You could bookmark the debian package-of-the-day page, or you could bookmark this freshmeat page, which takes you to a random project. If you use other OSes in addition to Linux, the freshmeat one might be more useful. Freshmeat also has ratings, user comments, etc.
First off, heavy ion beams make sense as a way of treating cancer. The reason is that when a heavy ion passes through matter, it decelerates along a straight-line path, and deposits a very large percentage of its energy near the very end of its path. If you compare with x-rays as a radiation treatment, x-rays deposit energy in an exponential-decay pattern, so if you're treating a brain tumor with a pencil beam of x-rays, the tissue that gets hit with the most radiation is the skin, followed by the skull, followed by the good parts of the brain, followed by the tumor. Now in reality you don't use a pencil beam, you use a focused beam, so it's not quite that bad, but focusing also works with heavy ion beams (I believe you actually rotate the patient, not the beam). So with heavy ion beams, you get energy concentrated near the tumor for two different reasons: (a) focusing, and (b) the pattern of energy loss, which is peaked at the end of the trajectory.
OK, now about antimatter. An amazing number of posters apparently (a) haven't read the article, (b) haven't understood the article, or (c) don't know enough physics to make heads or tails of any of this.
Antimatter is the same as matter except that it has the opposite charge.
No, you don't have to handle samples of it. They make antiprotons in a particle accelerator, and in the experiment, they delivered it to a sample of hamster cells suspended in gelatin. You'd just put the patient in the beam of the accelerator. This has already been done with beams of protons on real patients. There's absolutely no difference, in principle, between delivering a beam of protons to the tumor and delivering a beam of antiprotons.
Yes, antimatter is the most expensive stuff ever made. No, that isn't particularly relevant, because you're not feeding it to the patient in gram quantities.
At present, there is no dedicated medical facility where patients could get exposed to a beam of antiprotons, and there may never be. What you'd have to do, for the foreseeable future, is bring your patient to a particle acclerator, get him some beam time, and place him on the receiving end of the beam. Although beam time is incredibly expensive, it's not necessarily true that you'd have to pay for 1 hour of beam time in order to give the patient 1 hour of treatment. There may be times when the accelerator is being tested, and the beam would otherwise just be wasted. There may be times when someone is doing an experiment with 1 femtoamp of antiprotons, but they can spare 0.01 femtoamps of their beam to be diverted to the patient. Or there may be times when it's just not possible to book 100% of the available beam time for physics experiments (e.g., something goes wrong with an experiment, and they can't use the rest of their beamtime).
The reason a beam of antiprotons is four times more effective than a beam of protons is that after the antiproton delivers a bunch of energy through electrical interactions with electrons, it then annihilates itself with one of the protons in a nucleus in the tumor. This is such an energetic process that I imagine every single proton and neutron in that nucleus goes zipping off separately, with energies in the MeV range. These neutrons and protons then deposit their energy in the tumor as well.
The real problem isn't toxicity, it is selectivity. How do you kill cancer cells without killing the entire organism?
And if you'd read the article, you'd understand that that's exactly the advantage of antiprotons.
I thought On Intelligence was a very interesting book, but I didn't feel convinced about some of the strong opinions he expressed by the time I was done reading. It's an interesting insight to think of the human brain as essentially a pattern recognition device, and it's interesting to know that information flows in both directions, e.g., not just from the eyes to the brain but backward from the brain toward the eyes. OTOH, he has this abiding faith that the neocortex is made out of modules that are all interchangeable, and for the life of me, I never understood why he was so convinced of this assertion. Any comments from people with expertise in this area?
The other 94 aren't as well qualified. They have master's degrees, or they don't have any teaching experience. You say your friend is well qualified (which I assume means he has a PhD), and has experience. If that's the case, then I can't imagine why he wouldn't be able to get community college interviews.
