It's been a while since we last heard about legal customers being screwed by DRM, but Amazon and Microsoft have stepped up to the plate to help.

Turns out that Amazon's Kindle ebooks will lock you out after you replace your Kindle a few times. Exactly how many times you're allowed to replace your Kindle is a secret, and varies from book to book. A book could be locked to a single Kindle. But if you get onto the Kindle train, eventually you'll upgrade and one or more of your books will no longer be available to you.

Microsoft won't stand to be outdone. Microsoft has gone further and taken paid for music away from a customer. Microsoft lost the license to distribute some music and reached out to destroy copies on their customers devices. This particular user had "purchased" $100 of music. Now it's gone. Microsoft didn't even give him a refund, although presumably he doesn't want $100, he wants the music he paid for.

In both cases we are reminded: if you download an illegal copy from the internet, not only is it free of charge, but it's free of these encumbrances. That HTML copy of a book from Usenet, or that MP3 from P2P will continue working just fine. This is the DRM model: offer you crippled goods are a higher price. I'm in favor of copyright and paying creators, but I'm also in favor of not kicking the customers in the face.

Academic journals are, on the whole, a scam.

The reviewers aren't paid. The authors aren't paid, and have to pay for copies of their own article. Worse, the author usually has to transfer copyright to the journal. The entire paid staff for many academic journals amounts to a secretary who essentially emails drafts back and forth. With monstrous subscription prices, these academic journals are easy money for publishers. Because these journals are respected, this has proven a self perpetuating scam; authors need to published in respected journals, so they participate. Reviewing articles can help build contacts and reputation. So everyone dutifully hands over piles of money to publishers who do almost nothing.

It's now been revealed that Elsevier, an academic journal publisher, has been publishing fake journals to help drug companies. This is sickening.

Fortunately I gather that some fields of study are realizing that they can cut out the middleman and everyone benefits.

I just spend two hours of my life fighting Charter Communications, trying to accomplish the simple task of updating my credit card information.

About a month ago, someone acquired my credit card number and made several fraudulent charges. (That is "identity theft".) My bank (USAA) was on the ball. They called me within hours of the fraudulent charges to confirm that they were invalid. I confirmed that they were fraudulent, my card was canceled, and within a few days had a new card. Great.

Of course, at this exact same time, I started moving to a new house. So updating all of the places with recurring charges slipped my mind. I dealt with them as the individual companies had the number bounce. Each one sent me a polite email asking to promptly update their records, and I did.

Then Charter contacted me. They did by sending a letter asking me to update my records. Oh, and letting me know they would be charging me a "$25.00 processing fee for the returned payment."

Assholes.

Fine. Okay, strictly speaking that was the terms of the auto pay. (Oddly, if I had been paying by check and simply failed to pay, I believe the late payment penalty is much smaller. Way to encourage your long-standing customers to set up automatic payments, idiots.) I'll take my lumps. I'll just use the web site and...

Oops, I never created an account. No problem, I'll set one up now. So I plug in my account number and security code. Account found. It asks me to pick a username, password, and the like. Great. Submit and...

An account has already been created.

Well, I must have created an account and forgotten about it. I'm usually really good about keeping track of that sort of thing, but no problem. I'll just ask the system to find my login name. Let's see how do I do that? I have to contact customer service. Annoying. Well, I'll try the online service. It takes a few minutes to get a representative, but at least there is no hold music. I spend ten or so minutes chatting with the person, and they have no idea what's wrong. They tell me to call the number. Fine. Onto the phone I go.

The nice woman on the phone has some problems. My account is listed as disconnected. That's no good. Fortunately we quickly sort it out: instead of transferring my existing account to the new address, my old account was closed and a new account opened. She helpfully gives me my new account number and security code. I plug them into the web site and...

My account number is too short. She's given me a 12 digit number, and the web site wants a 16 digit number. She has no idea what is going on. She has me try adding four zeroes to the front, four to the end, two to each side. It doesn't work. She tries from her end. Nothing works. She checks some other things. She has me retry the zeroes again; it still doesn't work.

