Quite a few really awful books are available for free without pirating them.
If you have good taste you're on your own. I've occasionally found a gem, but seeing as genre fiction has always been 98% dreck the failure rate only seems marginally higher than traditional publishing. What I really hate about the sequel business model is its effect on stand alone novels. Fascinating ideas frequently only need a short story or single novel to explore, but there's no money in that for most authors. So those stories and novels never get written unless the author sees a way to tack a whole space opera onto it.
So... you're really up for vaccination by force? I could see the problems with kids solved by declaring schools with too low a vaccination rate to be public nuisances, at which point anti-vaccine parents are presented with the options of enrolling their kids at a school with a high enough vaccination rate, homeschooling, or vaccinating their kids. I could see more jobs that require close quarters contact with the general public (or their meals) requiring vaccination. But fines or vaccination by force for adults that choose to stay unvaccinated seems pretty unrealistic.
The flaw in your argument is clear in that you are pirating books to read. The argument should work the same if you limit it to works on Project Gutenberg, which are available legally. There are more books written before 1900 than I will ever read. But I want to read books written after that, because the world has changed. You do want to read recent books by pirating them.
Quite a few new books are available for free without pirating them. The business model for new-ish authors of genre fiction is to write the first novel for free and sell it for $0.00 on Amazon, then sell the sequels (self published or through a publisher). Unfortunately this model means fewer stand alone novels and more endless sagas.
Your model is going out of business, Charles, figure it out.
Hell, you wrote Accelerando, maybe you should re-read it so you can remember the lessons of your own book.
Or maybe you could read the article:
Forbes seem to think that Hachette is a producer and Amazon is a distributor. This isn't quite true. I am a producer. From my perspective, Hachette is a value-added wholesale distributor: they supply editorial, production, packaging, marketing, accounting, and sales services and pay me a percentage of the revenue. (I could do this myself, and self-publish, but I don't want to be a publisher, I want to be a writer: we have this thing called "the division of labour", and it suits me quite well to out-source that side of the job
I've actually got much of the equipment and contacts I need ready just in case I need to start self-publishing. I decline to go there right now because it's expensive in startup costs (think in terms of paying editors to work by the hour) and will require a lot of work, and I hate accounting, and there's a lot of it involved (think: separate business bank accounts, incorporation, quarterly VAT accounting)... but I keep it open as an option. Thing is, I reckon being my own publisher would take up half the time I would otherwise spend writing. It'd cut my written output by about 30%, in other words.
Ideally writers would eliminate publishers and Amazon, and sell direct to their readers.
Stross disagrees with you there -
Forbes seem to think that Hachette is a producer and Amazon is a distributor. This isn't quite true. I am a producer. From my perspective, Hachette is a value-added wholesale distributor: they supply editorial, production, packaging, marketing, accounting, and sales services and pay me a percentage of the revenue. (I could do this myself, and self-publish, but I don't want to be a publisher, I want to be a writer: we have this thing called "the division of labour", and it suits me quite well to out-source that side of the job
I've actually got much of the equipment and contacts I need ready just in case I need to start self-publishing.
I decline to go there right now because it's expensive in startup costs (think in terms of paying editors to work by the hour) and will require a lot of work, and I hate accounting, and there's a lot of it involved (think: separate business bank accounts, incorporation, quarterly VAT accounting)... but I keep it open as an option.
Thing is, I reckon being my own publisher would take up half the time I would otherwise spend writing. It'd cut my written output by about 30%, in other words.
I like Stross's novels quite a lot; I'd rather he spend his time writing.
In an article on the future of astronomy published in 1908, he wrote: “It is more than doubtful whether a further increase in size is a great advantage.” His argument was that factors other than size had a much bigger influence on astronomical data, factors such as climate. “It seems as if we had nearly reached the limit of size of telescopes, and as if we must hope for the next improvement in some other direction,” he said.
Loeb says Pickering’s views had a major impact on observational astronomy on the east coast compared to the west coast of the US. Just as Pickering was publishing his controversial idea, the 60-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles, saw first light. And while astronomers in the east were arguing the toss about size, this telescope was gathering the data that would eventually make it one of the most productive in astronomical history.
What’s more, at exactly that time, the Mount Wilson observatory received funding to build a 100-inch telescope and this was completed in 1917. And this was in turn superseded by the 200-inch telescope at nearby Mount Palomar in 1947 which remained the largest telescope in the world until 1993.
Pickering was right: a bigger telescope is not the answer when your site has poor climate, due to diminishing returns. Plus, from the article's own evidence, people kept building larger telescopes - they just put them in better places.
