I've seen a different outcome for a similar scenario. A friend of mine was driving a moving truck and while trying to make a tight turn clipped a car that was illegally parked (too close to the intersection). The owner of the car chased her down and insisted on calling the police, but they gave *him* the ticket for being illegally parked (plus a second for some other issue, like expired insurance or plates or something) but didn't fault my friend at all. This was Chicago, though, where police enforcement never makes any sense, so that may be it.
So you're saying people who fund and drive criminal activity but don't directly get their hands dirty are just fine.
You have no problem with someone ordering a murder? Just the person who actually does it?
Owning a mutual fund is now equivalent to ordering a murder? Man, gotta love slashdot logic.
On the one hand, I would be the first to ridicule how I looked in grade school, and I'd say a large majority of people feel the same way about their own childhood, but ridiculing the current job is just kind of silly.
They don't have to be. I showed up, enjoyed talking to a few old friends I'd fallen out of touch with, talked to a few people who I didn't remember at all but it was still kind of interesting essentially meeting them for the first time, and spent most of the evening hanging out with three very close friends who I rarely get to see because they're 2000 miles away, and we all just used the reunion as an excuse to be in the same place at the same time.
It's true. Relatives who, for example, want to see lots of pictures of my newborn need to be on Facebook, where I can post once and they can all get an update every couple of weeks, at most. The few holdouts who don't use FB get an email maybe once a quarter if I think about it and a picture with the holiday card. It's more convenient for me to post once, and for those who use it they can track a lot of family members at the same time, and forget the whole email/text/mail/etc. stuff. Not saying it's perfect, but it's certainly the reality in my family.
Main benefit: being able to actually recognize people. Between the weight gain and the hair loss, I spent hours at my 10-year reunion talking to a few people I didn't even remember, and nearly passed up one dear old friend who was 8 months pregnant and didn't look anything like what I remembered. I'm sure later reunions will only be worse.
Plus, there's some nice conversation starters. Like: "so, you're the guy who's completely obsessed with every *-ville game?" or "what are you, up to ten kids now?"
Nah, I've got a pretty well developed sense of awe and wonder, believe it or not. Definitely doesn't come from Christmas carols. I think they stick in my head because 1) they were a required part of childhood music class, 2) they're often pretty simple, and 3) they're played nonstop in public for about a month and a half every year. That's a lot of reinforcement.
I don't really get the rest of the stuff you were saying. The sarcasm doesn't speak to me, and "if you're not being tortured there's you've got no reason to talk about ways to improve other things" is a poor philosophy.
You will note that the constitution guarantees "Freedom OF religion", rather than "Freedom FROM religion".
I see this all the time. You try enjoying your religion with someone else's being shoved in your face. Not only all over the place by regular people, but also from the government itself. It doesn't work very well.
As just one fairly random example, I was both amused and kind of scandalized to discover that while trying to sing my newborn daughter to sleep, my sleep-deprived and musically unfit brain couldn't come up with anything but Christmas songs. I'm not Christian, but as a product of this country apparently the only songs I have memorized well enough to sing to anyone else (not counting Happy Birthday) are all Christmas songs. I don't even know how that's possible.
Now, I pretty happily accept Christmas as a secular holiday and gladly trade Christmas presents with the people around me, but the extent to which the US is completely sopping with Christian culture is totally at odds with the perception that activist Christians have -- a request for breathing room from someone of another faith is often interpreted as an attack on Christianity, and I've got to say I'm far more sympathetic with the former interpretation than the latter.
Prudes, too. So much of what's in the old testament is about what those other people were doing that the Jews found unacceptable. On a regular basis I'm disappointed that the world wasn't taken over by a sect of Baal worshippers instead. Those people really knew how to make religious activities fun!
The FHFA (pronounced fuh-fuh) society totally agrees with you, but nobody else respects them because they can't get past laughing at the "fuh-fuh" sound.
I didn't say *that* one was unintelligible. I said I've had some that are unintelligible, and I truly have. The given example was just useless. I couldn't reproduce one of the unintelligible ones from memory, because it's difficult to remember something unintelligible.
I don't think you understand the scope of how bad bug reports can get. I've had some that are unintelligible. For instance one (and this was just a copy edit) where the entirety of the message was:
you've got a place where it should be "an" but it says "the"
No amount of understanding the user will allow me to figure out what the hell they're talking about, other than their giving me the context in which to find the line of text.
