The copyright law is the reason why most restaurants ditched singing Happy Birthday song. Are we really better off with that? What benefit to the society was achieved?
For what it's worth, most restaurants that play music already have an ASCAP license, which allows them to sing Happy Birthday all day long. They sing something else because it's more fun than every single restaurant singing that same song. In a way, it lets them distinguish themselves from others.
I don't approve of the ASCAP/BMI/etc. schemes, but the diversification of songs, chants, etc. in the realm of birthday celebrations - and (live, non-cover versions of) music in general I'll take.
Mind you, there's plenty of verbiage on the site along the lines of "If you have been downloading or sharing content illegally" (where said downloading may or may not be illegal depending on jurisdiction), but afaik not in the actual process outline.
Yes, I'm sure that it could be extended to downloads in the future, and yes I know that there's a case to be made that IP address != individual. I'm merely addressing the whole distributing vs obtaining bit here.
I don't think anybody can speak for 'everyone'. If you asked the ARRRRRR types, everybody in Hollywood would love to charge you per pixel * second of content watched with a minimum of $100/month and something about firstborns, while if you ask the weasely lawyer types in the employ of the record labels/studios, then every internet user by default is somebody who simply gets couchpotato to download All The Things into a folder that is shared across multiple P2P programs and a torrent client directly sources from as well.
I think you'll find the truth lays somewhere in the middle and most people in the comments so far simply believe that all copyright enforcement should be given up on since the companies still make plenty of money and if they wish to make more money they should just find a better business model. ( None of them have even the faintest idea of what this better business model would constitute, but then again it doesn't fall to them to figure that out. )
But in terms of the strikes model, very few are actually attacking that. Instead, they're either attacking the particulars of the implementation, or copyright enforcement in general (well, with some notable exceptions).
Hell, I'm a fan of Queen. I'm friends with gays, atheists, hell, at least one murderer.
One of these is not like the others.
Is it the fan of Queen? It's the fan of Queen, isn't it?
From the implied conjugation between being a fan of Queen and one's views on homosexuality to the grouping together of Gays, Atheists and Murderers, to the "I don't hate X, why some of my best friends are X!", I don't know what happened there.
I'm sure he didn't mean it that way - it is, in part, just our perception that mcgrew went full wonko with that part of his post.
For the curious about the subject line, go watch "Shut Up And Sing". It is relevant in some ways, not so much in others. You can make up your own mind on what lessons to take away from that movie. I will, however, say that 1. there's an obvious difference between the right to free speech and not suffering the repercussions of exercising that right, and 2. people easily become sheeple given crafty shepherds.
Sounds better than the current malarky of putting the data on the disk and charging me an unlock code for material that should have been in the damn game to begin with
You're right, they should definitely not put the data on the disk and instead just sell it as a hefty download on release day. Or, sell it as a hefty download 30 days later. Or, sell it as an expansion pack (on disc) 60 days later. Or... something else with sufficient dissociation that you'd happily pony up that money - even though it still comes down to the fact that they had the material ready on the day of release but chose not to give it to right then and there for free. Just that you wouldn't be so blatantly aware of it nor have that feeling of entitlement inspired by the "but the bits and bytes are right here! *violently waves disc around*" phenomenon.
This ruling is not just huge - if upheld all the way, this could be the death knell for any hope of enforcing copyrights where it comes to individual users/distributors as long as the internet or structures like it (a potentially shared resource as the only identifying element) is involved.
This is basically me, downloading all of the movies currently on offer on TPB, putting them on a server, and seeding them for as long as that system will last, sharing these movies with hundreds of thousands of people during the course of its operation, with there being nothing for the copyright holders to even start forming litigation around short of a John Doe; which doesn't get them very far if a judge is just going to say "who is John Doe?" and the answer is "we don't know, that's why it's a John Doe."
They can write to my ISP, and even my ISP would have to concede that while the complaining party may very well have an IP address and a timestamp, and my ISP may very know which account that is assigned to, due to the fact that even my ISP doesn't know who - in terms of a legal entity - actually used the account.
At worst, my ISP has a clause saying that the account may be closed if they have a reasonable suspicion that I am indeed performing the above - but they'll likely still try to shy away from doing so.
The question is, how is this going to be countered? If there's one thing we've learned over time it's that the copyright holders will not just let the inevitable come easy.
Will laws be constructed, or (re)interpreted, such that the account holder can be held legally accountable for that which is done through the account? Will only authorized modems be allowed on ISP networks with users wishing to use these modems required to use a token that identifies the person per-packet up to the ISP and make them legally responsible to take great care that this token remains only with them? If this, will lobby groups (and I'm not just thinking of 'big content' here) then push to have this per-packet identification be sent out across all of the internet so that infringement of all sorts can be dealt with directly?
Yes, this is a victory on many levels for the great majority of internet users (albeit just a little more for 'pirates' who stand to benefit the most). Just don't be surprised if it's going to get worse long before it's going to get better.
That said, there's that 'if' at the top of my comment. That's a big 'if'.
On a side note: Good to see you again, NYCL - it's been a while.
You presume that Twin B has proof of either their own innocence, or Twin A's guilt.
If Twin B does not, saying "it wasn't me" is not obstructing justice - it's telling the truth, even if Twin A tells a lie when saying the same thing. Saying "It was him!", similarly, is of no help.
A completely dissimilar, and yet similar, situation occurred in NL a good while back; 'Nijmeegse Scooterzaak' Two kids on a moped, on the run from police, fatal accident. The prosecutor could not prove which of the two was the one operating the vehicle (each said it was the other). As a result, neither could be charged for anything too meaningful.
A lot of people did say "just charge them both, and find them both guilty", but there were quite a few people who said that if we, as a society, go down that road, that would be a terrible mistake to make - considering you are then willingly and knowingly finding an innocent person guilty; even if you don't know which of the two (or more) is the innocent one; also the opinion of the court that reluctantly let them off the hook for the greater charges.
The prosecutor has decided to appeal, though, which would land the case in something of an equivalent to a U.S. Supreme Court. I have no idea when the case is supposed to be heard, however.
Who knows what Y2K would have been had we just done nothing
Well, presumably...
the teams of coders working in even-then-archaic coding languages to adapt old software to work beyond their expected lifespan...would know.
But where are their stories?
I'm asking out of curiosity - not necessarily because I'm sceptical. Wikipedia does have some stories of Y2K-bug related issues (one even fatal, although I think more than just Y2K-bug failed there), but there doesn't seem to be a reference to people stating they were at so-and-so fixing a bug in this-and-that which, if left in place, would have caused such-and-such doomsday scenario. Maybe that's because those teams were under NDAs. Maybe it's because wikipedia doesn't like anecdotal stuff.
