However, claiming that NK is a more pressing issue is just uninformed. It's a big deal, yes, but not one that we can do much about right now, especially given how quiet they've been since China's new leader was installed.
North Korea has, in the last few weeks, repeatedly threatened to do things like "Turn New York into a sea of ashes." Maybe you didn't notice because US news sources have soft-pedaled that? Do a google, man.
Before you throw that "uninformed" brick, you might want to make sure there's no glass structure over your head.
Entertaining, readable book about textbooks and the sorts of forces that compromise their readability (and on some level, their honesty): "Lies my Teacher Told Me," by James Loewen.
Simple example: textbooks often include a paragraph or so about the Lincoln/Douglas debates. They'll mention Douglas's speaking style, and some specifically mention his being well-dressed. Very few of the textbooks Loewen looked at mentioned Douglas's moral justification of slavery, though, which is what the debates were basically about.
Basically Loewen's point is that publishers are under pressure not to offend so as to sell their books to the most school systems -- the result being that primary sources are reduced to little "sound bite" sidebars and captions instead of being made central to the narrative of the books. What kids get is watered-down, vague history in which America is vaguely progressing over time due to principles and Old Glory. The idea that individuals had to struggle to make that happen gets softened so much that it's hardly there. People like the suffragettes become marginal to their own stories, almost.
I imagine science textbooks have a similar challenge: they're trying to be marketable to the broadest group of people while not cheesing off the creationists and their friends. If this series somehow overcame the tendency for History textbooks to use "South Friendly" terms like "War Between the States" in the place of "Civil War," maybe it can take on the creationists too.
Personally, I'd like to see something combining the storyline of a good RPG with the action of a good FPS. Open ended would be nice, something like Privateer or Freelancer but in a fantasy or military setting rather than as a space sim.
Not that I'd mind any of those things, but when you can refer to the genre of your game in shorthand ("FPS") and you want to re-make existing games in a different setting, that's hardly breaking new ground. Do we want the open community to produce nothing but less-polished takes on overpriced, over-card-dependent consumer boxed titles?
Bloom County was lumped in with Calvin and Hobbes in my mind: the two early-to-mid-80s comics that got tired after a while and took "sabbaticals." (Calvin and Hobbes wasn't really just "time off," the author quit, but anyway, both of them got tired after maybe five years.)
I went to find collections for my kids this last year. Calvin and Hobbes is still as good, even better, than I remembered it. But Bloom County, sorry to say, is not just highly topical with 80s politics and all... it's just not quite as fantastically good. Sorry to say it, but there it is. Once you get past the initial "cute Opus" phase it just felt kind of seedy. The kids never got into the big book, either, though they're obsessed with Calvin and Hobbes now.
Myth II is maybe the best game I ever played, bar none. The solo game, the multiplayer, just everything about the look and feel, the soundtrack, the level design... It has to rank up there with the original Civ for time-sucking potential. I didn't even love the fantasy setting, personally, but it's the best.
Maybe I could RTFM/A, but not here: does the updated version support old films? Films, for example, with the various mod packs, like WWII, Civil War, or Lego Land? The films from this game were so watchable, just great.
(If someone had recast MOO II in a similar way, it'd rate a/. story. This is just as cool a game, or moreso.)
good luck trying to find a murder/mystery written totally in poetry form
Man, I think I actually did one of those. Not on a computer, as a jigsaw puzzle. One of those clues-from-the-puzzle things. (Further proof that single fathers rapidly become their own grandmothers, but I digress.)
In addition once you get big name enough to do what you want, you are generally going to write software in the same... What would be original is if Will Wright came out with a FPS shooter based in his genre of games.
Well, not original exactly, but at least it would be a hybrid between genres. Aren't these companies averse to even that level of risk, though? Take a look at that puzzle/mystery thing I did: mysteries and puzzles are two big deals for older folks, so they tried a crossover idea. There are game titles like that; WWII Online has both a strategic side and a shooter side. Black and White is a sort of God game crossed with a hey-you-Pikachu creature-interaction thing, maybe?
But most titles are dead center tries at one genre or another. You can glance at a box and know basically everything there is to know about how a game will play. Feels like I already played most of 'em. C'mon, cross-pollinate, at least.
If you stop buying their crappy product, they will get the message.
