The private sector couldn't have done any of the Apollo missions or any other space flight capabilities at the time. No one company had the resources or the motive or develop any sort of space flight, let alone manned space flight.
Exactly. Apollo was a great technical achievement for its time, but ultimately it was a huge boondoggle; no sane company would have spent that much money putting a few flags on the moon.
I think if Government was never involved, the private sector would be just beginning to get folks into the space now in 2011 or whenever Burt Rutan and gang gets folks in space
SpaceX will be putting people in space well before Rutan does; they've already proven the Dragon works.
My question is why you think it's so important that government sent some bureaucrats into space well before it made any financial sense? Would the world really have come to an end if people were only just now able to fly into orbit?
Well I hope you're wrong; that sounds to me like all the worst features of the command line and the GUI simultaneously (And I'm a die-hard CLI jockey).
Uh, yes.
Whenever people complain about how crappy the Unity/Gnome 3 graphical interface is, the fanboy answer is 'yes, but you can just type the name of the application to run it', without even realising how retarded that sounds.
Good thing global climate change is just a liberal hoax, or we'd be in real trouble!
But not so long ago we had to be scared of the Global Climate Warming Change Monster because it was going to cause droughts, not floods. It only changed to causing floods after floods started hitting the news.
Given that the 80's had no such car that was fully electric and ran at 125 MPH
That's because in the 80s we knew that electric cars sucked.
then it's unlikely we'd find such a car unless we went to the future.
More like the past; I'm not sure about 125mph, but I believe electric cars were doing over 100mph in the 19th century. But then people realised they sucked and switched to gasoline instead.
Although books like Shockwave Rider described a fair implementation of the internet, it only managed it a short time before it actually arrived, so merely describing things that occur within 10 years don't really count as "SF predictions".
Clarke's book about space elevators (I forget the name) had something similar to the web with geeks running competitions to see who could be the first to find obscure information on it. That was late 70s, I think.
Of course he either failed to predict Google or successfully predicted that it would grow to suck so bad that humans would do a better job.
Not allowed as in 'We're sorry - we are unable to accept materials submitted to us without the representation of an agent. We have refused delivery of this item so it will be returned to you / destroyed for you by your chosen carrier, contents unopened. Please note for the future that we cannot and will not accept manuscripts submitted to us without prior approval of our legal department and/or without arrangement through an agent." boilerplate language in a brief, legally terse letter usually accompanying your manuscript back to you.
And yet, in the real world, new authors keep sending novels to 'agent-only' publishers and they get published anyway.
I was reading recently that WH Smiths and Waterstones may be setting up their own e-book stores and e-readers.
Of course having a dozen different stores with a dozen different incompatible readers doesn't really help book buyers. But so long as the books are DRM-free, they can be converted.
You could put two dozen copies of Ass Goblins of Auschwitz in every grocery store, book store, and magazine stand in American and I promise it would still not be a best seller.
If 'Angels And Demons' can become a best-seller, 'Ass Goblins of Auschwitz' certainly can.
You aren't even allowed to submit your work to 99% of the publishers out there unless you have an agent.
Not allowed?
You think the publishing police will break down your door in the middle of the night if you send your novel to a publisher without going through an agent?
The only person 'not allowing' you to submit to a publisher without going through an agent is you. I was reading a few weeks ago about another new author who submitted directly to an 'agent-only' publisher and now has a publishing contract with them.
Of course if enough new authors realise this then publishers might really have to start rejecting unagented submissions the way most movie companies do. So let's just keep it between you and me.
What I don't see, however, is Amazon stepping up to provide any services at all, but merely waiting to bring in the windfall of selling their new hot writer, without having to pay for ads in the NYT, trade publications, on TV, or anywhere else, or having paid an editor to deal with prepping the book.
Why would Amazon be paying for 'ads in the NYT, trade publications, on TV, or anywhere else'? When was the last time you bought a book because of a TV ad or in a publishing trade mag?
Amazon will be marketing to Amazon customers who have bought similar books before; that's vastly more effective than wasting millions on TV ads.
Barry Eisler has written about his Amazon deal and from what I remember Amazon's marketing was one of the main reasons he listed for taking it.
A good editor is the critical difference between a hack and a best seller.
Putting two dozen copies of the book in a prominent place in every airport bookstore and Walmart in the country is the critical difference between a hack and a best seller.
Trade publishers publish tons of new authors every year. Most don't last beyond two or three books, but that's a different matter.
Nor is there a 'self-publishing blacklist', though before the rise of e-books most people who self-published fiction did so because they couldn't write well enough to interest a publisher.
You know how it's done, so what do you need Amazon for?
Marketing.
Self-publishing through Amazon or other e-book retailers is fine, but for many authors having Amazon push your book through their marketing capabilities (e.g. 'You bought 'An Ideal Husband', so you might like 'An Ideal Husband And Zombies') is worth a percentage of royalties and potential restrictions on other e-book retailers who might not want to sell Amazon-published books.
