Now there's something interesting. Long-time Slashdot readers might find it unsurprising. Bring up any topic that advocates added government regulation or new social safety net programs, and there are an overwhelming number of libertarian comments.
Why can't they offer a _slower_ speed for a lower price?
At least for cable,
because they're afraid that once it was available,
lots of customers would discover that they really don't need the higher speed.
The big costs associated with providing broadband
are not the cable modems and the CMTS and the routers;
it was the conversion to hybrid fiber/coax for distribution,
upgrades to all the analog amplifiers,
removal of the filters that were screwing things up,
etc.
Those things are done and the goal now is to maximize revenues.
The marketing people are easily smart enough to know
how the number of subscribers changes with price.
There are not hordes of people out there waiting to sign up
if the price drops $10/month;
certainly not enough to make up for the lost revenue
if your existing customers downgrade.
There's an analogy in baseball finances.
As a general rule,
the prices that maximize total revenue are high enough
that about 20% of the seats are empty for any given game.
If your ball park is full for every game,
your prices are too low.
Indeed.
If the device is actually delivered,
there will be a number of questions that will really get answered.
Is the display tolerable to use?
What is the real battery life?
How well do the touch functions actually work?
Does it survive the first drop
(and I suspect that as a small tablet, it will get dropped regularly)?
I sympathize with your perspective,
but once the cost of hardware comes down some more
(OLPC's XO-3 is targeting $75, and could be stripped down even more for an ebook-only device),
and the publishers and authors figure out that there's an optimal pricing strategy,
the libraries are going to be in trouble no matter what.
The "right" pricing scheme, based on what has worked for other types of content,
has three tiers:
initial release at $10-25, depending on the author and some other factors,
mass market release at $4-8 a few months later, and
when sales fall far enough,
library replacement at $1-2.
If you want the ebook version of the new Stephen King novel
the day it comes out,
you pay a hardcover price for it.
Not because it's hardcover, but because it's new content.
If you are willing to wait a few months,
you pay the paperback price.
And if you want to read last year's release,
it costs a buck or two.
A secondary reason for making the long term price that low
is that it undercuts piracy.
By the time you get to the last step,
most of the money should be going to the author.
The publishers should cover their costs —
and they do have costs, for editing and publicity and such, even for ebooks —
on the first releases.
If you're the author, which do you prefer:
10,000 loans from the libraries or
10,000 sales at a buck, most of it going to you?
A prolific author probably earns a significant revenue stream just on those long-tail sales.
At a dollar,
lots of people are going to prefer the ease of
buying a copy rather than making a physical trip to the library,
or waiting in queue to access the library's copy of the ebook.
If I'm the publishers,
one of my goals is to put the libraries and used-book stores
out of business.
Without Sony's technique, no one would be getting free electronic books from these libraries at all.
Where have you been for the last few years?
Libraries have been making free electronic book loans
using systems based on Adobe Digital Editions
for a considerable time.
OverDrive is the predominant service,
with something over 9,000 libraries participating.
Granted,
ADE requires a PC of some sort (Windows, Mac, Linux)
to handle the main interface and then transfers a copy
to your ebook reader.
That doesn't bother me because I manage my ebooks
on my Mac anyway,
regardless of where I got them.
And the ADE-based services support a large number of different readers,
not just Sony's.
...has been doing the same things for years. The physics of heat transfer, the chemistry of almost everything cooked, bits of biology and botany, a dash of history, etc.
This seems pretty plausible, especially due to the wide difference in bugs between them.
For the most part I can live with the differences between
Word on Windows and Word on my Mac.
The differences in Excel are a real game changer.
Too many academics that I deal with use Excel as it exists on Windows
as a de facto standard computing platform,
including both Solver and VBA.
Excel is the main reason I keep a virtual machine with Windows
on the Mac.
Exactly. If I recall previous statements from Microsoft properly, Office and Office for Mac are based on two completely separate source trees. This is one of the reasons that VBA was dropped in the 2008 version of Office for Mac -- they couldn't justify the enormous effort that would have been needed to port a new VBA to OS X, or to develop it from scratch. So your point about the cost of porting or reimplementing ClearType is spot on.
