Why does the current generation of kids seem to think just about everything should be free no matter how little it costs? Are government bodies not entitled to charge a nominal fee for services rendered?
In the first place, this stuff is public information, so the goal of the government should be to make it as widely available as possible at the smallest cost.
Second, the guy took advantage of a free trial period to download as many documents as he could. When the government found out, they shut down the free service.
Third, it's fine to charge a "nominal fee for services rendered," and it makes sense to do so when there is a real cost involved. However, the fee needs to reflect the real costs of retrieving the information. In this case, 18 million pages of documents are not "worth" $1.5 million dollars. They were giving away access to the material at libraries, the search and retrieval mechanism was obviously automatic, so it wasn't wasting people's time or costing more to get the documents.
Seriously, as far as I know, all this material is a matter of public record anyway. It should already be freely available. I've used bulk.resource.org primarily to read opinions of appeals court cases, and it's fantastic to have all that information freely available online. The FBI should be investigating the turrurists instead.
Moral of the story is that if you don't pay 8 cent duplication fees and you know how to use PERL the FBI could come a knockin'?
Apart from it being an N router (not sure what Linksys has in the way of N offerings, I'm still using a trusty WRT54G), this thing also has a USB port that you can hook up a USB drive to and use it like a NAS, which is kind of cool.
I noticed this as I was reading through a few of Asimov's Foundation books... the prose isn't spectacular, but the whole idea behind the books is so compelling and unusual. And it's not necessarily about technology... the whole idea of "psychohistory" is kind of like a super-advanced version of sociology and political science...
Chill out. I have an iPod. I just don't delude myself that I got it because it was the best MP3 player I could find.
I think a lot of people get it because everyone else they know has one (except for that one kid with the Zune). It's probably the only thing they got to try using, and yeah, the UI is pretty nice. And a lot of them are probably bought because the kids nags their parents for an iPod.
As for me, the whole reason I have one is because work bought me a MacBook, and I got a $200 coupon for an iPod along with it, so in my case, it was cheaper than the alternatives.
No, I meant to write what I wrote. I was kind of blown away with the fact that I could be sitting outside and browsing Project Gutenberg, selecting and downloading any book at my leisure, and have it on my reading device within seconds.
That kind of technology makes issues like distance to the nearest library and the collection size of that library moot. Imagine if that were a worldwide network, so that anyone, anywhere had instantaneous access to a vast repository of books, any of which they could transfer to their reader in seconds.
Besides, your point about dead authors is moot. Walk into any bookstore. What percentage of books there are older than 10 years? Next to none.
Pretty much every bookstore I've been to has a literature and philosophy section filled with books by dead people. Many books for various university curricula were written by dead people.
Even if I agreed that current copyright term lengths are appropriate, they still stand in the way of freely distributing thousands of works by authors who ARE dead. The rule of thumb is that if it was written post-1923, it's probably under copyright, and you shouldn't distribute it. Maybe you don't care about all the works written between 1923 and 1950 or whenever, but that doesn't mean no one else does.
My first question is: have you ever tried to read a file in PDF format as an e-book? You have an awful lot of opinion on something which I guess you have not tried.
Your assumption is wrong. I wrote that journal entry three months ago, at a time when I had read about 2 PDF books. Since then, I've read several more books in PDF format; all in all, I've probably read about 2500 pages or so in PDF format.
PDF as a format for an e-book reader is a very bad format.
You're right, it's not ideal. For certain documents it's appropriate, where preserving the original layout is paramount, but for many types of books that's not the case. I wouldn't have been able to do that reading on a smaller screen size, which is why the wider availability of large-format readers is important.
The reason I talk about PDF in my journal entry is not because it's the ideal e-book format, but because it is probably the most common format for pirated material.
You bring up a good point... just because we've spend hundreds of years relying on the codex as the standard format for written material, doesn't mean that the codex is the ideal format for everything we're used to reading. No one reads dictionaries or encyclopedias for extended periods of time, or in a linear manner, and you typically don't need to write in them, so backlit, digital versions of these are acceptable. Hardbound sets of volumes are a total anachronism for this type of material.
