The license on the CDs says that the CDs may be copied and shared but not sold. That's it. Copied and shared. No restriction on the number of people they are to be shared with. Jim Baen is perfectly happy with people giving them away, torrenting them, sharing them on peer to peer networks, hosting them on the Internet, etc. He'd do an AOL-CD mailing if he could afford it, and has said so on the Baen Bar. (BTW, the zlynx torrents are not "his" (in the sense of the poster to whom you responded), but have been around, and known about on the Baen Bar, for quite some time.)
For what it's worth, you can get Make Room Make Room in a variety of formats now, including eReader (which, while restricted, is fairly reasonable if you don't mind its reader program) and Microsoft Reader (which can be easily cracked into HTML).
Frankly, I think this is largely a matter of personal taste. I'm not going to argue that you're wrong, as it's not possible to be "wrong" when you're talking about your own opinion. I will say that my opinion differs with yours. I like being able to carry a small library's worth of books in my pocket, so I'm never without reading material wherever I am for as long as my batteries hold out. I like being able to read one-handed, and not have to worry about a paperback book not lying flat. I like being able to pocket my "book" without bookmarking it and know that returning to the exact spot where I left off is as simple as pushing a button. I like being able to get new reading material in the course of a minute or so sitting at my computer, rather than having to go all the way down to the library or bookstore to get a book that may not even be there. In college, I liked being able to read a book in class while looking like I was taking notes (though in retrospect, it probably was not as good an idea as it seemed at the time:). I also use my PDA for other things, like balancing my checkbook and keeping grocery lists--so as long as I have it, why shouldn't I read ebooks on it?
There are a lot of advantages printed books have, too, in terms of not needing battery power or special reading equipment, having greater longetivity, being able to be autographed, and so forth. Nobody's saying ebooks should or will replace printed books--or at least, I'm not. But I find that ebooks are great for reading in situations that printed books might not be.
We've tested a lot of e-book waters, including various cockamamie schemes involving overpriced e-books laden with DRM.
Oddly enough, a lot of those "books" didn't even sell enough copies to pay for their file-conversion costs. Meanwhile, it hasn't escaped our notice that Jim Baen has been doing something that works, that people like, and that makes money. I'm delighted to be doing this pilot program; I think Jim has been clueful on this issue for a long time, while almost everyone else in publishing has been staggering around on stage hitting one another over the head with inflated pig bladders.
Funny thing, I was looking back over that review I wrote, right before I discovered this article. (Too bad I didn't notice this article earlier so I could have gotten this post listed earlier without having to piggy-back on a high-ranked one, but oh well.:) In that review, referring to eReader/Palm Digital Media's DRM'd version, I wrote (emphasis added for this quotation):
It would have been nice to have A Fire Upon the Deep in open HTML like Baen's e-books, but it is understandable that Dr. Vinge (or his publisher) might have preferred for the book to be digitally protected. Since that is unlikely to change anytime soon, there is little point to letting the perfect be the enemy of the good; as digitally-protected e-book formats go, the PDM format is actually quite decent.
And two years later, here it is changing, and A Fire Upon the Deep is going to be one of the Tor titles coming out in Webscriptions. Guess I'll be buying a third e-copy of the book after all--but that one should be the last one I ever need to purchase.
It's quite exciting that Tor, who publishes 300 new titles yearly as opposed to Bean's 50 or so, and across a broader spectrum of SF than Baen's military/political focus, is taking this step. Maybe more will follow suit. We can only hope.
It's funny how history repeats itself. Last time this happened, in the 1950s-60s, the cinemas were losing viewers to that new-fangled TV contraption, especially after it got color. So they tried all sorts of gimmicks to get people to come out to the theaters. About the only one that stayed around was widescreen, though "Sensurround" might be considered an ancestor of the multi-channel Dolby and DTS sound systems that were another advantage the theaters had over home video...until home video got them too.