Right! They'll take a look at their bottom lines, glance suspiciously at the internet, and unleash a fusillade of PR, legal, and lobbying action against game "piracy."
(You did mean the message from the RIAA and the MPAA, right?)
B. Dalton's is also owned by...guess who? Barnes and Noble
Yeah, I used that example because I worked for both companies and was around when the purchase took place, actually.
McDonald's, though, isn't spinning off a more upscale division, or buying a new brand (ugh, that's so jargony) to fill in a market gap -- they're stuck with the golden arches brand, and they're seemingly viewing this three-city wifi thing as a test for migrating the whole chain in that direction... Seems to me like it's an idea that would work at freeway stops, not in inner-city franchises -- but they're trying to do it across both those in places like Chicago.
How does a consumer know which kind of Mickey D's she's walking into? Pretty muddled.
This is slashdot. S/he needs a reason? From SETI@home's donations page:
Almost none of our budget is spent on hardware (desktop and server computers, disks, tapes, telescope electronics etc.); these items have been generously donated by corporate sponsors.
Yeah, it does sound like a real sinkhole for money, doesn't it?
Why is it that people whining about waste always pick on the government and nonprofit tries like SETI@home? Could their objection be to the ends, and not the means they claim to be ridiculing? Gillette's initials plans, at least, were to spend $300 million on marketing the Mach 3 razor. Their previous model, the Sensor, cost nearly $200 million to develop. If you want to complain about waste, why is it you're choosing the idealistic scientific endeavor?
I think a wireless experience at a McDonalds is very different from a Starbucks or a Borders.
Right -- Starbucks and Borders are all about a business model that went out of its way NOT to push people in and out of the door as fast as possible. Borders, and the Barnes and Noble "superstores," were very much reactions to B Dalton's buy-your-Stephen-King-and-get-out-of-the-cashier's -way approach.
B Daltons is still around, though, just serving a different audience. Makes you wonder how well Mickey-D's knows its own business model -- or how seriously they're looking to change it.
(This'd maybe make sense in McDonalds' franchises at highway stops, for traveling types?)
Those capabilities frighten many at the networks, studios and Hollywood talent agencies.... Letting viewers reshuffle the TV schedule cripples the network's ability to build audiences for new shows by putting them on after hits. More troublesome, the easy fast-forwarding promises to deprive networks of revenue by decimating the audience for commercials.
One more example of an entertainment industry that doesn't understand point-to-point and can't break the ingrained habits of centralized, "broadcast" control. This is what they're supposedly worried about? That scheduling flexibility offered to the audience will prevent people from having new shows scheduled down their throats? A generation of network schedulers is quaking in their boots -- but c'mon, you can't think of any better ways to promote a program? Movies become big hits, almost always, without any such scheduling "in." (The ones that get heavy TV ad time are usually crap: "Master of Disguise," anyone?) And what about the full half of the glass: the people who DO get to watch it who couldn't otherwise? Huh?
And note to TV execs: anything that actually reports, legitimately, the rate of viewing is going to "decimate" your revenues from commercials. We go to the bathroom. The same people who watch commercials for Bud Light and laugh now aren't going to stop. The rest of us hit "mute."
Patrick O'Brian's sea stories, courtesy of John Hertz.
Cool to see that name on his list of inspirational reading. They're not similar writers; O'Brian's series are historical fiction, and their heart is really the complex, evolving friendship between the two main characters. Not really Niven territory, but they're astonishingly good once you're in the mindset.
Compare IE v5, v5.5 and v6.0. Nothing much really changed between them.
They changed how they interact with Office apps. Every new version we have to cope with they do some other fool thing with Excel or Word: docs that pop up in IE's window, with some of the same menu items, but some of those are broken... It's not improvement, just a kind of drifting around.
To my mind IE has started on the "upgrades that just change stuff" path that Word hit sometime in 1994 or so. They're changing it, but it's change for change's sake. Word 6.0 didn't do anything much better than 5.1a, it just did it differently, to make sure we kept "upgrading." IE might momentarily seem to take over file management tasks that used to happen in Explorer, but there's no real improvement in how things happen, they're just shiffling functions around.
No objection to the other choices you list, but Safari does offer leanness, in both design and responsiveness. That's a change from Mozilla in both respects, as long as the article's about Mozilla. You're right, though -- the "survive" line in the article overblows the thing.
