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“The books will stop working.”

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Re: “The books will stop working.”

#281

Post by dredmorbius »

AnssiH wrote: post #87
hyperman1 wrote: post #4

I wonder how this can even be legal in Europe. If someone sold you something, its yours. AFAIK, There is enough consumer protection to stop most EULA bullshit. So it seems it only needs someone to sue and some proof microsoft used the word 'sold' when you bought it.

I doubt the law requires anything more than the full refund which MS is providing. Similarly, if someone sells you a physical product that is faulty, the seller is not required to produce a replacement, they can just refund you instead.

Defective instances are a random (though not unpredictable) event occurring independently between instances, with no influence by the manufacturer, designholder, or vendor.

Hitting the Molly Switch on a DRM service is the exact opposite.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#282

Post by linuxftw »

cyphar wrote: post #246
linuxftw wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hoping this nostalgia trend will end. It's time to move forward. Instead of teaching kids about Shakespeare, we should be teaching about Super Mario for cultural history. Why should anyone care about poems or poetry? It was the entertainment of the early-print society, it has comparably little value today.

Modern human history is more than 50 years old. While I do appreciate that more modern examples of media might get children more interested in critical analysis, claiming that all of the "valuable" thoughts made by humans only started 50 years ago is incredibly narrow-minded. Hamlet talks about the human condition and coming to terms with your own mortality. Where in Super Mario does that come up? Before or after wor…

> Hamlet talks about the human condition and coming to terms with your own mortality.

So? Who cares? I don't think I ever read Hamlet. It was just entertainment, no different than a television show today.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#283

Post by asdff »

linuxftw wrote: post #147
logifail wrote: post #84

My grandmother is in her late 90s, has dementia, and is in a care home. My mother sent me this update last week: > Went to see Granny yesterday, was quite cheerful, read though the poems in "When we were very young"[0], her original copy[1], given to her in 1928, how about that. She knows them off by heart and joins in when you read them to her Q: When we're in our late 90s, how many of us will be able to consume 90-…

I've been hoping this nostalgia trend will end. It's time to move forward. Instead of teaching kids about Shakespeare, we should be teaching about Super Mario for cultural history. Why should anyone care about poems or poetry? It was the entertainment of the early-print society, it has comparably little value today.

Because our collective western culture is still the direct product of Greek philosophy no matter how many mario kart games are released.

The books in the western canon are important because they are good and went on to influence everything you consume today, even the narrative in super mario. Take some time to read a good chunk of these books and you will be wiser than most people you know on all sorts of topics.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#284

Post by dheera »

cyphar wrote: post #241
dheera wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, as long as their servers aren't in those countries, they can't do anything except censor the website. And most countries with long copyright terms don't censor websites.

Project Gutenberg self-censored themselves to all German users in protest of the lawsuit.

If they did not have servers in Germany couldn't they have just ignored the lawsuit?

They can make it illegal for Germans to use the site if they wish, but they can't go meddling in foreign media content. If Saudi Arabia serves you a lawsuit because you have a picture of a woman's face on a webpage without hijab, would you fly there to go to court? I'd just trash their lawsuit and never go there. They can block my site if they want -- same goes for Germany.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#286

Post by DenisM »

cyphar wrote: post #257
DenisM wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely with prices going that high the students could pool their resources to buy one copy and have it professionally scanned? It's only $1 per 100 pages.

Many students do that, but print shops might refuse to do the copying if they notice it's a textbook. At least, that's my experience in Australia. That's the kind of system draconian copyright laws create.

One only needs a single shop that would agree. And at those prices the shop can be in any country.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#287

Post by asdff »

dredmorbius wrote: post #279
la_barba wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its fine to have an opinion on how things should be, but some of your assertions are not based on facts. >Virtually all major DRM-"protected" works are available on thepiratebay shortly after release. Sometimes before release. "Virtually all Server OSs get hacked/have had security bugs. Nobody should use them to host or store anything." All you're saying is that DRM isn't perfect. Nothing is perfect, and it isn't exa…

FYI, Bill Gates has explicitly stated he prefers pirated MS Windows use to unencumbered Linux converts: "[A]s long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." https://web.archive.org/web/20060411095315/https://www.latim...

That's probably why they don't put up much fuss anymore if you never register windows 10.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#288

Post by DenisM »

ahakki wrote: post #261
DenisM wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely with prices going that high the students could pool their resources to buy one copy and have it professionally scanned? It's only $1 per 100 pages.

There could not be a more literal copyright violation than what you described.

So?

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#289

Post by quickthrower2 »

lloeki wrote: post #210
sjy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be longer than 100 years. I recently tried to find a copy of an article published in 1932. I can't find any version online and the nearest print version is in a library 1,000 km away. I asked the library if they could scan it and email it to me and they said no, it's still covered by copyright. This work was published early in the author's life; she died in 1983. So the Berne Convention would protect this wo…

Well I can’t even read my own research paper (lost my tex source and final digital copy when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour). I know for a fact that it is archived and basically exactly where but it’s beyond either one of an abusive layer of bureaucracy or a paywall, whichever I would choose to go through. Not that it’s worthy of anything or even remotely interesting but it tells a lot a…

Count yourself lucky. Most of us developers cant even read the code we wrote in a professional setting once we leave a company.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#290

Post by asdff »

_Microft wrote: post #3

Because of the volatile nature of all things web, I frequently screenshot (yes, screenshot, because printing to PDFs makes them look awful, imo) Twitter conversations, print blog posts to PDF or download articles that I want to make sure that I don't loose. It's so sad that this is necessary.

firefox singlefile extension is pretty nice for this but still not perfect given how much dynamic bullshit gets shoveled on top of every website
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