Calm down sweetie. Yes, abortion is part of reproductive rights, along with the morning after pill, birth control pills and plenty of other things. Now, if we were talking about someone banning a book, would you get so worked up if I called it a "freedom of speech" issue, even though that's only one element of freedom of speech? Probably not, but in this case, since it fits your agenda you insist that I separate individual elements out to make you feel better. I'm under no obligation to word things in a way that cranky little conservatives will like or even approve of.
That you don't like what I say doesn't make it a lie.
No particular data, but the FAQ suggests that it's true:
Slashdot seems to be very U.S.-centric. Do you have any plans to be more international in your scope? Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
Well, considering that many Tea Party members are Libertarians, then I'd say yes, many of them are.
Oh please, by and large, actual Libertarians are pretty damn thin on the ground. The vast majority of the Tea Partiers are people who more than a year ago would have just said "Republican" or "Conservative" to describe their political leaning.
The Tea Party movement is an ideologically diverse group made up of people from many walks of life.
Just like the bar in Blues Brothers had all kinds of music, both Country, AND Western....
As a general rule Tea Party people aren't brought together by social issues, but by economic issues
Yeah, I keep hearing that, but so many of them were fine with dumping every cent we could find into the rathole of the Iraq war that I have a hard time believing that. Oh, I forgot, fiscal conservatism is "Don't spend money unless you scream 'PATRIOT' while you're doing it".
has the interesting side effect of preventing religious do-gooders from imposing their ideology too. Neat how that works, isn't it?
And yet the most visible icons like Sara Palin and Glenn Beck are pretty damn religious, weeeeeird.
Face it. You don't know jack shit about the Tea Party movement other than what you've been spoon-fed by watching MSNBC, BBC, and their ilk.
I'd be happy to face it if it were true. Perhaps you'd be happier though if I were spoon-fed by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News?
You wanna spray your ignorance around, that's fine.
Easy muffin, I'm not into the kinky stuff.....
Just don't expect to be taken seriously by anyone with any intellectual prowess.
Basically, Tea Party people want Freedom. Not freedom to be irresponsible children taken care of by an all-powerful Mother state (as leftists want). We demand the freedom to be responsible adults in charge of our own lives and decisions free to choose from the marketplace of products and ideas the way in which we shall live according to our own choices. It's the reason why so many Tea Partiers are Libertarians and Conservatives. And the reason why Leftists love to paint us as evil. We threaten their power base. No Big Govt, no power for leftists to tell us all what to do like the big annoying do-gooder nanny-types that they are.
Which is why the Tea Party is firmly on the side of reproductive rights, gay marriage, legalizing recreational drugs, legal prostitution and a clear separation of church and state. Oh, wait, they're not? Those are mostly "lefty" issues? Face it, the Tea Party is just as fast to cry out for government interference in peoples lives when it's an issue they're passionate about as any other group. They just like to shout "Freedom!" while they're doing it.
The police wanted to charge me with a hate crime because I am white and he was not. eventhough he was the one who started the brawl!
Yeah, it's tough to be a white guy in America, always getting hassled by the police and wrongfully charged every time you go punching black people. What's this world coming to?
Anyway, key word here: wanted. You're implying there that they didn't charge you with a hate crime though, they just wanted to. So, ultimately, cops looked at the situation, considered the possibility of a hate crime, and either they or the prosecutor decided that it wasn't warranted. What exactly is your point here, sounds like the system worked as designed and there was no wrongful hate-crime charge.
As in, "a crime against a gay seems to be more serious than a crime against a straight, yet we are all supposed to be equal."
If a straight guy beats a gay guy specifically because he's gay, it can be charged as a hate crime. If a gay guy beats a straight guy specifically because he's straight, that can also be charged as a hate crime. If that actually happened, and they didn't charge the gay guy that way, you'd have pretty good cause to make some noise about the prosecutor not doing his job, but that doesn't change the fact that the law can and should be applied evenly. Now, the other problem of course is that there just aren't all that many cases of "straight-bashing" to make people worry about this as being a major problem....
Calling a law that protects scientists studying one thing discrimination against all other scientists is ridiculous
Unless of course that law forces the requirements for said science to be lowered far below what is expected of actual, legitimate scientists. Or should all scientists be able to pass off completely random and untestable thoughts as "theories"?
When you buy your washing machine for $399 the reason it's $399 is because of no taxes. If corporations were made to pay taxes the washing machine would cost you $450 or maybe $500.
That doesn't seem quite right. If they raise the price, they also increase their tax burden, so simply raising the price doesn't magically make them pay less taxes. The cost of the item will always end up around what the market will bear, or less if they think they'll make more overall by making less per unit but selling more units. If they think people will pay $500, that's what the thing will cost, but if people will only pay around $400, there's no choice but to either take less profit on the item, make less profit overall because of fewer sales, or stop being in the washing machine business.
No, taxes are paid by you and I. Not by corporations.
They're paid by both. Without the infrastructure and support provided by having a stable society, which you're not going to get without taxes, the corporations can't survive. The big difference is though that corporations swim in vast seas of money, and if that money sits in idle in their reserves, or moves out of the country, or simply gets hoovered up by executives that just shuffle most of it back and forth in the stock market, it does virtually nothing to keep the host country healthy enough to be a market for what the corporation provides.
