I have one of the older e-Ink, Wi-Fi only Kindles. Still has a physical keyboard, which I rarely use. My wife has the ad-supported one with no keyboard, and she doesn't seem to miss it.

The old e-ink kindle is great. I love it. They nailed the user scenario for me -- it is actually _better_ than a physical book. I can use it anywhere I'd use a physical book, I rarely worry about battery life. It's easier to read than a real book when laying on my side in bed.

I am completely uninterested in a color e-reader until it has the battery life and contrast of the e-ink display. And I don't want music, or apps, or multi-tasking, or anything else, because history tells me that adding them will detract from the basic experience of just reading a fucking book.

Here are the improvements I want out of a new kindle.

1) some kind of magical mystery charging. Maybe there is an inductive mat. Maybe its solar. Who knows. I said I _almost_ never worry about charging it. The next step would be I _NEVER_ worry about charging it -- and, I leave the Wi-Fi enabled and continue to not worry about it.

2) bendable/flexible - within limits. If they could make the thing so that it would reliably survive on the outside of soft-sided luggage; if I could put it in a pocket and not worry about it..that would be amazing. What's interesting about this is that the basic e-ink display technology can be flexible...

3) ability to easily -- and I mean easily -- send a book I've finished to my wife's device. Like, if me and her are in the same room, with both of our devices, I ought to be able to send a book on my device to her device. For free. Without any nonsense/bullshit.

Sorry, I fell into the trap of using "right and left", but these mean different things to different people.

When I say "right", I mean "laissez-faire", "capitalist", "individualist", "deregulated"

When many people say "right", they mean "authoritarian" and "nationalist"

That's not what I mean at all. I detest authoritarianism.

There are many places that are more authoritarian than the US (but we're working hard to catch up! (grumble))

There are no places that are more pro-individual liberty than the US. There are a few places which have better pro-business environments, and more economic freedom, but they tend to have fewer civil liberties than the US.

fwiw, my ideas about individual rights may also not be what yours are. I think "hate speech" should be legal, and like any other speech, should only be prosecuted when it is threatening or slanderous. And I think individuals ought to be able to keep machine guns without any government knowledge of oversight. Finally, I think homeschooling is a critical way to pre-empt the historical evils of government indoctrination, and so support homeschooling and parental rights to an essentially unlimited degree -- not because I think all parents are good, but because I think most governments are bad :)

I take individual rights _very seriously_, and so for me, a nation that offers a high degree of individual liberty has the following characteristics: few laws restricting the content of speech, few restrictions on private gun ownership, few restrictions on how children are educated outside of state control.

The US ranks quite well on all 3 of these individually, and taken together, far and away better than anywhere else.

To be fair, all of the countries that do worse than the US _also_ have more leftist governments.

The US has the most right leaning government there is. It also has the most racially, socially, culturally, and economically diverse population there is.

I wish I knew what to do about the problem of people not caring about Math and not excelling at it.

I think you and I probably disagree on many things, although I did see elsewhere that you complained about the growth of administrative/managerial positions within the school system. On that issue, I agree with you entirely.

It's frankly not clear how much the school can do for the kids _in general_ to improve outcomes for the broadest cross section of students, but one thing that has good empirical evidence is reducing class sizes.

That means hiring more teachers.

Frankly, given how much less it costs to hire a teacher than it does to hire an administrator, this should be a move everyone should get behind -- fiscally responsible, pro-teachers, pro-students.

The fact that this doesn't seem to be happening suggests that public education is sadly serving some other set of interests...

Nothing drives engineering like a tangible end goal that is big and easy to understand. Want to make batteries better? Have an engineering target that says what size car they have to fit in...

Tesla makes a better car than a "normal" car. It is faster than almost every sport sedan. It has excellent styling, excellent practicality (seating for 7!), very good handling.

Even if it weren't a pure EV, it would be an interesting contender.

But hey! It's also an EV. It is completely quiet. It doesn't need oil changes, or coolant flushes, or gasoline. You don't have to use the brake pedal anywhere near as much.

Tesla was the first company to make an electric car in my lifetime that wasn't a total piece of shit garbage joke. Not only did they instead make a _credible_ car, they made a car that kicks the ass of nearly other car. Their car is quieter than a Mercedes, out accelerates most BMWs, and handles better any other American sedan.

