This is completely inane, considering how easy and cheap it would have been to just add a second freaking button.
As someone who has worked in usability testing let me assure you, a regular two button mouse or trackpad is one of the most common sources of usability problems. Power users learn whatever hardware they have. Novice users don't know when to right click or when to left click or which they've done in the past. A significant number of users always click both buttons at once when clicking and hence have no idea why every tenth time or so it behaves differently. Many, many users never, ever, ever find functions accessible by right-clicking and just forego all uses that require it.
Apple did something very smart with the virtual second button. They took advantage of the ease of multiple user accounts on the Mac and made a system that accomodates both novices and experts using the same hardware by changing the functionality in software. For users of shared machines, this is a huge win. For the computer in the living room that four different people use, the geek in the family no longer has to unplug the simple mouse and plug in the 4 button mouse, they just change some settings in their user preferences. And grandma is not confused and just has one button that works for everything.
The "mighty mouse" is not perfect. Personally, I always use trackballs. But for a versatile all around mouse where one size fits all, it is a real improvement on the current state of the art.
But I thought most tasers have two modes: ranged mode and contact mode.
I suppose it is possible such a device exists, but all the ones I've seen have the cartridge on the end with no exposed contacts. I don't see such a model listed on Taser's Website You have to fire it (ranged mode as you describe it) and then you can deliver multiple shocks down the deployed wires. Nothing counts the number of times it sends a shock once fired so you could have cases where people are shocked a dozen times or more (like the guy who died last year).
Traditional stun guns, which do not deploy probes and require contact are often carried as well, and they do not count the number of times they are fired either, you just get new, standard batteries.
I don't know about these incidents, but if they were as you describe I agree these are completely unacceptable.
They did indeed happen as well as many other examples of abuse, because tasering someone is not considered a serious thing by police, after all it is non-lethal. Amnesty international wrote a report in 2004 detailing many such incidents including the use of tasers on people already handcuffed or in a cell, the elderly, pregnant women, handicapped, autistic people, and children (in some cases people who are in more than one of these categories). In one case a 12 year old boy who was handcuffed and on the ground was tasered twice for yelling at the officer. In another 4 different 14 year old girls were tasered by a school official and use in schools on children has risen dramatically in the last 10 years.
Amnesty international has since said despite the many documented deaths and abuses almost every police department contacted has ignored their recommendations and refused to create rules for responsible use of tasers.
WTF? Police have a duty to apprehend people who are committing serious offenses;
If a person is committing a crime, or is being arrested, sure the cops won't just walk away, but that does not mean they have to act with violence either. In many cases they can simply talk to a person until they realize the problem is not going away and surrender. In other cases, such as the elderly woman I described, there was no crime and they certainly could have just walked away instead of shocking her.
Police should never ever be tasering someone who can be dealt with simply by talking to them. So, I disagree that talking to someone or walking away would ever be an alternative to tasering them.
But they are, like on children hiding under the deck at their parent's house who refuse to come out and be taken to a foster home.
The ultimate extreme of force is to shoot someone; this is reserved for stopping an immediate, otherwise unavoidable danger of death or grave bodily harm to the innocent.
The point is, for the most part use of tasers when no one is in immediate danger of physical injury is unwarranted. The police, however, seem to think that because it does not kill, it is okay to use it to torture people into compliance... and make no mistake that is what it is, using repeated application of pain to punish people until they do what you want.
Police departments have "the book", and officers are supposed to "go by the book" (follow the rules). I agree that the guidelines in the book should forbid tasering punks to shut their smart mouths. However, I suspect that "the book" already forbids this.
The problem is most departments have little or no guidelines for when use of tasers is appropriate and have resisted efforts to create such regulations. Also, there is no accountability. Whenever an officer fires their gun, they have to justify that action and explain why it was necessary. In most cases when they taser someone, they just have to go pick up more ammo for it and no one takes it seriously.
Perhaps the best policy would be to issue tasers that have tamper-proof counters that increment each time they are used, and require officers to file a report each time they use the taser. Sure, more paperwork, as if they don't have enough... but at least it might make them think twice before tasering a punk, because they will be asked to justify doing so.
I basically agree, although most actual tasers load only a single set of probes then need to be reloaded. They should count the number of discharges that go through them and officers should be held accountable, which maybe this UN report will help make a reality.
There will come a time where only the worst most corrupt people will become cops because they're the only ones willing to deal with the ridiculous rules fosted on them.
In some places we're already there. The problem is, some cops honestly and truly want to help people, but they have a hard time because of the other cops. From the cops I know, they are already in the minority. The thing is, rules restricting cops from using tasers when no one is being threatened don't interfere with a normal cops duties at all and don't make their job any harder.
Have you ever asked yourself what it would take to make a Cop's job better?
Better funding and better pay would be a start. Also, better rules so that the corrupt cops who just want to hurt people and control them are caught and fired so people begin to trust them again. Why would any cop who is honestly trying to help people object to being restricted from using a taser on a person who is no threat?
ok, tasers kill some people, and they hurt except that, you need to give cops SOMETHING to control people. that cops will use these tools outside of the proper scenarios is a given: cops will always use lethal and nonlethal tools in ways they shouldn't. yes, you can make the case that because it is supposed to be nonlethal, they will use them when otherwise a few well chosen words would suffice instead
So maybe what we need are some better regulations and laws regarding how and when cops are allowed to use tasers, like only when someone is in physical danger?
this is actually how propaganda works...
This isn't propaganda. Tasers cause significant pain. They are used to torture people, and they are used by police to torture people. Classifying them as torture devices is appropriate. That is not to say they should be banned, only that when a cop tasers someone unnecessarily, or repeatedly, they should be convicted of torture.
people will go in to blinders mode
Really? How many posts here have advocated banning tasers? I didn't see any. If people were putting on blinders and seeing only the negative, I'd think that is exactly what people would be advocating. It looks more to me like you're putting on blinders to some degree and seeing this as an attack on the use of tasers, instead of simply an accurate classification of them that can and should be used to help guide how they are used.
I won't bother denying that it doesn't get abused, but I do think that it is important to recognize that somebody that is tazered is far less likely to come to permanent harm than one that has been shot.
Yes but a person who is tasered is often a lot more likely to come to harm than a person who would never have been shot. The cops who tasered Mr. Gaubert while he was incapacitated by a diabetic coma, would be in jail if they had just shot him. Ditto for the officer who tasered the 87 year old woman in a wheelchair who yelled at her.
