It has to do with practicality. You've got limited numbers of professors, and huge amounts of students. For some general courses, packing 200 students into a lecture hall is about the only way to cover the material.
When it comes to more specific courses, where you're only going to get 20 students anyway, a seminar format works better.
2. The best teaching professors are the ones who take a personal interest in the success of their students.
So, while you are correct that your own learning style is your own business, complaining about a professor actually being good is a bit on the stupid side - particularly when they're trying to keep students from proverbially shooting themselves in the foot.
Well, at this point, I think we have to just agree to disagree. I can see how you've come to some of your points, but I also think you're wrong. I additionally think you've bought into a couple of arguments that are shaky at best, but time will tell which one of us is right. It may very well be that I am looking at this from a business perspective (as a business owner myself), and you are looking at it from a gamer perspective.
However, I must say that I do not like having words put in my mouth. You made a statement about what could reduce the piracy rate. I pointed to an article that explored those very things, ran figures for them, and noted that those things had no effect on the piracy rate at all. I was speaking entirely of the ratio of pirated copies to legitimate copies, and you kept trying poke holes in the argument that a download is equal to a lost sale. I never made that claim, the article never made that claim, and frankly the claim was irrelevant to the ratio. That makes it a straw man.
I will point out, though, that if the sales figures for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are representative of a successful game - over 6 million copies sold for console vs. approximately 350,000 sold for PC - then the reason that the big game makers are going for the console market has a lot more to do with the size of the market than it does with the financial cost of DRM. Console games are less complex to develop (the PC game platform is really something like a hundred similar platforms, all with their own quirks, whereas a game that works on one X-Box 360 will work on all X-Box 360s), have fewer piracy issues, and a far larger market.
Or, put bluntly, why would any developer put the effort into selling around half a million copies for PC if they're REALLY lucky when they can put less effort into selling a few million for consoles first?
And that is my last word in this discussion. I will not reply further.
Based on piracy rates. I never said that a game couldn't be a success in the PC game market. I pointed out that, as the Tweakgames article stated, only two things actually had an impact on piracy rates:
1. The popularity of the game. If the game was more popular, the piracy rate was higher.
2. The presence of restrictive and intrusive DRM, which if not broken, actually does have the impact of lowering piracy rates until it is broken.
Nothing else made a difference. If a $20 game was as popular as a $60 game, it had the same level of piracy.
Did you even read the article I linked to?
"The simple fact that PC game developers are still in business and still making money, despite wasting who knows how many millions of dollars every year on failed anti-piracy measures is all it takes to prove otherwise."
Are they?
That's not a glib question. I started computer gaming in 1989 (and yes, I started out as a game pirate - I outgrew it by the age of 17, though). The PC game market is a wasteland today compared even to then. Only about ten years ago console ports were rare - now they're become more and more the norm. Most of the PC game market is concentrated in MMOs now. While there are still some big releases for the PC game market (eg., Starcraft II and Diablo III), most of the non-MMO releases start out on the console market, and the PC version comes out months later.
It's not rocket science to predict the trend. The PC games market that I started out in is long gone. The market from five years ago was far more rich and full than it is today. Yes, there are some big players still there, such as Stardock and Blizzard, but even Bioware is now starting its games on the console before the PC. The PC game makers are in the process of walking away. That's not a prediction - just an observation. It IS happening.
And, taking Stardock as an example, you haven't presented the whole story. Here's picking up after 2008:
May 1, 2009 - The Escapist, and a few others, report that Stardock has major piracy issues with Demigod (which does have DRM). Of 120,000 games connecting to the servers on the opening weekend, only 18,000 are legitimate. After the team spends a couple of days working on the servers, the CEO declares a victory against the pirates. Source: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/91400-Stardock-CEO-Demigod-Beats-Piracy
Now, that's a far cry from the DRM used by Ubisoft. But, it is important to note that Stardock DID end up implementing a very customer-friendly DRM solution, and got hit badly by piracy issues.
"The only possible metric you can use that would make what you said in any way correct is the one the big corporations use: that every pirated copy is a lost sale. So I guess it "fails utterly" if your metric is that they aren't making near as much money as they "could" be."
And with that, I KNOW you didn't read the article I linked to. That is a complete mischaracterization of the economic argument. You'll find a proper description here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_3.html
"The answers to the piracy problem are the same as they have always been: make the game worthwhile and convenient enough to purchase legitimately."
Here's the problem - that works wonderfully as a theory. It fails utterly in practice.
If you read the article, you'll find that the value added approach was tried - it had no impact on the piracy rate whatsoever. In fact, Ubisoft tried to use no DRM for Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia to see if that would help. Far from driving the piracy rate down, it skyrocketed it. In fact, as the Tweakguides article states, the only thing that has had any impact on lowering piracy was very restrictive DRM, and that was a hit or miss thing (more often a miss).
(And just to point it out, that last bit about the occasional impact of restrictive DRM surprised the hell out of me when I read it. I would never have called that one in a million years - I would have counted on a backlash making it worse.)
In fact, the only thing that seemed to have an impact on how much a game was pirated was popularity. The more popular the game, the more piracy. So, it's a freeloader effect in the end, with a pirate ideology to boot, and that makes it an arms race.
(And here's the thing about the pirate ideology - it's not about fighting the system, it's all about free swag. There are a lot of excuses, but it comes down to feeling entitled to take whatever you want, regardless of if it's yours to take or not. And that's a message that has to be fought, tooth and nail.)
And, we're seeing the impact of the arms race right now. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had a console piracy rate of around 6 legitimate copies to every pirated copy - around 6 million sales to around 970,000 illegal downloads. On the PC, it was around 11 pirated copies to every legitimate one - around 350,000 sales to around 4 and a half million illegal downloads. So, with the goal of DRM now being to hold the pirates off as long as possible - with a week being considered a success, and a month being a tremendous victory - it's no wonder that most of the big game companies are concentrating on the console market. And frankly, it would not surprise me in the slightest if Ubisoft announces that these next couple of games are the last ones they're producing for the PC market. That would be the correct business decision - the PC game market is poisoned to the point that the only way to stand a chance of avoiding being hammered by piracy for at least a week is to treat your customers like criminals. When that's the case, it's time to walk away.
The PC game market is being reduced to subscription games only. Just compare it five years ago and now. It's a shadow of what it once was. And, let's put the blame where it belongs - the game pirates.
Okay, first off, let me just say that I don't support any DRM that takes away the rights of the legitimate consumer. So, this post should not be taken as an endorsement of Ubisoft's DRM.
However, that said, this is part of an arms race between game pirates and PC game producers that has been going on for years, and at this point most of the PC game world is now a casualty. There is a reason that the console is king right now, and the main PC game out there today is the MMORPG.
