But we will. That's the entire point... Computer driven cars are better than humans, on average, and in an infrastructure re-modelled to suit such cars they are close to infallible compared to human drivers. We are struggling right now to get a computer to navigate the human infrastructure, but once this sort of machine has saturated the market the infrastructure WILL change.
You have to remember you don't live in the world of yesterday, you live in the world of now. The world of now has a very special aspect to it... what we choose to do, changes the world of tomorrow.
Don't arbitrarily limit tomorrow based on the world we had yesterday.
Except make sure you play a game with only one opponent, on a really good computer which does nothing else at the time, and that is built specifically to house an AI.
What, you thought in game AI was a good comparison? You don't think they might have to make some cuts in those for the sake of say system requirements? Or because they need five, ten, fifty AI controlled characters rather than just one goal oriented one?
I'm not saying you are necessarily wrong, AI likely has a ways to go, I'm just saying I've seen examples of it in lab environments that were hell of a lot more impressive than anything you can see in a game.
Likewise I don't suggest judging the state of the medical field after dr. mario, although the state of politics may or may not be comparable to tropico, depending on where you live and how much karma you have to burn.
I used to agree with that, then I realized that since we regularly inspect cars and since it would be easy enough to scan the software of every car that is involved in an accident, this is a crime that wouldn't go unnoticed. I like modding, but I'd probably be cautious if I knew that in an accident situation my crime could be upgraded from "manual operation of vehicle outside of my abilities" or whatever to "reckless endangerment" or in cases where someone was actually killed, it could easily be upgraded from "manslaughter" to "murder", or whatever the terms would be in the appropriate jurisdiction.
Sure, some people would still tamper... and the cops would likely have scanners scanning your software on routine stops, maybe even getting feedback from it remotely.
But you know what'll really kill it? Predictability.
If your car is driven by a program that will under no circumstances go above the speed limit, then if you go above the speed limit it's reasonable suspicion that you've tampered with your program. The car is impounded, and if it's found to be tampered with, lost.
Since the kind of people who really love to mod their cars are also the kind of people who really love their cars, this kind of thing is a fairly easily enforceable and not too harsh punishment that would likely make them think twice. And their hobby isn't outlawed, no, just moved to fenced trackways. If they want to race, feel the speed, mod their cars... then that's not for the streets, that's for the raceways.
Will there still be the one in a million idiot that does something insanely stupid, gets someone killed, and then drools in the courtroom saying he didn't know or that the rules somehow magically don't apply to them? Yes. There will also still be lightning strikes. If we got fenderbenders and carcrashes down to the scarcity of lightning strikes however, or lower... man, imagine the billions of dollars and manhours saved... not even mentioning the deaths and injuries avoided.
We had a neighbour when I was little who was obscenely proud of the fact that he had been driving for something like 70-80 years without ever being in a car accident. Even then, old, with deteriorating everything (but a sharp mind) he never had an accident!
Incidentally he had also been living on the family farm all those years, and aside from driving the tractor around the farm (and occasionally breaking shit with it, like one time he misjudged his angle going into the barn and tore half a wall down with his rear tire) he actually only drove into town once a month for supplies. A drive of about 15 minutes on a road where you met another car maybe once every five times you drove it, to get to a town where livestock had the right of way and everybody just kind of crawled around in their vehicles around whatever obstacles might appear, be they sheep, pedestrians, or a ninety year old half blind man driving on the wrong side of the road.
I'm just saying, sometimes good drivers have accidents, and bad drivers avoid them, because of whatever outside reasons govern their reality... rear-ended by an idiot, or spending their entire life driving in a very very safe environment. With that being said of course you are right that there are some good drivers who never cause an accident, and of course these are better drivers than an automated car... And there are drivers so bad that they pull the average right back down again.
In short, your argument is invalid - if we replace all cars with robots that have a better than average record, then the average would rise, even if we never let a good driver touch the controls again. And if ALL cars are automated, they can be patched, they can be linked, and they are over all predictable - which is the main risk in traffic today. Unpredictability. Almost every accident happens because of one of two things - 1) something unpredictable happens. 2) the driver failed to predict something obvious due to ignorance/distraction/narcissism/slashdottism/whatever.
Both of those aspects can be near eliminated by letting machines do the driving.
I believe you are incorrect in your last assertion. After all, first time authors are not paid based on anything but assumed sale-ability today, so nothing would actually change - just the size of the long term return. And the very fact that most authors take a decade to write their first book without getting paid a cent for it or having any book-related income to live off, proves that most of them are motivated by other things than money... while the fact that they are paid more for later books that are not as good and get less editing proves the capitalistic bent to the business.
I'm fine with that. I don't agree with rampant capitalism, but I'm fine with people wanting to make money. Sell your property, sell your ideas... but don't expect to be paid again when I use what is now MY property in a legal fashion.