This is pretty heavy economic theory, huh? But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense.
It's been repeated over, and over, and over, and over again that the use of the word "theory" in science is not the same as the use of the word "theory" in casual conversation. I can't believe that you haven't seen this, or that you don't understand this, therefore the only explanation I can come up with is that you are simply ignoring this fact as if it didn't exist. Everything you say above applies to "theory" as it might be used between two guys at a bowling alley trying to come up with reasons why the waitress doesn't like it when they flirt with her, but nothing at all to do with the word as used in the context of science.
In science, a theory is the gold-standard, doesn't get better than a theory. No, theories do not graduate to become "laws" when they are proven, nothing in science is proven, it's always possible to be refined, corrected, or overturned. "Law" is no longer applied to scientific principles.
It is not strictly a requirement that a theory be falsifiable in order for it to be a theory
Yes, it is.
A theory which is not falsifiable may not be scientific, but that does not mean it is not correct. A person can come to the correct conclusions for the wrong reasons, for example.
True, but they're not doing science in this case, they're making a guess and getting lucky.
Another alternative theory is that life arrived on this planet when a chunk of rock from space containing it landed here.
Panspermia is not a theory, it is a hypothesis.
Of these three theories, only the last one really has any potential to be falsifiable.
You only actually named two things, but I'm guessing you mean evolution to be the third. Evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life on this planet (or anywhere else). Evolution explains how life changes over time, not where it came from. Trying to tie it to panspermia or your unique definition of Intelligent Design in this case makes no sense, you're comparing apples to carburetors.
This is the kind of "evolution" that the Catholic Church says is okay to believe in - the kind where God took an active hand in the formation of humanity.
This is interesting to me, I've never heard it put this way. My understanding is that the Catholic Church sides with evolution, and that evolution is part of God's overall plan (I don't believe that, but my understanding is that they do). So, God creates the universe, using whatever mechanism he used, and would then know that the "end result" would be humans, because he's omnipotent and would know the outcome of any process he set in motion without having to wait and see how it turns out. Where does the "active hand" come in, other than setting up the whole thing so he could have some weird hairless apes on an insignificant ball in the Milky Way to mess with?
Or a law that says a crime against a gay person is a "hate crime" and thus must be punished more than the same crime committed against anyone else.
That's only if you don't understand what hate-crimes legislation is intended to accomplish. Not just any crime against a gay person is a hate crime. If you steal a gay persons wallet, or punch a gay man in the face during a bar brawl, it is not a hate crime. If you beat a gay man because he's gay, the additional penalty is because you're in essence sending a message of intimidation to your victim and other gay people, "he got what he deserved for being a fag". Hate crimes penalize criminals who choose their targets specifically for who they are. To suggest that they are a form of discrimination against bigoted criminals is ridiculous.
I don't know how many times I've heard people talk about how "The cops offered him xxx, it was entrapment!" IANAL, but my understanding is that entrapment requires duress of some kind (cop tells you to go buy drugs or he'll break your legs, and then arrests you for buying drugs) or overt trickery where you lack any intent (cop sells you a toaster filled with drugs even though you genuinely thought you were just buying a toaster). Merely offering something comes nowhere near the legal baseline for entrapment. This guy's "defense" would be like a drug user saying "But the guy told me it was like really, really, really good stuff, and that he loved it himself, so it sounded so good I had to have it too".
(as an aside, even though I used drug laws as an example, I personally don't agree with most of the drug laws that are on the books)
That's all I have ever paid for anything in the iTunes store..99 cent songs and.99 cent apps
I know, that's what set off alarm bells for me. We're heading down a road where people are starting to think song == novel, and I just don't think that's a fair way to look at it. It's really about framing what people are getting for their money. Right now, it's starting to look like it all boils down to the number "1". 1 song, 1 app, 1 novel, but beyond the quantity of "things", they're not really comparable.
As an author I agree with you 100% that writers should get paid more, but I just don't think it's gunna happen in these economic times.
Sad but true.
However, I think the argument has been made well (here) that 14.99 for an iBook is just too much.
Agreed. I think somewhere in the $5 neighborhood is fair, but that's just me. It's not just the money that's getting me, it's what the money means. A dollar is a throwaway, it's inconsequential. If you buy something for a dollar, and you lose/break it ten seconds later, you don't care, you just get another whateveritis or just forget about it. Saying that a novel is only worth a buck is kind of like saying to the author that his work has no value to you, or minimal value at best. "Hey author, your book has the same value to me as the pack of gum that I bought, tried, hated and threw away."
[Note: I balked at getting paid a penny a click a few years back, but now I see the light; I am getting compensated much better (for articles published on the web) then under the old publishing model of pay-once-per-article. Perhaps there is a comparison?]
That's fantastic, I love hearing about people who do well with writing. Hell, I'm thrilled for John Locke and his 99 cent ebooks. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this price point shouldn't be done, or is a horrible thing to do, or anything else. If I had a book in the Kindle market right now, I might be inclined to try it myself to see what happens. My points here are really more philosophical than purely economic. The 99 cent ebook may be a huge hit, and maybe more authors will make better livings from it. That would be great. I'm just a little stuck on the "value" issue, and how people value an authors time and effort.
