Baen's been smart about avoiding e-copy paranoia for a long time now. You can even browse some of the backlist online for free. Great folks; I'm always glad to do business with them.
You can download the Free Library for free. In whatever format you like, ePub, Mobi, HTML, Kindle, etc. I've got about half of it in my Sony Reader now. Plus the couple hundred dollars worth of stuff I've bought from Baen at about $6 per eBook....
The books I respect I buy in hard cover, largely Pratchett and reference books The ones that will enjoy and read casually I want to carry around I buy in paperback. If they really wanted to promote sales they would include an electronic copy with the purchase.
As an example of this, last time I bought a hardbound Honor Harrington novel, a CD was included with electronic copies of ALL the Honor Harrington books. Very nice, wish more publishers than Baen would do that.
You got the Privacy Act of 1974 which limits only _GOVERNMENT_ use of personal information. In 2006 several laws were attempted passed, but got rejected cause they would increase the cost of startup companies doing business.
You are assuming, as many do, that "government" is synonymous with "federal government".
We also have State governments around here, which are quite capable of passing laws on their own.
I note that I received in the mail this morning a card "amending" my customer agreement with AT&T. Which included a line to the effect "this modification doesn't apply if it runs counter to State laws where you live". And another line "this doesn't apply at all if you live in California". One of the nicer things about California is its very strong consumer protection laws....
Why does the US have this fetish with keeping the government out of their private lives, yet allow corporations free reign to use, misuse, misplace and basically be asses with the same information?
Most of the Americans who want the government to stay out of their private lives would also like corporations to stay out of their private lives.
In general, we can usually manage to get laws passed limiting the extent to which corporations can abuse our private information, but apparently there's no real way to get the government to pass a law that limits themselves....
For a stronger example, see the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, who believe that the planet would be better off without us, and choose not to breed.
Yah, they're a wonderful example of evolution in action - they'll breed themselves right out of the genepool, and the rest of us can carry on without them just fine.
Often times the best people for a job are the ones who've screwed up in a similar way in the past and have learned from the mistake.
This is true.
The question then becomes "Did this particular guy "learn from his mistake"?
Other than the obvious "don't get caught", of course.
Personally, I don't really care much at all who heads the TSA. But I'm concerned that Obama seems to have a hard time picking candidates for Senate confirmation that haven't broken a law relevant to their prospective new job....
Who's printed as the copyright holder in the book itself?
Presumably his great-great-grandmother, the author.
But, since she's almost certainly dead, then one of her heirs would hold the copyright (unless the State she was resident in distributed the copyright to all her heirs).
Course, that person is also likely to be dead, so presumably his/her heir has the copyright.
Now, that heir is quite possibly still alive. But not necessarily, of course - none of my grandparents are alive. So we might be looking at the next generation heir....
And note that some or all of those people might not have had wills. So standard State rules in whatever State they lived in might control who inherited the copyright.
What it likely means is that some mega-distributor (think WalMart or Sony) would snap up materials that no longer had an "owner" and they would publish and distribute them.
While WalMart or Sony might choose to publish and distribute a public domain work, that doesn't actually stop anyone else from publishing it and distributing it at the same time.
Nor does it prevent the Project Gutenberg people from adding it to their library.
Note, as examples, the King James Bible, the works of Shakespeare, the Sherlock Holmes stories, the works of Verne and Wells, etc. All of them public domain, all of them still reprinted by an assortment of publishers from time to time, all of them available as downloads.
Any idea when the latest copyright law/extensions were voted in and who voted for what? I would like to see if anyone I can make a vote for/against was part of them.
It received broad bipartisan support in both houses of Congress. So you can vote against any incumbents and stand a good chance of voting against someone who voted for it.
The Earth has been around for billions of years and in the last several hundred million years, it's been hit by how many bodies large enough to threaten all life?
Please note that Apophis is nowhere near large enough to "threaten all life".
Wreck a city? It can do that.
Make a spectular boom? That too.
But it's not a threat to "all life". Or even most life. Or even a little bit of life (unless it lands on the last four white rhinos in the wild).
And he's using out of date numbers. There are 6.5 billion people on Earth. If fewer than two are dying every second, our average life expectancy worldwide would be about 120.
Since average life expectancy worldwide is rather lower than 120 (just barely over half that, I think), I expect that the deathrate worldwide is rather higher than "almost 2 people per second".
With six times the mass of earth and subsequently higher gravity, any bi-pedal life from that evolves there will most certianly be able to kick your average human's ass.
Umm, no. That particular planet has a surface gravity of 0.9g. Six times Earth's mass, but only 1/3 Earth's density....
a week is an arbitrary figure that is at once too long to justify its cost for the majority of outages..
On the other hand, as part of a solar system...we had five days of rain in a row recently. Something like this as part of a solar system would help a lot in situations like that.
You probably meant kilotons here. Though even Saturn V didn't use as much as three kilotons of fuel per launch.
Seriously, the amount of fuel required for a rocket launch, even a very large rocket launch, isn't all that much. Remember that the USS Iowa carried 2.1 million gallons of fuel, which translates to about seven kilotons of fuel, no more than a month's supply.
