DRM ON FUCKING BOOKS???

The publishing industry 100% loves DRM on books. Like the publishers themselves will often insist upon it because they think it stops piracy.

The only media industry that doesn’t 100% love DRM is the music industry, and that’s because they released digital content without DRM before they realized they might need it. (You might have heard of it - it’s called the Compact Disc.)

(I’ll put a cut here, this got long.)

Keep reading

For a while, I was de-DRMing my Kindle books specifically so Amazon couldn’t spontaneously decide to just…take them all back. I should probably look at doing that more.

I love it when Cory does this.

Aside on How People Defeated The Music Industry With a Felt-Tip Pen/Sharpie.

CDs, like records before them, store their data in a long spiral track. Music CDs go from the inside out; data CDs go from the outside in. This prevents your CD player get confused/ruined by trying to play a data CD - it will look at the middle, see nothing, and go “nothing for me here!”. This is good.

When you put a CD in a computer’s CD player, it will check the outside first (assuming it’s more likely to be a data CD), then check the inside (so it can still play your tunes / rip them).

So a music exec came up with a dastardly plan: put something that ‘looks’ like a small data file on the outside of music CDs. CD players will still be fine (they will start from the inside), but computers will think it’s a data CD and ignore the music! No ripping possible!

… except people realized you could just do a quick line around the outside with your favourite black pen. The computer wouldn’t be able to read the data file on the outside, so would then (correctly) think it’s a music CD.

The ‘small file on the outside of music CDs’ thing died very quickly after that.

lol idk if you watch nautilus live at all but watching them process bio & geo samples side by side evokes exactly this Thing (the descriptions are gold too… “here are the 30 steps we use to preserve bio samples, and as for rocks, well, we let them dry, bag them, & put them in the Rock Box)

Good to know there’s enough Biologist Salt™ to go around

Paleontologists occupy a weird and highly uncomfortable slice of this Venn Diagram

in my own experience with geology most precautions with samples are to preserve the life and safety of the geologist, most of the rocks are fine. 

i am continually reminded of one of my colleagues, who wanted to collect a sample of gypsum on a field excursion but was too lazy to take off his backpack and get his rock hammer. so he said “eh, it’s soft enough” just fucking punched the rock until a piece fell off like it was fucking minecraft