Lastly thank you for the information about p2p lending versus KDP, I'll have to look into that. If it's true then it seems at face value like it could address my concerns, but I really don't know what KDP is yet.
Except amazon still takes the difference into account when setting the price to consumer in the first place. They calculate how many authors will opt for the extra 35%. and they take that cost and divide it on the amount of sales they'll make totally... every purchaser pays a fraction of those extra 35%. that likely most authors accept.
Like I said, 1+1=2, basic business - these people aren't operating a charity. They give more to some authors, they charge more to all customers. They give a lot extra to a few, they charge a little extra from a lot of customers. It evens out.
As long as they give me points for clicking buttons, who cares?
Okay, I'm failing at funny here, mainly because with all those zynga games it's pretty much proven that this is exactly the level most "casual gamers" are on. They don't care, as long as they get points for clicking a button. They might even pay for said points, just make sure they go "kaching!" when they arrive. After clicking the button.
That's actually quite correct - none of those take into account how good or popular the product is. Of course I'm not a capitalist, so I don't expect people to get paid differently based on such things. I believe a worker who makes an ipad should be paid as much as a worker who makes an android tablet... a worker who makes a rolls should be paid as much as a worker who makes a mini cooper. Of course in those cases, and in most other cases, salaries are indeed comparable if you look within the same working environment and financial zone... it's only within abstract goods that this strange notion of being paid for popularity arrives.
But all the same, I'm quite happy to entirely sidestep that argument... if you believe they should be paid as per popularity, go right ahead and add a fourth, fifth, sixth option. Like I said - whatever business model the real world can handle. Pay them a percentage of income during the first year, or a set amount per sold unit during a limited time. Now I prefer if this time is truly limited, say legally no more than five years or so - which is also how long copyright should last. But my argument holds true even if you pay them a percentage for every booksale for as long as they have the copyright to the material... They still shouldn't be paid again just because their customers utilizes their legal right to do what they wish with their legal property. They still shouldn't be paid past the point where the product has changed hands.
Last year I spent a few months living on a small sailboat. One of the issues I had was that, well, I'm a geek. Solar panels, batteries, laptop, android phone, kindle... it all had to survive. As for my phone I just got a motorola defy, no further protection needed... it's worked great and have taken no end of abuse without a hiccup. As for my ebook reader, I got myself a cheap kindle and a cheap waterproof bag from some dealer on amazon. I think it's called TrendyDigital or some such. It has a neckstrap as well, so I'd just carry my kindle with me, sit around reading, and was able to drop it at a moments notice without worrying about it falling and breaking. I'm not recommending any particular brand here, I'm sure a regular ziploc bag would do the trick, and you could probably add a strap to that as well with some thought to it.
And true, if it had fallen, or slammed against something hard when I bent over, it would have been bye bye kindle. It's not a hardcase... but honestly the kindle is so cheap that it would be a waste of money to protect it with a hardcase. If it breaks I wouldn't even call up the insurance company - the deductible would be the majority of the price of a new one. Just treat it with some care, and if it breaks - get the next model and treat that one with some MORE care.
No we don't get the same price anyways. As the end user we pay a price based on amazon's cost + profit margin. If you for a moment assume that they pay any author a single millionth of a cent without that going into their calculations when setting the price to consumer, then you need to go back to pre-school and learn some more about 1+1=2.
Paying a little extra for a right the user already has is simply eroding those rights - because eventually it means they'll have to pay extra for every and any right they wish to give us... which will mean we either get less rights, or higher prices. This is not acceptable, because Amazon is paying the author off twice for something the author has already sold - the book, and with it the rights to read it, lend it, or draw funny pictures on it and call it a swan.
I agree amazon should pay authors more, but that's not the case here. The case here is paying the author for something the author doesn't own: the rights to what I do with their book once I've already legally purchased it.
I'd love to be paid for things I don't own. Sounds great to me. In fact, if you start paying me for shit I don't own, I'll probably come up with a pretty long list of shit I don't own that you could pay me more for. Since you've started, you'd be hard pressed to say no... You've established precedent, and I quite like money, especially for things I don't own... But that doesn't make it right.
You can paint it in any light you want, it's still a pile of crap.
If someone - Amazon - starts paying people off so that you can use property you have legally bought in a legal fashion, then that's a horrible precedent no matter how you bend it. I don't know about you, but I don't feel comfortable about money trading hands so that I can do things that are my legal right to property that is legally mine. Why?
Well because if Amazon pays for it, you can bet your sweet ass it's included in the price when you buy it from them. Which means you are paying extra to actually use your legal rights with your legal property. Charging people for property is okay, like a book. Charging people for a service, say renting a book to them, is okay. Charging people for property, and then charging them some extra for the permission to use it legally... that's getting paid for a bridge that wasn't yours to sell.
