And lots of authors whose publisher contracts have expired also use POD. The notion of print runs needing to be large to be profitable are so last century.
That's pretty much what I said. unless you're equating PDF with "electronic edition", in which case you're off by a mile. eBooks are almost never distributed in PDF form because PDF doesn't reflow, and thus sucks on small screens (most eBook readers).
So for print purposes, you can readily reuse the same content. For electronic editions, you can reuse the same content, but instead of being able to design a simple PDF that works everywhere, you have to do a lot more work to create a flowing EPUB book that works everywhere.
This is not to say that folks don't ever redesign their book blocks between releases, but strictly speaking, it isn't necessary to do so unless the content changes publishers and the old publisher owned the rights to the original book block design.
Or on private roads/farms. Some vehicles almost never leave a farm, but they rack up miles of use anyway.
Easily solved. Have a separate license plate with a much lower per-mile fee for farm vehicles that get only incidental on-road use.
How do you determine miles driven? Mandatory vehicle inspections?
For states that already have them, sure. For other states, it would be a simple line item on your tax return, and a simple reporting requirement when the vehicle is transferred. Sure, you could lie about it for a while, but eventually you'll have to sell the car or take it to the junkyard, at which point you'll get hit with a colossal tax bill.
Thus creating a paperwork nightmare for both the consumer and the government.
First, most people don't regularly drive their cars outside the state and buy gasoline outside the state. So it's a small amount of effort for 99.999% of the driving public (commercial trucking excepted). They just save their gas receipts for the (statistically) one trip that they take during the summer.
Second, it's a temporary increase in paperwork. Hybrids are not the way of the future. They're a stopgap until we can come up with a better means of storing and delivering power. My solution creates a temporary and small amount of paperwork to avoid a large and permanent loss of privacy.
Really? You think having people keep track of paper receipts and filing extra paperwork, along with mandatory visual inspection of every vehicle's milage, is simpler and more easily managed than a simple device in every car that is pinged by a radio system to report time/location data logged by a computer? The initial concept in Oregon was that this data would be uploaded every time you stopped to buy gas. All-electric vehicles need to recharge, so having an upload at each recharge is their answer.
Yes. I think a system whereby owners are required to periodically report mileage on a piece of paper is simpler than a piece of technology that could make significant errors, resulting in very costly tax bills and lawsuits.
I also think a system in which you are charged a flat fee by the mile, regardless of where you drove, and in which tax revenue is distributed to states and localities based on their population is much, much simpler than any computer-based system, precisely because a computer-based system will invariably lead to a slippery slope in which each community demands greater and greater detail in the data, until eventually it is trying to compute how many times you drove down a particular block of a particular road so that the people who live on that road can get their fair share of the highway dollars.
Plus the advantage that GPS tracking allows use of the road tax as a social engineering tool, coercing people to drive during off-peak hours or non-main routes.
This is not an advantage. Getting people to use non-main routes just results in a lot of high-speed traffic on minor roads and an increase in pedestrian accidents. If the roads can't handle peak travel, then you either need wider roads or more major roads, period.
Besides, you're never going to convince people to drive at off-peak times through something like this. There's no instantaneous feedback. You find out how much you were billed at the end of the month or the end of the year or whatever. It's not like a toll that you have to actively pay, which actually makes you think as you're driving, "Maybe I should travel at a cheaper time in the future". Psychologically speaking, it isn't likely to have any real impact at all other than making people mad about what they will view as a tax on having a 9-to-5 job.
The only real way to make roads more green is to reduce the number of stops, the amount of time spent idling, and the number of turns/curves. That process really has
GPS-based taxes are a stupid solution to a simple problem. Tax cars based on the number of miles driven. Yes, some of your miles will be spent outside your state, but other vehicles from other states will spend some of their miles in your state, so on the whole, it should roughly balance out, so long as everyone adopts the same standard. 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.
And on a more selfish note, if your state assumes that all your drivers' miles are spent in your state, then if another state near you does GPS, in the best case, you'll get extra cash when their drivers cross the line, but you won't lose money if your drivers cross the line into their state. By contrast, if you choose GPS and they choose to assume that all miles are spent in their state, you'll end up paying those other states when your drivers cross the line into those other states, but you won't get anything back from them when their drivers cross the line into yours. So from a practical perspective, a state would have to be positively stupid to willingly choose GPS unless all states universally adopted that standard simultaneously.
By contrast, the "assume all miles are spent in your state" standard is one that your state can safely adopt today. And if the vehicle is a hybrid, you could allow drivers to submit gas station receipts from other states to buy down the miles based on the fact that they already paid a gas tax in another state. No GPS is needed for that. Such a solution is by far the most sane, as it has minimal impact on gasoline-based driving, while creating a much simpler, less invasive, and more easily managed scheme for electric-based driving.
Ebook you can distribute internationally forever. There is no way in hell preparing a book would be cheaper than preparing an ebook even if there is more than 1 vendor.
With a paper book, you prepare it once and distribute forever, too. You take the PDF that contains the book body text and you farm it out to traditional printers in various countries for large-scale distribution, or on-demand printers for small-scale distribution.
