I'm writing it in Google Docs because, well, to me it most accurately resembles what the final product will look like. Call me strange, but "seeing" it is important.
Technically Docs can convert to HTML too and it does a good job (as I mentioned), which the converter converts to their strange format. It's just that the Kindle converter, judging by my brief playing around with the converter, is very very strict. It's much more likely to pass if you build the HTML manually, which also produces much much cleaner code (CSS and styles are bad for Kindle, the Google Docs output uses a lot of both from what I can see).
That, and I really really like Google Docs. It makes it easy to share stuff with people who've foolishly volunteered to help, and I don't have to worry about constantly shuffling it between my iPhone, my laptop, my desktop, a net cafe...
I'm writing a book for Kindle (naturalistic sci-fi, 61,000 words in) and I look upon the inevitable Kindle conversion with a terrible dread. I'm typing it up in Google Docs, but because I use italics for emphasis, this means I have to either manually construct the book (and manually re-put in all my italics and formatting), or use a converter which will produce sucky output which will require a lot of manual cleanup...
If the Kindle supports HTML5 however, Google Docs will do a bang-up job (by and large) of converting it straight to HTML5. Good news for me I guess!
- For that price I could get an iPad 2 (or equivalent Android tablet), which aside from being a pretty good gaming platform in its own right (arguably not as good as a dedicated device) is a net tablet, touch screen, eBook reader, high battery life device where the games are usually $1 and there are tens of thousands of non-game applications, including Kindle app, hundreds and hundreds of tools, Google maps, etc etc etc. And you can bet your arse those games on the Vita will all be $30 or more, AKA PC Game prices without even the cries of piracy to justify them. The Vita does nothing the iPad can't do, while the reverse is far from true.
- 3G enabled is pointless for modern games if there's a a 20mb cap. It becomes something to only download tiny games on, which don't need a dedicated device. So I might as well... see above point.
- No backwards compatability (can't play PS1/PS2 games). It *might* play PSP games, for a nominal fee, of course... when you could just play them on your PSP. That you presumably already own since you own the game. Pretty pointless.
- Rootkit scandal, PSHome outage, Sony's utter apathy towards the safety and privacy of their victi- uhh, consumers, blah blah blah blah. This isn't just wearing a slightly-too-short skirt to a party and getting a little too drunk, this is deliberately giving yourself rohypnol and publically signing a contract that says anyone can do anything to you while you're unconscious. Remember, you can now no longer sue Sony for any reason when you sign up to their products, so the analogy is apt. You will regret signing up to the Vita when it next gets owned by 4Chan script kiddies.
- No compelling reason why you don't just buy an Android tablet at the same price, install a bunch of emulators and play basically any kind of game that's five years older or more. And it's still an Android tablet. See point 1.
- What games? It's not like there's going to be a *good*, exclusive, Final Fantasy or anything on it. It's going to be crappy, full-price ports of old games (in which case see above point), or it'll be a bunch of shovelware with one or two good titles which you can probably get through PSN on PS3 anyway.
So, in conclusion, pass. Pass like a skanky, herpes infested crack whore offering me unprotected sex for ten dollars. Pass like the opportunity to invest in a brand new bridge in Nigeria some Prince is offering me a 50% stake in for a few thousand dollars. Pass, pass, pass.
Funny that, my brother and I are also working on an Eye of the Beholder-ish game called Tales of Vamadon, now for iPhones, but also in pre-alpha. In fact, we're soon to go for the alpha part of Chapter I... of course, we were going to wait until the game was complete before doing our own Slashvertisement, but hey.;)
Screw supersoldiers. What about all the REAL soldiers that have arms and legs blown off? I'm certain that they would find this technology hugely liberating.... of course, the best way to avoid all this is to avoid stupid pointless un-winnable guerilla warfare (with the US as the 'occupation') in fundamentalist Islamic countries, but hey. At least we can help those who have been injured.
Obama's performance has been pretty lackluster. So much for Hope and Change, huh?
But the modern Republican party and the Tea Party (who are basically the Totalitarian Christian Theocracy party these days) scare the fucking shit out of me. HOW DO YOU PEOPLE EVEN CONSIDER VOTING FOR THEM!?
I made a joke on Facebook when Steve Jobs died. Something about how God was mad at him because iPhone 4S was just a minor upgrade to iPhone 4, rather than the long-awaited iPhone 5, etc etc. Some of the flames I got were seriously crazy; one girl compared Steve Jobs dying to *her two miscarriages*. I couldn't believe it.