I wonder what new gimmicks will come out of this new panic. Universal digital cinema, perhaps? Will Hollywood finally surrender and start releasing movies simultaneously to cable, home video, and cinema? Guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Odd that the article doesn't mention the high-profile body-part-snatching case that made the news a couple months back--the cancerous bones of renowned news commentator and Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke were removed and sold for transplanting. That case more than any other is probably what brought the practice to media attention.
Just ask all the writers and so forth who were naive enough to sign contracts awarding them a percentage of the net profit, rather than a percentage of the gross intake--including one of my favorite fantasy novelists, Peter S. Beagle, who is still owed a great deal of money for his work on the Rankin/Bass Lord of the Rings movie. It's questionable whether he'll ever see a penny of the $200 million that was paid to the rights-holder out of the Peter Jackson movies...
And telling users when results have been omitted/censored. Which no other search engine in China does.
And letting their slower-but-uncensored version remain accessible to the Chinese people if they'd rather use that instead.
If people could get past their knee-jerk reverse-Lars-Ulrich "Money BAD!" reaction and consider what Google's actions mean for the Chinese people--folks who might never have realized that their searches were being censored will now have evidence of it staring them right in the face--they might consider that it is, if not an unqualified good thing, at least a step or two closer to the right direction than the Chinese people have been able to use before.
"Though he seemed to lose his individuality, the introduction of Hugh's experiences into the collective had far-reaching consequences. Some eventually were severed from the collective and broke away as a renegade group. Initially dysfunctional and without purpose, this group later stumbled across and joined with Lore, Data's prototype brother, who helped them express their newfound freedom through hatred ('Descent')."
+ Google will not host any services that store personal information--such as GMail or Blogger--within China. In other words, they can't be forced to give up information to the government that they don't keep within the borders.
To all you naysayers: Business has to make a profit. That's the way our economy works. You can grumble about that, but nothing you do is going to change it. To complain about a business being a business is disingenuous; a business has no choice but to make a profit if it's going to continue being able to provide the goods and services it makes. With that in mind, Google's decision to add an in-China bank of servers to give the Chinese people better access to the 98% of searches that would be uncensored, while telling them when results were censored, and not removing access to the slow uncensored version can only be a good thing. It increases the options available to the Chinese people, rather than taking some away--and it will call attention to the censorship by telling the searchers when results have been removed, unlike every other search engine in China.
The more I find out about this, the more convinced I am that Google is actually doing a good thing here. Remember the episode of Star Trek Next Generation where Picard hatched a scheme to subvert the Borg from within by sending Hugh back into it with his new memories of individuality? It's like that.
Here I thought from the headline the article was talking about Roger Moore, and we could expect to see a "Farenheit 360" documentary hit theaters sometime soon.
When was this game released? Two years ago? And how fast is CGI tech improving these days? The game already looks dated.
Anyone who was really dying to play this game has probably already bought, borrowed, rented, or stolen an Xbox to play it on by now. Hell, I've managed to play through the whole damn thing and I'm not even generally into console gaming.
Cute, Microsoft, but hardly a great deal of incentive.
City of Heroes/Villains is actually very solo-friendly, depending on your class. Play a Scrapper, Tanker, Brute, or to some extent a Mastermind and you'll hardly ever have to see another player if you don't want to--especially now that a fix is in turning Arch-villains into the much-easier-to-solo Elite Bosses if your team has fewer than a certain number of people in it.
Yeah...and you can even use NWN to make your own multi-server MMORPGs by using portals to connect multiple worlds together. The Aurora toolkit is amazingly powerful in what it can do; I didn't really appreciate that fully until I took a look at some of the game worlds that are running out there, ranging from the astonishing (cases where players implemented all the 3.5 ed. rules into the game system on their own, not waiting for NWN 2 to do it for them) to the downright scary (there are a truly remarkable number of BDSM servers out there--just click the "social" tab in the multiplayer game list and see what I mean).
Players are running their own graphical MUDs. Who would have thought such a thing could be possible five years ago?
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong.