Abuse would likely also happen if officers just had firearms as well. I don't personally think that that would be a better situation. At least with tazers, mace and pepper spray the likelihood of having somebody to apologize to is far higher than with a firearm.
Sometimes that is true and sometimes it isn't. You assume the alternative to tasering someone is to pull a gun on them. In truth, the alternative is often just to stand back and talk to them, or simply walk away from them.
It is quite another to actually have to deal with both sides of the story and try to reconcile them in a way that suits the public interest rather than inflaming tensions between different groups of people.
I know quite a few cops. My brother used to be one and a friend of mine sells tasers as part of his law enforcement equipment business. I have heard the stories of punishing some "punk kid" or "nigger" or "hippy" and shutting their smart mouth up with a taser. Those same cops would never have fired their weapon in the same situation because they'd be held accountable, probably for murder.
I'm not arguing tasers don't have their uses and should not be used, but hopefully this classification by the UN will get police departments to look seriously at their rules for using them and start to help curb their overuse and use in inappropriate situations, as well as provide support for private lawsuits that will help do the same thing.
Does it change your preference whether the guy should be shot or tasered?
No, but hopefully it will change some laws and regulations about whether a person should be talked to or tasered in situations where no one would consider shooting them to be appropriate or even vaguely legal.
Don't break the law and you won't risk your life to a taser.
Bullshit. Because tasers are supposed to be nonlethal they are often abused and used on people who have broken no laws at all. See the recent case of the man who went into a diabetic coma and was subsequently tasered while lying helpless. See the case of the 87 year old woman who was tasered at her rest home for yelling at a police officer from her wheelchair. Neither broke the law, but both were put in danger.
I fail to see how something that is painful and has a non-zero chance of death is automatically torture and should be outlawed. By that measure we should outlaw the average daily commute.
Have you ever been tasered? I volunteered to try it. It really hurts, a lot more than a punch to the face even. Have you ever seen the TV show Cops, where they'll hit a guy multiple times while they're laying on the floor. Tasers make muscles contract, and you fall down. That's great, since then they can subdue and cuff a violent offender. Hitting someone more than once, however, is simply torturing someone into compliance. That is torture, unlike a daily commute. Don't believe me, go to a store that sells them and ask for a test shot, a regular 500K stun gun is pretty similar, if tasers are not available to civilians in your state.
How can transgenic crops kill off the local species if they're sterile?
I think the previous poster drastically oversimplified and is a bit confused to boot. The problems with patented sterile crops, is when those crops are resistant to a defoliant which is drastically overused (like RoundUpReady crops) where the US is eliminating the local crops en masse (like all the coffee destroyed by our attempts to poison all the cocaine crops) or by our burning of crops in Iraq and then "free" distribution of patented seeds, which is only free for a few years and then the locals will need to either find a supply of untainted grain and start all over again or start paying royalties to Monsanto.
The other problem in the first world is patented crops which do crossbreed and then the resulting lawsuits as you try to prove you did not intentionally crossbreed your crops with the farm upwind of you.
Just for fun, I looked through the first page of machines from that link and looked at each item for sale for under $160. I excluded all of them that said they were missing a battery or hard drive or power supply or that said they were broken and would not work. Of the first 25, that left one item, which claimed it came with 96Gb of memory. Sure. Maybe you need to narrow your search a little bit to working laptops, with all their parts. And that is not even taking into consideration that these are not ruggedized, don't have adaptors for a hand crank generator, and mostly don't have wi-fi and an OS with drivers to actually run all the hardware.
That particular idea is fundamentally flawed. If there is one thing that we have learned from the technology-based industry in the western world, it's that the vast majority of people have absolutely no ability to work in it. It's not like farming - if you can hold a stick, you can be a farmer.
I said work in intellectual property including custom software. Today, a few thousand people with these laptops could probably make more than they do now, by solving captchas. Pretty much anyone can learn to be literate and to read/write several languages with a few years of training, so they can be paid for translation work and editing. Then there is original content production, data entry, etc.
To write custom software worth paying for takes ten years of near-full-time experience and practice, a flexible mind, and the ability to think. People in the third world are not going to be any better at doing these things than we are, and we suck at it.
Right, so they're no better at it than we are, but have a thousand times the unemployment rate in some localities and will work for one one hundredth the cost.
You do not turn farmers into knowledge-based workers by giving them a laptop.
First, they aren't farmers now, they're children without much in the way of skills because farming does not pay enough to pay taxes on the land when the US is giving the same food away for free. You turn them into knowledge based workers by giving them a laptop and network access and a wealth of educational data and software specifically designed to be easy to modify for their entire childhood. It is called an education, and growing up with a basic laptop, wikipedia, and internet access will allow them to develop computing skills as they grow. Did you have access to a computer when you were young? Do you know many people who program who did not?
There are no short cuts in establishing a modern-style economy across half a planet - it takes centuries of work, in education, industry, construction, and technological development.
Does the phrase "modern-style economy" actually mean anything? An economy is an economy and providing tools that educate and are usable, certainly can make a real difference.
If this endeavour is going to have any benefits at all (and that's pretty questionable - whether it's worthwhile is open to debate, but it is definitely not certain that it will be), this is not going to be one of them.
Okay your skepticism is noted. That said, this is the best effort I've ever seen to provide a sustainable income for people growing up in some of these countries. If you think giving up is a better idea, then there is not a lot of point talking to you, otherwise; let's hear your better and more effective idea.
The thing is, Negroponte's $100 laptop suffers from the same flaw as Ford's Model T ultimately did. A used computer will probably give you more capability than a cheap new one. I think for $150, you could buy a notebook that's better than this "everyman's computer", and while you were at it, you could probably buy a used generator.
The cheapest I can find a hand powered generator capable of powering a laptop, even used, is about $60. The cheapest I can find used laptops online is about $200. How much value there in the tailored OS, preloaded with software and reference material and preconfigured to be ideal in the conditions of the third world?
I think you're very mistaken. Getting a good laptop that will work well for children in these situations, with questionable access to electricity is a lot harder than you seem to imply. And even if you do, it probably will still fail to meet the second half of the criteria, which is to say it is all free and easily editable/customizable without any lock-in to a particular vendor. The first world has undercut the agricultural sector in much of the third world and catching them up with agricultural equipment and fertilizer production would cost a huge amount. Providing them with the foundation to enter into the intellectual property industry, including custom software. This is a chance for them to develop a sustainable industry and income and offer their services to the world.
