It could be worse. A former employer of mine gave us gift certificates for Christmas. For the company's stores. Which sold only high-priced women's clothing.
In my more entrepreneurial moments I've been thinking of setting up a GC exchange corporation where people could trade cards they don't want for a modest fee say 1% off the top. My wife for example would enjoy trading cash for your GC, assuming that store isn't the fat chick mall store (don't recall name sry).
The killer is I have no freaking idea how to verify credit balance to not get ripped off, and being a retail op I would assume I'd have to deal with endless jerks trying to rip me off. Other than that, yeah it would be awesome.
Also my obvious competitor would be craigslist and ebay. I know from first hand retail experience that "lots" of salvation army etc food gift certs are turned into drug/cig/booze money by the simple expedient of walk into food store with neighbor A holding a GC (or food stamps, or WIC checks etc) and neighbor B holding cash (or drugs), neighbor B selects the food he wants, neighbor A pays, and after neighbor A completes checking out, neighbor B picks up the bags and hands over the cash/drugs to neighbor A. Seen it a million times in my retail/starving student years. The point being that I can't charge too high of a percentage for my "service" as people will just trade with neighbor and family.
Amazon, because I've got amazon in one tab, I cut and paste "PCI wireless NIC card" and found 219 matches admittedly half are USB adapters and books, another tab you open google, type in "linux compatibility PCI wireless NIC card" first link is "http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Devices/PCI" then mix and match.
Oh look, first one on both tabs is the "D-Link Xtreme N DWA-552" which costs $64.79 at amazon and the verified good linux driver is the ath9k.
Tada I just saved you about 2 hours of shopping time and probably two gallons of gas. I'll send you an invoice.
(insert BB mode)You know, your facebook timeline updates that you download over this card will look a hell of a lot better if you have gold plated wifi antenna, and a monster cable IEC power cord for whatever the hell you're plugging it into. And I'll sell you a three year replacement plan for only $50 on this $64 item.(end BB mode)
From first hand research, kids absolutely love best buy because its full of dvds and video games. I have no idea how to leverage this into adulthood... maybe sell pr0n dvds and adult toys (although I don't want the legendarily pushy salesguys rambling on about how Monster AA batteries give better vibrations)? Also the next generation of "steam" "red box" and "netflix" users are going to devastate them even with the kids. When the majority of kids think Barney comes from netflix instead of best buy, they're toast.
Maybe if they were an adult toy store... not XXX rated like a/.er would assume but something like pay a buck or two to get in, and play all you want with brand new electronics, nothing in packages, play all you want until you get tired, and then QR codes freaking everywhere to order items online from amazon, maybe a kickback affiliate percentage... Heck there's no reason Best Buy has to do this, an enterprising/.er could do it today...
Sometimes, though, you just need an inkjet cartridge right now, and going to
Walmart, walgreens drug stores (no kidding, just this Saturday I saw a wall of inkjet cartridges), office depot, office max, target, maybe kmart/sears (haven't been to one of those stores in years).. Best buy is different than these retailers because... um... because... well I guess its just another bland box store. Oh well, flush em, they're done.
There are no rural areas with just a Best Buy store surrounded on all sides by cattle. There are walmarts like that (I've been there in northern Wisconsin). And they sell the same stuff as best buy, for about the same price, and their shelf stockers know about as much as the Best Buy salesweasels but aren't as pushy, which makes them better.
Yes I do agree that generally, torrents are a better product, less DRM and less advertising, and some media is only released to certain countries... Just make sure to do it for that reason, not out of some misguided idea of saving money.
Society seems to be bifurcating into those who know how to find stuff and learn from it, and the masses who don't. I have no idea how to train people. You can't be successfully educated without knowing how to research, but thats just a filter, its not something thats taught. If there were a way to teach people how to research, especially research online, that would be helpful.
The train/educate ratio needs to tilt far over to the "train" side, IT is expected to do drone work, not invent or think. The education topics need to remain more or less the same, some comprehension of "big O" and scalability problems and algorithm analysis remain important. IT needs some biz and accounting classes... mandatory requirements. Intro to accounting is not terribly useful for a computer scientist. IT needs more liberal arts. Public speaking, mandatory for presentations. A computer scientist only needs pub speaking as an oral defense at the PHD and teaching classes. A foreign language (aka BA degree) seems highly wise for IT as your job will probably go to India or China very soon, so if you learn hindi or mandarin perhaps you can transfer into a project mismanagement or perhaps analyst position... IT needs to learn how to master a piece of software and/or a system. The software selected to master doesn't really matter, whats important is that some people, shockingly, don't know how to explore and fully learn a piece of software unless that skill is specifically taught to them. Like many, maybe most, computer people, I learned that around age 6, but there's some who need the formal class to learn it at age 20. IT needs database theory, a computer scientist only needs codd normal forms etc if s/he is going into the DB theory field (frankly, unlikely). Very little of a CS curriculum would be a total waste of time for a IT guy and vice versa, but a lot of mandatory and nice to have positions will swap.
who is going to want SSN's of a bunch of poor people on Medicaid?
