But you will not be forced to pick any job at all, and you will be able to work hours you choose, rather then ones your manager will choose for you. Which is the whole point of advance for the first authors, who are the ones pushing median size of allowance down.
If you're successful, advance starts to function more of an equalizer of your income, so that instead of spikes of royalties at release, followed by long dry periods you get steady income. Until then, it functions as a small allowance to help you get by and find time and motivation to write.
1. Get a job that will take your time and focus away from writing. 2. Get a loan from the bank, and risk your property (if you have any), or get declined if you have none. Your terms will be very unfavorable even if you do have property backing you up, as writing carries a very big risk.
Yes, advance is a very viable option to many authors. Most published authors in fact.
P.S. It's sad how many people out there nowadays are strongly opinionated, very clueless on the subject they're opinionated on, and actually see it appropriate to lecture knowledgeable people on the subject.
You're not getting any "sales at low prices" for your book when you're writing your book, period. So you either do a shitty, inspiration-sapping job while writing your book in your spare time, or you get a proper advance and can actually focus on producing best writing you can.
You forget the single most important part of publishing: it provides stable(ish) income to the author when his royalties do not. Income such as advance payments.
Dreamhost is cheap, but reliability and speed are not that good. We have a club that hosts its site, smallish but actively used database that fetches content from another database hourly and member email on it. During last year we had several unannounced short site outages, one mail outage that ended up losing day worth of mail randomly (small amount of mail went through, rest got lost) and one maintenance that they announced only a couple of hours before actual maintenance.
There is also an issue of speed, they do not seem to mirror outside US and their speeds to Europe are... well, bad. Takes up to ten seconds to load a text page with php script fetching content from DB (into a table). Guy who has full write access to DB for pushing some changes to it has to often wait really REALLY long for database to update his changes. I've seen up to 30 seconds for change to a single value this autumn, pretty much not usable, although that was partially script's fault for writing more then that value every time afaik,but still inexcusably slow.
It's cheap, but you get what you pay for. Considering that we don't really need reliability that bad, and beside the email loss that one time and slowness being occasionally annoying, it's a functioning system for most of us.
Electric grid of Japan is most likely at fault. It's not unified like in most Western countries, and is instead split between power generating companies. Ability to transfer electricity between different grids is nonexistent.
There is a geographical reason for this: Japan is a very mountainous area, and pulling and maintaining electric cables across mountains is astronomically expensive.
1. I live in a country where such arrangement would be illegal and therefore unenforceable afaik. 2. I bought my phone. Not rented it from my operator.
P.S. I don't recall ever even hearing of such a problem. Where did you get that? That sounds... insane.
Except that this is apples vs apples. You're arguing that using download.com over, say, megaupload.com somehow grants you extra layer of safety from malware. Fact: if you use a decent virus scanner, it does not, because all it does is virus scan the file for you. In fact, it's exact opposite in some cases, as there have been many instances of download.com software carrying various elements of malware inside legitimate downloads because it's such a popular (and spoofable as it's a directory) choice for downloaders. Something you can do just as well on your own machine after downloading the file.
Reality is, every time you install software, you implicitly trust the software vendor that he is not there to fuck you over. You can (and should) get additional layer of safety in virus scanner, but it makes absolutely no difference if the virus scanner is on download.com or your own machine. There is no grand difference between download.com and say, megaupload.com - in both cases software is uploaded by the maker/publisher, and so long as you scan the installer before installing, you've done all that download.com could have done.
And of course, now that it's bundling crap and making you jump through hoops, you're significantly WORSE off using download.com.
If you're "looking for warez", those are the last stop, not first one. They host whatever it is that you want them to host. They only offer downloads of material that other people chose to to upload to them. The main reason why anti-piracy outlets like to paint them as "omg warez" is because they are free to use, fast, and you can only get the download if you have the proper link - there is no directory.
You sound like your typical ignorant person who just swallows whatever media tells him at face value, and then moves on to preach about it. Personally I've used megaupload to share videos among my close circle of friends for a long time now. Good speeds, and I get to actually control access to the files. I guess I'm a nasty pirate, terrorist and a gay child molester in your eyes.
