Seems reasonable to me... Though I'm a longtime Android user, I have no problem with the idea of Apple trying to do their own thing and create a separate system. A little competition is good for everyone and all that. I know that Apple has a hard problem on their hands in creating a new mapping system - there's just an insane amount of data and tedious labor in creating really good global maps, and it takes years and many millions of dollars to get it right. But I'd still be pissed if I was an iPhone user who just lost a bunch of functionality because of the Apple-Google pissing match. Perhaps they should have at least spent a little more time and money on it, maybe had some sort of open beta phase for a year or two. Oh well, I'll just be glad that I'm on Android for now.
One other possibility, at least for servers and datacenters, is to move more of it to enormous virtualized systems such as ECC. The idea being that if you hosted a huge number of diverse websites on what is essentially one system, then they can all share capacity. Any individual site might get slammed at any time, but it's very unlikely that they'll all be slammed at the same time, so each site can have what is for it's own purposes an insane level of extra capacity, but the whole system may have very minimal overprovisioning compared to its total load.
Blind? Say what? Nobody cares about the radar actually based on the carrier. Carriers supply game-changing vision because they can put airborne radar aloft that can see much further than any ship-based radar, and doesn't reveal the exact position of the carrier or support ships in the process. People don't realize that this ability is far more important than the actual strike aircraft. Missiles are about as good as them for many purposes, but they're useless unless you can actually see what you're shooting at (or you're shooting at a fixed land-based target that you can get GPS coords for via satellite pictures).
Mostly agreed, but I'd point out that, though China and Russia in theory have a carrier, to the best of my knowledge, neither of their carriers have ever been on a deployment, due to assorted issues with maintenance, reliability, training, resources, etc. In my opinion, it doesn't count much as a carrier until it has actually crossed an ocean and launched and recovered aircraft on the other side, and I don't think either of their carriers have actually done that. Britain had a couple of those little Harrier-carriers, which don't stand up too well generally against semi-modern land-based aircraft, but at least they have good training, and that's still better than almost every other country in the world. To my knowledge, France is the only other country that has a full-size CATOBAR carrier that has actually launched and recovered aircraft overseas. Of course, they only have one, and it supposedly has had a lot of problems too. The real trouble with carriers is that, though they're fantastically expensive and complex to operate, you pretty much have to have at least 3-5 of them in order to be able to always send one anywhere you want anytime you want, what with maintenance, crew rest, and other such issues. Apparently, nobody but the US can or is willing to put enough money into it to do that.
No ship, aircraft, soldier, or other military vehicle ever gets closer to something dangerous than it absolutely has to. Or civilian for that matter. What makes the carrier king of the seas is that, thanks to its aircraft, it can see and hit the enemy from further away than anything else, thus it's "no closer than it absolutely has to" is much further than anything else. All other naval platforms are either just as vulnerable except with much less striking range and power, or can't detect anything at comparable ranges, or both.
The major advantage that a lot of people miss is the long detection range, thanks to airborne radar. Against an enemy naval formation that doesn't include carriers, the carrier can detect them and their position, then plot, launch, and recover a strike, all at a range where the enemy can't detect the carrier at all. Thus the enemy's missiles aren't worth much, no matter how fast and cool they are, because they don't know where to shoot them.
Battleships are rather better most of the time at beating up hilariously outmatched countries because they can shoot more stuff faster and there aren't any threats from those countries to require them to stay far away from the shores.
That's one of the interesting parts about the mobile OS wars. I'm pretty tied into Android in the same way. Not that I have any real complaint about it, but I do have all of my contacts set up in Google, some amount of money in apps purchased from Google Play store, time setting everything up in a way that works for me, etc. If I wanted to switch over to iOS, I'd have to rebuy all of the apps, in some cases, find new apps when they don't share the same ones, then figure out how to copy over the contacts with email, phone numbers, etc, and all of the text messages, etc. It'd be enough of a PITA that I'd have to seriously want to switch over to bother with it.
