So? They won't let me sign up for free over the internet, and so don't really enter into this discussion. guyminuslife makes a very good point about what will happen if there is unlimited, non-time-restricted lending of ebooks across the web. Totally different situation.
You do realize that you're responding to a thread about free public libraries, right? The margin is zero.
Second, a reality check: Baen already does offer free ebooks. They've got Jerry Pournelle, Mercedes Lackey, and Larry Niven. All of them write good stories, and are successful authors, but they're exactly not topping the NYT bestseller list. Big name authors (Stephen King, etc.) aren't going to sign on with publishers that give their ebooks away. Like it or not, the limitation that you can't offer a copy to an unlimited number of people for an arbitrary amount of time is going to be part of any DRM scheme. And until the publishers feel like dropping DRM will benefit them more than it hurts them, they won't do it.
Going to the library takes time. So does returning the book when you're done. And a library book isn't just like your personal book; if you spill your coffee on it, the library's going to charge you for it. An ebook, whether bought or lent, is exactly the same as every other copy.
Sometimes it's about scale. I'm 35. When I was in college in the mid-90s, we would copy other people's CDs. Of course, that copy was made from CD to tape, and you had to be there to do the recording (to make sure you split the album correctly between the sides of the tape), and you had to buy the tapes and keep up with them. In short, you could pirate music, but it was dependent on having a large group of friends with varied tastes in music and having lots of time to do the copying, and you were left with a copy inferior to the original. By 2002, five years after I graduated, it was trivial to amass a vast collection of music at the cost of a single hard drive dedicated to storage. These copies were very good, they did not degrade with time, and you didn't need to know anyone else who liked your kind of music in order to get them.
The publishers don't have to give us ebooks. They can refuse to put out anything but paper books. In that world the only books that are available as ebooks are ones popular enough for someone to scan, OCR, and correct them. Yes, there are limitations to ebooks, but there are advantages, too - I can take a book I buy on my Kindle and read it on a Mac, PC, Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, or Android device. It will even sync to the last page read automatically among the devices.
Ah. I couldn't figure out what people were using it for. I thought heating oil was a separate product. I'm in the deep south; around here it's noteworthy when it goes below freezing at all. We lost a lot of landscape plants last winter because the temp fell below freezing for 72 hours straight.
In the US, most stations don't sell diesel. It's not really a big deal on the highways - you can always go to a truck stop if you can't find auto diesel - but in town it can be a real pain.
You knew it was there. You just didn't realize that it might be visible to people you didn't think could see it. Parent applies: don't ever put anything on Facebook that you wouldn't put on the evening news.
You may know how to make steel, but do you know how to build a facility to make steel? Armed with an organic chemistry book and an Aldrich catalog, I could be a competent synthetic chemist, but that doesn't mean that I know how to make the precursors, or how to scale the operation up.
Well, go stick it to the man, then. I have no idea which side of the political divide you're on, but I'll remind you before you start your revolution that the rednecks are the ones with all the guns.
calls for all liberal politicians to be executed for treason
I'm not aware of any such incidents involving tea partiers (though I don't follow them very closely), as opposed to shock jocks, but if you'd care to bring them to my attention I'll happily denounce them. You cannot have a civilized society if you have people advocating the death of those who disagree with them politically, and people who suggest it should be shamed. It is a profoundly illiberal (in the classical sense, something both conservatives and liberals should embrace) impulse.
When you start advocating the death, en masse, of your political opponents, you've moved outside the realm of civilized society. Stop. Even if it's "just a joke".
WP5.1 didn't have WYSIWYG. WP6 did, at the expense of being a slow (unusably slow, on the 386s that were then still quite common) piece of crap. And MS Office sold their entire suite for less than WP sold its word processor alone.
You won't hear me argue that the best camp won - the best word processor, hands down, that I have ever used was Ami Pro 3.1, because it had the easiest-to-use and best-looking formula/equation editor out there at the exact moment in time that I was majoring in chemistry. People adopted Microsoft because it was cheaper and it was good enough.