However, with print, the standards are strictly followed by the hardware manufacturers, so almost without exception, a single PDF source document can be used by dozens of different printers to precisely duplicate the book without the need to work around bugs specific to each printer. That's what makes it so much easier and cheaper to set up a book for print than for electronic distribution.
There is no way in hell preparing a book would be cheaper than preparing an ebook even if there is more than 1 vendor.
Preparing a paper book is much cheaper unless you incorrectly count manufacturing and distribution costs as part of the cost of preparing a book for publication. Well, that's not necessarily true. You can do a really bad job of preparing an electronic edition with less effort, and many publishers do. Assuming equal quality, though, the electronic edition is much harder to put together.
Paper books also require storage (particularly if you are dealing with large amounts) can be damaged in transit at any point (to/from retailer)... and a book that ultimately fails to sell is a total loss
Yes and no.
The printing cost is nonzero, yes, but the unsold/destroyed rate is becoming less and less important over time. Even books by well-known authors are moving to a model where the publisher prints a large initial run and then does on-demand printing after that. And for new authors, publishers are often doing on-demand printing initially, then setting up a full print run only if demand warrants it.
Your argument about the preparation-to-print expense makes sense for a relatively small release, but not for anyone operating in bulk, since that cost is completely independent of how many books you end up selling.
It's still a cost that has to be amortized over the number of copies sold. The only difference is the magnitude. This, of course, also assumes that the publisher bothers to do the electronic edition right, but that's a separate issue.:-)
I'm not crazy. The LaTeX is a production-intermediate temp file format. My source format is XML.:-)
The translation to HTML isn't what makes it hard. What makes it hard is the literally dozens of reader bugs that I've found along the way. You work around a CSS handling bug on one platform and it breaks the layout on three others. The amount of interaction I've seen between the various readers' CSS bugs is just plain jaw-dropping, at a level of complexity that far exceeds anything I would ever have imagined possible, and this is coming from somebody who creates CSS for the web all the time.
It's the device's job to handle standard formats, and most of them do it rather well.
You've obviously never tried to do anything even slightly interesting in EPUB. If you attempt drop caps and you want consistent rendering, you'll tear your hair out literally for months.
Here's a short list of the reader bugs that I've found personally:
Destination anchors () incorrectly rendered as links (underlined and blue).
ADE-based readers ignore the entire CSS file if it contains @media rules (and maybe @page). Put them in a separate CSS file.
Same goes for the IE-specific filter property.
Nook refuses to center heading tags (h1, h2, and so on). Use div.
ADE and Nook (based on ADE) do not support the OpenType small-caps feature. You can work around this by using a separate small caps font in which the lowercase glyphs are replaced by small caps glyphs.
If you are working around this ADE bug by using a separate small caps font instead of a normal font with a smcp OpenType feature, be sure to add font-variant: small-caps not only in any CSS styles that request the font, but also in the @font declaration for the style. If you forget to add it in the @font declaration, some readers (Sony Reader in particular) will fall back to the next font that has either an smcp feature or a separate small-cap variant style.
ADE and Nook (based on ADE) do not support the use of the:before pseudo-element with the content: property.
Some readers get very unhappy when embedded fonts have multiple local names.
When creating drop caps, avoid padding-bottom; many readers compute the vertical position incorrectly if padding is nonzero. Instead use margins to set the vertical positioning of drop caps, which seems to be more compatible.
When working with drop caps, always explicitly set the line height to 1.2 em (or more), both for the body text and the drop cap block. Some readers (Kindle, IIRC) set lower bounds on line height, and some fonts have an intrinsic line height that is less than 1.2em. Those readers may force the line height up to 1.2em on your behalf, resulting in the drop cap character appearing too high or too low in those readers.
Nested block and inline-block elements are problematic on some readers. In particular, Nook on iOS appears to ignore (treat as zero) the margins of inline-block elements when drawing the contents of any block elements that appear inside them. Thus, if you are doing drop caps, you must not use nested block elements for positioning purposes if you care about supporting Nook on iOS.
Some readers incorrectly calculate block element height when computed in ems. In particular, Nook on iOS tends to undersize its boxes. This can result in drop caps that overlap text. When setting the height CSS property for drop caps, find the smallest value and the largest value that result in correct behavior on a proper web browser (e.g. WebKit or Firefox), then choose a value that is somewhere near the middle of this range.
Don't count on CSS precedence working correctly. Readers based on Adobe Digital Editions sometimes fail to treat classes in a selector as having a higher precedence than containing elements. For example, in spec-compliant readers and browsers, if you have a rule on "div.preface div.section p + p", a contrary rule on "p.classname" should override it, because a class on the selector for the element itself always has higher precedence than any number of elements). In ADE, however, the precedence calculation is broken, and the "div.preface div.section p + p" rule gets precedence.
In Kobo reader (at least on iOS), if you set the left and right margins of the body tag to zero, you will see part of page 2 on page 1, and so on, and you will be unable to reach the last page of a chapter.
In some iOS readers based on Adobe Digital Editions (seen on Sony Reader and Bluefire), if a paragraph containing a drop cap falls a
To put your figures in some kind of perspective as to who out of step they are. Authors used to get between 10-15% royalty through tradition means. They now expect 50%...but are generally offered 25% *forever*. It looks pretty awful for authors.