This article explains it better than I can, and anybody who really wants to understand this arms race should read it:
It is long, and I disagree with one or two of the author's final conclusions, but it is very much worth the read, and when somebody actually does a serious running of the piracy figures, it is very eye-opening.
Well, first off, you've raised some very good points, but you shouldn't have included authors in your list for a couple of reasons. Number one, authors don't get usually paid for book signings; and number two, most people still consume books as paper objects - the printed book occupies around 95% of the market, with the e-book and audiobook fighting over the remainder - so the original business model still actually holds true.
That said, there will be adjustments in the market. The way I figure it will play out is as follows:
1. Advertising-based sites lose revenue from ad-blockers, and content quality goes down. 2. Those sites either move to a subscription or corporate sponsorship-based revenue stream (or something else that works) or die out. 3. Something new happens.
Ultimately, somebody has to pay for the content - whether it's paying the writers (always a good thing!), or just for the bandwidth, the money has to come from somewhere. So, with online advertising having become somewhat toxic (as has been pointed out, a lot of these ads carry malware), that particular business model is on its way out. Eventually, a new one will come in, and it will last as long as the market allows.
So, it's not really a matter of deserving anything. The business plan either survives contact with reality or it doesn't.
You know, you remind me of one of those conspiracy theorists who no matter what evidence is laid before them, can't be turned away from some bizarre and inexplicable theory. So, there's no point in arguing with you - have fun in your fantasy world. I'll continue to live in the real one.
"They may well be, but their entire model is outdated. What value do they add other than marketing? And why should they get such obscenely large cuts for that?"
You really need to get a clue.
I'm serious about that, and I see stuff like this a lot. You are completely ignorant of the publishing world, and yet you are quite willing to make statements about how our entire model is outdated. Do you even know what our model is?
First off, you really need to look up the word "outdated." For something to be outdated, it must be operating in a way that was valid in the past, but is no longer valid. Taking the current book market, around 95% of the market consists of printed books, with e-books and audiobooks fighting over the other 5%. This means that the present model has not been replaced. Don't take my word for it - do a search for "Association of American Publishers" and look at their news - they track the market and the sales figures on a month by month basis.
Second, besides marketing and distribution being pretty big things, there's also quality control and editing, which make a huge difference. And that part of publishing a book takes months of work.
And finally, I suggest you do some research on wholesalers, distribution, and production costs. Or do you really think that Amazon offers a 25% discount off cover prices at a loss? For that matter, some basic business knowledge would be a good start.
As somebody who owns a small publishing company myself, I am left wondering just what sort of experiences you've had, and what branch of publishing you're in.
The reason I ask is because I've now got experience in the book market at just about every level now (I started off as an author with Simon & Schuster and Osborne/McGraw-Hill), and most of my experience has been that publishing companies are early adapters. Even publishing attitudes towards e-books are heavily informed by having tried to make them work in a serious way back around 2000 (an experiment I was part of).
One of the big problems that Attributor is dealing with is that when somebody copies an article wholesale, it doesn't necessarily result in additional publicity for the original source - in fact, all too frequently the original source isn't mentioned at all, and the website claims it as their own. That's just straight-up plagiarism, and it is a problem.
Now, there are certainly dinosaurs, and there are fields where the way people engage with content is very different from the original form of the field. To take newspapers, for example, people consume news in an active way - they don't just read the article, they comment on and discuss it. So, understanding that consuming news is very much a communal experience is the key to success today, and those who don't realize that are in for a rough time (on the internet, it is very easy to vote with your feet).
(Compare that to books, which are not consumed in an active, communal way, and you can see why the traditional model there still stands - the e-book represents something like 2.5% of the total book market on a good day. As somebody in that field, however, I can assure you that it has undergone quite a few internal revolutions, and another is in the process of starting with the Expresso Book Machine.)
But, at the same time, there's a very big difference between failing to adapt to your market and having your content stolen (or copied - it's a semantic issue, and the important thing is that the content is question is not the pirate's content to reproduce). And, there's nothing wrong with taking action there. The fact that somebody can burgle a house does not make it immoral to catch and jail the burglar for doing it...or to put it the cliched way, just because one CAN do a thing, it does not follow that one SHOULD do that thing.
So - and part of this may be that your branch of publishing is not the same as mine, and you've had a lot of bad luck with idiotic higher-ups - I see this as a justified reaction to a "pirate culture," if you want to call it that, and content producers and distributors do have a right to protect themselves within reason. So long as it doesn't fall into RIAA-level thuggery and stupidity, I think this is a good thing in the end.
Well, I just looked at the EETimes article, and I found a couple of specious claims.
Basically, they've got this chart, and they're using it to say that if the e-book reader gets below $99, the market penetration will rise to 65%.
Now, call me stupid if you want, but I took a close look at that chart, and that's not what it said. The actual figures for the $99 e-reader were:
Approx. 38% "Intend to buy in next six months" Approx. 42% "Want to know more" Approx. 54% "Frequent book readers with a household income of more than $75,000" Approx. 65% "All U.S. online adults."
I don't even know what the hell that last section means, particularly seeing as its bar is smaller than some of the others in the other categories...even as a sentence fragment it doesn't make sense.
Either way, I get the feeling that the 65% market penetration might be a bit of marketing-speak, and skepticism may be called for...particularly since the source happens to be the Freescale marketing department.
Well, that's the thing - as Venona indicates, they didn't go undetected. In fact, a lot of spies were caught because of Venona. The Rosenbergs, for example. And, some Soviet activities had a definite impact on sabotaging U.S. foreign policy - as I recall, one of the reasons China was able to go communist was that either the U.S. Treasury or State department had a high-level Soviet spy who made certain that funds earmarked for supporting Chiang Kai-Shek never arrived, allowing Mao Zedong to succeed.
When you start looking at the intelligence picture of the Cold War, particularly in the late 40s, 50s, and early 60s, you see VERY interesting things happening. And you have to look very carefully to see it. One of the things to keep in mind is that an intelligence success tends to be secret - it's the intelligence failures that are public.
(Modern examples: Bin Laden's satellite phone being tapped by the NSA and used to foil Al Qaeda operations up to 2000 vs. September 11, 2001.)
"You are playing a definition game. McCarthy wasn't simply looking for Communists, he was looking for a threat to the American way of life. Oddly enough, it wasn't there."
Actually, yes it was. It just wasn't where he was looking.
McCarthy was an opportunist who destroyed a lot of lives while running a witch hunt for communists - more or less taking what the FBI was doing and running rampant with it. And, up until the mid-1990s, the history books didn't have the information the FBI did from the NSA. So, accepted history was that it was only a witch hunt, and the wasn't really a communist threat.
And then, in the mid-1990s, the NSA declassified the Venona intercepts.
In fact, there WAS a serious Soviet infiltration of the United States government at some of the highest levels. It was detected because of duplication of some of the one-time pads (an otherwise unbreakable type of code) that allowed some Soviet intelligence communications to be decoded, and revealed the spy rings.
