(Note, I tried to make the subject line read, "Books>Kindle>Audiobooks", but for some reason, Slashdot removed the ">"s.)

I absorb least of all from audiobooks, only partly because I usually fall asleep in the first five minutes.

Ever since the Kindle app got rid of the little graphical representation of where you are in the book (like a timeline, at the bottom, where you saw whether you were 1/4 of the way through, halfway or close to the end), I've been a little uncomfortable with my ebooks.

Say what you will about those old paper-and-board book things, at least you knew exactly where you were, and could get some mental image of the progression of the narrative arc. So when you'd only got maybe 1/10th of the book read (based upon the fact that only a little bit of the book was on the left hand side) and you were reading a mystery, you could pretty much rest assured that there were some pretty big plot twists to come. Maybe that has something to do with any less absorption from ebooks (if there really is less, which I doubt this study proves).

Even so, I read mostly everything on a tablet, except sheet music. And when a really good sheet music e-book reader (and editor) comes out at less than $2000, I'm going to grab one. Musical manuscripts are just too small, even on a 10" tablet. I need to be able to see two pages of music at a time (at least).

The ad hominem was not yours, it was in the article you approvingly cited from The Federalist.

A hundred years ago, the first group of progressives concluded that this country needed to change in a big way. They argued explicitly for a refounding of the United States on the grounds that the only absolute in political life is that absolutes are material and economic rather than moral in nature.

The people from that "first group of progressives" that I cited were starting purely from moral grounds, and demanding that the United States live up to the morality professed by the very "federalists" from whom the group got its name.

At Wired, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has posted his take on net neutrality. He lays the problem at the feet of the large ISPs.

The argument was that the early progressives were not acting out of moral beliefs. I showed that's not true.

The Scotsman can't protect you from The Federalist's misrepresentation. It's funny that you would cite a logical fallacy in order to defend an ad hominem attack ("Progressives were never moral!")

At Wired, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has posted his take on net neutrality. He lays the problem at the feet of the large ISPs.

File this one under, "No Shit Sherlock".

A little problem with the thesis are people like Jane Adams, Fr. John Ryan and Dorothy Day. Economists like Henry George. What was it, like 1907 when Walter Rauschenbusch published "Christianity and the Social Crisis". Organizations like the YMCA and the Salvation Army came out of the Christian progressive movement.

It was called the "social gospel" and was very much moral in nature. Even going back to Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, you had a groundwork on purely moral grounds for a progressive movement. Leo talked about how capital and labor must to find a humane path for capitalism that respected workers and avoided the extremes of both socialism and laissez-faire conservatism. Just the fact that the Pontiff mentioned "labor" must have sent a chill through the blood of the robber barons in the gilded age.

But go ahead and hang on to your "godless progressives" meme if it helps you sleep at night. It's pretty easy to keep your nose in "The Federalist" and never know any of those things.

The internet does not qualify as "a civilization". And certainly it is possible for civilization to have commerce without the Internet, don't you think? Somehow, people managed before 1980.

I am willing to bet that at least by 1982 someone had sold a physical object to another usenet poster.

A swap meet is one thing. A job board, "for sale" signs, no problem.

Commercial uses of the Internet were prohibited until 1995 when the NSF ended its sponsorship of the backbone and turned it over to commercial services.

Hey, thanks for that, Mr AC. I didn't know about I2P.

https://thetinhat.com/tutorial...

It's what's for dinner.

No moms, please.

http://youtu.be/KzelrlH_pjQ

Carlos Mencia

Ain't he that four-star prospect whose tearing up triple-A in the Cubs farm system? I saw him play with Iowa and he's a terrific-looking second baseman who can hit for power.

I didn't know he's a comedian too.

How is it that on a story like this I'm the only one making goatse jokes?

What happened to you, Slashdot?

You forgot, "What does a man bending over and spreading his butthole look like?"

I've been burned by a goatse link too many times to click on that.

Which by the way, turns out to be what you get when you combine every image on the internet together. Weird, huh?

They should put the data center in a pyramid. Then, the servers would last forever!