Posts by beboyle

Tax free?

"Amazon seem very happy to profit (tax free)..." How so?

Re: Sales of these are going to crash at some point

And why would they bother doing that when they could much more easily hack your phone?

Admiral Hopper used to be well-known for her "nanosecond" "microsecond" and "millisecond" wires that she used when giving talks to non-technical (mostly) audiences. The nanosecond was actually just under 12" long, the microsecond a spool of wire almost 1,000 feet long, and the millisecond was "too big to bring".

Re: Sounds like a scene from a film I watched recently...

"Can't fault him too much for cashing out one last time."

Actually in several interviews he has said he didn't want to do the film at all but was offered such a large bucket of cash that he decided he couldn't refuse. But he did insist that he actually die this time as he had wanted to do in Return of the Jedi, as he has also said many times.

I once worked for a director who used a spreadsheet as a word processor. Literally, just typed memos or whatever in at one line per cell. And complained about how much work it was to manually re-word wrap everything if she had to make a change. She thought we should write a macro or something to do that for her.

And no, we never did get her to use Word, although she did eventually graduate to writing everything in her email client.

Re: It is a locked-down, readercentric tablet!

Clearly you've never actually seen one, then. It's not locked down in any way, and under the custom Amazon launcher is a pretty plain-vanilla edition of Android.

Denying quantum mechaicx

@Paul Smith: Sorry, Paul, but you're playing the same tune as many previous deniers of quantum physics - trying to frame uncertainty as a practical issue "if you measure it, you change it", rather than as the fundamental law of nature that it is.

Mars is just the most recent frontier

Not that much different from any explorer in the 17th and 18th centuries.

DRM Optional

Kindle does have DRM, and paid-for books from Amazon require it, but it also supports unencrypted MOBI format books. There are many sources for thousands of free (public domain) books that are formatted for the Kindle.

The downside is that it is not compatible with other DRM systems, so books using Adobe DRM (most public library e-books) are not compatible, nor are paid books from other vendors.

That's not what "net neutrality" means

Minor correction on "net neutrality" - nothing proposed would have the effect you suggest of requiring anybody to accept any content. It only prohibits net traffic carriers from giving preference to one type (or source) of traffic over another. And even if it did, it's hard to see how it would be enforced on a U.K. based publisher