jfruh's comments

Re: RMS's bonkers ethical system: I really don't think he ever moved past the mindset he had in academia, where he was essentially a researcher of how computers do and could work. To him, code should be shared freely just like research in biology and physics is. This has nothing to do with the real world as it exists today, but I do honestly belief that's the germ of his worldview.

The problem is that there's a major disconnect with what the comfortable middle and upper-class people who make decisions about the immigration system think of as a "valuable asset to society" and the actual economic incentives for most people who want to immigrate to the United States. To use your corporate analogy, it's as if the hiring committee of a major corporation decided that there were so many applicants for jobs that everyone the company would hire should have the same skills and credentials that the people on the hiring committee have -- master's degrees and continuing education credits -- even though what the company needs to hire is janitors and security guards.

You don't think that people who come here illegally (or, best case scenario, who come here under agricultural visas that give them temporary residence and no stake in the country) to work in the fields or construction are contributing anything? Well, enjoy it when your food doubles in price, then. Or, more likely, enjoy your food staying the same price but the people who grew it don't have any labor protection laws or real roots in this country.

My point is not that we should just open the borders willy-nilly. But we need to have some kind of process for people who want to live here that doesn't result in decades of limbo, and doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars to someone who's going to take up a minimum-wage agricultural job. And the process should help them become Americans. You know, like the process did for most of this country's history up until the 1930s or. That process did all right, as near as I can tell.

http://reason.com/assets/db/07cf533ddb1d06350cf1ddb5942ef5ad...

What's the difference in practice between "a laptop with a detachable screen" and "a tablet that fits into a case that holds up the screen and provides a keyboard"? In terms of form factor, those two strike me as identical. Of course, if iOS doesn't do it for you in the laptop form factor, then it doesn't do it for you, but that's more a software than a hardware problem (and I'm willing to bet is a software problem not everybody has).

Everyone loves to bash publisher/distributors in all areas of creative endevour, and often with good reason. But at their heart these companies are accumulations of capital and expertise that allow risky investment in creative works that might fail. Everyone who succeeds in the traditional world to the extent that they don't need the publishers anymore got there because that capital took a risk on them; now they don't want to let part of their profits go back into that capital pool. The question is, if the old system blows up, who takes that risk for unknowns?

I'm certainly not saying its impossible. Probably people will be ramping up creatively, writing/making music/what have you for nothing until they build up enough of a fan base to ask for something more. But crowdsourcing is definitely not just a free handout without huge accumulated goodwill.

Of course, if you pay via credit card or bank card other electronic means, as more and more people do even for small amounts, you pay the exact price.

I was someone who had already done a lot of fiddling on the computer at that point so even as a high-school student I had a lot of self-trained semi-fast typing skills that I had to unlearn. I found the first month of the class really frustrating as a result, but eventually the new skills kicked in and I found myself typing much faster than I did before.

Touch-typing is a skill that involves muscle memory, and as such there's no real short cut to it and you'll find the process annoying and not engaging to your higher intellect. But stick with it. It's incredibly useful, I promise.

On the other hand, the US's first-past-the-post election system makes a multi-party system pretty difficult to maintain, so who knows.

• Submit your book to the iBookstore for sale or free download with a few simple steps* • Export your book in iBooks format to share on iTunes U or to give to others • Create a version of your book as a PDF file

That footnote is: "Books may only be sold through the iBookstore; additional terms and conditions apply."

So if you export the PDF, can you submit that PDF to, say, Amazon's print on demand service?

Um, no? Knowledgable editors make any sort of writing easier to read and use -- especially crucial if you're talking about textbook-style material, which is specifically about someone with subject matter knowledge communicating with people who don't (yet) have that knowledge. They also serve as a useful backstop of fact-checking and just plain "does this make sense?" checking.

hahahaha

I wonder to what extent any under-the-covers code is shared between apps that run both on iOS and OS X (like Pages, for instance) and whether there's any economy of coding scale there.