You mean Congress, the President and VP and their aides get the same employer subsidies the rest of the federal workers get, it's just that instead of using the couple of plans negotiated by the federal government specifically for its employees, this subset of the federal employees will be buying their insurance from the state/federal exchanges. Will they be paying less than people who don't have an employer subsidizing their insurance and don't qualify for Medicaid assistance? Sure. But it's not the special sweetheart deal that the GOP and the right-wing media makes it out to be.
Bank of America, Citigroup and Discover all have virtual credit card programs. I think BoA and Citi are better than Discover. While all three limit the virtual credit card to a single merchant, BoA and Citi allow you to set lower credit limits and shorter expiration dates, Discover's credit limit and expiration date is the same as your real card. You can also bump up the credit limit and expiration date at BoA and Citi for repeat purchases from the virtual card's merchant. I think that if you tie a virtual credit card to a PayPal account, it can pay out to multiple PayPal accounts, so you're probably better off not using Discover with PayPal if you don't trust PayPal or the merchant. Amex shut down their virtual credit card program in 2004, I don't think it's been restarted. There may be other banks with virtual credit cards, but they're rare.
I've bought a lot of ebooks (well over a thousand), and most of them I bought on sale before agency pricing model took effect or after the settlements. I never bought any ebooks from Amazon before agency pricing model, and I calculated that I would have had to pay triple, at least $3,000 more, after agency pricing model took effect over what I paid. With that sort of price increase, I don't think they're being unfairly punished.
While Amazon's monopsony might make it harder for publishers to raise prices, they weren't alone in discounting best seller ebooks or hardcovers, sometimes even below cost. Who knows, maybe it would have forced the publishers to revise their business practices so they aren't so dependent on the blockbuster authors with the several million dollar advances. As for being disrupted by new technologies, it would be trivial for the publishers to compete with the used book stores by adding a new pricing tier at about half the new paperback book price when the paperback print run is over (instead of raising it to trade paperback prices like some publishers are doing). But they're not going to do that because they're afraid it will cannibalize the sales of their newly released books.
IANAL either, but they're not being penalized for doing a bunch of legal activities, they're being penalized for the collusion. The penalty is a limitation in their ability to make contracts using the legal activities they used during the collusion so that it will be harder for them to collude again in the near future. This includes forcing Apple to stagger their contracts with the publishers.
There's nothing illegal in the way Amazon got it's monopsony by sometimes selling ebooks cheaper by accepting lower profit margins, providing an easy way to buy ebooks and install them on the ereader, and creating ereaders that could only decrypt DRMd ebooks sold by Amazon. In general, once a Kindle owner, always a Kindle owner thanks to publisher DRM. If the publishers wanted to make it harder for Amazon to keep their monopsony, they should have dropped DRM or changed their contracts to stipulate the ebook format so Amazon couldn't lock Kindle owners into Amazon's proprietary format. Just because the publishers were afraid that Amazon was going to use it's monopsony to keep prices lower (a la Wal-Mart) doesn't give them the right to engage in collusion to fix prices.
That's because it's always been a wealth transfer program. When it was enacted, it was designed to tax workers only the amount needed to pay for the benefits received by the current retiree beneficiaries. The program was changed in 1977 and again in 1983 to collect deliberately surpluses "to ensure solvency when the baby boomers retire". Since the surpluses were used to pay for federal deficits giving the trust fund IOUs from the general treasury, it really means that when the boomer retires, some of their benefits will be paid for by general revenues taxes instead of social security taxes.
I was mostly buying my ebooks on sale, so the Apple/publisher collusion would have cost me between 2 and 3 times as much as what I paid before agency pricing went into effect. I've probably purchased as many books this year after the publishers settled with the DOJ than I did the 3 years in which agency pricing was in effect.
I suppose that if Toyota and Honda were to secretly collude to raise prices across the board, you'd use an the example that a Toyota Tacoma (pickup truck) is not essentially similar goods to a Honda Accord (sedan). It may well be that certain categories of books have different price points, for example historical biographies are more expensive than contemporary biographies because the expected sales per title are a lot lower for the former. If Macmillan and HarperCollins were to secretly decide to jointly to raise the price of all biographies by 15%, that would be illegal price fixing, even if Macmillan only sold historical biographies and HarperCollins only sold contemporary and therefore all Macmillan biographies cost more than HarperCollins.
