Even worse (as I'm sure you know) is that they actually had the food to feed people. Grain would rot in the silos. The famine in Stalinist Russia was a human-made disaster. They had guards standing outside the repositories to keep the starving masses at bay. The only 'good' thing Stalin did was help win a war against a different crazy dictator.
Is it actually better? The news that I hear about Korean factories isn't a lot better than what I hear about the foxconn factories, especially now that foxconn has been under so much scrutiny.
Sorry, do you have a degree in climate science? Even a BSc?
I know we all like playing armchair expert here on/., but you'll forgive me if I don't trust your word the same way I trust the word of a professor in climate/atmospheric science. You're very cavalier with phrases like 'obvious explanation'; if you know anything about science at all, you know that the 'obvious explanation' has very often been the wrong one, and it's only through study and experiment that we see that we were blinded by the obvious and remained ignorant to the truth.
I love physics, but I don't presume to lecture others on how black holes work. I've read a lot about them--books and articles and transcribed talks--and listened to lectures and watched shows...but I'm still no expert. I can only assess the physics at a layman's level. If Stephen Hawking and literally thousands of other physicists say something about black holes that I think contradicts the obvious, I have no space to argue with them.
Similarly with you (and I freely admit that at this point I'm assuming that you DON'T have a degree in atmospheric science): you have no scientific basis on which to argue with thousands of scientists that currently have a good consensus that the climate is changing and that humans are responsible. Right now, the quibble is about the magnitude of the change that we'll see, not whether we'll see a change. They even have suggestions for how we can change the course of the climate shift. Unfortunately, they also know that we missed our critical point years ago, and we can't reverse the damage that we've done, even if our emissions were to drop to 0 tomorrow. This ship turns slowly, and so the effects of our inaction will be with us for a long time.
There is a consensus among climate scientists that is so overwhelming, that in almost any other field of science, we would be scrambling to take their advice. If that many doctors told me I had cancer, I wouldn't sit around second guessing them, I'd go get some friggin' treatment.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you've got outstanding credentials and you're just the vanguard of climate scientists with peer reviewed, valuable work that's going to shut me up and put me in my place. If you are, do tell. I could use some good news.
Right, that's totally the same. That's why instead of getting a tattoo, I just get a friend to draw on my arm in ballpoint pen, and instead of piercings, I figured I'd just sort of balance and strap things on various body parts.
The point isn't really to do things the same or in the most common, practical way. I have a half-sleeve up my forearm; it's neither practical nor common. But that was never the point.
Some body modders do it for art, some do it because they're basically hacking their bodies. Very few of us are doing it conform.
Well, for one thing, LEDs are more robust. From the point of view of fragility, I think that's pretty obvious.
I believe that LED bulbs are okay in dimmer switch controlled sockets. I have an LED bulb, and I use it in a socket that seems to react very strongly to power fluctuations in my apartment. The CFL bulbs I've used in there make a terrible noise and really don't seem happy with it.
I don't know if the quality of light is any different, but that's not really technology dependent, per se.
I've mentioned it a few times at this point, but I agree that I wasn't clear. That IS the most correct action. My complaint rests with people that download the DRM stripped book and feel that it's somehow 'their right' to have a copy of it because the DRM was 'so inconvenient'. If you can't abide the DRM, then you shouldn't have the product in any way, shape or form. Don't go out of your way to find excuses to not pay a content creator for their work.
Yes, more irrelevant pedantry will solve the problem.
'Consumption' has been used colloquially in this manner for years. Much in the same way someone can 'devour' a book...without eating it! Gracious!
Consumers of books also do not 'consume' the books, per se. Nor would they 'consume' an iPad or a sock. And those material goods are also capable of being passed on to another person afterwards after their useful lives have been met by the original owner; in this case, 'content' isn't special in sense that it can be passed on.
I know what you mean--data isn't being destroyed or removed from the system--but again, this is needlessly pedantic and not meaningful to the discussion at hand.
Wow, I'm really impressed with all the climate scientists posting on this story! It's funny, though. So many don't seem to believe that Climate Change is happening or that we should do anything about it. It's a real turnabout from what I normally read, or what I hear when I talk to climate scientists.
