It is indeed like lending exclusive access to your books since most people don't bother to have multiple ereaders. But sure, let's amend it then: it's like giving your brother your house for a week while you can still read your books... with binoculars through the window. I have an eink ereader specifically because I don't like reading 600+ pages a day on the laptop screen, and because tablets and phone screens are simply way inferior. Lending my ereader to someone else would significantly impact my life, way past the loss of one book.
Still not acceptable, still not logically anywhere near the same as lending ONE book. The device might be cheap, but the function it provides is akin to full (and for most people more or less exclusive) access to your personal library. My cellphone is pretty cheap too, but it contains my contact lists, my calendars, and is the main method of contacting me. The price of a device does not equal its utilitarian value.
I don't care about lending books, but I do have to point out that your argument has a glaring hole in it: It's more akin to saying "If you want to lend your brother a book, just let him take over your house for a few weeks."
Or at the very least the library room, if you have a dedicated ereader. So you're comparing apples and oranges, under no circumstances could that be seen as an acceptable replacement for those that actually do engage in book-lending.
I'd like you to expand on your claim that android is a delivery mechanism for googles ads. In what context exactly is google delivering these ads that I'm apparently not seeing?
And I have absolutely zero interest in the kindle tablet either - I wasn't even aware they don't ship them here. Or I presume they don't given your statement, Sweden being rather close to Norway. I'm just picking at your argument, because I believe it to be fallacious.
You know, I'm quite surprised. Having had the same experience it's quite the refreshing thing when someone can calm down and drop things.
It's definitely not personal, it's more the concept of the thing I'm arguing. I'm taking a class on sustainability right now, so that angle in particular is interesting to me right now, but having gone through the same transition myself before, it's all very familiar. I didn't want to give up my books either, they've been a huge part of my life... but when you move onto a dinky little sailboat that weighs less than a tonne in itself, you don't want to bring several tonnes of books onboard. So I was pushed into it, and having made the transition I realized that while the emotional tie to books is still there... I now read more due to the portability of the device, have more use of my books because I can bring my entire library with me everywhere, and I'm paying about half as much in rent and heating and so on as I would have if I had brought my entire library in physical form, since I've cut down my living requirements with an entire room.
Your points are definitely valid in a small subsection of the userbase. Mainly those that have no electricity, or frequently spend time far away from electricity, or who are historians who gather information in the most durable form for long term storage - as in several lifetimes, not just for their own.
Outside of that there is data much more vital to most of our lives on electronics far more fragile, such as laptops of cellphones, and we manage to deal with that risk quite well, so the no-electricity/breakable argument really isn't very valid. If you follow proper backup procedures even accidentally (by having your library on your PC and copying it to you ebook reader), then I'd say the odds that you'll lose your books is pretty close to the odds that a hardcopy book gets lost, stolen, or that your house burns down with all of them, none of which are life-ending experiences for an ebook.
So I do argue that your only truly valid argument is emotional, unless you happen to fall into one of those minority usecases. For the average end user there is really no non-emotional reason to cling to books on paper, and it would be a huge relief for the environment if we stopped doing so.
A lot of people have called me silly over the years, over various things. I don't think I've ever taken it as an insult. I'm sorry you did, really. I should have phrased that differently.
I am however highly amused that you took it personally when I said that "some people" can't handle change. I didn't say YOU, I said some people have issues with that. I know I did, grumbled quite a bit when I first had to give up my library for practical reasons and switch to ebooks. But you clearly have an axe to grind here, and want to assume malice, so I'll take full blame for it - I'm very sorry that I insulted you and your technological acumen. My apologies.
As for the rest - bullcrap. No really, your books might have lasted x number of years, but they still came with a sustainability cost to print. The ebooks are at a near-zero to zero such cost, and thus win hands down whether you count over 50 years or 5000. Few people have their library only on their kindle or ebook reader, as far as I know you can even download purchased books again from amazon, but I might be mistaken because I sideload all my books and thus have it on two different storage medium, plus a backup, which makes them about as safe as can be. And if they were to disappear, that's okay, because digital books don't really go out of print. Ever. So I can get them back. And hey, even if I decide to re-format my kindle and buy every book again every week, the environmental impact of that would be far less than your library.