Why in the world should they stop making cars? The car they've made is better than most of the competition, AND is a game changer.

And, they're selling more of them than they can build. The model S is around 2 month lead time. The Model X already has 6 months of deposits.

I don't want Tesla to make batteries. I want everyone else to figure out how to make Telsas.

Based on my experience of using SketchUp to design a part that I ultimately had ShapeWays print for me, I would say that there's plenty of room for innovation in the 3d printing toolchain.

One thing to note is that modelers like SketchUp assume a uniform internal volume. And so you use tools like slic3r to prepare the model for printing.

In effect, the 3d geometry is the source code. Slic3r would be a "compiler" -- which translates idealized geometry to something more ready for printing -- e.g. by driving an extrusion head in 2d layers (or slices)

I think there is a lot of room left for innovation in the transformation pipeline, which can backfeed requirements into the modelling stage, and which could feed requirements into the print hardware to expose capabilities information upstream as well.

For instance, how can I optimally slice a model so that I use as little print media as possible, while still retaining enough strength? Slicers and printers differ on how they fill interior volumes. Filling volumes with uniform hollow geometry speeds up printing and lowers cost. But is uniform geometry the best choice? When and where are other choices better? And should I slice the model a certain way based on the characteristics of the printer?

Suppose my model let me capture information about stressed joints, where I would want to change the how the interior volume was printed, based both on my design and on the capabilities of my printer?

These features may actually exist, but in the free tools I used, there was no indication that this was the case.

Autodesk could certainly do a lot of good things here. Printing objects that are faster to print, cheaper to print, and stronger when used.. that would be impossible for the industry to ignore.

Obviously, because I think she's neither foolish nor hypocritical.

There's a class of people who respond to Ayn Rand with ad hominem. Which is funny -- She wrote a lot of pages -- more than I care to read in one sitting. In all that, somewhere, you'd think there's be fertile soil for a response more intellectually stimulating than, "she's a crank".

Fault her for whatever reasons you've faulted her, but to me, nobody has more constancy and conviction in their writing in favor of doing the right things for the right reasons. The importance of principle is central to everything she ever wrote.

The Mozilla conversation is about principle vs. pragmatism, and I think her quotes on the topic are highly relevant.

The Hurd isn't a viable alternative because it isn't needed.

Stallman had a vision of a completely free as in speech computer system. When he started, that meant, OS, tools, and application software.

It was a radical strawman against the beginnings of an industry of for-profit software with intellectual property laws.

It turns out that Stallman and his friends created the programmable editor, the compiler suite, the tool chain, the user-space unix tooling..

and them some Finnish guy and his friends came along and made the OS kernel.

The point is that now, not only is there a free OS and development tool chain -- more successful than Stallman could have ever managed -- there is an entire philosophy around free-as-in-speech software.

Stallman has been more influential on how we think about an use computer software than arguably just about anyone. I would at least put him in the same room as a Woz or a Bill Gates.

The market share of Hurd is the wrong metric. The fact that my company -- Microsoft -- is releasing more and more of our stuff as free-as-in-speech software -- that's the metric.

Let's objectively look at what Stallman started.

Let's use this metric: how many Fortune 100 companies have capitulated to _your_ philosophical demands?

Oh look. Here's a whole _page_ of Ayn Rand quotes about compromise

In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit

or...

Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates, compromise [on basic principles] does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to be all things to all men, end up by not being anything to anyone. And more: the partial victory of an unjust claim, encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim, discourages and paralyzes the victim.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexi...

Many folks have a go at the idea that they can somehow tame evil or compromise with it without being tainted too much. I'm not sure this has ever really worked out.

There is a lot to like about the Richard Stallmans of the world. They are clear about the what and the why, and they stick to their guns.

Imagine if google and bing decided that a certain candidate didn't exist and the name only returned some unrelated items. No news article links, no info sites, nothing.

You mean like what "traditional" media did to Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein?

This story seems like a case of moving goal posts. Of _course_ the place people go to get information skews their thinking about politics and politicians.

If someone is mad about google potentially doing this, it's only because they'd prefer that newspapers and tv stations retained that role by divine right...

BMW has already been putting CF into weight-sensitive areas of the car, like the roof panels on certain models. Up high is one of the worst places to carry weight from a vehicle dynamics perspective; it makes nearly every aspect of vehicle handling worse.

