At this point? Nostalgia, mostly. Keep in mind that when it came out, there was literally nothing else like it.
In many ways, there's still nothing else like it. It is a whole universe, created from scratch. Not just an extrapolation of our own, and not just the pieces you need to see for the story. Humans are common, but not special in any particular way. They mix with aliens and robots completely, and deal with each other as equals. There are lots of places where a race is shown once, in a background character, and never seen again. Most movies wouldn't bother: It's just extra expense.
There's a feeling of history and depth to the movies (especially the original trilogy), that's nearly unique. You can write thousands of books about what else is happening in the universe, because it is a universe, and not just a setting for the story.
Home values are computed based on sales of 'comparable' homes in the area. Houses are often comparable to their neighbors homes.
If your home value goes down, that just lowered the value of all 'comparable' homes in the area. Which includes the neighbors. (This is a reason some care. I don't necessarily agree with it.)
Oh, and for the Taliban preventing women wearing jeans: They prevent it because they do like to see it, and that is a temptation to men. (Which men cannot be expected to handle on their own.) So therefore to avoid leading men into sin, women should cover up.
Both reasoning make about the same amount of sense.
You assume they haven't already outsourced everything already.
From where I'm sitting (in a government IT center, with about 5 actual government employees among the couple thousand that work here), that's not all that likely to be a valid assumption.
As a corrallary: Reduce the number of errors/confirmation dialogs they see on a regular basis. If they regularly have to click-past dialogs, they get trained to do that without reading them. If the presence of a dialog means 'call helpdesk, and read the dialog to them', they are more likely to pay attention to it.
Make seeing a dialog an exceptional case, not a normal case.
If it's a contract that has been signed by both parties, it's not worthless. Sure there are more complexities in multinational contract law, but just because someone is in a different country from you doesn't mean you can't have a contract with them.*
*(Various terms and exclusions apply. May not be applicable in all areas. Make sure to check with a lawyer before taking legal advice from the Internet.)
Some crops, in some places. Plants need a balance between CO2 and O2, just like everyone else, and CO2 is rarely the limiting factor in their growth.
Many standard food crops have been highly optimized by centuries of selective breeding to be as efficient as they can be. Higher CO2 levels may hurt more than they help. (It's something under study, and the latest research says that you can't look at any one factor in isolation. Increase ingredient Foo, and growth goes down. Increase Foo and Bar, and it goes up. Increase Foo and double the increase in Bar, and growth goes down. Basically, at this point we don't really know.)
At least ePub is an open format with published fileformat descriptions, so you can theorethically make your own converter...
I've considered doing so, since I haven't found one that will do a smooth job of some of my more basic conversions.
As far as conversion is concerned, I'd recommend using calibre -- it's pretty much the ultimate ebook library manager, which supports converting back and forth between many of the common ebook formats and can interface with the majority of ebook readers currently on the market. Open source, free download at http://calibre-ebook.com/
It's a nice little program, in many ways. I like it's library management functions, although they are a bit clunky. (Browsing is a bit hard, duplicates aren't handled well, nor is automatically importing more than one format of the same book) It's had some intermittent problems syncing to my Nook, which makes me leary of doing so. (The entire library tends to disappear on occasion...)
Once a book is in it, I've not had any complaints about it's conversions, but I've had books in some basic formats (HTML, txt) that I just couldn't get it to recognize at all. (Despite the fact that I know it handles them in other cases.)
Still, one of the best general programs around at the moment.
I like Calibre a fair amount, except that it has a habit of occasionally making none of my books readable on my Nook, when they were just fine before, and that it's failed to do a good conversion of some HTML files I've wanted to convert. (Actually, it kept thinking they were.zip files...)
Oh, and it's interface isn't localized for the Mac, making it feel very clunky on mine.
All in all, it feels like a decent early beta product, and seems to be the best general converter/library manager around.
Basically everybody but the Kindle is using the ePub format, which is an open format. It supports DRM, but doesn't require it, and there are many sources out there who sell/provide books in it without DRM.
The conversion software available to ePub is a bit primitive at the moment, but it does exist, from practically any format you can care to name.