But areas with more densely packed residential areas do tend to have lower prices and don't seem to significantly subsidize service offerings in less densely packed areas which usually have higher prices.
Is that due to density or neighborhoods that are actually served by multiple providers?
In fact, you know what's usually around the carbon fiber layers in cars?
If the "carbon" is visible it's quite possibly just glass or aramid fiber died black before the resin is added, though I think fake carbon fiber is less prevalent now than it used to be.
Also not a big moment for Slashdot: No discussion of which aspects of the legislation the biotechs and universities objected to. Not in the summary, the original story, or the discussion here.
No, this means that you don't understand physics. If I come to a full stop and then go, I am going slower, so the time during which I am exposed to cross traffic is longer, which increases the likelihood that I will get hit.
If you are exposed to cross traffic at an intersection with stop signs/lights either you or the cross traffic is doing it wrong.
If you agree that it would be good for the H1-B program to be altered in ways that raise their wages, why did you argue that the program is necessary because US companies need access to cheaper labor?
Picking a US market value that would get future doctors and lawyers to pick software development instead is just an academic exercise.
You don't need to pick a figure that would get future doctors and lawyers to switch to careers for which they would be questionable fits; you just need a figure that is, from your source, at most $13k higher on average than H1-Bs are currently paid.
But most minority groups make less money than the average worker.
That's a red herring. How much do US born coders of Indian descent make compared to their H1-B counterparts?
Again, if the argument is that H1-Bs are needed and used to get labor at below US market value (good luck trying to get a CEO to admit that) why not extend it to manufacturing? Factories are hurting for skilled workers, but can't get them because other industries like fast food offer better pay and working conditions to unskilled workers.
And if it is about being able to compete, then make H1-Bs competitive to ensure they go where they are needed most. First, have H1-Bs allotted via weekly public auctions throughout the year: highest bidding companies get the workers. Second: instead of a sponsored worker being tied to a company, make them completely free to switch employers from day 1 with no additional paperwork outside of the usual tax forms. Again: the highest bidding companies will be the ones that get the workers.
Almost every company in the US is competing against foreign companies. They cannot always just raise local wages to the level it would take to attract American employees, because it would make it that much harder to compete with their foreign rivals. They cannot always wait to train new employees when there is a large supply of already trained workers that their foreign competitors could pull from.
Well in that case why not relax the minimum wage law for foreign workers in manufacturing, etc?
Anyway the stated purpose of the H1-B is completely at odds with this problem: it's supposed to find foreign candidates for jobs which have no viable US candidates, not to allow companies to fill the slot at a "competitive" price.
So lets fix H1-B programs. First, have H1-Bs allotted by weekly public auctions: highest bidding companies get the workers. Second: instead of a sponsored worker being tied to a company, make them completely free to switch employers from day 1 with no additional paperwork outside of the usual tax forms. Again: highest bidding companies get the workers. If the goal is actually what they say it is: to bring workers to the labor markets with the biggest shortages, shouldn't we let the free market decide that? Live by the free market, die by the free market.
If you haven't done so before, read a few actual journals. The big ones like Nature or Science do employ journalists - because yes, there really is news in science, and thank god they do because science coverage in the lay press is pretty abysmal. Then there are ads. People involved with ads are generating revenue for the journal well above whatever it costs to employ them and well above what the journal would make just using a platform like adsense - otherwise the journal would get rid of them and just use adsense. They decrease the costs that otherwise have to be passed on to subscribers.
As far as I know most, if not all, of the core functions of peer review are done on a quid pro quo basis by academics under the existing system.
No argument there, but note you said core functions. The editors (and their admin assistant) have to contact potential peer reviewers, cajole the slow ones into returning their comments somewhere near the deadline, cajole the unreasonable ones into toning down their reviews, cajole the authors of the manuscript to make the suggested edits as opposed to just yelling extended commentaries on the parentage of the peer reviewers, and then get the peer reviewers to accept the edits (by the deadline). Some of these people are direct competitors or have axes to grind with each other. Some of them are prima donnas, overwhelmed by their other responsibilities, or just incompetent when it comes to these particular responsibilities. Yes, it's in their own best interests (to varying degrees) to zip through the process with no fuss, supervision or babying, but you could say the same about almost any volunteer or work organization, almost all of which require someone to provide supervision and babying to cut through all of the crap.
Arxiv, by the way, avoids these problems by doing away with pre publication peer review, and instead has readers comment after the manuscripts are posted.