At this point I've been on the phone for 20 minutes. She decides she needs to transfer me to the next level of support. But first... she tries to convince me to upgrade to digital cable. I've been on the phone for 20 minutes, you haven't solved my problem, and you want to ask for more money? No, I don't think so. (Strictly speaking she was offering my digital cable at a cheaper price. For a year, then the price shoots up dramatically. I've had this conversation before. I even did it once a few years ago. Turned out the hassle of returning the digital box and canceling the service wasn't worth saving a few bucks over a year.)

It takes the women three minutes to transfer me, but eventually I make it. The new woman doesn't clearly explain what is going on, but apparently something needs to be set up. She confirms my security code for security reasons. I have this handy, since the woman I was just speaking to gave it to me! The second woman does some magic and gives me a 16 digit number. Victory! I plug it into the web site and...

It's still angry. It still wants a 16 digit number. It doesn't care that I've given it a 16 digit number. I have angered it and it refuses to be appeased.

After failing at this for a while, the second woman decides to create the account on my behalf. Fine. First, she asks for my security code again. You know, just in case someone else snuck in in the last few minutes. Well, I still have it. She essentially reads me the fields on the web page, I give her answers, and she fills in the site. It works. I end up with a username and password. I log in successfully. Victory! I thank her. She tries to upsell me again (I think not), and after 38 minutes, I hang up.

As expected, Charter's web site says I have an outstanding balance. I click to set up autopay, and get sent to an external site. Fine. I enter in my new credit card number, hit submit and...

Not enough digits! Is this demon of not enough digits following me around!? This is is easy. It's a credit card number. 16 digits. The site wants 16 digits, I entered 16. The stupid little form designed by chimpanzees only accepted 16 digits. I triple checked.

Fine. Let's just try and pay the outstanding bill. This time it inexplicable accepts the exact same credit card number. It asks me to confirm my bill for...

$0.00. Nothing? Moments before you wanted a big pile of money. What's up. I go back to Charter and check. Yup, they want a bunch of money. Try to pay and the balance jumps to $0.00. After a bit of investigation, I notice that while Charter's web site is using my new account number, the bill paying site is using my old account number. The old account is closed, so it has a zero balance. I can't pay my bill using the web site.

Well, at least I can update my address and phone number. Except nothing on the Charter web site appears to let me change my address or phone number. Fortunately, if I go to the billing section, which is the second company, there is a link suggesting I can update my address and phone number. I click it and... am back at Charter's Profile page which doesn't let me change my address and phone number.

Fine. I try paying by phone. I call in. It asks for my phone number. I enter my phone number. It tells me my balance and asks me to press 1 if I want to pay. Sure enough. 1. It asks for my phone number. That's... odd. I enter my phone number. It tells me my balance. Wait, what? Have I found a glitch in the Matrix? It asks if I'd like to enter a credit card number. Oh, please yes. I punch in a bunch more numbers and my bill is finally paid!

Of course, I still need to change my address and phone number, so once more back to a customer service representative. Third time is not the charm; this woman has a thick accent and I have problems understanding her. But we eventually work out setting up autopay and updating my information.

Total elapsed time: about two hours.

I should have known better. My last attempt at dealing with customer service was similarly incompetent. As we spoke, I kept thinking, "Hmmm, I hear setting up a satellite dish isn't that hard" and "I wonder how well the Tivo will work with a satellite tuner box?"

If you're on the fence between Charter and some other option, consider this a reasonably strong vote against Charter. Their support is incompetent.

(Oddly, the local techs I occasionally see are almost uniformly friend, skilled, and professional. I have no complaints for my last five or so years of in-person service men.)

This is my first post with my new AT&T DSL service. I'm unimpressed, but at least it's working.

Problem 1: Getting the DSL set up will take a few days. In the meanwhile, we're jonesin for some internet. We were told that our account also got us access to AT&T wireless at places like Starbucks. Great! So off we go to a Starbucks and we try to log on. We find we lack suitable login information. We call up AT&T and learn that we need to have working DSL service before we can use the wireless. Lame.

