Actually, that's orthogonal to the intent of Kickstarter, and the reason for these new policies. Watch in the future as they continue to implement policies that promote the idea of donations rather than "pre-order."
You're right, it's not an investment: you don't get a stake on the outcome of the project. However, it is closer to charity than you may want to think.
That you may get a "reward" for your pledge should be seen in the same light as contributing to your local Public Radio station and receiving a tote-bag in return. You don't get stock on NPR, and you didn't pre-order the news.
Moreover, if the Public Radio station decides to provide a copy of the newest show as a reward for your pledge, would you all of a sudden consider that now a pre-order on such show, or still just a donation?
Are you purposely being obtuse for the sake of being a semantic nazi?
I admit that the wording may be a bit ambiguous if taken literally, but it is absolutely clear that what they want to prevent is any confusion on the stage of development of a project.
Why is it so hard to understand that when the say "render" they mean a "realistic 3-D rendering of a prototype that may be confused with an actually existing and finished product"?
Oh that's right, because you saw the word "rendering" and whipped up your dictionary and decided to argue the finer points of semantics. This is Slashdot, after all.
No, I am arguing exactly the point you are trying to make:
I have problems with the fact a device manufactured by a ebook retailer does not support an DRM-enabled format except the retailer's own.
Why is it the manufacturer's problem when third-party publishers want to use proprietary DRM mechanisms that are not supported?
The problem is not the lack of support with DRM--it is DRM itself.
I think you misunderstand the drive to DRM. It is "Digital Rights Management," and the owner of such rights is the author or publisher, not the device manufacturer. The publisher is the one requiring and perpetuating the use of DRM, not the manufacturer. Your argument suggests that the manufacturer is imposing DRM restrictions on publishers for the sake of lock-in, when in fact it has been well established that the DRM requirements are imposed by the rights owners.
Think about what happened with music. Sure, everybody in Slashdot was complaining that Apple were pushing for their own proprietary copy-protection of songs in order to force everybody into using iTunes and iPods. (This ignores the fact that you could rip and export easily without DRM from the ecosystem, but that's another story.) When the music industry deemed it in their own interest to reduce their enforcement of DRM, Apple and Amazon started offering unprotected music without a problem. No "lock-in," no enforcement of DRM, yet people still buy from iTunes or Amazon.
The fundamental flaw in your argument, as I see it, is that you are viewing DRM as a manufacturer's lock-in artifact, when it is a pubisher's requirement.
I hear you. And most worrisome is that we may have endowed them with super powers by exposing them to cosmic radiation in outer space!
- "What's the status on those wriggly buggers?" - "Tardigrades? Well, sir, against all odds and expectations, some of them managed to survive. They're even breeding!" - "Really? Even the ones exposed to cosmic radiation?" - "Even the ones exposed to cosmic radiation, yes." - "Wow! They're even more resilient than we thought!" - "You could even say, indestructible..." - "Amazing." - "Sir, what should we do with them now?" - "We bring them back to Earth and watch them breed and see what happens from there... - "Aye! Aye! What could possibly go wrong?"
Agreed. To that point, and to the other responder's: that is a problem with the publisher, not Amazon.
If your favorite e-books are DRM-encumbered, preventing you from reading them on your device of choice; take it up with the publisher or author, not with the device manufacturer.
It doesn't lock you to a specific vendor: you are free to install e-books from other stores into your Kindle.
When you go to a B&N bookstore, you can only purchase books sold by B&N. You can go to a different store, purchase any sort of books yourself, and take them with you to read at the coffee bar within the B&N bookstore.
The Kindle device is an Amazon device, so it sells items from the Amazon store. It does not prevent you from using the device from reading material obtained from outside parties.
More to the point, if you don't like the Amazon device, you are free to purchase a different one.
How is this so hard to comprehend? You haven't a God-given right to have stores stock themselves with whatever you want--but you do have a legal right to purchase your items from whomever you want, or to not purchase them at all.