A more interesting question to ask is what portions of Freetype are they using and to what purpose. Rendering? Why not use Apple's native rendering engine? People have argued for years over the advantages and disadvantages of Apple's rendering tech relative to MS. MS has traditionally favored visual sharpness at the cost of precise positioning of the characters relative to each other. The cost of that is that at a detailed level, what you see on the screen may not accurately reflect what will be printed. Apple has gone the other way. The characters may look a bit fuzzier, but the positions are proper (again, at a very detailed level) relative to where they should be.
At least for some Windows applications over the years, the position inaccuracies have caused trouble when it comes to printing. Some word processing programs will (infrequently) get different line-filling results depending on whether they are writing to the display or to a printer. In the worst case, this causes a paragraph to be either one line longer or shorter in the printed document. Depending on how the app handles image placement, the results can be... interesting, as stuff gets pushed onto different pages in different ways.
I'm sure you insulted them in their day because they weren't DOS compatible and couldn't play your favorite game.
No, no, you've misunderstood me
(or I've expressed myself badly, always a possibility).
While I may decline to purchase one, either then or now, because it's not what I want/need,
they're useful to many people and I don't belittle either the devices or the people who use them.
I have to admit, at least on the days when I believe in conspiracy theories, that if I were Iran, I would seriously want at least a home-grown commercial nuclear industry, and probably a bomb.
There are far better things that I could do with my oil and gas than burn it to make electricity. Among others, they're feedstock for higher-value goods. I'd rather sell plastics and fertilizer than oil and NG.
Given the last 60 years of regional history, I have good reason not to trust some of the countries that could provide me with reactor fuel. Fabricating my own might be more expensive, but it also means I don't have to trust them to continue deliveries.
Given some of the possible future scenarios, I don't want to give some of the other countries any leverage. If I'm going to try to gauge Japan and South Korea on the price of oil and natural gas, I don't want them to have the counter-threat of withholding fuel for my Japanese or Korean reactors.
I know I'm going to be competing with a nuke-armed NG producer (Russia) who could disrupt some of my delivery systems. I'm going to be negotiating sales to at least a couple of nuke-armed customers (India and China, plus possibly France and the UK).
I know Israel has nukes. If the Arabs decide to make another try at wiping out Israel, I want the Israelis to think at least twice before tossing any of those nukes at me.
Some of those require a considerable degree of paranoia.
OTOH, as I mentioned, history gives Iran multiple reasons to be paranoid.
I'm just curious about what doctrine or treaty gives us a say in the matter of whether a sovereign country gets to use a technology that we already have.
That would be the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
All recognized governments except
North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel have agreed to play by those rules.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council
are legally allowed weapons;
nobody else is.
The countries with weapons promise not to share their weapons technology;
the countries without promise to allow IAEA inspection of all their nuclear facilities
to ensure they aren't being used for weapons programs.
India and Pakistan openly acknowledge that they have weapons.
Israel is generally believed to have weapons, but officially will neither confirm nor deny that.
South Africa developed weapons, but subsequently dismantled its weapons and signed the treaty.
North Korea withdrew from the treaty after their weapons program was discovered.
It's certainly possible to argue that
the nuclear powers have been inconsistent in their treatment
of countries that develop, or try to develop weapons.
India seems to have gotten away with it
with essentially no consequences;
Pakistan nearly so;
Israel has used its relationship with the US and the UK to get away with
thumbing their nose at the UN for decades;
South Africa was a special case,
and appears to have dismantled their weapons when
it became probable that there would be a radical change in government.
North Korea is being starved to death slowly.
Add that one of the characteristics of a reactor designed for plutonium production is to get a high ratio of Pu-239 in the isotope mix. Typically this involves either frequent refueling, or a separate set of U-238 targets which can be easily inserted and removed from the reactor core.
Besides, this reactor is a light-water type. It can never be used to breed plutonium.
Any reactor running on moderately enriched uranium breeds plutonium.
In a commercial reactor running on low-enriched uranium,
about 40% of the energy produced is from bred plutonium that is "burned" in place.
Japan currently has a stockpile of over 43 tons of plutonium,
all separated from spent fuel extracted from
commercial light-water reactors.
There are a number of things you could have said instead that would have been correct.
Commercial light-water reactors are poorly designed
for producing weapons-grade plutonium.
