My First Kindle- Hooray For Technology.

I bought my first Kindle this week and I have to say that I am quite impressed with it so far. It's the basic bog standard model, bought for £60. The battery life is extraordinary compared to mobile phones or laptops, the screen quality is more than adequate for the task in hand and the amount it can store is phenomenal.

It is true what people say about the special feeling of a real book but there are also disadvantages to paper books. For example where to put them- book cases are big, Kindles are small. When books replaced scrolls the replacement was almost total- I'm pretty sure this won't be the case for e-readers they will take a big chunk of the market.

I can also see how e-readers have potential to be very useful in a school environment- if the bulk of the textbooks children have to have can be transferred to an electronic device then they won't have to carry have their own body weight to school each day.

All in all it is already one of my favourite electronic devices.

Technical Help Please

Sorry been busy lately.

Could anyone help me with the following pieces of technology.

Printer:

I want a new printer as I currently have a crappy Epsom Stylus that breaks down frequently, especially when it has generic non-Epsom ink and the ink costs a fortune. So what printers are reliable and aren't rip offs in terms of ink costs? It cannot be an Epsom as they are shit and make cheap printers with the intention of ripping off customers with extortionate ink costs.

Mobile Phone:

I have an HTC phone and the memory has been playing up for months, so most of the Apps have had to be removed. How do I change this, does it happen with all phones and get the phone working properly again?

Sat Navs:

Need a new one. Any recommendations on what is good. I need it before Monday so any comments before Sunday afternoon will be appreciated.

Stuxnet In The Middle With You

Like Infidel I am very impressed by what the Stuxnet computer virus thingy has done to the Iranian nuclear programme. Making war by outwitting the enemy rather than killing them is an all round improvement.

Up until now cyber warfare has largely meant either Chinese epionage or Russia's petulant denial of service attacks against their enemies. This is much more sophisticated and suggests that the West is just as keen on using computers as weapons.

The only regrettable part is that it is now known about so therefore less effective.

A Nail In The Coffin Of Western Guilt

One of the most widely disseminated myths is that the reason that the West is wealthier than the rest of the world is due to things like colonialism and exploitation. This idea doesn't make a great deal of sense given that Western countries that never had colonies are not poorer than their neighbours, non-Western nations that were never colonised are not noticeably wealthier than their neighbours.

This should put another nail in the coffin of the idea anyhow:

The study gathered crude information on the state of technological development in various parts of the world in 1000 B.C.; around the birth of Jesus; and in A.D. 1500. It then compared these measures to per capita income today.

As it turns out, technology in A.D. 1500 is an extraordinarily reliable predictor of wealth today.

In other words the reason some countries are more developed than others today is because they were more developed yesterday. Trying to explain differences that go back thousands of years by using factors that only apply for 10s or 100s of years is inadequate.

Strange Fruit

The world's largest Apple shop is set to open in London's Covent Garden.

I'm not sure why anyone would want a jumbo apple really.

Saving The Newspapers.

I don't know whether Kindle will be saviour of newspapers, in its current form I don't think it will be. The problem for newspapers is that we web users are now used to reading articles from several different newspapers at zero cost ( I reckon I've looked at about 20 - 30 newspapers in the last week), so we aren't willing to revert to paying a significant sum to read just one paper.

The Kindle solution is to offer subscriptions to papers, but that restricts readers to one newspaper. Some newspapers have tried to charge for web articles before but usually the price has been ridiculously high- The Independent used to charge about £1 per article which was more than the whole dead tree publication. Who wants to pay that much?

A traditional newspaper costs 40p to £1.50 and contains dozens to hundreds of articles, so therefore the value of each article is usually pennies or fractions of pennies. Therefore if the newspapers want to start charging for articles in a way that doesn't cause a complete collapse in readership they need to create a system of micro charging, in which users can create an account put some money on it and then browse the web with each publication getting a very small fee per article read, although cumulatively the amount spent per user will be pretty similar to what is currently spent on physical newspapers. The technology exists to do this, google ads use a similar system where each ad clicks generates a few fractions of a cent, so it is feasible.