Doing one each week would amount to approximately $24 billion per year in costs.
And it would put about 1500 tons into orbit every year. Rather more than four times the current mass of the ISS.
Let's see. What could we do with that much mass in Earth orbit. Besides make the ISS about five times its current size, of course. Since most of our plans for Mars missions envision about 800 tons in orbit to send the mission off, we can do that. And an asteroid mission, of course, since that's easier than the Mars mission. A moon mission or two with the leftovers.
and sending people to the same rock over and over again is also not exciting to most people (witness the rapid dropoff in interest during the Apollo era).
The problem with public interest in Apollo is that we pretty much did the same thing every flight - went up, walked around a bit, picked up some rocks, flew home.
No base. Not even a little one.
No two Apollo missions at the same time - I was really looking forward to the first time we landed two LMs at the same place, but it never happened.
If you want people to pay attention to a manned space program, you need to launch often, you need to do different things often. If people see that this flight is building on last flight, and that the next one will build on this one, they'll watch. But they're not going to pay attention to more of the same every six months....
Not necessarily. It depends on the planet's density. Of course, given that it's 6 times larger than Earth, it's most likely its gravity is significantly higher, but not necessarily, and not necessarily proportional to its larger size.
Its density is less than 2g/cm^3.
Its surface gravity is about 0.9g.
It is probably a small rock surrounded by hundreds or thousands of miles of ice.
In other words, the temperature may be "just right", but the planet is iffy, at best.
"Reporting on a White House and NASA meeting last Wednesday, sources say that the President has decided to give NASA an additional $US1 billion in 2011. The extra funding will serve to create a new heavy lift rocket, as well as to increase the fleet of satellites controlling Earth's land, oceans and atmosphere.
The objective is to have the heavy rocket ready for a 2018 launch"
One billion a year extra isn't going to get a heavy lift rocket ready in nine years.
Note also that that extra billion is the lowest rate of growth of any budget item so far. Most of them are getting 9-12% increases, this is closer to 6%....
They impeached Clinton for lying in answer to a question that should never have been asked.
Umm, no.
About the time that Clinton was being questioned about his sex life, the Supremes ruled that someone's sex life was, in fact, relevant in a sexual harassment lawsuit. So asking Clinton that question in a sexual harassment lawsuit was perfectly reasonable.
Oh wait, when their access to oil was threatened they just invaded an oil producing country.
Someday, the people who say this are going to learn how stupid it is.
The USA has never imported oil from Iraq. Not now, not when Saddam was in charge, not before that.
The USA imports less than 10% of its oil from the Middle East. The largest source of imported oil in the USA is that internationally known terrorist hotspot Canada...
Now I don't know the constitution exactly however there are problem areas. Such as racism. Many constitutions will say that everyone is equal regardless of race/gender/religion/etc. Then comes a person claiming "blacks are inferior!", without any argumentation, scientific or otherwise.
Free speech maybe - but how about the equality? Doesn't this person deny just that?
Equality under the law is not negated by anything you or I might choose to say.
I/You can say that you/I are/am too stupid to live, but this does not serve as sufficient to make murdering you/me legal.
Remember, Freedom of Speech means anyone can say rude and hurtful things. It also means that everyone else can think he's an ass for saying such things.
The cost of letting a guilty man go free is always less than the cost of punishing the innocent, since unless the crime was completely fabricated, a guilty man went free so that the innocent man could be punished.
This does not follow.
Jury Trials aren't about "convict the guy behind door number one or the guy behind door number two". There's one guy on trial, the choice is "guilty or not guilty".
Picking "not guilty" for the guy who committed the crime in no way implies that there'll be a second trial involving some other poor schmuck.
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You can download the Free Library for free. In whatever format you like, ePub, Mobi, HTML, Kindle, etc. I've got about half of it in my Sony Reader now. Plus the couple hundred dollars worth of stuff I've bought from Baen at about $6 per eBook....
As an example of this, last time I bought a hardbound Honor Harrington novel, a CD was included with electronic copies of ALL the Honor Harrington books. Very nice, wish more publishers than Baen would do that.
You are assuming, as many do, that "government" is synonymous with "federal government".
We also have State governments around here, which are quite capable of passing laws on their own.
I note that I received in the mail this morning a card "amending" my customer agreement with AT&T. Which included a line to the effect "this modification doesn't apply if it runs counter to State laws where you live". And another line "this doesn't apply at all if you live in California". One of the nicer things about California is its very strong consumer protection laws....
Most of the Americans who want the government to stay out of their private lives would also like corporations to stay out of their private lives.
In general, we can usually manage to get laws passed limiting the extent to which corporations can abuse our private information, but apparently there's no real way to get the government to pass a law that limits themselves....
Hmm? The rovers weigh about 120 pounds. My daughter could roll one back over.
Or were you thinking of their weight on Earth? Doesn't much matter that they weigh 400 pounds here....
Yah, they're a wonderful example of evolution in action - they'll breed themselves right out of the genepool, and the rest of us can carry on without them just fine.
