Personally, I think the lawsuit was rather ridiculous, since Amazon was poised to destroy the entire industry, and the shift to the agency model was a necessary one to ensure the long-term health of the industry.
The lawsuit was nothing to do with Amazon. It was to do with Apples actions and those of the big publishers.
I didn't say there was. Just that they have a monopoly in the ebook market, which is clear and true and definitely not illegal.
No, it's nonsense.
Amazon used to have around 90% of the US e-book market. Now it's more like 60%, though if B&N continues its long suicide, their market share will probably rise again.
Outside America, they have far more competitors, so I'd expect market share to be even lower.
Microsoft isn't trying to make the greatest device ever with surface, nor are they trying to subsidize marketshare. They're trying to persuade other manufacturers to step up their game and make hardware worth buying.
So Microsoft are trying to persuade manufacturers to 'make hardware worth buying'... by making hardware hardly anyone buys?
The vast majority of Windows users would much rather have a $500 laptop running Windows 7 than a $1000 tablet running Windows 8.
If they could give you the best of both worlds - a laptop/PC when you need to do work, a tablet when you want a bathroom reader - I would consider it.
That's fundamentally impossible, because, to be able to use it as a tablet, you have to put all the heavy parts behind the screen, which makes it a really crappy laptop. Hence the need for the glorious NEW! IMPROVED! kickstand.
Anyone who's used an Asus Transformer should have been able to tell them it was a bad idea for that reason alone.
Bingo. When the keyboard on our netbook broke I went looking for a replacement. The only choices close to its price range were slightly larger laptops with crappy keyboards, and the majority of new laptops close to its size were >$500 'ultrabooks' with touch screens I didn't want and reviews that said 'it's good but it overheats like a bastard and the battery runs out in two hours if you try to do anything that uses the CPU power'.
And they wonder why PC sales are down.
Fortunately, a $12 replacement keyboard fixed the netbook and we'll wait a couple more years before we actually replace it.
There were a few other PiTA type things, but image leaching was the worst.
I believe you mean 'image linking'. If you don't want people accessing your images, don't put them on the web. Similarly, if you don't want your images to disappear, don't put them on someone else's web site, particularly one where you don't pay for storage.
Do tell! Do these things include marketing (which Amazon won't have to pay because it is selling these as an "upgrade" item to people who already own a different edition)?
You think publishers pay for marketing?
Oh, sure, they do, if you're Stephen King or JK Rowling[1]. For everyone else, maybe they'll send your book to a newspaper reviewer and ask them to review it, if they really think it's worth pushing.
[1] Except when you're JK Rowling publishing under a pseudonym, when you get as much marketing as any other unknown first time writer. That is, probably none.
My Kindle lets you put books in categories. Or do you mean they should automatically give you a category view using the categories from the Amazon site? That's what I'd like to see.
The ONLY exception to this, is where the private sector is completely incapable of doing something economically, like super-heavy lift and expensive deep-space vehicles.
I think you miss the point.
NASA doesn't need 'super heavy lift', it needs to get things into space.
Demanding that the private sector provide NASA with 'super heavy lift' is like demanding that they build an airliner capable of carrying a thousand people to fly NASA staff around the country, when they could just buy a thousand airline tickets instead.
SLS is a rocket without a mission. There are no funded payloads which require it. There's no likely funded payload any time in the future which can't launch on a Falcon 9 Heavy, or an even smaller launcher.
The fact private industry, Lockheed, Boeing, USA, and Co. haven't done it better and cheaper shows the value of NASA.
SpaceX built a new rocket engine and two new rockets and launched them into space for about the same amount of money as NASA spent putting a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launching it into the ocean.
I believe estimates for the cost of developing Falcon 9 using NASA methodology were about 10x what SpaceX actually spent on it.
The problem I see is that the idea is that commercial companies can do it cheaper than bloated government.
Of course they can do it cheaper.
So long as government doesn't go to them and say 'How much do you want? OK, here it is.'
Government doesn't care as much as a business about how much it pays for services, because it's spending someone else's money; the more they spend this year, the bigger the budget they can demand next year. They also often insist on contracts which limit profit to a percentage of the cost of the service, which gives the company a strong incentive to charge as much as possible to maximise their profits. They also often want oversight over the company's operation to justify it's costs, where they add so much paperwork that the cost doubles.
The way to do space on the cheap is to tell companies what you want, ask them to bid for it, and then hold them to that bid.
You see, in the real world, you patent X, you start producing a product based on X, then Big Corporation says 'your product violates three hundred of our patents. You will cease production of your products, or cross-license your patents'. You can either shut up shop, or Big Corporation will take your licensed patent and start making your product cheaper and put you out of business.