See my sig for a catalog of free books (books that have intentionally been set free by their authors, not old public domain ones like Project Gutenberg collects). Some professors at MIT write textbooks and put them up for free on their OCW pages, which is great. However, I've noticed that a lot of these tend to evaporate quickly. I have a feature in my catalog's web interface where users can click on a button to report that a link is broken. A lot of the time when this happens, I find that it was a link to an OCW page, which has disappeared, and google searching doesn't show the book existing at any new home, either. Maybe that professor didn't get tenure, and left, or maybe he got a publishing contract, and his publisher wouldn't let him keep the book on the web for free. As with software, this is always a concern with any book that isn't under a copyleft license; it can become unfree at any time. In general, I like the spirit of OCW, but I think it gets hyped waaay out of proportion to what it actually is. Having access to a professor's web page isn't unusual; it's the norm. And having access to professors' web pages isn't the same as getting a free college education.
The really weird thing about the google lawsuits is that the publishers suing google are also google's business partners. It's basically a dispute between business allies that's being handled partly in the courts. There's speculation that the outcome will end up being harmful to fair use. Google has tons of cash, and can afford to pay the publishers a certain amount of money to end the suit, even if they really have a good fair use defense that might eventually have held up in court. If that happens, then everybody else's fair use rights could be diminished, because it will be seen as normal that you have to pay for what really should be fair use. Google could end up with a de facto monopoly on indexing books, because competitors wouldn't have enough money to pay the publishers what google paid. (This is mostly paraphrased from a long article in the New Yorker, IIRC.)
>>There is a great shortage of a physics and chemistry teachers
>Bollocks there is, a good friend of mine is a qualified and experienced physics teacher, can't get a permanent position.
Is it possible that he can't get a permanent position at the specific kind of school he has in mind? I teach physics at a community college, and we have a horrible time getting qualified part-timers. When we interview for a full-time position, we generally get 100 applications, interview 6, and end up with 1 or 2 who are strong candidates. Anyone who's qualified and experienced should have absolutely no problem getting a full-time tenure track community college teaching job. Now it's a different story if what your friend had in mind was a job at a highly selective four-year school with a preexisting top-flight research program in his own field of physics.
Professors have to be paid based on the opportunity cost decisions they must make and as such people like phyiscs professors, economics professors, law professors, etc make a lot more money than english, classics, history type professors.
You're oversimplifying quite a bit here. I teach physics at a community college in California. My school has a set pay schedule. I'm tenured, have a PhD, and have been there for 12 years. I make exactly the same as every other tenured faculty member who has tenure, has a PhD, and has been there for 12 years.
At many state schools, what you get paid depends not on your field but on the state's budget situation at the time you were hired. My wife teaches French at Cal State LA, and makes less than some other people who also teach languages, but were hired later.
I went to second grade in the Menlo Park school district, the location of Oak Knoll School, which is described in the article. I went to Willow School. I don't know how much has changed since 1973, but back then, it was a low-income area, with really horrible schools. I remember learning to flake loose paint off of the buildings with a pin at recess. They had a government-subsidized breakfast program, and my parents offered to pay for it, but the school thought they were just being proud, and told them it was really OK. There was not much learning going on. The teacher would play records, read books to us, and give us toys and comic books as prizes for good behavior. There was no homework. One big reason we moved after that year was to get me out of that school. However, even though the next place we landed was much more affluent (I went to Forest Grove School in Pacific Grove, Ca.), there was still no homework.
Today, I have two kids in grade school, and I do think they get too much homework. (A lot of it is busywork, like word searches, or 50 arithmetic problems when 10 would have done it.) My impression is that the school assigns a lot of homework because the parents expect it. Real estate has tripled since we bought our house here, and I think large amounts of homework reassure affluent parents that their kids are getting a good education. Also, the area is majority Korean, so the culture leans that way too.
Re:a scripting language that targets the java vm !
on
Groovy in Action
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· Score: 1
Embed Groovy in your Java application to provide scripting extensions, and call the methods from inside your Java code.
