The solution might be to place a GUID and keywords in anything you post online, and specify its location by saying "Google GUID1239872129412 Joe Schmoe Lemur behavior paper"
Then if you move hosts, it'll eventually get picked up by search engines and people will be able to find it, even if the URL itself has changed. (Hell, it might even find a copy someone made and posted at their own site.)
I doubt a national security tidbit would make it through publication before being squelched. They have a way of finding out about such things.
"Perhaps they're voluntarily cooperating with a propaganda campaign in exchange for money or political favor."
They'd be far better off quickly publishing a whole, new book in line with the propaganda campaign, that would cast doubt on the other item and generally sling mud. That would generate more money, more publicity, and be better business all around.
Quietly changing the text of books that have been sold is kinda pointless - Most people wouldn't notice, people who'd already read the original text would likely never see it, and it would be pretty pointless if there were any original non-electronic copies in existence which would continue being unmodified.
" The (f?)AG is making a LOT more selling an ebook vs a physical book - no warehouse, shelves to store it, shipping, etc. There's little to no extra overhead selling an electronic ebook, so there's a huge cost saving there."
The Author's Guild is basically a union-type organization, not a business. I doubt they benefit directly from the economics of ebook vs. paper. The members just get whatever royalties their contracts with their publishers specify. And the publishers negotiate deals with Amazon for e-publishing. Assuming that there is a larger profit in kindle sales, it's hard to say how much of that works its way down to the authors.
The authors might get a different, higher royalty on an audiobook, and authors probably get extra money if they are the *reader* featured on the audiobook. So from that perspective sales 'lost' due to free text-to-speech in the kindle might hurt some authors a bit.
It's a bit like the whole MP3 music sales thing (iTunes vs. labels vs. artists, who gets the money), only authors seem to have more influence than musicians.
This is old news. The whole brouhaha over this happened months ago. The Kindle 2 came out, with text-to-speech. The Author's Guild whined like little babies claiming it would reduce audiobook sales (presumably they also want to charge you for reading to your kids.) They wanted the functionality removed completely. Amazon reached a compromise, that publishers could opt-out by requesting that it be disallowed on their books.
There's no point getting your panties in a bunch *now*. The horse is out of the barn. Nor is Amazon the one to complain to. The publishers and the Author's Guild are the ones to complain to.
If anything, Amazon deserves credit for putting the feature in in the first place without restrictions. Given their business model, you might have expected them to proactively design the feature to the publishers' requirements long before it was released. They might have been like Microsoft who preemptively crippled the Zune's sharing feature.
Furthermore, your notes and marked text are stored in a plain text file which you can access when you connect the kindle to a computer via USB. The kindle is mounted as a flash drive and one of the files is your notes.
I have a large PDF that I sent through Amazon's conversion process. The "Table of Contents" menu item is disabled, but the table of contents in the text has links to the corresponding pages. So there's that.
"They'd have to be seriously desperate to 'mine' a landfill."
Extracting the deposits would be pretty easy, as it'd just be an open pit mine type deal. No need for mineshafts and men, just a big earthmover and some dumptrucks. Respiratory protection might be desirable.
The big question is the separation of the 'ore' into its constituent elements. In the nerd rapture future, maybe there'll be nanotech that could strip the old garbage molecule from molecule, creating piles of copper, selenium, CRT phosphors, gold, silver, etc.
The question is, when will it be economically profitable to start pre-sorting electronic and industrial hardware waste and sitting on the resultant stockpiles. Stuffing them in a salt mine would at least be better, environmentally, than dumping them on the third world.
This isn't the only Sun censorship going on. Tim Bray [wikipedia.org] (of XML fame, now Sun's Director of Web Tech) had a very insightful post on his 'ongoing' [tbray.org] blog comparing Sun's strengths and weaknesses with Oracle's. It was up for all of a day before the lawyers stepped in and made him take it down.
Well, yeah. Bray should have the good sense to wait until the f'in merger closes.
This just might work. It'll take incredibly good optics, of course, and the chirality of the light from these distant planets might be lost when the light goes through the earth's atmosphere.
Then it'd also be lost going through the source planet's atmosphere.
They're not unfair. Apple still paid for bandwidth, hosting, web presence, and handling the user's request to do the return.
If you want unfair, look at what banks charge for a bounced check or an overdraft. Some guy wound up paying over $30 for a cup of coffee because he charged the coffee and it went over his limit. THAT is unfair.
"Is there actually a contingent out there of people that have used the offset keyboard with numpad and dislike it though, or is this just apologism where a reason is invented for every complaint,"
I'd call it a reasonable hypothesis based on Apple/Jobs' well-known maximally anal-retentive nature. The numeric keypad is not an unreasonable request, but Apple probably doesn't like the aesthetics.
Slashdot Mirror
"I can understand that because I sure as hell wouldn't want cell lines made from my genetic material without my consent."
You are Jango Fett and I claim my five pounds.
The solution might be to place a GUID and keywords in anything you post online, and specify its location by saying "Google GUID1239872129412 Joe Schmoe Lemur behavior paper"
Then if you move hosts, it'll eventually get picked up by search engines and people will be able to find it, even if the URL itself has changed. (Hell, it might even find a copy someone made and posted at their own site.)
I doubt a national security tidbit would make it through publication before being squelched. They have a way of finding out about such things.
"Perhaps they're voluntarily cooperating with a propaganda campaign in exchange for money or political favor."
They'd be far better off quickly publishing a whole, new book in line with the propaganda campaign, that would cast doubt on the other item and generally sling mud. That would generate more money, more publicity, and be better business all around.
