Interesting. So what is the usual percentage the authors net? Is it something like 1 or 2%, or is it something like 15%? Typically in retail the distributor ends up with 20-30% of the final cost, and the retailer nets another 20-40%, but publishers may do their own distributing, or own the distributor as a subsidiary. Of course in ebooks, Amazon is the distributor and retailer...
Mostly we're waiting on the price of e-ink tech to come down to commodity prices. Right now there's only one (two?) producers and the price remains high because they're having to pay down their R&D costs from the last 20 years, plus the fact that they have a monopoly on the technology. Eventually an A4/Letter sized sheet of e-ink, plus it's controller will only cost $99-120. At that point it'll become useful again and you'll see people like me buying them so they can get the NYT and WSJ subscriptions on them. I almost picked up a $500 Kindle DX + NYT subscription, but then the economy collapsed.
I agree with you, most people aren't interested in buying and reading books electronically. I buy all my books at Half Priced Books because there's more "classics" written in the last 20 years than I will ever have time to read in my lifetime. But people can read the news more quickly and easily on an e-reader and I think ultimately that is where the e-reader market is headed. E-textbooks and E-novels are only small slices of the e-reader market in the long run.
My concern is for the authors - they are going to get screwed.
I keep reading this everywhere. How are author's contracts structured? I thought unless they sell more than a million copies, they only get a royalty of $1.00 or so off each book - a flat rate. Can you explain how Author contracts are structured, and how the retailer's final sale price is affecting the author's bottom line? Most authors who can sell a million copies of any book they write (Tom Clancy owns a baseball team (Oriels, I think), and almost bought the Vikings (Football Team) at one point, Steven King isn't too far behind him) are already fabulously wealthy, and it's not like they need additional money.
DOOM was a good game but it wasn't ground breaking in the same way that Quake was a few years later. It was the first FPS to do real 3D, and gave birth to real FPS competitive play, based on the groundwork that DOOM did with FPS LAN play. Aside from that, the Quake engine led to all sorts of interesting gamemodes and mods that live with us still (Team Fortress was originally a Quake mod), and the physics of Quake 1 still has a legacy today (rocket jumping, bunny hopping).
You sir, have a career in video game blogging! Let me sign you up for a 3000 word "Top 10 Groundbreaking games of the 1990s" blog entry.
It might be a little hard to make out individual "pixels" of video when your display's pixel pitch already is more than 0.7mm. To use an old term in reverse, it's hard to see a tree from the forest satellite photo. It would probably be easier to see on a display in the 22-35" range, where the pixel pitch is about half that (or less).
Admins DO know better. They also know if a malicious worm comes through for IE, they can just go "yeah blame microsoft". If a malicious worm comes through for Firefox, after the admin switches the district to FF on the premise that it's safer, the admin has to start looking for a new job. It hasn't happened yet, but as the old (modified) addage goes, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
I'm using it on my netbook, desktop and work. The main problem I have with it is the lack of proper bookmark management. I only have two or three bookmarks I need to access, but I don't want to waste the screen space of a full bookmarks bar to use them. Thoughts/Ideas? Leaving the bookmark manager open seems like a bit of a kludge. I wish it would open bookmarks in a new tab when clicked on from the bookmark manager.
Lowering the level of grammar does have some uses. Traveling through south america, I spoke little/no spanish, so I ended up dragging my english speaking grammar/vocabulary down to their level to communicate, removing "phrasical verbs" and words that don't have a latin root. By the end of four weeks I was replacing english words with spanish here and there, and by the end of my time down there I was able to speak almost as well in their language (with bad grammar) as they were in mine. I'm sure as my spanish improves, so will my spoken grammar in that language.
That said, unless they're using community colleges in that sample, I don't see how that's completely accurate. You have to submit an essay to basically every school, and it's difficult if not impossible to pass english for twelve consecutive years without being forced to learn and use some grammar. In community college I saw a lot of teachers recommending students to grammar tutors or giving them second/third chances at rewriting their papers due to the grammar.
I'm curious what the cost of electricity has to be to maintain an industry standard profit margin on an average windmill - once it's paid off. I mean there's maintenance and eventually you're going to have to repaint the thing, replace the generator etc, but what's the lifespan on the actual structure? Once you've paid off the farmer for the land usage rights, it's built, and you pay it off (in what, 20 years?) the paint, new generator(s) have got to be peanuts compared to what the initial installation cost. I'm guessing they'll be able to sell electricity at $0.04/kw hr and still make a healthy profit margin off of the thing. Electricity in TX costs between 9 and 18 cents per kw hour so in 20 years you're making between a 50 and 450% profit on those windmills, even after maintenance.
