That a book that is relatively new would fetch such large amounts is unprecedented, said Luke Battenham, Bonham's book specialist.
"The author is still alive, it's a fairly new series . . . but by the time there was a third book, you could already see it would be a hit," Battenham said. "It's a phenomenon."
Under which scenario are you MORE likely to write a new book/album?
How many authors and musicians remain a significant creative force after fourteen years? How many who do remain productive have benefited from having an independent income?
It is not the young and hungry Spielberg of Duel who gets to produce Schindler's List.
Fining persons tens of thousands of dollars who live paycheck by paycheck, something they could not do without driving themselves into bankruptcy or poverty, especially for what is a fairly non-violent and minor crime, really is going overboard. I would much rather see a few hours of community service used instead.
Living paycheck by payback.
But a computer is in the budget. Broadband service. Blank DVDs in media purchase. The portable media player.
But not Netflix or Rhapsody or Live365 or XM Radio.
No thought at all to the legitimate "free" alternatives. Internet radio. Broadcast radio. The library loan.
Who do you think you are kidding?
Slashdot is a forum for posters who feel entitled to whine about salaries that are almost twice that of the median income for an entire american household.
playing a DVD on their Linux machine
Linspire will sell you a licensed DVD player for Linux for $20 - the retail price of a decoder for Windows.
Actually, unregulated industries tend to have better customer service... phone service and telecom is HIGHLY regulated..
I wouldn't know. What I do know is that the phones - always - work. I have power. I can't remember any significant outages since I was a boy. I have called customer service about a billing problem once in the last ten years.
which usually implies a strong position in world trade and good relations with its major trading partners
2.Doesn't care what the "western world" (i.e. the big US corps) have to say and doesn't enforce "western IP rights"
but does care about providing fan service to the american who wants to max out on western media?
even when it exposes the regime to violent - internal - cultural and religion reaction?
Iran seems to fit your bill nicely. I don't know what their stance is on copyright laws, but they might host a site like this just to poke a stick in the U.S.' eye.
Iran Copyright Law [UNESCO Translation 1970]
The basic term is life of the author plus thirty years. If there are no heirs, rights pass to the Ministry of Arts and Culture.
But don't hold your breath waiting for an Islamic republic to open its doors to re-distribution of Western media - particularly in its most violent/sexually explicit forms. The internal threat of a fundamentalist reaction rules that out.
I've recently switched about 20 people over to Ubuntu from Windows, and all but one of them were ecstatic. Other than that though, it's been 100% rave reviews and new clients for my little bedroom/repair shop.
Twenty customers is worth bupkis in this business.
Not one dealer or service advertises a Linux solution in our suburban phone book - not one bedroom shop thinks Linux worth a mention on the cards they post on the mini-mart walls.
. it's said 'is XXXX the year for the Linux Desktop'?
What would make it so? At what point would it be possible to quantify that 'yes, this IS the year!'... when there is 100,000 users? 500,000 users? 10,000,000 users?
I've seen estimates of Windows' desktop share that begin at 300 million users - equivalent to the entire population of the U.S.
Vista entered the consumer market in January.
In July, Walmart.com sells HP Pavilion Vista Premium laptops starting at $780.
15" Wide-Screen Display, Dual Core AMD CPU, 1 GB RAM, DVD burner and DX 9 GeForce Go graphics that do not suck. For $12 add 1 GB ReadyBoost Flash, for $120 a key chain USB HDTV tuner.
OEM Linux at Walmart is out. The generic Vista laptop from Dell is in.
If the Geek thinks mass-market pricing of Vista is going to be a turn-off, he is delusional. If he thinks that product activation, DRM, Windows Update, etc., concern anyone in this market, he is ready to be committed.
Now, with easy to "hack" software radios everyone could start broadcasting any information they want, in any format, on any frequency, at any power, etc...and there would be no way for the FCC to even begin to track that kind of rampant violation down.
"Broadcasting" by definition implies an audience that has the necessary equipment and knows how to receive your signal.
That is not a secret you can keep.
If one guy is in the street protesting it is easy to control and quell. If its 10,000 guys in the street protesting it gets a little harder, if its 10,000,000 guys its basically imposisble.
You won't get 10 million guys. You will be lucky if you can muster 1,000.
What is the justification for using taxpayer money to incarcerate a non-violent offender?
Tolerance of laziness and deceit, greed and corruption, is far more dangerous to democratic institutions than physical violence.
It erodes trust in all authority when the celebrity, the politician, the corporate executive, yes, even the geek, begins to believe - correctly - that jail time is for others but never for him.
That must be how they always catch the child porn guys that are having their computer worked on. A technician always "just accidently discovers" it.
You know, that may not be so far from the truth. The one common thread in child porn arrests here is that the guy was reckless to the point of self-destruction. The grade school teacher who routed his downloads through the district's network.
