First, you say that the average SF paperback sells 20k copies. Don't most paperbacks appear AFTER a first run hardback edition? Shouldn't these be included when discussing the single time costs (writing, editing, etc.)?
Second you say that it costs less than $1 a copy 'to print and ship a typical mass-market paperback,' then say that the majority of the costs are 'the editor, the proofreader, the cover artist, and the author's advance, which [sic] is probably going to be about $12,000 on that paperback.' So the author gets 12k (any royalties beyond this are going to be less per book) which equals about $0.60 per copy to the author. Do the editor, proofreader, and cover artist get more than this combined? But assuming they do then we are now about at the break even level between printing and shipping costs, so your assertion that the majority of costs lie in these aspects of publishing seems to be refuted by the only numbers you gave.
This brings up an interesting point: what about all the different closed source packages which are used in the hard sciences? On a regular basis I am required to use code written using closed source framework al la IDL or MATLAB. These frameworks are invaluable in the sense that we do not have to write the interface between the detectors and a standard PC, but they are often essentially black boxes. Do people really want to require scientists to write (inevitably bad code) to interface their scope to a PC just so they can release that code to the public?
Finally, I waste enough time fixing bugs in code that will likely never be used by anyone else that I would loath to have to clean it all up for others to use and understand. Scientists are writing tools to get things done, if they had the resources most would love to hire a programmer to write and document the program from a requirements document but very few if any do have such resources. There should be a balance between the publics desire to look over the shoulder of scientists are scientists desire to do science and not waste their time getting 60k emails regarding a bug which has no effect on their result.
NIST is not a new agency and has been around for some time. They are responsible for keeping track of US time and other standards. If the directory of NIST is anything like those I know who work there I do not think this will be anywhere near as bad as you imply. Finally ACTA has nothing to do with "international standards" and everything to do with copyright law.
While I believe I agree with you in general sentiment, that is that US IP laws are so long term and non permissive as to be more a hinderance to development than an incentive; the statement in the summary, quoted below makes no sense.
I still cannot understand why intellectual monopoly protectionism — the exact opposite of "free trade" — gets included in free trade agreements.
Intellectual property laws being uniform across a free trade so is REQUIRED for free trade of intellectual property and clearly not 'the exact opposite of free trade.' If laws differed between member nations then one nation would be able to use intellectual property to manufacture their goods which was prohibited by other members thus creating an unfair advantage. This would be most dramatic if the intellectual property was produced in one nation under its laws then used without license by another nation to effectively eliminate the benefits of the intellectual property protects. These protections are for the creators not for the nations (thus not protectionist in the traditional sense). Free trade is to stop nations from creating safe havens for their producers by erecting unfair barriers to trade not to allow anyone to take whatever IP they want and use it as they see fit.
Have you been reading the WSJ recently? It is full of sensationalized articles that seem clearly intended to push a political agenda. Case in point was their recent article entitled something about how our military drones were 'hacked' by terrorists, a statement which was directly contradicted in the article body. There have been quite a few such articles in the recent past a fact that has caused some die hard WSJ fans I know to reconsider their subscription. Unfortunately you are correct in that they ALSO publish invaluable business news which is what their readers are paying for. However your assertion that the WSJ is somehow about the standard of other new papers in terms of 'op-ed rants being passed off as news' you are sorely mistaken.
So your solution is to not let anything gain enough power to unfairly manipulate the market for their benefit? I can agree with that. How pray tell can we get to such an Utopia?
Fix the bugs that are "theoretical" and MAY be exploited at some point in the future if somebody else finds it?
You are asserting that the exploit is '"theoretical" (why the quotes?) and might be used in the future without any evidence that this is even the most common case much less the only case. The problem with an undisclosed vulnerability is that unsuspecting users believe they have more security than in fact they do. They expect, at very least, to be informed when a vulnerability is discovered. While this may be an unrealistic expectation in the current market place, customers should be able make informed decisions and thus operate in the market as their roll demands.
Could not agree with you more in the overall scheme of things. If I could 'friend' people and accept their average judgements' on the the legitimacy and quality of an App it would be of great worth to me. Even with old PCs it was difficult to find quality software behind the countless crappy products. gdgt.com should add the ability to rate Apps and provide API access to 'friends'
If i post all the intimate detail of my life to any social networking site, even if I only share with 'friends', I do not have a legal expectation of privacy. If I do not choose to share those details the fact that others do should have no effect on what is a 'reasonable expectation of privacy.' I do not see how this would hold up in a court of law. We have had exhibitionists (celebrities) in all societies for some time and yet their open lifestyles do not have an effect others rights.
I don't think that they are going to use this to announce an earthquake but to determine location and propagation parameters. Their sensors can tell them for certain IF a quake hit long before twitter will say anything but they need to correlate other measurements to get a good location estimation.
Fuel cells may replace batteries but they do not generate electricity and are thus irrelevant to the current discussion. People keep thinking that the so called 'Hydrogen economy' is a solution of energy production. It is NOT. Hydrogen is a great way of storing energy but impossible to generate without electricity and the only natural available source is in oil/gas reserves.
