Oh, and I forgot to mention the best part. The networks would be beholden to their subscribers. Had Sci-Fi Channel been bundled a la carte five years ago, we would not have SyFy with professional wrestling. Sure, it would cost more, but it would be an actual channel that ate and breathed science fiction. And if it deviated from that too far, people would drop the channel, and they'd either clean up their act or wither on the vine and eventually be replaced by someone who would.
You see, that's the biggest problem with the current system. There's only token competition when you have an oligopoly and things are bundled as they are. As far as NBCUniversal is concerned, SyFy is a transponder, and it is costing them money to keep it lit. Therefore, their goal is to maximize the amount of ad revenue, which means maximizing the number of eyes. You're the product. They don't care if science fiction viewers keep watching the channel because everybody gets the channel, so there's no incentive to cater to any particular audience. If they can get ten times as many viewers by showing pictures of fish swimming in an aquarium, they'll do it, because that's the most profitable way to run the network.
With a la carte pricing, at least to some degree, you're the customer. You're also a product that they can sell to the advertisers, of course, but because you're in full control over whether your eyes are even available as an asset to sell, you have much more say in the content decisions. People who don't watch science fiction are unlikely to subscribe to SyFy, which means those people who watch professional wrestling won't even be available as potential eyes to sell to advertisers. So if they air that sort of programming, it gets no viewers, and the advertisers say, "Why are we paying you again?" And if enough people get annoyed at the dumbing down of the network, they start to lose subscribers, at which point the advertisers say, "Why are we paying you so much?" Thus, you, the subscriber, get to cast an actual vote, albeit somewhat indirectly.
It's not quite as good as purely subscription-supported TV in that regard, mind you, but it is a lot better than the current situation, where the networks are bundled together and everybody gets all of them, so the MBA studio execs see them as interchangeable transponders instead of actual stations with an actual voice, an actual vision, and an actual mission.
There are very very few "desktop-sized" SSDs. Virtually every SSD found in a desktop is a 2.5" notebook drive, often mounted with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter plate. The UPS will protect any bus-powered device by keeping the bus itself powered.
My point was that most people don't use their laptops as a glorified desktop; a UPS won't do any good if the device is sitting on your lap in the car. And a UPS won't do any real good for the internal drive in a laptop or a bus-powered external drive attached to a laptop anyway, given that the laptop already is a glorified UPS. It's like, "Yo, dawg, I heard you liked UPSes, so I hooked a UPS to your UPS so you could be backed up while you're backed up." Or something.
Your scenario is, in current usage, extremely rare. Even the laptop-running-out-of-power scenario is virtually impossible, since most laptops will force themselves to hibernate before letting their battery actually completely die.
Yes, in theory. But you know the difference between theory and practice. In practice, as batteries age, the computer's ability to determine the battery's remaining capacity diminishes. And at some point, you'll be sitting there typing, the voltage will suddenly sag a little too low, and the computer will shut itself off unceremoniously. I've had a lot of laptops over the past 15 years, and every single one has eventually gotten to the point where it does that fairly reproducibly. If 100% is extremely rare, I'd hate to think what you consider common.:-)
What you're failing to account for is the difference in magnitude. Sports are subsidized by non-sports viewers far more than any other network.
By most estimates I've seen, only about a quarter of all cable households watch ESPN and other sports networks, give or take. And sports programming eats, on average, about half of a typical cable bill. So if only people who care about sports paid for it, the cost of the sports networks would increase by a factor of four, and even if they dropped every channel but sports, their cable bills would double.
And the people who dropped the sports networks? Their cable bills would fall in half.
This, of course, assumes that nobody dropped any other channels, mind you. At that point, most people are not likely to nickel-and-dime the buck-and-under channels (which is pretty much all of the non-sports channels). It's the channels that cost five bucks and up that are going to get slashed. So the ESPNs would be tossed aside en masse, and most of the smaller channels could then ask for more money, and programming quality would improve.
But even if I'm wrong about that—even if everyone decided that they were going to limit themselves to the channels that they actually watch and the price per channel went up by a factor of five, ten, even twenty—the average person would subscribe to fewer channels, so the average person would still end up paying less. (And getting less, to be fair, but you don't really watch the Soap Network, do you?)
