We're not talking about DRM. The guy said "game that cannot be purchased because of their insistence on junking it up with Steam".
This is preposterous. DRM is bad and Steam is less bad than most, so we can agree on that. But the post I was replying to made it sound like Steam makes a game harder to purchase.
Steam makes a game much, much easier to purchase by providing an immediate way to buy it. If you choose not to use Steam, any big release (such as Portal 2 or Duke Nuke 'em) is still going to be available at retailers. Steam is just an additional route, by definition it can't make a game harder to buy, let alone impossible to purchase - neither of these games would be Steam exclusives (are there Steam exclusives, I don't know, anything I've bought from Steam was available elsewhere).
Coke had the #1 product in its market segment. Unsatisfied with this, they formulated New Coke, which was practically a tribute to the #2 product in its class: Pepsi.
Turns out, people chose Coke over Pepsi because they actually preferred Coke over Pepsi, and not because of , say, the bottle shape or the name.
So then they scrapped New Coke and nobody missed it.
I hope they don't fall off the tracks and end up putting realism ahead of fun. Most of us who enjoyed Rock Band weren't playing it to get a primer on learning to play a real guitar. If I wanted a tedious simulation, I'd whip out a flight simulator, and if I wanted guitar lessons, well, I'd have spent the money on a real guitar to begin with.
That's interesting, thanks. Sadly, I think the answer to your last question will be answered in the future, and poorly:
> "how do we sell this new thing to people who've never heard of Amiga Computers".
What'll probably happen is that five years from now, someone will buy and use the Amiga name to sell humdrum gaming PCs with pretty paintjobs they way they tried to do with the Commodore name.
That amused me a lot, aiming the Commodore name at PC users who, if they remember the Commodore name at all, associate it with the 8- and 16-bit computing.
I can trump that. I saw the video for it on MTV. You see, long ago, MTV used to play "music videos" which were kind of like little movies for songs. Now, they play reality TV shows like every other station, having been instrumental in popularizing the format.
I think it's important to differentiate fans and the cult.
The AmigaOS was literally the last OS I actually loved, and that love came at a price: I had to watch an inferior operating system trundle forward clumsily, finally taking on many of the best aspects of the AmigaOS, but doing so very tentatively, awkwardly, or downright poorly.
But I'm a realist and a rationalist: The Last Chance for the Amiga was for a well-managed company to take it over. Escom bought it, and I suspect that even by that time, it was too late even if a better company had purchased it. It's not coming back, and more importantly, it doesn't need to: by the time Windows NT 4.0 and Mac System 7 came out (or if you're feeling far, far less charitable than me, XP and OSX), those things that the Amiga OS did better were eclipsed by modern OS developments.
The AmigaOS was the best OS of its time, but time moves on. Amiga's doom was probably inevitable the minute Commodore bought it. Commodore was managed as a small company with a small company mindset by a company president who treated his firm like a fief rather than a business with its eye on the future; in the hands of a company with more vision, maybe things would have worked out better for Amiga.
As I said, I loved the Amiga and its place in computer history, but that place is the past. The article suggests all Commodore fans are fanatics and not realists, and that the true fanatics are on the C64 end of the spectrum, of all things. I'm a fan of Commodore's 8-bit machines and the Amiga (and will emulate a favorite game from time to time), but I question the presence of this cult the author describes. In the middle 90s, the Cult of Amiga was indeed real, and tried to convince themselves it wasn't too late for the Amiga to re-emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes. Now, it's probably an insult to conflate fans with fanatics.
Yeah, I only discovered it accidentally, too. PMB.exe wanted a firewall rule when I had my firewall set on "learn" mode, which is often useful to see what's actually trying to phone home. Given that I have a legitimate torrent client running, the last thing in the world I wanted was a second torrent client competing with it for bandwidth for a game I hadn't played in months.
I'm a bit disappointed the earlier post was moderated as offtopic. I think luring in new players with a "play free" model and then slipping in a stealth torrent client is something most slashdotters who had any interest in the game would want to know about.
A stealth torrent client for game updates is fine the way WoW does it - informed consent and the app isn't hiding on you when it's running.
DDO's version of a torrent-based client updater starts up with Windows and operates silently, not even a system tray icon.
I wrote more about it on http://www.unhelpful.org/2010/02/15/underhanded-and-sneaky-pando-ddo-online-and-turbine/ when I discovered it, and did get a reply from Pando. Rather than risk traffic my host's server can assuredly not take, I'll just paste it here.
