"I sell my soul but at the highest rates, the highest rates." God bless Harlan Ellison

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Every time this topic comes up on slashdot, there is a huge run of comments about the "huge, evil publishing corporations" and never a single word about the actual creators. The straw-man depiction of publishing houses is a distortion and it immediately falsifies the rest of the arguments posted here.

What about the f***ing authors? Most authors have to write on the side, in addition to their day jobs, because authoring even well-regarded works pays only marginally and there are no 'benefits' at all. If the way you show love to your favorite creators is by stealing all their work (and then using fancy ideology to rationalize it) maybe the problem isn't with the details of the legal system.

Thank you, sincerely, for saying this here.

"They did not sneak into publisher systems or author's home PCs and extract unpublished works and put them on the Internet. They bought published, printed works. At which point, publisher's rights (we know author's rights are irrelevant to these assholes) end."

This is a completely specious argument. Buying a single copy of a printed work does NOT give you or anyone the right to make and distribute an arbitrary number of copies of it.

Speaking as a writer, and hopefully an author someday, I can tell you with confidence that 90% of authors, at least, are opposed to what IA is doing, and it would be 100% if authors were all paying attention. The author's rights are relevant to publishers, and certainly to authors, and they ought to be to you, as well. The fastest way to put your favorite author out of business is to find clever ways to distribute his or her work for free.

I'm sorry, I was being sincere. As I said upthread, a lot of my friends are novelists, and every single one of them has come out strongly against what IA is doing.

Thank you. This is a great argument and one I hadn't heard before!

The vast majority of authors, and several I know personally, all live precarious lives, hand-to-mouth existences—and all of them are aware that their work is chronically being stolen. If you all can't acknowledge the connection between those two facts, you're not being honest with yourselves. It's fun to dunk on Gaiman and Wendig, but any author you can think of has come out against what IA is doing right now. Every last one of them.

The work of authoring books, engaging and entertaining books that people want to read, is actual work. If you are willing to steal the results of those efforts, fewer people will write fewer books in the future. It's barely sustainable now.

Use a library. Libraries where I live are still loaning ebooks.

"Various physicists have discovered solutions to Einstein’s field equations that contain loops that return to the same point in space and time."

What a lazy bit of reporting! Mr. Kurt Friedrich Gödel first discovered the Einstein's general relativity allowed for closed timelike curves. He presented a paper describing this solution to Einstein as a birthday present, while they were both working at the IAS. It grieves me when Gödel is not given the recognition he is certainly due.

Slashdot: yesterday's news today!

"I am making a legal argument, [...]"

I'm not asking you to convince me that the Constitution says what you think it says. Maybe it even does. "Alexander Hamilton thought it was a great idea" is not a convincing argument for me here.

I'm asking you to convince me that what it is is the way it should be. The USA pays a huge cost for the amount of private gun ownership it has, relative to other countries. Most gun-related injuries are a) accidents, b) suicide attempts, and c) the result of domestic disputes. Very few gun injuries are at all like the script most gun-owners imagine, of them valiantly protecting their home and their loved ones from burglaries our assaults by criminals. No one on the pro-gun-ownership side of the argument seems willing to concede these clear and demonstrable facts.

I don't believe private gun ownership is deterring tyranny. I don't believe private gun ownership is deterring terrorism. I don't believe gun ownership is deterring a land invasion by a foreign aggressor. I don't believe private gun ownership is deterring illegal immigration. I don't believe private gun ownership is even much deterring garden-variety crime in America.

I do believe private gun ownership is causing an insane amount of injury and death, and distorting our politics in unhealthy ways. As a citizen and a taxpayer, I don't see why I should have to shoulder any part of the cost so that other guys can go out to a gun range on saturdays and shoot up the place, whatever their fantasies or rationalizations may be.

It reminds me about arguments for and against mandatory motorcycle helmet use. No one has convinced me that, even if they are within their rights, that its a very smart thing to do, for the individual or for society collectively.

[...] "Arms" doesn't mean "hunting rifles." It means "arms." [...]

We have to make the laws that are reasonable to our time. The Constitution allowed slavery, for instance, and no vote for women. There are lots of things that we can look at now and say need (or needed) to be changed from the original document, with the perspective of the passing of 200 years.

Make arguments, please, that are really arguments, rather than hiding behind a document. Does it make sense now for individuals to buy and sell full-auto weapons? "Assault rifles"? Flamethrowers? Surface-to-air missles? What are the real distinctions?

I had exactly the same reaction. It seems like an odd omission given "We've worked on this a long long time" (misquoting Mr. Cook here) and the vaunted Design capabilities of Apple.

I can probably just as well get by with the righties version, but I have to say I feel oddly discounted by this. I'm hoping they offer a lefties version in a follow-up announcement.

You'd think he'd have someone to do that for him!

"The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters -- a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his speech "The American Scholar"

What if, instead of delivering a package, it just delivered a pizza? That would be good. There wouldn't have to be any package involved.

I'd eat a pizza that wasn't in a package.