Which one was fun, though? We've all heard the stories about how lots of gave development companies are tortuous sweatshops with ridiculous hours, inept management, mostly boring tedious work, etc. Just because playing video games is fun doesn't mean that making them is. Not that it can't be, but you gotta check up on that before you sign on.
Except that it's physically impossible for any of those things to have a significant effect, even if you were somehow able to get everybody to try to do them at once. To take a few examples:
You cannot feed everyone with local and seasonal food - the whole reason why we have this massive industrialized network for the production and distribution of food is that it isn't possible to feed everyone any other way. A few hundred oddballs in a medium-sized city can eat locally without spending much extra money, or do any number of other oddball things without causing much trouble. There's no way you can produce enough food to feed the entire city while still being entirely local.
From the numbers that I've seen, in most American cities, mass transit doesn't actually save much energy. We're just too spread out. A bus/train with 50 people on it is much more efficient, but to get those 50 people to actually ride it, you have to run it back and forth a whole lot on a predictable schedule, and it's going to be virtually empty 95% of the time, and an empty bus/train moving around on schedule is hopelessly inefficient. To actually save transport energy, you have to build super-compact cities, with lots of tall buildings and underground construction. But then, building cities like that is highly energy-intensive and running them probably is too... haven't seen any studies of how the numbers come out, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes decades for the difference to take effect.
It's a weapon for the dictator's regime, no doubt, but like all weapons, it's not as effective as the people selling it would have you think. I haven't seen anything to make me think that it's a game changer in the war between state and rebel. If you're a rebel, it's something you'll have to watch out for and take measures against, just like any number of other things. Stuff like leaving the phone behind, switching phones at convenient times, doing things with/on it to make whoever is watching think your plan is something else and maybe lead the security forces into an ambush, etc. And some poor bastards will miss something or mess it up and get screwed... and some of them will deserve it.
Things might change if anybody ever gets the whole large-scale automated data mining that they're always talking about really working well, but that's something to worry about later.
I wouldn't exactly call it amoral corporate behavior. These companies all are publicly traded, and their primary obligation is to preserve and increase shareholder value. Standing up to the Government has no relation to their actual primary goals and is usually in opposition to them. When a company gets that big, they have a lot to lose, and the Government has hundreds of ways to arrange for them to lose it all. Think they're going to stand up to them and jeopardize shareholder value for the sake of someone who will be called a mobster, drug dealer, or terrorist? And regulate against? Do you really expect that the Government is ever going to punish a corporation for agreeing to give data to it, no matter what laws get passed?
I'm not thrilled about it or anything, but that's the way the world works. If you're going to do anything that might be legally iffy, you're better off assuming that every major and even medium-sized corporation will give the Government anything it asks for on a silver platter.
Nice theory. Let's take a look at some practical examples, though. In all of the rebellions in the Arab Spring, involving actual totalitarian government being overthrown by force, my understanding is that cell phones have proved far more useful to the rebels for coordinating their activities than to the Government for tracking people.
There are potential dangers from tracking and such, but I think they can be mostly mitigated with good tactics, and that the overall benefits outweigh the risks in most cases.
The funny thing is that, if you are a hermit with no contact with society, then Government agencies are very unlikely to care where you are or what you're up to anyways, since nobody else does. The people they want to know all about are the ones who are actively influencing opinion against whatever the Government is trying to do.
What's strange is how old and vauge it all is. There's pics of the same stuff from 2000. Have they made any progress since then? They've got some cool pictures, but are they willing to set foot in a Mars-simulated atmosphere yet? If not, what do they need to do to get there, and how much progress have they made on those problems in the last decade?
I'm a little uneasy at what will happen when most people are driving these and how they will interact with the police. I suppose there wouldn't be any point in trying to ticket one, but I still would expect they'll eventually do something like on a signal from a police car, the autonomous car will pull over and stop itself. Things just get more ominous, if more unlikely from there. What if it was set up that, if the Government wants you, any autonomous car you get into will automatically drive you to the nearest police station nonstop?