Do you have access to all the features the hardware of your phone supports? Can you update to a new version of the OS without carrier intervention? If so then you have a wonderfully unlocked device. That is great but it is not and was not the norm.
The 10 years when WinMo was a major player was characterized by NO consumer choice after the original purchase. Blackberry and Palm were the same way. Now the consumer is beginning to understand the benefits of having an open platform untied to their carrier. So if Android phones get locked down to the same level that WinMo, Palm, and Blackberries where for years then it will have to compete on crutches with the iPhone. Sure there are unlocked phones available but not enough to justify a vibrant marketplace al la iTunes.
I believe the post right above yours brings the point home: the specific exponential power law followed appears to be unstable. That is if the frequency of attacks differs in a specific conflict the conflict ends shortly. The poster above nicely provided a link to a TED talk
Also being able to draw a straight line on a log log plot is all well and good but if you get the slope off by even a small amount you will soon be orders of magnitude off in your predictions. Thus while you might expect a power-law distribution from simple arguments getting the specific value is much more difficult.
Seriously, this is like when my boss didn't want to have his pay directly deposited because he thought the payroll company could snoop in his bank account. It's just not grounded in reality.
While they may not be able to see your transactions any company authorized to direct deposit is authorized to deduct money from your account.
While I agree with your assertion that the level of reaction was due to fear of liability instead of concern for individuals I have to question the reasoning behind this. Do the schools who do nothing actually end up paying more than those who take extreme action in known cases? That is, do such heavy handed reactions actually protect the university from liability? Do the heavy handed reactions themselves lead to liability in and of themselves? Seems like these questions need to be answered and addressed if we are to have any hope of a 'reasonable' reaction.
True. However the situation that the OP was attempting to explain was for poor people being 4x more likely to be prescribed anti-psychotics. Since the poor are already dominate in terms of population I do not see how your explanation makes the OP's reasonable. You can't remove the class demarkation from 'poor.'
So you are suggesting that there exists a sub class of humans which are more likely to be mentally ill? Seems like a straight path towards eugenics to me. As for your statement how this is going to be used as a "OMG BIG GOVERNMENT/CAPITALIST CONSPIRACY:" who needs a capitalist conspiracy when we can 'scientifically justify' the position of people in society?
I have to disagree with your assertion that Machiavelli was sarcastic. He was bitter and discontent with the destruction of the Florentine Republic but he accurately described the methods used in its destruction. Those methods were and are how governments stay in power. Finally, while he may not like his name associated with this method his description became so ubiquitous that it has and his desires are lost to history.
Slashdot Mirror
First, you say that the average SF paperback sells 20k copies. Don't most paperbacks appear AFTER a first run hardback edition? Shouldn't these be included when discussing the single time costs (writing, editing, etc.)?
Second you say that it costs less than $1 a copy 'to print and ship a typical mass-market paperback,' then say that the majority of the costs are 'the editor, the proofreader, the cover artist, and the author's advance, which [sic] is probably going to be about $12,000 on that paperback.' So the author gets 12k (any royalties beyond this are going to be less per book) which equals about $0.60 per copy to the author. Do the editor, proofreader, and cover artist get more than this combined? But assuming they do then we are now about at the break even level between printing and shipping costs, so your assertion that the majority of costs lie in these aspects of publishing seems to be refuted by the only numbers you gave.
Just to be pedantic the 2nd amendment was written in the 1780s not the 1880s.
This brings up an interesting point: what about all the different closed source packages which are used in the hard sciences? On a regular basis I am required to use code written using closed source framework al la IDL or MATLAB. These frameworks are invaluable in the sense that we do not have to write the interface between the detectors and a standard PC, but they are often essentially black boxes. Do people really want to require scientists to write (inevitably bad code) to interface their scope to a PC just so they can release that code to the public?
Finally, I waste enough time fixing bugs in code that will likely never be used by anyone else that I would loath to have to clean it all up for others to use and understand. Scientists are writing tools to get things done, if they had the resources most would love to hire a programmer to write and document the program from a requirements document but very few if any do have such resources. There should be a balance between the publics desire to look over the shoulder of scientists are scientists desire to do science and not waste their time getting 60k emails regarding a bug which has no effect on their result.
NIST is not a new agency and has been around for some time. They are responsible for keeping track of US time and other standards. If the directory of NIST is anything like those I know who work there I do not think this will be anywhere near as bad as you imply. Finally ACTA has nothing to do with "international standards" and everything to do with copyright law.
Intellectual property laws being uniform across a free trade so is REQUIRED for free trade of intellectual property and clearly not 'the exact opposite of free trade.' If laws differed between member nations then one nation would be able to use intellectual property to manufacture their goods which was prohibited by other members thus creating an unfair advantage. This would be most dramatic if the intellectual property was produced in one nation under its laws then used without license by another nation to effectively eliminate the benefits of the intellectual property protects. These protections are for the creators not for the nations (thus not protectionist in the traditional sense). Free trade is to stop nations from creating safe havens for their producers by erecting unfair barriers to trade not to allow anyone to take whatever IP they want and use it as they see fit.
