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Via EFF comes this rather interesting calculation of the DRM tax of owning an Amazon Kindle. It’s not a definitive number, as it would differ for different people based on what kinds of books they buy, how often and how many of those books they’d like to keep. But it’s a good little thought experiment for those looking to buy a Kindle. The key recognition, of course, is that with a Kindle ebook you’re renting, not buying the books:

There is one other problem with DRM protected books. When the reading device reaches its end of life, you have to assume all the content you purchased will be lost. If, for instance, I went with a Kindle, all of the content I purchase can be used only on devices supported by Amazon.

When, several years later, it comes time to replace that Kindle I may get a new Kindle — but I can’t assume that. Maybe somebody else will have a better device at that time. Or, maybe Amazon went bankrupt or evil or stupid and I need to switch to another vendor. There are any number of reasons I might like to switch my e-reader. If I do, I have to assume I won’t be able to use any of the content I purchased for the Kindle.

Thanks to DRM, when my e-reader reaches its end of life, I will have to pay to acquire replacement books for the material that’s locked out of the new e-reader. I call the amount of that purchase the “DRM tax” — an added cost imposed by DRM restrictions.

He’s quite fair in calculating his own personal DRM tax, noting that he probably wouldn’t want to rebuy all the books, but just a portion of them. He also knows that ebooks are cheaper. But, in the end, he realizes that this DRM tax makes the total cost of ownership of a Kindle much higher for him than just buying the physical books — even if it’s more of a pain to have to sometimes lug them around. In his case, he would use it mainly for technical books, which is a different situation than, say, recreational novel reading, where “ownership” may be less important. Still, he feels that the DRM issue is a problem and a serious hidden cost:

Maybe someday Amazon (and publishers) will realize how much harm they are doing with DRM. If the DRM tax was removed, not only would more people get e-readers, but also, thanks to the low friction of e-book purchasing, they’d buy more e-content.

This is actually a key point. Just the fact that he had to run through this calculation to determine if a Kindle made sense is a serious amount of friction. If Amazon made this calculation easy (i.e., no DRM tax) that would lead to more sales.

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Filed under: Budget, Mercedes-Benz, Smart, Renault, Rumormill

Despite rumors of Daimler and Renault collaborating on a four-door Smart model, no official tie-up between the two companies has been announced. That could change next year when Daimler will reportedly decide who its small-car partner will be. Daimler is getting even more heavily into the development of small cars, both with its Smart brand and the Mercedes-Benz A- and B Class offerings that might one day make it to America.

Renault is planning a line of ultra-cheap small cars and is putting together a range of electric vehicles that will certainly feature new, small platforms. Like Daimler, the French automaker is talking to other companies about joining forces to save money on developing small cars, so a Daimler-Renault alliance isn’t a fait accompli. According to Automotive News, Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche says the company will announce its chosen partner by the middle of 2010.

[Source: Automotive News – sub. req.]

Zetsche reportedly says Daimler to pick new compact car partner by mid-2010 originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Two years ago, ethnographer danah boyd had the blogosphere abuzz with her look at class-based divisions between teens on MySpace and Facebook. The esteemed Microsoft researcher found that Facebook’s collegiate origins encouraged a group of slightly more educated mainstream community members. Meanwhile, MySpace encouraged self-expression and the organizing of subcultures. boyd’s latest paper entitled, “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook” suggests that those same origins also propel race-based divisions. She likens the mass teen migration from MySpace to Facebook to “white flight”.

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“White flight” refers to the 20th century exodus of Caucasian Americans from urban centers to what were believed to be the “safer”, more racially homogenous and affluent suburbs. She describes how teen language about MySpace is similar to that used to describe city dwellers in the 1980’s. The city dweller narrative is that it’s for “dysfunctional families, perverts and deviants, freaks and outcasts, thieves, and the working class. Implied in this is that no decent person could possibly have a reason to dwell in the city or on MySpace.”

