... broadcast medium is to remove ads.

Cable TV did it, Satellite radio did it, and the IP media services are doing it.

The question is, now that they have an audience are they willing to finally listen to them and what seems to draw them to their medium, or are we going to repeat ourselves again?

The inconvenient thing about everyone's life becoming infinitely more visible in our little digital village is that everyone's life is infinitely more visible. Those who have the inclination can know as much as any expert in any field is willing to share, and those who have the inclination can use that expertise as they see fit.

Tread lightly, you weary giants of flesh and steel. Wading head first into /dev/null is sure to fill the bitbucket in inconvenient ways.

As people have mentioned, this is a problem of software. The hardware exists and is plenty good for sustained use but we don't have the same cult community dedicated to supporting old hardware as say the PC. This may change as more and more of these SoCs go open source for their drivers and specifications but until we have a real solid infrastructure in place for maintaining these systems and a community that is enthused about the prospect of doing do, we're just going to look at the cost/value analysis and grab a new device.

I mean, this is a problem that can be solved if you put out a product that is less damaging

I mean, other people are doing it [not specifically NSFW, but... it is about porn]

Where am I going to fantasize about escaping the mediocrity of corporate existence now?

It is not a conflation to call an art art, nor is it inappropriate to use more than one interpretive lens. We shouldn't ignore the critical developments of the last hundred years just because the medium predates it. Authorial intent is one lens, but art is not just about expression it is also about interpretation. This is the ritual of language and of semiotics.

Does a dimestore paperback change the reading of a book compared to a leatherbound copy? I'd argue that it does. Does an e-book? Absolutely. Just as the mode of listening to a song changes from concert to radio to album so can the mode of reading a book. Cultural context will always inform interpretation.

That's not to say that the choices of the typesetter, editor or proofreader takes away from the vision of the author. We could borrow from film's Auteur theory :3 A line from The Tell-Tale Heart is still a line from The Tell-Tale Heart whether or not it is represented on a screen, the pages of a book, the foreground of a painting or put on needlework on a throw pillow. However, would you read them the same in each instance?

What if it was a caption under the picture of a cat?

I would argue that a physical book is enough of a cultural context switch to be both meaningfully different and yet the same. As I equally enjoy Pink Floyd's money as a single or as part of an album, I also know that it is substantially different to me in each listening.

Are art museums going to go out and replace all of their exhibits with HDPI IPS displays? No. The displays may be far more versatile but they also do not embody a work. They simply display it. A printed book both contains and embodies the contained text. That simple visceral realness of holding an artifact contributes not only to our willingness to step into the magic circle of the book but signals the beginning of a cultural ritual.

Reading is a form of magic that is wholly contained within our culture. Ebooks are yet another step in democratizing the cultural ritual and print on demand publication will provide the methodology to fully entrench these new pieces of culture within the canonic regalia. In ten years the significance of the printed word will not fade even as access becomes more and more trivial because they are canonic to the medium itself. They are inherently part of how we understand all written language in the same way that a live performance is inherently part of how we understand music (even principally electronic musicians engage in the ritual of live music).

Authors go on book tours and connect with their reader base in other ways but the single most defining ritual in the whole of literature has been the receipt of a book. As we go forward this will always be a landmark of success as well as an important if not centrally defining artifact of the medium.

Photography did not displace painting, it displaced the cultural focus on realism in painting. It displaced painting as a medium of simple depiction of the natural world and instead brought a greater implicit understanding of visual composition and other fundimntal principles of art into the every day culture. Likewise, I think that as ebooks become more and more accessible we will see /more/ veneration for the printed medium, perhaps in ways that were previously reserved only for bibliophiles.

The cultural acceptance of technology that is simultaneously legitimized as a medium for art and developed into a nearly risk free scratch pad for personal exploration has historically brought a wider and deeper appreciation. It happened once with the desktop publishing revolution and I believe as people begin to ask themselves /why/ they prefer the printed word over the ebook a deeper understanding of the artistry of the medium will develop.

I think it already has to a degree.

I'm going to associate it with that cool food art. My life has now improved significantly!
Thank you University of Tsukuba!

People keep implying this is somehow illegal, but in reality they have a DCMA exemption: http://archive.org/about/dmca.... .

... as full lossless tracks for their fans to remix anyway?

I've often heard it levied that some of the FSF's goals are a bit out of touch, and it's often been speculated that one of the root causes may be inexperience with the modern computer interface. Reading over even how you search for web pages, the pipeline is very unix but it would be nearly entirely alien to a modern computer user.

Do you think there is any value in trying to switch paradigms for a while?
(please disregard any loaded language that may have slipped through, i'm tired, but this question has been eating at the back of my head for a while)

Really? I was always under the assumption that space elevators were considered a good design and that we were just waiting for materials to present themselves that would be ideal for the conditions.

And then suddenly fall like a rock tword a large uncaring abyss with the screams of a uncountable more poor souls filling my ears as we collectively rush onward to an inevitable shared oblivion:
That's about packet loss?

Seriously, once in a while I like to kind of just take these sort of advancements at face value. It's just astonishing to me that we are so close to alleviating at least one facet of the organ transplant shortages that have so many people waiting for so long in uncertainty. This day could not get here fast enough and I hope that it becomes a true milestone down a great path for medical technology.

But damn that is an expensive pump.

It's not a question of if they can compete with established living room giants, It is if there is a niche for it to carve out. Valve has got great inroads with the PC gaming community. I don't see Steam Machines displacing consoles but I definitely see them as a way for Valve to carve out a place in the living rooms of their current clientele. SteamOS to throw on the old box in the living room, Steam Machines for the pre-built crowd wanting something that fits in with their other equipment.