This is only partially about cornering the eBook market (or should I say peripherally). The Amazon Prime lending library's main drawback is the lack of established authors and more current works. I'm just betting this is a trial program to test the waters. Mr. Bezos' next step will be to extend such an offer to a big name author. Ultimately, I believe his goal is to essentially dismantle the existing infrastructure of publishers and agents, with Amazon, of course, being the corporate entity to jump in and allow authors more or less direct access to the market without those middlemen taking a cut.
In the short term, I like this plan. Any time a layer of middlemen can be eliminated it is simply a matter of the market making a process more efficient, which is a good thing, both for authors (less cuts out of their royalties) and for Amazon (larger pool of renowned authors). The issue is the long term implication. If this process leads to all authors being locked into a proprietary tech, that is bad. So, in short, authors should be happy, but tread carefully and be sure to be aware of what the motives are for these moves. If handled carefully, authors can still win this battle in the long term - they have the truly irreplaceable commodity here, their words.
Thank God you appeared. I was wondering if anyone had acually ever READ Wonkette! I love the site, much in the same way I love the Weekly World News or (as one person put it) The Daily Show. I get my laughs from there, not my news. Anyone who honestly thinks Wonkette is a genuine "news" site should just read the various posts positing the size of John Kerry's er, endowment. And her obession with ass-f**king. It's hardly serious folks. Get a grip.
I have a question - and maybe the question will demonstrate my pig ignorance of the physics of deceleration, but I've not been able to figure this out. In the test they shot this piece of foam at approx 500 mph into the wing at approximately the same distance as the foam flew from the tank to Columbia's wing. Here's my question: At the moment of separation from the external tank, the piece of foam should have had nearly the same velocity as the shuttle/external tank, relative to a stationary object. Immediately upon separation, the foam would have started decelerating and the shuttle was still accelerating, but it seems hard to imagine that at the moment of impact, the differential velocity of the shuttle/tank versus the foam piece would have resulted in an impact at 500 mph.
I mean, it's not like the shuttle flew into a stationary object while it (the shuttle) was going 500 mph (similar to a jet hitting a bird or whatever). Was the shuttle really accelerating that quickly so that in the one or two seconds between foam separation and impact on the wing the shuttle had gained 500 mph in velocity relative to the foam piece? My faith in scientists is such that I imagine this must be the case (since the alternative is that they missed this question) but I would love to have someone with enough knowledge of the science to clue me in.
I believe he was one of the engineers at BBN that helped on the development of the Net through a grant from DARPA. If you want more data, try Nerds 2.0.1 or Where Wizards Stay Up Late, both available from your favorite bookseller.
Here in the insurance industry we've been hit hard by 9/11 - I mean we hold policies on WTC properties for goodness sakes.
Our response has been, I think, appropriate. We will get minimal, if any pay increases this year. That results in a net loss of spending power, but hey, that is manageable. Also, we are taking a long, hard look at staffing and making cuts where needed. As one poster put it, better off letting some folks go than giving everyone a REALLY demoralizing pay cut for a month. Most folks still live check to check, so this will be a definite hardship.
Of course, our company also practices belt tightening across the board (literally and figuratively). No big Enron style bonuses for the top dogs while we fight for scraps. There's a real feel of we're all in this together, and that soothes a lot of aches. We're gonna be fine, and we're all happy to pull our weight as long as we see everyone pulling with us.
The More Things Change . . .
on
Borland Backs Down
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I dunno - basically, this looks like an "Oops, you caught me" more than anything else. Accepting their explanation at face value makes me wonder how many times any developer at a large site has submitted themselves to these terms.
I think it would be wise (and maybe someone has done this) to have EULAs from all sorts of companies examined closely by laywers (not IANALs, real Juris Doctor lawyers). I think we need to see the revised non-enterprise license from Borland. For those of us who bring in personal laptops to the office, how does an enterprise license apply to us? How about telecommuters? Is there some sort of paper wall between the portion of my home PC that dials into work and allows me to work from home, and the rest of my home PC with its ripped MP3s, software "borrowed" from friends and collections of pr0n? How about the USB harddrive that holds MP3s that I take to work to listen to tunes while I work? Does that become "infected" by the enterprise license?
There are enough EULA's to choke a horse out there, and a lot of people (me included) have a tendency to buzz right by them on the way to an install. Add to that the variety of source licences and other varied licenses that we submit to and use, it makes for a nice legal morass that a lot of folks do not really comprehend until they get called on it, when it is too late. Just take a moment and try to count the number of legal agreements that you have made to get your PC to the point it is right now. How many? 100? 1000?
Is there anyone out there who has created a website specifically to deal with these sorts of things? A technologically inclined lawyer with a whole lotta time on their hands? Someone to offer all us legal dilettantes and wannabees some guidelines and advice regarding the various legal "boilerplate" to which we submit ourselves every day?
