Really? Apple actually came up with a new or improved battery technology? DO tell. Usually they just buy from Sony et al. And they REALLY get 7 hours? Colour me skeptical.
I don't know where they got it, but that's what I hear. I have a maybe 7-month old MacBook Pro and that thing can't make it though a movie without draining the battery. So make sure you get a new one.
However, a better battery is a better battery, and Apple should be given credit for putting one in a laptop, even if the rest of it is...
If it detects a heat-based failure due to abuse, it voids your warranty. If it detects a heat-based failure due to battery explosion, it automatically files a gag order with the courts.
I have an Aspire 1. I'm not sure I'd like it except for these things:
1. I installed Linux on it (Arch, to be precise) 2. I run fvwm, though I'd also be happy with xfce if I liked it as much 3. I installed the Vimperator Firefox plugin
Windows is just too much for it to be responsive. KDE is also too much. (I thought KDE felt more responsive than Windows, but I'm willing to admit that's just because of my massive dislike for the latter.) fvwm is snappy-fast and loads quick. xfce would be similar, I think.
Vimperator is excellent, expecially if you can type. Not only does it free you from using the touchpad mouse, it also frees up all that real-estate that is normally taken up with buttons and URL fields.
3 USB ports means you can easily plug in an external keyboard, mouse, and something else. I use the thing for presentations with the external VGA port--very conveniently portable. And the 6+ hour battery rules. I leave the thing suspended for days at a time--a week ago I couldn't even remember when I'd charged it and was sure the battery would be dead, but it was 54% when I reanimated it..
It even has enough 3D power to run simple games. (Only about 5 FPS with Flightgear, though!)
I use it for dev and writing. I don't miss my old laptop one bit.
It's a tradeoff, but I for one prefer having a laptop with 5+ hour battery life or a phone that can go 3 days without charging to saving $100 when I do replace the battery in 3 years. If you don't like it, buy another product.
That's actually a great suggestion. My previous non-Apple phone could go 4 days without charging, and I replaced the battery myself in 10 seconds for $15. My non-Apple laptop runs for 6.5 hours on a user-serviceable battery. Apple's not going to change this as long as they make more money on non-user-serviceable parts--why should they? And can one really blame them?
When you buy an iPhone, for example, you can buy an extended warranty for $70 that covers the battery replacement.
In examinations of the code that runs the towers, it has been found that as long as jailbreaking remains illegal, the cell towers will continue to function properly.
What if Apple rolls out a branded wireless service which will have excellent support for OS X, Windows and even Linux for an extra price? Will you blame the people buying it?
Just if the only difference is the rounded corners.:) And hopefully they don't go with AT&T, if you know what I'm saying.
I only ask because the last two times I moved (to new places in the same city), my insurance went up because I changed zip codes. (At that point I became suspicious and switched companies which "reset" my insurance cost back to its proper level.)
I think there's a much higher probability that fine-grained tracking will result in the customer being penalized by the insurance company than that they will get a discount. If they're willing to increase my premium for moving to a new house, you can be certain they will increase your premium for minor speeding offenses.
But per-mile, the expressway/freeway should be a lot safer than surface streets, so they should charge less for that. This is where fine-grained positional tracking would help the consumer's bottom line.
According the Library of Congress' website they have approximately 32 million books. A bit of googling turned up that an average book weight about 12 ounces. So,
32 million * 12 ounces = 10,886,216.9 kilograms
With that precise an answer, I think you might mean "exactly 32 million books" and an "average book weight of exactly 12 ounces". Personally, I think I'd just go with "11 million kilograms", unless you feel lucky.:-)
Your break-even tax rate for mileage "m" is going to be, I think:
t = 0.185 / m
If you get 10 mpg, any per mile tax less than $0.0185 (between 1 and 2 cents) is going to cost you less overall.
If you get 20 mpg, any per mile tax less than $0.00925 (just under 1 cent) will save you money.
If you get 35 mpg like me, the per mile tax will have to be about half a cent. Which is obviously not going to happen.
The saving grace for all these numbers is that you will still pay less overall if you get a more fuel-efficient car. Your mega-mileage car might be costing you $5/gallon in per-mile tax, but if you only buy two gallons per month, maybe it's no t so bad.
All this being said, the whole idea of GPS tracking is horrible, of course.
