Sorry, but that is the new globalized world. Company A spends millions in R&D, Company B then steals this and turns out clones for 1/4th the price. Company A goes out of business.
The result is cheaper products for consumers, which benefits just about everyone except the fat cat investors that staked the founders of Company A.
The only possible problem is running out of stupid fat cat investors. They are required to be stupid in order to invest in a company in US or Europe that can be toppled by this sort of action by clone makers. If they had a brain, they would realize that investing in R&D today is a losing game if the results can be cloned.
Apple has had a pretty good run, but it is clearly time for the clone makers to put them out of business. Their computers are way overpriced and they can't get away with that in a clone environment.
You will note that the result of being bottled up in Europe without significant exploitable resources resulted in migration to the New World. At significant cost, risk and a lot of people dying in the process. The first James Bay colony died to pretty much the last man and woman, but migration continued. Cortez is another fine example. He supposedly burned his ships to show his men that they were there for the long haul.
Sure, if we don't do it soon, it will result in significant shrinkage and a new dark age. Following that, you will have exploitation of resources off-planet. Just hundreds of years after it could have been with a lot more dead people behind it.
It works in most countries because when you get to be 60 or 70 years old it is pretty clear to everyone that you aren't going to get much care. Somewhere north of 80% of all health care spending in the US comes in the last year of people's lives, some of this is an utter waste. The rest is spent to buy people a few more years, or even months.
Other contries simply do not spend this money, at all. Obama and Harry Reid keep trying to figure out a way to tell people how the system in the US has to change for it to all be affordable. They can't. Sarah Palin uttered the words "death panels" to describe what was being written about in the various bills and got ridiculed for it. Don't you understand? We can't cover the 20-somethings for every scratch and still keep people in their 80s alive. The old ones HAVE to go. Now, if they have a healthy lifestyle and are accident-free, then maybe they can live on to a very old age. But the idea that the government is going to pay to keep someone alive after their 60th birthday is just silly.
Why do you think people from all over the world come to the US when they are old and sick, if they have the money? Because the US is the one place with experience in actually providing health care to old people. Everywhere else they have a far more realistic attitude towards old age, death and dying.
Of course, it could just as easily have been wealthy people moving to Detroit or Washington DC where the neighborhoods are closer knit and they will find that they tax payments going to more worthy causes.
One way or another, for whatever reason, New York lost that tax revenue. About the only solution is either to tax everyone everywhere in the US the same (all states, all cities, one tax rate) or for all states and cities to share the tax revenue equally. Then, no matter where anyone goes in the US it changes nothing.
I guess the other solution is just to stop people moving from higher tax areas to lower tax areas. Make it so they can't get away.
What you are saying is pretty much that communities should disallow businesses to operate that might cause pollution. Because no matter how much a business says they aren't going to, once they do in the stealth of night, it is done. And then someone has to clean it up.
So the obvious solution for a community - if they had control - is to disallow any business that has the potential to cause any sort of pollution of anything. So you block the dry cleaner because of PERC, the auto shop because of waste oil, refrigerant, spilled gasoline, etc. Then you need to block the small metal shop because of dangerous organic solvents and metal chips. Eventually, you have a perfectly safe community (like California is trying to achieve) without any commercial activity at all.
They figured this out in about 1950 and today communities have no control. It is decided at the state and federal level, far far away from anyone that might be impacted.
This is also why the manufacturing has moved out of the US and either across the border to Juarez or across the ocean to China. No matter what companies tried to do, they were getting blocked by lawsuits and stupid regulations. A stupid regulation is California's Prop 65 - all it is going to do is drive businesses across the state line. It will not force car dealers to eliminate the lead in the batteries or the oil from the cars. But by all means, keep passing these regulations and drive all those industries over somewhere else. We can all work for the Government.
If you really, really believe that the Earth is a closed system, you better start looking at your duties to the rest of the human race. The definition of a sustainable closed system is that the wastes are recycled pretty much by natural processes to become usable resources again. We are so far away from that - mostly because of population - that it isn't funny.
Note that I am not talking about recycling paper and aluminium cans. I am referring to garbage and human wastes. Currently, in India much of the population defecates in open fields. This works fine below certain population levels because the wastes are natually recycled. India past that point a while back, like maybe 1900 or so. Maybe earlier, I don't really know.