So I Googled around. Plenty of "Tell us your story" articles, and plenty of comments from people who 'were there' - by which they mean that they were alive on Jan 1st, 2000, and they reported nothing happening. There were some comments of people actually working to fix the problems, though. Mostly dealing with dates in log files, dates displayed, the odd "a customer could've gotten a bill for NN years of service" which would readily have been resolved after a customer complaint anyway. ( Actually, the number of finance-related recounts seem to outrate any others. Makes sense as they deal with dates a lot, but also because nobody wants to lose money, right? ) One guy noted that a central heating unit did not shut down at midnight and just kept going. Uncomfortable, sure, but not exactly a doomsday scenario either.
I think that perhaps the most unsettling, and telling, recount is from a Mattias Handley, who stated:
Still today, I wonder what would have happened if we hadnÂt done all that work, since we replaced a lot of code, a lot of hardware and also found lots of systems that nobody knew what they where doing.
But you'd think with all the people saying that it's because of all the hard work of people fixing these bugs that doom and gloom was avoided, that there would be people with actual "I averted doom and gloom, here's how" stories. If there are, please do link to them in follow-up comments (or write your own experience here - google might pick up on it for the next curious person to find.)
No, you wanted 2TiB more, not 1.819TiB. Which means that you should have gone shopping for a 2.2TB drive.
Now, if the store where you bought this was advertising it as 2TiB, by all means go back and demand they rectify the situation. If they did advertise it as 2TB but you still believe you should have gotten 2TiB, feel free to try dragging them to court for false advertising. Otherwise, just accept that you goofed based on an assumption that hasn't held in at least a decade. It happens to the best of us. When in doubt - as some in the shipping industry still are wrt 'ton' (short vs long), ask.
While I agree with your comment's latter part, I wonder if you caught what you wrote in the first part after posting - considering that Lightroom is a RAW processing app (among other).
No, I'm pointing out quirks in Photoshop. Again, I use it from time to time and am perfectly proficient with it. Do I prefer X over Y? That depends entirely on what I need to do, not whether or not it is open source (I certainly don't compile the thing myself, so I certainly have no direct stake in that aspect) or whether it is the defacto standard and big shot photographer/graphics design artist So DeSo lends their name and made-up quotes to marketing material.
Unfortunately you didn't actually address the points I was making, but rather attacked its name (hey, fair enough, I do so in another comment) and then suggest no professional graphics house uses it. Odd - I know several that do, there's a reason CinePaint was created and was initially based on The GIMP.
Yeah, I mentioned that change in another comment noting that I think it's the wrong direction to go, and somebody else also mentioned this change as a negative one.
Supposedly the GIMP developers talked to 'professionals' and made the change based on their input. I hope they stop talking to 'professionals'.
That said, I do know of a few other applications where save/save as deal strictly with their own native data formats and you have to use import/export to work with others. None of them are in the graphics realm, but they do all have one thing in common: save to anything but native, and you lose all your work. You're left with just the 'end result', as it were.
The same applies to The GIMP. I guess if there really were a bunch of users who made images with a bunch of layers, layer masks, etc., saved to JPG, and then when they had to make a change found that not only was all that information lost but re-saving made the quality go down, then some protection against themselves may be warranted. However, older GIMP versions already had warnings about exactly that - perhaps the warnings should have been improved, perhaps a preference override should be offered (it is, sort of), but ultimately I can 'understand' why the change was made and - knowing the keyboard shortcuts - it's not that big of a deal (again, same argument as in my list of things in Photoshop that are wonky).
Re:My experience with the GIMP
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The Book of GIMP
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Unified transform tool
Couldn't possibly agree more. For the curious, it's not just about being able to scale/rotate/shear/etc. with one tool - it's about those operations happening concurrently when finalized. Right now, a scale followed by a rotate is lower in quality than a rorate followed by a scale. So if you ever scale something down to roughly the size you need it to be, then realize it needs to be rotated a bit - you'll have to perform the rotation, jot down how much you needed to rotate it, undo both the rotate and the scale, rotate it by the amount you jotted down, and scale again. And no, the cage deformation tool is not an appropriate alternative - it doesn't do a point-to-point deformation. The perspective tool is also not an appropriate alternative, as you can't retain aspect ratio (why this is still called the 'perspective' tool is anyone's guess).
On Canvas Preview
Preferable using the on-screen pixels for performance sake. This would need quite a few changes under the hood, but GEGL does allow for this.
16/32 Color Bit Depth
Yep - and, with it, appropriate support for RAW files.
Layer Masks and other nondestructive editing.
I don't know if this will come to GIMP in the foreseeable future. For the curious, think of this as the old (might still be in there, haven't used it in forever) Adobe Premiere workflow of adding effects in realtime, and then having to 'render' to the final output. So in the above example of scale/rotate - right now if I scale that back up, I get a bunch of blocky pixels (or fuzzy, depending on extrapolator). In a non-destructive workflow, it would reference the original pixels. The down side to this is that you need to keep references to everything and, of course, have to 'render' the final result.
I'd really like an improvement to layers in GIMP. Right now you can't select multiple layers and move them up and down. Layer groups makes it tolerable, but it's still slower than photoshop.
Honestly, I'd keep layers for simplicity sake (for most purposes, it's just fine), but add an additional node-based workflow. I'm guessing you're familiar with node-based workflows, but those who aren't.. google it.. it makes you wonder why we're still using such a simplistic concept of layers in the first place.
Photoshop's menu organization is just about perfect; might as well copy it.
Going to have to disagree with you there. I find no logic in Image, Adjust... to adjust something on what happens to be the active layer, considering the effect it has is on the layer, not on the overall image. That's just one of many little bits that confound me. I'm not saying GIMP's menu and tool layout is better, mind you - just that when looking for ways to improve it, as I said in another comment, not all of Photoshop is gold.
Re:My experience with the GIMP
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The Book of GIMP
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Don't you think you might be tainted by your 15 years of use with Photoshop?
Don't get me wrong - I'm certainly not saying that GIMP is 'waaaay' better than Photoshop. Far from it. But a 5-year old (really? let's try 8, at least.) can probably find their way around either of them in the same amount of time.
Just to counter your example, I've mostly been used to another graphics editor and GIMP, and only occasionally use Photoshop. Here's some of the things I encountered in the past that I thought "oh sweet jesus, wtf?"
Panning around an image. Practically any application middle mouse 'button' and drag away. Photoshop? Hold the space bar, and drag with left mouse button. Huh?
Adding a layer mask. Right-click layer, choose 'add layer mask'. Photoshop? I had to actually google this.. it's a funny looking icon of a rectangle with a circle in it at the bottom of the layers dialog. What?
Zooming. Ctrl+scrollwheel - again, almost any application. Photoshop? Alt+scrollwheel. Eh?
