well gas prices are low here compared to the rest of the state at least that was on the radio this afternoon...Just had to shout out to a fellow houstonian.
Am i the only guy in the world here who can see that government regulation has contributed to the lack of doctors in the US? I mean the government regulates who can be a doc..they also regulate education. There are not enough medical schools in the usa to make enough doctors to drive the price of care down, but of course nobody is talking about building more. The AMA recently changed it;s stance to ask for congress to spend more money this way, but years ago they lobbied congress to keep that number low.
I HATE it when people complain how free markets fail and they point to very regulated industries like medicine or banking. I mean the banking industry is the most regulated this side of child porn, yet all those laws and oops still another crises every ten years.
Whats the solution..accountability and maybe making companies too big to fail break up under existing anti trust laws? No more regulation that will i grant you drive costs higher and quaility lower( when adjusted for technology) every time. And when those regulations fail to make it all better what will they suggest...yep more regulations..
how do you get 1 in 45000? that sounds kinda high to me. i mean does that take into account people who live in colombia or something? worldwide less than 5000 people died from terror attacks in the year 2001. This is by FAR the highest year death total on record( 911) so your talking about a 1500 in 7 billion chance thats 1 in 4.6 million and then assuming you will be alive for 70 more years that come out to like 1 in 66000 lifetime. But That is an over simplification as I am sure any statistic geeks out there will point out. the odds are much less.
well you could add profit...if we scrapped a lot of our pie in the sky BS policies and used the money to subsidies people driving EV's or smarts or other greener cars, then people would( well some people) and the price of the tech and other issues would come down.
Look at me. I spend 160 bucks a month on gas. I could lease a smart( 169 a month from their website) and save 120 a month off that. But it still costs me more. Now I know that this commute will not likely last more than 1 year. am I gonna by an extra car for it NO. Am I gonna buy a car, however cheap that I do not like to save on gas for a year, not likely. I am just gonna spend the money till this assignment is over, if it becomes long term i will just move.
Now if uncle sucker or the sierra club wants to pitch in...say half..hell yes i will buy that smart..
Also think about the people driving old beaters who cant afford a new car. I mean some guy with bad credit/no money who is gonna buy a used car for a high rate and likely that used car will be a big car or suv, cuz those are what everybody drove 3 years ago, well lets give him some incentive..say you buy green we will pay a lot of your car or even maybe get you better loan terms.
Cash for clunkers was ok..I could have done that and traded my truck in..accept that you couldn;t do both you had to take the money and scrap the car. Well my truck is worth a lot more than the money they offered so no way there. but if they would have done that alongside a trade in..i might have done green i mean saving gas and taking an extra 4k off the price hell yea i could have got a nissan cube or something.
The solutions to our problem of income gap will not be helped by government programs like socialized healthcare. This certainly has not helped in the EU, where they are going broke fast. The real solutions are in lower taxes on the poor( lowering the payroll tax as it is most regressive ) privatizing to a small degree our national pension program( taking it out of general funds and actually having seperate accounts for each tax payer and making that account go to his/her family when the taxpayer dies). revamping the education system to make trade schools better and colleges cheaper. And lastly giving collective bargaining some real teeth and union membership a real chance for all industries.
You do what I mention above and hardly anybody will be poor for more than 2 generations unless they are disabled or just do not want to make it.
The biggest threat to the poor improving there life right now is social security. If it where privatized, and not a ponzy scheme, a 56 year old man who died and never made more than min wage would still leave his adult children with a large nest egg to buy a house or pay off student loans or open a company or something.
And don't believe all those lies about losing SS in some risky wall street venture. We could regulate the way SS funds could be invested, requiring a large % to be in US T bills for example. The risk would be lower than it is now, the accounting would be more honest and we would protect our currency from the chinese. Bush wanted to start the ball rolling on this but 9/11 and the democrats got in the way.
ok this is slashdot..i am a little pissed here...where is the technical talk? I mean how hard would this new tech be to render useless? Say i was wanting to download a movie and do so in a way that would keep prying eyes from being able to tell who i am? would I need to use some sort of encryption and maybe a proxie server? Say a proxie in a jurisdiction not friendly to the US courts or simply outside their jursidiction?
while i do agree that often republicans are the lesser of two evils...and that both candidates are likely to fuck up more than they fix, I do have to make a point about international relations and bush.