I'm not going to argue any of that, all those numbers are more or less what I've heard them to be. Pretty much the same thing happens with writers really, 60% to the bookstore, 20% manufacturing/shipping, x% to the publisher, and then a few cents left over for the schmuck whose name is on the cover. My point is really about total price, not breakdown, and what people want/expect to pay. Simplify the entire thing so that we're talking about indies (writer/musician). Music has already settled to around 99 cents per song, which would net $10 or $12 for an album. A novel is more akin to an album than it is to a song, but the idea of pushing the price on that novel is being looked at as being equivalent to a single song. A complete novel just seems like an awful lot to expect for a buck. I'm not necessarily saying that a novel should be $10 or $12, but I'd think at least around $5 or so shows at least some level of appreciation for the effort that the writer put in.
Funny, I just installed the iBooks app today and expected all the prices to be $.99.
Why would you expect that though? At iTunes, you don't expect to get the new $MUSICAN album for 99 cents, do you? Individual songs, sure, but not the album. A song is not a novel, it's a chapter.
When did writers become the absolute bottom of society when it comes to value of their work? A musician gets $10 or $12 for an album (assuming it's actually worth buying all the songs from it), a waitress gets $3 or $4 for bringing me a sandwich and a coke at my favorite diner, and the homeless guy in the subway has a good chance of getting a buck or two if he's polite, yet we want to give an author less than a dollar for 250 or 300 pages of a story that we're presumably interested in.
Yeah, I've heard the argument that the author is "getting rich selling the same thing over and over", but really, that's only true of a tiny fraction of writers who are working today. There's a far larger number who are just hoping for middle-class from their efforts, and those efforts are paid for by spreading the cost of their time across as many readers as possible....
It took less than 3 months. If he spent 4 hours writing 5 days a week he'd write 2 books in three months, pushing 3 if they are all continuations of a series. Heck if he worked it as a full time job he could write 6 every three months.
This seems really unlikely. Leaving aside that it doesn't seem realistic that he's churning these things out like a machine on a regular schedule, it seems to assume that the first draft is the one that gets released. One book, start to finish, including multiple drafts, rewrites and other editing in a year would be pretty quick. A "fun novel" that doesn't really require a ton of research and keeps things simple and fairly formulaic, maybe six months (which would still be almost blindingly fast), but I really don't see anyone pushing out novels that are at all good at a rate of two or three in three months. Even a Harlequin Romance novel, which is generally quite a bit shorter than Locke's books, and are basically new details hung on old frames as far as stories go probably can't be done that fast. As for pushing out a novels at a rate of six in three months, that doesn't strike me as unlikely, it seems impossible. Writing fiction is a creative process. It can't be broken down easily like "it takes x minutes to put y widgets into a box, therefore you can fill z boxes in a week".
I wish you luck! I've considered trying the same thing, but my own unpublished novel needs editing work that I don't have the time or money for right now, so I keep putting it off.
Thanks, even if it doesn't really sell the dream is to see my book in print. If it does well, aside from being surprised as hell, I'll just enjoy that as an extra bonus! Good luck on yours as well, and I hope you get the chance to get it finished and see it in print before long:)
Point A will go away with time, but I do wonder if part of that process won't involve either establishing trusted digital publishers, or means to assess the quality of the work before purchase -- possibly via tools on the distribution site, like Amazon, possibly via some other community or ratings system.
This is exactly where things probably need to go for self published works. Right now, the problem is that a serious reviewer is less likely to pay attention to you if you're not published. Eventually I think that'll change, but for the moment we're kind of swimming against the tide of a very long standing industry with some strong opinions on "the right way to do things". The literary world has its own culture, and its not just about doing business for them, partly its playing by the traditions that culture has adopted over the years.
I think Point B, in the long run, is kind of moot. There'll always be some competition amongst people in the same business, and snootiness over the relative success. It'll probably be regardless of print or electronic later on, though -- any disdain based on publishing format is going to disappear with time.
Oh absolutely, but in the meantime, us POD people are definitely second-class citizens in the literary world (some, maybe most, deservedly so). It'd just be nice if the distinction of "Author" was less firmly connected to publishing. Hell, anyone who writes a book is an Author as far as I'm concerned, the distinction is whether you can prepend "Successful" to that job-title. Now defining "successful" in that context is another story lol
On the topic of quality, you've nailed it. I don't think people always realize the sheer amount of effort that goes into a book between the time it leaves the author's desk and gets to the bookstore. I'm trying to do this on a budget that wouldn't pay for a day in Disney World, but I'm lucky in that I have some people who are well suited towards doing some proofreading and a little editing for me on a volunteer basis. Even with their efforts though, I'm sure things will get by that would hopefully be caught by a professional editorial staff. Anyone who thinks they can proofread their own work though, they're just asking for trouble. I was horrified by how many corrections I got back, but in looking at it, I realized that I actually had a hard time seeing a number of the mistakes. My brain just "autocorrected" things as I went along at times, and even as I'd read a marked up copy it sometimes took a second for the mistake to register (probably didn't help that I wrote the first draft in VIM, with no spell/grammar checker, and went very quickly).