Slashdot Mirror
This is only partially about cornering the eBook market (or should I say peripherally). The Amazon Prime lending library's main drawback is the lack of established authors and more current works. I'm just betting this is a trial program to test the waters. Mr. Bezos' next step will be to extend such an offer to a big name author. Ultimately, I believe his goal is to essentially dismantle the existing infrastructure of publishers and agents, with Amazon, of course, being the corporate entity to jump in and allow authors more or less direct access to the market without those middlemen taking a cut. In the short term, I like this plan. Any time a layer of middlemen can be eliminated it is simply a matter of the market making a process more efficient, which is a good thing, both for authors (less cuts out of their royalties) and for Amazon (larger pool of renowned authors). The issue is the long term implication. If this process leads to all authors being locked into a proprietary tech, that is bad. So, in short, authors should be happy, but tread carefully and be sure to be aware of what the motives are for these moves. If handled carefully, authors can still win this battle in the long term - they have the truly irreplaceable commodity here, their words.
Thank God you appeared. I was wondering if anyone had acually ever READ Wonkette! I love the site, much in the same way I love the Weekly World News or (as one person put it) The Daily Show. I get my laughs from there, not my news. Anyone who honestly thinks Wonkette is a genuine "news" site should just read the various posts positing the size of John Kerry's er, endowment. And her obession with ass-f**king. It's hardly serious folks. Get a grip.
I have a question - and maybe the question will demonstrate my pig ignorance of the physics of deceleration, but I've not been able to figure this out. In the test they shot this piece of foam at approx 500 mph into the wing at approximately the same distance as the foam flew from the tank to Columbia's wing. Here's my question: At the moment of separation from the external tank, the piece of foam should have had nearly the same velocity as the shuttle/external tank, relative to a stationary object. Immediately upon separation, the foam would have started decelerating and the shuttle was still accelerating, but it seems hard to imagine that at the moment of impact, the differential velocity of the shuttle/tank versus the foam piece would have resulted in an impact at 500 mph.
I mean, it's not like the shuttle flew into a stationary object while it (the shuttle) was going 500 mph (similar to a jet hitting a bird or whatever). Was the shuttle really accelerating that quickly so that in the one or two seconds between foam separation and impact on the wing the shuttle had gained 500 mph in velocity relative to the foam piece? My faith in scientists is such that I imagine this must be the case (since the alternative is that they missed this question) but I would love to have someone with enough knowledge of the science to clue me in.
I believe he was one of the engineers at BBN that helped on the development of the Net through a grant from DARPA. If you want more data, try Nerds 2.0.1 or Where Wizards Stay Up Late, both available from your favorite bookseller.
Here in the insurance industry we've been hit hard by 9/11 - I mean we hold policies on WTC properties for goodness sakes. Our response has been, I think, appropriate. We will get minimal, if any pay increases this year. That results in a net loss of spending power, but hey, that is manageable. Also, we are taking a long, hard look at staffing and making cuts where needed. As one poster put it, better off letting some folks go than giving everyone a REALLY demoralizing pay cut for a month. Most folks still live check to check, so this will be a definite hardship. Of course, our company also practices belt tightening across the board (literally and figuratively). No big Enron style bonuses for the top dogs while we fight for scraps. There's a real feel of we're all in this together, and that soothes a lot of aches. We're gonna be fine, and we're all happy to pull our weight as long as we see everyone pulling with us.
I dunno - basically, this looks like an "Oops, you caught me" more than anything else. Accepting their explanation at face value makes me wonder how many times any developer at a large site has submitted themselves to these terms.
I think it would be wise (and maybe someone has done this) to have EULAs from all sorts of companies examined closely by laywers (not IANALs, real Juris Doctor lawyers). I think we need to see the revised non-enterprise license from Borland. For those of us who bring in personal laptops to the office, how does an enterprise license apply to us? How about telecommuters? Is there some sort of paper wall between the portion of my home PC that dials into work and allows me to work from home, and the rest of my home PC with its ripped MP3s, software "borrowed" from friends and collections of pr0n? How about the USB harddrive that holds MP3s that I take to work to listen to tunes while I work? Does that become "infected" by the enterprise license?
There are enough EULA's to choke a horse out there, and a lot of people (me included) have a tendency to buzz right by them on the way to an install. Add to that the variety of source licences and other varied licenses that we submit to and use, it makes for a nice legal morass that a lot of folks do not really comprehend until they get called on it, when it is too late. Just take a moment and try to count the number of legal agreements that you have made to get your PC to the point it is right now. How many? 100? 1000?
Is there anyone out there who has created a website specifically to deal with these sorts of things? A technologically inclined lawyer with a whole lotta time on their hands? Someone to offer all us legal dilettantes and wannabees some guidelines and advice regarding the various legal "boilerplate" to which we submit ourselves every day?