Oh, wait. Most of the people rejecting climate science aren't climate scientists themselves?
Listen, I appreciate that you're entitled to your opinion, but if I had that many oncologists telling me I had cancer, I'd sit up and get some damn medical attention. The amount of agreement in the field is actually fairly extraordinary. While I'm a programmer now, my BSc is about 50% climate and earth science. I don't know enough to make predictions, but I do know enough to read papers and figure out when I'm being snowed. Study after study, paper after paper...actual climate scientists have a solid consensus on what they believe the causes are and some good steps to try and mitigate them. Either we believe that climate science is a field that it's possible to have a specialty in, or we believe that anyone that can read a thermometer is qualified to make statements about atmospheric CO2 levels and whether or not they're harmful.
I also appreciate being a skeptic. But at a certain point, you cease being a skeptic and have just closed your eyes all together.
Climate scientists don't have all the answers, but I believe in the science that they produce a lot more than the predictions I hear from oil companies or right-wing pundits.
Flash has been a blight for over a decade. If what it took to kill it was Apple drawing a line in the sand with its iDevices, praise be to Apple. I don't care if it's nearly ubiquitous, it's terrible. And frankly, Jobs was right that a lot of the way Flash works doesn't work well with how you use your touch device.
I want Flash dead. I'm like the Trickster to Adobe's Flash.
I'm not a DRM advocate; I don't think anyone here is. What I'm not an advocate of is people rejecting the fundamental responsibility of paying for works that they consume. If you don't download DRMed files from the publisher/store, and don't go out after and find the book stripped of DRM and download it later, I have no complaint with you. Maybe I should have made it more clear that I'm irritated with the people that feel that the limited inconvenience of DRM is blanket permission to avoid paying for goods as some sort of protest.
I pay for the content I consume when I can. Excuses to not pay for what you consume are just that: excuses.
It's not a fundamental technological flaw any more than a passcode on an iPhone is a fundamental technological flaw; your assertion is absurd at best. I've yet to download an eBook that didn't work, DRMed or not. If it were a *fundamental* flaw, it would simply never work. You might say that DRM itself is fundamentally flawed in that it is doomed to always be cracked by people with some time and interest, but if you buy a Kindle book, it works on your Kindle. It pre-supposes that you own the technology to read the book, but so does any un-DRMed book. The layer of DRM is not actually noticeable to someone that has met the prior conditions for ownership. And if you strip the DRM from an eBook, it still works. There's nothing 'fundamental' at question here.
The question with DRM in eBooks is whether you should be required to own as many pieces of technology as they seem to want you to. If you want a book from the Kindle store, should you need to own a Kindle? (Leaving aside that there's a kindle app for the iPhone and a reader for the desktop, I believe.)
I'm willing to concede the point that if you don't download the product as well as not buying it, then you're at least working inside a self-consistent system. My issue is with people that are downloading the book but using the DRM as the sole excuse for not paying for it, as if to teach the companies a lesson. I believe that it's an untenable and unhelpful position to take.
A show stopper? What, you download a DRMed title and are BLINDED with rage and can't read it? Or you just fall down in a whimpering heap? What in the world are you talking about?
I've bought DRMed and un-DRMed books alike, and they all work fine. The only issue is getting the book to where I want it to be (which is, as I alluded to, so trivial as to be laughable). The reality is that a paper book's physicality is a more restrictive form of the work that you're reading than most DRM is. If I buy a book from Kobo, I have it on my desktop computer, both my Sony and Kobo eReaders, my iPad AND my iPhone. I practically can't get away from the book. If I forget my paper copy of a book at home, that's it. I don't get to read it until I get home.
DRM is philosophically offensive because it's unnecessary and treats actual paying customers as bad people, whereas actual bad people aren't slowed down by it at all. But calling it more than an inconvenience is either a ridiculous overstatement or a fundamental issue with your sense of priority.
Actually, instead of following the link that crafty.munchkin has given you, I'll cite you a relevant section from his eBook section on common misconceptions about publishing:
1. A manuscript is not the same thing as a book. Just as a random sampling of 100,000 words is not a novel, so too does a finished book differ from a manuscript (the text an author writes, which forms the core of the book). In particular, about 80-90% of the cover price of a book has nothing to do with the paper and ink object you buy in a shop; indeed, using current production standards, ebook production requires nearly as much work as paper book production. (Paper and ink are dirt cheap; proofreaders and marketing teams aren't.)