The fuel typically stays in the reactor too long,
so too much Pu-240 is produced relative to the Pu-239,
separation of the plutonium from the fuel rods is difficult (as you note),
there's no separate way to do short-term exposure of a U-238 target to the neutron flux,
etc.
Building weapons from reactor-grade plutonium is more complex
than using weapons-grade material,
but the problems are recognized and solutions have been worked out.
There are tens (hundreds?) of millions of people out there that are interested in "content" in small chunks (call them the iPod People, which might be a clever analogy, or not). They want music, notes, books, letters to read, maps, phone calls, and a bunch of other little pieces of content. In a digital world, one device can do large subsets of those. Lots of people have recognized that potential; I have memos I wrote over a decade ago, describing the functions that would be attractively served by "Mike's brick-of-plastic portable computer". Jobs not only recognized the potential, but also had the means and the courage to risk a large company's future on that potential.
There are another (smaller) group of people, which includes myself, who need something that lets them create content as well. I need something that lets me write hundreds of pages of text per year, program, generate complex graphs, etc. A device that meets my needs can also do all the things the iPod People want, but not vice versa. Like many in this group, I'm somewhat ticked off that the iPod people got their devices first, but I'm trying to be patient and believe that I'll eventually get something suitable. What I'm not doing is whining that the iPod People would be better off if forced to use the kind of gadget I need.
Second the idea of having your wife talk about childhood and teen photos of herself, if she's willing. There are stories there that she would have told your daughters here and there over the years. Those stories may not seem important to your daughters when they are 16; the stories will be more important when they are 26 or 36.
I have one photo of my father, age about 12, with his dog. The stories he told about the troubles he and the dog got into in a small town in Iowa are absolutely priceless.
I used to have this discussion with a librarian whose dissertation was about archival materials. Thinking in terms of "archival" seems appropriate here; while you are rightly concerned with preserving memories for you daughters, there will eventually be grandkids who are interested in the grandmother they didn't know. My librarian friend's opinion was that there only one practical medium available to the general public with proven archival properties: pigment-based ink on acid-free paper. Acid-free paper is readily available; inkjet printers that use pigmented ink are available but pricey; contemporary monochrome laser printers provide near-archival qualities; color laser printers somewhat less so.
My librarian friend's strongest argument for making analog copies on paper was the passive nature of that medium. You can tuck the paper away for 30 years and it's still good when you take it back out. Digital archives tend to require active copying from time to time. Digital files from 30-40 years ago are largely unreadable today, even if the medium is in good shape, for a number of reasons: the necessary hardware is no longer available, operating systems don't support the file system, the file format is no longer supported. In general, preserving a digital record for 30 years requires that intermediate copies be made.
However, archival work is something that can be done anytime in the next few years. Worry about other things now.
I haven't been systematic about checking, but it appears to me that old stuff and very new stuff that's not released in an ebook form yet are scanned and OCRed. Those are pretty easy to recognize: the OCR will make consistent mistakes, such as converting the word "service" to two words "ser vice". It's not hard to do, and it's getting cheaper. Slashdot has run stories about DIY rigs that take pretty minimal manual effort. The errors are irritating, but not horribly so.
The pirate version of most stuff that's available in ebook form with DRM appears to be decrypted from the ebook. It's essentially perfect (other than the crappy job of proofreading many publishers do these days). Adobe Digital Editions has been cracked, which lets you make a clear copy of most things you can get through your local library. I've argued for years that copyright holders can't win that technology war, the publishers have to freeze their algorithms so that older readers continue to work, and that encryption will eventually be broken.
Some professors don't do anything to make it interactive (eg: ask questions)
Many years ago, as a freshman in honors calculus, the professor had a habit of pausing in the middle of a proof, looking across the shining young faces, then settling on me and asking, "Mr. Cain, what comes next?" Often with the stick of chalk offered. Other people got asked as well, but I seemed to be the favorite victim. More than one of the other students asked me why Prof. Lewis hated me. "Mr. Cain, what comes next?" was the subject of occasional panicky nightmares for a decade. At one point some years later, I did get a chance to ask, and Prof. Lewis' response was "There was a mathematician inside, trying to get out, and you needed a bit of prodding."
Powerpoint slides might have saved me that particular bit of stress. But the "mathematician inside" might not have gotten loose, either.
