Pfft. Back in MY day, we called them PKs.

Dunno about that. Keep in mind anything above 40% market share can be considered monopolistic. That is pretty much right where Apple is in the US: http://appleinsider.com/articl...

But hey, if you are okay with it, then that is fine. I was just making sure we didn't have a hypocrisy on our hands. To any publishers who may be reading: get on this!

So would it also be ok if publishers colluded with cell phone stores to instead sell jailbroken iPhones that purchase and download the books directly from the publishers, bypassing Apple's app store? I mean, seems like a simple case of what you consider 'civil disobedience' to me.

There is a pretty tried and true method to handle monopolistic businesses: petitioning the government to start an anti-trust investigation and possibly taking the company to court. Just because one company is behaving badly does not mean others can become vigilantes and do whatever they please.

The mere fact that this case even exists is already proof it will be abused. And please, if the copyright regime has taught us anything, it is that fair use will continue to get shat upon.

It is like the researchers went out of their way to forget Alzheimer's... or maybe they just have Alzheimer's.

I ordered my parents a Windows 8 laptop to replace their old xp laptop, thinking, "Well, windows 8 can't be THAT bad." It was.

The thing would not download updates. It would just say "Downloading updates..." and stall for hours at a time. I searched as much as I could online and only found barely any help. Most of it involved stopping the windows update agent service, and then deleting cached update files. But then it would just freeze again when I started it again. After a whole bunch of attempts, I noticed it was filling up the cache folder again after every time I restarted the update service, and that if I waited a bit, and then rebooted the computer, it would apply a few patches. So... that's ultimately how I ended up getting the thing all patched up. Stop update service, delete all cached patches, start update service, wait a few hours while they download in the background with no fucking mention of what is going on, reboot machine. I guess running the windows update must have been causing some sort of deadlock with the background updater or something... What a fucking mess. How in the world did they ship an OS with a non functioning update manager... And to top it all off, I couldn't just download win 8.1 separately, like how you could download the xp service packs separately. If I could have just done that... it would have been a hell of a lot simpler to get everything working. Instead they want you to download it through the microsoft store in metro... which won't show up unless, you guessed it, you already have fully updated through windows update.

On the plus side, everything works fine now that it is fully updated.

+1 for doodling. I remember a slashdot article some time back that said people doodle to keep their minds occupied, since the lecture itself was simply not intellectually stimulating enough to require their full attention, and that it actually *helped* learning because it stopped them from dozing of or just completely losing concentration. I remember sitting and paying full attention for some of the more interesting classes, like advanced data structures, or chemistry. But for "How to write a resume and do a job interview" class (this was *required* for all CS students), yeah, I was doing a LOT of doodling.

It really is more similar than you may think. Berlin, prior to the Nazi takeover of Germany, was something of a sex capitol. Hitler was fairly annoyed by the wanton sexuality and liberalism of the place. In fact he tried to take over the city and failed the first time... but not the second.

I am honestly stunned that they are selling these at a loss considering how expensive they are. Is Microsoft simply incurring high manufacturing costs because this is not their normal market? How is is possible that the production costs of these tablets is so high when equivalent android tablets are sold at a fraction of the price, presumably for a profit? Why else would third party companies even sell them, after all? They don't get app sale revenue from google... It just... boggles the mind.

What exactly is the main problem with it? That it is slow/laggy? I would agree with that, but it is still *quite* usable. This is a two year old device, that was sold for ~$230. It completely pushed the price/performance tablet boundaries, and the small tablet form factor. It literally started its market, Apple likely wouldn't have even released the iPad mini because of it. Most importantly it works bloody great for reading websites, articles, and books. I still use it daily for this purpose. It can also handle 720p video with ease, thanks to dedicated hardware, and I watch all sorts of tv shows on it a few days a week. To top it off, the batter lasts for days if used sparingly, and can handle a full 8 hour day of web browsing/video watching as well. It is a good tablet, and it was sold at an incredible price when introduced.

They came up with what they thought was a reasonable theory. It is just one theory to explain it, there are other possibilities. The key is that they make theories that are consistent with the observable universe, and if they end up being unprovable by experiments or observations, then they are discarded, and then scientists go back to the great question, Why? You can see this with string theory, a lot of it is mathematically sound, but there is no actual observable evidence of it, so quite a few scientists now just regard it as unprovable nonsense. They may well regard dark matter/energy as nonsense if evidence continues to fall short. That is the whole point of science, observe something, come up with ideas for "Why?", and then test them. If they fail to explain it, then the theory is eventually discarded, and new ones must be made.

And that is exactly how science differs from religion. Religion is set in stone, there is only one true word of god, the bible. The mere text of it is considered divine and straight from god, written with the influence of the holy spirit. It is infallible, it cannot be questioned, and when it is proven wrong, or parts of it continue to fail the evidence test, the religious simply say "You need to have faith". There is no furthering of knowledge with religion, it is essentially a dead end that has already been decided.

The difference is people are looking for actual evidence of it, and come up with theories and experiments to prove its nature. They only reason physicists came up with it in the first place is because... they did experiments and observed space, and noticed that there was too much gravity compared to observable objects. There is a pattern here, observation, theory, experiment, confirmation or denial of theory. How does one currently unexplainable scientific observation suddenly equate to "scientists own version of god"?

Is that not how humans traditionally hunted bears? I keep seeing people deride all this hunting business as using too much technology or insight to trick the animals... but that is precisely what got us to the top of the food chain in the first place. The simple fact of the matter is that killing animals is a solved problem, so these people just self impose rules to make things more 'fun'. Their time would be better spent solving actually challenging problems, but oh well, everyone needs to find entertainment from some place...

Isn't device tree pretty much declarative firmware? It has gained quite a bit of ground in the ARM on Linux world recently too. Seems like the solution already exists, it just need a bigger push.