I'm glad I found out about this, I'll make sure never to use the lending feature on my kindle. I'll just either lend them my actual kindle so they can read it, or I'll direct them to a pirated version of the book. Both are the exact moral equivalent of lending them the file, they get to read it, decide if they want to own it... neither way gets the author paid extra for this new reader, unless they catch them as a new reader of their own.
What got to me was that on the complaining authors blog - which someone linked to - there was a part of a post saying that the reason they complained was because lendlnk was not an authorized lender, and only loans through authorized lenders cause the author to get their commission from the loan. Now, from what I've gathered lendlnk didn't loan the books themselves, they sent people to amazon - an authorized lender. However that's really not the big news here.
The big news is that authors are getting paid when we loan an e-book to someone else. If this is true it's horrendous.
Seriously, what's next, will they want to get paid if we read it in a new room? If we remove it from the kindle and then re-download it? If we read it in the dark? I mean, clearly it's amazon that pays out, but of course the cost ends up with the end consumer eventually... and even if it didn't, we really don't want to create another class of content producers that are fully expecting to write a book or three and then sit on their fat asses and ride the royalty checks for the rest of their lives. That's how the music and film industry got to be the giant douche-nozzles they are today - keep getting paid over and over again for the same work they already did and moved on from.
Man, I wish I could go to work at say a supermarket, work for a day, or hell work for a year... and then get paid a.01% royalty every time someone goes through the checkout for the rest of my life.
Now I'm not one of those people who devalue abstract goods... Ideas, books, poetry, whatever... these are valuable things. People should get paid to bring these to the world... However they should get paid for the work they do. Paid per book, per work, or per hour - whatever business model the REAL WORLD can handle... but they shouldn't be paid for future use of work they've already done. If they write a book in three months, they should write another one six months later, or a year, if they want to keep making a living as an author. Or if they do it for fun, because they WANT to write... well then they can just as well do it while working in wallmart to put food on the table. A lot of us - me included - could probably live off things we do for fun... But only if we made it our fulltime job. Of course eventually the market for professional gameplayers and buckyball artists would be saturated, but you get the idea. If it's a fulltime job, you should get paid while you work it.
So stop going the other way by bending to give these lazy fucks more money for things they shouldn't be able to even know. If I lend my hardcopy to someone, the author doesn't get paid again. Nothing has changed in what happens, so nothing should change in the payscheme.
Yes, that's excellent points. The exact same points I've been making over and over actually, except I come at it from the side of too many documents that contain nothing but text being put into pdf format for absolutely no reason, thus locking it into a very static format. Exactly the thing you say is an advantage in heavily formatted and illustrated documents is a drawback in all other forms of documents, since there the best benefit is to be able to rescale on the fly. Being able to increase the fontsize on my kindle in low light for instance, or if my eyes are tired, is incredibly useful, and impossible with most pdfs I've found. (Without zooming into the entire page that is, meaning you are left navigating left and right along every row since it doesn't adjust the flow.)
Also I'm not american, and the vast majority of books I read were never ever formatted for the a4 or letter sized pages, but rather paperbacks that are actually much closer to the kindle in size than an a4 page.
As I've stated repeatedly I totally agree that pdfs are still the best for heavily formatted publications such as magazines, some technical manuals with a lot of illustrations, roleplaying rulebooks with all their tables, and so on. For those things a large tablet might be a good reader. For everything that doesn't require such heavy formatting on the other hand, the best possible thing would be for people to stop using the pdf format as a catchall.
Well yes, all of that is exactly what I've been saying. It's a problem with the format, not the particular device. Or rather a problem with the wrong format for the type of device. Since e-book readers and tablets are getting more popular, I refer back to my argument that people should start using formats other than pdf for their documents, unless the documents absolutely require advanced formatting which might not be possible in e-book formats.
I totally agree. Of course both a more localized government as would be my choice and the option of no government are sociologically impossible to reach from our current status quo - so it's a moot point.
I'd like to point out however that not all governments have ruled by violence, legitimate or not... but that's a debate for another time, since the first argument against this is that these governments were eventually overtaken - usually by violent means - by outsiders.
When you come right down to it being an asshole is the human thing to do, so we have exactly the society we deserve, want, and are supposed to have. If we tried replacing it with anything else someone would just revert it because they stayed truer to the human nature of violence, conquest, egotism... There is no winning when you fight human nature.
This is true, and it's why I posit that the concept of government is flawed. Not any particular system, but ALL of them. Because none of them have the ruling class remaining a part of the group which they regulate...
Sure they might be in words, but we all know that they get treated differently, and we all know that when you are late for a meeting and can take a taxi clear cross country on the tax-payers money, then you're not really living in the same world as most people, who often would be hard pressed to afford a taxi across town even without a life and death situation arising. (Granted taxis are more expensive here where petrol prices are twice what they are in the US, but you get my point, I hope.)