Textbooks and documents need to be read linearly, so display quality is important, as is the ability for annotation. Likewise, novels require quality displays, but don't require the ability to annotate.
Now to other thoughts. I can sum these up simply: the DX is an iPod for books.
Think carefully about what that means. What are most people's iPods filled with? We'll not kid ourselves: pirated music. Of course pirated books and texts have been on the Internet for years, long before the MP3 reached its zenith. But just as the iPod made listening to those MP3s simple and enjoyable, to really enjoy a pirated book, you'll need an e-book reader, unless you want to read on the computer or print it out. Now, even e-book readers have been around a while; however, there are a variety of formats, and conversion between them is not always simple. PDF, on the other hand, is an extremely common and widely used format. This means that one could load up their DX with hundreds of pirated PDF books, all in one portable, simple to use package.
I won't be bold enough to call this a prediction, but rather a possibility: with the increasing adoption of e-book readers, particularly those capable of reading PDFs, we might witness digital book piracy on a much wider scale than before. I doubt it will ever reach the levels of music piracy, since books require a much larger investment of time to digest, but I do think it will increase markedly. The interesting thing about this is that while music piracy seems to cluster around recent and highly popular works, I don't think this will be as much the case with book piracy. Don't get me wrong; you can find all of J. K. Rowling's or Stephanie Meyer's works on The Pirate Bay, but you can also find the works of Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand. Slightly older books such as the latter, despite not being classics of all time, still elicit continued interest. So, when book piracy increases, sure, we'll see this year's bestsellers being shared, but we'll also see a lot more books published between 1923 and 1980 being shared than we see music from that time. This also means that we'll see a lot of books that, while still under copyright, were written by authors who are now dead. And if the copyright debate turns toward digital book piracy with even partially the same furor it has over music piracy, it's going to be a lot harder to convince people to feel bad about violating the copyrights of dead authors.
If there are any Star Trek fans reading this, you'll recall the PADD - an e-book like device ubiquitous enough to be carried in stacks, lent to friends, and forgotten carelessly. The DX is the first step in that direction. Like all consumer electronics, the price will drop eventually (remember how expensive the first VCRs and DVD players were?). And the idea of having free, wireless access anywhere in the U.S. to a sizable library of public domain works at Project Gutenberg is pretty inspiring. Imagine expanding that idea so that anyone with an e-book reader had access to a universal library of books. It'll be possible... let's hope that copyright doesn't stand in the way.
So you're saying Apple has more market share thanks to a better product ? Isn't that how competition works ?
Actually I was saying that the iPod is an overpriced, shiny toy with fewer features than many of its competitors. The iPod just has that je ne sais quoi/popular cool factor that makes people want it, not because it's better on features or price.
So where is Apple lacking competition in this space exactly ?
Yeah, but how many of those dozens of devices are overpriced shiny toys with fewer features?
More seriously, just because dozens of other options exist doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a monopoly. This article from two days ago cites Apple's iPod as having 75% of the MP3 player market share, and I've seen similar figures in plenty of other articles.
I think it's interesting how the NY Times offers a commenting facility for a science article, when there have been a spate of op-eds recently where they have disabled comments.
I have a decade-old 1100 that's still going strong here, too. Hooked it up to a JetDirect for easy network printing. The printer was given to me with the paper-feed problem, but I bought a replacement part off the Internet and easily fixed it.
The only real advantages to region locking are for the producer of the product. They can put up different price points for different markets and prevent consumers from tapping into a different market (region).
Depends on how you look at it. If the manufacturer can't price discriminate between different market segments, they will price the product beyond the reach of a lot of people who might want it. In that case, region locking can actually help the (poorer) consumer, since they will be able to purchase a product that otherwise would have been too expensive for them. Meanwhile the manufacturer avoids the risk of arbitrage.
