"1984" goes down the Memory Hole

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others - Pogue’s Posts Blog - NYTimes.com: "This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned."

Irony, thy name is Amazon right now. Could a worse author have been chosen to do this too? The level of irony here matches the national deficit. The only other book out there that could even come close would be "Fahrenheit 451."

I am sure this kind of stuff happens semi-automatically, a publisher calls telling them that the copy they are sending out is unauthorized and they have to stop, but surely there was some person there having to pull the trigger on it, who really should have bumped it upstairs just to let them know this was a bad idea and maybe they should work something out.

First they came for the audio features, then they limited the downloads, now they yank back the books completely!? Are they trying to destroy the Kindle?
The only thing I can relate it to is Kryptonite locks, you know the ones that were impossible to defeat unless you happen to have a cheap ball point pen handy. That brand imploded hard. I bet there are lots of investors shorting amazon.com right now.

Really it isn't about the book it is about trust and that has been shot to heck and a minor price drop is not going to help at all. They just showed in the most ironic way possible that you don't own the book but only lease it. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

It's funny, just in a creepy way, with a slightly hysterical edge to it.

I think I'll take a harder look at the iLiad by iRex.

Microsoft hosts Feynman lecture series • The Register

Microsoft hosts Feynman lecture series • The Register: "When you are Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, you can own just about anything that you want. And as it turns out, Gates owns the rights to the seven-part lecture series given by Feynman at Cornell University in 1964."

Amazingly valuable ideas.

Abundance is powerful in unexpected ways

Why Moore’s Law does not apply to Digital Photography: "So why do I say that we are near the limit? The diffraction limit of our lenses is larger than the pixel size on some sensors"

That may well be true but that also means we can start wasting transistors and doing something else with them that can help with making a better picture.

I have no idea what but I do remember when RAM cost $1000/MB, yes thats MegaByte. Now you can get a GB or about $50. When I was at Novell they had a $1 million computer for high speed testing, the only thing special about it was the fact it had 1GB of RAM, the cost of the rest of it was inconsequential. Now computers come with at least 1 GB of RAM as standard equipment.

The main problem was yield was really low <20% so RAM was expensive because of all the testing and waste and the whole thing had to be perfect to work.

I was in engineering school at this time and then all of the sudden the price of RAM dropped and kept dropping. It turned out that some smart guy figured out that there are lots of sections of the chips that were just fine only small areas usually were damaged in some way. So they threw even more transistors at the problem to route around any damaged areas. Suddenly yields jumped to 80+% and so the prices cratered.

When you have a lot of something you can waste some of it to create something far more valuable. That is the big effect of the Agricultural Revolution extra calories that was could waste on things like seeing what happens to this rock if you put it into a really hot fire or what is beyond that sea or desert. If making food doesn't take up so much time then you can begin philosophizing or making something new out of the other things you have a lot of.

There was a story of a family that was in trouble in the Midwest but they had some land and after a big wind a huge pile of tumble weeds so they created a website and started selling them. Now there are 182,000 hits for "tumbleweed for sale."

Works and Days Print The War Against the Producers

Works and Days Print The War Against the Producers: "So our electrician senses that despite his newfound, sizable contribution to the public good, he will a) not be thanked but only further ridiculed;b) see his money diverted from his own wise use of it, to anonymous agencies’ liberal expenditures of it: the money will not be just lost, but invested in things that will make things worse, not better, through subsidies of failed programs and the destruction of incentives; c) see that the world under Obama is now unfair in Orwellian fashion: the Citibanks and AIGs, in Robert Rubin fashion, are so well connected to both parties that they will suffer little for their mistakes; the Ivy-League and Washington technocratic class that is to run all this is happy with its government perks and does not think new taxes and compliance apply to themselves (cf. Dodd, Rangel, Geithner, Daschle, Murtha, etc.)."

And the road to hell is paved with what?

Snarkmarket: Free Book Idea: Too Big to Succeed

Snarkmarket: Free Book Idea: Too Big to Succeed

LOL, but some really good points.

StillTasty: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide - Save Money, Eat Better, Help The Environment

StillTasty: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide - Save Money, Eat Better, Help The Environment

Useful.

Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire.� - By Christine Kenneally - Slate Magazine

Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire.� - By Christine Kenneally - Slate Magazine: "Similarly, the more cooked food we ate, the less industrial-strength digestion we had to do, and the smaller our guts became. In the same way that our bodies evolved to better walk on two legs, our bellies changed to better handle well-done over rare. This had two enormous payoffs. First, as our guts got smaller, this freed up energy for our brains to operate on a larger and larger scale. (Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler first discovered the relationship between gut size and brain size, dubbing it the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis.) Second, as we spent less time eating, we had more time to do other things with those rapidly expanding brains."

Food production and cooking are foundational to our civilization. I am getting more and more annoyed at those who seek to restrain and control this more basic cornerstone of our humanness.