OK, seems logical. Are a lot of people actually using it for that? The review mentions "calling Groovy from a command-line," "writing automation scripts," and Grails for web applications. It doesn't mention the idea of using it as an extension language for java.
a scripting language that targets the java vm !?
on
Groovy in Action
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· Score: 2, Interesting
To me, the java vm seems like the natural choice for a gigantic, mission-critical, server-side application that you start once and then allow to run without restarting for a long time. I don't understand why you'd want a scripting language that targets the java vm. Starting up the vm, and loading all its libraries, takes time, and for a typical application of a scripting language, that time could easily be an order of magnitude more than the time it should take for the code to run. Also, you don't get the benefit of JIT compilation if it's just a script that runs, does a job, and exits. Of course I realize that scripting languages aren't just for the kind of thing that unix shell scripts can do, but really, that's a major part of a scripting language's natural niche. Also, part of the Unix Way is that you write lots of small tools that work together; but if each of those tools is starting up a java vm, and then maybe invoking ten other tools that start their vms, it just sounds like a recipe for horrible performance.
I haven't used rails, and don't know anything about grails, but I assume that a rails or grails application runs as a cgi, with a new process starting every time a user does something in a web interface. As a user of web interfaces, the last thing on earth I want is a web interface that has to start up a java vm every time I click on a button to submit a form. As a webmaster, I also can't see that as a good use of server-side resources. Or is there some mechanism similar to mod_perl that allows you to avoid this overhead?
Tell me this: Why shouldn't government policy favor Americans over Indians?
That's a standard argument for protectionism. There are also lots of standard arguments for free trade as well. You're oversimplifying by pretending that a restrictive immigration policy favors Americans. It favors some Americans, and hurts others.
Anyway, your example sucks: there is a more or less free labor market within the US
That was the point of my argument, which you don't seem to have understood.
There is no need for the government to intervene by importing desperate labor from either Hawaii via the H-1B visa or Mexico via an open-border policy. The free market, by itself and without government intervention, will fix the shortage or surplus.
How about rewriting your statement this way: There is no need for the California government to intervene by importing desperate labor from either Texas via the H-1B visa or Nevada via an open-border policy. The free market, by itself and without government intervention, will fix the shortage or surplus.
A free market would be one in which both goods and labor could move freely, all over the world. If the government keeps most Indians and Mexicans out of your workplace, then the government is artificially subsidizing you.
Washington does not intervene to fix the labor surplus (which is leading to massive layoffs) in Detroit.
Right. Washington doesn't intervene there, but it does intervene when it comes to India and Mexico.
The free market, by itself and without government intervention, will fix the shortage or surplus. Wages rise, and the shortage disappears. Wages fall, and layoffs occur -- thus fixing the surplus.
Supply and demand will operate to find some equilibrium. What equilibrium they find is influenced by government intervention. If the government wasn't artificially preventing Indians from working in the US as easily as US citizens can, there would be a different equilibrium, in which the price of labor in the US was lower.
Thank God he's not one of these libertarian candidates who thinks he can get elected by scapegoating immigrants. We had a ton of those in the most recent California election, and I couldn't bring myself to vote for them, even though I'm registered libertarian and normally vote the party ticket. You have to go back to page 5 of Phillies' web site to find any mention of immigration, and his position is relatively sane and not hysterical (although I would still prefer a candidate who supports free trade in labor the same way the party supports free trade in material goods).
I think in a lot of cases, it's mom and dad who are paying for the inkjet cartridges. You also have to think like a penniless community college student, not like someone who has a real job. I agree that it's strange, but in any case, that's what I see happen.
Are you talking about a different book, or a different edition? It's true that the textbook publishers bring out new editions on very short cycles, and the only reason they do it is to kill off the used book market. My experience, as a college teacher, is that teachers tend to stick with the same book (but new editions) for as long as possible; switching to a completely new book is a lot of work, and they want to avoid that.
But oddly enough, at least some people have found that free on-line editions of textbooks make the print versions sell better, too. See Flint's Prime Palaver #6.