The vast majority of patents are used by big business to keep new competitors out of the market. They don't protect you from big business, they prevent you from competing with big business.
0.0.0.0 is invalid, so should cause an immediate fail without attempting to connect. If you run a webserver on your computer, a loopback address may actually hit the webserver and require a response.
I can actually sort of understand this cutting off the accelerator - figure out what the maximum safe speed on any road is (and give maybe a 10mph buffer for evasive manuevers - I've nearly been in crashes that I only averted by speeding out of the way), and have the accelerator cut off at that point.
You're assuming that the speed limit bears any resemblance to the maximum safe speed for the road. The only time it does is through pure luck, since a speed limit that's safe with no other traffic in good weather will likely be suicidal when it's covered with ice.
Besides which, just imagine Joe Loser overtakes without checking the road ahead properly, could still easily pass safely if they just hit the gas and ignore the speed limit, but the car won't let them.
The whole worship of 'speed limits' is simply insane.
When I was in Holland last year, we had a car with a GPS and speed limit display. Only problem was, if you were on a main highway and passed over a local road, the speed limit would often switch to something like 50km/h as it briefly became confused about which road you were on.
Needless to say, having every car hitting the brakes at that point would probably be a bad idea.
But the speed limit signs really make no more sense, since they can trivially be 'hacked'; I've seen local kids in Britain turn speed limit signs around for grins, so you'd end up with a sixty mph limit in the town and a thirty on the road leading out of town.
All in all, it's a really stupid idea. Which is what you'd expect from the EU.
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To a large extent due to Apple.
I believe Kobo and B&N between them sell at least as many e-books as Apple, and there are plenty of other, smaller e-book retailers.
Strange that the monopoly breaker is being ruled against instead of the monopoly.
That's because Apple and the big publishers broke the law, and Amazon didn't.
I predict a successful appeal.
Then you don't understand the case.
Personally, I think the lawsuit was rather ridiculous, since Amazon was poised to destroy the entire industry, and the shift to the agency model was a necessary one to ensure the long-term health of the industry.
The lawsuit was nothing to do with Amazon. It was to do with Apples actions and those of the big publishers.
I didn't say there was. Just that they have a monopoly in the ebook market, which is clear and true and definitely not illegal.
No, it's nonsense.
Amazon used to have around 90% of the US e-book market. Now it's more like 60%, though if B&N continues its long suicide, their market share will probably rise again.
Outside America, they have far more competitors, so I'd expect market share to be even lower.
I really can't see what you can't do on a 5'' phone that you can on 7''.
Read an e-book at roughly the same size as a mass market paperback page?
]XBOX lost money for years at first.
Has the Xbox actually paid back its full development costs yet?
Microsoft isn't trying to make the greatest device ever with surface, nor are they trying to subsidize marketshare. They're trying to persuade other manufacturers to step up their game and make hardware worth buying.
So Microsoft are trying to persuade manufacturers to 'make hardware worth buying'... by making hardware hardly anyone buys?
The vast majority of Windows users would much rather have a $500 laptop running Windows 7 than a $1000 tablet running Windows 8.
If they could give you the best of both worlds - a laptop/PC when you need to do work, a tablet when you want a bathroom reader - I would consider it.
That's fundamentally impossible, because, to be able to use it as a tablet, you have to put all the heavy parts behind the screen, which makes it a really crappy laptop. Hence the need for the glorious NEW! IMPROVED! kickstand.
Anyone who's used an Asus Transformer should have been able to tell them it was a bad idea for that reason alone.
I actually can't find a reason for a tablet smaller than 10' since a smartphone can already cover this kind of usage.
Who wants to carry a seven foot phone in their pocket? Or even a seven inch phone?
Bingo. When the keyboard on our netbook broke I went looking for a replacement. The only choices close to its price range were slightly larger laptops with crappy keyboards, and the majority of new laptops close to its size were >$500 'ultrabooks' with touch screens I didn't want and reviews that said 'it's good but it overheats like a bastard and the battery runs out in two hours if you try to do anything that uses the CPU power'.
And they wonder why PC sales are down.
Fortunately, a $12 replacement keyboard fixed the netbook and we'll wait a couple more years before we actually replace it.
I have a 10" tablet. It's way too big and heavy, and I wish I'd bought a smaller one.
I can't imagine how anyone could do anything useful with a 17" tablet which wouldn't be better with a 17" laptop.
Particularly now we know the NSA has its tentacles everywhere.
I think the 16k RAM pack for the ZX81 was about $100 in early 80s money.
Which is about what I paid for 16GB earlier this year.
There were a few other PiTA type things, but image leaching was the worst.
