NO Republican voted for the PPACA health care bill. It was passed on a holiday evening by a vote on strictly partisan lines. 34 Democrats voted against it. Practically no one had even read the 2700 page bill (I did, eventually). The day after the House passed the Senate bill, the House tried to repeal it.
Whenever this topic comes up, we end up discussing what publishers really do.
Every time, someone with some knowledge of how the publishing industry works turns up and explains how there is this long road between the author's draft and the book in your hands, made of editing, copy-editing, typesetting, cover design, marketing and more, and the publisher is the truck driver that sees the draft to the end of that road. That's correct.
But I've come to the conclusion that none of that is the one irreplaceable service publishers perform in the system.
All of the above can, to some extent, and for a fee, be performed just as well by independent contractors. (There are great independent editors out there, and aren't we all glad for that.)
The one important thing publishers do is: they take the loss on books that don't earn out.
Now hear me out.
I know how we, Slashdot readers, tend to think about those things. In our minds, if the book doesn't earn out (that is, it brings in less money than the publisher gave the author as an advance), then it's got to be someone's fault, right? Bad writer, bad publisher. Something.
Wrong.
The thing is, a successful book requires a lot of factors. Great writing doesn't suffice. The public is fickle. Yesterday, supernatural romance sold by the truckload, now it doesn't. GRRM was a great writer for decades before you even heard of him. Harry Potter didn't start hitting it big until three or four books into the series. Word of mouth matters, but only after the readership has exceeded a certain critical mass. And until then... someone has to take the loss.
Because, here's the thing. GRRM, Rowling, they're outliers. Many books -- most books, AFAIK -- don't quite earn out. Many deserve to, but don't, because that's not how the world works.
But they still got written, you still read some of them, you still loved some of them, and that only happened because someone, somewhere, was willing to pay an author to keep writing, and take the risk that the great book in their hands may not earn that money back.
And that, friends, is what publishers really do.
So, if the Ebook does not sell, the publisher eats the inventory?
Do you think we are stupid enough to believe that?
Most Ebooks ARE interchangeable units of entertainment. A few authors and titles stand out, but those are generally of interest only to a niche audience. I buy over 50 Ebooks a year for my Kindle, varying from a highly technical textbook on molecular evolution (free!!!) to a Science Fiction novel by a great author ($7.99).
Let's face it, you are buying a brief reading experience, not a leather-bound pride-of-ownership thing for your smoking room.
What are the odds that an (easily prevented) driverless bomb car will be any more effective than any other kind of terrorist attack? All we need is a car occupant detector to prevent that. How does that stack up against the lives saved by driverless cars in traffic accidents?
Oh, yeah, and way less traffic ticket revenue for City Hall. It also makes those auto speed detectors in D.C obsolete. Now, if we could only stack them vertical to save parking spaces we would have a nice, disruptive technology.
The Chernobyl experiment was not ordered by scientists. It was ordered by a political appointee who wanted to exceed his boss's expectations and show that the plant could also generate useful power at low neutron densities. The onsite engineers protested to no avail. Unfortunately, the reactor graphite core did not shut down evenly. Instead, full neutron current ran in small sections of the graphite without adequate cooling. When the graphite reached the temperature to dissociate water, the free oxygen ignited a granite/hydrogen explosion which blew about 190 MT of fissionables out of the containment and into the environment.
I'm one of the proposers of an international nuclear intervention process for nuclear disaster like Chernobyl.
List me as a denier who knows a lot about the subject and rejects the bullshit. I strenuously object to any idiot that claims a tax on CO2 will save the world.
We had a record COLD winter this year. Will a one month record a few tenths of a degree higher make up for it? And how much money does the government propose taking out of the economy to fix a portion of a tenth of a degree?
Let me know when it's safe to assume this is not a political argument.
Smog aside, CO2 emissions have a very small effect on global warming. I would like to see Krugman's analysis of the cost per degree of climate warming abeyance. I think it's a number with 15 zeros.