That hasn't been my experience at all. I'm the author some physics textbooks, which have always been available for free as DRM-free PDFs, and which are also available in print. My experience has been that if the cost of a printed, 250-page volume rises above about $15 in the bookstore, students start choosing to download the book and print it themselves. When the price is about $20, only about 40% of students buy it in print. When the price is about $14, about 75% do. I'm perfectly happy with my current setup, which works like this: the books are free in digital form, and students can buy them for about $14 (depending on what shipping they choose) from lulu, with zero royalty going to me. However, that's a completely untenable business model for a publisher; their costs are such that they won't even consider selling such a book for less than about $50. (I know this from discussions with publishers who contacted me because they were interested in the books.) The Eric Flint article you linked to unfortunately doesn't say anything about what books he's talking about. For the kind of illustrated freshman science textbooks I'm talking about, one big issue is that publishers normally pay to license photos, and then they have to pay licensing fees to the photo agencies on every copy they sell. That actually makes it completely impossible for them to give away a free online book. The way I've handled the photo issue is to make my own, and also use a lot of photos from Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons. However, that's only possible because my books are under a copyleft license that's compatible with theirs. Most publishers are absolutely unwilling to publish a book if the arrangement is going to be nonexclusive, which means that a copylefted book is not an option for them. Yes, you can find counterexamples (O'Reilly, Prentice Hall and Bruce Perens' Open Source Series), but almost no publishers are willing to take that kind of chance.
Baen proved that free books increase sales enormously.
The problem is that you can't necessarily apply the same lessons to other types of information besides books, or even to other types of books.
College textbooks. College textbooks are unlike science fiction books because they're extremely expensive, the target audience doesn't have any choice about whether to choose a particular book, and the same title typically sells steadily for many years. So for college textbook publishers, following the Baen model just won't work. If they wanted to make it work, they'd have to lower the price of a calculus textbook from $150 to more like $20. Baen's model depends on the idea that the electronic freebies help to keep the books popular; no such consideration applies to college textbooks, where the only concern is to keep the professor from adopting some other book.
Software.
The Baen model depends on the fact that books are available in two forms, paper and electronic, and most people who are actually going to read a science fiction novel prefer paper. It doesn't really work that way with software, although you can certainly try to make two versions, or sell support, etc.
In both of these examples, information that has intentionally been set free by its authors really is a threat to the established industry -- and I think that's a good thing. (See my sig for numerous examples of free textbooks; not many of them are also available in print.)
Publishers claim that the majority of the cost of a book is printing, binding and shipping. All of those costs are gone with ebooks.
Well, no. That may be true for certain types of books, but it is certainly not true for any that I'm familiar with. One type of book where I have hard data is upper-division physics textbooks (black and white). For those books, paper, printing, and binding (PPB) are about $10 a copy, whereas the price of the book is normally in the $50-100 range. One way to tell that PPB is not a big slice of the pie for textbooks in general is that the cost of college textbooks has gone up 62% in the last decade, whereas PPB definitely has not. Paper has gotten more expensive, but not enough to explain an increase in the cost of an organic chemistry textbook from $100 to $160. In some cases, PPB may be getting cheaper, because publishers are using POD in cases where it's economically advantageous. (A lot of fiction publishers are getting slower-selling titles produced by Lightning Source, for example, in small batches.)
For most types of books, PPB is not a very big chunk of the retail price. Important chunks include:
editorial work
design work, for illustrated books, such as textbooks
licensing of photos (which is a per copy cost)
distribution
the bookstore's markup (typically 34% markup for a college bookstore)
advertising
financial costs incurred because you have to pay to produce the books, and then wait to sell them in order to get your money back
returns (a huge negative in the publishing business)
I can't believe that shipping is a big hunk of the pie, especially if they're using media mail.
It's silly to be talking about Mars bases, etc., when we haven't even done a sample return mission yet. A sample return could go a long way toward settling the question of whether there's actually microbial life on Mars.
As this stuff gets more complex, it totally makes sense to do anything you can do to cut down on the complexity. If landers only need a low-power radio, and a low-gain antenna, in order to talk to a permanenet orbiting comm satellite, that's a big reduction in complexity.
Another logical step would be to establish fuel depots of liquid oxygen, on the surface and/or in orbit. You've got free solar power, and in orbit it's really easy to get things cold enough to keep oxygen liquid. Otherwise any mission that's going to come back to earth needs to carry the fuel for the burns on the return leg, and that increases the mass you need to send to Mars, which increases the fuel requirements even more.
