I'll admit, I probably could have spent a few more minutes phrasing it clearly.
My point is that the authors still had to agree in the contract to the lending policy. Amazon/B&N only 'gave' buyers of ebooks the ability to lend their ebooks(once per title, for two weeks only) in the sense that they programmed in the functionality. In the case of Amazon, further research that I've don revealed that you could be eligible for a 70% royalty rate if you agree, but it's maxed out at 35% if you want to disallow lending. As such, it makes NO SENSE to not allow lending, because you get twice as much money, and at most a 3rd party gets access to the book for 2 weeks; if they like it and want to reread it, they'd have to buy it(discounting piracy here, which is a separate issue).
My second point is that studies conducted by Baen(a publisher with a great DRM-free ebook store), shows that 'free samples' tend to INCREASE sales. "Mother of Demons" saw increased paperback sales when they released the ebook free for download to the whole internet.
Even the AC wasn't entirely correct - part of the problem was that the site would list ALL books; 'borrow' was simply greyed out where lending was unavailable, and the site then encouraged you to buy the ebook, which if you purchased would give LendInk 6% referral commission, and the author his 35-70%. The authors didn't look close enough in their herd frenzy and thought ALL listed books were available for 'borrowing'.
Just wanted to point this out to the 2-3 non-americans who might not already know, but in the USA 'lightly armed', IE with a service handgun, is pretty much the default for Law Enforcement personnel.
You see an officer, he's going to have a handgun unless there's something special going on. 'Special' being it's somehow specifically dangerous to be wearing one(sometimes happens during crowd control duty), or 'special' in that an elevated danger situation is going on, where they'd be breaking out the shotguns/rifles and heavier body armor.
I selected it to 'spice up' my word choice. I then edited my post a bit and the portion that mentioned paper got chopped, but I didn't change the dead tree.
I have better than 10 LARGE bookcases full of books, and many still in boxes. Unfortunately, I had to move fairly recently(for work) and the new house is somewhat smaller than the old one(despite being much more expensive). As a result I feel confined; I've deliberately chosen to limit my acquisition of new physical books while trying to figure out which ones I'm willing to part with. The books are fighting for space with my other hobbies - computers, woodworking, firearms, rockets, etc...
It doesn't hurt that I find the ebooks easier to read(on average) than the paper type; I have (slowly) deteriorating vision, and being able to mess with font size helps. Heck, I find reading on an LCD Monitor easier on the eyes today. Can't really explain why. I used to read a paperback a day, on average, as a teen.
Except the stat says 'sells' more ebooks than physical, not 'distributes'. Sells implies an exchange took place, not a gift/give away.
I'll take a free ebook on a whim, and might not ever read it. Or I might read part of it and not like it.
Another thing to be careful about is that this is one on-line retailer. B&N, with it's physical stores, would be a much more interesting case if it started selling more digital editions than dead tree.
People are not embarrassed to be on welfare - Sadly, some are not. People make more money on welfare than on a minimum wage job - Depends on their situation, but it's entirely possible. It generally takes at least one minor involved to make this true though. Or: most people who are on welfare are gaming the system and riding the gravy train - Doesn't need to reach 'most' in order for massive amounts of fraud to occur. See the article about something like 1.5k false rebates submitted to the IRS. It's not that everyone cheats, is that those who DO cheat generally do so massively. Still, fraud rates have been dropping for years with effective auditing/enforcement. Welfare is cheating you out of your hard-earned money - I'd rather see my money spent more effectively, yes, but it's not strictly 'theft'. I try to be pound-wise by thinking that spending MORE, in the right spots, can ultimately save me money - such as more money for schools(where appropriate) can mean less expense for welfare. Though you gotta prevent it from being spent on more administrators, as opposed to books & teachers.
Basic insulation like cardboard isn't going to cover it when you're looking at a 100F temperature difference between your server room and the outside, and you're possibly looking at a week's worth of shipping time.
