Re:How long will the books stay around?
on
The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 1
What bothers me about e-readers is the impermanence of the content.
Then buy DRM-free e-books and back them up.
Re:Cost - Only real issue with eBooks
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 1
eBooks were supposed to bring about a revolution. More people published, high profits for everyone involved, all while still costing radically less for the consumer.
They have. I don't remember the last time I paid more than $2.99 for an e-book.
Almost everyone I know who refuses to have a cell phone is making over $100K/yr. Yes, there's a blatant sampling error in my observation; I have one because I've been forced to have one by work.
Indeed. Fifteen years ago a cell phone meant you were so important that you had to be contactable at all times. Today a cell phone means you're so unimportant that people can pester you at any time.
Life and limb trump free speech as shown with the "screaming fire in a crowded theater" example.
Uh, quite the opposite, in fact. The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" case was about the government wanting to prevent people distributing flyers that opposed the draft in WWI, which might have saved some of the soldiers who died in that pointless war if they had refused to go.
I am fairly confident the constitution protects your right to free speech, not your right to emanate electromagnetic waves at any power level or frequency.
Which part of the constitution lets the government tell you what you can and can't do with radio waves?
Would you claim that the first amendment would be satisfied if the government said 'you're free to print whatever you want, but we're banning the printing press and anyone found with one will be executed'?
DRM stinks for the end user and publisher alike--and is impossible to manage once a crack is out in the wild. Server-based game content, however, is a very different beast.
Server-based single-player games are just like traditional DRM, only worse.
If I want to play a server-based game there are about a bazillion MMOGs already.
Make a game a service, and you pretty much completely eliminate resale and piracy issues.
I see you finally mention the real reason right at the end. Game developers are far more concerned about evil consumers who resell their games than they are about pirates, because pirates would never have bought it in the first place.
'Game as a service' is excellent for them because they not only eliminate the evil resellers, they can also turn off the servers and force you to buy the new version of the game at any time.
thank fuck Scotland will be independent soon and we can let westminster so Scots can be rid of this bullshit. At least in Scotland we have the Scottish National party who do actually give a fuck about Scotland.
Uh, dude? Scottish votes put the Labour government into Parliament and kept it there. Without those Scottish votes, England would have had the Tory government that it voted for.
And, of course, if the Tories had pushed for arbitrary law-making by magistrates in this way, the Labour supporters would have been out on the streets demonstrating against it.
I don't think he's interested in stopping the piracy by forcing hardline anti-piracy methods.
Dongles are not 'hardline anti-piracy methods'; Avid use dongles and their software is still available on pirate sites. Dongles are a way to keep honest customers honest, because they can't accidentally install the software on ten PCs when they only bought five copies.
They're mildly annoying to legitimate buyers, but far less annoying than crappy 'activation' schemes that deactivate at random and lock you out of the software you've paid for.
One has to wonder just how hard the petroleum industry will fight these developments, though.
Until we have a better means of producing the carbohydrates, I'm guessing you'll see more death throes from the people who are starving because of the food we'r'e not growing.
And don't bother telling me to not use such PDF's in the first place... that sort of hand-waving hardly addresses my point.
Uh, don't use those stupid PDFs in the first place.
I wasted about two hours this week because my bank used those dumb PDFs for the sake of saving a few milliseconds creating a new PDF file with the content hard-coded. Since I didn't want to have to infect my Linux install with Adobe I had to boot into Windows for the first time in weeks, install all the updates, install Adobe PDF crap, reboot three or four times while doing so, find the Windows 7 x64 driver for my printer, which I assumed I could get from HP but their web site just said 'drivers are installed with Windows 7', which, duh, they're not unless you go to Windows Update to search for them and finally was able to print out the receipt I needed.
So yeah, please don't force your users to install Adobe crap just for your convenience. Next time I'll know to always pick 'send me all my paperwork in the mail, you idiots' option when I apply for anything there.
Splash screens had their time and place back in the floppy-disc era. Now days they seem kind of quaint.