To say that obama has improved on the bush administration in international relations is not true. Sure france and canada may like him, but big deal. Israel certainly would rather have W back and frankly they are a bigger ally in the region that counts most right now.
Also while many countries, say china ( or n korea) may prefer obama as the us president..that is only because they feel he is weaker on national defense and thus plays to their countries interest more than the US's.
Ask yourself this question honestly...would north korea test a Abomb if W was still in office? I doubt it.
while cuba and other communist countries may voice strong approval for the current administration, that does not equal a foreign policy success. Success in foreign policy requires the advancement of US interests. Bush may have made some enemies, sure, but you can't make an omlet without breaking eggs. Obama may make lots of friends..well so did carter...but carter got DICK for the us out of all that "goodwill" and my bets are the current president will get less that really matters..They will both have the noble peace prize sure..but the american people will get the short end.
the american people by and large do not elect a president to court foreign governments. they elect a president to protect the social, financial( that means oil too) and security interests of the united states of america. Sure we like to help. Americans are a very giving and charitable people, as even many of our critics will admit. But we expect our leaders to look out for us first, jsut as china and russia and france all expect from those they elect.
What i am saying is that you all are so hard on bush. I think that history will vindicate bush on all but the torture and the patriot act.
When you look at the war in Iraq you see that it was no less moral than the war in germany during WW2. Just on a smaller scale. SH may not have had any WMD when we raided his houses, but nobody can deny he had chemical weapons when he killed more than 100,000 of his own people with them. This is a fact that nobody on the left or right denies. The tragedy is not that we invaded iraq, the tragedy is that the UN treaty against geneocide is so toothless that we had to use WMD as a reason.
The problem with us is that we let the fox watch the hen house. ( nice ross perot like comment huh) we go through the trouble of a revolution to make a free state, then set up a constitution to limit the power of government. Great idea..BUT WAIT..then we let the GOVERNMENT set up indoctrination centers...oops i mean schools that teach all of our children what the fucking constitution means...Well gee wiz wally what kind of a good job do you think those same government workers are gonna do on teching kids about limiting their powers?
ONLY by taking back education( we have made great inroads lately with charter schools) will we take back the hearts and minds of the people and make america truly free again.
the problem is simple...free speech is only restricted at the extremes. People do not understand that the law that today is only used to restrict child porn, will be used next year to fight piracy then bloggers then any unpopular speech.
The right is usually rather transparent. If the "moral majority " types want to outlaw say lesbian porn or flag burning they make a law against it.
the left are a little more sneaky. They use lawsuits mostly. Or pass laws that will enable lawsuits. Think workplace laws that have gone from protecting women from being required to submit to groping in the workplace to now outlawing dirty jokes.
Also the left tends to favor lawsuits and other ways that do not require a statute. This allows for the current goverment, courts, etc to use a very subjective review of the type of speech. Making "hate speech" against right wing groups less likely for example to be punished. Or making ELF less likely than operation rescue to be prosicuted for acting on their respective semi-terrorist agendas.
i used to think i was one of those people..or maybe i used to be one.then i got a kindle 2 for xmas..WOW how did i go so long without it. Books are cheap( free if you find them on pirate bay hehe ARRR) and the e-ink screen rules!. I figure my kindle will last 3 years. I may use it for as many as 5.
Do i care if it has color..NO not really. The size would make most magazine articles hard to read and not really be good for even comic books. It is just for reading books to me. and newspaper articles.
will i buy apples new tablet..good chance i will. And good chance i will use it for the same things i use my laptop for now. Then i will upgrade my laptop to a desktop and not need a laptop.
Would i like a color e ink reader for magazines, not really. I think the glossy look of magazines will work well on an lcd screen and frankly magazines do not take as long to read so the headache of staring at a backlit screen is not an issue. The only advantage would be having 1000's of magazines in a single portable unit. But it would have to be bigger than a kindle2 maybe the size of the DX model or bigger.
Honestly I think the thing i would like to have would be a color e-ink screen that was at least comic book newsprint quality. Magazine quality would be nice but not something i would pay a lot extra for OR trade for a larger screen size. And with a 5 year plus lifespan( no need to upgrade for more power or features or to run software, just use it till it breaks) i would likely have a small size(kindle 2) e reader in BW and a larger color one for comics, provided the availability of lots of comics for purchase cheap and/or on the pirate bay( i think the latter is a given).