If this is useful, great, if it's overly spammy, just mod it down and accept my apologies, but I personally consider a stealth torrent client whose only visibility to the user is when they click on a boilerplate EULA for something called Pando Media Booster, and one that operates behind the scenes, on startup, without any icons or program windows to be malware in the loosest terms. I don't mind an MMOG providing an option to get (and obviously, provide) files to and from other users to speed up the overall update process via torrent client. Turbine's, or Pando's, is utterly unacceptable. A bit of quick looking confirms that PMB is part of the LotRO install.
-----
Underhanded and sneaky: Pando, DDO Online, and Turbine
Wherein the author takes Turbine to task for running a stealth torrent client on users' machines. Date: February 15th, 2010 @ 10:39 Author: delusion
A lot of us are familiar with software companies leveraging the BitTorrent protocol. World of Warcraft comes to mind; every update is, if possible, sent to you via the torrent protocol. This is fine, because once you close the updater, the torrenting ceases. You are aware and informed.
I found something a lot more underhanded the other day while investigating some issues. A program called PMB.exe wanted to access the internet. PMB is another torrent client (Pando Media Booster) used by some other pieces of software to share data (in my case, it was from trying Dungeons & Dragons Online for free for a few weeks).
The key difference is that, unlike the WoW patcher, PMB was operating without my being aware, and was not making any attempt to keep me informed. As I have quite enough torrents that I deliberately seed, the last thing I need is another client fighting for bandwith, sharing files that I’m not interested in sharing. It was only sharing game data files, nothing of mine, but it’s still an extremely unethical thing to do without my knowledge.
I don’t have any expectations for Pando to live up to; they make stealthware and sell it to other companies. I do, however, have expectations for DDO’s publisher Turbine to live up to. When Asheron’s Call was popular, one of their practices which set them apart was their approach to their customers. At the time, the big massively multiplayer online games were Ultima Online and Everquest. Ultima Online’s developer, Origin (now Electronic Arts) were best known for a rather brain-dead approach; problems with the game were often hand-waved as something the players should sort out, and there was insufficient attention to detail to the ramifications of software changes and how they would be exploited. Everquest’s developer, Verant (now Sony Online Entertainment) was better known for being downright hostile to its users; you were playing their game, according to their vision, and if you had a problem with that, well, you didn’t know what you were talking about and frankly you could go toss off if they didn’t ban you first.
Turbine was the first of the more popular MMOGs to treat its customers like customers. They were neither ignored nor actively treated like the enemy. Their customers weren’t always right (and anyone who ever played an MMOG is going to cringe at the notion that the customer is always right), but they weren’t talked down, patronized, or insulted.
This respect for the customer is precisely why this inclusion of Pando Media Booster feels like a bet
I haven't switched to Win7 yet, but the computer I've barely started buying parts for will have it. The context menu impressed me from the standpoint of lowering the barrier to accomplishing frequently used tasks. The fact that the taskbar defaults to unlabeled icons, however, I find bizarre, and I'm sure I'll change that the first day. I find it as bizarre as XP's default of hiding the status bar from the user in Windows Explorer. The Win7 Windows Explorer I find utterly godawful, but that won't affect me, as I'm a total DirectoryOpus fanboy.
"missing manual" books. They all seem far too shallow for even basic users, and insufficiently technical for advanced users. Maybe the two I've browsed through were just bad examples of the series. I'm not pre-disposed to dislike the idea; at least unlike the "Dummies" and "Complete Idiot's Guide" books, they're not blatantly insulting the intelligence of the novice user.
When one of the tasks to be accomplished is "not throw away the investment we've already made in our accounting package" or "maintain compatibility with third party vendor apps we have no control over" or "ensure we have continued support for drivers for expensive hardware we already purchased", then the OS isn't merely a tool. It's a platform.
Or to look at it another way, if your electrical company needed to re-purchase a supply of bolts via a bidding process, the fact that the tools you have are all metric or customary is not merely incidental to the bid. What good is a metric bolt that's $0.008 cheaper if it requires you to purchase new tools in excess of the money you're saving when what you already have tools for works, and when your existing install base is based on a customary bolt.
To me, this just seems like the a few OSS vendors pretending that they know more about the validity of the requirements set out by the Quebec government than the Quebec government knows, and looking for a sympathetic court shoulder to lean on.