So like you said.. You can care for the aggregate, when you are a part of it, and its well-being directly reflects on yours. Since leadership is so far removed from normal people this is not true for them, thus they can not care for the aggregate, can not care for the individual stranger that to them is just lost in a faceless mass of "other" people.
So if your latest law happens to cause severe problems for a few hundred or thousand of them, it's not your problem. It'll solve problems for some others, and hey, none of the people affected actually live in YOUR world... Your friends and family and social circle will be fine.
There are two kinds of people who have read Ayn Raynd. Those who did it at a desk, and those who did it in bed.
I'm sorry, did I miss you in my narrowminded view of reality? Impossible, there's no way that people are say... individuals... and do things with more diverse reasons or findings than you can simplify. Is there?
There are two kinds of people who post on slashdot. Those who post insightful, interesting and well researched comments... and those that gets modded up.
I wish there was a way to mod moderations. I want to mod the "insightful" on this funny... because clearly it's a joke. Well, either that or sarah palin now has a slashdot account and modpoints.
Hey thanks, that's neat. Personally I don't think I'll go through the trouble - if there's a book I have to read that's only available on pdf I just read it on my computer instead. It's awkward, but I have a lot of downtime between tasks and an extra screen. For me the trouble won't be worth it until there's a good reader or converter...
Or perhaps if people stop exporting to pdf as a "one size fits all" solution... and starts exporting to mobi or epub or whatever instead if it can handle the formatting their book requires.
I buy generic brand painkillers (which is a fairly new thing around here - I'm not american) that has caffeine in them. I've tried ones that doesn't have the caffeine as well, and they weren't as effective for me. I discussed this with my doctor and was referred to several double-blind studies showing that the type of painkiller that works best for me (Aspirin, basically, although by another name) has been shown to work better at lower doses if given with caffeine.
So, it works for me, and apparently science says it works in general - for that particular branch of analgesics.
If you lose some of the formatting at different zoom levels, that seems to indicate that it resizes just the text. In most pdfs I've encountered that wouldn't have been possible since they are locked or text is rendered as images or other stupid things. Like I said, a problem with the format chosen rather than the reader. If it's just a zoom and you then have to mover around the page with the arrow keys or page keys or whatnot, then well - the kindle does that as well.. it's just very kludgy and not really functional at all. Having to go right every time you want to read the end of a line and then back to read the start of the next one is not very nice... and yes, the kindle does support landscape and zoom to width. At least my kindle 3 (kindle keyboard) does, and presumably later versions as well - your friend either had an older version or was not aware of how to work it.
Again, not a good way to read, you click page down to read the next half of the page, and then page down again to see the next page, add to this varying formatting on the PDF pages like for instance multiple columns of text, or pages that only have a few lines on them making you press next page repeatedly to get to the continuation... Not very usable. And not because of the device, but because the format is designed to show pages as individual units, like a magazine, with a pre-decided layout. Each page has a certain size and there is no fluidity to it.
This is a problem on every device unless the device shows a 1:1 representation of the PDF page with a resolution good enough to read it. And that's not going to happen on such a small screen... so that's why it's not a problem with the device.
You might not find all these quirks annoying, so perhaps for YOU it isn't an issue... but I read about 600 pages a day on average when I hit my stride - for me this is a dealbreaker.
Saying there is more caffeine in undrunk coffee than in waste products is hardly "intuition" - caffeine is metabolised, so clearly any caffeine laden product that is poured directly out contains orders of magnitude more than feces or urine. The part where he claims there is more caffeine in feces than in urine seems to be based on his assertion that urine is not what we drink. This is of course true - urine is excess fluids from everything we ingest, and is extracted from the system in the bowels. Thus again it's not a question of intuition, but rather about what he knows about caffeine... is it a solid or a fluid, or does it bind to such, or whatever mechanism chooses its pathway. I personally know that caffeine is a solid, but not how it is sorted by the body, so I'll give him the benefit of a doubt. You can choose not to, since you seem the type, but it's still got nothing to do with the numbers.... just the quantitative differences.
If I see rain falling on a roof with a small hole in it, it doesn't take any intuition to say that most rain will run down the gutters, a smaller amount will enter the hole, and of course globally most of the rain wont even hit the roof. Making an assumption based on clearly obvious facts (small hole, big roof, bigger world) does not require actual measurements to be correct - unless of course there is some magic unknown factor to caffeine... In fact measuring exactly is usually how we find these unknown factors. Caffeine however is for some strange (addictive) reason rather well studied, so we have nothing to worry about there. It obeys the laws of physics and biology and logic and all that, as expected.
