I thought about going that route, but had a horrible suspicion that the installed base is what publishers look at when deciding how and where to release ebooks. From that perspective, the fact that you're keeping your Kindle clean is irrelevant. It's another Kindle, and as such is another argument for them to release with DRM since that's "obviously" what customers are happy with.
IMO, anyone who bought a Kindle has already made a pretty clear statement that they're perfectly happy with DRM and willing to reward it financially. What do they expect?
You referred to video with DRM as being "encumbered", and yet this post now says such a scheme is "sensible". Way to backpedal on that vitriol
What on earth are you wittering about? DRMed video *is* encumbered. Occasionally that encumbrance is justifiable. My beef with DRM is that you don't own the things you "buy". With rentals there's no pretence that you're buying anything, hence no problem. What's your point?
And Silverlight is used for far, far more than video, just as Flash was.
*Could* be used for more, sure. *Is* used for more - no, not for anything significant.
The view of Silverlight that you present is myopic and highlights the fact that you do not understand it.
The view that you present suggests that you've sunk a fair amount of time and effort into something that was clearly a pointless, dead-end technology from the start, and you're really really REALLY pissed off about it. I might sympathize if you weren't being quite so obnoxious.
Making the browser do everything that Silverlight does increases the browser's attack surface just as much as adding the Silverlight plugin does.
I see absolutely no need to make the browser do everything that Silverlight does. I don't object to plugins in absolute terms. I object to one honking huge plugin that sets itself up as a platform-within-a-platform.
The rest of your post seems to be arguing against the voices in your head, so I'll leave it there.
DId I say it was? I don't have anything against DRM for video rental; in that context I'd even call it sensible. My point is that if (as seems to be the case) the only traction Silverlight has got is in playing video, that niche would be much better served by a smaller and far less general plugin.
Do you not understand the concept of "attack surface"? Do you not think that a general-purpose platform maybe has a larger one than, say, a dedicated video player? Or are you just trolling, as your tone suggests?
The idea that a general-purpose applet platform, with all the attendant security risks, is worth keeping simply to play DRM-encumbered video strikes me as utterly daft. It's like keeping a rabid rottweiler in your kid's playroom so that they'll have something to draw.
I think you've misread TFS. The journalists are not doing the suing. The suing is by "20 public figures". The journalists are the villains of this story, and are employees of Murdoch, who is the villain of pretty much every story.
I'm pretty sure you're forgetting something important, and I'm pretty sure it's proofreading. Which should take a lot longer than 20 minutes, unless you want your readers to hate you.
Also, PDF is completely unsuitable for ebooks. Ebooks are mostly about text. PDF is a graphics format. About the only place where it ever made any sense was portable printing; otherwise, it's like those sad "websites" you saw in the late 90s where each page was just a big GIF.
And I've yet to see an automatic PDF-to-EPUB conversion that didn't blow goats.
Not the same thing at all. Suppose you've never heard of Fred Bloggs; "Fred Bloggs is a nigger" is still offensive, whereas "Fred Bloggs is a thief" is not. "Freeloader", like "thief", is only derogatory because freeloading, like theft, is generally accepted to be a bad thing. So whether or not it's appropriate depends very much on whether it's accurate.
In the case of the headline, barring some truly embarrassing bug in the app in question, the term is accurate: the only people who are going to be "shamed" by it are indeed freeloaders. If I told a random person on the street that I believed they were a thief, then yes, I'd expect them to be insulted, because they probably aren't. If on the other hand I told a convicted thief that I believed they were a thief, they don't really have a leg to stand on.
I'm not denying that intent matters, but I absolutely disagree that "accuracy is irrelevant".
Presumably neither you nor the GP has any special insight into the intent of the submitter here. Since you're not disputing that pirates are freeloaders, why couldn't they have chosen that word just to avoid a clunky repetition of "Pirates"? How is this headline any different from, for example, "Burgled Laptop Reports Thieves"? Would you really claim that "Thieves" there is a purposeful insult, as inappropriate as any offensive racial epithet could have been?
I honestly don't understand your argument. "Freeloaders" is a perfectly good descriptive term; it's not a word that only exists to be offensive. To the extent that it's derogatory, it's derogatory because the activity it describes is, well, kinda douchey. I'm sure a lot of pirates like to think of themselves as cool Jack Sparrow types sticking it to The Man, but if they get upset when someone uses a different term which, and I'm sorry to have to repeat this, describes exactly what they do, then they're in some serious denial.
There are perfectly reasonable arguments to be made against the use of "theft" or "stealing" in this context, because acquiring a digital good without paying for it doesn't normally deprive anybody else of that good.
But "freeloaders"? Granted, that term has various shades of meaning, but the dominant usage is equivalent to "free rider": someone who obtains a benefit without paying any of the costs involved in providing that benefit. Which describes pirates exactly. It's no more hyperbolic than describing sharks as "predators" or tapeworms as "parasites"; it's just saying what they do.