One of the problems with bid contracts is that often the bid requirements are too general, and you get bid fulfillment that really only satisfies the goals stated in the bid, and not the goals the submitter forgot to consider.
In this case, the government of Quebec specified what OS they wanted to run - presumably because they didn't want to throw away investments they've already made in software and hardware and/or needed to maintain compatibility with software they are forced to use that is outside of their control. Now a few zealots take them to court for being too specific and not vague enough?
That's fine in the abstract, but in the real world, it doesn't always hold up, particularly when what a new OS needs to accomplish is often something as mundane as "run the apps we've already spent money on" or "be compatible with the third party vendor software that we don't have (or want) an alternative to", such as enterprise small format and large format printers.
I've had this discussion with people before who migrated to Vista too soon who wanted drivers for $60,000 devices. In a couple of cases, I had to put it rather undiplomatically: "You have a $150 OS and a $60,000 device, and you're going to have to choose between them until the vendor is done with their driver update". If this is a company with 5 computers, the device wins. In business, you're often straddled with legacy applications that you as an IT person don't have the luxury of saying "it's not compatible with the new OS, so find a replacement".
Even worse, in a few rare cases we were talking about legacy equipment that was never, ever going to have a Vista/7 driver written for it. Most decided to stick with XP for a while longer and put off the question for a few months until they had a better picture on which to base such a decision.
...they rejected a bid submission for upgrading their XP machines to Vista which didn't actually successfully meet their requirement that the OS in question be the one they asked for?
I'm not trying to push anyone's buttons, but what if the proposal was to upgrade their linux servers with modern systems running linux. If a vendor came along and part of that proposal included a server running Windows Server 2008 and they rejected that proposal because it didn't meet their requirements, would the OSS community be up in arms then?
Does a government body seeking bids on computer systems have the right to specify which OS they plan to use, and may require for industry-specific ads? Or are all requirements on the table meaningless?
The religious texts say a thing, such as when Jesus told his followers "Remember that all these things will happen before the people now living have all died". And they didn't.
This leaves the religious with three choices, none of them good: either:
1: Jesus was wrong 2: Jesus was a liar or 3: the Bible doesn't mean what it says, and must be re-interpreted in order for it to remain relevant to us, who are not the audience it was written for.
Needless to say, most of the faithful pick the third option. The Revelation of John is even worse; in modern times most of the faithful read it as if it were written for a modern audience rather than a then-contemporary audience, so we turn a warning about the political power of Rome into a warning about bizarre apocalypse destined to happen in the future (ours).
This post reeks of this sort of post-hoc reasoning. Let's not do Zappa a disservice by deliberately reading him as if he were talking to us about something he clearly wasn't.
While I'm sure (I hope) it was meant as a jest, does this sort of evangelical logic really promote Linux in a way that is useful? This reads like fanboy logic written for the converted. More damning, however, is that while it is supposedly humorous, it's not actually funny.
...of any technology issue? Or any issue? And by "right" I mean "correct". As someone who is not a fan of the two parties (nor partisanship), it amazes me that anyone in Connecticut wants their state associated with this man.
Studies is that that field is less likely to be taught by people with a scientific background. If I wanted to peddle pro-religion non-science, I'd rather take my chances with history teachers than biology or physics teachers.
Not being familiar with Australian education, I don't know what sort of qualifications high school teachers have with regard to the field they teach, but even if in-field qualifications are much better than in the US, a lot more people study history seriously as a result of their religious indoctrination than study biology or physics, either of which would be much more relevant to debunking the anti-science that intelligent design peddles.
The battle is over in the sciences. They're just trying to push it through the back door they perceive to be available to them in the humanities. None of this is a slight against the humanities, which I consider very important.
I shouldn't have used the word "since". To me, it's about value. I value an ebook less, it's less tangible, and in order to overcome that, the price has to be less to meet my criteria.
I'm unwilling to pay more than 50% of a paperback's cost to have it in ebook. If some company can make that work as a business model, great, and if not, I don't see physical books going away any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
We're not talking about DRM. The guy said "game that cannot be purchased because of their insistence on junking it up with Steam".
This is preposterous. DRM is bad and Steam is less bad than most, so we can agree on that. But the post I was replying to made it sound like Steam makes a game harder to purchase.
Steam makes a game much, much easier to purchase by providing an immediate way to buy it. If you choose not to use Steam, any big release (such as Portal 2 or Duke Nuke 'em) is still going to be available at retailers. Steam is just an additional route, by definition it can't make a game harder to buy, let alone impossible to purchase - neither of these games would be Steam exclusives (are there Steam exclusives, I don't know, anything I've bought from Steam was available elsewhere).
