay living and healthy. Even if you accept that the overweight person can't help overeating while hardly moving in his everyday life the problem won't go away by itself, in the end only the person himself can control his own eating and activity level. In that respect it is no ones fault but his own. I'm very glad I don't have the problem, I seriously don't know if I'd have the strength of will to do as I preach.
Where I live obesity is not very common, still there are groups and courses anyone with excess weight can join. Going through these challenges alone will be very difficult, so seek help. Some overweight people choose not to change their lifestyle and instead cope with the problems it entails, others try to seek every avenue to get help taking measures in order to solve their problem. Even walking briskly (for various values of briskly) twenty minutes a day will help. If you complain about the consequences of your weight problem while not having taken steps to remedy it my sympathy will be limited.
Obesity can certainly be a handicap in everyday life, but it's one which most people can actually do something to assuage. Saying that it isn't so is not very constructive and will certainly do nothing to help people. My anecdotal experience shows that EVERY ONE I know that've gone through with the measures recommended by experts have lost various amounts of weight and found that the results were well worth the effort, which in at least one case was considerable and impressive. I'm not begging the question here; the ones that didn't succeed on a particular try admitted that they didn't keep up with their diet or training as prescribed by their advisors, thus failing my premise.
Sorry if I come across as harsh, but I believe that sometimes a little dose of realism instead of pampering can be very sound.
They also fail hard at being e-readers, which is what the question was about :)
I agree about the carrying capacity. It's akin to my mp3 player; I'll never listen to ALL my music on every trip, but it's nice not having to select a few CDs that I'm going to bring in advance. I used to bring 8-10 books on a week-long vacation, I'm glad those days are gone.
No. For serious reading e-ink is the only way to go. Either you don't read much or you haven't tried e-ink at all if you even consider other technologies, your eyes WILL get tired if you read 4-6 hours every day, as I do. With e-ink that's not an issue. And yes, I have tried several different phones with good screens for reading, they are not even close.
Also, it's very difficult to disregard the screen size for reading. What you describe would require me to turn the page about 5-6x as often as with my ebook-reader (PRS-600). Colours? Meh. The books I read don't require a colour display, the grayscale e-ink is great for anti-aliased fonts. The reader has absolutely no features other than reading, note-taking, basic mp3 functionality and an incredible battery life, which is exactly what I need. For everything else I use my phone.
The Iliad is a very neat piece of hardware, but it suffers greatly from lack of support and development from Irex. I used one for about a year, its main drawbacks are lack of epub support, battery life, a somewhat clunky user interface and slow pageturns even for e-ink. No matter what they claim 7-9 hours of battery life is the real-world fact if you're actually reading on it, even with the newer "improved" models.
While this sounds like it should be enough, I found that I was still constantly running out of battery and needed to recharge. Combine this with a 2 minute boot time, no sleep mode and NO power management whatsoever on an ARM processor no less, and it's nearly unusable compared to my new Sony Reader.
I got a PRS-600 a few months ago and it's a different world. I have never been close to running out of juice, you don't really even need to turn it off. It does so automatically after 5 days to save power. No, really, battery life is THAT good.
Everything in the UI is very smooth to operate, the unit is fast, and I can use Calibre under Linux to handle most books. For DRM ones I need to turn to Windows, but it has been no great hassle so far. I only need to use Windows to remove DRM from my legally purchased ebooks, then I can manage them under Linux. In short I'm very impressed with the unit, and can recommend it.
Of course you're probably already aware of it, but PDFs are generally not well suited for small-screen reading. I know you asked for testing with a Nook, but I put it on my Sony PRS-600 just for kicks.
It turns out that it works very well with the almost instant Zoom/Pan feature of the reader, no hassle at all to read and pan it. Unzoomed it's readable after I cropped it tightly, but of course the font get's very small. I know this was not what you asked, but here is a pic from my bad phone camera anyway. The contrast is perfect and the font is smooth when viewed on the reader.
Amen, brother. I work at a small publishing company, I strongly recommended 'no DRM' to the higher-ups when the question of ebooks came up. They agreed and I now make our epubs without DRM, we walk the walk.
As a buyer of ebooks I'm glad that the most common DRM for epubs and PDFs (Adobe ADEPT) is easily removed for the time being. I'm a supporter of commercial sales of ebooks, the publishers aren't simply another variant of the music industry, most authors *need* an editor. The publishers adds real and necessary value to the final work. I have no trouble supporting that, and paying 8-15 dollars for a good book is reasonable to me. I won't give my paid-for ebooks away, but where I live I'm legally entitled to use a bought product as I see fit, this specifically includes breaking encryption.