I'm pretty sure that we didn't have such nice download sites in the 90s. Which is why we had p2p for most of the copyright infringement back then.
Not to mention that pretty much no one "hosts their own files" anymore, except for really big companies. Outsourcing to professional hosting makes a whole lot more sense nowadays.
I think it's time you picked IAEA's report on what exactly went wrong in Fukushima. It's a pretty good debunk of everything you imagine that will happen. Because even if you "wreck" all of the aforementioned systems simultaneously, people will just pull new cables in a matter of hours, as surrounding infrastructure will not be devastated by massive flooding and earthquake damage.
Seriously, do you even understand how much of an undertaking hauling enough explosives AND chemical weapon dispersal systems you want along would be? These guys basically climbed over the damn fence and sat in the yard, far away from any important systems. You'd need to essentially hit all the control rooms at the same time to prevent reactor scramble, hold it long enough to rig explosives where you need, time your explosives well enough to cause damage you want, and during all this time hold the station against special forces and the army storming it..
Well, technically while "disaster of Fukushima is a thing that should never have happened", before that I'd think of "safety measures for tsunami and earthquake around Sendai should have been better".
You have to remember, they lost over 30.000 people, took a shitload of property damage, huge regions of country were flooded leaving many homeless and jobless and so on. Fukushima, while nasty, hasn't been in the same league, or hell, even same game when it comes to sheer destructiveness. That is what caused the difficulty in getting reactor cooled after everything shut down after tsunami hit - complete devastation of infrastructure in tens of kilometers around Fukushima. Not the Fukushima itself.
Then you didn't use your right to vote, or didn't push your opinion around to convince more people that this is wrong, so why are you complaining now? It's with your silent acceptance that they made the laws.
Honestly, I doubt that. Greenpeace pretty much requires a certain level of "environment as religion" from its activist wing, so they're unlikely to be stopped by "but these guys fund us".
About the only way that would work is if guys planning the hits would concentrate more efforts on non-paying "customers", which is probably true, but certainly doesn't prevent hits to coal plants all together for example.
1. Will do absolutely nothing while reactor is running and internal wiring is functional. 2. Will do absolutely nothing while reactor is running and internal wiring is functional. 3. Will do absolutely nothing while reactor is running and internal wiring is functional. 4. Will spread some fissile material in surroundings, an equivalent of minor dirty bomb. People will just lift top soil in a radius of few kilometers, similar to a fix to a small oil spill.
What happened in Fukushima was that tsunami killed essentially all electric system with flooding, and completely disrupted all electrical cables, while earthquake significantly weakened the structures making it very hard to pull in new wiring. You won't be "simulating" earthquake with explosives, unless you literally bring a tactical nuke or enough conventional explosives to simulate one, and you'll have severe issues finding enough water to cause damage on the level of tsunami to electrical systems. Restoring electricity even if you bomb all three you mention AND disrupt internal wiring AND cooling systems AND somehow succeed in doing all the above at the same time will still be far easier then in Fukushima because there won't be massive flooding and infrastructure damage to surroundings.
Why does someone "have to go to jail"? Will it fix something? Or is will tickle your sadistic fetish?
We don't live in times when lynching the first black guy who crosses the path of lynch mob was the right way to get justice for rape done by your neighbor, and that's exactly what you're asking for here.
People signed the contract that allowed them to do this. There are no laws that were broken. You and your neighbors elected people who decided that there was nothing illegal about this, as long as they were using it properly, to monitor the status of your phone in relation to their network. So far there has been no evidence of this being untrue. Just because the program gives them the ability to do much more then that doesn't mean it was USED to do much more. This is the argument used to allow us to do things from driving cars to owning guns for fuck's sake. Why does it suddenly become invalid here?
Therefore if someone should "go to jail", perhaps a long look into the mirror is in order?
Slashdot Mirror
But you will not be forced to pick any job at all, and you will be able to work hours you choose, rather then ones your manager will choose for you. Which is the whole point of advance for the first authors, who are the ones pushing median size of allowance down.
If you're successful, advance starts to function more of an equalizer of your income, so that instead of spikes of royalties at release, followed by long dry periods you get steady income. Until then, it functions as a small allowance to help you get by and find time and motivation to write.