Coke had the #1 product in its market segment. Unsatisfied with this, they formulated New Coke, which was practically a tribute to the #2 product in its class: Pepsi.
Turns out, people chose Coke over Pepsi because they actually preferred Coke over Pepsi, and not because of , say, the bottle shape or the name.
So then they scrapped New Coke and nobody missed it.
I hope they don't fall off the tracks and end up putting realism ahead of fun. Most of us who enjoyed Rock Band weren't playing it to get a primer on learning to play a real guitar. If I wanted a tedious simulation, I'd whip out a flight simulator, and if I wanted guitar lessons, well, I'd have spent the money on a real guitar to begin with.
You wrote "cannot be purchased".
What you meant to write is "cannot be as easily pirated by people who don't know what they're doing".
That's interesting, thanks. Sadly, I think the answer to your last question will be answered in the future, and poorly:
> "how do we sell this new thing to people who've never heard of Amiga Computers".
What'll probably happen is that five years from now, someone will buy and use the Amiga name to sell humdrum gaming PCs with pretty paintjobs they way they tried to do with the Commodore name.
That amused me a lot, aiming the Commodore name at PC users who, if they remember the Commodore name at all, associate it with the 8- and 16-bit computing.
I can trump that. I saw the video for it on MTV. You see, long ago, MTV used to play "music videos" which were kind of like little movies for songs. Now, they play reality TV shows like every other station, having been instrumental in popularizing the format.
I think it's important to differentiate fans and the cult.
The AmigaOS was literally the last OS I actually loved, and that love came at a price: I had to watch an inferior operating system trundle forward clumsily, finally taking on many of the best aspects of the AmigaOS, but doing so very tentatively, awkwardly, or downright poorly.
But I'm a realist and a rationalist: The Last Chance for the Amiga was for a well-managed company to take it over. Escom bought it, and I suspect that even by that time, it was too late even if a better company had purchased it. It's not coming back, and more importantly, it doesn't need to: by the time Windows NT 4.0 and Mac System 7 came out (or if you're feeling far, far less charitable than me, XP and OSX), those things that the Amiga OS did better were eclipsed by modern OS developments.
The AmigaOS was the best OS of its time, but time moves on. Amiga's doom was probably inevitable the minute Commodore bought it. Commodore was managed as a small company with a small company mindset by a company president who treated his firm like a fief rather than a business with its eye on the future; in the hands of a company with more vision, maybe things would have worked out better for Amiga.
As I said, I loved the Amiga and its place in computer history, but that place is the past. The article suggests all Commodore fans are fanatics and not realists, and that the true fanatics are on the C64 end of the spectrum, of all things. I'm a fan of Commodore's 8-bit machines and the Amiga (and will emulate a favorite game from time to time), but I question the presence of this cult the author describes. In the middle 90s, the Cult of Amiga was indeed real, and tried to convince themselves it wasn't too late for the Amiga to re-emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes. Now, it's probably an insult to conflate fans with fanatics.
The above post paid for by the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
Yeah, I only discovered it accidentally, too. PMB.exe wanted a firewall rule when I had my firewall set on "learn" mode, which is often useful to see what's actually trying to phone home. Given that I have a legitimate torrent client running, the last thing in the world I wanted was a second torrent client competing with it for bandwidth for a game I hadn't played in months.
I'm a Windows user out of practicality - I follow the apps - but I'm with you about Vista.
What I'm trying to defend isn't the idea of Vista.
What I'm trying to defend is an organization's right and ability to choose its own OS without someone trying to force the issue in the courts.
I'm a bit disappointed the earlier post was moderated as offtopic. I think luring in new players with a "play free" model and then slipping in a stealth torrent client is something most slashdotters who had any interest in the game would want to know about.
A stealth torrent client for game updates is fine the way WoW does it - informed consent and the app isn't hiding on you when it's running.
DDO's version of a torrent-based client updater starts up with Windows and operates silently, not even a system tray icon.
I wrote more about it on http://www.unhelpful.org/2010/02/15/underhanded-and-sneaky-pando-ddo-online-and-turbine/ when I discovered it, and did get a reply from Pando. Rather than risk traffic my host's server can assuredly not take, I'll just paste it here.