Considering the parallels between white flight and the move from MySpace to Facebook boyd writes, “The suburbs of Facebook signaled more mature living, complete with digital fences (privacy settings) to keep out strangers. While formal restrictions on who could move lifted in September 2006 (when the service moved from being a collegiate service to a public one), the more subtle network-based disincentives did not.”

After white flight, boyd describes the urban decay that followed including a reduction in investment, reduced property values, increasing unemployment (as jobs moved to the suburbs) and a rise in crime. She likens untended MySpace profiles to an abandoned and graffiti-covered city and spammers to street gangs.

boyd believes that while teens do not directly reference racial divisions in fleeing MySpace, the aesthetics of “bling” and “hip-hop culture” often criticized by new Facebook users do have racial overtones. Says boyd, “While Facebook’s minimalism is not inherently better, conscientious restraint has been one [cultural] marker of bourgeois fashion.”

In other words, the text, images and videos we choose to share amongst our friends through social networks are the cultural markers that reveal our racial identities. While boyd cites a number of reasons for racial divides online, one thing is certain. She writes, “Neither social media nor its users are colorblind simply because technology is present. The internet mirrors and magnifies everyday life, making visible many of the issues we hoped would disappear including race and class-based social divisions in American society.” To download her draft paper visit danah.org/papers/2009/.

Discuss

Ever since Richard Reid attempted to detonate his sneakers with pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) on an American Airlines flight in December 2001, airport travelers in the United States have had to remove their shoes while going through security. Now that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has tried to blow-up a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day with PETN sowed into his underwear, I worry that authorities will soon ask us to undress and put our undies on the conveyor belt. Let it not be so.

(more…)

The makeup-lovin’ guidettes from MTV’s reality smash Jersey Shore are going au naturel for a fresh-faced makeunder with In Touch Weekly!

What do you think of the change? Do the “guidettes” look better sans concealer?

Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, Jenni “J-Woww” Farley and Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola — who swear by eyeliner, bronzer, and lip gloss — ditched their cosmetic masks for the snaps, which arrive on newsstands this week.

Snooki, who sports lots of mascara and signature pouf on the buzzed-about series, uses Avon products that her mother sells. “If I go to a club and I start dancing, it’ll drip down my face, but Avon stays! Some brands don’t stay on that long. She also gets me a lot of bronzer, eyeliner and lip gloss from mark…..”

Here’s two tidbits on the upcoming Verizon webOS debut for you, one surprising and one not-so-surprising. Under the latter category, The Boy Genius Report today reports that the Pixi is “100%” locked in for Big Red along with the Pre, and will also be adding a “Plus” to its title. BGR also claims that the hardware specs are identical “in terms of size”, so those hoping for a memory upgrade may be disappointed. (Your correspondent, however, has heard differently on this matter – although whether the Pre Plus is the proper second-generation model I’ve been told about is still unconfirmed.)

Far more tantalising is this screenshot from Verizon’s internal database, leaked to PreCentral, which has an intriguing little “Y” in the voice dialing column. As they note, carrier spec sheets – especially pre-release ones – frequently get these kind of small details wrong, so it’s hardly a guarantee. But it is interesting, nonetheless, and if true raises the question: would Palm really deny a software feature to the rest of their userbase just to please Verizon?

Entramos en materia de equipamiento con este monovolumen y a la vez todoterreno de 7 plazas. Entre los competidores podemos encontrar el Kia Carnival, bastante más baja de gama y la Chrysler Voyager, ambas sin tracción integral ni de serie ni opcional y sin puertas traseras, sino una puerta corredera en un lado solamente. En cuanto a número de plazas se encuentran también la Renault Gran Scenic y Citroen Grand Picasso y C8, etc., pero no creo que se puedan equiparar.

Lo que no podemos negar es que es un monovolumen muy útil, siempre y cuando tengamos la oportunidad de llenarlo. De poco le servirá a una pareja joven o recién casada sin hijos. Es ideal para recoger a los niños del colegio y a media clase porque cabe un montón de gente dentro. Creedme cuando os digo que parece un salón de casa, es enorme. Eso sí, nos encontraremos con un problema a la hora de encontrar sitio en una gran ciudad, su tamaño no es precisamente apto para las calles con poco aparcamiento.