I believe the DOJ is arguing that between windowing, most favored retailer agreements with Apple, and enforcing a no-discounting sales model, all of which were organized in secret discussions between the 6 companies was a form of price fixing and hence illegal. It's not illegal if Macmillan decides to raise the new title mass market paperback price to $11, and then a few days later the rest of the publishers follow suit, as long as they didn't meet in advance and agree to all raise their prices.
Back in the 80s, I visited a MIT lab that used laundry detergents for their names, and each machine had the name from the detergent box taped to the hard drive. At the time, the hard drives were about the size of a washer and had a removable disk. Each computer was connected to a single hard drive. How times have changed....
At my work, they're more practical, and the first letter indicates domain (test, production, etc), second letter the OS, third letter server application type (webserver, database server, app server, etc), followed by a short name and number. When there are hundreds of servers, cutesy names just don't cut it.
In another forum, the founder of Smashwords was claiming that they didn't have excessive chargebacks, and that their most egregious chargeback was from someone in India using stolen credit cards to buy self-help books and books on spiritual enlightenment. Still, it makes me wonder whether Amazon is getting the same treatment from PayPal. I note that when I go to a site that displays all the Amazon freebies that became free within the last day and disable the filter for erotica, the titles indicate that of the free erotica there's a high percentage of stories that appear to violate PayPal's incest restriction, with titles with mentioning a parent, offspring or sibling, or using the term pseudo-incest. I assume the non-free erotica covers the same topics and fetishes with roughly the same percentages, although I have no interest in verifying it. I also suspect that some of the paranormal romances involving werewolves sold by both Amazon and Smashwords would also violate PayPal's restrictions.
Part of the problem for Smashwords is that they have embedded PayPal into their entire business process, and use PayPal to pay some or all of their authors. If they don't capitulate, at least for the short term, PayPal can severely damage their business by freezing their funds and shut down their disbursements to authors. I suspect Smashwords will be reassessing their internal systems over the next few months.
If you had bothered to RFA, you'd see that Climate Healers are trying to bring about reforestation by enabling these people in poor countries to have cheap solar cooking that can be used in their current way of life, just replacing wood for the heat source for their cooking. The original attempts failed because Climate Healers didn't do a good enough job of creating solar cooking replacements that fit with their current schedules, which includes cooking early in the morning and late in the day when the sunlight is inadequate for direct solar heating.
Just because something is traditional and has been done for centuries doesn't mean that it's an activity that should be continued. Slash and burn agriculture and using wood for cooking both work for very low population densities. As the population increases, there's less land available for forests, and the population quickly runs out of mature forest that can be used for these techniques.
As for electricity, the people in the poor countries want electricity also. They're currently burning stuff, like oil or candles to have light after dark, and electricity from renewable sources allows them to have the light without using oil and candles.
This suit has nothing to do with public domain works. It is whether the universities and HathiTrust have a fair use right to digitize copyrighted works for which they can't request permission because they can't find the copyright holder and make digital copies available to students and faculty. This fair use claim is based on one of the four factors for determining fair use of a US copyrighted work: the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes. The authors and Authors Guilds are saying the universities and HathiTrust are using a too broad an interpretation of this fair use factor, and besides that, they're using a tainted copy of the digital work because they're getting the copy from Google, which they claim is an unauthorized copy which would fail the fair use tests.
They're not suing the universities and HathiTrust over 200 year old books which are in the public domain, they're suing over books which are clearly copyrighted because the US copyright was renewed and has not lapsed, but universities and HathiTrust can't find the current copyright holders. One of the four factors of fair use in the US is the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes. In this case, the universities and HathiTrust claim the digitizing these works and making them available to students and faculty is fair use, and the authors/Authors Guilds are claiming this is too broad an interpretation of this factor in determining fair use.