You other options are:
1. Get a job that will take your time and focus away from writing.
2. Get a loan from the bank, and risk your property (if you have any), or get declined if you have none. Your terms will be very unfavorable even if you do have property backing you up, as writing carries a very big risk.
Yes, advance is a very viable option to many authors. Most published authors in fact.
P.S. It's sad how many people out there nowadays are strongly opinionated, very clueless on the subject they're opinionated on, and actually see it appropriate to lecture knowledgeable people on the subject.
Imho above comment is far more sad then funny...
Sad reality is, #2 does work when you remember to add "according to PETA". And not so surprisingly, it's actually true.
You're not getting any "sales at low prices" for your book when you're writing your book, period. So you either do a shitty, inspiration-sapping job while writing your book in your spare time, or you get a proper advance and can actually focus on producing best writing you can.
You forget the single most important part of publishing: it provides stable(ish) income to the author when his royalties do not. Income such as advance payments.
Just out of interest, how much did you pay for the BATTERIES? :D
Dreamhost is cheap, but reliability and speed are not that good. We have a club that hosts its site, smallish but actively used database that fetches content from another database hourly and member email on it. During last year we had several unannounced short site outages, one mail outage that ended up losing day worth of mail randomly (small amount of mail went through, rest got lost) and one maintenance that they announced only a couple of hours before actual maintenance.
There is also an issue of speed, they do not seem to mirror outside US and their speeds to Europe are... well, bad. Takes up to ten seconds to load a text page with php script fetching content from DB (into a table). Guy who has full write access to DB for pushing some changes to it has to often wait really REALLY long for database to update his changes. I've seen up to 30 seconds for change to a single value this autumn, pretty much not usable, although that was partially script's fault for writing more then that value every time afaik,but still inexcusably slow.
It's cheap, but you get what you pay for. Considering that we don't really need reliability that bad, and beside the email loss that one time and slowness being occasionally annoying, it's a functioning system for most of us.
Electric grid of Japan is most likely at fault. It's not unified like in most Western countries, and is instead split between power generating companies. Ability to transfer electricity between different grids is nonexistent.
There is a geographical reason for this: Japan is a very mountainous area, and pulling and maintaining electric cables across mountains is astronomically expensive.
1. I live in a country where such arrangement would be illegal and therefore unenforceable afaik.
2. I bought my phone. Not rented it from my operator.
P.S. I don't recall ever even hearing of such a problem. Where did you get that? That sounds... insane.
Except that this is apples vs apples. You're arguing that using download.com over, say, megaupload.com somehow grants you extra layer of safety from malware. Fact: if you use a decent virus scanner, it does not, because all it does is virus scan the file for you. In fact, it's exact opposite in some cases, as there have been many instances of download.com software carrying various elements of malware inside legitimate downloads because it's such a popular (and spoofable as it's a directory) choice for downloaders. Something you can do just as well on your own machine after downloading the file.
Reality is, every time you install software, you implicitly trust the software vendor that he is not there to fuck you over. You can (and should) get additional layer of safety in virus scanner, but it makes absolutely no difference if the virus scanner is on download.com or your own machine. There is no grand difference between download.com and say, megaupload.com - in both cases software is uploaded by the maker/publisher, and so long as you scan the installer before installing, you've done all that download.com could have done.
And of course, now that it's bundling crap and making you jump through hoops, you're significantly WORSE off using download.com.
And by "videos", I do mean "stuff I shot with my phone". I.e. stuff that I have copyright on.
If you're "looking for warez", those are the last stop, not first one. They host whatever it is that you want them to host. They only offer downloads of material that other people chose to to upload to them. The main reason why anti-piracy outlets like to paint them as "omg warez" is because they are free to use, fast, and you can only get the download if you have the proper link - there is no directory.
You sound like your typical ignorant person who just swallows whatever media tells him at face value, and then moves on to preach about it. Personally I've used megaupload to share videos among my close circle of friends for a long time now. Good speeds, and I get to actually control access to the files. I guess I'm a nasty pirate, terrorist and a gay child molester in your eyes.
As someone who had to use it a few times, CRINGE.