Short term, windmills suck, are expensive and a pain in the ass to get on the grid. Long term, they're geese that lay golden eggs. And wind generator technology will only get better as time goes on, improving profitability.
My question is, once we all own 3D, high def TVs, where do manufacturers go from there? 24" displays with HDMI/DVI in are already in the $120 range (NEW - see newegg), the 30" used market is about to become flooded in the next 2-3 years driving prices down to $100-180. People will continue to buy 40" HDTVs but anyone who works at subway or starbucks can afford or has already bought one. I guess 40" displays break and wear out, but HDTV sales are either going to level out or drop off a very steep cliff in the next 2-3 years.
Why wouldn't you use something in the visible spectrum? It seems that red lasers would work equally well. red lasers are insanely cheap (petco: $2.99, probably $0.30 in bulk). There's not really anything stopping someone from developing this sort of thing using red lasers and some sort of receiving eye. It's already been proven that you could intercept someone's network information by reading the data off of someone's network card TX LED. I don't know about the lifespan of 5w green lasers, but I bet homebrewers could develop some sort of 10 mile point to point link at night no problem.
just pull up "studies and projects->current/completed" and do a ctrl+f for sex or women. I don't know if a veterans affairs report counts as a DoD report but I'm guessing it's pretty close authority wise. I'm just showing you my sources, if those numbers bother you, and you find discrepancies between what the reports say and what the BBC/NPR published, you might want to contact them about publishing retractions because a lot of people are sourcing that as fact.
According to several studies of the US military funded by the Department of Veteran Affairs, 30% of military women are raped while serving, 71% are sexually assaulted, and 90% are sexually harassed. The Department of Defense acknowledges the problem, estimating in its 2009 annual report on sexual assault (issued last month) that some 90% of military sexual assaults are never reported.
No, I mean, enemy casualties reported by the US military tend to be much higher than the enemy records, and vice versa. Why would they even bother recording (or at least announcing to the public) such embarrassing information? It's not good for morale, and it doesn't improve the image of the US Military as "the most powerful military in the world". From the shocking number of rape cases that don't go reported or prosecuted in the military, it's not surprising that there's no official record of something like that not going on the record, especially since something like that is going to actually affect their bottom line (defense funding).
400 billion dollars for a fighter (F-22, F-35...each) program seems like an awful lot of money to kill one guy every 10 years. Prior to Serbia it was desert storm, in 1991 right? From reading Wikipedia it looks like almost a quarter of the US's F-14s were destroyed in flight accidents. I guess it's just that it's been a long time since we had an honest to god war, but even though "every life is priceless"... $400 billion dollars is approaching the upper limit of "priceless" in my mind. The lifetime tax contribution of everyone on slashdot probably doesn't even come close to 1 billion dollars, and millionares like John Carmack post here. Wouldn't we just be a lot better off building better surface to air missiles?
Clearly you never played against "Ace" level pilots in the original DOS Tie-Fighter game!
Let alone Ace-5 level AI pilots in X-Wing vs. TIE fighter in 2001.
I'll admit I don't have military level fighter training, but neither do the guys writing the AI for these games. For all intents and purposes these things have plenty enough thrust to counteract gravity; you just point and go. Keep the altitude above 500ft and you're good to go. The AI from Xwing v Tie Fighter is probably better than the flight training Iranian or Pakistani pilots get anyways.
Basically 100% of your federal income taxes go to welfare projects. Corporate fees/taxes, customs, import taxes, gas taxes and state taxes pay for everything else. As someone else said, roughly 50% of all taxed money in the US goes towards welfare in some way or form.
The longer the "boomers" are in the workforce, the longer it takes for my generation to begin to approach the buying power boomers already had by the time they were my age. Most everyone I know (with a 4 year degree) lives in an apartment and drives a used car. Of all my friends only two of them were able to buy their own house before 25 and all of them still drive used cars to maintain their current lifestyle.
More like the lean year. Assuming each journalist, manager, and janitor is paid $30,000 + $20,000 for health insurance, 401k, employers SS contribution etc, you can employ 80 people for one year. Or 20 people for four years, which is probably how long this economic slump is going to continue for. At which point you can just pay those 20 people to visit each subscriber's house personally and tell them about the day's news.
I'm not too sure about that. You're probably aware of new brands, or new products from existing brands than someone who watches no TV. The first 1-2 seconds are enough to get it to stick in your head, and then you end up recognizing the brand in the store (even if you don't buy it that time around). I on the other hand, don't watch TV or read magazines and end up going "hunh?" when people mention "the new star trek movie" (which apparently came out last april) or "so are you going to buy bioshock 2?" to which I respond, "they're making a sequel?". Advertising works, regardless of how long you are exposed to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. So what is the usual percentage the authors net? Is it something like 1 or 2%, or is it something like 15%? Typically in retail the distributor ends up with 20-30% of the final cost, and the retailer nets another 20-40%, but publishers may do their own distributing, or own the distributor as a subsidiary. Of course in ebooks, Amazon is the distributor and retailer...