I don't know about the medical supply houses, but according to finance.yahoo.com, for profit healthcare plans (i.e. the insurance companies) have an average profit margin of 4.5% compared to average profit margin of 13.2% for medical device suppliers. When the insurance company's contract requires the doctor to write down 30% - 50% of the listed fee, it's not turning into profit for the insurance company, it's a discount that is passed on to the insured in lower premiums.
The thing people forget about the public cloud is that it's metered usage. For the most part, if a business wants to go to cloud computing, they're going to want to have an internal private cloud so they can have controlled fixed costs, and have overflow capacity available in a public cloud for when management decides the overflow is necessary. If they rely solely on public clouds, they're going to have to have careful monitoring of the public cloud's usage. For most companies, heads will roll if the company incurs multiple times normal monthly cloud computing costs because of things out of the company's control, like cyber attacks, stealth use of the company's cloud resources, etc. For a small company, surprise public cloud bills could be fatal.
It may be that a lot of companies will turn to externally managed private clouds, which is not really all that much different from today's managed hosts at remote ISPs. In that case some of the "loser jobs" will probably be migrating from individual companies to the cloud providers.
Yes and no. iXsystems sponsored development of FreeNAS to upgrade it to FreeBSD 8, so it's still FreeBSD based, but there is a fork of FreeNAS that is Linux-based called OpenMediaVault.
When Tolkien was alive, the copyright term in the UK (where he was a citizen) was life+50. If they hadn't added another 20 years to the term, his works would still be under copyright until 2024.
These works have copyrights that fall under the US copyright laws, which at the time of publication originally had a term of 28 years + an optional 28 year extension (which required explicit renewal), and later laws which retroactively extended the term of copyrighted works from 56 years to 75 and then 95 years. Whether the author is alive or dead is immaterial to whether the copyright had been renewed after the original 28 year term. In this particular work of Poul Anderson, the PG volunteer did not realize that the story was under copyright because it was part of a greater work that was properly renewed.
Ankh is wrong about how copyright works across international borders. For example, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind is public domain in Canada and Australia because she died over 50 years ago, but not in the US because the term is 95 years or UK, where the term is life+70. Australia changed to life+70 a few years back, but anything in the PD when that happened remained in the PD, and since Mitchell's works were in the PD in Australia at the time, they are still in the PD.
PG wasn't intentionally testing the boundaries. The story in question was part of a novel, serialized in a magazine, and the name of the novel didn't match up with the name of the story so they missed that it had been renewed. PG checked with their lawyer, and he said the Bears were correct and the story was in copyright, so PG pulled it, and will be changing their policy on how they determine whether stories in magazines with elapsed copyrights have also elapsed. Most of the stories from science fiction magazines with elapsed copyrights are not parts of novels, they are stand alone short stories, and if their individual copyright was not renewed, they're now in the public domain. I doubt that there are more than a dozen titles in the PG catalog are at risk.
Copyright expiration is all over the map
on
The Hobbit On Hold
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· Score: 2, Informative
In life+50 countries like Canada, it will be 2024 (it becomes PD Jan 1 of the year after the 50th anniversary of the death), but in the US, since it was copyrighted under the rules in place then, with the extensions (geekoid forgot about the 20 year extension in 1998), the copyright will expire in 2033. In the UK and EU and many other countries where it is life+70, it will be PD in 2044. This is all assuming the terms aren't extended yet again.
Amazon will not be able to price match the ebook against the hard cover when there's a hardcover price war. Wal-Mart, Target and Amazon have been having a price war on best-seller hardcovers lately, in the $7.99-$9.99 range, and MacMillian's CEO has already said that that is too low a price for a new ebook. Given MacMillan's current track record (most ebooks still sell at hardcover price even after the mass market paperback is released), I don't expect MacMillan to drop the price of the ebook to match the discounted hardcover.