Pasting bitmap data on the clipboard as a new image. Edit, Paste as, New image. Photoshop? File, New, OK, Paste. Change to single layer or Photoshop will complain when you try to save the thing. Really?
Yeah, when you get used to it and learn the keyboard shortcuts these really aren't big issues - I don't really think about them anymore. But I wouldn't exactly hold all of Photoshop up as an example in UIX classes. ( Fly-out tools don't help either. Long-press a tool to find other tools that may only be vaguely related to the tool you first saw? )
Counter-counter example - GIMP's transform tools. Who do I bribe to bump those up to the top of the "let's fix this" list?
There's nothing wrong with the name, per se. It just has unfortunate connotations.
Let's say that after OpenOffice.org had to be split off, rather than than the already baffling 'LibreOffice', they had gone with Phree Open Office Program.
Instead of Blender, it could have been Free Animation/Rendering Toolchain.
Instead of Linux it could have been Free UNIX Command Kit.
And really, nothing would have been wrong with those names per se. Until you try explaining to somebody that you're using FART and The GIMP to make some graphics for your POOP Impress presentation on your FUCK machine. That's when you're treated to raised eyebrows, at the least.
That, in part, is why Film GIMP was quickly renamed to CinePaint; a paint app used primarily in the film industry, which tends to be pretty Linux-heavy as it is and is filled with geeks who would 'understand' GIMP just fine. http://www.cinepaint.org/more/press/cinepaint.pr.2003.3.1.html ( The other part being that it started to be less and less GIMP-based and more cobbled together from various open source applications, so keeping 'GIMP' in there just stopped making sense anyway. But they still decided on something that "will present a more professional name". )
The GIMP developers, however, brush off criticism with the FAQ entry: "GIMP is comfortable with its name and thinks that you should apologise for your rudeness".
That said, sources are available. It would be exceedingly trivial - short of evil bits of code in the source - to search&replace all of the 'GIMP' strings used for presentation and complying with the remainder of the licenses and publish an alternative build. I don't think anybody does. So as much as people like to complain about the name, it seems it's not enough for an issue for people to do something about it. There's bigger dragons to slay in The GIMP. Single window mode was a big one. GEGL getting fully implemented is another. User friendliness of various tools is next. ( imho they made a misstep with the new 'save as' behavior, but that's more of a personal preference. )
In the Gimp, fixing the white balance is a manual process using curves, but in Lightroom, you just point at a neutral color in the photo and it's all done for you.
Colors, Levels..., Pick gray point. Same sort of thing. The only problem is that it expects this to be the 50% grey point, so you may still have to shift things around a little afterward. I agree that this is something The GIMP could do better (there's scripts that may be of interest there. Another problem is that most people don't look beyond the 'automatic white balance' option in The GIMP.. which is truly awful and shouldn't even be there.
I won't contest the graduated neutral density filter because you're right - that's more involved in The GIMP. Again, something that could probably be fixed with a simple script or just accepting that it takes a bit more work but ultimately offers more flexibility.
These are two basic photo post-processing tasks that Lightroom is better at, true. Then again, Lightroom is better at that than Photoshop, too. You then go on to talk about the cataloging and batch features (GIMP can do batch, but let's not get into that), which similarly are not generally features of a photo editing tool but rather something like, say, Picasa (I'm sure there's a FLOSS 'equivalent').
Basically, The GIMP is not the tool for the job, and I'm glad you have realized that. Perhaps it can become that tool given a few tweaks, but I'm not sure that's its goal.
What you might be looking for - and I honestly wouldn't know for sure as I have only used darktable in a limited fashion and your use cases may not be at all similar to mine - are tools like DigiKam, DarkTable and RawTherapee. http://www.darktable.org/ http://www.digikam.org/ http://rawtherapee.com/ There's probably others, these are the ones I'm aware of as they deal with RAW files - which The GIMP can't handle those quite as well as anybody would like.
That said, since you already splurged for Lightroom - or hoisted a flag - you might as well keep using that. It's an excellent piece of software. ( Still, can't hurt to at least try the alternatives. )
Which, in turn, really isn't that much of a difficulty. The guy even compares it to a TomTom, and those generally have less than 2GB of storage as it is and will still let you store even the smallest of streets + a bunch of other data (e.g. approximate location of a house number along a street, zip codes, etc.) for the better part of a continent.
Somebody already mentioned Osmand, I myself tend to use Navfree. Works just fine as long as you ignore some of the routing they provide (right turn + U-turn + right turn = going straight.. admittedly, at some lights, this really is the faster route.. but then there's the 'exit highway, cross minor road, get back onto highway' quirks).
That, to me, is really the superficial difficulty - and why most people enjoy google's directions (which are almost on par with TomTom's).
I say superficial, because even more difficult - apparently - is making the app work intuitively and offering features people commonly need.
Just again as an example, and here Google's directions could really shine if they bothered... There's a road that seems to connect with another road and allows you to get from A to B in less than half the time compared to when that connection isn't there. Unfortunately, that connection is not there - it's 250 yards or so of private land with private 'road' and the owner is flipping off the government until they offer enough to take away the 12 feet strip of non-arable, barren, littered-with-junk land from him.
On my TomTom, I would have to tell it that a road isn't accessible, find me an alternative. Unfortunately, since that section is not a separate section, I can only tell it that I can't enter the road that's leading up to that section, at all. It makes me go around even longer.
On Navfree, I can't even point to a road. I can only say that for whatever reason, I can't go down the next N miles (or yards). Since the turn-off to the way around is a few miles out, I have to tell it, at that point on the map, that I can't go down the next few miles. The result is that it, too, decides that the turn-off is not an option since I just told it I can't go down the next N miles. I have to drive up to the section, tell it I can't go down the next 100 yards or whatever, and then it'll suggest the usual way around.
On Google's Navigation.. I don't even know how I would do this. Possibly go to the 'alternate routes' screen, but I think I'd have to start a new navigation.
On web-based Google Maps? Click the trajectory, drag over to what to me looks like an alternate route, and have Google tell me 'yup, you can go through here... it's N miles long and will take you M minutes'. That's a major positive usability factor of web-based Google Maps.
Add to that list things like lack of support for multiple destinations, lack of routing options (offering only 'fastest' is just sad, 'fastest' and 'shortest' is substantially better, but what happened to 'easiest' (more relaxed version of 'fewest turns'), ease of getting directions from A to B where A is not your current position, etc. etc. and the navigation apps really still have a long way to go. Storing the maps is definitely not the difficult part.
Slightly off-topic, but sometimes I wish there weren't updates - or, rather, that the authors did a better job of keeping in mind the ramifications of their updates. Google's Play store doesn't help, though.
Just to venture on-topic for a moment.. keep the APK files around. Even if there's never an update, at least you'll still have the app. If the app also relies on a service, and that service goes down, you're still screwed. (F/L)OSS can help there, but only if you feel like compiling things yourself and actually know how the service worked.
