When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author's Guild, 2002
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party [...]
Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007
This kind of juxtaposition is what I had in mind when I expanded a/. comment in this piece on the Kindle.
I think the Kindle gets so much press because it's technologically so damn impressive but legally so damn irritating. Until there's a way of solving the hurdles to distributing books, I wouldn't even consider buying the Kindle.
Incidentally, I just made a similar point here. Cable sucks, and WiMax is here -- in Capitol Hill, anyway -- but has its own problems, as the link at my former post demonstrates.
Incidentally, this is why I mentioned ClearWire last time broadband came up. Some posters responded by pointing out that ClearWire isn't very good either, but given the choice between one unresponsive cable company and an unresponsive but upstart wireless company, I chose the latter. So far, anyway, we've been getting up and down speeds faster than what we had before and for less money.
Granted, I doubt this situation will last forever and suspect that ClearWire is as eager to oversubscribe as cable companies are. The question for me is, which choice of evils will I pick? And why can't I find city council members interested in municipal FIOS?
This actually sounds like a very good idea -- do you know of any municipalities that have actually installed such a system? I ask because it also sounds like a system that would be harder to implement than it sounds, as how would one actually move cable from place to place? How would it scale from one house to hundreds or thousands? And although we call it the "last mile," it could be as long as five or ten miles from the telco's box to the house.
Anyhow, thanks for the insightful post, which was actually moderated correctly!
Thanks for the heads up. I'm only signed up for six months, but the big issue for me was price: it's about $25 less than cable, and, in addition, Millenium was never responsive when the line went myteriously dead and such. Oh, and it also galled me that cable TV was only $15 or so more per month, compared to $50 or so as a standalone package -- but I don't have a TV (sorry to be this guy) and felt like they were jerking me around. Yes, I know you want to cell me bundles, but I have zero use for one and don't want to be part of your marketing ploy.
So far the dl/ul speeds are pretty good, and I haven't noticed the 6 - 9 p.m. slowdown that used to occur. This may become a bigger problem as more people sign up. I do live in Seattle, about a mile from downtown, so if anywhere in the city is going to get good connections it ought to be people in my area.
I'm sorry to hear the abysmal stories about ClearWire but am not especially surprised by them, given how low their nominal competition sets the bar. I can only hope the competition from ClearWire improves cable service, much as mobiles made landline telecos moderately more responsive and satellite TV forced cable companies to improve their offerings, if not their service.
In many ways we do invest for the long term. POTS has been around for about a century. For another example, my parents' house was built in 1996 or something like that, and they have an option for something like six phone lines if they so choose. Except they now use cell phones and have zero phone lines -- oops! All the money spent on those extra copper lines doesn't matter, but I know they'd use fiber optic lines if the builder had had the foresight to include them.
Fast forward to today. As I stated in an earlier post, there's a real danger that technology might solve the last mile problem through wireless. We might not, and if Verizon offered FIOS to my apartment I'd certainly take it over Clearwire, but telecom companies can't be eager to take the very real risk that in 10 years consumers will all be using laptops and iPhones connecting via whatever the successor to EVDO is/will be.
There's a reasonable chance wireless will eventually solve many of the last mile problems; I recently cancelled Millennium Cable in Seattle for ClearWire instead. Right now it isn't available everywhere and the service isn't particularly fast by fiber standards, as its 1.5 down/756 (I think) up. But if the technology improves faster than fiber can be rolled out we might not care by the time 2011 rolls around.
As my website link probably indicates, I do a lot of reading, and as my posting to/. probably indicates, I pay more attention to technology than the average book nerd. Consequently, failures-waiting-to-happen like the Kindle are highly frustrating, especially because both it and the Sony version suffer from the same problem: how to get books and other material. The iPod comparison is a terrible one because lots of people already had mp3 files on their hard drives. It was easy to rip CDs, so you could, with a minimal amount of effort, load the $2K worth of music you already had on your player. If you're a scofflaw, you could load your friends' CDs too. The experience of music is nearly identical between a CD and an mp3 file (audiophiles: with all due respect, shut up. I know, you love your vinyl. I'm talking about everyone else who can't tell the difference when they're listening to death metal or rap or country or whatever). You had tons of content, and tons more readily available, before the player.
