Excellent point. The Prize Committee doesn't tell who the nominated parties are until 50 years, according to the first link in the summary. I could nominate my toothbrush, and post about it, and it'd be as a legitimate a story as this one.
Hey, this might actually save our asses. After all, Skynet won't want to look like an ungrateful hypocrite after getting a Peace Prize. So, instead of killing us all, we'll simply be confined to our homes!
In addition to fewer scattering events, I believe the energy required to affect the electron bonds on graphene is less than on silicon, so you reach the energy level faster, so you move the electron along faster.
...nooo... I'm pretty sure on my VHS copy you see Han shoot Greedo, and Greedo's body flops unconvincingly (obviously no body in the suit) on to the table top.
The police have to pay for the storage. Since the amount of online data is constantly increasing, I figure having to lay out funds for that many terrabytes of storage should bankrupt them, and then they can focus on doing the job they *should* be doing (picking up garbage), instead of the one they *want* to be doing (invading privacy without probable cause).
Restrict government to its constitutional duties, and suddenly these corporations have no reason to care what's going on in DC.
And that's where you'd get most of the argument coming from. What would qualify as a constitutional duty? As the world changes, should those duties change as well? Should they be explicitly demarcated, or loosely interpreted?
You've presented what seems like a simple, direct, excellent answer, but it's still as much of a minefield as anything else. But I'm Canadian, what do I care? You guys are just our largest trading partners, so I've no interest in your well-being as a nation.;)
I've had my MSN account 4 years. I've gotten about 5 spam emails in that entire time, and they've all been from "friends" who had their accounts pwned and spam came through their address lists.
Parent will inevitably be modded funny, but I'd like to point out there's a lot of people who'd benefit from doing number 1, and would like assistance in number 2. And hey, everyone loves a giant anthropomorphic paper clip, bring him along!
Funny, I've only had one virus/spy-ware/mal-ware in my entire time using Windows, right from 3.11 to current. And that was my roommate getting his Windows ME machine pwnd and letting it sit on the network. I defrag my machine overnight once a month or so. I ran without an active AV scanner for over a year. As it is, just out of habit, I'll run Spy-bot once every few weeks, and I threw Avast on there, and run it too. Always overnight. Total time wasted? About 5 minutes setting them up.
Now, on my Mac machine at work? Programs regularly crash, network performance is shit, and 90% of updates require the machine to be rebooted, including Safari updates. I've wasted more time trying to make my Mac work properly than I have keeping my Windows box secure.
The cost isn't a firm 30%, first off. Second, it's not publishers putting in DRM, it's places like Amazon. They dictate what format an ebook can be sold in.
And no, my message didn't "fail" to take in to account "charge backs, shipping costs, storage and other costs in keeping around a book, amazon needs a huge climate controlled warehouse, there are tucks and trains that have to be paid to move everything." Again, all that stuff isn't that huge. Amazon is responsible for Amazon's stock. Warehouses that specialize in storing and shipping books and similar keep stock, and send it to bookstores that order the books. Shipping and storage costs are *tiny* compared to other things. We've got over 100 active titles, and our warehouse charges are about $2000/month. That's about $2/TITLE. Not per COPY. Each has hundreds of copies.
Also, generally, the printing costs also includes the printer shipping it to the warehouses in the first place. Your so-called "50%" savings works out to pennies per copy. Okay, so we'll charge $9.97 instead of $9.99
Are you economically stupid? Amazon's not going to sell a book for free. There are costs associated with converting to any ebook format, too. So, if you want books cheaper, bitch to the retailers to take a smaller cut. Macmillan was looking forward, knowing that at some point, Amazon was going to demand a good share of ebook revenues once the Kindle base was large enough. And I said *at most* printing is 30%. And that's on trade paperbacks. Anything that requires any kind of research and time investiture and that percentage goes *way* down. One of our newer, image-heavy books costs $60, but it was only $5/copy to print. That's less than 10%. Your model is unrealistic at best, delusional at worst.
That sounds like a bit of a scam to me because you're making a much larger profit for much less work.
I know you won't actually distribute an infinite number of books because there aren't an infinite number of people to buy them, but the point I'm trying to make is the market is much wider.
As cdguru pointed out, the ebook market right now is *very* small, especially for a publisher like ours. Yes, over time we might make more money selling ebooks for $10 a shot instead of $40 for a physical copy, but the timeline stretches out a lot further, and we pay for everything upfront, so that means rather than say, recouping costs in 2 years, it might take 5, or 10. And with ebook publication comes that overhyped spectre of piracy. I won't say we'd lose a lot to it, but when you're selling only 200 copies a year, even a few people pirating makes an impact. Yes, 200 copies. An initial print run on our books goes to about 1000 copies for something we think will sell well.