I do know that above a population of maybe 200 million people there is no hope for a "sustainable" closed system. We are going to have to import resources from off-planet to keep this population. Or we can choose to decrease the population rather drastically. Almost overnight, because the resource and waste problem is going to catch up to us very quickly. And every year that goes by with people saying that space exploration is too expensive and all the while people are having more children just makes the problem worse.
So think about this very carefully. Take a look at this. There are some very serious people thinking that the Earth is indeed a closed system, and it is high time we get the population down to under 1 billion or fewer. Think about what it would take to decrease the population by 5/6ths in 20 or 30 years. Because without off-planet resources that might be all the time we have left.
There is in fact a similar "three strikes" law for using the telephone for committing crimes. If you use the telephone to commit a crime (and you are caught), you find out about the one-strike law. At least in the US you stand a pretty good chance of going to jail where you will most certainly surrender your cell phone, your land line, your television and your computer. Oh, and your clothes.
So a three strikes law against committing crimes is in fact quite a step up from those committed in the physical world.
Problem is, on the Internet money can be made by not following those rules. They rules aren't clearly 100% applicable in all situations so everyone understands that the parallels aren't going to be exact. This allows for some interpretation.
Now, if the US Postal Service could figure out a way to make money by reading your mail, they might have done that, say in 1790. No, there wasn't any way to do this in 1790 so the rules got built up with the idea that the US Postal Service (modeled on the similar service in UK) wouldn't read people's mail. But Google does this every day, for profit.
There are plenty of other examples of this. It sort of makes sense if you take the position that when you want it to be that way everything on the Internet is different. And then, when you want it the other way, everything on the Internet is the same. We are caught in the middle of people making rules and interpreting them who now are convinced that they can decide either way whenever it suits them.
How does this get resolved? Long, expensive and painful court battles. Legislation might help, but unfortunately we will still end up with the confusing arbitrary rules of everything is different at the same time everything is the same.
With the Internet, it is everyone's right to destroy the revenue model of any business they choose to target. You and I should equally be able to force any business into bankruptcy just by posting their creations online for everyone to download for free. With suitable bulletproof hosting, the original owner isn't going to be able to do anything about it.
It is all about making things free that didn't used to be. Devalues everything over time - creators get the message that they might as well make it free when they have a choice before someone takes that choice away from them.
As an author, you probably get to do that when you reach the revenue generation level of Stephen King or Issac Asimov. Until you have 10+ books to your name the publisher's editing team is going to do whatever the heck they want to your book and keep the copyright to themselves. It is in the contract you grudgingly agreed to because you wanted to be a published author.
After you sign such contracts for the first ten books, you might just be able to negotiate that your words are inviolate and you get to keep the copyright.
Yes, but this is likely happening on the Internet, a pretty much law-free, consequences free zone. Nobody on the Internet pays much attention to copyright, so it is only realistic that corporations are going to start taking advantage of this.
If Russian hackers can steal your bank account and nobody can do much about it, expect to see Sony stealing your music compositions and selling them on the Internet soon. If college kids can download movies, expect Netflix to start downloading them and offering them for rental. Should it surprise anyone that Amazon might be doing something with books that might be questionable?
Today, warfare isn't conducted between armies. It is conducted between armies and civilians, often times with the civilians coming out on top. Specifically, this probably started in the early 1900s in Ireland. Gained strenght in Viet Nam where most of the Viet Cong weren't army regulars but were civilian "terrorists".
The Russians were pretty much thrown out of Afganistan by civilians. The US is about to suffer the same fate there because there is no longer the will to see anything through. Iraq is all about the US Army vs. civilians - the Iraqi Army surrendered but the people still fight on. Odd, though that in both Iraq and Afganistan the main thrust doesn't seem to be attacking US soldiers but killing their fellow civilians. But such is the fact of war today.
Israel seems to try to go out of their way not to kill unarmed people and only kill the people that are actually attacking them - while those people are hiding among the unarmed folks just trying to get on with their lives. The result is, predictably, the Israeli Army is accused of targeting civilians by Arab media. I suspect that if the US population were given a steady diet of German and Japanese news reports during WW II there would have been a much shorter war with a completely different outcome. Funny, but the "enemy" news media seems always to have a different view of the various battles, one that deeply conflicts with the reports from the other side. Israel vs. the Arabs, Viet Nam vs. the US, Russia vs. Afganistan, India vs. Pakistan, etc. You get the idea.