At least, that is how it's supposed to work in theory. In reality region locking is used for a lot more than price discrimination, and it's just pointless and annoying when the product isn't even sold in multiple regions.
I'm considering the Wii-mote smartboard and multitouch displays, but I'm afraid I'm overreaching."
Not necessarily overreaching (I guess it depends on their prior experience), but those projects, while they have a definite "cool" factor, aren't particularly useful.
Personally I would stick to teaching them more useful stuff... maybe basic repair of electric appliances, or if you want something more advanced and that has both the cool factor and would be useful (at least to some people), maybe this DIY book scanner.
A Kindle simply isn't suitable for professional work, or even students. iRex iLiad is still the only ereader with *correct* pdf rendering and mark up.
I think you mean the Kindle isn't suitable for you. Why do you generalize from your experience to all people?
I looked at iRex's offerings before deciding to get a Kindle DX. iRex's definite strength is the Wacom pen input. If that's a necessity for you, then they are pretty much your only option. Not all of us need to write all over everything we read, though.
iRex's products are also expensive! $699 for the iLiad, which has a smaller screen than the DX and isn't in stock, and $859 for the DR-1000... ouch. The "book edition", still smaller than the DX, is $599, more than $100 more expensive than the DX. Granted you get more features, but again, it depends on what you want or need. When I was considering an iRex, reading through their forum made me nervous, too. There were lots of complaints about battery life on the DR-1000.
In any case, I don't know what you mean by "correct" pdf rendering, since pretty much every PDF I've loaded on to the DX has been displaced without issue.
I'm certainly not concerned about the torrented books. Also, to clear up a misconception, Amazon can't simply remove anything from your Kindle without action on your part. You first have to turn on the wireless (which is kept off to save battery life), and then (I believe) manually select "Sync and Check for New Items." That's the way you get new purchases, and the way they can remove purchases.
I posted about this elsewhere, but I bought a Kindle book and got a refund because the quality was poor (apparently Amazon OCRs some books in-house). Out of curiosity, I synced my Kindle after getting the refund, and the book disappeared. However, when I restored a backup copy, not only was I able to read it, but the book has not disappeared despite syncing several times after that.
My suspicion is that anyone with the 1984 book would likely have been able to restore a backup and use it without issue.
I ordered one practically as soon as Amazon unveiled it, and I've been using it on pretty much a daily basis since July. I love it.
Is the navigation slow? Yes. Is the keyboard almost useless? Yes. Does it suck that they don't have folders in which to organize your documents? Yes.
On the other hand, the hundreds of pages of PDFs, articles, and book chapters I have to read for school are all stored in a single place. I can't stand reading stuff for any length of time on a computer screen; the Kindle's screen is much, much better. It also weights less than 2 lbs, which is much nicer to be carrying around in my bag all day in the city compared with my 5 lb laptop (small differences matter).
I found a torrent containing thousands of science fiction books and read several novels on the Kindle. I'm using Calibre, and I have it set so that each morning at 6:30 AM, my computer starts, Calibre fetches news from several sources and puts them on the Kindle, and the computer shuts off at 6:40. By the time I've made coffee, the Kindle is sitting there with the days news ready for me to read.
Obviously the built-in keyboard is pretty much useless, but I've always typed my notes separately anyway. Now, when I am done with my notes, I drop them in a watch directory on my home server; they are automatically converted to.MOBI format and put on a password protected website. Later, when I want them, I can just log into the site from the Kindle and download them directly to the home screen. This way I bypass Amazon's conversion service.
My experience with PDFs has also been great. I can only think of one file that hasn't rendered properly, out of several hundred. Occasionally if the original document is a larger format, the text will be small, but for most of my journal articles, etc., it is pretty much the perfect size.
It's definitely not perfect. I think it would be less useful for undergrads and more useful for grad students, who aren't going to be relying solely on commercial textbooks. It would be nice if you could take useful notes on the Kindle. It would be nice if it had a touchscreen like the iRex models. It would be nice if it had a lot of things. The question for me was, how long did I want to wait for all those features to become widely available? I am getting so much use out of the DX just as a reader that it has made it worth it for me.
