I've seen it in Germany, too, though it was a long time ago. I spent a year there as an undergrad in the mid-80's and we had a homeless drunk guy being disorderly and aggressive in the dorm. The police finally got called, and they sent all of two guys who showed up on foot. They calmed the guy down enough to be able to physically escort him away, one cop on either side, with their elbows linked through his, half to hold him up, half to keep him from flailing or trying to get away. IIRC they didn't even use handcuffs (which they had, along with guns and I probably sticks), and they just sort of walked him off into the night. He didn't get a beating, and the cops stayed friendly to everybody involved the whole time.
It's also a lot of work compared to other attack vectors.
...
Those QR codes mean you have to go out, find suitable places to physically stick them to, and then hope someone will actually scan them. Sounds like a lot more work, with far less results, than the more traditional routes.
And you have to pay actual money for those stickers or fliers that you're sticking to things, and maybe even have to pay someone to do it. More traditional all digital vectors probably give you a lot more bang for the buck.
QR codes do just encode straight data, text, or a link, but many of the sites that will generate them for free for you actually generate a link to their own site and forward to your site, so they can be doing the same kind of tracking. The best way to do them is to print the link (or at least the domain) in readable text along with the QR, so that you can at least check that they resolve the same way. There's plenty of free software that will generate good QR codes without the deceit, but most people who want to use them probably can't easily download and run code, and may not even realize that the code they downloaded from a site goes through a redirect.
Are you a shill or are you serious?! The transaction cost on PayPal is ridiculously high as it is. I'm sure it can cover compliance with banking rules, with plenty left to spare.
They're one of the few places you can get different rates for micropayments (less than $10) on cc processing, which does make them less expensive for some types of transaction. Most of mine are less than $5, so I need that. But for regular cc processing they're comparable to regular banks/merchant accounts. Other than that, you're probably pretty accurate.
My neighborhood is littered with ~$500 weather stations (I think mostly oregon scientific) that are all connected to the internet and report to weather underground. I thought for a while about getting my own, and realized it was silly as it was pretty easy to interpolate from 3-4 stations within a half mile of me. They generally report data consistent with one another (temp, RH, wind, rainfall) and most update pretty frequently. I googled the Rainwise, and it looks like it has features that aren't critical in urban areas-- you don't need a mile range or solar power when you can plug it in in somebody's backyard.
The interesting thing about Weather Underground is that it the local weatherstations pretty much are just people who buy and maintain them themselves and hook them up to the net to share.
They're by no means a complete solution (and I personally think the satellites are necessary), Weather Underground is a really valuable cooperative weather resource.
High of 80 is kind of chilly for LA. The high here today is supposed to be 84 and I was almost regretting not bringing a sweatshirt on the ride to work this morning.
After living here for a while, the bay area feels like the north pole.
It's the only one I haven't really seen a F/OSS alternative for and it's very annoying. Indesign is horrible in many ways, and has bad behaviours and bugs that have survived multiple versions, but there doesn't seem to be a decent alternative. I would be more than happy to be proven wrong.
I rode for a week in southern France about 10 years ago and found that they were extremely careful about passing us on the road. Most drivers gave plenty of room, and would often go fully into the opposite lane of a two lane road to pass, even when there was moderate traffic. As you say, the US is the polar opposite-- most drivers won't even cross a dashed yellow (passing allowed) on a totally empty road to pass a cyclist-- they'd rather squeeze you over to the edge of the road.
The US gov't has been depending on them for a quite a while, and the current model Soyuz are among the most reliable launch vehicles you can get. And Eurockot is cheap enough (and capable enough) for a shared launch that you almost can get a bunch of your friends together, build something in the garage, and fund the launch out of bake sales and kickstarter.
But really, my peeve is about equating "commercial space"=="commercial manned space". Space has been *very* commercial for decades, and the terminology that manned space advocates use tends to neglect that, or pretend it isn't so.
Russia has cheap reliable man rated stuff that they're willing to take any paying customer on, and there's not all that long a line of commercial customers waiting for rides on it.
Commercial spaceflight is really the only hope. And so far we have one company that appears to be capable of doing it, and a very large number of failed efforts, which I guess is what is to be expected. We're really lucky to have that one company.