Back off-topic.. an example of a bad update, Flightradar24 (Pro). I'm not even talking about the recent breaking of features, I'm sure that will be fixed. I am, however, talking about the 10MB+ that the app now is thanks to high resolution graphics for 'retina display' tablets getting included. For the top of the line phones, that doesn't matter - especially if they're running Android 4.whatever. For anything else, 10MB+ over the 2MB it used to be means you may have to juggle things around to get 20MB+ of free space before you can grab the app and have it not complain about free space. Even for the phones that don't have that problem, though, that's a bunch of resources being used for no particularly good reason. One solution would be to split this out to different apps. But then of course the popularity of the app gets split out (which means you rank lower in Google Play, etc.), users end up downloading wrong versions, etc. So I can understand why most developers don't (some do split out HD versions, usually with a higher price on that version).
Another solution would be for the Play store to actually only serve up an APK with resources applicable to your device. It already knows whether an app can or cannot run on it, based on hardware specifications, the APK already has resources split out to various resolutions, and not too long ago the Play store started serving up update 'patches' rather than the full APK if the app is already installed. Would be nice if they put these things to good use.
Time for a '(system) storage is cheap'-phone upgrade, I suppose.
You can have trademarks of the same name applied to a different trade. I'm pretty sure that the cider production trade is rather unrelated to the glbt gaming culture trade.
Prior art as to its common use by glbt gamers going back a decade or two would be a more appropriate argument in the trademark dispute.
Well, we're not talking about a modern human, at least - but depending on just which article you read, they're human, proto-human, the same species or sub-species. Then if you're bored and click onward, just defining 'species' itself is apparently not all that black and white (see 'species problem').
A common layman's definition may be depending on interbreeding - but then there's Ring Species. Another may add the fertility of the offspring - but then there's the many Zebroids that end up being fertile (even if most are not).
Just to loop this around to your original post, consider this alternative: Richard Dawkins, according to the Species article, "[...] defines two organisms as conspecific if and only if they have the same number of chromosomes and, for each chromosome, both organisms have the same number of nucleotides". I'm sure there's more to it than that, but let's roll with that quotation. People with Down Syndrome generally have an extra chromosome. Per the above, that would mean that they are not the same species as most of the rest of us. ( Please note that Dawkins also argues against Speciesism, so in that context the notion that the two groups would not be the same species may be considered moot. See also Anthropocentrism)
If you then substitute the whole "neanderthal" bit in your original post with "person with Down Syndrome", the questions suddenly seem completely preposterous. I say 'seem' because it wasn't all that long ago that in the U.S. there was quite a bit of eugenics going on targeting people with Down Syndrome. But since that no longer applies, consider the movement for acceptance of people with Down Syndrome - who do generally look physically different, may be developmentally different, etc. etc. much like a Neanderthal would be ( in before anybody thinks I'm saying people with Down Syndrome are Neanderthals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Avfac4zI8l4#t=2612s ), could similar arguments not be made for this Neanderthalian offspring?
While ethics may lay the foundation, I think that initially it would come down to legality. How are our rights granted to us (we may like to think that there are inalienable rights but in reality we derive them from what rights are granted us by governing bodies)? What are the exact conditions required? As far as I could figure out from NL law (which seems similar to U.S. law), it is derived from Personhood (not to be confused with the semi-recent movements to declare a fertilized egg a person). This has in the past excluded certain groups, while more recently some governments have extended certain personhood rights to e.g. Great Apes. The Personhood article states with regard to U.S. law: "A person is recognized by law as such, not because he is human, but because rights and duties are ascribed to him. The person is the legal subject or substance of which the rights and duties are attributes."
So you'd really have to ask if this Neanderthalian being - if not considered a Human being - would be considered a Person. I'm not convinced that there would be solid arguments against that notion, especially in light of the Personhood of others (such as, say, corporations; see Corporate Personhood) that may well be less deserving of the associated rights and duties.
I'm glad it's only 'so, so wrong' and not 'entirely wrong'.
I understand the point you're making - you paid to watch the movie and in your view it doesn't matter if that's a crappy SD 4:3 pan-and-scan with poor audio quality with barely even stereo separation that you can't hear in the family room anyway making it near impossible to follow, or the HD 16:9 with minor black bars because the movie was actually 2.3x:1 with surround sound and captions.
In your view, those additional pixels, the additional audio channels and captions simply don't exist in the equation.
Would you then also argue that blu-ray movies should cost the exact same as their DVD counterparts? Would you argue that if you go to the counter at a store and pay for the DVD they just scanned, that you should be entitled to walk back to the racks, put the DVD back where it was, grab the blu-ray, and walk out with that?
If you did buy the VHS and you believe you paid for the movie (regardless of format, pixels, audio, captions, etc.), then how does bonus content and the actual physical media factor into what you're saying?
Personally, I don't see them as 'the same stuff'. Yeah, if the blu-ray was basically a transfer of the original VHS just as it would be if I'd digitize the thing myself, I'd certainly not want to pay much more for it than just the physical media. But they tend not to be.
Flip the argument around. Let's say in a few years you get the 4k version of a movie in the h.264 follow-up with 21 channels of audio etc. etc. etc. on whatever new media follows. You manage to screw up that physical media, and decide to write to the company behind it. They reply that they're sorry to hear you damaged the copy and send you a nice 320x240 mono audio version. Supposedly, this is 'the same stuff', so you should be perfectly happy with that solution, right? Or is it only 'the same stuff' if it is of at least equal or better usability/appeal?
Why can't we get copies of our ebooks when we buy the dead-tree version?
Because they want you to buy it twice.
How do you buy 'it' twice when the 'it' is two different things, unless you're talking about the text itself and not the form, formatting, etc.?
If you buy the dead-tree version, you're buying the physical copy that you can feel the weight of, page through, put a physical bookmark into, read anywhere - not just in strong sunlight but even where you have no facility to charge your e-reader at all resell just fine if you treat it nice and - if you're one of the people with a book-peen - put it in your conspicuously displayed library for your guests to admire and use for brief talking points and the odd 'take it, I loved it!' suggestion.
If you buy the ebook version you're buying the one that doesn't take up that physical space, that you won't damage and put folds in, that you can take with you - along with hundreds of other books - on an e-reader, a tablet or even your smartphone - and thus read pretty much everywhere you want and transfer between devices (provided not locked to a device or platform) as you please.
Both have their pros and cons, and that is what you pay for - just as you pay for the 1080p picture with surround sound on a disc that seeks in no time or a stream you can access from practically anywhere despite the fact that once upon a time, a long, long time ago, you bought the same content on VHS.