Equipamiento de serie

En esta parte tocaría hacer mención a la puntuación de las pruebas EuroNCAP pero no dispone de tal valoración, por lo que nos tendremos que guiar por su equipamiento. Dispone de 2 airbags (conductor y pasajero) y ABS con distribución electrónica de frenado en su versión más básica, pero las siguientes versiones incluyen además ESP, control antivuelco (ARP) y control de tracción.

La estructura es monocasco, mucho más rígida y segura, que se ve reforzada por barras laterales antivuelco. Aun así, no va muy cargadito en lo que se refiere a elementos de seguridad.

Como venimos diciendo en toda la prueba, lo mejor es su interior y veremos porqué. Desde noviembre todas las versiones incluyen navegador y radio CD/MP3 además de DVD y Bluetooth. EL DVD incluye mando a distancia, auriculares para no molestar y entradas USB, tarjetas SD y vídeo compuesto para una consola (ver detalle). Está todo pensado.

El clima bizona y los asientos calefactables de conductor y pasajero harán más confortable el viaje. Además, dispone de un tercer mando para regular la salida de aire (no temperatura) en las plazas traseras (ver detalle), siempre que se autorice por parte de las plazas delanteras. Algo similar a los elevalunas eléctricos.

Las ayudas al conductor son bastante abundantes. Dispone de control de velocidad, sensor de luces y lluvia, sensor de aparcamiento trasero (imprescindible) y mandos en el volante para controlar la radio. Aún quedan marcas que no integran sus propias radios en sus coches; en este caso era de la mítica Alpine. También incluye de serie en las versiones altas el techo solar.

Los espejos exteriores son térmicos pero no dispone de opción de faros de xenon, ni más airbags, ni nada por el estilo. En la versión probada, la más alta de gama, como opción únicamente se ofrece la pintura metalizada por 430 euros, pero el resto viene todo de serie, o todo o nada. El resto de versiones más básicas tienen como opción el sensor de lluvia, la reductora y regulación eléctrica del asiento del conductor

Algo que me sorprendió mucho es que hoy en día aún se hicieran coches de gama media-alta sin ordenador de a bordo. Cuando uno lleva más de 5 años acostumbrado a que la autonomía la marque un display digital o el consumo instantáneo o medio, es difícil hacerse a la idea de que no lo vas a encontrar por mucho que mires. Lo que sí tiene es indicador de distancia recorrida, velocidad media, temperatura exterior, brújula (aunque en el modelo probado no funcionaba muy bien) e indicador de carga de batería.

Se ve un acabado de calidad en los asientos y salpicadero, aunque algunos mandos de plástico no es que sean de poca calidad, sino que el acabado general recuerda a modelos anteriores; por más que evolucionen las demás marcas, siempre será el mismo que hace 10 años.

Valoración general y precio

Podemos elegir entre cuatro versiones de equipamiento (siete si distinguimos cambio automático y manual): básico, Premium, Limited y Limited AWD con precios que oscilan entre los casi 21.000 euros de la básica hasta los casi 33.000 euros de la más equipada con reductora y cambio automático. Hay donde elegir en equipamiento, pero el motor siempre es el mismo.

A grandes rasgos me ha gustado y he disfrutado mucho con el modelo, sobre todo cuando lo llenas con 7 personas y aún hay sitio para alguna más si no fuera por la limitación de plazas. Es realmente amplia en su interior y eso, al fin y al cabo, es lo que debe de primar por encima del diseño exterior que en ese aspecto, seamos claros, no anda muy fino.

El motor no es malo, pero sí algo antiguo y con poca tecnología que no está adaptado a estos tiempos, donde con poca cilindrada se obtienen mucha potencia. Es un aspecto muy mejorable, así como su visibilidad trasera casi nula (la lateral es bastante buena). Los puntos más débiles los veo en la seguridad y la estabilidad y ruidos, que aunque es poco aerodinámico, no deja de ser incómodo cuando rodamos por autopista en los límites de la legalidad.

