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Comment Re:Quite Fitting (Score 1) 282

Thin crispy crust can really only be cut in triangles

Not true--here in central Illinois, we often cut our thin crust pizza in a grid. This is proven to be a superior method of slicing pizza (citation needed), but only works on moderately crispy, thin crust pizza that doesn't need a handle like deep dish does.

Comment Re:Someone else who wants somethign for nothing (Score 1) 275

Buying a nook is not buying a 3G wireless data connection to the internet. It's buying a 3G wireless data connection to buy B&N ebooks. Hack the hardware all you want, but if you use that hardware to get a service you haven't paid for, that's just like stealing TV.

Mod parent up. When somebody changes my mind with two sentences, they deserve to be heard.

Note that he's NOT saying, "it's like stealing A television", he's saying it's like stealing cable from your neighbor. It may or may not be stealing, but I have a hard time figuring out how it'd be unethical.

All said, I think the question is whether or not the contract says you're only going to B&N.com or whatever.

Comment Re:Any alternatives? (Score 1) 420

Sure, there's not not revenue in ads to cover the massive overhead of a normal newspaper. But I'd be curious what percentage of that overhead is the salaries of the kind of long-form, investigative journalists you're talking about, compared to how much is their outdated production and distribution models (and the facilities those demand), plus the kind of normal business overhead demanded by such large enterprise (accounting, HR, etc).

Reduce a newspaper to ONLY its investigative journalists, 2 or 3 editors and 2 IT staff, one of whom manages the website where the content is published and distributed, downsize to an office big enough to hold the 5 employees who are actually there during the day, outsource accounting and HR, liscense/syndicate the rest of the daily 'news' from the rest of the internet and then look at the numbers.

I don't know whether or not that's realistic b/c I don't have any ideas what those salaries are like nor what the ad revenues are like. But it seems like a reasonable, albeit difficult, business model. Of course, with the exception of the small town local paper, I don't think anybody has ever accused the newspaper market of being anything but tough. It's on a lot smaller scale than the newspapers we see now (which means profits will be smaller), but I'm hard pressed to see how that's my problem (particularly if your other choice is to fold altogether).

I think there's a place for investigative journalism, and I think it's short-sighted to say that just b/c national newspapers are folding that it'll disappear. It's valuable--the people that want to see it just need to imagine a new way to support it.

Comment Re:Scientific Reporting (Score 1) 536

This is scientific reporting in the (relatively) mainstream media.

More than likely, there's some really interesting, albeit impossible-to-explain-in-less-than-20-paragraphs-unless-you-know-a-lot-about-ancient-Europe, evidence that the article's author chose to leave out so that he could quote the attention-getting "I'm sure that they had sex".

The only scientific conclusions you can draw from this kind of reporting is that a scientist is investigating a subject that has something to do with Neanderthals and humans.

Comment Re:Because it's not relevant? (Score 3, Interesting) 442

I'd ask the same questions. But in my day job in marketing, I know the OP is right--the marketing guy is trying to keep the conversation focused on the message for the AVERAGE consumer, not the nonaverage consumers like you and me. He's trying to communicate the product's core benefits to the customer, not features or specs, or what you're asking for: fringe benefits that may or may not be...er...beneficial.

His job is to brand this thing as a lets-you-do-cool-stuff-and-makes-you-feel-good box or whatever, not to convince the fringe audience (ie. me and you) that we could hack the thing. Anything that distracts from that feel-good message (including Linux) takes up too much of his valuable 3 minutes on the radio. He's just trying to keep his CEO on track, not trying to dodge/cover up Linux.

Comment Re:The cloudy facts. (Score 1) 348

I wouldn't call it "useless." I'd go with something more like "a poor trade, exchanging privacy and control for interoperability and ubiquitous access".

To me, the advantage of the cloud is that my inbox looks the same at work (on an XP desktop) as it does at home (linux laptop). Gmail's good like that. I could see the advantage of doing things similarlly for word processing, etc. If I was willing to trade control of my data and privacy and speed for that sort of interoperability and access.

I'm not.

Comment Re:" historical weakness in terms of networking" (Score 1) 817

Have you spent much time w/ Linux recently? There might be a lot niggling problems w/ Linux (particularly wrt proprietary drivers and UI usability), but I'll say this--this OS is born live on the network. X forwarding is a great example--by its very nature, the graphical interface is designed to be usuable over a network. It may or may not be great to use (I can't really comment on that--my main experience with it involves programs running on an over-worked 800MHz server via an overcrowded T1 line) but architecturally, it's built with network in mind.

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