If you can fog a mirror you can get a car loan. A car can be driven across the border, to a chop shop, etc. If you're poor the interest rate will be 15% but if you stole the info and intend to never make a payment, no one cares. My mom had zero income, and someone with her info bought a pickup truck in Texas and disappeared into Mexico. She had no problem removing it from her credit history as it was beyond ridiculous, but if she were not so lucky, then it could have been a problem.
You don't need any money for an illegal to use your information to hold a job (IRS etc) or get free medical care. Actually a poor person has much better medical coverage than I do... so their info is more valuable than mine. The IRS thing with stolen SS numbers is no problem unless the illegal claims 15 exemptions and pays no tax.. then you have to pay their tax for them, or prove you're not working both as a sysadmin and a restaurant dishwasher simultaneously.
You don't need any money or credit record to visit a "check cashing place / payday loan joint" with a fake check, walk out with cash, and leave the victim to figure it all out.
Its important to point out that at a couple bucks per movie you're rapidly approaching "blueray at the local redbox" prices. This isn't relevant to the original european requester, but its still interesting.
For the financial and mass budget penalties of designing for on-orbit repair, they could have afforded to do all the optical tests on the mirror so as to not launch a bum mirror, and packed the thing with 50 backup gyros.
Either way, launch 3 scope, or launch one really good scope, it would have been a better mission without the shuttle.
...leaving the US to outsource manned spaceflight to the Russians for years to come.
To the best of my knowledge COTS demo flight 2/3 is still on in 20 days. I am excited about this flight. Its the last test before regular scheduled space-x cargo flights begin.
The proposal deadline for CCDev 3, which now has some hopelessly goofy new name that I can't be bothered to search for and doesn't matter anyway, was only something like 2 weeks ago according to the article I read when the deadline passed. The deadline was somewhere around the Ides of March. From a technical standpoint you don't have to do a heck of a lot different to shove a person into COTS 2/3. I guess testing the escape capsule would be really nice, but we flew the shuttle a hundred times without a realistic escape plan so I wouldn't freak. I'd stowaway on a cargo flight and worry more about the TSA reaction to my daring to travel without being humiliated by them than about surviving the flight itself. From an administration and contract awarding and paperwork standpoint it will be years before a person is stuffed into a COTS2/3 capsule, as seen above. Tech is advancing much faster than the paper pushers can possibly keep up.
Its sort of like asking how long it takes for a manned jet flight to Hawaii. Well, in theory, I as a private citizen could leap into a tin can right now and be there somewhat before a late dinner. Actually with timezones it might technically still be lunch time when I arrive, I need to think about that. If I'm the govt, I need to work to save up the money (+ years?), get probed by creepy control-freaks at the airport (+2 hours), I have to propose competitive bids (+ months) then evaluate the bids and select them (+ months) then possibly court fights with those who don't get selected (+ years) then some more R+D flights under the new contract to "prove" what has already been done before (+ years). Finally some traditional scheduling issues (+ months). This is how a private citizen can fly to Hawaii before dinner, but NASA will not get there until at least 2030.
Someone recap for me please. Millions of pounds for...slightly faster internet on my phone? It's kind of fine now, really. Can I opt out of this, and the extra expense the phone companies are going to pass on down to me, please?
Its all a mistake. naughty editors. "Everything Everywhere" isn't a UK phone operator, its the motto of their government surveillance service.
Blacks have a higher percent of single parent households
I wonder if anyone has ever compared kids growing up during WWII to kids slightly before and slightly after. My aunt didn't turn out much different than my father, although my grandfather was overseas during most of her youth due to WWII and some post-war activity.
I'm thinking its cultural, requiring a little bit more than "did someone with testosterone live in close proximity"
Lead towards what... I love nukes, they make total world war unthinkable, thats why we don't do it. At the rate of one world war per generation, we're a couple behind now, so we'd have to catch up. The more nukes, the more unthinkable war becomes. The opposite, the fewer nukes, the better idea total world war appears. Given a choice of world war, or nukes, I'd prefer the nukes.
