I did a search of the thread for VGER and got no hits.

Where did all the nerds on this site go?

Okay, let's see...

Borders lost the "chicken bluff game" and folded "early".

But this site is semi specialized in Int. Prop. issues, yet you know what? Now it seems *both* big chains had all the cash in the world, but couldn't get Print On Demand to work?! That would completely eat Amazon's lunch!

The stuff on the shelves would just be the starter samplers, to get you quick access to the classics in each section. But then make say 70% (non-oversized etc) of the inventory Print On Demand. I'd wait up to an hour - that's easy to burn browing, or dinner, or whatever. With a little work you can get it down to 15 minutes.

But no. If you think IP rights for music is bad, the media houses have successfully blocked POD from happening for reasons known only to them.

The tech is there - *three years ago* I got some sample POD books in Harvard Square bookstore. Yes they didn't have the cover art rights. But the paperbacks were as solid as any tome printed the old way.

So now I'm just grumpy because we're getting tangled into the e-reader device mess that seems to be becoming strip-mined real fast.

Yes people are reading paper books a LOT less. Every person I know has a Kindle or an iPad or like me and my wife, Nexus 7's. Paper books are great, don't get me wrong but when my mother in law even has an iPad for reading you know the death of paper books is on the horizon.

I was a bitter clinger to paper books. I graduated with an English degree and love literature. Too me paper books were sacred. Now I can't stand the thought of dealing with a paper book, storing it, watching it yellow on my shelf or having to fight with the binding while trying to read and holding the cover back. My Nexus 7 is the perfect experience. I can get books from multiple retailers on a single device while sitting in bed. I have Google Books, Kindle, Nook, Kobo and many others on my device and I shop around for prices.

Couple this with Calibre and I can manage my library any way I see fit, convert between formats and store them locally or in the cloud as I see fit.

You're so fucking full of shit it's ridiculous. I can't even begin to take you seriously with this crap. All I can say is "fuck you" for trying to redefine terms. Want to know what the LP stands for? Go to their god damned website and read for 10 seconds. Paul Ryan is a libertarian on economic issues and nothing else. He isn't a part of the libertarian party, nor has he ever been.

So again, FUCK YOU with your bullshit. Assholes like you trying to constantly move the goal post ruin the political discourse in this country. I happily treat you witht he contempt you deserve. Fucking weasel.

Don't bother. The leftists here have their talking points. Pointing out that the Democrat party was the party that founded the KKK, created the Jim Crow laws, created gun control specifically to keep blacks from arming and protecting themselves, founded Planned Parenthood as a way to euthanize the black population and had a grand wizard of the KKK in the Senate up to just a few years ago. Nevermind that the Republican party was the part of Martin Luther King. That it was the Republican party that fought a civil war that helped to free American slaves. That it was the Republican party that fought for civil rights for minorities from the 40's all the way to the present.

No sir, leftists have their new plantation. Any black person, such as Herman Cain, Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Alan West or any of the many others who go against their Democratic talking points are "working for the man" and not "real" black folks.

Liberalism is a mental disease. Its the ultimate form of projection where they can do no wrong, everyone else is evil and free speech is only ok when you're saying something they agree with. If you aren't a liberal you're "stupid" or "ignorant" or "crazy."

I'm so sick of the fucking debate with them it's beyond words for me to express. They have pushed people so far that I honestly believe a civil war is coming. The takers have run out of other peoples money and the workers are fed up. With all the new scandals, all someone needs to do is light a match to this powder keg.

They weren't random. They were specifically targeted for their political, social and economic beliefs, which is far, far worse than random.

Hey gang, we really might be morphing into "Web 3.0" in whichever of many things that means.

We're starting to enter the age of the Law Meta-Game.

Google does their fair share of morally complex things, but they haven't been called "stupid" very often.

So *because it's Google* and not some two-guys-and-a-garage operation, they're not so easy to shove in a corner. Even at the rate that lawyer fees rise, if some "typical" (as the cynics would say) "travesty of justice" occurred, that then becomes a hell of a Meta-Game news article.

"Google: We wanted to report on secret govt data requests. Govt said no."

You/they don't file motions like that "out of boredom on a Tuesday". They have the money to submit the motion and all the bells and whistles. So this might be the first of many kinds of steps it takes to slowly begin to roll back the Big Brother Engine. Not a lot, but they're helping to drag it into the sunlight where such scampery things don't like to be.

Yes it does.

We put men on the moon in 1969 and it "almost killed us". Why isn't anyone tapping into Moore's Law for the moon? The MoonBase is the next "leap" in the process. That requires capability - but of a different kind. By now the math should be cake. Materials durability, etc is the next easiest part.

The *really scary* part is how we manage our "Terrorist Meme" when something like a MoonBase has to be protected! And no, don't tell me a MoonBase is "hard" - just haul a big rectangular metal/whatever allow box up there and plunk it down. Voila. Instant Moonbase. Then you can have a staging zone for all kinds of fun stuff.

But it's the social aspect that we have to really get a grip on, and I believe it will take some "doing stuff" for the social-political flashpoint to show up in actual conversation.

A little three person project?!

I'll wait until someone with real money decides to properly fund something.

Submission trolls cost U.S. Slashdot readers 29 billion minutes in 2013 alone. My solution? Make it easier for low quality submissions to be re-examined and rejected by the Slashdot Firehose! : )

This.

I never used Google Reader. However, I do use an RSS reader. And to keep in sync across the devices, my reader uses Google Reader infrastructure---as do most readers. That is, I keep my reading history "in the cloud", this being one of the things the cloud is good at.

So, Google did the RSS sync thing well, so well that everyone else used the infrastructure. Google Reader itself though was, at best, meh. Everyone else used the Google Reader infrastructure invisibly, so there was no contribution to Google's coffers.

Google could have competed with a better RSS client, but they didn't. Instead, they have killed their poor client and also their pretty good infrastructure. As far as I can tell, that's the reason people are upset. They don't care about Google Reader, but the loss of the syncing infrastructure is a problem.

"There's nothing to "believe" in when it comes to science (it works either way)"

I *strongly* disagree!

Science "sorta" works. What you have to decide to believe at any particular moment is whether the "sciencey" stuff presented to you in fact is "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". An immensely important example is the case of two overlapping diagnoses coupled with compound problems, plus "local" hygiene problems at that particular hospital.

So you the patient go in sick, complaining of a stomach ache, a fever, body aches, and a busted leg cut from a game of barbecue-football. You also just happen to have allergies to nuts and shellfish. So in a comedy of mash-science, the doctor gets all confused and scrambles the three separate correct diagnoses needed, gives you a ham sandwich on "12 grain bread" (that happens to contain little bits of nuts" made on the same table as a tuna sandwich for the next patient, and then was too tired to wash his hands properly and you get complication from your already infected leg.

Or you could just sit at home and "pray for a miracle to get better".

What exactly is "maintaining"? I've spent nothing on "Maintaining" my PC for some six years. And you can buy four PC's for that fee. And you can get a techie at $20 an hour for five hours a month every other month, so call it $500 per year. (Skipping currency games.)

So can we all have a piece of that slush fund?

Wow, just wow. Talk about fucking clueless