One practical difficulty of CF for general automotive use is that it's not really repairable.

Of course, modern autobody repair is often about replacing affected panels with pristine replacements (either new or from junk yard cars), as opposed to trying to repair an existing panel. So, in that sense, CF might be a fine choice, as the lack of reparability is in practice a non-issue.

BMW is already gluing cars together -- for almost 10 years they have been building the front clip on certain models out of aluminum, and in effect gluing it to the remainder of the unibody, which is conventional steel.

Also, BMW has been designing recyclability into its cars also for at least 15 years. I seem to recall that the E46 3 series was something like 90% recoverable.

I don't expect they would turn away from their recyclability commitment, so they must have a plausible plan for how they would like to apply it to CF parts.

Well, for the specific case of rape, its hard to see what would be politically gained by a society advanced enough to deploy these. I view some atrocities as a by product of turning real humans into killers in a war setting.

The discussion is about fully autonomous devices. It makes no sense to program an autonomous device to project power as sexual violence instead of just violence.

Now, if we're talking about remote controlled machines..i fear we replace one kind of dynamic with another. We protect women from sexual violence from predatory men who are in theater, but introduce to the problem invincible machines being remotely controlled by guys who shoot the prostitutes in grand theft auto.

Almost nothing could be worse than to let humans control these machines remotely with live audio/video feeds. If that happens, You WILL see women stripping for the machines like cam girls, under threat, in fear....before being killed anyway after the operator has caused enough humiliation and anguish.

The office file formats have been stable for several releases.

One of the big changes I appreciated from excel was the expansion of the 65k row limit to now 2^20 allowable rows. That required a file format change. But that happened several releases ago.

Visual Studio generally supports n+1 version round tripping, e.g. VS 2013 will round trip VS 2012 project files and assets in most cases.. so that mixed organizations of VS 2012 and VS 2013 can work together...

The Office Ribbon UI was created because the Office UI needed a reset. The tool-strip idea was appropriate back when Win32 was created... in the early 1990s. A fast computer then ran at 33mhz, and a high resolution display was 1024x768. Touch computing was a niche.

Office has had 20 years of adding features since then. Features that few could use because they couldn't find them, buried in menus and tool strips and everywhere else. Display DPI has changed. Touch computing is pervasive

The UI needed to change. It did. Most people who don't have an automatic rejection of any change prefer the new UI.

Most office documents are now editable on the web and on the phone. That's kind of a Big Deal.

Now. I think we don't need to look very hard at Slashdot to see that, even if you think MS is making unneeded changes for dubious reasons, they're certainly not the only guilty party. How many Slashdot stories have we read of people who are furious about systemd? How many stories about all of the UI changes in Ubuntu?

There are people who claim that these changes are necessary, but there are also a convincing and vocal contingent who claim they are bad change for bad change's sake.

I learned unix and Linux systems more than 20 years ago, so when I see things like systemd or replacing X11, I just shake my head because I am perfectly happy with the existing systems and do not want to re-invest the time to learn different ones.

Microsoft is by no means unique in forcing change to established patterns and systems.

Whilst it might not be for everyone, here I am sitting at my PC looking at my Computer Science books (purchased between 1995 and 1998) and I don't think I've opened any of them in the past 10 years (looking at you "Unix System Programming" by Haviland and Salama, reprinted in 1994).

If I get a DRM free digital version after the course has ended and the pricing is right, then this might actually be more useful than a pile of dead wood taking up space on my bookshelf - most of which is probably long out of date.

Oh, I already knew my beef was with government :)

As far as what doesn't happen in your area: what you say may be true of Comcast in your area, but certainly isn't of telephone companies.

The latter have a bizarre territory system that all of us are subject to.

I just recently called the ILEC of the neighboring town, only 4 miles away, that provides DSL service in that town. I am in a different ILEC service area (CenturyLink). CL can't even give me an analog phone that doesn't buzz, much less DSL -- even though I am in their territory, their switch is much too far away.

The neighboring ILEC cannot sell me any service of any kind -- even though I'm actually closer to their switch, and I cannot physically get the products I want from "my" LEC.

The reasons are not technical. They aren't even financial. The neighboring ILEC cannot trench cable to my site no matter how much I pay them -- because I am "owned" by some other ILEC.