Surely I can't be the only one who got REALLY worried when I read this part of the interview: "It's not only the effect of 3-D, ['Avatar' has] just shown that if you do a movie in 3-D, you can ask for more money and that's the trick."
It really seems to me that this is proof that Emmerich has missed the point here. 3D is a wonderful tool for telling stories, but the story has to be there first. I've been a fan of movies all my life, and many of the most impressive movies I've seen were done on a very low budget - what made them impressive was that they told really good stories, or they told their story really well.
To take an example of the first: Moon. If you haven't seen it, see it. It's an amazing movie, a mind-blowing story, and it was done with a budget of all of $5 million. Another example: Cube. That's a very effective and extremely imaginative SF horror movie, with a budget of a grand total of around $365,000.
But, what about a larger story? One with lots of pyrotechnics, battles, etc. Well, besides the fact that each Lord of the Rings movie came in at $90 million only - making them now cheaper than most other event movies - I present for your consideration Underworld. It doesn't have a mind-blowing story - it's a pretty basic one, although it is well-told - but it does have a centuries-old war between vampires and werewolves, and it was incredibly stylish with very good effects, and an emphasis on story. Its budget? Around $22 million.
Emmerich's comment about how 3D will be very good at shaking loose more money worries me a great deal. I'm afraid that we're going to see lots of big event movies that are all computer FX, and lacking in craft or storytelling. Sure, you'll see the money on the screen, but part of creativity in moviemaking is coming up with new ways to tell stories, and limited budgets are often a good thing - they force the filmmaker to concentrate on the important parts of the movie, rather than getting distracted by the FX sequences. Now we're looking at 3D for the sake of 3D - or even worse, for the sake of getting money to do 3D - rather than 3D because that's the best way to tell the story.
(Aside from which, am I the only one who thinks that a few too many people are talking about FX allowing them to do things they couldn't do before, particularly when their examples ARE things that have been done before, and done well? Sure, there are stories that are probably unfilmable, such as Dante's Divine Comedy, but that's mainly because it's more travelogue than story - all the visual effects could have been done for that by Ray Harryhausen forty years ago. Seriously, if King Kong could do it in 1933, it wasn't impossible before computers.)
One of the things that I have to do as a publisher is keep track of the e-book market, so that if it does move to a point where I should be supporting it, I can do so in a reasonable time. Such a move has not happened, nor are there any signs it will.
Now, you said that an e-book market would reasonably be 5-10% of the printed book market today, and that just isn't where it's sitting. As of November 2009 (the December figures aren't out yet), it was at 2.26% of the total book market. Even if you remove the audiobook (which was just marginally larger), it's still less than 5%. What we have here is a very slow arithmetic growth. Compare that to a market such as the DVD, which did supplant the VHS, and you see exponential growth as one supplants the other.
"Um, most print books only sell a few hundred copies a year. The average print book maybe 5000 copies over its lifetime."
I know. I do own and run a publishing company as one of my sidelines.
"Your book was a niche genre for a niche market and did pretty well for its time and potential."
And there you're completely wrong. For its built-in market it did exceedingly poorly. The Diablo print books did very well, and sold thousands upon thousands of copies - enough for a trilogy to be commissioned, and an anthology book to be later published. The Diablo e-book did very well in comparison to other e-books, but it was a failure otherwise - and the publisher later shut down its entire e-book program.
The market wanted Diablo fiction, make no mistake. But they didn't want it as an e-book. And they voted with their wallets.
"It's understandable that the publishers don't like this, in general. For one, they understand hardcovers and paperbacks, but can't quite get their heads wrapped around an eBook as being something different. They want it to be a hardcover, Amazon wants it to be a paperback, but delivered at about the same time as a hardcover. I think, in reality, this is a different form, and needs to be treated as such. For one, there are lots of publisher's expenses associated with a hardcover: printing fees, distribution, in-store kiosks, maybe shelving fees, etc. All of these, at the very least, should be subtracted from the retail price and the publisher's piece of the book sale. Otherwise, they're going to be using this as a trick to increase revenues, even though they're performing significantly less of a service."
I've been in the publishing industry in some way, shape, or form since 1998, when I made my first article sale. My first book sale was in 2000 - and the reason I'm telling you this is because my first book sale was the Diablo e-book that launched the entire Blizzard fiction line. So, I have some inkling about what was going on behind the scenes - I was there.
The first thing you have to understand is that publishers are early adapters. There have been several revolutions behind the scenes, such as using email for manuscript submissions, electronic presses, and print-on-demand. So, when the e-book looked like it was going to make a massive impact on the way we read, and might even replace the print book, they decided to see what this thing could do. And believe me, they picked up on the whole "reduced production costs" right from the get-go. This was back around 1999-2000. Certain publishers launched e-book projects to push the format and see how far it would go, and the others watched very carefully.
My e-book, Demonsbane, was commissioned in large part to help in the attempt to blow open the market. It was carefully selected, both in content and length. To prevent possible reader fatigue, the word count was limited to 30,000 words. The franchise it was based on had just sold over a million copies of Diablo II, and had a large group of tech-savvy people on Battle.net who were likely to be early adapters. So, built in fan base - check. Tech-savvy potential customers - check. Distribution across several formats and from several online resellers - check. Behind the scenes, the editor, myself, and even my favorite author, had worked our collective hindquarters off to make sure it was a good read. The only thing that wasn't going for this book was that I wasn't Stephen King. If something was going to take off and be a success, it was this e-book. It even launched on Halloween, 2000, and was advertised for months on Battle.net.
It tanked.
All the noise about there being a massive e-book market was just noise. The factors I mentioned helped - and Demonsbane sold a couple of hundred copies per year while other e-books were selling two or three copies in the same time. Across the board, e-book attempts failed, and by 2003 publishers had identified e-books as a niche market, good for some inexpensive marketing more than anything else.
Now, others here have already dispelled the fallacy that the major cost is production and distribution - so I won't go into details there. But...
Ten years later, we can track the progress of the e-book. According to the latest figures from the Association of American Publishers, the e-book occupied 2.26% of the total book market in November 2009. That's it. The audio book did marginally better. The majority of the market prefers a printed book - and your customers dictate to you, not vice versa.
So, publishers DO understand the e-book and what it's capable of. They're not dinosaurs.
Well, I own and run a small publishing company. And one of the things that I always find very amusing is when people call the print book outdated, and those of us who focus on them "dinosaurs." It's not, and we're not.
What I am, however, is connected to reality.
There is a basic business truth: your customer base dictates to you - not the other way around. If your customer base demands e-books, you give them e-books. If they demand printed books, you give them printed books.
So, what does the customer base demand here? Well, the Association of American Publishers tracks the book market based on net sales, and on a month-to-month basis, we can thus tell just what formats the market is demanding. The most recent month's figures available is November 2009.