I don't know why people believe that the hard work isn't in the WRITING of the book. If any hack could write Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings, it would have been done dozens of times. Instead, we get these remarkable stand-out series; they have value because of the STORY not because of the PAPER. If you printed LotR on a dot matrix printer, it would still be a remarkable story. Print The DaVinci Code on platinum tablets in 24k gold ink and it's still an unreadable lump of dross.
$1-$2 books is a sure way to make sure you read nothing but tripe for the rest of your life.
I've read a bunch of comments and there are two things that I keep seeing:
1) "I hate DRM and I won't pay if there's DRM on a book! I'm definitely just going to download it!" 2) "DRM is so easily cracked, anyway! Why do they think it's going to stop anyone?"
Bonus:
3) "With DRM, how will I move my books to a new platform?"
We all know DRM is, at best, an inconvenience. I agree that it should be removed, and publishers should face up to the reality that people are willing to pay a fair price--even an inflated price, honestly--for a product as long as it's convenient. Piracy is only more appealing when it's easier than buying.
But if you're using DRM as an excuse to not pay for the book, you're full of shit. Seriously.
You should buy the book anyway and send an email to the company explaining why their system is counter-productive. Downloading books without paying shortchanges authors. These are the people that you're ostensibly trying to support.
iTunes ended up DRM free because the middleman (Apple, obviously) was convinced by consumers that DRM wasn't necessary, and encouraged the labels to drop DRM as a requirement. It became obvious to everyone that people are happy to spend their money to support artists they enjoy. I'm sure there's still quite an active music trading scene, but there's money changing hands, too.
Your positions on downloading and trading are inconsistent with your positions on supporting artists and convincing companies to remove DRM. You have to show them that the market is there and willing to pay (assuming they're not fleecing us) to convince them that DRM is unnecessary. In the meantime, you're just entrenching them further and making it harder for your favourite writers to do their work.
Buy books. Pay for them. If you can, buy from a publisher that's already DRM free and thank them for their decision. If you can't, buy the book and remove the DRM afterwards if you like and stop falsely complaining that you can't device-shift your collection. Then get off your lazy ass and write the publisher and remind them that you ALREADY paid for the book and that you'd appreciate it if they considered changing their policy.
I've heard this in a few places, and I'd like to point out that just because a physical book costs a certain amount, it's *not necessarily* the case that a digital version should cost less.
Yes, a physical version comes with all sorts of physical costs: the paper, ink, shipping and storage. But when I buy a book, I'm not actually looking at those things when I make my decision to buy it. The content--the actual story or information being conveyed--is what's important to me. Thus, when I pay $10 for a paperback version of one of George RR Martin's books, I'm really just trying to give him $10 for a good story that I can enjoy.
I would argue that book prices should actually stay close to what they are, and hopefully more of the money can go to the authors. In the event that I'd like a hardcopy version of the book, I'd like license to print it out myself, or even better, have it printed for me in a volume of my choice (leather bound, large format, thick paper, etc.) with the cost of the materials borne by me, since in that case I AM looking to pay some extra money for the medium.
I know this is sort of tangential to the whole discussion of price fixing and collusion, but I actually don't think that the authors should be making any less. The margins for the publishers might diminish or disappear (since everyone now has the possibility of self publishing), but I'm just concerned with the stories.
This is true in Canada. I've had the government correct my taxes *in my favour* when I've made a mistake. In University, I knew people that would just send in the receipts and income slips, and sure enough, the taxes were done for them.
I suspect this only works in cases where the taxes are simple, since the government is checking the incoming taxes for fraud anyway. If your tax situation isn't complicated, it's no more work to actually do the taxes than check them.
But the tax situation in Canada is significantly more simple to begin with. It used to take me a couple hours, once a year, and all at once to file my taxes. I actually kind of enjoyed it. Now my situation is more complicated, and I'm more concerned with spending the money to get the best possible tax return than spend my time. My accountant has definitely saved me more than they've charged.