Well, let's get something straight: It's a store, not a bazaar.
It is a wall garden in the same sense that going to a retail, brick-and-mortar store is entering a wall garden.
If you want a free-for-all, everybody-bring-whatever-you-want-to-sell, you can go to a flea market or a bazaar or one of those bartering marketplaces in Calcuta, or something. Most people go to stores because they trust the quality of the experience and the goods, which involves a reasonable amount of control over what articles to put up in shelves.
Note that Amazon will not prevent you from acquiring such e-books from external sources and loading them up in your Kindle; that's your problem. However, they don't seem willing to turn their store into a wholesale repository for re-prints of Wikipedia articles; online forum threads; or even works in the public domain retrieved verbatim from Project Gutenberg, with no adornment or specific added value above the many that came before.
If calling that a "walled-garden" gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling of superiority, then go ahead. However, consider the same thing whenever you go next to your grocery store, clothing store, convenience store, or any other store. Or do you shunt those too for not offering every single do-dad made by Tom, Dick, or Harry from who-knows-where?
The Creative Commons license may allow exactly that, but the Creative Commons license does not govern Amazon.
Amazon, as a for-profit business, is entitled to sell whatever it wants. It seems they don't want their store stuffed with "me-too" copies of Wikipedia articles and online forum pages, and that's their prerogative.
Now, if you have your own store and printing press, go knock yourself out printing Wikipedia on demand and selling it; you are fully capable of doing so.
Not quite true. Apple is claiming that Samsung's solution for multitouch works in much the same way as theirs. They are not saying that the overall product equals in quality. They are not even claiming that the multitouch solution is equal in quality; just that the solution to the problem is similar.
Method and quality similarity are not equivalent. The one doesn't necessarily leads to the other.
The software does not bargain. Bargaining requires at least two parties, this is purely a one-sided process.
As long as the system retains this informational asymmetry during the process, there is little advantage to the end user, and more than a little disadvantage.
I thought that return-oriented programming was precisely to build a payload out of innocuous numeric data values by manipulating them into looking like op-codes.
Isn't this just one of the features of "return oriented programming," wherein the stack is manipulated to point to a set of addresses containing a sequence of instructions already in the binary (whether in executable code, or in data structures), that combined forms malicious code?
I, on the other hand, do care, and I expect my opinion to be just a valid as yours.
Then, if we agree on that, would you also agree that such a system should be strictly opt-in, so that those--like you--that do not care about their privacy may take advantage of whatever added value Google offers with this service?
So, why hasn't this been the case so far with other similar technologies that have the potential to threaten personal privacy--especially from Google?
You tell me! If it were so obvious, how come every previous implementation did not include that? So far, prior art included the wholesale and indiscriminate magnification of the point of contact.
It is obvious, of course, once you see it for the first time.
Read the patent. No, really, it's enlightening and a propos to any discussion on the subject.
It does not claim the "tap-to-zoom" gesture as novel. It claims a specific mechanism that describes how to determine which parts to zoom, when to zoom in or out, and on which part to focus and center; all using various methods and heuristics to determine user intent.
Have you noticed that in say, Mobile Safari, when you double-tap to zoom it doesn't just "zoom in"; it tries to determine which is the relevant content block that the user is selecting and magnifies that, often at the exclusion of the surrounding content. The mechanisms to determine what to do and how to do that is what is claimed in the patent.
The prior art on "tap-to-zoom" is precisely a non-contextual and non-discriminating magnification at the point of contact; which is different.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL!
You should get out of your basement more often and spend some time with the three-dimensional people.
Actually, that's orthogonal to the intent of Kickstarter, and the reason for these new policies. Watch in the future as they continue to implement policies that promote the idea of donations rather than "pre-order."
You're right, it's not an investment: you don't get a stake on the outcome of the project. However, it is closer to charity than you may want to think.
