How can you argue that you make literature more accessible by imposing a minimal price?!
Because, like the FUCKING SUMMARY said, Amazon has very, VERY deep pockets. They are so big, they will do anything they can, legally, to capture the market (which is a nice way of saying "destroying competition"). Amazon can put a kiosk in the sidewalk in front of a physical store and give away the same books in the store. And keep doing that until the store goes out of business. This is basically what they do when they sell books at 90% discount with free shipping. No other bookstore can do that. This is what's called "unfairness".
But let's suppose you don't care for that. There's also the issue of amazon wanting to go all digital. Amazon is all for efficiency and they would just love to sell just kindle books, not physical ones. What will happen to all those paper books, which are too old, or are in a grey area of copyright? They will never scan and sell those. They will be lost forever, ending up with just a handful of copies scattered in a few libraries around the world. Very accesible, right?
And of course, let's not forget about all those "banned" books. Are there any banned books in France? I don't know. Will there be? With the growing muslim population there, YES.
No, not really. The problem is that everything is a race to the bottom, and when manufacturers sell something "better" they do at a very high premium. It becomes a luxury or a specialty item. It's not that the "normal" ones are cheap. It's that the others are expensive.
Serves them right. Microsoft should have learn already that the way to release stuff is to put a BETA label in it, like Google does with everything else. Service unavailable? BETA! Unexpected error? BETA! Lost all your data? BETA!
Beta is a blanket term for "we can charge for this but if it breaks it's not our fault".
Kodak had a specialised film made for weddings and portraits, and I can't remember seeing anything other than caucasians in the example brochures.
Kodak Professional Pro Image 100. Box. This one seems a localized version for the Asian market, with some very white asians. Mine has white people only: this is it.
Large-scale wi-fi? I guess they should call that "that big ugly thing that just does not work". WiFi is difficult to make work properly in a big house, and they tried to make it work in a city-wide scale. I just never understoond the point of making public wi fi hotspots available for free. In 2006? Maybe. In 2013? Who uses that? 3G and 4G services have the potential to provide a much better service than a half-assed wi-fi.
And i'm just guessing here, but I'm pretty sure this is a "mesh" of AP. Back in the early 00s, WiFI meshes, or WDS, were supposed to solve all connectivity problems. People would just have a big mesh of APs that would cover from one house to another and some internet pipes here and there. Guess what? Meshes just don't work. They aren't reliable. If they are reliable, they're also unusably slow, and don't scale with hundreds of users.
If a city wants to give free internet acces, why bother deploying wi-fi? Wouldn't it be a good idea to just subsidize 3G/4G access and make it free for everyone? Before you all jump at me claiming that wi-fi is free: remember it's not. Your $30 AP can't work in outdoor conditions. Cases are expensive, heat makes the AP crash. You need to wire some of them at least. And heat also kills the APs in just a few years (just look at the Cisco outdoor APs which look nothing like toy APs. And cost thousands each). Deploying and maintaining a Wi-Fi network made of cheap APs in a mesh probably costs the same in the long run as using very expensive APs. And why throw away so much money into that? I know Mountain View city has money to spare but i'm sure there are other things where the money could be used, rather than providing "free wifi".
Erm... an ENC28J60 module with RJ45 jack, magnetics, crystal, and all you need to connect an arduino (or any other MCU) is $3.50 on ebay. Less than the price of the ENC28J60 chip alone!.
If you look at it with a completely cynical and sociopathic view, then yeah, there's nothing wrong with it.
When you look at it with a human view, you see people too old to get a new job, and too young to retire, being put on the streets with a big "fuck you".
Eventually you end up with a large enough mass of unemployed people, which becomes a problem. You have, on one hand, people feeling sorry for them but unable to do anything; and sociopaths who think humans are a disposable good, with an overly simplistic and optimistic view of the world and an "adapt or die" motto.
You talk about social security nets, but the truth is, these people won't be covered properly. Right now the US is divided with the whole Obamacare thing. Money lets out the worst of people. Just listening to the arguments against universal healthcare in the US is scary. You can really see how people only care for themselves, fuck everyone "i'm sorry you have to die but it's my money". Just wow. Not to mention the "it's your fault you have to die because you didn't save money for your treatment" types. Now think that, instead of giving people free healthcare, you have to give people money for nothing.
most people i know can't be bothered with "secondary storage". and 32-64GB of storage is "too little". i know at least 2 persons who would like to carry their whole movie collection in their laptop so they bought CD-bay-to-HDD-bay converters to let them install a second 500GB or 1TB disk in their laptops.