In November 2009, the total net book market was $808.5 million. Of that, the e-book occupied $18.3 million ($.1 million below the audiobook). This makes the e-book a grand total of 2.26% of the entire book market.
That's right - 2.26%. Any general publisher who abandoned the printed book in favour of the e-book at this time would be endangering their business' survival. Should the e-book one day represent 65% of the market, then anybody not supporting it would indeed be a dinosaur. But, right now, putting the printed book ahead of the e-book simply means that one has a realistic view of the market.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree here. THIS is a joke about terrorism:
A Canadian and an American are captured by an Al Qaeda cell, and told by the terrorists that they are about to be beheaded. When asked if they have any last words, the Canadian says: "Yes. I will talk about the human rights dimension of this situation in relation to constitutional law, drawing upon previous incidents in Afghanistan and Iraq, and looking at a comparative religion aspect regarding the lack of moral justification for this act." The American then says: "I've got nothing to say - just kill me before the Canadian starts talking."
That's a joke about terrorism. "Get your act together or I'm going to blow your airport sky high" is a threat. It may not be one spoken in earnest, but it is a threat, and the police have an obligation to investigate it, and make sure that it is neither a terrorist plot or an unbalanced wacko who's about to try to kill thousands of people. The police are the ones in the right here.
"The parent posting isn't a troll. He is saying it like it is."
No, he's not. I see this tactic all the time with AGW supporters - if there's evidence demonstrating a problem with their theory, they say it's just a smear campaign, or misinformation. This is not "just another sissy-fit thrown by the denier groups that are willing to use any tactics to distract people from the real issue." This is a revelation that the lead climate scientists in the world were engaged in fraud. The released program code and comments demonstrates that they "cooked" their data to create a more alarming climate picture than actually existed, and the emails contain clear proof that they conspired to defeat FOI requests and subverted the peer-review process at major journals to suppress conflicting research.
"And I'm trying to figure out the scientific arguments being put forward by the contrarians. Are they saying that data has been suppressed that shows the world hasn't being warming significantly since the 1970's?!! Really?"
No. Not really. That's another AGW trick I see used all too often. The skeptic points out a problem with the research, and the AGW supporter misrepresents the skeptic's view. I have yet to see a single person claim that there hasn't been significant warming since the 1970s.
There is no denying that we are on an overall upwards trend in world climate. None. However, the AGW thesis is that industrial CO2 has enough of an impact to swing the balance - that the impact is highly statistically significant. Little problem, though - since 1998 the global temperature has remained steady, with some cooling now coming into the picture...while the CO2 levels continue to rise. If the AGW theory was correct, there should be a corresponding rise in temperature over the last ten years...but there isn't. Some AGW climatologists have tried to hand-wave this away, saying that there's something going on with the oceans or somesuch, and we can look forward to cooling for about another ten years, but we shouldn't forget the AGW threat. In the meantime, solar physicists are noting that this pretty much correlates to solar activity quite nicely. So, yes, the temperature has risen since 1970. But the proof that it was due to human activity is quite weak.
What Climategate does is demonstrate that certain AGW claims themselves, such as this decade being hotter than the 1990s, cannot be substantiated any longer. The CRU, which is pivotal to these claims, has now been caught out fudging their data.
So, to summarize, this is the skeptic argument: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and if you add it to the atmosphere it will have a warming effect. However, in the case of industrial CO2, the warming effect is small enough that it is not statistically significant, and is swamped by natural forcings. THAT is the argument.
It strikes me that this is yet another case of "company buys patent from somebody else, company tries to sue people with their new patent." It really is quite abusive, seeing as patents are there to reward innovation by inventors, but I think I've figured out a simple and elegant way to prevent this sort of thing.
Make patents non-transferable.
So, the only person or organization who can sue somebody for patent infringement is the one who actually invented the thing. That might not knock out every patent troll out there, but I'll bet it would wipe out the majority of them...
"IMO the big problem with amazon, versus lulu, is that I believe amazon has no zero-cost option. Money should always flow toward the author; anything else is generally a waste of money, and possibly a scam.
"Big problem with lightning source versus lulu or amazon is that lightning source won't handle order fulfillment. That means you have lots of hassles: maintaining a merchant credit card account, laying out capital for books, storing books, packing orders, state sales tax returns, customers who want to pay with POs but then don't pay their bills, returns, damaged shipments..."
Um...I'm afraid you're wrong there on a number of levels.
First, you're right about where money should flow, but it's important to keep in mind that Lightning Source is a printer, not a publisher. They provide printing services to publishers (hence the requirement for a business number). I don't know if Booksurge/Amazon is the same, but they are certainly targeting the small publisher market.
Second, Lightning Source handles order fulfillment. They're owned by Ingram, which is the largest wholesaler in the American market, and so all books published by Lightning Source go directly into the Ingram supply chain, as well as a couple of other wholesalers. The only time I have to handle my own order fulfillment is when I get a direct order, in which case I place the order, and Lightning Source ships it and bills me for it.
There is a company named Bookmobile that does short run printings and does not do order fulfillment - you may be thinking of them. But Lightning Source does enough that I really can just upload the books and just let the money come rolling in.
I hate to say it, but that's a really bad idea. I'm afraid that as a publisher who has to deal with PoD printers, I know something of the reputation that Amazon's PoD service has - and it's terrible. The company is called Booksurge, and they are known for off-center covers, missing pages, and in some cases typos that aren't in the PDF they were sent.
If you want a good company to work with for that, use Lightning Source. You need a business number, but they're professional, they have worldwide distribution (they're owned by Ingram), and their quality control is superb. And, you just have to send them two PDFs.
First off, congratulations - may your marriage be long and happy.
Second, I'm not married, but I got to the point of proposing once. She said no...and the reason amounted to one thing. So, I'm just going to tell you what our mistake was, and advise that you don't repeat it.
She had one vision for what the relationship would be, and I had another. Neither one of us just left it alone to be what it was. And that's what ensured it died a slow death. We loved each other a great deal, but that didn't save us from our own manhandling of it.
So, as I said, congratulations, and don't make my mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
It has to do with practicality. You've got limited numbers of professors, and huge amounts of students. For some general courses, packing 200 students into a lecture hall is about the only way to cover the material.
When it comes to more specific courses, where you're only going to get 20 students anyway, a seminar format works better.
And yes, I'm a grad student.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but...
1. A lecture IS a type of class.
2. The best teaching professors are the ones who take a personal interest in the success of their students.
So, while you are correct that your own learning style is your own business, complaining about a professor actually being good is a bit on the stupid side - particularly when they're trying to keep students from proverbially shooting themselves in the foot.