Firstly, his quote is entirely untrue. If there were noone between the writer and reader, you'd end up with lackluster works.
Have you been to a bookstore lately?
Sparkly Vampire #16, Sparkly Werewolf #5, Oscar Wilde - Vampire Hunter (Ok, I might read that one), Zombies Vs Vampires #9, More Zombies #97.
There's a reason why I mostly buy self-published books these days; they may have more typos, but at least there's some variety in the stories for sale.
Amazon is a retailer; it's only recently become a publisher as well. From what they've said, one of the reasons why established authors have been signing up with Amazon as a publisher is that their contracts are far more author-friendly than trade publishers.
How exactly do you see it making sense, at all, ever, to eat a Big Mac on the Moon, given that there's absolutely nothing there?
How could anyone possibly believe that the human race will be content to sit on this dirt-ball until the end of time?
First of all, your definition of moderately well paid is optimistic at best.
Most people in decent IT jobs could afford a $200k ticket if they really wanted to go, and Virgin have said they expect that to drop to more like $50k over a few years... save $5k a year for ten years and by then it should buy you a ticket.
I know you're a troll, but you're not even a very good one.
There will not be space colonies, McDonald's on the Moon or bungalows on Mars. Get over it.
Yes there will, unless some catastrophe wipes out the human race.
And if you'd told Alan Shephard that in fifty years anyone with a moderally well-paid job would be able to buy a ticket to do what he was about to do then he'd consider that progress too.
This will be the moment we remember. NASA having to charter flights to space, from a Private Company.
NASA routinely buys flights to space from private companies; who do you think launches all those Mars rovers? There's no good reason why they shouldn't do the same for manned flights.
Slashdot Mirror
The private sector couldn't have done any of the Apollo missions or any other space flight capabilities at the time. No one company had the resources or the motive or develop any sort of space flight, let alone manned space flight.
Exactly. Apollo was a great technical achievement for its time, but ultimately it was a huge boondoggle; no sane company would have spent that much money putting a few flags on the moon.
I think if Government was never involved, the private sector would be just beginning to get folks into the space now in 2011 or whenever Burt Rutan and gang gets folks in space
SpaceX will be putting people in space well before Rutan does; they've already proven the Dragon works.
My question is why you think it's so important that government sent some bureaucrats into space well before it made any financial sense? Would the world really have come to an end if people were only just now able to fly into orbit?
Well I hope you're wrong; that sounds to me like all the worst features of the command line and the GUI simultaneously (And I'm a die-hard CLI jockey).
Uh, yes.
Whenever people complain about how crappy the Unity/Gnome 3 graphical interface is, the fanboy answer is 'yes, but you can just type the name of the application to run it', without even realising how retarded that sounds.
The hatred for all things new in the FLOSS community never ceases to surprise me.
We don't hate it because it's new, we hate it because it's crap.
Shortages usually mean higher prices. And if spinning platters become more expensive, more people will turn to solid state instead.
Yeah, prices only have to go up about a factor of a hundred and that 3TB SSD will finally be competitive with my 3TB HDD.
Good thing global climate change is just a liberal hoax, or we'd be in real trouble!
But not so long ago we had to be scared of the Global Climate Warming Change Monster because it was going to cause droughts, not floods. It only changed to causing floods after floods started hitting the news.
Given that the 80's had no such car that was fully electric and ran at 125 MPH
That's because in the 80s we knew that electric cars sucked.
then it's unlikely we'd find such a car unless we went to the future.
More like the past; I'm not sure about 125mph, but I believe electric cars were doing over 100mph in the 19th century. But then people realised they sucked and switched to gasoline instead.
The future of "computing" is not utopian. It is a future in which humans as we know them do not exist anymore.
Which is not a big deal; humans as we know them are poorly designed for this universe.
But I agree, most SF writers are not very good at predicting the consequences of their technological predictions.
Although books like Shockwave Rider described a fair implementation of the internet, it only managed it a short time before it actually arrived, so merely describing things that occur within 10 years don't really count as "SF predictions".
Clarke's book about space elevators (I forget the name) had something similar to the web with geeks running competitions to see who could be the first to find obscure information on it. That was late 70s, I think.
Of course he either failed to predict Google or successfully predicted that it would grow to suck so bad that humans would do a better job.
When it is time to go to MARS or to the nearest star do you really think that private companies are going to fund that?
SpaceX wants to send people to Mars. I don't know about MARS.
Not allowed as in 'We're sorry - we are unable to accept materials submitted to us without the representation of an agent. We have refused delivery of this item so it will be returned to you / destroyed for you by your chosen carrier, contents unopened. Please note for the future that we cannot and will not accept manuscripts submitted to us without prior approval of our legal department and/or without arrangement through an agent." boilerplate language in a brief, legally terse letter usually accompanying your manuscript back to you.
