Tag Books

Entries 9 Total

Remind me never to buy a Kindle

Jul 18, ’09 10:48 AM

Amazon has remotely wiped a book that people had already pur­chased for the Kindle (an ebook reader).

As John Gruber notes:

It’s one thing to stop selling them. It’s some­thing else entirely to remove them from the Kindles of those who already bought them. That this happened with1984, of all the books that have ever been writ­ten, is simply incredible.

(Point of com­par­ison: when apps get yanked from the App Store, they don’t get deleted from the iPhones of people who already bought them.)

I don’t care what reason Amazon has for this. If the book shouldn’t have been sold they should have stopped it in the first place.

This is a very dif­fer­ent world to that of the free and open inter­net; this is the world of “inter­net appli­ances,” where the com­pan­ies that sell these products have remote con­trol over them. I feel cagey enough about own­ing an iPhone, which is also an inter­net appli­ance, but there’s no way I’m going near the Kindle after this episode.

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Michael Hanlon’s Eternity a red herring

Nov 7, ’08 1:24 PM

I received a link from Amazon today tout­ing a new book by Michael Hanlon:

Human­kind is not doomed, we may be around for mil­lions of years yet. We have already sur­vived one of the most extraordin­ary planet-wide cata­strophes — the Ice Ages. … The sub­ject of the book is very much in the news at the moment — will we be wiped out by cli­mate change, war or pes­ti­lence? Han­lon is say­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent, that the spe­cies will sur­vive as the planet changes around us. This dif­fer­ent point of view is refresh­ing, and some sec­tions of the book are very con­tro­ver­sial, which should get the atten­tion of the media. Not only is human­kind not doomed, but that we may be around for mil­lions, if not hun­dreds of mil­lions of years. We have already sur­vived one of the most extraordin­ary planet-wide cata­strophes — the great Ice Ages. Equipped with the simplest tech­no­logy, Homo sapi­ens sailed through the great gla­ci­ations, and profited from them.

Except that the “news at the moment” isn’t simply “will we be wiped out by cli­mate change, war or pes­ti­lence.” It is do we want to sur­vive in such a world and what can we do to avoid these things?

The premise of the book is a red herring.

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Israeli best seller challenges Zionism

Oct 16, ’08 3:14 PM

Jonathan Cook on Dr. Shlomo Sand’s new book:

Dr. Shlomo Sand argues that the idea of a Jew­ish nation — whose need for a safe haven was ori­gin­ally used to jus­tify the found­ing of the state of Israel — is a myth inven­ted little more than a cen­tury ago.

In addi­tion, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today’s Jews have no his­tor­ical con­nec­tion to the land called Israel and that the only polit­ical solu­tion to the country’s con­flict with the Palestini­ans is to abol­ish the Jew­ish state.

… he pre­dicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched … in the United States next year.

In con­trast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly sup­port­ive, at least curi­ous about his argument.

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Fired for plagiarising plagiarism?

Mar 24, ’08 5:44 PM

At the begin­ning of Feb­ru­ary, when I arrived back in Lon­don from a trip to New Zea­l­and, I was sur­prised to find my inbox full of mes­sages alert­ing me that a per­son named Ty McDon­ald had been fired from a news­pa­per for pla­gi­ar­ising me.

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Plagiarism and intellectual loot

Jun 11, ’06 9:58 PM

The mar­ket­place of ideas, like any mar­ket­place, is fit only for looting.

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It’s all just a big misunderstanding

May 21, ’06 10:09 AM

Kirk Mac­Gib­bon, a New Zeal­ander liv­ing in New York, says that Kiwi’s are pre­ju­dice against Amer­ic­ans and that this comes from, amongst other things, “their lim­ited under­stand­ing of Amer­ican for­eign policy.”

But we’re not the only ones to lack under­stand­ing. Much of the world mis­un­der­stands U.S. for­eign policy, espe­cially those who have to deal with it at the end of a gun barrel.

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Revoking Baptism and Confirmation

Apr 17, ’06 2:32 AM

I spent my early teen­age years attend­ing a cath­olic high school where debate about the more dubi­ous aspects of organ­ised reli­gion was rel­at­ively open, so I’ve gen­er­ally had an atti­tude of live and let live; as long as people don’t attempt to impose their fairy tales on me I won’t get on their backs about how silly they’re being.

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Should the Americans invade Oz next?

Oct 7, ’05 10:28 AM

In terms of the war on ter­ror, who should be the next coun­try to invade? Read on to see some of the bet­ter res­ults of “engin­eer­ing consent.”

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Review of Great New Zealand Argument

Jul 5, ’05 10:53 PM

Today I received a copy of Great New Zea­l­and Argu­ment: Ideas about ourselves, edited by Rus­sell Brown, which was sur­pris­ingly quick. Pre­sum­ably it was dis­trib­uted from within the UK some­where. It’s a good look­ing book; the cover appears as if it might be a pic­ture of Rus­sell and his kid walk­ing down a coun­try road (I’ll have to ask him). Well chosen fonts, a good lay­out and obvi­ously metic­u­lous edit­ing make it easy on the eye too. I only wish I’d been able to get a hard­back ver­sion as this is a book I’d like to last.

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