Sure, in some views today the US Army is intentionally out there raping, pillaging and killing civilians by remote control. This popular view should be expected to be reflected in games and popular culture. Everyone knows that the only reason Iraq was invaded was to secure oil supplies. Or was it that Saddam insulted George Bush I? Whatever the reason, most people are convinced today that the US government cannot be trusted and that all war is (a) started by the US, (b) evil, and done to benefit rich fat cat friends of the current president. So of course there are going to be games and TV shows showing this viewpoint.
Newspapers, magazines, and pretty much anything else that was considered to have mass viewership 30 years ago is pretty much dead.
The summary mentions something about "Plan B". Well, the bad news is that for the most part, there isn't a Plan B. There is nothing that anyone can do about this - the readership numbers that kept newspapers alive are gone. Magazines have fewer readers and any "serious" magazine is pretty much dead today unless it is kept alive by huge subscription fees - the advertisers aren't interested any longer. So we have Cosmo and National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout and that is about it.
Plan B would have been online, but online is free and there isn't any mass viewership. That doesn't pay salaries. So where there might have been a reporter in 1975 there wasn't one in 1995 because of cost cutting. Today, the newsroom is empty because there isn't any way to pay anyone any longer. They can try to hang on by reprinting wire stories, but that isn't going to work.
News is now free and nobody is going to pay. And even more importantly, nobody is going to focus on a single web site enough to make it possible to get any real ad revenue. Wall Street Journal has a dedicated following for their speciality, but I wouldn't consider them a "newspaper" any more than you would consider Nature to be a magazine. Wall Street Journal and Nature are probably both going to survive, but I don't think anything like what we consider a newspaper to be is going to be around in five years.
News? Maybe you should start reading fark.com for its inciteful commenting and news selection. Or try to balance between dailykos.com and freerepublic.com - between the two of them you might come up with some idea of what is happening in the US. If you care.
There is nothing wrong with CFL bulbs, as long as you get a well-made one that high-quality components were used in.
When you get a poorly made one that the cheapest components were used in, you will have problems and they are a waste of money.
Unfortunately, both types sell for the same price at the same stores and there is no way to tell what you are getting. Might be getting one that will last for years of quality service, might be getting a piece of garbage. There is no way to tell.
We are going to start seeing more and more automation being supplied to us via the power company and/or government regulation. I know in Florida it is basically a requirement to have your air conditioner on a remote control switch - so the power company can turn it off. We are going to see this on more and more equipment in the future as electric power demand continues to increase without building any new power plants.
You might try solar, but it is actually doubtful you are going to put up enough solar panels to run the air conditioner in the early evening. Noon? Maybe. I'd be expecting the refrigerator and big-screen TV to be next on the power company remote control list.
Maybe having a suitably robust automation system might let you get a jump on things and avoid having your house filled with switches you cannot control.
I seriously doubt Amazon will be doing anything involving multiple carriers with any version of the Kindle.
The software would need to be "localized" or "individualized", or at the very least some configuration would need to be done based on what carrier was to be connected to. This would be a huge pain that today virtually does not exist.
I can take a unlocked GSM phone to Australia and in five minutes have a SIM card on a prepaid plan. The connection to the carrier is controlled by inserting the SIM card. OK, I guess the Kindle could use a SIM card for the purpose - they would just have to send the proper SIM card with each and every Kindle shipped. Unlikely that this would be an error-free process even if Amazon decided to try it, which I doubt.
The problem is finding one carrier so they can embed the carrier information into the device once and not have to configure each device individually for each customer. Or require the customer to spend 30 minutes with their new Kindle to connect it with the appropriate carrier.
They aren't going to do anything except go with a single carrier worldwide. Yes, it is going to cost more than enabling the device to use 300 different carriers, but it will be a lot saner for both Amazon and their customers.
Simple process. That is how it worked in the 1700s. Rich fat cat paid people to compose and play "his kind" of music. Nothing else to speak of was produced besides what was paid for by these people.
This is our historical legacy, what we call today "classical music". The style of it was dictated by the tastes of the people paying to have it produced. It also dictated how music was taught, because the only paying jobs there were for people playing music followed that style as well.
Universally, I think everyone would agree that having music composed to order by the people that can afford to pay for its composition would be a bad thing. Patronage worked fine in a very limited market. Hopefully, nobody will ever try that again.
