I've been using the google App on my iPhone to speak my searches and it is amazingly accurate. For some people its approaching 98% accurate in the voice recognition portion.
However, just looking at their 10Q leads you to believe this idea they they are losing that much money on every ebook sold just does not ring true. You can't lose 10 bucks on each sale and make it up on volume. The whole story put forth by the publishing house sound like urban legend to me.
The far more likely scenario is that when Apple found out what a huge discount Amazon was REALLY getting and demanded that same price, or a lower one, the publishers did the math and realized the iPad + Steep Discounts added up to doom, and was going to kill hardcover sales totally.
Kindle sales may have played some part, in that Amazon sold a bazillion of them last quarter.
I agree with you that authors can now start getting what they are worth by just not selling their life's work to publishing firms. In fact they may actually trip to this fact more quickly than musicians.
The market for free-lance editing proofreading and ebook building is going to be booming. Publishers can either become service bureaus, or dinosaurs.
His assertion that Amazon was losing 4 bucks on every ebook sold is utter nonsense. You can't sell that many kindles to make up for that kind of losses.
I say fine. The sooner all the publishers band together and collude with Steve Jobs to raise book prices and dictate the Retail price the sooner the DOJ can step in and smack them down for price fixing.
If the publishers want more money they could have just started rising price (regardless of the fact we are in the midst of a rather major depression). But to attempt to dictate retail prices by banding together is nothing but an assault on copyright law.
I notice no crocodile tears are shed by Murdoch for the authors, who are still stuck at 5 to 10% of revenue.
Seems odd, and just a tad self serving, for Unforgiven to have an explanation for a cheesy writer's ploy designed to keep the good guy's body as intact as his halo.
Almost as odd as spending time researching this.
Perhaps they will do a follow up on how there can be a huge running firefight with automatic weapons and virtually no cover, and yet nobody from either side gets hurt.
But even dicks can be defused and deflected with a few social skills, a bit of verbal bantering, etc.
Most dicks want to be liked and respected but settle for being feared.
It is possible to deal this way with most bullys, but the skill set required is often something that won't be learned by the bulling target for a year or maybe two.
We keep kinds back (retain them in lower grades) for academic reasons, but seldom for social reasons. Often, I suspect, simply delaying entry into school for socially awkward kids might solve a lot of this. Either that or enroll overly aggressive kids a year ahead of time.
Age driven school enrollment is probably the root cause of much of the bully problem
I notice that the people who keep saying this are the same people who pour ridicule on NASAs funding of the initial development of technologies needed for a space elevator, and decry nuclear rockets as too unsafe and environmentally unfriendly.
Where did I ever post on either of those subjects? Or did you make that up?
For any extended mission where we try to "get out of sight" chemical is clearly not the way to go.
Throw us a bone here: what the heck do you think NASA should be developing w.r.t. launch technology?
This portion of the thread is not about launch technology. Its about in-space refueling of vehicles with propellants that are hard to lift, tricky to handle, and exceedingly dangerous.
This is also the reason I'm excited about the orbital propellant storage and automated rendezvous technology.
We are never going to get out of sight with our current propellant technology. The money spent on this is a waste, like building yet another pony express station. Its time to focus in another direction.
As for automated rendezvous, the Russians have been doing this for years. Just buy it from them.
NASA spending also makes jobs. Everything from top level engineers and administrators down to bag boys in the grocery stores.
I wish people could get it thru their head that we are not launching stacks of 100 dollar bills into space. Every last red cent is spent here on earth.
Why make the poor into hand-out wards of the State? I have never understood the so called (self called) "Progressive" parties propensity to enslave population thusly, and lose the first derivative of government spending.
If NASA did nothing at all and delivered nothing at all but stacks of study after study it would STILL be better for society than handing out food stamps because there were no jobs.
Seriously? I just can't see mining a trillion tons of anything to carry it back to earth being a good idea. And mining a moon seems fraught with peril, an generally a bad idea. For Christ sake if exhaling can destroy earth's environment, how could de-orbiting a trillion tons do the planet any good?
The only way to gain the riches of mars is to live there. You can't bring it home.
Again, you seem to think that the only thing that can be done to address social problems is wait for fixes.
No, actually it was you that suggested social problems should not be fixed with technical means. I am merely pointing out that social problems are seldom fixed with social solutions.
active social fixes have occurred many times in human history.
