The jargon file/hacker's dictionary explicitly states that day-mun is acceptable pronunciation. It doesn't really matter that the original users, in correct English, pronounced it dee-mon when a made up meaning of a word (the computer terminology definition) is pronounced in a multitude of ways decades later.
And yet a large number of people still throw away their old computers that way anyway (along with a ton of other electronic equipment)...and it's naive to think otherwise.
There is so much wrong with what you've written that I don't even know where to start. Firstly, this article is about Amazon's self-publishing department delisting an author's ebooks. I do not believe any ebooks were removed from devices of purchasers.
Secondly, Ebooks and ebook reading software have been around for a very very long time. It is not new. Ebooks themselves since at least the 70s. Maybe they aren't popular but reading paper books isn't very popular either. Newness and popularity having nothing to do with barrier to entry for selling ebooks.
Yes, portable ebook readers are new to the last decade and are just now becoming more popular and have the potential of making ebooks more popular. You speak of DRM on these devices as if it's the end of the written word. Ebook format doesn't matter. Every device that I know of accepts at least one entirely open non-DRM ebook format. It is very easy to convert between formats.
Even if Amazon banned my book and no other marketplace existed then I could still toss it online with my own website at $5/month costs and sell it as an ebook, in multiple formats, that would be viewable on any device. The barrier to entry for selling ebooks is THAT low. If you want to start a website selling ebooks the only HARD part is getting the popular publishers on board because they want to protect their precious hardcover sales. They're also usually the people pushing hard for DRM formats.
In this market the only possible way I see corporation censorship being a problem is if one could prove that Amazon (or any company) has such a large monopoly on ebooks that by not being able to list your book on Amazon you are then not able to financially make it worth it to sell your ebook. The existence of other paper book and ebook marketplaces (barnes and nobles to say the least) makes me think that is not true.
A) Can the owners of a Kindle/etc use their device to read whatever they wish from wherever they wish?
Yes. Using Calibre (or other software) you can convert nearly any text format to an ebook format readable by your Whatevercompany Ebook reading device.
B) Can the purchasers of ebooks keep them forever, as with a physical book?
Yes. Maybe not backed up on Amazons servers but there is nothing stopping you from keeping a copy on your computer (or even your Kindle). As far as I know, after the 1984 fiasco and per court settlement, Amazon no longer removes books from Kindles remotely without user permission. They will remove access from buying the book via the Amazon store or redownloading from your "archive" in their cloud. Slashdot news titles and summaries are often misleading or plain wrong.
C) Are the wielders of this power applying it fairly and with the same value system as their customers?
Do not care. I can buy books from elsewhere if Amazon won't sell a book. Someone will always sell these books if there is demand unless they are illegal (and probably then too).
I don't think Amazon should have removed the two specific books from the article from their store but I also feel that, as a corporation and not a government, they have a right to sell what they want to sell. Would you force a bookseller to buy copies of books from every publisher that exists so that the threat of censoring doesn't exist? In any case, the barrier to entry for ebook marketing and distribution is so low that I can't even see that a market share monopoly matters.
I thought the turkey day tryptophan thing was a myth/urban legend and it was really just the amount of food eaten + blood going to the stomach or something to digest it...
Tribes 2 Shifter was pretty good after a while though rather different from Tribes 1 Shifter (no brokenly overpowered laser turrets...). There was a decent community for some years but Tribes 2 base was so bad (excluding rather good net code) and by the time they fixed it with patches it was too late and the population had died off completely.
I fail to see how 'rapid ambulation' is unnecessarily complicated. I suppose he could replace 'any form of rapid ambulation' with 'running away' or 'rapid ambulation' with 'speed walking' but those do change the meaning somewhat.
At worst it's like using an int instead of a short. And I do believe slashdot qualifies as hanging out at the A/V club...I can't believe your original post was moderated insightful on a forum that I would think cherishes use of an extensive vocabulary. It was Funny though =)
There are still logs that report device coordinates, cell tower coordinates, titles of books read, etc to Amazon. Supposedly it's all for 'diagnostic' purposes but who knows.
Of course you can just keep your wireless turned off and that information never gets reported and there are also some hacks out there to disable the logging (as shown here).
If we charged companies for those things they would not provide services in areas where it was not economical (which is what currently happens anyway). The only reason everyone has access to telephone lines is because the government decided that telephone service was a necessary utility like water or electricity and subsidized it with taxpayer dollars.
The FCC now considers broadband Internet to be a necessary utility. I think 'free' public Internet would probably be a bad idea but I understand where the FCC is coming from in the desire to make telecoms provide better broadband services to more citizens.