Problem 2: More minor, but irritating. The documentation that came with the DSL modem repeatedly directs me to the AT&T website for help. If I had internet access, I wouldn't need help!

Problem 3: The default way to set up your DSL requires Microsoft Windows, and requires Internet Explorer. In a household where the only two computers are Mac OS X and Linux, this doesn't work really well. Fortunately I had a loaner laptop from work and used that.

Problem 4: The default set up system wants me to download and run software. I managed to set up internet access via Charter cable and TDS Telecom DSL without needing to install software, why does AT&T system require it?

Problem 5: The download fails. Repeatedly. I end up calling. On the up side, the guy on the phone is very helpful and walks me through an installation process that requires no downloads at all. It would have worked fine on our normal computers. (Indeed, I accidentally started using Firefox halfway through, and it didn't cause any problems.)

Problem 6: Giant terms of service. Gee, thanks. Make me agree to terms of service after you've shipped me crap. Also, I've got tech support on the phone, I'm running on laptop battery, my laptop is perched on my lap because the DSL modem is nowhere near a table. Like 99% of their users, I click agree without really looking at it. Contract law is America is a depressing joke.

Problem 7: The freebie DSL modem wants to call the built in wifi router 2WIRE924. How... memorable. And it wants to use a hard coded WEP key. 64 lousy bits. And the key uses a painfully obvious subset of the potential keyspace.

There were, happily two bright spots:

1: The freebie modem has 4 ethernet jacks and built in wifi.

2: Telephone tech support was pretty good, was easy to understand, and they answered the phone relatively late into the evening.

Under the Bush/Cheney administration, America tortured people. We waterboarded someone more than 180 times in a single month. We slammed people into walls. Bush, Cheney, and other scum were so chickenshit that they decided to "protect" America by lowering our standards. We needed to destroy human rights to protect... well, something or another. This was a dark period of American history. We descended so low that far too many people were willing, and sadly still are willing, to defend torture. I'm glad it's over, and I hope we can recover quickly. I want America to again be a shining city upon the hill, a beacon of hope, the highest standards against which all others are compared; not just a cowardly, petty nation lashing out blindly.

(2009-04-23: Typo fix)

I take back almost everything nice I said about Wisconsin's eFiling system. They moved to Adobe Acrobat forms, a proprietary format. They required the most recent version, interrupting my working on taxes to download an update. (I pity people trying to use a library's computer where upgrades may be locked out.) The forms don't let me include dashes in numbers that have them; then mocks me By adding them. Worse, the form clearly warns me "NO COMMAS," then proceeds to add them itself. One of my W2s clearly has letters in the "Employer's FED ID field." I'm not allowed to enter them into the form. I hope that's okay! The form refused the address for one of my employers. That employer with the malformed address? The State of Wisconsin. And yet again I'm asked to remember what school district I live in (not having kids, I really don't care), look it up in a separate PDF, and copy four numbers back into the form. To add insult to injury, after entering the number, it tells me what school district it is! And while the form includes a number of checks for errors, it doesn't check most of them until you submit, at which point it stops after detecting a single problem.

This is a steaming pile of crap. I guess at least it's free, but for the amount of nuisance I'm sorely tempted to go back to filing paper.

My thoughts on 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons are a confused jumble. I love it and hate it, and I'm having difficulty clearly saying why I love it and why I hate it. In some cases the same game element makes me happy and frustrates me. However, Robin Laws, in the article "D&D, GUMSHOE, Compartments, and You" mentioned, almost in passing, a key part of what I simultaneously love and hate. Here's the relevant bit:

A primary goal, if not the primary goal, of fourth edition D&D is to bring balance to fight sequences. The latest build of the RPG mothership seeks balance across several axes:

• between players, so that everyone gets to be effective during a fight
• throughout combat, so that you can do something useful even after firing your big guns
• against enemies, more evenly matching PCs and their opponents
• across levels, so that the game performs equally well at low, mid and high levels

To achieve balance, 4E compartmentalizes its crunchy bits by function, into combat and non-combat categories. A few character elements, like skill checks, cross the line between combat and roleplaying sequences. Most, however, are tuned for either one type of scene or the other. Powers are part of the combat balance. Rituals aren’t.