The less-popular channels would cost more, and the more-popular channels would cost less. And the less-popular channels would then have greater incentive to bring in revenue, which would lead to greater competition, and hopefully, better programming. In practice, it would probably also lead to fewer networks, but better programming at each of them.
They are perfectly happy to allow you to rent ESPN separately of Disney Channel. What they won't do, is rent you Disney Channel without also renting ESPN, and that is where they get you, if you're a sports-loving parent of young children.
And by that, I assume you meant "non-sports-loving".
Of course, you know the reason for that, right? If the sports lovers actually had to pay the cost of ESPN on their own, most of them would balk at the price. So they subsidize the heck out of ESPN by making it hard to avoid even if you don't watch it. That way everybody who doesn't watch it ends up paying most of its actual cost (which is staggering, in large part because of the high price that the major sports leagues charge them per viewer).
Want to fix the problem in a hurry? Convince everyone you know to all watch every major sports event for a year. Make it so that the sports networks' ratings go through the roof. When the sports leagues crank up the amount they charge ESPN through the roof, ESPN will then demand $200 per customer, which the cable companies will be forced to pass on. Then cancel your cable. If enough people did this, the system would go Hindenburg.
You're assuming a desktop-sized drive in a desktop computer, yet nearly all computers sold today are portables, and laptop users are more likely to buy bus-powered external drives than mains-powered drives.
So the five most likely causes of power failure in a consumer hard drives (and presumably, in the future, SSDs), ordered from most likely to least likely, are probably:
Somebody yanking a USB cable before the device is fully unmounted.
The laptop's battery dying earlier than expected.
Somebody yanking a FireWire cable before the device is fully unmounted.
Somebody yanking an eSATAp cable before the device is fully unmounted.
An electrical power disruption caused by the hinge pinching the inverter cable.
An unexpected mains power failure with a non-battery-backed device falls somewhere around #87. A UPS won't help with any of the above.
This could have been totally avoided with a little user education and decent network security policy.
By which, of course, you mean banning Adobe software and blocking any attempts to download it. It seems like I'm getting Flash Player security updates about once a week. On the one hand, it's good news that they're finally fixing that steaming pile of bugs, but on the other hand, it makes me wonder how many of those security holes have been secretly exploited for years, and how many of the Flash crashes I've seen over the years would have been successful attacks on some specific version of some specific OS.
That's potentially a much worse design than a design where the device generates the key and encrypts a copy of that key with your passcode, for several reasons:
You have no assurance that the manufacturer doesn't have a copy of the keys (zero security from a subpoena, for example).
Even if they don't have a copy, depending on how the key is stored, a skilled attacker might be able to trivially read the crypto key right out of the chip in minutes with appropriate microscopy techniques, with no computation necessary.
The data is effectively gone if the case fails in any way, assuming there is no way for the user to make a backup copy of the key.
Only if the attacker is clueless enough to actually use the hardware to do the decryption without adding a SATA write blocker inline between the device and the drive.
Oh, fucking spare us the "Programmer as Ubermensch" bullshit. The ability to "memorize pi to 15+ decimal places" is not a marker of "intelligence," no matter how much you want to feel special for having wasted your time doing so. (I'd submit that a "good programmer" would realize this is a useless waste of time when pi to any arbitrary precision is readily available for the price of linking in an external math library.)
It's not a question of whether they do this. It's a question of whether then can do this quickly and easily. People who can are much more likely to be good programmers. People who succeed in music above a very basic level are also likely to be good programmers because of the need for memorization (and because they use both the analytical and creative parts of their brain heavily, much like programmers do).
I know you want to make it out like you're a special little snowflake, marking a new chapter in human evolution, because you know how to program a computer, but there's a large body of evidence (see: the entirety of human history) to show that analytical skills are not all that rare, or even all that special. Skyscrapers, medicine, and the automobile are all examples of remarkably complex "interrelated" systems which people have managed to master.
What an amazing coincidence. Engineering and pre-med programs also have high dropout rates, in part because not everyone has those innate abilities.
Unless, of course, you mean building skyscrapers, giving people their medicine, or driving/repairing automobiles, in which case, those are all examples of remarkably simple tasks that just happen to tangentially involve complex interrelated systems. You don't have to master the complexity of an automobile to use it any more than you have to master the complexity of writing software to use an iPhone. Other people design the systems to hide the complexity so that you don't have to understand it. And that's a big part of what makes good programming hard.
