After trying to get the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy from Audible ($30+/pop) and realising that most of the author's books are not available in my country (stupid)...
I figured, that I could buy the same books on dvds. MP3 format, not linked to any Audible or other account, and for $10 or less. Tantor media.

I also don't like physical formats and CD/DVD is the ultimate nightmare for me (I have one working cd drive remaining in my MBP) but with this pricing you can get 3-4 books for the price of the audible one.

Just got Thirteen (Black) and Market Forces, $10 shipped too:O

Except for the people who don't own a single optical drive. Not trolling, Being an Apple user first I freaked out. Then now back to Linux and somehow don't miss them. So when I put a server and a desktop machine together, I didn't put an optical drive in them at all.

I think the right way to do it is to give users a bootable USB drive. Or offer the download with a utility to make a drive bootable.

I have probably 50 driver CDs in a shelf I never opened and this plastic nonsense has to end right now.

my 2c ...

You seem to have a different experience I run OCZ in 3 24/7 machines ( 2 OS/x 1 linux) ... the only SSD drive that failed on me was on my Macbook Air, and it was a Samsung, and it was a "freeze, then all data gone and drive unrecognisable" nasty failure (thanks Apple for time machine, really) ...

The OCZ drives are Vertex 4 and Agility 3 drives (latter in the Linux box, crunching data all day, writing to a mysql db non-stop - data collection app) ..

I am happy with the drives, but would double-think getting a Samsung or Kingston (knowing the filed drive and the total crap quality of several sticks I own)...

Actually, not. Prime coin is more about "usable" or "practical" math. Then there are a load of other coins. Some of them with a pretty reasonable exchange/sale value ...

But .. just trolling, really ... yes.. could have said bitcoin as well ..

I wonder what this little app would do with the keyboard I am typing on. First of all, it is a mechanical keyboard with cherry MX browns. Second, I have the "buzzer" function on that simulates "clicky"-ness, since it is not a real clicking switch (though tactile) like e.g. the blue one or the real buckled ones.

I am not saying it would work better or worse, just curious if it would work on a Kinesis and how much the "clicker" and the totally odd shape of the keyboards would disrupt the functionality.

Anyway.... my phone is usually on airplane mode when I enter the house and is redirected to a landline that has an Asterisk box on it... then the Asterisk box' FXO is carefully disconnected, so no calls in, no calls out:). That's the way I like to handle phones and phone calls.

Almost as useless and annoying as mining primecoin then :)

That is why I mine crypto currencies with my graphics card 24/7 and liquid cool them.

The overclocking burns the malware out, then the distilled water flushes it out. My 99.8% pure silver kill coil takes care of any remaining parasites - just in case the UV lighting didn't burn them to death already....

I know I2P ...

And agree with mostly what you say. However I think ANY crypto would be better than NO crypto. I think we can agree on the following:

sending a PGP encoded mail out on my connection that has a bitcoin purchased (no payment info) VPN, maybe even do that over TOR (shit or not) makes things a little more complicated for whoever that wants to see that mail and where it was coming from.

That said, a friend argued, that if I started using crypto chat over Skype (OTR with Adium or Pidgin) then I would draw attention. Which might be true. That is why EVERYONE should start using it, so it will require crazy amounts of computing powers to figure out what the hell is happening on the wire.

Realistically, we could also go back to remailers. If it is 2048 +bit encrypted, the remailing would occur, else, it wouldn't.

I mean, with a little effort we could make it really hard for the snoopers.

my 2c :)

HAhah.... I live in Costa Rica... Dry season and Wet season. People keep insisting it is winter and summer, though we are on the north hemisphere and wet season coincides with summer on the north hemisphere and the driest dry is Dec/Jan when it is the coldest elsewhere.

And still, people use gmail, hotmail, Facebook, mobile me ....

