Booksurge is great for very niche products. I've bought some stuff that was published with them, that was great, but far, far from mainstream (Neopagan reconstructionism). One can see where a publisher's resources would help (higher rate of spelling errors), but overall, I think self-publishing like that is great for books with a very specific market.
That said, I agree with you that mainstream publishers aren't going anywhere. They do provide valuable services in terms of proofreading, editing and promotion, even if the actual printing aspect is likely to decline in importance.
Somewhere, there's a recording executive reading this article and planning on dispatching a team to try to retrofit DRM onto vinyl records somehow.
Which I imagine would be quite a feat for a purely analog medium.
Either that, or said executive is now more paranoid about the "analog hole" than ever before, and now believes that people are turning to vinyl to pirate music somehow.
Yep. Last I remember of Salon.com was sometime in 2000 or so, they had some decent stuff. Then the paywall went up ages ago, and I forgot they existed. Except for a few times throughout the decade where Google led me to an article of theirs, only to end up being blocked of by the paywall.
Half of me thinks this is just them screaming "LOOK WE DON'T HAVE A PAYWALL ANYMORE". That is, assuming they actually don't.
On second thought, the guy in the picture is bald, so if that's him, I'd say he's more likely to end up as a supervillian. Might be for the best.
Dammit, this is why you're not supposed to reveal your secret identity. He could have been a superhero with a wide array of crazy gadgets, but now if we see some crazy guy with a jetpack stopping crime, everyone will know who it is.
I would easily take a free netbook if it were offered. I'd mess around with it, if it was useful, I'd continue using it, if not, it would go in the big pile of laptops I've replaced but haven't gotten rid of yet. (Going back to a PowerBook 540c from 1994, IIRC).
However, I can't see the advertising or whatever actually making up for it, especially considering that a fair number of them wouldn't end up being used at all, and many would end up being used for strange purposes.
The last time I remember a company giving large amounts of free hardware away, to make it up with advertising, was the CueCat disaster. OTOH, the CueCat was pretty useless to begin with, and their company was based only on that junk, IIRC. Even if such an idea tanks, I'm sure google could eat a few billion in losses. Still, I really doubt such a thing will happen. Free netbooks just sound too good to be true.
The internet is a mass of data interconnected by address. Data is not an object, but the status of variables. Data has no more weight than any other abstract concept.
WHAT!? I thought the internet was a series of tubes.
Well, I guess that answers my question of whether Superman could legally gather evidence for the police using his X-Ray vision.
Good to know. Now I can stop lining my walls with lead and kryptonite.
Now, need to find a case relating to super-hearing.
If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.