Source? IANAL, but my understanding is that you may invoke the Fifth whenever your testimony could be used to convict you of a crime, whether the testimony in question would occur in a civil or criminal case, and whether or not you actually stand accused of a crime.
All the prosecutor has to do in such a case is invoke "use immunity" which says they won't use that evidence itself in a future criminal trial. Here's a discussion of the general topic. If you're not under threat of prosecution for an actual crime and they agree not to pursue such, then your testimony can be compelled.
See United States v. Hubbell.
That's pretty interesting if it is a criminal proceeding against you, it does allow you to indirectly apply the 5th amendment. Cool.
I don't know about where you're from, but here in the U.S. we still (for now, at least) have something called the Fifth Amendment.
The 5th amendment only applies if you in particular are charged with a crime. If you are subpoenaed or being sued and the court orders you to reveal the password, you will go to jail for contempt of court if you refuse to submit it. Even when charged with a criminal offense, not being testimony as to your actions, it may well hold up in court to charge you. Finally, in many parts of the world legislation requiring this has already been passed and at least three bills in congress have specifically required this, although to my knowledge none have yet passed.
Basically, unless you have a whole buttload of money to burn and are feeling lucky and are charged with a crime, don't count on the 5th amendment.
OTR actually has deniability built in to it. Once the conversation is finished it impossible to prove what the conversation text was.
Which is pretty decent. The only item lacking is if the feds demand your password so they can impersonate you talking to someone else. A nice dummy password that will allow them to do that, but presage the first message with a warning that the channel is compromised.
"I do not recall." If it's good enough for the administration to use and get away with, it's good enough for me.
Unless you're in the administration, that will get you tossed in jail. Normal citizens require plausible deniability. For hard drive encryption, this can be accomplished by saving dummy data accessible with a second password. For IM, perhaps we need something similar. If an IM client were to give a user the option of using a dummy password which would still initiate encrypted messages, but with a warning flag to the user on the other end, we might have parity.
Encryption technologies that provide plausible deniability are possible, but I doubt they will enter widespread use (or even encryption in general) until the big players champion them. Why one of the major IM providers has not jumped on this as a differentiating feature is beyond me. I guess I see why Google would not include it in GTalk, seeing as they want to use the data to target ads (ditto yahoo and MS), but why isn't it built into ichat yet?
Also one KDE component can call any other running component at run time using the dkop interface in KDE 3 & dbus in KDE4 what does apples system services do above and beyond this?
The OS X system allows the user to drop a file in a directory and all applications will gain the functionality, regardless of whether or not the programmer of that application knew such a service existed. The OS X system allows an application to offer services to other applications, regardless of whether or not the programmers of those applications did anything.
Think of it this way, KDE does not ship with a grammar checker by default, thus no one is going to code their apps to use some third party grammar checking KPart library that is not on most systems. Now suppose you buy a commercial office suite like StarOffice that offers some functionality, like thesaurus lookup. On OS X, it can offer that function as a service and Mail.app and Safari can both suddenly look up highlighted words in the thesaurus. On KDE there is no way for StarOffice to suddenly grant this ability in Kmail and Konquerer. Another example is, prior to the latest version OS X did not offer a built in grammar checker, even though such functionality is awfully useful to me for helping me proof documents. I just downloaded a free, third party one and dropped it in ~/Library/Services/ and suddenly my word processor, e-mail, Web browser, chat client, terminal, text editor, etc. all had the ability to check grammar. If there is a way to do this on Kubuntu I'd really love to hear how.
Here are some services I installed:
PDF to RTF
30 text conversions (line endings, tabs, encodings, etc.)
grammar checker
translation services between 14 languages
bibliography auto-formatting
search google and wikipedia
speak text english and german
summarize text
statistics on text
insert date/time in various formats
Here are some services that came as functions of applications:
graphing data sets
lookup words in 5 online dictionaries, a thesaurus, and an acronym database
calculate checksums
create font collection from selection
screenshot/timed screenshot
replace with thesaurus selection
mail selection to
Those are functions I use (I make most of my income writing), but the main benefit of this system is people can add the services they need, which they presumably know a lot better than the person writing a given application.
I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think every release of a product should have to force obvious new features down a user's throat...
I usually think of features as being offered. If they are not useful to me, I don't use them.
Personally I don't have much need for a new spellchecker or grammar checker, but to me they sound like things that would be better implemented as apps or plugins.
The problem with implementing a spelling or grammar checker outside of the design of the desktop environment, is that you don't want every app developer to have to implement their own both for efficiency and because it means it won't reach a lot of applications. I was hoping KDE would update KParts to catch up with OS X's system services so that applications and stand alone services could offer such functionality globally. I agree it is best to offer these as plug-ins, but plug-ins to the entire system, not just one app. Unfortunately, no such framework has yet been introduced in KDE.
What do those have that KParts don't? Never used OS X myself...
With OS X you can drop arbitrary functions in the Services or ~/Services directory or a service can be part of an application. Unlike KParts the developer of an application does not have to specifically include a service when they code it, rather it can be accessed by all applications, even if the developer of that application had no idea such a service existed. It is used in OS X for spell checking and grammar checking so it works everywhere, but applications like Graphviz offer to graph any random table of data in any application. Stand alone services do everything from translate text between languages to rot13 text.
KRunner is (will be) similar to OS X's Spotlight.
I've never seen or heard of KRunner. Is it a Beagle implementation, reusing the actual spotlight code from Darwin, or a from scratch implementation?
No grammar checking in 4.0, no.
That right there is where OS X's system services are a big win. Before Apple included one by default, I just installed a third party service for grammar checking everywhere.
And there's lots of years ahead of it, to make the most out of a really solid foundation... IOW if you want "meat", come back for 4.1.
I understand building a good foundation, I'm just a little disappointed that there is nothing in this foundation that is really novel and does not exist elsewhere already. I guess I keep hoping KDE will stop playing catch up and really leapfrog the competition in some way. KDE is solid and useful, but honestly if not for certain application's lack of support on OS X or Windows, Kubuntu might fall off my list of everyday OS's and become something to tinker with occasionally.
ALL electric and hybrid vehicles are priced way out of the reach of the typical american.
All the ones currently on the market, but if a market appears, cars will be priced to reach it. In some places for the first time the average cost of a car is lower than the price of gas needed to run it for a year. Also, Hybrids are new, the market will adjust over time and used hybrids will cost about the same as a used gas powered car today.
The payment on a $24,000.00 car is insane and therefore not afforadble by the masses only by the few rich people. Most people can afford USED cars under $8000.00 some stretch to the $14,000.00 mark but not many.