This is a good example of what I find is one of the least desirable traits of the Linux community in general: a tendency to blame everyone else for any failure, whether it's the user who's too stupid or Microsoft who's too mean.
Damn right!
Sure, MS has a bad track record and I have no doubt they tried their best to use their influence in this case
Wait...so you are blaming Microsoft?;-)
Let's look at it this way, via a hypothetical conversation:
ASUS: "We designed an ARM-based Android netbook." MS: "We don't support ARM." ASUS: "It's OK; we have Android." MS: "What percentage of your netbook product line runs XP?" ASUS: "About 95%." MS: "If you release the ARM netbook, we'll raise your price per unit from $15 to $100." ASUS: "Well, I guess that's the end of the ARM netbook. Can we somehow make a public apology?" MS: "All too easy."
Now I ask you: is there any level of mind-blowing Android or Linux OS awesomeness that's going to change that outcome? Don't hold back; really cut loose with your imagination. The answer: no. There's no way they can make up all that expense with one new product.
I could be mistaken. ASUS might have just spent all this R&D and Q&A money on a new kick-ass product, and showed it to the world, and only then realized that Windows didn't support ARM. Or maybe they got too much positive feedback, so they pulled it.
Did you watch the video here? This is one sweet machine that vanished. And from the looks of it, it's not because of the shit OS.
I live in they San Francisco Bay Area (East Bay), and purposefully live in a bicycle-friendly place close to public transit. It is totally possible to live without a car if you restrict yourself to living in a place that suits it. My pal lives up the street from me and has been carless for ages.
However, I do own a car. I very rarely drive it locally (and not to commute), but a number of times a year I drive to remote northeastern California (7 hours away) and do volunteer work, and it just makes financial sense to own a car for these trips. The US is big, and I mean that factually, not in some kind of boasting sense. California by itself is big. If you want to get out and about in remote areas without a car, you can just forget it. Imagine the opposite of the Swiss public transit network. We cannot possibly afford to provide service to all the semi-remote (let alone actually remote) areas of this country.
The real bummer is that with a car, when we get 2-3 people together, it stops making sense to take public transit. Three of us aren't going to pay $25 to get to the City and back when we can drive there faster for $6 in gas and toll. The only reason it makes sense for one person to take public transit is because driving is such a pain in the butt (or if you have to park all day downtown.)
Google "casual carpool" to get an idea of how this stuff works out practically. People are very creative, and the car is a great solution.
I agree with what you say in theory, and I love the idea, and I think there's a huge amount of improvement that can made in dense urban areas where a public transit system is actually economically viable (I'm looking at you, LA!) But dense urban areas (or indeed, populated areas) are a tiny portion of the land in the US.
The UK has 250 people per square kilometer; the US has 31--California by itself has almost twice as much area. I like bicycles and public transit and I use them all the time, but sometimes and in some places (like most of the US) cars just make sense. And with gas costing as little as it does here, it makes twice as much sense.
And, finally, even though I'm a Berkeley freak with a milk crate full of groceries on the back of my bicycle, I LOVE The Great American Road Trip! Amen!
I think that if you get deadlocks on quad cores then there's something wrong about your design to begin with, i.e. you didn't plan for N cores correctly.
Part of the Ptolemy Project experiment sought to determine whether we could develop effective software engineering practices for an academic research setting. We developed a process that included a four-level code maturity rating system (red, yellow, green, and blue), design reviews, code reviews, nightly builds, regression tests, and automated code coverage metrics. We wrote the kernel portion that ensured a consistent view of the program structure in early 2000, design reviewed to yellow, and code reviewed to green. The reviewers included concurrency experts, not just inexperienced graduate students.
We wrote regression tests that achieved 100 percent code coverage. The nightly build and regression tests ran on a two-processor SMP machine, which exhibited different thread behavior than the development machines, which all had a single processor.
The Ptolemy II system itself became widely used, and every use of the system exercised this code. No problems were observed until the code deadlocked in April 2004, four years later.
Our relatively rigorous software engineering practice had identified and fixed many concurrency bugs. But that a problem as serious as a deadlock could go undetected for four years despite this practice is alarming. How many more such problems remain? How long must we test before we can be sure to have discovered all such problems? Regrettably, I must conclude that testing might never reveal all the problems in nontrivial multithreaded code.
I've learned quite a bit about programming in Erlang recently, and have grown quite fond of no shared state, superlight processes, and message passing.
