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Article choice seems to be lackluster these past few years. We got a link to a nutjob calculating the end of the world with regards to the gulf oil disaster instead of like... well.. a link to NPR.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126809525

However, I do cruise on by here every so often in the vain hope of a good story. The firehose method of "voting for stories" sucks.

ObT: Yeah, Apple is a walled garden, so what? Some people can't handle anything else and to decry walled gardens as evil are entirely missing the point. It's better to live in a walled garden when you're entirely incapable of defending yourself from the barbarians at the gates.

--
BMO

Also, I did a bit of searching, and it turns out that basic robots already exist for underground mining:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12637032
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/robot-00g.html

More evidence the spill is MUCH higher than previously believed: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126809525&loc=interstitialskip Estimates of 70,000-100,000 barrels a day.

You can find better diagrams, but the water from the Gulf of Mexico suices out between Florida and Cuba and carries on over to Europe taking with it whatever it has:
http://harvardair.com/images/oceancurrents.jpg

Normally that Gulf Stream carries with it lots of heat which in dissipating keeps Europe habitable.
The oil can directly and through side effects like killing shore vegetation can cause the water to become deoxygenated and spread on up through the Atlantic to Europe like one of the old death smogs. I had considered the possibility that this oil leak was an accident till I heard of Limbaugh spouting off. Now it looks like BP execs might possibly have been overly cavalier with life on Earth.

If justice knew how to lower the recidivism rate 50%, they would do it.

They do know. It's called job training.

Back in the day when Johnny Cash played at Folsom Prison, almost every man there was in school or learning a trade. And once they got out, the majority of them never came back. Today, there are only a handful of classes, with waiting lists more than 1,000 long, and the three-year recidivism rate is 75 percent.

We know how to make the system much better. Job training, ending the War on (Some) Drugs, and taking mental health seriously would slash recidivism, lower crime, make our streets safer, and generally improve the quality of life for all Americans. We just don't care to do it.

I mean, first of all, no one knows what they are going to do to solve the problem.

Says who? They are going to solve the problem by drilling a relief well. Unfortunately that takes time. In the interim we need to figure out a way to reduce and/or contain the existing flow.

I believe your blame is misplaced. A white guy in his 40s was seen in leaving the area and changing shirts as he left. The FBI wanted to question him as a "person of interest". They had him on a security camera. He was one of the first people they looked at, but they dismissed him as a suspect very quickly.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126565648

This was not some vast liberal conspiracy to make it look like a tea-party member did it. It was simply the 24-hour news media going crazy with a video that somehow went public.

NPR's story would seem to disagree that the INTERNET speaks only standard English. http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/04/30/126420060/bridging-the-online-language-barrier-translating-the-internet

Ridiculous tribalism, that's all it is.

Easy for you to say - you who happens to be a member of the native tribe. What do we say to all those (i.e., the majority of the entire human race) that aren't speakers of Standard English. Are they to be denied access to the internet? Because they can't spell "Google" using whatever appears on their local keyboard?

It's not like the internet doesn't already have significant fragmentation. There are whole swaths of the internet - the largest growing portion, in fact - that are conducted in languages other than English. (interesting piece on that here.) Do you think all those websites in China are using Standard English in their page content? Allowing non-latin characters in TLDs just brings website addresses up to the same level as the rest of the internet.

Besides, it's not like, if you happen to be a speaker of Arabic, you won't be able to reach those Arabic-TLD websites. How hard would it be to find what you are looking for using an arabic-domain search engine? Or to type in the arabic equivalent of "www.somedomain.co.eg"?

IAA(non-certified)PE, although I don't work for any of the companies in question.

Although drilling is a cowboy science, there are a few concepts to it that are not immediately obvious and help explain what they're doing. I'd like to define the problem a little bit better, which may actually lead to someone finding a better answer.

The problem that they're facing is that there is a pipe placed in a hole down many thousand feet into an oil reservoir, most likely at the edge of a salt dome. The reservoir is at very high pressure (which is common in the GoM and one of the benifits of drilling here), and effectively we have an uncapped fire hydrant spewing high pressure fluid into the ocean, which floats up and producing the lovely oil sheen. As you'll notice, all attacks follow this vein... capping the end of a wildly spewing fire hydrant. My personal opinion isn't really relevant, but hey, they've got to show they're trying all options.

