I'm not under any illusion that Amazon has any animus against Australia or Rwanda or even Elbonia for that matter. But attempting to enforce local/global laws and taxes on global/local products is becoming increasingly counter-productive. Nobody gets to buy what they want, and since they can't buy it, they can't be taxed on it.
This is where the current technology is a bit behind my current requirements. I have a significant number of expensive and very heavy dead-tree text-books related to my areas of study (molecular biology and biochemistry) where a convenient e-book reader would be an excellent resource. But since current offerings seem to be monochrome and just as expensive (if available at all), the attraction just isn't there yet.
E-readers need to have colour displays, and they need to be a lot more robust than the devices so far offered by Amazon, which seem to be excessively fragile.
The publishers are the problem, not Amazon. The publishers are fighting tooth and nail to prevent the success of ebooks.
This is a rather cretinous policy; it would make more sense to take advantage of a "bums on seats" strategy of selling cheaply to many. Given that the entire burden of distribution is taken off their hands, it would literally be money for nothing.
I am not a Canadian, but I wouldn't count on the product working well, given that Amazon suppresses digital content to anybody they don't happen to care for. Australia currently falls into this category; digital copies of books are unavailable where Amazon is perfectly happy to sell you a dead-tree version.
I happen to prefer the latter, but for some texts, it would be nice to forego the exorbitant US freight costs.
I did read TFA. So you've made another incorrect assumption
No I have not. From the article:
"I found a nice lawyer guy at Warners, very apologetic, promised to get it sorted, but all these months later it isn't."
Either that says what it says or it doesn't. I am exaggerating or distorting nothing, and I have absolutely no axe to grind in this matter. I couldn't give a flying fart about Edwyn Collins or MySpace.
All I was suggesting was that the guy is wasting too much of his life complaining about (1) something that he can't change and (2) something that probably isn't worth the trouble of bothering with anyway.
I thought of that, but they don't seem to react to power tools such as electric drills, angle grinders or planers. And they're not bothered by my tractor, either, though I wish they were, so they'd stay away from it.
If I had a Roomba, it would probably go on strike over the workload of cat and dog hair in my house. But I guess it would at least keep the animals entertained...;-)
What if it takes you a full day to hack one robot.
the Sci-Fi shelves are (I suppose) full of scenarios (scenaria?) where armies of robot soldiers go berserk. One that comes to mind is Sheri Tepper's "Raising The Stones".
But something that might be of more immediate interest is the handy little gadget on wheels that the bomb disposal guys send in to take care of unexploded ordnance. Seems to me there's all sorts of possibilities there.
Oh wait, there's some guys in black uniforms banging on my door...
Most pets freak out at the sight of a vacuum cleaner
I've always wondered if that's because they see things getting sucked up, that never reappear. And maybe wonder if the same thing might happen to them...
OK. I'd say probably every single one of us has been 'just a few clicks away from falling into a classic Internet phishing scam'. I know I have. The point is that I, and I hope nearly all of us know not to make those few clicks.
The FBI honcho apparently did too, but everybody, including his wife, decided to make a big deal of it.
There is no news here, except for a reminder for all of us to use our brains.
they probably just arrested the first guys on the watch list compiled in 2007.
In which case, I hope for the sakes of the ~100 people they've nailed so far that they managed to skim more than $1.5M between them. If they're all involved in the same scam, that's only $150K each, which is pretty much peanuts nowadays.
If I were likely to do the same time in PITA jail for stealing $100 as I would for $100*10^6, I'd make damn sure I did the latter.
Likewise, they would be unsanitary in an operating room.
I often get comments to the effect that my cheese factory looks like an operating theatre. My response is always that a surgeon only gets to kill one patient at a time, whereas I can potentially kill hundreds - so my theatre has to be cleaner.
Close. The bonnets are not sterile, since there is absolutely no point in covering non-sterile hair with a sterile porous membrane. The purpose is simply to keep particulates from falling off hair on to anything that comes near food.
The actual wording of the code as I implement it is "any hair of more than one day's growth must be covered".
My boss hates having to wear a mask to cover his moustache, but I'm the one with the microbiology background, and he does as he's told.:-) I go to the opposite extreme. I'm perfectly happy to shave my head as well as my face...
But natty dreads would just be too much of a risk, and I wouldn't allow them through the door.
And saying that he was "spending months" on this is equally silly.
I said that because that's what he said in TFA. But I guess you didn't bother reading that, did you?