Getting rid of them dooms my son to die overseas in WWIII... or even worse, die here in WWIII. Seem like a kinda nasty thing to do to a kid, when all you have to do to prevent it, is fill a couple bunkers with nukes.
Another way to put it is you can either set off non-nuke weapons in bulk about once a generation, or you can not set off nuke weapons. The latter seems preferable.
A test ban seems more like a non-proliferation strategy
That reaction mechanism seems extraordinarily mysterious to me.
The standard/. car analogy is if I decide to never again test car air bags, then no one will ever commit suicide by intentionally crashing their car into my car. If I never check the oil level on the dipstick of my car engine, then my neighbor will never purchase oil for his car. If I never check that there is a spare condom in my back seat ashtray (which works a hell of a lot better BTW if you're a non-smoker) then my neighbor will never try to have sex in his car.
I think it more reasonable they didn't want to explain we'll never have to use them in war if we know they work via testing, and the opposite is true, if no one knows if they'll work or not, they may as well risk an attack.
There really seems to be no reason to reduce the reliability of the arsenal other than to eliminate MAD, to make a nuclear war winnable. Its very dangerous to peace not to test.
If there is a silver lining, the people that currently can't figure out how to install subfloor hydronic heating without causing a flood, are never going to correctly install this dystopian stuff. You'll get a few folks installing it to show off how well they can spend money, on the assumption that spending money means they're rich as opposed to the more likely serial home equity refinancers or credit card max-outers, but it won't actually work.
How long before we see the first advertisement for special shoes to shield us from smart floors?
Surely you've seen the classic movie "Animal House"? "unregistered boyfriends" merely need ride their motorcycle up the stairs. What could possibly go wrong?
Lately whenever young men are in the news its traditional to put in a hoodie comment so I'm surprised the article didn't put some lame trendy crap about detecting if a young man walking on the floor is wearing a hoodie or not. Its illogically pointless, therefore required.
Another idea might be to give up on "truth" and just teach "2012 astronomy" until someone ponies up the cash to write "2018 astronomy".
Ooooh I just thought of something really evil, which is probably how its going to turn out. Anyone can download "2009 astronomy" for free instantly, instead of paying $40 for a textbook, but... if you want a copy of "2012 errata and new discoveries for 2009-astronomy" then you're going to have to shell out $40 to the usual suspects. Thats the solution that screws the most people, so that's probably what we'll be stuck with.
Sort of like how I never understood in my youth how the "cliffs notes" somehow cost more than paperback versions of the literature they discussed...
And I bet they could clean up selling "disposable workbook compatible with astronomy-2009" neatly printed with extra problems etc.
if the group is large enough, it de facto becomes the standard text, and there would be sufficient political cover by chosing that way to go
Just thought of another problem, if curriculums were free, then you'd have parents with the "I didn't pay 10 times as much to live in this suburb to get the same curricula as the inner city kids get". Might be a badge of honor in rich districts to blow money on expensive proprietary books. Already works that way with software.
The biggest issue is that things like science books may be rewritten to reflect 'facts' such as 'the earth is flat', 'dinosaurs walked the earth 6000 years ago', intelligent design and other nonsense
CC-ND seems to prevent that, while allowing cheap copies, but also prevents the de-planetization of Pluto, or the proof of Fermats last theorem exists, exoplanets have been detected, etc.
Maybe they need a standards committee which releases CC-ND...
Another idea might be to give up on "truth" and just teach "2012 astronomy" until someone ponies up the cash to write "2018 astronomy". With some paragraphs at the start that kids better get used to technological change so they better understand that some stuff in the books is a bit out of date. We already accept this with paper, but with instantly distributed e-books it might take some getting used to, that I can download "2007 astronomy" for free and instantly, but its forever going to be "2007 astronomy" even if I download it in 2012...
Slashdot Mirror
It could be worse. A former employer of mine gave us gift certificates for Christmas. For the company's stores. Which sold only high-priced women's clothing.
In my more entrepreneurial moments I've been thinking of setting up a GC exchange corporation where people could trade cards they don't want for a modest fee say 1% off the top. My wife for example would enjoy trading cash for your GC, assuming that store isn't the fat chick mall store (don't recall name sry).
