DOCSIS 3.0 modems can carry gigabit data over coax. DOCSIS 3.1 is expected to be capable of multi-gigabit service. The cable ISP loves their tiers though, so they artifically limit your connection speed and tie that to a billing level. It has fairly little to do with what the hardware is capable of.

You behave as though the ebook is being composed letter by letter by some team of pensioned union workers and not 99% just a .doc file being run through a converter. Sure, there might be a bit of touch up to the final copy, but it's not the insurmountable work you make it out to be.

I'd challenge your perceptions there, because most self published ebooks on Amazon sell for 1/10th the cost of a publisher produced eBook. Yet there is a hungry market for books that they are serving, regardless of their warts and grammatical errors. Publishers, as they currently do business, are standing in the way of that market, in fact blatantly ignoring it for their own higher profit "established" authors.

I can, perhaps, agree with that, except apparently computer files are more expensive then paper since most eBooks are priced higher than the paperback version, and priced much higher when released at the same time as a hardcover.

Typically those are books that are being 'self' published and Amazon is just providing a store front for the unscrupulous jerks who are repackaging public domain stuff. I don't think it's Amazon's fault their system is being abused this way.

This. I don't know how Mr. Stross can complain that eBooks are being sold at a loss when they are ROUTINELY priced at $9.99 while the paperback is $6.99 to $7.99. Often while a book is in hardcover for $15-$18, the eBook will sell for $12-$15. If publishers aren't making a profit with those prices then they suck at business and deserve to be shuttered.

The aristocracy tastes like chicken.

All I can say is thank < insert deity of preference here > that Aristotle, Caesar, Gengis Khan and all the other people throughout history never had a "right to be forgotten" or we'd know absolutely nothing about our past. Who's to say what a future historian may or may not find useful, and who are we to rob our descendants of the legacy of our lives? There are historians and archaeologists who'd kill for any kind of day to day minutia of just daily life in various ancient civilizations.

Destroyed slave culture! We must protect slavery so that our children can continue to live and thrive in slave culture! It's our moral responsibility!

You've never played Star Wars: The Old Republic, have you. The majority of the problems they've had with development has been wrangling their 3rd party game engine to fit their game concept.

The art & the story are hard to do, but picking the right game engine can make or break your game as well.

Seriously?

1. a) Nobody knows exactly what information the NSA collects. They might very well have an extensive workup on everyone in Congress.
2. b) It's not a matter of better or not better. It's a matter of access to sensitive information & ability to effect the nations laws. Nobody is going to blackmail Joe Schmoe to pass laws benefiting them but they certainly might Joe Congressman.

So yes, spying on anyone without a warrant is bad, but spying on government officials is worse.

A member of Congress or the Senate on a day to day basis will deal with 100x the sensitive material you will. Furthermore there's the question of who gets access to the records & can they abuse it to blackmail govt. officials or otherwise effect policy decisions.

So yes you are not a special snowflake.

a) It's also smaller, so easier for an employee to put in their pocket and walk away with.
b) There is absolutely nothing wrong with a text based OS. As for it being proprietary, well so is iOS outside of a few BSD bits. The point is that it is a small dedicated device and you don't have to worry about some bored clerk cracking it to put his Facebook app on the thing or browse porn on it's built in browser.
c) Lots of handheld scanners used to use Palm devices and I'm sure they'll use Androids too. The lightness factor only matters in if you expected them to be at a station or carting the thing around the store.

You act as though the regulations came out of a vacuum. AT&T lobbyists created those regulations and their pet congressmen & senators enacted them. Because the regulations limit who can compete against AT&T.

If corporations had no influence on government, THEN you could cry about government intervention. Every person with a functioning brain, however, knows that corporations are deeply mired in our politics and they heavily influence what regulations will effect them.

This is why free market utopianism is such a crock. Business do not want to compete with each other and will use every ounce of their power & every legal trick they can create to prevent an upstart from disrupting their markets.

Ironically the only way to have a free market is if the government forces them to.