If this is useful, great, if it's overly spammy, just mod it down and accept my apologies, but I personally consider a stealth torrent client whose only visibility to the user is when they click on a boilerplate EULA for something called Pando Media Booster, and one that operates behind the scenes, on startup, without any icons or program windows to be malware in the loosest terms. I don't mind an MMOG providing an option to get (and obviously, provide) files to and from other users to speed up the overall update process via torrent client. Turbine's, or Pando's, is utterly unacceptable. A bit of quick looking confirms that PMB is part of the LotRO install.
-----
Underhanded and sneaky: Pando, DDO Online, and Turbine
Wherein the author takes Turbine to task for running a stealth torrent client on users' machines.
Date: February 15th, 2010 @ 10:39
Author: delusion
A lot of us are familiar with software companies leveraging the BitTorrent protocol. World of Warcraft comes to mind; every update is, if possible, sent to you via the torrent protocol. This is fine, because once you close the updater, the torrenting ceases. You are aware and informed.
I found something a lot more underhanded the other day while investigating some issues. A program called PMB.exe wanted to access the internet. PMB is another torrent client (Pando Media Booster) used by some other pieces of software to share data (in my case, it was from trying Dungeons & Dragons Online for free for a few weeks).
The key difference is that, unlike the WoW patcher, PMB was operating without my being aware, and was not making any attempt to keep me informed. As I have quite enough torrents that I deliberately seed, the last thing I need is another client fighting for bandwith, sharing files that I’m not interested in sharing. It was only sharing game data files, nothing of mine, but it’s still an extremely unethical thing to do without my knowledge.
I don’t have any expectations for Pando to live up to; they make stealthware and sell it to other companies. I do, however, have expectations for DDO’s publisher Turbine to live up to. When Asheron’s Call was popular, one of their practices which set them apart was their approach to their customers. At the time, the big massively multiplayer online games were Ultima Online and Everquest. Ultima Online’s developer, Origin (now Electronic Arts) were best known for a rather brain-dead approach; problems with the game were often hand-waved as something the players should sort out, and there was insufficient attention to detail to the ramifications of software changes and how they would be exploited. Everquest’s developer, Verant (now Sony Online Entertainment) was better known for being downright hostile to its users; you were playing their game, according to their vision, and if you had a problem with that, well, you didn’t know what you were talking about and frankly you could go toss off if they didn’t ban you first.
Turbine was the first of the more popular MMOGs to treat its customers like customers. They were neither ignored nor actively treated like the enemy. Their customers weren’t always right (and anyone who ever played an MMOG is going to cringe at the notion that the customer is always right), but they weren’t talked down, patronized, or insulted.
This respect for the customer is precisely why this inclusion of Pando Media Booster feels like a bet
I haven't switched to Win7 yet, but the computer I've barely started buying parts for will have it. The context menu impressed me from the standpoint of lowering the barrier to accomplishing frequently used tasks. The fact that the taskbar defaults to unlabeled icons, however, I find bizarre, and I'm sure I'll change that the first day. I find it as bizarre as XP's default of hiding the status bar from the user in Windows Explorer. The Win7 Windows Explorer I find utterly godawful, but that won't affect me, as I'm a total DirectoryOpus fanboy.
"missing manual" books. They all seem far too shallow for even basic users, and insufficiently technical for advanced users. Maybe the two I've browsed through were just bad examples of the series. I'm not pre-disposed to dislike the idea; at least unlike the "Dummies" and "Complete Idiot's Guide" books, they're not blatantly insulting the intelligence of the novice user.
When one of the tasks to be accomplished is "not throw away the investment we've already made in our accounting package" or "maintain compatibility with third party vendor apps we have no control over" or "ensure we have continued support for drivers for expensive hardware we already purchased", then the OS isn't merely a tool. It's a platform.
Or to look at it another way, if your electrical company needed to re-purchase a supply of bolts via a bidding process, the fact that the tools you have are all metric or customary is not merely incidental to the bid. What good is a metric bolt that's $0.008 cheaper if it requires you to purchase new tools in excess of the money you're saving when what you already have tools for works, and when your existing install base is based on a customary bolt.
To me, this just seems like the a few OSS vendors pretending that they know more about the validity of the requirements set out by the Quebec government than the Quebec government knows, and looking for a sympathetic court shoulder to lean on.
One of the problems with bid contracts is that often the bid requirements are too general, and you get bid fulfillment that really only satisfies the goals stated in the bid, and not the goals the submitter forgot to consider.