Stealing homemade sex videos and that sort of thing from customers' computers is another matter. That would be a pretty major invasion of privacy and should be grounds for substantial, per-case lawsuits.
With you camcorder sex play entered as "Exhibit A." That's a humiliation most geeks would as soon be spared.
If this is the simple combination of existing technologies it shouldn't be enforceable
O.K., bright boy. Build something better than S3. Open Source it, if you like. But first prove to me that your solution scales to an enterprise the size of Amazon.com. That it will be cheaper and more reliable. Then we can talk.
There is no shortage of programmers or software engineers in the U.S.; there is a shortage of people who are interested in being paid next to nothing.
The median income for an American household was $45,000 in 2004. The median salary for a software engineer was between $75,000 and $80,000 in 2004. Computer Software Engineers
Are you really saying that these things would only be available as a result of the patent system?
Consider this bit of history:
Hippocrates [ca 400 BC] writes about the use of willow bark to relieve pain.
The active ingredient in willow bark is isolated and extracted in concentrated form. [1828-1839]
The problem was that salicylic acid was tough on stomachs and a means of 'buffering' the compound was searched for. The first person to do so was a French chemist named Charles Frederic Gerhardt. In 1853, Gerhardt neutralized salicylic acid by buffering it with sodium (sodium salicylate) and acetyl chloride, creating acetylsalicylic acid. Gerhardt's product worked but he had no desire to market it and abandoned his discovery.
In 1899, a German chemist named Felix Hoffmann, who worked for a German company called Bayer, rediscovered Gerhardt's formula. Felix Hoffmann made some of the formula and gave it to his father who was suffering from the pain of arthritis. With good results, Felix Hoffmann then convinced Bayer to market the new wonder drug. Aspirin was patented on March 6, 1889.
Aspirin was first sold as a powder. In 1915, the first Aspirin tablets were made. Interestingly, Aspirin ® and Heroin ® were once trademarks belonging to Bayer. After Germany lost World War I, Bayer was forced to give up both trademarks as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.The History of Aspirin
And most of the chemical industry was founded in Switzerland at the turn of the century
I would have placed the origins of the modern chemical industry in Germany ca. 1860 with companies like Bayer and with the exploitation of coal tar dyes - modern organic chemistry. Harold Baron:
The Chemical Industry on the Continent
Sure, in RETROSPECT, many of these crazy patents are obvious
The view through the rear-view mirror is always twenty-twenty.
If an invention becomes obvious only in retrospect then - just maybe - it wasn't so obvious at all. 1-click shopping is simply an idea. Amazon has a system that works.
Slashdot Mirror
Ownership of a PC requires a middle class income or better.
The free OS and applications software doesn't change things all that much.
Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies' back door to every network connected country and business on earth.
Yes. This does wonders to make your argument more convincing.
And it was a hugely successful novel
No it wasn't.
The first British edition of "Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone" had a print run of 500-1000 copies. First edition of `Philosopher's Stone' snags $18,000 at auction [June 26, 2007]
That a book that is relatively new would fetch such large amounts is unprecedented, said Luke Battenham, Bonham's book specialist.
"The author is still alive, it's a fairly new series . . . but by the time there was a third book, you could already see it would be a hit," Battenham said. "It's a phenomenon."
Under which scenario are you MORE likely to write a new book/album?
How many authors and musicians remain a significant creative force after fourteen years? How many who do remain productive have benefited from having an independent income?
It is not the young and hungry Spielberg of Duel who gets to produce Schindler's List.
Living paycheck by payback.
But a computer is in the budget. Broadband service. Blank DVDs in media purchase. The portable media player.
But not Netflix or Rhapsody or Live365 or XM Radio.
No thought at all to the legitimate "free" alternatives. Internet radio. Broadcast radio. The library loan.
Who do you think you are kidding?
Slashdot is a forum for posters who feel entitled to whine about salaries that are almost twice that of the median income for an entire american household.
playing a DVD on their Linux machine
Linspire will sell you a licensed DVD player for Linux for $20 - the retail price of a decoder for Windows.
I wouldn't know. What I do know is that the phones - always - work. I have power. I can't remember any significant outages since I was a boy. I have called customer service about a billing problem once in the last ten years.
1 Has a stable government.
which usually implies a strong position in world trade and good relations with its major trading partners
2.Doesn't care what the "western world" (i.e. the big US corps) have to say and doesn't enforce "western IP rights"
but does care about providing fan service to the american who wants to max out on western media? even when it exposes the regime to violent - internal - cultural and religion reaction?
Iran Copyright Law [UNESCO Translation 1970] The basic term is life of the author plus thirty years. If there are no heirs, rights pass to the Ministry of Arts and Culture.
But don't hold your breath waiting for an Islamic republic to open its doors to re-distribution of Western media - particularly in its most violent/sexually explicit forms. The internal threat of a fundamentalist reaction rules that out.
Twenty customers is worth bupkis in this business.
