Of course there is. Books are not a requirement for living. If a book is priced at a level you don't want to pay, wait for it to go down in price, wait for it to show up in the library or do without. I would rather pay a little more for ebooks than have Amazon drive all the publishers out of business and be stuck with nothing but the self-published crap Amazon publishes. Some of that stuff would get a failing mark in 6th grade.
This doesn't work. Every major publisher in the United States is not selling the same set of books. Each publisher is selling/their/ books. Books are not commodities, they are not subject to 'supply and demand', They are one-off creative works with what is, for all intents and purposes, infinite supply. Additionally, each publisher is, again in effect, it's own monopoly.
Of course buyers have a say. Books are not commodities, they are one-off creative works. Each one is worth what it's worth to an individual reader. It's up to the reader to decide of they wish to pay the asked for price or not.
There are any number of products that are sold this way with no one objecting. Try buying a Vox AC30C2 guitar amplifier for a dollar less than $999.99 anywhere in the country.
From a purely consumer standpoint, sure, cheaper is better. And as long as there's no development of monopolies or other devious practices, that's fine for consumers.
Cheaper is better for consumers is not an absolute. Cheaper may not be better when it leads to lower quality.
Are you really so thick you don't understand that books are not buggy whips? Books are not mass produced items subject to scaling efficiencies etc. Books are one off pieces of creative work. It was a bad analogy the first time someone used it 10 years ago and it reamains bad today. Not to mention wholly unoriginal.
If by improve our standing of living you mean our ability to buy cheap crap from Walmart and the death of high quality goods, I'm in complete agreement!
There's a lot more wrong with 8 than merely removal of the start button. Begin with them deciding to design a desktop OS around the notion that everyone in the universe has a touchscreen interface. I don't have one on my desktop, I don't/want/ one on my desktop.
It ran both DOS and CP/M. Had 8086 and X80 processors, used VT220 display hardware and would only read a proprietary floppy format. You had to buy your floppies from DEC. Compatible with the IBM PC? Not so much. In my job, I'd developed a project management system for the PC, and I had to make sure it ran on the IBM, but also the DEC, Data General, Prime and Wang versions of the PC. Each one was incompatible in it's own special way.
DEC and Prime both followed the same path to willful self-destruction. Probably for the same reason, old like hardware guys who couldn't/wouldn't adapt to the changing condition. Who remembers the DEC Rainbow?
Slashdot Mirror
Klipsch. That.
Steve 'Romulus Augustus' Ballmer?
Of course there is. Books are not a requirement for living. If a book is priced at a level you don't want to pay, wait for it to go down in price, wait for it to show up in the library or do without. I would rather pay a little more for ebooks than have Amazon drive all the publishers out of business and be stuck with nothing but the self-published crap Amazon publishes. Some of that stuff would get a failing mark in 6th grade.
This doesn't work. Every major publisher in the United States is not selling the same set of books. Each publisher is selling /their/ books. Books are not commodities, they are not subject to 'supply and demand', They are one-off creative works with what is, for all intents and purposes, infinite supply. Additionally, each publisher is, again in effect, it's own monopoly.
Of course buyers have a say. Books are not commodities, they are one-off creative works. Each one is worth what it's worth to an individual reader. It's up to the reader to decide of they wish to pay the asked for price or not.
There are any number of products that are sold this way with no one objecting. Try buying a Vox AC30C2 guitar amplifier for a dollar less than $999.99 anywhere in the country.
He didn't say ALL he wanted was unix userland. Some people want both.
Exactly. I expect the percentage of people buying an Android platform that know it's based on Linux is probably less than 10 percent (WAG).
I remember that! The first time I installed Linux, I had to patch the boot floppy with debug!
Cheaper is better for consumers is not an absolute. Cheaper may not be better when it leads to lower quality.
Are you really so thick you don't understand that books are not buggy whips? Books are not mass produced items subject to scaling efficiencies etc. Books are one off pieces of creative work. It was a bad analogy the first time someone used it 10 years ago and it reamains bad today. Not to mention wholly unoriginal.
Fine. But it makes a perfectly cogent argument as to why Amazon may not be as great for the consumer as it's fans claim it is.
You apparently have never been to an actual GOOD bookstore.
If by improve our standing of living you mean our ability to buy cheap crap from Walmart and the death of high quality goods, I'm in complete agreement!
There's a lot more wrong with 8 than merely removal of the start button. Begin with them deciding to design a desktop OS around the notion that everyone in the universe has a touchscreen interface. I don't have one on my desktop, I don't /want/ one on my desktop.
Better the federal department of education than the Texas School Board.
...the teaching of basic literacy and communications skills. Like...I don't know, writing?
What a perfectly repulsive human being you are.
I prefer the primary defintion: A complete mispelling of an already mispelled word...
"powned'? You need to return to geek school and retake a few courses.
It ran both DOS and CP/M. Had 8086 and X80 processors, used VT220 display hardware and would only read a proprietary floppy format. You had to buy your floppies from DEC. Compatible with the IBM PC? Not so much. In my job, I'd developed a project management system for the PC, and I had to make sure it ran on the IBM, but also the DEC, Data General, Prime and Wang versions of the PC. Each one was incompatible in it's own special way.
DEC and Prime both followed the same path to willful self-destruction. Probably for the same reason, old like hardware guys who couldn't/wouldn't adapt to the changing condition. Who remembers the DEC Rainbow?
Probably not a big issue when the thing is running a NUCLEAR POWER PLANT.
I sill fondly remember the 5MB disk drives with the removable platters the size of manhole covers. Those were the days.
Wut?