This is factually incorrect. The average sale price for a used car in the US last year was $9,877 and the median car sale (what the average person who bought a car spent) was $16,544.
the ONLY way to get this going is get subcompact efficient cars that are under $11,000.00 NEW.
I think you're making the mistake of assuming the changes I mentioned would immediately change the market, which is highly doubtful. Rising gas prices will correspondingly dirve down the cost for used gas powered cars.
The guy barely making it at a paltry $16.00 an hour will suffer huge because he HAS to drive a old low gas mileage car to work and back.
The only way to promote change is to make sure the entire market is motivated to change. Take a look at the number of people in Europe who drive subcompact cars, motorcycle, and mopeds compares to areas of the US with a similar climate.
So your plan is to punish the poor?
I dn't want to punish anyone, just let everyone pay the real cost of the products they use so they can decide which one works for them. Right now and for many years we've been paying people to choose gas over other alternatives and we've been paying part of the cost if they use unneeded gas. I think that should stop.
Want that Fararri? you get to subsidise 20 Smart fortwo's to be sold at 1/2 price to poor families.
I'm not opposed to subsidies as they are funding environmental benefits and reducing our strategic reliance on outside sources of energy, but they should be in addition to removing subsidies on gas, not in addition to it.
The poor kid making minimum wage will only be able to afford that prius when he can buy it for $800.00.
Yeah, and would you care to bet in 10 years what a Prius will cost (assuming any still run?)
Nice to hear, but EV's won't be feasible until the costs and reliability approach those of gas vehicles ( or when gas goes up to 10 bucks a gallon ). They also move the problem upsteam to the power plants.
I think most people on Slashdot probably understand what it will take. We need to stop subsidizing oil companies with tax dollars. We need to stop spending billions on wars to secure supplies for oil companies. We need to pass strict legislation to regulate the types of power plants that can be built based upon the real costs to the citizens. We need to legislate a date within the next decade when coal plants are required to meet emission, waste, and safety standards and stop approving new, unclean coal plants. Then, when the real costs of all these industries are borne by those industries, we need to let the market sort it out and provide the most cost effective solution.
I suspect politicians and their advisors know this as well. I just don't think any of them are as interested in making it happen as they are in making sure their re-election campaign is well funded and they're owed political favors.
Well, I can't say I object to any of these improvements, but most of them seem pretty minor and incremental. Cleaner APIs and more efficient libraries are nice. For the end user, where's the meat of this release? Okay now it supports Widgets. Well, that can be sort of useful if there is a good selection of them. I've heard claims they added support for OS X native widgets and that could help a lot to make this actually useful. Anyone actually tried using them yet?
When a new full version comes out and I find myself looking forward to the improved spellchecker, because it is still worse architecturally than on other platforms I use, but at least it is better... well I start to wonder what happened. I'm not trying to put down the developers or anything, this is obviously a lot of work, especially Dolphin, but I guess I was hoping for more. When will KParts be upgraded to work like OS X system services? Where's grammar checking? Where's anything we haven't seen on another OS/Window manager already? As a Kubuntu user, I guess I'm just not really as excited by this as I'd like to be.
The iPhone actually isn't just a phone. In fact, it's arguable whether or not it's among the best phones out there. There are phones with simpler--i.e. phone only--interfaces, nicer form factors (little flip phones, for example) and probably better sound, clearer reception, etc.
I disagree. I've owned four different cellphones in my life. I generally buy cheap and simple phones, but all of them available seem to be gaining bullet point features. To me, the basic features of a phone are:
easy to answer
easy to put in silent mode
easy to call an arbitrary number
easy to enter a new number/contact
easy to call a contact
I seriously wish any of the phones I've owned were as easy to use for those tasks as the iPhone, when I tested it.
I believe you're right that people do want converged devices, but there is more to it. My current cellphone has functions I never use, not because they could not be useful to me, but because they don't work very well, are hard to get to, or I never bothered figuring out the crappy interface to them. The iPhone is succeeding because while it may not do everything a Blackberry does, those things it does, are easy to learn and easy to use. Unless Apple makes a polished workflow/interface for acquiring and viewing ebooks, I don't think it is a threat to that market.
Re:Don't understand the Kindle at all... for the..
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Kindle Versus The iPhone
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I beg to differ. There were numerous easy to use tools available for ripping CDs long before iTunes.
I know people who installed iTunes solely for the purpose of ripping their CD collection, because that process was too hard with the software that came with their mp3 player. Heck, two people came over to my place to rip their collection on my mac, because they could not figure out how on their own system. "Easy to use" is relative, and I'm not sure you're considering it as it applies to the general populace instead of geeks.
It was the full integration from top to bottom with purchasing albums that put it over the top.
It was the full experience, but not so much for purchasing. Last time I saw a survey something like 1.5% of music on the average iPod was purchased from any online store, with the rest being ripped CDs and P2P downloads.
You can't "rip" a book except in the literal sense anyway and 99.99% of the population doesn't already own books in electronic form. So, they don't give a damn about that.
People had collections of CDs and were using portable CD players. Almost no one owned an mp3 player when the iPod premiered. The iPod was a success because it let people easily move that music onto the iPod without repurchasing everything. Some ripped it and some just snagged it from P2P networks. People do give a damn about repurchasing all their books, although it is questionable if anyone will have a solution. One possibility is if the reader hardware becomes good enough, P2P networks will start carrying books. Another, is this will cause people to be more price conscious. If they're not just buying new music, but repurchasing their entire library, they will not be willing to pay more than the cost of a used version of that book for old titles.
As for Amazon locking people in...well, that's worked pretty well for Apple.
Ahh, but as I stated, Apple did everything possible to be non-threatening to the existing publishers who control all the legacy content. Amazon is not being non-threatening at all, directly competing with them as well as trying to get them to cooperate. As for Apple's lock-in, in case you hadn't noticed they're now selling DRM-free content at the same price they were selling DRM'd content. In truth, Apple doesn't care about control of the publishing, they just want it as cheap and easy as possible to sell more hardware.
Amazon DOES, in fact, work with publishers (look at the damn catalog if you don't believe me).
Of course they do, I never claimed otherwise. The difference is Apple refused offers to publish directly through them, strictly requiring a publisher of music to offer it to them. Amazon on the other hand has initiated a program to lure writers away from existing publishers and cut that publisher out of future profits. If it works, it will mean a lot more money for Amazon, but I doubt it will work unless Amazon has a lot more leverage than I think they do.