I've bought four or five Great Quality brand generic PCs at Fry's with Linux preinstalled. In every case I immediately wiped out the distro that came on it, and installed something else. As you say, part of the reason was knowing that drivers were likely to be available; however, back before I got broadband, I ran into the fact that that wasn't necessarily the case. Those things had winmodems, and yes, there was a linux driver, but no, I couldn't find any documentation for what it was. (Well, the documentation may have existed, but Great Quality's web site is in Chinese:-) Not the end of the world, but I did end up buying an external modem.
For me, the main motivation was really (a) I didn't want my money going to MS, (b) I didn't want to help inflate MS's sales figures, and (c) even if I didn't mind about a and b, I've never seen a machine with windows preinstalled that you could buy for $180.
Slashdot Mirror
You could bookmark the debian package-of-the-day page, or you could bookmark this freshmeat page, which takes you to a random project. If you use other OSes in addition to Linux, the freshmeat one might be more useful. Freshmeat also has ratings, user comments, etc.
a) Read the article. b) Read the article. c) Read the article. d) Read the article.
First off, heavy ion beams make sense as a way of treating cancer. The reason is that when a heavy ion passes through matter, it decelerates along a straight-line path, and deposits a very large percentage of its energy near the very end of its path. If you compare with x-rays as a radiation treatment, x-rays deposit energy in an exponential-decay pattern, so if you're treating a brain tumor with a pencil beam of x-rays, the tissue that gets hit with the most radiation is the skin, followed by the skull, followed by the good parts of the brain, followed by the tumor. Now in reality you don't use a pencil beam, you use a focused beam, so it's not quite that bad, but focusing also works with heavy ion beams (I believe you actually rotate the patient, not the beam). So with heavy ion beams, you get energy concentrated near the tumor for two different reasons: (a) focusing, and (b) the pattern of energy loss, which is peaked at the end of the trajectory.
OK, now about antimatter. An amazing number of posters apparently (a) haven't read the article, (b) haven't understood the article, or (c) don't know enough physics to make heads or tails of any of this.
The real problem isn't toxicity, it is selectivity. How do you kill cancer cells without killing the entire organism?
And if you'd read the article, you'd understand that that's exactly the advantage of antiprotons.
I thought On Intelligence was a very interesting book, but I didn't feel convinced about some of the strong opinions he expressed by the time I was done reading. It's an interesting insight to think of the human brain as essentially a pattern recognition device, and it's interesting to know that information flows in both directions, e.g., not just from the eyes to the brain but backward from the brain toward the eyes. OTOH, he has this abiding faith that the neocortex is made out of modules that are all interchangeable, and for the life of me, I never understood why he was so convinced of this assertion. Any comments from people with expertise in this area?
The other 94 aren't as well qualified. They have master's degrees, or they don't have any teaching experience. You say your friend is well qualified (which I assume means he has a PhD), and has experience. If that's the case, then I can't imagine why he wouldn't be able to get community college interviews.
See my sig for a catalog of free books (books that have intentionally been set free by their authors, not old public domain ones like Project Gutenberg collects). Some professors at MIT write textbooks and put them up for free on their OCW pages, which is great. However, I've noticed that a lot of these tend to evaporate quickly. I have a feature in my catalog's web interface where users can click on a button to report that a link is broken. A lot of the time when this happens, I find that it was a link to an OCW page, which has disappeared, and google searching doesn't show the book existing at any new home, either. Maybe that professor didn't get tenure, and left, or maybe he got a publishing contract, and his publisher wouldn't let him keep the book on the web for free. As with software, this is always a concern with any book that isn't under a copyleft license; it can become unfree at any time. In general, I like the spirit of OCW, but I think it gets hyped waaay out of proportion to what it actually is. Having access to a professor's web page isn't unusual; it's the norm. And having access to professors' web pages isn't the same as getting a free college education.