It's so you can't see what or who they're looking at.
This is true.
The question then becomes "Did this particular guy "learn from his mistake"?
Other than the obvious "don't get caught", of course.
Personally, I don't really care much at all who heads the TSA. But I'm concerned that Obama seems to have a hard time picking candidates for Senate confirmation that haven't broken a law relevant to their prospective new job....
Presumably his great-great-grandmother, the author.
But, since she's almost certainly dead, then one of her heirs would hold the copyright (unless the State she was resident in distributed the copyright to all her heirs).
Course, that person is also likely to be dead, so presumably his/her heir has the copyright.
Now, that heir is quite possibly still alive. But not necessarily, of course - none of my grandparents are alive. So we might be looking at the next generation heir....
And note that some or all of those people might not have had wills. So standard State rules in whatever State they lived in might control who inherited the copyright.
See the problem?
While WalMart or Sony might choose to publish and distribute a public domain work, that doesn't actually stop anyone else from publishing it and distributing it at the same time.
Nor does it prevent the Project Gutenberg people from adding it to their library.
Note, as examples, the King James Bible, the works of Shakespeare, the Sherlock Holmes stories, the works of Verne and Wells, etc. All of them public domain, all of them still reprinted by an assortment of publishers from time to time, all of them available as downloads.
It received broad bipartisan support in both houses of Congress. So you can vote against any incumbents and stand a good chance of voting against someone who voted for it.
Please note that Apophis is nowhere near large enough to "threaten all life".
Wreck a city? It can do that.
Make a spectular boom? That too.
But it's not a threat to "all life". Or even most life. Or even a little bit of life (unless it lands on the last four white rhinos in the wild).
And he's using out of date numbers. There are 6.5 billion people on Earth. If fewer than two are dying every second, our average life expectancy worldwide would be about 120.
Since average life expectancy worldwide is rather lower than 120 (just barely over half that, I think), I expect that the deathrate worldwide is rather higher than "almost 2 people per second".
Maybe even as high as "Four people per second".
Umm, no. That particular planet has a surface gravity of 0.9g. Six times Earth's mass, but only 1/3 Earth's density....
On the other hand, as part of a solar system...we had five days of rain in a row recently. Something like this as part of a solar system would help a lot in situations like that.
You probably meant kilotons here. Though even Saturn V didn't use as much as three kilotons of fuel per launch.
Seriously, the amount of fuel required for a rocket launch, even a very large rocket launch, isn't all that much. Remember that the USS Iowa carried 2.1 million gallons of fuel, which translates to about seven kilotons of fuel, no more than a month's supply.
And it would put about 1500 tons into orbit every year. Rather more than four times the current mass of the ISS.
Let's see. What could we do with that much mass in Earth orbit. Besides make the ISS about five times its current size, of course. Since most of our plans for Mars missions envision about 800 tons in orbit to send the mission off, we can do that. And an asteroid mission, of course, since that's easier than the Mars mission. A moon mission or two with the leftovers.
And that's just this year....
The problem with public interest in Apollo is that we pretty much did the same thing every flight - went up, walked around a bit, picked up some rocks, flew home.
No base. Not even a little one.
No two Apollo missions at the same time - I was really looking forward to the first time we landed two LMs at the same place, but it never happened.
If you want people to pay attention to a manned space program, you need to launch often, you need to do different things often. If people see that this flight is building on last flight, and that the next one will build on this one, they'll watch. But they're not going to pay attention to more of the same every six months....
Its density is less than 2g/cm^3.
Its surface gravity is about 0.9g.
It is probably a small rock surrounded by hundreds or thousands of miles of ice.
In other words, the temperature may be "just right", but the planet is iffy, at best.
One billion a year extra isn't going to get a heavy lift rocket ready in nine years.
Note also that that extra billion is the lowest rate of growth of any budget item so far. Most of them are getting 9-12% increases, this is closer to 6%....
Umm, no.
About the time that Clinton was being questioned about his sex life, the Supremes ruled that someone's sex life was, in fact, relevant in a sexual harassment lawsuit. So asking Clinton that question in a sexual harassment lawsuit was perfectly reasonable.
Woodstock was shortly after Apollo 11. Which would make it '69, not '68.
Someday, the people who say this are going to learn how stupid it is.
The USA has never imported oil from Iraq. Not now, not when Saddam was in charge, not before that.
The USA imports less than 10% of its oil from the Middle East. The largest source of imported oil in the USA is that internationally known terrorist hotspot Canada...
Equality under the law is not negated by anything you or I might choose to say.
I/You can say that you/I are/am too stupid to live, but this does not serve as sufficient to make murdering you/me legal.
Remember, Freedom of Speech means anyone can say rude and hurtful things. It also means that everyone else can think he's an ass for saying such things.
This does not follow.
Jury Trials aren't about "convict the guy behind door number one or the guy behind door number two". There's one guy on trial, the choice is "guilty or not guilty".
Picking "not guilty" for the guy who committed the crime in no way implies that there'll be a second trial involving some other poor schmuck.