Amazon's attempt at dealing with the copyright problems of their system is to allow users to access no more than 20 percent of the pages of a given book within a one month period.
[sarcasm] Oh. I see. There are no groups of five people with Amazon accounts who are willing to compile all the pages of any given book. Good thinking, guys.[/sarcasm]
Full text searching is a wonderful idea, but it really needed some thinking through before being implemented, IMO. I wonder whether micropayments for pages searched (5% or 10% of normal cost, prorated for book length) wouldn't be a good idea, but only if you could easily turn off the full text search. AND with a highly noticeable, upfront explanation of the cost. I wouldn't want to do a text search on ten or twelve different sources (compiling a hundred pages, say) and suddenly find a credit card hit I didn't expect.
This post and its comments deal with the problem of focusing a search so as not to get inundated with excerpts. I haven't tried it yet, but comment #6 details a way of getting past said "feature." (But it ought not to be necessary to jump through hoops for a simple search.)
Stefan: If the orchard incident is true, it doesn't strike me as something *soldiers* would come up with. Rounding up bulldozers and systematically flatten a bunch of trees doesn't sound like drunken / resentful / rowdy behavior. It would almost certainly have to be the action of someone a bit higher up.
Actually, it sounds a great deal like a bunch of soldiers who had specifically been ordered not to hurt PEOPLE because it would look bad.
More to the point, if it is policy, then it's a war crime. And last time I heard, officers were held responsible for the acts of those under their command.
Or were supposed to be. Right, Mr. Shrub-in-Chief?
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2003 | 3 |
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