Heating your large house, on the other hand, is a sustainability impact, regardless of where you live and whether you have to be space-conscious. So you can't argue that. Or I guess you can, but if you want to argue against simple facts then I really don't have the time for that. Let's see, what other arguments did you have... Ah yes, my kindle might break! True. It might. I'm quite comfortable with spending another hundred bucks every four-five years or however long it'll hold out. As many books as I read and as much cheaper as they are in e-book format, I'm still saving money.
Electricity? Well, I spent a few months living on a small sailboat last year, and had no problems with my kindle. This isn't the dark ages, solar panels and mobile internet and so on means I was even surfing the web and wasting time on online forums while a few nautical miles off the coast. I love simple living, but with a battery time of a month or so, there are few situations in which I ever come close to running out of battery, even when I'm out camping or other such things. I suppose if I was planning to live for more than a month in a situation where I absolutely couldn't get my hands on any electricity.... I'd have to bring an external batterypack. It would still end up cheaper and lighter than the amount of books I'd carry to read in that time.
So, electricity, breakage, data loss, sustainability covered and your points refuted.
Now, if you still disagree with this, fine, then there's no arguing with you, and we'll have to agree to disagree. But I still argue that you just proved my point - this is entirely emotional for you. You got in a big huff over very little reason. Consider that for a while.
Yeah, I'm skeptical myself against the built in light, I'd rather have the extra battery time, since I frequently stay away from electrical outlets for a long time, and a small camping light no doubt is more efficient than most built in solutions... and if the battery runs out in the external light, I can still read as long as its light out, or by an open flame.
That being said, I'm still curious to try the paperwhite some day, see how it measures up. Even if I never use the backlight the increased resolution might be nice.
Actually it's true regardless. Even if I re-read a book, it's a waste of space compared to the space the same information occupied on my kindle. I've got a library in my pocket. If I had a house to put those real world books in, that would be an excessive amount of resources needed to store information, not to mention the excessive amount of resources needed to make all those PAPER books in the first place. I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of sustainability, but in books versus ebooks, ebooks win as the more environmentally friendly, whether you read them once or a million times.
Oh, and if you ever buy new books, or if you move, you have to take into account how much more resources that wastes with regular books compared to e-books.
I mean, I'm a reader, have been all my life. I love real books, the smell of them, the feel of them... But let's not be idiots about it - it's an emotional attachment, not a rational one. I gave my library up in favour of one that's better for the environment, more convenient, and still contains exactly the same information and pretty much the same experience once you get over that emotional "newness". Some people can't deal with that. Some people still can't handle computers, even, or cell phones - they are too emotionally invested in how things used to be... but rationally, this is a step forward in every way.
So please, don't make yourself look silly by trying to argue that it is anything but emotional.
If their ways of doing that improves my user experience above the base level of not having ads, then the ads and their mechanisms are a net win for me as a customer. So your argument really falls down on an objective level, while I suppose certain individuals might be so hostile to ads that the frustration they feel on seeing even a single one is greater than all the benefits they get from the network put in place to as you say cater for its delivery.
Personally I've had an android phone for a few years now, and I've seen maybe a handful of ads. I don't use a lot of free apps, and there is to my knowledge no ads built into the system. So your argument falls there as well.
And if ads are a major concern to you, there are very competent and well working adblockers for the android system, so you have absolutely no reason to worry about it.
For the kindle fire on the other hand your argument works better, since that's a locked in proprietary system without outside intervention.
I understand what you mean, and in part I agree. The problem here is that you're using the wrong term. An e-ink device by definition is ANY device with an e-ink screen, regardless of use, form factor, lighting. The pebble watch is an e-ink device, for instance, and nobody is saying that's for reading books on.
There isn't really a word for the kind of "pure" device you're talking about, but maybe "ebook reader" would be the closest.
Don't be surprised when people disagree when you're not using the same terminology as the rest of the world.
I'm sure it will work with calibre just as well as previous incarnations - I've had a kindle for a long time and haven't "bought" a single book for it.
That's true, that makes the population density in China less harmful than that in the UK and India and so on. Because condensing the area people live on reduces their energy needs. If every chinese household had a car and a need to use it, then that would be a problem - but due to the lack of "lots of flat arable land", they don't need to drive to get their needs filled. Same goes for a lot of other things... Granted they still need to work on the efficiency of their production chain and on reducing the craptastic factory pollution and so on, but that's not an issue of population density.
Dystopian future? Doesn't sound like one to me - there's no mention of ads on the paperwhite, which is the better option for e-books anyway. The fire is not primarily an ebook device, it's a media device, so ads seem quite fitting.