There are a few neural gaming interfaces that are not prohibitively expensive. One of the fancier items is "emotive.con", which taps several cortical centers. Since the damage was reported in the brain stem, the EEG activity in the higher cortical centers ought to be intact.
She will still need training, but if it was me, I'd be damned happy to have a device like this.
There are so many digital and complex analog signals on the ham bands, especially 70 cm and 220, that it would be pretty unusual for someone to detect an encrypted signal from all that clever noise.
I've sent pictures on ham radio bands thousands of miles (slow scan), but none encrypted. I run software defined radios and several digital modes.
However, any form of commercial business or encryption is against the regs.
Hams enforce the regs in their own rules and we are pretty efficient at it.
Nevada ceded administration of their state land to the Fed originally because the new state had no infrastructure to tend the land or secure it. The Nevada constitution provides explicitly for grazing on this land. It is supposed to be pubic land, not private land held by the Fed or BLM. There is a constitutional prohibition against the Fed owning land as a squatter.
The idea was that at some future time the Fed would relinquish the land to the state of Nevada. Fat chance of that.
Around 1993 BLM insisted on a contract that required ranchers to give up their water and grazing rights forever, except where the BLM doled them out for a fee. All but a few ranchers quit the range. Bundy refused to sign and got stubborn.
Twenty years later, 200 armed BLM thugs showed up with snipers and SWAT teams to collect the grazing fees.....the rest is history. By coincidence, that grazing land is now set aside to mitigate tortoises for a solar power plant about 35 miles away. By coincidence, Harry Reid's son is an executive for that power plant project. By coincidence, the head of the BLM was Reid's former staffer. By coincidence, nothing was done for 20 years until those people suddenly needed Bundy gone.
Global climate trends take longer than 500 years. Go back to the last ice age and plot CO2 against average temperature. Bet you see something other than AGW.
About a decade ago I was involved in an aerospace project and had to make a presentation to a group of legislators and their assistants regarding remote telemetry of an AUV. The response time was squishy because of transmission time for the radio signal from the distant AUV. The legislators had a report to that effect and wanted to know why we could't fix the problem. One if us mentioned that the speed of light was a law of physics. To which a congressperson responded. "Well, we make the laws. We can change them."
I believe the real issues have little to do with the right to contract with another for an exclusive consensual arrangement. That right, which we call marriage, ought to be mediated, if at all, by ministers or secular magistrates, and the agreements registered locally. When there are tax deductions and tax rates skewed toward marriage, health-care, social security, loans and other financial consequences, that becomes a spousal support issue, not a "marriage" issue. Blowing this up into a matter of morality is simply a disguise.
Let the Federal and State get out of the "marriage" business and get out of the bedrooms. If the financial landscape is no longer skewed, the heat will disappear from the discussions.
Here is the real question: The State once had legitimate interests in "line of descent" and family members as inheritors of real estate and chattels. Then it acquired an "interest" in middle class and family as the foundations of civilian society. Are these interests really legitimate in modern society, or would they be better left to individuals and their chosen religious ministries?
None of this needs to change the basic supports for raising children, which we subsidize in various ways.
The limitation on serial computation is not really in the architecture, it's in the code. If the compiler were to generate multi-threaded code where serial dependencies were minimized, (and if coders learned to use this feature), then it would be fairly easy to uncouple the various cars on the computer train and let them each follow their own tracks until some intermediate output was exchanged.
A lot of new VLSI architecture is capable of this kind of uncoupling. Even with the same clock rates.
My iPhone 5 connector is no longer reliable. Half the time it is plugged in and the iPhone does not get charged. Tolerances are tight on the tiny thing and its socket loosens up with time, allowing just enough play to disconnect if the phone is even breathed on. 2-sided, yes. Bipolar would be a better description.
It is rather too easy to sue a CEO or a CFO, provided that you can establish that they contributed to the damage. However, driving a car entails a certain risk. It's not the same as buying a toothbrush or an insurance policy. Anyone who buys a car does so assuming a certain level of risk. The only question is: what is an ACCEPTABLE LEVEL OF RISK.
