We have books that are thousands of years old. Without explicitly copying and translating formats, media, etc., I wouldn't count on any digital format to survive more than a century - and probably be undecipherable at the end of it anyway. Some scholars have suggested that we're in the midst of what will be a digital dark age because of this very reason.
Let's also consider the sort of degradation that can creep in. I've got a 110 year old document I'm deciphering at the moment, and there are parts of letters where the ink has faded or the paper has torn. I can usually make out from the remaining bits what the letter should be. You've probably done this on old letters: "Is that an 'a' or an 'o'? On the other hand, if I have a lower-case f in UTF-32, its binary representation is "00000000000000000000000001100110." If I have minor data corruption, one or more of those bits will flip (1-->0 or 0-->1). Since it could be anywhere in the sequence, I could end up with something totally unrelated to an 'f' either in character shape or alphabetic proximity.
Then there's the reading, indexing, and searching abilities in a physical book - no "add a bookmark" feature compares to sticking a finger on the page you want to flip back to, or comparing a few pages side-by-side. Physical bookmarks, stickies, or earmarking (noooo!) are all ways that people reference books which don't translate well.
Visually, lit displays are harder on our eyes than paper books in good ambient light.
e-books of course have some advantages, especially for technical material. Being able to hit "ctrl-f" and search for a single word or phrase is incredibly valuable. Constant updates of product documentation means not having to throw away books whenever a new version of the item/software is released. Linking to references (e.g. dictionary lookup) is much more convenient than going to get another book out.
But for just sitting down and reading, the tactile experience of a real book rules over everything else in my opinion. Sitting in a coffee shop with a book in hand is a profoundly human experience. Walking through the endless aisles of books at a library is both inspiring and humbling.
So in short, yeah - there is HUGE doubt that e-books are superior.
There is actually a hell of a lot of evidence he did.
You can read a capsule summary with references on Wikipedia, but it is accepted fact among historians - not just religious scholars - that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Judea under King Herod, was baptised by John the Baptist, and was cruxified under the orders of Pontius Pilate.
Here's a fun excerpt: "There are at least fourteen independent sources for the historicity of Jesus from multiple authors within a century of the crucifixion of Jesus such as the letters of Paul (contemporary of Jesus who personally knew eyewitnesses), the gospels, and non-Christian sources such as Josephus (Jewish historian and commander in Galilee) and Tacitus (Roman historian and Senator)."
I'm an atheist, but a historical Jesus almost certainly did exist.
I absolutely love Star Wars - I saw the first movie four times in the theatre back in 1977/78 as a kid.
But let's be clear: Star Wars is "cowboys and indians in space." (Yes, that's a dated and culturally inappropriate comparison - it is also perfectly appropriate for the era.)
Technology has never played a significant part in it - light sabres are magic swords, FTL travel is a well-worn convenient trope that 'just happens' (unless it doesn't). Droids are servants.
Basically, tech has never been a core aspect of the SW world, mostly because the show has never been science fiction.
"We still love you as much as ever" said senator Tim Kaine.
And we love you as much as ever - but it has never been as much as you think.
Canada and Canadians have always harboured a quiet, seething resentment towards the US - even as our snowbirds have flown south in the winter and we've greedily bought crap on Amazon. As proud as we are of Canadian musicians hitting the big time, we're slightly bitter that we spend more time listening to American content.
I think it's fair to say that we've always - at least in my 50+ years of awareness - felt the pressure of living next door to a ten-ton behemoth that fills our every waking moment just by merely leaking across the border.
And now the dam has broken. Trump has made things so unbearable that we finally have the resolve to break free. It's going to be tough, it's going to hurt for a number of years, we're going to suffer financially in the short-mid term, but I'm confident that we're going to do it. We will not allow ANY country or trading partner to control our destiny as much as the US has done since 1959.
So thanks for the love, but I'm afraid we're still getting out of this toxic relationship.