I think apple's new product will help the sale of e-ink style readers...as more people try ebooks and want a better way to read them. The e - ink reader is about as good as it gets for electronic reading. And the costs are pretty good on many books, plus when you factor in all the free ones it is amazing. if you just save 5.00 on 10 books a year a kindle 2 pays for itself in 5 years. I have already since Xmas saved more than the thing would have cost. I mean I have downloaded 45 free books ( well i have read 15 of them so far but they are on my pc waiting lol). Assuming i would have bought them used for an average price of 6.00 that is 270.00 saved so far. Keep in mind that even public domain books cost money when you purchase a physical copy...now sure i could have read thos e 15 books on my laptop...but you know how many books i have read on a laptop screen? 1 and that was just the last harry potter book...i wanted to read it before it came out...sure i bought it later though..and reading that in 2 days ona laptop was MURDER!!!...so the savings from e-ink is real for me..
I hear all this talk about upgrades and early adopters..i think it is kinda silly. E-ink readers are at the quality of paper back books now. That is the product they are "replacing" for most of us. Any other features/upgrades ( and i am sure there will be every year) are really gadgets that do not affect the prime usable function most of us would need the reader for. Also these are not laptops...no need to upgrade two years form now to run the latest antivirus software or whatever...this is more like buying a kitchen aid mixer than buying a PC. You want a good one that will last. When mine breaks i will buy one either just like it, or with new features. Plus with all the money i am saving on books..I could easily buy one kindle2 a year( or more likely a few different readers, maybe a color version of the DX when it comes out) and still be ahead.
ok but the bigger point here is that IF you have a camera hard wired into your laptop, anybody with root access can use it remotely. This is not something that can really be changed. Turning it off stops this.
As built in cams ( and answering emails naked) become more common, this will be a problem. I mean forget the school that OWNS the laptop( or your company) but really there are trojans designed to do this. I think all cams and mics should have a MANDATED HARDWIRED SEPERATE off switch. Kinda like the wifi on off on most laptops. This is a safety feature that would not cost a lot and could solve this issue..
And if you think this is a small deal WAIT till angelena jolie's laptop cam is hacked !@
you must not look very hard for informed and detailed debate..I follow that issue and there is a HUGE amount of information and opinion available. Of course to get it you have to actually look. If you are not smart enough to do that, well then you get drivel along with the other uninformed "sheeple".
ok first off you are viewing publishing in the context of print books. The switch to eformats( it will happen) will change the upfront costs. secondly much of the cost of selling books retail involves shipping( huge costs) and markup for the retailer. Retailers have limited shelf space and high costs for labor, etc.They have to recoup those or fold. Ebooks will eventually be sold with a tiny markup by the retailer OR direct from the publisher.
The new market will eliminate shipping, retail space costs, most retail markup. More importantly it will eliminate printing books that do not sell. Many books do not sell. Printing a book may cost 5 bucks but if you print 3 for every one you sell WHOA thats 15 per book. Also the move to ebooks eliminates the vast amounts of capital publishing requires. This will allow publishers to publish many more books. Also by spending former production costs on marketing sell they can sell more copies also, to a point.
The question is WHY book publishers have not moved faster to ditch paper and trucks in favor of electrons and cables? I predict more books will come out ONLY on ebook soon and not just junkie fan fiction or how to manuals. Universities( and students) should be the first to insist on ebooks to curtail the insane price of text books. A sensible ebook lending policy could cause libraries to buy thousands more books( no need for a bigger building, or a library visit, or even to live in the same city) thus improving sales of some titles. Imagine a national lending library for ebooks funded by a small donation made at the point of purchase( click here to donate 1 dollar to put a copy of this book in the national library). The amount of good for the people(including the industry) that can come from this is HUGE. But it will hurt some existing profit models..so what.