I'm sorry Steve Jobs is dead. Really. He was a human being, and he had hopes, dreams, feelings and ambitions just like the rest of us.
But to put Steve Jobs in the same league as people like Alan Turing, or Ada Lovelace, or Charles Babbage seems... very wrong. He was imperfect in life, like all of us, and remains imperfect in death. He was just a man. 150,000 other people I hadn't met died that day too, but nobody gave a shit about them. 150,000 people I've never met died today too. If I broke down crying and sobbing for each and every one of them, I'd be a wreck.
We as a society idolize the dead. I don't believe in extolling the virtues of the recently deceased. Given a long enough time the life expectancy of all Humans drops to 0; we all die some time, and when my time comes I would much, much rather people tell the truth about me and maybe even have a bit of a laugh, even at my expense. It's not like I'm going to care, I'll be dead.
I find it completely disrespectful that people think the best way to remember and "respect" someone who's recently died is to gloss over their flaws and essentially tell lies about how grand they were.
When I die I just want people to remember the truth about me, whatever that was, not some kind of warped 1984-ish false memory of a person who never was.
Their reach certainly seems to stretch into French courts and French lawmakers.
And if that's the case, why don't I just create a new corporation every time I download a file (or every time I get caught) so I never, personally, get any strikes, but each of my corporations gets one each before being discarded?
Oh, you're saying that hiding behind a corporate veil only works for the rich and powerful?
No more MPAA! They're offline forever! After all, the law is just and equal and fair and blind, right? And the MPAA -- the people who, let's face it, basically *wrote* this law -- should be held to the highest standard themselves. They, more than anyone else, cannot call it a youthful mistake, or a silly error in judgement, or ignorance or anything else... they have zero excuse and so accordingly they will be punished for their obvious and flagrant transgressions!
That's cool. If you don't want to pay for it, or you think $2 is too much to pay for a book, as the post clearly indicated I don't really care. You don't have to justify why you're not buying it, just... don't buy it.
Correct, except that "after hours time" is generally the working person's most valuable commodity, especially for people earning above minimum wage. That's why, especially for something so cheap, I reckon it's just cheaper to pay the small cost and have those couple of minutes back. That's why people have super-fast internet, why they eat fast food, and why they grumble about the commute to and from work -- because a few minutes here and there does add up.
Plus, buying the book legitimately means that if I issue updates or special features (such as alternate endings, or short stories, or whatever) those come through automagically.
Except that "after hours time" is generally the working person's most valuable commodity, especially for people earning above minimum wage. That's why, especially for something so cheap, I reckon it's just cheaper to pay the small cost and have those couple of minutes back. That's why people have super-fast internet, why they eat fast food, and why they grumble about the commute to and from work -- because a few minutes here and there does add up.
Plus, buying the book legitimately means that if I issue updates or special features (such as alternate endings, or short stories, or whatever) those come through automagically.
Perhaps so, but if you are sitting at home and not being paid (assuming you just worked a full day and are tired), how much is extra hours in the day worth to you? Would you pay a couple of bucks to get an extra 15 minutes in a day of relaxation time?
That's what I'm trying to say here. You can either spend, say, 15 minutes torrenting or take a few clicks to get the thing through the Kindle store (when it's up there). What you're buying is those extra few minutes, and spending a couple of bucks to do so.
I'm in the process of writing a book, called Lacuna: Demons of the Void, seen here. The first three chapters are available for free, and are CC-BY-SA-NC; this means that you can legally and safely write whatever fanfiction you want, or pass the sample chapters around, or change and remix them or do whatever you want basically as long as you don't sell it, don't change the licence and credit me appropriately.
I did this because if the book (and subsequent sequels if any) gets popular, I didn't want to get old and fat and retarded and turn into the next George Lucas, grabbing hold of my precious precious IP and never letting go.
Anyway.
Regarding piracy, I wrote on my webpage:
First up I don't like the term "piracy". Bleh. But language is fluid and you all know what I mean, so let's go with it.
Real pirates, like those guys in Somalia, are evil. They're not Jack Sparrow, they're not Captain Hook, they're murderers and rapists and kidnappers and deserved to eat a Tomahawk missile in their sleep. They're scum. They're villains. They're evil. They're not some kid who just wants to read the next (awesome, awesome, aweeeesome) Harry Potter book for free or whatever.
I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.
I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?
Fuck those guys.
