The Nook is the same as the Kindle in that respect. The contract for service belongs to the device and is lifetime no cost for the owner of the e-book. The 3G company doesn't even know who you are to charge you. That contract is handled between the manufacturer and the 3G company OEM.
Kindle does not have WiFi capability, so it is irrelevant that you can't use WiFi on Flights. I only turn on my Wireless connection on my Kindle when I want to browse and download a book. So for a few minutes every few weeks, when I grab a few books for my queue. Other than that, it stays off for battery conservation.
Also, Kindle is incredibly good for Flights. Especially long ones. I don't' travel every week, but I travel often, and between waiting at the airport and time on the plane, I can go through 2-4 books on a trip. A Kindle is much lighter to carry than a stack of books. plus if you run out, you can switch on at the airport and get another.
The US Space and Rocket Center [spacecamp.com] in Huntsville Alabama is a great museum and home to Space Camp. I went several times as a kid. They've got actual rockets (Saturn V *huge* and many more) and an SR71.
Let's see from the site:
"In the museum collection, there are the original Mercury and Gemini capsule trainers, the Apollo 16 capsule, Casper and a full life size replica of the Apollo 11 Saturn V."
It doesn't matter what "paper size" you choose for your PDF. Many EBook readers will change their font size as their eyes get tired to make books easier to read. This by definition changes the page size on the display. What if they move to a different device with a different screen size? You will have to produce hundreds of PDFs and get your user to choose the correct one among them.
You can probably spend a lot of effort and come up with some scheme to shoe-horn PDFs to make them work like this, but it would be much easier for you to figure out how to use one of the many open formats like HTML RTF, or EPUB. Those have been designed for this purpose.
I am not criticizing you, lucas, you are correct, but it doesn't really matter if the PDF is rendered natively on the device, or converted before hand. The device has a screen size and a user selected font size. PDF is a format that sets a specific page size, which cannot be followed on a device like this except for zooming out to fit, which will typically make the text unreadabe. The bottom line is, PDF is a terrible format to use if you expect to use it on ANY ebook reader. PDF is designed for PRINTING. This author you are replying to is really giving the Kindle grief for his/her own poor formatting choice. They will have the same issues regardless of which ebook reader they try to use.
Who gets to decide what Christianity is supposed to be? You?
Several instances, but, ultimately, it's the Pope.
I'm an atheist myself, so I could really couldn't care less about this argument, but I think this point is wrong. The Pope is not the guy to decide. Whereas Catholic makeup the largest denomination of christians world wide, they don't make up the majority. Catholics makeup 48.9% of global christians in 2009. In the US, 24% of people are Catholic, and 52% claim a protestant religion.
This means the pope (while obviously an influential guy in the christian world) can't really make that call either.
Whereas I don't disagree with your ideas about a monopoly, I don't see a monopoly here. This service competes with any manner of Internet service, so it competes with Cable Modem, DSL from phone lines, Satellite Internet, and Cellular phone data services. Not to mention, there is more spectrum for another company to make another wireless variant.
Clearwire is not free to price gouge, as the bulk of people will just get DSL or Cable modem instead.
I would expect endurance speeds to be about the same % of the top run speed for most mammals.
Then your expectations would be wrong. Even among breeds or horses, there significant differences in top speed versus a speed that can be maintained.
Average is really the average of people who decide to run in marathons.
I'm sorry, I meant to put a smiley here to denote my joke.
I would expect that these mice have already been training for some time also.
possibly even are the "cream of the crop" out of the mice available
I don't think this is a good assumption at all. It was not mentioned at all. From Occam's Razor, I would assume that they had a box of lab mice and they treated one and dropped it and a control mouse on the tread mill.
I'm pretty sure that the Human Average is to NOT finish the marathon at all.