An exposure time of 6 minutes (during which everything is moving) goes to show how "blurry" even an 800 megapixel image of the night sky (an enormous subject) must be.
He used a moving equatorial mount to correct for the earth's motion.
Yeah, i still use my old Fujitsu Loox 720 with WM 2003 SE. I mostly use it for taking notes now (paired with a bluetooth foldable keyboard), but it's pretty capable in a pinch. I've got SSH, SCP, RDP and VNC clients on there; a Cisco VPN client, and several foreign language dictionaries.
I noticed an outage maybe a week ago or so when the front page was full of articles from several months ago, and nothing happened when you clicked on them. Anyone else notice that?
Hey. You weren't complaining when region free DVD players stopped honoring the "intellectual property" of the DVD content "owners".
Region codes don't have anything to do with honoring or not honoring intellectual property of DVD content producers. They are technological measures designed to segment the market so that producers can price discriminate more easily. The only reason they would be related to copyright law is because they can also be construed as a copy protection measure, and circumventing that is a violation of the DMCA. As everyone around here should know, it's entirely possible to violate the DMCA without actually infringing copyrights.
If region-free DVD players are illegal, it would only be because the manufacturers of such players signed on to the DVD spec and didn't abide by it, or because they never signed on to the spec in the first place and are perhaps infringing on patents that the DVD Forum allows its members to use. That's a problem for the DVD Forum and its rivals to sort out, and doesn't really have to do with the content on the DVD so much as the licensing agreement surrounding the DVD spec.
2) The photo of this model is only 7 inches tall. The actual model is over 5 feet tall. Do not attempt to reduce your height to only 7 inches, as it might affect your health."
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Why does the current generation of kids seem to think just about everything should be free no matter how little it costs? Are government bodies not entitled to charge a nominal fee for services rendered?
In the first place, this stuff is public information, so the goal of the government should be to make it as widely available as possible at the smallest cost.
Second, the guy took advantage of a free trial period to download as many documents as he could. When the government found out, they shut down the free service.
Third, it's fine to charge a "nominal fee for services rendered," and it makes sense to do so when there is a real cost involved. However, the fee needs to reflect the real costs of retrieving the information. In this case, 18 million pages of documents are not "worth" $1.5 million dollars. They were giving away access to the material at libraries, the search and retrieval mechanism was obviously automatic, so it wasn't wasting people's time or costing more to get the documents.
Seriously, as far as I know, all this material is a matter of public record anyway. It should already be freely available. I've used bulk.resource.org primarily to read opinions of appeals court cases, and it's fantastic to have all that information freely available online. The FBI should be investigating the turrurists instead.
Moral of the story is that if you don't pay 8 cent duplication fees and you know how to use PERL the FBI could come a knockin'?
Apart from it being an N router (not sure what Linksys has in the way of N offerings, I'm still using a trusty WRT54G), this thing also has a USB port that you can hook up a USB drive to and use it like a NAS, which is kind of cool.
I noticed this as I was reading through a few of Asimov's Foundation books... the prose isn't spectacular, but the whole idea behind the books is so compelling and unusual. And it's not necessarily about technology... the whole idea of "psychohistory" is kind of like a super-advanced version of sociology and political science...
Chill out. I have an iPod. I just don't delude myself that I got it because it was the best MP3 player I could find.
I think a lot of people get it because everyone else they know has one (except for that one kid with the Zune). It's probably the only thing they got to try using, and yeah, the UI is pretty nice. And a lot of them are probably bought because the kids nags their parents for an iPod.
As for me, the whole reason I have one is because work bought me a MacBook, and I got a $200 coupon for an iPod along with it, so in my case, it was cheaper than the alternatives.
I think you meant to write...