I don't give a shit if you got my book from The Pirate Bay. It costs $2 to buy and is available in DRM free PDFs, or even DRM free plaintext if you really want it and you're Richard Stallman (I met you once, by the way, and you were cool. You hated my iPhone though. Sorry bro). If you make $15 Aussie dollars an hour, minimum wage, then $2 represents about eight minutes of your time. If you spent more than eight minutes bringing up the highly overloaded Pirate Bay page, finding a correct torrent, loading the torrent into uTorrent, downloading the file, moving it around on your NAS, putting it into iTunes, getting the book's coverart then syncing it to your iPhone, then yeah you pretty much just robbed yourself.
Just saying. You're probably saving money by buying it vs pirating it, since time=money. LOL. This is why CD's shouldn't be so fucking expensive.
But hey, a lot people have genuine and interesting philosophical beliefs against paying for services rather than physical objects ("it's just bits, man! You can't own bits...!"). Other people are unemployed (or underemployed) and couldn't afford the book anyway. How both these types have high-speed internet is a mystery for the ages, but for those people, well, go forth and torrent... I don't care. I just ask that if you believe all that crazy crap and do like the book, then subsequently you think I deserve some kind of reward for creating it, I beg you not to compromise your principles. Instead, just donate $2 (or whatever) to Child's Play, run by the infinitely-more-talented-than-me dynamic duo of
Abstinence is the worst of all the safe-sex choices.
The best way to describe it is, "It is 100% effective, when used correctly. When not used correctly it is 0% effective, and among females and males between 14-25 it has a very high failure rate."
How many non-Slashdot users do you know that are 25 years old and never had sex?
Unless you're some kind of super 4Chan, you can't run a business that actively keeps no logs and relies upon -- as your buisness model -- the idea that you can keep people 100% anonymous online no matter what they do. That's just retarded.
Generally speaking, the best you can hope for is, "We will keep you safe from basically anyone who doesn't come knocking with a court order or warrant. Depending on your country, they may not even have that, but they'll definitely have to be law enforcement related."
I mean, really. Would you willingly operate a legitimate business that had, as its business model, the idea that your clients give you a hunk of money and then you give them back an entirely different set of money (minus 15%) in non-sequential bills? Do you think such a business would operate without being investigated by the FBI/CIA/ASIO etc? Who would you think the primary clientele of such a business would be and is it really ethical to protect them?
Somewhat more tin-foil-hatty is the idea that anyone who runs a business that promises to give the finger to the law, doesn't keep any logs and is prepared to go to jail to project your online anonymity... well, to me, that screams that they're a honeypot. Probably paid for directly by the FBI, with 95% of their clientelle being 13 year old 4Chan script kiddies, PirateBay users and other harmless folk who are utterly ignored and left in peace... but that other 5% being pedos (there are *very very* few pedophiles online; don't buy into the panic!), drug runners and organized crime members who are kept under close surveillance.
In short, I would rather use an anonymizing VPN service who spells out exactly what is kept and why, and what level of law enforcement intervention is required. A service I would use would probably have the following terms of service:
1) If you commit any crime, or transmit evidence of any crime, that has a minimum of one year in jail OR do anything *truly* retarded (like Skype-out over the VPN and call the White House legitimately threatening to assassinate the President of the United States) then your arse is grass. 2) If you are DDOSing from behind the VPN service, or sending spam e-mail, or operating any form of spam/volume based attack behind the VPN we'll disconnect you since that typically rapes our already overloaded services. Generally no legal butthole-raping, just a D/C, one day timeout, and an e-mail explaining why. Note rule #1 still applies if you are scamming people. 3) If the cops come with a 100% legal warrant issued by a judge, irrespective of the crime, we'll comply with its order.
I believe that's entirely fair and I know some people will scream for more, but realistically, I think that if your business doesn't basically follow those three rules it's not going to survive... or is a honeypot.
I demand 100% complete disconnection of the MPAA, including subsidaries, partent companies, any company where any member of the MPAA (or subsidaries, parent companies, etc) is a shareholder in whole or in part, from ALL Italian users. They cannot connect to ANY Italian IP address, on pain of defying a court order (or whatever the punishment is for evading the 'one strike' law).
Any "evidence" gathered against Italian internet users is null and void because in order to gather that evidence they had broken the "one strike" rule in Italy. And, of course, the MPAA would never download something they didn't actually own the rights to, therefore committing copyright infringement themselves, right? Never?...
Oh wait, the laws don't apply to those who make them? The MPAA is allowed to commit the worst kind of copyright infringement -- claiming you created something you didn't, and then using it for commercial purposes and making a bunch of money with it -- and that doesn't count as a strike? Because they are immune to their own law?
I've always wondered what the economics of the world of cheap, prolific, effective 3D printers is like. If anyone can create basically any material good, what's the economics of that place like?