The laws and culture are different in different places. I can assure you that the police and animal control where I live would do nothing of the sort. Not everyone lives in Portland or Austin.
Jail time for what? All I have to do is point out - truthfully - that I felt menaced on my own property and that the dogs made attacking moves. Self defense is always legitimate.
This ignores Medicare and Medicaid, and the outsized role they play in health care. Raytheon Is a private company, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that government doesn't determine their success or failure.
How about just on the 2-channel version of the soundtrack? Give the home theater people a 5.1 soundtrack with quiet and loud bits. That way, we can both be happy - in your nice basement home theater, you get quiet and loud, while in the living room (with kids, pets, household appliances, etc. contributing to the noise) you get something that you can hear all of without getting blown out of your seat from time to time. My living room and kitchen are open to one another, and I usually have the door to the laundry room open so the cats can get to their litter box. If the refrigerator cuts on, and the washer starts filling, my living room gets noisy. Same thing in the car - dynamic range compression makes things sound better there because you don't have to worry about adjusting the volume constantly.
By the way, what's the fine and jail time for the bitch who let her 80+ lb dogs roam the neighborhood, where they attacked and killed my cat in my yard? My neighbor's wife saw it happen. I didn't bother with the courts - I went over and told her that if I ever saw the dogs out, off leash, again, she'd find them in the same state I found my cat. And that plenty of the neighbors would testify that they were both menacing and unrestrained.
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So? They won't let me sign up for free over the internet, and so don't really enter into this discussion. guyminuslife makes a very good point about what will happen if there is unlimited, non-time-restricted lending of ebooks across the web. Totally different situation.
You do realize that you're responding to a thread about free public libraries, right? The margin is zero.
Second, a reality check: Baen already does offer free ebooks. They've got Jerry Pournelle, Mercedes Lackey, and Larry Niven. All of them write good stories, and are successful authors, but they're exactly not topping the NYT bestseller list. Big name authors (Stephen King, etc.) aren't going to sign on with publishers that give their ebooks away. Like it or not, the limitation that you can't offer a copy to an unlimited number of people for an arbitrary amount of time is going to be part of any DRM scheme. And until the publishers feel like dropping DRM will benefit them more than it hurts them, they won't do it.
Yes, but they won't loan them to me, because I don't live in your city. guyminuslife is making a point about what would happen with universal lending.
Going to the library takes time. So does returning the book when you're done. And a library book isn't just like your personal book; if you spill your coffee on it, the library's going to charge you for it. An ebook, whether bought or lent, is exactly the same as every other copy.
Sometimes it's about scale. I'm 35. When I was in college in the mid-90s, we would copy other people's CDs. Of course, that copy was made from CD to tape, and you had to be there to do the recording (to make sure you split the album correctly between the sides of the tape), and you had to buy the tapes and keep up with them. In short, you could pirate music, but it was dependent on having a large group of friends with varied tastes in music and having lots of time to do the copying, and you were left with a copy inferior to the original. By 2002, five years after I graduated, it was trivial to amass a vast collection of music at the cost of a single hard drive dedicated to storage. These copies were very good, they did not degrade with time, and you didn't need to know anyone else who liked your kind of music in order to get them.
The publishers don't have to give us ebooks. They can refuse to put out anything but paper books. In that world the only books that are available as ebooks are ones popular enough for someone to scan, OCR, and correct them. Yes, there are limitations to ebooks, but there are advantages, too - I can take a book I buy on my Kindle and read it on a Mac, PC, Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, or Android device. It will even sync to the last page read automatically among the devices.
Ah. I couldn't figure out what people were using it for. I thought heating oil was a separate product. I'm in the deep south; around here it's noteworthy when it goes below freezing at all. We lost a lot of landscape plants last winter because the temp fell below freezing for 72 hours straight.
YMMV. I'm aware of the stations that sell diesel, and the ones that aren't truck stops are pretty rare around here. Some of us live in BFE.