So, like you note, the purpose of 3G really boils down to selling books while you're sitting around -- which is nice but not a crucial need.
In all honesty, built-in wifi has pretty much the same purpose.
My wife bought me a wifi-only Barnes & Noble nook when
they introduced them at $149;
I find that I just leave the wifi turned off.
I download content to and manage it with calibre,
and copy/share things with the nook using it as a USB device.
Other people might be more spontaneous than I am,
but I've always got at least a half-dozen unread things stored on it.
So far,
I've never run out of material on the road.
I have to say that I've been astounded at the range of
pirated stuff available through bittorrent.
Somehow I thought books wouldn't be pirated as much as other media.
I was wrong.
On the contrary, using a derivation of Windows 7 would presumably give MSFT's iPad advantages that the giant iPod touch does not have. Namely, being able to be more like a PC than an iPod Touch. I'm thinking of... being able to use true software... rather than "apps"...
But the important thing is that the iPad is just an iPod derivative.
Jobs' had two insights.
The first was that there's a pretty big market for a not-a-PC digital widget you can carry around in a pocket and run single-purpose apps rather than full-blown applications.
The second was that you can sell content for that little widget in small chunks: songs, individual apps, etc.
You and I may not care for it particularly, but there are tens of millions of people who find it enormously useful.
As you say, the iPad stretches the model slightly, but not that much.
There are a bunch of people who carry a backpack or briefcase anyway, and who find the bigger-screen version of the widget more useful.
At one level,
the goal of each addition to the iPod class has been to
replace more of the things that you find in a college student's pockets/purse:
music player, camera, phone, portable game player, ebook reader, etc.
Personally,
I think MS has blown it entirely,
because their "natural" market was a widget that replaced more and more of
the things you find in the business person's briefcase:
daytimer, detailed contact lists, memos and other documents, notebook, etc.
There would be some different core UI aspects of such a device compared to an iPod.
I think high-res stylus touch input with good handwriting recognition would be a must;
too many times when a business person needs to write down 20 words right now while holding the device in one hand.
The daytimer form factor is probably the right one.
I had hopes for the now-canceled Courier device, even if it was late to the game.
Well, you could say the same of Apple when Steve Jobs came back. Actually Apple was in a more tenuous position when he took over. While many slashdotters might not like Apple products, Jobs (and I mean he led the effort as CEO) took the company from the brink of bankruptcy to surpass MS in market cap. He revitalized their core computer business and expanded into new product lines. All the while, Apple is also hugely profitable while expanding into new markets.
Jobs v. Balmer is a very interesting comparison to make.
Jobs has been as successful as he has for three reasons, I think.
He created an Apple "style".
Clean, minimalist, emphasis on easy to understand.
A simple example outside of technology is the "Mac vs PC" commercials that ran for so many years.
Two guys on a white background making a particular point.
The style provided the company with enough of a cachet that
they could charge premium prices for hardware and make it profitable.
And I suspect that Jobs consciously avoids products that don't allow that style to be an important feature.
Jobs will never, I think, take Apple into the game console market;
there's no way to make a console where the Apple "style" differentiates it.
The iPod/iPhone/iPad set of hand-held digital widgets.
He recognized that a digital device could be
a better personal audio device than one based on
cassettes and CDs.
And as the price of various hardware components has come down
to the necessary level,
he added a screen, touch, telephone service, etc to the device.
ITunes.
He recognized that you could sell content in little chunks,
not just big ones.
Don't buy the album with two good songs and a bunch of filler,
just buy the songs.
Don't buy the package of little software apps that some manufacturer thinks is right,
buy what you need one piece at a time.
Or grab free apps from a company that wants you buy other little chunks of content.
It is not surprising, though, that the apps you can get
are filtered at least minimally by Apple;
Jobs wants to preserve the distinctive style of the devices.
Balmer has done nothing like that.
Perhaps it's because he was never forced into it,
as Jobs was:
Balmer sits atop a behemoth that has always been profitable based on
its dominant position with Windows, Office, and a few other big applications.
The company style, if you want to call it that, is "basic industrial".
Despite some expensive forays into building their own hardware,
one would be hard pressed to look at an Xbox, a Zune device, and a Kin phone
and claim there was a consistent style and direction.