Is it rather nice to get both at the same time? Yes. Do I think that it would be reasonable - to say the least - that you could get the alternative content for a small extra if you already own one version rather than full price? Heck yeah. But that doesn't mean that I think it's unreasonable for them to want to charge you twice for the same content delivered in two distinctly different ways. You can always DIY; just as Amazon's option is a case of convenience - considering you can always just rip the CD yourself, you're welcome to OCR the book yourself and put it on your digital reader of choice. Or you can pay for the convenience / alternative presentation.... or go the route of 'piracy', then you can have all that without the hassle of paying for it. Piracy is driving the industry's changes of mind very well.. at this pace, we should get the pipedream realized come 2020.
Would you like them all to have the same dimensions so that you're not building an oblong pyramid with every addition of device, too?
As much as I prefer nice perpendicular-angled boxes myself, that is more of an aversion to convex sides that make it impossible to stack anything on top of them - or them on top of anything - than it is about the actual angles. Looks like this thing's X shape will happily let it stand on a flat surface on all 4 sides, and anything else will happily lay flat on it.
Most likely, though, I would just put it in the furniture meant for all the audio/visual and the odd book - which currently only has 2 devices stacked (PVR/DVD combo and DVD player (plays all regions, no hacky firmware for the PVR/DVD available)).
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For what it's worth, most restaurants that play music already have an ASCAP license, which allows them to sing Happy Birthday all day long. They sing something else because it's more fun than every single restaurant singing that same song. In a way, it lets them distinguish themselves from others.
I don't approve of the ASCAP/BMI/etc. schemes, but the diversification of songs, chants, etc. in the realm of birthday celebrations - and (live, non-cover versions of) music in general I'll take.
I am under the impression that this system does go after people who 'share', rather than those who download.
http://www.copyrightinformation.org/the-copyright-alert-system/what-is-a-copyright-alert/
Mind you, there's plenty of verbiage on the site along the lines of "If you have been downloading or sharing content illegally" (where said downloading may or may not be illegal depending on jurisdiction), but afaik not in the actual process outline.
Yes, I'm sure that it could be extended to downloads in the future, and yes I know that there's a case to be made that IP address != individual. I'm merely addressing the whole distributing vs obtaining bit here.
I don't think anybody can speak for 'everyone'. If you asked the ARRRRRR types, everybody in Hollywood would love to charge you per pixel * second of content watched with a minimum of $100/month and something about firstborns, while if you ask the weasely lawyer types in the employ of the record labels/studios, then every internet user by default is somebody who simply gets couchpotato to download All The Things into a folder that is shared across multiple P2P programs and a torrent client directly sources from as well.
I think you'll find the truth lays somewhere in the middle and most people in the comments so far simply believe that all copyright enforcement should be given up on since the companies still make plenty of money and if they wish to make more money they should just find a better business model. ( None of them have even the faintest idea of what this better business model would constitute, but then again it doesn't fall to them to figure that out. )
But in terms of the strikes model, very few are actually attacking that. Instead, they're either attacking the particulars of the implementation, or copyright enforcement in general (well, with some notable exceptions).
Is it the fan of Queen? It's the fan of Queen, isn't it?
From the implied conjugation between being a fan of Queen and one's views on homosexuality to the grouping together of Gays, Atheists and Murderers, to the "I don't hate X, why some of my best friends are X!", I don't know what happened there.
I'm sure he didn't mean it that way - it is, in part, just our perception that mcgrew went full wonko with that part of his post.
For the curious about the subject line, go watch "Shut Up And Sing". It is relevant in some ways, not so much in others. You can make up your own mind on what lessons to take away from that movie. I will, however, say that 1. there's an obvious difference between the right to free speech and not suffering the repercussions of exercising that right, and 2. people easily become sheeple given crafty shepherds.
You're right, they should definitely not put the data on the disk and instead just sell it as a hefty download on release day.
Or, sell it as a hefty download 30 days later.
Or, sell it as an expansion pack (on disc) 60 days later.
Or... something else with sufficient dissociation that you'd happily pony up that money - even though it still comes down to the fact that they had the material ready on the day of release but chose not to give it to right then and there for free. Just that you wouldn't be so blatantly aware of it nor have that feeling of entitlement inspired by the "but the bits and bytes are right here! *violently waves disc around*" phenomenon.
This ruling is not just huge - if upheld all the way, this could be the death knell for any hope of enforcing copyrights where it comes to individual users/distributors as long as the internet or structures like it (a potentially shared resource as the only identifying element) is involved.
This is basically me, downloading all of the movies currently on offer on TPB, putting them on a server, and seeding them for as long as that system will last, sharing these movies with hundreds of thousands of people during the course of its operation, with there being nothing for the copyright holders to even start forming litigation around short of a John Doe; which doesn't get them very far if a judge is just going to say "who is John Doe?" and the answer is "we don't know, that's why it's a John Doe."
They can write to my ISP, and even my ISP would have to concede that while the complaining party may very well have an IP address and a timestamp, and my ISP may very know which account that is assigned to, due to the fact that even my ISP doesn't know who - in terms of a legal entity - actually used the account.
At worst, my ISP has a clause saying that the account may be closed if they have a reasonable suspicion that I am indeed performing the above - but they'll likely still try to shy away from doing so.
The question is, how is this going to be countered? If there's one thing we've learned over time it's that the copyright holders will not just let the inevitable come easy.
Will laws be constructed, or (re)interpreted, such that the account holder can be held legally accountable for that which is done through the account? Will only authorized modems be allowed on ISP networks with users wishing to use these modems required to use a token that identifies the person per-packet up to the ISP and make them legally responsible to take great care that this token remains only with them? If this, will lobby groups (and I'm not just thinking of 'big content' here) then push to have this per-packet identification be sent out across all of the internet so that infringement of all sorts can be dealt with directly?
Yes, this is a victory on many levels for the great majority of internet users (albeit just a little more for 'pirates' who stand to benefit the most). Just don't be surprised if it's going to get worse long before it's going to get better.
That said, there's that 'if' at the top of my comment. That's a big 'if'.
On a side note: Good to see you again, NYCL - it's been a while.
Let's say Twin A did it.
You presume that Twin B has proof of either their own innocence, or Twin A's guilt.
If Twin B does not, saying "it wasn't me" is not obstructing justice - it's telling the truth, even if Twin A tells a lie when saying the same thing.
Saying "It was him!", similarly, is of no help.
A completely dissimilar, and yet similar, situation occurred in NL a good while back; 'Nijmeegse Scooterzaak' Two kids on a moped, on the run from police, fatal accident. The prosecutor could not prove which of the two was the one operating the vehicle (each said it was the other). As a result, neither could be charged for anything too meaningful.
A lot of people did say "just charge them both, and find them both guilty", but there were quite a few people who said that if we, as a society, go down that road, that would be a terrible mistake to make - considering you are then willingly and knowingly finding an innocent person guilty; even if you don't know which of the two (or more) is the innocent one; also the opinion of the court that reluctantly let them off the hook for the greater charges.