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But we will. That's the entire point... Computer driven cars are better than humans, on average, and in an infrastructure re-modelled to suit such cars they are close to infallible compared to human drivers. We are struggling right now to get a computer to navigate the human infrastructure, but once this sort of machine has saturated the market the infrastructure WILL change.
You have to remember you don't live in the world of yesterday, you live in the world of now. The world of now has a very special aspect to it... what we choose to do, changes the world of tomorrow.
Don't arbitrarily limit tomorrow based on the world we had yesterday.
Except make sure you play a game with only one opponent, on a really good computer which does nothing else at the time, and that is built specifically to house an AI.
What, you thought in game AI was a good comparison? You don't think they might have to make some cuts in those for the sake of say system requirements? Or because they need five, ten, fifty AI controlled characters rather than just one goal oriented one?
I'm not saying you are necessarily wrong, AI likely has a ways to go, I'm just saying I've seen examples of it in lab environments that were hell of a lot more impressive than anything you can see in a game.
Likewise I don't suggest judging the state of the medical field after dr. mario, although the state of politics may or may not be comparable to tropico, depending on where you live and how much karma you have to burn.
I used to agree with that, then I realized that since we regularly inspect cars and since it would be easy enough to scan the software of every car that is involved in an accident, this is a crime that wouldn't go unnoticed. I like modding, but I'd probably be cautious if I knew that in an accident situation my crime could be upgraded from "manual operation of vehicle outside of my abilities" or whatever to "reckless endangerment" or in cases where someone was actually killed, it could easily be upgraded from "manslaughter" to "murder", or whatever the terms would be in the appropriate jurisdiction.
Sure, some people would still tamper... and the cops would likely have scanners scanning your software on routine stops, maybe even getting feedback from it remotely.
But you know what'll really kill it? Predictability.
If your car is driven by a program that will under no circumstances go above the speed limit, then if you go above the speed limit it's reasonable suspicion that you've tampered with your program. The car is impounded, and if it's found to be tampered with, lost.
Since the kind of people who really love to mod their cars are also the kind of people who really love their cars, this kind of thing is a fairly easily enforceable and not too harsh punishment that would likely make them think twice. And their hobby isn't outlawed, no, just moved to fenced trackways. If they want to race, feel the speed, mod their cars... then that's not for the streets, that's for the raceways.
Will there still be the one in a million idiot that does something insanely stupid, gets someone killed, and then drools in the courtroom saying he didn't know or that the rules somehow magically don't apply to them? Yes. There will also still be lightning strikes. If we got fenderbenders and carcrashes down to the scarcity of lightning strikes however, or lower... man, imagine the billions of dollars and manhours saved... not even mentioning the deaths and injuries avoided.
We had a neighbour when I was little who was obscenely proud of the fact that he had been driving for something like 70-80 years without ever being in a car accident. Even then, old, with deteriorating everything (but a sharp mind) he never had an accident!
Incidentally he had also been living on the family farm all those years, and aside from driving the tractor around the farm (and occasionally breaking shit with it, like one time he misjudged his angle going into the barn and tore half a wall down with his rear tire) he actually only drove into town once a month for supplies. A drive of about 15 minutes on a road where you met another car maybe once every five times you drove it, to get to a town where livestock had the right of way and everybody just kind of crawled around in their vehicles around whatever obstacles might appear, be they sheep, pedestrians, or a ninety year old half blind man driving on the wrong side of the road.
I'm just saying, sometimes good drivers have accidents, and bad drivers avoid them, because of whatever outside reasons govern their reality... rear-ended by an idiot, or spending their entire life driving in a very very safe environment. With that being said of course you are right that there are some good drivers who never cause an accident, and of course these are better drivers than an automated car... And there are drivers so bad that they pull the average right back down again.
In short, your argument is invalid - if we replace all cars with robots that have a better than average record, then the average would rise, even if we never let a good driver touch the controls again. And if ALL cars are automated, they can be patched, they can be linked, and they are over all predictable - which is the main risk in traffic today. Unpredictability. Almost every accident happens because of one of two things - 1) something unpredictable happens. 2) the driver failed to predict something obvious due to ignorance/distraction/narcissism/slashdottism/whatever.
Both of those aspects can be near eliminated by letting machines do the driving.
Mooh!
I believe you are incorrect in your last assertion. After all, first time authors are not paid based on anything but assumed sale-ability today, so nothing would actually change - just the size of the long term return. And the very fact that most authors take a decade to write their first book without getting paid a cent for it or having any book-related income to live off, proves that most of them are motivated by other things than money... while the fact that they are paid more for later books that are not as good and get less editing proves the capitalistic bent to the business.
I'm fine with that. I don't agree with rampant capitalism, but I'm fine with people wanting to make money. Sell your property, sell your ideas... but don't expect to be paid again when I use what is now MY property in a legal fashion.