In this case, the government of Quebec specified what OS they wanted to run - presumably because they didn't want to throw away investments they've already made in software and hardware and/or needed to maintain compatibility with software they are forced to use that is outside of their control. Now a few zealots take them to court for being too specific and not vague enough?
That's fine in the abstract, but in the real world, it doesn't always hold up, particularly when what a new OS needs to accomplish is often something as mundane as "run the apps we've already spent money on" or "be compatible with the third party vendor software that we don't have (or want) an alternative to", such as enterprise small format and large format printers.
I've had this discussion with people before who migrated to Vista too soon who wanted drivers for $60,000 devices. In a couple of cases, I had to put it rather undiplomatically: "You have a $150 OS and a $60,000 device, and you're going to have to choose between them until the vendor is done with their driver update". If this is a company with 5 computers, the device wins. In business, you're often straddled with legacy applications that you as an IT person don't have the luxury of saying "it's not compatible with the new OS, so find a replacement".
Even worse, in a few rare cases we were talking about legacy equipment that was never, ever going to have a Vista/7 driver written for it. Most decided to stick with XP for a while longer and put off the question for a few months until they had a better picture on which to base such a decision.
sorry
...they rejected a bid submission for upgrading their XP machines to Vista which didn't actually successfully meet their requirement that the OS in question be the one they asked for?
I'm not trying to push anyone's buttons, but what if the proposal was to upgrade their linux servers with modern systems running linux. If a vendor came along and part of that proposal included a server running Windows Server 2008 and they rejected that proposal because it didn't meet their requirements, would the OSS community be up in arms then?
Does a government body seeking bids on computer systems have the right to specify which OS they plan to use, and may require for industry-specific ads? Or are all requirements on the table meaningless?
That trying to shoe-horn new meaning into a work where it didn't exist is intellectually dishonest, whether it's the Bible or a Frank Zappa song.
Recontextualization is one thing, but this sort of no-holds-barred literary deconstruction is simply nonsense.
And an ad hominem attack based on my username against a post where "what I'm on about" is pretty clear? Really? In 2010?
The religious texts say a thing, such as when Jesus told his followers "Remember that all these things will happen before the people now living have all died". And they didn't.
This leaves the religious with three choices, none of them good: either:
1: Jesus was wrong
2: Jesus was a liar
or 3: the Bible doesn't mean what it says, and must be re-interpreted in order for it to remain relevant to us, who are not the audience it was written for.
Needless to say, most of the faithful pick the third option. The Revelation of John is even worse; in modern times most of the faithful read it as if it were written for a modern audience rather than a then-contemporary audience, so we turn a warning about the political power of Rome into a warning about bizarre apocalypse destined to happen in the future (ours).
This post reeks of this sort of post-hoc reasoning. Let's not do Zappa a disservice by deliberately reading him as if he were talking to us about something he clearly wasn't.
While I'm sure (I hope) it was meant as a jest, does this sort of evangelical logic really promote Linux in a way that is useful? This reads like fanboy logic written for the converted. More damning, however, is that while it is supposedly humorous, it's not actually funny.
...of any technology issue? Or any issue? And by "right" I mean "correct". As someone who is not a fan of the two parties (nor partisanship), it amazes me that anyone in Connecticut wants their state associated with this man.
Note: the "free (as in beer)" comment is never going to be funny, no matter how many times you repeat it.
Presumably my "bit of research" should pretty much begin and end with Ben Stein's intellectually dishonest documentary he came out a few years ago?
Studies is that that field is less likely to be taught by people with a scientific background. If I wanted to peddle pro-religion non-science, I'd rather take my chances with history teachers than biology or physics teachers.
Not being familiar with Australian education, I don't know what sort of qualifications high school teachers have with regard to the field they teach, but even if in-field qualifications are much better than in the US, a lot more people study history seriously as a result of their religious indoctrination than study biology or physics, either of which would be much more relevant to debunking the anti-science that intelligent design peddles.
The battle is over in the sciences. They're just trying to push it through the back door they perceive to be available to them in the humanities. None of this is a slight against the humanities, which I consider very important.
I shouldn't have used the word "since". To me, it's about value. I value an ebook less, it's less tangible, and in order to overcome that, the price has to be less to meet my criteria.
I'm unwilling to pay more than 50% of a paperback's cost to have it in ebook. If some company can make that work as a business model, great, and if not, I don't see physical books going away any time soon.