In reality we have a bunch of regional broadband monopolies or duopolies. Wishing that we didn't won't change that reality. Why should they want to upgrade infrastructure if it won't earn them more money?
Wasn't there a Mythbusters where they tested for fecal matter on different things and found it on toothbrushes?
Just because visible amounts of water don't get splashed out doesn't mean nothing does. It pretty much makes no sense to leave the lid open (things can fall in too!).
Same with leaving dirty dishes in the sink. They're a billion times easier to clean if you rinse them when freshly dirty and/or put them straight into the dishwasher. It also means other people can actually use the sink instead of cleaning for you so they can use the sink.
Keep your eyes off her tits is completely valid pointless DRM though.
Predicting that they might get into the backbone business is not the same as it being real. And so what if Google bought dark fiber to power their own intranet between data centers to save money in the long term? Maybe they're using some of that fiber for this foray into the last mile business. Does it really matter? It's not like they're trying to purchase Level3 or Akamai et al.
They'd need trillions of dollars and the support of multiple government regulation systems to globally usurp the internet. It's not happening anytime soon as Google is nowhere near that big.
Oh, come on. It's not like Google has anything close to a monopoly on any of those services. I understand people (rightly!) getting upset over privacy issues with using Google services but acting like Google is taking over the internet is just silly. They don't own the backbones and they don't even create much content. They mostly stick with ways to find and view content and they are not even close to being the only way to find or view that content online (excluding maybe Google Books).
ISPs/telecoms in the high-speed internet business, for the most part, have regional monopoly or duopolies in the US. I also believe a lot of their intrastructure was promoted in some way by government tax benefits or funding. With that said what's the problem with Google testing the waters to see if they could potentially become a competitor without getting bulldozed from incumbents? Do you really think anytime in the near future Google is going to be able to drive out multiple entrenched companies that are, lets face it, much larger monetarily?
Sure plug-ins will and do exist but if the user experience isn't seamless then firefox will likely lose users.
If firefox can be pointed to youtube and videos don't play and there is no obvious solution to make them play but IE/chrome/whatever plays them out of the box then people will use IE/chrome/whatever because it's easier and works. Though I doubt youtube will ever do that some obscure new yet popular site that uses only html5 might.
Slashdot users are not the average internet consumer.
And how many people/stewardesses haven't seen/remember http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcd34tt8YPU and will try to smother the fire and just lead to bigger problems?
I think an automated cargo sensor + suppression system would be far safer than relying on humans to properly execute something. It just wouldn't be cheaper.
For the people who won't watch the FAA video they advise using a water extinguisher or other extinguisher and dousing the batteries with water/liquid to cool them.
Supposedly Amazon was paying 50% of the list price of ~$28 for new bestseller hardcover books to publishers for ebooks that Amazon charged $10 for. So they are/were, again supposedly, losing $4 per new bestseller ebook. Amazon is apparently changing due to publisher pressure or something and will now give publishers 70% of a $13 to $15 on new bestseller ebook price and Amazon will make around $4 profit instead of loss. Amazon has said they'd rather stick with charging $10 which I imagine is because they want to keep ebooks as affordable as possible to drive their kindle platform. Most books aren't bestseller hardcover books and so I imagine they make a profit from most ebooks.
Publishers, apparently, are fine with making less from ebooks because it protects their hardcover sales They see it as a lower difference between ebook price and hardcover price which means people are more likely to buy hardcover or something. In my opinion they just won't buy it at all then and wait for the price to go down. I hope that one day authors can just bypass the publishers and sell ebooks and still make as much or more money from their books. I'm not sure it will ever happen though because then they'd have to actually be good writers instead of rely on a marketing machine.
And the handbrake guys are jumping the gun and putting on blinders. H.264 AND Xvid are still the present. Look at top downloads in the p2p arena, look at the anime scene. Xvid is still going very strong. H.264 and the MKV container have had a rough road in the past with compatibility and performance issues. They're finally strong as well but it's taken a while.
People tend to go with what they know works and is more readily accessible. For many people out there that is still xvid/avi. Hopefully one day that will change as h264 in an mkv container is obviously far better.
Slashdot Mirror
The jargon file/hacker's dictionary explicitly states that day-mun is acceptable pronunciation.
It doesn't really matter that the original users, in correct English, pronounced it dee-mon when a made up meaning of a word (the computer terminology definition) is pronounced in a multitude of ways decades later.
And yet a large number of people still throw away their old computers that way anyway (along with a ton of other electronic equipment)...and it's naive to think otherwise.
