The Nook, Kibo, and (I think) Sony readers all use ePub, but the books still have DRM. As you yourself point out, just because it's an open standard (or a de facto one, like MP3) doesn't mean you're automatically free of DRM.
If anything, the way this will change is if people buy the hardware, use it, and put pressure on the vendors to get rid of the DRM. It eventually worked on Apple and Amazon for music. I think Barnes & Noble would be more than happy to provide people with DRM-free books (and I've received some classics from them that already are, though they don't advertise it). It's the publishers we have to convince (and maybe Amazon, which seems to want to create an empire).
Also, note that it's trivial to crack the Adobe DRM used on the Nook, for example. And I often find myself doing it, not necessarily to pirate the book, but because the formatting is so cockeyed on my Nook that I have to bust open the ePub and tweak the CSS myself. Digital publishing still has way to go before it's truly mainstream.
What people want is the features and maybe some aspects of the hardware. Maybe the "brand" or things like enterprise/business support. People don't buy Operating Systems.
They do when the features they want are baked into the OS. BlackBerry's push infrastructure is still the best around, and it remains so because RIM has a lot of patents in this area which it defends vigorously. You "could" implement the same thing as Android apps... and yet no one has.
Are they just going to translate Dalvik bytecode back to Java bytecode, and run Android applications that way?
It would have to be something like that, though I doubt it will be on-the-fly. And Android isn't just Dalvik, it has its own set of APIs and a core Linux kernel as well. I posted some thoughts on this a couple weeks back over at InfoWorld.
When people who consume traditional/mass-market offerings hadn't heard about "indie" and didn't know that there were people who wanted to do things differently.
To me, by the time it's called "indie" it's already so watered down it's indistinguishable from mainstream. Look around the city sometime -- if you've got a lot of tattoos, you are definitely not "doing things differently."
The screen doesn't shine, attracting attention, and page turn buttons are very soft, so that click is hardly louder than a page turn.
On the Nook, you can optionally swipe the little touchscreen at the bottom to turn pages, which makes no sound at all. (The touchscreen doesn't have to be lit up to swipe it.)
One of the things San Francisco is doing now is that, when developers want to put up big new office buildings, they have to include a certain amount of "public space" in their designs. I know a couple of buildings that do this, and the result is a really nice, large, open space in the lobby, surrounded by glass, with lots of tables and chairs and some plants, where anybody can go in and sit for free. So if the local coffee shop really wants me to buy my coffee and get the fuck out, then by all means... I'll take it up the road.
Ah, but that's just the thing. Most coffee shops don't just want you to buy your coffee and get the fuck out, because a coffee shop with no people in it seems cold and uninviting, and it makes you wonder whether there's something wrong with the coffee. The traditional coffee shop atmosphere is one where people sip, read, quietly talk, study, and maybe do a little work. So they need a certain number of people doing just that.
When I hear about coffee shops making up rules to kick those people out, though, I can only assume that it must be because times are flush. Lucky you -- enjoy it while you can. Cuz you opened a coffee shop in NYC, pal. Hipster trends come and go -- by definition -- and I guarantee you, your coffee won't taste as good as the next guy's in a couple years' time, no matter what you do. You might start wishing you still had some of those customers you alienated, back when it was still cool to pretend people didn't want Nooks and Kindles.
This is much like if a restaurant wants to enforce a dress code; they are perfectly free to kick you out if you do not conform to it. I dont get why this is a story.
Sure, but there are some kinds of "dress codes" restaurants are not allowed to enforce. You can't kick me out because I'm black, for example, or because I'm in a wheelchair or because I have an oxygen tank.
And then there are restrictions that are just silly and unreasonable. A Kindle is not distracting in any way. Put it in a cover and it looks like any other book. The screen does not glow; you won't see it from across the room. And suppose the reason you have a Kindle in the first place is because you're elderly or otherwise have poor vision, and you like reading books on the Kindle because it allows you to bump up the font size?
That's why I probably wouldn't frequent any café that had restrictions like this. The restriction isn't for any kind of logical reason. It's a kind of hipsterism, where they assume that everybody who goes to the café is going to be a young person who doesn't have any vision issues, and so they are free to pick and choose who is wearing hip shoes and who is a square.
It's an idiotic attitude. It's just like the people who used to mock you, back in the 90s, for having a cell phone. Forget that it's useful; you must be a yuppie. Then it was having a Palm Pilot that made you uncool. Now people like to mock iPhones. Hey, whatever.
But to me, a Kindle is even different than all of those. It has pretty much one purpose and one purpose only: reading books. If you're sitting there staring at one, it's safe to say you're reading a book. A café that's hostile to reading books is probably not one that I'd be interested in visiting.