Oh, you could probably make a good movie of it, with a good cast and scriptwriter.
But it's not Lord of the Rings as Tolkien wrote it, it's a (subtly) different story. If you sell it as an 'alternate interpretation', I have no problems with it. If you try to pretend it's the original, well, be glad we have laws against physical attacks.
And the themes: The three laws; the ways in which these laws can be, unexpectedly, harmful (the point of about half of the stories in the book)
The reason Asimov's robot stories are so famous is because he did not write 'robot as the monster' stories. His robots were machines, and broke down like machines. They did not go havok or turn on their creators. They had weird, unpredictable bugs that resulted in unexpected behavior, but did not violate their core concepts. His robots were safe: 'Made so.'
Once he had that fully established, he played with it a bit in no more than a couple of stories, because he was too good an author to not do so. But even then, there was never a robot 'menace', or robots running around murdering people.
Robots running haywire and trying to supplant the human race is exactly what Asimov was known for not doing. Making a movie where that's the plot and putting Asimov's name on it is like doing a movie about Lord of the Rings - and having Saruon as a misunderstood rebel, who's really all right underneath.
Then they would simply be charged with murder as well as their current charge, and the RIAA et all would simply hire a new attorney. (While the person has to deal with the trial while being held in jail.)
Better yet: Not any shape. Place it on a disk, that fits semi-loosely in your cylinder. (Tighter will get more wear, but be more efficient. There'll be a range of 'good' values here.)
Then you let the air back in from vents under the disk. It'll launch most of the way from air pressure alone.
'Good' marketing (in the sense of good for the economy and population at large, which isn't always the same as good for the company paying for it) helps that market assumption of 'perfect information': It informs you of a product you didn't know existed, and gives you the reasons why it might be a product you would wish to buy.
Of course, most of the people/companies paying for the marketing would rather it informed you of a product you didn't know existed, and created a need to buy that product. Regardless of whether you would wish to buy it or not, or if it would benefit you in any way.
The value-add of a Kindle or a Nook is the number of books you can carry, not the cost per se. As long as the cost and reading experience is close, they are useful just for that. (And, arguably, they improve on a paper book in some ways, without many new downsides.)
I can see the value of interactivity here, but I don't seen the iPad as all that good at adding that value. A cheaper, larger device would work better. (As would one not locked down by the manufacturer, so that it's easier to get new games on to it.) Plus I don't see that level of interactivity as being all that great a value: It's basically a gimmick, and it's cheaper to use cutouts or die-casts, which will work almost as well for most uses.
Being able to play a game of chess against someone on another continent would be something people would pay for, but you can already do that with a laptop or a desktop. (And I wouldn't be surprised if there were dedicated devices.)
Which would be one of the reasons they are not ready for prime time yet: The display issue hasn't been solved.
Sooner or later it will be, somehow. Foldable, projection, HUD, implant, something else; one will work well enough to be usable. Then we'll see if the other problems are solved or solvable.
Really: He's not saying it's ready now. He thinks it will be sometime soon, and he's got his company working on it so they'll be ready when it is.
He didn't say the netbook is dead. Just that it's a short-term solution, and long-term it'll be surpassed.
Even they think that's more of a long-term thing. (They say 5 years, before they are on the market. Which might be possible. It'd take longer yet for them to take off, my opinion.)
From the article, they have no reason to think the netbook is dead yet. Just that sooner or later it'll be replaced with something smaller and more functional.
Which is probably true, as long as you don't think it'll happen in the next couple of years.
Which is exactly what the original poster should do: Charge a non-nominal amount, and pay 10-20% to some lawyer to write up the license for them.
Heck, call some lawyer in the US, and tell them that for 15% of whatever they can negotiate, you want them to talk to this company and come up with a license/fee for you. There are probably more than a few lawyers who'll work under those terms.
Slashdot Mirror
At this point? Nostalgia, mostly. Keep in mind that when it came out, there was literally nothing else like it.
In many ways, there's still nothing else like it. It is a whole universe, created from scratch. Not just an extrapolation of our own, and not just the pieces you need to see for the story. Humans are common, but not special in any particular way. They mix with aliens and robots completely, and deal with each other as equals. There are lots of places where a race is shown once, in a background character, and never seen again. Most movies wouldn't bother: It's just extra expense.