I'd agree, except in my experience most games with micropayments don't actually work like that - there tends to be plenty of things in most of them that you can't access at all unless you open your wallet. That's a dealbreaker to me when it comes to micropayments, because then it's suddenly a way to get more money out of people rather than a way to let you choose between putting time or money into it. If I want to put money into a game, I do it upfront, or I do it to unlock it once I've tried it - I am not willing to be nickle-and-dimed to death for little things I had no idea I'd have a reason to need when I started out, and have no other way of getting.
Seems like your question is fallacious. After all: even if it's harm reduction, it's beneficial. No matter what the cause, it's money he wasn't getting otherwise, and people who wouldn't have heard of it otherwise that's now hearing about the game. So in a way it's advertising he's actually getting paid for, which can't be seen as anything less than a win/win/win scenario.
Well, in the way the poster describes it, he wants it to be a facebook replacement. So it has to be argued that this isn't realistic with the way he's setting the idea up. He needs to build the framework of his idea to fit his long term goals, otherwise he might have to start over rather than continue the development when it gets big - if it ever does.
As for point number 2, true, it's no different than a self-hosted website, except it is. It's more like say a facebook profile... presumably supposedly simple to set up, simple to spread, visible to everyone if you wish... and presumably you would be able to tag other users as well. If he links to her on his pictures, she wouldn't have the authority to "unlink", because of the distributed way the system works. And if the "node" he's on threatens to delete him, he can just keep moving his profile to new hosting, over and over again, making the issue linger forever. Meanwhile it's not quite as trivial to set up your own website (well, it can be, but most people don't know that,) and if you abuse it your host can shut you down quickly and efficiently - and there'll be a trace back to you as a person due to billing records and so on. Your diaspora account can be entirely anonymous if you set it up over TOR, for instance... and it doesn't even matter if you just find some node off in faraway-istan that couldn't care less about what you put on it as long as it doesn't bring the heavy hitters in.
So really, there are some issues there. It makes it trivially EASY to do that sort of thing, which is a bad thing, because it today's society that shit happens constantly.
1. No farmville
Congratulations, you lost 99% of potential users. 2. No mention of abuse
Sometimes pictures and profiles are removed for good reasons. Without that oversight the decentralized network would be much like the hidden web - overrun by places like silk road and so on. Not to mention all the photos posted without someone's permission. Not that I care much about copyrights, but what about someone posting nude pics of their ex, to shame them? No safeguards. 3. Too complicated. Congratulations, you lost 99% of potential users.
Really, I could go on and on, I could go into detail, but you're over-thinking it... The average user couldn't care less. If it's complicated, it's not going to get chosen over the easy option. Figure out how to do ALL that you wrote about, with absolutely no technical know-how, and make it work as seamlessly as facebook or similar sites, then we're talking.
Except it has a very good point. If the headline is written in the form of a question, it's because the people who wrote the article didn't feel they had the answer. If they had an answer and felt confident about it, or even had the suggestion of a probable answer, then they would have written a statement as a headline rather than a question. Using a headline like this is bad practice because it is the trademark of an article that contains absolutely nothing of any value, just sensationalist statements to trigger a lively discussion. It's not "news", for nerds or anyone else, and it's not "stuff that matters", because it would only matter if there was a strong indication that it was indeed true.
So whoever chooses a headline for an article here should really consider double checking any story with a headline like this before letting it through.
Of course we all know that slashdot is just a gossip magazine with absolutely no journalistic integrity and an audience comprised entirely of people who are only interested in arguing, so if that's the kind of place we want it to be... I see your point entirely.
Nope. Cheap lighters, take up less room per lit fire, lights more fires than a box of matches, and works when wet. Much more efficient. And as a backup, regardless of what you choose, a firesteel.
Well, personally I agree with that, I think copyright is a crock of shit and if it existed at all it should be in the five-ten years range, and if it had to be longer then under no circumstances should it be transferable to anyone but the creator, nor should it be able to continue after their death. But that's another issue.
On the other hand your jumping to conclusions. What if the current abundance of entertainment is BECAUSE we have copyright? I know, it's playing the devils advocate, but you can't assume it isn't - there's no data on it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is indeed like lending exclusive access to your books since most people don't bother to have multiple ereaders. But sure, let's amend it then: it's like giving your brother your house for a week while you can still read your books... with binoculars through the window. I have an eink ereader specifically because I don't like reading 600+ pages a day on the laptop screen, and because tablets and phone screens are simply way inferior. Lending my ereader to someone else would significantly impact my life, way past the loss of one book.