Contrast that with books. There's no easy way for me to transfer the 200-odd books Delicious Library tells me I have to one of these devices. They're a mix of hardcover and paperback, new and used, and I'd be comfortable wagering that they average out to costing around $10 each, and I'm not about to throw that investment away for a digital reader that, just to get the reader, costs as much as 40 books. There's no way for me to easily transfer The Atlantic and The New Yorker to it whenever a new issue comes out. I don't want to read books on my computer screen, even though I have a nice shiny aluminum iMac with a monitor nicer than 90% of those used by people in the industrial wirkd on my desk, so I haven't bothered becoming a digital ruffian and downloading books from p2p or Bittorrent networks, assuming they are even available. Amazon isn't going to have every book I want available, and every book I want that I can't find and have to buy or check out of the library represents another reason not to use their system. This goes back to the digital ruffian issue that made mp3 players so appealing.
If I'm still reading thirty years from now, I probably won't be doing it on dead pages of ground up trees. The question is how the transition will happen. Maybe someone will come along and give me a free e-book of every book I already have. Maybe the piracy networks will develop, although this seems unlikely given the number of books out there and the difficulty of converting them from bound paper to digital files. Or maybe environmental problems will make printing and shipping books so cost ineffective that we'll end up converting to these devices for reasons other than those I'm imagining. Whatever the shift, I don't see it happening until someone solves these problems.
Detroit? DETROIT?! You choose the American city with the climate the most similar to Moscow and the economy most similar to Siberia, or wherever the hell the Soviet Union tried manufacturing. Of those two options, I'll take Seattle.
Japan was actually getting serious about the possibility of a fission bomb,
Japan was never close to building an atomic bomb. If you read Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, he dissected how far both the Japanese and Germans got toward building one, and the answer was "not very." Neither government really made building one a priority, and neither had the engineering resources to pull it off because they weren't really sure how to.
I'd quote from Rhodes' book, but it isn't in my apartment.
Even at the top of the Mac line the case is designed to hold only 2 drives.
Umm, no. From the product page: "Mac Pro accommodates up to four drives and 3TB of storage with optional internal RAID, offers eight DIMM slots to fill with up to 16GB of RAM [...]"
Plenty of nerds here will advise you to read Heinlen or some shit. But the prose of science fiction (or really, of any genre fiction) is for shit and the metaphors shallow, and really don't add anything to being a well-rounded, broadly-educated youth. They're the literary equivalent of watching "the Matrix" and "Independence Day" in a marathon session, with no real depth or artistic value. Furthermore, the sort of people who would get anything out of science-fiction are the sort of people who would read it anyway.
This is true of bad science fiction, just as it is true that bad literary fiction is overly abstract, botches its metaphors, and is incoherent. The same thing might have once applied to Gothic fiction like Poe's -- who I read for high school -- or to fiction with strong Gothic elements, like Wuthering Heights. Good science fiction is still good fiction, and has even become canonized or recognized in its own way, as the Library of America edition of Philip K. Dick shows.
Quality is not necessarily indicated by genre -- it's only indicated by quality. I am also highly skeptical about your Chinese friends, who are probably either abnormally educated or about whom you're making bad judgments. If they've lived in China their whole life, it is highly improbable that an education system that refuses to acknowledge the Tiananemen (sp?) Square massacre, a small but significant nation off its coast that is independent only because of the threat of a greater power, and the horrors of the Orwellian "Great Leap Forward" would produce people with a deep knowledge of history or appreciation of it at more than a superficial level.
Speaking of Orwell, he couldn't even be assigned in Chinese schools, but many consider 1984 science fiction, along with Brave New World and other writers that are canonized or nearly so. I think students should be exposed to a broad array of reading that emphasizes what is perceived to be the literary canon, but that also includes other relevant material like what the original questioner appears to want. If there were one thing I wish I could've handed to my eight- or ninth-grade self, it wouldn't be a book, or a poem, or whatever: It would be this essay from Paul Graham. It's not really science or math writing, but I suspect students would find it more valuable than almost anything else.
China has a GDP of 7 trillion dollars, while the US has one of 12 trillion.
How does this idiocy get modded up, when even a cursory examination (warning:.pdf) shows that China has a GDP of 2.6B, compared to 2.9 for Germany, 4.3 for Japan, and 13 for the U.S.
With a larger GDP, they will be able to outspend us militarily, without causing any strain on their economy.
We spend about $466B, the rest of the world combined spends about $500B, and China $65B. Granted, China's PPP means they get more stuff for their $65B, but they still spend far, far less than we do.
The parent post is so wrong that it should be modded down.
Well, this much is obvious: IAAL, but you are not my client. This isn't legal advice. I probably didn't even think before I wrote it. Cheers!