There's a feeling of history and depth to the movies (especially the original trilogy), that's nearly unique. You can write thousands of books about what else is happening in the universe, because it is a universe, and not just a setting for the story.
Home values are computed based on sales of 'comparable' homes in the area. Houses are often comparable to their neighbors homes.
If your home value goes down, that just lowered the value of all 'comparable' homes in the area. Which includes the neighbors. (This is a reason some care. I don't necessarily agree with it.)
Oh, and for the Taliban preventing women wearing jeans: They prevent it because they do like to see it, and that is a temptation to men. (Which men cannot be expected to handle on their own.) So therefore to avoid leading men into sin, women should cover up.
Both reasoning make about the same amount of sense.
Sitting at home alone very quietly with your hands on the table is 'Not doing regular maintenance.' That will bring down local property values.
That depends on whether you believe he A: Followed policy, and B: Was right.
There is at least a very good case that he did, and that it was his bosses who fucked up, and are trying to cover it up by charging him with a crime.
And, either way, he probably could speak on 'Lessons Learned about Dealing With Management.'
You assume they haven't already outsourced everything already.
From where I'm sitting (in a government IT center, with about 5 actual government employees among the couple thousand that work here), that's not all that likely to be a valid assumption.
As a corrallary: Reduce the number of errors/confirmation dialogs they see on a regular basis. If they regularly have to click-past dialogs, they get trained to do that without reading them. If the presence of a dialog means 'call helpdesk, and read the dialog to them', they are more likely to pay attention to it.
Make seeing a dialog an exceptional case, not a normal case.
If it's a contract that has been signed by both parties, it's not worthless. Sure there are more complexities in multinational contract law, but just because someone is in a different country from you doesn't mean you can't have a contract with them.*
*(Various terms and exclusions apply. May not be applicable in all areas. Make sure to check with a lawyer before taking legal advice from the Internet.)
Some crops, in some places. Plants need a balance between CO2 and O2, just like everyone else, and CO2 is rarely the limiting factor in their growth.
Many standard food crops have been highly optimized by centuries of selective breeding to be as efficient as they can be. Higher CO2 levels may hurt more than they help. (It's something under study, and the latest research says that you can't look at any one factor in isolation. Increase ingredient Foo, and growth goes down. Increase Foo and Bar, and it goes up. Increase Foo and double the increase in Bar, and growth goes down. Basically, at this point we don't really know.)
At least ePub is an open format with published fileformat descriptions, so you can theorethically make your own converter...
I've considered doing so, since I haven't found one that will do a smooth job of some of my more basic conversions.
As far as conversion is concerned, I'd recommend using calibre -- it's pretty much the ultimate ebook library manager, which supports converting back and forth between many of the common ebook formats and can interface with the majority of ebook readers currently on the market. Open source, free download at http://calibre-ebook.com/
It's a nice little program, in many ways. I like it's library management functions, although they are a bit clunky. (Browsing is a bit hard, duplicates aren't handled well, nor is automatically importing more than one format of the same book) It's had some intermittent problems syncing to my Nook, which makes me leary of doing so. (The entire library tends to disappear on occasion...)
Once a book is in it, I've not had any complaints about it's conversions, but I've had books in some basic formats (HTML, txt) that I just couldn't get it to recognize at all. (Despite the fact that I know it handles them in other cases.)
Still, one of the best general programs around at the moment.
I like Calibre a fair amount, except that it has a habit of occasionally making none of my books readable on my Nook, when they were just fine before, and that it's failed to do a good conversion of some HTML files I've wanted to convert. (Actually, it kept thinking they were .zip files...)
Oh, and it's interface isn't localized for the Mac, making it feel very clunky on mine.
All in all, it feels like a decent early beta product, and seems to be the best general converter/library manager around.
Basically everybody but the Kindle is using the ePub format, which is an open format. It supports DRM, but doesn't require it, and there are many sources out there who sell/provide books in it without DRM.
The conversion software available to ePub is a bit primitive at the moment, but it does exist, from practically any format you can care to name.
