I realize I'm off-topic, but ending the drug war is as simple as asking "Why don't we just regulate the legitimate sales of substances that the public wants to buy?" You can still throw dealers who traffic to children in prison. In fact, you'd have so many DEA agents available to do the job (since they would no longer be monitoring adult users) that the problem might be reduced to as near to zero as it ever will be.
Sorry. I live with chronic pain in a state w/o medical marijuana laws. No, I can't move -- there's a recession on.
I'm 38, and I preferred Bugs Bunny to Mickey as a kid in part because I could catch old (WWII-era) Bugs cartoons in the mornings and afternoons and newer Bugs cartoons for two hours every Saturday morning. Mickey, OTOH, only appeared every few months on a Sunday night Disney movie.
Even then, Disney held Mickey back as some kind of icon that one was allowed to worship only on certain high holy days. It backfired then, and it will backfire now.
Vegeta99 is right about the sound quality. (I don't know about the chemical composition of the tape-- it's probably on Wikipedia, but I can't be bothered to look it up.;) The cases were always plastic, of course.
Metal tapes were a lot more expensive than regular tapes, and you could only buy them at specialty stores, such as Musicland. If you were going to create a master mix and then duplicate it on a cutting-edge dual-cassette deck, you would create the master on a metal tape ($4 to $5 each in mid-80's currency IIRC) and then duplicate it onto a normal tape (either something like a decent mid-level Maxell or, if you had no money, cheap POS tapes [made from recycled scraps] which were sold at Walgreen's). The normal tape would go into the Walkman; if it chewed that up, you were OK. However, if you were a poor student, you made do with what you had. Rule Of Thumb: the cheaper the Walkman, the more likely it will eat your tapes.
If your tape did get eaten, you had two choices: 1) toss it 2) get out a screwdriver, take the case apart, and try to respool the tape without twisting or pulling too hard. [The more you paid for your tape, the more likely this option was.]
Tapes were also _the_ way to listen to your music in a car. And a professionally recorded tape played for the first time sounded almost as good as a CD does, so it's not as if we were total philistines!;)
All that said, we Walkman users would sometimes look despairingly at our 60-cassette case of tapes and dream of the day when a small, lightweight object would hold all of those songs at once. And now it's here!
It will take someone older than me to explain that whole 8-track thing, though...
Would very much like to pay for a serious background check on this guy -- using public records, of course -- and see how he appreciates that info being posted on the net.
If I were going to buy a ten year old technical book, I'd buy it used. You wouldn't make any royalties off of me because of or in spite of ebook piracy.
I hope this doesn't come across as cynical or sarcastic, because I want to present this as honestly as I can.
If I had checked out your book from the library, wouldn't that have meant one sale for you (the library) but no royalties from me? Wouldn't that be the same net result as if one person bought your book, scanned it, posted it, which I then downloaded?
Now, the common rebuttal to this is: if I like a book I borrow from a library, I might buy it later on; but if I download a book I like, I'll never buy it.
True, I would never buy another ebook; but if I want a hardcopy, I have two choices: new or used.
Being a fairly cheap consumer, the first thing I'll do when I want a book is to pop over to Amazon and see what the retail price is and compare it to the array of used prices. If your book is $9.95 and used copies are going for $8, I'll buy new. However, if your book is $29.95 and used copies are going for about $11, I'll buy used.
So, in only one of those two scenarios, you get royalties.
Now, here's the kicker: even if your work wasn't out there as a pirated ebook, these would still be my basic choices, and I'd still heavily lean toward a used copy rather than pay retail price.
My take on this issue is that if we truly follow the anti-piracy arguments to their logical conclusion, we will have to institute a royalty-pay scheme in each library on a per-checkout basis as well as tax all used book sales so that this revenue stream goes into a royalty fund. In other words, selling, trading or just loaning books as we do today would have to be criminalized (a la "The Right to Read"). And the only way to effectively enforce these laws would be within a police-state.
Now I am NOT suggesting that because you want to be paid royalties that you are advocating a police state. What I am saying is this:
1. You will lose royalties with or without ebooks due to libraries and used sales.
2. To change our present system of book sales, societies in the free world would need to submit to a new kind of close scrutiny, one where even the lending of books becomes a government regulated transaction.
Rather than fighting a no-win battle, consider book readings, book signings, or simply lowering the price of the retail/ebook editions of your work as a more viable way to enhance your revenue stream.
...then every used book, CD, or DVD transaction is a lost sale. Every item checked out from a public library is a lost sale. Every loaned item from one friend to another is a lost sale.
They want "The Right to Read" to become a reality. Then there will be no free market of ideas -- they will own them all.
I found my post written at the time (Mar 29 2008):
***
I haven't installed or used a Red Hat distro since about 2003 -- version 8.1, in fact. I quit about the time that Red Hat announced that all of us nonpaying users were leeches that they were better off without. I ignored the Fedora project, sticking with Kanotix, since it was deb-based, as I was tired of the dependency hell that rpm packages were known for. Kanotix worked after a lot of tweaking, and once Kubuntu reached 6.06, I switched over to that. Kubuntu has had ups and downs but won overall on consistency. It's still the best distro I've ever used. But it only achieved its potential with additional packages, best installed via Automatix.
