Re: Woman who gives up,

Because an engineer sees society as an immensly complex machine with a myriad of interacting feedback mechanisms which require adjusting from time to time?

Re: Tablets

Could you do black background and (dark) red text? That's what astronomy software does to protect your night vision. I find Cool Reader's white on black dims pretty well - so much so that if I don't reset it I can't see the text in daylight.

Re: The eBook Problem

It isn't the retailer, its the publisher that is the problem here. It would be great to have a bundled deal available.

For a number of years SF publisher Baen Books have included a CD with some hardcover releases with DRM-free e-editions of the book, previous books in the series, other works by the author and other bonus material.

Of course Baen were also the first publisher to encourage their authors to make one or more of their books available online for free as a 'taster'.

Lunar Catapult

I think we have to add Robert Heinlein to the mix, with the linear accelerator described in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", which delivered payloads to earth.

Re: If TPB dies

JDX @ 18:52 wrote:

"Weren't there some stats in the news recently suggesting sales HAD increased due to strict anti-piracy laws? I forget the details, maybe someone can recall..."

It was to do with the closure of Megaupload last year. Allegedly sales & rentals rose 4-10%.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/megaupload_piracy_study/

I seem to recall reports before Megaupload closed to the effect that internet traffic to/from file lockers exceeded torrent traffic. If so, then shutting down all the torrent sites - not just the flag carrier TBP - will likely increase sales by no more than 10% again.

Re: I don't even use TPB...

Buy her a cheap no-name chinese DVD player. They are often region free, and if not, have easily findable codes for setting them up all-region via the remote. Many major brand players do too.

Re: Paper and Future-proof

Your arguments are more applicable against the Amazon model than ebooks generally: When you buy an ebook from Amazon you don't own it. What you have is a license to use it for a while. Per their conditions of use Amazon reserves the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, remove or edit content, or cancel orders at their sole discretion. And, as you say, they are encrypted. Can you imagine if every physical book you owned had its own different lock and key, like church bibles in the days before the printing press? How long before you lost some of the keys, or forgot which belonged to which?

Still, physical books are subject to loss by fire, earthquake, flood, tornado, theft, silverfish, pulp degrading, etc. Insurance might replace your books after a disaster, but they won't be the same editions, and some may not be available at all, even after a long hunt through the online & physical second hand stores. How many copies from a print run of, say, 50,000 are left after 40 or 100 years? It isn't quite in the "yesterday's news, tomorrow's chip paper" category, but not a great percentage.

With other publishers and retailers (e.g. Baen Books and the recently departed Fictionwise.com) you get the book in a choice of formats and *no* DRM. Epub is an open format - basically an xml file in a zip wrapper. A backup of your ebooks can be kept in many locations - on your home PC, on a usb stick at your office, on some cloud service, whatever you want.

Being dropped in a hot bath won't necessarily destroy a book, but it won't do it much good and will show permanent damage even after drying. I have found that a ziplock bag solves the ereader-in-bath problem.

I like my tablet, and keep many books and magazines on it, with the selection changing every few months as the mood takes me. I also still spend far too much money on physical books, both new and second hand. Both have their place.

And as for the paperless office? I've been hearing businesses talk about it for the past 25 years and am still waiting. At least most books published and paper made in Europe, North America and Australasia comes from renewable resources - forest plantations rather than old growth forest.

Re: 386?

"An abacus? We had to do our calculations with rings of giant stones, and it took the machine 31,557,600 seconds for one clock cycle!"

I thought it was 31,556,925 and a half seconds.

Or was that the mark II?

Re: Bollocks

That is precisely the conservative point of view.

Rural areas don't deserve the additional infrastructure because it isn't worthwhile.

Unless some duke/earl/internet billionaire is in a given area, in which case exceptions will be found.

Re: Clarke's Stations: Not Manned

I liked George O Smith's "Venus Equilateral" series, and reread it earlier this year. It is a great example of a SF writer extrapolating from the best knowledge of the time. It is also an example of how unforseen and perhaps unforseeable discoveries and advances invalidate the basic assumptions that the story is built on.

I must see if there are any interviews with Smith, who died in 1981, comparing VE with how space communication actually played out.

As a quick rule of thumb...

Take a standard CD case and see if it'll go in the pocket. For most of my inside jacket pockets the answer is 'yes'.

Ditto in my location. They 'upgraded the customer experience' a couple of months ago and removed all the components etc. For what, more TVs and a Kindle display?

pretty normal

First appearance - is normally the day after arrest/charge. Next appearance 14 or 21 days later to enter a plea. How much longer it goes on after that depends on if he pleads guilty or wants to fight it out.

Copernic 2

Agreed. I made the mistake of 'upgraging' to ver3 once. What a great leap backwards. Ver2 mostly does what I need, and is very handy for foing full text sarches - if only it would read inside .rar files.