That you may get a "reward" for your pledge should be seen in the same light as contributing to your local Public Radio station and receiving a tote-bag in return. You don't get stock on NPR, and you didn't pre-order the news.
Moreover, if the Public Radio station decides to provide a copy of the newest show as a reward for your pledge, would you all of a sudden consider that now a pre-order on such show, or still just a donation?
-dZ.
Are you purposely being obtuse for the sake of being a semantic nazi?
I admit that the wording may be a bit ambiguous if taken literally, but it is absolutely clear that what they want to prevent is any confusion on the stage of development of a project.
Why is it so hard to understand that when the say "render" they mean a "realistic 3-D rendering of a prototype that may be confused with an actually existing and finished product"?
Oh that's right, because you saw the word "rendering" and whipped up your dictionary and decided to argue the finer points of semantics. This is Slashdot, after all.
That's sad, LOL!
How the hell do you get a DUI in Facebook?
It must be a miserable existence to not be able to enjoy things for what they are.
Sorry dude.
-dZ.
No, I am arguing exactly the point you are trying to make:
Why is it the manufacturer's problem when third-party publishers want to use proprietary DRM mechanisms that are not supported?
The problem is not the lack of support with DRM--it is DRM itself.
I think you misunderstand the drive to DRM. It is "Digital Rights Management," and the owner of such rights is the author or publisher, not the device manufacturer. The publisher is the one requiring and perpetuating the use of DRM, not the manufacturer. Your argument suggests that the manufacturer is imposing DRM restrictions on publishers for the sake of lock-in, when in fact it has been well established that the DRM requirements are imposed by the rights owners.
Think about what happened with music. Sure, everybody in Slashdot was complaining that Apple were pushing for their own proprietary copy-protection of songs in order to force everybody into using iTunes and iPods. (This ignores the fact that you could rip and export easily without DRM from the ecosystem, but that's another story.) When the music industry deemed it in their own interest to reduce their enforcement of DRM, Apple and Amazon started offering unprotected music without a problem. No "lock-in," no enforcement of DRM, yet people still buy from iTunes or Amazon.
The fundamental flaw in your argument, as I see it, is that you are viewing DRM as a manufacturer's lock-in artifact, when it is a pubisher's requirement.
-dZ.
I hear you. And most worrisome is that we may have endowed them with super powers by exposing them to cosmic radiation in outer space!
- "What's the status on those wriggly buggers?"
- "Tardigrades? Well, sir, against all odds and expectations, some of them managed to survive. They're even breeding!"
- "Really? Even the ones exposed to cosmic radiation?"
- "Even the ones exposed to cosmic radiation, yes."
- "Wow! They're even more resilient than we thought!"
- "You could even say, indestructible..."
- "Amazing."
- "Sir, what should we do with them now?"
- "We bring them back to Earth and watch them breed and see what happens from there...
- "Aye! Aye! What could possibly go wrong?"
Agreed. To that point, and to the other responder's: that is a problem with the publisher, not Amazon.
If your favorite e-books are DRM-encumbered, preventing you from reading them on your device of choice; take it up with the publisher or author, not with the device manufacturer.
dZ.
It doesn't lock you to a specific vendor: you are free to install e-books from other stores into your Kindle.
When you go to a B&N bookstore, you can only purchase books sold by B&N. You can go to a different store, purchase any sort of books yourself, and take them with you to read at the coffee bar within the B&N bookstore.
The Kindle device is an Amazon device, so it sells items from the Amazon store. It does not prevent you from using the device from reading material obtained from outside parties.
More to the point, if you don't like the Amazon device, you are free to purchase a different one.
How is this so hard to comprehend? You haven't a God-given right to have stores stock themselves with whatever you want--but you do have a legal right to purchase your items from whomever you want, or to not purchase them at all.
-dZ.
Well, let's get something straight: It's a store, not a bazaar.
It is a wall garden in the same sense that going to a retail, brick-and-mortar store is entering a wall garden.