Hay que verlo como un monovolumen para hacer muchos desplazamientos por carretera, excursiones por el campo o a la nieve/montaña o bien para aquellos con familia numerosa que buscan algo diferente de uno convencional. Su precio es muy óptimo y poco se puede encontrar en el mercado que ofrezca esa calidad a ese precio.

SsangYong Rodius XDI270 165 CV

Fotos | Javi Vicente

It’s been almost 525,600 minutes since we raised a glass to welcome the arrival of 2009 and in that time we’ve witnessed a daily avalanche of innovation which precipitated thousands of stories on Gizmag. Though popularity is rarely an accurate measure of quality (take Governments f’rinstance), we peered into the database to create the following list of the most read stories on Gizmag during the last 12 months, and … the medal winners are, a gun that kills hidden people, a washing machine that doesn’t use water, and cure for multiple sclerosis. May 2010 be a good one for you and yours!..

Tags: Gadgets,
Prototype,
Vision

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Thanks to the recent proliferation of do-it-yourself iPhone app services, the next big thing in Apple’s App Store might just be vanity apps. Take, for example, Appsfire’s Ouriel Ohayon, who just announced the launch of his own iPhone app. Ohayon used Odiogo Apps to create this personalized app. Odiogo, which mostly focuses on providing text-to-speech services for news sites and blogs, allows users to add RSS feeds, Twitter updates and photos from Flickr to its apps.

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Odiogo’s apps also feature the company’s text-to-speech services, offline access and advertising support. For now, though, potential users still have to contact the company’s sales department to get their own apps and the price of these customized apps isn’t clear.

More Clutter or a Great Opportunity?

As the barrier of entry for creating customized iPhone apps continues to fall, chances are that we will see more and more vanity apps in the App Store. On the one hand, this could clutter the store with relatively useless apps. On the other hand, it could also provide a new source of income for independent bloggers who could use the apps to sell more advertising inventory or even charge a small fee for the app itself. Even bloggers with a small fanbase could reap the benefits of having their own iPhone apps.

The question, however, is if users are actually interested in installing a single-purpose iPhone app that only gives them access to the content of one blogger. In the end, these apps are less flexible than a good mobile RSS reader.

Apps like this probably make more sense for large multi-author blogs that publish a lot of content every day. On the other hand, the idea of being able to point their friends to their iPhone apps will surely prove to be irresistible for many people.

Discuss

Virginia Gov.-elect Bob McDonnell isn’t waiting to get the keys to the mansion to keep up his push to bring offshore drilling to the commonwealth. It would bring sorely needed jobs and tax revenue, he says.

But it turns out his oil-drilling-brings-economic-development argument rests on some threadbare data.

First, a recap: The Virginia gubernatorial election turned in large part on a major difference in the candidate’s energy platforms. GOP candidate Mr. McDonnell was a drill, baby, driller, while the sitting Democratic Gov. Timothy Kaine wanted to proceed with caution.

Earlier this week, Mr. McDonnell kept up his call for the federal government to clear the way for drilling off the Virginia coast in a letter to Interior Sec. Salazar.

“Virginia stands ready to help address America’s energy needs while creating badly needed good-paying jobs for our citizens,” he wrote, asking the federal government “move forward” with a lease sale for offshore oil and gas exploration. (The oil industry applauded the letter enthusiastically.)

But what’s the proof that offshore drilling would be an economic boom for the commonwealth? Mr. McDonnell cites the following:

A 2005 study by a former president at Old Dominion University forecast that offshore natural gas production alone off of the Atlantic coast near Virginia would, over a 10-year period, likely create at least 2,578 new jobs, induce capital investment of $7.84 billion, yield $644 million in direct and indirect payroll, and result in $271 million in state and local taxes. The study also estimated that there could be up to 500 million barrels of oil in this lease area – enough to fuel all four million cars in Virginia for more than four years.