Even if they do, why do I give a damn about the publishers? If their business model is dead, then that's just too damn bad.
You don't have to give a damn about publishers, but surely you recognize that publishers give a damn about themselves and their profits? It speaks to whether or not the publishers will continue to cooperate with Amazon and if the device will be successful. A reason to care is because instead of having a loose, fairly weak cartel of publishers with room for independents, if ebooks take off, and Amazon grabs a big chunk of the market with DRM'd ebooks, that will no longer be the case and there will be one major publisher that can control prices, and extort more money via DRM, for example, by switching DRM schemes when moving to a new version of the device forcing you to buy all your content yet again once your existing reader dies. A little foresight can go a long way towards avoiding this crap.
"Profit on hardware, profit on software, even profit on content the user already owns." Sounds a lot like the iPod and iTunes which of course were total failures...
Actually, with the iPod and iTunes, it was made really easy for people to rip CDs, and was advertised as such, so most people could load the content they already had. It also supported the mp3 format, used by popular P2P services so many people re-downloaded music they had in other formats (as well as other music). How are you supposed to quickly and easily load your current books onto the Kindle?
It is also interesting that Apple ran and runs the iTunes store at near break-even pricing so they only really make money on the iPod, not on music sales. This somewhat appeases the publishers who are still super worried about how much this undermines their position as gatekeepers to the point that those publishers are willing to sell at lower prices to smaller volume online stores in order to prop up potential competitors. Apple refuses to sell content directly, requiring it to come from a publisher, whereas Amazon immediately started a program to sign up writers to sell directly from them, cutting out publishers entirely.
Kindle is a blatant power play by Amazon and they're trying to use their leverage as the biggest online seller of books to get both end users and publishers to slit their own throats by permanently locking themselves into Amazon as the only gatekeeper for books. I don't think they will pull it off though, since they have not provided enough value or ease of use.
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As someone who has worked in usability testing let me assure you, a regular two button mouse or trackpad is one of the most common sources of usability problems. Power users learn whatever hardware they have. Novice users don't know when to right click or when to left click or which they've done in the past. A significant number of users always click both buttons at once when clicking and hence have no idea why every tenth time or so it behaves differently. Many, many users never, ever, ever find functions accessible by right-clicking and just forego all uses that require it.
Apple did something very smart with the virtual second button. They took advantage of the ease of multiple user accounts on the Mac and made a system that accomodates both novices and experts using the same hardware by changing the functionality in software. For users of shared machines, this is a huge win. For the computer in the living room that four different people use, the geek in the family no longer has to unplug the simple mouse and plug in the 4 button mouse, they just change some settings in their user preferences. And grandma is not confused and just has one button that works for everything.
The "mighty mouse" is not perfect. Personally, I always use trackballs. But for a versatile all around mouse where one size fits all, it is a real improvement on the current state of the art.
I suppose it is possible such a device exists, but all the ones I've seen have the cartridge on the end with no exposed contacts. I don't see such a model listed on Taser's Website You have to fire it (ranged mode as you describe it) and then you can deliver multiple shocks down the deployed wires. Nothing counts the number of times it sends a shock once fired so you could have cases where people are shocked a dozen times or more (like the guy who died last year).
Traditional stun guns, which do not deploy probes and require contact are often carried as well, and they do not count the number of times they are fired either, you just get new, standard batteries.
They did indeed happen as well as many other examples of abuse, because tasering someone is not considered a serious thing by police, after all it is non-lethal. Amnesty international wrote a report in 2004 detailing many such incidents including the use of tasers on people already handcuffed or in a cell, the elderly, pregnant women, handicapped, autistic people, and children (in some cases people who are in more than one of these categories). In one case a 12 year old boy who was handcuffed and on the ground was tasered twice for yelling at the officer. In another 4 different 14 year old girls were tasered by a school official and use in schools on children has risen dramatically in the last 10 years.
Amnesty international has since said despite the many documented deaths and abuses almost every police department contacted has ignored their recommendations and refused to create rules for responsible use of tasers.
WTF? Police have a duty to apprehend people who are committing serious offenses;If a person is committing a crime, or is being arrested, sure the cops won't just walk away, but that does not mean they have to act with violence either. In many cases they can simply talk to a person until they realize the problem is not going away and surrender. In other cases, such as the elderly woman I described, there was no crime and they certainly could have just walked away instead of shocking her.
Police should never ever be tasering someone who can be dealt with simply by talking to them. So, I disagree that talking to someone or walking away would ever be an alternative to tasering them.But they are, like on children hiding under the deck at their parent's house who refuse to come out and be taken to a foster home.
The ultimate extreme of force is to shoot someone; this is reserved for stopping an immediate, otherwise unavoidable danger of death or grave bodily harm to the innocent.The point is, for the most part use of tasers when no one is in immediate danger of physical injury is unwarranted. The police, however, seem to think that because it does not kill, it is okay to use it to torture people into compliance... and make no mistake that is what it is, using repeated application of pain to punish people until they do what you want.
Police departments have "the book", and officers are supposed to "go by the book" (follow the rules). I agree that the guidelines in the book should forbid tasering punks to shut their smart mouths. However, I suspect that "the book" already forbids this.The problem is most departments have little or no guidelines for when use of tasers is appropriate and have resisted efforts to create such regulations. Also, there is no accountability. Whenever an officer fires their gun, they have to justify that action and explain why it was necessary. In most cases when they taser someone, they just have to go pick up more ammo for it and no one takes it seriously.
Perhaps the best policy would be to issue tasers that have tamper-proof counters that increment each time they are used, and require officers to file a report each time they use the taser. Sure, more paperwork, as if they don't have enough... but at least it might make them think twice before tasering a punk, because they will be asked to justify doing so.I basically agree, although most actual tasers load only a single set of probes then need to be reloaded. They should count the number of discharges that go through them and officers should be held accountable, which maybe this UN report will help make a reality.
In some places we're already there. The problem is, some cops honestly and truly want to help people, but they have a hard time because of the other cops. From the cops I know, they are already in the minority. The thing is, rules restricting cops from using tasers when no one is being threatened don't interfere with a normal cops duties at all and don't make their job any harder.
Have you ever asked yourself what it would take to make a Cop's job better?Better funding and better pay would be a start. Also, better rules so that the corrupt cops who just want to hurt people and control them are caught and fired so people begin to trust them again. Why would any cop who is honestly trying to help people object to being restricted from using a taser on a person who is no threat?