The really weird thing about the google lawsuits is that the publishers suing google are also google's business partners. It's basically a dispute between business allies that's being handled partly in the courts. There's speculation that the outcome will end up being harmful to fair use. Google has tons of cash, and can afford to pay the publishers a certain amount of money to end the suit, even if they really have a good fair use defense that might eventually have held up in court. If that happens, then everybody else's fair use rights could be diminished, because it will be seen as normal that you have to pay for what really should be fair use. Google could end up with a de facto monopoly on indexing books, because competitors wouldn't have enough money to pay the publishers what google paid. (This is mostly paraphrased from a long article in the New Yorker, IIRC.)
>>There is a great shortage of a physics and chemistry teachers
>Bollocks there is, a good friend of mine is a qualified and experienced physics teacher, can't get a permanent position.
Is it possible that he can't get a permanent position at the specific kind of school he has in mind? I teach physics at a community college, and we have a horrible time getting qualified part-timers. When we interview for a full-time position, we generally get 100 applications, interview 6, and end up with 1 or 2 who are strong candidates. Anyone who's qualified and experienced should have absolutely no problem getting a full-time tenure track community college teaching job. Now it's a different story if what your friend had in mind was a job at a highly selective four-year school with a preexisting top-flight research program in his own field of physics.
Professors have to be paid based on the opportunity cost decisions they must make and as such people like phyiscs professors, economics professors, law professors, etc make a lot more money than english, classics, history type professors.
You're oversimplifying quite a bit here. I teach physics at a community college in California. My school has a set pay schedule. I'm tenured, have a PhD, and have been there for 12 years. I make exactly the same as every other tenured faculty member who has tenure, has a PhD, and has been there for 12 years.
At many state schools, what you get paid depends not on your field but on the state's budget situation at the time you were hired. My wife teaches French at Cal State LA, and makes less than some other people who also teach languages, but were hired later.
I went to second grade in the Menlo Park school district, the location of Oak Knoll School, which is described in the article. I went to Willow School. I don't know how much has changed since 1973, but back then, it was a low-income area, with really horrible schools. I remember learning to flake loose paint off of the buildings with a pin at recess. They had a government-subsidized breakfast program, and my parents offered to pay for it, but the school thought they were just being proud, and told them it was really OK. There was not much learning going on. The teacher would play records, read books to us, and give us toys and comic books as prizes for good behavior. There was no homework. One big reason we moved after that year was to get me out of that school. However, even though the next place we landed was much more affluent (I went to Forest Grove School in Pacific Grove, Ca.), there was still no homework.
Today, I have two kids in grade school, and I do think they get too much homework. (A lot of it is busywork, like word searches, or 50 arithmetic problems when 10 would have done it.) My impression is that the school assigns a lot of homework because the parents expect it. Real estate has tripled since we bought our house here, and I think large amounts of homework reassure affluent parents that their kids are getting a good education. Also, the area is majority Korean, so the culture leans that way too.
Embed Groovy in your Java application to provide scripting extensions, and call the methods from inside your Java code.
OK, seems logical. Are a lot of people actually using it for that? The review mentions "calling Groovy from a command-line," "writing automation scripts," and Grails for web applications. It doesn't mention the idea of using it as an extension language for java.
To me, the java vm seems like the natural choice for a gigantic, mission-critical, server-side application that you start once and then allow to run without restarting for a long time. I don't understand why you'd want a scripting language that targets the java vm. Starting up the vm, and loading all its libraries, takes time, and for a typical application of a scripting language, that time could easily be an order of magnitude more than the time it should take for the code to run. Also, you don't get the benefit of JIT compilation if it's just a script that runs, does a job, and exits. Of course I realize that scripting languages aren't just for the kind of thing that unix shell scripts can do, but really, that's a major part of a scripting language's natural niche. Also, part of the Unix Way is that you write lots of small tools that work together; but if each of those tools is starting up a java vm, and then maybe invoking ten other tools that start their vms, it just sounds like a recipe for horrible performance.
I haven't used rails, and don't know anything about grails, but I assume that a rails or grails application runs as a cgi, with a new process starting every time a user does something in a web interface. As a user of web interfaces, the last thing on earth I want is a web interface that has to start up a java vm every time I click on a button to submit a form. As a webmaster, I also can't see that as a good use of server-side resources. Or is there some mechanism similar to mod_perl that allows you to avoid this overhead?