Amen. Here in the UK it's even worse, especially for coders; various important punctuation keys have been randomly moved around compared to normal UK keyboards, and there's no sodding # key. But we do have that oh-so-useful subsection mark key, thank goodness. A key so useful it doesn't even show up in my post preview.
When you use a normal keyboard all day at work, switching to this braindead abomination of a layout in the evenings is a real pain in the posterior. My MBP is coming to the end of its lifespan, and the keyboard is the #1 reason I'm strongly considering going back to Windows for my next machine.
This all sounds like good wholesome geeky fun, but the guy is co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, probably the most egregious and destructive patent troll in the world. Shun him! Shun him!
the 10 book Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which is at least the equal of ASoIaF
That's very much a matter of opinion. Personally, ASoIaF has definitely gone downhill, but when it's good, it's spectacularly good. I read the first of the Malazan books, threw it straight in the trash, and would be perfectly happy to never read another.
"Why not just buy a paper version (to ease your conscience) and download it off BitTorrent?"
I've strongly considered doing exactly that. But in the long run I think it's better to support those authors and publishers who are doing ebooks right, in order to demonstrate to the others that there's a market there. Paper+piracy, insofar as it has any effect, seems more likely to discourage them from moving to digital distribution at all.
"From a purely pragmatical point of view, just buy books in formats for which DRM stripping tools are readily available at the moment."
From an arguable-equally-pragmatic but slightly more forward-looking point of view, just acquire books which don't have DRM in the first place. Webscriptions, indie publishers, Gutenberg & Co, whatever. Paying people for trying to screw you over is not inducive to progress.
Yes, you'll miss out on reading a good number of books you wanted to read. That's what makes it a principled stand; you're actually sacrificing something.
The really depressing thing about that is that the earlier script drafts had the humans' brains being used as a parallel computing engine for running AIs
Maybe they were worried about getting slapped with a lawsuit by Dan Simmons.
"Dreamweaver's Dilemma"? More irony: I'd never even heard of that, let alone read it, and from a quick Google it's the only story set in that universe that I haven't read. It's like rain, on your wedding day.
Obviously I'm not going to argue about the merits of that particular story - there are several of Bujold's peripheral and other-universe novels that didn't grab me at all - but I do think you were unlucky in your sample. The Vorkosigan books IMHO could serve as the dictionary definition of "a good compelling story with characters I can identify with".
The first couple of novels (Shards of Honor, Barrayar) are fine, but a bit Mills-and-Boone and not especially representative. The best of the lot to my mind are "Mirror Dance", "Memory" and "A Civil Campaign", but you'd be missing a whole truckload of backstory if you jumped straight in there. The best of the short stories is probably "Borders of Infinity".
There's not a lot in Baen's catalog I'd really be interested in reading as a casual sci-fi/fantasy reader.
Oh, c'mon. Yes, Sturgeon's Law applies here like anywhere else, but are you really claiming that writers like Lois Bujold don't appeal to casual genre readers? Do you know anyone that's read the Vorkosigan Saga and not been utterly bowled over by it?
The problem with eBooks is that the pirated content is often poor. Numerous formatting errors, glaring OCR errors that never get fixed
To be fair, that's a problem with some legitimate content as well. I bought an E-Reads title recently and it was just appalling - probably averaged around an error per (small) page, including one in the very first paragraph. It was very very obvious that nobody had even glanced at the text after scanning it.
An Archduke, if you want to be picky. But nice analogy nonetheless. Like WW1, I think this is a fight that's been waiting to happen for a while now. Like WW1, the specifics of the flashpoint incident are largely irrelevant.
Unlike WW1, the two sides seem far from evenly matched this time. My gut says the pro-WikiLeaks side will get tired and give up; there's nobody paying them to keep going, and that matters in the long haul. I'd love to be proved wrong, though.
Who cares about what Amazon does not want you to do with the books? Removing the DRM completely is not entirely trivial (yet; it shouldn't be hard to write a 1-click app that does it, it's just that no-one bothered, so far as I know), but the instructions are out there.
Personally, I care because when I pay money to Amazon for a Kindle book, I'm sending them an implicit message that I approve. That I consider it acceptable for them to be locking me in to their walled garden and stripping me of my basic consumer rights while pretending that this is normal and nothing has changed and this is still a "sale", no really, it is.
I do not approve. I do not consider it acceptable. And I do not believe that Amazon will ever grow an ethical backbone on this issue until they start losing sales because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought about going that route, but had a horrible suspicion that the installed base is what publishers look at when deciding how and where to release ebooks. From that perspective, the fact that you're keeping your Kindle clean is irrelevant. It's another Kindle, and as such is another argument for them to release with DRM since that's "obviously" what customers are happy with.