Mostly we're waiting on the price of e-ink tech to come down to commodity prices. Right now there's only one (two?) producers and the price remains high because they're having to pay down their R&D costs from the last 20 years, plus the fact that they have a monopoly on the technology. Eventually an A4/Letter sized sheet of e-ink, plus it's controller will only cost $99-120. At that point it'll become useful again and you'll see people like me buying them so they can get the NYT and WSJ subscriptions on them. I almost picked up a $500 Kindle DX + NYT subscription, but then the economy collapsed.
I agree with you, most people aren't interested in buying and reading books electronically. I buy all my books at Half Priced Books because there's more "classics" written in the last 20 years than I will ever have time to read in my lifetime. But people can read the news more quickly and easily on an e-reader and I think ultimately that is where the e-reader market is headed. E-textbooks and E-novels are only small slices of the e-reader market in the long run.
I keep reading this everywhere. How are author's contracts structured? I thought unless they sell more than a million copies, they only get a royalty of $1.00 or so off each book - a flat rate. Can you explain how Author contracts are structured, and how the retailer's final sale price is affecting the author's bottom line? Most authors who can sell a million copies of any book they write (Tom Clancy owns a baseball team (Oriels, I think), and almost bought the Vikings (Football Team) at one point, Steven King isn't too far behind him) are already fabulously wealthy, and it's not like they need additional money.
You sir, have a career in video game blogging! Let me sign you up for a 3000 word "Top 10 Groundbreaking games of the 1990s" blog entry.
It might be a little hard to make out individual "pixels" of video when your display's pixel pitch already is more than 0.7mm. To use an old term in reverse, it's hard to see a tree from the forest satellite photo. It would probably be easier to see on a display in the 22-35" range, where the pixel pitch is about half that (or less).
Admins DO know better. They also know if a malicious worm comes through for IE, they can just go "yeah blame microsoft". If a malicious worm comes through for Firefox, after the admin switches the district to FF on the premise that it's safer, the admin has to start looking for a new job. It hasn't happened yet, but as the old (modified) addage goes, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
I'm using it on my netbook, desktop and work. The main problem I have with it is the lack of proper bookmark management. I only have two or three bookmarks I need to access, but I don't want to waste the screen space of a full bookmarks bar to use them. Thoughts/Ideas? Leaving the bookmark manager open seems like a bit of a kludge. I wish it would open bookmarks in a new tab when clicked on from the bookmark manager.
Lowering the level of grammar does have some uses. Traveling through south america, I spoke little/no spanish, so I ended up dragging my english speaking grammar/vocabulary down to their level to communicate, removing "phrasical verbs" and words that don't have a latin root. By the end of four weeks I was replacing english words with spanish here and there, and by the end of my time down there I was able to speak almost as well in their language (with bad grammar) as they were in mine. I'm sure as my spanish improves, so will my spoken grammar in that language.
That said, unless they're using community colleges in that sample, I don't see how that's completely accurate. You have to submit an essay to basically every school, and it's difficult if not impossible to pass english for twelve consecutive years without being forced to learn and use some grammar. In community college I saw a lot of teachers recommending students to grammar tutors or giving them second/third chances at rewriting their papers due to the grammar.
I'm curious what the cost of electricity has to be to maintain an industry standard profit margin on an average windmill - once it's paid off. I mean there's maintenance and eventually you're going to have to repaint the thing, replace the generator etc, but what's the lifespan on the actual structure? Once you've paid off the farmer for the land usage rights, it's built, and you pay it off (in what, 20 years?) the paint, new generator(s) have got to be peanuts compared to what the initial installation cost. I'm guessing they'll be able to sell electricity at $0.04/kw hr and still make a healthy profit margin off of the thing. Electricity in TX costs between 9 and 18 cents per kw hour so in 20 years you're making between a 50 and 450% profit on those windmills, even after maintenance.
Short term, windmills suck, are expensive and a pain in the ass to get on the grid. Long term, they're geese that lay golden eggs. And wind generator technology will only get better as time goes on, improving profitability.
My question is, once we all own 3D, high def TVs, where do manufacturers go from there? 24" displays with HDMI/DVI in are already in the $120 range (NEW - see newegg), the 30" used market is about to become flooded in the next 2-3 years driving prices down to $100-180. People will continue to buy 40" HDTVs but anyone who works at subway or starbucks can afford or has already bought one. I guess 40" displays break and wear out, but HDTV sales are either going to level out or drop off a very steep cliff in the next 2-3 years.
