So because something is too expensive for you, you have no compunction in stealing it.
Posts by CN Hill
44 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Oct 2008
Publishers sue to shut down books-for-all Internet Archive for 'willful digital piracy on an industrial scale'
All your jobs are belong to us... Amazon is hiring 75,000 people but if you want US home groceries, tough luck
NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount
Smart speaker maker Sonos takes heat for deliberately bricking older kit with 'Trade Up' plan
Boffins blow hot and cold over li-ion battery that can cut leccy car recharging to '10 mins'
Geiger counters are so last summer. Lasers can detect radioactive material too, y'know
Brexit text-it wrecks it: Vote Leave fined £40k for spamming 200k msgs ahead of EU referendum
"But it admitted it had deleted this evidence, along with the phone numbers the messages were sent from, and details on the volume of messages sent and received."
As they were required to do by electoral law. "The reason Vote Leave were unable to prove it was specifically because they deleted their entire database after the vote as agreed with the ICO before the referendum."
However:
' Meanwhile the Remain campaign – now in its third different incarnation as People’s Vote – kept its entire database from the referendum campaign and has continued to pump out messages to its database on an almost daily basis since the referendum. Funnily enough the regulators don’t have a problem with that…'
https://order-order.com/2019/03/19/vindictive-ico-hits-vote-leave-40000-fine-not-data-agreed-delete/
Microsoft, you shouldn't have: Festive Windows 10 Insiders build about as exciting as new socks
F-35 'incomparable' to Harrier jump jet, top test pilot tells El Reg
How's this for a stocking filler next year? El Reg catches up with Gemini
Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!
Boeing and Airbus fly new planes for first time
This is where UK's Navy will park its 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers
So, was it really the Commies that caused the early 20th Century inequality collapse?
Hey, folks. Meet the economics 'genius' behind Jeremy Corbyn
Why is that idiot Osbo continuing with austerity when we know it doesn't work?
Inside GOV.UK: 'Chaos' and 'nightmare' as trendy Cabinet Office wrecked govt websites
1,000mph ROCKET CAR project dogged by beancounters
So long Lotus 1-2-3: IBM ceases support after over 30 years of code
SpaceX breaks ground on first commercial spaceport in Texas
Govt control? Hah! It's IMPOSSIBLE to have a successful command economy
Down with Unicode! Why 16 bits per character is a right pain in the ASCII
Euro GPS Galileo gets ready for nuclear missile use
What ereader decline? Kobo pumps up the volumes despite grim forecasts
'Doomsday' asteroid Apophis more massive than first thought
Forget value-added broker jokes: Could YOU shift nuclear plant scrap?
Sinofsky OFFSKI: Is Windows 9 now codenamed 'Defenestrate'?
Mozilla teaches coding with new Thimble 'Webmaker'
Walmart offers $2 digital copies of your DVDs
Woomera: Ghosts of Britain's space past
Office 15 steals OVERLARGE font, design vision from Windows PHO
European parliament loves the Tobin tax
Google insists it couldn't have been British. Excuse me?
Hackers break Amazon's Kindle DRM
You delude yourself, Mr Usher
"The problem is not authors getting paid. Its publishers who want to milk the cash cow for generation after generation."
True, the extension of copyright on old books is dubious, but that has nothing at all to do with DRM.
If ebooks can be freely copied, then Doctorow or no [I read the ebook, certainly wouldn't buy the hardcopy], people will do it, and though you might rage at those publishers who 'rip everyone off', no publishers = no books.
Authors get peanuts anyway, and unfortunately 5% of peanuts is penury.
I think this problem is going to be with us for some time ...
Publisher' was right - once 'cracked' copies of best sellers are loose on the Internet, then sales will collapse. Analogies with CDs etc aren't quite right: I don't think many people would see a problem with ripping your own CDs. But if you then posted them on the Internet so that anyone could download them for free, that would be regarded, quite rightly, as being wrong.
So with cracked 'ebooks'. If they're out there and easily available, why buy them?
I can see why publishers have gone with DRM [and quite why this should be illegal, I have absolutely no idea], but in the long run, it won't work. And don't get patronising by saying 'Oh, they need a new business model. Sell fridge magnets.'
Cory Doctorow makes a great play of saying, 'If they like my ebooks, people will go out and buy the real thing.' Maybe 5% will, if you're lucky.
What's the answer? I have no idea, other than I think that in 10 years time, authors and composers will be shafted even more than they are at the moment.
Sony plots death of Amazon Kindle
UK e-Borders scheme thrown into confusion by EU rules
Complete waste of time and money
This year I travelled from the UK through French, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark and Sweden. I showed my passport three times: going out the UK, once to a Polish Border Guard, and coming back into the UK.
Gosh, all these murderers and rapists arrested. Obviously there are no rapes or murders in French, Belgium etc etc - or perhaps they just think the whole eborders idea is *** useless. Unlike Mr Woolas.
Pro-Palestine vandals deface Army, NATO sites
The netbook newbie's guide to Linux
All well and good
I learned DOS about 20 odd years ago. About 16 years ago, when Windows 3.1 came out, I no longer had to remember obscure commands, switches, and the rest of it, or go delving into thick manuals to work out exactly what it was that I needed.
I know a lot of you don't like Windows on principle, but command lines! For heaven's sake, haven't we moved on past this? I'm sure I could go back to raw coding in bytes if I had to, but the world has moved on. It's time Linux did.