As for the Phoenix example, I fully believe the outcome is the result of mismanagement. This is Arizona we're talking about. Read Ken Silverstein's article in Harper's for a full exploration of the many mind-boggling choices that state's legislature has made in recent years.
Odd, I found them pretty seriously overrated. Maybe it's just the English translations, but I thought the language wavered between dull and corny throughout. The plots and characters seemed fairly run-of-the-mill, at least as far as this genre of thrillers goes (which, admittedly, is not really my usual cuppa). I chalk up their popularity to the same reasons Dan Brown is popular -- he's accessible and he can put together a twisty plot. (And no offense, but the fact that you see the books on the bestseller lists and jump back to/. to recommend the movies only reinforces this opinion.) I also found Larsson's musings on Swedish politics to be a little impenetrable at times, and thus tedious (though I realize social commentary was a large part of why he wrote in the first place).
I think Bowlby made that pretty clear - not that he was the only one, but I do like his work.
Bowlby worked on separation anxiety, not childhood fragility. Hazen and Shaver could be anybody, but I can only assume you're spinning their research to suit your point, too. Quote me some research that says the 11th grade (the grade this teacher taught) is the most emotionally fragile time of a person's life and I'll concede you have a point.
So, now let's consider a school age child. This is the most fragile time in a person's life, pschologically.
Really?
They may already be dealing with severely stressful situations outside of school, such as parents getting divorced, parents out of work, a close family member dying from cancer, the death of a pet, moving away from all their friends
On the other hand, adults have to deal with stuff like actually getting divorced, losing a job (and not being able to feed their kids), people actually dying (and more often, as they get older), pets dying, and all their friends moving away while they're stuck in a dead-end job teaching other parent's spoiled, stupid rugrats.
The way I remember it, when I was in school I didn't have to worry about rent, food, real romantic relationships, real financial responsibilities, or anything of the kind. Yeah, some of those things you mention happened to me, but I wasn't "fragile." I had a gigantic safety net beneath me that made it OK to explore the world and my place in it.
On the other hand, if my parents had mollycoddled me to the extent that I could snitch out my teacher for saying mean things about (unnamed) children and that teacher would actually get fired -- well then I figure I would grow up to be a scared, vindictive, grasping, needy adult, and then the whole rest of my life would be my "most fragile" time.
This is a real link to the text of the original blog and, shockingly enough... it's just a blog.
The teacher does not call out any particular students by name. She is talking about her feelings about teaching students in aggregate, with the overall impression that she's considering several years' worth of students.
The list of comments reads like a joke -- she's making up comments that she'd like to say, but doesn't. It's a wacky list.
The students' comments in TFA are still spot-on -- you wouldn't like to sit in a classroom where you had a teacher who thought of you this way -- but you know what? You did. We've all had teachers like this. The difference is, in our day the teacher couldn't be summarily canned for holding opinions. Welcome to the 21st century, where even teachers aren't allowed to think.
There is no basis for that statement. With your logic, as web traffic grows for any site, all ad revenue is just enough to cover growth. Realistically we know such a notion is idiotic and it simply doesn't work that way.
So how does it work? What do we "know"? Based on your comments, I'd venture it's a lot more difficult to make good money selling banner ads than you think it is -- especially when governments around the world claim your site is involved in criminal activity.
Do you see McDonald's advertising on The Pirate Bay? Or Sony? Or Pepsi? Or Ford? Just who are all these deep-pockets sponsors whom you imagine are shoveling money to the Pirate Bay, hand over fist? Do you really think the medical technician trade school in Oakland, CA that keeps popping up when I access the site has the millions to spend that you claim The Pirate Bay is earning?
So Pirate Bay is registered as a non-profit and has open books that are freely auditable?
What difference does that make? I don't have to register as a non-profit to not make money.
Sure, it's all speculation, but I agree with the GP that between operating the site and paying lawyers and other professionals, there's probably not a lot of profit in running the Pirate Bay.
My Motorola Defy just received an update. It didn't change to a new Android version number, but it improved UI performance, stability, and voicemail functionality -- and those kind of things seem like they're even more important, no? If they make my phone work better, for free, what do I care what OS version it's running?
Hmmm. Well, honestly, I've never been laid up for two weeks for any kind of cold or flu. I don't think even the chicken pox knocked me out for that long (more like nine days). Also, I can't say for sure that I've caught the flu in 20 years. Colds, sure -- but that debilitating sickness that has you stuck in bed with a pounding headache (characteristic of the flu vs. colds) -- I don't remember catching that since I was a child. If I lost as much time to the flu as you claim to have, I guess I would see it the same way as you, but I kinda suspect you're an outlier.