More to the point, those tasks are easily compartmentalized. You have to be able to understand a small part of how something works, but you do not have to have a big-picture view at the same time. When you build a bridge or a building, you have parts that are numbered, that were cut and measured, that you put into place. You need to know where they go. You need to know how to fasten them in place. You do not need to understand that the beam is arched slightly so that it will end up being flat after the concrete weighs it down. (You do, however, need to know which side goes up.) You do not need to have a complete understanding of why particular beams are thicker than others. You certainly do not need to understand precisely how the length of the beams and other elements were tweaked to avoid resonance problems (Tacoma Narrows, anyone?) because someone already figured out those details and provided someone else with the manufacturing specs to produce the beam that you're hanging.
Programming, by contrast, cannot easily be compartmentalized. You can't write a function in isolation and hope it fits in with the rest of the code, because there's nobody handing you a detailed specification for exactly how that code should be written (usually). You have to figure it out for yourself. You have to be simultaneously creative and logical. You have to simultaneously understand something very large while understanding how something very small fits in with it. And when you get people who do not have that ability writing code, you get colossal train wrecks.:-)
Yes, in a few organizations, you do have division of labor sufficient to turn programming into code monkey work, but that isn't all that common, and tends to be indicative of a bloated bureaucracy, usually involving government contracts. For everyone else, programming is like designing the skyscraper while you're building it, and living on the ground floor wh
Some ability is learned, but some ability is innate. Programming is a skill with a rather unique requirement: the ability to quickly learn and retain lots of information. Where the average person can easily memorize a seven-digit phone number, most good programmers have memorized pi out to at least 15+ decimal places.
The reason this is important should be obvious to anyone who has ever sat down to debug a problem with an 80,000 line piece of software. To do it right, need to be able to instantly recall how the big pieces fit together just so you can know the likely places to begin looking for the problem. Then you have to be able to quickly recall how each of those pieces works in order to understand whether it is doing what it should be doing.
To a degree, good high-level code architecture documentation and good function-level documentation can alleviate some of that need, but at some point, you still have to be able to look at a function that is a hundred lines long (or, in the case of one spectacularly complex function that I work with regularly, almost 5,500 lines long, though admittedly it is mostly a giant switch statement, and each functional piece is only tens of lines long) and be able to efficiently construct a hierarchical model of how the code functions, beginning from a high-level view and progressing to greater and greater levels of exactness as you close in on the problem.
That level of mental ability can't be taught. Your brain can either handle a problem with a very large and complex scope or it can't. If it can't, you can be a passable programmer for small projects (and that's good enough for a lot of things), but you won't ever be a great programmer.
Not only do the Brits use it in some of their airports, you can't even opt out in Britain. That's a big reason why travel agencies who cater to large groups are avoiding British Airways in favor of flights that change planes either in the U.S. or Europe instead of Britain.
Except during the peak of the holiday rush, they have been the primary screening method at BNA and SJC for at least the last three or four years, as far as I can tell.
It was precisely that change from secondary to primary screening that caused me to stop flying altogether except when I absolutely cannot afford the extra couple of days to travel by train.
A replacement for credit cards that is even less secure than the current ones doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
If this is just checking for the presence of capillaries, I can't think of any reason that it couldn't trivially be fooled by a slight tweak to the gummy bear trick in which you stick the glue pattern print onto a shaved elbow instead of a gummy bear.
If, on the other hand, this is trying to determine who you are based on the pattern of blood vessels, I suspect that the methodology is just plain doomed to fail. What makes fingerprints a good method of identification is that they are relatively static. By contrast, the blood vessels in your skin change significantly over the course of your life, particularly in your fingertips. Every time you get a paper cut, new capillaries form. Imagine having to update your biometric profile every time you get a paper cut or a solder burn.:-)
What I couldn't figure out was the emphasis on shopping; I thought these applications were for security. Cutting someone's hand off to make purchases seems a bit extreme.
You obviously haven't been to an American toy store on Black Friday.
Well, that request prompted me to go ahead and finish up the website, minus all the "buy" and "download a sample" links, since I'm still doing editing.:-)
You will never regret buying class 10, but you will almost certainly regret a class 6 so why bother? Heck, in a year or two there won't be any class 6 available anyway - it is too slow...