Still not acceptable, still not logically anywhere near the same as lending ONE book. The device might be cheap, but the function it provides is akin to full (and for most people more or less exclusive) access to your personal library. My cellphone is pretty cheap too, but it contains my contact lists, my calendars, and is the main method of contacting me. The price of a device does not equal its utilitarian value.
I don't care about lending books, but I do have to point out that your argument has a glaring hole in it: It's more akin to saying "If you want to lend your brother a book, just let him take over your house for a few weeks."
Or at the very least the library room, if you have a dedicated ereader. So you're comparing apples and oranges, under no circumstances could that be seen as an acceptable replacement for those that actually do engage in book-lending.
I'd like you to expand on your claim that android is a delivery mechanism for googles ads. In what context exactly is google delivering these ads that I'm apparently not seeing?
And I have absolutely zero interest in the kindle tablet either - I wasn't even aware they don't ship them here. Or I presume they don't given your statement, Sweden being rather close to Norway. I'm just picking at your argument, because I believe it to be fallacious.
You know, I'm quite surprised. Having had the same experience it's quite the refreshing thing when someone can calm down and drop things.
It's definitely not personal, it's more the concept of the thing I'm arguing. I'm taking a class on sustainability right now, so that angle in particular is interesting to me right now, but having gone through the same transition myself before, it's all very familiar. I didn't want to give up my books either, they've been a huge part of my life... but when you move onto a dinky little sailboat that weighs less than a tonne in itself, you don't want to bring several tonnes of books onboard. So I was pushed into it, and having made the transition I realized that while the emotional tie to books is still there... I now read more due to the portability of the device, have more use of my books because I can bring my entire library with me everywhere, and I'm paying about half as much in rent and heating and so on as I would have if I had brought my entire library in physical form, since I've cut down my living requirements with an entire room.
Your points are definitely valid in a small subsection of the userbase. Mainly those that have no electricity, or frequently spend time far away from electricity, or who are historians who gather information in the most durable form for long term storage - as in several lifetimes, not just for their own.
Outside of that there is data much more vital to most of our lives on electronics far more fragile, such as laptops of cellphones, and we manage to deal with that risk quite well, so the no-electricity/breakable argument really isn't very valid. If you follow proper backup procedures even accidentally (by having your library on your PC and copying it to you ebook reader), then I'd say the odds that you'll lose your books is pretty close to the odds that a hardcopy book gets lost, stolen, or that your house burns down with all of them, none of which are life-ending experiences for an ebook.
So I do argue that your only truly valid argument is emotional, unless you happen to fall into one of those minority usecases. For the average end user there is really no non-emotional reason to cling to books on paper, and it would be a huge relief for the environment if we stopped doing so.
A lot of people have called me silly over the years, over various things. I don't think I've ever taken it as an insult. I'm sorry you did, really. I should have phrased that differently.
I am however highly amused that you took it personally when I said that "some people" can't handle change. I didn't say YOU, I said some people have issues with that. I know I did, grumbled quite a bit when I first had to give up my library for practical reasons and switch to ebooks. But you clearly have an axe to grind here, and want to assume malice, so I'll take full blame for it - I'm very sorry that I insulted you and your technological acumen. My apologies.
As for the rest - bullcrap.
No really, your books might have lasted x number of years, but they still came with a sustainability cost to print. The ebooks are at a near-zero to zero such cost, and thus win hands down whether you count over 50 years or 5000. Few people have their library only on their kindle or ebook reader, as far as I know you can even download purchased books again from amazon, but I might be mistaken because I sideload all my books and thus have it on two different storage medium, plus a backup, which makes them about as safe as can be. And if they were to disappear, that's okay, because digital books don't really go out of print. Ever. So I can get them back. And hey, even if I decide to re-format my kindle and buy every book again every week, the environmental impact of that would be far less than your library.
Heating your large house, on the other hand, is a sustainability impact, regardless of where you live and whether you have to be space-conscious. So you can't argue that. Or I guess you can, but if you want to argue against simple facts then I really don't have the time for that. Let's see, what other arguments did you have... Ah yes, my kindle might break! True. It might. I'm quite comfortable with spending another hundred bucks every four-five years or however long it'll hold out. As many books as I read and as much cheaper as they are in e-book format, I'm still saving money.