They don't seem quaint when they take up a quarter of the screen and force themselves to the top so I can't continue to use other apps while I wait for the bloated monster to start up.
why are we so hell-bent on destroying all the progress we made over the past 50 or so years?
'We' aren't. Governments are.
Fortunately most of them are bankrupt and can't sustain a war against their people for long. The EU is collapsing, the USA is reliant on China buying their bonds to keep them afloat, and most Western nations have only sustained their economy over the last decade by printing money to fund non-jobs.
The great thing about economics is that you can only ignore reality for so long before it comes back and bites you.
As for this law, well thats being pushed by a Tory government. The last Labour government were also quite right-wing & like most of your US politicians in the pockets of big business.
The suggestion that either Blair's Labour or Cameron's Tories are 'right wing' makes me laugh. They're only right wing when compared to Stalin and Mao, and not by much.
Webapps or just web pages, as we used to call them, are the future of software.
Webapps suck. Slashdot is a glaring example.
As for being 'the future', good luck running a Webapp on Earth from the Moon with 3 second ping times. 'The Cloud' is a temporary fantasy that will be destroyed by the speed of light limits.
The counterargument to that would be that you can vote out politicians, but corporate monopolies last for generations.
You can't vote out politicians. You can only vote in another politician, and if they're not as corrupt as the one you threw out they probably will be after a few years.
We're STILL dealing with a Windows monopoly.
Thanks to copyright, patents and other monopolies granted to them by governments.
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What bothers me about e-readers is the impermanence of the content.
Then buy DRM-free e-books and back them up.
eBooks were supposed to bring about a revolution. More people published, high profits for everyone involved, all while still costing radically less for the consumer.
They have. I don't remember the last time I paid more than $2.99 for an e-book.
Almost everyone I know who refuses to have a cell phone is making over $100K/yr. Yes, there's a blatant sampling error in my observation; I have one because I've been forced to have one by work.
Indeed. Fifteen years ago a cell phone meant you were so important that you had to be contactable at all times. Today a cell phone means you're so unimportant that people can pester you at any time.
Schenck is no longer good law.
It was never good law.
Life and limb trump free speech as shown with the "screaming fire in a crowded theater" example.
Uh, quite the opposite, in fact. The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" case was about the government wanting to prevent people distributing flyers that opposed the draft in WWI, which might have saved some of the soldiers who died in that pointless war if they had refused to go.
I am fairly confident the constitution protects your right to free speech, not your right to emanate electromagnetic waves at any power level or frequency.
Which part of the constitution lets the government tell you what you can and can't do with radio waves?
Would you claim that the first amendment would be satisfied if the government said 'you're free to print whatever you want, but we're banning the printing press and anyone found with one will be executed'?
So as I already said, you do the math over what you value and then decide what you want prefer to buy (and what streaming is good enough for).
I don't need to do any math, because they refuse to let me view their crap on my operating system.
DRM stinks for the end user and publisher alike--and is impossible to manage once a crack is out in the wild. Server-based game content, however, is a very different beast.
Server-based single-player games are just like traditional DRM, only worse.
If I want to play a server-based game there are about a bazillion MMOGs already.
Make a game a service, and you pretty much completely eliminate resale and piracy issues.
I see you finally mention the real reason right at the end. Game developers are far more concerned about evil consumers who resell their games than they are about pirates, because pirates would never have bought it in the first place.
'Game as a service' is excellent for them because they not only eliminate the evil resellers, they can also turn off the servers and force you to buy the new version of the game at any time.
There's nothing preventing you from representing yourself pro se, for example.
Except the lawyers have made the law so complex that even they don't really understand it any more.
Or they decided to not pay any attention to people who aren't their target audience.
Yeah, life's much easier if you ignore anything the users say until they stop using your software.
Did they remove the suck?
thank fuck Scotland will be independent soon and we can let westminster so Scots can be rid of this bullshit. At least in Scotland we have the Scottish National party who do actually give a fuck about Scotland.
Uh, dude? Scottish votes put the Labour government into Parliament and kept it there. Without those Scottish votes, England would have had the Tory government that it voted for.