People on this thread have argued freelance editing is inexpensive, but when you're paying out of pocket for something that may not make any money at all, it doesn't take much at all to make it unaffordable.
And it takes an awful lot of 99 cent downloads to make that money back. There's sometimes an attitude of "Well, it's all just words that you made up so why should it cost so much?" People need to remember that there's a pretty vast difference between a professionally done novel, and the creative writing assignments they did in high school. Sure, if you sell a lot of copies, at 99 cents each you can do really well, but if you don't get masses of eager readers coming to you what you end up with is uncounted hours of unpaid work, a
Don't be so quick to give that one up, actually. More and more new authors are being told that the publishing house will handle distribution, but publicizing the book is the author's problem. If you're not Stephen King, don't expect much in the way of publicity.
I don't think TV viewers, in general, read. Reading is not part of the "sports bar" and "reality tv" mindset.
You probably think wrong then. Most people are not of the "I don't own a TV because I'm too intellectually superior to everyone else to have one" mindset. I think you'd find plenty of people who read avidly and yet still watched Lost. That even includes philosophy students, assuming they can find a way to afford a television.
A philosophy student whom downloads his little crime drama
Oh, way to go minimizing the guy's work. I assume you've written a number of books yourself that are of far better quality and higher caliber than his "little crime drama"? He's done well, and his audience seems to respond very positively to what he's written, I'd say he's done a pretty damn good job for himself there.
I'd say that maybe clarifying the difference between a pure democracy and a republic for students isn't such a bad idea, although I do suspect that there's more to this behind the scenes than TFA states outright.
Writers are finally waking up to the fact that without the need to actually print books, they have no need of monolithic publishing houses whatsoever.
Well, sort of. I kind of hope that it does work out that way though.
Right now I'm working on my own novel (release in another couple of months, yay!). I'm doing it myself through a POD company, and it will be both print and digital. Doing it that way allows me to keep a much higher part of the sales (which I expect to be in the tens of copies), and more importantly, actually allows me to see it go to print as it's pretty damn difficult to get a publisher to even look at a book from an unknown author with no prior sales record. The downsides: A) It's much harder to be taken seriously with a book that's self published. Publishers bring legitimacy to a book, people assume that it's going to be better if it's been vetted by a publisher (and let's be honest, they're probably right most of the time). B) Other authors will generally consider you to be "outside the club" unless you've racked up the kinds of sales that they themselves often don't see through a traditional publisher. Even then, often you're not one of them. I know this last part from reading various authors forums, not because I try to walk up to people like Neil Gaiman and say "Hey, I'm an author too!".
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the long run. Personally, I think self-publishing will gain more legitimacy, but self-published authors have to make sure the quality of their work is up there with the stuff coming out of the publishing houses (and yes, I know there's a ton of complete garbage with an impressive imprint on its spine). Self publishing allows anyone who thinks they can write to "be an author", and most of them really just aren't that good. It also allows people to push things out (print or digital) that desperately need a real editor, making a potentially good book seem amateurish because of errors or layout problems.
By the way, I also completely agree with the insanity of charging $9.95 for an ebook. I haven't settled on pricing for my book yet, but I know I'm thinking significantly lower than the print copy. 99 cents? I dunno, that seems exceptionally low, but I wouldn't rule it out. Generally I'm happy paying somewhere in the $3 - $5 range for an ebook, but maybe I'm the exception (TFA certainly seems to imply that).
Ask them if they'd like to be able to add SD cards, or thumb drives
No. If I *really* want to, I can jailbreak and do that, but really I haven't found any compelling reasons to do that yet. If I'm working on documents on the thing, I use dropbox. If I want to put a movie on it, well, iTunes ain't great but it's fine for transferring movies. Really though, I'm more likely to stream video to it than store it locally most of the time.
change the keyboard
No. What's the obsession with changing keyboards? I hate Swype (and I doubt making it bigger would be an improvement), and while I tried several different ones on my Evo, I ended up just going back to the one it shipped with. The only serious keyboard change I ever actually make is to an actual hardware keyboard, which the iPad supports just fine.
the way the launcher works
No, it works just fine as it is, I really just don't care about changing it.
Now, what I do want is NetFlix. How many of the Android tablets on the market right now can stream from them? I believe the number is somewhere around zero. How about movie downloads/rentals? Are there a lot of places to legitimately download those? Again, rough number seems to be around zero (one if you count Blockbuster for rentals, but I'm not interested in yet another service with a monthly charge). I also enjoy not seeing "The Application XXX has stopped responding, force close?", which seems a pretty regular feature on my Evo.
I wouldn't tell anyone *not* to get an Android tablet, but assuming that iPad owners simply "don't know what we're missing" is probably a mistake on your part.
If they've no interest in that, fine, the iPad and it's walled garden is perfect for them.