Another thing about books is their a lot like games, sales-wise. Unless they're adopted in to a classroom, sales are mostly done in the first year, and drop off after that, fairly steadily.
So, to put this in a more concrete format, we'll take a hypothetical book and take two scenarios, 1 will be physical-only distribution, 2 will be online-only distribution, and we'll assume that interest in the online-only is stronger, and longer lasting.
1. Book is printed for 1000 copies. Publisher receives $10 per copy, let's say. Book sells strongly, and 500 copies move the first year. That's $5,000. The next year, sells 250, getting $2,500, bringing us to a 2-year total of $7,500, with another 250 copies to sell over time.
2. Book is placed for sale online, and publisher receives $2 per copy, due to lowered prices for online copies. First year, book sells like wildfire, 1,000 copies! Amazing! But that's only $2,000. Second year remains strong, another 1,000 copies! But we're only at $4,000 after two years. That's only $4,000 to put towards new projects' costs. Okay, let's extend the timeline. Third year, interest dips. 500 copies. $1,000, for a total of $5,000. Three years to reach the sales total of situation 1 after one year, and that's with an extra 1,500 copies sold. And then oops, the technology changes, so the old version doesn't work on new readers. And paying to get something converted is nearly as expensive as getting a new print run.
And as I said, we're a fairly niche publisher. Selling 2,500 copies of something is insanely optimistic for us, especially since it's targeted to academics and scholars--a group known to be classically technophobic.
So, as I said, the market isn't there, and a $10 price point for an ebook when the physical copy goes for $50 is not a sustainable business model yet.
We _are_ looking at publishing ebooks, and we've got some of our older, out-of-print titles scanned and converted, and listed in e-library services, but until the technology's solidified so that the market's less divided, we likely won't do much. And even after it's solidified, we're likely to do dual runs, both hard copy and physical. And it's very unlikely we'd run at a $10 price point for new books.
and I have to say, our director would have an aneurysm at the prospect of "stealing" the copyright from our authors. The deal is we have copyright as long as the book is in print, but that's necessary to actually do business. Multiple editions are at the author's discretion, but it's generally in their best interests, and are usually the ones pushing for it so they can get more royalties.
We're not a textbook publisher, though (we've published textbooks, but it isn't our business model), so most of the charges levelled by the summary don't apply to us, and we're Canadian, so the others aren't directly analogous either.
The one thing I can speak to though, is the issue of people thinking e-books should be so much cheaper than print books. That's bullshit. The cost of physically printing books is generally about 30% of the cover price, even less for larger print runs. The biggest chunk of the price is retailers. They buy our books at a 40% discount, meaning they pay $6 for a $10 book. If Amazon wants to make books cheaper so desperately, they can take a fucking smaller profit margin (especially since they like to push for even *larger* discounts, so they can offer the book cheaper). The market for e-books is still quite small compared to paper books, mostly because of how much uncertainty there is in the format (it's worse than Betamax vs. VHS right now) and selling them for so cheap makes it incredibly difficult to recoup costs for small publishers like us (we put out about 15 new books a year, and have 9 permanent employees). Most of our scholarly works retail for between $30-$50. Without printing costs, we could probably move that to $25-40 (keeping in mind we get a little over half that amount, including what we need to pay to the author in royalties-generally another 10%). How many people are going to pay that for an e-book, when there's no guarantee a new reader will actually read it 3 years from now? Maybe with the iPad we'll see some standardization in the e-book format, and then we can drop the price to something lower, and make it up in volume, because right now, it's just not feasible.
Personally, I think auto-update needs to go die in a fire. I don't want a program dialing home, downloading a file, and then bitching at me to install it (or even going ahead an installing it on its own). FFS, even Windows Update doesn't do that if you tell it not to.
However, what *does* need to happen is someone should make a small program that can check what version of a program you're running, and what the latest version is, and let you know if you can update. Ideally, the program would allow you to list and delist programs on your own initiative (in case you don't want something updated, say for compatibility reasons). I've heard that one massive problem with security on computers is running out-of-date software, so making something like this for Windows would be a massive boon. Especially if it could also track things like Flash.
He's asking "what is the breakthrough," not "what is a breakthrough," which is a small difference, but crucial. What changed about the process, or in the concept behind the process that allowed the breakthrough to happen. That's the question posed.