For now I just pirate books on to my kindle at a ratio of around 10:1 to compensate for the gouging done by ebook retailers. For murdoch's company i guess i will raise that ratio to 15:1( or higher) now..no big deal...please join me in this act of revolution and make ebooks more common.
ok first off I am pretty sure the data from that little breakthrough will be published in a way that it can be verified objectively if it has not already. second the cancer gene people are not asking the planet to collectively spend trillions of dollars on blind faith in their research. If they where I am pretty sure people would be as concerned(if not more) about the integrity of it. For example any company that plans to spend even millions in r&d based on that research will likely want more than the scientists word.
yes but dollars spent on climate credits will be wasted..Tis is a shadow tax system designed to rape the western democracies It is a bad idea. Even if man made global warming is real, and I am not sure that it is, climate credits are bad and frankly a warmer globe sounds good right about now..it was nut swriveling cold this morning.
you have to understand this man is a politician..at the higher levels of public companies all the execs are politicians...specialized ones who know the biz...
oddly enough we have gone past the point in america of trying to run the government like a company and are now running companies like governments...
this is a side effect of wide spread public ownership(401ks) among other things.
the gay guy next door STOLE my families cat. When i was 18 no joke..he moved out of his house to remodel it for like almost a year...the cat went missing at the same time...THEN when he came back...the cat came back a few days later declawed and wearing a rather feminine( but stylish) collar...this is almost 12 months later..
even leashed pets get lost...i know there is a lot we can do to prevent it..but they do...or they dig or otherwise figure a way out of the back yard...GPS for the pet is a great idea. Many of those animals would not be "Road kill" if they where found within minutes of being lost. Bad pet owners are bad with or without GPS , but for the rest of us gps collars would be a great help.
as for privacy..why not make a GPS that deactivates in the presence of a local RIFD signal. So if the non-tracking reciever gets a signal that you are say within 25 feet...no tracking..when it DOES NOT get the signal..it broadcasts it's location..
that is a false analogy...the maintaning of the commons is a legitimate concern and function of goverment. We do not , for example, ask comcast to maintain our state fisheries, or regulate poaching or river pollution.
ok so solution..city lays fiber, city sets up a non profit PRIVATE trust to own and maintain fiber at ZERO profit, just break even. City sells fiber to trust at no cost, or sells the right to manage and maintain the fiber, it could in theory retain ownership to keep the "balance of power"..problem solved. This is how all communal resources should be managed.
Slashdot Mirror
well gas prices are low here compared to the rest of the state at least that was on the radio this afternoon...Just had to shout out to a fellow houstonian.
Am i the only guy in the world here who can see that government regulation has contributed to the lack of doctors in the US? I mean the government regulates who can be a doc..they also regulate education. There are not enough medical schools in the usa to make enough doctors to drive the price of care down, but of course nobody is talking about building more. The AMA recently changed it;s stance to ask for congress to spend more money this way, but years ago they lobbied congress to keep that number low. I HATE it when people complain how free markets fail and they point to very regulated industries like medicine or banking. I mean the banking industry is the most regulated this side of child porn, yet all those laws and oops still another crises every ten years. Whats the solution..accountability and maybe making companies too big to fail break up under existing anti trust laws? No more regulation that will i grant you drive costs higher and quaility lower( when adjusted for technology) every time. And when those regulations fail to make it all better what will they suggest...yep more regulations..
how do you get 1 in 45000? that sounds kinda high to me. i mean does that take into account people who live in colombia or something? worldwide less than 5000 people died from terror attacks in the year 2001. This is by FAR the highest year death total on record( 911) so your talking about a 1500 in 7 billion chance thats 1 in 4.6 million and then assuming you will be alive for 70 more years that come out to like 1 in 66000 lifetime. But That is an over simplification as I am sure any statistic geeks out there will point out. the odds are much less.
well you could add profit...if we scrapped a lot of our pie in the sky BS policies and used the money to subsidies people driving EV's or smarts or other greener cars, then people would( well some people) and the price of the tech and other issues would come down. Look at me. I spend 160 bucks a month on gas. I could lease a smart( 169 a month from their website) and save 120 a month off that. But it still costs me more. Now I know that this commute will not likely last more than 1 year. am I gonna by an extra car for it NO. Am I gonna buy a car, however cheap that I do not like to save on gas for a year, not likely. I am just gonna spend the money till this assignment is over, if it becomes long term i will just move. Now if uncle sucker or the sierra club wants to pitch in ...say half ..hell yes i will buy that smart..
Also think about the people driving old beaters who cant afford a new car. I mean some guy with bad credit/no money who is gonna buy a used car for a high rate and likely that used car will be a big car or suv, cuz those are what everybody drove 3 years ago, well lets give him some incentive..say you buy green we will pay a lot of your car or even maybe get you better loan terms.