As usual, Apple releases a beta of an app and people either a) exult or b) express dismay that it didn't utterly change the world. It's a Web browser. By version 1.0 maybe they'll have a nice, stable, lean little browser that hooks into the rest of the OS without becoming cancerware like IE on a Windows box. That'd be handy.
-- fellow Chimera user.
Extrasolar ones, too? The word's vague.
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Defining "Planet"
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"Planet" is a huge, vague term that isn't really of practical use. Sure, you can use it for anything that doesn't produce its own light, and you can narrow that down by saying stuff about what it orbits or doesn't orbit, and then you can try to cull the comets and asteroids from that list using size (or whatever) as a criterion... The definition doesn't DO much, practically, to help us understand the big woolly universe out there.
Example: Pluto's the small end, great, but what about the current methods for searching for extrasolar "planets"? Because of our methods, we're mostly limited to seeing massive, super-Jupiters in incredibly close orbits around their stars. ('Till last year, anyway.) I guess those are "planets," but they sure don't look or act like anything familiar to us, and calling them a "planet" doesn't help us understand them much.
If we settle this debate, elementary school kids everywhere will know the names to memorize for the solar system. And that's about it.
Just nip and tuck out all the legitimate bad acting, and you got yourself a "Best Actor" nomination.
Just remove all the stone that isn't Michelangelo's "David," and you'll sculpt Michelangelo's "David." It's that simple.
Point taken. No, really -- I get it. Actors are on screen, but really the complexity of the whole process is so great now that big, major release films are more like a complex technical feat made by a team of artisans than a personal work of art by the people in front of the camera.
(The observation applies more to the overproduced blockbuster than to anything else, though. Indie films are still believers in acting, and they can't afford 60 takes.)
Amazon's "helpful" votes are a problem
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An IMDb for Books
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This'll make me seem pathetic, but over several years I have something like 70 reviews on Amazon. Just things I thought of on some given afternoon and wanted to spout off about... you know, for the times when you feel like prating.
Anyway, I can toss in two cents to back up criticisms of their model: Amazon has a serious bias in favor of positive reviews. When you write a glowing review of something, the "helpful" votes pour in, especially if the book in question is on a controversial subject. Don't believe me? Write a positive review of something nastily political.
On the other hand when you really slam something, air it out, pretty often the votes are overwhelmingly against you. Doesn't matter how shoddy the book is, there are people who take offense.
I can honestly say I've written every review I have with the person who might be considering that title in mind: Should they buy this? When I don't recommend something, for example, I try to suggest an alternative. But the "helpful" votes aren't much interested in that; they're about staking out positions. The only real exception (for me) has been reference works -- which type of dog should I think about? or Is this bird guide organized well? -- those sorts of things.
Not sure why, but imdb isn't like that. Maybe it really is the conflict-of-interest thing. Seems like a natural problem with a commercial site, but then imdb does actually link to sources for movies, doesn't it?
However, I do not feel your bank analogy is fair. First of all, at any given point, the bank vault can not be accessed by anyone anywhere...
The money you have in your account is accessible from anywhere, if your bank has any kind of Web front end for checking and savings. It does, by now. Banks also hook into one hell of a certificate system for all the electronic transactions going on out there, leaving alone the little consumer Web site thing. They take this stuff seriously; if anything they take it more seriously than Health Care has, which is why HIPAA's got everyone worked up.
I agree, negligence would be the legal principle, so we don't need to invent new punishments as a deterrent. But the analogy works.
On a 17" 1440x900 Mac, companies have basically released baby updates to add the new resolution. Most games do support it -- anyway all the five or six my kids like. (And Civ III that I like.)
Haven't yet seen anything that wouldn't run on the first double-click, anyway.
Where are the comparison numbers: these laptops, which were based on earmarked funds and not taken from the general tax bucket, vs. sports expenditures? Someone? $37 million sounds like a lot, but how much is it next to the amount Maine spends on its annual football championships?
Sports based initiatives often have similar effects for example.
Anyone like to post a link about how much the state of Maine spends on sports in schools every year? I'm not making a point, just curious how they compare.
Are we also saying the sports money is wasted because it could have been spent on books, teachers, libraries, and every other True Good Thing?
IMHO, (I know, no such thing) this is actually a bit more sincere.