Still, the moment I can't change the font or add my own notes to the description is the moment I'll borrow the paper version from the library to scan it, or simply look elsewhere a better version of the product.
On a side note, the analog hole for ebooks is not even analog. It's embarrassingly simple to set up a script/macro that'll grab screenshots of each page from the reader software and run it through OCR with perfect precision. This should never be necessary to use the book as it suits the customer. There will always be pirated versions of ebooks, and as long as you use crippling DRM on commercial ebooks many of your potential customers will turn to the pirated version instead.
In Sweden you may borrow ebooks at the libraries. They solve this by not buying the book initially at an inflated 'lending' price as is common for libraries, instead the library pays a fee each time someone borrows the book. It seems to work out fine, although I haven't seen any statistics for how this turns out financially for the libraries. As a good library will otherwise buy many books that are checked out once or twice, if at all, I suspect it won't be too bad.
I always keep my phone in the front pocket of my pants. Since I'm pretty careful with that area of my body it benefits my phone as well :)
Conversely, if the area should take any real damage I probably wouldn't care much about the phone.
I believe he could escape this by living on a spaceship moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light, the Doppler effect would shift the perceived frequencies. The spaceship would probably act as a Faraday cage as well for extra protection. Then again, the simplest solution is probably to get treatment for his real problems from a psychiatrist :)
I'm also amused by the fact that some lawyer will have to do his very best to convince a court that this guy is not nuts.
It reminds me of this gem from bash.org:
<kyourek> There was a 23% drop in temperature. ... That was one of the most worthless comments I've ever heard.
<nappyjallapy> That's almost 25%!
<kyourek>
He's probably referring to mammoths, extinct relatives of the modern elephant. If you were able to take one down with your bare hands you'd be pretty scary :)
They were successfully hunted by groups of humans armed with spears and other primitive weapons, probably aiding in their extinction. I guess that a few people would die during a hunt, but then the rest would have food for a long time.
I believe it's in order to remove ghost images from your previous page. On the Sony PRS-600 it seems to first render the page in pure b/w, the black flash is the page rendered in reverse monochrome, and then it displays the antialiased final version. This takes an estimated 0.4s in total, and there is readable text on the page for all but a very tiny fraction of a second.
The black flash is not as disruptive as it sounds, I couldn't really remember it and had to fire up my device to investigate it specifically. Obviously, it has not annoyed me or even been especially noticeable during the thousands and thousands of pages I've already read. It doesn't contribute to eye strain even after reading hundreds of pages in one sitting, and I find the page turning on the Sony device less disruptive than turning a paper page for every other page read. You still have to move your eyes to the top of the page, and when you're there it's already finishing.
I think that people requesting dual-screen readers haven't really thought it through. While two opposing pages is a given when you have paper sheets and a spine, it makes no sense for an ebook-reader. Having used different readers for about two years (my current one is a Sony PRS-600) I don't really see a use case for it at all, and it would probably double the bulk and weight. The page-turning on the Sony is very quick, and with the slower readers (iLiad) you will soon start to push the pageturn-button while you are on the last line or so of a page.
The only added value I can think of for two screens is to spread a large fixed-size PDF page over the two screens, but that was never a feature of regular books anyway, and you're better off converting your PDF into a more reader-friendly format.
Tinyurl has its uses, for instance on Slashdot where your complex/malformed url can be expected to be mangled by a filter.
If you're not yet immune to goatse you can visit this page (I see the irony, it's actually a php page at tinyurl.com itself, copy & paste http://tinyurl.com/preview.php if you prefer) and enable a handy url-preview. I presume that they use a cookie, so keep your tinfoil hat on.
Frankly I don't believe it, but it's not a big deal :) You just got me curious. Thanks for your answer, there's no reason to discuss this further.
I find this extremely hard to believe, especially because of its anecdotal nature. The French have no notion of private property? If I run through the door as you exit, you can't have me removed because I didn't break the door? If you hire/ask random criminals to do your dirty work, or benefit from others' criminal behaviour, you are not responsible? How did this third person prove it wasn't him who broke the door?
And the French have no protection from vandalism? It's ok to break stuff, for instance furniture or doors, because you can't be prosecuted or sued?
This doesn't ring true. I googled for a while and, as expected, found absolutely nothing to support your story. Do you have links to laws, or even news stories?