The problem with the Kindle is that it can be used to "produce" audio books. You play the Kindle into a CD recorder and play the CD in your car. Or, you set up a table on the street and start selling the CDs.
OK, it isn't the most professional sounding audio book ever made, but it is indeed an audio book. Would you think that for $2 (vs. maybe $20) would garner some sales? How about a set of DRM-free MP3 files of a recent, popular book?
I haven't seen this happening yet, but you better believe this will appear in the marketplace at some point.
The problem is that it would appear that other companies did not build a neighborhood node structure. This put them years behind the US in delivering the Internet but once they did it was a lot faster. Problem in the US is we have 1000 homes hung off a single neighborhood node which is supplied by a fiber connection to the head end. This pretty much is how both DSL and cable work.
So you can give the homes "up to 20Mbit" access because the fiber link was upgraded from 256Mbit to (maybe) 2Gb. We are probably now at the limit of how fast you can link the neighborhood node to the head end. Sure, the right way today might be a fiber for each house - probably how it was done in Japan and Korea. But we did do it that way and to change now would be a complete re-do of the entire system. My guess is that would take billions and they just spend tens of millions upgrading the fiber to the neighborhood nodes.
Problem is, this is an unattractive pricing model. If the Cable Co. implements this people will flock to DSL Company which doesn't implement this. Currently, supplying Internet connections to homes is all about market share - either you have enough density to support the company or you do not. Density is everything because there is a huge fixed cost to supplying a "neighborhood". Every user you get in the neighborhood can be added at almost zero additional cost - whereas adding a neighborhood costs millions.
So without market share in a neighborhood it is a lose-lose proposition and expansion is pointless. This is also why there can't be any small ISPs any more - when the neighborhood node requires dedicated fiber to the head end and a lot of expensive gear then nobody can afford to do it for 10% of the homes in a neighborhood.
The short answer is unless someone made everyone supplying Internet connections price it that way, nobody is going to go to a real usage-based pricing model. \
Biggest single problem with Vista was people trying to use Windows 98-era software with it. The installers didn't work right, the files were in the wrong place and permissions were a huge problem because the rules changed.
It was possible, if you were determined enough, to install Windows 98 software on Vista. It wasn't a good idea, it made life difficult for the user and it didn't work real well, but it was possible. The fact that a lot of people encountered problems doing stuff like this makes it clear that Microsoft didn't make it clear enough to people that Vista was a huge compatibility break. The cry went out "But it worked on XP..." and people kept reading on and on about how awful Vista was.
If Windows 7 if pre-emptively uninstalling software that isn't compatible this is a huge leap forward. Now if it would only refuse to install software that wasn't compatible. Just abjectly refusing to install it with "No, it isn't compatible and it won't work right." This would probably solve 75% of the problems people had with Vista.
Most of the rest came from people installing software that was SUPPOSED to be compatible.
If you can transcode it, you can "lend" it out or "share" it for the betterment of mankind. Of course, this pretty much puts the vendor out of business, but heck they are using an outmoded business model that involves people paying for free stuff.
Walmart almost certainly saw the future in big bold letters - there is no revenue to be had in the near future from selling recorded music. It is available for free by downloading, so basing your business model on poor folks on the wrong side of the Digital Divide doesn't really make sense.
Wait until they stop selling music CDs. Today there are still people buying them, but not so many. It will drop to the point where almost nobody is buying CDs and then Walmart will take them out of the store.
There are two kinds of PDFs in the world: those where the text is plainly in the document in ASCII form (or maybe compressed) and those where the document is a collection of bitmaps, one per page.
Google Books uses the latter form.
Bitmap-style PDFs are never going to be really usable on a eReader device of any sort unless it has a screen the size of the original page that the bitmap was taken from.
The text form of a PDF could be rendered in the original page form, which is how the Kindle DX works I believe. Again, the display isn't quite large enough so you have to try to zoom, pan and scroll. Not an optimal experience.
The key is probably to reformat the text dynamically such that the page now fits nicely on the reader screen. This may be possible with lots of PDFs but it certainly doesn't help with Google Books and may not be much help with a large percentage of other PDFs as well. Which is why it probably isn't being done.
Sorry, but the PDF document format is pretty much a page description language and with an eReader the last thing you want is a page that is laid out for a much bigger surface. I don't think any eReader is going to work very well with PDF documents, ever. Certainly none of the existing ones work well with them.