Funnily, we were also complaining about readers' lack of reading comprehension.
Pick mediafire then. Zero wait, over 1MB/sec download speed.
Megaupload usually saturates my 2.2MB/sec download bandwidth, but it has wait time.
I'm pretty sure that we didn't have such nice download sites in the 90s. Which is why we had p2p for most of the copyright infringement back then.
Not to mention that pretty much no one "hosts their own files" anymore, except for really big companies. Outsourcing to professional hosting makes a whole lot more sense nowadays.
Not much of advantage anymore. You can just host on rapidshare/megaupload/similar site.
I think it's time you picked IAEA's report on what exactly went wrong in Fukushima. It's a pretty good debunk of everything you imagine that will happen. Because even if you "wreck" all of the aforementioned systems simultaneously, people will just pull new cables in a matter of hours, as surrounding infrastructure will not be devastated by massive flooding and earthquake damage.
Seriously, do you even understand how much of an undertaking hauling enough explosives AND chemical weapon dispersal systems you want along would be? These guys basically climbed over the damn fence and sat in the yard, far away from any important systems. You'd need to essentially hit all the control rooms at the same time to prevent reactor scramble, hold it long enough to rig explosives where you need, time your explosives well enough to cause damage you want, and during all this time hold the station against special forces and the army storming it..
Well, technically while "disaster of Fukushima is a thing that should never have happened", before that I'd think of "safety measures for tsunami and earthquake around Sendai should have been better".
You have to remember, they lost over 30.000 people, took a shitload of property damage, huge regions of country were flooded leaving many homeless and jobless and so on. Fukushima, while nasty, hasn't been in the same league, or hell, even same game when it comes to sheer destructiveness. That is what caused the difficulty in getting reactor cooled after everything shut down after tsunami hit - complete devastation of infrastructure in tens of kilometers around Fukushima. Not the Fukushima itself.
Then you didn't use your right to vote, or didn't push your opinion around to convince more people that this is wrong, so why are you complaining now? It's with your silent acceptance that they made the laws.
Honestly, I doubt that. Greenpeace pretty much requires a certain level of "environment as religion" from its activist wing, so they're unlikely to be stopped by "but these guys fund us".
About the only way that would work is if guys planning the hits would concentrate more efforts on non-paying "customers", which is probably true, but certainly doesn't prevent hits to coal plants all together for example.
1. Will do absolutely nothing while reactor is running and internal wiring is functional.
2. Will do absolutely nothing while reactor is running and internal wiring is functional.
3. Will do absolutely nothing while reactor is running and internal wiring is functional.
4. Will spread some fissile material in surroundings, an equivalent of minor dirty bomb. People will just lift top soil in a radius of few kilometers, similar to a fix to a small oil spill.
What happened in Fukushima was that tsunami killed essentially all electric system with flooding, and completely disrupted all electrical cables, while earthquake significantly weakened the structures making it very hard to pull in new wiring. You won't be "simulating" earthquake with explosives, unless you literally bring a tactical nuke or enough conventional explosives to simulate one, and you'll have severe issues finding enough water to cause damage on the level of tsunami to electrical systems. Restoring electricity even if you bomb all three you mention AND disrupt internal wiring AND cooling systems AND somehow succeed in doing all the above at the same time will still be far easier then in Fukushima because there won't be massive flooding and infrastructure damage to surroundings.
Smith&Wesson and amen.
Why does someone "have to go to jail"? Will it fix something? Or is will tickle your sadistic fetish?
We don't live in times when lynching the first black guy who crosses the path of lynch mob was the right way to get justice for rape done by your neighbor, and that's exactly what you're asking for here.
People signed the contract that allowed them to do this. There are no laws that were broken. You and your neighbors elected people who decided that there was nothing illegal about this, as long as they were using it properly, to monitor the status of your phone in relation to their network. So far there has been no evidence of this being untrue. Just because the program gives them the ability to do much more then that doesn't mean it was USED to do much more. This is the argument used to allow us to do things from driving cars to owning guns for fuck's sake. Why does it suddenly become invalid here?
Therefore if someone should "go to jail", perhaps a long look into the mirror is in order?