Shrug.
IMO, anyone who bought a Kindle has already made a pretty clear statement that they're perfectly happy with DRM and willing to reward it financially. What do they expect?
You referred to video with DRM as being "encumbered", and yet this post now says such a scheme is "sensible". Way to backpedal on that vitriol
What on earth are you wittering about? DRMed video *is* encumbered. Occasionally that encumbrance is justifiable. My beef with DRM is that you don't own the things you "buy". With rentals there's no pretence that you're buying anything, hence no problem. What's your point?
And Silverlight is used for far, far more than video, just as Flash was.
*Could* be used for more, sure. *Is* used for more - no, not for anything significant.
The view of Silverlight that you present is myopic and highlights the fact that you do not understand it.
The view that you present suggests that you've sunk a fair amount of time and effort into something that was clearly a pointless, dead-end technology from the start, and you're really really REALLY pissed off about it. I might sympathize if you weren't being quite so obnoxious.
Making the browser do everything that Silverlight does increases the browser's attack surface just as much as adding the Silverlight plugin does.
I see absolutely no need to make the browser do everything that Silverlight does. I don't object to plugins in absolute terms. I object to one honking huge plugin that sets itself up as a platform-within-a-platform.
The rest of your post seems to be arguing against the voices in your head, so I'll leave it there.
DId I say it was? I don't have anything against DRM for video rental; in that context I'd even call it sensible. My point is that if (as seems to be the case) the only traction Silverlight has got is in playing video, that niche would be much better served by a smaller and far less general plugin.
Do you not understand the concept of "attack surface"? Do you not think that a general-purpose platform maybe has a larger one than, say, a dedicated video player? Or are you just trolling, as your tone suggests?
The idea that a general-purpose applet platform, with all the attendant security risks, is worth keeping simply to play DRM-encumbered video strikes me as utterly daft. It's like keeping a rabid rottweiler in your kid's playroom so that they'll have something to draw.
I think you've misread TFS. The journalists are not doing the suing. The suing is by "20 public figures". The journalists are the villains of this story, and are employees of Murdoch, who is the villain of pretty much every story.
He was talking about scanning a book he bought.
Yes, using a scanner and OCR software. Which will produce lots and lots of errors.
I'm pretty sure you're forgetting something important, and I'm pretty sure it's proofreading. Which should take a lot longer than 20 minutes, unless you want your readers to hate you.
Also, PDF is completely unsuitable for ebooks. Ebooks are mostly about text. PDF is a graphics format. About the only place where it ever made any sense was portable printing; otherwise, it's like those sad "websites" you saw in the late 90s where each page was just a big GIF.
And I've yet to see an automatic PDF-to-EPUB conversion that didn't blow goats.
Not the same thing at all. Suppose you've never heard of Fred Bloggs; "Fred Bloggs is a nigger" is still offensive, whereas "Fred Bloggs is a thief" is not. "Freeloader", like "thief", is only derogatory because freeloading, like theft, is generally accepted to be a bad thing. So whether or not it's appropriate depends very much on whether it's accurate.
In the case of the headline, barring some truly embarrassing bug in the app in question, the term is accurate: the only people who are going to be "shamed" by it are indeed freeloaders. If I told a random person on the street that I believed they were a thief, then yes, I'd expect them to be insulted, because they probably aren't. If on the other hand I told a convicted thief that I believed they were a thief, they don't really have a leg to stand on.
I'm not denying that intent matters, but I absolutely disagree that "accuracy is irrelevant".
Presumably neither you nor the GP has any special insight into the intent of the submitter here. Since you're not disputing that pirates are freeloaders, why couldn't they have chosen that word just to avoid a clunky repetition of "Pirates"? How is this headline any different from, for example, "Burgled Laptop Reports Thieves"? Would you really claim that "Thieves" there is a purposeful insult, as inappropriate as any offensive racial epithet could have been?
I honestly don't understand your argument. "Freeloaders" is a perfectly good descriptive term; it's not a word that only exists to be offensive. To the extent that it's derogatory, it's derogatory because the activity it describes is, well, kinda douchey. I'm sure a lot of pirates like to think of themselves as cool Jack Sparrow types sticking it to The Man, but if they get upset when someone uses a different term which, and I'm sorry to have to repeat this, describes exactly what they do, then they're in some serious denial.
Oh, come on. This is just silly.
There are perfectly reasonable arguments to be made against the use of "theft" or "stealing" in this context, because acquiring a digital good without paying for it doesn't normally deprive anybody else of that good.
But "freeloaders"? Granted, that term has various shades of meaning, but the dominant usage is equivalent to "free rider": someone who obtains a benefit without paying any of the costs involved in providing that benefit. Which describes pirates exactly. It's no more hyperbolic than describing sharks as "predators" or tapeworms as "parasites"; it's just saying what they do.