What are the amazing things that I should be jealous of outside the "walled garden"? I've had my Evo since release day, and I think I've found two apps outside the Android Market that were compelling enough for me to download them (btw: the same two apps are in Apples App Store). As far as customizing it goes, yeah, I've added launchers and such, and I can't help but notice that some of the more popular ones look pretty familiar to an iPod/iPhone/iPad user. Also, the difference between rooting an Android device and rooting an iPad seems to be that the iPad is easier to root. At least I don't have to wonder if I'm playing "rom roulette" where an update that works great for the Galaxy S grinds the Evo to a halt. About the only thing that I'd say I miss from Android on the iPad is more predictable multitasking (some apps close when you take focus away from them, some don't), but at least I don't need to open a task manager and kill 20 apps that I never opened because I notice that the machine is slowing down unacceptably.
The discussion is evolution, not abiogenesis. Evolution makes no attempt to describe the origin of life, only how it got from wherever it started, to where it is now (developmentally speaking). Complaining that evolution doesn't explain abiogenesis is like complaining that the theory of gravity doesn't explain why my favorite color is blue. They're not the same thing.
Looks like he's talking about the arrest record. Those stay with you, regardless of the outcome of the case, or even if the charges are dropped. It's just what it sounds like: a record of arrest, nothing else.
So, basically, you are saying that a principal is going to see a candidate's name associated with accusations of child molestation, and without asking for an explanation, without checking for a trial or even so much as an arrest, simply assume that the person is unfit to teach?
Absolutely.
You don't think that in a tight job market that an employer, responsible for the education of children, given two (or more likely far more than two) candidates qualified for a position isn't being reasonable when he tosses the resume of the one that's potentially a child molester? How do you figure that? Really, this seems like a no-brainer: Person A: Master's degree, 5 years experience, available immediately, rumored to be a child molester Person B: Master's degree, 5 years experience, available immediately. No principal in the world would even think about this choice. Why would he want to take the chance that in a year he'd be in front of the board listening to angry citizens ask him why he hired someone that he had even the tiniest inkling might be a child molester, to work in a school?
Maybe the principal himself needs to be fired, for utter and complete incompetence and a failure to spend more than 1 second thinking about the information he received.
It's highly unlikely that a principal of a school would ever, EVER find himself being fired, or even questioned, for not hiring a person that he has even the slightest inkling might possibly, maybe, perhaps be a child molester. Never happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Calm down sweetie. Yes, abortion is part of reproductive rights, along with the morning after pill, birth control pills and plenty of other things. Now, if we were talking about someone banning a book, would you get so worked up if I called it a "freedom of speech" issue, even though that's only one element of freedom of speech? Probably not, but in this case, since it fits your agenda you insist that I separate individual elements out to make you feel better. I'm under no obligation to word things in a way that cranky little conservatives will like or even approve of.
That you don't like what I say doesn't make it a lie.
No particular data, but the FAQ suggests that it's true:
Slashdot seems to be very U.S.-centric. Do you have any plans to be more international in your scope?
Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
Oh please, by and large, actual Libertarians are pretty damn thin on the ground. The vast majority of the Tea Partiers are people who more than a year ago would have just said "Republican" or "Conservative" to describe their political leaning.
Just like the bar in Blues Brothers had all kinds of music, both Country, AND Western....
Yeah, I keep hearing that, but so many of them were fine with dumping every cent we could find into the rathole of the Iraq war that I have a hard time believing that. Oh, I forgot, fiscal conservatism is "Don't spend money unless you scream 'PATRIOT' while you're doing it".
And yet the most visible icons like Sara Palin and Glenn Beck are pretty damn religious, weeeeeird.
I'd be happy to face it if it were true. Perhaps you'd be happier though if I were spoon-fed by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News?
Easy muffin, I'm not into the kinky stuff.....
That's a risk I'll just have to take.
Which is why the Tea Party is firmly on the side of reproductive rights, gay marriage, legalizing recreational drugs, legal prostitution and a clear separation of church and state. Oh, wait, they're not? Those are mostly "lefty" issues? Face it, the Tea Party is just as fast to cry out for government interference in peoples lives when it's an issue they're passionate about as any other group. They just like to shout "Freedom!" while they're doing it.
Yeah, it's tough to be a white guy in America, always getting hassled by the police and wrongfully charged every time you go punching black people. What's this world coming to?
Anyway, key word here: wanted. You're implying there that they didn't charge you with a hate crime though, they just wanted to. So, ultimately, cops looked at the situation, considered the possibility of a hate crime, and either they or the prosecutor decided that it wasn't warranted. What exactly is your point here, sounds like the system worked as designed and there was no wrongful hate-crime charge.
Yeah, here's the problem though....
If a straight guy beats a gay guy specifically because he's gay, it can be charged as a hate crime. If a gay guy beats a straight guy specifically because he's straight, that can also be charged as a hate crime. If that actually happened, and they didn't charge the gay guy that way, you'd have pretty good cause to make some noise about the prosecutor not doing his job, but that doesn't change the fact that the law can and should be applied evenly. Now, the other problem of course is that there just aren't all that many cases of "straight-bashing" to make people worry about this as being a major problem....
Unless of course that law forces the requirements for said science to be lowered far below what is expected of actual, legitimate scientists. Or should all scientists be able to pass off completely random and untestable thoughts as "theories"?