There can be two reasons for this, it really does cost more to produce it, or the publisher is evil
In some cases, the print book was created prior to the advent of ebooks, and so it costs about as much to create the ebook master files as it does to create the master files for a new print edition. If the expected number of sales of the ebook is sufficiently less than even a hardback print run, then it's not profitable for the publisher unless they price it up at a trade paperback or hardback prices. Thanks to the tower of eBabel, there's usually at least 3-4 formats the publisher must prep, although if they have good software, that conversion shouldn't be that hard. Even so, as someone who is involved at Distributed Proofreaders, I can tell you that even for a simple novel for which you don't have the original electronic source documents, the amount of time it takes to create the master files (for example, scan the book, OCR it, proofread it, generate XML master) at minimum is probably about 8-10 hours. Even if you freelance this, it's probably going to take a couple thousand to do this. Since our publisher is afraid of copyright infringement, add in the cost of DRM, another couple thousand. Add in Author royalties, the rest of the publisher overhead including profit margin, and the ebook store's markup, it really does cost more than $9.99 to break even if you have projected sales of about 2,000 ebooks.
In other cases, the publisher created an electronic master document from which the hardbound and mass market paperback editions as well as ebook formats are created. The publisher made the ebook available at the same time as the HB, and priced it the same as the HB. Then, when the MMPB came out a year later, the publisher kept the price of the ebook at the HB price. Why? Because the publishers don't like ebooks, they're afraid that ebook sales will cannibalize the print editions, and any cheap prices on ebooks will get the consumer to expect all books to be priced cheaply. You're proof of it, in their eyes.
In MacMillan's PR campaign for their side of the Amazon dispute, they claim that with their agent model, they will release the ebooks at the same time as the initial HB release, price it around the price of a trade paperback, and eventually drop the price to below that of a MMPB, presumably when the MMPB is released. This sounds good until you take a look at MacMillan's track record. Most of their ebooks are currently priced at HB or TPB prices, even though there's a MMPB available, and their TOR/Forge SF/F imprint has almost no ebooks available. If they really do change their ways, great, if not, it won't be any different from now, where I don't buy ebooks from MacMillan because either they're too expensive, or unavailable.
Unless Amazon is the ebook publisher, the ebook is usually available from other ebook stores or the publisher's website. However, Amazon is trying to become the sole distributor, by offering authors 70% royalties if Amazon is their publisher, the list is between $2.99 and $9.99, below the price of any print copies, allows Text To Speech, and various other caveats beneficial to Amazon.
The paperback edition will eventually cost less than the 9.99 to 14.99 that Macmillan wants to charge.
While it is true that MacMillan claims that their model will have dynamic pricing that will drop the price from the $15 starting price eventually down to $6, I don't believe it. If you look at MacMillan ebooks, you'll find most of them are still priced at hardback prices even years after the mass market paperback has been released. For example, consider the backlist Kinsey Millhone mysteries by MacMillan author Sue Grafton (i.e., all but the most recent one that's not yet been released in MMPB). I compared the prices at MacMillan, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Fictionwise, and Books on Board. MacMillan is charging $7.99 for all of the MMPBs, and $14 for all of the ebooks. The other ebook stores are probably the top selling ebook stores after Amazon. There are probably 50 titles between these 4 stores, and about a dozen are at or below the MMPB price, about a dozen are selling for over $20, and the rest are selling for between $10 and $17. Randomly looking at other fiction at MacMillan's website, if they sell an ebook edition, unless it's only been published as a MMPB, the ebook is almost always priced higher than a MMPB.
Second, despite SF and Fantasy readers tending to be early adopters of tech devices like ebook readers, very few of MacMillan's SF/F imprint Tor/Forge are released as ebooks. About 3 years ago, Tor did some experiments with Webscriptions (primarily associated, but not exclusively, with Baen), but Tor's parent company shut it down. In addition, MacMillan's CEO refuses to sell ebooks to libraries http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/21/technology/in-lean-times-e-books-find-a-friend-libraries.html.
I don't doubt that ebook pricing is somewhat broken, and Amazon is part of the problem. Whether MacMillan likes it or not, the average ebook consumer does not value the ebook to be worth the same price as a hardback, and probably not even as much as a MMPB. You can't sell it, you can't get it signed by the author, you can't loan it, etc. When a best seller is getting heavily discounted by online and bricks and mortar retailers alike, it's unreasonable for MacMillan to expect that the ebook consumer should have to pay two to three times the hardback price, but that's exactly what they are trying to achieve by moving to the agency model where the retailer is unable to set its own price. And if MacMillan continues to overprice ebooks as they are presently doing, ebook consumers will stop buying.
