The interesting point is that you can often tell "good" American sparkling wine apart from cheap crap simply because most of the finer sparkling wine houses don't claim to be "Champagne" whereas most of the cheap crap houses do.
Similarly, American Bordeaux is almost always bad, whereas if they call it something else and then quietly say that it's made in the Bordeaux style, it'll be more likely to be good.
Just not Alan Ralsky. It's there to help folks like the DMA do *their* kinder, gentler spam. That it gets rid of the current competition is merely a side benefit that I'm sure they made some sizable campaign contributions to ensure.
Consider that POD inevitably costs much more per book than normal publishing, even after returns, warehousing, etc. Thusly, it's inevitable that if you take the same book in two parallel universes and sell it with POD in one universe and the normal way in the other universe, the one that was printed the normal way in the other universe will end up making far more money.
So Superior Books was pretty much doomed from the beginning. I've felt that book editors do a valuable service ever since I read my first truly wretched vanity press novel sent in to my now-defunct 'zine for review.;)
I wish they had a bigger presence in the books-that-don't-sell-well-anymore-but-should-stil l-be-published department.
Now, the other point is, if you are aiming at a book published in the American market by an American publisher, a Swedish agent isn't going to help much. A Swedish agent, if they exist, will have contacts with the Swedish-speaking publishers in Sweden and any marketing to an English-speaking publisher in America or Europe is going to be through an overseas agent anyway. Meaning, if you book is to be published in NY, get an agent there because one there will be involved anyway.
The other thing is, if you have one good novel, it's not like you have broken the mold and cannot ever create another good story. Give it a year of trying to get it published to give it a fair shake and then just put it up on the 'net, promote it, and see what happens.
Editors are a filter between the unwashed masses and you.
If you take every science fiction story this year that somebody is willing to show people other than their closest writing buddy, put it in one massive bookshelf, and pick a single story at random, that story may be a bestseller. Or it may be a really bad star wars slashfic written by somebody who's really repressed. Remember, 90% of everything is crap.
The goal of a publisher is to filter this out. A publisher is doing their job if you can pick a book at random from a much smaller bookshelf (so that most of the crap is gone), look at the cover to decide if it's your sort of thing, and then generally be satisfied with your selection.
Now, the problem is that people are self-correlated. A given individual, unless they totally suck, generally thinks that they are above average in every way. So most writers, even rather awful writers, still consider themselves good enough to join the honored ranks of the published (yet still pennieless) authors. This means that an editor for any book publisher or magazine of note sends out 10 to 100 rejections for each novel they take.
This means that an Editor is overworked, in general. They are hated by most writers because you are statistically likely to get a rejection. They often times will stop reading a story at the first few pages if it's got something that they feel indicates suckage (This can be off-the-wall things like including dedications in the beginning, chapter breaks in anything shorter than 50,000 words, weird fonts, etc)
And, of course, they screw up. Names sell, so they would be dumb to not buy up an existing famous-name writer's latest, even if it's crap. They will almost invariably turn down somebody good on a regular basis. They are not paid to develop writers, they are paid to convert unsorted submissions of varying quality to money, via a printing press.
This also means that your average reader avoids some or all vanity press styled publishing mediums simply because the amount of choice is far too overwhelming whereas Barnes and Nobles is certain to have something they will like despite the reduced choice.
The problem with controversial books is that they can backfire or flop in a variety of interesting ways. Boycots of publishers can hurt the bottom line and overrule any cheap publicity gains. It can hurt the reputation of the publisher among scholarly crowds and/or their authors. They can be sued, sometimes successfully.
Or, even better, it could be a book that was written specifically to be controversial, yet ends up just being pretentious, trite, or dumb. Lolita or A Clockwork Orange were groundbreaking at the time. Trying to write the same novel now just looks dumb.
The problem is that Sturgeon was charitable in saying that 90% of everything sucks.
My cube at work has 2 pieces of my art in it, some random weird webcomics, the sign "It is illegal to be normal and work here", and a random toy I got when I was younger. People pause when they see odd colored light coming out of my cube.
And it's not the weirdest cube in the office by far. *That* cube has a bunch of even more random stuff including Brittney Spears posters, Phish posters, a mousetrap, and a drum kit.