The people who work on journals are not the reason journals are expensive; journal production, even with 5-15 FTEs per masthead are cheap to produce. Journals are expensive because of the position publishers like Elsevier and ACS hold in the marketplace: folks working in science have to have access to some of their products in order to do their jobs, so Elsevier and ACS force libraries to subscribe to bundles of their products at insane markups. That's the big way they make revenue. Don't blame The History Channel or even HBO for your $180 per month cable bill, blame Comcast.
Out of curiosity - how much could you charge your 100M users if all of them needed your product to do their jobs, no one else was selling your product, and most of them had their subscriptions subsidized by their workplaces? Would that price bear much relation to your own costs?
Between reputable open access journals and open access requirements from funding bodies the situation will eventually get better, but it won't happen overnight.
How responsible are you for the content created/viewed by your 100M users? The hosting part scales cheaply. Advertisement, (no, it's not just adsense), herding peer reviewers, corresponding with authors, and -gasp- actually reading their articles before deciding to accept them takes actual time, technical knowledge of the field, and people skills. A journal may even employ actual journalists. And none of that work scales with volume. Some journals, like Arxiv, manage to provide a great resource without those functions, but the bulk of the journals that dispose of them are on Beall's list of sleazy predatory publishers.
Have a look at an issue of a PLOS journal. Then look at their masthead.
If you are a publisher you will have to have all of those positions filled - but their costs will be shared between dozens and dozens of journals. A relatively high impact journal's staff can amount to the named editors (who may or may not be paid a salary), one or two copy editors, plus an admin assistant. A junk journal ditches the copy editors and doesn't pay the named editors.
The most dangerous weapon is the one that doesn't work when you need it.
Actually it's the reverse: the most dangerous weapon (for its user) is the one that does work when you don't want it to. Most gun owners will never be in a firefight, but they and their families will be around weapons fairly often.
51 were killed with their own weapon or another officers weapon (presumably obtained during the incident)...
This system would have saved at minimum 51 police officers lives.
I don't see how you arrive at that conclusion. Many of those 51 deaths were probably suicides, friendly fire during a confrontation, or other situations where the safety system wouldn't prevent the weapon from discharging.
And here's a man trying to BUY THEM BACK. Get off your asses and HELP HIM.
Problem is, it's only cheap to buy a congressman when there is no one opposing your point of view; the more opposition, the more expensive it gets. If they raise enough money to seriously threaten, say, 100 seats in congress, then the usual suspects will easily raise and spend twice as much to maintain the status quo.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite a few really awful books are available for free without pirating them.
If you have good taste you're on your own. I've occasionally found a gem, but seeing as genre fiction has always been 98% dreck the failure rate only seems marginally higher than traditional publishing. What I really hate about the sequel business model is its effect on stand alone novels. Fascinating ideas frequently only need a short story or single novel to explore, but there's no money in that for most authors. So those stories and novels never get written unless the author sees a way to tack a whole space opera onto it.
So ... you're really up for vaccination by force? I could see the problems with kids solved by declaring schools with too low a vaccination rate to be public nuisances, at which point anti-vaccine parents are presented with the options of enrolling their kids at a school with a high enough vaccination rate, homeschooling, or vaccinating their kids. I could see more jobs that require close quarters contact with the general public (or their meals) requiring vaccination. But fines or vaccination by force for adults that choose to stay unvaccinated seems pretty unrealistic.
The flaw in your argument is clear in that you are pirating books to read. The argument should work the same if you limit it to works on Project Gutenberg, which are available legally. There are more books written before 1900 than I will ever read. But I want to read books written after that, because the world has changed. You do want to read recent books by pirating them.
Quite a few new books are available for free without pirating them. The business model for new-ish authors of genre fiction is to write the first novel for free and sell it for $0.00 on Amazon, then sell the sequels (self published or through a publisher). Unfortunately this model means fewer stand alone novels and more endless sagas.
Your model is going out of business, Charles, figure it out.
Hell, you wrote Accelerando, maybe you should re-read it so you can remember the lessons of your own book.
Or maybe you could read the article:
Forbes seem to think that Hachette is a producer and Amazon is a distributor. This isn't quite true. I am a producer. From my perspective, Hachette is a value-added wholesale distributor: they supply editorial, production, packaging, marketing, accounting, and sales services and pay me a percentage of the revenue. (I could do this myself, and self-publish, but I don't want to be a publisher, I want to be a writer: we have this thing called "the division of labour", and it suits me quite well to out-source that side of the job
I've actually got much of the equipment and contacts I need ready just in case I need to start self-publishing. I decline to go there right now because it's expensive in startup costs (think in terms of paying editors to work by the hour) and will require a lot of work, and I hate accounting, and there's a lot of it involved (think: separate business bank accounts, incorporation, quarterly VAT accounting) ... but I keep it open as an option. Thing is, I reckon being my own publisher would take up half the time I would otherwise spend writing. It'd cut my written output by about 30%, in other words.