Electricity? Well, I spent a few months living on a small sailboat last year, and had no problems with my kindle. This isn't the dark ages, solar panels and mobile internet and so on means I was even surfing the web and wasting time on online forums while a few nautical miles off the coast. I love simple living, but with a battery time of a month or so, there are few situations in which I ever come close to running out of battery, even when I'm out camping or other such things. I suppose if I was planning to live for more than a month in a situation where I absolutely couldn't get my hands on any electricity.... I'd have to bring an external batterypack. It would still end up cheaper and lighter than the amount of books I'd carry to read in that time.
So, electricity, breakage, data loss, sustainability covered and your points refuted.
Now, if you still disagree with this, fine, then there's no arguing with you, and we'll have to agree to disagree. But I still argue that you just proved my point - this is entirely emotional for you. You got in a big huff over very little reason. Consider that for a while.
Yeah, I'm skeptical myself against the built in light, I'd rather have the extra battery time, since I frequently stay away from electrical outlets for a long time, and a small camping light no doubt is more efficient than most built in solutions... and if the battery runs out in the external light, I can still read as long as its light out, or by an open flame.
That being said, I'm still curious to try the paperwhite some day, see how it measures up. Even if I never use the backlight the increased resolution might be nice.
Actually it's true regardless. Even if I re-read a book, it's a waste of space compared to the space the same information occupied on my kindle. I've got a library in my pocket. If I had a house to put those real world books in, that would be an excessive amount of resources needed to store information, not to mention the excessive amount of resources needed to make all those PAPER books in the first place. I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of sustainability, but in books versus ebooks, ebooks win as the more environmentally friendly, whether you read them once or a million times.
Oh, and if you ever buy new books, or if you move, you have to take into account how much more resources that wastes with regular books compared to e-books.
I mean, I'm a reader, have been all my life. I love real books, the smell of them, the feel of them... But let's not be idiots about it - it's an emotional attachment, not a rational one. I gave my library up in favour of one that's better for the environment, more convenient, and still contains exactly the same information and pretty much the same experience once you get over that emotional "newness". Some people can't deal with that. Some people still can't handle computers, even, or cell phones - they are too emotionally invested in how things used to be... but rationally, this is a step forward in every way.
So please, don't make yourself look silly by trying to argue that it is anything but emotional.
If their ways of doing that improves my user experience above the base level of not having ads, then the ads and their mechanisms are a net win for me as a customer. So your argument really falls down on an objective level, while I suppose certain individuals might be so hostile to ads that the frustration they feel on seeing even a single one is greater than all the benefits they get from the network put in place to as you say cater for its delivery.
Personally I've had an android phone for a few years now, and I've seen maybe a handful of ads. I don't use a lot of free apps, and there is to my knowledge no ads built into the system. So your argument falls there as well.
And if ads are a major concern to you, there are very competent and well working adblockers for the android system, so you have absolutely no reason to worry about it.
For the kindle fire on the other hand your argument works better, since that's a locked in proprietary system without outside intervention.
Sure it does - they just call it a "screen saver" on the kindle e-ink devices.
I understand what you mean, and in part I agree. The problem here is that you're using the wrong term. An e-ink device by definition is ANY device with an e-ink screen, regardless of use, form factor, lighting. The pebble watch is an e-ink device, for instance, and nobody is saying that's for reading books on.
There isn't really a word for the kind of "pure" device you're talking about, but maybe "ebook reader" would be the closest.
Don't be surprised when people disagree when you're not using the same terminology as the rest of the world.
I'm sure it will work with calibre just as well as previous incarnations - I've had a kindle for a long time and haven't "bought" a single book for it.
That's true, that makes the population density in China less harmful than that in the UK and India and so on. Because condensing the area people live on reduces their energy needs. If every chinese household had a car and a need to use it, then that would be a problem - but due to the lack of "lots of flat arable land", they don't need to drive to get their needs filled. Same goes for a lot of other things... Granted they still need to work on the efficiency of their production chain and on reducing the craptastic factory pollution and so on, but that's not an issue of population density.
It might not be AS GOOD, but it still REDUCES HARM. Any reduction in harm is by definition beneficial, compared to not reducing harm.
The accurate comparison would be smoking less compared to smoking more, not compared to stopping completely.
Dystopian future? Doesn't sound like one to me - there's no mention of ads on the paperwhite, which is the better option for e-books anyway. The fire is not primarily an ebook device, it's a media device, so ads seem quite fitting.