Ha ha! In my case I'm in rural Colorado, actually, where we still have bears and mountain lions which often aren't a direct threat to people, but which do cause a little trouble now and then. A co-worker has had a bear in his house, one of my wife's co-workers has pictures of a mountain lion resting in her back yard about a foot from the house.
The black widow spiders don't compare to anything in Australia, but they've occasionally gotten into our house, so I'm often looking out for them, and while I've never seen one there are rattlesnakes in the neighborhood, too.
I'd argue that taking stock of the new room is the biggest of those distractors. There's a lot involved when you have to take stock of "new" territory, and it'd be pretty easy for that to distract you. Even if you're familiar with the room, it takes a moment to verify things are as you left them. We're not all that far removed from needing to figure out if there's something waiting to eat us around every corner.
I think you two are talking about slightly different things. A new species, for instance, most certainly can only be proved to exist, and never to not exist. Theories, on the other hand, can only be falsified or "determined to agree in this instance" but not ever proved.
Publishers pushed editing off onto agents and writers years ago, proofreading costs about $100 even if you hire someone to do it rather than spend a few evenings doing it yourself...
This isn't true in my experience. I used to freelance copy edit/proofread, and it paid $20/hour, which for most books was between $600 and $1000 by the time I was done. And that was after one, two, or sometimes three editors (if there was a subject matter expert) had worked it over, in addition to the author. This is for nonfiction -- maybe the fiction market is different.
1) Editing. Writers cannot edit. If they could edit they would be editors. If they could do ANYTHING else they would do it.
Close, but not quite. I can write. I can edit. I cannot edit my own writing, and I think that's the case for almost everyone. It's not that they don't have the skills, it's that they can't get the right perspective on their own work.
I agree, and this isn't a small point at all. I don't think anyone knows yet how all those other costly features will be covered - it's a huge investment for an author and will be very inconsistently applied if that becomes the norm, but it doesn't get us anywhere interesting if we fall back on the same old (or maybe some new but still traditional) publishing houses. And you rightly note a very key point that removing the cost of printing barrier is only being replaced with the obstacle of being found amidst an increasingly large sea of self-published works of dubious quality -- basically marketing, but on perhaps a slightly different level. It would be a real waste if it becomes a requirement that every author is required to become a search engine optimization expert and marketing whiz, just to get their book out there.
I'm still hoping for a world where there's a better option than the two scenarios you lay out: neither author pays nor traditional publishing house are really satisfying to me, but I don't really know exactly what that other option would look like. I'm fairly sure the only possible way of finding decent electronic-only books is going to require the internet - search functions and crowdsourcing to get decent reviews of books, recommendation tools to correlate your interests (and tolerance or lack therof for really crappy editing, say) with available options. Maybe Amazon will just end up doing this by default, but I think there ought to be room for a dedicated community or communities to really focus on the "how do I find something good to read?" problem without being one of the mega-corps. If they can get that far, they may be able to assist with some of the other key issues. Illustration may not be all that necessary for most e-books, but editing most certainly is. It's probably not too hard, in the context of a community like that, to find volunteer proofreaders who would go over a free early edition of the book and catch most of the typos and bad grammar, but I don't have any idea how you'd get the services of a more serious editor without someone coughing up the cash, if that's what is really needed.
The other possible option I see is places that specialize in "assisted self publishing" which helps provide a small stamp of quality to the work, and thus will eventually be recognized enough to help it stand out from the messes created by a lot of totally lone wolf self publishers. Problem is I think trying to hit that spot is going to lead down a slippery slope, either back to the traditional model where the publisher takes some financial risk themselves and demands a big portion of the reward, or the author has to pay for everything anyway and it's not much different than what they face now.
This gets stated in every discussion about publishing, and it is always refuted. You do not need to pay the advance back. Why do people feel the need to keep saying this over and over?
Ah, so I think we're almost on the same page. It appears you're assuming people *should* keep their personal religion personal, in which case I agree with you entirely that whatever crazy ol' belief they have is perfectly fine by me (barring some child abuse, etc.). From my slightly more practical approach that people often don't keep personal religion personal, and tend to let it overflow into their politics and other aspects of how they treat others, it definitely can be a problem, and then I do consider it my business to push back some in self defense.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen a different outcome for a similar scenario. A friend of mine was driving a moving truck and while trying to make a tight turn clipped a car that was illegally parked (too close to the intersection). The owner of the car chased her down and insisted on calling the police, but they gave *him* the ticket for being illegally parked (plus a second for some other issue, like expired insurance or plates or something) but didn't fault my friend at all. This was Chicago, though, where police enforcement never makes any sense, so that may be it.