Well, at this point, I think we have to just agree to disagree. I can see how you've come to some of your points, but I also think you're wrong. I additionally think you've bought into a couple of arguments that are shaky at best, but time will tell which one of us is right. It may very well be that I am looking at this from a business perspective (as a business owner myself), and you are looking at it from a gamer perspective.
However, I must say that I do not like having words put in my mouth. You made a statement about what could reduce the piracy rate. I pointed to an article that explored those very things, ran figures for them, and noted that those things had no effect on the piracy rate at all. I was speaking entirely of the ratio of pirated copies to legitimate copies, and you kept trying poke holes in the argument that a download is equal to a lost sale. I never made that claim, the article never made that claim, and frankly the claim was irrelevant to the ratio. That makes it a straw man.
I will point out, though, that if the sales figures for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are representative of a successful game - over 6 million copies sold for console vs. approximately 350,000 sold for PC - then the reason that the big game makers are going for the console market has a lot more to do with the size of the market than it does with the financial cost of DRM. Console games are less complex to develop (the PC game platform is really something like a hundred similar platforms, all with their own quirks, whereas a game that works on one X-Box 360 will work on all X-Box 360s), have fewer piracy issues, and a far larger market.
Or, put bluntly, why would any developer put the effort into selling around half a million copies for PC if they're REALLY lucky when they can put less effort into selling a few million for consoles first?
And that is my last word in this discussion. I will not reply further.
"Really? Based on what metric?"
Based on piracy rates. I never said that a game couldn't be a success in the PC game market. I pointed out that, as the Tweakgames article stated, only two things actually had an impact on piracy rates:
1. The popularity of the game. If the game was more popular, the piracy rate was higher.
2. The presence of restrictive and intrusive DRM, which if not broken, actually does have the impact of lowering piracy rates until it is broken.
Nothing else made a difference. If a $20 game was as popular as a $60 game, it had the same level of piracy.
Did you even read the article I linked to?
"The simple fact that PC game developers are still in business and still making money, despite wasting who knows how many millions of dollars every year on failed anti-piracy measures is all it takes to prove otherwise."
Are they?
That's not a glib question. I started computer gaming in 1989 (and yes, I started out as a game pirate - I outgrew it by the age of 17, though). The PC game market is a wasteland today compared even to then. Only about ten years ago console ports were rare - now they're become more and more the norm. Most of the PC game market is concentrated in MMOs now. While there are still some big releases for the PC game market (eg., Starcraft II and Diablo III), most of the non-MMO releases start out on the console market, and the PC version comes out months later.
It's not rocket science to predict the trend. The PC games market that I started out in is long gone. The market from five years ago was far more rich and full than it is today. Yes, there are some big players still there, such as Stardock and Blizzard, but even Bioware is now starting its games on the console before the PC. The PC game makers are in the process of walking away. That's not a prediction - just an observation. It IS happening.
And, taking Stardock as an example, you haven't presented the whole story. Here's picking up after 2008:
March 27, 2009 - Stardock unveils a low customer impact DRM solution named GOO (Game Object Obfuscation). Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/stardock-goo-drm-copy-piracy,7390.html
May 1, 2009 - The Escapist, and a few others, report that Stardock has major piracy issues with Demigod (which does have DRM). Of 120,000 games connecting to the servers on the opening weekend, only 18,000 are legitimate. After the team spends a couple of days working on the servers, the CEO declares a victory against the pirates. Source: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/91400-Stardock-CEO-Demigod-Beats-Piracy
Now, that's a far cry from the DRM used by Ubisoft. But, it is important to note that Stardock DID end up implementing a very customer-friendly DRM solution, and got hit badly by piracy issues.
"The only possible metric you can use that would make what you said in any way correct is the one the big corporations use: that every pirated copy is a lost sale. So I guess it "fails utterly" if your metric is that they aren't making near as much money as they "could" be."
And with that, I KNOW you didn't read the article I linked to. That is a complete mischaracterization of the economic argument. You'll find a proper description here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_3.html
Please read that before you reply.
"The answers to the piracy problem are the same as they have always been: make the game worthwhile and convenient enough to purchase legitimately."
Here's the problem - that works wonderfully as a theory. It fails utterly in practice.
If you read the article, you'll find that the value added approach was tried - it had no impact on the piracy rate whatsoever. In fact, Ubisoft tried to use no DRM for Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia to see if that would help. Far from driving the piracy rate down, it skyrocketed it. In fact, as the Tweakguides article states, the only thing that has had any impact on lowering piracy was very restrictive DRM, and that was a hit or miss thing (more often a miss).
(And just to point it out, that last bit about the occasional impact of restrictive DRM surprised the hell out of me when I read it. I would never have called that one in a million years - I would have counted on a backlash making it worse.)
In fact, the only thing that seemed to have an impact on how much a game was pirated was popularity. The more popular the game, the more piracy. So, it's a freeloader effect in the end, with a pirate ideology to boot, and that makes it an arms race.
(And here's the thing about the pirate ideology - it's not about fighting the system, it's all about free swag. There are a lot of excuses, but it comes down to feeling entitled to take whatever you want, regardless of if it's yours to take or not. And that's a message that has to be fought, tooth and nail.)
And, we're seeing the impact of the arms race right now. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had a console piracy rate of around 6 legitimate copies to every pirated copy - around 6 million sales to around 970,000 illegal downloads. On the PC, it was around 11 pirated copies to every legitimate one - around 350,000 sales to around 4 and a half million illegal downloads. So, with the goal of DRM now being to hold the pirates off as long as possible - with a week being considered a success, and a month being a tremendous victory - it's no wonder that most of the big game companies are concentrating on the console market. And frankly, it would not surprise me in the slightest if Ubisoft announces that these next couple of games are the last ones they're producing for the PC market. That would be the correct business decision - the PC game market is poisoned to the point that the only way to stand a chance of avoiding being hammered by piracy for at least a week is to treat your customers like criminals. When that's the case, it's time to walk away.
The PC game market is being reduced to subscription games only. Just compare it five years ago and now. It's a shadow of what it once was. And, let's put the blame where it belongs - the game pirates.
Okay, first off, let me just say that I don't support any DRM that takes away the rights of the legitimate consumer. So, this post should not be taken as an endorsement of Ubisoft's DRM.
However, that said, this is part of an arms race between game pirates and PC game producers that has been going on for years, and at this point most of the PC game world is now a casualty. There is a reason that the console is king right now, and the main PC game out there today is the MMORPG.
This article explains it better than I can, and anybody who really wants to understand this arms race should read it:
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
Of particular note is this page:
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html
It is long, and I disagree with one or two of the author's final conclusions, but it is very much worth the read, and when somebody actually does a serious running of the piracy figures, it is very eye-opening.
Well, first off, you've raised some very good points, but you shouldn't have included authors in your list for a couple of reasons. Number one, authors don't get usually paid for book signings; and number two, most people still consume books as paper objects - the printed book occupies around 95% of the market, with the e-book and audiobook fighting over the remainder - so the original business model still actually holds true.