Star Trek had replicators, which could basically make anything, even food or water (except for a few things which were a de-facto currency). They were basically communists, which doesn't work with people being people but might work if anyone could create whatever they wanted.
But what about things that can't be replicated/printed? Like electricity, or land for housing, or water/food? Trek says that water and food are replicable, but with our current 3D printers obviously we can't make that just yet unless you can eat plastic.
What's the economy of the western world going to look like if the only thing we need is material for 3D printers, power, land, food and water? Will provision of the un-replicable become the job of the state?
... but I already gave both my wrists to Diablo and Diablo II. They are now RSI ridden husks, ready to be discarded and replaced with official Blizzard prosthetics.
While the body fails me, my mind -- sharpened in the Halls of the Blind and practiced at hunting for elusive pixels outlined with the tab key -- remembers is training well, ready to once again take arms against the forces of Hell.
Sometimes, when I sleep, all I can hear is the clicking of the mouse and the 1, 1, 1 of potions chain-quaffed in haste. The clicking, like the jaws and mandibles of a billion fiendish ants, coming to tear me limb from limb unless I find the last piece of Tal Rasha's Wrappings.... and the Baal runs. Endless Baal runs, searching, always searching...
Now gaze ye upon my graveyard of Hardcore mode characters, mortal, and despair . Despair as I do when inspecting this broken, shattered life; a veteran of a digital war, a soldier of fictitious battles...... stay a while, and listen.
I'm excited about all the trickle-down technology that'll eventually become consumer grade fare, and I appreciate the advancement in various technology that war brings, but I would much prefer it if the US stopped economically destroying itself (while giving the Middle East a "Great Satan" to fight) and instead let them get back to killing each other over tiny differences in interpretation of fundamentalist Islam.
Not even Bob the Builder can fix the Middle East at the moment. Not when you have God handing out the real estate titles and commanding the thousands of various splinter cells to annihilate everything that's not exactly identical to themselves, as trillions of dollars of oil money pour into the region to feed and fund it all.
I wait until we can project information directly onto the retina, or even push it directly to the optic nerve or the brain itself.
You could get real-time subtitles for the person you're talking to. Their name would float above their head so there's no embarrassed fumbling as you try and remember who they are.
You could even have a small note beside them; "Last met at Jake's party 10/10/2009".
You could turn ANY FLAT SURFACE into a computer monitor by holding out your fingers to make a box where it should go. Make a different sign for "make a keyboard here", then type away.
You could also "airbrush out" advertising and unwanted images ("I'm a Fundie so I never want to see a nipple ever again!").
You could ask for directions and get an arrow. Couple the system with tiny cameras arranged, say, on your hat, and you could give yourself full 360 degree vision, or visual warnings ("CAUTION: CAR APPROACHING LEFT", etc).
You could take a picture by blinking twice.
You could zoom in.
You could make T-shirts that had a barcode on them instead of an image. The barcode gets read, and then the device projects something else over the top. If you're a metal fan, it says "SLAYER". If you're a Christian, it has a picture of Jesus. Etc.
And all that's off the top of my head. The possibilities are endless.
Userspace. Userspace. Want to go to Userspace. Can we go to Userspace? Userspace. Look at me. I'm in Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace. You know what's slow? You know what's low power? Userspace.... Userspace. Want to go to Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace.... Userspace.
Reliable, consistent wifi suitable for gaming and deployed across a broad area would certainly be a welcome development... MW2 over mobile broadband?
Alas... my experience with wireless networks is that they tend to vary wildly in their throughput, their reliability (especially in regards to dropped or delayed packets) and, especially here in Australia, their cost. Most sub $100 mobile broadband plans have less than 10gb a month. And that's over 3G; an upgrade to 4G would have to bring with it significant cost savings to make it worthwhile down here.
A fair few areas don't have reliable 3G access anyway. 4G is a long way away for us... gah.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm writing it in Google Docs because, well, to me it most accurately resembles what the final product will look like. Call me strange, but "seeing" it is important.
Technically Docs can convert to HTML too and it does a good job (as I mentioned), which the converter converts to their strange format. It's just that the Kindle converter, judging by my brief playing around with the converter, is very very strict. It's much more likely to pass if you build the HTML manually, which also produces much much cleaner code (CSS and styles are bad for Kindle, the Google Docs output uses a lot of both from what I can see).
That, and I really really like Google Docs. It makes it easy to share stuff with people who've foolishly volunteered to help, and I don't have to worry about constantly shuffling it between my iPhone, my laptop, my desktop, a net cafe...