I used to hope that MS/Balmer was going to figure out
that business people at work were their target demographic.
Apple did "insanely great" widgets that fit in their target market's pocket;
MS should have been building "insanely great" widgets that fit in their target market's briefcase or portfolio.
I used to have hopes that MS would do something really good along the lines
of the Courier form factor.
Put a small but rugged display on the outside cover for phone and music player apps;
two displays on the inside,
one that was high-quality e-paper and one that was good for everything else.
High-quality touch screen input so you could actually take notes on the thing.
MS, I thought, had the bucks to get the right display technologies finished.
And the clout to get the textbook publishers on board so the device family
could move into college, then into K-12.
It may (or may not) be worth noting that after spending some millions of federal dollars to expand coverage for emergency providers (law enforcement, fire, etc) in the last few years, there are still significant amounts of the mountain terrain that do not have coverage on those frequencies. There are likely to always be places that you can hike to where there's no coverage of any sort, including satellite except for brief periods.
OTOH, in an emergency situation, local repeaters may not be necessary. This story describes a case where the emergency broadcast was received by a ham more than 100 miles away, apparently without benefit of a repeater.
So,
when was the last time that anyone was successful in court
arguing that a corporate action that was
devastating to its employees and the community
(eg, a plant relocation or a merger resulting in thousands of layoffs)
should be halted,
even though stopping it cost the shareholders something?
Or even that management should consider
the impact on employees or communities as part of its
decision-making process?
In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,
both Luna City and Tyco Under include
volcanic bubbles as part of their original "cubic".
Perhaps not as realistic as lava tubes,
but they work better as story elements than tubes would have.
How can I get my laptop back -- and more importantly -- stop this criminal in his tracks?
There is at least a reasonable chance that the person currently using the laptop bought it from the original thief.
Or bought it from a pawn shop where the original thief disposed of it.
If such is the case,
you may recover your property after a court appearance or two,
but would be unlikely to stop the thief,
who has pocketed their profit and moved on.
Slashdot Mirror
Now there's something interesting. Long-time Slashdot readers might find it unsurprising. Bring up any topic that advocates added government regulation or new social safety net programs, and there are an overwhelming number of libertarian comments.
(Ducks)
At least for cable, because they're afraid that once it was available, lots of customers would discover that they really don't need the higher speed. The big costs associated with providing broadband are not the cable modems and the CMTS and the routers; it was the conversion to hybrid fiber/coax for distribution, upgrades to all the analog amplifiers, removal of the filters that were screwing things up, etc. Those things are done and the goal now is to maximize revenues. The marketing people are easily smart enough to know how the number of subscribers changes with price. There are not hordes of people out there waiting to sign up if the price drops $10/month; certainly not enough to make up for the lost revenue if your existing customers downgrade.
There's an analogy in baseball finances. As a general rule, the prices that maximize total revenue are high enough that about 20% of the seats are empty for any given game. If your ball park is full for every game, your prices are too low.
Indeed. If the device is actually delivered, there will be a number of questions that will really get answered. Is the display tolerable to use? What is the real battery life? How well do the touch functions actually work? Does it survive the first drop (and I suspect that as a small tablet, it will get dropped regularly)?
I sympathize with your perspective, but once the cost of hardware comes down some more (OLPC's XO-3 is targeting $75, and could be stripped down even more for an ebook-only device), and the publishers and authors figure out that there's an optimal pricing strategy, the libraries are going to be in trouble no matter what.
The "right" pricing scheme, based on what has worked for other types of content, has three tiers: initial release at $10-25, depending on the author and some other factors, mass market release at $4-8 a few months later, and when sales fall far enough, library replacement at $1-2. If you want the ebook version of the new Stephen King novel the day it comes out, you pay a hardcover price for it. Not because it's hardcover, but because it's new content. If you are willing to wait a few months, you pay the paperback price. And if you want to read last year's release, it costs a buck or two. A secondary reason for making the long term price that low is that it undercuts piracy.
By the time you get to the last step, most of the money should be going to the author. The publishers should cover their costs — and they do have costs, for editing and publicity and such, even for ebooks — on the first releases. If you're the author, which do you prefer: 10,000 loans from the libraries or 10,000 sales at a buck, most of it going to you? A prolific author probably earns a significant revenue stream just on those long-tail sales. At a dollar, lots of people are going to prefer the ease of buying a copy rather than making a physical trip to the library, or waiting in queue to access the library's copy of the ebook.