A 'temperature controlled' truck doesn't even have to turn on said features until like 24-48 hours before delivery, but it's still useful.
I unloaded trucks in the wintertime in Nebraska. Nowhere near the arctic circle, but the cold seeped into said vehicles. Even with a hot air blower in the store pointed into the truck, with a sort of rubber seal locking out the outside air, I'd be freezing even as I'm tossing boxes as fast as I can(exercise). All the mass involved in a filled semi, the cold 'seeped' into it and acted to cool the air quite well. At that most of the stuff I handled was nowhere near as dense as computer equipment.
You want the equipment to warm up quickly? You're going to need to spread it out over quite a bit of area. A heated truck isn't that much more expensive - many of them will scavenge the diesel's exhaust to heat for free, and in any case with the touch of extra insulation on such trucks it doesn't take that much more fuel. As a bonus, it allows you to use more of your expensive data center as data center, not equipment warming area. Think of the heated truck as less of a moving extravagance than a short term rental of a warming area that also allows you to use your expensive equipment faster, and saves a bit of wear/tear with cooling/heating cycles.
Also, most electronic circuits freeze to death within a few hour by -5C; Luleå stay below that temperature most parts of the year. Any remotely advanced electronic circuits is dead by -20 - -30C, unless isolated from the cold, common temperatures during winter in N. Sweden.
Fairbanks, AK here. We get plenty of -30, and we find that most electronics that survive it just fine. Vehicles are plugged in more to keep the lubricants, coolant fluid within their operating range, and keep the battery a bit warmer so it can start stuff. Even servers can get that cold when not operating; just let them get up to operating temperature before plugging them in.
Again, you don't need to tax it like that to kill the profitability. Even a 1% redemption fee would normally stop these shenanigans cold. It's not a high margin business, what makes it profitable is that you can do it several hundred/thousand times a day.
I agree that HFT is ultimately worthless; however I wouldn't even limit ownership to 'a few days'. Even a few seconds would ruin these types; as such a limit of hours, or even minutes, would be more than sufficient.
Heck, institute a random (up to) 5 second delay and watch them whine.
You can't have both 'The F-15 can shoot down anything flying' AND 'the F-22 and F-35 are going to be obsolete soon enough'.
The problem is that it's getting to the point that the F-15 isn't clearly superior to everything in other country's hands. It's actually inferior in many ways, and the airframe was getting to the point that designing a new one is more cost effective than updating. Thus the F-22.
Getting into Military theory - you don't necessarily have a military in order to use it. In many cases the best weapon system is one you never have to use. You either have super-advanced weaponry, or such huge stockpiles that they go back to/stay at the bargaining table. Examples include the Cold war and nukes.
With the F-22 any opposing airforce, even those with modern Russian jets, have to consider the losses said planes could inflict. Right now they're best used for training/testing, leave older cheaper planes as bomb trucks, but their being around is an important deterrent. Note: I don't think we're particularly more immune to WWIII than the world was from WWI and II. Given the right conditions...
The F-22 is too expensive to waste on offensive warfare(for now). Opposing it is too expensive to try. Result? Peace(generally).
Meanwhile, I agre with you on manned aircraft. The F22/35 will be the last generation of manned fighters. I just think they'll have a 30-40 year lifespan in that role.
the Armalite company never did the kind of field-testing that the Soviet design bureau did.
I want to defend the Armalite Comany a touch here - The army didn't help matters. They sabotoged the testing trials; deleted the chrome barrel and chamber that the prototype had, switched from the low-fouling cylinder shaped powder to stockpiled, cheaper ball powder, and deleted the cleaning kit designed to be stored in the buttstock - not even issuing cleaning kits.
An enemy with accurate weapons and superior training could be overcome if you just rounded up a whole bunch of peasants and gave every one of them a gun that shot 600 rounds per minute.
As shown in Korea and Vietnam, doing so was only at enourmous human cost, and as the USA developed it's combined weapons doctrine, only got more expensive as we got better at hitting such formations with artillery and air power.