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Sorry, but that is the new globalized world. Company A spends millions in R&D, Company B then steals this and turns out clones for 1/4th the price. Company A goes out of business.
The result is cheaper products for consumers, which benefits just about everyone except the fat cat investors that staked the founders of Company A.
The only possible problem is running out of stupid fat cat investors. They are required to be stupid in order to invest in a company in US or Europe that can be toppled by this sort of action by clone makers. If they had a brain, they would realize that investing in R&D today is a losing game if the results can be cloned.
Apple has had a pretty good run, but it is clearly time for the clone makers to put them out of business. Their computers are way overpriced and they can't get away with that in a clone environment.
You will note that the result of being bottled up in Europe without significant exploitable resources resulted in migration to the New World. At significant cost, risk and a lot of people dying in the process. The first James Bay colony died to pretty much the last man and woman, but migration continued. Cortez is another fine example. He supposedly burned his ships to show his men that they were there for the long haul.
Sure, if we don't do it soon, it will result in significant shrinkage and a new dark age. Following that, you will have exploitation of resources off-planet. Just hundreds of years after it could have been with a lot more dead people behind it.
It works in most countries because when you get to be 60 or 70 years old it is pretty clear to everyone that you aren't going to get much care. Somewhere north of 80% of all health care spending in the US comes in the last year of people's lives, some of this is an utter waste. The rest is spent to buy people a few more years, or even months.
Other contries simply do not spend this money, at all. Obama and Harry Reid keep trying to figure out a way to tell people how the system in the US has to change for it to all be affordable. They can't. Sarah Palin uttered the words "death panels" to describe what was being written about in the various bills and got ridiculed for it. Don't you understand? We can't cover the 20-somethings for every scratch and still keep people in their 80s alive. The old ones HAVE to go. Now, if they have a healthy lifestyle and are accident-free, then maybe they can live on to a very old age. But the idea that the government is going to pay to keep someone alive after their 60th birthday is just silly.
Why do you think people from all over the world come to the US when they are old and sick, if they have the money? Because the US is the one place with experience in actually providing health care to old people. Everywhere else they have a far more realistic attitude towards old age, death and dying.
Of course, it could just as easily have been wealthy people moving to Detroit or Washington DC where the neighborhoods are closer knit and they will find that they tax payments going to more worthy causes.
One way or another, for whatever reason, New York lost that tax revenue. About the only solution is either to tax everyone everywhere in the US the same (all states, all cities, one tax rate) or for all states and cities to share the tax revenue equally. Then, no matter where anyone goes in the US it changes nothing.
I guess the other solution is just to stop people moving from higher tax areas to lower tax areas. Make it so they can't get away.
What you are saying is pretty much that communities should disallow businesses to operate that might cause pollution. Because no matter how much a business says they aren't going to, once they do in the stealth of night, it is done. And then someone has to clean it up.
So the obvious solution for a community - if they had control - is to disallow any business that has the potential to cause any sort of pollution of anything. So you block the dry cleaner because of PERC, the auto shop because of waste oil, refrigerant, spilled gasoline, etc. Then you need to block the small metal shop because of dangerous organic solvents and metal chips. Eventually, you have a perfectly safe community (like California is trying to achieve) without any commercial activity at all.
They figured this out in about 1950 and today communities have no control. It is decided at the state and federal level, far far away from anyone that might be impacted.
This is also why the manufacturing has moved out of the US and either across the border to Juarez or across the ocean to China. No matter what companies tried to do, they were getting blocked by lawsuits and stupid regulations. A stupid regulation is California's Prop 65 - all it is going to do is drive businesses across the state line. It will not force car dealers to eliminate the lead in the batteries or the oil from the cars. But by all means, keep passing these regulations and drive all those industries over somewhere else. We can all work for the Government.
If you really, really believe that the Earth is a closed system, you better start looking at your duties to the rest of the human race. The definition of a sustainable closed system is that the wastes are recycled pretty much by natural processes to become usable resources again. We are so far away from that - mostly because of population - that it isn't funny.
Note that I am not talking about recycling paper and aluminium cans. I am referring to garbage and human wastes. Currently, in India much of the population defecates in open fields. This works fine below certain population levels because the wastes are natually recycled. India past that point a while back, like maybe 1900 or so. Maybe earlier, I don't really know.