That doesn't seem quite right. If they raise the price, they also increase their tax burden, so simply raising the price doesn't magically make them pay less taxes. The cost of the item will always end up around what the market will bear, or less if they think they'll make more overall by making less per unit but selling more units. If they think people will pay $500, that's what the thing will cost, but if people will only pay around $400, there's no choice but to either take less profit on the item, make less profit overall because of fewer sales, or stop being in the washing machine business.
They're paid by both. Without the infrastructure and support provided by having a stable society, which you're not going to get without taxes, the corporations can't survive. The big difference is though that corporations swim in vast seas of money, and if that money sits in idle in their reserves, or moves out of the country, or simply gets hoovered up by executives that just shuffle most of it back and forth in the stock market, it does virtually nothing to keep the host country healthy enough to be a market for what the corporation provides.
Not really.
It's been repeated over, and over, and over, and over again that the use of the word "theory" in science is not the same as the use of the word "theory" in casual conversation. I can't believe that you haven't seen this, or that you don't understand this, therefore the only explanation I can come up with is that you are simply ignoring this fact as if it didn't exist. Everything you say above applies to "theory" as it might be used between two guys at a bowling alley trying to come up with reasons why the waitress doesn't like it when they flirt with her, but nothing at all to do with the word as used in the context of science.
In science, a theory is the gold-standard, doesn't get better than a theory. No, theories do not graduate to become "laws" when they are proven, nothing in science is proven, it's always possible to be refined, corrected, or overturned. "Law" is no longer applied to scientific principles.
Yes, it is.
True, but they're not doing science in this case, they're making a guess and getting lucky.
Panspermia is not a theory, it is a hypothesis.
You only actually named two things, but I'm guessing you mean evolution to be the third. Evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life on this planet (or anywhere else). Evolution explains how life changes over time, not where it came from. Trying to tie it to panspermia or your unique definition of Intelligent Design in this case makes no sense, you're comparing apples to carburetors.
This is interesting to me, I've never heard it put this way. My understanding is that the Catholic Church sides with evolution, and that evolution is part of God's overall plan (I don't believe that, but my understanding is that they do). So, God creates the universe, using whatever mechanism he used, and would then know that the "end result" would be humans, because he's omnipotent and would know the outcome of any process he set in motion without having to wait and see how it turns out. Where does the "active hand" come in, other than setting up the whole thing so he could have some weird hairless apes on an insignificant ball in the Milky Way to mess with?
That's only if you don't understand what hate-crimes legislation is intended to accomplish. Not just any crime against a gay person is a hate crime. If you steal a gay persons wallet, or punch a gay man in the face during a bar brawl, it is not a hate crime. If you beat a gay man because he's gay, the additional penalty is because you're in essence sending a message of intimidation to your victim and other gay people, "he got what he deserved for being a fag". Hate crimes penalize criminals who choose their targets specifically for who they are. To suggest that they are a form of discrimination against bigoted criminals is ridiculous.
I don't know how many times I've heard people talk about how "The cops offered him xxx, it was entrapment!" IANAL, but my understanding is that entrapment requires duress of some kind (cop tells you to go buy drugs or he'll break your legs, and then arrests you for buying drugs) or overt trickery where you lack any intent (cop sells you a toaster filled with drugs even though you genuinely thought you were just buying a toaster). Merely offering something comes nowhere near the legal baseline for entrapment. This guy's "defense" would be like a drug user saying "But the guy told me it was like really, really, really good stuff, and that he loved it himself, so it sounded so good I had to have it too".
(as an aside, even though I used drug laws as an example, I personally don't agree with most of the drug laws that are on the books)
I know, that's what set off alarm bells for me. We're heading down a road where people are starting to think song == novel, and I just don't think that's a fair way to look at it. It's really about framing what people are getting for their money. Right now, it's starting to look like it all boils down to the number "1". 1 song, 1 app, 1 novel, but beyond the quantity of "things", they're not really comparable.
Sad but true.
Agreed. I think somewhere in the $5 neighborhood is fair, but that's just me. It's not just the money that's getting me, it's what the money means. A dollar is a throwaway, it's inconsequential. If you buy something for a dollar, and you lose/break it ten seconds later, you don't care, you just get another whateveritis or just forget about it. Saying that a novel is only worth a buck is kind of like saying to the author that his work has no value to you, or minimal value at best. "Hey author, your book has the same value to me as the pack of gum that I bought, tried, hated and threw away."
That's fantastic, I love hearing about people who do well with writing. Hell, I'm thrilled for John Locke and his 99 cent ebooks. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this price point shouldn't be done, or is a horrible thing to do, or anything else. If I had a book in the Kindle market right now, I might be inclined to try it myself to see what happens. My points here are really more philosophical than purely economic. The 99 cent ebook may be a huge hit, and maybe more authors will make better livings from it. That would be great. I'm just a little stuck on the "value" issue, and how people value an authors time and effort.