If I'm the publishers, one of my goals is to put the libraries and used-book stores out of business.
Where have you been for the last few years? Libraries have been making free electronic book loans using systems based on Adobe Digital Editions for a considerable time. OverDrive is the predominant service, with something over 9,000 libraries participating. Granted, ADE requires a PC of some sort (Windows, Mac, Linux) to handle the main interface and then transfers a copy to your ebook reader. That doesn't bother me because I manage my ebooks on my Mac anyway, regardless of where I got them. And the ADE-based services support a large number of different readers, not just Sony's.
...has been doing the same things for years. The physics of heat transfer, the chemistry of almost everything cooked, bits of biology and botany, a dash of history, etc.
For the most part I can live with the differences between Word on Windows and Word on my Mac. The differences in Excel are a real game changer. Too many academics that I deal with use Excel as it exists on Windows as a de facto standard computing platform, including both Solver and VBA. Excel is the main reason I keep a virtual machine with Windows on the Mac.
Exactly. If I recall previous statements from Microsoft properly, Office and Office for Mac are based on two completely separate source trees. This is one of the reasons that VBA was dropped in the 2008 version of Office for Mac -- they couldn't justify the enormous effort that would have been needed to port a new VBA to OS X, or to develop it from scratch. So your point about the cost of porting or reimplementing ClearType is spot on.
A more interesting question to ask is what portions of Freetype are they using and to what purpose. Rendering? Why not use Apple's native rendering engine? People have argued for years over the advantages and disadvantages of Apple's rendering tech relative to MS. MS has traditionally favored visual sharpness at the cost of precise positioning of the characters relative to each other. The cost of that is that at a detailed level, what you see on the screen may not accurately reflect what will be printed. Apple has gone the other way. The characters may look a bit fuzzier, but the positions are proper (again, at a very detailed level) relative to where they should be.
At least for some Windows applications over the years, the position inaccuracies have caused trouble when it comes to printing. Some word processing programs will (infrequently) get different line-filling results depending on whether they are writing to the display or to a printer. In the worst case, this causes a paragraph to be either one line longer or shorter in the printed document. Depending on how the app handles image placement, the results can be... interesting, as stuff gets pushed onto different pages in different ways.
No, no, you've misunderstood me (or I've expressed myself badly, always a possibility). While I may decline to purchase one, either then or now, because it's not what I want/need, they're useful to many people and I don't belittle either the devices or the people who use them.
Some of those require a considerable degree of paranoia. OTOH, as I mentioned, history gives Iran multiple reasons to be paranoid.
That would be the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. All recognized governments except North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel have agreed to play by those rules. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council are legally allowed weapons; nobody else is. The countries with weapons promise not to share their weapons technology; the countries without promise to allow IAEA inspection of all their nuclear facilities to ensure they aren't being used for weapons programs. India and Pakistan openly acknowledge that they have weapons. Israel is generally believed to have weapons, but officially will neither confirm nor deny that. South Africa developed weapons, but subsequently dismantled its weapons and signed the treaty. North Korea withdrew from the treaty after their weapons program was discovered.
It's certainly possible to argue that the nuclear powers have been inconsistent in their treatment of countries that develop, or try to develop weapons. India seems to have gotten away with it with essentially no consequences; Pakistan nearly so; Israel has used its relationship with the US and the UK to get away with thumbing their nose at the UN for decades; South Africa was a special case, and appears to have dismantled their weapons when it became probable that there would be a radical change in government. North Korea is being starved to death slowly.
Add that one of the characteristics of a reactor designed for plutonium production is to get a high ratio of Pu-239 in the isotope mix. Typically this involves either frequent refueling, or a separate set of U-238 targets which can be easily inserted and removed from the reactor core.
Any reactor running on moderately enriched uranium breeds plutonium. In a commercial reactor running on low-enriched uranium, about 40% of the energy produced is from bred plutonium that is "burned" in place. Japan currently has a stockpile of over 43 tons of plutonium, all separated from spent fuel extracted from commercial light-water reactors.