Unless you're using the card in an audio recorder, in which case a class 10 card is just a waste of money; they are generally quite happy with class 4 cards.
I'm not a regular reader of eBooks, so I don't have much of an opinion, but AFAIK, they all exhibit these problems to at least some degree.
What the EPUB industry really needs is for someone to create the equivalent of the ACID test for EPUB books. It would be eye-opening, to say the least.:-)
New York City? Don't a lot of people live out of state?
Washington D.C. has the same problem. However, I believe I covered that two levels up:
And to the extent that there is an actual imbalance caused by more people visiting a state (e.g. Florida) than leaving to visit other states, you can always make up that difference by increasing your bed tax.
Granted, in those two particularly unusual edge cases, true visitors have a bigger burden because the commuters aren't actually paying the tax, but that's already the case with the current system. Raise your hand if you routinely buy gasoline in NYC or D.C. rather than at the much cheaper stations near your suburban home.
Crickets chirp.
So no real impact, then, assuming you continue to charge bridge and tunnel tolls.
We were actually discussing that very issue on the MobileRead forums just a couple of weeks ago. Part of the problem is that most of the EPUB readers don't properly support page-break-inside: avoid. For sure, WebKit doesn't support it yet, and AFAIK, neither does ADE. Between those two, that covers almost all the EPUB readers, Kindle, etc.
You might be successful by forcing a page break before the image (but your success would depend on the aspect ratio of the reader's screen), or you could use SVG that contains both the caption and the image (but SVG is kind of buggy on some readers, particularly when it comes to text, so this is potentially problematic as well). Neither of those is a particularly good alternative to what ought to have been solved by a single line of CSS on the container. And that's why every single eBook you've looked at is broken....
Sure. The start of the website is at http://www.patriotsbooks.com/. Note that I've done a lot of the web design work, but I haven't pushed any of it yet, so all that's there at the moment is a short placeholder description, and if you reload the page enough times, you'll see banners for all three books.:-)
Author, software engineer, font designer, art designer.... I'm wearing lots of hats on this one.:-)
I'm currently up to about 3600 lines of Perl, 700 lines of XSL, and 2100 lines of custom LaTeX macros, plus four custom fonts....
I didn't go the Smashwords route because I want my books to have more of a distinct visual identity, and more to the point, for the electronic editions to look at least passably close to the PDF editions if you happen to set the page size the same.:-)
Yes, the point is that it's a lot easier to do things like drop caps in PDF (where it always looks the same no matter what engine rasterizes it) and doing it in HTML/CSS (where I've seen drop caps be several em too high or too low in one reader while looking perfect on many others).
It has nothing whatsoever to do with DRM. PDFs are not typically used for eBooks because they don't reflow, and thus can't adjust their layout, font size, etc. to suit the size and resolution of the screen.
If PDF files were good enough, the effort for producing an eBook would be exactly zero, because you'd just hand off the same file that you hand off to your POD printing house....
The actual preparation step ends when you hand it off, whether to a printer for printing or to an electronic distributor for distribution. The work done after the press gets the file is not part of preparing a book for publication:
If you're using digital printing (e.g. for print-on-demand), the printing service prints exactly what's in the file. Except for fixing any problems that you discover during a test run, once you hand off the file, there's no more work happening to it.
If you're doing offset printing, the setup work is done by the printing house, not by the publisher, and thus it should be considered a manufacturing cost, not a book preparation cost.
Either way, it is out of scope. Yes, it was partially in scope back in the old days, when you used to hand off films, but I hope nobody is still doing that....
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and I forgot to mention the best part. The networks would be beholden to their subscribers. Had Sci-Fi Channel been bundled a la carte five years ago, we would not have SyFy with professional wrestling. Sure, it would cost more, but it would be an actual channel that ate and breathed science fiction. And if it deviated from that too far, people would drop the channel, and they'd either clean up their act or wither on the vine and eventually be replaced by someone who would.
You see, that's the biggest problem with the current system. There's only token competition when you have an oligopoly and things are bundled as they are. As far as NBCUniversal is concerned, SyFy is a transponder, and it is costing them money to keep it lit. Therefore, their goal is to maximize the amount of ad revenue, which means maximizing the number of eyes. You're the product. They don't care if science fiction viewers keep watching the channel because everybody gets the channel, so there's no incentive to cater to any particular audience. If they can get ten times as many viewers by showing pictures of fish swimming in an aquarium, they'll do it, because that's the most profitable way to run the network.
