> So let me get this straight... because you dont want to have to leave your apartment, and because its a massive hardship to have a dvd binder on a shelf, you should be allowed to steal.

Let me get this straight: get your reading comprehension improved because it sucks.

Hard to answer without swearing. First downloading torrents is not stealing. Second, what exactly lead you to conclude that I download illegally? Does anyone complaining of the lack of legal digital video download options is to be taken as a criminal?

If you are so interested in my media habits I invite you to read this post (posted before your retarded reply BTW) http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2462320&cid=37624726

I either buy DVDs or get them at a local public library. Like with books before I got a Kindle, the nuisance of getting videos (ordering DVD + shelve space, physically going to the library), means we watch less movies than we would otherwise. Having a small baby means going to the cinema is not a trivial thing to do.

My point is that the lack of convenience for getting movies at home is such that even people with the cash to spare don't buy DVDs.

> These days even a mediocre computer can rip a DVD and make an MPEG4 file.

We have an iPad, an MacBookAir, a Lenovo X220, a 5 year old desktop, and a NAS. The desktop is the only one with a DVD drive and my intention is to get rid of it, soonish. The DVD drive is not enough to keep it. I guess I should say "mediocre computers can rip DVDs, the ones I want to have at home can't".

I live in France, and don't know of any one who's got that letter. I think a lot of people in my age and income bracket would be embarrassed to mention they got suck a letter.

What _really_ sucks (not only in France, but in most of Europe AFAIK) is that I have no way of easily renting/buying videos through the internet. All choices I've looked at had a really old and incomplete catalogue. Last I tried to check that was in the beginning of the year, and all alternatives sucked big. I live in Paris (i.e. square meters cost a lot), there is no way I will pile up DVDs in the house.

I can understand that French parliament was lead (read: bought) into writing this legislation, but I really can't understand they did that without requiring the industry to put a legal alternative in place.

Are the stations of these dense enough, that you can just go somewhere else and drop the car? Instead of having to (more or less) be forced into a round-trip?

One thing I hope this system will provide is a high density of stations to allow that. IIRC the system we used in the NL actually required us to return the car to the same spot. But then, it also allowed us to reserve a car at a given location and given time.

A lot of people are commenting that this is not "the first". Who cares?

It is not the first but, for one, it will be the first that will be heard of by people living far from it. Folks get over this: there are more international reporters in Paris than in all of the other quoted cities I've seen so far combined.

More importantly, given the monthly price, it seems to be a lot more geared to the occasional short trip. We (me+wife) used a car pool system in The Netherlands for a couple of years. The trick with it was that the monthly fees were so high that it only made financial sense if you needed a car for a couple of hours a week, every week.

The trick of this Parisian car system is that it costs a small amount to be part of it, that should allow (I hope) for people without constant need for a car to make use of it. It should also go a long way towards giving car-pooling more global visibility.

FWIW, The Netherlands also had an early bicycle sharing program in Amsterdam in the 70s that was a disaster, perhaps they were also the first in it, but again, who cares? It did not work, and was cancelled. France had a huge success with large-scale bicycle sharing programs which spread through all its major cities, and they work. The Velib in Paris (also not the first) works in every way it should, and given the amount of tourists that come to Paris, it is probably the most visible in the planet (i.e. it is the one that spreads the good news, and helps to convince the sceptics).

Hi,

Someone was complaining that Crashplan was somewhat slow. Do you folks using SpiderOak have any comments regarding sync speed? Is it fast (enough)?

SpiderOak is quite more expensive than Crashplan, would I be getting that difference in performance? (I need to ask as I just realized that I won't get geographic redundancy with them)

For a while I tried to read Proj. Gutenberg books in e-readers (both using the Hanlin v3, and a Kindle DX). The lack of any kind of formatting or typesetting information other than line breaks hurts a lot. Specially with poetry.

The formatting of text in a page influences the reading experience a lot, and in all Gutenberg project books I tried to read, the on-screen result was always a mess. On non-English books things are even worse. I tried using some Perl scripts hacked by some people, and also wrote my own code to create epub or mobi files. At some point I just gave up on reading material from the Guttenberg project.

> Open Source: you're never trapped, you have some great alternatives.

Unless of course I have better things to do with my free time than to be eternally trying and testing different desktop/distros alternatives every 1/2/3 years. Migrating takes time.

The problem with that view is that it seems to assume users are willing to put up with a alpha/beta quality desktop for 2 or 3 years. People want a desktop that works and that they can trust that will just keep working.

I simply cannot trust the KDE project anymore. They really don't give a crap for their users. What I've discovered now, is that I also cannot trust Gnome.

The Linux desktop seems to remain eternally locked into BETA quality. The only applications that are truly top-notch are developer tools and system-administration stuff. The actual desktop applications remain indeed eternally in beta.

What I think it happened is that there was a generation of people who like me got into the "Linux" wave of the 90s. Most people I know with this background (myself included) now have a lot of disposable income, and little spare time. Everybody I know with this background has either moved to OSX or is considering the move to OSX. Younger people have no nostalgia for Linux and are not even considering using it, if they can afford they just get a Macintosh.

[...]

I mean it is fucking 2011, and my desktop crashes because of fancy graphical effects I have no use for. It is fucking 2011 and I still don't have a decent(!) photo organizer that doesn't crash once every 2 days. I have a quad-core desktop with 8G RAM, the whole thing locks every now and then for 10 seconds for no apparent reason.

> Also, you say you tried a few releases. my guess is you haven't tries in a year. Which is an enormous amount of dev time. So you maybe should keep trying :)

You see that is what many FOSS devs (specially Linux Desktop devs (specially KDE devs)) don't seem to get.

Trying out a desktop takes time and effort. Most people have better things to do in life than "trying out KDE/Gnome/XFCE/etc every 3/6/12 months" to see which are the latest (mostly useless) desktop new effects and integration gimmicks.

Same here.

The only print books I consider buying are professional books I need for work and can't get on the Kindle.

What I really find amazing is the Slashdot vitriol on e-books. I really get the impression that is all just a bunch of young people who:
-- don't own loads of books;
-- who never had to move said loads of books to another house/flat;
-- who never thought out the costs of having all that paper stored in a shelve.
-- have eagle eyes and don't care about small & crappy fonts

Not to mention the convenience of getting new books while travelling.

You probably live in a desert. Where I live, at some point one third of all subway advertisements were an ipad photo.

Star athletes make more money because (thanks to mass-media), they provide entertainment to many, many people. The same applies to star musicians, actors, writers etc. The local swimming / golf / basketball instructor at the local club does not make the same money as Phelps / Woods / Jordan.

Honestly, I think they should be teaching Math. Unlike Chess or Go (which I play) Math can be directly used in real life, and honestly most adults are incapable of using math in its most basic form (see Innumeracy)

If you need to make students create some form of creative thinking make them understand probability and get them to try to apply it to understand real life problems (such as finding flaws in news articles).