I'm no fan of MS for a variety of reasons, but there are a couple things about these secure_s functions that are worthy of consideration.
First of all, there's the explicit max-bytes-to-copy that's declared in memcpy_s(). Many people have pointed out that this is only as safe as you're trusting the programmer to be anyway, which is true to a certain extent, but it also calls on the coder to be acutely aware of the maximum buffer size.
In this way, it makes the call safer against accidental overrun, and also against accidental overrun 5 years from now when an intern modifies the code as part of his or her code-familiarization project.
This being said, I can also imagine people doing things like this:
Yay! (That example could be worse, but could overrun dest for short buffers.)
Secondly, the memcpy_s() function, like the rest of the _s functions, can invoke the "invalid parameter handler". This is a way to channel all your security violations into the same handler, which is rather nice in some ways. Instead of doing error checking all over (or failing to do error checking all over), you can have these things caught for you. IMHO, this feature is much more important than what you get from passing in the destSize.
Here's my untested guess at the guts of the function (sans invalid parameter handler support):
I'm a little annoyed that "dest" is not returned like it is with memcpy(), but they probably don't want you to use it without testing it.
One final thing that is irksome is that if this is supposed to be some kind of robust call, why does it still invoke undefined behavior for overlapping regions? Why not detect the overlap and return an error--or automagically switch to memmove_s()? Or just make memcpy_s() an alias for memmove_s()?
I think I would assert that memcpy_s() will reduce the number of security defects. But I also think some percentage of the time it will be used incorrectly, and I don't know what that percentage is.
I have a BS and MS in computer science, and over a decade of experience. This is for me, but it could be different for you:
When I got out of school, the cost of my MS was paid for in less than 6 months by the difference in salary. This was at HP; I would guess that most smaller companies do not differentiate that much based on degree, but it was an influential factor.
Because I stayed at the same school and got my MS straight away, I didn't have to take the GRE. This REALLY influenced my decision.
I would never expect or rely on my MS to help me get a job. In general, experience trumps your degrees. If it does help, great, but if you have an MS and don't pass the interview questions the tech guys throw at you, it's not going to matter.
The exception to the above paragraph is if you wanted to be an instructor at a junior college; in that case you generally need an MS (but requirements vary). You'll never get paid as well as an instructor (and depending on where you are, positions can be scarce), so you should only do it if you love it.
I have no regrets over that "lost" time. I learned a bunch of good stuff, and it was fun--way more fun than being an undergrad.:) I had, after all, the whole rest of my life to work.
I bounced around, out of HP to a dot-com, to a big game studio, to being an independent contractor. One thing's for sure: you never stop learning. I'm familiar with technologies that were unheard of when I was in school. It can take time to keep up with what's going on, but I can't recommend it enough!
Speaking as one of those people who goes outside beyond the range of cell phone service (it's not mythological--I've actually been there), having a 5 W handheld radio has been very useful for coordinating with other members of my party...
But I admit I'm in a tiny minority of people who have such a use for a radio where FRS is insufficient, sadly.
What profit? If the book is freely available there won't be any significant profit to be made.
The profit that all sellers of works make; I never said "freely available". I'm talking about buying a legit copy of a non-freely-available book for $10 or whatever, copying the whole thing, and selling it yourself. With your name instead of the author's. Without copyright, what would prevent you from legally doing that?
I'm all for shorter copyright terms. I would consider correcting the 14-year term for change in life-expectancy in the year 2009, but I share the general sentiment.
I would also consider a constitutional amendment to more-clearly define "limited time".
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Really? Apple actually came up with a new or improved battery technology? DO tell. Usually they just buy from Sony et al.
And they REALLY get 7 hours? Colour me skeptical.
I don't know where they got it, but that's what I hear. I have a maybe 7-month old MacBook Pro and that thing can't make it though a movie without draining the battery. So make sure you get a new one.
However, a better battery is a better battery, and Apple should be given credit for putting one in a laptop, even if the rest of it is ...
If it detects a heat-based failure due to abuse, it voids your warranty. If it detects a heat-based failure due to battery explosion, it automatically files a gag order with the courts.
I have an Aspire 1. I'm not sure I'd like it except for these things:
1. I installed Linux on it (Arch, to be precise)
2. I run fvwm, though I'd also be happy with xfce if I liked it as much
3. I installed the Vimperator Firefox plugin
Windows is just too much for it to be responsive. KDE is also too much. (I thought KDE felt more responsive than Windows, but I'm willing to admit that's just because of my massive dislike for the latter.) fvwm is snappy-fast and loads quick. xfce would be similar, I think.