Well, the news that Automatix is dead prompted me to install Fedora 8 on a spare partition.
Not that I couldn't do what Automatix did via the command prompt, but I figured that it was time to eject my Red Hat prejudices and take a look at what its community has come up with after five years. That, and the end of Automatix might spell the end of K/Ubuntu as the distro of choice for the casual user who wants to give Linux a spin. Those users are its base; tough to survive if your base gets alienated.
And, after five years, I figured that the problems associated with rpm-based distros would be history.
How many words are there on Earth for WRONG?!
Fedora 8 installs fine, and its Gnome desktop looks like a Mac (which is good), but if you add KDE, you lose sound support (as least on my laptop). And I have four packages that can't install because of -- believe it or not -- dependency hell.
It's been five years, folks. Five years! May I be blunt? It's time to ditch the rpms and move to debs. apt works just fine, folks. yum does not. End of story.
***
Broken fiddle my backside. That's a legitimate, serious error. And "apt-get install kde-desktop" does not cause this problem in Ubuntu.
I tried a Fedora release not too long ago and found myself in dep-hell before the install was set up to my specs. That was the reason I bailed on RH back when they were on v8.1 If they can't fix that in the space of several years, why bother?
I'd like to see them try this with a book like "The Analysis of Linear Partial Differential Operators II: Differential Operators with Constant Coefficients (v. 2)" by Lars Hörmander and come up with anything that wasn't laughable.
"I liked it! Much better than 'Cats'! I'm going to read it again and again!"
This girl is either a failure and content to be so ("Look at all the things I can't do!!") or a shill for M$. As for the press... well, there's a reason we call them the drive-by media.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize I'm off-topic, but ending the drug war is as simple as asking "Why don't we just regulate the legitimate sales of substances that the public wants to buy?" You can still throw dealers who traffic to children in prison. In fact, you'd have so many DEA agents available to do the job (since they would no longer be monitoring adult users) that the problem might be reduced to as near to zero as it ever will be.
Sorry. I live with chronic pain in a state w/o medical marijuana laws. No, I can't move -- there's a recession on.
We now return to our on-topic /. discussion.
I will correct grammar in a rare article now, but that's all. I'm not in the inner circle -- therefore, it's not worth my time to fight for anything.
...all shovels are illegal.
That's my interpretation, but IANAL. Any thoughts from those how know something about law?
I'm 38, and I preferred Bugs Bunny to Mickey as a kid in part because I could catch old (WWII-era) Bugs cartoons in the mornings and afternoons and newer Bugs cartoons for two hours every Saturday morning. Mickey, OTOH, only appeared every few months on a Sunday night Disney movie.
Even then, Disney held Mickey back as some kind of icon that one was allowed to worship only on certain high holy days. It backfired then, and it will backfire now.
A steady diet of crap will only make you sick.
Frak! I owned the model on the lower right!
Vegeta99 is right about the sound quality. (I don't know about the chemical composition of the tape-- it's probably on Wikipedia, but I can't be bothered to look it up. ;) The cases were always plastic, of course.
Metal tapes were a lot more expensive than regular tapes, and you could only buy them at specialty stores, such as Musicland. If you were going to create a master mix and then duplicate it on a cutting-edge dual-cassette deck, you would create the master on a metal tape ($4 to $5 each in mid-80's currency IIRC) and then duplicate it onto a normal tape (either something like a decent mid-level Maxell or, if you had no money, cheap POS tapes [made from recycled scraps] which were sold at Walgreen's). The normal tape would go into the Walkman; if it chewed that up, you were OK. However, if you were a poor student, you made do with what you had. Rule Of Thumb: the cheaper the Walkman, the more likely it will eat your tapes.
If your tape did get eaten, you had two choices:
1) toss it
2) get out a screwdriver, take the case apart, and try to respool the tape without twisting or pulling too hard. [The more you paid for your tape, the more likely this option was.]
Tapes were also _the_ way to listen to your music in a car. And a professionally recorded tape played for the first time sounded almost as good as a CD does, so it's not as if we were total philistines! ;)
All that said, we Walkman users would sometimes look despairingly at our 60-cassette case of tapes and dream of the day when a small, lightweight object would hold all of those songs at once. And now it's here!
It will take someone older than me to explain that whole 8-track thing, though...
The online encyclopedia that anyone (who is _in_ with Jimbo Wales) can edit.
Would very much like to pay for a serious background check on this guy -- using public records, of course -- and see how he appreciates that info being posted on the net.
My two cents worth: if in doubt, don't. Wait a year for others to find the bugs.
If you've written a book, made a CD, produced a video, etc., that's downloadable & DRM-free, reply to this message with a description and the URL.