Ideally writers would eliminate publishers and Amazon, and sell direct to their readers.
Stross disagrees with you there -
Forbes seem to think that Hachette is a producer and Amazon is a distributor. This isn't quite true. I am a producer. From my perspective, Hachette is a value-added wholesale distributor: they supply editorial, production, packaging, marketing, accounting, and sales services and pay me a percentage of the revenue. (I could do this myself, and self-publish, but I don't want to be a publisher, I want to be a writer: we have this thing called "the division of labour", and it suits me quite well to out-source that side of the job
I've actually got much of the equipment and contacts I need ready just in case I need to start self-publishing. I decline to go there right now because it's expensive in startup costs (think in terms of paying editors to work by the hour) and will require a lot of work, and I hate accounting, and there's a lot of it involved (think: separate business bank accounts, incorporation, quarterly VAT accounting) ... but I keep it open as an option.
Thing is, I reckon being my own publisher would take up half the time I would otherwise spend writing. It'd cut my written output by about 30%, in other words.
I like Stross's novels quite a lot; I'd rather he spend his time writing.
In an article on the future of astronomy published in 1908, he wrote: “It is more than doubtful whether a further increase in size is a great advantage.” His argument was that factors other than size had a much bigger influence on astronomical data, factors such as climate. “It seems as if we had nearly reached the limit of size of telescopes, and as if we must hope for the next improvement in some other direction,” he said. Loeb says Pickering’s views had a major impact on observational astronomy on the east coast compared to the west coast of the US. Just as Pickering was publishing his controversial idea, the 60-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles, saw first light. And while astronomers in the east were arguing the toss about size, this telescope was gathering the data that would eventually make it one of the most productive in astronomical history. What’s more, at exactly that time, the Mount Wilson observatory received funding to build a 100-inch telescope and this was completed in 1917. And this was in turn superseded by the 200-inch telescope at nearby Mount Palomar in 1947 which remained the largest telescope in the world until 1993.
Pickering was right: a bigger telescope is not the answer when your site has poor climate, due to diminishing returns. Plus, from the article's own evidence, people kept building larger telescopes - they just put them in better places.
More than density I think Google looks at existing fiber networks they can buy.
But areas with more densely packed residential areas do tend to have lower prices and don't seem to significantly subsidize service offerings in less densely packed areas which usually have higher prices.
Is that due to density or neighborhoods that are actually served by multiple providers?
In fact, you know what's usually around the carbon fiber layers in cars?
If the "carbon" is visible it's quite possibly just glass or aramid fiber died black before the resin is added, though I think fake carbon fiber is less prevalent now than it used to be.
Also not a big moment for Slashdot: No discussion of which aspects of the legislation the biotechs and universities objected to. Not in the summary, the original story, or the discussion here.
No, this means that you don't understand physics. If I come to a full stop and then go, I am going slower, so the time during which I am exposed to cross traffic is longer, which increases the likelihood that I will get hit.
If you are exposed to cross traffic at an intersection with stop signs/lights either you or the cross traffic is doing it wrong.
Picking a US market value that would get future doctors and lawyers to pick software development instead is just an academic exercise.
You don't need to pick a figure that would get future doctors and lawyers to switch to careers for which they would be questionable fits; you just need a figure that is, from your source, at most $13k higher on average than H1-Bs are currently paid.
But most minority groups make less money than the average worker.
That's a red herring. How much do US born coders of Indian descent make compared to their H1-B counterparts?
Again, if the argument is that H1-Bs are needed and used to get labor at below US market value (good luck trying to get a CEO to admit that) why not extend it to manufacturing? Factories are hurting for skilled workers, but can't get them because other industries like fast food offer better pay and working conditions to unskilled workers.
And if it is about being able to compete, then make H1-Bs competitive to ensure they go where they are needed most. First, have H1-Bs allotted via weekly public auctions throughout the year: highest bidding companies get the workers. Second: instead of a sponsored worker being tied to a company, make them completely free to switch employers from day 1 with no additional paperwork outside of the usual tax forms. Again: the highest bidding companies will be the ones that get the workers.
Almost every company in the US is competing against foreign companies. They cannot always just raise local wages to the level it would take to attract American employees, because it would make it that much harder to compete with their foreign rivals. They cannot always wait to train new employees when there is a large supply of already trained workers that their foreign competitors could pull from.