Which is why insurgent/guerrilla warfar is about the only way left. Deny the US the knowledge of where you're at until you're attacking, preferably not even then.
With a few exceptions, there ARE americans that will do the jobs that the illegals will do. We just won't do it for the money they will, which is why we were displaced in the first place.
The second would be skillset - there are jobs that most americans just don't train enough in - picking fruit, sowing clothing, etc... This is partially a result of our de-emphasis on skilled trades and emphasis on college education. And yes, things like picking fruits and vegetables are skilled. They might not require an education, but they do take practice.
I mean, 'American's won't do it'? We have Americans who will dive into sewage to do welding work. We just won't do it for less than a six figure income(sewage diving IS a rather specialized skill).
Given the land value - footprint is expensive and you typically don't want any permanently occupied structures(such as a house) within double the height of the tower, which limits install on highly populated islands like Hawaii, combined with the power of the more than occasional monsoon/hurricane making it so you'll probably want a (somewhat)thicker tower, I figure that the best wind solution would be off-shore - sufficiently off shore that the towers aren't visible from either in the higher hotels or in sailboats and such within view of shore. That should satisfy most of the view-sensitive types.
Solar panels on the roof can be attractive, if done right.
About 'Registered Mail' in the USA. It's a level of service that the US Government trusts enough to send classified documents and objects through. Not the highest levels, of course, but still extremely sensitive documents. Other companies will use it for much the same purpose, in addition to shipping expensive objects such as jewels.
As such, while it's not perfect, all handlers of registered mail have to pass security investigations, which tends to ensure a certain level of reliability. It's not the fastest delivery system as a result - nobody cleared available? It sits in a safe.
I don't know about 15%, but I can certainly understand wanting to be cautious - their electricity might be mostly oil, but that doesn't mean those generators can scale up/down on a dime - more than x% might cause problems with the grid.
Now, I'd think that 20% would be no problem(due to average power increase during the day), but somebody higher up mentioned that the rule was recently amended to 25%. I haven't done any studies specifically for Hawaii.
It might be because I'm a techie, but I don't have any problems with tastefully done solar panels, and it's my understanding that solar thermal for hot water is a requirement for new housing there anyways.
True; but it means that any additional expense is only actually about 70% what it would be compared to the sticker price. Perhaps not even including the rebates: IE Actual cost of system = Cost of system *.7 - rebates instead of (cost of system - rebates) *.7
How does that work when the person wronged is an individual of midling means(IE poor) and the one who did wrong is a huge company? Can the huge company bury the small guy in legal fees/bills?
There needs to be a balance, and you can't always assume that the losing party was in the wrong, or at least to the extent that it shouldn't have been a court trial.
A truly *good* shell company will only have the rights to ONE patent, and only enough money assigned to it to feed the lawyers for the patent suit itself.
There's deeper rules that try to prevent this sort of stuff, but it's complicated to work through. If I understand it right today, in many ways companies that are wholly(or mostly wholly) owned by another company are considered part of that company.
It's not my study, just listing them out. Under your thinking, one could then call speeding reckless driving, which indeed happens when you're speeding excessively.
Still, given how common it is I wouldn't consider including it as a category out of line. Personally, I'd try to only attribute accidents that could have obviously been avoided if they'd been going the speed limit - IE they attempted to brake, but due to their speed were unable to stop in time, while they would have been able to if they had been going the limit.
Which is why I don't really want to bother testing all drivers so much as I'd love to see self-driving cars. A car that can determine it needs to slam on the brakes in 1/100th of a second as opposed to the 1.5 that many humans take means a computer controlled car can stop in a shorter distance at 100mph than a human can at 65.
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I'll admit, I probably could have spent a few more minutes phrasing it clearly.