Some animals are built for speed and others for endurance. Horses are much faster than humans, but for a race over distance for several days, a human can finish long before a horse. I don't know where mice fit into this equation, but I suspect that they must be built for speed instead of endurance, since the normal mouse lasted only for a fraction of the time.
the National Association of the Self Employed has Health Insurance offerings for it's members. It kind of acts like a large company by joining everyone in the association into one large plan, and thus they can have leverage to keep the costs low. At least that's the theory. That is the Insurance I use right now, and it seems to stay at a reasonable cost.
That kind of sounds like an answer to what you are asking about.
The point is, there are thousands of Passenger Jets in the air everyday, and they are normally higher than 5km for the bulk of their journey. There have been many crashes, and while, yes, when accidents happen there someone might be hurt, those odds are as statistically acceptable, just like commercial airliners.
What the other guy was trying to tell you, is that there would not be any crazy environmental damage or something like Lucifer's Hammer, the cars traveling the line are not gigatonnes.
1) Were you using the fastest speeds available to transmit data from cellphone conversations? I've lost track of the fastest fiber speeds somewhere after OC-192, but if you took the fastest available fiber optic system and priced it out against a wireless equivelent, guess who wins.
I'm sorry, I didn't intent to sound so attacking as i did, by my point is that LandLine solutions are not always the cheapest or best. In this US, our infrastructure is such that there is a short hop copper solution available almost everywhere. Digginng a 2000 mile trench to put cables in (and repeaters) is very expensive.
Also, there was a slashdot article on AT&T selling some of their old Microwave Backbone Bunkers. This is because for long hops, this kind of wireless solution is much better than a cable type solution.
BTW, the microwave backbone we used in Brasil was equivalent to 128 E1s. That's in the range of your OC192, and not the fastest speed available for that type of microwave links either.
I won't argue anymore, but there are many satellites in orbit right now that use wireless means to communicate the volume of data you are talking about that everyone can pick up easily. Think about DishNetwork or DirecTV.
That is true, except you need not increase the out radiation, you could also inmprove the filtering and abilities of the receiver to make longer distances possible. You could also change teh frequencies to improve the reange. As far as causing cancer. You choose frequencies that are not absorbed by the human body.
Ever hear of Shortwave radio? HAM guys use this all the time to listen to broadcasts from nearly every point on the globe. Yes, this is also accross the oceans. Signals bounce around between the ionosphere and the ground making a sort of refracted Line of Site.
1) it's always cheaper to run landline for the highest speeds available
Not true! I was participated in the roll out of the Brasilian B-Band cellular telephone system. Believe me, it was much cheaper to use microwave repeater technologies to connect up the network of towers than to lay cable to do the same job.
2) There are great distances between areas where people live. Despite apperances you can't go from DC to Boston through suburbs all the way.
This is also incorrect. You merely have to increase the ouput power of each node signal or the ability to read weak signals to that which would allow each hop to span several hundred miles, then you could easily make that distance through the suburbs, and just have a couple of benevolent citizens on each side of the ocean to make the transoceanic hops.
3) Data has to be served from somewhere, and you have to connect that to everyone somehow. Your not going to do multi Gigabit out of a medium sized Data center let alone the big ones.
This makes me think of the Bill Gates quote: "No one could ever use more than 640k.
I think possible in the future some scheme like this could be possible, but probably not anytime soon.
The main problem that I see is the massive amounts of traffic each node(cell phone, NIC, etc.) would need to receive and process. Take for instance, If I initiate a phone call to someone else, assuming that their phone is mobile, I have no Idea where they might be, so I have to broadcast to every device near me hoping that it can route. It in turn must then broadcast to everyone it is next to, and so forth. You can see that the number of packets present in the system gets exponentially big from just this one packet.
Now imagine that that you are the receiving handset. You may receive millions of the same packet from various sources around the world as the packet was passed around trying to find you.
Esentially every packet in the system would have to be passed around to nearly everyone else.