Then again, who's to say I haven't been a carrier of the flu without having symptoms? I'd love to see some research on that.
That's going to be darn tricky. There are two ways to combat influenza right now: one involves preventing the virus from entering cells to infect them, and the other involves preventing viruses from leaving cells (so they can't go on to infect other cells). Coincidentally, those are the two mechanisms that shift very often (and they are the source of the "H1N1" type nomenclature -- H for hemagglutinin, N for neuraminidase). Even if another part of the virus didn't change, if it doesn't have any role in transmitting the disease, it might be hard to construct a vaccine against it that's effective.
And interestingly, McCarthy recanted her claim that vaccines caused her child's problems a little over a year ago.
Not quite. Careful not to be called out on the hard facts, she now says she thinks "vaccines should be studied more carefully," and she still works as a speaker for the anti-vax movement. The current homepage for Jenny McCarthy's Generation Rescue organization includes the headline, "Recent Dr. Andrew Wakefield Media Circus: Much Ado About Nothing," where the organization flatly denies that Wakefield's study was a fraud.
they were passionate about the quality of life of future children.
You could say the same about anybody who supports any practice with enough zeal -- from anti-vaccination, to foot binding, to female circumcision, to NAMBLA. They always say they're doing it for a reason.
Yes, the tradition in science is that things need to be proven, and that we should acknowledge what is not yet proven
Not quite. The scientific tradition is that things need to be disproven. The more experiments return the same result, and the more attempts to falsify that result fail, the more reliable the theory is.
This is why activists often have a field day twisting scientists' words, because scientists will almost never come out and say "this is proven to be true," because that's not the way it works. The activist then turns around and says, "See? He admits that it hasn't been proven to be true, just like he can't prove that what I say isn't true!"
Slashdot Mirror
The Nook, Kibo, and (I think) Sony readers all use ePub, but the books still have DRM. As you yourself point out, just because it's an open standard (or a de facto one, like MP3) doesn't mean you're automatically free of DRM.
If anything, the way this will change is if people buy the hardware, use it, and put pressure on the vendors to get rid of the DRM. It eventually worked on Apple and Amazon for music. I think Barnes & Noble would be more than happy to provide people with DRM-free books (and I've received some classics from them that already are, though they don't advertise it). It's the publishers we have to convince (and maybe Amazon, which seems to want to create an empire).
Also, note that it's trivial to crack the Adobe DRM used on the Nook, for example. And I often find myself doing it, not necessarily to pirate the book, but because the formatting is so cockeyed on my Nook that I have to bust open the ePub and tweak the CSS myself. Digital publishing still has way to go before it's truly mainstream.
What people want is the features and maybe some aspects of the hardware. Maybe the "brand" or things like enterprise/business support. People don't buy Operating Systems.
They do when the features they want are baked into the OS. BlackBerry's push infrastructure is still the best around, and it remains so because RIM has a lot of patents in this area which it defends vigorously. You "could" implement the same thing as Android apps ... and yet no one has.
Are they just going to translate Dalvik bytecode back to Java bytecode, and run Android applications that way?
It would have to be something like that, though I doubt it will be on-the-fly. And Android isn't just Dalvik, it has its own set of APIs and a core Linux kernel as well. I posted some thoughts on this a couple weeks back over at InfoWorld.
When people who consume traditional/mass-market offerings hadn't heard about "indie" and didn't know that there were people who wanted to do things differently.
To me, by the time it's called "indie" it's already so watered down it's indistinguishable from mainstream. Look around the city sometime -- if you've got a lot of tattoos, you are definitely not "doing things differently."
The screen doesn't shine, attracting attention, and page turn buttons are very soft, so that click is hardly louder than a page turn.
On the Nook, you can optionally swipe the little touchscreen at the bottom to turn pages, which makes no sound at all. (The touchscreen doesn't have to be lit up to swipe it.)
One of the things San Francisco is doing now is that, when developers want to put up big new office buildings, they have to include a certain amount of "public space" in their designs. I know a couple of buildings that do this, and the result is a really nice, large, open space in the lobby, surrounded by glass, with lots of tables and chairs and some plants, where anybody can go in and sit for free. So if the local coffee shop really wants me to buy my coffee and get the fuck out, then by all means... I'll take it up the road.