(And, the 2009 figures are in - the e-book made a lot of gains in 2009, reaching 3.31% of the total market. Source: http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Archicves/2010_February/SalesUp4.1in2009Release.htm )
That said, there will be adjustments in the market. The way I figure it will play out is as follows:
1. Advertising-based sites lose revenue from ad-blockers, and content quality goes down.
2. Those sites either move to a subscription or corporate sponsorship-based revenue stream (or something else that works) or die out.
3. Something new happens.
Ultimately, somebody has to pay for the content - whether it's paying the writers (always a good thing!), or just for the bandwidth, the money has to come from somewhere. So, with online advertising having become somewhat toxic (as has been pointed out, a lot of these ads carry malware), that particular business model is on its way out. Eventually, a new one will come in, and it will last as long as the market allows.
So, it's not really a matter of deserving anything. The business plan either survives contact with reality or it doesn't.
You know, you remind me of one of those conspiracy theorists who no matter what evidence is laid before them, can't be turned away from some bizarre and inexplicable theory. So, there's no point in arguing with you - have fun in your fantasy world. I'll continue to live in the real one.
"They may well be, but their entire model is outdated. What value do they add other than marketing? And why should they get such obscenely large cuts for that?"
You really need to get a clue.
I'm serious about that, and I see stuff like this a lot. You are completely ignorant of the publishing world, and yet you are quite willing to make statements about how our entire model is outdated. Do you even know what our model is?
First off, you really need to look up the word "outdated." For something to be outdated, it must be operating in a way that was valid in the past, but is no longer valid. Taking the current book market, around 95% of the market consists of printed books, with e-books and audiobooks fighting over the other 5%. This means that the present model has not been replaced. Don't take my word for it - do a search for "Association of American Publishers" and look at their news - they track the market and the sales figures on a month by month basis.
Second, besides marketing and distribution being pretty big things, there's also quality control and editing, which make a huge difference. And that part of publishing a book takes months of work.
And finally, I suggest you do some research on wholesalers, distribution, and production costs. Or do you really think that Amazon offers a 25% discount off cover prices at a loss? For that matter, some basic business knowledge would be a good start.
As somebody who owns a small publishing company myself, I am left wondering just what sort of experiences you've had, and what branch of publishing you're in.
The reason I ask is because I've now got experience in the book market at just about every level now (I started off as an author with Simon & Schuster and Osborne/McGraw-Hill), and most of my experience has been that publishing companies are early adapters. Even publishing attitudes towards e-books are heavily informed by having tried to make them work in a serious way back around 2000 (an experiment I was part of).
One of the big problems that Attributor is dealing with is that when somebody copies an article wholesale, it doesn't necessarily result in additional publicity for the original source - in fact, all too frequently the original source isn't mentioned at all, and the website claims it as their own. That's just straight-up plagiarism, and it is a problem.
Now, there are certainly dinosaurs, and there are fields where the way people engage with content is very different from the original form of the field. To take newspapers, for example, people consume news in an active way - they don't just read the article, they comment on and discuss it. So, understanding that consuming news is very much a communal experience is the key to success today, and those who don't realize that are in for a rough time (on the internet, it is very easy to vote with your feet).
(Compare that to books, which are not consumed in an active, communal way, and you can see why the traditional model there still stands - the e-book represents something like 2.5% of the total book market on a good day. As somebody in that field, however, I can assure you that it has undergone quite a few internal revolutions, and another is in the process of starting with the Expresso Book Machine.)
But, at the same time, there's a very big difference between failing to adapt to your market and having your content stolen (or copied - it's a semantic issue, and the important thing is that the content is question is not the pirate's content to reproduce). And, there's nothing wrong with taking action there. The fact that somebody can burgle a house does not make it immoral to catch and jail the burglar for doing it...or to put it the cliched way, just because one CAN do a thing, it does not follow that one SHOULD do that thing.
So - and part of this may be that your branch of publishing is not the same as mine, and you've had a lot of bad luck with idiotic higher-ups - I see this as a justified reaction to a "pirate culture," if you want to call it that, and content producers and distributors do have a right to protect themselves within reason. So long as it doesn't fall into RIAA-level thuggery and stupidity, I think this is a good thing in the end.
Well, I just looked at the EETimes article, and I found a couple of specious claims.
Basically, they've got this chart, and they're using it to say that if the e-book reader gets below $99, the market penetration will rise to 65%.
Now, call me stupid if you want, but I took a close look at that chart, and that's not what it said. The actual figures for the $99 e-reader were:
Approx. 38% "Intend to buy in next six months"
Approx. 42% "Want to know more"
Approx. 54% "Frequent book readers with a household income of more than $75,000"
Approx. 65% "All U.S. online adults."
I don't even know what the hell that last section means, particularly seeing as its bar is smaller than some of the others in the other categories...even as a sentence fragment it doesn't make sense.
Either way, I get the feeling that the 65% market penetration might be a bit of marketing-speak, and skepticism may be called for...particularly since the source happens to be the Freescale marketing department.
Well, that's the thing - as Venona indicates, they didn't go undetected. In fact, a lot of spies were caught because of Venona. The Rosenbergs, for example. And, some Soviet activities had a definite impact on sabotaging U.S. foreign policy - as I recall, one of the reasons China was able to go communist was that either the U.S. Treasury or State department had a high-level Soviet spy who made certain that funds earmarked for supporting Chiang Kai-Shek never arrived, allowing Mao Zedong to succeed.
When you start looking at the intelligence picture of the Cold War, particularly in the late 40s, 50s, and early 60s, you see VERY interesting things happening. And you have to look very carefully to see it. One of the things to keep in mind is that an intelligence success tends to be secret - it's the intelligence failures that are public.
(Modern examples: Bin Laden's satellite phone being tapped by the NSA and used to foil Al Qaeda operations up to 2000 vs. September 11, 2001.)
Wikipedia has an article that's a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Soviet_and_Russian_espionage_in_the_United_States
"You are playing a definition game. McCarthy wasn't simply looking for Communists, he was looking for a threat to the American way of life. Oddly enough, it wasn't there."
Actually, yes it was. It just wasn't where he was looking.
McCarthy was an opportunist who destroyed a lot of lives while running a witch hunt for communists - more or less taking what the FBI was doing and running rampant with it. And, up until the mid-1990s, the history books didn't have the information the FBI did from the NSA. So, accepted history was that it was only a witch hunt, and the wasn't really a communist threat.
And then, in the mid-1990s, the NSA declassified the Venona intercepts.
In fact, there WAS a serious Soviet infiltration of the United States government at some of the highest levels. It was detected because of duplication of some of the one-time pads (an otherwise unbreakable type of code) that allowed some Soviet intelligence communications to be decoded, and revealed the spy rings.