This is a pet peeve of mine. People need to stop equating commercial manned space with commercial space. Space is extremely commercial already. US based launch capability is provided entirely by commercial entities, and there's no shortage of them-- Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital, and SpaceX. There's also ArianeSpace, Eurockot (bargain launches), and a number of other international groups, plus foreign governments. There's a ton of commercial stuff in space-- mostly telecom, imaging, and nav satellites. Even the US government now buys a great deal of its space imaging from commercial providers. And now there are the rebel asteroid miners and picture takers (Arkyd/Planetary Resources), too. Space is dominated by commercial interests (telecom, etc) and military (earth observing/listening). The stuff that NASA does in space is generally much smaller than either of those markets.
What there isn't a lot of is commercial manned space. There's not a lot of market for it at any price you're likely to see in the next decade or two. Just about anything you could want to do in earth orbit with people (short of saying "Dude, I was in space!!") is drastically cheaper to do with robotic missions.
I don't think there were many years when a shuttle launch was $500M. Typical program cost was closer to $4B/year for 4 launches/year, and if you divide total program cost by the number of launches it's about $1.5B/launch. And it didn't really cost less if you didn't launch it. It never really lived up to its promise, partly because reusability doesn't save you much when you're going to space unless you can avoid all the rework and retest. The cost of a piece of hardware is often incidental compared to the cost of verifying that it's going to have the reliability you need. So it doesn't save you much (and might cost more) to reuse a piece of hardware rather than just buying extras the first time through.
Objects IRL like a whiteboard/todo list/grocery list on your fridge don't need to be saved.
There's been a long stream of technologies for saving whiteboards. I'm sitting in a building that has at least two generations of them in different conference rooms-- one is a whiteboard that has a flexible writing surface that can be drawn past a scanner and printed (and presumably saved, but I've never seen that done). There's another that has special pens that measure their location in realtime to reproduce what's drawn. There have been many others. If you work in an environment where whiteboards are common, and people work on them dynamically, you very frequently want to "save" them. I usually just take a picture or two.
And back in the day, there was even a standard way to "save" a blackboard. You wrote "SAVE" in really big letters up in the corner and the after hours blackboard cleaner would leave it up until you erased where it said "save".
Bottom line. We all have multiple considerations for big decisions (which job should I take? which house should I buy, taking into account how close it is to the city, how much it costs, amount of yard space, number of bedrooms, etc.) You need to figure out which parameters are your most important considerations, and make a determination taking everything into account, but not letting something that might be a really unimportant facet outweigh the considerations that really matter to you.
The real value of AHP is in that last paragraph-- it's a structured way to make you think about what you want. I've generally seen it used to help groups make decisions, and it's useful, but it's also important to recognize that it's also gameable. The gaming is the valuable part because that brings your subtle biases more out in the open.
All an author does is submit a manuscript. The editor catches stuff like mispellings, typos, and other grammatical errors (but never about content). The manuscript goes back to the author for corrections and it's submitted again.
There are different levels of editor. There's generally a lot of "macro" editing where an editor will give general suggestions for changes, as well as identifying plot problems (for fiction) or clarity problems in non-fiction. The copy editing is what you describe, which can be after months or even years of macro editing. Very few authors generate manuscripts that are ready to send straight to a copy editor and then into the print process.
We're working on an ebook distribution model to put our ebooks in bookstores and give them credit as if they'd sold a paper book. Hopefully that will help out with some of the small retail channels. The catch for most publishers will be that for now it's not worth the trouble of DRM other than watermarking (and IMO, DRM isn't worth the trouble anyway). For us it's a way to get better visibility for customers and also try to support local places that we like to go and read.
If I had mod points I'd mod you up. I just recently got into publishing and it's pretty amazing how bad some good writers are. Bad in the sense that they construct weird sentences, or have terrible grammar, or can't spell (even with a spell checker), or gloss over plot holes or major inconsistencies. But they can often tell great stories better than people with good command of the mechanics, so you take them and help them clean the stuff up so people can read it. And it's much easier to take a great story and clean up the mechanics of the writing than the other way around.