I do know that above a population of maybe 200 million people there is no hope for a "sustainable" closed system. We are going to have to import resources from off-planet to keep this population. Or we can choose to decrease the population rather drastically. Almost overnight, because the resource and waste problem is going to catch up to us very quickly. And every year that goes by with people saying that space exploration is too expensive and all the while people are having more children just makes the problem worse.
So think about this very carefully. Take a look at this. There are some very serious people thinking that the Earth is indeed a closed system, and it is high time we get the population down to under 1 billion or fewer. Think about what it would take to decrease the population by 5/6ths in 20 or 30 years. Because without off-planet resources that might be all the time we have left.
There is in fact a similar "three strikes" law for using the telephone for committing crimes. If you use the telephone to commit a crime (and you are caught), you find out about the one-strike law. At least in the US you stand a pretty good chance of going to jail where you will most certainly surrender your cell phone, your land line, your television and your computer. Oh, and your clothes.
So a three strikes law against committing crimes is in fact quite a step up from those committed in the physical world.
Problem is, on the Internet money can be made by not following those rules. They rules aren't clearly 100% applicable in all situations so everyone understands that the parallels aren't going to be exact. This allows for some interpretation.
Now, if the US Postal Service could figure out a way to make money by reading your mail, they might have done that, say in 1790. No, there wasn't any way to do this in 1790 so the rules got built up with the idea that the US Postal Service (modeled on the similar service in UK) wouldn't read people's mail. But Google does this every day, for profit.
There are plenty of other examples of this. It sort of makes sense if you take the position that when you want it to be that way everything on the Internet is different. And then, when you want it the other way, everything on the Internet is the same. We are caught in the middle of people making rules and interpreting them who now are convinced that they can decide either way whenever it suits them.
How does this get resolved? Long, expensive and painful court battles. Legislation might help, but unfortunately we will still end up with the confusing arbitrary rules of everything is different at the same time everything is the same.
With the Internet, it is everyone's right to destroy the revenue model of any business they choose to target. You and I should equally be able to force any business into bankruptcy just by posting their creations online for everyone to download for free. With suitable bulletproof hosting, the original owner isn't going to be able to do anything about it.
It is all about making things free that didn't used to be. Devalues everything over time - creators get the message that they might as well make it free when they have a choice before someone takes that choice away from them.
As an author, you probably get to do that when you reach the revenue generation level of Stephen King or Issac Asimov. Until you have 10+ books to your name the publisher's editing team is going to do whatever the heck they want to your book and keep the copyright to themselves. It is in the contract you grudgingly agreed to because you wanted to be a published author.
After you sign such contracts for the first ten books, you might just be able to negotiate that your words are inviolate and you get to keep the copyright.
Yes, but this is likely happening on the Internet, a pretty much law-free, consequences free zone. Nobody on the Internet pays much attention to copyright, so it is only realistic that corporations are going to start taking advantage of this.
If Russian hackers can steal your bank account and nobody can do much about it, expect to see Sony stealing your music compositions and selling them on the Internet soon. If college kids can download movies, expect Netflix to start downloading them and offering them for rental. Should it surprise anyone that Amazon might be doing something with books that might be questionable?
Today, warfare isn't conducted between armies. It is conducted between armies and civilians, often times with the civilians coming out on top. Specifically, this probably started in the early 1900s in Ireland. Gained strenght in Viet Nam where most of the Viet Cong weren't army regulars but were civilian "terrorists".
The Russians were pretty much thrown out of Afganistan by civilians. The US is about to suffer the same fate there because there is no longer the will to see anything through. Iraq is all about the US Army vs. civilians - the Iraqi Army surrendered but the people still fight on. Odd, though that in both Iraq and Afganistan the main thrust doesn't seem to be attacking US soldiers but killing their fellow civilians. But such is the fact of war today.
Israel seems to try to go out of their way not to kill unarmed people and only kill the people that are actually attacking them - while those people are hiding among the unarmed folks just trying to get on with their lives. The result is, predictably, the Israeli Army is accused of targeting civilians by Arab media. I suspect that if the US population were given a steady diet of German and Japanese news reports during WW II there would have been a much shorter war with a completely different outcome. Funny, but the "enemy" news media seems always to have a different view of the various battles, one that deeply conflicts with the reports from the other side. Israel vs. the Arabs, Viet Nam vs. the US, Russia vs. Afganistan, India vs. Pakistan, etc. You get the idea.