You can read about it here: http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/venona/index.shtml
Surely I can't be the only one who got REALLY worried when I read this part of the interview: "It's not only the effect of 3-D, ['Avatar' has] just shown that if you do a movie in 3-D, you can ask for more money and that's the trick."
It really seems to me that this is proof that Emmerich has missed the point here. 3D is a wonderful tool for telling stories, but the story has to be there first. I've been a fan of movies all my life, and many of the most impressive movies I've seen were done on a very low budget - what made them impressive was that they told really good stories, or they told their story really well.
To take an example of the first: Moon. If you haven't seen it, see it. It's an amazing movie, a mind-blowing story, and it was done with a budget of all of $5 million. Another example: Cube. That's a very effective and extremely imaginative SF horror movie, with a budget of a grand total of around $365,000.
But, what about a larger story? One with lots of pyrotechnics, battles, etc. Well, besides the fact that each Lord of the Rings movie came in at $90 million only - making them now cheaper than most other event movies - I present for your consideration Underworld. It doesn't have a mind-blowing story - it's a pretty basic one, although it is well-told - but it does have a centuries-old war between vampires and werewolves, and it was incredibly stylish with very good effects, and an emphasis on story. Its budget? Around $22 million.
Emmerich's comment about how 3D will be very good at shaking loose more money worries me a great deal. I'm afraid that we're going to see lots of big event movies that are all computer FX, and lacking in craft or storytelling. Sure, you'll see the money on the screen, but part of creativity in moviemaking is coming up with new ways to tell stories, and limited budgets are often a good thing - they force the filmmaker to concentrate on the important parts of the movie, rather than getting distracted by the FX sequences. Now we're looking at 3D for the sake of 3D - or even worse, for the sake of getting money to do 3D - rather than 3D because that's the best way to tell the story.
(Aside from which, am I the only one who thinks that a few too many people are talking about FX allowing them to do things they couldn't do before, particularly when their examples ARE things that have been done before, and done well? Sure, there are stories that are probably unfilmable, such as Dante's Divine Comedy, but that's mainly because it's more travelogue than story - all the visual effects could have been done for that by Ray Harryhausen forty years ago. Seriously, if King Kong could do it in 1933, it wasn't impossible before computers.)
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're wrong here.
One of the things that I have to do as a publisher is keep track of the e-book market, so that if it does move to a point where I should be supporting it, I can do so in a reasonable time. Such a move has not happened, nor are there any signs it will.
Now, you said that an e-book market would reasonably be 5-10% of the printed book market today, and that just isn't where it's sitting. As of November 2009 (the December figures aren't out yet), it was at 2.26% of the total book market. Even if you remove the audiobook (which was just marginally larger), it's still less than 5%. What we have here is a very slow arithmetic growth. Compare that to a market such as the DVD, which did supplant the VHS, and you see exponential growth as one supplants the other.
If you don't believe me, crunch the numbers for yourself. The source is here: http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Archicves/2010_January/November10StatsRelease.htm
Sorry, but it's a niche market, and it's showing every indication that it will stay that way.
"Um, most print books only sell a few hundred copies a year. The average print book maybe 5000 copies over its lifetime."
I know. I do own and run a publishing company as one of my sidelines.
"Your book was a niche genre for a niche market and did pretty well for its time and potential."
And there you're completely wrong. For its built-in market it did exceedingly poorly. The Diablo print books did very well, and sold thousands upon thousands of copies - enough for a trilogy to be commissioned, and an anthology book to be later published. The Diablo e-book did very well in comparison to other e-books, but it was a failure otherwise - and the publisher later shut down its entire e-book program.
The market wanted Diablo fiction, make no mistake. But they didn't want it as an e-book. And they voted with their wallets.
Sorry, but I find this quite uninformed:
"It's understandable that the publishers don't like this, in general. For one, they understand hardcovers and paperbacks, but can't quite get their heads wrapped around an eBook as being something different. They want it to be a hardcover, Amazon wants it to be a paperback, but delivered at about the same time as a hardcover. I think, in reality, this is a different form, and needs to be treated as such. For one, there are lots of publisher's expenses associated with a hardcover: printing fees, distribution, in-store kiosks, maybe shelving fees, etc. All of these, at the very least, should be subtracted from the retail price and the publisher's piece of the book sale. Otherwise, they're going to be using this as a trick to increase revenues, even though they're performing significantly less of a service."
I've been in the publishing industry in some way, shape, or form since 1998, when I made my first article sale. My first book sale was in 2000 - and the reason I'm telling you this is because my first book sale was the Diablo e-book that launched the entire Blizzard fiction line. So, I have some inkling about what was going on behind the scenes - I was there.
The first thing you have to understand is that publishers are early adapters. There have been several revolutions behind the scenes, such as using email for manuscript submissions, electronic presses, and print-on-demand. So, when the e-book looked like it was going to make a massive impact on the way we read, and might even replace the print book, they decided to see what this thing could do. And believe me, they picked up on the whole "reduced production costs" right from the get-go. This was back around 1999-2000. Certain publishers launched e-book projects to push the format and see how far it would go, and the others watched very carefully.
My e-book, Demonsbane, was commissioned in large part to help in the attempt to blow open the market. It was carefully selected, both in content and length. To prevent possible reader fatigue, the word count was limited to 30,000 words. The franchise it was based on had just sold over a million copies of Diablo II, and had a large group of tech-savvy people on Battle.net who were likely to be early adapters. So, built in fan base - check. Tech-savvy potential customers - check. Distribution across several formats and from several online resellers - check. Behind the scenes, the editor, myself, and even my favorite author, had worked our collective hindquarters off to make sure it was a good read. The only thing that wasn't going for this book was that I wasn't Stephen King. If something was going to take off and be a success, it was this e-book. It even launched on Halloween, 2000, and was advertised for months on Battle.net.
It tanked.
All the noise about there being a massive e-book market was just noise. The factors I mentioned helped - and Demonsbane sold a couple of hundred copies per year while other e-books were selling two or three copies in the same time. Across the board, e-book attempts failed, and by 2003 publishers had identified e-books as a niche market, good for some inexpensive marketing more than anything else.
Now, others here have already dispelled the fallacy that the major cost is production and distribution - so I won't go into details there. But...
Ten years later, we can track the progress of the e-book. According to the latest figures from the Association of American Publishers, the e-book occupied 2.26% of the total book market in November 2009. That's it. The audio book did marginally better. The majority of the market prefers a printed book - and your customers dictate to you, not vice versa.
So, publishers DO understand the e-book and what it's capable of. They're not dinosaurs.
Well, I own and run a small publishing company. And one of the things that I always find very amusing is when people call the print book outdated, and those of us who focus on them "dinosaurs." It's not, and we're not.
What I am, however, is connected to reality.