It could be funny if the ship was controlled by a computer that can't be overridden locally but only controlled by a remote satellite link or something. Sure, they can try and board the ship, but they won't be able to do anything but sit around on it until it reaches a port which has plenty of cops.
Interesting idea. I suppose it would have to be different people - I don't think dirt-poor Somalis are going to be hacking guidance computers anytime soon. But is there anyone who could do that and would want to and lives somewhere where they won't be promptly tracked down and arrested?
It might work in some cases, but I'm just a bit skeptical that telecommuting is the future for all jobs. Anything involving hardware, for one. Even if it's all software and documents, between time zones, poor quality conference calls, and text-based communications, there are some things that are just hopelessly inefficient if you can't actually get all of the people together in the same physical room.
I learned long ago that you should make sure that you look at the negative reviews to really get a feel for a product. For one, there's always some of the dopes that are never satisfied with anything and will give awful reviews for trivial reasons. If their reviews AREN'T present, then they're being removed or edited out, which should make you wonder what else is being removed. Then there's usually some people who are unhappy with some aspect of the thing for a legitimate reason - these are the people to listen to, to be aware of what the thing's real issues are and consider whether they affect you.
I admit, I forgot the name of my rep soon after election day. That aside, I'm pretty sure that he and 95% of the rest of the congresspeople have no idea themselves where they stand on IP issues. They all know that the number of people who care enough about it to affect their vote is far, far smaller than for dozens of other mainstream issues. They probably won't even bother trying to learn about it. If they're feeling strapped for cash, they'll probably say and vote along with whichever lobbyist pays them the most, or if they're unusually principled, they'll go whichever way their aide who actually has the time and inclination to care about it, says.
Insightful because we all know that only America has individuals who actually think and make their own decisions for their own individual reasons. The rest of the 5.7 Billion people on the planet can be safely lumped into a "rest of the world" category that all think the same thing and are not capable of doing anything other than reacting to what Americans do.
From an American, speaking only slightly tongue-in-cheek...
The summary at least seems to be focusing on individual developers, but how often is it really the developer's fault? Imagine that your boss asked you to write a program to do A. You say, well, I can use algorithm X, which will be a fast project, but not secure, or algorithm Y, which is more secure, but will take twice as long and twice as many developers to create. What do you think they're going to pick? What about just plain not having enough time to actually finish something and fully test it before having to move on to something else? What about stuff like no budget for software testers, pen testing, proper security audits, etc? Probably 80% of it isn't really the fault of the individual developer, so it makes no sense to focus on holding them accountable.
If you wanted to do something like the PE program, like certified developers, then you'd have to have some sort of legal requirement for what programs require what kinds of sign-offs from who. The State can easily enforce that, say, plans for an actual physical building must be signed off, and inspect the building to make sure it's actually built to the plan, etc. How do you do that for software? Is there supposed to be some organization that monitors publicly accessible servers or something and fines anybody operating one that doesn't have the right licensing? Sounds like a mess.
My default is to block or avoid all ads everywhere. I don't even have cable, and all of the TV I watch is either Netflix instant view or Torrent streams, so I never see any TV ads. I block all internet ads on all of my computers, plus my phone and tablet. About the only ads I see are on the radio while driving, mostly because I am too lazy and don't drive enough to bother with setting up audio CDs or getting satellite radio.
On the internet, at least on computers, I sometimes whilelist sites I like and want to support, if their ads aren't too obnoxious. At least if I bother to remember about it. For internet ads, there's so much bad stuff out there - malware in ads, tracking systems, javascript that slows your browser to a crawl, annoying animations, and just plain ugly stuff, that it's much easier to block it all and not worry than to try and sort out what's what.
For morality, I try to look at the situation in reverse to get a little perspective. How many internet advertising people are really worried about whether they infect our computers with malware, track us, slow our browsers to a crawl, etc? How much effort are they going to to make sure that those things don't happen? Yeah, I thought so. I think I'll continue to not care about any greater implications of being part of the 5% of internet users tech-savvy enough to block ads.