If I say a bulldozer isn't a really good choice for urban commuting, its not the same as saying that bulldozers are useless.
Mr. BadAnalogyGuy, is that you?
Bulldozers destroy, temporarily leaving you with nothing.
DARPA research touched nothing, and came up with an entirely new concept of data sharing and communication.
What is proposed is more akin to the later than the former.
Waiting for a social fix is a fool's errand. We'b been using the internet widely since about 1980, and the situation has only gotten worse. Further, poverty is still with us, crime, disease, greed, slums, cruelty and war are still never ending problems. Don't you think, that when waiting for social fixes has failed since the dawn of human civilization, and is still failing today, that maybe, just maybe, its time to stop expecting social fixes and start looking somewhere else?
Putting money into technical research that specifically requires that it go only into things that are radically different than what exists now -- and thus a bigger social problem to get people to transition to -- don't help at all.
So, funding the development of the internet, while ignoring the perfectly good post, office was a total bust then???
From the Network World article: The NSF says it won't make the same mistake today as was made when the Internet was invented, with security bolted on to the Internet architecture after-the-fact instead of being designed in from the beginning.
"We are not going to fund any proposals that don't have security expertise on their teams because we think security is so important," says Darleen Fisher, program director
And this really is the crux of the problem isn't it?
Rampant SPAM (95% of all email), deep packet inspection, attacks, bot nets, the list goes on. Almost all the abuses we suffer daily on the internet are due to the security-as-an-afterthought model.
There will be those (there always are) who insist that this is nothing more than a government take over and the installation ob yet more back doors. There is nothing that can be done to appease that viewpoint, even open standards and open source will not suffice.
But I am not prepared to believe we can not improve upon what was done 40 years ago given the number of minds and the level of technology we have to apply to the problem today.
We defend the status quo because we know it, not because it is optimal, not because it is even close to being fully functional, and certainly not because it is fair.
Deal with political problems in the political arena. But in the mean time, lets fix our tools.
And it is over hyped. First by every blogger out there, then by Apple.
There is NOTHING new here, and much that has been left out.
Apple has run out of ideas, and have taken to eating their young. This thing will kill off the iPod Touch sales in a heart beat, especially the low end wifi version.
It might server for Grandma who can't quite figure out that laptop thingie you gave her last year with all those buttons and stuff. The only time she uses that is when you call her up and ask her if she got your email last week.
Its a huge disappointment if you ask me, but this time next year they can add a front facing cam, a mic and maybe Grandma can talk to the grand kids over it.
1) Traits may be inherited. Clearly traits had to arise from somewhere, either mutations, the action of the environment physically changing an organism, acquired by horizontal gene transfer, or some as yet undiscovered method.
Darwin never insisted that inheritance was the ONLY method of trait acquisition. Even he was was able to imagine backward a few million years and realize that the slight differences that were subsequently amplified had to have been acquired by some means he did not document. He often ruminated on this inability to quantify the source.
This so called new theory does no violence to Darwin's basic premise.
Acquisition of a trait (by whatever means) would never amount to a significant percentage of the gene pool of an organism unless it proffered some usefulness. Mutation or horizontal genetic transfer are but mere mechanisms. Darwinism discusses the overall process, not the details.
How that transfer took place is mere details. When that transfer takes place is not fixed in time. Horizontal transfer still exists in larger and more complex organisms and their symbiotic partners.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly enough North Carolina had a right to revolution written into their constitution. http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/Legislation/constitution/article1.html (section 3D).
Their neighbors to the south, not so much.
I've been using the google App on my iPhone to speak my searches and it is amazingly accurate. For some people its approaching 98% accurate in the voice recognition portion.
Way better than a fish in the ear.
That is what Macmillan did, they raised the price of ebooks. Amazon attempted to push back and lost.
Its much more than that. Macmillian demanded the right to set the RETAIL price of books.
Well for some values of "Supposedly" ...
However, just looking at their 10Q leads you to believe this idea they they are losing that much money on every ebook sold just does not ring true. You can't lose 10 bucks on each sale and make it up on volume. The whole story put forth by the publishing house sound like urban legend to me.
The far more likely scenario is that when Apple found out what a huge discount Amazon was REALLY getting and demanded that same price, or a lower one, the publishers did the math and realized the iPad + Steep Discounts added up to doom, and was going to kill hardcover sales totally.