I'm not going to argue any of that, all those numbers are more or less what I've heard them to be. Pretty much the same thing happens with writers really, 60% to the bookstore, 20% manufacturing/shipping, x% to the publisher, and then a few cents left over for the schmuck whose name is on the cover. My point is really about total price, not breakdown, and what people want/expect to pay. Simplify the entire thing so that we're talking about indies (writer/musician). Music has already settled to around 99 cents per song, which would net $10 or $12 for an album. A novel is more akin to an album than it is to a song, but the idea of pushing the price on that novel is being looked at as being equivalent to a single song. A complete novel just seems like an awful lot to expect for a buck. I'm not necessarily saying that a novel should be $10 or $12, but I'd think at least around $5 or so shows at least some level of appreciation for the effort that the writer put in.
Why would you expect that though? At iTunes, you don't expect to get the new $MUSICAN album for 99 cents, do you? Individual songs, sure, but not the album. A song is not a novel, it's a chapter.
When did writers become the absolute bottom of society when it comes to value of their work? A musician gets $10 or $12 for an album (assuming it's actually worth buying all the songs from it), a waitress gets $3 or $4 for bringing me a sandwich and a coke at my favorite diner, and the homeless guy in the subway has a good chance of getting a buck or two if he's polite, yet we want to give an author less than a dollar for 250 or 300 pages of a story that we're presumably interested in.
Yeah, I've heard the argument that the author is "getting rich selling the same thing over and over", but really, that's only true of a tiny fraction of writers who are working today. There's a far larger number who are just hoping for middle-class from their efforts, and those efforts are paid for by spreading the cost of their time across as many readers as possible....
This seems really unlikely. Leaving aside that it doesn't seem realistic that he's churning these things out like a machine on a regular schedule, it seems to assume that the first draft is the one that gets released. One book, start to finish, including multiple drafts, rewrites and other editing in a year would be pretty quick. A "fun novel" that doesn't really require a ton of research and keeps things simple and fairly formulaic, maybe six months (which would still be almost blindingly fast), but I really don't see anyone pushing out novels that are at all good at a rate of two or three in three months. Even a Harlequin Romance novel, which is generally quite a bit shorter than Locke's books, and are basically new details hung on old frames as far as stories go probably can't be done that fast. As for pushing out a novels at a rate of six in three months, that doesn't strike me as unlikely, it seems impossible.
Writing fiction is a creative process. It can't be broken down easily like "it takes x minutes to put y widgets into a box, therefore you can fill z boxes in a week".
Thanks, even if it doesn't really sell the dream is to see my book in print. If it does well, aside from being surprised as hell, I'll just enjoy that as an extra bonus! Good luck on yours as well, and I hope you get the chance to get it finished and see it in print before long :)
This is exactly where things probably need to go for self published works. Right now, the problem is that a serious reviewer is less likely to pay attention to you if you're not published. Eventually I think that'll change, but for the moment we're kind of swimming against the tide of a very long standing industry with some strong opinions on "the right way to do things". The literary world has its own culture, and its not just about doing business for them, partly its playing by the traditions that culture has adopted over the years.
Oh absolutely, but in the meantime, us POD people are definitely second-class citizens in the literary world (some, maybe most, deservedly so). It'd just be nice if the distinction of "Author" was less firmly connected to publishing. Hell, anyone who writes a book is an Author as far as I'm concerned, the distinction is whether you can prepend "Successful" to that job-title. Now defining "successful" in that context is another story lol
On the topic of quality, you've nailed it. I don't think people always realize the sheer amount of effort that goes into a book between the time it leaves the author's desk and gets to the bookstore. I'm trying to do this on a budget that wouldn't pay for a day in Disney World, but I'm lucky in that I have some people who are well suited towards doing some proofreading and a little editing for me on a volunteer basis. Even with their efforts though, I'm sure things will get by that would hopefully be caught by a professional editorial staff. Anyone who thinks they can proofread their own work though, they're just asking for trouble. I was horrified by how many corrections I got back, but in looking at it, I realized that I actually had a hard time seeing a number of the mistakes. My brain just "autocorrected" things as I went along at times, and even as I'd read a marked up copy it sometimes took a second for the mistake to register (probably didn't help that I wrote the first draft in VIM, with no spell/grammar checker, and went very quickly).
And it takes an awful lot of 99 cent downloads to make that money back. There's sometimes an attitude of "Well, it's all just words that you made up so why should it cost so much?" People need to remember that there's a pretty vast difference between a professionally done novel, and the creative writing assignments they did in high school. Sure, if you sell a lot of copies, at 99 cents each you can do really well, but if you don't get masses of eager readers coming to you what you end up with is uncounted hours of unpaid work, a
Don't be so quick to give that one up, actually. More and more new authors are being told that the publishing house will handle distribution, but publicizing the book is the author's problem. If you're not Stephen King, don't expect much in the way of publicity.
You probably think wrong then. Most people are not of the "I don't own a TV because I'm too intellectually superior to everyone else to have one" mindset. I think you'd find plenty of people who read avidly and yet still watched Lost. That even includes philosophy students, assuming they can find a way to afford a television.
Oh, way to go minimizing the guy's work. I assume you've written a number of books yourself that are of far better quality and higher caliber than his "little crime drama"? He's done well, and his audience seems to respond very positively to what he's written, I'd say he's done a pretty damn good job for himself there.
I'd say that maybe clarifying the difference between a pure democracy and a republic for students isn't such a bad idea, although I do suspect that there's more to this behind the scenes than TFA states outright.