And what animosity? If a website locks you out of publishing your content for months on end, I don't see what is so wrong with suggesting trying something else. Sure, MySpace is there, and it's free, but if it doesn't serve your purposes, there are alternatives. He can always link to the content from MySpace without actually hosting it there.
...dirty looks from people who see me on the street (my dreadlocks probably don't help this...
Fair enough. I work in the dairy food industry, and our hygiene policy has a total ban on the use of scotch-brite pads, because no matter how much you wash and rinse them with industrial bleach, they continue to harbour large colonies of bacteria. Since you can't subject your head to that kind of agressive cleansing, one can only imagine what kind of wildlife will be festering in your dreadlocks. There is just no way you can convince me those damn things are clean.
but there are times when being able to visualize something like this would greatly help the learning experience.
I'm sure the cleaners probably prefer it too.;-)
Of course, it looks gobsmackingly awesome right now, but I guess in 5 years or so this'll all be old hat. Maybe there's something a bit sad about that. But then, when I was a kid, the humble flatbed scanner would have been well and truly in the realms of science fiction...
This is true. But what I find a bit curious about this case is that rather than doing something about the situation - like finding another hosting service or hosting the material himself (well, Hello! Maybe that's too obvious), the guy seems to prefer spending months whining about MySpace's policies.
Seems to me that if you don't like MySpace, you can always just dump it, and tell everybody why.
The entire substance of my own post was a minor nitpick with a remark that "the idea that "communication is two way" does not seem to be founded in law..."
It is perfectly obvious that email is just as much communication as a snail-mail letter or even a smoke signal.
No reason why not, since the genetic payload of most viruses is quite small, even allowing for the open reading frame. But I suspect the technology will be used primarily for less benign purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like classic IBM overkill
Well, as the old saw goes:
An elephant is a mouse with an IBM operating system.
I'm not under any illusion that Amazon has any animus against Australia or Rwanda or even Elbonia for that matter. But attempting to enforce local/global laws and taxes on global/local products is becoming increasingly counter-productive. Nobody gets to buy what they want, and since they can't buy it, they can't be taxed on it.
Nobody wins.
This is where the current technology is a bit behind my current requirements. I have a significant number of expensive and very heavy dead-tree text-books related to my areas of study (molecular biology and biochemistry) where a convenient e-book reader would be an excellent resource. But since current offerings seem to be monochrome and just as expensive (if available at all), the attraction just isn't there yet.
E-readers need to have colour displays, and they need to be a lot more robust than the devices so far offered by Amazon, which seem to be excessively fragile.
The publishers are the problem, not Amazon. The publishers are fighting tooth and nail to prevent the success of ebooks.
This is a rather cretinous policy; it would make more sense to take advantage of a "bums on seats" strategy of selling cheaply to many. Given that the entire burden of distribution is taken off their hands, it would literally be money for nothing.
how well will it work in Canada?
I am not a Canadian, but I wouldn't count on the product working well, given that Amazon suppresses digital content to anybody they don't happen to care for. Australia currently falls into this category; digital copies of books are unavailable where Amazon is perfectly happy to sell you a dead-tree version.
I happen to prefer the latter, but for some texts, it would be nice to forego the exorbitant US freight costs.
I did read TFA. So you've made another incorrect assumption
No I have not. From the article:
"I found a nice lawyer guy at Warners, very apologetic, promised to get it sorted, but all these months later it isn't."
Either that says what it says or it doesn't. I am exaggerating or distorting nothing, and I have absolutely no axe to grind in this matter. I couldn't give a flying fart about Edwyn Collins or MySpace.
All I was suggesting was that the guy is wasting too much of his life complaining about (1) something that he can't change and (2) something that probably isn't worth the trouble of bothering with anyway.
You do seem to be taking this very personally.
Nah, it's probably just the noise.
I thought of that, but they don't seem to react to power tools such as electric drills, angle grinders or planers. And they're not bothered by my tractor, either, though I wish they were, so they'd stay away from it.
If I had a Roomba, it would probably go on strike over the workload of cat and dog hair in my house. But I guess it would at least keep the animals entertained... ;-)
What if it takes you a full day to hack one robot.
the Sci-Fi shelves are (I suppose) full of scenarios (scenaria?) where armies of robot soldiers go berserk. One that comes to mind is Sheri Tepper's "Raising The Stones".