During drilling we control well pressures during drilling with heavy mud fluids, which provide counter-pressure and keep this problem in check. From a discussion on a plane yesterday with someone in well completions, they had set a plug in the drilling fluid (probably a brine at this point, replacing the mud) but may not have tested it well enough, and enough gas escaped from below the plug to displace the drilling fluid with a large bubble of gas. The low density of the gas created an unstable pressure system, and allowed the pressure below to burst through the plug and cause a kick, sinking the rig. Note that rigs tend to drill many wells at the same location now, spreading them out using directional drilling but not actually moving the rig. When we drill a well and a production platform is not yet in place, we temporarily cap the well... using the same process that didn't go so great this time. So when the drilling platform sank, any already drilled and capped wells were likely damaged as well. These are likely easier to shut off due to properly operating subsurface safety valves being in place (required in the GoM), and possibly BoP stacks being in place still as well (not likely but maybe? usually these are removed after drilling).

So here we are, with the BoPs not working on this one well, and it's gushing oil. In most situations we drill a relief well, because when we intersect the gushing well, our wellbore is full of drilling mud, and we can kill the flow by using extra-heavy mud weighs to stifle flow right at the source. This is, in my opinion, the best and most complete option. The problem to this method is that it takes days/weeks, not hours/days, and we want an "hours/days" solution. Hence the multi-million-dollar "cork" they are trying to place on top of this fire hydrant. I see estimates of 3 months in the news for the relief well being effective, and I think that's a bit high but reasonable. "Off the cuff" (do not use this as a real estimate) I like to guess about 500 feet of drilling a day, and this well is 13,000 feet, but that's certainly much too optimistic in this case.

Here is a link to an event similar to this one near Australia

What no one really seems to be talking about is what happened to the blow out preventor? That is the huge question and no one really seems to be asking.

Actually, people have asked, and they believe they have an answer:

The device attempted to crush the pipe to cut off the leak. Unfortunately, parts of the drilling apparatus, called the drill string, were running inside the pipe at that point, so the pipe couldn't be crimped off neatly. But a BP spokesman said the drill string did not stop the blowout preventer from working. BP is now talking about chopping off the jammed blowout preventer and installing a new one.

Source All the more reason to love NPR's reporting.

In terms of understanding humans, yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#Intelligence_and_behavior

http://smartdogs.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/are-dogs-smarter-than-wolves/

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1952976

In other ways perhaps not.

Better re-read your pirated Scientology myths. Xenu is like the devil to them, and the ally and benevolent master of all those of us who love free speech and psychoactive medication. Hail Xenu!

These are pretty good.

There are more and more dangerous germs in your keyboard than outside. [citation needed]

I don't think this is on my keyboard.
or these 11 deadly pathogens

"Apple has been flat lining in cellphone market-share and is now losing market-share while Android is growing at an astronomical rate."

In today's news, Record iPhone Sales Raises Apple's Earnings

It's one thing to ask whether these tests make you "smarter". But even the story says they improve speeds in taking the brain tests. I also notice that the control group didn't just sit there doing nothing, they used the Internet, which may have "exercised the brain" in some fashion, assuming they weren't reading /.

Also, there does seem to be evidence that mental activity can ward off Alzheimer's and "Research has also found that cognitive leisure activities reduce the risk of cognitive decline."

Maybe it doesn't serve a practical purpose for some people, but it seems among the elderly at least there may be some benefit (?)

This is fascinating in light of the recent lawsuit filed and won in Louisiana on behalf of a group of teachers from the Philippines who were brought here to teach and virtually held hostage by the agency that recruited them. (They won their lawsuit a few days ago--can't recall the more recent source.) Their visas were held by the recruiter as they were squeezed for ever-increasing fees, forced to rent substandard housing at exorbitant rates, and otherwise abused.

It's especially fascinating to me that in these recessionary times when recent American college graduates can't find work, we have to import elementary and high school teachers and people with the most basic IT skills so that they can be held in indentured servitude and squeezed for more and more money. I guess human trafficking is no longer limited to unskilled workers.

when I first experienced depth perception, I first experienced depth perception I just about fell out of my chair. While I haven't investigated trying to correct the vision problem,

Maybe you should. It used to be considered impossible for someone to acheive depth perception later in life if they didn't develop it as a child. This famous story is about a woman neuroscientist who did so: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5507789

WERTHEIMER: What does eight hours get you? What does it buy you?