I suppose with your smartass answer, you're used to being able to coast through limited reading comprehension through application of "humour."
I use my Wi-Fi for that. If it's late, and I'm tired, I'll watch a movie on my laptop off my NAS, so then I can just close the laptop when I'm finally tired enough to drop off.
However, that means this new optical wireless is useless to me. The only application for home use I could see is keeping multiple devices connected to some data server in a home theatre set up, to minimize cables. I think this is something not even for enthusiasts, but for very specific situations, so Wi-Fi isn't going to be "replaced." Misleading headline at best, eh?
I thought that too. Pretty much instantly took me out of the desire to get one. I'll take a look at the HP slate when it's ready to hit shelves, but my hopes for a decent tablet formfactor product this year are pretty much dashed if the Android-based one is hitting memory issues. Might as well just keep plugging along on my old laptop.
The "sealed engine" is the computer in the system. If a manufacturer decides to encrypt that, or use specialized error codes, and only give the key to "authorized dealers," all of a sudden any non-authorized mechanic is in for a world of additional difficulty. As for doing it at home? Good luck getting the interface at all. It'll be a damned sight more expensive yet.
Er, no. He's saying everyone should use linux. If you notice, he also says that disconnecting every Windows machine is a good idea. No Windows, no Macs, that leaves linux/BeOS/BSD/etc.
Forgive my ignorance, but what the hell are you talking about? "anoder false flag?" I have no idea what that phrase means.
And no, you do not "get this right," it's not forced WHOIS exposure, it's criminalizing the filing of anonymized data in abetting a crime (in this case, violation of the CAN-SPAM act). So, it's, at present, only an additional hammer against people already breaking the law. It's akin to felony murder. If you're committing a robbery, and someone has a heart attack while you're robbing the place, you get a murder charge, even though you didn't kill the guy.
And way to toss in a slippery slope fallacy while you were at it.
But computers can't generate truly random data, it's always at least partially procedurally generated. Thus, any data from a computer you feed to it is non-random random data:p
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent point. The Prize Committee doesn't tell who the nominated parties are until 50 years, according to the first link in the summary. I could nominate my toothbrush, and post about it, and it'd be as a legitimate a story as this one.
Hey, this might actually save our asses. After all, Skynet won't want to look like an ungrateful hypocrite after getting a Peace Prize. So, instead of killing us all, we'll simply be confined to our homes!
that I've got very little hope of the clock at work running fast, anymore, eh?
In addition to fewer scattering events, I believe the energy required to affect the electron bonds on graphene is less than on silicon, so you reach the energy level faster, so you move the electron along faster.
I think you got some Upsidasium in your Unobtanium if it's hovering.
...nooo... I'm pretty sure on my VHS copy you see Han shoot Greedo, and Greedo's body flops unconvincingly (obviously no body in the suit) on to the table top.
The police have to pay for the storage. Since the amount of online data is constantly increasing, I figure having to lay out funds for that many terrabytes of storage should bankrupt them, and then they can focus on doing the job they *should* be doing (picking up garbage), instead of the one they *want* to be doing (invading privacy without probable cause).
Restrict government to its constitutional duties, and suddenly these corporations have no reason to care what's going on in DC.
And that's where you'd get most of the argument coming from. What would qualify as a constitutional duty? As the world changes, should those duties change as well? Should they be explicitly demarcated, or loosely interpreted?
You've presented what seems like a simple, direct, excellent answer, but it's still as much of a minefield as anything else. But I'm Canadian, what do I care? You guys are just our largest trading partners, so I've no interest in your well-being as a nation. ;)
Hey, if I worked for a year, I could pay off my share of the national debt, and still have enough to pay my rent.
I'd die of starvation, likely, but hey, at least I did my civic duty, and didn't drain the pension fund.
I've had my MSN account 4 years. I've gotten about 5 spam emails in that entire time, and they've all been from "friends" who had their accounts pwned and spam came through their address lists.
Parent will inevitably be modded funny, but I'd like to point out there's a lot of people who'd benefit from doing number 1, and would like assistance in number 2. And hey, everyone loves a giant anthropomorphic paper clip, bring him along!
Funny, I've only had one virus/spy-ware/mal-ware in my entire time using Windows, right from 3.11 to current. And that was my roommate getting his Windows ME machine pwnd and letting it sit on the network. I defrag my machine overnight once a month or so. I ran without an active AV scanner for over a year. As it is, just out of habit, I'll run Spy-bot once every few weeks, and I threw Avast on there, and run it too. Always overnight. Total time wasted? About 5 minutes setting them up.