You also have to remember that he used an 8x10 view camera. You can do things with a view camera that there's basicly no way you can reproduce on a "normal" SLR or viewfinder camera.
I don't think the analysis is correct. Right now, nobody has a true upper hand.
Cable ISPs have no experience running a teleco, but they have a marginal technical advantage over a non-ISP VoIP provider simply because of better network routing
ILEC DSL ISPs (the phone company) can sell you a pure DSL connection without canabalizing their existing market simply because they will use VoIP instead of a splitter.
CLEC DSL ISPs (Covad) benefit simply because they don't need the phone company do to the splitter anymore.
Pure VoIP providers benefit because they have no fear of canabalization and they've already started. With the CLECs, they share the benefit of being folks who generally don't have people who have been mad at them since the 80s when the cable was always out of service and ma bell was busy screwing you over.
Lately, it's been the case that I've claimed "Well, I'm going to fill it up sooner or later, so I might as well push it off for a while." This is then followed by "Make it two hard drives, please?"
The other problem that hasn't been covered yet is that people might potentially want to "wildcard" addresses.
The cannonical example of this is the andrew mailing system, which lets you pick addresses like person+foler@andrew.mail.server.com
This when I say I want to opt-out, I need to be able to say person+*@andrew.mail.server.com.
Similarly, since I own my own domain name, I want to be able to opt-out *@wirewd.com.
Of course, that doesn't prevent you from adding entries to the DNS record for a spam-acceptance policy. If yes, they can send. If no, they are not allowed to send. If maybe, they have to query some other service.
Re:The spirit of the law...
on
Who Is An ISP?
·
· Score: 1
The spirit of the law is that the DMA and other such groups want Spam to be classified as "every bulk unsolicitied mailing that we didn't send".
The problem is that you pay just as much as your ISP does, in agregates. If they could avoid upgrading, they would probably end up charging less to compete with "the other guys", thus passing the savings on to the user. If you go over your allocation of storage space and get billed for it, you are the one who gets charged.
The problem is that your average ISP is going to do a mental calculation. It costs $X to sue a spammer yet costs $Y to suck it and buy a new box and filtering software. If X>Y, they won't sue. Sure, some ISPs will get some extra cash $Z for the free advertising, etc. but it's not going to work out very often.
One of the ways that the junk fax laws partially worked is because they allow the average joe to file suit for some small amount of money in small claims court. There are generally no lawyers in small claims courts, thus the costs are much lower. There are enough people who have the time to sue. The agregate costs will cause great fiscial hardship for a company if enough people pull it off.
The problem is fax.com has been above the law for several years now because they play rough in small claims court.
I think the *main* potential for good effects from the new anti-spam laws is going to be that filtering might get easier, simply because the "legit" marketers will be broadcasting from non-forged, non-hacked addresses. This makes blacklisting easier and tends to imply that it will be relatively easy to baysean-filter out their individualized removal mechanism/removal address/etc.
Thought number one was that the phone companies in general have made great money playing *both* sides of the telemarketing fence, so why wouldn't they pull the same stunt in the spamming world.
The interesting part about chad being well-hung (heh heh) is that after the 2000 elections, everybody checks their chad to make sure that there's nothing hangin'.
Of course, the problem is that the ballot only makes sense if you have the butterfly key there, so there's only so much you can do to check ahead of time.
Not sure. It's not a particular field, it means that you left an issue unvoted *in general*. So there's no way for them to actually extraploate what you actually left blank -- at no point do they actually see your ballot.
I think the main reason is that it's easier to have a human being say, "OK, so it's beeping because you left a field blank. Did you mean to do that?" than to try to make an instruction book explanation that makes sense to everybody.
That, and you don't want people pushing random buttons on the machine.
My personal model for the best system is what my county uses.
There's a big fscking arrow with a gap in it, not a little bubble. You have a big black marker of the correct optimal type. They tell you to connect the arrow. We're talking about a broadsheet-sized ballot card here, so space is decidedly *not* a problem. There's no key, everything you need is on the ballot.
