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Why Amazon's Kindle Should Use Open Standards
Tim O'Reilly wrote in Forbes a while back that he thinks the Kindle only has another two or three years of life left, unless Amazon wises up and embraces open standards. He came to this conclusion, in part, because of his experience deciding how to publish documents on the web back in the mid-1990s.
"You see, I'd recently been approached by the folks at the Microsoft Network. They'd identified O'Reilly as an interesting specialty publisher, just the kind of target that they hoped would embrace the Microsoft Network (or MSN, as it came to be called). The offer was simple: Pay Microsoft a $50,000 fee plus a share of any revenue, and in return it would provide this great platform for publishing, with proprietary publishing tools and file formats that would restrict our content to users of the Microsoft platform. The only problem was we'd already embraced the alternative: We had downloaded free Web server software and published documents using an open standards format. That meant anyone could read them using a free browser. While MSN had better tools and interfaces than the primitive World Wide Web, it was clear to us that the Web's low barriers to entry would help it to evolve more quickly, would bring in more competition and innovation, and would eventually win the day."
That's not true. A) It costs a couple of hundred dollars more than the competition. B) It ripped off the UI from the competition with the exception of the buttons on the case. C) The iPod never had as many features as the competition did, you're probably thinking of attachments. D) The competition wasn't crap, I've used the competition for years, and I've never had to send it back for a costly battery replacement.
"If you people actually paid for stuff, you might have an economy."
Yes, because America's economy is doing so well, and it is because we pay for things like the birthday song. Yeah, the reason the third world is so poor is that they are busy sharing books and music instead of paying for individual copies. You should probably go ahead and apply to be chairman of the world bank, since you seem to have all the answers for the world's economic problems.
Palm trees and 8
Conviction. Do you know the word or what?
He was given bond, he couldn't pay it.
So, I'll ask you again, has there been a single person convicted of a DMCA charge? Anyone? If not, why would you bet your business on it happening?
I called you an idiot because you're clearly too dumb to follow a simple argument.
How we know is more important than what we know.