The following almost made me spit my drink on my new Kindle:
“The book was highly interesting, and it is a wonder that some enterprising American publisher has not appropriated it, as the author is now extremely dead.”
Bill Nye’s Comic History of England, Edgar “Bill” Wilson Nye (1850-1896)
I’m sure this was a topical jab from a working author at the actions of publishers at the time, but it was rather funny to be reading it downloaded from Project Gutenberg as an ebook…
Apparently someone just realized that the non-DRM laden iTunes Plus tracks from the iTunes Music Store contain personally identifiable information. The original article doesn’t really editorialize the fact, it’s more of a “let’s be careful out there” warning. I’m interested to see how this gets spun – will the main stream media pick it up at all, and will the geek media and general geek populace shrug and move on or declare that this is somehow evil on Apple’s part?
Personally I could care less. If it was a chip on the table that Apple laid down to be able to sell DRM-free tracks, good for them. I’ve been so itchy lately about the DRM nightmare stories of losing content when providers turn their servers off that I’ve been seriously considering burning and ripping my ~500 Protected AAC tracks so I could sleep better at night. I’ve pretty much stopped buying from iTMS because there are other vendors selling unladen tracks (eMusic and Amazon MP3 store being my current main choices), only buying from iTMS when I can’t find it anywhere else (including physical media) for a comparable price.
At the end of the day, you shouldn’t allow your music to end up on a share somewhere. I’m perfectly content to have Apple embed my email address in the tracks that I bought if they don’t have the ability to prevent me from listening to that music in the future. Seems like a fair trade to me.
As an aside, I wonder if converting the track to MP3 (which I’ve been considering doing with all my non-protected AAC files to further ensure longevity and maximum portability of my music) would include the PII in the MP3 file or strip it?
I love when Prima asks me questions. I’m humbled when I don’t know the answer. I’m aware intellectually that half of the stuff I think I know is really just contextual feelings that I can’t actually define, but leave it to a two year old to lay me bare.
Source: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
This one was bad, because the text that caused the question actually contains a description of a mongoose. The text I was reading from was abbreviated for children from the original, but it was something like “He was a mongoose, with a body like a cat and head like a weasel.”
I don’t remember the path I took trying to find an acceptable answer to this one, but the question has been ritualized. Even after looking up the real answer and showing her pictures of real mongooses, the only answer I’ve found that works is “it’s like a cat”. Not one of my finer answers.