Mr. CROWDER: Currently, and as you mentioned, we've got a single transmission line that was built over 60 years ago, and when we lose that line, we have no electrical connection to Presidio. What we have in place and what we've had for years is an agreement with the Mexican government that we can transfer the Presidio load over to Mexico, but that takes some time, and during that period of time, the townspeople don't have power.

WERTHEIMER: So it just sort of gives you a bridging amount of power.

Mr. CROWDER: That's right. It's key for short period of time or bridging the power until we can find a long-term connection. It also has benefits of just being there in the area. Generators are needed near where electricity is consumed to provide what we call voltage support, and this ensures that the power quality is high, and you don't have flickering of lights or resetting of VCRs...

WERTHEIMER: No fluctuations, computers quitting on you.

NPR Story Transcript

Seriously, guys, are you that desperate for views?
The article linked to in the summary got the article from PopSci, who got it from NPR.

That aside... They should probably just stick a little reactor nearby to power their community and other nearby communities. Maybe even sell some power to Mexico.
I'm sure they've got enough wasteland that you could build one on without causing too much damage to human settlements in the region (which is all the NIMBYists care about).

This story originally came from an NPR interview. Here is a link.

The house-sized battery can hold four megawatts of power for up to eight hours.

I wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean. Does the battery discharge in 8 hours if you don't use the energy?

The original NPR article http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125561502 leads me to think they are saying that the consumption of the town is 4MW and the battery can feed it for 8 hours, so it holds 32MW (or less, since the 4MW is the peak load).

On an unrelated note, why does the inhabitat article have four links, which all go to the same popsci article? Does the author get paid by the link?

I hope you're being sarcastic. If not, I have some bad news for you.

I have some good news for you. Corporations aren't mindless robotic entities with free will that can enslave the human race. Corporations are actually a collection of people--and those people can decide collectively to donate to campaigns--similarly to the people on my block getting together to donate to a particular candidate.

Of course that says nothing about the intelligence of the collective group of people making up the corporation--just look at SCO.

I hope you're being sarcastic. If not, I have some bad news for you.

Traffic fines work that way in several European countries such as Finland and Norway.

NSA Is Giving Microsoft Some Help On Windows 7 Security

The National Security Agency has been working with Microsoft Corp. to help improve security measures for its new Windows 7 operating system, a senior NSA official said on Tuesday

Anakin, is that you?

Problem is that modern democracy is too far in the other direction.

Are you saying that we have too many rights?

Very little gets done because it might interfere with what the uneducated masses think is best for them.

First, the very fact that you would say such thing makes you an elitist dick. But putting that aside...
There will always be someone more educated than you that thinks they know what is better for you than you do. Sometimes, it's something as simple as turning your thermostat a degree or two warmer. Sometimes, it's aborting your child without giving you a say. Always, it's because someone who thinks they are smarter than you decided to take it upon themselves to make decisions for you. Every time it happens, you lose a little more control of your own life, your own destiny. Every time it happens, you become less and less of a person and more and more like livestock. Of course, we know what's best for our livestock, but would you like to be led to slaughter house?

It's predicted that the human population will reach 9 billion by 2040. That rate of growth simply cannot be sustained indefinitely, and by ignoring the problem we are condemning our descendants to a life of food and water shortages -- and not just those living in third world countries.

Where have heard those warnings before? Aren't you glad we didn't give up our rights over the warnings then? I'm certainly glad that the previous generations were smarter than you were. Maybe you should call your grandma and give her complete control over your life since you think that it's OK for the smarter to control the less intelligent like yourself.

Fact is, we will either adapt or we will die. If adapting means I have the same rights as cattle, then I'd rather die.

Why doesn't the same principle apply here?

The only principal that ever applies is that rich, litigious people and institutions get whatever they want.

