Please, MS has NOTHING on Rambus when it comes to using the courts.

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Of course refusing to sell a book based upon content of the book is censoring that book. Is refusing to loan out a book in a public library censoring that book? Of course. Does it matter that you can go down the street to the local bookstore and buy it? No. The library is still censoring that book.

I tend to agree that the use of the word implies that what Amazon did was stronger than what they did.... or to put another way, they censored stuff that 99.9999% of the people in the US feel is objectionable and we don't mind it being censored. If some people write books on "how to torture small animals" I hope they censor those books too. I don't hold any animosity toward Amazon for CENSORING the books they did.

I think it's better to point out how stupid and over the top the guy's language by simply stating what Amazon's crime was rather than going off on this word. It's like calling a guy a convicted criminal because he got a J-walking ticket. While it may be factually true, it implies more than the reality of the situation. Pointing out how stupid the statement is is more useful than going off on the definition of "convicted criminal".

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I agree with you that the students will never go back and listen to the lecture. However there was one time when I really saw the value of recording a lecture... Back in early 2000's I was taking satellite graduate classes and they streamed their videos over the web. They also recorded and stored them on a server so the students could refer back to them and watch them at a later time if they couldn't watch them live.

There were many times when studying with other students where we would pull up the lecture and watch a specific part again to get a better understanding of how the teacher was solving a particular problem. However this required several things: First the notes and times based upon the specific notes were covered in the class so we could find the relevant parts of the lecture, and second, enough detail in the recording to be useful. This is totally the way to study if you can manage it, however just bringing a tape recorder to class won't provide you with the same tools.

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"Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body"

Amazon Kindle = "media outlet"

Amazon reportedly is removing all works that contain references to incest or m/m rape or something like that.

Honestly I don't know if I care at all about this, but the GP's usage of the word "censorship" is accurate with the definition of the word and your outrage is stupid. You can point out that what they are censoring is totally worth censoring and they should be applauded for it or take more of a "who gives a crap if they censor this stuff" attitude, but either way, the original language was not out of line.

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This one? http://tinyurl.com/ckxrbvr

Paint ball field.... and it looks fucken awesome!

Unfortunately, the answer for me is "neither". I will not buy a tablet that doesn't have a very quick touch to response rate and I will not buy a "walled garden" tech toy. I *want* to buy a tablet, but for what I want to use its not worth $500. $200 is a good price point for me and I'll pay more if I perceive the value is there.

However, I absolutely won't purchase something slow and clunky and that's exactly what a B&N nook color felt like to me. I'm afraid from the reviews that that is what the fire will feel like also. So, as much as people say that sluggish performance is not a deal breaker, it is for me and I believe it will keep android devices from succeeding in the market place unless do better.

When it came to android phones, I waited until the Nexus One appeared because the G1 seemed sluggish when I played with it. The Nexus One was the first android phone IMO that succeeded with a good responsive UI. This also correlates to when Android really started take off in the market place. Perhaps history will still repeat itself.

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Holy crap... it's the Call of Duty RPG.

Don't worry about that arm... it'll grow back in a few minutes.

Bummer. I actually think this degrades games. I liked the old games where when you got injured you'd have to limp back to town and get healed... all the while hoping you don't run into a large sewer rat or something else. It gave the games a bit more excitement IMHO.

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Say some more please. What do you mean by "dumbed down". Are you talking about character interaction? Combat? depth of stats? quests? or perhaps just general world interaction?

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Back when CS first came out I used to play a lot. CS of course only had dedicated servers and I jumped around from server to server caring only about who had the lowest ping... and then I stumbled on some servers that were run by good admins. Those servers were well regulated and managed by a handful of people who enjoyed playing there. They kept the cursing pre-teens away and banned, hackers cheaters or anyone who couldn't play by the rules. One server I finally landed on in particular was refreshingly fun to play on and like Norm entering Cheers, the regulars all knew who each other was and were friendly to each other. I spent way to many hours on that server eventually becoming a regular and helping admin it myself.

That's what a good dedicated server should be... a bastion of fun where regulars can go to create a positive online gaming experience. In an internet filled with people trying to rise out of you by using racist, homophobic, and crude language, filled with assholes and the like, it's good to allow people to create communities where they can have a positive impact and feel like you're part of a shared gaming experience. This is what a dedicated server allows players of a game to do, create a community. With random matching, the odds are you'll never run into the same person twice and everyone just becomes "random internet player".

If you think it's much better being an anonymous member of the infinite horde then I'm guessing that you've never had an actual positive online community experience, and that... that's kind of sad.

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The southerners were arguing that their slaves, while property, would still count toward representation within the congress. However beyond that issue... they were property and of course they weren't given the right to vote.

People compromise the less of evils in order to get things done. We may not have had a country if that compromise wasn't made. The constitution was written so that it could be changed, and that's exactly what happened to erase the compromise from our laws.

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Much as I agree with you, you must take things on a case by case basis. In many cases he's let us down. In this case he hasn't. So criticize him where it's warranted, but reward him with praise when it's also warranted.

So good job Obama!

Now... about the other 99 things that need improvement....

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Except if you do anything different that that. In my case, it's reinstalling the OS. Once I do that I lose all my ratings on music, all files that are tagged as audio books I need to tag again as audio books and group together, all files on my ipod must be dumped and re installed, thus losing all my ratings. And finally, podcasts. If I switch between operating systems and I don't package things up BEFORE I make the move, I lose all my setup podcasts and I have to go find them again. Why is this? Because of their fucken DRM. I can't just take the configuration file from the old files and copy them to the new and have everything "just work".

I've reinstalled my OS twice in the past year. Once when I got windows 7 (while upgrading my system) and once when I got an SSD. Yes, I should have learned my lesson the first time, but when I'm transferring over everything else, itunes gets forgotten and I get burned.

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Sorry, I do this type of stuff for a living. Designing the next generation Cisco router is hard. Major design hurdles in heating and power. Designing new asics running faster than anything before it. Packaging everything together with the reliability that an enterprise customer demands... that's hard. Creating a mini-PC in a box by subbing out all the hard parts to other companies (graphics processor, micro processor, memory, etc...) just isn't as hard.

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At best you're an engineering student who doesn't actually understand what an engineer does or at worst you really don't have a clue. Engineering is not about "learning rules and following them". Engineering is about understanding that the world is modeled in mathematics and that we use these models as tools to accomplish tasks. We design things, we test things, we build things. The only engineers I've ever met who just "learn rules and follow them" are bad engineers and they've certainly been the minority of engineers in the US.

Engineers and scientists are very closely related. The only real difference is that scientists goal is knowledge and the engineers goal is a product. We both use the scientific method and statistics very often in determining the "truth" of the situation. Weather that "truth" is the reliability of a process or the speed of a nutrino, the process is the same.

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Yes, but the barrier to entry is all about the software market. No one wants to buy even the coolest gaming rig if there aren't games. Building a gaming rig is actually pretty easy in comparison to building the hardware. I mean, hell, MS will just go out and source a bunch of PC based chips and package them all inside their box. Before they have the software market, they have to pay people to develop software and work really hard to support them in their development work. This is the REAL barrier to entry for this market. Once they have a software market they can CHARGE for their help and their design tools. Building a new box is just not that big an investment.

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