If you want a free-for-all, everybody-bring-whatever-you-want-to-sell, you can go to a flea market or a bazaar or one of those bartering marketplaces in Calcuta, or something. Most people go to stores because they trust the quality of the experience and the goods, which involves a reasonable amount of control over what articles to put up in shelves.
Note that Amazon will not prevent you from acquiring such e-books from external sources and loading them up in your Kindle; that's your problem. However, they don't seem willing to turn their store into a wholesale repository for re-prints of Wikipedia articles; online forum threads; or even works in the public domain retrieved verbatim from Project Gutenberg, with no adornment or specific added value above the many that came before.
If calling that a "walled-garden" gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling of superiority, then go ahead. However, consider the same thing whenever you go next to your grocery store, clothing store, convenience store, or any other store. Or do you shunt those too for not offering every single do-dad made by Tom, Dick, or Harry from who-knows-where?
-dZ.
Pubit? Is that really... Pube... It...?
Tsk! Tsk!
The Creative Commons license may allow exactly that, but the Creative Commons license does not govern Amazon.
Amazon, as a for-profit business, is entitled to sell whatever it wants. It seems they don't want their store stuffed with "me-too" copies of Wikipedia articles and online forum pages, and that's their prerogative.
Now, if you have your own store and printing press, go knock yourself out printing Wikipedia on demand and selling it; you are fully capable of doing so.
-dZ.
Not quite true. Apple is claiming that Samsung's solution for multitouch works in much the same way as theirs. They are not saying that the overall product equals in quality. They are not even claiming that the multitouch solution is equal in quality; just that the solution to the problem is similar.
Method and quality similarity are not equivalent. The one doesn't necessarily leads to the other.
That would be fine, except that he said, "as always," without further qualification.
Words have mearning, you know.
But, but, but... Open beats closed every time!
No, that is the wrong question. That will just perpetuate the problem in an escalated arms race.
The parent poster had it right: how do we stop the arms race and protect the consumer by preventing this sort of price gouging.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
The software does not bargain. Bargaining requires at least two parties, this is purely a one-sided process.
As long as the system retains this informational asymmetry during the process, there is little advantage to the end user, and more than a little disadvantage.
But if it is not probable, or at least highly unlikely, what's the point of even discussing that notion, for the sake of semantics?
I thought that return-oriented programming was precisely to build a payload out of innocuous numeric data values by manipulating them into looking like op-codes.
-dZ.
Isn't this just one of the features of "return oriented programming," wherein the stack is manipulated to point to a set of addresses containing a sequence of instructions already in the binary (whether in executable code, or in data structures), that combined forms malicious code?
Fair enough. To each his own, I always say.
I, on the other hand, do care, and I expect my opinion to be just a valid as yours.
Then, if we agree on that, would you also agree that such a system should be strictly opt-in, so that those--like you--that do not care about their privacy may take advantage of whatever added value Google offers with this service?
So, why hasn't this been the case so far with other similar technologies that have the potential to threaten personal privacy--especially from Google?
dZ.
You tell me! If it were so obvious, how come every previous implementation did not include that? So far, prior art included the wholesale and indiscriminate magnification of the point of contact.
It is obvious, of course, once you see it for the first time.
Read the patent. No, really, it's enlightening and a propos to any discussion on the subject.
It does not claim the "tap-to-zoom" gesture as novel. It claims a specific mechanism that describes how to determine which parts to zoom, when to zoom in or out, and on which part to focus and center; all using various methods and heuristics to determine user intent.
Have you noticed that in say, Mobile Safari, when you double-tap to zoom it doesn't just "zoom in"; it tries to determine which is the relevant content block that the user is selecting and magnifies that, often at the exclusion of the surrounding content. The mechanisms to determine what to do and how to do that is what is claimed in the patent.
The prior art on "tap-to-zoom" is precisely a non-contextual and non-discriminating magnification at the point of contact; which is different.
Yes, reading, it's a dangerous thing.
-dZ.
Agreed.