You could potentially get around this by "checking in" to a central server somewhere and tell it your present location. Then you could find an optimal path to pass the packets in the right direction always to eliminate most excess packets. The problem is that then you are talking about some sort of Telco or ISP again.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nook is the same as the Kindle in that respect. The contract for service belongs to the device and is lifetime no cost for the owner of the e-book. The 3G company doesn't even know who you are to charge you. That contract is handled between the manufacturer and the 3G company OEM.
Kindle does not have WiFi capability, so it is irrelevant that you can't use WiFi on Flights. I only turn on my Wireless connection on my Kindle when I want to browse and download a book. So for a few minutes every few weeks, when I grab a few books for my queue. Other than that, it stays off for battery conservation.
Also, Kindle is incredibly good for Flights. Especially long ones. I don't' travel every week, but I travel often, and between waiting at the airport and time on the plane, I can go through 2-4 books on a trip. A Kindle is much lighter to carry than a stack of books. plus if you run out, you can switch on at the airport and get another.
The US Space and Rocket Center [spacecamp.com] in Huntsville Alabama is a great museum and home to Space Camp. I went several times as a kid. They've got actual rockets (Saturn V *huge* and many more) and an SR71.
Let's see from the site: "In the museum collection, there are the original Mercury and Gemini capsule trainers, the Apollo 16 capsule, Casper and a full life size replica of the Apollo 11 Saturn V."
Great stuff.
It doesn't matter what "paper size" you choose for your PDF. Many EBook readers will change their font size as their eyes get tired to make books easier to read. This by definition changes the page size on the display. What if they move to a different device with a different screen size? You will have to produce hundreds of PDFs and get your user to choose the correct one among them.
You can probably spend a lot of effort and come up with some scheme to shoe-horn PDFs to make them work like this, but it would be much easier for you to figure out how to use one of the many open formats like HTML RTF, or EPUB. Those have been designed for this purpose.
I am not criticizing you, lucas, you are correct, but it doesn't really matter if the PDF is rendered natively on the device, or converted before hand. The device has a screen size and a user selected font size. PDF is a format that sets a specific page size, which cannot be followed on a device like this except for zooming out to fit, which will typically make the text unreadabe. The bottom line is, PDF is a terrible format to use if you expect to use it on ANY ebook reader. PDF is designed for PRINTING. This author you are replying to is really giving the Kindle grief for his/her own poor formatting choice. They will have the same issues regardless of which ebook reader they try to use.
Who gets to decide what Christianity is supposed to be? You?
Several instances, but, ultimately, it's the Pope.
I'm an atheist myself, so I could really couldn't care less about this argument, but I think this point is wrong. The Pope is not the guy to decide. Whereas Catholic makeup the largest denomination of christians world wide, they don't make up the majority. Catholics makeup 48.9% of global christians in 2009. In the US, 24% of people are Catholic, and 52% claim a protestant religion. This means the pope (while obviously an influential guy in the christian world) can't really make that call either.
Whereas I don't disagree with your ideas about a monopoly, I don't see a monopoly here. This service competes with any manner of Internet service, so it competes with Cable Modem, DSL from phone lines, Satellite Internet, and Cellular phone data services. Not to mention, there is more spectrum for another company to make another wireless variant. Clearwire is not free to price gouge, as the bulk of people will just get DSL or Cable modem instead.
Then your expectations would be wrong. Even among breeds or horses, there significant differences in top speed versus a speed that can be maintained.
Average is really the average of people who decide to run in marathons.
I'm sorry, I meant to put a smiley here to denote my joke.
I would expect that these mice have already been training for some time also. possibly even are the "cream of the crop" out of the mice available
I don't think this is a good assumption at all. It was not mentioned at all. From Occam's Razor, I would assume that they had a box of lab mice and they treated one and dropped it and a control mouse on the tread mill.