The killer is I have no freaking idea how to verify credit balance to not get ripped off, and being a retail op I would assume I'd have to deal with endless jerks trying to rip me off. Other than that, yeah it would be awesome.
Also my obvious competitor would be craigslist and ebay. I know from first hand retail experience that "lots" of salvation army etc food gift certs are turned into drug/cig/booze money by the simple expedient of walk into food store with neighbor A holding a GC (or food stamps, or WIC checks etc) and neighbor B holding cash (or drugs), neighbor B selects the food he wants, neighbor A pays, and after neighbor A completes checking out, neighbor B picks up the bags and hands over the cash/drugs to neighbor A. Seen it a million times in my retail/starving student years. The point being that I can't charge too high of a percentage for my "service" as people will just trade with neighbor and family.
Guess which store got my business?
Amazon, because I've got amazon in one tab, I cut and paste "PCI wireless NIC card" and found 219 matches admittedly half are USB adapters and books, another tab you open google, type in "linux compatibility PCI wireless NIC card" first link is "http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Devices/PCI" then mix and match.
Oh look, first one on both tabs is the "D-Link Xtreme N DWA-552" which costs $64.79 at amazon and the verified good linux driver is the ath9k.
Tada I just saved you about 2 hours of shopping time and probably two gallons of gas. I'll send you an invoice.
(insert BB mode)You know, your facebook timeline updates that you download over this card will look a hell of a lot better if you have gold plated wifi antenna, and a monster cable IEC power cord for whatever the hell you're plugging it into. And I'll sell you a three year replacement plan for only $50 on this $64 item.(end BB mode)
No one is happy to be in a BestBuy.
From first hand research, kids absolutely love best buy because its full of dvds and video games. I have no idea how to leverage this into adulthood... maybe sell pr0n dvds and adult toys (although I don't want the legendarily pushy salesguys rambling on about how Monster AA batteries give better vibrations)? Also the next generation of "steam" "red box" and "netflix" users are going to devastate them even with the kids. When the majority of kids think Barney comes from netflix instead of best buy, they're toast.
Maybe if they were an adult toy store... not XXX rated like a /.er would assume but something like pay a buck or two to get in, and play all you want with brand new electronics, nothing in packages, play all you want until you get tired, and then QR codes freaking everywhere to order items online from amazon, maybe a kickback affiliate percentage... Heck there's no reason Best Buy has to do this, an enterprising /.er could do it today...
Then it would have been a walmart card
Sometimes, though, you just need an inkjet cartridge right now, and going to
Walmart, walgreens drug stores (no kidding, just this Saturday I saw a wall of inkjet cartridges), office depot, office max, target, maybe kmart/sears (haven't been to one of those stores in years).. Best buy is different than these retailers because... um... because... well I guess its just another bland box store. Oh well, flush em, they're done.
There are no rural areas with just a Best Buy store surrounded on all sides by cattle. There are walmarts like that (I've been there in northern Wisconsin). And they sell the same stuff as best buy, for about the same price, and their shelf stockers know about as much as the Best Buy salesweasels but aren't as pushy, which makes them better.
Yes I do agree that generally, torrents are a better product, less DRM and less advertising, and some media is only released to certain countries... Just make sure to do it for that reason, not out of some misguided idea of saving money.
Googling
Society seems to be bifurcating into those who know how to find stuff and learn from it, and the masses who don't. I have no idea how to train people. You can't be successfully educated without knowing how to research, but thats just a filter, its not something thats taught. If there were a way to teach people how to research, especially research online, that would be helpful.
The train/educate ratio needs to tilt far over to the "train" side, IT is expected to do drone work, not invent or think.
The education topics need to remain more or less the same, some comprehension of "big O" and scalability problems and algorithm analysis remain important.
IT needs some biz and accounting classes... mandatory requirements. Intro to accounting is not terribly useful for a computer scientist.
IT needs more liberal arts. Public speaking, mandatory for presentations. A computer scientist only needs pub speaking as an oral defense at the PHD and teaching classes. A foreign language (aka BA degree) seems highly wise for IT as your job will probably go to India or China very soon, so if you learn hindi or mandarin perhaps you can transfer into a project mismanagement or perhaps analyst position...
IT needs to learn how to master a piece of software and/or a system. The software selected to master doesn't really matter, whats important is that some people, shockingly, don't know how to explore and fully learn a piece of software unless that skill is specifically taught to them. Like many, maybe most, computer people, I learned that around age 6, but there's some who need the formal class to learn it at age 20.