Well, sort of. I kind of hope that it does work out that way though.
Right now I'm working on my own novel (release in another couple of months, yay!). I'm doing it myself through a POD company, and it will be both print and digital. Doing it that way allows me to keep a much higher part of the sales (which I expect to be in the tens of copies), and more importantly, actually allows me to see it go to print as it's pretty damn difficult to get a publisher to even look at a book from an unknown author with no prior sales record.
The downsides:
A) It's much harder to be taken seriously with a book that's self published. Publishers bring legitimacy to a book, people assume that it's going to be better if it's been vetted by a publisher (and let's be honest, they're probably right most of the time).
B) Other authors will generally consider you to be "outside the club" unless you've racked up the kinds of sales that they themselves often don't see through a traditional publisher. Even then, often you're not one of them. I know this last part from reading various authors forums, not because I try to walk up to people like Neil Gaiman and say "Hey, I'm an author too!".
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the long run. Personally, I think self-publishing will gain more legitimacy, but self-published authors have to make sure the quality of their work is up there with the stuff coming out of the publishing houses (and yes, I know there's a ton of complete garbage with an impressive imprint on its spine). Self publishing allows anyone who thinks they can write to "be an author", and most of them really just aren't that good. It also allows people to push things out (print or digital) that desperately need a real editor, making a potentially good book seem amateurish because of errors or layout problems.
By the way, I also completely agree with the insanity of charging $9.95 for an ebook. I haven't settled on pricing for my book yet, but I know I'm thinking significantly lower than the print copy. 99 cents? I dunno, that seems exceptionally low, but I wouldn't rule it out. Generally I'm happy paying somewhere in the $3 - $5 range for an ebook, but maybe I'm the exception (TFA certainly seems to imply that).
okay, fine then....
No. If I *really* want to, I can jailbreak and do that, but really I haven't found any compelling reasons to do that yet. If I'm working on documents on the thing, I use dropbox. If I want to put a movie on it, well, iTunes ain't great but it's fine for transferring movies. Really though, I'm more likely to stream video to it than store it locally most of the time.
No. What's the obsession with changing keyboards? I hate Swype (and I doubt making it bigger would be an improvement), and while I tried several different ones on my Evo, I ended up just going back to the one it shipped with. The only serious keyboard change I ever actually make is to an actual hardware keyboard, which the iPad supports just fine.
No, it works just fine as it is, I really just don't care about changing it.
Now, what I do want is NetFlix. How many of the Android tablets on the market right now can stream from them? I believe the number is somewhere around zero. How about movie downloads/rentals? Are there a lot of places to legitimately download those? Again, rough number seems to be around zero (one if you count Blockbuster for rentals, but I'm not interested in yet another service with a monthly charge). I also enjoy not seeing "The Application XXX has stopped responding, force close?", which seems a pretty regular feature on my Evo.
I wouldn't tell anyone *not* to get an Android tablet, but assuming that iPad owners simply "don't know what we're missing" is probably a mistake on your part.
What are the amazing things that I should be jealous of outside the "walled garden"? I've had my Evo since release day, and I think I've found two apps outside the Android Market that were compelling enough for me to download them (btw: the same two apps are in Apples App Store). As far as customizing it goes, yeah, I've added launchers and such, and I can't help but notice that some of the more popular ones look pretty familiar to an iPod/iPhone/iPad user. Also, the difference between rooting an Android device and rooting an iPad seems to be that the iPad is easier to root. At least I don't have to wonder if I'm playing "rom roulette" where an update that works great for the Galaxy S grinds the Evo to a halt. About the only thing that I'd say I miss from Android on the iPad is more predictable multitasking (some apps close when you take focus away from them, some don't), but at least I don't need to open a task manager and kill 20 apps that I never opened because I notice that the machine is slowing down unacceptably.
I could see that....after all, they do give all their employees MacBooks
Stop.
The discussion is evolution, not abiogenesis. Evolution makes no attempt to describe the origin of life, only how it got from wherever it started, to where it is now (developmentally speaking). Complaining that evolution doesn't explain abiogenesis is like complaining that the theory of gravity doesn't explain why my favorite color is blue. They're not the same thing.
Looks like he's talking about the arrest record. Those stay with you, regardless of the outcome of the case, or even if the charges are dropped. It's just what it sounds like: a record of arrest, nothing else.
Absolutely.
You don't think that in a tight job market that an employer, responsible for the education of children, given two (or more likely far more than two) candidates qualified for a position isn't being reasonable when he tosses the resume of the one that's potentially a child molester? How do you figure that? Really, this seems like a no-brainer:
Person A: Master's degree, 5 years experience, available immediately, rumored to be a child molester
Person B: Master's degree, 5 years experience, available immediately.
No principal in the world would even think about this choice. Why would he want to take the chance that in a year he'd be in front of the board listening to angry citizens ask him why he hired someone that he had even the tiniest inkling might be a child molester, to work in a school?
It's highly unlikely that a principal of a school would ever, EVER find himself being fired, or even questioned, for not hiring a person that he has even the slightest inkling might possibly, maybe, perhaps be a child molester. Never happen.