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You mean Congress, the President and VP and their aides get the same employer subsidies the rest of the federal workers get, it's just that instead of using the couple of plans negotiated by the federal government specifically for its employees, this subset of the federal employees will be buying their insurance from the state/federal exchanges. Will they be paying less than people who don't have an employer subsidizing their insurance and don't qualify for Medicaid assistance? Sure. But it's not the special sweetheart deal that the GOP and the right-wing media makes it out to be.
Bank of America, Citigroup and Discover all have virtual credit card programs. I think BoA and Citi are better than Discover. While all three limit the virtual credit card to a single merchant, BoA and Citi allow you to set lower credit limits and shorter expiration dates, Discover's credit limit and expiration date is the same as your real card. You can also bump up the credit limit and expiration date at BoA and Citi for repeat purchases from the virtual card's merchant. I think that if you tie a virtual credit card to a PayPal account, it can pay out to multiple PayPal accounts, so you're probably better off not using Discover with PayPal if you don't trust PayPal or the merchant. Amex shut down their virtual credit card program in 2004, I don't think it's been restarted. There may be other banks with virtual credit cards, but they're rare.
I've bought a lot of ebooks (well over a thousand), and most of them I bought on sale before agency pricing model took effect or after the settlements. I never bought any ebooks from Amazon before agency pricing model, and I calculated that I would have had to pay triple, at least $3,000 more, after agency pricing model took effect over what I paid. With that sort of price increase, I don't think they're being unfairly punished.
While Amazon's monopsony might make it harder for publishers to raise prices, they weren't alone in discounting best seller ebooks or hardcovers, sometimes even below cost. Who knows, maybe it would have forced the publishers to revise their business practices so they aren't so dependent on the blockbuster authors with the several million dollar advances. As for being disrupted by new technologies, it would be trivial for the publishers to compete with the used book stores by adding a new pricing tier at about half the new paperback book price when the paperback print run is over (instead of raising it to trade paperback prices like some publishers are doing). But they're not going to do that because they're afraid it will cannibalize the sales of their newly released books.
IANAL either, but they're not being penalized for doing a bunch of legal activities, they're being penalized for the collusion. The penalty is a limitation in their ability to make contracts using the legal activities they used during the collusion so that it will be harder for them to collude again in the near future. This includes forcing Apple to stagger their contracts with the publishers.
There's nothing illegal in the way Amazon got it's monopsony by sometimes selling ebooks cheaper by accepting lower profit margins, providing an easy way to buy ebooks and install them on the ereader, and creating ereaders that could only decrypt DRMd ebooks sold by Amazon. In general, once a Kindle owner, always a Kindle owner thanks to publisher DRM. If the publishers wanted to make it harder for Amazon to keep their monopsony, they should have dropped DRM or changed their contracts to stipulate the ebook format so Amazon couldn't lock Kindle owners into Amazon's proprietary format. Just because the publishers were afraid that Amazon was going to use it's monopsony to keep prices lower (a la Wal-Mart) doesn't give them the right to engage in collusion to fix prices.
That's because it's always been a wealth transfer program. When it was enacted, it was designed to tax workers only the amount needed to pay for the benefits received by the current retiree beneficiaries. The program was changed in 1977 and again in 1983 to collect deliberately surpluses "to ensure solvency when the baby boomers retire". Since the surpluses were used to pay for federal deficits giving the trust fund IOUs from the general treasury, it really means that when the boomer retires, some of their benefits will be paid for by general revenues taxes instead of social security taxes.
I was mostly buying my ebooks on sale, so the Apple/publisher collusion would have cost me between 2 and 3 times as much as what I paid before agency pricing went into effect. I've probably purchased as many books this year after the publishers settled with the DOJ than I did the 3 years in which agency pricing was in effect.
I suppose that if Toyota and Honda were to secretly collude to raise prices across the board, you'd use an the example that a Toyota Tacoma (pickup truck) is not essentially similar goods to a Honda Accord (sedan). It may well be that certain categories of books have different price points, for example historical biographies are more expensive than contemporary biographies because the expected sales per title are a lot lower for the former. If Macmillan and HarperCollins were to secretly decide to jointly to raise the price of all biographies by 15%, that would be illegal price fixing, even if Macmillan only sold historical biographies and HarperCollins only sold contemporary and therefore all Macmillan biographies cost more than HarperCollins.