I'm talking solely in the context of author-publishers, comparing apples to apples, total return from the bookseller to total return from the bookseller. How that gets divided among author and publisher is an entirely separate issue.
Put another way, yes, if you use a publishing house, you get a much lower rate on your printed books, but that's not a fair comparison because you're not going to get all of the eBook royalties if you're working with a publisher, either. You're trading per-unit percentages for volume, at least in theory. That tradeoff is largely irrelevant for the purposes of determining whether you'll make more off the eBooks or the paper books unless the publisher is giving you a significantly different cut of one versus the other, which depends entirely on your contract.
I realize that it's a big assumption that the terminator gene doesn't have any side effects, but it's no bigger an assumption than the assumption that any other genetic modification doesn't have any side effects. The terminator gene at least makes it practical to quickly stop using a variety of GMO crops if a potentially dangerous problem is discovered. Whether that problem is caused by the terminator gene or some other modified gene is largely irrelevant; it's a relatively small increase in short-term risk that results in a relatively large decrease in long-term risk.
Worse than that. Depending on the sales model, publishers may get less money from an electronic book than from a print book, even after printing costs are taken into account.
For example, with Amazon's KDP program, you either get 70% of Amazon's current price (which is not your cover price) or 35% of your cover price, at your option. If you set the price at a fairly typical $10, you get $3.50.
By contrast, with print publishing, you get anywhere from 45–80% of the cover price, depending on how you set the discount (which affects how broadly you get distributed, but it is your choice). If you assume that a typical hardcover book costs under five bucks apiece, and you set the cover price at a fairly typical $25, even at a 55% discount (you get 45%), you get $6.24.
And at a more typical small-press hardcover discount of 30%, even if you set the premium at your actual manufacturing cost plus the eBook cost ($15), you get $5.50—significantly more than you get for the electronic edition at the fixed 35% royalty rate.
So there's really no guarantee that people are making more money off of electronic versions of their book, even ignoring the much, much higher cost of designing the electronic edition in the first place. Once you factor that in, you should be glad it doesn't cost several times what the physical edition costs.:-)
Except that it's much, much easier to prepare a book for print than it is to prepare an eBook. Preparing a book for electronic publishing is a bit like designing a web page in the mid-1990s, except that there are a lot more eBook reader vendors than there were browser vendors. Each one has its own set of quirks, some of which are... shall we say rather sizable sets. A single copy of your content has to look at least acceptable when used with all of those readers.
As much as I swear about the amount of time it took to create several thousand lines of custom LaTeX macros when designing the print edition of my novels, it pales compared with the amount of time I've spent on EPUB, MOBI, and KF8 versions. It has taken at least an order of magnitude more work, and that's a conservative estimate.
In addition to working around all the reader bugs, you'll also find yourself swearing at the lack of good fonts that can legally be distributed in such an easily opened format, particularly if you are distributing your books DRM-free. A big chunk of my time has been spent taking existing SIL-licensed fonts and redesigning parts of them so that they actually look acceptable. That's a lot harder than it looks.
Finally, the tools out there for doing electronic publishing leave much to be desired, particularly when it comes to working around all the aforementioned reader bugs. The folks working with major commercial design packages are having just as much trouble as those of us who are writing our own tools from scratch—maybe even more so, given that they don't have an easy way to fix bugs in their tools.
If my time has any value, I can't foresee a future in which the electronic versions of my trilogy of novels ever break even. I'd have to clear at least a couple hundred grand. That's a heck of a lot of books at ten bucks apiece (of which the publisher gets a lot less than ten bucks). Perhaps in ten years, when the technology has improved dramatically, eBook sales will be pure profit. Today, however, except for very, very basic transfers that eschew formatting altogether, I'd imagine that most eBooks are loss leaders.
Small correction. The BSA isn't actually doing anything other than filing amicus briefs. Oracle is doing the suing. So Oracle should be spanked with a fine for bringing the lawsuit in the first place.
Well, pedantically (but not legally), they are correct. There is creativity involved in designing an API. The problem is that an API is also a functional element. According to case law precedents, functional elements (e.g. chip masks) are protected only if there is more than one way to do something. By definition, it is not possible to create something that is functionally compatible with an API without copying everything that makes that API a creative work (everything but the parameter names, essentially), and therefore it cannot be protected under copyright law under any circumstances. There simply are no situations in which allowing copyright to protect API would not result in a substantial judicial overreach that dramatically expands the scope of copyright.
Put another way, an API is the software equivalent to the shape of a connector. Just as a connector is the physical interface for electrically connecting one thing to another, an API is the software interface for programmatically connecting one piece of software to another. There is no less creativity involved in the design of a connector than in the design of an API. Therefore, given that you can patent connectors, but you cannot copyright them, this lawsuit has exactly zero chance of success.
I am of the opinion that the BSA's appeal should be declared frivolous, and that they should be spanked with a hefty fine for bringing this lawsuit in the first place. That would set a strong precedent that such absurd abuse of copyright in an attempt to protect obviously non-copyrightable things will not be tolerated.