The prosecutor has decided to appeal, though, which would land the case in something of an equivalent to a U.S. Supreme Court. I have no idea when the case is supposed to be heard, however.
curses. Well it's a good thing I didn't have to fix any Y2K bugs - I can't even manage a simple </blockquote> ;)
Well, presumably...
And in all likelihood that's what you got.
No, you wanted 2TiB more, not 1.819TiB.
Which means that you should have gone shopping for a 2.2TB drive.
Now, if the store where you bought this was advertising it as 2TiB, by all means go back and demand they rectify the situation. If they did advertise it as 2TB but you still believe you should have gotten 2TiB, feel free to try dragging them to court for false advertising. Otherwise, just accept that you goofed based on an assumption that hasn't held in at least a decade. It happens to the best of us. When in doubt - as some in the shipping industry still are wrt 'ton' (short vs long), ask.
While I agree with your comment's latter part, I wonder if you caught what you wrote in the first part after posting - considering that Lightroom is a RAW processing app (among other).
No, I'm pointing out quirks in Photoshop. Again, I use it from time to time and am perfectly proficient with it. Do I prefer X over Y? That depends entirely on what I need to do, not whether or not it is open source (I certainly don't compile the thing myself, so I certainly have no direct stake in that aspect) or whether it is the defacto standard and big shot photographer/graphics design artist So DeSo lends their name and made-up quotes to marketing material.
Unfortunately you didn't actually address the points I was making, but rather attacked its name (hey, fair enough, I do so in another comment) and then suggest no professional graphics house uses it. Odd - I know several that do, there's a reason CinePaint was created and was initially based on The GIMP.
I think you should learn from your co-AC who at least bothered to point out why some things I mentioned were just so - even if I still think they're quirks:
http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3440537&cid=42826763
Yeah, I mentioned that change in another comment noting that I think it's the wrong direction to go, and somebody else also mentioned this change as a negative one.
Supposedly the GIMP developers talked to 'professionals' and made the change based on their input. I hope they stop talking to 'professionals'.
That said, I do know of a few other applications where save/save as deal strictly with their own native data formats and you have to use import/export to work with others. None of them are in the graphics realm, but they do all have one thing in common: save to anything but native, and you lose all your work. You're left with just the 'end result', as it were.
The same applies to The GIMP. I guess if there really were a bunch of users who made images with a bunch of layers, layer masks, etc., saved to JPG, and then when they had to make a change found that not only was all that information lost but re-saving made the quality go down, then some protection against themselves may be warranted. However, older GIMP versions already had warnings about exactly that - perhaps the warnings should have been improved, perhaps a preference override should be offered (it is, sort of), but ultimately I can 'understand' why the change was made and - knowing the keyboard shortcuts - it's not that big of a deal (again, same argument as in my list of things in Photoshop that are wonky).
Couldn't possibly agree more. For the curious, it's not just about being able to scale/rotate/shear/etc. with one tool - it's about those operations happening concurrently when finalized. Right now, a scale followed by a rotate is lower in quality than a rorate followed by a scale. So if you ever scale something down to roughly the size you need it to be, then realize it needs to be rotated a bit - you'll have to perform the rotation, jot down how much you needed to rotate it, undo both the rotate and the scale, rotate it by the amount you jotted down, and scale again.
And no, the cage deformation tool is not an appropriate alternative - it doesn't do a point-to-point deformation. The perspective tool is also not an appropriate alternative, as you can't retain aspect ratio (why this is still called the 'perspective' tool is anyone's guess).
Preferable using the on-screen pixels for performance sake. This would need quite a few changes under the hood, but GEGL does allow for this.
Yep - and, with it, appropriate support for RAW files.
I don't know if this will come to GIMP in the foreseeable future.
For the curious, think of this as the old (might still be in there, haven't used it in forever) Adobe Premiere workflow of adding effects in realtime, and then having to 'render' to the final output.
So in the above example of scale/rotate - right now if I scale that back up, I get a bunch of blocky pixels (or fuzzy, depending on extrapolator). In a non-destructive workflow, it would reference the original pixels. The down side to this is that you need to keep references to everything and, of course, have to 'render' the final result.
Honestly, I'd keep layers for simplicity sake (for most purposes, it's just fine), but add an additional node-based workflow. I'm guessing you're familiar with node-based workflows, but those who aren't.. google it.. it makes you wonder why we're still using such a simplistic concept of layers in the first place.
Going to have to disagree with you there. I find no logic in Image, Adjust... to adjust something on what happens to be the active layer, considering the effect it has is on the layer, not on the overall image. That's just one of many little bits that confound me.
I'm not saying GIMP's menu and tool layout is better, mind you - just that when looking for ways to improve it, as I said in another comment, not all of Photoshop is gold.
Don't you think you might be tainted by your 15 years of use with Photoshop?
Don't get me wrong - I'm certainly not saying that GIMP is 'waaaay' better than Photoshop. Far from it. But a 5-year old (really? let's try 8, at least.) can probably find their way around either of them in the same amount of time.
Just to counter your example, I've mostly been used to another graphics editor and GIMP, and only occasionally use Photoshop. Here's some of the things I encountered in the past that I thought "oh sweet jesus, wtf?"
Panning around an image. Practically any application middle mouse 'button' and drag away. Photoshop? Hold the space bar, and drag with left mouse button. Huh?
Adding a layer mask. Right-click layer, choose 'add layer mask'. Photoshop? I had to actually google this.. it's a funny looking icon of a rectangle with a circle in it at the bottom of the layers dialog. What?
Zooming. Ctrl+scrollwheel - again, almost any application. Photoshop? Alt+scrollwheel. Eh?
Pasting bitmap data on the clipboard as a new image. Edit, Paste as, New image. Photoshop? File, New, OK, Paste. Change to single layer or Photoshop will complain when you try to save the thing. Really?
Yeah, when you get used to it and learn the keyboard shortcuts these really aren't big issues - I don't really think about them anymore. But I wouldn't exactly hold all of Photoshop up as an example in UIX classes.
( Fly-out tools don't help either. Long-press a tool to find other tools that may only be vaguely related to the tool you first saw? )
Counter-counter example - GIMP's transform tools. Who do I bribe to bump those up to the top of the "let's fix this" list?
There's nothing wrong with the name, per se. It just has unfortunate connotations.
Let's say that after OpenOffice.org had to be split off, rather than than the already baffling 'LibreOffice', they had gone with Phree Open Office Program.
Instead of Blender, it could have been Free Animation/Rendering Toolchain.
Instead of Linux it could have been Free UNIX Command Kit.
