Eastern Europe ;-)

To be honest the process has probably already started, it's just a few years behind USA and some other countries.

What has already disappeared are some of the smaller bookstores and used books that used to be found at the major streets. In larger cities you would see even a few of them located at the main street, all busy.
What made them disappear is high rental fees though, not lack of readership. Right now those spaces are taken by banks and banks and banks, paying top money for such good locations. Used books moved to more peripheral locations with cheaper rent, but you can still find them - it's just not in your normal walking path anymore.

Agreed about the overcharging, margins seem (seem, as I am not sure how this business works out) to be pretty high there. Locally difference was not as big as on your side of the pond, usually it's up to 20-25% cheaper, often price difference is just nominal.

"Look inside" is still clicking, not browsing.

Browsing is going along a row of books, scanning titles/authors with your eyes, picking a book to check, thumbing it open to a few passages etc. This is physical experience, and a streamlined one thanks to having random access to pages and to books. Then you get a bunch of other factors - size of the book (small ones for travel), thickness (number of pages is not the same), print quality etc. These do influence purchase decision, and are not palpable online.

"Look..." is clicking through the few pages (after clicking to get to that book), not moving your eyes from the screen, a whole different process. Don't take me wrong - this does work for reference manuals, technical books and similar where you can quickly judge if information you need is there. Not so much for fiction/non-fiction books, at least not for me.

I fully agree with you though that stock is a major obstacle when shopping for a particular book. When I know a particular book, I buy it online just like you b) choice. The books I still order through shops are ones that might get damaged while shipping (large format, albums etc). Makes it easier to resolve issue.

When I browse books at a shop with limited selection, there is still more than I can read anyway, so lack of particular book is not a problem ;-)

edit:
I was wrong, he seems to already have a list prepared, just bought it locally. Not what I meant.

"Then Obama reportedly whipped out his BlackBerry smartphone, on which he made a shopping book list."

While it is cheaper to buy online, it is not always better to do so. I usually buy online only books that I know I already decided to buy.

However I buy more books by visiting physical stores. This is the only place where I can go to and browse through the books, read a few passages, get acquainted with the volume in hand. This process is more important for me than hit-and-run browsing on the internet. Books are tangible goods for me.

I suspect USA president might have visited a bookstore for similar reason (except for PR) - he might have preferred to actually look the book over, decide about the purchase based on physical item, especially with children books.

While travelling to USA I was struck that so many bookshops have closed, starting with Borders. This was always a good place to visit, and I always came out with a handful of books that I would never find&buy otherwise. Now it is much harder to find a bookstore, as even other large chains (or rather the only one - B&N) closed many locations.

Amazon is NOT a competition there for me. I bought relatively few books through them compared to real store (about 1:5 ratio). This is not going to increase with lack of physical stores in USA.

While in my country this is the same - I buy majority of books in real shops, based on browsing. Similar ratio (1:5) is bought online as a result of reviews, recommandations and other sources that make me decide in advance.
Luckily there is no shortage of bookstores where I live, and even with succesfull online retailers they are not going away.

What applies to books does not apply to music or movies - those can be easily searched for, reviewed, listened to and decided upon using online tools, with online purchase of a physical item.

PS: yes, I realise I am in a minority. I realize enough people think differently to me to cause bookstores closing.

> Most of the arms are smuggled in my ship

You are very open about your support for smuggling ;-)

I'm sorry to say that OP seems to be nationalistic about his "hacker countries" conception, promoting negative stereotypes, not to mention that he confused EU with Europe.

Top hacking countries are very different from Eastern Europe countries: USA (yup, still number 1 spot), China (Eastern, but not European), Russia (not Europe, just Eastern), Brazil, Germany (Europe and EU, but not Eastern), UK (an island off Europe coast), India (totally away from Europe)...

With your attempt at "humour" you basically allowed all those people right to hack your servers over the next two months ;-)

It is hard to maker a good analogy and I find most of those posted far off the track.

I see it differently: imagine a library. You know, books, of the paper variety. A lot of them, all available for public use.
Somehow careless library management put in there their finance book. Someone found it and picked up for rental. Person at the checkout out did not object.

It is negligence of the people who let the financial info get in the library, not the one who rented it.

Article is very light in details (except "Libraries of Congress" things), but it looks like those guys implemented a kind of error correction code (ECC) to recover lost data through extra data found in other packets. This has been in use for various types of networks (optical, DSL, GSM) for years.

Of course it is all down to how good the actual algorithm ("algebra") is in terms of overhead vs extent/capability of error correction vs introduced coding delay. There is always a trade-off, but a particular algorithm can take into account technology specifics (WiFi) and optimize it very well for a given task (whole packet lost, but not so often).

Journalists like to put BIG BUZZWORDS to well known things.

"If said book isn't closing properly after it's been read in the bath, they dropped it. I always... absolute guarantee..."

Your experience does not mean it is the same for everyone :-) It's nice though that you do not have that problem!

It really depends on the paper that the book has been printed on. Some kinds of paper soak moisture, and if such a book is in bathroom for, say, 1h during your bath, then it will curl and wrinkle from moisture in the air (evaporating from your bathtube for starters). You can see that effect most easily with some magazines - not the glossy ones, but those printed on normal paper.

Other books have more durable paper, some will show minimum effects from moisture, some will not show any such deformation.

As it is often not possible to say in advance which book is going to last through a bath and which not - it might not be advisable to read there a book you value.

It's even mentioned in the original article, but left out by submitter and editors (are there any true editors here?).

I guess that's why so many people say their experience has been different - they learn under different teaching systems.

My experience is also opposite. Teachers were inciting to find new solutions and think in scientific way how to make progress rather than "catalogue facts" and remember them as, say, historicians do.

Not Psygonis or Psygnonis.

Please shows some respect and check spelling of last names and company names at the very least. Basic Editor skillz, rigot?

Guy lost his gov-issued iPad.
Local IT admin said he can recover all his data and burn on CD, so MP doesn't need to worry it's lost. Data including his _private_ emails that was on iPad.

This is what set him off to return the iPad. Not Apple control.

Original iPad wasn't found he bought a replacement one from private money and returned it. Good guy!

As a form of protest he posted "Admins have access to everything!" on his Facebook before returning device. 300 of government officials (out of 460) use such iPads for work.

Exactly.

This is as much stealing as turning over pages in printed magazines without watching ads on them.
I used to tear out all ad pages before reading those magazines that had dedicated ad pages without actual content.
I have also stopped buying certain magazines that ran over reasonable ad:content ratio.

In a way this is sad, because often printed magazines keep afloat not with money from sold ones, but with money from advertisers. Cost of printing and distribution is pretty high, and even with electronic magazines it might be substituted by the costs of keeping up a website and paying for bandwidth, at least in case of larger popular magazines (did not run calculations).

It's different because Cisco publicly announces their security advisories and publishes security bug information. Full disclosures:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/products_security_advisories_listing.html

Other companies (such as Juniper) are a bit less public, but seem to offer more information than Huawei to their customers too:
http://s-tools1.juniper.net/support/security/report_vulnerability.html

Could always be, because any implementation might have holes.

You could be even closer than you think - rememeber that "hacking power strip from DARPA"? It could easily generate wrong power signal that could damage devices - depending on protections they have.

Power features in Power over Ethernet (802.3af) are negotiated, but it seems that a lot of logics is on the side supplying power, not the receiving one.

Various companies make overvoltage/overcurrent protection and surge suppression mechanisms that would need to be integrated in powered device to prevent attacks.