Assuming that the particular terminator gene doesn't have unwanted side-effects, then I don't see a problem with it. This is the same standard I apply to other genetically modified living things.
I would go one step further. Assuming that the particular terminator gene doesn't have unwanted side effects, I am of the opinion that it should be mandatory, because it reduces the risk associated with genetically modified plants considerably.
When it comes to future evolution and survival of the fittest, genetically modified crops, particularly when those modifications involve resistance against weed killer, are likely to be preferentially naturally selected for. In the absence of modifications that prevent those genes from being passed on to future generations, those modified varieties will likely eventually become the dominant variety over all non-modified varieties. If in fifty or a hundred years, we discover that one of those genetic modifications causes harm, it will be an uphill battle to get our agriculture back to safe crops.
By contrast, if the genetically modified varieties contain terminator genes that make them sterile, the issue of contaminating future generations of plants ceases to be a problem. When farmers stop planting the dangerous variety, it stops growing. This, of course, assumes a completely effective terminator gene, which probably isn't likely, but even an imperfect terminator gene would help balance the odds somewhat.
So if it makes enough sense to use paper bags, why not just pay the 10 cents?
Most people won't spend money that they don't have to spend. Besides, this isn't about what I do; it's about what an average person does. The issue of health effects doesn't directly affect me, because I never buy raw meat.
I don't see how handles would help you... either you have someone else put the meat in the bag, handles or not, or you find a way to clean your hands after putting it into the bag yourself, handles or not.
Not necessarily. If you're just buying meat on that trip and nothing else, then it does make a difference. If the bags had handles, you would simply not bring the reusable bags in with you at all. It at least makes it possible to avoid the cross-contamination, whereas without it, that isn't feasible.
Then don't buy heavy bags if you are just going to get the same amount of use out of them, buy the same light bags that were used at grocery stores before.
AFAIK, you can't buy the light bags that grocery stores provide, unless you buy them by the palette. And besides, even if you could buy them in small quantities at the store, because you'd be buying them in small quantities wrapped in a box, the gasoline spent to transport all that extra packaging from the factory alone would still make it a poor environmental choice compared with getting the free bags at the grocery store.
My question is why aren't they using paper bags? Those things are far better than any reusable bag I've ever had. On the plus side, they're multipurpose as well as 100/% recyclable.
Because the environuts who passed these laws managed simultaneously mandated a 10 cent per bag charge for paper bags, thus ensuring that everyone will use their reusable bags for everything, whether it makes sense or not. And no, the availability of the free plastic bags for fresh vegetables is not a solution. There aren't usually free bags at the meat counter, which means everything else you carry is going to get contaminated if you buy meat. And even if they have bags, those bags don't have handles, which means that you're still handling contaminated meat and then touching a reusable bag's handle.
Of course, for those of us who, prior to the ban, routinely refused bags that we didn't need and reused the plastic bags we did get as trash bags, these new laws basically amount to a flat tax on living in the affected cities. We now have to buy plastic bags to replace the bags that we used to get for free. And because the bags you buy are much heavier than the bags they replaced, these laws actually represent a net increase in petroleum consumption for me.
Plastic bag bans are pretty much net negatives, as far as I can tell. The only benefit is a reduction in litter from plastic bags blowing around, and that problem is mostly caused by garbage pickup people who don't care about all the bits they leave behind. They could have solved the same problem by driving along behind the garbage trucks for a week and fining them every time they failed to pick up trash that fell out of the cans, and our neighborhoods would have been significantly cleaner for it. Instead, they attacked the problem by punishing the users. It clearly falls on the other side of my bats**t crazy line as far as laws go, and I strongly encourage any communities thinking about such laws to reconsider.
Odd. Competition is what has resulted in us having the highest healthcare costs of any first-world nation, without significant differences in actual results compared with most of Europe. The profit motive does not result in better healthcare. It results in more expensive healthcare.
There are several reasons for this:
Emergency healthcare must be local. In practice, most people have only one or two hospitals within a reasonable distance for handling emergencies. That hospital is usually owned by one of a handful of major hospital chains that also own most of the other hospitals for 200 miles. Thus, any competition for emergency services is an illusion.
Non-emergency care for serious issues (cancer, etc.) is highly specialized, and is best handled by one of a fairly small number of large hospitals. Any competition there is also largely an illusion, though not completely so, assuming you personally have the money to fly to another state for treatment. Your insurance won't cover the airline flight, though.
Care for the elderly in nursing homes generally needs to be somewhere close to where the family is, or close to where the person lived. Although there is a small amount of competition here, many of these facilities are in a race to the bottom quality-wise, and a race to the top care-wise, to maximize their profit. Clearly there isn't enough competition to force them to improve things, and it's enough of a hassle to move someone that it doesn't happen often enough to drive that competition. And even the worst nursing homes rarely have a bed empty for very long, which means moving people isn't always feasible even if you want to move them.
Unless I'm forgetting something, all other care represents a small percentage of healthcare spending.
So the fact is that there's not useful competition in healthcare as it is. And there can't be. Healthcare falls into the category of "essential services". I can't think of anything else in that category where there has ever been any real competition, simply because the companies who provide those services know that they have you by the balls. It's the same reason most places in the country have exactly one cable provider, one telephone provider, at most two Internet providers (usually the cable company and the telephone company), etc.