Sure, in some views today the US Army is intentionally out there raping, pillaging and killing civilians by remote control. This popular view should be expected to be reflected in games and popular culture. Everyone knows that the only reason Iraq was invaded was to secure oil supplies. Or was it that Saddam insulted George Bush I? Whatever the reason, most people are convinced today that the US government cannot be trusted and that all war is (a) started by the US, (b) evil, and done to benefit rich fat cat friends of the current president. So of course there are going to be games and TV shows showing this viewpoint.
Newspapers, magazines, and pretty much anything else that was considered to have mass viewership 30 years ago is pretty much dead.
The summary mentions something about "Plan B". Well, the bad news is that for the most part, there isn't a Plan B. There is nothing that anyone can do about this - the readership numbers that kept newspapers alive are gone. Magazines have fewer readers and any "serious" magazine is pretty much dead today unless it is kept alive by huge subscription fees - the advertisers aren't interested any longer. So we have Cosmo and National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout and that is about it.
Plan B would have been online, but online is free and there isn't any mass viewership. That doesn't pay salaries. So where there might have been a reporter in 1975 there wasn't one in 1995 because of cost cutting. Today, the newsroom is empty because there isn't any way to pay anyone any longer. They can try to hang on by reprinting wire stories, but that isn't going to work.
News is now free and nobody is going to pay. And even more importantly, nobody is going to focus on a single web site enough to make it possible to get any real ad revenue. Wall Street Journal has a dedicated following for their speciality, but I wouldn't consider them a "newspaper" any more than you would consider Nature to be a magazine. Wall Street Journal and Nature are probably both going to survive, but I don't think anything like what we consider a newspaper to be is going to be around in five years.
News? Maybe you should start reading fark.com for its inciteful commenting and news selection. Or try to balance between dailykos.com and freerepublic.com - between the two of them you might come up with some idea of what is happening in the US. If you care.
There is nothing wrong with CFL bulbs, as long as you get a well-made one that high-quality components were used in.
When you get a poorly made one that the cheapest components were used in, you will have problems and they are a waste of money.
Unfortunately, both types sell for the same price at the same stores and there is no way to tell what you are getting. Might be getting one that will last for years of quality service, might be getting a piece of garbage. There is no way to tell.
We are going to start seeing more and more automation being supplied to us via the power company and/or government regulation. I know in Florida it is basically a requirement to have your air conditioner on a remote control switch - so the power company can turn it off. We are going to see this on more and more equipment in the future as electric power demand continues to increase without building any new power plants.
You might try solar, but it is actually doubtful you are going to put up enough solar panels to run the air conditioner in the early evening. Noon? Maybe. I'd be expecting the refrigerator and big-screen TV to be next on the power company remote control list.
Maybe having a suitably robust automation system might let you get a jump on things and avoid having your house filled with switches you cannot control.
Dell Vostro 1220 can have drive encryption and TPM configured for delivery.
I seriously doubt Amazon will be doing anything involving multiple carriers with any version of the Kindle.
The software would need to be "localized" or "individualized", or at the very least some configuration would need to be done based on what carrier was to be connected to. This would be a huge pain that today virtually does not exist.
I can take a unlocked GSM phone to Australia and in five minutes have a SIM card on a prepaid plan. The connection to the carrier is controlled by inserting the SIM card. OK, I guess the Kindle could use a SIM card for the purpose - they would just have to send the proper SIM card with each and every Kindle shipped. Unlikely that this would be an error-free process even if Amazon decided to try it, which I doubt.
The problem is finding one carrier so they can embed the carrier information into the device once and not have to configure each device individually for each customer. Or require the customer to spend 30 minutes with their new Kindle to connect it with the appropriate carrier.
They aren't going to do anything except go with a single carrier worldwide. Yes, it is going to cost more than enabling the device to use 300 different carriers, but it will be a lot saner for both Amazon and their customers.
Simple process. That is how it worked in the 1700s. Rich fat cat paid people to compose and play "his kind" of music. Nothing else to speak of was produced besides what was paid for by these people.
This is our historical legacy, what we call today "classical music". The style of it was dictated by the tastes of the people paying to have it produced. It also dictated how music was taught, because the only paying jobs there were for people playing music followed that style as well.
Universally, I think everyone would agree that having music composed to order by the people that can afford to pay for its composition would be a bad thing. Patronage worked fine in a very limited market. Hopefully, nobody will ever try that again.