There are a number of things you could have said instead that would have been correct. Commercial light-water reactors are poorly designed for producing weapons-grade plutonium. The fuel typically stays in the reactor too long, so too much Pu-240 is produced relative to the Pu-239, separation of the plutonium from the fuel rods is difficult (as you note), there's no separate way to do short-term exposure of a U-238 target to the neutron flux, etc. Building weapons from reactor-grade plutonium is more complex than using weapons-grade material, but the problems are recognized and solutions have been worked out.
But can't be used to breed plutonium? Just wrong.
Exactly.
There are tens (hundreds?) of millions of people out there that are interested in "content" in small chunks (call them the iPod People, which might be a clever analogy, or not). They want music, notes, books, letters to read, maps, phone calls, and a bunch of other little pieces of content. In a digital world, one device can do large subsets of those. Lots of people have recognized that potential; I have memos I wrote over a decade ago, describing the functions that would be attractively served by "Mike's brick-of-plastic portable computer". Jobs not only recognized the potential, but also had the means and the courage to risk a large company's future on that potential.
There are another (smaller) group of people, which includes myself, who need something that lets them create content as well. I need something that lets me write hundreds of pages of text per year, program, generate complex graphs, etc. A device that meets my needs can also do all the things the iPod People want, but not vice versa. Like many in this group, I'm somewhat ticked off that the iPod people got their devices first, but I'm trying to be patient and believe that I'll eventually get something suitable. What I'm not doing is whining that the iPod People would be better off if forced to use the kind of gadget I need.
Second the idea of having your wife talk about childhood and teen photos of herself, if she's willing. There are stories there that she would have told your daughters here and there over the years. Those stories may not seem important to your daughters when they are 16; the stories will be more important when they are 26 or 36.
I have one photo of my father, age about 12, with his dog. The stories he told about the troubles he and the dog got into in a small town in Iowa are absolutely priceless.
I used to have this discussion with a librarian whose dissertation was about archival materials. Thinking in terms of "archival" seems appropriate here; while you are rightly concerned with preserving memories for you daughters, there will eventually be grandkids who are interested in the grandmother they didn't know. My librarian friend's opinion was that there only one practical medium available to the general public with proven archival properties: pigment-based ink on acid-free paper. Acid-free paper is readily available; inkjet printers that use pigmented ink are available but pricey; contemporary monochrome laser printers provide near-archival qualities; color laser printers somewhat less so.
My librarian friend's strongest argument for making analog copies on paper was the passive nature of that medium. You can tuck the paper away for 30 years and it's still good when you take it back out. Digital archives tend to require active copying from time to time. Digital files from 30-40 years ago are largely unreadable today, even if the medium is in good shape, for a number of reasons: the necessary hardware is no longer available, operating systems don't support the file system, the file format is no longer supported. In general, preserving a digital record for 30 years requires that intermediate copies be made.
However, archival work is something that can be done anytime in the next few years. Worry about other things now.
I haven't been systematic about checking, but it appears to me that old stuff and very new stuff that's not released in an ebook form yet are scanned and OCRed. Those are pretty easy to recognize: the OCR will make consistent mistakes, such as converting the word "service" to two words "ser vice". It's not hard to do, and it's getting cheaper. Slashdot has run stories about DIY rigs that take pretty minimal manual effort. The errors are irritating, but not horribly so.
The pirate version of most stuff that's available in ebook form with DRM appears to be decrypted from the ebook. It's essentially perfect (other than the crappy job of proofreading many publishers do these days). Adobe Digital Editions has been cracked, which lets you make a clear copy of most things you can get through your local library. I've argued for years that copyright holders can't win that technology war, the publishers have to freeze their algorithms so that older readers continue to work, and that encryption will eventually be broken.
Many years ago, as a freshman in honors calculus, the professor had a habit of pausing in the middle of a proof, looking across the shining young faces, then settling on me and asking, "Mr. Cain, what comes next?" Often with the stick of chalk offered. Other people got asked as well, but I seemed to be the favorite victim. More than one of the other students asked me why Prof. Lewis hated me. "Mr. Cain, what comes next?" was the subject of occasional panicky nightmares for a decade. At one point some years later, I did get a chance to ask, and Prof. Lewis' response was "There was a mathematician inside, trying to get out, and you needed a bit of prodding."