No, I meant to write what I wrote. I was kind of blown away with the fact that I could be sitting outside and browsing Project Gutenberg, selecting and downloading any book at my leisure, and have it on my reading device within seconds.
That kind of technology makes issues like distance to the nearest library and the collection size of that library moot. Imagine if that were a worldwide network, so that anyone, anywhere had instantaneous access to a vast repository of books, any of which they could transfer to their reader in seconds.
Besides, your point about dead authors is moot. Walk into any bookstore. What percentage of books there are older than 10 years? Next to none.
Pretty much every bookstore I've been to has a literature and philosophy section filled with books by dead people. Many books for various university curricula were written by dead people.
Even if I agreed that current copyright term lengths are appropriate, they still stand in the way of freely distributing thousands of works by authors who ARE dead. The rule of thumb is that if it was written post-1923, it's probably under copyright, and you shouldn't distribute it. Maybe you don't care about all the works written between 1923 and 1950 or whenever, but that doesn't mean no one else does.
My first question is: have you ever tried to read a file in PDF format as an e-book? You have an awful lot of opinion on something which I guess you have not tried.
Your assumption is wrong. I wrote that journal entry three months ago, at a time when I had read about 2 PDF books. Since then, I've read several more books in PDF format; all in all, I've probably read about 2500 pages or so in PDF format.
PDF as a format for an e-book reader is a very bad format.
You're right, it's not ideal. For certain documents it's appropriate, where preserving the original layout is paramount, but for many types of books that's not the case. I wouldn't have been able to do that reading on a smaller screen size, which is why the wider availability of large-format readers is important.
The reason I talk about PDF in my journal entry is not because it's the ideal e-book format, but because it is probably the most common format for pirated material.
You bring up a good point... just because we've spend hundreds of years relying on the codex as the standard format for written material, doesn't mean that the codex is the ideal format for everything we're used to reading. No one reads dictionaries or encyclopedias for extended periods of time, or in a linear manner, and you typically don't need to write in them, so backlit, digital versions of these are acceptable. Hardbound sets of volumes are a total anachronism for this type of material.
Textbooks and documents need to be read linearly, so display quality is important, as is the ability for annotation. Likewise, novels require quality displays, but don't require the ability to annotate.
Now to other thoughts. I can sum these up simply: the DX is an iPod for books.
Think carefully about what that means. What are most people's iPods filled with? We'll not kid ourselves: pirated music. Of course pirated books and texts have been on the Internet for years, long before the MP3 reached its zenith. But just as the iPod made listening to those MP3s simple and enjoyable, to really enjoy a pirated book, you'll need an e-book reader, unless you want to read on the computer or print it out. Now, even e-book readers have been around a while; however, there are a variety of formats, and conversion between them is not always simple. PDF, on the other hand, is an extremely common and widely used format. This means that one could load up their DX with hundreds of pirated PDF books, all in one portable, simple to use package.
I won't be bold enough to call this a prediction, but rather a possibility: with the increasing adoption of e-book readers, particularly those capable of reading PDFs, we might witness digital book piracy on a much wider scale than before. I doubt it will ever reach the levels of music piracy, since books require a much larger investment of time to digest, but I do think it will increase markedly. The interesting thing about this is that while music piracy seems to cluster around recent and highly popular works, I don't think this will be as much the case with book piracy. Don't get me wrong; you can find all of J. K. Rowling's or Stephanie Meyer's works on The Pirate Bay, but you can also find the works of Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand. Slightly older books such as the latter, despite not being classics of all time, still elicit continued interest. So, when book piracy increases, sure, we'll see this year's bestsellers being shared, but we'll also see a lot more books published between 1923 and 1980 being shared than we see music from that time. This also means that we'll see a lot of books that, while still under copyright, were written by authors who are now dead. And if the copyright debate turns toward digital book piracy with even partially the same furor it has over music piracy, it's going to be a lot harder to convince people to feel bad about violating the copyrights of dead authors.