Ah, but that's just the thing. Most coffee shops don't just want you to buy your coffee and get the fuck out, because a coffee shop with no people in it seems cold and uninviting, and it makes you wonder whether there's something wrong with the coffee. The traditional coffee shop atmosphere is one where people sip, read, quietly talk, study, and maybe do a little work. So they need a certain number of people doing just that.
When I hear about coffee shops making up rules to kick those people out, though, I can only assume that it must be because times are flush. Lucky you -- enjoy it while you can. Cuz you opened a coffee shop in NYC, pal. Hipster trends come and go -- by definition -- and I guarantee you, your coffee won't taste as good as the next guy's in a couple years' time, no matter what you do. You might start wishing you still had some of those customers you alienated, back when it was still cool to pretend people didn't want Nooks and Kindles.
I go to cafes to eat and drink, not play with my Nook or check my e-mail.
And by "play with my Nook," you mean read, right? God forbid.
This is much like if a restaurant wants to enforce a dress code; they are perfectly free to kick you out if you do not conform to it. I dont get why this is a story.
Sure, but there are some kinds of "dress codes" restaurants are not allowed to enforce. You can't kick me out because I'm black, for example, or because I'm in a wheelchair or because I have an oxygen tank.
And then there are restrictions that are just silly and unreasonable. A Kindle is not distracting in any way. Put it in a cover and it looks like any other book. The screen does not glow; you won't see it from across the room. And suppose the reason you have a Kindle in the first place is because you're elderly or otherwise have poor vision, and you like reading books on the Kindle because it allows you to bump up the font size?
That's why I probably wouldn't frequent any café that had restrictions like this. The restriction isn't for any kind of logical reason. It's a kind of hipsterism, where they assume that everybody who goes to the café is going to be a young person who doesn't have any vision issues, and so they are free to pick and choose who is wearing hip shoes and who is a square.
It's an idiotic attitude. It's just like the people who used to mock you, back in the 90s, for having a cell phone. Forget that it's useful; you must be a yuppie. Then it was having a Palm Pilot that made you uncool. Now people like to mock iPhones. Hey, whatever.
But to me, a Kindle is even different than all of those. It has pretty much one purpose and one purpose only: reading books. If you're sitting there staring at one, it's safe to say you're reading a book. A café that's hostile to reading books is probably not one that I'd be interested in visiting.
Coffee shops used to be about going to meet people, sitting down with a good cup of coffee or tea.
And some people just went to grab some coffee and study or read a book. Maybe they found all your yakkety-yakk distracting.
As for the Phoenix example, I fully believe the outcome is the result of mismanagement. This is Arizona we're talking about. Read Ken Silverstein's article in Harper's for a full exploration of the many mind-boggling choices that state's legislature has made in recent years.
Odd, I found them pretty seriously overrated. Maybe it's just the English translations, but I thought the language wavered between dull and corny throughout. The plots and characters seemed fairly run-of-the-mill, at least as far as this genre of thrillers goes (which, admittedly, is not really my usual cuppa). I chalk up their popularity to the same reasons Dan Brown is popular -- he's accessible and he can put together a twisty plot. (And no offense, but the fact that you see the books on the bestseller lists and jump back to /. to recommend the movies only reinforces this opinion.) I also found Larsson's musings on Swedish politics to be a little impenetrable at times, and thus tedious (though I realize social commentary was a large part of why he wrote in the first place).
I think Bowlby made that pretty clear - not that he was the only one, but I do like his work.
Bowlby worked on separation anxiety, not childhood fragility. Hazen and Shaver could be anybody, but I can only assume you're spinning their research to suit your point, too. Quote me some research that says the 11th grade (the grade this teacher taught) is the most emotionally fragile time of a person's life and I'll concede you have a point.
So, now let's consider a school age child. This is the most fragile time in a person's life, pschologically.
Really?
They may already be dealing with severely stressful situations outside of school, such as parents getting divorced, parents out of work, a close family member dying from cancer, the death of a pet, moving away from all their friends
On the other hand, adults have to deal with stuff like actually getting divorced, losing a job (and not being able to feed their kids), people actually dying (and more often, as they get older), pets dying, and all their friends moving away while they're stuck in a dead-end job teaching other parent's spoiled, stupid rugrats.
The way I remember it, when I was in school I didn't have to worry about rent, food, real romantic relationships, real financial responsibilities, or anything of the kind. Yeah, some of those things you mention happened to me, but I wasn't "fragile." I had a gigantic safety net beneath me that made it OK to explore the world and my place in it.
On the other hand, if my parents had mollycoddled me to the extent that I could snitch out my teacher for saying mean things about (unnamed) children and that teacher would actually get fired -- well then I figure I would grow up to be a scared, vindictive, grasping, needy adult, and then the whole rest of my life would be my "most fragile" time.