It does go the other way sometimes too -- usually (but not always), the eBook is cheaper than the hardcover, but more often than not, the eBook seems to be priced more than the paperback, and is almost always more than a used book.
You'll find it mostly with small publishers. Unless you can do enormous print runs and have a big distribution network, it's expensive to deal with print. Small publishers are likely to do their print distribution via print-on-demand (the big ones do, too, now, but they keep it secret), and the cost of reproduction and distribution is a significant factor. You can make more profit on a $4.99 ebook than on a $14.99 paperback unless the page count is really low. That's why you see a lot of POD stuff in 6x9-- you typically pay the same per page up to 6x9, and then there's a bump in the page cost, so a lot of people will format everything 6x9 to keep the page count at a minimum.
It's really no different than what they did with paper books to drive the bricks and mortar stores out of business. As far as dealing with Amazon vs B&N - Amazon has their act together *way* better when it comes to interacting with suppliers. I recently bought another small publisher, and while Amazon was a little inconsistent with instructions on how to transfer titles, ultimately, everything was available to do online and could be done in about 10 minutes once we sort out which way to do it. B&N? We're lucky if we get a reply, let alone getting the titles transferred. We were collecting money right away from Amazon, while the people we bought out still get checks from B&N that they have to forward to us. My impression is that they're using paper processes to manage epublishing.
Amazon does have some hiccups-- their reporting is a little fuzzy on which titles sold at exactly what exchange rate in their foreign stores, but it's still not too painful.
If Amazon gets a monopoly it will only be because big publishers give it to them. The big publishers are so stuck on DRM that they give the device makers enough control to lock them to their stores. If it's easy to read the ebooks you buy the way you want to read them (any device, no active net connection), you can buy them anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen it in Germany, too, though it was a long time ago. I spent a year there as an undergrad in the mid-80's and we had a homeless drunk guy being disorderly and aggressive in the dorm. The police finally got called, and they sent all of two guys who showed up on foot. They calmed the guy down enough to be able to physically escort him away, one cop on either side, with their elbows linked through his, half to hold him up, half to keep him from flailing or trying to get away. IIRC they didn't even use handcuffs (which they had, along with guns and I probably sticks), and they just sort of walked him off into the night. He didn't get a beating, and the cops stayed friendly to everybody involved the whole time.
It's also a lot of work compared to other attack vectors.
Those QR codes mean you have to go out, find suitable places to physically stick them to, and then hope someone will actually scan them. Sounds like a lot more work, with far less results, than the more traditional routes.
And you have to pay actual money for those stickers or fliers that you're sticking to things, and maybe even have to pay someone to do it. More traditional all digital vectors probably give you a lot more bang for the buck.
QR codes do just encode straight data, text, or a link, but many of the sites that will generate them for free for you actually generate a link to their own site and forward to your site, so they can be doing the same kind of tracking. The best way to do them is to print the link (or at least the domain) in readable text along with the QR, so that you can at least check that they resolve the same way. There's plenty of free software that will generate good QR codes without the deceit, but most people who want to use them probably can't easily download and run code, and may not even realize that the code they downloaded from a site goes through a redirect.
Hehe -- and if all else fails, your wife might get these mistress pictures sent to her :)
It's Europe - she doesn't care: Mitterand Funeral
I think they should hand over the domain name to me now. For obvious reasons.
Are you a shill or are you serious?! The transaction cost on PayPal is ridiculously high as it is. I'm sure it can cover compliance with banking rules, with plenty left to spare.
They're one of the few places you can get different rates for micropayments (less than $10) on cc processing, which does make them less expensive for some types of transaction. Most of mine are less than $5, so I need that. But for regular cc processing they're comparable to regular banks/merchant accounts. Other than that, you're probably pretty accurate.
My neighborhood is littered with ~$500 weather stations (I think mostly oregon scientific) that are all connected to the internet and report to weather underground. I thought for a while about getting my own, and realized it was silly as it was pretty easy to interpolate from 3-4 stations within a half mile of me. They generally report data consistent with one another (temp, RH, wind, rainfall) and most update pretty frequently. I googled the Rainwise, and it looks like it has features that aren't critical in urban areas-- you don't need a mile range or solar power when you can plug it in in somebody's backyard.