If there are any Star Trek fans reading this, you'll recall the PADD - an e-book like device ubiquitous enough to be carried in stacks, lent to friends, and forgotten carelessly. The DX is the first step in that direction. Like all consumer electronics, the price will drop eventually (remember how expensive the first VCRs and DVD players were?). And the idea of having free, wireless access anywhere in the U.S. to a sizable library of public domain works at Project Gutenberg is pretty inspiring. Imagine expanding that idea so that anyone with an e-book reader had access to a universal library of books. It'll be possible... let's hope that copyright doesn't stand in the way.
So you're saying Apple has more market share thanks to a better product ? Isn't that how competition works ?
Actually I was saying that the iPod is an overpriced, shiny toy with fewer features than many of its competitors. The iPod just has that je ne sais quoi/popular cool factor that makes people want it, not because it's better on features or price.
So where is Apple lacking competition in this space exactly ?
Yeah, but how many of those dozens of devices are overpriced shiny toys with fewer features?
More seriously, just because dozens of other options exist doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a monopoly. This article from two days ago cites Apple's iPod as having 75% of the MP3 player market share, and I've seen similar figures in plenty of other articles.
Nowadays, of course, everyone helpfully interprets the Bible to mean whatever they want it to, which is so much better.
90% of the cost was probably due to the lawyers who worked on the contracts.
I think it's interesting how the NY Times offers a commenting facility for a science article, when there have been a spate of op-eds recently where they have disabled comments.
I have a decade-old 1100 that's still going strong here, too. Hooked it up to a JetDirect for easy network printing. The printer was given to me with the paper-feed problem, but I bought a replacement part off the Internet and easily fixed it.
The only real advantages to region locking are for the producer of the product. They can put up different price points for different markets and prevent consumers from tapping into a different market (region).
Depends on how you look at it. If the manufacturer can't price discriminate between different market segments, they will price the product beyond the reach of a lot of people who might want it. In that case, region locking can actually help the (poorer) consumer, since they will be able to purchase a product that otherwise would have been too expensive for them. Meanwhile the manufacturer avoids the risk of arbitrage.
At least, that is how it's supposed to work in theory. In reality region locking is used for a lot more than price discrimination, and it's just pointless and annoying when the product isn't even sold in multiple regions.
I'm considering the Wii-mote smartboard and multitouch displays, but I'm afraid I'm overreaching."
Not necessarily overreaching (I guess it depends on their prior experience), but those projects, while they have a definite "cool" factor, aren't particularly useful.
Personally I would stick to teaching them more useful stuff... maybe basic repair of electric appliances, or if you want something more advanced and that has both the cool factor and would be useful (at least to some people), maybe this DIY book scanner.
A Kindle simply isn't suitable for professional work, or even students. iRex iLiad is still the only ereader with *correct* pdf rendering and mark up.
I think you mean the Kindle isn't suitable for you. Why do you generalize from your experience to all people?
I looked at iRex's offerings before deciding to get a Kindle DX. iRex's definite strength is the Wacom pen input. If that's a necessity for you, then they are pretty much your only option. Not all of us need to write all over everything we read, though.
iRex's products are also expensive! $699 for the iLiad, which has a smaller screen than the DX and isn't in stock, and $859 for the DR-1000... ouch. The "book edition", still smaller than the DX, is $599, more than $100 more expensive than the DX. Granted you get more features, but again, it depends on what you want or need. When I was considering an iRex, reading through their forum made me nervous, too. There were lots of complaints about battery life on the DR-1000.
In any case, I don't know what you mean by "correct" pdf rendering, since pretty much every PDF I've loaded on to the DX has been displaced without issue.
I'm certainly not concerned about the torrented books. Also, to clear up a misconception, Amazon can't simply remove anything from your Kindle without action on your part. You first have to turn on the wireless (which is kept off to save battery life), and then (I believe) manually select "Sync and Check for New Items." That's the way you get new purchases, and the way they can remove purchases.