Now, on my Mac machine at work? Programs regularly crash, network performance is shit, and 90% of updates require the machine to be rebooted, including Safari updates. I've wasted more time trying to make my Mac work properly than I have keeping my Windows box secure.
The cost isn't a firm 30%, first off. Second, it's not publishers putting in DRM, it's places like Amazon. They dictate what format an ebook can be sold in.
And no, my message didn't "fail" to take in to account "charge backs, shipping costs, storage and other costs in keeping around a book, amazon needs a huge climate controlled warehouse, there are tucks and trains that have to be paid to move everything." Again, all that stuff isn't that huge. Amazon is responsible for Amazon's stock. Warehouses that specialize in storing and shipping books and similar keep stock, and send it to bookstores that order the books. Shipping and storage costs are *tiny* compared to other things. We've got over 100 active titles, and our warehouse charges are about $2000/month. That's about $2/TITLE. Not per COPY. Each has hundreds of copies.
Also, generally, the printing costs also includes the printer shipping it to the warehouses in the first place. Your so-called "50%" savings works out to pennies per copy. Okay, so we'll charge $9.97 instead of $9.99
Are you economically stupid? Amazon's not going to sell a book for free. There are costs associated with converting to any ebook format, too. So, if you want books cheaper, bitch to the retailers to take a smaller cut. Macmillan was looking forward, knowing that at some point, Amazon was going to demand a good share of ebook revenues once the Kindle base was large enough. And I said *at most* printing is 30%. And that's on trade paperbacks. Anything that requires any kind of research and time investiture and that percentage goes *way* down. One of our newer, image-heavy books costs $60, but it was only $5/copy to print. That's less than 10%. Your model is unrealistic at best, delusional at worst.
That sounds like a bit of a scam to me because you're making a much larger profit for much less work.
I know you won't actually distribute an infinite number of books because there aren't an infinite number of people to buy them, but the point I'm trying to make is the market is much wider.
As cdguru pointed out, the ebook market right now is *very* small, especially for a publisher like ours. Yes, over time we might make more money selling ebooks for $10 a shot instead of $40 for a physical copy, but the timeline stretches out a lot further, and we pay for everything upfront, so that means rather than say, recouping costs in 2 years, it might take 5, or 10. And with ebook publication comes that overhyped spectre of piracy. I won't say we'd lose a lot to it, but when you're selling only 200 copies a year, even a few people pirating makes an impact. Yes, 200 copies. An initial print run on our books goes to about 1000 copies for something we think will sell well.
Another thing about books is their a lot like games, sales-wise. Unless they're adopted in to a classroom, sales are mostly done in the first year, and drop off after that, fairly steadily.
So, to put this in a more concrete format, we'll take a hypothetical book and take two scenarios, 1 will be physical-only distribution, 2 will be online-only distribution, and we'll assume that interest in the online-only is stronger, and longer lasting.
1. Book is printed for 1000 copies. Publisher receives $10 per copy, let's say. Book sells strongly, and 500 copies move the first year. That's $5,000. The next year, sells 250, getting $2,500, bringing us to a 2-year total of $7,500, with another 250 copies to sell over time.
2. Book is placed for sale online, and publisher receives $2 per copy, due to lowered prices for online copies. First year, book sells like wildfire, 1,000 copies! Amazing! But that's only $2,000. Second year remains strong, another 1,000 copies! But we're only at $4,000 after two years. That's only $4,000 to put towards new projects' costs. Okay, let's extend the timeline. Third year, interest dips. 500 copies. $1,000, for a total of $5,000. Three years to reach the sales total of situation 1 after one year, and that's with an extra 1,500 copies sold. And then oops, the technology changes, so the old version doesn't work on new readers. And paying to get something converted is nearly as expensive as getting a new print run.
And as I said, we're a fairly niche publisher. Selling 2,500 copies of something is insanely optimistic for us, especially since it's targeted to academics and scholars--a group known to be classically technophobic.
So, as I said, the market isn't there, and a $10 price point for an ebook when the physical copy goes for $50 is not a sustainable business model yet.
We _are_ looking at publishing ebooks, and we've got some of our older, out-of-print titles scanned and converted, and listed in e-library services, but until the technology's solidified so that the market's less divided, we likely won't do much. And even after it's solidified, we're likely to do dual runs, both hard copy and physical. And it's very unlikely we'd run at a $10 price point for new books.
and I have to say, our director would have an aneurysm at the prospect of "stealing" the copyright from our authors. The deal is we have copyright as long as the book is in print, but that's necessary to actually do business. Multiple editions are at the author's discretion, but it's generally in their best interests, and are usually the ones pushing for it so they can get more royalties.