When you are done, you put it in the machine. If you screwed up or made some incorrect marks, it tells you, so there's an immediate feedback loop. If you don't mark a candidate, it will require an election official to make sure that you did, in fact, mean to leave it blank.
Paper record, cheaper than a computer, a check to make sure that it will scan before the ballot leaves your sight.
Of course, they are still playing semantics games.
Their latest goal is to say "Oh, do you want to be off our list?"
Which simply means that they remove your row from the database. Next time they get new numbers, you are back on the list. They aren't breaking any laws, in theory, because the "Do not call" list isn't mentioned.
1) Solid rocket engines. They have made Peroxide+Gasoline rocket engines in small scale. Use one of them. At the very least a pressure fed John Carmack special style engine. 2) One stage. The Saturn V has 3 stages. This one, and all of the injection-molded toys before it, were only 1 stage. Where's the fun in that? 3) Injection molding. Where's the work in that?
It's a trade off. Wings get you precise landing locations, better reusability, and less G-loading in ways that a capsule doesn't. Capsules are lighter and simpler.
Part of the 4-different-shape OSP graphic's appeal is that it lets NASA float the idea of a capsule around and see if people are against it. When your funding depends on congressional and public popularity and part of your goal is national prestige, you tend to go towards ferrari styling instead of volvo styling.
Either way the OSP *has* to offer something that the Soyuz and Shenzhu don't or else it's an instant loser.
Reusable launchers will be useful if you are doing more flights per year and therefore can afford the maintenence. So it's not a waste of money, it's just not needed yet.
The thing with the vision statement is that it assumes that long term money is also on the way, because that's the new mission.
The reason why we got to the moon was not because Kennedy or his spending, it was because he made a mission that everybody could latch onto and fund. Well, that, and being assassinated before he could screw up always helps.
The big problem is that NASA's main mission is to keep everything it has and appease politicians. If they were told to get together hardware to go to (insert destination here) they can lobby for that one thing and perhaps get some other folks involved in that vision.
The problem is that the last time NASA got such a mission (Bush Sr. told them to go to Mars, Regan with the Orient Express) nobody cared and they faceplanted.
Slashdot Mirror
The interesting point is that you can often tell "good" American sparkling wine apart from cheap crap simply because most of the finer sparkling wine houses don't claim to be "Champagne" whereas most of the cheap crap houses do.
Similarly, American Bordeaux is almost always bad, whereas if they call it something else and then quietly say that it's made in the Bordeaux style, it'll be more likely to be good.
It is.
Just not Alan Ralsky. It's there to help folks like the DMA do *their* kinder, gentler spam. That it gets rid of the current competition is merely a side benefit that I'm sure they made some sizable campaign contributions to ensure.
Consider that POD inevitably costs much more per book than normal publishing, even after returns, warehousing, etc. Thusly, it's inevitable that if you take the same book in two parallel universes and sell it with POD in one universe and the normal way in the other universe, the one that was printed the normal way in the other universe will end up making far more money.
;)
l l-be-published department.
So Superior Books was pretty much doomed from the beginning. I've felt that book editors do a valuable service ever since I read my first truly wretched vanity press novel sent in to my now-defunct 'zine for review.
I wish they had a bigger presence in the books-that-don't-sell-well-anymore-but-should-sti
Now, the other point is, if you are aiming at a book published in the American market by an American publisher, a Swedish agent isn't going to help much. A Swedish agent, if they exist, will have contacts with the Swedish-speaking publishers in Sweden and any marketing to an English-speaking publisher in America or Europe is going to be through an overseas agent anyway. Meaning, if you book is to be published in NY, get an agent there because one there will be involved anyway.
The other thing is, if you have one good novel, it's not like you have broken the mold and cannot ever create another good story. Give it a year of trying to get it published to give it a fair shake and then just put it up on the 'net, promote it, and see what happens.
Editors are a filter between the unwashed masses and you.
If you take every science fiction story this year that somebody is willing to show people other than their closest writing buddy, put it in one massive bookshelf, and pick a single story at random, that story may be a bestseller. Or it may be a really bad star wars slashfic written by somebody who's really repressed. Remember, 90% of everything is crap.
The goal of a publisher is to filter this out. A publisher is doing their job if you can pick a book at random from a much smaller bookshelf (so that most of the crap is gone), look at the cover to decide if it's your sort of thing, and then generally be satisfied with your selection.