An internet search for the study came up blank. Messages with Mr. McDonnell’s transition team seeking to see the study were unreturned. We were dumbfounded until we got an email from James V. Koch, the study’s author.

But he wrote that it wasn’t really a study, at least not in the academic sense. Mr. Koch said he was asked to do a quick look at the issue. Since “I did not have time to parse Virginia’s situation in detail, I examined the experiences of Louisiana and a Canadian province” and extrapolated. The figures “were very rough estimates” and the topic would benefit from a detailed, thorough study.

By the way, even Mr. Koch couldn’t provide us with a copy of the study. It’s not the type of thing he puts on the resume, he said. “That does not suggest the quoted study was somehow deficient, only that it was quick work. I was not painting the Sistine Chapel,” he said.

Filed under: Government/Legal, Hirings/Firings/Layoffs, GM

While the job may not be popular at all in terms of public opinion, General Motors departing lobbyist Ken Cole has done a pretty good job of making the automaker a sympathetic figure for those inclined to bend rules and bail out poorly-managed behemoths. Sure, GM’s stature in the public eye is still down there with big tobacco, but Cole managed to keep the automaker’s relationship with governments around the world on a somewhat even keel. No mean feat when you consider how much divestiture underpins the whole of GM’s plan forward.

It might even be said that Cole the individual can’t be replaced by just one person, and Ed Whitacre seemingly agrees. Two of Whitacre’s former AT&T colleagues have been given offices in the company’s Detroit Renaissance Center headquarters as replacements for the departing Ken Cole. John Montford has been given a seat beside Whitacre where he will put government affairs under his purview, a role he honed as AT&T’s Senior Vice President of state legislative affairs. GM’s new Vice President of Government Relations is Bob Ferguson, who was most recently doing public affairs consulting, but he was all over state regulatory affairs at AT&T before that. We may get to see how well these guys can dance come June, when Whitacre has vowed to pay back nearly $7 billion in government loans. Official press release after the jump.

[Source: General Motors]

Continue reading GM hires ex-AT&T execs for lobbying efforts

GM hires ex-AT&T execs for lobbying efforts originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The dawning of a new year has brought new love for one former talk show host: Media maven Rosie O’Donnell is romancing artist Tracy Kachtick-Anders, a rep for the star said Wednesday. The news comes just a few months after the mother of four confirmed her split from wife Kelli Carpenter.

Image Source

Rosie and Tracy were photographed holding hands while vacationing in Miami on Tuesday. Both women are active on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender parenting and adoption frontier and Tracy is the adoptive mom of six.

The SMH has a look at the economics of nuclear power – Nuclear economics just don’t add up.

In Europe there are two nuclear plants under construction, one in Flamanville, France and one in Olkiluoto, Finland both by France’s state-owned Areva. Both have been subject to significant troubles, partly related to being the first-build of the most evolved advanced model in production, Areva’s EPR, which was supposed to be simpler, more efficient, cheaper and faster to build. In Finland’s Olkiluotu a 50 per cent blowout in costs (to $US6.4 billion so far, lawsuits pending) and doubling in construction time (from 3.5 years to at least seven years) is typical of nuclear projects over the decades. Today Areva concede that construction of a similar reactor of 1.6 gigawatts would be $US8 billion ($A9 billion).

The reasons why nuclear plants routinely run into such troubles are that it is hugely capital intensive so delays greatly add to the cost of capital long before any revenue is generated. Construction is extremely complex, which is greatly compounded by safety regulation — this was another major cause of the slowdown at Olkiluoto. For these reasons the industry prefers to use “overnight” costs, which are the costs as if a plant was constructed overnight at today’s prices.

Dr Ziggy Switkowski, chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), has said that Australia should build 50 reactors though this assumes a doubling of electricity consumption by 2050. Dr Ian Smith suggested, when chief executive of ANSTO in 2008, that Australia could realistically construct six to 14 plants but this would still provide only 10-20 per cent of total electricity requirements.