There is so much wrong with what you've written that I don't even know where to start. Firstly, this article is about Amazon's self-publishing department delisting an author's ebooks. I do not believe any ebooks were removed from devices of purchasers.
Secondly, Ebooks and ebook reading software have been around for a very very long time. It is not new. Ebooks themselves since at least the 70s. Maybe they aren't popular but reading paper books isn't very popular either. Newness and popularity having nothing to do with barrier to entry for selling ebooks.
Yes, portable ebook readers are new to the last decade and are just now becoming more popular and have the potential of making ebooks more popular. You speak of DRM on these devices as if it's the end of the written word.
Ebook format doesn't matter. Every device that I know of accepts at least one entirely open non-DRM ebook format. It is very easy to convert between formats.
Even if Amazon banned my book and no other marketplace existed then I could still toss it online with my own website at $5/month costs and sell it as an ebook, in multiple formats, that would be viewable on any device. The barrier to entry for selling ebooks is THAT low. If you want to start a website selling ebooks the only HARD part is getting the popular publishers on board because they want to protect their precious hardcover sales. They're also usually the people pushing hard for DRM formats.
In this market the only possible way I see corporation censorship being a problem is if one could prove that Amazon (or any company) has such a large monopoly on ebooks that by not being able to list your book on Amazon you are then not able to financially make it worth it to sell your ebook. The existence of other paper book and ebook marketplaces (barnes and nobles to say the least) makes me think that is not true.
A) Can the owners of a Kindle/etc use their device to read whatever they wish from wherever they wish?
Yes. Using Calibre (or other software) you can convert nearly any text format to an ebook format readable by your Whatevercompany Ebook reading device.
B) Can the purchasers of ebooks keep them forever, as with a physical book?
Yes. Maybe not backed up on Amazons servers but there is nothing stopping you from keeping a copy on your computer (or even your Kindle). As far as I know, after the 1984 fiasco and per court settlement, Amazon no longer removes books from Kindles remotely without user permission. They will remove access from buying the book via the Amazon store or redownloading from your "archive" in their cloud. Slashdot news titles and summaries are often misleading or plain wrong.
C) Are the wielders of this power applying it fairly and with the same value system as their customers?
Do not care. I can buy books from elsewhere if Amazon won't sell a book. Someone will always sell these books if there is demand unless they are illegal (and probably then too).
I don't think Amazon should have removed the two specific books from the article from their store but I also feel that, as a corporation and not a government, they have a right to sell what they want to sell. Would you force a bookseller to buy copies of books from every publisher that exists so that the threat of censoring doesn't exist? In any case, the barrier to entry for ebook marketing and distribution is so low that I can't even see that a market share monopoly matters.
I thought the turkey day tryptophan thing was a myth/urban legend and it was really just the amount of food eaten + blood going to the stomach or something to digest it...
Tribes 2 Shifter was pretty good after a while though rather different from Tribes 1 Shifter (no brokenly overpowered laser turrets...). There was a decent community for some years but Tribes 2 base was so bad (excluding rather good net code) and by the time they fixed it with patches it was too late and the population had died off completely.
I thank you, kind sir, for much laughter.
I fail to see how 'rapid ambulation' is unnecessarily complicated. I suppose he could replace 'any form of rapid ambulation' with 'running away' or 'rapid ambulation' with 'speed walking' but those do change the meaning somewhat.
At worst it's like using an int instead of a short. And I do believe slashdot qualifies as hanging out at the A/V club...I can't believe your original post was moderated insightful on a forum that I would think cherishes use of an extensive vocabulary. It was Funny though =)
And what does a siren's song do, hmm?
Isn't this slashdot? I can say with some certainty that women do not, in fact, exist.
I think automated spell checking is a poor way to learn grammar and that such tools are frequently wrong.
A quick review makes me suspect that the correct possessive form is still someone else's. (Sources: a dictionary, a writing guide, and a google test)
There are still logs that report device coordinates, cell tower coordinates, titles of books read, etc to Amazon. Supposedly it's all for 'diagnostic' purposes but who knows.
Of course you can just keep your wireless turned off and that information never gets reported and there are also some hacks out there to disable the logging (as shown here).
Coming to a voting booth near you on November 6th, 2012: Independents' Day.
Reading material on the toilet paper itself. Brilliant!
If we charged companies for those things they would not provide services in areas where it was not economical (which is what currently happens anyway). The only reason everyone has access to telephone lines is because the government decided that telephone service was a necessary utility like water or electricity and subsidized it with taxpayer dollars.
