I went to see it with my very reluctant wife and she loved it. Thinking about it later I realised that Avatar isn't Science Fiction it is a Fairy Story. Personally I thought it was great.

Then the sex scene wouldn't have been as interesting; well maybe more interesting but less arousing.

Mod parent up +6 insightful.

The sheer number of book available is mindblowingly gigantic. The number of people making a living by WRITING this material is abysmally small. Example: a friend of mine just wrote the Illinois book in a series on good tent camping in Illinois. He'll be lucky to break even on the endeavor. Which isn't to say he didn't enjoy the process and isn't glad he did it, just that a lack of monetary reward wouldn't change his mind one way or another about writing the Indiana version (ok, granted, somebody's going to have to reimburse for Indiana due to the stupid Hoosier entry tax on state parks).

In any case, the parent is correct--we can only hope that piracy undercuts the razor thin margins that are shoring up the book industry. We don't need more of that crap. I feel as bad for the publishing execs (the only people making money on the crap production) losing their jobs as I about the RIAA execs. Let's get our signs out for the protest: "No bail out for the leaders of the Crap Production Industry."

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.

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.

just out of curiosity, how much coffee are you getting out of that bush? I've thought about raising my own coffee, but somebody told me the yields make it pretty much impractical. Are you getting enough coffee to make it worthwhile?

I'll give Okular another look, but last time I looked, Okular didn't save the annotations to the pdf so I could send it back to someone using a different reader.

Deal breaker.

mod parent up. It's insane to me that I can't annotate a .pdf on Linux. In-freaking-sane. It's really a deal breaker for me when using Linux for work stuff.

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.

It's just you. I'll stick w/ running days-long, outlandishly esoteric processes that no one really cares about on my 4,096 cores.

That's why I always grab the torrent and do a fresh install. A regular/in-place upgrade has always failed for me. That and I'm always curious about what's configured and how by default.

ooooo...now THAT'D be awesome. I concur.

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.

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.

Who are the big players?