Australia’s current electricity consumption is almost 40 gigawatts from installed capacity of about 50 gigawatts. So, to replace most of this would require about 25 reactors of the EPR design, each of 1.6 gigawatts (or 40 of the Westinghouse AP1000 1 gigawatt design). This could cost about $225 billion in today’s money, or close to half a trillion dollars for 50 reactors. Using Smith’s more modest suggestions the cost could be up to $126 billion but displace a lot less coal burning. Switkowski may be correct in the sense that why create all these contentious issues and still not substantially solve the problem? This points to another weakness: with nuclear it appears to be an all-or-nothing gamble with hundreds of billions of dollars.

Nuclear advocates always cite “next-gen” designs and purported much swifter and cheaper construction but the figures given above are the actual costs of the plants being constructed in Europe today, not even the much higher industry estimates reported by Grunwald for the proposed US plants. The timetable of this construction is anyone’s guess except that history warns us to be pessimistic. By comparison China plans for 50-60 of the simpler, smaller Westinghouse design by 2030, but nuclear will still account for only about 4 per cent of their energy needs.

Those are just the construction costs. As is well known, liability insurance needs to be covered by government. The other big cost is the decommissioning of reactors. Even with many of the world’s 439 existing reactors approaching the end of their productive lives, so far none have been decommissioned. The world’s first commercial nuclear power generator, Calder Hall at what is now called Sellafield (previously Windscale), was turned off in 2003. It has been estimated by the UK industry that full decommissioning of Calder Hall, if ever done, will cost about $2 billion at today’s prices. Meanwhile, old plants need continuous maintenance and high-security against decay and incursion including against potential terrorists.

But the biggest cost, especially for Australia, could be the opportunity cost of throwing these vast sums into an old technology dominated by other countries, rather than investing in new renewable technologies and industries of the future. From relatively modest funding Australia has already produced world-beating solar-photovoltaic and solar-thermal technologies, even if both have moved offshore due to lack of investment support. Geothermal power has just received government grants, which will allow full prototypes to be tested in a few years. Many scientists believe that it is inevitable that these technologies will be viable, provide so-called baseload power cost-competitively, and that their maturation would be faster than the typical construction schedules of nuclear power stations if comparable budgets and subsidies were deployed.

Is this any different to the claims by the nuclear dreamers such as Brook and Nicholson? Emphatically yes. The nuclear industry is not a new one but an old mature one. For more than 50 years it has consistently over-promised and under-delivered, yet its advocates continue to propose that governments should provide massive subsidies to nuclear construction, provide unlimited liability insurance, assume most of the decommissioning costs and — after 50 years — continue to search for the elusive “permanent” storage of high-level waste.

There are not minority views and indeed are not contested by the nuclear industry, or the Wall Street Journal, or Lazards the merchant bank. Or many scientists. Here is commentary from the world’s top science journal Nature (W.Patterson, Vol 449, 11/10/07): “As climate and fuel security dominate the energy agenda, the battle between traditional and innovative electricity intensifies around the world, notably in fast-growing economies such as China. After half a century, nuclear power is the ultimate in tradition. It needs climate more than climate needs it. To avert catastrophic global warming, why pick the slowest, most expensive, most limited, most inflexible and riskiest option? In 1957, despite the Windscale fire, nuclear power was worth trying. We tried it: its weakness proved to be economics, not safety. Now nuclear generation is just an impediment to sustainable electricity.”

It is a clear enough choice. The economics and the long time to approve and build show nuclear is not the smart choice, arguably for the world but certainly not for Australia with its plentiful resources in renewables (solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal).

The real question for Australia is whether we have what it takes to grasp the opportunities.

Peak Energy has (somewhat surprisingly) made it past its 5th birthday.

While its been an up and down year for me personally and a bit of a slow year here at PE in terms of original content, I’m glad to see there are still plenty of people reading and I’d like to wish you all a happy new year.