If that level of risk is zero, nothing will get manufactured. Everything real can fail somehow.
If a CEO or CFO has a business that requires a certain level of safety, so that the ignition does not shut off at 65 MPH on the highway and kill someone, and they fail or obstruct that mission, they are not only liable under Sorbanes Oxley to their shareholders and the SEC compliance people, they may be subject to criminal penalties under plain old tort law.
Recessive genes persist because they are not expressed in every generation, but lie hidden until two gametes with the same recessives mate. The hidden genes have no selective pressures so they persist.
The same goes for red hair and innate forms of homosexuality. However, homosexuality may be a development issue in the fetus as well.
Not all homosexuals are innate or developmental, it seems. There is such a thing as a cultural genome.
If cars were on electronic adaptive cruise control and set to keep only a few feet between cars, and cars were organized into platoons based on the length of the typical green light, everything would move faster and smoother.
Traffic tangles are chaotic systems with properties like a gas. Fast movers just increase the temperatures all around. Platoons are like polymers and step down the chaos.
Cinnamon oil, mustard poultice, licorice root tea, green tea, honey, cumin, are all useful home remedies with medical effects well beyond the placebo effect. Just because they cannot be patented by Big Pharma does not mean they are ineffective. At issue here is the tens of millions of dollars it takes to run a full set of placebo-based double-blind studies. There is no profit in running these studies for home remedies.
There is a competition between "ethical" pharmaceutical companies that require a doctor's prescription for there products and the OTC suppliers like Life Extension, who have extensive research on animal models and metabolic pathways. If a Pharma company takes over an OTC formula the price goes up by a factor of ten. Lots of prescriptions could be safely delivered OTC at great savings to the consumer.
Slashdot Mirror
SO THAT's the way life got seeded on Earth! Mis-directed panspermia!
Better check your history.
NO Republican voted for the PPACA health care bill. It was passed on a holiday evening by a vote on strictly partisan lines. 34 Democrats voted against it. Practically no one had even read the 2700 page bill (I did, eventually). The day after the House passed the Senate bill, the House tried to repeal it.
Whenever this topic comes up, we end up discussing what publishers really do.
Every time, someone with some knowledge of how the publishing industry works turns up and explains how there is this long road between the author's draft and the book in your hands, made of editing, copy-editing, typesetting, cover design, marketing and more, and the publisher is the truck driver that sees the draft to the end of that road. That's correct.
But I've come to the conclusion that none of that is the one irreplaceable service publishers perform in the system.
All of the above can, to some extent, and for a fee, be performed just as well by independent contractors. (There are great independent editors out there, and aren't we all glad for that.)
The one important thing publishers do is: they take the loss on books that don't earn out.
Now hear me out.
I know how we, Slashdot readers, tend to think about those things. In our minds, if the book doesn't earn out (that is, it brings in less money than the publisher gave the author as an advance), then it's got to be someone's fault, right? Bad writer, bad publisher. Something.
Wrong.
The thing is, a successful book requires a lot of factors. Great writing doesn't suffice. The public is fickle. Yesterday, supernatural romance sold by the truckload, now it doesn't. GRRM was a great writer for decades before you even heard of him. Harry Potter didn't start hitting it big until three or four books into the series. Word of mouth matters, but only after the readership has exceeded a certain critical mass. And until then... someone has to take the loss.
Because, here's the thing. GRRM, Rowling, they're outliers. Many books -- most books, AFAIK -- don't quite earn out. Many deserve to, but don't, because that's not how the world works.
But they still got written, you still read some of them, you still loved some of them, and that only happened because someone, somewhere, was willing to pay an author to keep writing, and take the risk that the great book in their hands may not earn that money back.
And that, friends, is what publishers really do.
So, if the Ebook does not sell, the publisher eats the inventory?
Do you think we are stupid enough to believe that?