Also relevant are two posts by Gamer Bling!. In "Two URLs, One Class" and 4th Time's the Charm he discusses how 4e delivers on (some of) the promise of cool magic that earlier editions never did.

It's been a while since we've checked in on the amazing success story that is post-invasion Afghanistan. How are things?

A new Afghan law makes it legal for men to rape their wives, human rights groups and some Afghan lawmakers said Thursday, accusing President Hamid Karzai of signing the legislation to bolster his re-election prospects.

"As long as the husband is not traveling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night," Article 132 of the law says. "Unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband."

Right then.

"Critics assail Afghan law that 'legalizes rape'", Associated Press. (backup) Via Deus Ex Malcontent NSFW</a>.

• Tony Slydini, appearing on the Dick Cavett show in the late 70s. Simple, elegant work with coins, handkerchiefs, and rope.
• Lennart Green works magic with cards at TED.
• Penn and Teller on The View, doing the traditional cup and balls, first normally, then with clear cups. Maybe not strictly close up magic, but their dexterity still amazes me.
• I can't find a single great video for Ricky Jay, so I'll point you at a selection of the Ricky Jay videos on YouTube.

  (Slydini is via news from me. Green is via /whois Dialogue.)

20 years ago the Exxon Valdez oil tanker trashed much of the Alaskan coastline. The cause? Not a drunk captain, but a broken radar that Exxon refused to fix. It would have been an easy fix, but Exxon failed to carry legally required damage control systems. Exxon lied about it. The livelihoods of perhaps 30,000 people were destroyed, and Exxon has been fighting this entire time to avoid paying them. It looks like they'll finally be paying up... about $16,000 to each victim. Your entire way of life destroyed? Surely $16,000 will cover that. Of course, it won't help the victims who have died since then.

Of course, Exxon is a poor, impoverished company. If they had been forced to pay more in damages, or to actually clean the damaged land, they wouldn't have been able to pay a $400,000,000 retirement bonus to the man who was President of Exxon when the disaster happened.

Read the full story about Exxon's abuse here.

Via Mark Evanier's news from me)

A defense attorney explains why you never talk to the police, even if you're innocent. Officer George Bruch from the Virginia Beach police department agrees.

(Via Schneier on Security)

So the corn syrup lobby...

Wait, let's stop there. We have a corn syrup lobby. That's just sad. But that's actually the core of the problem. Anyway.

The corn syrup lobby is running an advertising campaign defending corn syrup. Corn syrup has gotten a bad reputation for being unhealthy in way different than sugar. It's apparently actually reducing demand for corn syrup. So the lobby is advertising to try and convince people that it's just fine and wonderful, and that people who are against it are ignorant fools.

Now, the health problems associated with corn syrup are admittedly unclear. As best I know, there is no particular evidence that corn syrup is worse than sugar, when used to the same effect. That is, if you make soda with sugar, and replace it with corn syrup, it's about as bad for you as it was before. Some studies suggest some problems, but they're not clear yet.

However, I still hate corn syrup. Not because it's bad for me, but because the pervasive use of it's the result of bad government meddling in the economy. Our government has big tariffs on sugar, so our sugar is unusually expensive. Furthermore, our government subsidizes corn. As a result, corn products, including corn syrup, are unusually cheap. The combination means that corn syrup is a cheaper sweetener than sugar. Looking to make a bit more money, any business that could jumped to corn syrup.

The solution is easy: eliminate the sugar tariff, eliminate the corn subsidies. Sugar will drop in price and most users of corn syrup will switch back to sugar. (Some will stick with corn syrup, as it does have some advantages.)