This is a real link to the text of the original blog and, shockingly enough ... it's just a blog.
The teacher does not call out any particular students by name. She is talking about her feelings about teaching students in aggregate, with the overall impression that she's considering several years' worth of students.
The list of comments reads like a joke -- she's making up comments that she'd like to say, but doesn't. It's a wacky list.
The students' comments in TFA are still spot-on -- you wouldn't like to sit in a classroom where you had a teacher who thought of you this way -- but you know what? You did. We've all had teachers like this. The difference is, in our day the teacher couldn't be summarily canned for holding opinions. Welcome to the 21st century, where even teachers aren't allowed to think.
There is no basis for that statement. With your logic, as web traffic grows for any site, all ad revenue is just enough to cover growth. Realistically we know such a notion is idiotic and it simply doesn't work that way.
So how does it work? What do we "know"? Based on your comments, I'd venture it's a lot more difficult to make good money selling banner ads than you think it is -- especially when governments around the world claim your site is involved in criminal activity.
Do you see McDonald's advertising on The Pirate Bay? Or Sony? Or Pepsi? Or Ford? Just who are all these deep-pockets sponsors whom you imagine are shoveling money to the Pirate Bay, hand over fist? Do you really think the medical technician trade school in Oakland, CA that keeps popping up when I access the site has the millions to spend that you claim The Pirate Bay is earning?
As such, the ONLY reasonable assumption is they were making money left and right.
Except that the Pirate Bay has flatly denied that it makes "huge profits," and in fact they suspect that they operate at a loss overall.
So Pirate Bay is registered as a non-profit and has open books that are freely auditable?
What difference does that make? I don't have to register as a non-profit to not make money.
Sure, it's all speculation, but I agree with the GP that between operating the site and paying lawyers and other professionals, there's probably not a lot of profit in running the Pirate Bay.
My Motorola Defy just received an update. It didn't change to a new Android version number, but it improved UI performance, stability, and voicemail functionality -- and those kind of things seem like they're even more important, no? If they make my phone work better, for free, what do I care what OS version it's running?
Hmmm. Well, honestly, I've never been laid up for two weeks for any kind of cold or flu. I don't think even the chicken pox knocked me out for that long (more like nine days). Also, I can't say for sure that I've caught the flu in 20 years. Colds, sure -- but that debilitating sickness that has you stuck in bed with a pounding headache (characteristic of the flu vs. colds) -- I don't remember catching that since I was a child. If I lost as much time to the flu as you claim to have, I guess I would see it the same way as you, but I kinda suspect you're an outlier.
Then again, who's to say I haven't been a carrier of the flu without having symptoms? I'd love to see some research on that.
Well, that was a particularly witty retort. Kudos for that. But your prejudice still has no more validity than it did before.
That's going to be darn tricky. There are two ways to combat influenza right now: one involves preventing the virus from entering cells to infect them, and the other involves preventing viruses from leaving cells (so they can't go on to infect other cells). Coincidentally, those are the two mechanisms that shift very often (and they are the source of the "H1N1" type nomenclature -- H for hemagglutinin, N for neuraminidase). Even if another part of the virus didn't change, if it doesn't have any role in transmitting the disease, it might be hard to construct a vaccine against it that's effective.
And interestingly, McCarthy recanted her claim that vaccines caused her child's problems a little over a year ago.
Not quite. Careful not to be called out on the hard facts, she now says she thinks "vaccines should be studied more carefully," and she still works as a speaker for the anti-vax movement. The current homepage for Jenny McCarthy's Generation Rescue organization includes the headline, "Recent Dr. Andrew Wakefield Media Circus: Much Ado About Nothing," where the organization flatly denies that Wakefield's study was a fraud.
they were passionate about the quality of life of future children.
You could say the same about anybody who supports any practice with enough zeal -- from anti-vaccination, to foot binding, to female circumcision, to NAMBLA. They always say they're doing it for a reason.
Yes, the tradition in science is that things need to be proven, and that we should acknowledge what is not yet proven
Not quite. The scientific tradition is that things need to be disproven. The more experiments return the same result, and the more attempts to falsify that result fail, the more reliable the theory is.
This is why activists often have a field day twisting scientists' words, because scientists will almost never come out and say "this is proven to be true," because that's not the way it works. The activist then turns around and says, "See? He admits that it hasn't been proven to be true, just like he can't prove that what I say isn't true!"
Not to mention, the MMR vaccine has not contained mercury-based preservatives (thiomersal) for ten years now.