Did the moderators bother reading the case? I hope not, as it would indicate that they're not just lazy but simply can't read. From the case:
Prosecution for carrying concealed weapon. The Court of Common Pleas of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, overruled pretrial motion to suppress and rendered judgment, and defendant appealed. The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Judicial District, 5 Ohio App.2d 122, 214 N.E.2d 114, affirmed, the Ohio Supreme Court dismissed an appeal on ground that no substantial constitutional question was involved, and certiorari was granted. The Supreme Court, Mr. Chief Justice Warren, held that police officer who observed conduct by defendant and another consistent with hypothesis that they were contemplating daylight robbery, and who approached, identified himself as officer, and asked their names, acted reasonably, when nothing appeared to dispel his reasonable belief of their intent, in seizing defendant in order to search him for weapons, and did not exceed reasonable scope of search in patting down outer clothing of defendants without placing his hands in their pockets or under outer surface of garments until he had felt weapons, and then merely reached for and removed guns.
In other words, the parent poster has no clue what he's talking about.
On the laptop of a blonde college-girl, I installed F7 and then installed vmware server and client along with WindowsXP Corporate^WPirate Edition. (She calls it 'baby windows') From that platform, she runs all the stuff she needs or wants... Linux stuff for as much as possible and "baby windows" for anything she can't figure out. So far she's ecstatic about Linux...
Yeah, but did you sleep with her? No? Well, who's smart now, you or the frat boy?
Facebook, at least in my experience, is free of spam -- unlike, say, e-mail. Opening up the network would allow all the problems that currently plague e-mail (and, in my much briefer experience prior to deleting my profile, MySpace), thus reducing the value of Facebook to its users.
I also trust, within reason, Facebook to not display my personal data to anyone except those on my friend lists. I don't want the "content" available to everyone, which is the whole reason Facebook took off in the first place -- people I want to see my profile can (friends, classmates), and everyone else can't. This article is a call to fight a problem that doesn't exist and that the author will create.
With the world being what it is -- which is what it always has been -- there is no room for fun. None. Every day people are dying, and we're reading Slashdot. Okay, maybe that isn't fun, but sometimes we're using procreation processors for pleasure when we could be thinking about the Taliban. Okay, so, once again, we're reading Slashdot, so this is unlikely. Well, we're writing filesystems. {get Recursive_Joke}
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of juxtaposition is what I had in mind when I expanded a /. comment in this piece on the Kindle.
I think the Kindle gets so much press because it's technologically so damn impressive but legally so damn irritating. Until there's a way of solving the hurdles to distributing books, I wouldn't even consider buying the Kindle.
Incidentally, I just made a similar point here. Cable sucks, and WiMax is here -- in Capitol Hill, anyway -- but has its own problems, as the link at my former post demonstrates.
Granted, I doubt this situation will last forever and suspect that ClearWire is as eager to oversubscribe as cable companies are. The question for me is, which choice of evils will I pick? And why can't I find city council members interested in municipal FIOS?
You must have turned off the Apple section of Slashdot.
Anyhow, thanks for the insightful post, which was actually moderated correctly!
So far the dl/ul speeds are pretty good, and I haven't noticed the 6 - 9 p.m. slowdown that used to occur. This may become a bigger problem as more people sign up. I do live in Seattle, about a mile from downtown, so if anywhere in the city is going to get good connections it ought to be people in my area.
I'm sorry to hear the abysmal stories about ClearWire but am not especially surprised by them, given how low their nominal competition sets the bar. I can only hope the competition from ClearWire improves cable service, much as mobiles made landline telecos moderately more responsive and satellite TV forced cable companies to improve their offerings, if not their service.
Fast forward to today. As I stated in an earlier post, there's a real danger that technology might solve the last mile problem through wireless. We might not, and if Verizon offered FIOS to my apartment I'd certainly take it over Clearwire, but telecom companies can't be eager to take the very real risk that in 10 years consumers will all be using laptops and iPhones connecting via whatever the successor to EVDO is/will be.
There's a reasonable chance wireless will eventually solve many of the last mile problems; I recently cancelled Millennium Cable in Seattle for ClearWire instead. Right now it isn't available everywhere and the service isn't particularly fast by fiber standards, as its 1.5 down /756 (I think) up. But if the technology improves faster than fiber can be rolled out we might not care by the time 2011 rolls around.
Contrast that with books. There's no easy way for me to transfer the 200-odd books Delicious Library tells me I have to one of these devices. They're a mix of hardcover and paperback, new and used, and I'd be comfortable wagering that they average out to costing around $10 each, and I'm not about to throw that investment away for a digital reader that, just to get the reader, costs as much as 40 books. There's no way for me to easily transfer The Atlantic and The New Yorker to it whenever a new issue comes out. I don't want to read books on my computer screen, even though I have a nice shiny aluminum iMac with a monitor nicer than 90% of those used by people in the industrial wirkd on my desk, so I haven't bothered becoming a digital ruffian and downloading books from p2p or Bittorrent networks, assuming they are even available. Amazon isn't going to have every book I want available, and every book I want that I can't find and have to buy or check out of the library represents another reason not to use their system. This goes back to the digital ruffian issue that made mp3 players so appealing.