But, we're back to the corn syrup lobby. It's really the corn lobby as a whole. They like the current situation. The tariffs create artificial demand for corn, and the subsidies are basically free money. They don't want to accept that we need to grow less corn in this country, not more. This is the same lobby that is pushing for ethanol. They love ethanol... so long as it comes from corn. Which turns out to be a particularly inefficient source for ethanol. But the corn lobby is surprisingly powerful.

So screw the corn lobby and screw corn syrup.

(2009-03-25: Typo fixes: admitted to admittedly. "result bad" to "result of bad". goverment to government.

I'm written before about how Copperfield is now an egomaniacal blowhard. He's just phoning it in. But I now know that he's a copyright bully. Check out this fine YouTube video...

Oops, it's gone, because Copperfield claims copyright on it. Okay, maybe they just copied his video. Maybe there is a copyright claim and these are just scum. Except, you can still find the video...

If that doesn't work go here.

Not a single frame of video from the original trick. Copperfield has no copyright claim. This scum abused copyright to keep the secret of his trick. Sorry David, suck it up. Tricks get revealed. It must be doubly embarrassing because these are magicians, nor did they get the information from a leak. No, they just studied the trick and deduced what must have happened. But Copperfield has lawyers. He's apparently scared the Trickbusters into removing all references to his tricks. (If you search online, you can find their analysis of several of his tricks.)

David Copperfield is scum.

Fortunately I don't recommend his shows anyway. Mac King is more fun and cheaper. And I'm optimistic about Spencers: Theatre of Illusion, who Eva and I will be seeing tomorrow.

Got my "Blueful" postcard. Now that I've seen both endings*, I strongly prefer my choice. I can't see the mindset behind the other. Of course, maybe that's the point.

Now I really need to get around to playing the game.

(No idea what I'm talking about? It's a short story, told online in a strange way that meshes well with the story itself. I really enjoyed it. Start here. The story is self-contained and satisfying, but for people wanting more it continues with an interactive fiction (text adventure) game.)

* I picked one, my wife the other. I feel a touch guilty about this, but donated a bit to the cause to assuage my guilt.

The Author's Guild is eager to help drag us all back into the 20th century.

The Guild previously made a big stink about Google's Book search, going so far as to sue. Google's crime: making it easier for people to find books! Google Books search system was quite well thought out. For most books you would only get a little snippit from the book, akin to the snippit you get from a web page search. But the Author's Guild, horrified that someone might see even a few sentences from a book without paying couldn't stand that. The Author's Guild apparently felt that books were worthy of protections beyond what web pages are. Seeing as how the entire point of the search system was to make it easier to find books, this was a profoundly stupid and backward thinking decision. Google eventually settled; and while the settlement is good for Google (they basically got everything they wanted in exchange for what Google would view as very modest fee), it's bad for society as a whole. Any small startup is unable to offer a competing service, since they'll be expected to pay the same "modest fee." While$150,000,000 or so is a modest fee fee Google, it's crushing to anyone else.

Now these Luddites have gutted the Kindle's TTS (Text-To-Speech) feature. For all of the Guild's claims, fundamentally TTS is simply converting media from one form to another. If TTS without a special agreement is illegal, so is copying your CD to tape, or ripping it to iTunes.

Yes, in the long run TTS will likely gut the audiobook market. Life's tough; suck it up. A few decades ago there wasn't an audiobook market at all! The market primarily exists because the technology didn't exist, and when it arrived the technology sucked. (It still sucks, but it continues to improve.) So there was a market to solve a problem technology couldn't. Now that technology has improved, demanding that technology be held back so you can maintain your existing business model is selfish and shortsighted. You might as well demand that scanner makers add complexity and cost to refuse to scan books, since it might compete with the eBook market.

I was suspicious of the Author's Guild before. Now I'm convinced. At best they're Luddites demanding that society as a whole suffer because they're afraid of the future. At worst they're scum abusing the legal system. Either way, they are worthy only of contempt. Instead of leading into the future, discovering new business models, they're doing a gross disservice to the authors they purport to represent.

From Slate:

Two Pennsylvania county judges stand accused of sending thousands of teenagers to juvenile prison in exchange for $2.6 million in bribes from the privately run detention facilities.