Vimperator is excellent, expecially if you can type. Not only does it free you from using the touchpad mouse, it also frees up all that real-estate that is normally taken up with buttons and URL fields.
3 USB ports means you can easily plug in an external keyboard, mouse, and something else. I use the thing for presentations with the external VGA port--very conveniently portable. And the 6+ hour battery rules. I leave the thing suspended for days at a time--a week ago I couldn't even remember when I'd charged it and was sure the battery would be dead, but it was 54% when I reanimated it..
It even has enough 3D power to run simple games. (Only about 5 FPS with Flightgear, though!)
I use it for dev and writing. I don't miss my old laptop one bit.
It's a tradeoff, but I for one prefer having a laptop with 5+ hour battery life or a phone that can go 3 days without charging to saving $100 when I do replace the battery in 3 years. If you don't like it, buy another product.
That's actually a great suggestion. My previous non-Apple phone could go 4 days without charging, and I replaced the battery myself in 10 seconds for $15. My non-Apple laptop runs for 6.5 hours on a user-serviceable battery. Apple's not going to change this as long as they make more money on non-user-serviceable parts--why should they? And can one really blame them?
When you buy an iPhone, for example, you can buy an extended warranty for $70 that covers the battery replacement.
But that's never going to fit on a DeLorean. Why don't these guys ever plan ahead?
In examinations of the code that runs the towers, it has been found that as long as jailbreaking remains illegal, the cell towers will continue to function properly.
#if IPHONE_JAILBREAK_LEGAL
crash_system(HARDDISK|TRANSCEIVER|WITH_FIRE);
#else
if (rand()%3490) {
drop_call();
set_customer_accidental_overcharge_multiplier(2.5);
}
#endif
What if Apple rolls out a branded wireless service which will have excellent support for OS X, Windows and even Linux for an extra price? Will you blame the people buying it?
Just if the only difference is the rounded corners. :) And hopefully they don't go with AT&T, if you know what I'm saying.
Their users don't need no steenkin' free wifi! They're all waiting for Apple to roll out $100/month wifi with the rounded corners!
I only ask because the last two times I moved (to new places in the same city), my insurance went up because I changed zip codes. (At that point I became suspicious and switched companies which "reset" my insurance cost back to its proper level.)
I think there's a much higher probability that fine-grained tracking will result in the customer being penalized by the insurance company than that they will get a discount. If they're willing to increase my premium for moving to a new house, you can be certain they will increase your premium for minor speeding offenses.
But per-mile, the expressway/freeway should be a lot safer than surface streets, so they should charge less for that. This is where fine-grained positional tracking would help the consumer's bottom line.
According the Library of Congress' website they have approximately 32 million books. A bit of googling turned up that an average book weight about 12 ounces. So,
32 million * 12 ounces = 10,886,216.9 kilograms
With that precise an answer, I think you might mean "exactly 32 million books" and an "average book weight of exactly 12 ounces". Personally, I think I'd just go with "11 million kilograms", unless you feel lucky. :-)
Your break-even tax rate for mileage "m" is going to be, I think:
t = 0.185 / m
If you get 10 mpg, any per mile tax less than $0.0185 (between 1 and 2 cents) is going to cost you less overall.
If you get 20 mpg, any per mile tax less than $0.00925 (just under 1 cent) will save you money.
If you get 35 mpg like me, the per mile tax will have to be about half a cent. Which is obviously not going to happen.
The saving grace for all these numbers is that you will still pay less overall if you get a more fuel-efficient car. Your mega-mileage car might be costing you $5/gallon in per-mile tax, but if you only buy two gallons per month, maybe it's no t so bad.
All this being said, the whole idea of GPS tracking is horrible, of course.
This is a good example of what I find is one of the least desirable traits of the Linux community in general: a tendency to blame everyone else for any failure, whether it's the user who's too stupid or Microsoft who's too mean.
Damn right!
Sure, MS has a bad track record and I have no doubt they tried their best to use their influence in this case
Wait...so you are blaming Microsoft? ;-)
Let's look at it this way, via a hypothetical conversation:
ASUS: "We designed an ARM-based Android netbook."
MS: "We don't support ARM."