With a la carte pricing, at least to some degree, you're the customer. You're also a product that they can sell to the advertisers, of course, but because you're in full control over whether your eyes are even available as an asset to sell, you have much more say in the content decisions. People who don't watch science fiction are unlikely to subscribe to SyFy, which means those people who watch professional wrestling won't even be available as potential eyes to sell to advertisers. So if they air that sort of programming, it gets no viewers, and the advertisers say, "Why are we paying you again?" And if enough people get annoyed at the dumbing down of the network, they start to lose subscribers, at which point the advertisers say, "Why are we paying you so much?" Thus, you, the subscriber, get to cast an actual vote, albeit somewhat indirectly.
It's not quite as good as purely subscription-supported TV in that regard, mind you, but it is a lot better than the current situation, where the networks are bundled together and everybody gets all of them, so the MBA studio execs see them as interchangeable transponders instead of actual stations with an actual voice, an actual vision, and an actual mission.
My point was that most people don't use their laptops as a glorified desktop; a UPS won't do any good if the device is sitting on your lap in the car. And a UPS won't do any real good for the internal drive in a laptop or a bus-powered external drive attached to a laptop anyway, given that the laptop already is a glorified UPS. It's like, "Yo, dawg, I heard you liked UPSes, so I hooked a UPS to your UPS so you could be backed up while you're backed up." Or something.
Yes, in theory. But you know the difference between theory and practice. In practice, as batteries age, the computer's ability to determine the battery's remaining capacity diminishes. And at some point, you'll be sitting there typing, the voltage will suddenly sag a little too low, and the computer will shut itself off unceremoniously. I've had a lot of laptops over the past 15 years, and every single one has eventually gotten to the point where it does that fairly reproducibly. If 100% is extremely rare, I'd hate to think what you consider common. :-)
What you're failing to account for is the difference in magnitude. Sports are subsidized by non-sports viewers far more than any other network.
By most estimates I've seen, only about a quarter of all cable households watch ESPN and other sports networks, give or take. And sports programming eats, on average, about half of a typical cable bill. So if only people who care about sports paid for it, the cost of the sports networks would increase by a factor of four, and even if they dropped every channel but sports, their cable bills would double.
And the people who dropped the sports networks? Their cable bills would fall in half.
This, of course, assumes that nobody dropped any other channels, mind you. At that point, most people are not likely to nickel-and-dime the buck-and-under channels (which is pretty much all of the non-sports channels). It's the channels that cost five bucks and up that are going to get slashed. So the ESPNs would be tossed aside en masse, and most of the smaller channels could then ask for more money, and programming quality would improve.
But even if I'm wrong about that—even if everyone decided that they were going to limit themselves to the channels that they actually watch and the price per channel went up by a factor of five, ten, even twenty—the average person would subscribe to fewer channels, so the average person would still end up paying less. (And getting less, to be fair, but you don't really watch the Soap Network, do you?)
The less-popular channels would cost more, and the more-popular channels would cost less. And the less-popular channels would then have greater incentive to bring in revenue, which would lead to greater competition, and hopefully, better programming. In practice, it would probably also lead to fewer networks, but better programming at each of them.
Actually, the Mini does not support ECC, according to Apple's specs. Unless you know something that we don't....
And by that, I assume you meant "non-sports-loving".
Of course, you know the reason for that, right? If the sports lovers actually had to pay the cost of ESPN on their own, most of them would balk at the price. So they subsidize the heck out of ESPN by making it hard to avoid even if you don't watch it. That way everybody who doesn't watch it ends up paying most of its actual cost (which is staggering, in large part because of the high price that the major sports leagues charge them per viewer).
Want to fix the problem in a hurry? Convince everyone you know to all watch every major sports event for a year. Make it so that the sports networks' ratings go through the roof. When the sports leagues crank up the amount they charge ESPN through the roof, ESPN will then demand $200 per customer, which the cable companies will be forced to pass on. Then cancel your cable. If enough people did this, the system would go Hindenburg.
You're assuming a desktop-sized drive in a desktop computer, yet nearly all computers sold today are portables, and laptop users are more likely to buy bus-powered external drives than mains-powered drives.