So maybe what we need are some better regulations and laws regarding how and when cops are allowed to use tasers, like only when someone is in physical danger?
this is actually how propaganda works...This isn't propaganda. Tasers cause significant pain. They are used to torture people, and they are used by police to torture people. Classifying them as torture devices is appropriate. That is not to say they should be banned, only that when a cop tasers someone unnecessarily, or repeatedly, they should be convicted of torture.
people will go in to blinders modeReally? How many posts here have advocated banning tasers? I didn't see any. If people were putting on blinders and seeing only the negative, I'd think that is exactly what people would be advocating. It looks more to me like you're putting on blinders to some degree and seeing this as an attack on the use of tasers, instead of simply an accurate classification of them that can and should be used to help guide how they are used.
Yes but a person who is tasered is often a lot more likely to come to harm than a person who would never have been shot. The cops who tasered Mr. Gaubert while he was incapacitated by a diabetic coma, would be in jail if they had just shot him. Ditto for the officer who tasered the 87 year old woman in a wheelchair who yelled at her.
Abuse would likely also happen if officers just had firearms as well. I don't personally think that that would be a better situation. At least with tazers, mace and pepper spray the likelihood of having somebody to apologize to is far higher than with a firearm.Sometimes that is true and sometimes it isn't. You assume the alternative to tasering someone is to pull a gun on them. In truth, the alternative is often just to stand back and talk to them, or simply walk away from them.
It is quite another to actually have to deal with both sides of the story and try to reconcile them in a way that suits the public interest rather than inflaming tensions between different groups of people.I know quite a few cops. My brother used to be one and a friend of mine sells tasers as part of his law enforcement equipment business. I have heard the stories of punishing some "punk kid" or "nigger" or "hippy" and shutting their smart mouth up with a taser. Those same cops would never have fired their weapon in the same situation because they'd be held accountable, probably for murder.
I'm not arguing tasers don't have their uses and should not be used, but hopefully this classification by the UN will get police departments to look seriously at their rules for using them and start to help curb their overuse and use in inappropriate situations, as well as provide support for private lawsuits that will help do the same thing.
No, but hopefully it will change some laws and regulations about whether a person should be talked to or tasered in situations where no one would consider shooting them to be appropriate or even vaguely legal.
Bullshit. Because tasers are supposed to be nonlethal they are often abused and used on people who have broken no laws at all. See the recent case of the man who went into a diabetic coma and was subsequently tasered while lying helpless. See the case of the 87 year old woman who was tasered at her rest home for yelling at a police officer from her wheelchair. Neither broke the law, but both were put in danger.
I fail to see how something that is painful and has a non-zero chance of death is automatically torture and should be outlawed. By that measure we should outlaw the average daily commute.Have you ever been tasered? I volunteered to try it. It really hurts, a lot more than a punch to the face even. Have you ever seen the TV show Cops, where they'll hit a guy multiple times while they're laying on the floor. Tasers make muscles contract, and you fall down. That's great, since then they can subdue and cuff a violent offender. Hitting someone more than once, however, is simply torturing someone into compliance. That is torture, unlike a daily commute. Don't believe me, go to a store that sells them and ask for a test shot, a regular 500K stun gun is pretty similar, if tasers are not available to civilians in your state.
I think the previous poster drastically oversimplified and is a bit confused to boot. The problems with patented sterile crops, is when those crops are resistant to a defoliant which is drastically overused (like RoundUpReady crops) where the US is eliminating the local crops en masse (like all the coffee destroyed by our attempts to poison all the cocaine crops) or by our burning of crops in Iraq and then "free" distribution of patented seeds, which is only free for a few years and then the locals will need to either find a supply of untainted grain and start all over again or start paying royalties to Monsanto.
The other problem in the first world is patented crops which do crossbreed and then the resulting lawsuits as you try to prove you did not intentionally crossbreed your crops with the farm upwind of you.
Just for fun, I looked through the first page of machines from that link and looked at each item for sale for under $160. I excluded all of them that said they were missing a battery or hard drive or power supply or that said they were broken and would not work. Of the first 25, that left one item, which claimed it came with 96Gb of memory. Sure. Maybe you need to narrow your search a little bit to working laptops, with all their parts. And that is not even taking into consideration that these are not ruggedized, don't have adaptors for a hand crank generator, and mostly don't have wi-fi and an OS with drivers to actually run all the hardware.
Color me unconvinced by your evidence.
I said work in intellectual property including custom software. Today, a few thousand people with these laptops could probably make more than they do now, by solving captchas. Pretty much anyone can learn to be literate and to read/write several languages with a few years of training, so they can be paid for translation work and editing. Then there is original content production, data entry, etc.
To write custom software worth paying for takes ten years of near-full-time experience and practice, a flexible mind, and the ability to think. People in the third world are not going to be any better at doing these things than we are, and we suck at it.Right, so they're no better at it than we are, but have a thousand times the unemployment rate in some localities and will work for one one hundredth the cost.
You do not turn farmers into knowledge-based workers by giving them a laptop.First, they aren't farmers now, they're children without much in the way of skills because farming does not pay enough to pay taxes on the land when the US is giving the same food away for free. You turn them into knowledge based workers by giving them a laptop and network access and a wealth of educational data and software specifically designed to be easy to modify for their entire childhood. It is called an education, and growing up with a basic laptop, wikipedia, and internet access will allow them to develop computing skills as they grow. Did you have access to a computer when you were young? Do you know many people who program who did not?
There are no short cuts in establishing a modern-style economy across half a planet - it takes centuries of work, in education, industry, construction, and technological development.Does the phrase "modern-style economy" actually mean anything? An economy is an economy and providing tools that educate and are usable, certainly can make a real difference.
If this endeavour is going to have any benefits at all (and that's pretty questionable - whether it's worthwhile is open to debate, but it is definitely not certain that it will be), this is not going to be one of them.Okay your skepticism is noted. That said, this is the best effort I've ever seen to provide a sustainable income for people growing up in some of these countries. If you think giving up is a better idea, then there is not a lot of point talking to you, otherwise; let's hear your better and more effective idea.
The cheapest I can find a hand powered generator capable of powering a laptop, even used, is about $60. The cheapest I can find used laptops online is about $200. How much value there in the tailored OS, preloaded with software and reference material and preconfigured to be ideal in the conditions of the third world?
I think you're very mistaken. Getting a good laptop that will work well for children in these situations, with questionable access to electricity is a lot harder than you seem to imply. And even if you do, it probably will still fail to meet the second half of the criteria, which is to say it is all free and easily editable/customizable without any lock-in to a particular vendor. The first world has undercut the agricultural sector in much of the third world and catching them up with agricultural equipment and fertilizer production would cost a huge amount. Providing them with the foundation to enter into the intellectual property industry, including custom software. This is a chance for them to develop a sustainable industry and income and offer their services to the world.