Now, the problem is that people are self-correlated. A given individual, unless they totally suck, generally thinks that they are above average in every way. So most writers, even rather awful writers, still consider themselves good enough to join the honored ranks of the published (yet still pennieless) authors. This means that an editor for any book publisher or magazine of note sends out 10 to 100 rejections for each novel they take.
This means that an Editor is overworked, in general. They are hated by most writers because you are statistically likely to get a rejection. They often times will stop reading a story at the first few pages if it's got something that they feel indicates suckage (This can be off-the-wall things like including dedications in the beginning, chapter breaks in anything shorter than 50,000 words, weird fonts, etc)
And, of course, they screw up. Names sell, so they would be dumb to not buy up an existing famous-name writer's latest, even if it's crap. They will almost invariably turn down somebody good on a regular basis. They are not paid to develop writers, they are paid to convert unsorted submissions of varying quality to money, via a printing press.
This also means that your average reader avoids some or all vanity press styled publishing mediums simply because the amount of choice is far too overwhelming whereas Barnes and Nobles is certain to have something they will like despite the reduced choice.
The problem with controversial books is that they can backfire or flop in a variety of interesting ways. Boycots of publishers can hurt the bottom line and overrule any cheap publicity gains. It can hurt the reputation of the publisher among scholarly crowds and/or their authors. They can be sued, sometimes successfully.
Or, even better, it could be a book that was written specifically to be controversial, yet ends up just being pretentious, trite, or dumb. Lolita or A Clockwork Orange were groundbreaking at the time. Trying to write the same novel now just looks dumb.
The problem is that Sturgeon was charitable in saying that 90% of everything sucks.
My cube at work has 2 pieces of my art in it, some random weird webcomics, the sign "It is illegal to be normal and work here", and a random toy I got when I was younger. People pause when they see odd colored light coming out of my cube.
And it's not the weirdest cube in the office by far. *That* cube has a bunch of even more random stuff including Brittney Spears posters, Phish posters, a mousetrap, and a drum kit.
The problem is that I'm too evil to really do good passive justice. ;)
I've often felt that. For a short span of time, there was a spammer operating a few miles from me.
I'd probably manage to get myself arrested for either trespassing, assault, or perhaps something more sinister if I did pay them a visit, tho.
You also have to remember that he used an 8x10 view camera. You can do things with a view camera that there's basicly no way you can reproduce on a "normal" SLR or viewfinder camera.
Lately, it's been the case that I've claimed "Well, I'm going to fill it up sooner or later, so I might as well push it off for a while." This is then followed by "Make it two hard drives, please?"
I always thought that 100 MHz would start making you broadcast too much radio interference because it was at the bottom of the FM band.
But I was also a grade school geek, so what did I know?
Not necessarily.
.
The other problem that hasn't been covered yet is that people might potentially want to "wildcard" addresses.
The cannonical example of this is the andrew mailing system, which lets you pick addresses like person+foler@andrew.mail.server.com
This when I say I want to opt-out, I need to be able to say person+*@andrew.mail.server.com.
Similarly, since I own my own domain name, I want to be able to opt-out *@wirewd.com
Of course, that doesn't prevent you from adding entries to the DNS record for a spam-acceptance policy. If yes, they can send. If no, they are not allowed to send. If maybe, they have to query some other service.
The spirit of the law is that the DMA and other such groups want Spam to be classified as "every bulk unsolicitied mailing that we didn't send".
The problem is that you pay just as much as your ISP does, in agregates. If they could avoid upgrading, they would probably end up charging less to compete with "the other guys", thus passing the savings on to the user. If you go over your allocation of storage space and get billed for it, you are the one who gets charged.
The problem is that your average ISP is going to do a mental calculation. It costs $X to sue a spammer yet costs $Y to suck it and buy a new box and filtering software. If X>Y, they won't sue. Sure, some ISPs will get some extra cash $Z for the free advertising, etc. but it's not going to work out very often.