There is a basic business truth: your customer base dictates to you - not the other way around. If your customer base demands e-books, you give them e-books. If they demand printed books, you give them printed books.
So, what does the customer base demand here? Well, the Association of American Publishers tracks the book market based on net sales, and on a month-to-month basis, we can thus tell just what formats the market is demanding. The most recent month's figures available is November 2009.
In November 2009, the total net book market was $808.5 million. Of that, the e-book occupied $18.3 million ($.1 million below the audiobook). This makes the e-book a grand total of 2.26% of the entire book market.
That's right - 2.26%. Any general publisher who abandoned the printed book in favour of the e-book at this time would be endangering their business' survival. Should the e-book one day represent 65% of the market, then anybody not supporting it would indeed be a dinosaur. But, right now, putting the printed book ahead of the e-book simply means that one has a realistic view of the market.
Source: http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Archicves/2010_January/November10StatsRelease.htm
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree here. THIS is a joke about terrorism:
A Canadian and an American are captured by an Al Qaeda cell, and told by the terrorists that they are about to be beheaded. When asked if they have any last words, the Canadian says: "Yes. I will talk about the human rights dimension of this situation in relation to constitutional law, drawing upon previous incidents in Afghanistan and Iraq, and looking at a comparative religion aspect regarding the lack of moral justification for this act." The American then says: "I've got nothing to say - just kill me before the Canadian starts talking."
That's a joke about terrorism. "Get your act together or I'm going to blow your airport sky high" is a threat. It may not be one spoken in earnest, but it is a threat, and the police have an obligation to investigate it, and make sure that it is neither a terrorist plot or an unbalanced wacko who's about to try to kill thousands of people. The police are the ones in the right here.
"The parent posting isn't a troll. He is saying it like it is."
No, he's not. I see this tactic all the time with AGW supporters - if there's evidence demonstrating a problem with their theory, they say it's just a smear campaign, or misinformation. This is not "just another sissy-fit thrown by the denier groups that are willing to use any tactics to distract people from the real issue." This is a revelation that the lead climate scientists in the world were engaged in fraud. The released program code and comments demonstrates that they "cooked" their data to create a more alarming climate picture than actually existed, and the emails contain clear proof that they conspired to defeat FOI requests and subverted the peer-review process at major journals to suppress conflicting research.
"And I'm trying to figure out the scientific arguments being put forward by the contrarians. Are they saying that data has been suppressed that shows the world hasn't being warming significantly since the 1970's?!! Really?"
No. Not really. That's another AGW trick I see used all too often. The skeptic points out a problem with the research, and the AGW supporter misrepresents the skeptic's view. I have yet to see a single person claim that there hasn't been significant warming since the 1970s.
There is no denying that we are on an overall upwards trend in world climate. None. However, the AGW thesis is that industrial CO2 has enough of an impact to swing the balance - that the impact is highly statistically significant. Little problem, though - since 1998 the global temperature has remained steady, with some cooling now coming into the picture...while the CO2 levels continue to rise. If the AGW theory was correct, there should be a corresponding rise in temperature over the last ten years...but there isn't. Some AGW climatologists have tried to hand-wave this away, saying that there's something going on with the oceans or somesuch, and we can look forward to cooling for about another ten years, but we shouldn't forget the AGW threat. In the meantime, solar physicists are noting that this pretty much correlates to solar activity quite nicely. So, yes, the temperature has risen since 1970. But the proof that it was due to human activity is quite weak.
What Climategate does is demonstrate that certain AGW claims themselves, such as this decade being hotter than the 1990s, cannot be substantiated any longer. The CRU, which is pivotal to these claims, has now been caught out fudging their data.
This is a good summary: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/30/crugate_analysis/
So, to summarize, this is the skeptic argument: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and if you add it to the atmosphere it will have a warming effect. However, in the case of industrial CO2, the warming effect is small enough that it is not statistically significant, and is swamped by natural forcings. THAT is the argument.
Clear enough for you?
It strikes me that this is yet another case of "company buys patent from somebody else, company tries to sue people with their new patent." It really is quite abusive, seeing as patents are there to reward innovation by inventors, but I think I've figured out a simple and elegant way to prevent this sort of thing.
Make patents non-transferable.
So, the only person or organization who can sue somebody for patent infringement is the one who actually invented the thing. That might not knock out every patent troll out there, but I'll bet it would wipe out the majority of them...
Yeah, Lulu is sort of on the mid-line between a printer and a vanity press. It strikes me that they're mainly for the self-publishing crowd.
I'd put them more on the vanity press side, I guess. At least they aren't Authorhouse.
"IMO the big problem with amazon, versus lulu, is that I believe amazon has no zero-cost option. Money should always flow toward the author; anything else is generally a waste of money, and possibly a scam.
"Big problem with lightning source versus lulu or amazon is that lightning source won't handle order fulfillment. That means you have lots of hassles: maintaining a merchant credit card account, laying out capital for books, storing books, packing orders, state sales tax returns, customers who want to pay with POs but then don't pay their bills, returns, damaged shipments..."
Um...I'm afraid you're wrong there on a number of levels.
First, you're right about where money should flow, but it's important to keep in mind that Lightning Source is a printer, not a publisher. They provide printing services to publishers (hence the requirement for a business number). I don't know if Booksurge/Amazon is the same, but they are certainly targeting the small publisher market.
Second, Lightning Source handles order fulfillment. They're owned by Ingram, which is the largest wholesaler in the American market, and so all books published by Lightning Source go directly into the Ingram supply chain, as well as a couple of other wholesalers. The only time I have to handle my own order fulfillment is when I get a direct order, in which case I place the order, and Lightning Source ships it and bills me for it.
There is a company named Bookmobile that does short run printings and does not do order fulfillment - you may be thinking of them. But Lightning Source does enough that I really can just upload the books and just let the money come rolling in.
I hate to say it, but that's a really bad idea. I'm afraid that as a publisher who has to deal with PoD printers, I know something of the reputation that Amazon's PoD service has - and it's terrible. The company is called Booksurge, and they are known for off-center covers, missing pages, and in some cases typos that aren't in the PDF they were sent.
If you want a good company to work with for that, use Lightning Source. You need a business number, but they're professional, they have worldwide distribution (they're owned by Ingram), and their quality control is superb. And, you just have to send them two PDFs.
Hmm...lots of people giving advice...
First off, congratulations - may your marriage be long and happy.
Second, I'm not married, but I got to the point of proposing once. She said no...and the reason amounted to one thing. So, I'm just going to tell you what our mistake was, and advise that you don't repeat it.
She had one vision for what the relationship would be, and I had another. Neither one of us just left it alone to be what it was. And that's what ensured it died a slow death. We loved each other a great deal, but that didn't save us from our own manhandling of it.
So, as I said, congratulations, and don't make my mistake.