But something that might be of more immediate interest is the handy little gadget on wheels that the bomb disposal guys send in to take care of unexploded ordnance. Seems to me there's all sorts of possibilities there.
Oh wait, there's some guys in black uniforms banging on my door...
Most pets freak out at the sight of a vacuum cleaner
I've always wondered if that's because they see things getting sucked up, that never reappear. And maybe wonder if the same thing might happen to them...
OK. I'd say probably every single one of us has been 'just a few clicks away from falling into a classic Internet phishing scam'. I know I have. The point is that I, and I hope nearly all of us know not to make those few clicks.
The FBI honcho apparently did too, but everybody, including his wife, decided to make a big deal of it.
There is no news here, except for a reminder for all of us to use our brains.
they probably just arrested the first guys on the watch list compiled in 2007.
In which case, I hope for the sakes of the ~100 people they've nailed so far that they managed to skim more than $1.5M between them. If they're all involved in the same scam, that's only $150K each, which is pretty much peanuts nowadays.
If I were likely to do the same time in PITA jail for stealing $100 as I would for $100*10^6, I'd make damn sure I did the latter.
Likewise, they would be unsanitary in an operating room.
I often get comments to the effect that my cheese factory looks like an operating theatre. My response is always that a surgeon only gets to kill one patient at a time, whereas I can potentially kill hundreds - so my theatre has to be cleaner.
...but they do wear sterile bonnets.
:-) I go to the opposite extreme. I'm perfectly happy to shave my head as well as my face...
Close. The bonnets are not sterile, since there is absolutely no point in covering non-sterile hair with a sterile porous membrane. The purpose is simply to keep particulates from falling off hair on to anything that comes near food.
The actual wording of the code as I implement it is "any hair of more than one day's growth must be covered".
My boss hates having to wear a mask to cover his moustache, but I'm the one with the microbiology background, and he does as he's told.
But natty dreads would just be too much of a risk, and I wouldn't allow them through the door.
I hope you meant 640. :-)
It refers to a 128 bit filesystem ala ZFS, not the whole OS.
Either we're not reading the same article, or I suspect you didn't read it at all. At no point is a filesystem mentioned.
And saying that he was "spending months" on this is equally silly.
I said that because that's what he said in TFA. But I guess you didn't bother reading that, did you?
And what animosity? If a website locks you out of publishing your content for months on end, I don't see what is so wrong with suggesting trying something else. Sure, MySpace is there, and it's free, but if it doesn't serve your purposes, there are alternatives. He can always link to the content from MySpace without actually hosting it there.
...dirty looks from people who see me on the street (my dreadlocks probably don't help this...
Fair enough. I work in the dairy food industry, and our hygiene policy has a total ban on the use of scotch-brite pads, because no matter how much you wash and rinse them with industrial bleach, they continue to harbour large colonies of bacteria. Since you can't subject your head to that kind of agressive cleansing, one can only imagine what kind of wildlife will be festering in your dreadlocks. There is just no way you can convince me those damn things are clean.
but there are times when being able to visualize something like this would greatly help the learning experience.
;-)
I'm sure the cleaners probably prefer it too.
Of course, it looks gobsmackingly awesome right now, but I guess in 5 years or so this'll all be old hat. Maybe there's something a bit sad about that. But then, when I was a kid, the humble flatbed scanner would have been well and truly in the realms of science fiction...
Friends don't let friends join MySpace....
This is true. But what I find a bit curious about this case is that rather than doing something about the situation - like finding another hosting service or hosting the material himself (well, Hello! Maybe that's too obvious), the guy seems to prefer spending months whining about MySpace's policies.
Seems to me that if you don't like MySpace, you can always just dump it, and tell everybody why.
I did not write that. BrightSpark did.
The entire substance of my own post was a minor nitpick with a remark that "the idea that "communication is two way" does not seem to be founded in law..."
It is perfectly obvious that email is just as much communication as a snail-mail letter or even a smoke signal.
Will this be able to identify viruses?
No reason why not, since the genetic payload of most viruses is quite small, even allowing for the open reading frame. But I suspect the technology will be used primarily for less benign purposes.
But I challenge you to find a law banning government agencies from doing it.
Apparently you're right. The new 160GB model seems to be a bit thinner than mine, too. I guess they no longer have multi-platter disk drives. Oh well.
I don't have any information on when hell last froze over, but a blue moon (a second full moon within a month) occurs quite frequently.