And, of course, if the Tories had pushed for arbitrary law-making by magistrates in this way, the Labour supporters would have been out on the streets demonstrating against it.
Impractical to those who want to spy on everything users do, anyway.
I don't think he's interested in stopping the piracy by forcing hardline anti-piracy methods.
Dongles are not 'hardline anti-piracy methods'; Avid use dongles and their software is still available on pirate sites. Dongles are a way to keep honest customers honest, because they can't accidentally install the software on ten PCs when they only bought five copies.
They're mildly annoying to legitimate buyers, but far less annoying than crappy 'activation' schemes that deactivate at random and lock you out of the software you've paid for.
This is confusing.
Actually, it's easy. All governments are bad guys.
Well, maybe a few aren't, but if you start by assuming they're bad guys then you'll be pleasantly surprised if you turn out to be wrong.
One has to wonder just how hard the petroleum industry will fight these developments, though.
Until we have a better means of producing the carbohydrates, I'm guessing you'll see more death throes from the people who are starving because of the food we'r'e not growing.
And don't bother telling me to not use such PDF's in the first place... that sort of hand-waving hardly addresses my point.
Uh, don't use those stupid PDFs in the first place.
I wasted about two hours this week because my bank used those dumb PDFs for the sake of saving a few milliseconds creating a new PDF file with the content hard-coded. Since I didn't want to have to infect my Linux install with Adobe I had to boot into Windows for the first time in weeks, install all the updates, install Adobe PDF crap, reboot three or four times while doing so, find the Windows 7 x64 driver for my printer, which I assumed I could get from HP but their web site just said 'drivers are installed with Windows 7', which, duh, they're not unless you go to Windows Update to search for them and finally was able to print out the receipt I needed.
So yeah, please don't force your users to install Adobe crap just for your convenience. Next time I'll know to always pick 'send me all my paperwork in the mail, you idiots' option when I apply for anything there.
Splash screens had their time and place back in the floppy-disc era. Now days they seem kind of quaint.
They don't seem quaint when they take up a quarter of the screen and force themselves to the top so I can't continue to use other apps while I wait for the bloated monster to start up.
The catchpa is worthless against an army of Indians being paid just pennies a pop to break them. The only thing they do is annoy the script kiddies.
No, They also annoy your actual, real human users. I often have to try three or four times to get the bloody thing right.
why are we so hell-bent on destroying all the progress we made over the past 50 or so years?
'We' aren't. Governments are.
Fortunately most of them are bankrupt and can't sustain a war against their people for long. The EU is collapsing, the USA is reliant on China buying their bonds to keep them afloat, and most Western nations have only sustained their economy over the last decade by printing money to fund non-jobs.
The great thing about economics is that you can only ignore reality for so long before it comes back and bites you.
Name-calling aside, I think Parent has a point. I'm pretty sure it's the responsibility of the people to keep government power limited
And how do you plan to do that? Labour were authoritarian scum, and they were replaced by Tories who are authoritarian scum.
There is no electable party which is not full of authoritarian scum, which is why so few Britons bother to vote any more.
As for this law, well thats being pushed by a Tory government. The last Labour government were also quite right-wing & like most of your US politicians in the pockets of big business.
The suggestion that either Blair's Labour or Cameron's Tories are 'right wing' makes me laugh. They're only right wing when compared to Stalin and Mao, and not by much.
Webapps or just web pages, as we used to call them, are the future of software.
Webapps suck. Slashdot is a glaring example.
As for being 'the future', good luck running a Webapp on Earth from the Moon with 3 second ping times. 'The Cloud' is a temporary fantasy that will be destroyed by the speed of light limits.
The counterargument to that would be that you can vote out politicians, but corporate monopolies last for generations.
You can't vote out politicians. You can only vote in another politician, and if they're not as corrupt as the one you threw out they probably will be after a few years.
We're STILL dealing with a Windows monopoly.
Thanks to copyright, patents and other monopolies granted to them by governments.