If I were going to buy a ten year old technical book, I'd buy it used. You wouldn't make any royalties off of me because of or in spite of ebook piracy.
I hope this doesn't come across as cynical or sarcastic, because I want to present this as honestly as I can.
If I had checked out your book from the library, wouldn't that have meant one sale for you (the library) but no royalties from me? Wouldn't that be the same net result as if one person bought your book, scanned it, posted it, which I then downloaded?
Now, the common rebuttal to this is: if I like a book I borrow from a library, I might buy it later on; but if I download a book I like, I'll never buy it.
True, I would never buy another ebook; but if I want a hardcopy, I have two choices: new or used.
Being a fairly cheap consumer, the first thing I'll do when I want a book is to pop over to Amazon and see what the retail price is and compare it to the array of used prices. If your book is $9.95 and used copies are going for $8, I'll buy new. However, if your book is $29.95 and used copies are going for about $11, I'll buy used.
So, in only one of those two scenarios, you get royalties.
Now, here's the kicker: even if your work wasn't out there as a pirated ebook, these would still be my basic choices, and I'd still heavily lean toward a used copy rather than pay retail price.
My take on this issue is that if we truly follow the anti-piracy arguments to their logical conclusion, we will have to institute a royalty-pay scheme in each library on a per-checkout basis as well as tax all used book sales so that this revenue stream goes into a royalty fund. In other words, selling, trading or just loaning books as we do today would have to be criminalized (a la "The Right to Read"). And the only way to effectively enforce these laws would be within a police-state.
Now I am NOT suggesting that because you want to be paid royalties that you are advocating a police state. What I am saying is this:
1. You will lose royalties with or without ebooks due to libraries and used sales.
2. To change our present system of book sales, societies in the free world would need to submit to a new kind of close scrutiny, one where even the lending of books becomes a government regulated transaction.
Rather than fighting a no-win battle, consider book readings, book signings, or simply lowering the price of the retail/ebook editions of your work as a more viable way to enhance your revenue stream.
In terms of UI, also a big leap over 8.10, as well as better Bluetooth support.
...then every used book, CD, or DVD transaction is a lost sale. Every item checked out from a public library is a lost sale. Every loaned item from one friend to another is a lost sale.
They want "The Right to Read" to become a reality. Then there will be no free market of ideas -- they will own them all.
You were lucky to have a lake! We had to code in cesspool while sulfuric acid was dumped all over our bodies and melted our keyboards!
http://open.crngames.com/src/donjon.html
All of the rules are online. Buying the PDFs are optional. And all of your D&D books can work with it.
So, it weighs the same as a duck?
What are the best open ebook reader options out there?
I found my post written at the time (Mar 29 2008):
***
I haven't installed or used a Red Hat distro since about 2003 -- version 8.1, in fact. I quit about the time that Red Hat announced that all of us nonpaying users were leeches that they were better off without. I ignored the Fedora project, sticking with Kanotix, since it was deb-based, as I was tired of the dependency hell that rpm packages were known for. Kanotix worked after a lot of tweaking, and once Kubuntu reached 6.06, I switched over to that. Kubuntu has had ups and downs but won overall on consistency. It's still the best distro I've ever used. But it only achieved its potential with additional packages, best installed via Automatix.
Well, the news that Automatix is dead prompted me to install Fedora 8 on a spare partition.
Not that I couldn't do what Automatix did via the command prompt, but I figured that it was time to eject my Red Hat prejudices and take a look at what its community has come up with after five years. That, and the end of Automatix might spell the end of K/Ubuntu as the distro of choice for the casual user who wants to give Linux a spin. Those users are its base; tough to survive if your base gets alienated.
And, after five years, I figured that the problems associated with rpm-based distros would be history.
How many words are there on Earth for WRONG?!
Fedora 8 installs fine, and its Gnome desktop looks like a Mac (which is good), but if you add KDE, you lose sound support (as least on my laptop). And I have four packages that can't install because of -- believe it or not -- dependency hell.
It's been five years, folks. Five years! May I be blunt? It's time to ditch the rpms and move to debs. apt works just fine, folks. yum does not. End of story.
***
Broken fiddle my backside. That's a legitimate, serious error. And "apt-get install kde-desktop" does not cause this problem in Ubuntu.
Yes. I can't recall the package, but it was something that wasn't standard.
I tried a Fedora release not too long ago and found myself in dep-hell before the install was set up to my specs. That was the reason I bailed on RH back when they were on v8.1 If they can't fix that in the space of several years, why bother?
I'm already I-L-L.
I'd like to see them try this with a book like "The Analysis of Linear Partial Differential Operators II: Differential Operators with Constant Coefficients (v. 2)" by Lars Hörmander and come up with anything that wasn't laughable.
"I liked it! Much better than 'Cats'! I'm going to read it again and again!"
This girl is either a failure and content to be so ("Look at all the things I can't do!!") or a shill for M$. As for the press... well, there's a reason we call them the drive-by media.