Our legal system fails sometimes. And, as the above reminds us, there is occasionally corruption. In this case, two corrupt judges may have incorrectly sentenced thousands of teenagers to prison. Strong protections for the accused, high quality public defenders, and even rights for those found guilty are how we defend against and mitigate these problems.

Who is hatin' on the Kindle? Me.

Actually, none of this is Kindle specific. It just gets singled out as the most successful ebook reader.

So, what's wrong with ebook readers?

1. Electronic ink isn't here yet. It's damn good. The first time I saw an e-ink reader, I thought I was seeing a fake screen display. Discovering it was a live display was mind blowing. Essentially zero power. It's not quite as easy to read as paper, but it's so close that I'm okay with it. It's not color, but color is overrated. Only the minority of my wall of books are color inside. So that's fine. But the flicker, egad is that bad. Every electronic ink screen requires a full screen wipe, black, then white, to change its display. Failure to do so leads to ghost images being left being. The wipe is jarring, and relatively slow. The best defense I've heard is "you get used to it" and "you learn to plan ahead." That's not evidence that e-ink is ready. Those are coping mechanisms for something that isn't ready. And it's not good enough if I need to pop back to re-read the start of a sentence. (The color and wipe problems are solved by other display types, but those types chew up power and don't read as well as paper. e-ink is the most promising option right now.) I believe this will be fixed, but we're not there yet.

2. DRM. Sure, I limit myself to DRM-free works, but where am I getting my mass market books legally? If I'm stuck with only a subset of published works, ebooks clearly aren't ready. If I want mass market works, I'm buying DRM encumbered works. Many books cannot be borrowed from the library because of publisher restrictions. I'm not aware of any book DRM system that lets me loan a book to a friend without loaning my entire library. I'm not aware of any book DRM system that lets me sell a book I no longer want. I'm unlikely to be able to will my "library" to someone else. If an ebook provider goes under, I may lose access to chunks of bought and paid for library. If I jump from ebook reader to ebook reader, I'm going to lose access to some of my purchased works. Maybe book publishers will get the hell over it, like music publishers got over DRM on music, but we're not there yet. (Props to Baen for already being here. Everything they sell (and give away!) is DRM free.)

ebook readers are the future. I look forward to it. But the future isn't ready yet. Kindle buyers are early adopters, and early adopters occasionally get burned. Call me when this isn't such a mess, and I'll be first in line to buy an ebook reader. Maybe even the Kindle 8.

Added February 12, 2009:

The Ars Technica article on ebooks rang very true to me.

While I still hold that current e-ink technology requires a number of crappy coping mechanisms, the reality is that if we can solve the content/DRM issue, I'd probably learn to cope for the benefits. On the up side, looking at the video demonstration of the Kindle 2 it looks like the page change speed is actually fast enough from me, but the flash remains really annoying. So, progress is being made.

Also, being able to use my Palm or iPhone makes a compelling argument. Neither has the battery life, but both have good enough displays and I'm already carrying them around. Having my library, or at least a big chunk of it, always available would be a huge win.

Finally, something I forgot: publishers need to get past exact page layouts for text-heavy books. If I'm going to read the exact same ebook on my iPhone, my Palm, my laptop, and the Kindle, it needs to flow differently for each platform. In particular, this means PDFs and anything else with a page oriented model is full of fail. I've read PDFs on my Palm (props to the most excellent PalmPDF), and the experience is painful. Smaller screens require narrower columns and need to give up on floating images beside text. Fixed width not only causes problems for small screens by being too wide; it can also be too small, reducing the text per screen in a clumsy and inevitably failed attempt at beauty. I need to be able to adjust the text size, trading off between eyestrain and text-per-screen. Multiple columns are a terrible idea unless I can see the entire column; anything that makes me scroll upwards to see later text fails instantly. Go simple. HTML with CSS is plenty good enough, and portable to boot.

(I replaced "eink" with "e-ink" to be more clear.)

(2009-03-04: Fixed link to Ars Technica)