Cash for clunkers was ok..I could have done that and traded my truck in..accept that you couldn;t do both you had to take the money and scrap the car. Well my truck is worth a lot more than the money they offered so no way there. but if they would have done that alongside a trade in..i might have done green i mean saving gas and taking an extra 4k off the price hell yea i could have got a nissan cube or something.
The solutions to our problem of income gap will not be helped by government programs like socialized healthcare. This certainly has not helped in the EU, where they are going broke fast. The real solutions are in lower taxes on the poor( lowering the payroll tax as it is most regressive ) privatizing to a small degree our national pension program( taking it out of general funds and actually having seperate accounts for each tax payer and making that account go to his/her family when the taxpayer dies). revamping the education system to make trade schools better and colleges cheaper. And lastly giving collective bargaining some real teeth and union membership a real chance for all industries. You do what I mention above and hardly anybody will be poor for more than 2 generations unless they are disabled or just do not want to make it. The biggest threat to the poor improving there life right now is social security. If it where privatized, and not a ponzy scheme, a 56 year old man who died and never made more than min wage would still leave his adult children with a large nest egg to buy a house or pay off student loans or open a company or something. And don't believe all those lies about losing SS in some risky wall street venture. We could regulate the way SS funds could be invested, requiring a large % to be in US T bills for example. The risk would be lower than it is now, the accounting would be more honest and we would protect our currency from the chinese. Bush wanted to start the ball rolling on this but 9/11 and the democrats got in the way.
it's the way they rub up against each other in the womb!
ok this is slashdot..i am a little pissed here...where is the technical talk? I mean how hard would this new tech be to render useless? Say i was wanting to download a movie and do so in a way that would keep prying eyes from being able to tell who i am? would I need to use some sort of encryption and maybe a proxie server? Say a proxie in a jurisdiction not friendly to the US courts or simply outside their jursidiction?
while i do agree that often republicans are the lesser of two evils...and that both candidates are likely to fuck up more than they fix, I do have to make a point about international relations and bush. To say that obama has improved on the bush administration in international relations is not true. Sure france and canada may like him, but big deal. Israel certainly would rather have W back and frankly they are a bigger ally in the region that counts most right now. Also while many countries, say china ( or n korea) may prefer obama as the us president ..that is only because they feel he is weaker on national defense and thus plays to their countries interest more than the US's.
Ask yourself this question honestly...would north korea test a Abomb if W was still in office? I doubt it.
while cuba and other communist countries may voice strong approval for the current administration, that does not equal a foreign policy success. Success in foreign policy requires the advancement of US interests. Bush may have made some enemies, sure, but you can't make an omlet without breaking eggs. Obama may make lots of friends..well so did carter...but carter got DICK for the us out of all that "goodwill" and my bets are the current president will get less that really matters..They will both have the noble peace prize sure..but the american people will get the short end.
the american people by and large do not elect a president to court foreign governments. they elect a president to protect the social, financial( that means oil too) and security interests of the united states of america. Sure we like to help. Americans are a very giving and charitable people, as even many of our critics will admit. But we expect our leaders to look out for us first, jsut as china and russia and france all expect from those they elect.
What i am saying is that you all are so hard on bush. I think that history will vindicate bush on all but the torture and the patriot act.
When you look at the war in Iraq you see that it was no less moral than the war in germany during WW2. Just on a smaller scale. SH may not have had any WMD when we raided his houses, but nobody can deny he had chemical weapons when he killed more than 100,000 of his own people with them. This is a fact that nobody on the left or right denies. The tragedy is not that we invaded iraq, the tragedy is that the UN treaty against geneocide is so toothless that we had to use WMD as a reason.