So the five most likely causes of power failure in a consumer hard drives (and presumably, in the future, SSDs), ordered from most likely to least likely, are probably:
An unexpected mains power failure with a non-battery-backed device falls somewhere around #87. A UPS won't help with any of the above.
By which, of course, you mean banning Adobe software and blocking any attempts to download it. It seems like I'm getting Flash Player security updates about once a week. On the one hand, it's good news that they're finally fixing that steaming pile of bugs, but on the other hand, it makes me wonder how many of those security holes have been secretly exploited for years, and how many of the Flash crashes I've seen over the years would have been successful attacks on some specific version of some specific OS.
That's potentially a much worse design than a design where the device generates the key and encrypts a copy of that key with your passcode, for several reasons:
Only if the attacker is clueless enough to actually use the hardware to do the decryption without adding a SATA write blocker inline between the device and the drive.
It's not a question of whether they do this. It's a question of whether then can do this quickly and easily. People who can are much more likely to be good programmers. People who succeed in music above a very basic level are also likely to be good programmers because of the need for memorization (and because they use both the analytical and creative parts of their brain heavily, much like programmers do).
What an amazing coincidence. Engineering and pre-med programs also have high dropout rates, in part because not everyone has those innate abilities.
Unless, of course, you mean building skyscrapers, giving people their medicine, or driving/repairing automobiles, in which case, those are all examples of remarkably simple tasks that just happen to tangentially involve complex interrelated systems. You don't have to master the complexity of an automobile to use it any more than you have to master the complexity of writing software to use an iPhone. Other people design the systems to hide the complexity so that you don't have to understand it. And that's a big part of what makes good programming hard.
More to the point, those tasks are easily compartmentalized. You have to be able to understand a small part of how something works, but you do not have to have a big-picture view at the same time. When you build a bridge or a building, you have parts that are numbered, that were cut and measured, that you put into place. You need to know where they go. You need to know how to fasten them in place. You do not need to understand that the beam is arched slightly so that it will end up being flat after the concrete weighs it down. (You do, however, need to know which side goes up.) You do not need to have a complete understanding of why particular beams are thicker than others. You certainly do not need to understand precisely how the length of the beams and other elements were tweaked to avoid resonance problems (Tacoma Narrows, anyone?) because someone already figured out those details and provided someone else with the manufacturing specs to produce the beam that you're hanging.
Programming, by contrast, cannot easily be compartmentalized. You can't write a function in isolation and hope it fits in with the rest of the code, because there's nobody handing you a detailed specification for exactly how that code should be written (usually). You have to figure it out for yourself. You have to be simultaneously creative and logical. You have to simultaneously understand something very large while understanding how something very small fits in with it. And when you get people who do not have that ability writing code, you get colossal train wrecks. :-)
Yes, in a few organizations, you do have division of labor sufficient to turn programming into code monkey work, but that isn't all that common, and tends to be indicative of a bloated bureaucracy, usually involving government contracts. For everyone else, programming is like designing the skyscraper while you're building it, and living on the ground floor wh
Some ability is learned, but some ability is innate. Programming is a skill with a rather unique requirement: the ability to quickly learn and retain lots of information. Where the average person can easily memorize a seven-digit phone number, most good programmers have memorized pi out to at least 15+ decimal places.
The reason this is important should be obvious to anyone who has ever sat down to debug a problem with an 80,000 line piece of software. To do it right, need to be able to instantly recall how the big pieces fit together just so you can know the likely places to begin looking for the problem. Then you have to be able to quickly recall how each of those pieces works in order to understand whether it is doing what it should be doing.
To a degree, good high-level code architecture documentation and good function-level documentation can alleviate some of that need, but at some point, you still have to be able to look at a function that is a hundred lines long (or, in the case of one spectacularly complex function that I work with regularly, almost 5,500 lines long, though admittedly it is mostly a giant switch statement, and each functional piece is only tens of lines long) and be able to efficiently construct a hierarchical model of how the code functions, beginning from a high-level view and progressing to greater and greater levels of exactness as you close in on the problem.
That level of mental ability can't be taught. Your brain can either handle a problem with a very large and complex scope or it can't. If it can't, you can be a passable programmer for small projects (and that's good enough for a lot of things), but you won't ever be a great programmer.
