Are there dashes in Japanese? I suppose the interpunct character (・) best represents the idea.
The ー character is typically used with hiragana and katakana to elongate the previous character's tailing sound: リー for the name Lee (rii), メートル for meter (meetoru), as examples.
The ー character is not used after kanji because their sound cannot be elongated.
Unrelated: What is the point in publishing an interesting list such as this and then restricting my ability to highlight so I can copy and paste? (Chrome 4.1 on Windows)
It's too late for that. DRM was invented as a result of rampant piracy. You should be blaming the pirates rather than the company using it.
People were sharing programs long before p2p became popular. Only difference in recent years to accessibility to the copying mechanisms. Blame it on the Internet taking off and creating a world where bits are no longer a scarcity, where purchasing a physical media containing those bits is becoming legacy. With the Internet making it easy for anyone to copy anything suddenly those that made those physical copies weren't needed as much. Certainly their value has been questioned.
DRM became widespread as a way for the content distributors to maintain their status quo without having to change their business model in any way.
I'm reminded of the reference book "Writing CGI Applications with Perl." In the introduction the author warned that there will be several purposeful mistakes in every chapter as an exercise to the reader to find and correct. Using this technique in a reference manual was bad enough but it made things even more difficult given that there was no key.
I got rid of the book. Tough to learn from a book that lies.
It leads the reader to believe batteries are more dangerous than the water. While that might be true, it leaves out the reasoning behind 3-1-1. The batteries may be more dangerous than a bottle of water, but they are not more dangerous than a water bottle filled with liquid explosives.
How about:
Batteries may be more dangerous than a stick, but they aren't more dangerous than a man poking you with that stick.
Batteries may be more dangerous than a kitten, but they aren't more dangerous than a kitten who is about to jump with claws ready on your face.
This reminds me a lot of the video game console market, where newcomers compete with: the existing consoles with the established customer base, library of games and even second or third generation consoles that have the initial quirks ruled out.
B&N will have to compete with the Kindle and even Sony's readers to an extent. The biggest question is always what will B&N bring to the table that is different enough or better than its competitors to woo customers over? It seems a lot like just another iPod and iTunes clone.
And how long until the B&N bookstore will be able to match the number of ebooks offered at Amazon? Until then B&N will lose customers to the company with an already established library.
The browser can be scripted to mimic human behavior -- clicks, keyboard entry, mouse movements, etc. How do you determine that a human is behind the browser?
At the risk of being downvoted out of existence, perhaps I should clarify.
I'm definitely not advocating his actions in the least, just saying that there are other companies that may not be doing well on the market and would be interested in someone who can take risks. More than anything this entire endeavor has been a warning to us that we haven't seen the last of this sort of behavior -- whether or not from McBride remains to be seen, but there are others who will also take these sorts of risks.
The action that McBride took resulted ultimately in what could be seen as a failed strategy, but the fact that he went out on a limb in attempting to revitalize his company speaks wonders. There are a lot of companies that would value a CEO who can take risks.
It's fascinating to listen to but I wonder about extending it to other languages. Does American English lend itself well to this sort of thing or are other languages and accents reproducible. I imagine that languages with much harsher stops like German or Russian would be more difficult and those that are easily broken down, like Japanese, would be even easier than English.
https://github.com/EWSoftware/SHFB