All the prosecutor has to do in such a case is invoke "use immunity" which says they won't use that evidence itself in a future criminal trial. Here's a discussion of the general topic. If you're not under threat of prosecution for an actual crime and they agree not to pursue such, then your testimony can be compelled.
See United States v. Hubbell.That's pretty interesting if it is a criminal proceeding against you, it does allow you to indirectly apply the 5th amendment. Cool.
The 5th amendment only applies if you in particular are charged with a crime. If you are subpoenaed or being sued and the court orders you to reveal the password, you will go to jail for contempt of court if you refuse to submit it. Even when charged with a criminal offense, not being testimony as to your actions, it may well hold up in court to charge you. Finally, in many parts of the world legislation requiring this has already been passed and at least three bills in congress have specifically required this, although to my knowledge none have yet passed.
Basically, unless you have a whole buttload of money to burn and are feeling lucky and are charged with a crime, don't count on the 5th amendment.
Which is pretty decent. The only item lacking is if the feds demand your password so they can impersonate you talking to someone else. A nice dummy password that will allow them to do that, but presage the first message with a warning that the channel is compromised.
Unless you're in the administration, that will get you tossed in jail. Normal citizens require plausible deniability. For hard drive encryption, this can be accomplished by saving dummy data accessible with a second password. For IM, perhaps we need something similar. If an IM client were to give a user the option of using a dummy password which would still initiate encrypted messages, but with a warning flag to the user on the other end, we might have parity.
Encryption technologies that provide plausible deniability are possible, but I doubt they will enter widespread use (or even encryption in general) until the big players champion them. Why one of the major IM providers has not jumped on this as a differentiating feature is beyond me. I guess I see why Google would not include it in GTalk, seeing as they want to use the data to target ads (ditto yahoo and MS), but why isn't it built into ichat yet?
The OS X system allows the user to drop a file in a directory and all applications will gain the functionality, regardless of whether or not the programmer of that application knew such a service existed. The OS X system allows an application to offer services to other applications, regardless of whether or not the programmers of those applications did anything.
Think of it this way, KDE does not ship with a grammar checker by default, thus no one is going to code their apps to use some third party grammar checking KPart library that is not on most systems. Now suppose you buy a commercial office suite like StarOffice that offers some functionality, like thesaurus lookup. On OS X, it can offer that function as a service and Mail.app and Safari can both suddenly look up highlighted words in the thesaurus. On KDE there is no way for StarOffice to suddenly grant this ability in Kmail and Konquerer. Another example is, prior to the latest version OS X did not offer a built in grammar checker, even though such functionality is awfully useful to me for helping me proof documents. I just downloaded a free, third party one and dropped it in ~/Library/Services/ and suddenly my word processor, e-mail, Web browser, chat client, terminal, text editor, etc. all had the ability to check grammar. If there is a way to do this on Kubuntu I'd really love to hear how.
Here are some services I installed:
Here are some services that came as functions of applications:
Those are functions I use (I make most of my income writing), but the main benefit of this system is people can add the services they need, which they presumably know a lot better than the person writing a given application.
I usually think of features as being offered. If they are not useful to me, I don't use them.
Personally I don't have much need for a new spellchecker or grammar checker, but to me they sound like things that would be better implemented as apps or plugins.The problem with implementing a spelling or grammar checker outside of the design of the desktop environment, is that you don't want every app developer to have to implement their own both for efficiency and because it means it won't reach a lot of applications. I was hoping KDE would update KParts to catch up with OS X's system services so that applications and stand alone services could offer such functionality globally. I agree it is best to offer these as plug-ins, but plug-ins to the entire system, not just one app. Unfortunately, no such framework has yet been introduced in KDE.
With OS X you can drop arbitrary functions in the Services or ~/Services directory or a service can be part of an application. Unlike KParts the developer of an application does not have to specifically include a service when they code it, rather it can be accessed by all applications, even if the developer of that application had no idea such a service existed. It is used in OS X for spell checking and grammar checking so it works everywhere, but applications like Graphviz offer to graph any random table of data in any application. Stand alone services do everything from translate text between languages to rot13 text.
KRunner is (will be) similar to OS X's Spotlight.I've never seen or heard of KRunner. Is it a Beagle implementation, reusing the actual spotlight code from Darwin, or a from scratch implementation?
No grammar checking in 4.0, no.That right there is where OS X's system services are a big win. Before Apple included one by default, I just installed a third party service for grammar checking everywhere.
And there's lots of years ahead of it, to make the most out of a really solid foundation... IOW if you want "meat", come back for 4.1.I understand building a good foundation, I'm just a little disappointed that there is nothing in this foundation that is really novel and does not exist elsewhere already. I guess I keep hoping KDE will stop playing catch up and really leapfrog the competition in some way. KDE is solid and useful, but honestly if not for certain application's lack of support on OS X or Windows, Kubuntu might fall off my list of everyday OS's and become something to tinker with occasionally.
All the ones currently on the market, but if a market appears, cars will be priced to reach it. In some places for the first time the average cost of a car is lower than the price of gas needed to run it for a year. Also, Hybrids are new, the market will adjust over time and used hybrids will cost about the same as a used gas powered car today.
The payment on a $24,000.00 car is insane and therefore not afforadble by the masses only by the few rich people. Most people can afford USED cars under $8000.00 some stretch to the $14,000.00 mark but not many.This is factually incorrect. The average sale price for a used car in the US last year was $9,877 and the median car sale (what the average person who bought a car spent) was $16,544.
the ONLY way to get this going is get subcompact efficient cars that are under $11,000.00 NEW.I think you're making the mistake of assuming the changes I mentioned would immediately change the market, which is highly doubtful. Rising gas prices will correspondingly dirve down the cost for used gas powered cars.
The guy barely making it at a paltry $16.00 an hour will suffer huge because he HAS to drive a old low gas mileage car to work and back.The only way to promote change is to make sure the entire market is motivated to change. Take a look at the number of people in Europe who drive subcompact cars, motorcycle, and mopeds compares to areas of the US with a similar climate.
So your plan is to punish the poor?I dn't want to punish anyone, just let everyone pay the real cost of the products they use so they can decide which one works for them. Right now and for many years we've been paying people to choose gas over other alternatives and we've been paying part of the cost if they use unneeded gas. I think that should stop.
