With the UK and Scotland, no politician's life depends on the outcome. Whatever happens with the Scottish referendum, the people in office now expect to eventually depart from office and enter some cushy retirement position.
With Russia, Putin cannot afford to back down from a display of military might: it keeps his support among the masses high, and intimidates other post-Soviet states like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan which he hopes to bring into his Eurasian Union. If Putin were to back down and support a peaceful resolution whose outcome might not satisfy Russian nationalists, he could find himself out of power. It's not a matter of him being done in by the West like a Saddam or Milosevic; that claim of Western conspiracy against him is just played for the cameras. The fact is that he's got enough enemies within Russian elite circles, he's pissed too many people off, that if his hold on power weakens, he'll certainly end up imprisoned or dead.
While it is true that Israel is blocking one part of the border, the other side is being blocked by either Qatar or Egypt. All US allies in the region.
Qatar is quite a ways away from the Levant. I think you meant "Jordan".
And for what it's worth, Israel controls the border between the West Bank and Jordan.
Considering that most of the e-books sold (at least from the companies that are or might be selling monthly subscriptions for a buffet style approach) contain DRM, you don't really own it even if you make a lump sum payment either.
Stripping DRM from an ebook is a trivial process. For mass-market ebooks like the sort you can get from Amazon, DRM removal is automated in Calibre when you import the book, as long as you've installed the relevant plugin. For scholarly works made available in PDF, cracking the antiquated Adobe Digital Editions DRM is also not especially difficult and, while I've never tried, can probably be automated as well because the inventory of pirate ebook sites grows so large by the day that I doubt it is being done by hand.
You can quibble about legalities, but with the current DRM being so half-ass, you can have a lasting collection of ebooks free of the seller's whim.
While trolling was greater, there was a larger diversity of troll posts, from "BSD is Dying" to the GNAA, from Last Measure to "Batman Touched My Junk". Now it's basically down to the two trolls I mentioned in my post above (there are also some mentally ill people who repeatedly post, but I prefer to consider them separately). I suppose that changes in Slashcode made it harder to crapflood, but I'd really like to see a return to the ingenuity of trolls of yore.
It's a shame that this "Republican poster" gets so many replies when it is clear even to casual followers of Slashdot that he is a troll who posts the same thing ("Republicans hate X", "Republicans took away Y") in various thread on a daily basis.
For me, a real sign of the death of Slashdot is the predictability of the trolls. The Republican troll and the Space Nutter troll (who may be one and the same, though I've never counted), offer only this invariable single-issue shtick instead of making things wacky and unpredictable like classic trolls of yore.
It has also been an enabler for millions of people in Iran, Syria and Turkmenistan to frequent social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The considerable soft power that the West gains over the youth in these often hostile or hermetic states is worth the occasional use of the network for financial crimes.
Read my post again. I am talking about local conservatives decrying the emigration of their compatriots with all of the brain drain and absentee parents that entails. I am not talking about other conservatives decrying the immigration of foreign workers.
Conservatives certainly emphasize the importance of a stable family and decry the attempt to replace parents with govt programs, but I've never heard any conservative object ideologically about moving one's family to take a better job.
Come to Eastern Europe where movement of people away to Western Europe for better jobs is often decried by the right.
Nokia N900 owners can tell you of installing EasyDebian on their phones to run e.g. desktop Firefox and LibreOffice. As Sailfish inherits much of the same functionality, and it can run Android apps, I imagine that we might see EasyDebian on Jolla phones eventually. Apparently the only obstacle is that EasyDebian requires X11, but Sailfish doesn't have it, but this may be resolved with increasing uptake of Wayland within the Debian project.
There are plenty of jobs out there ("We are experiencing a heavier call volume than usual, please be prepared to wait up to 40 minutes to speak to someone."
Have you not considered that phone support is a loss center, not a profit center? It may be that the company would lose more money on hiring more call center workers than they would get from people happy about the shorter waiting time. Human beings, even when paid fairly low salaries, are not cheap.
There are plenty of examples of unreasonably risk-adverse companies, but I don't think this is one.
Then people can go to where the laws are how they like them instead of having bad ones forced on them at a federal level.
For one, not everyone wants to move. Many of the people who call for a hands-off federal government would be quick to emphasize the value of family and stable local communities. Conservatives everywhere deplore the brain-drain and family disruption that comes with people migrating away from an area for better work elsewhere.