I believe the DOJ is arguing that between windowing, most favored retailer agreements with Apple, and enforcing a no-discounting sales model, all of which were organized in secret discussions between the 6 companies was a form of price fixing and hence illegal. It's not illegal if Macmillan decides to raise the new title mass market paperback price to $11, and then a few days later the rest of the publishers follow suit, as long as they didn't meet in advance and agree to all raise their prices.
Back in the 80s, I visited a MIT lab that used laundry detergents for their names, and each machine had the name from the detergent box taped to the hard drive. At the time, the hard drives were about the size of a washer and had a removable disk. Each computer was connected to a single hard drive. How times have changed....
At my work, they're more practical, and the first letter indicates domain (test, production, etc), second letter the OS, third letter server application type (webserver, database server, app server, etc), followed by a short name and number. When there are hundreds of servers, cutesy names just don't cut it.
In another forum, the founder of Smashwords was claiming that they didn't have excessive chargebacks, and that their most egregious chargeback was from someone in India using stolen credit cards to buy self-help books and books on spiritual enlightenment. Still, it makes me wonder whether Amazon is getting the same treatment from PayPal. I note that when I go to a site that displays all the Amazon freebies that became free within the last day and disable the filter for erotica, the titles indicate that of the free erotica there's a high percentage of stories that appear to violate PayPal's incest restriction, with titles with mentioning a parent, offspring or sibling, or using the term pseudo-incest. I assume the non-free erotica covers the same topics and fetishes with roughly the same percentages, although I have no interest in verifying it. I also suspect that some of the paranormal romances involving werewolves sold by both Amazon and Smashwords would also violate PayPal's restrictions.
Part of the problem for Smashwords is that they have embedded PayPal into their entire business process, and use PayPal to pay some or all of their authors. If they don't capitulate, at least for the short term, PayPal can severely damage their business by freezing their funds and shut down their disbursements to authors. I suspect Smashwords will be reassessing their internal systems over the next few months.
If you had bothered to RFA, you'd see that Climate Healers are trying to bring about reforestation by enabling these people in poor countries to have cheap solar cooking that can be used in their current way of life, just replacing wood for the heat source for their cooking. The original attempts failed because Climate Healers didn't do a good enough job of creating solar cooking replacements that fit with their current schedules, which includes cooking early in the morning and late in the day when the sunlight is inadequate for direct solar heating.
Just because something is traditional and has been done for centuries doesn't mean that it's an activity that should be continued. Slash and burn agriculture and using wood for cooking both work for very low population densities. As the population increases, there's less land available for forests, and the population quickly runs out of mature forest that can be used for these techniques.
As for electricity, the people in the poor countries want electricity also. They're currently burning stuff, like oil or candles to have light after dark, and electricity from renewable sources allows them to have the light without using oil and candles.
This suit has nothing to do with public domain works. It is whether the universities and HathiTrust have a fair use right to digitize copyrighted works for which they can't request permission because they can't find the copyright holder and make digital copies available to students and faculty. This fair use claim is based on one of the four factors for determining fair use of a US copyrighted work: the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes. The authors and Authors Guilds are saying the universities and HathiTrust are using a too broad an interpretation of this fair use factor, and besides that, they're using a tainted copy of the digital work because they're getting the copy from Google, which they claim is an unauthorized copy which would fail the fair use tests.
They're not suing the universities and HathiTrust over 200 year old books which are in the public domain, they're suing over books which are clearly copyrighted because the US copyright was renewed and has not lapsed, but universities and HathiTrust can't find the current copyright holders. One of the four factors of fair use in the US is the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes. In this case, the universities and HathiTrust claim the digitizing these works and making them available to students and faculty is fair use, and the authors/Authors Guilds are claiming this is too broad an interpretation of this factor in determining fair use.