I'm writing a book for Kindle (naturalistic sci-fi, 61,000 words in) and I look upon the inevitable Kindle conversion with a terrible dread. I'm typing it up in Google Docs, but because I use italics for emphasis, this means I have to either manually construct the book (and manually re-put in all my italics and formatting), or use a converter which will produce sucky output which will require a lot of manual cleanup...
If the Kindle supports HTML5 however, Google Docs will do a bang-up job (by and large) of converting it straight to HTML5. Good news for me I guess!
Issues I can see right off the top of my head:
- For that price I could get an iPad 2 (or equivalent Android tablet), which aside from being a pretty good gaming platform in its own right (arguably not as good as a dedicated device) is a net tablet, touch screen, eBook reader, high battery life device where the games are usually $1 and there are tens of thousands of non-game applications, including Kindle app, hundreds and hundreds of tools, Google maps, etc etc etc. And you can bet your arse those games on the Vita will all be $30 or more, AKA PC Game prices without even the cries of piracy to justify them. The Vita does nothing the iPad can't do, while the reverse is far from true.
- 3G enabled is pointless for modern games if there's a a 20mb cap. It becomes something to only download tiny games on, which don't need a dedicated device. So I might as well... see above point.
- No backwards compatability (can't play PS1/PS2 games). It *might* play PSP games, for a nominal fee, of course... when you could just play them on your PSP. That you presumably already own since you own the game. Pretty pointless.
- Rootkit scandal, PSHome outage, Sony's utter apathy towards the safety and privacy of their victi- uhh, consumers, blah blah blah blah. This isn't just wearing a slightly-too-short skirt to a party and getting a little too drunk, this is deliberately giving yourself rohypnol and publically signing a contract that says anyone can do anything to you while you're unconscious. Remember, you can now no longer sue Sony for any reason when you sign up to their products, so the analogy is apt. You will regret signing up to the Vita when it next gets owned by 4Chan script kiddies.
- No compelling reason why you don't just buy an Android tablet at the same price, install a bunch of emulators and play basically any kind of game that's five years older or more. And it's still an Android tablet. See point 1.
- What games? It's not like there's going to be a *good*, exclusive, Final Fantasy or anything on it. It's going to be crappy, full-price ports of old games (in which case see above point), or it'll be a bunch of shovelware with one or two good titles which you can probably get through PSN on PS3 anyway.
So, in conclusion, pass. Pass like a skanky, herpes infested crack whore offering me unprotected sex for ten dollars. Pass like the opportunity to invest in a brand new bridge in Nigeria some Prince is offering me a 50% stake in for a few thousand dollars. Pass, pass, pass.
Funny that, my brother and I are also working on an Eye of the Beholder-ish game called Tales of Vamadon, now for iPhones, but also in pre-alpha. In fact, we're soon to go for the alpha part of Chapter I... of course, we were going to wait until the game was complete before doing our own Slashvertisement, but hey. ;)
Interesting stuff. Best of luck, guys! If your game is good, we'll recommend it; until that time, there's Undercroft, and the novel I'm working on here: http://www.lacunaverse.com/reading/lacuna-demons-of-the-void
Screw supersoldiers. What about all the REAL soldiers that have arms and legs blown off? I'm certain that they would find this technology hugely liberating. ... of course, the best way to avoid all this is to avoid stupid pointless un-winnable guerilla warfare (with the US as the 'occupation') in fundamentalist Islamic countries, but hey. At least we can help those who have been injured.
Obama's performance has been pretty lackluster. So much for Hope and Change, huh?
But the modern Republican party and the Tea Party (who are basically the Totalitarian Christian Theocracy party these days) scare the fucking shit out of me. HOW DO YOU PEOPLE EVEN CONSIDER VOTING FOR THEM!?
Whatever Obama's flaws, he's *gotta* be better than someone who literally prays for rain while denying climate change, or someone who believes gay marriage is the #1 issue to affect America in the next 30 years, or someone who was so homophobic that the gay community named a mixture of semen and faeces, a by-product of improperly performed anal sex, after him.
How does this... how is... I don't even...
I made a joke on Facebook when Steve Jobs died. Something about how God was mad at him because iPhone 4S was just a minor upgrade to iPhone 4, rather than the long-awaited iPhone 5, etc etc. Some of the flames I got were seriously crazy; one girl compared Steve Jobs dying to *her two miscarriages*. I couldn't believe it.
I'm sorry Steve Jobs is dead. Really. He was a human being, and he had hopes, dreams, feelings and ambitions just like the rest of us.
