I just used a Surface Pro 3.

In my opinion it beats every tablet on the market. Once I replace my laptop with the Surface Pro 3, I am pretty sure that I will eventually stop using my Kindles e-readers.

However, I will still use the Kindle app. So are you wanting a different "e-reader" or are you wanting Amazon to have competition?

No. Just ask an indie author now making a living!

Look, Amazon is not a monopoly. They might be a large market share holder, but they have competition:

B&N
iBooks
Google Play Books
Kobo
Smashwords

The problem is that Amazon is doing a better job than all of them. They are selling 90% of the eBooks. I am not sure about the print books. The other companies aren't doing anything different. They are using DRM. If you buy ebooks through them, you are pretty much locked into using their app.

Amazon is making plenty of money off of indie authors and they don't need publishers. So this is not bullying. It is simply business.
Why should Amazon add books that will make them less money?
In what business does that make sense?

It is time that authors realize that publishers are no longer what they once were. Why?
1. Good editors are everywhere and cost $2000 or less.
2. Good book cover designers are everywhere and cost $500 or less.
3. Good print layout designer are $500 or less.
4. Good publicist/marketer is $500 a month ($6k a year)
5. Distribution is easy. Now distribution is done online through all the stores I just mentioned. The last remaining distribution channels that publishers have are brick and mortar stores (which are declining) and libraries, which are now including the ability to checkout eBooks, even from indie authors.

So publishers are realizing that their only value are these:
1. One time upfront cash infusion (cost of editor/cover/print layout)
2. They can send an email to their large contact list.
3. A sense of quality.

If an author builds their own contact list, then #2 is canceled out. That means all a publisher is anymore is one time service. Why would any author give up 80% to 90% of profits for nothing more than a one time service? Hire your own editor, your own cover artist and your publicist. You pay $9k and you own 100% of your work. You get %70 from all eBook sales on amazon.

The final feature, quality, is not going to last. Indie authors can write quality. Check out this: http://scififantasyreaders.com...
Pretty soon, there were be quality standards that indies follow. What will be left of the publishers? If they don't change and adapt, they will all go out of business and only their names in the books they once printed will remain.

Yes!

What will the candle makers do when electricity takes over?
What will the horse trainers and carriage makers do when cars take over?
What will the printers and mail deliverers do when digital documents take over?
What will the highway patrol, taxi drivers, other drivers do when autonomous cars take over?

The world will improve. Other jobs will be available. Some individuals will have personal struggles, but the rest of the world will grow.

I get annoyed reading lines like: "There is growing evidence that the center of the Milky Way contains a mysterious object some 4 million times more massive than the Sun."

What evidence do we have? How is it growing? How big is it now? How much does it grow?

I mean, are we talking a mustard seed of evidence here? (Yes, iron analogy to use in science, I know ;-)

After reading the article, science is making a guess that wormholes are smaller than black holes. There is no scientific basis behind this guess. It is just a guess. So this article assumes that because Sagittarius A is small it is a worm hole, not a black hole.

So basically we are in the hypothesis phase, not even in the theory phase yet.

I think you might be mistaken.

Just because someone posts something to git hub doesn't mean that is "the" language they have chosen.

We now have classes in college that are called "Intro to Programming Languages" and the whole purpose is to learn many different programming languages. Some of these "class projects" will invariably end up on GitHub. Then they have a final in the language of their choice, with a requirement that the language be "other" than the big 4 (Java, C#, C/C++, PHP).

So first, remove all those homework project from your evaluation, then redo your evaluation. You might see what I everyone else sees in the market: Java, C#, C/C++/ObjectiveC for compiled languages and JavaScript and PHP for non-compiled languages and then everything else is sometimes used for a product here and there.

I work for LANDesk, the premier desktop management tool in the world. There is much more to the cost of an operating system than, well, "the operating system". There are very few companies that have 100,000+ open source desktops. But there are many companies that have 100,000+ Windows desktops. Trust me, if it were cheaper to have an open source operating system, these companies would be the ones doing it.

How do you deploy the operating system?
How do you deploy software to the operating system?
How do you re-image the operating system when the user hoses it?
And when you re-image, how do you make sure that all the software that they should have is deployed to them with the new image?
How do many IT support calls do you take on the operating system?
How do you remote control these operating systems?
How do you manage security and patches on all these devices?
What is the cost to train an individual on these operating systems?

Windows is the most cost effective Operating System in all these areas.

It doesn't make sense to avoid the Operating System cost of $200-$300 for an OS license that you may even use for 10 years, but then spend $10,000 extra per PC per year to do all the tasks listed above. You will have to have more staff. Each FTE you add in IT is pretty much 100k after you factor in total cost of your employee (salary plus benefits, equipment, training, etc.). If it is a senior developer, the cost is closer to 150k.

Yes, all the above tasks can be done on Open Source platforms. But it isn't going to be as seamless as it is with Windows.

LANDesk's Management Suite helps IT departments manage desktops (and movile devices now) better than any other company, it is our job and our focus. We manage Open Source desktops better than most but all desktop management companies manage Windows more seamlessly.

And before you pass me off as just a Microsoft fan-boy, you should check out my blog, where you will see I am actually an Open Source fan-boy but I also have no hate for proprietary software like some do. I just love technology. The truth is truth no matter who you are a fan of.

Quote: "Cops got better things to do than get killed." --Wang from Big Trouble in Little China

Me too. English major. Now I am a Senior Software Developer. I have my thesis left for my Masters of CS.

