471–480 of 494 posts
On a related note (unfortunately not an alternative to everything Amazon offers):
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/07/torforge-e-books-are-now-dr...
FWIW, I'm from Norway, and this story seems legit - although it hasn't (yet) blown up in dead tree media over here. I think it just might. On a related note (unfortunately not an alternative to everything Amazon offers): http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/07/torforge-e-books-are-now-dr...
A comment from the Norwegian Government's "Consumer Council" - charged with protecting (private) consumer rights.
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Indeed. But don't expect the sort of person whose battle cry w/re to RS is "But he's so unkempt!" to acknowledge that he tends to be correct.
The main reason Stallman isn't mainstream is not his physical appearance, but his refusal to compromise with potential allies on even minor details. Not to mention a truckload of NIH on the part of the FSF, although you could argue this is another side of the same coin.
If the cost of winning certain potential allies to your cause would amount to the complete subversion and hollowing out of your cause, maybe it's better to forge ahead without those allies. If your vision is correct, some of them may come around to the correct position, your position, as time goes on. Or maybe not.
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My eBay account was closed because someone disputed a purchase from a family member, and my previous address was the same as theirs. Now it would take 99 other HNers who haven't had accounts closed to cancel me out and keep the ratio at 1%.
On the other side of the same coin: HN gets 120k uniques per day (as of October 5, 2011 - http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html ). So it will take another 1,199 people who've had accounts closed to put the ratio at above 1%. Of course, this is all incredibly blatant misuse of statistics. What we really need is a poll.
Ok, /newpoll... >Sorry, polls are turned off for a while.
Now we'll never know.
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You make it sound like releasing an ebook is somehow cheaper than releasing a paperback. I think in many cases this does not hold true. As long as ebooks represent a minority of all book sales producing paperbacks will be cheaper to produce than ebooks, just by law of mass production.
I don't understand how ebooks can cost more than a mass production paper book. If you are familiar with the industry of producing paper and ebooks for books that are best sellers then I would really love hear about the cost difference in producing both.
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There are several stores that sell content legally in DRM-free ePub, such as ebooks.com, not to mention all of the public domain content from Project Gutenberg. Moreover, I think consumers who have purchased a legal copy of a physical or DRM'd book have the moral authority to torrent a matching non-DRM copy, legal technicalities be damned. Please don't try to paint everyone with the same brush, or resort to name-call…
>legal technicalities be damned. I think the moment anyone says this, I'm well within the realm of normality to question that person's judgement making abilities. I happen to agree with you, but to simply ignore the fact that you need to break the law to make the value equation work in your favour is pretty much, well, idiotic.
The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.
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The DRM system is completely decentralized and doesn't cost anything to uphold.
Hello! I am unfamiliar with the details of the Kindle DRM implementation. Would you mind explaining at least the degree to which you are familiar with it, if not providing some background and/or links so that I can verify this statement for myself instead of just taking your word for it? Thanks!
It has to be decentralized because you don't have to connect your kindle to amazon at any point in order to purchase and read a book.
You can choose to download the book manually from amazon when purchasing and move the file directly to the kindle over USB and be done.
The book is encrypted with your device serial number (or something similar), which is also why, if you would want to strip the DRM from the file (which might be illegal, depending on where you live), you have to supply your kindle serial number to be able to decrypt it.
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Excellent idea. Though I fear that this will be essentially ignored too (as the recent precedent with Facebook shows). It is very unfortunate that apparently the only way to resolve such cases is to bring them to enough media spotlight, that the corporation involved has to do something to avoid damages to its image.
What Facebook precedent? I only know of the Facebook vs Ireland stuff and that works well.
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"Don't be too skeptical. Most of the people on HN had some big company restrict/kill an account by some BigCo at some point." Most ? That is a pretty serious statement, and I really doubt you can back it up. I don't have statistics on this and don't know where to look for them, but I would guess that the numbers of HN'ers that have had an account closed by a BigCo is actually much less than 1%, never mind more than 5…
I have been (by Reddit), and had no history of spam or disallowed use. I wasted time writing and responding to comments and nobody except me could see anything I wrote. I was unknowingly talking into the void for weeks. That was 5 years ago and to this day, I've never forgiven them.
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I agree that they are making a big mistake causing those feelings of rage and helplessnes. But the rights you list are rights we have in court. We never had any right to representation in an internal procedure of some private company. If our access to essential digital facilities ends up being dominated by a handful of global companies, these companies will be regulated like traditional facilities if they don't start…
Flickr is yahoo's toy, if they get pissed off they can take it home and deprive everyone of the game; it's still legal to be a jerk. The whole world used to be that way, though - kings owned everything and if you didn't like it, die - but it pissed people off so bad, they took back the rights to what really was the king's property. The real problem seems to be how easy it is to enter into extremely unjust agreements…
In Australia, consumer law prevents unfair terms in contracts by the simple expedient of nullifying them.