Lastly thank you for the information about p2p lending versus KDP, I'll have to look into that. If it's true then it seems at face value like it could address my concerns, but I really don't know what KDP is yet.
At first I misread, didn't notice the second C, and I was all over that idea. Then I realized it said clicking, and that just seems unrealistic.
Except amazon still takes the difference into account when setting the price to consumer in the first place. They calculate how many authors will opt for the extra 35%. and they take that cost and divide it on the amount of sales they'll make totally... every purchaser pays a fraction of those extra 35%. that likely most authors accept.
Like I said, 1+1=2, basic business - these people aren't operating a charity. They give more to some authors, they charge more to all customers. They give a lot extra to a few, they charge a little extra from a lot of customers. It evens out.
As long as they give me points for clicking buttons, who cares?
Okay, I'm failing at funny here, mainly because with all those zynga games it's pretty much proven that this is exactly the level most "casual gamers" are on. They don't care, as long as they get points for clicking a button. They might even pay for said points, just make sure they go "kaching!" when they arrive. After clicking the button.
The button is important.
That's actually quite correct - none of those take into account how good or popular the product is. Of course I'm not a capitalist, so I don't expect people to get paid differently based on such things. I believe a worker who makes an ipad should be paid as much as a worker who makes an android tablet... a worker who makes a rolls should be paid as much as a worker who makes a mini cooper. Of course in those cases, and in most other cases, salaries are indeed comparable if you look within the same working environment and financial zone... it's only within abstract goods that this strange notion of being paid for popularity arrives.
But all the same, I'm quite happy to entirely sidestep that argument... if you believe they should be paid as per popularity, go right ahead and add a fourth, fifth, sixth option. Like I said - whatever business model the real world can handle. Pay them a percentage of income during the first year, or a set amount per sold unit during a limited time. Now I prefer if this time is truly limited, say legally no more than five years or so - which is also how long copyright should last. But my argument holds true even if you pay them a percentage for every booksale for as long as they have the copyright to the material... They still shouldn't be paid again just because their customers utilizes their legal right to do what they wish with their legal property. They still shouldn't be paid past the point where the product has changed hands.
Last year I spent a few months living on a small sailboat. One of the issues I had was that, well, I'm a geek. Solar panels, batteries, laptop, android phone, kindle... it all had to survive. As for my phone I just got a motorola defy, no further protection needed... it's worked great and have taken no end of abuse without a hiccup. As for my ebook reader, I got myself a cheap kindle and a cheap waterproof bag from some dealer on amazon. I think it's called TrendyDigital or some such. It has a neckstrap as well, so I'd just carry my kindle with me, sit around reading, and was able to drop it at a moments notice without worrying about it falling and breaking. I'm not recommending any particular brand here, I'm sure a regular ziploc bag would do the trick, and you could probably add a strap to that as well with some thought to it.
And true, if it had fallen, or slammed against something hard when I bent over, it would have been bye bye kindle. It's not a hardcase... but honestly the kindle is so cheap that it would be a waste of money to protect it with a hardcase. If it breaks I wouldn't even call up the insurance company - the deductible would be the majority of the price of a new one. Just treat it with some care, and if it breaks - get the next model and treat that one with some MORE care.
No we don't get the same price anyways. As the end user we pay a price based on amazon's cost + profit margin. If you for a moment assume that they pay any author a single millionth of a cent without that going into their calculations when setting the price to consumer, then you need to go back to pre-school and learn some more about 1+1=2.
Paying a little extra for a right the user already has is simply eroding those rights - because eventually it means they'll have to pay extra for every and any right they wish to give us... which will mean we either get less rights, or higher prices. This is not acceptable, because Amazon is paying the author off twice for something the author has already sold - the book, and with it the rights to read it, lend it, or draw funny pictures on it and call it a swan.
I agree amazon should pay authors more, but that's not the case here. The case here is paying the author for something the author doesn't own: the rights to what I do with their book once I've already legally purchased it.
I'd love to be paid for things I don't own. Sounds great to me. In fact, if you start paying me for shit I don't own, I'll probably come up with a pretty long list of shit I don't own that you could pay me more for. Since you've started, you'd be hard pressed to say no... You've established precedent, and I quite like money, especially for things I don't own... But that doesn't make it right.
You can paint it in any light you want, it's still a pile of crap.
If someone - Amazon - starts paying people off so that you can use property you have legally bought in a legal fashion, then that's a horrible precedent no matter how you bend it. I don't know about you, but I don't feel comfortable about money trading hands so that I can do things that are my legal right to property that is legally mine. Why?
Well because if Amazon pays for it, you can bet your sweet ass it's included in the price when you buy it from them. Which means you are paying extra to actually use your legal rights with your legal property. Charging people for property is okay, like a book. Charging people for a service, say renting a book to them, is okay. Charging people for property, and then charging them some extra for the permission to use it legally... that's getting paid for a bridge that wasn't yours to sell.