In a democratic society, they couch their whims into bite sized "causes" with simple-seeming resolutions that the populace can get behind to reduce the effort the upper class has to put into getting their way, such as "copyright infringement starving all the poor artists" or "carbon emissions destroying the environment" or "Lack of Christian Values (and influence) in our schools leading to bedlam". Then they just sit back, nudge where they feel they need to, and drive popular opinion towards their destinations.

This is why when the rich are hoist by their own petard: be it homophobic GOP senators and leaders of the church buying meth from their male prostitutes, or music studios caught mass-infringing their own artists' copyright, or (alleged) copyright holders perjuring DMCA provisions by issuing fraudulent takedown notices (be it for IP address confusion, or just as often for scattershot pissing in the pool) you never hear more than a "gotcha" headline about the matter, and then nothing after that ever changes. The power of these "causes" are always directly proportional to wealthy, influential people orchestrating them to suit their particular needs.

IP's being poor relation to individuals (or IP's listed at tracker being poor relation to actually participating clients) mean nothing to the powers that seek to waylay citizens with the cultural blunt trauma of Intellectual Property. They don't have to explain themselves, they don't have to make sense, they just have to have more resources than you and occasionally convince a cadre of crazies Glenn Beck style that they are in the right in order to keep their own hands clean while you are beaten.

If a news report on NPR this AM is accurate, the physicists don't expect to get the system to its fullest potential until around 2013/14. There will be rounds of studying the results of each run and then retuning the system based on what is learned.

7TEV is huge for such a small amount of matter - the scientist interviewed pointed out that a mosquito generates about 1TEV to beat its wings, but then it's fantastically large compared with subatomic particles obviously. When compared with the forces theorized to hold these particles together however, 7 is a good step forward, but they didn't expect to get there at only this power level.

The story/interview, if you are interested.

Given the recent reports about the problems with the airline industry, some tech transfer here might not be a bad idea.

Well in all honesty, he's not quite a dictator, since there still are binding elections, which he does occasionally lose. Now that doesn't mean he doesn't want to be a dictator. He's certainly setting himself up as one, and his actions clearly show that he wants no opposition to his rule. Keep in mind, Hugo Chavez came to (inter)national attention during the failed 1992 coup against Pérez.

What is really interesting is that Venezuela is falling apart (perhaps most bizarrely having massive blackouts in an OPEC country) because he placed political ideology above practical needs, and got predictable results.

Is he a dictator? I think he's worse than that. He's a pudgy tin horn wannabe dictator, that revels in the trying externalizing his own short comings on the yanqis. He's a threat to no one except perhaps his own people, and maybe not even to them beyond an economic threat.

... However, you will find that those figures vary widely based on factor W - WHO is being charged for the service. And the people doing that are not the consumers, but the providers and the insurance companies.

Well that was exactly my point. And when it's government-controlled, it will become a system of charging the maximum allowed for everything, and non-covered services will simply be unavailable to all (except congress, of course).

In short, I think that your story (like those of most conservatives) are fantasies, ... I would be willing to pay a few dollars a month more if it ensured that you received mental health care to bring an end to your delusions.

Cute. I'm not a conservative, I'm a classic liberal. And your comments just demonstrate that it's actually your OWN viewpoint that is myopic.

Of course, a cheaper treatment would be to stop watching Fox News.

Except that I hardly ever watch Fox news, and in fact some of my view on the matter you call "fantasy" came from NPR and my own research from other sources you would consider quite credible.

I'm sorry that your view of people that you don't agree with is so skewed that you actually think that they all must be dumb and mislead. The world is not black and white like you seem to think it is, and Team D is not full of altruistic white hats battling the villainous Team R for the good of the poor. Politicians all act from self-interest, but you may never be able to see that for yourself.

Viacom is the parent company of Blockbuster Video and they are just upset because Blockbuster is having to file Chapter 11. source.

Besides they can make more by doing less and collecting unemployment.

You are forgetting that it takes more than just being unemployed to receive any Federal and most State unemployment payments. For Federal unemployment payments you have to have a work history with aggregate of at least an couple of years an employer paying into the system (this is for young adults the required number of years goes up gradually as you age). Perhaps even more important you have absolutely no eligibility to Federal unemployment payments if you left your most recent job voluntarily, including taking a voluntary buy-out sometimes offered during lay-offs.

Shit happens in war.