Have you been reading the WSJ recently? It is full of sensationalized articles that seem clearly intended to push a political agenda. Case in point was their recent article entitled something about how our military drones were 'hacked' by terrorists, a statement which was directly contradicted in the article body. There have been quite a few such articles in the recent past a fact that has caused some die hard WSJ fans I know to reconsider their subscription. Unfortunately you are correct in that they ALSO publish invaluable business news which is what their readers are paying for. However your assertion that the WSJ is somehow about the standard of other new papers in terms of 'op-ed rants being passed off as news' you are sorely mistaken.
So your solution is to not let anything gain enough power to unfairly manipulate the market for their benefit? I can agree with that. How pray tell can we get to such an Utopia?
You are asserting that the exploit is '"theoretical" (why the quotes?) and might be used in the future without any evidence that this is even the most common case much less the only case. The problem with an undisclosed vulnerability is that unsuspecting users believe they have more security than in fact they do. They expect, at very least, to be informed when a vulnerability is discovered. While this may be an unrealistic expectation in the current market place, customers should be able make informed decisions and thus operate in the market as their roll demands.
Did he also fix the transposition? laywer!=lawyer
Could not agree with you more in the overall scheme of things. If I could 'friend' people and accept their average judgements' on the the legitimacy and quality of an App it would be of great worth to me. Even with old PCs it was difficult to find quality software behind the countless crappy products. gdgt.com should add the ability to rate Apps and provide API access to 'friends'
This would cause glare since the OLED will need to have something to protect it thus negating the benefits of the e-ink.
If i post all the intimate detail of my life to any social networking site, even if I only share with 'friends', I do not have a legal expectation of privacy. If I do not choose to share those details the fact that others do should have no effect on what is a 'reasonable expectation of privacy.' I do not see how this would hold up in a court of law. We have had exhibitionists (celebrities) in all societies for some time and yet their open lifestyles do not have an effect others rights.
I don't think that they are going to use this to announce an earthquake but to determine location and propagation parameters. Their sensors can tell them for certain IF a quake hit long before twitter will say anything but they need to correlate other measurements to get a good location estimation.
Fuel cells may replace batteries but they do not generate electricity and are thus irrelevant to the current discussion. People keep thinking that the so called 'Hydrogen economy' is a solution of energy production. It is NOT. Hydrogen is a great way of storing energy but impossible to generate without electricity and the only natural available source is in oil/gas reserves.
Then my point is made, referring to it as OSU is ambiguous at best.
While I am sure that Oklahoma State University refers to itself as 'OSU' if you go to osu.edu you will get The Ohio State University.
Do you have access to all the features the hardware of your phone supports? Can you update to a new version of the OS without carrier intervention? If so then you have a wonderfully unlocked device. That is great but it is not and was not the norm.
The 10 years when WinMo was a major player was characterized by NO consumer choice after the original purchase. Blackberry and Palm were the same way. Now the consumer is beginning to understand the benefits of having an open platform untied to their carrier. So if Android phones get locked down to the same level that WinMo, Palm, and Blackberries where for years then it will have to compete on crutches with the iPhone. Sure there are unlocked phones available but not enough to justify a vibrant marketplace al la iTunes.
I believe the post right above yours brings the point home: the specific exponential power law followed appears to be unstable. That is if the frequency of attacks differs in a specific conflict the conflict ends shortly. The poster above nicely provided a link to a TED talk
Also being able to draw a straight line on a log log plot is all well and good but if you get the slope off by even a small amount you will soon be orders of magnitude off in your predictions. Thus while you might expect a power-law distribution from simple arguments getting the specific value is much more difficult.
Seriously, this is like when my boss didn't want to have his pay directly deposited because he thought the payroll company could snoop in his bank account. It's just not grounded in reality.
While they may not be able to see your transactions any company authorized to direct deposit is authorized to deduct money from your account.
While I agree with your assertion that the level of reaction was due to fear of liability instead of concern for individuals I have to question the reasoning behind this. Do the schools who do nothing actually end up paying more than those who take extreme action in known cases? That is, do such heavy handed reactions actually protect the university from liability? Do the heavy handed reactions themselves lead to liability in and of themselves? Seems like these questions need to be answered and addressed if we are to have any hope of a 'reasonable' reaction.
True. However the situation that the OP was attempting to explain was for poor people being 4x more likely to be prescribed anti-psychotics. Since the poor are already dominate in terms of population I do not see how your explanation makes the OP's reasonable. You can't remove the class demarkation from 'poor.'
So you are suggesting that there exists a sub class of humans which are more likely to be mentally ill? Seems like a straight path towards eugenics to me. As for your statement how this is going to be used as a "OMG BIG GOVERNMENT/CAPITALIST CONSPIRACY:" who needs a capitalist conspiracy when we can 'scientifically justify' the position of people in society?
Did boxee get Hulu working again? Last I heard it was dead.
I have to disagree with your assertion that Machiavelli was sarcastic. He was bitter and discontent with the destruction of the Florentine Republic but he accurately described the methods used in its destruction. Those methods were and are how governments stay in power. Finally, while he may not like his name associated with this method his description became so ubiquitous that it has and his desires are lost to history.