But even when people want to move, there's a general expectation that things work more or less the same everywhere. Sure, there are still some cultural differences between large regions, but the US isn't 13 distinct colonies any more. If the American Revolution happened today in our hyper-connected world, there definitely wouldn't be the same call for devolution and autonomy as in the days of the Founding Fathers.
You misunderstand my post. I don't mean that bloggers advertise their own site to "bring in eyeballs", I mean that bloggers can get something in return for their hard work by including advertising from other businesses within their blog.
For example, I blog on an academic field and so in virtually every post I mention books. By linking said books to Amazon with a referrer account, I get a decent amount of money each month.
Finnegans Wake (note that there is no apostrophe) is entirely coherent and enjoyable as long as one has the linguistic background to understand the constant (and rather tiresome) punning in the book. In any event, this particular book is a case for the value of editors, as the Rose & Oâ(TM)Hanlon edition is vastly superior to the error-ridden text now in the public domain and widely sold.
Damn, son, do you have any reading comprehension skills? Of course I mentioned hipsters. The point of my post above was that offering non-book items of interest to this lucrative demographic is one major way that bookstores are staying afloat. But how you got from that to your misquote "Indie bookstores are only for hipsters" is beyond me: bookstores continue to offer items that interest non-hipsters, but they simply aren't as powerful a profit centre.
People used to have their own web sites about their hobbies and interests..
And they continued to do so until well after the explosion of advertising. Blogging through convenient, easy-to-use platforms only became a thing in the early to mid years of the first decade of the new millennium.
At least in some special-interest niches, blogging is now on the wane, with people moving to Twitter or simply falling silent. There are shortening attention spans, plus the fact that sites like StackExchange and Wikipedia are better centralized places to send the content that one creates instead of keeping it on an obscure personal website.
Many bloggers give up because they are unable to monetize their blogging, leaving them wondering what was the point of expending such effort on creating content when they get nothing in return. In fact, deft use of advertising actually helps ordinary people continue to stay focused on a personal website.
Just wait until Comcast, U-verse, and anybody else who can make sure there's a way to send data about you back to them starts to show FORCIBLY INTERACTIVE videos that quiz you about the ad content & make you re-watch the ad until you get the answers right.
Advertisement CAPTCHAs have been a thing for years now, just not so widespread. The CAPTCHA will be next to a big banner ad for a product, and you'll be asked to enter the name of the product into the text box to proceed.
Television is funded by a 2414-kroner annual license fee. That allows broadcasting without advertising, but it's not free: citizens are paying for it very directly.
When people say "internet", they mean content showing their favorite celebrities, mainstream news, and the same special-interest articles that used to appear in print manages. They don't mean a bunch of bearded, pasty-faced nerds discussing filk music and making obscure UNIX jokes on Usenet like the "internet that ran fine before the ads" that you are thinking of.
Way to misquote me. I never said that such shops were "only for hipsters". However, there's no denying that in certain markets, hipsters make up a powerful consumer force, and a shop can stay afloat by expanding its stock to meet their demand. However, I do wonder what will happen to these shops when fashion changes, as it inevitably will.
Brick and mortar retail is still there and taking up more real-estate than ever.
Yeah, I'm still waiting for a citation that the amount of floor space dedicated to books in retail stores (as opposed to other products) has actually increased in recent years.
Professional editing isn't just about the appearance of a text on the page, it can also be about making the text coherent and understandable. Kindle-only books on Amazon are often riddled with errors like one passage accidently moved to the wrong part of the book by a careless cut-and-paste operation, a footnote number linking to a different footnote that has nothing to do with the passage in question, or confusing, non-standard terminology for the field in quetion. Sometimes hyperlinks, whether because of improper formatting or negligence on the part of the publisher, don't go to the external sites they should. A spellchecker doesn't catch any of this.
Furthermore, even within ebook publishing, there is still a need for someone more computer savvy than the average author to have a look at the manuscript. For hyphenation to work correctly in next-generation e-readers (ditto for audiobook support), someone has to tag foreign-language words with the right ISO-639 tags. Image floating is still difficult to get right and requires some human intervention.
BIG bookstores are dying. The independent bookstores seem to be multiplying, after what seemed like iminent death at the hands of Borders, B&N and BAM.
Could you please cite evidence for this "renaissance"? While local smaller bookstores are hanging on, they aren't surviving as bookstores per se: they have massively cut the floor space dedicated to books and instead are selling hipster accoutrements: tea sets, Lomography cameras, vinyl records, and hip stationary. Reading is down considerably in recent years, and what books are read can be had cheapest online.
How has this being a global economy made it easier for Americans to go to Western Europe for example to work?