So you're saying people who fund and drive criminal activity but don't directly get their hands dirty are just fine. You have no problem with someone ordering a murder? Just the person who actually does it?
Owning a mutual fund is now equivalent to ordering a murder? Man, gotta love slashdot logic.
On the one hand, I would be the first to ridicule how I looked in grade school, and I'd say a large majority of people feel the same way about their own childhood, but ridiculing the current job is just kind of silly.
They don't have to be. I showed up, enjoyed talking to a few old friends I'd fallen out of touch with, talked to a few people who I didn't remember at all but it was still kind of interesting essentially meeting them for the first time, and spent most of the evening hanging out with three very close friends who I rarely get to see because they're 2000 miles away, and we all just used the reunion as an excuse to be in the same place at the same time.
It's true. Relatives who, for example, want to see lots of pictures of my newborn need to be on Facebook, where I can post once and they can all get an update every couple of weeks, at most. The few holdouts who don't use FB get an email maybe once a quarter if I think about it and a picture with the holiday card. It's more convenient for me to post once, and for those who use it they can track a lot of family members at the same time, and forget the whole email/text/mail/etc. stuff. Not saying it's perfect, but it's certainly the reality in my family.
Main benefit: being able to actually recognize people. Between the weight gain and the hair loss, I spent hours at my 10-year reunion talking to a few people I didn't even remember, and nearly passed up one dear old friend who was 8 months pregnant and didn't look anything like what I remembered. I'm sure later reunions will only be worse.
Plus, there's some nice conversation starters. Like: "so, you're the guy who's completely obsessed with every *-ville game?" or "what are you, up to ten kids now?"
Nah, I've got a pretty well developed sense of awe and wonder, believe it or not. Definitely doesn't come from Christmas carols. I think they stick in my head because 1) they were a required part of childhood music class, 2) they're often pretty simple, and 3) they're played nonstop in public for about a month and a half every year. That's a lot of reinforcement.
I don't really get the rest of the stuff you were saying. The sarcasm doesn't speak to me, and "if you're not being tortured there's you've got no reason to talk about ways to improve other things" is a poor philosophy.
You will note that the constitution guarantees "Freedom OF religion", rather than "Freedom FROM religion".
I see this all the time. You try enjoying your religion with someone else's being shoved in your face. Not only all over the place by regular people, but also from the government itself. It doesn't work very well.
As just one fairly random example, I was both amused and kind of scandalized to discover that while trying to sing my newborn daughter to sleep, my sleep-deprived and musically unfit brain couldn't come up with anything but Christmas songs. I'm not Christian, but as a product of this country apparently the only songs I have memorized well enough to sing to anyone else (not counting Happy Birthday) are all Christmas songs. I don't even know how that's possible.
Now, I pretty happily accept Christmas as a secular holiday and gladly trade Christmas presents with the people around me, but the extent to which the US is completely sopping with Christian culture is totally at odds with the perception that activist Christians have -- a request for breathing room from someone of another faith is often interpreted as an attack on Christianity, and I've got to say I'm far more sympathetic with the former interpretation than the latter.
Prudes, too. So much of what's in the old testament is about what those other people were doing that the Jews found unacceptable. On a regular basis I'm disappointed that the world wasn't taken over by a sect of Baal worshippers instead. Those people really knew how to make religious activities fun!
Man, I wish I had mod points. This sums up the entire issue quite nicely.
Every decade may be reasonable. Every two years is probably overkill. But refreshers are definitely in order.
The FHFA (pronounced fuh-fuh) society totally agrees with you, but nobody else respects them because they can't get past laughing at the "fuh-fuh" sound.
But can we prove he wouldn't have made more profit with DRM?
I didn't say *that* one was unintelligible. I said I've had some that are unintelligible, and I truly have. The given example was just useless. I couldn't reproduce one of the unintelligible ones from memory, because it's difficult to remember something unintelligible.
you've got a place where it should be "an" but it says "the"
No amount of understanding the user will allow me to figure out what the hell they're talking about, other than their giving me the context in which to find the line of text.