The problem with us is that we let the fox watch the hen house. ( nice ross perot like comment huh) we go through the trouble of a revolution to make a free state, then set up a constitution to limit the power of government. Great idea..BUT WAIT..then we let the GOVERNMENT set up indoctrination centers...oops i mean schools that teach all of our children what the fucking constitution means...Well gee wiz wally what kind of a good job do you think those same government workers are gonna do on teching kids about limiting their powers? ONLY by taking back education( we have made great inroads lately with charter schools) will we take back the hearts and minds of the people and make america truly free again.
the problem is simple...free speech is only restricted at the extremes. People do not understand that the law that today is only used to restrict child porn, will be used next year to fight piracy then bloggers then any unpopular speech. The right is usually rather transparent. If the "moral majority " types want to outlaw say lesbian porn or flag burning they make a law against it. the left are a little more sneaky. They use lawsuits mostly. Or pass laws that will enable lawsuits. Think workplace laws that have gone from protecting women from being required to submit to groping in the workplace to now outlawing dirty jokes. Also the left tends to favor lawsuits and other ways that do not require a statute. This allows for the current goverment, courts, etc to use a very subjective review of the type of speech. Making "hate speech" against right wing groups less likely for example to be punished. Or making ELF less likely than operation rescue to be prosicuted for acting on their respective semi-terrorist agendas.
e-ink reminds me more of a REALLY hi res etch a sketch than any other kind of display.
i used to think i was one of those people..or maybe i used to be one.then i got a kindle 2 for xmas..WOW how did i go so long without it. Books are cheap( free if you find them on pirate bay hehe ARRR) and the e-ink screen rules!. I figure my kindle will last 3 years. I may use it for as many as 5. Do i care if it has color..NO not really. The size would make most magazine articles hard to read and not really be good for even comic books. It is just for reading books to me. and newspaper articles. will i buy apples new tablet..good chance i will. And good chance i will use it for the same things i use my laptop for now. Then i will upgrade my laptop to a desktop and not need a laptop. Would i like a color e ink reader for magazines, not really. I think the glossy look of magazines will work well on an lcd screen and frankly magazines do not take as long to read so the headache of staring at a backlit screen is not an issue. The only advantage would be having 1000's of magazines in a single portable unit. But it would have to be bigger than a kindle2 maybe the size of the DX model or bigger. Honestly I think the thing i would like to have would be a color e-ink screen that was at least comic book newsprint quality. Magazine quality would be nice but not something i would pay a lot extra for OR trade for a larger screen size. And with a 5 year plus lifespan( no need to upgrade for more power or features or to run software, just use it till it breaks) i would likely have a small size(kindle 2) e reader in BW and a larger color one for comics, provided the availability of lots of comics for purchase cheap and/or on the pirate bay( i think the latter is a given). I think apple's new product will help the sale of e-ink style readers...as more people try ebooks and want a better way to read them. The e - ink reader is about as good as it gets for electronic reading. And the costs are pretty good on many books, plus when you factor in all the free ones it is amazing. if you just save 5.00 on 10 books a year a kindle 2 pays for itself in 5 years. I have already since Xmas saved more than the thing would have cost. I mean I have downloaded 45 free books ( well i have read 15 of them so far but they are on my pc waiting lol). Assuming i would have bought them used for an average price of 6.00 that is 270.00 saved so far. Keep in mind that even public domain books cost money when you purchase a physical copy...now sure i could have read thos e 15 books on my laptop...but you know how many books i have read on a laptop screen? 1 and that was just the last harry potter book...i wanted to read it before it came out...sure i bought it later though..and reading that in 2 days ona laptop was MURDER!!! ...so the savings from e-ink is real for me..
I hear all this talk about upgrades and early adopters..i think it is kinda silly. E-ink readers are at the quality of paper back books now. That is the product they are "replacing" for most of us. Any other features/upgrades ( and i am sure there will be every year) are really gadgets that do not affect the prime usable function most of us would need the reader for. Also these are not laptops...no need to upgrade two years form now to run the latest antivirus software or whatever...this is more like buying a kitchen aid mixer than buying a PC. You want a good one that will last. When mine breaks i will buy one either just like it, or with new features. Plus with all the money i am saving on books..I could easily buy one kindle2 a year( or more likely a few different readers, maybe a color version of the DX when it comes out) and still be ahead.
too big to fail should also mean to big to be legal..if a company is too bid to fail it should be split up.
my real name is blitziod...A. Coward is just my slave name
ok but the bigger point here is that IF you have a camera hard wired into your laptop, anybody with root access can use it remotely. This is not something that can really be changed. Turning it off stops this. As built in cams ( and answering emails naked) become more common, this will be a problem. I mean forget the school that OWNS the laptop( or your company) but really there are trojans designed to do this. I think all cams and mics should have a MANDATED HARDWIRED SEPERATE off switch. Kinda like the wifi on off on most laptops. This is a safety feature that would not cost a lot and could solve this issue.. And if you think this is a small deal WAIT till angelena jolie's laptop cam is hacked !@
you must not look very hard for informed and detailed debate..I follow that issue and there is a HUGE amount of information and opinion available. Of course to get it you have to actually look. If you are not smart enough to do that, well then you get drivel along with the other uninformed "sheeple".