What I think you're missing is that the standard bean-counter approach to budgeting and project management just doesn't apply here. Take a car company as the opposite - they make hundreds of thousands of everything. Because they're dealing with well-known technology and high production numbers, they can say with a great deal of confidence exactly how much it will cost to make the next one, or the next ten, or the next ten thousand. Neither of those apply to a lot of these technological projects that are so famous for cost overruns - they're only making one JWST, and all of the gear in it is cutting-edge technology that nobody has much real experience with, and some of which has to be invented for the purpose. You're never going to be able to make an accurate schedule or cost estimate for that.
The same applies to a lot of other stuff, like fighter jets. Each new generation is pushing the cutting edge of several different branches of technology, including aviation, low-observables, engine design, materials, etc. Problems nobody could have forseen are going to come up, and solutions will have to be found, and nobody will be able to predict how much it will cost or how long it will take ahead of time. Especially when you're only planning on making a few hundred of them, at most.
My take: Get the most basic Kindle. Only $80, or $110 if you want to spring for one with no ads. Spend the rest on books.
What's really nice about the eReader experience is the instant buying. See a book you like, click, pay $10 or whatever, and you're reading it 30 seconds later. That, and the ability to carry around dozens of books in a package that's smaller and weighs less than one paperback.
Why the Kindle over a tablet? I have one of both, and I find the tablet slightly unwieldy for reading. The extra weight means that some positions get uncomfortable after 10-20 minutes. The extra size means you may have to reach or hold it in a funny position to turn pages sometimes. Granted, mine is 10", and a 7" one might be more comfortable. Also, even the cheap tablets are twice as expensive, making it less of an easy impulse buy. I also find tablets a little more fiddly - more updates and settings and such to worry about. Kindle gives you text size and that's about it, generally no apps or updates to get in the way. And you gotta love the 1-month battery life.
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Seems reasonable to me... Though I'm a longtime Android user, I have no problem with the idea of Apple trying to do their own thing and create a separate system. A little competition is good for everyone and all that. I know that Apple has a hard problem on their hands in creating a new mapping system - there's just an insane amount of data and tedious labor in creating really good global maps, and it takes years and many millions of dollars to get it right. But I'd still be pissed if I was an iPhone user who just lost a bunch of functionality because of the Apple-Google pissing match. Perhaps they should have at least spent a little more time and money on it, maybe had some sort of open beta phase for a year or two. Oh well, I'll just be glad that I'm on Android for now.
Good summary.
One other possibility, at least for servers and datacenters, is to move more of it to enormous virtualized systems such as ECC. The idea being that if you hosted a huge number of diverse websites on what is essentially one system, then they can all share capacity. Any individual site might get slammed at any time, but it's very unlikely that they'll all be slammed at the same time, so each site can have what is for it's own purposes an insane level of extra capacity, but the whole system may have very minimal overprovisioning compared to its total load.
Blind? Say what? Nobody cares about the radar actually based on the carrier. Carriers supply game-changing vision because they can put airborne radar aloft that can see much further than any ship-based radar, and doesn't reveal the exact position of the carrier or support ships in the process. People don't realize that this ability is far more important than the actual strike aircraft. Missiles are about as good as them for many purposes, but they're useless unless you can actually see what you're shooting at (or you're shooting at a fixed land-based target that you can get GPS coords for via satellite pictures).
Mostly agreed, but I'd point out that, though China and Russia in theory have a carrier, to the best of my knowledge, neither of their carriers have ever been on a deployment, due to assorted issues with maintenance, reliability, training, resources, etc. In my opinion, it doesn't count much as a carrier until it has actually crossed an ocean and launched and recovered aircraft on the other side, and I don't think either of their carriers have actually done that. Britain had a couple of those little Harrier-carriers, which don't stand up too well generally against semi-modern land-based aircraft, but at least they have good training, and that's still better than almost every other country in the world. To my knowledge, France is the only other country that has a full-size CATOBAR carrier that has actually launched and recovered aircraft overseas. Of course, they only have one, and it supposedly has had a lot of problems too. The real trouble with carriers is that, though they're fantastically expensive and complex to operate, you pretty much have to have at least 3-5 of them in order to be able to always send one anywhere you want anytime you want, what with maintenance, crew rest, and other such issues. Apparently, nobody but the US can or is willing to put enough money into it to do that.