Amen. Here in the UK it's even worse, especially for coders; various important punctuation keys have been randomly moved around compared to normal UK keyboards, and there's no sodding # key. But we do have that oh-so-useful subsection mark key, thank goodness. A key so useful it doesn't even show up in my post preview.
When you use a normal keyboard all day at work, switching to this braindead abomination of a layout in the evenings is a real pain in the posterior. My MBP is coming to the end of its lifespan, and the keyboard is the #1 reason I'm strongly considering going back to Windows for my next machine.
This all sounds like good wholesome geeky fun, but the guy is co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, probably the most egregious and destructive patent troll in the world. Shun him! Shun him!
Does each book stand on its own fairly well? 'Cause I can't remember anything at all from the one I read.
Either read them all or don't, but don't base entire opinions off one book
So my options are:
1) Form an opinion of a series without reading any of them, or
2) Read all 10 books in a series before forming an opinion
Yeah, good luck selling that.
the 10 book Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which is at least the equal of ASoIaF
That's very much a matter of opinion. Personally, ASoIaF has definitely gone downhill, but when it's good, it's spectacularly good. I read the first of the Malazan books, threw it straight in the trash, and would be perfectly happy to never read another.
"Why not just buy a paper version (to ease your conscience) and download it off BitTorrent?"
I've strongly considered doing exactly that. But in the long run I think it's better to support those authors and publishers who are doing ebooks right, in order to demonstrate to the others that there's a market there. Paper+piracy, insofar as it has any effect, seems more likely to discourage them from moving to digital distribution at all.
"From a purely pragmatical point of view, just buy books in formats for which DRM stripping tools are readily available at the moment."
From an arguable-equally-pragmatic but slightly more forward-looking point of view, just acquire books which don't have DRM in the first place. Webscriptions, indie publishers, Gutenberg & Co, whatever. Paying people for trying to screw you over is not inducive to progress.
Yes, you'll miss out on reading a good number of books you wanted to read. That's what makes it a principled stand; you're actually sacrificing something.
The really depressing thing about that is that the earlier script drafts had the humans' brains being used as a parallel computing engine for running AIs
Maybe they were worried about getting slapped with a lawsuit by Dan Simmons.
"Dreamweaver's Dilemma"? More irony: I'd never even heard of that, let alone read it, and from a quick Google it's the only story set in that universe that I haven't read. It's like rain, on your wedding day.
Obviously I'm not going to argue about the merits of that particular story - there are several of Bujold's peripheral and other-universe novels that didn't grab me at all - but I do think you were unlucky in your sample. The Vorkosigan books IMHO could serve as the dictionary definition of "a good compelling story with characters I can identify with".
The first couple of novels (Shards of Honor, Barrayar) are fine, but a bit Mills-and-Boone and not especially representative. The best of the lot to my mind are "Mirror Dance", "Memory" and "A Civil Campaign", but you'd be missing a whole truckload of backstory if you jumped straight in there. The best of the short stories is probably "Borders of Infinity".
There's not a lot in Baen's catalog I'd really be interested in reading as a casual sci-fi/fantasy reader.
Oh, c'mon. Yes, Sturgeon's Law applies here like anywhere else, but are you really claiming that writers like Lois Bujold don't appeal to casual genre readers? Do you know anyone that's read the Vorkosigan Saga and not been utterly bowled over by it?
The problem with eBooks is that the pirated content is often poor. Numerous formatting errors, glaring OCR errors that never get fixed
To be fair, that's a problem with some legitimate content as well. I bought an E-Reads title recently and it was just appalling - probably averaged around an error per (small) page, including one in the very first paragraph. It was very very obvious that nobody had even glanced at the text after scanning it.
assassination of a prince from memory
An Archduke, if you want to be picky. But nice analogy nonetheless. Like WW1, I think this is a fight that's been waiting to happen for a while now. Like WW1, the specifics of the flashpoint incident are largely irrelevant.
Unlike WW1, the two sides seem far from evenly matched this time. My gut says the pro-WikiLeaks side will get tired and give up; there's nobody paying them to keep going, and that matters in the long haul. I'd love to be proved wrong, though.
hermafrodite
noun
a person or animal having both male and female sex organs, plus giant frizzy hair
Who cares about what Amazon does not want you to do with the books? Removing the DRM completely is not entirely trivial (yet; it shouldn't be hard to write a 1-click app that does it, it's just that no-one bothered, so far as I know), but the instructions are out there.
Personally, I care because when I pay money to Amazon for a Kindle book, I'm sending them an implicit message that I approve. That I consider it acceptable for them to be locking me in to their walled garden and stripping me of my basic consumer rights while pretending that this is normal and nothing has changed and this is still a "sale", no really, it is.
I do not approve. I do not consider it acceptable. And I do not believe that Amazon will ever grow an ethical backbone on this issue until they start losing sales because of it.