Essential services all have three things in common: a relatively high barrier to entry (startup cost), substantial economies of scale and/or other benefits from consolidation, and low risk of people refusing the service because of cost (though in healthcare, there is a risk of people refusing to pay for the service, but that's a separate issue). In these areas, the trend towards consolidation, absent federal regulators stepping in and preventing it, is very strong. That's why we nearly dropped from four nationwide cellular companies to three a few months back. That's why I can think of only a handful of places in the country where you have a choice in electrical or gas providers. And so on.
That said, in practice, for the same reason that private businesses do a terrible job at providing essential services, government also does a terrible job because they have no incentive to maintain the quality of service above the bare minimum, and because they want to turn a profit that they can pump into their pet program of the week. This is why public hospitals and for-profit private hospitals are both consistently worse than nonprofit hospitals, at least in terms of mortality rate.
So what's the answer? Nonprofits. We could fix healthcare in America very, very easily. Take the VA hospital system and spin it off into a purely non-profit hospital chain. Encourage it to expand as much as possible. Then stop allowing Medicare to pay for care at for-profit hospitals. Then create a public option (government insurance program) that competes with private insurance and provides care only at nonprofit hospitals. Statistically speaking, reducing or eliminating for-profit hospitals and converting government hospitals into standalone nonprofits would significantly improve healthcare in the U.S., both in terms of patient mortality rates and cost.
Uh, no. Stolen connotes lack of permission to take something, generally with no intent to give it back.
One owes money that one borrows, or owes money in return for a non-monetary item that one borrows or buys or for a service rendered. Owing implies a debt, which implies a prior agreement by both parties.
By contrast, one does not owe money that one steals because there is neither any agreement to repay that money, nor any intent to repay it, nor any prior agreement to the transfer itself. It is not a debt, but rather financial harm, which is separate and distinct from a debt, though financial harm could be caused by defaulting on a debt.
By saying that it is owed back to the trust fund, I am saying that it was not stolen. At such time as the federal government defaults on that debt (which would cause the government's credit rating to immediately go to zero, making future debt dramatically more expensive, which would quickly cancel out any financial benefits that they could derive from such a default), then the money would arguably be stolen.
Backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. The trust fund is not empty. Unless the federal government declares bankruptcy, that money is owed back to Social Security, period. The government borrowing the money from Social Security is no different than borrowing it from China or from the American people in the form of government bonds.
Social security is not discretionary spending, and it is not part of the federal budget. It is a separate trust fund funded by separate taxes. Even if you got rid of social security completely, unless you raise income tax, the federal budget won't be affected.
There is no reason you have to eliminate social security in order to raise the income tax rate, so the federal budget and social security are orthogonal.
Okay, so pedantically there would be a very small increase from the income tax that you would otherwise have paid on the money you paid in social security taxes, but that's such a small amount of money that it basically qualifies as noise.
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And lots of authors whose publisher contracts have expired also use POD. The notion of print runs needing to be large to be profitable are so last century.
That's pretty much what I said. unless you're equating PDF with "electronic edition", in which case you're off by a mile. eBooks are almost never distributed in PDF form because PDF doesn't reflow, and thus sucks on small screens (most eBook readers).
So for print purposes, you can readily reuse the same content. For electronic editions, you can reuse the same content, but instead of being able to design a simple PDF that works everywhere, you have to do a lot more work to create a flowing EPUB book that works everywhere.
This is not to say that folks don't ever redesign their book blocks between releases, but strictly speaking, it isn't necessary to do so unless the content changes publishers and the old publisher owned the rights to the original book block design.
Easily solved. Have a separate license plate with a much lower per-mile fee for farm vehicles that get only incidental on-road use.
For states that already have them, sure. For other states, it would be a simple line item on your tax return, and a simple reporting requirement when the vehicle is transferred. Sure, you could lie about it for a while, but eventually you'll have to sell the car or take it to the junkyard, at which point you'll get hit with a colossal tax bill.
First, most people don't regularly drive their cars outside the state and buy gasoline outside the state. So it's a small amount of effort for 99.999% of the driving public (commercial trucking excepted). They just save their gas receipts for the (statistically) one trip that they take during the summer.
Second, it's a temporary increase in paperwork. Hybrids are not the way of the future. They're a stopgap until we can come up with a better means of storing and delivering power. My solution creates a temporary and small amount of paperwork to avoid a large and permanent loss of privacy.
Yes. I think a system whereby owners are required to periodically report mileage on a piece of paper is simpler than a piece of technology that could make significant errors, resulting in very costly tax bills and lawsuits.
I also think a system in which you are charged a flat fee by the mile, regardless of where you drove, and in which tax revenue is distributed to states and localities based on their population is much, much simpler than any computer-based system, precisely because a computer-based system will invariably lead to a slippery slope in which each community demands greater and greater detail in the data, until eventually it is trying to compute how many times you drove down a particular block of a particular road so that the people who live on that road can get their fair share of the highway dollars.