Not only do the Brits use it in some of their airports, you can't even opt out in Britain. That's a big reason why travel agencies who cater to large groups are avoiding British Airways in favor of flights that change planes either in the U.S. or Europe instead of Britain.
Except during the peak of the holiday rush, they have been the primary screening method at BNA and SJC for at least the last three or four years, as far as I can tell.
It was precisely that change from secondary to primary screening that caused me to stop flying altogether except when I absolutely cannot afford the extra couple of days to travel by train.
A replacement for credit cards that is even less secure than the current ones doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
If this is just checking for the presence of capillaries, I can't think of any reason that it couldn't trivially be fooled by a slight tweak to the gummy bear trick in which you stick the glue pattern print onto a shaved elbow instead of a gummy bear.
If, on the other hand, this is trying to determine who you are based on the pattern of blood vessels, I suspect that the methodology is just plain doomed to fail. What makes fingerprints a good method of identification is that they are relatively static. By contrast, the blood vessels in your skin change significantly over the course of your life, particularly in your fingertips. Every time you get a paper cut, new capillaries form. Imagine having to update your biometric profile every time you get a paper cut or a solder burn. :-)
You obviously haven't been to an American toy store on Black Friday.
Well, that request prompted me to go ahead and finish up the website, minus all the "buy" and "download a sample" links, since I'm still doing editing. :-)
Unless you're using the card in an audio recorder, in which case a class 10 card is just a waste of money; they are generally quite happy with class 4 cards.
I'm not a regular reader of eBooks, so I don't have much of an opinion, but AFAIK, they all exhibit these problems to at least some degree.
What the EPUB industry really needs is for someone to create the equivalent of the ACID test for EPUB books. It would be eye-opening, to say the least. :-)
Washington D.C. has the same problem. However, I believe I covered that two levels up:
Granted, in those two particularly unusual edge cases, true visitors have a bigger burden because the commuters aren't actually paying the tax, but that's already the case with the current system. Raise your hand if you routinely buy gasoline in NYC or D.C. rather than at the much cheaper stations near your suburban home.
Crickets chirp.
So no real impact, then, assuming you continue to charge bridge and tunnel tolls.
We were actually discussing that very issue on the MobileRead forums just a couple of weeks ago. Part of the problem is that most of the EPUB readers don't properly support page-break-inside: avoid. For sure, WebKit doesn't support it yet, and AFAIK, neither does ADE. Between those two, that covers almost all the EPUB readers, Kindle, etc.
You might be successful by forcing a page break before the image (but your success would depend on the aspect ratio of the reader's screen), or you could use SVG that contains both the caption and the image (but SVG is kind of buggy on some readers, particularly when it comes to text, so this is potentially problematic as well). Neither of those is a particularly good alternative to what ought to have been solved by a single line of CSS on the container. And that's why every single eBook you've looked at is broken....
Sure. The start of the website is at http://www.patriotsbooks.com/. Note that I've done a lot of the web design work, but I haven't pushed any of it yet, so all that's there at the moment is a short placeholder description, and if you reload the page enough times, you'll see banners for all three books. :-)
Author, software engineer, font designer, art designer.... I'm wearing lots of hats on this one. :-)
I'm currently up to about 3600 lines of Perl, 700 lines of XSL, and 2100 lines of custom LaTeX macros, plus four custom fonts....
I didn't go the Smashwords route because I want my books to have more of a distinct visual identity, and more to the point, for the electronic editions to look at least passably close to the PDF editions if you happen to set the page size the same. :-)
Yes, the point is that it's a lot easier to do things like drop caps in PDF (where it always looks the same no matter what engine rasterizes it) and doing it in HTML/CSS (where I've seen drop caps be several em too high or too low in one reader while looking perfect on many others).
It has nothing whatsoever to do with DRM. PDFs are not typically used for eBooks because they don't reflow, and thus can't adjust their layout, font size, etc. to suit the size and resolution of the screen.
If PDF files were good enough, the effort for producing an eBook would be exactly zero, because you'd just hand off the same file that you hand off to your POD printing house....
The actual preparation step ends when you hand it off, whether to a printer for printing or to an electronic distributor for distribution. The work done after the press gets the file is not part of preparing a book for publication:
Either way, it is out of scope. Yes, it was partially in scope back in the old days, when you used to hand off films, but I hope nobody is still doing that....