ASUS: "It's OK; we have Android."
MS: "What percentage of your netbook product line runs XP?"
ASUS: "About 95%."
MS: "If you release the ARM netbook, we'll raise your price per unit from $15 to $100."
ASUS: "Well, I guess that's the end of the ARM netbook. Can we somehow make a public apology?"
MS: "All too easy."
Now I ask you: is there any level of mind-blowing Android or Linux OS awesomeness that's going to change that outcome? Don't hold back; really cut loose with your imagination. The answer: no. There's no way they can make up all that expense with one new product.
I could be mistaken. ASUS might have just spent all this R&D and Q&A money on a new kick-ass product, and showed it to the world, and only then realized that Windows didn't support ARM. Or maybe they got too much positive feedback, so they pulled it.
Did you watch the video here? This is one sweet machine that vanished. And from the looks of it, it's not because of the shit OS.
It's also useful if you want to patch or edit the game at runtime--this can really speed iterations.
But I agree that it can be overkill. Casual games I write often either lack a scripting language, or are entirely written in a scripting language. :-)
I live in they San Francisco Bay Area (East Bay), and purposefully live in a bicycle-friendly place close to public transit. It is totally possible to live without a car if you restrict yourself to living in a place that suits it. My pal lives up the street from me and has been carless for ages.
However, I do own a car. I very rarely drive it locally (and not to commute), but a number of times a year I drive to remote northeastern California (7 hours away) and do volunteer work, and it just makes financial sense to own a car for these trips. The US is big, and I mean that factually, not in some kind of boasting sense. California by itself is big. If you want to get out and about in remote areas without a car, you can just forget it. Imagine the opposite of the Swiss public transit network. We cannot possibly afford to provide service to all the semi-remote (let alone actually remote) areas of this country.
The real bummer is that with a car, when we get 2-3 people together, it stops making sense to take public transit. Three of us aren't going to pay $25 to get to the City and back when we can drive there faster for $6 in gas and toll. The only reason it makes sense for one person to take public transit is because driving is such a pain in the butt (or if you have to park all day downtown.)
Google "casual carpool" to get an idea of how this stuff works out practically. People are very creative, and the car is a great solution.
I agree with what you say in theory, and I love the idea, and I think there's a huge amount of improvement that can made in dense urban areas where a public transit system is actually economically viable (I'm looking at you, LA!) But dense urban areas (or indeed, populated areas) are a tiny portion of the land in the US.
The UK has 250 people per square kilometer; the US has 31--California by itself has almost twice as much area. I like bicycles and public transit and I use them all the time, but sometimes and in some places (like most of the US) cars just make sense. And with gas costing as little as it does here, it makes twice as much sense.
And, finally, even though I'm a Berkeley freak with a milk crate full of groceries on the back of my bicycle, I LOVE The Great American Road Trip! Amen!
I think that if you get deadlocks on quad cores then there's something wrong about your design to begin with, i.e. you didn't plan for N cores correctly.
Perhaps. I'm going to quote from the paper The Problem With Threads here:
Part of the Ptolemy Project experiment sought to determine whether we could develop effective software engineering practices for an academic research setting. We developed a process that included a four-level code maturity rating system (red, yellow, green, and blue), design reviews, code reviews, nightly builds, regression tests, and automated code coverage metrics. We wrote the kernel portion that ensured a consistent view of the program structure in early 2000, design reviewed to yellow, and code reviewed to green. The reviewers included concurrency experts, not just inexperienced graduate students.
We wrote regression tests that achieved 100 percent code coverage. The nightly build and regression tests ran on a two-processor SMP machine, which exhibited different thread behavior than the development machines, which all had a single processor.
The Ptolemy II system itself became widely used, and every use of the system exercised this code. No problems were observed until the code deadlocked in April 2004, four years later.
Our relatively rigorous software engineering practice had identified and fixed many concurrency bugs. But that a problem as serious as a deadlock could go undetected for four years despite this practice is alarming. How many more such problems remain? How long must we test before we can be sure to have discovered all such problems? Regrettably, I must conclude that testing might never reveal all the problems in nontrivial multithreaded code.
I've learned quite a bit about programming in Erlang recently, and have grown quite fond of no shared state, superlight processes, and message passing.
...when will AT&T's support for voice calling be out of beta?
Could this be one of the big iPhone announcements to come from WWDC?