This is not an advantage. Getting people to use non-main routes just results in a lot of high-speed traffic on minor roads and an increase in pedestrian accidents. If the roads can't handle peak travel, then you either need wider roads or more major roads, period.
Besides, you're never going to convince people to drive at off-peak times through something like this. There's no instantaneous feedback. You find out how much you were billed at the end of the month or the end of the year or whatever. It's not like a toll that you have to actively pay, which actually makes you think as you're driving, "Maybe I should travel at a cheaper time in the future". Psychologically speaking, it isn't likely to have any real impact at all other than making people mad about what they will view as a tax on having a 9-to-5 job.
The only real way to make roads more green is to reduce the number of stops, the amount of time spent idling, and the number of turns/curves. That process really has
GPS-based taxes are a stupid solution to a simple problem. Tax cars based on the number of miles driven. Yes, some of your miles will be spent outside your state, but other vehicles from other states will spend some of their miles in your state, so on the whole, it should roughly balance out, so long as everyone adopts the same standard. 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.
And on a more selfish note, if your state assumes that all your drivers' miles are spent in your state, then if another state near you does GPS, in the best case, you'll get extra cash when their drivers cross the line, but you won't lose money if your drivers cross the line into their state. By contrast, if you choose GPS and they choose to assume that all miles are spent in their state, you'll end up paying those other states when your drivers cross the line into those other states, but you won't get anything back from them when their drivers cross the line into yours. So from a practical perspective, a state would have to be positively stupid to willingly choose GPS unless all states universally adopted that standard simultaneously.
By contrast, the "assume all miles are spent in your state" standard is one that your state can safely adopt today. And if the vehicle is a hybrid, you could allow drivers to submit gas station receipts from other states to buy down the miles based on the fact that they already paid a gas tax in another state. No GPS is needed for that. Such a solution is by far the most sane, as it has minimal impact on gasoline-based driving, while creating a much simpler, less invasive, and more easily managed scheme for electric-based driving.
Which is why vaccination is so important for people who regularly work with small children and the elderly.
With a paper book, you prepare it once and distribute forever, too. You take the PDF that contains the book body text and you farm it out to traditional printers in various countries for large-scale distribution, or on-demand printers for small-scale distribution.
However, with print, the standards are strictly followed by the hardware manufacturers, so almost without exception, a single PDF source document can be used by dozens of different printers to precisely duplicate the book without the need to work around bugs specific to each printer. That's what makes it so much easier and cheaper to set up a book for print than for electronic distribution.
Preparing a paper book is much cheaper unless you incorrectly count manufacturing and distribution costs as part of the cost of preparing a book for publication. Well, that's not necessarily true. You can do a really bad job of preparing an electronic edition with less effort, and many publishers do. Assuming equal quality, though, the electronic edition is much harder to put together.
Yes and no.
The printing cost is nonzero, yes, but the unsold/destroyed rate is becoming less and less important over time. Even books by well-known authors are moving to a model where the publisher prints a large initial run and then does on-demand printing after that. And for new authors, publishers are often doing on-demand printing initially, then setting up a full print run only if demand warrants it.
It's still a cost that has to be amortized over the number of copies sold. The only difference is the magnitude. This, of course, also assumes that the publisher bothers to do the electronic edition right, but that's a separate issue. :-)
I'm not crazy. The LaTeX is a production-intermediate temp file format. My source format is XML. :-)
The translation to HTML isn't what makes it hard. What makes it hard is the literally dozens of reader bugs that I've found along the way. You work around a CSS handling bug on one platform and it breaks the layout on three others. The amount of interaction I've seen between the various readers' CSS bugs is just plain jaw-dropping, at a level of complexity that far exceeds anything I would ever have imagined possible, and this is coming from somebody who creates CSS for the web all the time.
You've obviously never tried to do anything even slightly interesting in EPUB. If you attempt drop caps and you want consistent rendering, you'll tear your hair out literally for months.
Here's a short list of the reader bugs that I've found personally:
I'm talking solely in the context of author-publishers, comparing apples to apples, total return from the bookseller to total return from the bookseller. How that gets divided among author and publisher is an entirely separate issue.
Put another way, yes, if you use a publishing house, you get a much lower rate on your printed books, but that's not a fair comparison because you're not going to get all of the eBook royalties if you're working with a publisher, either. You're trading per-unit percentages for volume, at least in theory. That tradeoff is largely irrelevant for the purposes of determining whether you'll make more off the eBooks or the paper books unless the publisher is giving you a significantly different cut of one versus the other, which depends entirely on your contract.
I realize that it's a big assumption that the terminator gene doesn't have any side effects, but it's no bigger an assumption than the assumption that any other genetic modification doesn't have any side effects. The terminator gene at least makes it practical to quickly stop using a variety of GMO crops if a potentially dangerous problem is discovered. Whether that problem is caused by the terminator gene or some other modified gene is largely irrelevant; it's a relatively small increase in short-term risk that results in a relatively large decrease in long-term risk.
Worse than that. Depending on the sales model, publishers may get less money from an electronic book than from a print book, even after printing costs are taken into account.
For example, with Amazon's KDP program, you either get 70% of Amazon's current price (which is not your cover price) or 35% of your cover price, at your option. If you set the price at a fairly typical $10, you get $3.50.