The license on the CDs says that the CDs may be copied and shared but not sold. That's it. Copied and shared. No restriction on the number of people they are to be shared with. Jim Baen is perfectly happy with people giving them away, torrenting them, sharing them on peer to peer networks, hosting them on the Internet, etc. He'd do an AOL-CD mailing if he could afford it, and has said so on the Baen Bar. (BTW, the zlynx torrents are not "his" (in the sense of the poster to whom you responded), but have been around, and known about on the Baen Bar, for quite some time.)
For what it's worth, you can get Make Room Make Room in a variety of formats now, including eReader (which, while restricted, is fairly reasonable if you don't mind its reader program) and Microsoft Reader (which can be easily cracked into HTML).
Don't forget Writing on Your Palm.
Disclaimer: I'm an occasional WoYP contributor.
In spite of this being an author who is (apparently) pro-ebooks, you can't find much of [Scalzi's] published work in that format.
You will soon. Scalzi's stuff will be included in Tor's move to Webscriptions.
Frankly, I think this is largely a matter of personal taste. I'm not going to argue that you're wrong, as it's not possible to be "wrong" when you're talking about your own opinion. I will say that my opinion differs with yours. I like being able to carry a small library's worth of books in my pocket, so I'm never without reading material wherever I am for as long as my batteries hold out. I like being able to read one-handed, and not have to worry about a paperback book not lying flat. I like being able to pocket my "book" without bookmarking it and know that returning to the exact spot where I left off is as simple as pushing a button. I like being able to get new reading material in the course of a minute or so sitting at my computer, rather than having to go all the way down to the library or bookstore to get a book that may not even be there. In college, I liked being able to read a book in class while looking like I was taking notes (though in retrospect, it probably was not as good an idea as it seemed at the time :). I also use my PDA for other things, like balancing my checkbook and keeping grocery lists--so as long as I have it, why shouldn't I read ebooks on it?
There are a lot of advantages printed books have, too, in terms of not needing battery power or special reading equipment, having greater longetivity, being able to be autographed, and so forth. Nobody's saying ebooks should or will replace printed books--or at least, I'm not. But I find that ebooks are great for reading in situations that printed books might not be.
Or at least Tor Books is, as they're going to start publishing ebooks through Webscriptions right along with Baen. Including the ebook that I reviewed for Slashdot a couple of years back, A Fire Upon the Deep . There's a great quote from Tor's senior editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, about why they came to this decision:Funny thing, I was looking back over that review I wrote, right before I discovered this article. (Too bad I didn't notice this article earlier so I could have gotten this post listed earlier without having to piggy-back on a high-ranked one, but oh well.
It's quite exciting that Tor, who publishes 300 new titles yearly as opposed to Bean's 50 or so, and across a broader spectrum of SF than Baen's military/political focus, is taking this step. Maybe more will follow suit. We can only hope.
It's funny how history repeats itself. Last time this happened, in the 1950s-60s, the cinemas were losing viewers to that new-fangled TV contraption, especially after it got color. So they tried all sorts of gimmicks to get people to come out to the theaters. About the only one that stayed around was widescreen, though "Sensurround" might be considered an ancestor of the multi-channel Dolby and DTS sound systems that were another advantage the theaters had over home video...until home video got them too.
I wonder what new gimmicks will come out of this new panic. Universal digital cinema, perhaps? Will Hollywood finally surrender and start releasing movies simultaneously to cable, home video, and cinema? Guess we'll just have to wait and see.
It's kinda like boxers
Actually, being that it's legal and all, it's actually more like briefs.
...who knows, it may be useful. So don't knock it.
Or, no, wait...do knock it.
Odd that the article doesn't mention the high-profile body-part-snatching case that made the news a couple months back--the cancerous bones of renowned news commentator and Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke were removed and sold for transplanting. That case more than any other is probably what brought the practice to media attention.
Oh, sure...and you could resell a DIVX, too.
Actually, everybody's wrong.
Serenity will never make a profit.
Why? Because no movie ever makes a profit.