EU legislation for hiring foreign workers is easily comparable to the US H1-B system. So, Indian workers can come to the US when an American company asserts a skill shortage, and Americans can go to Europe when a EU company asserts a skills shortage.
Sadly I have to agree. Doing fieldwork among Russian villagers, I had long been used to the appalling prevalance of alcoholism among the male population, but the rise in heroin use (or heroin substitute use like krokodil) is yet another nail in the demographic suicide coffin.
That said, the Yamal Peninsula is Nenets country, and while alcoholism is known among that population, I'd be surprised if hard drug were common there yet, as it is probably off the supply chain.
"I don't use the library because it has a shitty selection" doesn't wash for a large amount of public libraries in the United States. Inter-library loan can get you whatever title you want, no matter how obscure, for a fee of as little as 50 cents (or even for free).
Slashdot Mirror
With the UK and Scotland, no politician's life depends on the outcome. Whatever happens with the Scottish referendum, the people in office now expect to eventually depart from office and enter some cushy retirement position.
With Russia, Putin cannot afford to back down from a display of military might: it keeps his support among the masses high, and intimidates other post-Soviet states like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan which he hopes to bring into his Eurasian Union. If Putin were to back down and support a peaceful resolution whose outcome might not satisfy Russian nationalists, he could find himself out of power. It's not a matter of him being done in by the West like a Saddam or Milosevic; that claim of Western conspiracy against him is just played for the cameras. The fact is that he's got enough enemies within Russian elite circles, he's pissed too many people off, that if his hold on power weakens, he'll certainly end up imprisoned or dead.
Qatar is quite a ways away from the Levant. I think you meant "Jordan".
And for what it's worth, Israel controls the border between the West Bank and Jordan.
Stripping DRM from an ebook is a trivial process. For mass-market ebooks like the sort you can get from Amazon, DRM removal is automated in Calibre when you import the book, as long as you've installed the relevant plugin. For scholarly works made available in PDF, cracking the antiquated Adobe Digital Editions DRM is also not especially difficult and, while I've never tried, can probably be automated as well because the inventory of pirate ebook sites grows so large by the day that I doubt it is being done by hand.
You can quibble about legalities, but with the current DRM being so half-ass, you can have a lasting collection of ebooks free of the seller's whim.
It's a shame that this "Republican poster" gets so many replies when it is clear even to casual followers of Slashdot that he is a troll who posts the same thing ("Republicans hate X", "Republicans took away Y") in various thread on a daily basis.
For me, a real sign of the death of Slashdot is the predictability of the trolls. The Republican troll and the Space Nutter troll (who may be one and the same, though I've never counted), offer only this invariable single-issue shtick instead of making things wacky and unpredictable like classic trolls of yore.
It has also been an enabler for millions of people in Iran, Syria and Turkmenistan to frequent social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The considerable soft power that the West gains over the youth in these often hostile or hermetic states is worth the occasional use of the network for financial crimes.
Read my post again. I am talking about local conservatives decrying the emigration of their compatriots with all of the brain drain and absentee parents that entails. I am not talking about other conservatives decrying the immigration of foreign workers.
Come to Eastern Europe where movement of people away to Western Europe for better jobs is often decried by the right.
Nokia N900 owners can tell you of installing EasyDebian on their phones to run e.g. desktop Firefox and LibreOffice. As Sailfish inherits much of the same functionality, and it can run Android apps, I imagine that we might see EasyDebian on Jolla phones eventually. Apparently the only obstacle is that EasyDebian requires X11, but Sailfish doesn't have it, but this may be resolved with increasing uptake of Wayland within the Debian project.
Have you not considered that phone support is a loss center, not a profit center? It may be that the company would lose more money on hiring more call center workers than they would get from people happy about the shorter waiting time. Human beings, even when paid fairly low salaries, are not cheap.
There are plenty of examples of unreasonably risk-adverse companies, but I don't think this is one.
For one, not everyone wants to move. Many of the people who call for a hands-off federal government would be quick to emphasize the value of family and stable local communities. Conservatives everywhere deplore the brain-drain and family disruption that comes with people migrating away from an area for better work elsewhere.
But even when people want to move, there's a general expectation that things work more or less the same everywhere. Sure, there are still some cultural differences between large regions, but the US isn't 13 distinct colonies any more. If the American Revolution happened today in our hyper-connected world, there definitely wouldn't be the same call for devolution and autonomy as in the days of the Founding Fathers.
You misunderstand my post. I don't mean that bloggers advertise their own site to "bring in eyeballs", I mean that bloggers can get something in return for their hard work by including advertising from other businesses within their blog.