Dude, way to miss the point entirely.
No ship, aircraft, soldier, or other military vehicle ever gets closer to something dangerous than it absolutely has to. Or civilian for that matter. What makes the carrier king of the seas is that, thanks to its aircraft, it can see and hit the enemy from further away than anything else, thus it's "no closer than it absolutely has to" is much further than anything else. All other naval platforms are either just as vulnerable except with much less striking range and power, or can't detect anything at comparable ranges, or both.
The major advantage that a lot of people miss is the long detection range, thanks to airborne radar. Against an enemy naval formation that doesn't include carriers, the carrier can detect them and their position, then plot, launch, and recover a strike, all at a range where the enemy can't detect the carrier at all. Thus the enemy's missiles aren't worth much, no matter how fast and cool they are, because they don't know where to shoot them.
Battleships are rather better most of the time at beating up hilariously outmatched countries because they can shoot more stuff faster and there aren't any threats from those countries to require them to stay far away from the shores.
That's one of the interesting parts about the mobile OS wars. I'm pretty tied into Android in the same way. Not that I have any real complaint about it, but I do have all of my contacts set up in Google, some amount of money in apps purchased from Google Play store, time setting everything up in a way that works for me, etc. If I wanted to switch over to iOS, I'd have to rebuy all of the apps, in some cases, find new apps when they don't share the same ones, then figure out how to copy over the contacts with email, phone numbers, etc, and all of the text messages, etc. It'd be enough of a PITA that I'd have to seriously want to switch over to bother with it.
Which one was fun, though? We've all heard the stories about how lots of gave development companies are tortuous sweatshops with ridiculous hours, inept management, mostly boring tedious work, etc. Just because playing video games is fun doesn't mean that making them is. Not that it can't be, but you gotta check up on that before you sign on.
Except that it's physically impossible for any of those things to have a significant effect, even if you were somehow able to get everybody to try to do them at once. To take a few examples:
You cannot feed everyone with local and seasonal food - the whole reason why we have this massive industrialized network for the production and distribution of food is that it isn't possible to feed everyone any other way. A few hundred oddballs in a medium-sized city can eat locally without spending much extra money, or do any number of other oddball things without causing much trouble. There's no way you can produce enough food to feed the entire city while still being entirely local.
From the numbers that I've seen, in most American cities, mass transit doesn't actually save much energy. We're just too spread out. A bus/train with 50 people on it is much more efficient, but to get those 50 people to actually ride it, you have to run it back and forth a whole lot on a predictable schedule, and it's going to be virtually empty 95% of the time, and an empty bus/train moving around on schedule is hopelessly inefficient. To actually save transport energy, you have to build super-compact cities, with lots of tall buildings and underground construction. But then, building cities like that is highly energy-intensive and running them probably is too... haven't seen any studies of how the numbers come out, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes decades for the difference to take effect.
It's a weapon for the dictator's regime, no doubt, but like all weapons, it's not as effective as the people selling it would have you think. I haven't seen anything to make me think that it's a game changer in the war between state and rebel. If you're a rebel, it's something you'll have to watch out for and take measures against, just like any number of other things. Stuff like leaving the phone behind, switching phones at convenient times, doing things with/on it to make whoever is watching think your plan is something else and maybe lead the security forces into an ambush, etc. And some poor bastards will miss something or mess it up and get screwed... and some of them will deserve it.
Things might change if anybody ever gets the whole large-scale automated data mining that they're always talking about really working well, but that's something to worry about later.