I believe you mean 'image linking'. If you don't want people accessing your images, don't put them on the web. Similarly, if you don't want your images to disappear, don't put them on someone else's web site, particularly one where you don't pay for storage.
Do tell! Do these things include marketing (which Amazon won't have to pay because it is selling these as an "upgrade" item to people who already own a different edition)?
You think publishers pay for marketing?
Oh, sure, they do, if you're Stephen King or JK Rowling[1]. For everyone else, maybe they'll send your book to a newspaper reviewer and ask them to review it, if they really think it's worth pushing.
[1] Except when you're JK Rowling publishing under a pseudonym, when you get as much marketing as any other unknown first time writer. That is, probably none.
My Kindle lets you put books in categories. Or do you mean they should automatically give you a category view using the categories from the Amazon site? That's what I'd like to see.
Our non-IKEA book shelves are made from compressed sawdust. They don't bow unless you try to fit three layers of books onto a shelf designed for one.
The ONLY exception to this, is where the private sector is completely incapable of doing something economically, like super-heavy lift and expensive deep-space vehicles.
I think you miss the point.
NASA doesn't need 'super heavy lift', it needs to get things into space.
Demanding that the private sector provide NASA with 'super heavy lift' is like demanding that they build an airliner capable of carrying a thousand people to fly NASA staff around the country, when they could just buy a thousand airline tickets instead.
SLS is a rocket without a mission. There are no funded payloads which require it. There's no likely funded payload any time in the future which can't launch on a Falcon 9 Heavy, or an even smaller launcher.
The fact private industry, Lockheed, Boeing, USA, and Co. haven't done it better and cheaper shows the value of NASA.
SpaceX built a new rocket engine and two new rockets and launched them into space for about the same amount of money as NASA spent putting a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launching it into the ocean.
I believe estimates for the cost of developing Falcon 9 using NASA methodology were about 10x what SpaceX actually spent on it.
The problem I see is that the idea is that commercial companies can do it cheaper than bloated government.
Of course they can do it cheaper.
So long as government doesn't go to them and say 'How much do you want? OK, here it is.'
Government doesn't care as much as a business about how much it pays for services, because it's spending someone else's money; the more they spend this year, the bigger the budget they can demand next year. They also often insist on contracts which limit profit to a percentage of the cost of the service, which gives the company a strong incentive to charge as much as possible to maximise their profits. They also often want oversight over the company's operation to justify it's costs, where they add so much paperwork that the cost doubles.
The way to do space on the cheap is to tell companies what you want, ask them to bid for it, and then hold them to that bid.
And how often does that actually happen?
You see, in the real world, you patent X, you start producing a product based on X, then Big Corporation says 'your product violates three hundred of our patents. You will cease production of your products, or cross-license your patents'. You can either shut up shop, or Big Corporation will take your licensed patent and start making your product cheaper and put you out of business.
The vast majority of patents are used by big business to keep new competitors out of the market. They don't protect you from big business, they prevent you from competing with big business.
Inconveniencing folks so they can't use technology until they give you money is the whole point of patents.
0.0.0.0 is invalid, so should cause an immediate fail without attempting to connect. If you run a webserver on your computer, a loopback address may actually hit the webserver and require a response.
I can actually sort of understand this cutting off the accelerator - figure out what the maximum safe speed on any road is (and give maybe a 10mph buffer for evasive manuevers - I've nearly been in crashes that I only averted by speeding out of the way), and have the accelerator cut off at that point.
You're assuming that the speed limit bears any resemblance to the maximum safe speed for the road. The only time it does is through pure luck, since a speed limit that's safe with no other traffic in good weather will likely be suicidal when it's covered with ice.
Besides which, just imagine Joe Loser overtakes without checking the road ahead properly, could still easily pass safely if they just hit the gas and ignore the speed limit, but the car won't let them.
The whole worship of 'speed limits' is simply insane.
When I was in Holland last year, we had a car with a GPS and speed limit display. Only problem was, if you were on a main highway and passed over a local road, the speed limit would often switch to something like 50km/h as it briefly became confused about which road you were on.
Needless to say, having every car hitting the brakes at that point would probably be a bad idea.
But the speed limit signs really make no more sense, since they can trivially be 'hacked'; I've seen local kids in Britain turn speed limit signs around for grins, so you'd end up with a sixty mph limit in the town and a thirty on the road leading out of town.
All in all, it's a really stupid idea. Which is what you'd expect from the EU.
The US government is all for fundamental freedoms, providing your use of them can be logged, queried at will and used against you later.
Indeed. The US government wants everyone to talk about current affairs online, so they can easily flag and monitor the trouble-makers.
The Vietnamese alternative is just so twentieth century.