Hoekstra is a Nazi, just like his boss, just like his peers, just like Musk and the rest of them.
It was TEN YEARS AGO that he said "“The Islamic movement has now gotten to a point where they have put Europe into chaos. Chaos in the Netherlands, there are cars being burnt, there are politicians that are being burnt … and yes there are no-go zones in the Netherlands," and he has only gotten more extreme.
The answer to ALL things going on in the US is simple:
Who's gonna stop them?
The president and his (ex?-)boyfriend are doing whatever the FUCK they want, and they even have the backing of the Supreme Court, so the only way to stop them is active resistance.
You'd be surprised at how effective it is to absolutely ignore the law when you're on top of the heap. I expect that Le Pen would do the same if she got a chance; as would Poilievre, the nuts in charge of the AfD, or any of the unrepentant fascists.
The truth is that the laws put in place to stop this sort of behaviour are like the velvet ropes for crowd control. They only work is people decide to obey them, and if someone were to stomp over them all, it's only the other people who could stop that person from reaching the front of the line.
Hoekstra is just another Nazi fuck, feigning outrage. Weird to make him ambassador to Canada, but we'll continue to go our own way and ignore the ravings.
I don't disagree, but I ...don't entirely agree either.
It's absolutely true that devs are pretty bad at estimating costs, because it's not their job. (And they're usually good at estimating timelines, but bad at insisting on them.)
It's also true that games blow over budgets and deadlines all the time, and yeah I remember when Duke Nukem Forever first became a joke and then a meme.
But consider that DNF was completed by a small handful of devs who ran with an almost-finished game that they knew they could make happen. In contrast, there is no finish line for Star Citizen. There is no path to success. As you say, they can't drop it and be satisfied, so they make more promises and ask for more money. But here's the key: They KNOW they cannot fulfill those promises - existing or future. It's impossible at this point! The only thing they're doing is delaying the inevitable, which would be fine if it was their own time and money; but since they're constantly begging for money from optimistic gamers with promises they have no intention of delivering on, they are grifting. No excuses, no conditions, no "but maybe..." just pure con-artistry at work.
No. In fact, I'd say hardly ever.
We have books that are thousands of years old. Without explicitly copying and translating formats, media, etc., I wouldn't count on any digital format to survive more than a century - and probably be undecipherable at the end of it anyway. Some scholars have suggested that we're in the midst of what will be a digital dark age because of this very reason.
Let's also consider the sort of degradation that can creep in. I've got a 110 year old document I'm deciphering at the moment, and there are parts of letters where the ink has faded or the paper has torn. I can usually make out from the remaining bits what the letter should be. You've probably done this on old letters: "Is that an 'a' or an 'o'? On the other hand, if I have a lower-case f in UTF-32, its binary representation is "00000000000000000000000001100110." If I have minor data corruption, one or more of those bits will flip (1-->0 or 0-->1). Since it could be anywhere in the sequence, I could end up with something totally unrelated to an 'f' either in character shape or alphabetic proximity.
Then there's the reading, indexing, and searching abilities in a physical book - no "add a bookmark" feature compares to sticking a finger on the page you want to flip back to, or comparing a few pages side-by-side. Physical bookmarks, stickies, or earmarking (noooo!) are all ways that people reference books which don't translate well.
Visually, lit displays are harder on our eyes than paper books in good ambient light.
e-books of course have some advantages, especially for technical material. Being able to hit "ctrl-f" and search for a single word or phrase is incredibly valuable. Constant updates of product documentation means not having to throw away books whenever a new version of the item/software is released. Linking to references (e.g. dictionary lookup) is much more convenient than going to get another book out.
But for just sitting down and reading, the tactile experience of a real book rules over everything else in my opinion. Sitting in a coffee shop with a book in hand is a profoundly human experience. Walking through the endless aisles of books at a library is both inspiring and humbling.
So in short, yeah - there is HUGE doubt that e-books are superior.