But to put Steve Jobs in the same league as people like Alan Turing, or Ada Lovelace, or Charles Babbage seems... very wrong. He was imperfect in life, like all of us, and remains imperfect in death. He was just a man. 150,000 other people I hadn't met died that day too, but nobody gave a shit about them. 150,000 people I've never met died today too. If I broke down crying and sobbing for each and every one of them, I'd be a wreck.
We as a society idolize the dead. I don't believe in extolling the virtues of the recently deceased. Given a long enough time the life expectancy of all Humans drops to 0; we all die some time, and when my time comes I would much, much rather people tell the truth about me and maybe even have a bit of a laugh, even at my expense. It's not like I'm going to care, I'll be dead.
I find it completely disrespectful that people think the best way to remember and "respect" someone who's recently died is to gloss over their flaws and essentially tell lies about how grand they were.
When I die I just want people to remember the truth about me, whatever that was, not some kind of warped 1984-ish false memory of a person who never was.
Their reach certainly seems to stretch into French courts and French lawmakers.
And if that's the case, why don't I just create a new corporation every time I download a file (or every time I get caught) so I never, personally, get any strikes, but each of my corporations gets one each before being discarded?
Oh, you're saying that hiding behind a corporate veil only works for the rich and powerful?
Damn.
Strike 1: http://gizmodo.com/329648/mpaas-university-toolkit-taken-down-for-violating-copyright
Strike 2: http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-steals-code-violates-linkware-license/
Strike 3: http://www.amdzone.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=95638
BOOM!
No more MPAA! They're offline forever! After all, the law is just and equal and fair and blind, right? And the MPAA -- the people who, let's face it, basically *wrote* this law -- should be held to the highest standard themselves. They, more than anyone else, cannot call it a youthful mistake, or a silly error in judgement, or ignorance or anything else... they have zero excuse and so accordingly they will be punished for their obvious and flagrant transgressions!
Right? ... right?
http://xkcd.com/605/
"By your third trimester, there will be hundreds of babies inside of you."
That's cool. If you don't want to pay for it, or you think $2 is too much to pay for a book, as the post clearly indicated I don't really care. You don't have to justify why you're not buying it, just... don't buy it.
Eh. At the end of the day, you're right, it's $2. Doesn't make a difference in the scheme of things. Either buy the book or don't. Heh. ;)
Correct, except that "after hours time" is generally the working person's most valuable commodity, especially for people earning above minimum wage. That's why, especially for something so cheap, I reckon it's just cheaper to pay the small cost and have those couple of minutes back. That's why people have super-fast internet, why they eat fast food, and why they grumble about the commute to and from work -- because a few minutes here and there does add up.
Plus, buying the book legitimately means that if I issue updates or special features (such as alternate endings, or short stories, or whatever) those come through automagically.
Except that "after hours time" is generally the working person's most valuable commodity, especially for people earning above minimum wage. That's why, especially for something so cheap, I reckon it's just cheaper to pay the small cost and have those couple of minutes back. That's why people have super-fast internet, why they eat fast food, and why they grumble about the commute to and from work -- because a few minutes here and there does add up.
Plus, buying the book legitimately means that if I issue updates or special features (such as alternate endings, or short stories, or whatever) those come through automagically.
Perhaps so, but if you are sitting at home and not being paid (assuming you just worked a full day and are tired), how much is extra hours in the day worth to you? Would you pay a couple of bucks to get an extra 15 minutes in a day of relaxation time?
That's what I'm trying to say here. You can either spend, say, 15 minutes torrenting or take a few clicks to get the thing through the Kindle store (when it's up there). What you're buying is those extra few minutes, and spending a couple of bucks to do so.
I'm in the process of writing a book, called Lacuna: Demons of the Void, seen here. The first three chapters are available for free, and are CC-BY-SA-NC; this means that you can legally and safely write whatever fanfiction you want, or pass the sample chapters around, or change and remix them or do whatever you want basically as long as you don't sell it, don't change the licence and credit me appropriately.
I did this because if the book (and subsequent sequels if any) gets popular, I didn't want to get old and fat and retarded and turn into the next George Lucas, grabbing hold of my precious precious IP and never letting go.
Anyway.
Regarding piracy, I wrote on my webpage:
First up I don't like the term "piracy". Bleh. But language is fluid and you all know what I mean, so let's go with it.
Real pirates, like those guys in Somalia, are evil. They're not Jack Sparrow, they're not Captain Hook, they're murderers and rapists and kidnappers and deserved to eat a Tomahawk missile in their sleep. They're scum. They're villains. They're evil. They're not some kid who just wants to read the next (awesome, awesome, aweeeesome) Harry Potter book for free or whatever.
