fuck analog! The Louvre should scan all their paintings, and burn the originals in a furnace to generate electricity for walls and walls of digital picture frames. High resolution picture frames, of course!
This article makes a compelling case against e-books... that old nagging problem that the people who make user interfaces are, in fact, more often than not... idiots.
"I found that even in a very small font that if the original line is beyond a certain length, they will take the extra word and have it flush left on the screen, so that instead of a three-line stanza you actually have a four-line stanza. And that screws everything up,"
The user interface of a book has a lot to offer over that of any computer program. There are downsides to books of course... you can't search... but if you have both the physical book and an e-book, then this problem is fixed.
Maybe eventually they'll come out with
e-paper. Imagine... the advantages of a book with thin flexible pages, combined with the advantages of electronics.
Maybe instead of electronic displays, they should develop paper that can simply be re-printed an infinite number of times, kind of like a CD. Then you could have a book that you simply feed into a special printer... wait an hour, and out pops whatever book you want. Then you could have the world's library stored in a crystal cube, yet still read it on a physical 'book.'
Of course, if you really want to get to the nub of the matter, this question goes far beyond books to the problem of people having too many fuck*ng babies. The obvious thing to do would be to continue to print paper books, rather than
destroy the earth and ourselves in our insatiable quest for oil:
[...] "we all had cars and we burned oil and made computers out of plastic which were made from oil and we just needed so much oil that we eventually couldn’t get enough of it for cheap enough so we started drilling holes into the center of the earth underneath the ocean and one of them erupted that we couldn’t recap and the ocean was destroyed. And since marine plants in the ocean create between 70-80 percent of the earth’s oxygen, we all died. "
But that's the rub ... the Earth is becoming over-populated, so there's no way we can kill enough trees to make books for everyone because there just aren't any more trees to kill, so OBVIOUSLY the solution is to step it up a notch and instead kill the entire planet and the entire ecosystem with petrolatium-based e-books! Problem solved!
As far as pictures of the self are concerned, hey, you should see Africans... specifically, African men. I'm thinking of Nigerians in particular, but this phenomenon is I'm sure by no means restricted to just Nigerians. Go on Facebook, find a Nigerian, and start clicking from one Nigerian Facebook account to another... You will certainly notice that the FB profiles of men feature an inordinate number of pictures of the self.
Here's one random one I've clicked on now... This dude has around 40 pictures of himself, and one that is very telling - a screen capture from some gangster movie titled "Respect The Don." Self-effacing humor or seriousness? It's hard to say...
Again, back to oil. You can imagine what might happen to many cultures including our own... if you take and dump HUGE quantities of wealth into that culture, and no one really has to do anything of value to generate that wealth, other than sign a lease with some oil company. A culture that is already rooted in traditions of pride and prejudice, a culture of extended family where social standing and relationships are historically already incredibly important, as we find in many traditional non-western cultures, and what will that culture do, of course, than turn inwards, and lean on these ways of operating even more, so as to ensure, as much as possible, a distribution as wide as possible of all that oil wealth.
No longer does perception of one's social standing mean the difference between getting the healthy goat or the haggardly goat, now it means the difference between getting a cut of a few billion dollars of oil wealth and an iphone, or starving in the streets and
not having electricity to light a lamp to be able to read your old analog book.
Fuck the gift-wrapped present of a framed picture of one's self, the real gift to give is a framed digital picture frame with several GB worth of pictures of yourself, locked so that it can't be erased, ever!
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Topic: It's time (Read 9196 times)