By contrast, with print publishing, you get anywhere from 45–80% of the cover price, depending on how you set the discount (which affects how broadly you get distributed, but it is your choice). If you assume that a typical hardcover book costs under five bucks apiece, and you set the cover price at a fairly typical $25, even at a 55% discount (you get 45%), you get $6.24.
And at a more typical small-press hardcover discount of 30%, even if you set the premium at your actual manufacturing cost plus the eBook cost ($15), you get $5.50—significantly more than you get for the electronic edition at the fixed 35% royalty rate.
So there's really no guarantee that people are making more money off of electronic versions of their book, even ignoring the much, much higher cost of designing the electronic edition in the first place. Once you factor that in, you should be glad it doesn't cost several times what the physical edition costs. :-)
Except that it's much, much easier to prepare a book for print than it is to prepare an eBook. Preparing a book for electronic publishing is a bit like designing a web page in the mid-1990s, except that there are a lot more eBook reader vendors than there were browser vendors. Each one has its own set of quirks, some of which are... shall we say rather sizable sets. A single copy of your content has to look at least acceptable when used with all of those readers.
As much as I swear about the amount of time it took to create several thousand lines of custom LaTeX macros when designing the print edition of my novels, it pales compared with the amount of time I've spent on EPUB, MOBI, and KF8 versions. It has taken at least an order of magnitude more work, and that's a conservative estimate.
In addition to working around all the reader bugs, you'll also find yourself swearing at the lack of good fonts that can legally be distributed in such an easily opened format, particularly if you are distributing your books DRM-free. A big chunk of my time has been spent taking existing SIL-licensed fonts and redesigning parts of them so that they actually look acceptable. That's a lot harder than it looks.
Finally, the tools out there for doing electronic publishing leave much to be desired, particularly when it comes to working around all the aforementioned reader bugs. The folks working with major commercial design packages are having just as much trouble as those of us who are writing our own tools from scratch—maybe even more so, given that they don't have an easy way to fix bugs in their tools.
If my time has any value, I can't foresee a future in which the electronic versions of my trilogy of novels ever break even. I'd have to clear at least a couple hundred grand. That's a heck of a lot of books at ten bucks apiece (of which the publisher gets a lot less than ten bucks). Perhaps in ten years, when the technology has improved dramatically, eBook sales will be pure profit. Today, however, except for very, very basic transfers that eschew formatting altogether, I'd imagine that most eBooks are loss leaders.
Small correction. The BSA isn't actually doing anything other than filing amicus briefs. Oracle is doing the suing. So Oracle should be spanked with a fine for bringing the lawsuit in the first place.
They're not suing. They're just filing amicus briefs.
Well, pedantically (but not legally), they are correct. There is creativity involved in designing an API. The problem is that an API is also a functional element. According to case law precedents, functional elements (e.g. chip masks) are protected only if there is more than one way to do something. By definition, it is not possible to create something that is functionally compatible with an API without copying everything that makes that API a creative work (everything but the parameter names, essentially), and therefore it cannot be protected under copyright law under any circumstances. There simply are no situations in which allowing copyright to protect API would not result in a substantial judicial overreach that dramatically expands the scope of copyright.
Put another way, an API is the software equivalent to the shape of a connector. Just as a connector is the physical interface for electrically connecting one thing to another, an API is the software interface for programmatically connecting one piece of software to another. There is no less creativity involved in the design of a connector than in the design of an API. Therefore, given that you can patent connectors, but you cannot copyright them, this lawsuit has exactly zero chance of success.
I am of the opinion that the BSA's appeal should be declared frivolous, and that they should be spanked with a hefty fine for bringing this lawsuit in the first place. That would set a strong precedent that such absurd abuse of copyright in an attempt to protect obviously non-copyrightable things will not be tolerated.
Obligatory xkcd.
I would go one step further. Assuming that the particular terminator gene doesn't have unwanted side effects, I am of the opinion that it should be mandatory, because it reduces the risk associated with genetically modified plants considerably.
When it comes to future evolution and survival of the fittest, genetically modified crops, particularly when those modifications involve resistance against weed killer, are likely to be preferentially naturally selected for. In the absence of modifications that prevent those genes from being passed on to future generations, those modified varieties will likely eventually become the dominant variety over all non-modified varieties. If in fifty or a hundred years, we discover that one of those genetic modifications causes harm, it will be an uphill battle to get our agriculture back to safe crops.
By contrast, if the genetically modified varieties contain terminator genes that make them sterile, the issue of contaminating future generations of plants ceases to be a problem. When farmers stop planting the dangerous variety, it stops growing. This, of course, assumes a completely effective terminator gene, which probably isn't likely, but even an imperfect terminator gene would help balance the odds somewhat.
Most people won't spend money that they don't have to spend. Besides, this isn't about what I do; it's about what an average person does. The issue of health effects doesn't directly affect me, because I never buy raw meat.
Not necessarily. If you're just buying meat on that trip and nothing else, then it does make a difference. If the bags had handles, you would simply not bring the reusable bags in with you at all. It at least makes it possible to avoid the cross-contamination, whereas without it, that isn't feasible.