Even worse: no one uses crypto. PGP is there. TOR is there (OK, with some problems with the latter),. a 4096bit key is a tough cookie to crack. There are 2-3 click installers for almost every OS (linux, win, osx, ios and android).

There is also OTR chat for chatting.

Still, I cannot convince one single person to use it, even for business matters that shouldn't go through mail servers and chat servers in clear text form.

I am talking about programmers, technical managers and system administrators, who find these tools either unnecessary, or too bothersome to use..... So how will average Joe convince grandma, grandpa, and uncle Joe to install these tools and go through the incredibly long (5 minute tops) learning curve and start using the F@#$@#$ tools?

Let's use diaspora, go back to vote-in BBS systems with made up names and use crypto ... but no... people are upset about their privacy while posting borderline illegal videos with under their own name with location services stamping info into the media.

ARE WE STUPID or what ?

I was whining about the price tag too. Finally I got one and it is the best ever investment (after a Kinesis keyboard and a quality trackpad) ...
I was going nuts over ambient noise at the office where I was abroad, plus being winter I had to have the heater on at the hotel.
I first got a "noise cancelling" Sony, that turned out a joke, then tested the Bose QC 15 at Best Buy with the airplane noise simulation ....

I had various fans at my home office before my Bitcoin miners went water cooled, and without them it was unbearable. As of other noises: it is actually capable of levelling the sound of a (just in front of my open window) lawnmower to a level, where I can listen to music on a really low level and only hear the occasional bursts of RPM adjustments caused by whatever stuff the mower is chewing through...

Trust me. BUY ONE. You won't regret it. I am not a Bose sales person, nor do I like their products too much, but the QC 15 is simply great.. It also sounds really good with movies, music, though it is a little heavy on the bass.

Hope this helps...

but..

Can that achieve hearing god through your speaker cat /boot/vmlinuz >> /dev/speaker (or audio, or sound or .. .whatever your device creates)

The Millennium Falcon needed no ground crew at all, just a wookie and a pistol slinging smuggler.. Who by the way shot first.

Does that appear to you, that every time you enter *certain* countries they ask for your full fingerprint? Then as we know they swap this data with other governments for no good reason.

You cannot use your fingerprint for anything.... it is almost like tattooing a QR code on your forehead and using that for authentication purposes...
OK. maybe not that bad, but pretty close. Did I just watch to much mission impossible and think that they can take my fingerprint, then 3d print it to a condom and use it to unlock my whatever they want to unlock?

I could have done a lot of things, you are totally right.

Or I could have just set a cron job up or a shell script to do them .

Don't get me wrong, if I cared for phones I would be programming for them probably (I am actually mostly working with Java console apps these days that process/monitor data) ...

The big difference is that when you have the power of command line, you don't have to "write a program" for every little stupid task you want to achieve.

Compare the effort of setting up a cron job (to stay with the example) to send you the location of the phone every 5 minutes.
In cron (given that you have a theoretical program called GPSutil and SMSutil) would be
crontab -e; put time, path GPSutil --currentlocation| SMSutil 12345667 ....
in an other 10 minutes of tinkering, if there is no net, you could log it to a file, then send the batch when there is net again.

You can also install the dev tools, start reading the API, the docs, figure out how to compile .. set up an app, see how you can run that in the background, use a crapload of unnecessary resources to keep an app running, automate its startup, check (if possible) how to restart if it fails ... write the app, deploy.. blablabla...

And solution 2 is perfect ... will take you from cold start .. at least 2 weeks.. more if you are not a Java dev.

Solution 1 for someone using linux for almost 20 years : 15-30 minutes, if you really polish it.

It is like the thing I always tell to the windows admins/programmers:
solve this problem: open a file, and replace every instance of "blabla" but only if it is the first word on the line with a tab before.....

You can write an app and regex, you can install VI or SED.... the difference, is that my preferred OS (osx or linux) comes with that installed, I just need to chain them together to get what I want .. and I am done before you found it on google what to install