You clearly don't know many rich people with versionitis.
I went to install this IP camera for some rich guy and he was using windows 8 and IE. I asked him if he didn't have any other browser, like Chrome or FF and he went "wowwww... okay, if this camera doesn't support a STANDARD browser like IE then i don't want it!"...
Funny, isn't it? How rednecks are considered ignorants, but most of them have a clear definition of what is "government" and what is "america". Amazing how patriotic they usually are (flags, american pride, traditions), and yet they hate the "gub'mint". They're considered crazy paranoids because of that hate, and how the gub'mint tramples on their freedom.
And here we are, educated people, confusing government with country.
Argentina's Canal Encuentro (Ministry of Education) is (or at least it was, when I watched it a couple years ago) just EXCELLENT. It even completely replaced Discovery for me. No silly explosions and car tuning on Encuentro. Just some very decent documentaries on a lot of subjects. Then I realized over half of their programming is BBC. I envy the british, who get that kind of programming over the air.
If the brits leave the country for a bit, and watch what's available everywhere else, I assure you they'd gladly pay the TV license and more.
It costs money to run a business. It's not the same to buy to Joe Sysadmin who stole a Catalyst 2900 from work than to buy from a store that has to keep a big warehouse, employees, and pay taxes.
DUUUH I will buy wherever it's cheaper DUUUUUH I don't care about brick and mortar stores DUUUUH they are too expensive and if they can't compete they should go out of busines DUUUUUUUH I don't feel sorry for them, they should have found another job. DUUUH i don't care if they had the store for 30 years and are about to retire, it's their fault because they should have adapted DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRR.
There's your answer. Look around slashdot and you'll see the average geek is a lot like the average person. They only care about the lowest price TODAY.
Slashdot Mirror
Because, like the FUCKING SUMMARY said, Amazon has very, VERY deep pockets. They are so big, they will do anything they can, legally, to capture the market (which is a nice way of saying "destroying competition").
Amazon can put a kiosk in the sidewalk in front of a physical store and give away the same books in the store. And keep doing that until the store goes out of business. This is basically what they do when they sell books at 90% discount with free shipping. No other bookstore can do that. This is what's called "unfairness".
But let's suppose you don't care for that. There's also the issue of amazon wanting to go all digital. Amazon is all for efficiency and they would just love to sell just kindle books, not physical ones. What will happen to all those paper books, which are too old, or are in a grey area of copyright? They will never scan and sell those. They will be lost forever, ending up with just a handful of copies scattered in a few libraries around the world. Very accesible, right?
And of course, let's not forget about all those "banned" books. Are there any banned books in France? I don't know. Will there be? With the growing muslim population there, YES.
No, not really.
The problem is that everything is a race to the bottom, and when manufacturers sell something "better" they do at a very high premium. It becomes a luxury or a specialty item. It's not that the "normal" ones are cheap. It's that the others are expensive.
Serves them right. Microsoft should have learn already that the way to release stuff is to put a BETA label in it, like Google does with everything else. Service unavailable? BETA! Unexpected error? BETA! Lost all your data? BETA!
Beta is a blanket term for "we can charge for this but if it breaks it's not our fault".
Come on, MS. You're lagging behind.
Kodak Professional Pro Image 100. Box. This one seems a localized version for the Asian market, with some very white asians. Mine has white people only: this is it.
Ah, the American Freedom jerkbag. God, you have no idea how much i hate your kind.
I carry my phone in my pocket. I don't carry a backpack or a manpurse. Where the fuck should i put the cable? Ah yes, at home, where it belongs.
No, please. Stay off 900MHz... i like my noise floor at -105dB ;)
Ubiquiti user here. NanoStation M900. 10mbps on a link 1km at 9m off the floor, in a city with 3-4 8-story buildings in the middle. Not bad at all.
Large-scale wi-fi? I guess they should call that "that big ugly thing that just does not work". WiFi is difficult to make work properly in a big house, and they tried to make it work in a city-wide scale. I just never understoond the point of making public wi fi hotspots available for free. In 2006? Maybe. In 2013? Who uses that? 3G and 4G services have the potential to provide a much better service than a half-assed wi-fi.
