> This is not small potatoes

Unless you're a small potato. Approximately 0% of what I pay for spotify goes to the artists I actually listen to. Fucking Taylor Swift and the Beatles estate don't need my money.

As a reasonably known but not super popular bluegrass artist, I agree: please steal my music instead of paying Spotify for it.

Those details don't belong in the error log level, that's what info or trace is for.

They were replying to a person who says “it’s almost always wrong for library functions to log anything”. Not just errors.

If it’s not your code how is a log useful vs returning an error?

Even relatively complex operations like say convert this document into a PDF etc basically only has two useful states either it worked or something specific failed at which point just tell me that thing.

Now independent software like web servers or database can have useful logs because they have completely independent interfaces with the outside world. But I call libraries they don’t call me.

That’s a very simple operation. Try “take these 100 user generated pdfs and translate all of them”. Oh, “cannot parse unexpected character 0x001?” Cool beans, I wish I knew more.

That’s ok, I’ll just check the log. 50MB of ‘This is my happy place.’ followed by a one liner “cannot to parse unexpected character 0x001?’

Any library can do a bad job here, that doesn’t come down to logging vs error messages.

How much state tax do you think someone working 40 hours a week at minimum wage is paying?

I believe the usual thing is to essentially encode it by the spaces between the taps, rather than the taps themselves.

But then how does one distinguish between letters? Something like "ETA" would be difficult to tell apart from "II".

But only if the author/publisher explicitly go in and permit it.

This isn't announcing that pdf's and epub's are now available for everything that was drm-free, this is announcing that they will _permit_ pdf's and epub's to be available.

I'm a self-published author. This is the default setting for new books uploaded without DRM. It's gated behind an "I understand" checkbox. I plan to allow my books to be downloaded as PDF and ePUB.

It makes sense not to do this retroactively.

Can you create the epub and pdf files yourself and have them distributed unaltered?

Technically, yes, but Amazon customers probably wouldn't benefit from that. I don't currently distribute or sell books directly because that creates a tax burden. So it's probably best to let the various stores handle it. I still want to sell books but I don't want my readers to be restricted by DRM for a book they paid for. The honor system is fine for me.

Edit: I now realize you might mean in the Amazon KDP UI. I don't see a way to upload your own.

As an independent author you can do what you wish. The only restriction is if you are in the Amazon KDP select program then you have promised Amazon exclusive use for a cut of the Kindle Select pie. I also distribute my books on all the other platforms, and for my free sci-fi book host it direct on my web site and on my Ko-Fi shop (the 'buy-me-a-coffee' site). Selling directly and collecting money requires a bit too much work but technically you could do it.

That seems reasonable enough to me though. It should be the publisher's choice what formats of the book they are willing to sell.

Having the action prominent and potentially with the default reversed would still leave it to the publisher's choice.

We can understand why they do it this way (they only need the option to exist, and can afford to apply dark patterns to it), but we don't need to excuse Amazon. Especially when they don't give a shit about what we think in the first place.

Oh I wouldn't expect Amazon to care what I think, especially with regards to digital books as at least I am not a customer.

I'm also not going to write off everything they do as evil only because of who they are though. Defaulting to disabled vs enabled would be reasonable too, though I don't know enough publishers or independent authors to know which option would be more often selected to pick a default.

Yes it reads that way, and I guess that also means all previous purchases will be behind DRM.

1. Sell digital things, that costs as same as physical copy

2. Make it so that customer doesn't even own them

3. Profit (No question marks in between)

What a mess. I've mostly stopped Kindle/ebooks but I still have audible which seems like suffering from the same problem.

> But only if the author/publisher explicitly go in and permit it.

actually, many kindle books I have from years ago mention they have no drm at the request of the publisher.

...yet were distributed in DRM .azw format

We've had voice recognition for over a decade, but we have not had “tell your phone what to do”. Heavy structured voice input to a command line is not what we're talking about.

As befits our new position as the begrudging leader of the free world.

The complaint is that they're violating the law right now.

“

Today a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.

This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.

We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.

This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.

I congratulate all of you ladies and gentlemen, all of you in the Congress, in the executive departments and all of you who come from private life, and I thank you for your splendid efforts in behalf of this sound, needed and patriotic legislation.

If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time. ”

--Franklin D. Roosevelt

I wish this was still what we meant by "Greatness" in America

Anglo, French _and Aboriginal_ nationalities. That's not a minor detail to exclude.

In the concept of a “nation-state”, it is accurate. 20% of Israel’s population is non-Jewish, but it is still accurately described as a Jewish nation.

I’m not defending the morality of this classification scheme, just trying by to be accurate. It dates to the 19th century and is not with the times today, which is why I generally prefer to avoid the term myself.