If I'm still reading thirty years from now, I probably won't be doing it on dead pages of ground up trees. The question is how the transition will happen. Maybe someone will come along and give me a free e-book of every book I already have. Maybe the piracy networks will develop, although this seems unlikely given the number of books out there and the difficulty of converting them from bound paper to digital files. Or maybe environmental problems will make printing and shipping books so cost ineffective that we'll end up converting to these devices for reasons other than those I'm imagining. Whatever the shift, I don't see it happening until someone solves these problems.
See this post about 20 posts above you.
Detroit? DETROIT?! You choose the American city with the climate the most similar to Moscow and the economy most similar to Siberia, or wherever the hell the Soviet Union tried manufacturing. Of those two options, I'll take Seattle.
Japan was never close to building an atomic bomb. If you read Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, he dissected how far both the Japanese and Germans got toward building one, and the answer was "not very." Neither government really made building one a priority, and neither had the engineering resources to pull it off because they weren't really sure how to.
I'd quote from Rhodes' book, but it isn't in my apartment.
Umm, no. From the product page: "Mac Pro accommodates up to four drives and 3TB of storage with optional internal RAID, offers eight DIMM slots to fill with up to 16GB of RAM [...]"
I understand that the same is true of reproductive technology.
Just because you have a right to say it doesn't mean you have a right to force me to listen.
This is true of bad science fiction, just as it is true that bad literary fiction is overly abstract, botches its metaphors, and is incoherent. The same thing might have once applied to Gothic fiction like Poe's -- who I read for high school -- or to fiction with strong Gothic elements, like Wuthering Heights. Good science fiction is still good fiction, and has even become canonized or recognized in its own way, as the Library of America edition of Philip K. Dick shows.
Quality is not necessarily indicated by genre -- it's only indicated by quality. I am also highly skeptical about your Chinese friends, who are probably either abnormally educated or about whom you're making bad judgments. If they've lived in China their whole life, it is highly improbable that an education system that refuses to acknowledge the Tiananemen (sp?) Square massacre, a small but significant nation off its coast that is independent only because of the threat of a greater power, and the horrors of the Orwellian "Great Leap Forward" would produce people with a deep knowledge of history or appreciation of it at more than a superficial level.
Speaking of Orwell, he couldn't even be assigned in Chinese schools, but many consider 1984 science fiction, along with Brave New World and other writers that are canonized or nearly so. I think students should be exposed to a broad array of reading that emphasizes what is perceived to be the literary canon, but that also includes other relevant material like what the original questioner appears to want. If there were one thing I wish I could've handed to my eight- or ninth-grade self, it wouldn't be a book, or a poem, or whatever: It would be this essay from Paul Graham. It's not really science or math writing, but I suspect students would find it more valuable than almost anything else.
How does this idiocy get modded up, when even a cursory examination (warning: .pdf) shows that China has a GDP of 2.6B, compared to 2.9 for Germany, 4.3 for Japan, and 13 for the U.S.
With a larger GDP, they will be able to outspend us militarily, without causing any strain on their economy.
We spend about $466B, the rest of the world combined spends about $500B, and China $65B. Granted, China's PPP means they get more stuff for their $65B, but they still spend far, far less than we do.
The parent post is so wrong that it should be modded down.
Did the moderators bother reading the case? I hope not, as it would indicate that they're not just lazy but simply can't read. From the case:
In other words, the parent poster has no clue what he's talking about.That was hard: typing in Blu Ray HD DVD hybrid into Google brought a plethora of links, including this one.
Yeah, but did you sleep with her? No? Well, who's smart now, you or the frat boy?
Shouldn't that read, "Certain features: "I'm not looking at you because you're not there anymore, browse toolbar) actually disappeared from VC++?
Facebook, at least in my experience, is free of spam -- unlike, say, e-mail. Opening up the network would allow all the problems that currently plague e-mail (and, in my much briefer experience prior to deleting my profile, MySpace), thus reducing the value of Facebook to its users. I also trust, within reason, Facebook to not display my personal data to anyone except those on my friend lists. I don't want the "content" available to everyone, which is the whole reason Facebook took off in the first place -- people I want to see my profile can (friends, classmates), and everyone else can't. This article is a call to fight a problem that doesn't exist and that the author will create.
I'll take the spam.