AFAIK, you can't buy the light bags that grocery stores provide, unless you buy them by the palette. And besides, even if you could buy them in small quantities at the store, because you'd be buying them in small quantities wrapped in a box, the gasoline spent to transport all that extra packaging from the factory alone would still make it a poor environmental choice compared with getting the free bags at the grocery store.
Because the environuts who passed these laws managed simultaneously mandated a 10 cent per bag charge for paper bags, thus ensuring that everyone will use their reusable bags for everything, whether it makes sense or not. And no, the availability of the free plastic bags for fresh vegetables is not a solution. There aren't usually free bags at the meat counter, which means everything else you carry is going to get contaminated if you buy meat. And even if they have bags, those bags don't have handles, which means that you're still handling contaminated meat and then touching a reusable bag's handle.
Of course, for those of us who, prior to the ban, routinely refused bags that we didn't need and reused the plastic bags we did get as trash bags, these new laws basically amount to a flat tax on living in the affected cities. We now have to buy plastic bags to replace the bags that we used to get for free. And because the bags you buy are much heavier than the bags they replaced, these laws actually represent a net increase in petroleum consumption for me.
Plastic bag bans are pretty much net negatives, as far as I can tell. The only benefit is a reduction in litter from plastic bags blowing around, and that problem is mostly caused by garbage pickup people who don't care about all the bits they leave behind. They could have solved the same problem by driving along behind the garbage trucks for a week and fining them every time they failed to pick up trash that fell out of the cans, and our neighborhoods would have been significantly cleaner for it. Instead, they attacked the problem by punishing the users. It clearly falls on the other side of my bats**t crazy line as far as laws go, and I strongly encourage any communities thinking about such laws to reconsider.
Odd. Competition is what has resulted in us having the highest healthcare costs of any first-world nation, without significant differences in actual results compared with most of Europe. The profit motive does not result in better healthcare. It results in more expensive healthcare.
There are several reasons for this:
So the fact is that there's not useful competition in healthcare as it is. And there can't be. Healthcare falls into the category of "essential services". I can't think of anything else in that category where there has ever been any real competition, simply because the companies who provide those services know that they have you by the balls. It's the same reason most places in the country have exactly one cable provider, one telephone provider, at most two Internet providers (usually the cable company and the telephone company), etc.
Essential services all have three things in common: a relatively high barrier to entry (startup cost), substantial economies of scale and/or other benefits from consolidation, and low risk of people refusing the service because of cost (though in healthcare, there is a risk of people refusing to pay for the service, but that's a separate issue). In these areas, the trend towards consolidation, absent federal regulators stepping in and preventing it, is very strong. That's why we nearly dropped from four nationwide cellular companies to three a few months back. That's why I can think of only a handful of places in the country where you have a choice in electrical or gas providers. And so on.
That said, in practice, for the same reason that private businesses do a terrible job at providing essential services, government also does a terrible job because they have no incentive to maintain the quality of service above the bare minimum, and because they want to turn a profit that they can pump into their pet program of the week. This is why public hospitals and for-profit private hospitals are both consistently worse than nonprofit hospitals, at least in terms of mortality rate.
So what's the answer? Nonprofits. We could fix healthcare in America very, very easily. Take the VA hospital system and spin it off into a purely non-profit hospital chain. Encourage it to expand as much as possible. Then stop allowing Medicare to pay for care at for-profit hospitals. Then create a public option (government insurance program) that competes with private insurance and provides care only at nonprofit hospitals. Statistically speaking, reducing or eliminating for-profit hospitals and converting government hospitals into standalone nonprofits would significantly improve healthcare in the U.S., both in terms of patient mortality rates and cost.
Uh, no. Stolen connotes lack of permission to take something, generally with no intent to give it back.
One owes money that one borrows, or owes money in return for a non-monetary item that one borrows or buys or for a service rendered. Owing implies a debt, which implies a prior agreement by both parties.
By contrast, one does not owe money that one steals because there is neither any agreement to repay that money, nor any intent to repay it, nor any prior agreement to the transfer itself. It is not a debt, but rather financial harm, which is separate and distinct from a debt, though financial harm could be caused by defaulting on a debt.
By saying that it is owed back to the trust fund, I am saying that it was not stolen. At such time as the federal government defaults on that debt (which would cause the government's credit rating to immediately go to zero, making future debt dramatically more expensive, which would quickly cancel out any financial benefits that they could derive from such a default), then the money would arguably be stolen.
Backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. The trust fund is not empty. Unless the federal government declares bankruptcy, that money is owed back to Social Security, period. The government borrowing the money from Social Security is no different than borrowing it from China or from the American people in the form of government bonds.
Already did.
Social security is not discretionary spending, and it is not part of the federal budget. It is a separate trust fund funded by separate taxes. Even if you got rid of social security completely, unless you raise income tax, the federal budget won't be affected.
There is no reason you have to eliminate social security in order to raise the income tax rate, so the federal budget and social security are orthogonal.
Okay, so pedantically there would be a very small increase from the income tax that you would otherwise have paid on the money you paid in social security taxes, but that's such a small amount of money that it basically qualifies as noise.