IT needs database theory, a computer scientist only needs codd normal forms etc if s/he is going into the DB theory field (frankly, unlikely).
Very little of a CS curriculum would be a total waste of time for a IT guy and vice versa, but a lot of mandatory and nice to have positions will swap.
Arrest like 5 people ... almost a quarter of the population. A lot harder to do that in the US.
We'll git er done... Americuh, F yeah!
who is going to want SSN's of a bunch of poor people on Medicaid?
If you can fog a mirror you can get a car loan. A car can be driven across the border, to a chop shop, etc. If you're poor the interest rate will be 15% but if you stole the info and intend to never make a payment, no one cares. My mom had zero income, and someone with her info bought a pickup truck in Texas and disappeared into Mexico. She had no problem removing it from her credit history as it was beyond ridiculous, but if she were not so lucky, then it could have been a problem.
You don't need any money for an illegal to use your information to hold a job (IRS etc) or get free medical care. Actually a poor person has much better medical coverage than I do... so their info is more valuable than mine. The IRS thing with stolen SS numbers is no problem unless the illegal claims 15 exemptions and pays no tax.. then you have to pay their tax for them, or prove you're not working both as a sysadmin and a restaurant dishwasher simultaneously.
You don't need any money or credit record to visit a "check cashing place / payday loan joint" with a fake check, walk out with cash, and leave the victim to figure it all out.
Its important to point out that at a couple bucks per movie you're rapidly approaching "blueray at the local redbox" prices.
This isn't relevant to the original european requester, but its still interesting.
For the financial and mass budget penalties of designing for on-orbit repair, they could have afforded to do all the optical tests on the mirror so as to not launch a bum mirror, and packed the thing with 50 backup gyros.
Either way, launch 3 scope, or launch one really good scope, it would have been a better mission without the shuttle.
...leaving the US to outsource manned spaceflight to the Russians for years to come.
To the best of my knowledge COTS demo flight 2/3 is still on in 20 days. I am excited about this flight. Its the last test before regular scheduled space-x cargo flights begin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COTS_Demo_Flight_2
The proposal deadline for CCDev 3, which now has some hopelessly goofy new name that I can't be bothered to search for and doesn't matter anyway, was only something like 2 weeks ago according to the article I read when the deadline passed. The deadline was somewhere around the Ides of March. From a technical standpoint you don't have to do a heck of a lot different to shove a person into COTS 2/3. I guess testing the escape capsule would be really nice, but we flew the shuttle a hundred times without a realistic escape plan so I wouldn't freak. I'd stowaway on a cargo flight and worry more about the TSA reaction to my daring to travel without being humiliated by them than about surviving the flight itself. From an administration and contract awarding and paperwork standpoint it will be years before a person is stuffed into a COTS2/3 capsule, as seen above. Tech is advancing much faster than the paper pushers can possibly keep up.
Its sort of like asking how long it takes for a manned jet flight to Hawaii. Well, in theory, I as a private citizen could leap into a tin can right now and be there somewhat before a late dinner. Actually with timezones it might technically still be lunch time when I arrive, I need to think about that. If I'm the govt, I need to work to save up the money (+ years?), get probed by creepy control-freaks at the airport (+2 hours), I have to propose competitive bids (+ months) then evaluate the bids and select them (+ months) then possibly court fights with those who don't get selected (+ years) then some more R+D flights under the new contract to "prove" what has already been done before (+ years). Finally some traditional scheduling issues (+ months). This is how a private citizen can fly to Hawaii before dinner, but NASA will not get there until at least 2030.
Sort of sad as a programmer you have no knowledge of some of programming history.
How else would marketing sell the same old idea as something new? That is about 99% of "innovation" in IT.
Someone recap for me please. Millions of pounds for...slightly faster internet on my phone? It's kind of fine now, really. Can I opt out of this, and the extra expense the phone companies are going to pass on down to me, please?
Its all a mistake. naughty editors. "Everything Everywhere" isn't a UK phone operator, its the motto of their government surveillance service.
Blacks have a higher percent of single parent households
I wonder if anyone has ever compared kids growing up during WWII to kids slightly before and slightly after. My aunt didn't turn out much different than my father, although my grandfather was overseas during most of her youth due to WWII and some post-war activity.