Why wouldn't you use something in the visible spectrum? It seems that red lasers would work equally well. red lasers are insanely cheap (petco: $2.99, probably $0.30 in bulk). There's not really anything stopping someone from developing this sort of thing using red lasers and some sort of receiving eye. It's already been proven that you could intercept someone's network information by reading the data off of someone's network card TX LED. I don't know about the lifespan of 5w green lasers, but I bet homebrewers could develop some sort of 10 mile point to point link at night no problem.
I googled "" and came up with this as the first result
http://www.research.va.gov/news/research_highlights/sexual_trauma-111808.cfm
heres another: http://www.hsrd.research.va.gov/research/abstracts.cfm?Project_ID=2141696682
heres one that says "Women reported much higher rates of sexual harrassment (79.8%) and assualt (15.5%) than men" http://www.hsrd.research.va.gov/research/abstracts.cfm?Project_ID=909438600
just pull up "studies and projects->current/completed" and do a ctrl+f for sex or women. I don't know if a veterans affairs report counts as a DoD report but I'm guessing it's pretty close authority wise. I'm just showing you my sources, if those numbers bother you, and you find discrepancies between what the reports say and what the BBC/NPR published, you might want to contact them about publishing retractions because a lot of people are sourcing that as fact.
400 billion dollars for a fighter (F-22, F-35...each) program
re: statistics
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8005198.stm
No, I mean, enemy casualties reported by the US military tend to be much higher than the enemy records, and vice versa. Why would they even bother recording (or at least announcing to the public) such embarrassing information? It's not good for morale, and it doesn't improve the image of the US Military as "the most powerful military in the world". From the shocking number of rape cases that don't go reported or prosecuted in the military, it's not surprising that there's no official record of something like that not going on the record, especially since something like that is going to actually affect their bottom line (defense funding).
400 billion dollars for a fighter (F-22, F-35...each) program seems like an awful lot of money to kill one guy every 10 years. Prior to Serbia it was desert storm, in 1991 right? From reading Wikipedia it looks like almost a quarter of the US's F-14s were destroyed in flight accidents. I guess it's just that it's been a long time since we had an honest to god war, but even though "every life is priceless"... $400 billion dollars is approaching the upper limit of "priceless" in my mind. The lifetime tax contribution of everyone on slashdot probably doesn't even come close to 1 billion dollars, and millionares like John Carmack post here. Wouldn't we just be a lot better off building better surface to air missiles?
Clearly you never played against "Ace" level pilots in the original DOS Tie-Fighter game!
Let alone Ace-5 level AI pilots in X-Wing vs. TIE fighter in 2001.
I'll admit I don't have military level fighter training, but neither do the guys writing the AI for these games. For all intents and purposes these things have plenty enough thrust to counteract gravity; you just point and go. Keep the altitude above 500ft and you're good to go. The AI from Xwing v Tie Fighter is probably better than the flight training Iranian or Pakistani pilots get anyways.
US Military documentation has a reputation of being, uh, US-centric. The winners write the history books, and all that.
Basically 100% of your federal income taxes go to welfare projects. Corporate fees/taxes, customs, import taxes, gas taxes and state taxes pay for everything else. As someone else said, roughly 50% of all taxed money in the US goes towards welfare in some way or form.
The longer the "boomers" are in the workforce, the longer it takes for my generation to begin to approach the buying power boomers already had by the time they were my age. Most everyone I know (with a 4 year degree) lives in an apartment and drives a used car. Of all my friends only two of them were able to buy their own house before 25 and all of them still drive used cars to maintain their current lifestyle.
More like the lean year. Assuming each journalist, manager, and janitor is paid $30,000 + $20,000 for health insurance, 401k, employers SS contribution etc, you can employ 80 people for one year. Or 20 people for four years, which is probably how long this economic slump is going to continue for. At which point you can just pay those 20 people to visit each subscriber's house personally and tell them about the day's news.
I'm not too sure about that. You're probably aware of new brands, or new products from existing brands than someone who watches no TV. The first 1-2 seconds are enough to get it to stick in your head, and then you end up recognizing the brand in the store (even if you don't buy it that time around). I on the other hand, don't watch TV or read magazines and end up going "hunh?" when people mention "the new star trek movie" (which apparently came out last april) or "so are you going to buy bioshock 2?" to which I respond, "they're making a sequel?". Advertising works, regardless of how long you are exposed to it.
I think the PSX also didn't have dedicated hardware for 2D applications, so games like Marvel vs. Capcom ran particularly bad.
aka "divorce mode". this term has become very popular with my friends. i think penny arcade originated it however
So long as you have a federal level budget to pay for them