Most Ebooks ARE interchangeable units of entertainment. A few authors and titles stand out, but those are generally of interest only to a niche audience. I buy over 50 Ebooks a year for my Kindle, varying from a highly technical textbook on molecular evolution (free!!!) to a Science Fiction novel by a great author ($7.99).
Let's face it, you are buying a brief reading experience, not a leather-bound pride-of-ownership thing for your smoking room.
More bullshit "security" concerns.
What are the odds that an (easily prevented) driverless bomb car will be any more effective than any other kind of terrorist attack? All we need is a car occupant detector to prevent that. How does that stack up against the lives saved by driverless cars in traffic accidents?
Oh, yeah, and way less traffic ticket revenue for City Hall. It also makes those auto speed detectors in D.C obsolete. Now, if we could only stack them vertical to save parking spaces we would have a nice, disruptive technology.
That gives China the market for solar panels and wind turbines to the detriment of US producers.
The Chernobyl experiment was not ordered by scientists. It was ordered by a political appointee who wanted to exceed his boss's expectations and show that the plant could also generate useful power at low neutron densities. The onsite engineers protested to no avail. Unfortunately, the reactor graphite core did not shut down evenly. Instead, full neutron current ran in small sections of the graphite without adequate cooling. When the graphite reached the temperature to dissociate water, the free oxygen ignited a granite/hydrogen explosion which blew about 190 MT of fissionables out of the containment and into the environment.
I'm one of the proposers of an international nuclear intervention process for nuclear disaster like Chernobyl.
Melting permafrost releases methane. Not much CO2, if any.
Projections are not climate either.
List me as a denier who knows a lot about the subject and rejects the bullshit. I strenuously object to any idiot that claims a tax on CO2 will save the world.
We had a record COLD winter this year. Will a one month record a few tenths of a degree higher make up for it? And how much money does the government propose taking out of the economy to fix a portion of a tenth of a degree?
Let me know when it's safe to assume this is not a political argument.
Smog aside, CO2 emissions have a very small effect on global warming. I would like to see Krugman's analysis of the cost per degree of climate warming abeyance. I think it's a number with 15 zeros.
There are a few neural gaming interfaces that are not prohibitively expensive. One of the fancier items is "emotive.con", which taps several cortical centers. Since the damage was reported in the brain stem, the EEG activity in the higher cortical centers ought to be intact.
She will still need training, but if it was me, I'd be damned happy to have a device like this.
You are describing EVERY outcome based government program.
There is no such thing as race. Oh, you vote for skin color or hair color? Your local drug store has things for that.
There are so many digital and complex analog signals on the ham bands, especially 70 cm and 220, that it would be pretty unusual for someone to detect an encrypted signal from all that clever noise.
I've sent pictures on ham radio bands thousands of miles (slow scan), but none encrypted. I run software defined radios and several digital modes.
However, any form of commercial business or encryption is against the regs.
Hams enforce the regs in their own rules and we are pretty efficient at it.
AB3BG
Nevada ceded administration of their state land to the Fed originally because the new state had no infrastructure to tend the land or secure it. The Nevada constitution provides explicitly for grazing on this land. It is supposed to be pubic land, not private land held by the Fed or BLM. There is a constitutional prohibition against the Fed owning land as a squatter.
The idea was that at some future time the Fed would relinquish the land to the state of Nevada. Fat chance of that.
Around 1993 BLM insisted on a contract that required ranchers to give up their water and grazing rights forever, except where the BLM doled them out for a fee. All but a few ranchers quit the range. Bundy refused to sign and got stubborn.
Twenty years later, 200 armed BLM thugs showed up with snipers and SWAT teams to collect the grazing fees.....the rest is history. By coincidence, that grazing land is now set aside to mitigate tortoises for a solar power plant about 35 miles away. By coincidence, Harry Reid's son is an executive for that power plant project. By coincidence, the head of the BLM was Reid's former staffer. By coincidence, nothing was done for 20 years until those people suddenly needed Bundy gone.
Global climate trends take longer than 500 years. Go back to the last ice age and plot CO2 against average temperature. Bet you see something other than AGW.
