And look at how well that has gone for us...

A great many countries require their citizens to carry ID cards, and many that don't still issue them. All countries issue passports. There's your physical "outside the internet" ID verification system. All I'm suggesting is the logical extensional step.

Yet again, we see how it is currently impossible to verify identities on the internet. I personally don't find it too hard to envisage a system wherein it is actually possibly to identify a person via the certificate they present.

At some point we were always going to need to have personal digital certificates, surely in the age we live in, with the extent to which the internet is integrated into our lives, some form of GPG-alike certificate ought to be part of our national ID-card/whatever.

Anyone else feel we are getting to the point where that needs to happen?

Hi AC,

I clearly should have added "written on my Mac" to the bottom of that post then.

And don't get me wrong, I own an ebook reader and for some things, scientific papers included I think it's great. Still, having etextbooks just doesn't make up for being able to have multiple books open on my desk, not being tied to a platform, and being able to get books out of the library, a point I initially missed. My university, department, and research group all have great libraries, which could well die a death in the DRM laden ebook world. I can see that eventually pricing a lot of students out of the market. In reach of my desk at the moment I have ~£1500 worth of reference books, just about all from the library. There is no way that is sustainable in the Apple model of the education world, but it could happen if publishers all decide that ebooks are the future.

"As for padding Apple's coffers, their agency model of pricing is the same or LOWER than Amazon, and if you think big publishing houses are giving you a bigger cut as an author then you are deluded." That I can't put figures on but then odds are you can't either. But if you think that any multinational in the modern world, will even think twice about squeezing a captive audience as hard as it can then YOU are deluded. Reel them in with a good deal, then screw them once they are stuck. Happens everywhere, every time.

I will freely admit to having a grandstanding moment wrt to the whole Foxconn plant thing, but I still find the idea of labour camp esque factories abhorrent, and though sadly for the tech I essentially *need* to have, i.e a computer of some kind, mobile phone of some kind, I still do my best to find the least unethical manufacturer I can, (hollow laughter).

-FS-

"Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly."

For me studying physics every day the e-textbook is still years away from being useful. I can agree with the portability argument but thats about it. I can, with a real, physical textbook have the following advantages over an iTextBook however:

- drop a textbook without breaking it, and even if I damage it I can still use it, not wait for my insurer to maybe replace it because the screen shattered

- flick open at the index and quickly find what I want, and flick back and forth between sticky marked pages, and generally navigate a real book a lot faster

- have several books open on my desk at once - rather a necessity for any scientist

- be sure that the textbook I have bought is decent, well edited, well peer reviewed and correct, because it came from an internationally renowned publisher not "#physicsgeek78695#", as Apple seem to want to make the e-textbook market the same as the Android App Store

- keep a real book if I decide to change my computer manufacturer, phone, name, credit card number etc.

- Be sure that my textbook, while murdering some tree somewhere and not being 100% green and hippy, did not cause several factory workers to jump to their deaths, add to the toll of heavy metal pollution in east asian watercourses, or pad the coffers of Apple in preference to the Authors who sweated over the book. Odds are Apple will take a bigger cut than conventional publishers, because brand power means they can.

Just my $0.02

I believe that's kinda the parent poster's point. For a windows developer MS make their proprietary C# language easy, and C hard work. Now for most stuff that's fine, but sometimes a lower level language is needed. Ever tried writing a kernel mode driver in C#?

They need to make sure they invest in rural areas not the cities, city BB is already pretty good for most people whereas over here at least rural broadband is either a joke/nonexistent.

As a city dweller who has experienced the "Advances" offered by BT's infinity service I can assure anyone wondering about this that there is no point at all in rolling out FTTC in the city as the advantages /at the current time/ are negligible, whereas in the countryside, where villages don't have their own exchange there is a much greater need for Fibre Rollout, example from my own experience follows:

I live in Manchester ~1.5mi from the exchange and get almost identical line speeds on standard ADSL2+ to that delivered by BTs infinity service using VDSL ( difference of 2.5Mb/s in 20+ Mb/s, no server is ever going allocate that much bandwidth to a connection these days so it doesn't matter. Ping speeds and other latency/loss metrics were no better on infinity and in some cases actually a little worse, probably due to the extra hardware between me and the exchange.

Combine these facts with the ridiculous cost of BT infinity with it's 27mins of full speed downloading per month (as noted above) vs a truly unlimited ADSL2+ plan from the like of BE and there really is no surprise people aren't switching.

OTOH there are people like my parents, who live in a village ~5 miles from the exchange where the "broadband" speeds are a joke. On their "up to 24 MB" ADSL2+ connection they get 236/644 kb/s DOWN/UP. Now if BT are really interested both in useful returns on their investment and actually providing a /good service/ to all their customers, (yes I'm an idealist I know) then they should really be spending their money, and the governments money connecting these rural communities to a decent internet service, as I know that my parents and just about anyone else in the village will jump at the chance to have a connection that is actually up to streaming video, and has sufficiently good line metrics to make online gaming possible.

PS. another 500yds down the road from them there is no available landline internet at all, so much for the governments pledge to get all households on broadband by 20xx, at this rate I don't see it happening until 21xx!