I feel that I have the best of both worlds.

I use C# in Visual Studio. C++, yes even C++11, looks like a dinosaur in comparison.

Even if I am working on FreeBSD or Linux, C# is better. Mono is easy to install and the MonoDevelop is already friendlier than any other open source IDE out there.

But both Java and C# make C++11 look slow. The syntactical bloat needed to code the same features in C++ compared to C# and Java is just not acceptable.

It isn't just the language that makes C++11 old. It is the fact that IDEs suck. Visual Studio is so far ahead of all other IDEs that everything else is abysmal. However, VS is not as feature rich for C++ so even C++ on Visual Studio is a pain.

#1. Fix syntax. If I were to fix C++, I would change the compiler to support hundreds of the C#/Java syntax. Sure it is syntactical sugar, but that sugar is what makes those languages awesome.
#2. Fix references. Make stupid simple. Check out NuGet and the Java equivalent and implement something. Maybe this is an IDE fix, I don't care. The language is does not stand alone, but the tools around it are important too.

Now for all Langauges, C++, Java, C#, and others. Make the same freaking libraries with the same signatures.

Drop the books. Unless you are going to be tested on them or have to do exercises from the end of a chapter. And if you are going to do that, get a friend in class and share the book.

Books are awesome, but not for Computer Science. There are plenty of online tutorials/videos that are free.

Adoption takes time and is driven by money. Right now a home user for 3D printing is not really going to see money savings by owning a 3D printer.

Some industry will though. My guess . . . First, you are going to see 3D printing take over an industry, like autoparts. Think how much cheaper it is to sell a 3D model than to actually manufacture a part. So your Autozone, NAPA, Checker and other auto parts store will stop being warehouses of parts. Instead, they will have 3D printers.

You need a new alternator. We'll print you one.

The company that makes the 3D model gets a royalty on the part. However, the royalty is far smaller than the cost of storing so many parts.

After this, multiple industries do this. The price goes down on 3D printing and the features improve. More complex parts are printed with every lease.

"Man observed his universe and, lacking any other kind of explanation, invented some Gods that explain his observation."

Until the theory of intelligent design is disproven, as it has yet to be disproven, your statement is a theory. You theorize that humanity made up the idea of God. What evidence do you have to prove your theory? Do you have any?

Now what evidence do we have to disprove your theory. We have a lot. The possibility exists that intelligent design happened. There are thousands of accounts of interaction with superior beings in our past. There are thousands of eye witness accounts for thousands of years that provide evidence for intelligent design. Not to mention DNA is very similar to "software code" and can be reused. Almost as if it is a biological programming language. DNA itself is an example of intelligent design. I could go on showing you evidence after evidence of intelligent design. There's masses of evidence.

So in essence you ridicule with hypocrisy.

Actually, many scientist do doubt those theories, or at least parts of them.

For example, DNA is just as much proof of good code reuse (biological code in this case) by an intelligent being as it is proof of evolution.

Evolution is nearly law in some things, such as species drift. But it is still the "theory" of evolution because it isn't 100% a proven law. Why everyone wants us to except as doctrine something that isn't 100% proven yet, while at the same time attacking religion for the same reason, is just silly.

Also, evolution has yet to prove how life began. It is a limited theory and there is a lot of work to be done on it yet.

As for the big bang theory, there are a lot of possibilities. Everything appears to be expanding from a central point. That is done with math and is very good. However, saying that everything was smashed into a dense object that one moment just exploded is a major reach that has pretty much zero evidence. Hey, it isn't disproven, but let's face it, it is a wild theory with very little to back it up.

It is quite surprising that those outside of the US are so gungho "believing" in hypothesis and theories before they have become proven laws.

Gravity:
Hypothesis, Theory, or proven Law? Law
It is proven. It has a test. Take any object. Raise it above the ground with nothing but grown underneath. Let it go. It falls to the ground. All objects, regardless of magnetism do this. It is a law. It has a proof.

Big Bang:
Hypothesis, Theory, or proven Law? Theory
Why is it just a theory? We have very little proof of this. Just a little mathematically calculations based on the expanding universe. I've never met a scientists who fully believes this.

Climate Change being causes by humans:
Hypothesis, Theory, or proven Law? Theory
It started as a hypothesis. Some evidence exists which allowed it to graduate from hypothesis to theory, but not enough evidences of the past exists to compare it to. Also evidence shows that one volcanoe can do more damage in one eruption that humans have done in hundreds of years, so this one is harder to prove than those scientists studying it admit. Not to mention all the controversial falsification of data that came to light a few years ago. Fudging the numbers to prove human caused global warming is going to increase disbelievers.

The earth being 4.7 billion years old:
Hypothesis, Theory, or proven Law? Hypothesis/Educated Guess
There is some evidence but it is based on controversial dating techniques that have been proven to be fallible. There is no proof that some of the earth doesn't appear this old because it was floating matter in space for billions of years. Scientists are doing their best trying to determine that though. Also, the rate of decay may have been far greater before the atmosphere or due to any of a million unforeseen reasons. Basically we do some carbon dating and a few other advanced dating techniques and then we've pulled a number out of are butt for this hypothesis.

So it isn't that in the US we don't believe in these scientific hypothesis. It is that we believe when it is a law. We are taught the scientific method year after year and we understand that a bunch of hypothesis make it to theory before finally being proven false.