Want that Fararri? you get to subsidise 20 Smart fortwo's to be sold at 1/2 price to poor families.I'm not opposed to subsidies as they are funding environmental benefits and reducing our strategic reliance on outside sources of energy, but they should be in addition to removing subsidies on gas, not in addition to it.
The poor kid making minimum wage will only be able to afford that prius when he can buy it for $800.00.Yeah, and would you care to bet in 10 years what a Prius will cost (assuming any still run?)
I think most people on Slashdot probably understand what it will take. We need to stop subsidizing oil companies with tax dollars. We need to stop spending billions on wars to secure supplies for oil companies. We need to pass strict legislation to regulate the types of power plants that can be built based upon the real costs to the citizens. We need to legislate a date within the next decade when coal plants are required to meet emission, waste, and safety standards and stop approving new, unclean coal plants. Then, when the real costs of all these industries are borne by those industries, we need to let the market sort it out and provide the most cost effective solution.
I suspect politicians and their advisors know this as well. I just don't think any of them are as interested in making it happen as they are in making sure their re-election campaign is well funded and they're owed political favors.
Well, I can't say I object to any of these improvements, but most of them seem pretty minor and incremental. Cleaner APIs and more efficient libraries are nice. For the end user, where's the meat of this release? Okay now it supports Widgets. Well, that can be sort of useful if there is a good selection of them. I've heard claims they added support for OS X native widgets and that could help a lot to make this actually useful. Anyone actually tried using them yet?
When a new full version comes out and I find myself looking forward to the improved spellchecker, because it is still worse architecturally than on other platforms I use, but at least it is better... well I start to wonder what happened. I'm not trying to put down the developers or anything, this is obviously a lot of work, especially Dolphin, but I guess I was hoping for more. When will KParts be upgraded to work like OS X system services? Where's grammar checking? Where's anything we haven't seen on another OS/Window manager already? As a Kubuntu user, I guess I'm just not really as excited by this as I'd like to be.
I disagree. I've owned four different cellphones in my life. I generally buy cheap and simple phones, but all of them available seem to be gaining bullet point features. To me, the basic features of a phone are:
I seriously wish any of the phones I've owned were as easy to use for those tasks as the iPhone, when I tested it.
I believe you're right that people do want converged devices, but there is more to it. My current cellphone has functions I never use, not because they could not be useful to me, but because they don't work very well, are hard to get to, or I never bothered figuring out the crappy interface to them. The iPhone is succeeding because while it may not do everything a Blackberry does, those things it does, are easy to learn and easy to use. Unless Apple makes a polished workflow/interface for acquiring and viewing ebooks, I don't think it is a threat to that market.
I know people who installed iTunes solely for the purpose of ripping their CD collection, because that process was too hard with the software that came with their mp3 player. Heck, two people came over to my place to rip their collection on my mac, because they could not figure out how on their own system. "Easy to use" is relative, and I'm not sure you're considering it as it applies to the general populace instead of geeks.
It was the full integration from top to bottom with purchasing albums that put it over the top.It was the full experience, but not so much for purchasing. Last time I saw a survey something like 1.5% of music on the average iPod was purchased from any online store, with the rest being ripped CDs and P2P downloads.
You can't "rip" a book except in the literal sense anyway and 99.99% of the population doesn't already own books in electronic form. So, they don't give a damn about that.People had collections of CDs and were using portable CD players. Almost no one owned an mp3 player when the iPod premiered. The iPod was a success because it let people easily move that music onto the iPod without repurchasing everything. Some ripped it and some just snagged it from P2P networks. People do give a damn about repurchasing all their books, although it is questionable if anyone will have a solution. One possibility is if the reader hardware becomes good enough, P2P networks will start carrying books. Another, is this will cause people to be more price conscious. If they're not just buying new music, but repurchasing their entire library, they will not be willing to pay more than the cost of a used version of that book for old titles.
As for Amazon locking people in...well, that's worked pretty well for Apple.Ahh, but as I stated, Apple did everything possible to be non-threatening to the existing publishers who control all the legacy content. Amazon is not being non-threatening at all, directly competing with them as well as trying to get them to cooperate. As for Apple's lock-in, in case you hadn't noticed they're now selling DRM-free content at the same price they were selling DRM'd content. In truth, Apple doesn't care about control of the publishing, they just want it as cheap and easy as possible to sell more hardware.
Amazon DOES, in fact, work with publishers (look at the damn catalog if you don't believe me).Of course they do, I never claimed otherwise. The difference is Apple refused offers to publish directly through them, strictly requiring a publisher of music to offer it to them. Amazon on the other hand has initiated a program to lure writers away from existing publishers and cut that publisher out of future profits. If it works, it will mean a lot more money for Amazon, but I doubt it will work unless Amazon has a lot more leverage than I think they do.
Even if they do, why do I give a damn about the publishers? If their business model is dead, then that's just too damn bad.You don't have to give a damn about publishers, but surely you recognize that publishers give a damn about themselves and their profits? It speaks to whether or not the publishers will continue to cooperate with Amazon and if the device will be successful. A reason to care is because instead of having a loose, fairly weak cartel of publishers with room for independents, if ebooks take off, and Amazon grabs a big chunk of the market with DRM'd ebooks, that will no longer be the case and there will be one major publisher that can control prices, and extort more money via DRM, for example, by switching DRM schemes when moving to a new version of the device forcing you to buy all your content yet again once your existing reader dies. A little foresight can go a long way towards avoiding this crap.
Actually, with the iPod and iTunes, it was made really easy for people to rip CDs, and was advertised as such, so most people could load the content they already had. It also supported the mp3 format, used by popular P2P services so many people re-downloaded music they had in other formats (as well as other music). How are you supposed to quickly and easily load your current books onto the Kindle?
It is also interesting that Apple ran and runs the iTunes store at near break-even pricing so they only really make money on the iPod, not on music sales. This somewhat appeases the publishers who are still super worried about how much this undermines their position as gatekeepers to the point that those publishers are willing to sell at lower prices to smaller volume online stores in order to prop up potential competitors. Apple refuses to sell content directly, requiring it to come from a publisher, whereas Amazon immediately started a program to sign up writers to sell directly from them, cutting out publishers entirely.
Kindle is a blatant power play by Amazon and they're trying to use their leverage as the biggest online seller of books to get both end users and publishers to slit their own throats by permanently locking themselves into Amazon as the only gatekeeper for books. I don't think they will pull it off though, since they have not provided enough value or ease of use.