I hope they're also planning on discontinuing the "call dropping" feature that my iPhone seems to have near-complete support for.
Are you positively ABSOLUTELY sure it is 47 Million years OLD?
Being a geology fan, I like to think of it as "47 million years YOUNG"!
There's a case to be made that raising the CAFE won't save oil or reduce greenhouse gases.
So true. If my car got 8 million miles per gallon, I'd totally drive 8 million times as much.
I'm no fan of MS for a variety of reasons, but there are a couple things about these secure_s functions that are worthy of consideration.
First of all, there's the explicit max-bytes-to-copy that's declared in memcpy_s(). Many people have pointed out that this is only as safe as you're trusting the programmer to be anyway, which is true to a certain extent, but it also calls on the coder to be acutely aware of the maximum buffer size.
In this way, it makes the call safer against accidental overrun, and also against accidental overrun 5 years from now when an intern modifies the code as part of his or her code-familiarization project.
This being said, I can also imagine people doing things like this:
void dostuff(char *src, char *dest)
{
memcpy_s(dest, sizeof dest, src, strlen(src));
}
Yay! (That example could be worse, but could overrun dest for short buffers.)
Secondly, the memcpy_s() function, like the rest of the _s functions, can invoke the "invalid parameter handler". This is a way to channel all your security violations into the same handler, which is rather nice in some ways. Instead of doing error checking all over (or failing to do error checking all over), you can have these things caught for you. IMHO, this feature is much more important than what you get from passing in the destSize.
Here's my untested guess at the guts of the function (sans invalid parameter handler support):
errno_t memcpy_s(void *dest, size_t numberOfElements, const void *src, size_t count)
{
if (count > numberOfElements) return errno = EINVAL;
memcpy(dest, src, count);
return 0;
}
I'm a little annoyed that "dest" is not returned like it is with memcpy(), but they probably don't want you to use it without testing it.
One final thing that is irksome is that if this is supposed to be some kind of robust call, why does it still invoke undefined behavior for overlapping regions? Why not detect the overlap and return an error--or automagically switch to memmove_s()? Or just make memcpy_s() an alias for memmove_s()?
I think I would assert that memcpy_s() will reduce the number of security defects. But I also think some percentage of the time it will be used incorrectly, and I don't know what that percentage is.
I'm sure the time complexity of memcpy_s is the same as memcpy. We can hope they only test against the max length one time, and not inside the loop. :)
I have a BS and MS in computer science, and over a decade of experience. This is for me, but it could be different for you:
When I got out of school, the cost of my MS was paid for in less than 6 months by the difference in salary. This was at HP; I would guess that most smaller companies do not differentiate that much based on degree, but it was an influential factor.
Because I stayed at the same school and got my MS straight away, I didn't have to take the GRE. This REALLY influenced my decision.
I would never expect or rely on my MS to help me get a job. In general, experience trumps your degrees. If it does help, great, but if you have an MS and don't pass the interview questions the tech guys throw at you, it's not going to matter.
The exception to the above paragraph is if you wanted to be an instructor at a junior college; in that case you generally need an MS (but requirements vary). You'll never get paid as well as an instructor (and depending on where you are, positions can be scarce), so you should only do it if you love it.
I have no regrets over that "lost" time. I learned a bunch of good stuff, and it was fun--way more fun than being an undergrad. :) I had, after all, the whole rest of my life to work.
I bounced around, out of HP to a dot-com, to a big game studio, to being an independent contractor. One thing's for sure: you never stop learning. I'm familiar with technologies that were unheard of when I was in school. It can take time to keep up with what's going on, but I can't recommend it enough!
Speaking as one of those people who goes outside beyond the range of cell phone service (it's not mythological--I've actually been there), having a 5 W handheld radio has been very useful for coordinating with other members of my party...
But I admit I'm in a tiny minority of people who have such a use for a radio where FRS is insufficient, sadly.
What profit? If the book is freely available there won't be any significant profit to be made.
The profit that all sellers of works make; I never said "freely available". I'm talking about buying a legit copy of a non-freely-available book for $10 or whatever, copying the whole thing, and selling it yourself. With your name instead of the author's. Without copyright, what would prevent you from legally doing that?
I'm all for shorter copyright terms. I would consider correcting the 14-year term for change in life-expectancy in the year 2009, but I share the general sentiment.
I would also consider a constitutional amendment to more-clearly define "limited time".