My point is that the authors still had to agree in the contract to the lending policy. Amazon/B&N only 'gave' buyers of ebooks the ability to lend their ebooks(once per title, for two weeks only) in the sense that they programmed in the functionality. In the case of Amazon, further research that I've don revealed that you could be eligible for a 70% royalty rate if you agree, but it's maxed out at 35% if you want to disallow lending. As such, it makes NO SENSE to not allow lending, because you get twice as much money, and at most a 3rd party gets access to the book for 2 weeks; if they like it and want to reread it, they'd have to buy it(discounting piracy here, which is a separate issue).
My second point is that studies conducted by Baen(a publisher with a great DRM-free ebook store), shows that 'free samples' tend to INCREASE sales. "Mother of Demons" saw increased paperback sales when they released the ebook free for download to the whole internet.
Even the AC wasn't entirely correct - part of the problem was that the site would list ALL books; 'borrow' was simply greyed out where lending was unavailable, and the site then encouraged you to buy the ebook, which if you purchased would give LendInk 6% referral commission, and the author his 35-70%. The authors didn't look close enough in their herd frenzy and thought ALL listed books were available for 'borrowing'.
Just wanted to point this out to the 2-3 non-americans who might not already know, but in the USA 'lightly armed', IE with a service handgun, is pretty much the default for Law Enforcement personnel.
You see an officer, he's going to have a handgun unless there's something special going on. 'Special' being it's somehow specifically dangerous to be wearing one(sometimes happens during crowd control duty), or 'special' in that an elevated danger situation is going on, where they'd be breaking out the shotguns/rifles and heavier body armor.
Authors had to sign contracts allowing said lending though. Not all did, and you can't lend out those books, not even once.
Thing is, book lending is good for sales, as Baen has discovered.
I selected it to 'spice up' my word choice. I then edited my post a bit and the portion that mentioned paper got chopped, but I didn't change the dead tree.
I have better than 10 LARGE bookcases full of books, and many still in boxes. Unfortunately, I had to move fairly recently(for work) and the new house is somewhat smaller than the old one(despite being much more expensive). As a result I feel confined; I've deliberately chosen to limit my acquisition of new physical books while trying to figure out which ones I'm willing to part with. The books are fighting for space with my other hobbies - computers, woodworking, firearms, rockets, etc...
It doesn't hurt that I find the ebooks easier to read(on average) than the paper type; I have (slowly) deteriorating vision, and being able to mess with font size helps. Heck, I find reading on an LCD Monitor easier on the eyes today. Can't really explain why. I used to read a paperback a day, on average, as a teen.
Except the stat says 'sells' more ebooks than physical, not 'distributes'. Sells implies an exchange took place, not a gift/give away.
I'll take a free ebook on a whim, and might not ever read it. Or I might read part of it and not like it.
Another thing to be careful about is that this is one on-line retailer. B&N, with it's physical stores, would be a much more interesting case if it started selling more digital editions than dead tree.
People are not embarrassed to be on welfare - Sadly, some are not.
People make more money on welfare than on a minimum wage job - Depends on their situation, but it's entirely possible. It generally takes at least one minor involved to make this true though.
Or: most people who are on welfare are gaming the system and riding the gravy train - Doesn't need to reach 'most' in order for massive amounts of fraud to occur. See the article about something like 1.5k false rebates submitted to the IRS. It's not that everyone cheats, is that those who DO cheat generally do so massively. Still, fraud rates have been dropping for years with effective auditing/enforcement.
Welfare is cheating you out of your hard-earned money - I'd rather see my money spent more effectively, yes, but it's not strictly 'theft'. I try to be pound-wise by thinking that spending MORE, in the right spots, can ultimately save me money - such as more money for schools(where appropriate) can mean less expense for welfare. Though you gotta prevent it from being spent on more administrators, as opposed to books & teachers.
Those aren't typically dumped down the sink.
Now, old undrunk coffee; that is dumped into the drains all the time, and still has it's caffeine intact.
Basic insulation like cardboard isn't going to cover it when you're looking at a 100F temperature difference between your server room and the outside, and you're possibly looking at a week's worth of shipping time.