I don't know about the medical supply houses, but according to finance.yahoo.com, for profit healthcare plans (i.e. the insurance companies) have an average profit margin of 4.5% compared to average profit margin of 13.2% for medical device suppliers. When the insurance company's contract requires the doctor to write down 30% - 50% of the listed fee, it's not turning into profit for the insurance company, it's a discount that is passed on to the insured in lower premiums.
The thing people forget about the public cloud is that it's metered usage. For the most part, if a business wants to go to cloud computing, they're going to want to have an internal private cloud so they can have controlled fixed costs, and have overflow capacity available in a public cloud for when management decides the overflow is necessary. If they rely solely on public clouds, they're going to have to have careful monitoring of the public cloud's usage. For most companies, heads will roll if the company incurs multiple times normal monthly cloud computing costs because of things out of the company's control, like cyber attacks, stealth use of the company's cloud resources, etc. For a small company, surprise public cloud bills could be fatal.
It may be that a lot of companies will turn to externally managed private clouds, which is not really all that much different from today's managed hosts at remote ISPs. In that case some of the "loser jobs" will probably be migrating from individual companies to the cloud providers.
Yes and no. iXsystems sponsored development of FreeNAS to upgrade it to FreeBSD 8, so it's still FreeBSD based, but there is a fork of FreeNAS that is Linux-based called OpenMediaVault.
When Tolkien was alive, the copyright term in the UK (where he was a citizen) was life+50. If they hadn't added another 20 years to the term, his works would still be under copyright until 2024.
These works have copyrights that fall under the US copyright laws, which at the time of publication originally had a term of 28 years + an optional 28 year extension (which required explicit renewal), and later laws which retroactively extended the term of copyrighted works from 56 years to 75 and then 95 years. Whether the author is alive or dead is immaterial to whether the copyright had been renewed after the original 28 year term. In this particular work of Poul Anderson, the PG volunteer did not realize that the story was under copyright because it was part of a greater work that was properly renewed.
Ankh is wrong about how copyright works across international borders. For example, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind is public domain in Canada and Australia because she died over 50 years ago, but not in the US because the term is 95 years or UK, where the term is life+70. Australia changed to life+70 a few years back, but anything in the PD when that happened remained in the PD, and since Mitchell's works were in the PD in Australia at the time, they are still in the PD.
PG wasn't intentionally testing the boundaries. The story in question was part of a novel, serialized in a magazine, and the name of the novel didn't match up with the name of the story so they missed that it had been renewed. PG checked with their lawyer, and he said the Bears were correct and the story was in copyright, so PG pulled it, and will be changing their policy on how they determine whether stories in magazines with elapsed copyrights have also elapsed. Most of the stories from science fiction magazines with elapsed copyrights are not parts of novels, they are stand alone short stories, and if their individual copyright was not renewed, they're now in the public domain. I doubt that there are more than a dozen titles in the PG catalog are at risk.
In life+50 countries like Canada, it will be 2024 (it becomes PD Jan 1 of the year after the 50th anniversary of the death), but in the US, since it was copyrighted under the rules in place then, with the extensions (geekoid forgot about the 20 year extension in 1998), the copyright will expire in 2033. In the UK and EU and many other countries where it is life+70, it will be PD in 2044. This is all assuming the terms aren't extended yet again.
Amazon will not be able to price match the ebook against the hard cover when there's a hardcover price war. Wal-Mart, Target and Amazon have been having a price war on best-seller hardcovers lately, in the $7.99-$9.99 range, and MacMillian's CEO has already said that that is too low a price for a new ebook. Given MacMillan's current track record (most ebooks still sell at hardcover price even after the mass market paperback is released), I don't expect MacMillan to drop the price of the ebook to match the discounted hardcover.
There can be two reasons for this, it really does cost more to produce it, or the publisher is evil
In some cases, the print book was created prior to the advent of ebooks, and so it costs about as much to create the ebook master files as it does to create the master files for a new print edition. If the expected number of sales of the ebook is sufficiently less than even a hardback print run, then it's not profitable for the publisher unless they price it up at a trade paperback or hardback prices. Thanks to the tower of eBabel, there's usually at least 3-4 formats the publisher must prep, although if they have good software, that conversion shouldn't be that hard. Even so, as someone who is involved at Distributed Proofreaders, I can tell you that even for a simple novel for which you don't have the original electronic source documents, the amount of time it takes to create the master files (for example, scan the book, OCR it, proofread it, generate XML master) at minimum is probably about 8-10 hours. Even if you freelance this, it's probably going to take a couple thousand to do this. Since our publisher is afraid of copyright infringement, add in the cost of DRM, another couple thousand. Add in Author royalties, the rest of the publisher overhead including profit margin, and the ebook store's markup, it really does cost more than $9.99 to break even if you have projected sales of about 2,000 ebooks.