The interesting thing about Weather Underground is that it the local weatherstations pretty much are just people who buy and maintain them themselves and hook them up to the net to share.
They're by no means a complete solution (and I personally think the satellites are necessary), Weather Underground is a really valuable cooperative weather resource.
High of 80 is kind of chilly for LA. The high here today is supposed to be 84 and I was almost regretting not bringing a sweatshirt on the ride to work this morning.
After living here for a while, the bay area feels like the north pole.
Indesign.
It's the only one I haven't really seen a F/OSS alternative for and it's very annoying. Indesign is horrible in many ways, and has bad behaviours and bugs that have survived multiple versions, but there doesn't seem to be a decent alternative. I would be more than happy to be proven wrong.
Often seen as an anti-vietnam war book, it was written well before that. It's much more about people in large nonsensical organizations.
Not to mention that everything is funnier when there's a duck involved.
I rode for a week in southern France about 10 years ago and found that they were extremely careful about passing us on the road. Most drivers gave plenty of room, and would often go fully into the opposite lane of a two lane road to pass, even when there was moderate traffic. As you say, the US is the polar opposite-- most drivers won't even cross a dashed yellow (passing allowed) on a totally empty road to pass a cyclist-- they'd rather squeeze you over to the edge of the road.
Herschel and Planck are at Earth-Sun L2 (solar orbit), not Earth-Moon L2 (earth orbit)
The US gov't has been depending on them for a quite a while, and the current model Soyuz are among the most reliable launch vehicles you can get. And Eurockot is cheap enough (and capable enough) for a shared launch that you almost can get a bunch of your friends together, build something in the garage, and fund the launch out of bake sales and kickstarter.
But really, my peeve is about equating "commercial space"=="commercial manned space". Space has been *very* commercial for decades, and the terminology that manned space advocates use tends to neglect that, or pretend it isn't so.
Russia has cheap reliable man rated stuff that they're willing to take any paying customer on, and there's not all that long a line of commercial customers waiting for rides on it.
Commercial spaceflight is really the only hope. And so far we have one company that appears to be capable of doing it, and a very large number of failed efforts, which I guess is what is to be expected. We're really lucky to have that one company.
This is a pet peeve of mine. People need to stop equating commercial manned space with commercial space. Space is extremely commercial already. US based launch capability is provided entirely by commercial entities, and there's no shortage of them-- Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital, and SpaceX. There's also ArianeSpace, Eurockot (bargain launches), and a number of other international groups, plus foreign governments. There's a ton of commercial stuff in space-- mostly telecom, imaging, and nav satellites. Even the US government now buys a great deal of its space imaging from commercial providers. And now there are the rebel asteroid miners and picture takers (Arkyd/Planetary Resources), too. Space is dominated by commercial interests (telecom, etc) and military (earth observing/listening). The stuff that NASA does in space is generally much smaller than either of those markets.
What there isn't a lot of is commercial manned space. There's not a lot of market for it at any price you're likely to see in the next decade or two. Just about anything you could want to do in earth orbit with people (short of saying "Dude, I was in space!!") is drastically cheaper to do with robotic missions.
I don't think there were many years when a shuttle launch was $500M. Typical program cost was closer to $4B/year for 4 launches/year, and if you divide total program cost by the number of launches it's about $1.5B/launch. And it didn't really cost less if you didn't launch it. It never really lived up to its promise, partly because reusability doesn't save you much when you're going to space unless you can avoid all the rework and retest. The cost of a piece of hardware is often incidental compared to the cost of verifying that it's going to have the reliability you need. So it doesn't save you much (and might cost more) to reuse a piece of hardware rather than just buying extras the first time through.
Objects IRL like a whiteboard/todo list/grocery list on your fridge don't need to be saved.
There's been a long stream of technologies for saving whiteboards. I'm sitting in a building that has at least two generations of them in different conference rooms-- one is a whiteboard that has a flexible writing surface that can be drawn past a scanner and printed (and presumably saved, but I've never seen that done). There's another that has special pens that measure their location in realtime to reproduce what's drawn. There have been many others. If you work in an environment where whiteboards are common, and people work on them dynamically, you very frequently want to "save" them. I usually just take a picture or two.