One of the ways that the junk fax laws partially worked is because they allow the average joe to file suit for some small amount of money in small claims court. There are generally no lawyers in small claims courts, thus the costs are much lower. There are enough people who have the time to sue. The agregate costs will cause great fiscial hardship for a company if enough people pull it off.
The problem is fax.com has been above the law for several years now because they play rough in small claims court.
I think the *main* potential for good effects from the new anti-spam laws is going to be that filtering might get easier, simply because the "legit" marketers will be broadcasting from non-forged, non-hacked addresses. This makes blacklisting easier and tends to imply that it will be relatively easy to baysean-filter out their individualized removal mechanism/removal address/etc.
That was thought number two.
Thought number one was that the phone companies in general have made great money playing *both* sides of the telemarketing fence, so why wouldn't they pull the same stunt in the spamming world.
San Mateo county, actually.
The interesting part about chad being well-hung (heh heh) is that after the 2000 elections, everybody checks their chad to make sure that there's nothing hangin'.
Of course, the problem is that the ballot only makes sense if you have the butterfly key there, so there's only so much you can do to check ahead of time.
Not sure. It's not a particular field, it means that you left an issue unvoted *in general*. So there's no way for them to actually extraploate what you actually left blank -- at no point do they actually see your ballot.
I think the main reason is that it's easier to have a human being say, "OK, so it's beeping because you left a field blank. Did you mean to do that?" than to try to make an instruction book explanation that makes sense to everybody.
That, and you don't want people pushing random buttons on the machine.
Nope. California.
My personal model for the best system is what my county uses.
There's a big fscking arrow with a gap in it, not a little bubble. You have a big black marker of the correct optimal type. They tell you to connect the arrow. We're talking about a broadsheet-sized ballot card here, so space is decidedly *not* a problem. There's no key, everything you need is on the ballot.
When you are done, you put it in the machine. If you screwed up or made some incorrect marks, it tells you, so there's an immediate feedback loop. If you don't mark a candidate, it will require an election official to make sure that you did, in fact, mean to leave it blank.
Paper record, cheaper than a computer, a check to make sure that it will scan before the ballot leaves your sight.
If you want to play games while looking like you are doing something productive, get a PDA. ;)
Of course, they are still playing semantics games.
Their latest goal is to say "Oh, do you want to be off our list?"
Which simply means that they remove your row from the database. Next time they get new numbers, you are back on the list. They aren't breaking any laws, in theory, because the "Do not call" list isn't mentioned.
Work for the person who's building the mold and running the press, not for the person assembling. ;)
1) Solid rocket engines. They have made Peroxide+Gasoline rocket engines in small scale. Use one of them. At the very least a pressure fed John Carmack special style engine.
2) One stage. The Saturn V has 3 stages. This one, and all of the injection-molded toys before it, were only 1 stage. Where's the fun in that?
3) Injection molding. Where's the work in that?
It's a trade off. Wings get you precise landing locations, better reusability, and less G-loading in ways that a capsule doesn't. Capsules are lighter and simpler.
Part of the 4-different-shape OSP graphic's appeal is that it lets NASA float the idea of a capsule around and see if people are against it. When your funding depends on congressional and public popularity and part of your goal is national prestige, you tend to go towards ferrari styling instead of volvo styling.
Either way the OSP *has* to offer something that the Soyuz and Shenzhu don't or else it's an instant loser.
Reusable launchers will be useful if you are doing more flights per year and therefore can afford the maintenence. So it's not a waste of money, it's just not needed yet.
The thing with the vision statement is that it assumes that long term money is also on the way, because that's the new mission.
The reason why we got to the moon was not because Kennedy or his spending, it was because he made a mission that everybody could latch onto and fund. Well, that, and being assassinated before he could screw up always helps.
The big problem is that NASA's main mission is to keep everything it has and appease politicians. If they were told to get together hardware to go to (insert destination here) they can lobby for that one thing and perhaps get some other folks involved in that vision.
The problem is that the last time NASA got such a mission (Bush Sr. told them to go to Mars, Regan with the Orient Express) nobody cared and they faceplanted.
Except that you'd have to redefine huge chunks of the NASA/DARPA/Congress bureacracy in order to do it right.
Well, that, and it would take another incremental huge expense for any of them to go orbital, so it's not one year away, either way.