About a decade ago I was involved in an aerospace project and had to make a presentation to a group of legislators and their assistants regarding remote telemetry of an AUV. The response time was squishy because of transmission time for the radio signal from the distant AUV. The legislators had a report to that effect and wanted to know why we could't fix the problem. One if us mentioned that the speed of light was a law of physics. To which a congressperson responded. "Well, we make the laws. We can change them."
Ayup.
I believe the real issues have little to do with the right to contract with another for an exclusive consensual arrangement. That right, which we call marriage, ought to be mediated, if at all, by ministers or secular magistrates, and the agreements registered locally. When there are tax deductions and tax rates skewed toward marriage, health-care, social security, loans and other financial consequences, that becomes a spousal support issue, not a "marriage" issue. Blowing this up into a matter of morality is simply a disguise.
Let the Federal and State get out of the "marriage" business and get out of the bedrooms. If the financial landscape is no longer skewed, the heat will disappear from the discussions.
Here is the real question: The State once had legitimate interests in "line of descent" and family members as inheritors of real estate and chattels. Then it acquired an "interest" in middle class and family as the foundations of civilian society. Are these interests really legitimate in modern society, or would they be better left to individuals and their chosen religious ministries?
None of this needs to change the basic supports for raising children, which we subsidize in various ways.
The limitation on serial computation is not really in the architecture, it's in the code. If the compiler were to generate multi-threaded code where serial dependencies were minimized, (and if coders learned to use this feature), then it would be fairly easy to uncouple the various cars on the computer train and let them each follow their own tracks until some intermediate output was exchanged.
A lot of new VLSI architecture is capable of this kind of uncoupling. Even with the same clock rates.
My iPhone 5 connector is no longer reliable. Half the time it is plugged in and the iPhone does not get charged. Tolerances are tight on the tiny thing and its socket loosens up with time, allowing just enough play to disconnect if the phone is even breathed on. 2-sided, yes. Bipolar would be a better description.
It is rather too easy to sue a CEO or a CFO, provided that you can establish that they contributed to the damage. However, driving a car entails a certain risk. It's not the same as buying a toothbrush or an insurance policy. Anyone who buys a car does so assuming a certain level of risk. The only question is: what is an ACCEPTABLE LEVEL OF RISK.
If that level of risk is zero, nothing will get manufactured. Everything real can fail somehow.
If a CEO or CFO has a business that requires a certain level of safety, so that the ignition does not shut off at 65 MPH on the highway and kill someone, and they fail or obstruct that mission, they are not only liable under Sorbanes Oxley to their shareholders and the SEC compliance people, they may be subject to criminal penalties under plain old tort law.
Recessive genes persist because they are not expressed in every generation, but lie hidden until two gametes with the same recessives mate. The hidden genes have no selective pressures so they persist.
The same goes for red hair and innate forms of homosexuality. However, homosexuality may be a development issue in the fetus as well.
Not all homosexuals are innate or developmental, it seems. There is such a thing as a cultural genome.
If cars were on electronic adaptive cruise control and set to keep only a few feet between cars, and cars were organized into platoons based on the length of the typical green light, everything would move faster and smoother.
Traffic tangles are chaotic systems with properties like a gas. Fast movers just increase the temperatures all around. Platoons are like polymers and step down the chaos.
Cinnamon oil, mustard poultice, licorice root tea, green tea, honey, cumin, are all useful home remedies with medical effects well beyond the placebo effect. Just because they cannot be patented by Big Pharma does not mean they are ineffective. At issue here is the tens of millions of dollars it takes to run a full set of placebo-based double-blind studies. There is no profit in running these studies for home remedies.
There is a competition between "ethical" pharmaceutical companies that require a doctor's prescription for there products and the OTC suppliers like Life Extension, who have extensive research on animal models and metabolic pathways. If a Pharma company takes over an OTC formula the price goes up by a factor of ten. Lots of prescriptions could be safely delivered OTC at great savings to the consumer.
I don't support homeopathic remedies.