A 'temperature controlled' truck doesn't even have to turn on said features until like 24-48 hours before delivery, but it's still useful.
I unloaded trucks in the wintertime in Nebraska. Nowhere near the arctic circle, but the cold seeped into said vehicles. Even with a hot air blower in the store pointed into the truck, with a sort of rubber seal locking out the outside air, I'd be freezing even as I'm tossing boxes as fast as I can(exercise). All the mass involved in a filled semi, the cold 'seeped' into it and acted to cool the air quite well. At that most of the stuff I handled was nowhere near as dense as computer equipment.
You want the equipment to warm up quickly? You're going to need to spread it out over quite a bit of area. A heated truck isn't that much more expensive - many of them will scavenge the diesel's exhaust to heat for free, and in any case with the touch of extra insulation on such trucks it doesn't take that much more fuel. As a bonus, it allows you to use more of your expensive data center as data center, not equipment warming area. Think of the heated truck as less of a moving extravagance than a short term rental of a warming area that also allows you to use your expensive equipment faster, and saves a bit of wear/tear with cooling/heating cycles.
Also, most electronic circuits freeze to death within a few hour by -5C; Luleå stay below that temperature most parts of the year. Any remotely advanced electronic circuits is dead by -20 - -30C, unless isolated from the cold, common temperatures during winter in N. Sweden.
Fairbanks, AK here. We get plenty of -30, and we find that most electronics that survive it just fine. Vehicles are plugged in more to keep the lubricants, coolant fluid within their operating range, and keep the battery a bit warmer so it can start stuff. Even servers can get that cold when not operating; just let them get up to operating temperature before plugging them in.
Again, you don't need to tax it like that to kill the profitability. Even a 1% redemption fee would normally stop these shenanigans cold. It's not a high margin business, what makes it profitable is that you can do it several hundred/thousand times a day.
I agree that HFT is ultimately worthless; however I wouldn't even limit ownership to 'a few days'. Even a few seconds would ruin these types; as such a limit of hours, or even minutes, would be more than sufficient.
Heck, institute a random (up to) 5 second delay and watch them whine.
On the other hand you'll be able to be at the bar almost every day, and not stuck over in some FOB.
You can't have both 'The F-15 can shoot down anything flying' AND 'the F-22 and F-35 are going to be obsolete soon enough'.
The problem is that it's getting to the point that the F-15 isn't clearly superior to everything in other country's hands. It's actually inferior in many ways, and the airframe was getting to the point that designing a new one is more cost effective than updating. Thus the F-22.
Getting into Military theory - you don't necessarily have a military in order to use it. In many cases the best weapon system is one you never have to use. You either have super-advanced weaponry, or such huge stockpiles that they go back to/stay at the bargaining table. Examples include the Cold war and nukes.
With the F-22 any opposing airforce, even those with modern Russian jets, have to consider the losses said planes could inflict. Right now they're best used for training/testing, leave older cheaper planes as bomb trucks, but their being around is an important deterrent. Note: I don't think we're particularly more immune to WWIII than the world was from WWI and II. Given the right conditions...
The F-22 is too expensive to waste on offensive warfare(for now). Opposing it is too expensive to try. Result? Peace(generally).
Meanwhile, I agre with you on manned aircraft. The F22/35 will be the last generation of manned fighters. I just think they'll have a 30-40 year lifespan in that role.
the Armalite company never did the kind of field-testing that the Soviet design bureau did.
I want to defend the Armalite Comany a touch here - The army didn't help matters. They sabotoged the testing trials; deleted the chrome barrel and chamber that the prototype had, switched from the low-fouling cylinder shaped powder to stockpiled, cheaper ball powder, and deleted the cleaning kit designed to be stored in the buttstock - not even issuing cleaning kits.
An enemy with accurate weapons and superior training could be overcome if you just rounded up a whole bunch of peasants and gave every one of them a gun that shot 600 rounds per minute.