Ha ha! In my case I'm in rural Colorado, actually, where we still have bears and mountain lions which often aren't a direct threat to people, but which do cause a little trouble now and then. A co-worker has had a bear in his house, one of my wife's co-workers has pictures of a mountain lion resting in her back yard about a foot from the house.
The black widow spiders don't compare to anything in Australia, but they've occasionally gotten into our house, so I'm often looking out for them, and while I've never seen one there are rattlesnakes in the neighborhood, too.
I'd argue that taking stock of the new room is the biggest of those distractors. There's a lot involved when you have to take stock of "new" territory, and it'd be pretty easy for that to distract you. Even if you're familiar with the room, it takes a moment to verify things are as you left them. We're not all that far removed from needing to figure out if there's something waiting to eat us around every corner.
I think you two are talking about slightly different things. A new species, for instance, most certainly can only be proved to exist, and never to not exist. Theories, on the other hand, can only be falsified or "determined to agree in this instance" but not ever proved.
Does that get adjusted annually for inflation?
Publishers pushed editing off onto agents and writers years ago, proofreading costs about $100 even if you hire someone to do it rather than spend a few evenings doing it yourself ...
This isn't true in my experience. I used to freelance copy edit/proofread, and it paid $20/hour, which for most books was between $600 and $1000 by the time I was done. And that was after one, two, or sometimes three editors (if there was a subject matter expert) had worked it over, in addition to the author. This is for nonfiction -- maybe the fiction market is different.
1) Editing. Writers cannot edit. If they could edit they would be editors. If they could do ANYTHING else they would do it.
Close, but not quite. I can write. I can edit. I cannot edit my own writing, and I think that's the case for almost everyone. It's not that they don't have the skills, it's that they can't get the right perspective on their own work.
I agree, and this isn't a small point at all. I don't think anyone knows yet how all those other costly features will be covered - it's a huge investment for an author and will be very inconsistently applied if that becomes the norm, but it doesn't get us anywhere interesting if we fall back on the same old (or maybe some new but still traditional) publishing houses. And you rightly note a very key point that removing the cost of printing barrier is only being replaced with the obstacle of being found amidst an increasingly large sea of self-published works of dubious quality -- basically marketing, but on perhaps a slightly different level. It would be a real waste if it becomes a requirement that every author is required to become a search engine optimization expert and marketing whiz, just to get their book out there.
I'm still hoping for a world where there's a better option than the two scenarios you lay out: neither author pays nor traditional publishing house are really satisfying to me, but I don't really know exactly what that other option would look like. I'm fairly sure the only possible way of finding decent electronic-only books is going to require the internet - search functions and crowdsourcing to get decent reviews of books, recommendation tools to correlate your interests (and tolerance or lack therof for really crappy editing, say) with available options. Maybe Amazon will just end up doing this by default, but I think there ought to be room for a dedicated community or communities to really focus on the "how do I find something good to read?" problem without being one of the mega-corps. If they can get that far, they may be able to assist with some of the other key issues. Illustration may not be all that necessary for most e-books, but editing most certainly is. It's probably not too hard, in the context of a community like that, to find volunteer proofreaders who would go over a free early edition of the book and catch most of the typos and bad grammar, but I don't have any idea how you'd get the services of a more serious editor without someone coughing up the cash, if that's what is really needed.
The other possible option I see is places that specialize in "assisted self publishing" which helps provide a small stamp of quality to the work, and thus will eventually be recognized enough to help it stand out from the messes created by a lot of totally lone wolf self publishers. Problem is I think trying to hit that spot is going to lead down a slippery slope, either back to the traditional model where the publisher takes some financial risk themselves and demands a big portion of the reward, or the author has to pay for everything anyway and it's not much different than what they face now.
This gets stated in every discussion about publishing, and it is always refuted. You do not need to pay the advance back. Why do people feel the need to keep saying this over and over?
You either don't have kids, or you do laundry every single day.
Ah, so I think we're almost on the same page. It appears you're assuming people *should* keep their personal religion personal, in which case I agree with you entirely that whatever crazy ol' belief they have is perfectly fine by me (barring some child abuse, etc.). From my slightly more practical approach that people often don't keep personal religion personal, and tend to let it overflow into their politics and other aspects of how they treat others, it definitely can be a problem, and then I do consider it my business to push back some in self defense.