OK, correct me if I'm way off base, here!
Tell me this: Why shouldn't government policy favor Americans over Indians?
That's a standard argument for protectionism. There are also lots of standard arguments for free trade as well. You're oversimplifying by pretending that a restrictive immigration policy favors Americans. It favors some Americans, and hurts others.
Anyway, your example sucks: there is a more or less free labor market within the US
That was the point of my argument, which you don't seem to have understood.
There is no need for the government to intervene by importing desperate labor from either Hawaii via the H-1B visa or Mexico via an open-border policy. The free market, by itself and without government intervention, will fix the shortage or surplus.
How about rewriting your statement this way:
There is no need for the California government to intervene by importing desperate labor from either Texas via the H-1B visa or Nevada via an open-border policy. The free market, by itself and without government intervention, will fix the shortage or surplus.
A free market would be one in which both goods and labor could move freely, all over the world. If the government keeps most Indians and Mexicans out of your workplace, then the government is artificially subsidizing you.
Washington does not intervene to fix the labor surplus (which is leading to massive layoffs) in Detroit.
Right. Washington doesn't intervene there, but it does intervene when it comes to India and Mexico.
The free market, by itself and without government intervention, will fix the shortage or surplus. Wages rise, and the shortage disappears. Wages fall, and layoffs occur -- thus fixing the surplus.
Supply and demand will operate to find some equilibrium. What equilibrium they find is influenced by government intervention. If the government wasn't artificially preventing Indians from working in the US as easily as US citizens can, there would be a different equilibrium, in which the price of labor in the US was lower.
Thank God he's not one of these libertarian candidates who thinks he can get elected by scapegoating immigrants. We had a ton of those in the most recent California election, and I couldn't bring myself to vote for them, even though I'm registered libertarian and normally vote the party ticket. You have to go back to page 5 of Phillies' web site to find any mention of immigration, and his position is relatively sane and not hysterical (although I would still prefer a candidate who supports free trade in labor the same way the party supports free trade in material goods).
I think in a lot of cases, it's mom and dad who are paying for the inkjet cartridges. You also have to think like a penniless community college student, not like someone who has a real job. I agree that it's strange, but in any case, that's what I see happen.
Are you talking about a different book, or a different edition? It's true that the textbook publishers bring out new editions on very short cycles, and the only reason they do it is to kill off the used book market. My experience, as a college teacher, is that teachers tend to stick with the same book (but new editions) for as long as possible; switching to a completely new book is a lot of work, and they want to avoid that.
But oddly enough, at least some people have found that free on-line editions of textbooks make the print versions sell better, too. See Flint's Prime Palaver #6.
That hasn't been my experience at all. I'm the author some physics textbooks, which have always been available for free as DRM-free PDFs, and which are also available in print. My experience has been that if the cost of a printed, 250-page volume rises above about $15 in the bookstore, students start choosing to download the book and print it themselves. When the price is about $20, only about 40% of students buy it in print. When the price is about $14, about 75% do. I'm perfectly happy with my current setup, which works like this: the books are free in digital form, and students can buy them for about $14 (depending on what shipping they choose) from lulu, with zero royalty going to me. However, that's a completely untenable business model for a publisher; their costs are such that they won't even consider selling such a book for less than about $50. (I know this from discussions with publishers who contacted me because they were interested in the books.) The Eric Flint article you linked to unfortunately doesn't say anything about what books he's talking about. For the kind of illustrated freshman science textbooks I'm talking about, one big issue is that publishers normally pay to license photos, and then they have to pay licensing fees to the photo agencies on every copy they sell. That actually makes it completely impossible for them to give away a free online book. The way I've handled the photo issue is to make my own, and also use a lot of photos from Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons. However, that's only possible because my books are under a copyleft license that's compatible with theirs. Most publishers are absolutely unwilling to publish a book if the arrangement is going to be nonexclusive, which means that a copylefted book is not an option for them. Yes, you can find counterexamples (O'Reilly, Prentice Hall and Bruce Perens' Open Source Series), but almost no publishers are willing to take that kind of chance.