For example, I blog on an academic field and so in virtually every post I mention books. By linking said books to Amazon with a referrer account, I get a decent amount of money each month.
Finnegans Wake (note that there is no apostrophe) is entirely coherent and enjoyable as long as one has the linguistic background to understand the constant (and rather tiresome) punning in the book. In any event, this particular book is a case for the value of editors, as the Rose & Oâ(TM)Hanlon edition is vastly superior to the error-ridden text now in the public domain and widely sold.
Damn, son, do you have any reading comprehension skills? Of course I mentioned hipsters. The point of my post above was that offering non-book items of interest to this lucrative demographic is one major way that bookstores are staying afloat. But how you got from that to your misquote "Indie bookstores are only for hipsters" is beyond me: bookstores continue to offer items that interest non-hipsters, but they simply aren't as powerful a profit centre.
And they continued to do so until well after the explosion of advertising. Blogging through convenient, easy-to-use platforms only became a thing in the early to mid years of the first decade of the new millennium.
At least in some special-interest niches, blogging is now on the wane, with people moving to Twitter or simply falling silent. There are shortening attention spans, plus the fact that sites like StackExchange and Wikipedia are better centralized places to send the content that one creates instead of keeping it on an obscure personal website.
Many bloggers give up because they are unable to monetize their blogging, leaving them wondering what was the point of expending such effort on creating content when they get nothing in return. In fact, deft use of advertising actually helps ordinary people continue to stay focused on a personal website.
Advertisement CAPTCHAs have been a thing for years now, just not so widespread. The CAPTCHA will be next to a big banner ad for a product, and you'll be asked to enter the name of the product into the text box to proceed.
Television is funded by a 2414-kroner annual license fee. That allows broadcasting without advertising, but it's not free: citizens are paying for it very directly.
s/manages/magazines/.
When people say "internet", they mean content showing their favorite celebrities, mainstream news, and the same special-interest articles that used to appear in print manages. They don't mean a bunch of bearded, pasty-faced nerds discussing filk music and making obscure UNIX jokes on Usenet like the "internet that ran fine before the ads" that you are thinking of.
Way to misquote me. I never said that such shops were "only for hipsters". However, there's no denying that in certain markets, hipsters make up a powerful consumer force, and a shop can stay afloat by expanding its stock to meet their demand. However, I do wonder what will happen to these shops when fashion changes, as it inevitably will.
Yeah, I'm still waiting for a citation that the amount of floor space dedicated to books in retail stores (as opposed to other products) has actually increased in recent years.
Professional editing isn't just about the appearance of a text on the page, it can also be about making the text coherent and understandable. Kindle-only books on Amazon are often riddled with errors like one passage accidently moved to the wrong part of the book by a careless cut-and-paste operation, a footnote number linking to a different footnote that has nothing to do with the passage in question, or confusing, non-standard terminology for the field in quetion. Sometimes hyperlinks, whether because of improper formatting or negligence on the part of the publisher, don't go to the external sites they should. A spellchecker doesn't catch any of this.
Furthermore, even within ebook publishing, there is still a need for someone more computer savvy than the average author to have a look at the manuscript. For hyphenation to work correctly in next-generation e-readers (ditto for audiobook support), someone has to tag foreign-language words with the right ISO-639 tags. Image floating is still difficult to get right and requires some human intervention.
Could you please cite evidence for this "renaissance"? While local smaller bookstores are hanging on, they aren't surviving as bookstores per se: they have massively cut the floor space dedicated to books and instead are selling hipster accoutrements: tea sets, Lomography cameras, vinyl records, and hip stationary. Reading is down considerably in recent years, and what books are read can be had cheapest online.
EU legislation for hiring foreign workers is easily comparable to the US H1-B system. So, Indian workers can come to the US when an American company asserts a skill shortage, and Americans can go to Europe when a EU company asserts a skills shortage.
Sadly I have to agree. Doing fieldwork among Russian villagers, I had long been used to the appalling prevalance of alcoholism among the male population, but the rise in heroin use (or heroin substitute use like krokodil) is yet another nail in the demographic suicide coffin.
That said, the Yamal Peninsula is Nenets country, and while alcoholism is known among that population, I'd be surprised if hard drug were common there yet, as it is probably off the supply chain.
"I don't use the library because it has a shitty selection" doesn't wash for a large amount of public libraries in the United States. Inter-library loan can get you whatever title you want, no matter how obscure, for a fee of as little as 50 cents (or even for free).