Quietly changing the text of books that have been sold is kinda pointless - Most people wouldn't notice, people who'd already read the original text would likely never see it, and it would be pretty pointless if there were any original non-electronic copies in existence which would continue being unmodified.
Really, I just don't see the point.
" The (f?)AG is making a LOT more selling an ebook vs a physical book - no warehouse, shelves to store it, shipping, etc. There's little to no extra overhead selling an electronic ebook, so there's a huge cost saving there."
The Author's Guild is basically a union-type organization, not a business. I doubt they benefit directly from the economics of ebook vs. paper. The members just get whatever royalties their contracts with their publishers specify. And the publishers negotiate deals with Amazon for e-publishing. Assuming that there is a larger profit in kindle sales, it's hard to say how much of that works its way down to the authors.
The authors might get a different, higher royalty on an audiobook, and authors probably get extra money if they are the *reader* featured on the audiobook. So from that perspective sales 'lost' due to free text-to-speech in the kindle might hurt some authors a bit.
It's a bit like the whole MP3 music sales thing (iTunes vs. labels vs. artists, who gets the money), only authors seem to have more influence than musicians.
"It's another to have a feature disabled after the point of purchase."
It's not even clear to me if this is what has happened.
"Not only that but then amazon claims ownership of the content to distribute it to other platforms?"
I suspect that's only there to support things like the Kindle iPhone app, but the legalize makes it seem like a bigger deal.
"conversely, books are best enjoyed on paper pulp: durable, zero power usage, cheap as heck"
Also: bulky, awkward to handle in some circumstances, very heavy in quantity.
This is old news. The whole brouhaha over this happened months ago. The Kindle 2 came out, with text-to-speech. The Author's Guild whined like little babies claiming it would reduce audiobook sales (presumably they also want to charge you for reading to your kids.) They wanted the functionality removed completely. Amazon reached a compromise, that publishers could opt-out by requesting that it be disallowed on their books.
There's no point getting your panties in a bunch *now*. The horse is out of the barn. Nor is Amazon the one to complain to. The publishers and the Author's Guild are the ones to complain to.
If anything, Amazon deserves credit for putting the feature in in the first place without restrictions. Given their business model, you might have expected them to proactively design the feature to the publishers' requirements long before it was released. They might have been like Microsoft who preemptively crippled the Zune's sharing feature.
And the profit motive here?
It's more to the publishers' benefit to put out new, hyped, 'corrected' editions, or completely different books that 'expose' the flaws.
There's no money in 'fixing' already-sold texts to remove politically or ideologically inconvenient information.
out of sheer anhedonic joy.
Everyone knows how to hit an x86 in its vulnerables.
You may be right. I'm just pining for the salad days of comp.sys.next.*
My main complaint about Twitter is that it seems to have killed Cocoa programming blogs. Everyone who used to blog now just tweets to each other.
Furthermore, your notes and marked text are stored in a plain text file which you can access when you connect the kindle to a computer via USB. The kindle is mounted as a flash drive and one of the files is your notes.
I have a large PDF that I sent through Amazon's conversion process. The "Table of Contents" menu item is disabled, but the table of contents in the text has links to the corresponding pages. So there's that.
"They'd have to be seriously desperate to 'mine' a landfill."
Extracting the deposits would be pretty easy, as it'd just be an open pit mine type deal. No need for mineshafts and men, just a big earthmover and some dumptrucks. Respiratory protection might be desirable.
The big question is the separation of the 'ore' into its constituent elements. In the nerd rapture future, maybe there'll be nanotech that could strip the old garbage molecule from molecule, creating piles of copper, selenium, CRT phosphors, gold, silver, etc.
The question is, when will it be economically profitable to start pre-sorting electronic and industrial hardware waste and sitting on the resultant stockpiles. Stuffing them in a salt mine would at least be better, environmentally, than dumping them on the third world.
OT: After hearing Cash's version of 'Hurt', Reznor's version just sounds like a whiny little emo twerp.
3. Rants against the kindle because it uses DRM on store-bought files.
This isn't the only Sun censorship going on. Tim Bray [wikipedia.org] (of XML fame, now Sun's Director of Web Tech) had a very insightful post on his 'ongoing' [tbray.org] blog comparing Sun's strengths and weaknesses with Oracle's. It was up for all of a day before the lawyers stepped in and made him take it down.
Well, yeah. Bray should have the good sense to wait until the f'in merger closes.
If anything was important, somebody would have copied it already.
This just might work. It'll take incredibly good optics, of course, and the chirality of the light from these distant planets might be lost when the light goes through the earth's atmosphere.
Then it'd also be lost going through the source planet's atmosphere.
I don't see the scheme working.
I assume the copyright is on the specific *scan* of the item, not on the original item. You'd be free to transcribe the text depicted.
They're not unfair. Apple still paid for bandwidth, hosting, web presence, and handling the user's request to do the return.
If you want unfair, look at what banks charge for a bounced check or an overdraft. Some guy wound up paying over $30 for a cup of coffee because he charged the coffee and it went over his limit. THAT is unfair.
He gets to join the ranks of Linus Pauling, with his Vitamin C woo.
"Is there actually a contingent out there of people that have used the offset keyboard with numpad and dislike it though, or is this just apologism where a reason is invented for every complaint,"
I'd call it a reasonable hypothesis based on Apple/Jobs' well-known maximally anal-retentive nature. The numeric keypad is not an unreasonable request, but Apple probably doesn't like the aesthetics.