If you search for 'Indoctrination Theory' on youtube, you'll find a 20 minute video that addresses the plot holes and stuff that just makes no sense at all. It not only changes the ending, it changes how I looked at the game.
But if it's true—and it might very well be—then BioWare failed at ending presentation, because it was too subtle for most of us to figure it out without referencing a video on youtube.
I'm on my second playthrough, and I've decided that the Geth are the thing that makes the least sense in the game. Why do Geth ships have hallways and railings? Consoles to type at? Guards? Why bother with any of that stuff? And the 'renegade' options near the end of that mission-line are stupid. They present a false dichotomy. You can be a renegade, but not only do you throw away a potential war resource, but they're no danger at all to the Quarians if you pick the paragon options. It's infuriating.
(Disclosure: I worked for BioWare for many years. I do not work for BioWare or EA anymore.)
I agree with the other AC that responded to you, but I'll say it myself: no. And no, it wouldn't be fair for them to not pay those taxes.
The fact is that even if you can afford to pay for your own healthcare, you get a large benefit out of a healthy populace around you. It may also be the case that you're not always rich enough to pay for your own care. Paying into the system even when you're not using it doesn't mean that you don't derive current or future benefit from it.
When it comes to health, we have to think about things on a much larger scale. We have to acknowledge that we live in communities, and keeping communities healthy means keeping the country healthy. And if we keep the country healthy, it comes back and individuals are healthy. The purpose of a healthcare system needs to be to serve the public interest, not to make people rich.
Healthcare is a provincial responsibility with restrictions defined by the Canada health act. The things that a province must provide and the way the money is allocated are actually very strictly mandated at a high level, though individual spending priorities are provincial prerogative. But the reason we don't have a two-tier system is due largely to the CHA.
The act is more a list of guidelines that specific spending rules, but I think it's more effective for that. Unlike the American health bill that's currently being warred over, it's easy to read the CHA; the American bill is literally thousands of pages long, detailing minutia that it seems insane for a federal government to care about. Seriously, you can read the whole Canadian Health Act on wikipedia, with commentary, in an hour or two.
Never paid for an ambulance ride, either. My insurance would cover it anyway, but I never saw a bill for that.
I'm pretty sure you don't pay 50% of your income as tax, even after all those things. My marginal tax rate is still under 30%, and the way marginal tax systems work, 30% is much, much higher than the actual amount of taxes I pay. Even with the crazy QC taxes that I live with now (one hospital trip in AB, one in QC) I suspect that my taxes are still much less than 50%. That's just what the crazies at the right wing think-tanks would have you think.
I don't disagree that there's mismanagement of funds, but no, you're probably not going to see any better service anywhere else. Emergency rooms triage people. Broken arms always rank lower than heart attacks. It will always be thus. Have enough people to handle a broken arm as soon as it comes in, and you're looking at an emergency room with a lot of excess capacity. That could either be because they've screwed up and have so many people on staff that a bunch of them are sitting idle all the time, or because of a slow night, but either way, there are people that don't have anything to do, which isn't any good for money management either.
Broken bones are minor emergencies. That's just the way it is.
Living in Canada, I can tell that you have zero experience with a health care system outside of our own.
Yeah, it's crummy. I've been hit by two cars in my life, and I've spent my time in my share of emergency rooms while bleeding and hurt. But once I left the emergency room, I didn't pay for any of the care I received. And, on the grand scale, it wasn't so bad.
I remember sitting in the waiting area, and one of the hospital volunteers came around to talk to me. He asked if he could get me anything, and apologised for the wait (I was obviously pretty badly hurt; I ended up with 23 stitches in my lip to effectively sew a chunk of it back on, and two broken teeth). I told him it wasn't so bad, since there were people literally dying while I waited. I saw families walking out of private rooms crying.
But that's triage. My injuries weren't life threatening, no matter how uncomfortable they were. If you've broken your arm and you're not going to bleed out, sit down, shut up, and cope. The reason why nobody is currently helping you is because there are other emergencies that need to be taken care of in advance of your concerns. They'll get to you when they can.
And you still won't have a bill to pay when you leave.