I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.
I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?
Fuck those guys.
I don't give a shit if you got my book from The Pirate Bay. It costs $2 to buy and is available in DRM free PDFs, or even DRM free plaintext if you really want it and you're Richard Stallman (I met you once, by the way, and you were cool. You hated my iPhone though. Sorry bro). If you make $15 Aussie dollars an hour, minimum wage, then $2 represents about eight minutes of your time. If you spent more than eight minutes bringing up the highly overloaded Pirate Bay page, finding a correct torrent, loading the torrent into uTorrent, downloading the file, moving it around on your NAS, putting it into iTunes, getting the book's coverart then syncing it to your iPhone, then yeah you pretty much just robbed yourself.
Just saying. You're probably saving money by buying it vs pirating it, since time=money. LOL. This is why CD's shouldn't be so fucking expensive.
But hey, a lot people have genuine and interesting philosophical beliefs against paying for services rather than physical objects ("it's just bits, man! You can't own bits...!"). Other people are unemployed (or underemployed) and couldn't afford the book anyway. How both these types have high-speed internet is a mystery for the ages, but for those people, well, go forth and torrent... I don't care. I just ask that if you believe all that crazy crap and do like the book, then subsequently you think I deserve some kind of reward for creating it, I beg you not to compromise your principles. Instead, just donate $2 (or whatever) to Child's Play, run by the infinitely-more-talented-than-me dynamic duo of
Abstinence is the worst of all the safe-sex choices.
The best way to describe it is, "It is 100% effective, when used correctly. When not used correctly it is 0% effective, and among females and males between 14-25 it has a very high failure rate."
How many non-Slashdot users do you know that are 25 years old and never had sex?
Unless you're some kind of super 4Chan, you can't run a business that actively keeps no logs and relies upon -- as your buisness model -- the idea that you can keep people 100% anonymous online no matter what they do. That's just retarded.
Generally speaking, the best you can hope for is, "We will keep you safe from basically anyone who doesn't come knocking with a court order or warrant. Depending on your country, they may not even have that, but they'll definitely have to be law enforcement related."
I mean, really. Would you willingly operate a legitimate business that had, as its business model, the idea that your clients give you a hunk of money and then you give them back an entirely different set of money (minus 15%) in non-sequential bills? Do you think such a business would operate without being investigated by the FBI/CIA/ASIO etc? Who would you think the primary clientele of such a business would be and is it really ethical to protect them?
Somewhat more tin-foil-hatty is the idea that anyone who runs a business that promises to give the finger to the law, doesn't keep any logs and is prepared to go to jail to project your online anonymity... well, to me, that screams that they're a honeypot. Probably paid for directly by the FBI, with 95% of their clientelle being 13 year old 4Chan script kiddies, PirateBay users and other harmless folk who are utterly ignored and left in peace... but that other 5% being pedos (there are *very very* few pedophiles online; don't buy into the panic!), drug runners and organized crime members who are kept under close surveillance.
In short, I would rather use an anonymizing VPN service who spells out exactly what is kept and why, and what level of law enforcement intervention is required. A service I would use would probably have the following terms of service:
1) If you commit any crime, or transmit evidence of any crime, that has a minimum of one year in jail OR do anything *truly* retarded (like Skype-out over the VPN and call the White House legitimately threatening to assassinate the President of the United States) then your arse is grass.
2) If you are DDOSing from behind the VPN service, or sending spam e-mail, or operating any form of spam/volume based attack behind the VPN we'll disconnect you since that typically rapes our already overloaded services. Generally no legal butthole-raping, just a D/C, one day timeout, and an e-mail explaining why. Note rule #1 still applies if you are scamming people.
3) If the cops come with a 100% legal warrant issued by a judge, irrespective of the crime, we'll comply with its order.
I believe that's entirely fair and I know some people will scream for more, but realistically, I think that if your business doesn't basically follow those three rules it's not going to survive... or is a honeypot.
I wholeheartedly support this "One Strike" law. As the first barrage in the torrent (heh!) of complaints, let me fire this one off:
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-steals-code-violates-linkware-license/
I demand 100% complete disconnection of the MPAA, including subsidaries, partent companies, any company where any member of the MPAA (or subsidaries, parent companies, etc) is a shareholder in whole or in part, from ALL Italian users. They cannot connect to ANY Italian IP address, on pain of defying a court order (or whatever the punishment is for evading the 'one strike' law).