And yet, in the real world, new authors keep sending novels to 'agent-only' publishers and they get published anyway.
This is in the UK, so no B&N here
I was reading recently that WH Smiths and Waterstones may be setting up their own e-book stores and e-readers.
Of course having a dozen different stores with a dozen different incompatible readers doesn't really help book buyers. But so long as the books are DRM-free, they can be converted.
Stephen Fry already played Oscar Wilde once... can you imagine something that awesome?
LOL. That would be cool :).
Publishers provide both editors and (hopefully) marketing. I'm no fan of the publishers, but they do add value in most cases.
And yet mid-list authors are continually complaining that their publisher didn't provide any editing or marketing.
You could put two dozen copies of Ass Goblins of Auschwitz in
every grocery store, book store, and magazine stand in American and I promise it would still not be a best seller.
If 'Angels And Demons' can become a best-seller, 'Ass Goblins of Auschwitz' certainly can.
You aren't even allowed to submit your work to 99% of the publishers out there unless you have an agent.
Not allowed?
You think the publishing police will break down your door in the middle of the night if you send your novel to a publisher without going through an agent?
The only person 'not allowing' you to submit to a publisher without going through an agent is you. I was reading a few weeks ago about another new author who submitted directly to an 'agent-only' publisher and now has a publishing contract with them.
Of course if enough new authors realise this then publishers might really have to start rejecting unagented submissions the way most movie companies do. So let's just keep it between you and me.
What I don't see, however, is Amazon stepping up to provide any services at all, but merely waiting to bring in the windfall of selling their new hot writer, without having to pay for ads in the NYT, trade publications, on TV, or anywhere else, or having paid an editor to deal with prepping the book.
Why would Amazon be paying for 'ads in the NYT, trade publications, on TV, or anywhere else'? When was the last time you bought a book because of a TV ad or in a publishing trade mag?
Amazon will be marketing to Amazon customers who have bought similar books before; that's vastly more effective than wasting millions on TV ads.
Barry Eisler has written about his Amazon deal and from what I remember Amazon's marketing was one of the main reasons he listed for taking it.
A good editor is the critical difference between a hack and a best seller.
Putting two dozen copies of the book in a prominent place in every airport bookstore and Walmart in the country is the critical difference between a hack and a best seller.
Trade publishers publish tons of new authors every year. Most don't last beyond two or three books, but that's a different matter.
Nor is there a 'self-publishing blacklist', though before the rise of e-books most people who self-published fiction did so because they couldn't write well enough to interest a publisher.
You know how it's done, so what do you need Amazon for?
Marketing.
Self-publishing through Amazon or other e-book retailers is fine, but for many authors having Amazon push your book through their marketing capabilities (e.g. 'You bought 'An Ideal Husband', so you might like 'An Ideal Husband And Zombies') is worth a percentage of royalties and potential restrictions on other e-book retailers who might not want to sell Amazon-published books.
Firstly, his quote is entirely untrue. If there were noone between the writer and reader, you'd end up with lackluster works.
Have you been to a bookstore lately?
Sparkly Vampire #16, Sparkly Werewolf #5, Oscar Wilde - Vampire Hunter (Ok, I might read that one), Zombies Vs Vampires #9, More Zombies #97.
There's a reason why I mostly buy self-published books these days; they may have more typos, but at least there's some variety in the stories for sale.
Who the hell comes up with these pricing models?
Publishers who don't want people buying ebooks and destroying their dead tree book market.
Amazon is a retailer; it's only recently become a publisher as well. From what they've said, one of the reasons why established authors have been signing up with Amazon as a publisher is that their contracts are far more author-friendly than trade publishers.
How exactly do you see it making sense, at all, ever, to eat a Big Mac on the Moon, given that there's absolutely nothing there?
How could anyone possibly believe that the human race will be content to sit on this dirt-ball until the end of time?
First of all, your definition of moderately well paid is optimistic at best.
Most people in decent IT jobs could afford a $200k ticket if they really wanted to go, and Virgin have said they expect that to drop to more like $50k over a few years... save $5k a year for ten years and by then it should buy you a ticket.
I know you're a troll, but you're not even a very good one.
There will not be space colonies, McDonald's on the Moon or bungalows on Mars. Get over it.
Yes there will, unless some catastrophe wipes out the human race.
And if you'd told Alan Shephard that in fifty years anyone with a moderally well-paid job would be able to buy a ticket to do what he was about to do then he'd consider that progress too.
This will be the moment we remember. NASA having to charter flights to space, from a Private Company.
NASA routinely buys flights to space from private companies; who do you think launches all those Mars rovers? There's no good reason why they shouldn't do the same for manned flights.