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Even worse (as I'm sure you know) is that they actually had the food to feed people. Grain would rot in the silos. The famine in Stalinist Russia was a human-made disaster. They had guards standing outside the repositories to keep the starving masses at bay. The only 'good' thing Stalin did was help win a war against a different crazy dictator.
Is it actually better? The news that I hear about Korean factories isn't a lot better than what I hear about the foxconn factories, especially now that foxconn has been under so much scrutiny.
You don't think much of scientists, do you?
Sorry, do you have a degree in climate science? Even a BSc?
I know we all like playing armchair expert here on /., but you'll forgive me if I don't trust your word the same way I trust the word of a professor in climate/atmospheric science. You're very cavalier with phrases like 'obvious explanation'; if you know anything about science at all, you know that the 'obvious explanation' has very often been the wrong one, and it's only through study and experiment that we see that we were blinded by the obvious and remained ignorant to the truth.
I love physics, but I don't presume to lecture others on how black holes work. I've read a lot about them--books and articles and transcribed talks--and listened to lectures and watched shows...but I'm still no expert. I can only assess the physics at a layman's level. If Stephen Hawking and literally thousands of other physicists say something about black holes that I think contradicts the obvious, I have no space to argue with them.
Similarly with you (and I freely admit that at this point I'm assuming that you DON'T have a degree in atmospheric science): you have no scientific basis on which to argue with thousands of scientists that currently have a good consensus that the climate is changing and that humans are responsible. Right now, the quibble is about the magnitude of the change that we'll see, not whether we'll see a change. They even have suggestions for how we can change the course of the climate shift. Unfortunately, they also know that we missed our critical point years ago, and we can't reverse the damage that we've done, even if our emissions were to drop to 0 tomorrow. This ship turns slowly, and so the effects of our inaction will be with us for a long time.
There is a consensus among climate scientists that is so overwhelming, that in almost any other field of science, we would be scrambling to take their advice. If that many doctors told me I had cancer, I wouldn't sit around second guessing them, I'd go get some friggin' treatment.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you've got outstanding credentials and you're just the vanguard of climate scientists with peer reviewed, valuable work that's going to shut me up and put me in my place. If you are, do tell. I could use some good news.
Right, that's totally the same. That's why instead of getting a tattoo, I just get a friend to draw on my arm in ballpoint pen, and instead of piercings, I figured I'd just sort of balance and strap things on various body parts.
The point isn't really to do things the same or in the most common, practical way. I have a half-sleeve up my forearm; it's neither practical nor common. But that was never the point.
Some body modders do it for art, some do it because they're basically hacking their bodies. Very few of us are doing it conform.
Well, for one thing, LEDs are more robust. From the point of view of fragility, I think that's pretty obvious.
I believe that LED bulbs are okay in dimmer switch controlled sockets. I have an LED bulb, and I use it in a socket that seems to react very strongly to power fluctuations in my apartment. The CFL bulbs I've used in there make a terrible noise and really don't seem happy with it.
I don't know if the quality of light is any different, but that's not really technology dependent, per se.
I've mentioned it a few times at this point, but I agree that I wasn't clear. That IS the most correct action. My complaint rests with people that download the DRM stripped book and feel that it's somehow 'their right' to have a copy of it because the DRM was 'so inconvenient'. If you can't abide the DRM, then you shouldn't have the product in any way, shape or form. Don't go out of your way to find excuses to not pay a content creator for their work.
Yes, more irrelevant pedantry will solve the problem.
'Consumption' has been used colloquially in this manner for years. Much in the same way someone can 'devour' a book...without eating it! Gracious!
Consumers of books also do not 'consume' the books, per se. Nor would they 'consume' an iPad or a sock. And those material goods are also capable of being passed on to another person afterwards after their useful lives have been met by the original owner; in this case, 'content' isn't special in sense that it can be passed on.
I know what you mean--data isn't being destroyed or removed from the system--but again, this is needlessly pedantic and not meaningful to the discussion at hand.
Wow, I'm really impressed with all the climate scientists posting on this story! It's funny, though. So many don't seem to believe that Climate Change is happening or that we should do anything about it. It's a real turnabout from what I normally read, or what I hear when I talk to climate scientists.
Oh, wait. Most of the people rejecting climate science aren't climate scientists themselves?