Any "evidence" gathered against Italian internet users is null and void because in order to gather that evidence they had broken the "one strike" rule in Italy. And, of course, the MPAA would never download something they didn't actually own the rights to, therefore committing copyright infringement themselves, right? Never? ...
Oh wait, the laws don't apply to those who make them? The MPAA is allowed to commit the worst kind of copyright infringement -- claiming you created something you didn't, and then using it for commercial purposes and making a bunch of money with it -- and that doesn't count as a strike? Because they are immune to their own law?
Oh damn.
Well, it was a nice thought anyway.
I've always wondered what the economics of the world of cheap, prolific, effective 3D printers is like. If anyone can create basically any material good, what's the economics of that place like?
Star Trek had replicators, which could basically make anything, even food or water (except for a few things which were a de-facto currency). They were basically communists, which doesn't work with people being people but might work if anyone could create whatever they wanted.
But what about things that can't be replicated/printed? Like electricity, or land for housing, or water/food? Trek says that water and food are replicable, but with our current 3D printers obviously we can't make that just yet unless you can eat plastic.
What's the economy of the western world going to look like if the only thing we need is material for 3D printers, power, land, food and water? Will provision of the un-replicable become the job of the state?
... but I already gave both my wrists to Diablo and Diablo II. They are now RSI ridden husks, ready to be discarded and replaced with official Blizzard prosthetics.
While the body fails me, my mind -- sharpened in the Halls of the Blind and practiced at hunting for elusive pixels outlined with the tab key -- remembers is training well, ready to once again take arms against the forces of Hell.
Sometimes, when I sleep, all I can hear is the clicking of the mouse and the 1, 1, 1 of potions chain-quaffed in haste. The clicking, like the jaws and mandibles of a billion fiendish ants, coming to tear me limb from limb unless I find the last piece of Tal Rasha's Wrappings. ... and the Baal runs. Endless Baal runs, searching, always searching...
Now gaze ye upon my graveyard of Hardcore mode characters, mortal, and despair . Despair as I do when inspecting this broken, shattered life; a veteran of a digital war, a soldier of fictitious battles... ... stay a while, and listen.
Why don't we, instead of perfecting our killing methods, simply stop initiating economy destroying pointless wars?
I'm excited about all the trickle-down technology that'll eventually become consumer grade fare, and I appreciate the advancement in various technology that war brings, but I would much prefer it if the US stopped economically destroying itself (while giving the Middle East a "Great Satan" to fight) and instead let them get back to killing each other over tiny differences in interpretation of fundamentalist Islam.
Not even Bob the Builder can fix the Middle East at the moment. Not when you have God handing out the real estate titles and commanding the thousands of various splinter cells to annihilate everything that's not exactly identical to themselves, as trillions of dollars of oil money pour into the region to feed and fund it all.
I wait until we can project information directly onto the retina, or even push it directly to the optic nerve or the brain itself.
You could get real-time subtitles for the person you're talking to. Their name would float above their head so there's no embarrassed fumbling as you try and remember who they are.
You could even have a small note beside them; "Last met at Jake's party 10/10/2009".
You could turn ANY FLAT SURFACE into a computer monitor by holding out your fingers to make a box where it should go. Make a different sign for "make a keyboard here", then type away.
You could also "airbrush out" advertising and unwanted images ("I'm a Fundie so I never want to see a nipple ever again!").
You could ask for directions and get an arrow. Couple the system with tiny cameras arranged, say, on your hat, and you could give yourself full 360 degree vision, or visual warnings ("CAUTION: CAR APPROACHING LEFT", etc).
You could take a picture by blinking twice.
You could zoom in.
You could make T-shirts that had a barcode on them instead of an image. The barcode gets read, and then the device projects something else over the top. If you're a metal fan, it says "SLAYER". If you're a Christian, it has a picture of Jesus. Etc.
And all that's off the top of my head. The possibilities are endless.
Userspace. Userspace. Want to go to Userspace. Can we go to Userspace? Userspace. Look at me. I'm in Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace. You know what's slow? You know what's low power? Userspace. ... Userspace. Want to go to Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. Userspace. ... Userspace.
Reliable, consistent wifi suitable for gaming and deployed across a broad area would certainly be a welcome development... MW2 over mobile broadband?
Alas... my experience with wireless networks is that they tend to vary wildly in their throughput, their reliability (especially in regards to dropped or delayed packets) and, especially here in Australia, their cost. Most sub $100 mobile broadband plans have less than 10gb a month. And that's over 3G; an upgrade to 4G would have to bring with it significant cost savings to make it worthwhile down here.
A fair few areas don't have reliable 3G access anyway. 4G is a long way away for us... gah.