Powerpoint slides might have saved me that particular bit of stress. But the "mathematician inside" might not have gotten loose, either.
In all honesty, built-in wifi has pretty much the same purpose. My wife bought me a wifi-only Barnes & Noble nook when they introduced them at $149; I find that I just leave the wifi turned off. I download content to and manage it with calibre, and copy/share things with the nook using it as a USB device. Other people might be more spontaneous than I am, but I've always got at least a half-dozen unread things stored on it. So far, I've never run out of material on the road.
I have to say that I've been astounded at the range of pirated stuff available through bittorrent. Somehow I thought books wouldn't be pirated as much as other media. I was wrong.
But the important thing is that the iPad is just an iPod derivative. Jobs' had two insights. The first was that there's a pretty big market for a not-a-PC digital widget you can carry around in a pocket and run single-purpose apps rather than full-blown applications. The second was that you can sell content for that little widget in small chunks: songs, individual apps, etc. You and I may not care for it particularly, but there are tens of millions of people who find it enormously useful. As you say, the iPad stretches the model slightly, but not that much. There are a bunch of people who carry a backpack or briefcase anyway, and who find the bigger-screen version of the widget more useful.
At one level, the goal of each addition to the iPod class has been to replace more of the things that you find in a college student's pockets/purse: music player, camera, phone, portable game player, ebook reader, etc. Personally, I think MS has blown it entirely, because their "natural" market was a widget that replaced more and more of the things you find in the business person's briefcase: daytimer, detailed contact lists, memos and other documents, notebook, etc. There would be some different core UI aspects of such a device compared to an iPod. I think high-res stylus touch input with good handwriting recognition would be a must; too many times when a business person needs to write down 20 words right now while holding the device in one hand. The daytimer form factor is probably the right one. I had hopes for the now-canceled Courier device, even if it was late to the game.
Jobs v. Balmer is a very interesting comparison to make. Jobs has been as successful as he has for three reasons, I think.
Balmer has done nothing like that. Perhaps it's because he was never forced into it, as Jobs was: Balmer sits atop a behemoth that has always been profitable based on its dominant position with Windows, Office, and a few other big applications. The company style, if you want to call it that, is "basic industrial". Despite some expensive forays into building their own hardware, one would be hard pressed to look at an Xbox, a Zune device, and a Kin phone and claim there was a consistent style and direction.
I used to hope that MS/Balmer was going to figure out that business people at work were their target demographic. Apple did "insanely great" widgets that fit in their target market's pocket; MS should have been building "insanely great" widgets that fit in their target market's briefcase or portfolio. I used to have hopes that MS would do something really good along the lines of the Courier form factor. Put a small but rugged display on the outside cover for phone and music player apps; two displays on the inside, one that was high-quality e-paper and one that was good for everything else. High-quality touch screen input so you could actually take notes on the thing. MS, I thought, had the bucks to get the right display technologies finished. And the clout to get the textbook publishers on board so the device family could move into college, then into K-12.
I also live in Colorado.
It may (or may not) be worth noting that after spending some millions of federal dollars to expand coverage for emergency providers (law enforcement, fire, etc) in the last few years, there are still significant amounts of the mountain terrain that do not have coverage on those frequencies. There are likely to always be places that you can hike to where there's no coverage of any sort, including satellite except for brief periods.
OTOH, in an emergency situation, local repeaters may not be necessary. This story describes a case where the emergency broadcast was received by a ham more than 100 miles away, apparently without benefit of a repeater.
So, when was the last time that anyone was successful in court arguing that a corporate action that was devastating to its employees and the community (eg, a plant relocation or a merger resulting in thousands of layoffs) should be halted, even though stopping it cost the shareholders something? Or even that management should consider the impact on employees or communities as part of its decision-making process?
In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, both Luna City and Tyco Under include volcanic bubbles as part of their original "cubic". Perhaps not as realistic as lava tubes, but they work better as story elements than tubes would have.
There is at least a reasonable chance that the person currently using the laptop bought it from the original thief. Or bought it from a pawn shop where the original thief disposed of it. If such is the case, you may recover your property after a court appearance or two, but would be unlikely to stop the thief, who has pocketed their profit and moved on.