And back in the day, there was even a standard way to "save" a blackboard. You wrote "SAVE" in really big letters up in the corner and the after hours blackboard cleaner would leave it up until you erased where it said "save".
Bottom line. We all have multiple considerations for big decisions (which job should I take? which house should I buy, taking into account how close it is to the city, how much it costs, amount of yard space, number of bedrooms, etc.) You need to figure out which parameters are your most important considerations, and make a determination taking everything into account, but not letting something that might be a really unimportant facet outweigh the considerations that really matter to you.
The real value of AHP is in that last paragraph-- it's a structured way to make you think about what you want. I've generally seen it used to help groups make decisions, and it's useful, but it's also important to recognize that it's also gameable. The gaming is the valuable part because that brings your subtle biases more out in the open.
All an author does is submit a manuscript. The editor catches stuff like mispellings, typos, and other grammatical errors (but never about content). The manuscript goes back to the author for corrections and it's submitted again.
There are different levels of editor. There's generally a lot of "macro" editing where an editor will give general suggestions for changes, as well as identifying plot problems (for fiction) or clarity problems in non-fiction. The copy editing is what you describe, which can be after months or even years of macro editing. Very few authors generate manuscripts that are ready to send straight to a copy editor and then into the print process.
Google
Also, If the publishers where willing to do without DRM there is nothing stopping them from setting up their own store.
Google play isn't much of a competitor-- it looks like you can only read when you have a net connection (I'd like to be wrong about that).
I totally agree about the DRM, though. Many publishers are so hard over on DRM that they'll sink themselves rather than go DRM free.
We're working on an ebook distribution model to put our ebooks in bookstores and give them credit as if they'd sold a paper book. Hopefully that will help out with some of the small retail channels. The catch for most publishers will be that for now it's not worth the trouble of DRM other than watermarking (and IMO, DRM isn't worth the trouble anyway). For us it's a way to get better visibility for customers and also try to support local places that we like to go and read.
If I had mod points I'd mod you up. I just recently got into publishing and it's pretty amazing how bad some good writers are. Bad in the sense that they construct weird sentences, or have terrible grammar, or can't spell (even with a spell checker), or gloss over plot holes or major inconsistencies. But they can often tell great stories better than people with good command of the mechanics, so you take them and help them clean the stuff up so people can read it. And it's much easier to take a great story and clean up the mechanics of the writing than the other way around.
It does go the other way sometimes too -- usually (but not always), the eBook is cheaper than the hardcover, but more often than not, the eBook seems to be priced more than the paperback, and is almost always more than a used book.
You'll find it mostly with small publishers. Unless you can do enormous print runs and have a big distribution network, it's expensive to deal with print. Small publishers are likely to do their print distribution via print-on-demand (the big ones do, too, now, but they keep it secret), and the cost of reproduction and distribution is a significant factor. You can make more profit on a $4.99 ebook than on a $14.99 paperback unless the page count is really low. That's why you see a lot of POD stuff in 6x9-- you typically pay the same per page up to 6x9, and then there's a bump in the page cost, so a lot of people will format everything 6x9 to keep the page count at a minimum.
It's really no different than what they did with paper books to drive the bricks and mortar stores out of business. As far as dealing with Amazon vs B&N - Amazon has their act together *way* better when it comes to interacting with suppliers. I recently bought another small publisher, and while Amazon was a little inconsistent with instructions on how to transfer titles, ultimately, everything was available to do online and could be done in about 10 minutes once we sort out which way to do it. B&N? We're lucky if we get a reply, let alone getting the titles transferred. We were collecting money right away from Amazon, while the people we bought out still get checks from B&N that they have to forward to us. My impression is that they're using paper processes to manage epublishing.
Amazon does have some hiccups-- their reporting is a little fuzzy on which titles sold at exactly what exchange rate in their foreign stores, but it's still not too painful.
If Amazon gets a monopoly it will only be because big publishers give it to them. The big publishers are so stuck on DRM that they give the device makers enough control to lock them to their stores. If it's easy to read the ebooks you buy the way you want to read them (any device, no active net connection), you can buy them anywhere.