Kindle sales may have played some part, in that Amazon sold a bazillion of them last quarter.
I agree with you that authors can now start getting what they are worth by just not selling their life's work to publishing firms. In fact they may actually trip to this fact more quickly than musicians.
The market for free-lance editing proofreading and ebook building is going to be booming. Publishers can either become service bureaus, or dinosaurs.
But will anything really happen or will this just be another excuse for yet more surveillance of home computer usage?
The track record of the House of Lords hasn't been so good over the long run has it?
I would bet that if Lucas gains any traction great pressure will be brought to shut him up one way or another.
His assertion that Amazon was losing 4 bucks on every ebook sold is utter nonsense. You can't sell that many kindles to make up for that kind of losses.
He has a problem with loss leaders. Too bad. What he seeks to do is nothing more than to forcibly repeal the First Sale Doctrine and Bobbs-Merrill vs Straus.
I say fine. The sooner all the publishers band together and collude with Steve Jobs to raise book prices and dictate the Retail price the sooner the DOJ can step in and smack them down for price fixing.
If the publishers want more money they could have just started rising price (regardless of the fact we are in the midst of a rather major depression). But to attempt to dictate retail prices by banding together is nothing but an assault on copyright law.
I notice no crocodile tears are shed by Murdoch for the authors, who are still stuck at 5 to 10% of revenue.
The person who draws first has just as much opportunity to be Fast and Accurate as the person who draws second.
So while true, your explanation really does not really help explain anything about the movies or real life.
The movie bad guy usually has 10 or 20 notches on his gun, so why did he not learn that the Bang does nothing?
Seems odd, and just a tad self serving, for Unforgiven to have an explanation for a cheesy writer's ploy designed to keep the good guy's body as intact as his halo.
Almost as odd as spending time researching this.
Perhaps they will do a follow up on how there can be a huge running firefight with automatic weapons and virtually no cover, and yet nobody from either side gets hurt.
Yeah that might work.
Of course they will be back next week with a smuggled 9mil.
If you think violence TO children is the answer to violence FROM children you have no business calling other ideas "idiotic".
Is english a second language for you?
You hold back the timid from first grade enrollment. They get an extra year to develop social (and physical) skills.
You rush the overly aggressive in early. They are slightly younger than their classmates, and will not be able to bully them.
What is so hard to understand about that?
But even dicks can be defused and deflected with a few social skills, a bit of verbal bantering, etc.
Most dicks want to be liked and respected but settle for being feared.
It is possible to deal this way with most bullys, but the skill set required is often something that won't be learned by the bulling target for a year or maybe two.
We keep kinds back (retain them in lower grades) for academic reasons, but seldom for social reasons. Often, I suspect, simply delaying entry into school for socially awkward kids might solve a lot of this. Either that or enroll overly aggressive kids a year ahead of time.
Age driven school enrollment is probably the root cause of much of the bully problem
I notice that the people who keep saying this are the same people who pour ridicule on NASAs funding of the initial development of technologies needed for a space elevator, and decry nuclear rockets as too unsafe and environmentally unfriendly.
Where did I ever post on either of those subjects? Or did you make that up?
For any extended mission where we try to "get out of sight" chemical is clearly not the way to go.
Throw us a bone here: what the heck do you think NASA should be developing w.r.t. launch technology?
This portion of the thread is not about launch technology. Its about in-space refueling of vehicles with propellants that are hard to lift, tricky to handle, and exceedingly dangerous.
This is also the reason I'm excited about the orbital propellant storage and automated rendezvous technology.
We are never going to get out of sight with our current propellant technology. The money spent on this is a waste, like building yet another pony express station. Its time to focus in another direction.
As for automated rendezvous, the Russians have been doing this for years. Just buy it from them.
Precious = Rare.
Cease being Rare = Cease being precious.
Phil is absolutely correct on this.
NASA spending also makes jobs. Everything from top level engineers and administrators down to bag boys in the grocery stores.
I wish people could get it thru their head that we are not launching stacks of 100 dollar bills into space. Every last red cent is spent here on earth.
Why make the poor into hand-out wards of the State? I have never understood the so called (self called) "Progressive" parties propensity to enslave population thusly, and lose the first derivative of government spending.
If NASA did nothing at all and delivered nothing at all but stacks of study after study it would STILL be better for society than handing out food stamps because there were no jobs.
Seriously?