I haven't the foggiest where you live, but I've never seen kerosene at a gas station.
In the US, most stations don't sell diesel. It's not really a big deal on the highways - you can always go to a truck stop if you can't find auto diesel - but in town it can be a real pain.
You knew it was there. You just didn't realize that it might be visible to people you didn't think could see it. Parent applies: don't ever put anything on Facebook that you wouldn't put on the evening news.
You may know how to make steel, but do you know how to build a facility to make steel? Armed with an organic chemistry book and an Aldrich catalog, I could be a competent synthetic chemist, but that doesn't mean that I know how to make the precursors, or how to scale the operation up.
Well, go stick it to the man, then. I have no idea which side of the political divide you're on, but I'll remind you before you start your revolution that the rednecks are the ones with all the guns.
I think a better phrase is "slightly less deserving of being drawn and quartered" rather than "morally superior".
If they respected you, wouldn't they just have not stolen your car stereo?
calls for all liberal politicians to be executed for treason
I'm not aware of any such incidents involving tea partiers (though I don't follow them very closely), as opposed to shock jocks, but if you'd care to bring them to my attention I'll happily denounce them. You cannot have a civilized society if you have people advocating the death of those who disagree with them politically, and people who suggest it should be shamed. It is a profoundly illiberal (in the classical sense, something both conservatives and liberals should embrace) impulse.
When you start advocating the death, en masse, of your political opponents, you've moved outside the realm of civilized society. Stop. Even if it's "just a joke".
You are seriously misremembering something.
WP5.1 didn't have WYSIWYG. WP6 did, at the expense of being a slow (unusably slow, on the 386s that were then still quite common) piece of crap. And MS Office sold their entire suite for less than WP sold its word processor alone.
You won't hear me argue that the best camp won - the best word processor, hands down, that I have ever used was Ami Pro 3.1, because it had the easiest-to-use and best-looking formula/equation editor out there at the exact moment in time that I was majoring in chemistry. People adopted Microsoft because it was cheaper and it was good enough.
(remember WordPerfect, which most people were highly unwilling to leave but got forced to by MS)
Yeah, "forced". As in, "We'll sell you the entire office suite for the price WP charges for the word processor alone. And WYSIWYG will actually work."
The laws and culture are different in different places. I can assure you that the police and animal control where I live would do nothing of the sort. Not everyone lives in Portland or Austin.
IIRC the problems with turbine locomotives also included melting asphalt on bridges over the railway if it was stopped under one.
Jail time for what? All I have to do is point out - truthfully - that I felt menaced on my own property and that the dogs made attacking moves. Self defense is always legitimate.
This ignores Medicare and Medicaid, and the outsized role they play in health care. Raytheon Is a private company, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that government doesn't determine their success or failure.
How about just on the 2-channel version of the soundtrack? Give the home theater people a 5.1 soundtrack with quiet and loud bits. That way, we can both be happy - in your nice basement home theater, you get quiet and loud, while in the living room (with kids, pets, household appliances, etc. contributing to the noise) you get something that you can hear all of without getting blown out of your seat from time to time. My living room and kitchen are open to one another, and I usually have the door to the laundry room open so the cats can get to their litter box. If the refrigerator cuts on, and the washer starts filling, my living room gets noisy. Same thing in the car - dynamic range compression makes things sound better there because you don't have to worry about adjusting the volume constantly.
My driveway. Your driveway may vary.
By the way, what's the fine and jail time for the bitch who let her 80+ lb dogs roam the neighborhood, where they attacked and killed my cat in my yard? My neighbor's wife saw it happen. I didn't bother with the courts - I went over and told her that if I ever saw the dogs out, off leash, again, she'd find them in the same state I found my cat. And that plenty of the neighbors would testify that they were both menacing and unrestrained.
The comments section on this one should be a lot of fun. Don't disappoint me, trolls!
Brilliant idea. Thankfully, I already have a sprinkler system, so the water bill should be manageable - I don't pay sewage charges on that line.