And here you see the primary use to which print newspapers are put today. All the dog owners and other pet owners use it to collect their pets' bowel movements.

The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson addresses this issue a bit (along with all the other issues).

In those books, the colonists (numbering 100 for the initial batch) are split on whether "contamination" of Mars is acceptable or not. Eventually, a group splinters off, much like the staunch environmentalists we have in the US today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

Back when I worked for a web host company, we occasionally (rarely) had some issues where customers got screwed. In the worst case, your VPS is on a box where multiple disks die in a RAID array, and you don't have backups, and that's that.

We were customer-friendly, so we would refund the customer's hosting charges if something went terribly wrong. But if you're paying $19/month, you can't really expect us to refund you more than $19/mo when something goes wrong.

There's a rule of thumb in physical security; you should spend ~5% of the value of the thing to secure the thing. E.g. ~$1000 bicycle means ~$50 bicycle lock. If you're using a $19/mo service to hold $10k worth of value, you better be taking some other precautions. These guys were doing the equivalent of keeping $10k in cash in a $20 lockbox in a public place.

You're right, higher resolution (ppi) means that text can still be legible at a slightly smaller size. But that also means that the high ppi is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for the people that also want large font size, so they can have the same exact experience as reading a piece of paper.

Wikipedia page about "Underground"

Download page for "Underground"

I read it on my Kindle.

You can get a SuperMicro reseller to sell you one workstation with 4 sockets of CPUs and a bunch of RAM. UK£ 4000 = 6 299.2 U.S. dollars

That buys you a box with 4 x Opteron 6134 (32 cores) and 128GB RAM (32 x 4GB sticks). And some hard disks.

And he has a kid???

You are confusing the hardware device with the Amazon service. Amazon has gone to great pains to make it super-easy to buy things from their bookstore directly on the device, and manage those purchases on your device through the Amazon website.

But the device itself is a regular e-reader, you can put files on it via USB and manage them via the filesystem or an app like Calibre. And Amazon does not manage books on the device except the ones that you buy through the Amazon service.

Most people who complain about the Kindle have never even used one.

So to address these complaints directly: 1. "sharing" a book is a feature of Amazon's DRMed service. It doesn't apply to regular e-books. 2. They promised they'd never delete a book from a person's account again again. And again, that only applies to DRMed books purchased through Amazon.

I tend to get my books from Project Gutenberg or manybooks.net and then manage them via USB with Calibre. You could load most of Project Gutenberg on a Kindle and send it to a place without network (but with electricity) and it would be much better than sending them trunkfuls of books.

First, OKCupid is free. Second, what you're saying is that car manufacturers should sell us cars that break down after a year so that we're forced to buy new working cars? That's not how it works.

As Cory Doctorow says "my biggest threat as an author isn't piracy, it's obscurity."

What better way to increase sales than making sure that everyone has heard of your work?

[citation needed]

Here's Apple's page about the new display: http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/retina-display.html

They say "the Retina display’s pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels." I suppose we can assume that they imply "at the typical distance at which you hold your iPhone" because otherwise the claim would be nonsense. Because surely you can hold it close enough to distinguish the pixels. (Unless you really can't, I haven't seen the screen).

But in any case, it's more of a marketing claim than a technical spec. They do not literally mean "this screen has the same 'resolution' as your retina". Your retina doesn't even have pixels! They just mean "it makes web pages looks great!".

So this "president of DisplayMate Technolgies" [sic] is tilting at windmills here.

"open source" (but you probably mean Free Software) is about making tools available. So a knife may be an apt analogy, a very useful tool that could be easily used for good or evil.

I think you should e-mail that guy that wanted to manage his Windows desktops by running Windows images on top of Linux, using some virtualization technology, but also passing through the hardware capabilities of the video cards, so he could run multiple monitors.

I bet he'd have some great tips about how to spice up your shell scripts. He probably edits them in emacs (running inside an AJAX terminal inside his web browser, connected to a web server on the machine he's editing the file on).

and I thought, "oh, that's not bad, that's ~10 FTEs and ~$5million of equipment, you can really accomplish something with that". And then I realized I was off by a factor of a _thousand_!!!

So that's 10 _thousand_ full time employees, and 5 _billion_ for equipment. Wow. What the hell are you doing that you need $6 billion dollars for 50 "combat air patrols"? Tracking every squirrel in Afghanistan's mountains?