Oh, you could probably make a good movie of it, with a good cast and scriptwriter.
But it's not Lord of the Rings as Tolkien wrote it, it's a (subtly) different story. If you sell it as an 'alternate interpretation', I have no problems with it. If you try to pretend it's the original, well, be glad we have laws against physical attacks.
And the themes: The three laws; the ways in which these laws can be, unexpectedly, harmful (the point of about half of the stories in the book)
The reason Asimov's robot stories are so famous is because he did not write 'robot as the monster' stories. His robots were machines, and broke down like machines. They did not go havok or turn on their creators. They had weird, unpredictable bugs that resulted in unexpected behavior, but did not violate their core concepts. His robots were safe: 'Made so.'
Once he had that fully established, he played with it a bit in no more than a couple of stories, because he was too good an author to not do so. But even then, there was never a robot 'menace', or robots running around murdering people.
Robots running haywire and trying to supplant the human race is exactly what Asimov was known for not doing. Making a movie where that's the plot and putting Asimov's name on it is like doing a movie about Lord of the Rings - and having Saruon as a misunderstood rebel, who's really all right underneath.
Then they would simply be charged with murder as well as their current charge, and the RIAA et all would simply hire a new attorney. (While the person has to deal with the trial while being held in jail.)
You'd just have to put in long enough spikes. Have it brush the driver every time the driver moves.
Better yet: Not any shape. Place it on a disk, that fits semi-loosely in your cylinder. (Tighter will get more wear, but be more efficient. There'll be a range of 'good' values here.)
Then you let the air back in from vents under the disk. It'll launch most of the way from air pressure alone.
'Good' marketing (in the sense of good for the economy and population at large, which isn't always the same as good for the company paying for it) helps that market assumption of 'perfect information': It informs you of a product you didn't know existed, and gives you the reasons why it might be a product you would wish to buy.
Of course, most of the people/companies paying for the marketing would rather it informed you of a product you didn't know existed, and created a need to buy that product. Regardless of whether you would wish to buy it or not, or if it would benefit you in any way.
It's not the mortality rate that would cause safer driving. It's the threat of the mortality rate.
It's much harder to ignore the threat of a large spike than of the steering column.
The value-add of a Kindle or a Nook is the number of books you can carry, not the cost per se. As long as the cost and reading experience is close, they are useful just for that. (And, arguably, they improve on a paper book in some ways, without many new downsides.)
I can see the value of interactivity here, but I don't seen the iPad as all that good at adding that value. A cheaper, larger device would work better. (As would one not locked down by the manufacturer, so that it's easier to get new games on to it.) Plus I don't see that level of interactivity as being all that great a value: It's basically a gimmick, and it's cheaper to use cutouts or die-casts, which will work almost as well for most uses.
Being able to play a game of chess against someone on another continent would be something people would pay for, but you can already do that with a laptop or a desktop. (And I wouldn't be surprised if there were dedicated devices.)
That may have been the point...
Your analysis is faulty: You miss-identified the virus.
Which would be one of the reasons they are not ready for prime time yet: The display issue hasn't been solved.
Sooner or later it will be, somehow. Foldable, projection, HUD, implant, something else; one will work well enough to be usable. Then we'll see if the other problems are solved or solvable.
Really: He's not saying it's ready now. He thinks it will be sometime soon, and he's got his company working on it so they'll be ready when it is.
He didn't say the netbook is dead. Just that it's a short-term solution, and long-term it'll be surpassed.
Even they think that's more of a long-term thing. (They say 5 years, before they are on the market. Which might be possible. It'd take longer yet for them to take off, my opinion.)
From the article, they have no reason to think the netbook is dead yet. Just that sooner or later it'll be replaced with something smaller and more functional.
Which is probably true, as long as you don't think it'll happen in the next couple of years.
And they don't use DRM, either.
Which is exactly what the original poster should do: Charge a non-nominal amount, and pay 10-20% to some lawyer to write up the license for them.
Heck, call some lawyer in the US, and tell them that for 15% of whatever they can negotiate, you want them to talk to this company and come up with a license/fee for you. There are probably more than a few lawyers who'll work under those terms.