The problem with the Kindle is that it can be used to "produce" audio books. You play the Kindle into a CD recorder and play the CD in your car. Or, you set up a table on the street and start selling the CDs.
OK, it isn't the most professional sounding audio book ever made, but it is indeed an audio book. Would you think that for $2 (vs. maybe $20) would garner some sales? How about a set of DRM-free MP3 files of a recent, popular book?
I haven't seen this happening yet, but you better believe this will appear in the marketplace at some point.
The problem is that it would appear that other companies did not build a neighborhood node structure. This put them years behind the US in delivering the Internet but once they did it was a lot faster. Problem in the US is we have 1000 homes hung off a single neighborhood node which is supplied by a fiber connection to the head end. This pretty much is how both DSL and cable work.
So you can give the homes "up to 20Mbit" access because the fiber link was upgraded from 256Mbit to (maybe) 2Gb. We are probably now at the limit of how fast you can link the neighborhood node to the head end. Sure, the right way today might be a fiber for each house - probably how it was done in Japan and Korea. But we did do it that way and to change now would be a complete re-do of the entire system. My guess is that would take billions and they just spend tens of millions upgrading the fiber to the neighborhood nodes.
Problem is, this is an unattractive pricing model. If the Cable Co. implements this people will flock to DSL Company which doesn't implement this. Currently, supplying Internet connections to homes is all about market share - either you have enough density to support the company or you do not. Density is everything because there is a huge fixed cost to supplying a "neighborhood". Every user you get in the neighborhood can be added at almost zero additional cost - whereas adding a neighborhood costs millions.
So without market share in a neighborhood it is a lose-lose proposition and expansion is pointless. This is also why there can't be any small ISPs any more - when the neighborhood node requires dedicated fiber to the head end and a lot of expensive gear then nobody can afford to do it for 10% of the homes in a neighborhood.
The short answer is unless someone made everyone supplying Internet connections price it that way, nobody is going to go to a real usage-based pricing model.
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Biggest single problem with Vista was people trying to use Windows 98-era software with it. The installers didn't work right, the files were in the wrong place and permissions were a huge problem because the rules changed.
It was possible, if you were determined enough, to install Windows 98 software on Vista. It wasn't a good idea, it made life difficult for the user and it didn't work real well, but it was possible. The fact that a lot of people encountered problems doing stuff like this makes it clear that Microsoft didn't make it clear enough to people that Vista was a huge compatibility break. The cry went out "But it worked on XP..." and people kept reading on and on about how awful Vista was.
If Windows 7 if pre-emptively uninstalling software that isn't compatible this is a huge leap forward. Now if it would only refuse to install software that wasn't compatible. Just abjectly refusing to install it with "No, it isn't compatible and it won't work right." This would probably solve 75% of the problems people had with Vista.
Most of the rest came from people installing software that was SUPPOSED to be compatible.
If you can transcode it, you can "lend" it out or "share" it for the betterment of mankind. Of course, this pretty much puts the vendor out of business, but heck they are using an outmoded business model that involves people paying for free stuff.
Walmart almost certainly saw the future in big bold letters - there is no revenue to be had in the near future from selling recorded music. It is available for free by downloading, so basing your business model on poor folks on the wrong side of the Digital Divide doesn't really make sense.
Wait until they stop selling music CDs. Today there are still people buying them, but not so many. It will drop to the point where almost nobody is buying CDs and then Walmart will take them out of the store.
There are two kinds of PDFs in the world: those where the text is plainly in the document in ASCII form (or maybe compressed) and those where the document is a collection of bitmaps, one per page.
Google Books uses the latter form.
Bitmap-style PDFs are never going to be really usable on a eReader device of any sort unless it has a screen the size of the original page that the bitmap was taken from.
The text form of a PDF could be rendered in the original page form, which is how the Kindle DX works I believe. Again, the display isn't quite large enough so you have to try to zoom, pan and scroll. Not an optimal experience.
The key is probably to reformat the text dynamically such that the page now fits nicely on the reader screen. This may be possible with lots of PDFs but it certainly doesn't help with Google Books and may not be much help with a large percentage of other PDFs as well. Which is why it probably isn't being done.
Sorry, but the PDF document format is pretty much a page description language and with an eReader the last thing you want is a page that is laid out for a much bigger surface. I don't think any eReader is going to work very well with PDF documents, ever. Certainly none of the existing ones work well with them.