Well in that case why not relax the minimum wage law for foreign workers in manufacturing, etc? Anyway the stated purpose of the H1-B is completely at odds with this problem: it's supposed to find foreign candidates for jobs which have no viable US candidates, not to allow companies to fill the slot at a "competitive" price.
But in many cases those jobs already existed and, until they were forced to train their H1-B replacements, were held by Americans.
So lets fix H1-B programs. First, have H1-Bs allotted by weekly public auctions: highest bidding companies get the workers. Second: instead of a sponsored worker being tied to a company, make them completely free to switch employers from day 1 with no additional paperwork outside of the usual tax forms. Again: highest bidding companies get the workers. If the goal is actually what they say it is: to bring workers to the labor markets with the biggest shortages, shouldn't we let the free market decide that? Live by the free market, die by the free market.
As far as I know most, if not all, of the core functions of peer review are done on a quid pro quo basis by academics under the existing system.
No argument there, but note you said core functions. The editors (and their admin assistant) have to contact potential peer reviewers, cajole the slow ones into returning their comments somewhere near the deadline, cajole the unreasonable ones into toning down their reviews, cajole the authors of the manuscript to make the suggested edits as opposed to just yelling extended commentaries on the parentage of the peer reviewers, and then get the peer reviewers to accept the edits (by the deadline). Some of these people are direct competitors or have axes to grind with each other. Some of them are prima donnas, overwhelmed by their other responsibilities, or just incompetent when it comes to these particular responsibilities. Yes, it's in their own best interests (to varying degrees) to zip through the process with no fuss, supervision or babying, but you could say the same about almost any volunteer or work organization, almost all of which require someone to provide supervision and babying to cut through all of the crap.
Arxiv, by the way, avoids these problems by doing away with pre publication peer review, and instead has readers comment after the manuscripts are posted.
The people who work on journals are not the reason journals are expensive; journal production, even with 5-15 FTEs per masthead are cheap to produce. Journals are expensive because of the position publishers like Elsevier and ACS hold in the marketplace: folks working in science have to have access to some of their products in order to do their jobs, so Elsevier and ACS force libraries to subscribe to bundles of their products at insane markups. That's the big way they make revenue. Don't blame The History Channel or even HBO for your $180 per month cable bill, blame Comcast.
Out of curiosity - how much could you charge your 100M users if all of them needed your product to do their jobs, no one else was selling your product, and most of them had their subscriptions subsidized by their workplaces? Would that price bear much relation to your own costs?
Between reputable open access journals and open access requirements from funding bodies the situation will eventually get better, but it won't happen overnight.
How responsible are you for the content created/viewed by your 100M users? The hosting part scales cheaply. Advertisement, (no, it's not just adsense), herding peer reviewers, corresponding with authors, and -gasp- actually reading their articles before deciding to accept them takes actual time, technical knowledge of the field, and people skills. A journal may even employ actual journalists. And none of that work scales with volume. Some journals, like Arxiv, manage to provide a great resource without those functions, but the bulk of the journals that dispose of them are on Beall's list of sleazy predatory publishers. Have a look at an issue of a PLOS journal. Then look at their masthead.
If you are a publisher you will have to have all of those positions filled - but their costs will be shared between dozens and dozens of journals. A relatively high impact journal's staff can amount to the named editors (who may or may not be paid a salary), one or two copy editors, plus an admin assistant. A junk journal ditches the copy editors and doesn't pay the named editors.
You sound like someone who doesn't want to understand the problem.
Have you ever known a gun owner that left their weapons unattended in public places on a daily basis for hours on end?
Yes. They leave them in the glove compartment of their car.
The most dangerous weapon is the one that doesn't work when you need it.
Actually it's the reverse: the most dangerous weapon (for its user) is the one that does work when you don't want it to. Most gun owners will never be in a firefight, but they and their families will be around weapons fairly often.
51 were killed with their own weapon or another officers weapon (presumably obtained during the incident) ...
This system would have saved at minimum 51 police officers lives.
I don't see how you arrive at that conclusion. Many of those 51 deaths were probably suicides, friendly fire during a confrontation, or other situations where the safety system wouldn't prevent the weapon from discharging.
And here's a man trying to BUY THEM BACK. Get off your asses and HELP HIM.
Problem is, it's only cheap to buy a congressman when there is no one opposing your point of view; the more opposition, the more expensive it gets. If they raise enough money to seriously threaten, say, 100 seats in congress, then the usual suspects will easily raise and spend twice as much to maintain the status quo.
Not to mention actually altering the rules of the exchanges themselves: they got the exchanges to add new order types specifically to facilitate HFT.