I Was Not Impressed With the Kindle Touch

I have to say that I was simply not impressed by the Kindle Touch. I looked at one recently, and I can see why they sort of keep these things boxed up and hidden away. They really don't want you to see how small it is.

Now, is small good? When it comes to gadgets, people love small. But, for functionality reasons, small is not always good for me. And so, this is sort of more about me than the Kindle, and that's why I don't know how useful this is to say: the Kindle just didn't do what I thought it would do.

People have complained about how slow it is; I didn't think it was that slow. It's a device that runs from $99-149. It doesn't have to be like lightning. But, compared to my Sony reader, it's not much faster. In fact, the Sony reader is roughly the same as the Kindle but with a clunkier operating system and a much heavier device body. The Sony reader is durable and made of aluminum; the Kindle touch is thinner and lighter, and that's what people want.

The fact that the device uses cloud storage concerns me. After what happened with Megaupload, will anyone ever think of cloud storage in the same way again? The 3G aspect of the device doesn't really register with me, either. I don't need it; I need something that I can read books on.

The display is excellent. However, the Touch has a six inch screen which I found to be too small since I am a fast reader.

That's really all I can say. I'm sure that if I had one, I could get used to it. But the size limitation really is what made me say, no thanks. And I'm not paying $500 or more for an iPad. I just don't think that that is a sustainable price, at least not for me.

Megaupload Users May Permanently Lose Legitimate Data

Now, that's something that I did not consider.

Megaupload's use of vendors to store data might have been organized in such a way as to keep their fingerprints clean. Was that a business strategy enacted early on or was that done in order to ensure that they could expand and hold someone else to blame if something failed?

The loss of data puts someone at risk of being culpable for damages. I would imagine that there is a desire to dump all of that supposedly pirated content. But, along with that would go an undetermined amount of perfectly legitimate stuff that people care about.

The government should put a hold on all of this data. Anyone who wants to retrieve their information should be willing to prove it isn't a pirated copy of a movie or a television show. But, what if this is really nobody's business?

I tend to come down on the side of "it's nobody's business. It's not Megaupload's data, it's not the storage vendor's data, and it's not the government's data. It belongs to the people who stored their data in the cloud.

Why shouldn't they be allowed to get their stuff?

Shutting Down Megaupload Caused a Lot of People a Lot of Grief

When you think about it, isn't it possible that Megaupload had legitimate uses?

Absolutely. I have not doubt that there were people who were using it to share files that were not illegal in any way and that were too large to share otherwise. If you think about video projects, coding, and development work being shared via Megaupload with only the links (and passwords) being shared between users, sure. It's entirely possible that the side had legitimate uses. Everything that those users were sharing is pretty much locked down and gone now; getting their legitimate work back might prove to be impossible. It might be years before the case is resolved. What good is their work going to be when they finally get access to it?

I think that this fact is going to cause the government's case to have a lot of legalese thrown at it. If a site has legitimate uses, I don't think it can be shut down entirely. I think that the illegal uses of Megaupload were probably pretty vast and undocumented, but who knows for certain?

The shutdown of the site left people who had been paying for access to the site in the lurch; it left files locked in the hands of the government. A good number of those people have been angry since the moment they lost their access.

The God of Toys

The RedPad will probably become a much sought-after item for people who want to cash in on the "status" that it confers. How long before there is a copy of it for sale to people who want to pose as a state-sanctioned bureaucrat?

Megaupload is Gone and the Rest Are Sure to Follow

This is a fairly chilling and significant event in the history of the Internet, at least in terms of what it means for people who do business on the shadier side of things. It is certainly going to cause a number of people to continue doing business overseas and to resist the temptation of traveling to the United States for business purposes. What's even more significant, perhaps, is the reaction delivered by Anonymous, which has knocked several major websites offline.

The landscape is changing, and it will now begin to change very quickly. Time to brush up on fair use rules and all of that.

Target Already Sells iPods, So Why Not?

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These Apple "stores" really don't amount to much. Apple products, in and of themselves, are engineered and designed to be operational almost immediately; sure, some people do have customer service requirements, but an Apple product is something that, for as long as I can remember, you can use as soon as you turn the thing on.

Target already sells iPods, so what's the big fuss here?

Ground Penetrating Radar Finds Nothing

Well, what do you know. Three million dollars later and there's no evidence of what some dude said he buried there in 1978. Does that mean, definitively, that it never happened? No, but what are you going to do? Ask him to pay it all back? Call it a wash, then.

The ground penetrating radar device is one of the neatest things ever, though. I'd love to have one of those things. No rinky-dink metal detector for me. I'll use that thing and I'll find treasures all day long.