See your point. In a way it's as if big advertising -- if Dr. Pepper can be considered "big" -- has actually understood the advantages of point-to-point as opposed to broadcast media. They can identify individuals who like it anyway, and sweeten the pot just a little, and that spreads some for a minimal investment in free crap. Wow, someone gets it -- at least enough to exploit it. Note to MPAA...
But how sad is it that we're weighing the relative degrees of "sincerity" in soft-drink advertising? Maybe the word "sincere" is ripe for some sort of pop-cultural degradation, just based on our thinking this way: Dr. Pepper -- ahhh, it's sincere."
On another note, there is DRM of a sort in the iPod, specifically for the Audible content, but I think that is unique to their format and not system wide.
It's not just the iPod, it's content in iTunes 3.0.1 too -- and half the time this DRM thing, whatever it is, stops me from burning legitimate tracks from CDs I bought and paid for years ago. The discs are sitting next to the CPU, this isn't "piracy." (Arrrr.) Extremely annoying. Doesn't seem to be Audible content only, and the error message is infuriatingly vague -- you don't find out the Audible connection unless you dig a bit.
This does make me wary of DRM problems with Apple's proposed service. Bad PR.
Slashdot Mirror
North Korea has, in the last few weeks, repeatedly threatened to do things like "Turn New York into a sea of ashes." Maybe you didn't notice because US news sources have soft-pedaled that? Do a google, man.
Before you throw that "uninformed" brick, you might want to make sure there's no glass structure over your head.
Simple example: textbooks often include a paragraph or so about the Lincoln/Douglas debates. They'll mention Douglas's speaking style, and some specifically mention his being well-dressed. Very few of the textbooks Loewen looked at mentioned Douglas's moral justification of slavery, though, which is what the debates were basically about.
Basically Loewen's point is that publishers are under pressure not to offend so as to sell their books to the most school systems -- the result being that primary sources are reduced to little "sound bite" sidebars and captions instead of being made central to the narrative of the books. What kids get is watered-down, vague history in which America is vaguely progressing over time due to principles and Old Glory. The idea that individuals had to struggle to make that happen gets softened so much that it's hardly there. People like the suffragettes become marginal to their own stories, almost.
I imagine science textbooks have a similar challenge: they're trying to be marketable to the broadest group of people while not cheesing off the creationists and their friends. If this series somehow overcame the tendency for History textbooks to use "South Friendly" terms like "War Between the States" in the place of "Civil War," maybe it can take on the creationists too.
Personally, I'd like to see something combining the storyline of a good RPG with the action of a good FPS. Open ended would be nice, something like Privateer or Freelancer but in a fantasy or military setting rather than as a space sim.
Not that I'd mind any of those things, but when you can refer to the genre of your game in shorthand ("FPS") and you want to re-make existing games in a different setting, that's hardly breaking new ground. Do we want the open community to produce nothing but less-polished takes on overpriced, over-card-dependent consumer boxed titles?
(Anyone who can come up with a worthy successor to M.U.L.E. would have my blessing, such as it is.)
I went to find collections for my kids this last year. Calvin and Hobbes is still as good, even better, than I remembered it. But Bloom County, sorry to say, is not just highly topical with 80s politics and all... it's just not quite as fantastically good. Sorry to say it, but there it is. Once you get past the initial "cute Opus" phase it just felt kind of seedy. The kids never got into the big book, either, though they're obsessed with Calvin and Hobbes now.
Maybe I could RTFM/A, but not here: does the updated version support old films? Films, for example, with the various mod packs, like WWII, Civil War, or Lego Land? The films from this game were so watchable, just great.
(If someone had recast MOO II in a similar way, it'd rate a /. story. This is just as cool a game, or moreso.)
Man, I think I actually did one of those. Not on a computer, as a jigsaw puzzle. One of those clues-from-the-puzzle things. (Further proof that single fathers rapidly become their own grandmothers, but I digress.)
In addition once you get big name enough to do what you want, you are generally going to write software in the same... What would be original is if Will Wright came out with a FPS shooter based in his genre of games.
Well, not original exactly, but at least it would be a hybrid between genres. Aren't these companies averse to even that level of risk, though? Take a look at that puzzle/mystery thing I did: mysteries and puzzles are two big deals for older folks, so they tried a crossover idea. There are game titles like that; WWII Online has both a strategic side and a shooter side. Black and White is a sort of God game crossed with a hey-you-Pikachu creature-interaction thing, maybe?