I wouldn't exactly call it amoral corporate behavior. These companies all are publicly traded, and their primary obligation is to preserve and increase shareholder value. Standing up to the Government has no relation to their actual primary goals and is usually in opposition to them. When a company gets that big, they have a lot to lose, and the Government has hundreds of ways to arrange for them to lose it all. Think they're going to stand up to them and jeopardize shareholder value for the sake of someone who will be called a mobster, drug dealer, or terrorist? And regulate against? Do you really expect that the Government is ever going to punish a corporation for agreeing to give data to it, no matter what laws get passed?
I'm not thrilled about it or anything, but that's the way the world works. If you're going to do anything that might be legally iffy, you're better off assuming that every major and even medium-sized corporation will give the Government anything it asks for on a silver platter.
Nice theory. Let's take a look at some practical examples, though. In all of the rebellions in the Arab Spring, involving actual totalitarian government being overthrown by force, my understanding is that cell phones have proved far more useful to the rebels for coordinating their activities than to the Government for tracking people.
There are potential dangers from tracking and such, but I think they can be mostly mitigated with good tactics, and that the overall benefits outweigh the risks in most cases.
The funny thing is that, if you are a hermit with no contact with society, then Government agencies are very unlikely to care where you are or what you're up to anyways, since nobody else does. The people they want to know all about are the ones who are actively influencing opinion against whatever the Government is trying to do.
What's strange is how old and vauge it all is. There's pics of the same stuff from 2000. Have they made any progress since then? They've got some cool pictures, but are they willing to set foot in a Mars-simulated atmosphere yet? If not, what do they need to do to get there, and how much progress have they made on those problems in the last decade?
I'm a little uneasy at what will happen when most people are driving these and how they will interact with the police. I suppose there wouldn't be any point in trying to ticket one, but I still would expect they'll eventually do something like on a signal from a police car, the autonomous car will pull over and stop itself. Things just get more ominous, if more unlikely from there. What if it was set up that, if the Government wants you, any autonomous car you get into will automatically drive you to the nearest police station nonstop?
It could be funny if the ship was controlled by a computer that can't be overridden locally but only controlled by a remote satellite link or something. Sure, they can try and board the ship, but they won't be able to do anything but sit around on it until it reaches a port which has plenty of cops.
Interesting idea. I suppose it would have to be different people - I don't think dirt-poor Somalis are going to be hacking guidance computers anytime soon. But is there anyone who could do that and would want to and lives somewhere where they won't be promptly tracked down and arrested?
Could happen. I wonder how tough it will be to automate stuff like backing a tractor-trailer into the right spot in tight quarters?
It might work in some cases, but I'm just a bit skeptical that telecommuting is the future for all jobs. Anything involving hardware, for one. Even if it's all software and documents, between time zones, poor quality conference calls, and text-based communications, there are some things that are just hopelessly inefficient if you can't actually get all of the people together in the same physical room.
I learned long ago that you should make sure that you look at the negative reviews to really get a feel for a product. For one, there's always some of the dopes that are never satisfied with anything and will give awful reviews for trivial reasons. If their reviews AREN'T present, then they're being removed or edited out, which should make you wonder what else is being removed. Then there's usually some people who are unhappy with some aspect of the thing for a legitimate reason - these are the people to listen to, to be aware of what the thing's real issues are and consider whether they affect you.
I admit, I forgot the name of my rep soon after election day. That aside, I'm pretty sure that he and 95% of the rest of the congresspeople have no idea themselves where they stand on IP issues. They all know that the number of people who care enough about it to affect their vote is far, far smaller than for dozens of other mainstream issues. They probably won't even bother trying to learn about it. If they're feeling strapped for cash, they'll probably say and vote along with whichever lobbyist pays them the most, or if they're unusually principled, they'll go whichever way their aide who actually has the time and inclination to care about it, says.
Insightful because we all know that only America has individuals who actually think and make their own decisions for their own individual reasons. The rest of the 5.7 Billion people on the planet can be safely lumped into a "rest of the world" category that all think the same thing and are not capable of doing anything other than reacting to what Americans do.