ok first off you are viewing publishing in the context of print books. The switch to eformats( it will happen) will change the upfront costs. secondly much of the cost of selling books retail involves shipping( huge costs) and markup for the retailer. Retailers have limited shelf space and high costs for labor, etc.They have to recoup those or fold. Ebooks will eventually be sold with a tiny markup by the retailer OR direct from the publisher. The new market will eliminate shipping, retail space costs, most retail markup. More importantly it will eliminate printing books that do not sell. Many books do not sell. Printing a book may cost 5 bucks but if you print 3 for every one you sell WHOA thats 15 per book. Also the move to ebooks eliminates the vast amounts of capital publishing requires. This will allow publishers to publish many more books. Also by spending former production costs on marketing sell they can sell more copies also, to a point. The question is WHY book publishers have not moved faster to ditch paper and trucks in favor of electrons and cables? I predict more books will come out ONLY on ebook soon and not just junkie fan fiction or how to manuals. Universities( and students) should be the first to insist on ebooks to curtail the insane price of text books. A sensible ebook lending policy could cause libraries to buy thousands more books( no need for a bigger building, or a library visit, or even to live in the same city) thus improving sales of some titles. Imagine a national lending library for ebooks funded by a small donation made at the point of purchase( click here to donate 1 dollar to put a copy of this book in the national library). The amount of good for the people(including the industry) that can come from this is HUGE. But it will hurt some existing profit models..so what. For now I just pirate books on to my kindle at a ratio of around 10:1 to compensate for the gouging done by ebook retailers. For murdoch's company i guess i will raise that ratio to 15:1( or higher) now..no big deal...please join me in this act of revolution and make ebooks more common.
ok first off I am pretty sure the data from that little breakthrough will be published in a way that it can be verified objectively if it has not already. second the cancer gene people are not asking the planet to collectively spend trillions of dollars on blind faith in their research. If they where I am pretty sure people would be as concerned(if not more) about the integrity of it. For example any company that plans to spend even millions in r&d based on that research will likely want more than the scientists word.
yea but this one has a color screen..so amazon will have to discount the kindle or upgrade it..
yes but dollars spent on climate credits will be wasted..Tis is a shadow tax system designed to rape the western democracies It is a bad idea. Even if man made global warming is real, and I am not sure that it is, climate credits are bad and frankly a warmer globe sounds good right about now..it was nut swriveling cold this morning.
you have to understand this man is a politician ..at the higher levels of public companies all the execs are politicians...specialized ones who know the biz...
oddly enough we have gone past the point in america of trying to run the government like a company and are now running companies like governments...
this is a side effect of wide spread public ownership(401ks) among other things.
the gay guy next door STOLE my families cat. When i was 18 no joke..he moved out of his house to remodel it for like almost a year...the cat went missing at the same time...THEN when he came back...the cat came back a few days later declawed and wearing a rather feminine( but stylish) collar...this is almost 12 months later..
even leashed pets get lost...i know there is a lot we can do to prevent it..but they do...or they dig or otherwise figure a way out of the back yard...GPS for the pet is a great idea. Many of those animals would not be "Road kill" if they where found within minutes of being lost. Bad pet owners are bad with or without GPS , but for the rest of us gps collars would be a great help.
as for privacy..why not make a GPS that deactivates in the presence of a local RIFD signal. So if the non-tracking reciever gets a signal that you are say within 25 feet...no tracking..when it DOES NOT get the signal..it broadcasts it's location..
that is a false analogy...the maintaning of the commons is a legitimate concern and function of goverment. We do not , for example, ask comcast to maintain our state fisheries, or regulate poaching or river pollution.
ok so solution..city lays fiber, city sets up a non profit PRIVATE trust to own and maintain fiber at ZERO profit, just break even. City sells fiber to trust at no cost, or sells the right to manage and maintain the fiber, it could in theory retain ownership to keep the "balance of power"..problem solved. This is how all communal resources should be managed.