I'd agree, except in my experience most games with micropayments don't actually work like that - there tends to be plenty of things in most of them that you can't access at all unless you open your wallet. That's a dealbreaker to me when it comes to micropayments, because then it's suddenly a way to get more money out of people rather than a way to let you choose between putting time or money into it. If I want to put money into a game, I do it upfront, or I do it to unlock it once I've tried it - I am not willing to be nickle-and-dimed to death for little things I had no idea I'd have a reason to need when I started out, and have no other way of getting.
Seems like your question is fallacious. After all: even if it's harm reduction, it's beneficial. No matter what the cause, it's money he wasn't getting otherwise, and people who wouldn't have heard of it otherwise that's now hearing about the game. So in a way it's advertising he's actually getting paid for, which can't be seen as anything less than a win/win/win scenario.
My favourite beer is Schroedinger's beer.
Can't it be both?
Uhm, how was this modded flamebait? It's accurate. The summary uses the pronoun "he", while the author bio on TFA uses the pronoun "she".
Well, in the way the poster describes it, he wants it to be a facebook replacement. So it has to be argued that this isn't realistic with the way he's setting the idea up. He needs to build the framework of his idea to fit his long term goals, otherwise he might have to start over rather than continue the development when it gets big - if it ever does.
As for point number 2, true, it's no different than a self-hosted website, except it is. It's more like say a facebook profile... presumably supposedly simple to set up, simple to spread, visible to everyone if you wish... and presumably you would be able to tag other users as well. If he links to her on his pictures, she wouldn't have the authority to "unlink", because of the distributed way the system works. And if the "node" he's on threatens to delete him, he can just keep moving his profile to new hosting, over and over again, making the issue linger forever. Meanwhile it's not quite as trivial to set up your own website (well, it can be, but most people don't know that,) and if you abuse it your host can shut you down quickly and efficiently - and there'll be a trace back to you as a person due to billing records and so on. Your diaspora account can be entirely anonymous if you set it up over TOR, for instance... and it doesn't even matter if you just find some node off in faraway-istan that couldn't care less about what you put on it as long as it doesn't bring the heavy hitters in.
So really, there are some issues there. It makes it trivially EASY to do that sort of thing, which is a bad thing, because it today's society that shit happens constantly.
1. No farmville
Congratulations, you lost 99% of potential users.
2. No mention of abuse
Sometimes pictures and profiles are removed for good reasons. Without that oversight the decentralized network would be much like the hidden web - overrun by places like silk road and so on. Not to mention all the photos posted without someone's permission. Not that I care much about copyrights, but what about someone posting nude pics of their ex, to shame them? No safeguards.
3. Too complicated.
Congratulations, you lost 99% of potential users.
Really, I could go on and on, I could go into detail, but you're over-thinking it... The average user couldn't care less. If it's complicated, it's not going to get chosen over the easy option. Figure out how to do ALL that you wrote about, with absolutely no technical know-how, and make it work as seamlessly as facebook or similar sites, then we're talking.
Oh, and don't forget the games.
Except it has a very good point. If the headline is written in the form of a question, it's because the people who wrote the article didn't feel they had the answer. If they had an answer and felt confident about it, or even had the suggestion of a probable answer, then they would have written a statement as a headline rather than a question. Using a headline like this is bad practice because it is the trademark of an article that contains absolutely nothing of any value, just sensationalist statements to trigger a lively discussion. It's not "news", for nerds or anyone else, and it's not "stuff that matters", because it would only matter if there was a strong indication that it was indeed true.
So whoever chooses a headline for an article here should really consider double checking any story with a headline like this before letting it through.
Of course we all know that slashdot is just a gossip magazine with absolutely no journalistic integrity and an audience comprised entirely of people who are only interested in arguing, so if that's the kind of place we want it to be... I see your point entirely.
Nope. Cheap lighters, take up less room per lit fire, lights more fires than a box of matches, and works when wet. Much more efficient. And as a backup, regardless of what you choose, a firesteel.
Well, personally I agree with that, I think copyright is a crock of shit and if it existed at all it should be in the five-ten years range, and if it had to be longer then under no circumstances should it be transferable to anyone but the creator, nor should it be able to continue after their death. But that's another issue.
On the other hand your jumping to conclusions. What if the current abundance of entertainment is BECAUSE we have copyright? I know, it's playing the devils advocate, but you can't assume it isn't - there's no data on it.
Well yes, but if you think they've gotten this far without having a "get out of temporary outages" clause in their TOS, then you're pretty naive.