I'm pretty sure that the Human Average is to NOT finish the marathon at all. Some animals are built for speed and others for endurance. Horses are much faster than humans, but for a race over distance for several days, a human can finish long before a horse. I don't know where mice fit into this equation, but I suspect that they must be built for speed instead of endurance, since the normal mouse lasted only for a fraction of the time.
the National Association of the Self Employed has Health Insurance offerings for it's members. It kind of acts like a large company by joining everyone in the association into one large plan, and thus they can have leverage to keep the costs low. At least that's the theory. That is the Insurance I use right now, and it seems to stay at a reasonable cost. That kind of sounds like an answer to what you are asking about.
The point is, there are thousands of Passenger Jets in the air everyday, and they are normally higher than 5km for the bulk of their journey. There have been many crashes, and while, yes, when accidents happen there someone might be hurt, those odds are as statistically acceptable, just like commercial airliners. What the other guy was trying to tell you, is that there would not be any crazy environmental damage or something like Lucifer's Hammer, the cars traveling the line are not gigatonnes.
I'm sorry, I didn't intent to sound so attacking as i did, by my point is that LandLine solutions are not always the cheapest or best. In this US, our infrastructure is such that there is a short hop copper solution available almost everywhere. Digginng a 2000 mile trench to put cables in (and repeaters) is very expensive.
Also, there was a slashdot article on AT&T selling some of their old Microwave Backbone Bunkers. This is because for long hops, this kind of wireless solution is much better than a cable type solution.
BTW, the microwave backbone we used in Brasil was equivalent to 128 E1s. That's in the range of your OC192, and not the fastest speed available for that type of microwave links either.
I won't argue anymore, but there are many satellites in orbit right now that use wireless means to communicate the volume of data you are talking about that everyone can pick up easily. Think about DishNetwork or DirecTV.
That is true, except you need not increase the out radiation, you could also inmprove the filtering and abilities of the receiver to make longer distances possible. You could also change teh frequencies to improve the reange. As far as causing cancer. You choose frequencies that are not absorbed by the human body.
Ever hear of Shortwave radio? HAM guys use this all the time to listen to broadcasts from nearly every point on the globe. Yes, this is also accross the oceans. Signals bounce around between the ionosphere and the ground making a sort of refracted Line of Site.
Not true! I was participated in the roll out of the Brasilian B-Band cellular telephone system. Believe me, it was much cheaper to use microwave repeater technologies to connect up the network of towers than to lay cable to do the same job.
2) There are great distances between areas where people live. Despite apperances you can't go from DC to Boston through suburbs all the way.
This is also incorrect. You merely have to increase the ouput power of each node signal or the ability to read weak signals to that which would allow each hop to span several hundred miles, then you could easily make that distance through the suburbs, and just have a couple of benevolent citizens on each side of the ocean to make the transoceanic hops.
3) Data has to be served from somewhere, and you have to connect that to everyone somehow. Your not going to do multi Gigabit out of a medium sized Data center let alone the big ones.
This makes me think of the Bill Gates quote: "No one could ever use more than 640k.
I think possible in the future some scheme like this could be possible, but probably not anytime soon. The main problem that I see is the massive amounts of traffic each node(cell phone, NIC, etc.) would need to receive and process. Take for instance, If I initiate a phone call to someone else, assuming that their phone is mobile, I have no Idea where they might be, so I have to broadcast to every device near me hoping that it can route. It in turn must then broadcast to everyone it is next to, and so forth. You can see that the number of packets present in the system gets exponentially big from just this one packet. Now imagine that that you are the receiving handset. You may receive millions of the same packet from various sources around the world as the packet was passed around trying to find you. Esentially every packet in the system would have to be passed around to nearly everyone else. You could potentially get around this by "checking in" to a central server somewhere and tell it your present location. Then you could find an optimal path to pass the packets in the right direction always to eliminate most excess packets. The problem is that then you are talking about some sort of Telco or ISP again.
I don't think he asked for a Free, as in costless, system, he only wants to take the Telco out of the picture.