But most titles are dead center tries at one genre or another. You can glance at a box and know basically everything there is to know about how a game will play. Feels like I already played most of 'em. C'mon, cross-pollinate, at least.
Right! They'll take a look at their bottom lines, glance suspiciously at the internet, and unleash a fusillade of PR, legal, and lobbying action against game "piracy."
(You did mean the message from the RIAA and the MPAA, right?)
Microsoft, apparently, == Washington spam laws?
Will it "exempt" ISPs from the laws, or will it "overturn" the laws?
Muddled.
Yeah, I used that example because I worked for both companies and was around when the purchase took place, actually.
McDonald's, though, isn't spinning off a more upscale division, or buying a new brand (ugh, that's so jargony) to fill in a market gap -- they're stuck with the golden arches brand, and they're seemingly viewing this three-city wifi thing as a test for migrating the whole chain in that direction... Seems to me like it's an idea that would work at freeway stops, not in inner-city franchises -- but they're trying to do it across both those in places like Chicago.
How does a consumer know which kind of Mickey D's she's walking into? Pretty muddled.
This is slashdot. S/he needs a reason? From SETI@home's donations page:
Yeah, it does sound like a real sinkhole for money, doesn't it?
Why is it that people whining about waste always pick on the government and nonprofit tries like SETI@home? Could their objection be to the ends, and not the means they claim to be ridiculing? Gillette's initials plans, at least, were to spend $300 million on marketing the Mach 3 razor. Their previous model, the Sensor, cost nearly $200 million to develop. If you want to complain about waste, why is it you're choosing the idealistic scientific endeavor?
Right -- Starbucks and Borders are all about a business model that went out of its way NOT to push people in and out of the door as fast as possible. Borders, and the Barnes and Noble "superstores," were very much reactions to B Dalton's buy-your-Stephen-King-and-get-out-of-the-cashier's -way approach.
B Daltons is still around, though, just serving a different audience. Makes you wonder how well Mickey-D's knows its own business model -- or how seriously they're looking to change it.
(This'd maybe make sense in McDonalds' franchises at highway stops, for traveling types?)
Those capabilities frighten many at the networks, studios and Hollywood talent agencies.... Letting viewers reshuffle the TV schedule cripples the network's ability to build audiences for new shows by putting them on after hits. More troublesome, the easy fast-forwarding promises to deprive networks of revenue by decimating the audience for commercials.
One more example of an entertainment industry that doesn't understand point-to-point and can't break the ingrained habits of centralized, "broadcast" control. This is what they're supposedly worried about? That scheduling flexibility offered to the audience will prevent people from having new shows scheduled down their throats? A generation of network schedulers is quaking in their boots -- but c'mon, you can't think of any better ways to promote a program? Movies become big hits, almost always, without any such scheduling "in." (The ones that get heavy TV ad time are usually crap: "Master of Disguise," anyone?) And what about the full half of the glass: the people who DO get to watch it who couldn't otherwise? Huh?
And note to TV execs: anything that actually reports, legitimately, the rate of viewing is going to "decimate" your revenues from commercials. We go to the bathroom. The same people who watch commercials for Bud Light and laugh now aren't going to stop. The rest of us hit "mute."
Cool to see that name on his list of inspirational reading. They're not similar writers; O'Brian's series are historical fiction, and their heart is really the complex, evolving friendship between the two main characters. Not really Niven territory, but they're astonishingly good once you're in the mindset.
They changed how they interact with Office apps. Every new version we have to cope with they do some other fool thing with Excel or Word: docs that pop up in IE's window, with some of the same menu items, but some of those are broken... It's not improvement, just a kind of drifting around.
To my mind IE has started on the "upgrades that just change stuff" path that Word hit sometime in 1994 or so. They're changing it, but it's change for change's sake. Word 6.0 didn't do anything much better than 5.1a, it just did it differently, to make sure we kept "upgrading." IE might momentarily seem to take over file management tasks that used to happen in Explorer, but there's no real improvement in how things happen, they're just shiffling functions around.
As usual, Apple releases a beta of an app and people either a) exult or b) express dismay that it didn't utterly change the world. It's a Web browser. By version 1.0 maybe they'll have a nice, stable, lean little browser that hooks into the rest of the OS without becoming cancerware like IE on a Windows box. That'd be handy.