I'm glad I found out about this, I'll make sure never to use the lending feature on my kindle. I'll just either lend them my actual kindle so they can read it, or I'll direct them to a pirated version of the book. Both are the exact moral equivalent of lending them the file, they get to read it, decide if they want to own it... neither way gets the author paid extra for this new reader, unless they catch them as a new reader of their own.
What got to me was that on the complaining authors blog - which someone linked to - there was a part of a post saying that the reason they complained was because lendlnk was not an authorized lender, and only loans through authorized lenders cause the author to get their commission from the loan. Now, from what I've gathered lendlnk didn't loan the books themselves, they sent people to amazon - an authorized lender. However that's really not the big news here.
The big news is that authors are getting paid when we loan an e-book to someone else. If this is true it's horrendous.
Seriously, what's next, will they want to get paid if we read it in a new room? If we remove it from the kindle and then re-download it? If we read it in the dark? I mean, clearly it's amazon that pays out, but of course the cost ends up with the end consumer eventually... and even if it didn't, we really don't want to create another class of content producers that are fully expecting to write a book or three and then sit on their fat asses and ride the royalty checks for the rest of their lives. That's how the music and film industry got to be the giant douche-nozzles they are today - keep getting paid over and over again for the same work they already did and moved on from.
Man, I wish I could go to work at say a supermarket, work for a day, or hell work for a year... and then get paid a .01% royalty every time someone goes through the checkout for the rest of my life.
Now I'm not one of those people who devalue abstract goods... Ideas, books, poetry, whatever... these are valuable things. People should get paid to bring these to the world... However they should get paid for the work they do. Paid per book, per work, or per hour - whatever business model the REAL WORLD can handle... but they shouldn't be paid for future use of work they've already done. If they write a book in three months, they should write another one six months later, or a year, if they want to keep making a living as an author. Or if they do it for fun, because they WANT to write... well then they can just as well do it while working in wallmart to put food on the table. A lot of us - me included - could probably live off things we do for fun... But only if we made it our fulltime job. Of course eventually the market for professional gameplayers and buckyball artists would be saturated, but you get the idea. If it's a fulltime job, you should get paid while you work it.
So stop going the other way by bending to give these lazy fucks more money for things they shouldn't be able to even know. If I lend my hardcopy to someone, the author doesn't get paid again. Nothing has changed in what happens, so nothing should change in the payscheme.
Yes, that's excellent points. The exact same points I've been making over and over actually, except I come at it from the side of too many documents that contain nothing but text being put into pdf format for absolutely no reason, thus locking it into a very static format. Exactly the thing you say is an advantage in heavily formatted and illustrated documents is a drawback in all other forms of documents, since there the best benefit is to be able to rescale on the fly. Being able to increase the fontsize on my kindle in low light for instance, or if my eyes are tired, is incredibly useful, and impossible with most pdfs I've found. (Without zooming into the entire page that is, meaning you are left navigating left and right along every row since it doesn't adjust the flow.)
Also I'm not american, and the vast majority of books I read were never ever formatted for the a4 or letter sized pages, but rather paperbacks that are actually much closer to the kindle in size than an a4 page.
As I've stated repeatedly I totally agree that pdfs are still the best for heavily formatted publications such as magazines, some technical manuals with a lot of illustrations, roleplaying rulebooks with all their tables, and so on. For those things a large tablet might be a good reader. For everything that doesn't require such heavy formatting on the other hand, the best possible thing would be for people to stop using the pdf format as a catchall.
Well yes, all of that is exactly what I've been saying. It's a problem with the format, not the particular device. Or rather a problem with the wrong format for the type of device. Since e-book readers and tablets are getting more popular, I refer back to my argument that people should start using formats other than pdf for their documents, unless the documents absolutely require advanced formatting which might not be possible in e-book formats.
I totally agree. Of course both a more localized government as would be my choice and the option of no government are sociologically impossible to reach from our current status quo - so it's a moot point.
I'd like to point out however that not all governments have ruled by violence, legitimate or not... but that's a debate for another time, since the first argument against this is that these governments were eventually overtaken - usually by violent means - by outsiders.
When you come right down to it being an asshole is the human thing to do, so we have exactly the society we deserve, want, and are supposed to have. If we tried replacing it with anything else someone would just revert it because they stayed truer to the human nature of violence, conquest, egotism... There is no winning when you fight human nature.
This is true, and it's why I posit that the concept of government is flawed. Not any particular system, but ALL of them. Because none of them have the ruling class remaining a part of the group which they regulate...
Sure they might be in words, but we all know that they get treated differently, and we all know that when you are late for a meeting and can take a taxi clear cross country on the tax-payers money, then you're not really living in the same world as most people, who often would be hard pressed to afford a taxi across town even without a life and death situation arising. (Granted taxis are more expensive here where petrol prices are twice what they are in the US, but you get my point, I hope.)