It happens nowadays without any war too. There's no declared war in Yemen or in the West Bank. Is the USA currently at war in Somalia?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5353313

"Basically, to keep its currency fixed against the U.S. dollar, China must promise to be able to redeem one U.S. dollar for every 8 yuan. As China's economy grows, it must buy more and more U.S. currency to meet the growing number of yuan."

China will not be able to sell those bonds at face value.

For example, if they sell 10%, the price of the rest would drop (from a glut of bonds for sale on the market).

If they hold 10 trillion dollars in bonds, selling them all too quickly could lose them several trillion dollars.

What terrorists do has nothing to do with whether or not we follow our own laws. Waterboarding is torture. This isn't a matter of opinion. We have prosecuted people in the US for doing it, and brought war crimes charges against others. If the people in the Bush administration thought they had no other choice, they should have no problem standing up before a jury and justifying their actions. Otherwise, they are just cowards with no real convictions. They want to take the easy way out and convince everyone that torture is just fine if the 'good guys' are doing it. It's disgusting, and so is anyone who buys into it.

Making money isn't "criminal" and I, for one, hope it never will be.
--
I've just had an epiphany.

Close. Think theological or ethical rather than legal. See Caritas in Veritate on 5.) causing poverty and 6.) becoming obscenely wealthy. There are also a lot of chemicals in creating hardware components that can mutate DNA and / or act as gender hormone mimics...

Think of the shareholders!

This reminded me of a recent legal movement to allow a corporation to not necessarily put shareholders first. The linked story refers to Ben & Jerry's, who were forced by threat of shareholder litigation to literally sell out.

It is definitely not hundreds of times more - here, you can compare every manufacturer for the last 20 years.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124235858

You didn't mention that the Lacks cancer cells were unusual in this way: they don't die under normal conditions, so they never needed to be preserved by freezing. That's why the hospital et al. saw so much value in them-- the cells may hold clues in terms of delaying or stopping human aging, a modern "Fountain of Youth", as it were.

The issue described in TFA, as often is the case when parents are involved, is disclosure. Most parents won't have that much of a problem with the practice you've described-- but hackles are raised if this sort of thing involving their children is done without their knowledge or consent.

And as a matter of fact, the Lacks family, for the most part, either was unhappy with the consequences of being a part of the research (too much publicity) or couldn't understand what was going on. Here is a Fresh Air interview of a freelancer who wrote a book on Henrietta Lacks.

Actually, here's a very well respected source reporting on how sociopathic, narcissistic behaviour is present in children, regardless of video games A more serious explanation about the teen brain was on NPR this morning.

Bottom line, it can be proved that children, like cats (and Terry Pratchett elves) are cute and cudly but actually quite vile, evil little creatures.

And don't you suggest my kids are sociopaths because of video games, neither of them is even 5 yet. They haven't even learned about video games yet, but they are just starting to learn empathy. In fact anyone who looks at their kids with any kind of honest appraisal should tell you that they actually have to be conditioned NOT to be sociopathic.

If you are reading my words with disbelief, I suggest that you visit the Web link that I have provided. The TSE was real and was an atrocity committed by the American government against its own citizens.

President Bill Clinton ultimately apologized to the victims and their families.

This was my conclusion, too, as soon as I read the headline after hearing this story on NPR last week:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123761651

From that report:

One patron, Christian Lingreen, says his native Denmark has 100 percent Wi-Fi coverage — Italy maybe just 1 percent. "I love Italy," he says, "but I have to say [information technology], that is not their cup of tea."

Nearby sits Riikka Vanio of Finland, who is a mother of two children. "In the school, it's impossible to pass information to other parents through Internet, because none of them have Internet connection at home or not even e-mail address," she says. "So it's not part of their culture yet."

Nevertheless, Italy's right-wing government is going far beyond its European partners with the decree that would require Web sites with video content to request authorization and would mandate the vetting of copyrighted videos before they're uploaded.

Once again, US consumers are getting screwed over by their corporate overlords while the government sits by and does nothing.

You seem to be misinformed. These days, government is run by corporations and special interests. (And don't even get me started on that recent Supreme Court decision.)