I posted about this elsewhere, but I bought a Kindle book and got a refund because the quality was poor (apparently Amazon OCRs some books in-house). Out of curiosity, I synced my Kindle after getting the refund, and the book disappeared. However, when I restored a backup copy, not only was I able to read it, but the book has not disappeared despite syncing several times after that.
My suspicion is that anyone with the 1984 book would likely have been able to restore a backup and use it without issue.
I ordered one practically as soon as Amazon unveiled it, and I've been using it on pretty much a daily basis since July. I love it.
Is the navigation slow? Yes. Is the keyboard almost useless? Yes. Does it suck that they don't have folders in which to organize your documents? Yes.
On the other hand, the hundreds of pages of PDFs, articles, and book chapters I have to read for school are all stored in a single place. I can't stand reading stuff for any length of time on a computer screen; the Kindle's screen is much, much better. It also weights less than 2 lbs, which is much nicer to be carrying around in my bag all day in the city compared with my 5 lb laptop (small differences matter).
I found a torrent containing thousands of science fiction books and read several novels on the Kindle. I'm using Calibre, and I have it set so that each morning at 6:30 AM, my computer starts, Calibre fetches news from several sources and puts them on the Kindle, and the computer shuts off at 6:40. By the time I've made coffee, the Kindle is sitting there with the days news ready for me to read.
Obviously the built-in keyboard is pretty much useless, but I've always typed my notes separately anyway. Now, when I am done with my notes, I drop them in a watch directory on my home server; they are automatically converted to .MOBI format and put on a password protected website. Later, when I want them, I can just log into the site from the Kindle and download them directly to the home screen. This way I bypass Amazon's conversion service.
My experience with PDFs has also been great. I can only think of one file that hasn't rendered properly, out of several hundred. Occasionally if the original document is a larger format, the text will be small, but for most of my journal articles, etc., it is pretty much the perfect size.
It's definitely not perfect. I think it would be less useful for undergrads and more useful for grad students, who aren't going to be relying solely on commercial textbooks. It would be nice if you could take useful notes on the Kindle. It would be nice if it had a touchscreen like the iRex models. It would be nice if it had a lot of things. The question for me was, how long did I want to wait for all those features to become widely available? I am getting so much use out of the DX just as a reader that it has made it worth it for me.
An exposure time of 6 minutes (during which everything is moving) goes to show how "blurry" even an 800 megapixel image of the night sky (an enormous subject) must be.
He used a moving equatorial mount to correct for the earth's motion.
Yeah, i still use my old Fujitsu Loox 720 with WM 2003 SE. I mostly use it for taking notes now (paired with a bluetooth foldable keyboard), but it's pretty capable in a pinch. I've got SSH, SCP, RDP and VNC clients on there; a Cisco VPN client, and several foreign language dictionaries.
I noticed an outage maybe a week ago or so when the front page was full of articles from several months ago, and nothing happened when you clicked on them. Anyone else notice that?
Hey. You weren't complaining when region free DVD players stopped honoring the "intellectual property" of the DVD content "owners".
Region codes don't have anything to do with honoring or not honoring intellectual property of DVD content producers. They are technological measures designed to segment the market so that producers can price discriminate more easily. The only reason they would be related to copyright law is because they can also be construed as a copy protection measure, and circumventing that is a violation of the DMCA. As everyone around here should know, it's entirely possible to violate the DMCA without actually infringing copyrights.
If region-free DVD players are illegal, it would only be because the manufacturers of such players signed on to the DVD spec and didn't abide by it, or because they never signed on to the spec in the first place and are perhaps infringing on patents that the DVD Forum allows its members to use. That's a problem for the DVD Forum and its rivals to sort out, and doesn't really have to do with the content on the DVD so much as the licensing agreement surrounding the DVD spec.
2) The photo of this model is only 7 inches tall. The actual model is over 5 feet tall. Do not attempt to reduce your height to only 7 inches, as it might affect your health."
Sounds like a perfect place for one of these stickers