And really, nothing would have been wrong with those names per se. Until you try explaining to somebody that you're using FART and The GIMP to make some graphics for your POOP Impress presentation on your FUCK machine. That's when you're treated to raised eyebrows, at the least.
That, in part, is why Film GIMP was quickly renamed to CinePaint; a paint app used primarily in the film industry, which tends to be pretty Linux-heavy as it is and is filled with geeks who would 'understand' GIMP just fine.
http://www.cinepaint.org/more/press/cinepaint.pr.2003.3.1.html
( The other part being that it started to be less and less GIMP-based and more cobbled together from various open source applications, so keeping 'GIMP' in there just stopped making sense anyway. But they still decided on something that "will present a more professional name". )
The GIMP developers, however, brush off criticism with the FAQ entry: "GIMP is comfortable with its name and thinks that you should apologise for your rudeness".
That said, sources are available. It would be exceedingly trivial - short of evil bits of code in the source - to search&replace all of the 'GIMP' strings used for presentation and complying with the remainder of the licenses and publish an alternative build. I don't think anybody does. So as much as people like to complain about the name, it seems it's not enough for an issue for people to do something about it. There's bigger dragons to slay in The GIMP. Single window mode was a big one. GEGL getting fully implemented is another. User friendliness of various tools is next. ( imho they made a misstep with the new 'save as' behavior, but that's more of a personal preference. )
Colors, Levels..., Pick gray point. Same sort of thing. The only problem is that it expects this to be the 50% grey point, so you may still have to shift things around a little afterward. I agree that this is something The GIMP could do better (there's scripts that may be of interest there.
Another problem is that most people don't look beyond the 'automatic white balance' option in The GIMP.. which is truly awful and shouldn't even be there.
I won't contest the graduated neutral density filter because you're right - that's more involved in The GIMP. Again, something that could probably be fixed with a simple script or just accepting that it takes a bit more work but ultimately offers more flexibility.
These are two basic photo post-processing tasks that Lightroom is better at, true. Then again, Lightroom is better at that than Photoshop, too. You then go on to talk about the cataloging and batch features (GIMP can do batch, but let's not get into that), which similarly are not generally features of a photo editing tool but rather something like, say, Picasa (I'm sure there's a FLOSS 'equivalent').
Basically, The GIMP is not the tool for the job, and I'm glad you have realized that. Perhaps it can become that tool given a few tweaks, but I'm not sure that's its goal.
What you might be looking for - and I honestly wouldn't know for sure as I have only used darktable in a limited fashion and your use cases may not be at all similar to mine - are tools like DigiKam, DarkTable and RawTherapee.
http://www.darktable.org/
http://www.digikam.org/
http://rawtherapee.com/
There's probably others, these are the ones I'm aware of as they deal with RAW files - which The GIMP can't handle those quite as well as anybody would like.
That said, since you already splurged for Lightroom - or hoisted a flag - you might as well keep using that. It's an excellent piece of software. ( Still, can't hurt to at least try the alternatives. )
Which, in turn, really isn't that much of a difficulty. The guy even compares it to a TomTom, and those generally have less than 2GB of storage as it is and will still let you store even the smallest of streets + a bunch of other data (e.g. approximate location of a house number along a street, zip codes, etc.) for the better part of a continent.
Somebody already mentioned Osmand, I myself tend to use Navfree. Works just fine as long as you ignore some of the routing they provide (right turn + U-turn + right turn = going straight.. admittedly, at some lights, this really is the faster route.. but then there's the 'exit highway, cross minor road, get back onto highway' quirks).
That, to me, is really the superficial difficulty - and why most people enjoy google's directions (which are almost on par with TomTom's).
I say superficial, because even more difficult - apparently - is making the app work intuitively and offering features people commonly need.
Just again as an example, and here Google's directions could really shine if they bothered...
There's a road that seems to connect with another road and allows you to get from A to B in less than half the time compared to when that connection isn't there. Unfortunately, that connection is not there - it's 250 yards or so of private land with private 'road' and the owner is flipping off the government until they offer enough to take away the 12 feet strip of non-arable, barren, littered-with-junk land from him.
On my TomTom, I would have to tell it that a road isn't accessible, find me an alternative. Unfortunately, since that section is not a separate section, I can only tell it that I can't enter the road that's leading up to that section, at all. It makes me go around even longer.
On Navfree, I can't even point to a road. I can only say that for whatever reason, I can't go down the next N miles (or yards). Since the turn-off to the way around is a few miles out, I have to tell it, at that point on the map, that I can't go down the next few miles. The result is that it, too, decides that the turn-off is not an option since I just told it I can't go down the next N miles. I have to drive up to the section, tell it I can't go down the next 100 yards or whatever, and then it'll suggest the usual way around.
On Google's Navigation.. I don't even know how I would do this. Possibly go to the 'alternate routes' screen, but I think I'd have to start a new navigation.
On web-based Google Maps? Click the trajectory, drag over to what to me looks like an alternate route, and have Google tell me 'yup, you can go through here... it's N miles long and will take you M minutes'.
That's a major positive usability factor of web-based Google Maps.
Add to that list things like lack of support for multiple destinations, lack of routing options (offering only 'fastest' is just sad, 'fastest' and 'shortest' is substantially better, but what happened to 'easiest' (more relaxed version of 'fewest turns'), ease of getting directions from A to B where A is not your current position, etc. etc. and the navigation apps really still have a long way to go. Storing the maps is definitely not the difficult part.
Slightly off-topic, but sometimes I wish there weren't updates - or, rather, that the authors did a better job of keeping in mind the ramifications of their updates. Google's Play store doesn't help, though.
Just to venture on-topic for a moment.. keep the APK files around. Even if there's never an update, at least you'll still have the app. If the app also relies on a service, and that service goes down, you're still screwed. (F/L)OSS can help there, but only if you feel like compiling things yourself and actually know how the service worked.
Back off-topic.. an example of a bad update, Flightradar24 (Pro). I'm not even talking about the recent breaking of features, I'm sure that will be fixed. I am, however, talking about the 10MB+ that the app now is thanks to high resolution graphics for 'retina display' tablets getting included. For the top of the line phones, that doesn't matter - especially if they're running Android 4.whatever. For anything else, 10MB+ over the 2MB it used to be means you may have to juggle things around to get 20MB+ of free space before you can grab the app and have it not complain about free space. Even for the phones that don't have that problem, though, that's a bunch of resources being used for no particularly good reason.
One solution would be to split this out to different apps. But then of course the popularity of the app gets split out (which means you rank lower in Google Play, etc.), users end up downloading wrong versions, etc. So I can understand why most developers don't (some do split out HD versions, usually with a higher price on that version).
Another solution would be for the Play store to actually only serve up an APK with resources applicable to your device. It already knows whether an app can or cannot run on it, based on hardware specifications, the APK already has resources split out to various resolutions, and not too long ago the Play store started serving up update 'patches' rather than the full APK if the app is already installed. Would be nice if they put these things to good use.