The FCC now considers broadband Internet to be a necessary utility. I think 'free' public Internet would probably be a bad idea but I understand where the FCC is coming from in the desire to make telecoms provide better broadband services to more citizens.
In reality we have a bunch of regional broadband monopolies or duopolies. Wishing that we didn't won't change that reality. Why should they want to upgrade infrastructure if it won't earn them more money?
Wasn't there a Mythbusters where they tested for fecal matter on different things and found it on toothbrushes?
Just because visible amounts of water don't get splashed out doesn't mean nothing does. It pretty much makes no sense to leave the lid open (things can fall in too!).
Same with leaving dirty dishes in the sink. They're a billion times easier to clean if you rinse them when freshly dirty and/or put them straight into the dishwasher. It also means other people can actually use the sink instead of cleaning for you so they can use the sink.
Keep your eyes off her tits is completely valid pointless DRM though.
Predicting that they might get into the backbone business is not the same as it being real. And so what if Google bought dark fiber to power their own intranet between data centers to save money in the long term? Maybe they're using some of that fiber for this foray into the last mile business. Does it really matter? It's not like they're trying to purchase Level3 or Akamai et al.
They'd need trillions of dollars and the support of multiple government regulation systems to globally usurp the internet. It's not happening anytime soon as Google is nowhere near that big.
Oh, come on. It's not like Google has anything close to a monopoly on any of those services. I understand people (rightly!) getting upset over privacy issues with using Google services but acting like Google is taking over the internet is just silly. They don't own the backbones and they don't even create much content. They mostly stick with ways to find and view content and they are not even close to being the only way to find or view that content online (excluding maybe Google Books).
ISPs/telecoms in the high-speed internet business, for the most part, have regional monopoly or duopolies in the US. I also believe a lot of their intrastructure was promoted in some way by government tax benefits or funding. With that said what's the problem with Google testing the waters to see if they could potentially become a competitor without getting bulldozed from incumbents? Do you really think anytime in the near future Google is going to be able to drive out multiple entrenched companies that are, lets face it, much larger monetarily?
Sure plug-ins will and do exist but if the user experience isn't seamless then firefox will likely lose users.
If firefox can be pointed to youtube and videos don't play and there is no obvious solution to make them play but IE/chrome/whatever plays them out of the box then people will use IE/chrome/whatever because it's easier and works. Though I doubt youtube will ever do that some obscure new yet popular site that uses only html5 might.
Slashdot users are not the average internet consumer.
.__.
I forgot I had extrans set from a previous post.
I died to an aircraft battery fire along with 138 other people.
And how many people/stewardesses haven't seen/remember http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcd34tt8YPU and will try to smother the fire and just lead to bigger problems?
I think an automated cargo sensor + suppression system would be far safer than relying on humans to properly execute something. It just wouldn't be cheaper.
For the people who won't watch the FAA video they advise using a water extinguisher or other extinguisher and dousing the batteries with water/liquid to cool them.
Supposedly Amazon was paying 50% of the list price of ~$28 for new bestseller hardcover books to publishers for ebooks that Amazon charged $10 for. So they are/were, again supposedly, losing $4 per new bestseller ebook. Amazon is apparently changing due to publisher pressure or something and will now give publishers 70% of a $13 to $15 on new bestseller ebook price and Amazon will make around $4 profit instead of loss. Amazon has said they'd rather stick with charging $10 which I imagine is because they want to keep ebooks as affordable as possible to drive their kindle platform. Most books aren't bestseller hardcover books and so I imagine they make a profit from most ebooks.
Publishers, apparently, are fine with making less from ebooks because it protects their hardcover sales They see it as a lower difference between ebook price and hardcover price which means people are more likely to buy hardcover or something. In my opinion they just won't buy it at all then and wait for the price to go down. I hope that one day authors can just bypass the publishers and sell ebooks and still make as much or more money from their books. I'm not sure it will ever happen though because then they'd have to actually be good writers instead of rely on a marketing machine.
I drink your milkshake?
And the handbrake guys are jumping the gun and putting on blinders.
H.264 AND Xvid are still the present. Look at top downloads in the p2p arena, look at the anime scene. Xvid is still going very strong. H.264 and the MKV container have had a rough road in the past with compatibility and performance issues. They're finally strong as well but it's taken a while.
People tend to go with what they know works and is more readily accessible. For many people out there that is still xvid/avi. Hopefully one day that will change as h264 in an mkv container is obviously far better.
Because Windows 7 is a majority representation of the Windows operating systems in current use, right?