They are not a loophole. The supreme court has ruled that treaties do not supersede the constitution.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89100044
http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/staterights/treaties.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_Clause
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=354&page=1

On a related note:

The Secret Advantage Of Being Short

So if we grow taller with age, time will remain constant.

Brilliant!!

I'm 6'5". While I disagree with the living-in-the-past assessment of brain function, I agree that short people have a hidden advantage. When I was younger, it took years to get used to my height. I was hitting my head constantly. One time I even knocked myself out. I still hit my head from time to time, especially on that fscking shower door frame. I don't fit in cars. I don't fit in airplanes. I don't fit in clothes. I don't fit in movie theaters. I have to pick the right seat on commuter trains making me arrive 10 minutes earlier to the train to ensure that I get it. I have to bend over for literally everything. I have to duck to get under shower heads in hotel rooms. My feet are constantly hanging off the end of mattresses and out from under the end of blankets. Baby strollers have handles that are so low that I have to bend over constantly to push them. Roll-around luggage generally has handles that are too short so that it's just another handle I can use to carry the bag. At least my feet are too small for my height, making them closer to average. I believe being tall even makes me look disproportionally less muscular.

Many short men wish they were tall. Being tall sucks. I wish that I were about 5'10". It's tall enough to not be considered short. But short enough so that the world still fits you.

On a related note:

The Secret Advantage Of Being Short

So if we grow taller with age, time will remain constant.

Brilliant!!

Have a look at this post. There's a nice PDF there that will break down costs for you. The short answer to your question is that printing and distribution aren't a large part of the cost of a book to begin with, and e-books have new costs associated with them. Also given that e-books don't gain us any market-share (rather, it displaces market share we already had), and that we still have to do all of the traditional production alongside the new stuff, e-books really cost us more to make, at least at the moment. Oh, and it should be reiterated-- Amazon takes a huge cut. That ads a lot of cost to a book. To make a $20 paper book into a $9.99 e-book isn't so simple as cutting out the printing and distribution part and then selling the book without those costs. Maybe if we had our own platform.

Looking at "printing and distribution aren't a large part of the cost of a book to begin with", the PDF linked to in the posting gives $0.321, the single biggest piece, as "all manufacturing costs from editing to paper costs to distribution, as well as storage, record keeping, billing, publisher's offices, employee's salaries and benefits." So basically the linked PDF tells us nothing about how much of the costs will go down by eliminating a) paper costs, b) printing, c) storage, and d) distribution; the only quantifiable reduction is the elimination of the $.013 shipping costs. We have no way to tell what the printing and distribution costs are, except for your unsupported assertion, and the documentation you cite provides no actual information to support your claim.

As for "we still have to do all the traditional production alongside the new stuff", consider that, unless you're still seriously mired in decades-old typesetting, the books you are publishing are edited electronically and sent to the printing machines electronically; the "new stuff" consists of a single conversion program that takes the electronic format you use for editing and proofing and converts it to the e-book format you're going to be distributing; dragging the file icon to copy the final edited version to the fileserver where a batch process will automatically read new files, convert them, and send them to whoever is responsible for emailing a single file per book to the end seller is, after all, such a massive investment of time and effort. But, looking at the trail from the finished electronic version to the end product, an e-book exists only as a data file, whereas a DTE book still has to be printed and bound, then boxed, and stored until shipped to a bookstore.

And don't forget returns. In a piece on NPR last year, Mr. Jed Lyons, President and Chief Operating Officer at Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, part of the National Book Network, stated that roughly 25% of what they ship comes back as unsold. Now, this excludes paperbacks, which are stripped by the store and destroyed because they're not worth shipping back to be redistributed, but this whole flap with MacMillan is over new titles, which would presumably be hardback. All your costs for returns disappear for e-books; since the seller only gets one 'master', and that's electronic, there is nothing to return; the bigger the fraction of e-books a publisher sells, the smaller the number of employees they have to hire to handle returns; another cost that isn't broken out in the PDF you cite -- there is a cost on the part of the store for personnel costs for various functions, some of which (shelving, returns, pricing) go away or are severely reduced by e-books, but nothing broken out on the publisher's side.

'Moving into e-books is risky'. I think that you're greatly mistaken; e-books is perhaps the biggest opportunity for publishers that has come along in decades; adopting e-books means that the compression of the midlist, where authors whos