Listen, I appreciate that you're entitled to your opinion, but if I had that many oncologists telling me I had cancer, I'd sit up and get some damn medical attention. The amount of agreement in the field is actually fairly extraordinary. While I'm a programmer now, my BSc is about 50% climate and earth science. I don't know enough to make predictions, but I do know enough to read papers and figure out when I'm being snowed. Study after study, paper after paper...actual climate scientists have a solid consensus on what they believe the causes are and some good steps to try and mitigate them. Either we believe that climate science is a field that it's possible to have a specialty in, or we believe that anyone that can read a thermometer is qualified to make statements about atmospheric CO2 levels and whether or not they're harmful.
I also appreciate being a skeptic. But at a certain point, you cease being a skeptic and have just closed your eyes all together.
Climate scientists don't have all the answers, but I believe in the science that they produce a lot more than the predictions I hear from oil companies or right-wing pundits.
Flash has been a blight for over a decade. If what it took to kill it was Apple drawing a line in the sand with its iDevices, praise be to Apple. I don't care if it's nearly ubiquitous, it's terrible. And frankly, Jobs was right that a lot of the way Flash works doesn't work well with how you use your touch device.
I want Flash dead. I'm like the Trickster to Adobe's Flash.
I'm not a DRM advocate; I don't think anyone here is. What I'm not an advocate of is people rejecting the fundamental responsibility of paying for works that they consume. If you don't download DRMed files from the publisher/store, and don't go out after and find the book stripped of DRM and download it later, I have no complaint with you. Maybe I should have made it more clear that I'm irritated with the people that feel that the limited inconvenience of DRM is blanket permission to avoid paying for goods as some sort of protest.
I pay for the content I consume when I can. Excuses to not pay for what you consume are just that: excuses.
It's not a fundamental technological flaw any more than a passcode on an iPhone is a fundamental technological flaw; your assertion is absurd at best. I've yet to download an eBook that didn't work, DRMed or not. If it were a *fundamental* flaw, it would simply never work. You might say that DRM itself is fundamentally flawed in that it is doomed to always be cracked by people with some time and interest, but if you buy a Kindle book, it works on your Kindle. It pre-supposes that you own the technology to read the book, but so does any un-DRMed book. The layer of DRM is not actually noticeable to someone that has met the prior conditions for ownership. And if you strip the DRM from an eBook, it still works. There's nothing 'fundamental' at question here.
The question with DRM in eBooks is whether you should be required to own as many pieces of technology as they seem to want you to. If you want a book from the Kindle store, should you need to own a Kindle? (Leaving aside that there's a kindle app for the iPhone and a reader for the desktop, I believe.)
To clarify, I'm citing Stross' MCOB and saving people the time it takes to click on the link.
I'm willing to concede the point that if you don't download the product as well as not buying it, then you're at least working inside a self-consistent system. My issue is with people that are downloading the book but using the DRM as the sole excuse for not paying for it, as if to teach the companies a lesson. I believe that it's an untenable and unhelpful position to take.
A show stopper? What, you download a DRMed title and are BLINDED with rage and can't read it? Or you just fall down in a whimpering heap? What in the world are you talking about?
I've bought DRMed and un-DRMed books alike, and they all work fine. The only issue is getting the book to where I want it to be (which is, as I alluded to, so trivial as to be laughable). The reality is that a paper book's physicality is a more restrictive form of the work that you're reading than most DRM is. If I buy a book from Kobo, I have it on my desktop computer, both my Sony and Kobo eReaders, my iPad AND my iPhone. I practically can't get away from the book. If I forget my paper copy of a book at home, that's it. I don't get to read it until I get home.
DRM is philosophically offensive because it's unnecessary and treats actual paying customers as bad people, whereas actual bad people aren't slowed down by it at all. But calling it more than an inconvenience is either a ridiculous overstatement or a fundamental issue with your sense of priority.
Actually, instead of following the link that crafty.munchkin has given you, I'll cite you a relevant section from his eBook section on common misconceptions about publishing:
1. A manuscript is not the same thing as a book. Just as a random sampling of 100,000 words is not a novel, so too does a finished book differ from a manuscript (the text an author writes, which forms the core of the book). In particular, about 80-90% of the cover price of a book has nothing to do with the paper and ink object you buy in a shop; indeed, using current production standards, ebook production requires nearly as much work as paper book production. (Paper and ink are dirt cheap; proofreaders and marketing teams aren't.)