From an American, speaking only slightly tongue-in-cheek...
The summary at least seems to be focusing on individual developers, but how often is it really the developer's fault? Imagine that your boss asked you to write a program to do A. You say, well, I can use algorithm X, which will be a fast project, but not secure, or algorithm Y, which is more secure, but will take twice as long and twice as many developers to create. What do you think they're going to pick? What about just plain not having enough time to actually finish something and fully test it before having to move on to something else? What about stuff like no budget for software testers, pen testing, proper security audits, etc? Probably 80% of it isn't really the fault of the individual developer, so it makes no sense to focus on holding them accountable.
If you wanted to do something like the PE program, like certified developers, then you'd have to have some sort of legal requirement for what programs require what kinds of sign-offs from who. The State can easily enforce that, say, plans for an actual physical building must be signed off, and inspect the building to make sure it's actually built to the plan, etc. How do you do that for software? Is there supposed to be some organization that monitors publicly accessible servers or something and fines anybody operating one that doesn't have the right licensing? Sounds like a mess.
My default is to block or avoid all ads everywhere. I don't even have cable, and all of the TV I watch is either Netflix instant view or Torrent streams, so I never see any TV ads. I block all internet ads on all of my computers, plus my phone and tablet. About the only ads I see are on the radio while driving, mostly because I am too lazy and don't drive enough to bother with setting up audio CDs or getting satellite radio.
On the internet, at least on computers, I sometimes whilelist sites I like and want to support, if their ads aren't too obnoxious. At least if I bother to remember about it. For internet ads, there's so much bad stuff out there - malware in ads, tracking systems, javascript that slows your browser to a crawl, annoying animations, and just plain ugly stuff, that it's much easier to block it all and not worry than to try and sort out what's what.
For morality, I try to look at the situation in reverse to get a little perspective. How many internet advertising people are really worried about whether they infect our computers with malware, track us, slow our browsers to a crawl, etc? How much effort are they going to to make sure that those things don't happen? Yeah, I thought so. I think I'll continue to not care about any greater implications of being part of the 5% of internet users tech-savvy enough to block ads.
What I think you're missing is that the standard bean-counter approach to budgeting and project management just doesn't apply here. Take a car company as the opposite - they make hundreds of thousands of everything. Because they're dealing with well-known technology and high production numbers, they can say with a great deal of confidence exactly how much it will cost to make the next one, or the next ten, or the next ten thousand. Neither of those apply to a lot of these technological projects that are so famous for cost overruns - they're only making one JWST, and all of the gear in it is cutting-edge technology that nobody has much real experience with, and some of which has to be invented for the purpose. You're never going to be able to make an accurate schedule or cost estimate for that.
The same applies to a lot of other stuff, like fighter jets. Each new generation is pushing the cutting edge of several different branches of technology, including aviation, low-observables, engine design, materials, etc. Problems nobody could have forseen are going to come up, and solutions will have to be found, and nobody will be able to predict how much it will cost or how long it will take ahead of time. Especially when you're only planning on making a few hundred of them, at most.
My take: Get the most basic Kindle. Only $80, or $110 if you want to spring for one with no ads. Spend the rest on books.
What's really nice about the eReader experience is the instant buying. See a book you like, click, pay $10 or whatever, and you're reading it 30 seconds later. That, and the ability to carry around dozens of books in a package that's smaller and weighs less than one paperback.
Why the Kindle over a tablet? I have one of both, and I find the tablet slightly unwieldy for reading. The extra weight means that some positions get uncomfortable after 10-20 minutes. The extra size means you may have to reach or hold it in a funny position to turn pages sometimes. Granted, mine is 10", and a 7" one might be more comfortable. Also, even the cheap tablets are twice as expensive, making it less of an easy impulse buy. I also find tablets a little more fiddly - more updates and settings and such to worry about. Kindle gives you text size and that's about it, generally no apps or updates to get in the way. And you gotta love the 1-month battery life.