And i'm just guessing here, but I'm pretty sure this is a "mesh" of AP. Back in the early 00s, WiFI meshes, or WDS, were supposed to solve all connectivity problems. People would just have a big mesh of APs that would cover from one house to another and some internet pipes here and there. Guess what? Meshes just don't work. They aren't reliable. If they are reliable, they're also unusably slow, and don't scale with hundreds of users.
If a city wants to give free internet acces, why bother deploying wi-fi? Wouldn't it be a good idea to just subsidize 3G/4G access and make it free for everyone? Before you all jump at me claiming that wi-fi is free: remember it's not. Your $30 AP can't work in outdoor conditions. Cases are expensive, heat makes the AP crash. You need to wire some of them at least. And heat also kills the APs in just a few years (just look at the Cisco outdoor APs which look nothing like toy APs. And cost thousands each). Deploying and maintaining a Wi-Fi network made of cheap APs in a mesh probably costs the same in the long run as using very expensive APs. And why throw away so much money into that? I know Mountain View city has money to spare but i'm sure there are other things where the money could be used, rather than providing "free wifi".
Erm... an ENC28J60 module with RJ45 jack, magnetics, crystal, and all you need to connect an arduino (or any other MCU) is $3.50 on ebay. Less than the price of the ENC28J60 chip alone!.
If you look at it with a completely cynical and sociopathic view, then yeah, there's nothing wrong with it.
When you look at it with a human view, you see people too old to get a new job, and too young to retire, being put on the streets with a big "fuck you".
Eventually you end up with a large enough mass of unemployed people, which becomes a problem. You have, on one hand, people feeling sorry for them but unable to do anything; and sociopaths who think humans are a disposable good, with an overly simplistic and optimistic view of the world and an "adapt or die" motto.
You talk about social security nets, but the truth is, these people won't be covered properly. Right now the US is divided with the whole Obamacare thing. Money lets out the worst of people. Just listening to the arguments against universal healthcare in the US is scary. You can really see how people only care for themselves, fuck everyone "i'm sorry you have to die but it's my money". Just wow. Not to mention the "it's your fault you have to die because you didn't save money for your treatment" types. Now think that, instead of giving people free healthcare, you have to give people money for nothing.
It's called cursive.
But but but... Islam is a religion of peace!
RTFA, AC.
what does this have to do with intelligence?
most people i know can't be bothered with "secondary storage". and 32-64GB of storage is "too little". i know at least 2 persons who would like to carry their whole movie collection in their laptop so they bought CD-bay-to-HDD-bay converters to let them install a second 500GB or 1TB disk in their laptops.
yes but how much do they cost?
Jobs came up with the colorful iMac.
Learn your history, fucktard fanboi.
Yes... surely SOMEONE at the NSA knows about SELinux!
In Argentina we have 43% annual for credit cards right now =D
You clearly don't know many rich people with versionitis.
I went to install this IP camera for some rich guy and he was using windows 8 and IE. I asked him if he didn't have any other browser, like Chrome or FF and he went "wowwww... okay, if this camera doesn't support a STANDARD browser like IE then i don't want it!"...
LOL.
Funny, isn't it? How rednecks are considered ignorants, but most of them have a clear definition of what is "government" and what is "america". Amazing how patriotic they usually are (flags, american pride, traditions), and yet they hate the "gub'mint". They're considered crazy paranoids because of that hate, and how the gub'mint tramples on their freedom.
And here we are, educated people, confusing government with country.
BEFORE it gets there? Wow... someone's not up to date with the current state of affairs.
Argentina's Canal Encuentro (Ministry of Education) is (or at least it was, when I watched it a couple years ago) just EXCELLENT. It even completely replaced Discovery for me. No silly explosions and car tuning on Encuentro. Just some very decent documentaries on a lot of subjects. Then I realized over half of their programming is BBC. I envy the british, who get that kind of programming over the air.
If the brits leave the country for a bit, and watch what's available everywhere else, I assure you they'd gladly pay the TV license and more.
It costs money to run a business. It's not the same to buy to Joe Sysadmin who stole a Catalyst 2900 from work than to buy from a store that has to keep a big warehouse, employees, and pay taxes.
DUUUH I will buy wherever it's cheaper DUUUUUH I don't care about brick and mortar stores DUUUUH they are too expensive and if they can't compete they should go out of busines DUUUUUUUH I don't feel sorry for them, they should have found another job. DUUUH i don't care if they had the store for 30 years and are about to retire, it's their fault because they should have adapted DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRR.
There's your answer. Look around slashdot and you'll see the average geek is a lot like the average person. They only care about the lowest price TODAY.