As shown in Korea and Vietnam, doing so was only at enourmous human cost, and as the USA developed it's combined weapons doctrine, only got more expensive as we got better at hitting such formations with artillery and air power.
Which is why insurgent/guerrilla warfar is about the only way left. Deny the US the knowledge of where you're at until you're attacking, preferably not even then.
With a few exceptions, there ARE americans that will do the jobs that the illegals will do. We just won't do it for the money they will, which is why we were displaced in the first place.
The second would be skillset - there are jobs that most americans just don't train enough in - picking fruit, sowing clothing, etc... This is partially a result of our de-emphasis on skilled trades and emphasis on college education. And yes, things like picking fruits and vegetables are skilled. They might not require an education, but they do take practice.
I mean, 'American's won't do it'? We have Americans who will dive into sewage to do welding work. We just won't do it for less than a six figure income(sewage diving IS a rather specialized skill).
Given the land value - footprint is expensive and you typically don't want any permanently occupied structures(such as a house) within double the height of the tower, which limits install on highly populated islands like Hawaii, combined with the power of the more than occasional monsoon/hurricane making it so you'll probably want a (somewhat)thicker tower, I figure that the best wind solution would be off-shore - sufficiently off shore that the towers aren't visible from either in the higher hotels or in sailboats and such within view of shore. That should satisfy most of the view-sensitive types.
Solar panels on the roof can be attractive, if done right.
About 'Registered Mail' in the USA. It's a level of service that the US Government trusts enough to send classified documents and objects through. Not the highest levels, of course, but still extremely sensitive documents. Other companies will use it for much the same purpose, in addition to shipping expensive objects such as jewels.
As such, while it's not perfect, all handlers of registered mail have to pass security investigations, which tends to ensure a certain level of reliability. It's not the fastest delivery system as a result - nobody cleared available? It sits in a safe.
I don't know about 15%, but I can certainly understand wanting to be cautious - their electricity might be mostly oil, but that doesn't mean those generators can scale up/down on a dime - more than x% might cause problems with the grid.
Now, I'd think that 20% would be no problem(due to average power increase during the day), but somebody higher up mentioned that the rule was recently amended to 25%. I haven't done any studies specifically for Hawaii.
It might be because I'm a techie, but I don't have any problems with tastefully done solar panels, and it's my understanding that solar thermal for hot water is a requirement for new housing there anyways.
It's not market forces that are precluding new plants. It's political - legal and perception.
True; but it means that any additional expense is only actually about 70% what it would be compared to the sticker price. Perhaps not even including the rebates: IE Actual cost of system = Cost of system *.7 - rebates instead of (cost of system - rebates) * .7
How does that work when the person wronged is an individual of midling means(IE poor) and the one who did wrong is a huge company? Can the huge company bury the small guy in legal fees/bills?
There needs to be a balance, and you can't always assume that the losing party was in the wrong, or at least to the extent that it shouldn't have been a court trial.
A truly *good* shell company will only have the rights to ONE patent, and only enough money assigned to it to feed the lawyers for the patent suit itself.
There's deeper rules that try to prevent this sort of stuff, but it's complicated to work through. If I understand it right today, in many ways companies that are wholly(or mostly wholly) owned by another company are considered part of that company.
It's not my study, just listing them out. Under your thinking, one could then call speeding reckless driving, which indeed happens when you're speeding excessively.
Still, given how common it is I wouldn't consider including it as a category out of line. Personally, I'd try to only attribute accidents that could have obviously been avoided if they'd been going the speed limit - IE they attempted to brake, but due to their speed were unable to stop in time, while they would have been able to if they had been going the limit.
Which is why I don't really want to bother testing all drivers so much as I'd love to see self-driving cars. A car that can determine it needs to slam on the brakes in 1/100th of a second as opposed to the 1.5 that many humans take means a computer controlled car can stop in a shorter distance at 100mph than a human can at 65.