I don't know why people believe that the hard work isn't in the WRITING of the book. If any hack could write Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings, it would have been done dozens of times. Instead, we get these remarkable stand-out series; they have value because of the STORY not because of the PAPER. If you printed LotR on a dot matrix printer, it would still be a remarkable story. Print The DaVinci Code on platinum tablets in 24k gold ink and it's still an unreadable lump of dross.
$1-$2 books is a sure way to make sure you read nothing but tripe for the rest of your life.
I've read a bunch of comments and there are two things that I keep seeing:
1) "I hate DRM and I won't pay if there's DRM on a book! I'm definitely just going to download it!"
2) "DRM is so easily cracked, anyway! Why do they think it's going to stop anyone?"
Bonus:
3) "With DRM, how will I move my books to a new platform?"
We all know DRM is, at best, an inconvenience. I agree that it should be removed, and publishers should face up to the reality that people are willing to pay a fair price--even an inflated price, honestly--for a product as long as it's convenient. Piracy is only more appealing when it's easier than buying.
But if you're using DRM as an excuse to not pay for the book, you're full of shit. Seriously.
You should buy the book anyway and send an email to the company explaining why their system is counter-productive. Downloading books without paying shortchanges authors. These are the people that you're ostensibly trying to support.
iTunes ended up DRM free because the middleman (Apple, obviously) was convinced by consumers that DRM wasn't necessary, and encouraged the labels to drop DRM as a requirement. It became obvious to everyone that people are happy to spend their money to support artists they enjoy. I'm sure there's still quite an active music trading scene, but there's money changing hands, too.
Your positions on downloading and trading are inconsistent with your positions on supporting artists and convincing companies to remove DRM. You have to show them that the market is there and willing to pay (assuming they're not fleecing us) to convince them that DRM is unnecessary. In the meantime, you're just entrenching them further and making it harder for your favourite writers to do their work.
Buy books. Pay for them. If you can, buy from a publisher that's already DRM free and thank them for their decision. If you can't, buy the book and remove the DRM afterwards if you like and stop falsely complaining that you can't device-shift your collection. Then get off your lazy ass and write the publisher and remind them that you ALREADY paid for the book and that you'd appreciate it if they considered changing their policy.
I've heard this in a few places, and I'd like to point out that just because a physical book costs a certain amount, it's *not necessarily* the case that a digital version should cost less.
Yes, a physical version comes with all sorts of physical costs: the paper, ink, shipping and storage. But when I buy a book, I'm not actually looking at those things when I make my decision to buy it. The content--the actual story or information being conveyed--is what's important to me. Thus, when I pay $10 for a paperback version of one of George RR Martin's books, I'm really just trying to give him $10 for a good story that I can enjoy.
I would argue that book prices should actually stay close to what they are, and hopefully more of the money can go to the authors. In the event that I'd like a hardcopy version of the book, I'd like license to print it out myself, or even better, have it printed for me in a volume of my choice (leather bound, large format, thick paper, etc.) with the cost of the materials borne by me, since in that case I AM looking to pay some extra money for the medium.
I know this is sort of tangential to the whole discussion of price fixing and collusion, but I actually don't think that the authors should be making any less. The margins for the publishers might diminish or disappear (since everyone now has the possibility of self publishing), but I'm just concerned with the stories.
This is true in Canada. I've had the government correct my taxes *in my favour* when I've made a mistake. In University, I knew people that would just send in the receipts and income slips, and sure enough, the taxes were done for them.
I suspect this only works in cases where the taxes are simple, since the government is checking the incoming taxes for fraud anyway. If your tax situation isn't complicated, it's no more work to actually do the taxes than check them.
But the tax situation in Canada is significantly more simple to begin with. It used to take me a couple hours, once a year, and all at once to file my taxes. I actually kind of enjoyed it. Now my situation is more complicated, and I'm more concerned with spending the money to get the best possible tax return than spend my time. My accountant has definitely saved me more than they've charged.