Just ask all the writers and so forth who were naive enough to sign contracts awarding them a percentage of the net profit, rather than a percentage of the gross intake--including one of my favorite fantasy novelists, Peter S. Beagle, who is still owed a great deal of money for his work on the Rankin/Bass Lord of the Rings movie. It's questionable whether he'll ever see a penny of the $200 million that was paid to the rights-holder out of the Peter Jackson movies...
Putting a link works better than just pasting a URL that will be munged by Slashcode.
No, as in "This search result has been removed by government request" as opposed to "Here are all the search results you asked for."
And telling users when results have been omitted/censored. Which no other search engine in China does.
And letting their slower-but-uncensored version remain accessible to the Chinese people if they'd rather use that instead.
If people could get past their knee-jerk reverse-Lars-Ulrich "Money BAD!" reaction and consider what Google's actions mean for the Chinese people--folks who might never have realized that their searches were being censored will now have evidence of it staring them right in the face--they might consider that it is, if not an unqualified good thing, at least a step or two closer to the right direction than the Chinese people have been able to use before.
On the other hand, at least he's not predicting that Apple is going to switch to Windows...
It did work, to an extent.
"Though he seemed to lose his individuality, the introduction of Hugh's experiences into the collective had far-reaching consequences. Some eventually were severed from the collective and broke away as a renegade group. Initially dysfunctional and without purpose, this group later stumbled across and joined with Lore, Data's prototype brother, who helped them express their newfound freedom through hatred ('Descent')."
You forgot
+ Google will not host any services that store personal information--such as GMail or Blogger--within China. In other words, they can't be forced to give up information to the government that they don't keep within the borders.
To all you naysayers: Business has to make a profit. That's the way our economy works. You can grumble about that, but nothing you do is going to change it. To complain about a business being a business is disingenuous; a business has no choice but to make a profit if it's going to continue being able to provide the goods and services it makes. With that in mind, Google's decision to add an in-China bank of servers to give the Chinese people better access to the 98% of searches that would be uncensored, while telling them when results were censored, and not removing access to the slow uncensored version can only be a good thing. It increases the options available to the Chinese people, rather than taking some away--and it will call attention to the censorship by telling the searchers when results have been removed, unlike every other search engine in China.
The more I find out about this, the more convinced I am that Google is actually doing a good thing here. Remember the episode of Star Trek Next Generation where Picard hatched a scheme to subvert the Borg from within by sending Hugh back into it with his new memories of individuality? It's like that.
Oops, yeah. I conflated the name of Michael Moore with the name of his documentary, "Roger and Me." Boy is my face red.
Here I thought from the headline the article was talking about Roger Moore, and we could expect to see a "Farenheit 360" documentary hit theaters sometime soon.
When was this game released? Two years ago? And how fast is CGI tech improving these days? The game already looks dated.
Anyone who was really dying to play this game has probably already bought, borrowed, rented, or stolen an Xbox to play it on by now. Hell, I've managed to play through the whole damn thing and I'm not even generally into console gaming.
Cute, Microsoft, but hardly a great deal of incentive.
City of Heroes/Villains is actually very solo-friendly, depending on your class. Play a Scrapper, Tanker, Brute, or to some extent a Mastermind and you'll hardly ever have to see another player if you don't want to--especially now that a fix is in turning Arch-villains into the much-easier-to-solo Elite Bosses if your team has fewer than a certain number of people in it.
Squishier classes have trouble, of course.
Yeah...and you can even use NWN to make your own multi-server MMORPGs by using portals to connect multiple worlds together. The Aurora toolkit is amazingly powerful in what it can do; I didn't really appreciate that fully until I took a look at some of the game worlds that are running out there, ranging from the astonishing (cases where players implemented all the 3.5 ed. rules into the game system on their own, not waiting for NWN 2 to do it for them) to the downright scary (there are a truly remarkable number of BDSM servers out there--just click the "social" tab in the multiplayer game list and see what I mean).
Players are running their own graphical MUDs. Who would have thought such a thing could be possible five years ago?
Can't you get xmms compiled for Windows, too?
Personally, I use iTunes now, because it just works with my iPod. I could probably use something else, but why bother?
...whips your computer's ass, as well as the llama's.