-- fellow Chimera user.
"Planet" is a huge, vague term that isn't really of practical use. Sure, you can use it for anything that doesn't produce its own light, and you can narrow that down by saying stuff about what it orbits or doesn't orbit, and then you can try to cull the comets and asteroids from that list using size (or whatever) as a criterion... The definition doesn't DO much, practically, to help us understand the big woolly universe out there.
Example: Pluto's the small end, great, but what about the current methods for searching for extrasolar "planets"? Because of our methods, we're mostly limited to seeing massive, super-Jupiters in incredibly close orbits around their stars. ('Till last year, anyway.) I guess those are "planets," but they sure don't look or act like anything familiar to us, and calling them a "planet" doesn't help us understand them much.
If we settle this debate, elementary school kids everywhere will know the names to memorize for the solar system. And that's about it.
Just remove all the stone that isn't Michelangelo's "David," and you'll sculpt Michelangelo's "David." It's that simple.
Point taken. No, really -- I get it. Actors are on screen, but really the complexity of the whole process is so great now that big, major release films are more like a complex technical feat made by a team of artisans than a personal work of art by the people in front of the camera.
(The observation applies more to the overproduced blockbuster than to anything else, though. Indie films are still believers in acting, and they can't afford 60 takes.)
Anyway, I can toss in two cents to back up criticisms of their model: Amazon has a serious bias in favor of positive reviews. When you write a glowing review of something, the "helpful" votes pour in, especially if the book in question is on a controversial subject. Don't believe me? Write a positive review of something nastily political.
On the other hand when you really slam something, air it out, pretty often the votes are overwhelmingly against you. Doesn't matter how shoddy the book is, there are people who take offense.
I can honestly say I've written every review I have with the person who might be considering that title in mind: Should they buy this? When I don't recommend something, for example, I try to suggest an alternative. But the "helpful" votes aren't much interested in that; they're about staking out positions. The only real exception (for me) has been reference works -- which type of dog should I think about? or Is this bird guide organized well? -- those sorts of things.
Not sure why, but imdb isn't like that. Maybe it really is the conflict-of-interest thing. Seems like a natural problem with a commercial site, but then imdb does actually link to sources for movies, doesn't it?
The money you have in your account is accessible from anywhere, if your bank has any kind of Web front end for checking and savings. It does, by now. Banks also hook into one hell of a certificate system for all the electronic transactions going on out there, leaving alone the little consumer Web site thing. They take this stuff seriously; if anything they take it more seriously than Health Care has, which is why HIPAA's got everyone worked up.
I agree, negligence would be the legal principle, so we don't need to invent new punishments as a deterrent. But the analogy works.
I'd check it more seriously if my friend who works at the Apple store hadn't seen a rash of the same problem.
Haven't yet seen anything that wouldn't run on the first double-click, anyway.
Where are the comparison numbers: these laptops, which were based on earmarked funds and not taken from the general tax bucket, vs. sports expenditures? Someone? $37 million sounds like a lot, but how much is it next to the amount Maine spends on its annual football championships?
Anyone like to post a link about how much the state of Maine spends on sports in schools every year? I'm not making a point, just curious how they compare.
Are we also saying the sports money is wasted because it could have been spent on books, teachers, libraries, and every other True Good Thing?
See your point. In a way it's as if big advertising -- if Dr. Pepper can be considered "big" -- has actually understood the advantages of point-to-point as opposed to broadcast media. They can identify individuals who like it anyway, and sweeten the pot just a little, and that spreads some for a minimal investment in free crap. Wow, someone gets it -- at least enough to exploit it. Note to MPAA...
But how sad is it that we're weighing the relative degrees of "sincerity" in soft-drink advertising? Maybe the word "sincere" is ripe for some sort of pop-cultural degradation, just based on our thinking this way: Dr. Pepper -- ahhh, it's sincere."
It's not just the iPod, it's content in iTunes 3.0.1 too -- and half the time this DRM thing, whatever it is, stops me from burning legitimate tracks from CDs I bought and paid for years ago. The discs are sitting next to the CPU, this isn't "piracy." (Arrrr.) Extremely annoying. Doesn't seem to be Audible content only, and the error message is infuriatingly vague -- you don't find out the Audible connection unless you dig a bit.
This does make me wary of DRM problems with Apple's proposed service. Bad PR.