I'm thinking its cultural, requiring a little bit more than "did someone with testosterone live in close proximity"
lead by example and scrap them
Lead towards what... I love nukes, they make total world war unthinkable, thats why we don't do it. At the rate of one world war per generation, we're a couple behind now, so we'd have to catch up. The more nukes, the more unthinkable war becomes. The opposite, the fewer nukes, the better idea total world war appears. Given a choice of world war, or nukes, I'd prefer the nukes.
Getting rid of them dooms my son to die overseas in WWIII... or even worse, die here in WWIII. Seem like a kinda nasty thing to do to a kid, when all you have to do to prevent it, is fill a couple bunkers with nukes.
Another way to put it is you can either set off non-nuke weapons in bulk about once a generation, or you can not set off nuke weapons. The latter seems preferable.
A test ban seems more like a non-proliferation strategy
That reaction mechanism seems extraordinarily mysterious to me.
The standard /. car analogy is if I decide to never again test car air bags, then no one will ever commit suicide by intentionally crashing their car into my car. If I never check the oil level on the dipstick of my car engine, then my neighbor will never purchase oil for his car. If I never check that there is a spare condom in my back seat ashtray (which works a hell of a lot better BTW if you're a non-smoker) then my neighbor will never try to have sex in his car.
I think it more reasonable they didn't want to explain we'll never have to use them in war if we know they work via testing, and the opposite is true, if no one knows if they'll work or not, they may as well risk an attack.
There really seems to be no reason to reduce the reliability of the arsenal other than to eliminate MAD, to make a nuclear war winnable. Its very dangerous to peace not to test.
If there is a silver lining, the people that currently can't figure out how to install subfloor hydronic heating without causing a flood, are never going to correctly install this dystopian stuff. You'll get a few folks installing it to show off how well they can spend money, on the assumption that spending money means they're rich as opposed to the more likely serial home equity refinancers or credit card max-outers, but it won't actually work.
How long before we see the first advertisement for special shoes to shield us from smart floors?
Surely you've seen the classic movie "Animal House"? "unregistered boyfriends" merely need ride their motorcycle up the stairs. What could possibly go wrong?
Lately whenever young men are in the news its traditional to put in a hoodie comment so I'm surprised the article didn't put some lame trendy crap about detecting if a young man walking on the floor is wearing a hoodie or not. Its illogically pointless, therefore required.
But isn't really weird for it to be somehow OK to warn against one skin color but not the other?
If the rate of criminal activity were identical, or even "close" then I'd agree with that 100%.
Another idea might be to give up on "truth" and just teach "2012 astronomy" until someone ponies up the cash to write "2018 astronomy".
Ooooh I just thought of something really evil, which is probably how its going to turn out. Anyone can download "2009 astronomy" for free instantly, instead of paying $40 for a textbook, but ... if you want a copy of "2012 errata and new discoveries for 2009-astronomy" then you're going to have to shell out $40 to the usual suspects. Thats the solution that screws the most people, so that's probably what we'll be stuck with.
Sort of like how I never understood in my youth how the "cliffs notes" somehow cost more than paperback versions of the literature they discussed...
And I bet they could clean up selling "disposable workbook compatible with astronomy-2009" neatly printed with extra problems etc.
Oh and answer keys too. And test study guides.
if the group is large enough, it de facto becomes the standard text, and there would be sufficient political cover by chosing that way to go
Just thought of another problem, if curriculums were free, then you'd have parents with the "I didn't pay 10 times as much to live in this suburb to get the same curricula as the inner city kids get". Might be a badge of honor in rich districts to blow money on expensive proprietary books. Already works that way with software.
The biggest issue is that things like science books may be rewritten to reflect 'facts' such as 'the earth is flat', 'dinosaurs walked the earth 6000 years ago', intelligent design and other nonsense
CC-ND seems to prevent that, while allowing cheap copies, but also prevents the de-planetization of Pluto, or the proof of Fermats last theorem exists, exoplanets have been detected, etc.
Maybe they need a standards committee which releases CC-ND...
Another idea might be to give up on "truth" and just teach "2012 astronomy" until someone ponies up the cash to write "2018 astronomy". With some paragraphs at the start that kids better get used to technological change so they better understand that some stuff in the books is a bit out of date. We already accept this with paper, but with instantly distributed e-books it might take some getting used to, that I can download "2007 astronomy" for free and instantly, but its forever going to be "2007 astronomy" even if I download it in 2012...
Some fun math to take the number of active users (not installed, not "created an account", but active) and divide the billion by that.
Also fun to contemplate a billion divided by the number of pics taken.
They're going to have to monetize that billion somehow, plus a profit... how is the mystery...