I just can't see mining a trillion tons of anything to carry it back to earth being a good idea. And mining a moon seems fraught with peril, an generally a bad idea. For Christ sake if exhaling can destroy earth's environment, how could de-orbiting a trillion tons do the planet any good?
The only way to gain the riches of mars is to live there. You can't bring it home.
Again, you seem to think that the only thing that can be done to address social problems is wait for fixes.
No, actually it was you that suggested social problems should not be fixed with technical means. I am merely pointing out that social problems are seldom fixed with social solutions.
active social fixes have occurred many times in human history.
Really? In how many lifetimes?
Name one.
If I say a bulldozer isn't a really good choice for urban commuting, its not the same as saying that bulldozers are useless.
Mr. BadAnalogyGuy, is that you?
Bulldozers destroy, temporarily leaving you with nothing.
DARPA research touched nothing, and came up with an entirely new concept of data sharing and communication.
What is proposed is more akin to the later than the former.
Waiting for a social fix is a fool's errand. We'b been using the internet widely since about 1980, and the situation has only gotten worse. Further, poverty is still with us, crime, disease, greed, slums, cruelty and war are still never ending problems. Don't you think, that when waiting for social fixes has failed since the dawn of human civilization, and is still failing today, that maybe, just maybe, its time to stop expecting social fixes and start looking somewhere else?
Putting money into technical research that specifically requires that it go only into things that are radically different than what exists now -- and thus a bigger social problem to get people to transition to -- don't help at all.
So, funding the development of the internet, while ignoring the perfectly good post, office was a total bust then???
I'm not convinces social networking sites are the security model I would like to see for the rest of the internet.
Just sayin.....
If only the future had opted into the past.
Quote from TFA:
From the Network World article: The NSF says it won't make the same mistake today as was made when the Internet was invented, with security bolted on to the Internet architecture after-the-fact instead of being designed in from the beginning.
"We are not going to fund any proposals that don't have security expertise on their teams because we think security is so important," says Darleen Fisher, program director
And this really is the crux of the problem isn't it?
Rampant SPAM (95% of all email), deep packet inspection, attacks, bot nets, the list goes on. Almost all the abuses we suffer daily on the internet are due to the security-as-an-afterthought model.
There will be those (there always are) who insist that this is nothing more than a government take over and the installation ob yet more back doors. There is nothing that can be done to appease that viewpoint, even open standards and open source will not suffice.
But I am not prepared to believe we can not improve upon what was done 40 years ago given the number of minds and the level of technology we have to apply to the problem today.
We defend the status quo because we know it, not because it is optimal, not because it is even close to being fully functional, and certainly not because it is fair.
Deal with political problems in the political arena. But in the mean time, lets fix our tools.
And it is over hyped. First by every blogger out there, then by Apple.
There is NOTHING new here, and much that has been left out.
Apple has run out of ideas, and have taken to eating their young. This thing will kill off the iPod Touch sales in a heart beat, especially the low end wifi version.
It might server for Grandma who can't quite figure out that laptop thingie you gave her last year with all those buttons and stuff. The only time she uses that is when you call her up and ask her if she got your email last week.
Its a huge disappointment if you ask me, but this time next year they can add a front facing cam, a mic and maybe Grandma can talk to the grand kids over it.
Wait till next year.
10 hours runtime on a charge.
No spinning hard drive or fans, and only 64gig memory max.
That's not impressive for a device this new. There would seem to be a lot of room in a device this big to pack in lots of battery. But no.
1) Traits may be inherited. Clearly traits had to arise from somewhere, either mutations, the action of the environment physically changing an organism, acquired by horizontal gene transfer, or some as yet undiscovered method.
Darwin never insisted that inheritance was the ONLY method of trait acquisition. Even he was was able to imagine backward a few million years and realize that the slight differences that were subsequently amplified had to have been acquired by some means he did not document. He often ruminated on this inability to quantify the source.
This so called new theory does no violence to Darwin's basic premise.
I fail to see the point of confusion.
Acquisition of a trait (by whatever means) would never amount to a significant percentage of the gene pool of an organism unless it proffered some usefulness. Mutation or horizontal genetic transfer are but mere mechanisms. Darwinism discusses the overall process, not the details.
How that transfer took place is mere details. When that transfer takes place is not fixed in time. Horizontal transfer still exists in larger and more complex organisms and their symbiotic partners.