Time for a '(system) storage is cheap'-phone upgrade, I suppose.
You can have trademarks of the same name applied to a different trade. I'm pretty sure that the cider production trade is rather unrelated to the glbt gaming culture trade.
Prior art as to its common use by glbt gamers going back a decade or two would be a more appropriate argument in the trademark dispute.
Well, we're not talking about a modern human, at least - but depending on just which article you read, they're human, proto-human, the same species or sub-species. Then if you're bored and click onward, just defining 'species' itself is apparently not all that black and white (see 'species problem').
A common layman's definition may be depending on interbreeding - but then there's Ring Species.
Another may add the fertility of the offspring - but then there's the many Zebroids that end up being fertile (even if most are not).
Just to loop this around to your original post, consider this alternative:
Richard Dawkins, according to the Species article, "[...] defines two organisms as conspecific if and only if they have the same number of chromosomes and, for each chromosome, both organisms have the same number of nucleotides". I'm sure there's more to it than that, but let's roll with that quotation.
People with Down Syndrome generally have an extra chromosome. Per the above, that would mean that they are not the same species as most of the rest of us.
( Please note that Dawkins also argues against Speciesism, so in that context the notion that the two groups would not be the same species may be considered moot. See also Anthropocentrism)
If you then substitute the whole "neanderthal" bit in your original post with "person with Down Syndrome", the questions suddenly seem completely preposterous. I say 'seem' because it wasn't all that long ago that in the U.S. there was quite a bit of eugenics going on targeting people with Down Syndrome.
But since that no longer applies, consider the movement for acceptance of people with Down Syndrome - who do generally look physically different, may be developmentally different, etc. etc. much like a Neanderthal would be ( in before anybody thinks I'm saying people with Down Syndrome are Neanderthals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Avfac4zI8l4#t=2612s ), could similar arguments not be made for this Neanderthalian offspring?
While ethics may lay the foundation, I think that initially it would come down to legality. How are our rights granted to us (we may like to think that there are inalienable rights but in reality we derive them from what rights are granted us by governing bodies)? What are the exact conditions required? As far as I could figure out from NL law (which seems similar to U.S. law), it is derived from Personhood (not to be confused with the semi-recent movements to declare a fertilized egg a person). This has in the past excluded certain groups, while more recently some governments have extended certain personhood rights to e.g. Great Apes. The Personhood article states with regard to U.S. law: "A person is recognized by law as such, not because he is human, but because rights and duties are ascribed to him. The person is the legal subject or substance of which the rights and duties are attributes."
So you'd really have to ask if this Neanderthalian being - if not considered a Human being - would be considered a Person. I'm not convinced that there would be solid arguments against that notion, especially in light of the Personhood of others (such as, say, corporations; see Corporate Personhood) that may well be less deserving of the associated rights and duties.
I'm glad it's only 'so, so wrong' and not 'entirely wrong'.
I understand the point you're making - you paid to watch the movie and in your view it doesn't matter if that's a crappy SD 4:3 pan-and-scan with poor audio quality with barely even stereo separation that you can't hear in the family room anyway making it near impossible to follow, or the HD 16:9 with minor black bars because the movie was actually 2.3x:1 with surround sound and captions.
In your view, those additional pixels, the additional audio channels and captions simply don't exist in the equation.
Would you then also argue that blu-ray movies should cost the exact same as their DVD counterparts? Would you argue that if you go to the counter at a store and pay for the DVD they just scanned, that you should be entitled to walk back to the racks, put the DVD back where it was, grab the blu-ray, and walk out with that?
If you did buy the VHS and you believe you paid for the movie (regardless of format, pixels, audio, captions, etc.), then how does bonus content and the actual physical media factor into what you're saying?
Personally, I don't see them as 'the same stuff'. Yeah, if the blu-ray was basically a transfer of the original VHS just as it would be if I'd digitize the thing myself, I'd certainly not want to pay much more for it than just the physical media. But they tend not to be.
Flip the argument around. Let's say in a few years you get the 4k version of a movie in the h.264 follow-up with 21 channels of audio etc. etc. etc. on whatever new media follows. You manage to screw up that physical media, and decide to write to the company behind it. They reply that they're sorry to hear you damaged the copy and send you a nice 320x240 mono audio version.
Supposedly, this is 'the same stuff', so you should be perfectly happy with that solution, right? Or is it only 'the same stuff' if it is of at least equal or better usability/appeal?
How do you buy 'it' twice when the 'it' is two different things, unless you're talking about the text itself and not the form, formatting, etc.?
If you buy the dead-tree version, you're buying the physical copy that you can feel the weight of, page through, put a physical bookmark into, read anywhere - not just in strong sunlight but even where you have no facility to charge your e-reader at all resell just fine if you treat it nice and - if you're one of the people with a book-peen - put it in your conspicuously displayed library for your guests to admire and use for brief talking points and the odd 'take it, I loved it!' suggestion.
If you buy the ebook version you're buying the one that doesn't take up that physical space, that you won't damage and put folds in, that you can take with you - along with hundreds of other books - on an e-reader, a tablet or even your smartphone - and thus read pretty much everywhere you want and transfer between devices (provided not locked to a device or platform) as you please.
Both have their pros and cons, and that is what you pay for - just as you pay for the 1080p picture with surround sound on a disc that seeks in no time or a stream you can access from practically anywhere despite the fact that once upon a time, a long, long time ago, you bought the same content on VHS.
Is it rather nice to get both at the same time? Yes. Do I think that it would be reasonable - to say the least - that you could get the alternative content for a small extra if you already own one version rather than full price? Heck yeah. But that doesn't mean that I think it's unreasonable for them to want to charge you twice for the same content delivered in two distinctly different ways. You can always DIY; just as Amazon's option is a case of convenience - considering you can always just rip the CD yourself, you're welcome to OCR the book yourself and put it on your digital reader of choice. Or you can pay for the convenience / alternative presentation. ... or go the route of 'piracy', then you can have all that without the hassle of paying for it. Piracy is driving the industry's changes of mind very well.. at this pace, we should get the pipedream realized come 2020.
Would you like them all to have the same dimensions so that you're not building an oblong pyramid with every addition of device, too?
As much as I prefer nice perpendicular-angled boxes myself, that is more of an aversion to convex sides that make it impossible to stack anything on top of them - or them on top of anything - than it is about the actual angles. Looks like this thing's X shape will happily let it stand on a flat surface on all 4 sides, and anything else will happily lay flat on it.
Most likely, though, I would just put it in the furniture meant for all the audio/visual and the odd book - which currently only has 2 devices stacked (PVR/DVD combo and DVD player (plays all regions, no hacky firmware for the PVR/DVD available)).