Not one dealer or service advertises a Linux solution in our suburban phone book - not one bedroom shop thinks Linux worth a mention on the cards they post on the mini-mart walls.
which may just explain why everyone else client-side choses Windows or OSX.
What would make it so? At what point would it be possible to quantify that 'yes, this IS the year!'... when there is 100,000 users? 500,000 users? 10,000,000 users?
I've seen estimates of Windows' desktop share that begin at 300 million users - equivalent to the entire population of the U.S.
Vista entered the consumer market in January.
In July, Walmart.com sells HP Pavilion Vista Premium laptops starting at $780.
15" Wide-Screen Display, Dual Core AMD CPU, 1 GB RAM, DVD burner and DX 9 GeForce Go graphics that do not suck. For $12 add 1 GB ReadyBoost Flash, for $120 a key chain USB HDTV tuner.
OEM Linux at Walmart is out. The generic Vista laptop from Dell is in.
If the Geek thinks mass-market pricing of Vista is going to be a turn-off, he is delusional. If he thinks that product activation, DRM, Windows Update, etc., concern anyone in this market, he is ready to be committed.
This tells me nothing unless I know where you are working and the target audience of the blogs.
"Broadcasting" by definition implies an audience that has the necessary equipment and knows how to receive your signal.
That is not a secret you can keep.
If one guy is in the street protesting it is easy to control and quell. If its 10,000 guys in the street protesting it gets a little harder, if its 10,000,000 guys its basically imposisble.
You won't get 10 million guys. You will be lucky if you can muster 1,000.
"Twice nothing is still nothing,"
It is precisely why he gets the mod +4, Insightful. On Slashdot.
That is why some promoters are finding that there is money to made in the home-theater like theater for adult admission only.
Luxury seating. No kids. No teens. No phones.
Tolerance of laziness and deceit, greed and corruption, is far more dangerous to democratic institutions than physical violence.
It erodes trust in all authority when the celebrity, the politician, the corporate executive, yes, even the geek, begins to believe - correctly - that jail time is for others but never for him.
Personally, I'd say six months hard time sounds about right for bringing a phone into a theater.
If Bush was in tech and not politics his arguments against jail time for white collar crime would sound perfectly Geek.
You know, that may not be so far from the truth. The one common thread in child porn arrests here is that the guy was reckless to the point of self-destruction. The grade school teacher who routed his downloads through the district's network.
With you camcorder sex play entered as "Exhibit A." That's a humiliation most geeks would as soon be spared.
O.K., bright boy. Build something better than S3. Open Source it, if you like. But first prove to me that your solution scales to an enterprise the size of Amazon.com. That it will be cheaper and more reliable. Then we can talk.
The median income for an American household was $45,000 in 2004. The median salary for a software engineer was between $75,000 and $80,000 in 2004. Computer Software Engineers
Consider this bit of history:
Hippocrates [ca 400 BC] writes about the use of willow bark to relieve pain.
The active ingredient in willow bark is isolated and extracted in concentrated form. [1828-1839]
The problem was that salicylic acid was tough on stomachs and a means of 'buffering' the compound was searched for. The first person to do so was a French chemist named Charles Frederic Gerhardt. In 1853, Gerhardt neutralized salicylic acid by buffering it with sodium (sodium salicylate) and acetyl chloride, creating acetylsalicylic acid. Gerhardt's product worked but he had no desire to market it and abandoned his discovery.
In 1899, a German chemist named Felix Hoffmann, who worked for a German company called Bayer, rediscovered Gerhardt's formula. Felix Hoffmann made some of the formula and gave it to his father who was suffering from the pain of arthritis. With good results, Felix Hoffmann then convinced Bayer to market the new wonder drug. Aspirin was patented on March 6, 1889.
Aspirin was first sold as a powder. In 1915, the first Aspirin tablets were made. Interestingly, Aspirin ® and Heroin ® were once trademarks belonging to Bayer. After Germany lost World War I, Bayer was forced to give up both trademarks as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The History of Aspirin
And most of the chemical industry was founded in Switzerland at the turn of the century
I would have placed the origins of the modern chemical industry in Germany ca. 1860 with companies like Bayer and with the exploitation of coal tar dyes - modern organic chemistry. Harold Baron: The Chemical Industry on the Continent
Name one. Just one. The Asian isn't slow to patent tech that can be marketed world-wide.
A post like this boggles the mind.
When he has a headache does he reach for an Aspirin?
Does he wear cotton or synthetics? - Has he never heard of Eli Whitney, DuPont Chemical?
Does he hand-sew his own suits?
What does he use for artificial lighting? - A torch? A candle? Does he write with a quill, mix his own inks?
When he switches on the A/C does the name Carrier ring a bell? Edison? Tesla?
The view through the rear-view mirror is always twenty-twenty.
If an invention becomes obvious only in retrospect then - just maybe - it wasn't so obvious at all. 1-click shopping is simply an idea. Amazon has a system that works.