Baen proved that free books increase sales enormously.
The problem is that you can't necessarily apply the same lessons to other types of information besides books, or even to other types of books.
College textbooks. College textbooks are unlike science fiction books because they're extremely expensive, the target audience doesn't have any choice about whether to choose a particular book, and the same title typically sells steadily for many years. So for college textbook publishers, following the Baen model just won't work. If they wanted to make it work, they'd have to lower the price of a calculus textbook from $150 to more like $20. Baen's model depends on the idea that the electronic freebies help to keep the books popular; no such consideration applies to college textbooks, where the only concern is to keep the professor from adopting some other book.
Software. The Baen model depends on the fact that books are available in two forms, paper and electronic, and most people who are actually going to read a science fiction novel prefer paper. It doesn't really work that way with software, although you can certainly try to make two versions, or sell support, etc.
In both of these examples, information that has intentionally been set free by its authors really is a threat to the established industry -- and I think that's a good thing. (See my sig for numerous examples of free textbooks; not many of them are also available in print.)
What is DRMed and also "high-priced"?
Books in electronic form. That's what the article is about.
Publishers claim that the majority of the cost of a book is printing, binding and shipping. All of those costs are gone with ebooks.
Well, no. That may be true for certain types of books, but it is certainly not true for any that I'm familiar with. One type of book where I have hard data is upper-division physics textbooks (black and white). For those books, paper, printing, and binding (PPB) are about $10 a copy, whereas the price of the book is normally in the $50-100 range. One way to tell that PPB is not a big slice of the pie for textbooks in general is that the cost of college textbooks has gone up 62% in the last decade, whereas PPB definitely has not. Paper has gotten more expensive, but not enough to explain an increase in the cost of an organic chemistry textbook from $100 to $160. In some cases, PPB may be getting cheaper, because publishers are using POD in cases where it's economically advantageous. (A lot of fiction publishers are getting slower-selling titles produced by Lightning Source, for example, in small batches.)
For most types of books, PPB is not a very big chunk of the retail price. Important chunks include:
- editorial work
- design work, for illustrated books, such as textbooks
- licensing of photos (which is a per copy cost)
- distribution
- the bookstore's markup (typically 34% markup for a college bookstore)
- advertising
- financial costs incurred because you have to pay to produce the books, and then wait to sell them in order to get your money back
- returns (a huge negative in the publishing business)
I can't believe that shipping is a big hunk of the pie, especially if they're using media mail.How is ConTeXt better?
It's silly to be talking about Mars bases, etc., when we haven't even done a sample return mission yet. A sample return could go a long way toward settling the question of whether there's actually microbial life on Mars.
As this stuff gets more complex, it totally makes sense to do anything you can do to cut down on the complexity. If landers only need a low-power radio, and a low-gain antenna, in order to talk to a permanenet orbiting comm satellite, that's a big reduction in complexity.
Another logical step would be to establish fuel depots of liquid oxygen, on the surface and/or in orbit. You've got free solar power, and in orbit it's really easy to get things cold enough to keep oxygen liquid. Otherwise any mission that's going to come back to earth needs to carry the fuel for the burns on the return leg, and that increases the mass you need to send to Mars, which increases the fuel requirements even more.
I've bought four or five Great Quality brand generic PCs at Fry's with Linux preinstalled. In every case I immediately wiped out the distro that came on it, and installed something else. As you say, part of the reason was knowing that drivers were likely to be available; however, back before I got broadband, I ran into the fact that that wasn't necessarily the case. Those things had winmodems, and yes, there was a linux driver, but no, I couldn't find any documentation for what it was. (Well, the documentation may have existed, but Great Quality's web site is in Chinese :-) Not the end of the world, but I did end up buying an external modem.
For me, the main motivation was really (a) I didn't want my money going to MS, (b) I didn't want to help inflate MS's sales figures, and (c) even if I didn't mind about a and b, I've never seen a machine with windows preinstalled that you could buy for $180.