So like you said.. You can care for the aggregate, when you are a part of it, and its well-being directly reflects on yours. Since leadership is so far removed from normal people this is not true for them, thus they can not care for the aggregate, can not care for the individual stranger that to them is just lost in a faceless mass of "other" people.
So if your latest law happens to cause severe problems for a few hundred or thousand of them, it's not your problem. It'll solve problems for some others, and hey, none of the people affected actually live in YOUR world... Your friends and family and social circle will be fine.
There are two kinds of people who have read Ayn Raynd. Those who did it at a desk, and those who did it in bed.
I'm sorry, did I miss you in my narrowminded view of reality? Impossible, there's no way that people are say... individuals... and do things with more diverse reasons or findings than you can simplify. Is there?
There are two kinds of people who post on slashdot. Those who post insightful, interesting and well researched comments... and those that gets modded up.
I wish there was a way to mod moderations. I want to mod the "insightful" on this funny... because clearly it's a joke. Well, either that or sarah palin now has a slashdot account and modpoints.
Hey thanks, that's neat. Personally I don't think I'll go through the trouble - if there's a book I have to read that's only available on pdf I just read it on my computer instead. It's awkward, but I have a lot of downtime between tasks and an extra screen. For me the trouble won't be worth it until there's a good reader or converter...
Or perhaps if people stop exporting to pdf as a "one size fits all" solution... and starts exporting to mobi or epub or whatever instead if it can handle the formatting their book requires.
I buy generic brand painkillers (which is a fairly new thing around here - I'm not american) that has caffeine in them. I've tried ones that doesn't have the caffeine as well, and they weren't as effective for me. I discussed this with my doctor and was referred to several double-blind studies showing that the type of painkiller that works best for me (Aspirin, basically, although by another name) has been shown to work better at lower doses if given with caffeine.
So, it works for me, and apparently science says it works in general - for that particular branch of analgesics.
If you lose some of the formatting at different zoom levels, that seems to indicate that it resizes just the text. In most pdfs I've encountered that wouldn't have been possible since they are locked or text is rendered as images or other stupid things. Like I said, a problem with the format chosen rather than the reader. If it's just a zoom and you then have to mover around the page with the arrow keys or page keys or whatnot, then well - the kindle does that as well.. it's just very kludgy and not really functional at all. Having to go right every time you want to read the end of a line and then back to read the start of the next one is not very nice... and yes, the kindle does support landscape and zoom to width. At least my kindle 3 (kindle keyboard) does, and presumably later versions as well - your friend either had an older version or was not aware of how to work it.
Again, not a good way to read, you click page down to read the next half of the page, and then page down again to see the next page, add to this varying formatting on the PDF pages like for instance multiple columns of text, or pages that only have a few lines on them making you press next page repeatedly to get to the continuation... Not very usable. And not because of the device, but because the format is designed to show pages as individual units, like a magazine, with a pre-decided layout. Each page has a certain size and there is no fluidity to it.
This is a problem on every device unless the device shows a 1:1 representation of the PDF page with a resolution good enough to read it. And that's not going to happen on such a small screen... so that's why it's not a problem with the device.
You might not find all these quirks annoying, so perhaps for YOU it isn't an issue... but I read about 600 pages a day on average when I hit my stride - for me this is a dealbreaker.
I do actually!
Green potatoes and flysoup.
Saying there is more caffeine in undrunk coffee than in waste products is hardly "intuition" - caffeine is metabolised, so clearly any caffeine laden product that is poured directly out contains orders of magnitude more than feces or urine. The part where he claims there is more caffeine in feces than in urine seems to be based on his assertion that urine is not what we drink. This is of course true - urine is excess fluids from everything we ingest, and is extracted from the system in the bowels. Thus again it's not a question of intuition, but rather about what he knows about caffeine... is it a solid or a fluid, or does it bind to such, or whatever mechanism chooses its pathway. I personally know that caffeine is a solid, but not how it is sorted by the body, so I'll give him the benefit of a doubt. You can choose not to, since you seem the type, but it's still got nothing to do with the numbers.... just the quantitative differences.
If I see rain falling on a roof with a small hole in it, it doesn't take any intuition to say that most rain will run down the gutters, a smaller amount will enter the hole, and of course globally most of the rain wont even hit the roof. Making an assumption based on clearly obvious facts (small hole, big roof, bigger world) does not require actual measurements to be correct - unless of course there is some magic unknown factor to caffeine... In fact measuring exactly is usually how we find these unknown factors. Caffeine however is for some strange (addictive) reason rather well studied, so we have nothing to worry about there. It obeys the laws of physics and biology and logic and all that, as expected.