If you search for 'Indoctrination Theory' on youtube, you'll find a 20 minute video that addresses the plot holes and stuff that just makes no sense at all. It not only changes the ending, it changes how I looked at the game.
But if it's true—and it might very well be—then BioWare failed at ending presentation, because it was too subtle for most of us to figure it out without referencing a video on youtube.
I'm on my second playthrough, and I've decided that the Geth are the thing that makes the least sense in the game. Why do Geth ships have hallways and railings? Consoles to type at? Guards? Why bother with any of that stuff? And the 'renegade' options near the end of that mission-line are stupid. They present a false dichotomy. You can be a renegade, but not only do you throw away a potential war resource, but they're no danger at all to the Quarians if you pick the paragon options. It's infuriating.
(Disclosure: I worked for BioWare for many years. I do not work for BioWare or EA anymore.)
Go to youtube and search for 'indoctrination theory'. You'll see what AC is talking about.
I agree with the other AC that responded to you, but I'll say it myself: no. And no, it wouldn't be fair for them to not pay those taxes.
The fact is that even if you can afford to pay for your own healthcare, you get a large benefit out of a healthy populace around you. It may also be the case that you're not always rich enough to pay for your own care. Paying into the system even when you're not using it doesn't mean that you don't derive current or future benefit from it.
When it comes to health, we have to think about things on a much larger scale. We have to acknowledge that we live in communities, and keeping communities healthy means keeping the country healthy. And if we keep the country healthy, it comes back and individuals are healthy. The purpose of a healthcare system needs to be to serve the public interest, not to make people rich.
Healthcare is a provincial responsibility with restrictions defined by the Canada health act. The things that a province must provide and the way the money is allocated are actually very strictly mandated at a high level, though individual spending priorities are provincial prerogative. But the reason we don't have a two-tier system is due largely to the CHA.
The act is more a list of guidelines that specific spending rules, but I think it's more effective for that. Unlike the American health bill that's currently being warred over, it's easy to read the CHA; the American bill is literally thousands of pages long, detailing minutia that it seems insane for a federal government to care about. Seriously, you can read the whole Canadian Health Act on wikipedia, with commentary, in an hour or two.
Never paid for an ambulance ride, either. My insurance would cover it anyway, but I never saw a bill for that.
I'm pretty sure you don't pay 50% of your income as tax, even after all those things. My marginal tax rate is still under 30%, and the way marginal tax systems work, 30% is much, much higher than the actual amount of taxes I pay. Even with the crazy QC taxes that I live with now (one hospital trip in AB, one in QC) I suspect that my taxes are still much less than 50%. That's just what the crazies at the right wing think-tanks would have you think.
I don't disagree that there's mismanagement of funds, but no, you're probably not going to see any better service anywhere else. Emergency rooms triage people. Broken arms always rank lower than heart attacks. It will always be thus. Have enough people to handle a broken arm as soon as it comes in, and you're looking at an emergency room with a lot of excess capacity. That could either be because they've screwed up and have so many people on staff that a bunch of them are sitting idle all the time, or because of a slow night, but either way, there are people that don't have anything to do, which isn't any good for money management either.
Broken bones are minor emergencies. That's just the way it is.
Living in Canada, I can tell that you have zero experience with a health care system outside of our own.
Yeah, it's crummy. I've been hit by two cars in my life, and I've spent my time in my share of emergency rooms while bleeding and hurt. But once I left the emergency room, I didn't pay for any of the care I received. And, on the grand scale, it wasn't so bad.
I remember sitting in the waiting area, and one of the hospital volunteers came around to talk to me. He asked if he could get me anything, and apologised for the wait (I was obviously pretty badly hurt; I ended up with 23 stitches in my lip to effectively sew a chunk of it back on, and two broken teeth). I told him it wasn't so bad, since there were people literally dying while I waited. I saw families walking out of private rooms crying.
But that's triage. My injuries weren't life threatening, no matter how uncomfortable they were. If you've broken your arm and you're not going to bleed out, sit down, shut up, and cope. The reason why nobody is currently helping you is because there are other emergencies that need to be taken care of in advance of your concerns. They'll get to you when they can.
And you still won't have a bill to pay when you leave.