In other cases, the publisher created an electronic master document from which the hardbound and mass market paperback editions as well as ebook formats are created. The publisher made the ebook available at the same time as the HB, and priced it the same as the HB. Then, when the MMPB came out a year later, the publisher kept the price of the ebook at the HB price. Why? Because the publishers don't like ebooks, they're afraid that ebook sales will cannibalize the print editions, and any cheap prices on ebooks will get the consumer to expect all books to be priced cheaply. You're proof of it, in their eyes.
In MacMillan's PR campaign for their side of the Amazon dispute, they claim that with their agent model, they will release the ebooks at the same time as the initial HB release, price it around the price of a trade paperback, and eventually drop the price to below that of a MMPB, presumably when the MMPB is released. This sounds good until you take a look at MacMillan's track record. Most of their ebooks are currently priced at HB or TPB prices, even though there's a MMPB available, and their TOR/Forge SF/F imprint has almost no ebooks available. If they really do change their ways, great, if not, it won't be any different from now, where I don't buy ebooks from MacMillan because either they're too expensive, or unavailable.
Unless Amazon is the ebook publisher, the ebook is usually available from other ebook stores or the publisher's website. However, Amazon is trying to become the sole distributor, by offering authors 70% royalties if Amazon is their publisher, the list is between $2.99 and $9.99, below the price of any print copies, allows Text To Speech, and various other caveats beneficial to Amazon.
The paperback edition will eventually cost less than the 9.99 to 14.99 that Macmillan wants to charge.
While it is true that MacMillan claims that their model will have dynamic pricing that will drop the price from the $15 starting price eventually down to $6, I don't believe it. If you look at MacMillan ebooks, you'll find most of them are still priced at hardback prices even years after the mass market paperback has been released. For example, consider the backlist Kinsey Millhone mysteries by MacMillan author Sue Grafton (i.e., all but the most recent one that's not yet been released in MMPB). I compared the prices at MacMillan, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Fictionwise, and Books on Board. MacMillan is charging $7.99 for all of the MMPBs, and $14 for all of the ebooks. The other ebook stores are probably the top selling ebook stores after Amazon. There are probably 50 titles between these 4 stores, and about a dozen are at or below the MMPB price, about a dozen are selling for over $20, and the rest are selling for between $10 and $17. Randomly looking at other fiction at MacMillan's website, if they sell an ebook edition, unless it's only been published as a MMPB, the ebook is almost always priced higher than a MMPB.
Second, despite SF and Fantasy readers tending to be early adopters of tech devices like ebook readers, very few of MacMillan's SF/F imprint Tor/Forge are released as ebooks. About 3 years ago, Tor did some experiments with Webscriptions (primarily associated, but not exclusively, with Baen), but Tor's parent company shut it down. In addition, MacMillan's CEO refuses to sell ebooks to libraries http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/21/technology/in-lean-times-e-books-find-a-friend-libraries.html.
I don't doubt that ebook pricing is somewhat broken, and Amazon is part of the problem. Whether MacMillan likes it or not, the average ebook consumer does not value the ebook to be worth the same price as a hardback, and probably not even as much as a MMPB. You can't sell it, you can't get it signed by the author, you can't loan it, etc. When a best seller is getting heavily discounted by online and bricks and mortar retailers alike, it's unreasonable for MacMillan to expect that the ebook consumer should have to pay two to three times the hardback price, but that's exactly what they are trying to achieve by moving to the agency model where the retailer is unable to set its own price. And if MacMillan continues to overprice ebooks as they are presently doing, ebook consumers will stop buying.
If the reports that 90% of all US money has traces of cocaine are accurate, they were probably detaining him under suspicion of drug running.