We're not a textbook publisher, though (we've published textbooks, but it isn't our business model), so most of the charges levelled by the summary don't apply to us, and we're Canadian, so the others aren't directly analogous either.
The one thing I can speak to though, is the issue of people thinking e-books should be so much cheaper than print books. That's bullshit. The cost of physically printing books is generally about 30% of the cover price, even less for larger print runs. The biggest chunk of the price is retailers. They buy our books at a 40% discount, meaning they pay $6 for a $10 book. If Amazon wants to make books cheaper so desperately, they can take a fucking smaller profit margin (especially since they like to push for even *larger* discounts, so they can offer the book cheaper). The market for e-books is still quite small compared to paper books, mostly because of how much uncertainty there is in the format (it's worse than Betamax vs. VHS right now) and selling them for so cheap makes it incredibly difficult to recoup costs for small publishers like us (we put out about 15 new books a year, and have 9 permanent employees). Most of our scholarly works retail for between $30-$50. Without printing costs, we could probably move that to $25-40 (keeping in mind we get a little over half that amount, including what we need to pay to the author in royalties-generally another 10%). How many people are going to pay that for an e-book, when there's no guarantee a new reader will actually read it 3 years from now? Maybe with the iPad we'll see some standardization in the e-book format, and then we can drop the price to something lower, and make it up in volume, because right now, it's just not feasible.
Personally, I think auto-update needs to go die in a fire. I don't want a program dialing home, downloading a file, and then bitching at me to install it (or even going ahead an installing it on its own). FFS, even Windows Update doesn't do that if you tell it not to.
However, what *does* need to happen is someone should make a small program that can check what version of a program you're running, and what the latest version is, and let you know if you can update. Ideally, the program would allow you to list and delist programs on your own initiative (in case you don't want something updated, say for compatibility reasons). I've heard that one massive problem with security on computers is running out-of-date software, so making something like this for Windows would be a massive boon. Especially if it could also track things like Flash.
He's asking "what is the breakthrough," not "what is a breakthrough," which is a small difference, but crucial. What changed about the process, or in the concept behind the process that allowed the breakthrough to happen. That's the question posed.
I suppose with your smartass answer, you're used to being able to coast through limited reading comprehension through application of "humour."
I use my Wi-Fi for that. If it's late, and I'm tired, I'll watch a movie on my laptop off my NAS, so then I can just close the laptop when I'm finally tired enough to drop off.
However, that means this new optical wireless is useless to me. The only application for home use I could see is keeping multiple devices connected to some data server in a home theatre set up, to minimize cables. I think this is something not even for enthusiasts, but for very specific situations, so Wi-Fi isn't going to be "replaced." Misleading headline at best, eh?
I thought that too. Pretty much instantly took me out of the desire to get one. I'll take a look at the HP slate when it's ready to hit shelves, but my hopes for a decent tablet formfactor product this year are pretty much dashed if the Android-based one is hitting memory issues. Might as well just keep plugging along on my old laptop.
Or, you go to the Andriod station, borrow a pump for free, sell your 100 litres of gas, and go home with all your profit.
The "sealed engine" is the computer in the system. If a manufacturer decides to encrypt that, or use specialized error codes, and only give the key to "authorized dealers," all of a sudden any non-authorized mechanic is in for a world of additional difficulty. As for doing it at home? Good luck getting the interface at all. It'll be a damned sight more expensive yet.
Er, no. He's saying everyone should use linux. If you notice, he also says that disconnecting every Windows machine is a good idea. No Windows, no Macs, that leaves linux/BeOS/BSD/etc.
Forgive my ignorance, but what the hell are you talking about? "anoder false flag?" I have no idea what that phrase means.
And no, you do not "get this right," it's not forced WHOIS exposure, it's criminalizing the filing of anonymized data in abetting a crime (in this case, violation of the CAN-SPAM act). So, it's, at present, only an additional hammer against people already breaking the law. It's akin to felony murder. If you're committing a robbery, and someone has a heart attack while you're robbing the place, you get a murder charge, even though you didn't kill the guy.
And way to toss in a slippery slope fallacy while you were at it.
But computers can't generate truly random data, it's always at least partially procedurally generated. Thus, any data from a computer you feed to it is non-random random data :p