Global e-book reader shipments in the fourth quarter of 2012 will reach 4.57 million units, hiking 92% on quarter but dropping 49.1% on year, according to Digitimes Research.

Thus, 2012 global shipments will reach 9.82 million e-book readers, decreasing 57.3% from 2011. Amazon will be the largest vendor in 2012 accounting for 55% of global shipments, followed by Japan-based Kobo with 20%, Barnes and Noble with 10% and Sony with 6%.

http://www.digitimes.com/Reports/Report.asp?datepublish=2012/11/14&pages=VL&seq=200

That's not the ultimate purpose. The ultimate purpose is to solve problems.

The *ultimate* purpose of education in science is to solve problems we have no current solutions for. They are not solved by looking up the formula, but by developing your own formula based on your understanding of how things work.

I don't need to look up the formula that allows me to calculate the acceleration of a body of known mass when known force is applied to it, because I understand their relationship. I also understand the relationship between velocity, time, and acceleration, so I can create further formulas based on these two sets of relationships that might've not been obvious at first.

If I've just looked up the final formula, I've skipped the important steps that give me the underlying understanding of physics, which will allow me to create new formulas to solve new problems.

Are you saying someone gave you an iPhone and locked you into a contract? What a thoughtful gift! Here, I'll buy you this thing that you will have to pay for yourself for next two or three years, I hope you enjoy it!

I don't know what the ETFs are these days, but I'm sure sale of a new iPhone will cover it -- used iPhone 4s 16GB still fetches almost $400 on ebay.

You're on your own to get a phone that better suits your needs after that, though.

You cant in US. HR is not to help you work more efficient. HR is there to shield corporation from LAWSUITS. They can point a finger and say 'mister X was reprimanded by HR for grabbing women asses and ejaculating into water cooler".

Geez, what company do you work for? Around here, HR handles payroll, work permits/visas, arranges interviews, helps new hires move/settle in if needed, maintain personnel databases with vacations, sick days, etc. They are quite useful, and they do things that get in the way of engineering managers doing the engineering work.

But I guess we don't have many people around who are likely to ejaculate into the water cooler, so I guess things are different where you work.

Well, if they are giving them away for $50, then of course you'll upgrade every time you can. I'll upgrade three times a year at that price.

It's not that you don't have the money to replace your technology, it's that your carrier doesn't have the money to.

Your worry should only be what the contract premium you're paying is, and how much that is times 36 months vs. a brand new unlocked phone.

Professionalism is in the eye of the beholder, and when I see an expensive watch I think "more money than sense".

You're only hurting yourself by jumping to such conclusions. There is no way that you can accurately estimate the price of the watch you see on someone's arm. More often than not, expensive-looking watches are anything but.

You seem to think that the deficit is proportional to the debt, when in fact the deficit is the first derivative of the debt. There's no proportional relationship at all. That is, even when your deficit is small, your debt is still INCREASING.

The relationship is still there -- whether exponential or linear, the fact is that *both* debt and deficit become more irrelevant the further out you go, due to inflation.

The debt is always growing exponentially, but the inflation and economic growth overshadow it. The total debt in 1970? 350 billion. Total government receipts just last year? Two and a half trillion. So, *all* the debt accumulated up to 1970 can be considered irrelevant today.

40 years from now, total current debt will be irrelevant, as well.

I am waiting for interest rates to go up--I hope, a LOT, maybe 7% or 15%--before I buy another, larger, much nicer house.

Interesting thinking, thanks for that post!

Managers today are bean-counters, controllers, MBAs.

Maybe they are where you work. There are plenty of companies where that's not true, likely most of the ones with less than 5,000 employees.

It is fundamental that you can't spend more than you take in indefinitely.

It's not quite true... Due to inflation, increase in GDP, etc., the debt from N years ago becomes irrelevant, where N isn't all that large. If you look at the history of the revenue vs. spending, you'll see that US had a deficit pretty much every year since 1940s:

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=200

You'll also notice that in the 1980s, the deficit was about the half of the percentage points of GDP that it is now, and it's already peanuts compared to the current GDP and current revenue. The World War II deficit was 3x the current, per year, yet by the time 70s came around, it was equivalent of 2% of GDP.

So, yeah, if your economy is growing, then you can keep spending more than you make. Many growing companies do that all the time, as it's cheaper to take out debt then to make money in other ways.

A15 is much more power efficient than A8 (and A9, which was the one being actually compared). It uses more power, but it provides higher performance per watt.

Comparing two CPUs and saying that one is more power efficient than the other because it uses less power is meaningless, otherwise the old 8086 kicks the new Atom's ass in "power efficiency".

What an obnoxious comment. You'd think that at least here on Slashdot people would be intelligent enough to understand that when somebody asks for an advice on an activity, it doesn't mean that that's the only thing they will do for the rest of their lives.

That just measures relative weight. It compares the forces of gravity acting on two objects, and slides if one is being pulled harder than the other.

I decided to learn human biochemistry directly

Any good learning material that you can point us to?

Here's a hint. That 5 gal bucket of hypochlorate intended to kill the algae in your swimming pool can make a bomb big enough to blow a house into splinters. It is frequently used as an oxidizer in rocket fuel. Guess what, unless you go on a binge on buying the stuff, the checkout lady won't even look twice about you buying it! Make it into a bomb? Crush the shit up, blender it with some deisel fuel, and pour it into a sturdy container. Use a model rocket engine as the ignition source. One improvised explosive device, all ready to go.

Or, if you want a dangerous high explosive, you can go the more complicated route of putting ammonium nitrate into a bunch of 1 gal glass cider jugs, attaching some labgrade tubing to a glass shunt inserted into a stopcock, and putting aquarium bubbler stones on the other side, dropping some copper items into the cider jugs, corking them off, and using the resulting nitrogen oxide gasses to produce clean nitric acid with some distilled water. After that, you simply titrate out a nice supply of ETN explosive using the big bottle of truvia brand sweetener as the erythritol source. A 16oz bottle of truvia sweetener will get you one hell of a bomb.

For the above mentioned poison, you hermitically burn the bloodmeal without an oxygen source, and bubble the gas through a tall cylender of water. (Such as in a high temperature glass crucible). After that, the method of delivery is a subject best left for the madman; one I felt would be particularly nasty would be to add the hydrocyanic acid to some freshly milled mazipan, then chocolate coat it and hand it out. Marzipan already contains very small quantities of hydrocyanate from the bitter almonds used for flavoring, so it would be completely undetectable by the victim.

Are you seriously saying that those are equally hard to kill 30 people in a school as walking in with guns and shooting? You are going to hand out poisonous Marzipan bars in kindergarten to 30 kids that will eat it without anybody stopping you? Do you really think that building a chemistry set at home and learning to titrate is as easy as picking up a gun? And, how are you going to get into the school, blow up the front door, and then get kids to nicely wait in the classroom while you get in and set up another round?

There's a reason why almost all mass killings here are with guns -- they are by far the easiest way to kill a whole bunch of people. The fact that it's possible to do it another way doesn't make it nearly as easy.