Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetAre there going to be exceptions for the really spread-out seats like the Scillies and the Scottish Isles? I wouldn't fancy trying to move the ballot boxes off some of the smaller islands in the dark - boatmen or helicopter pilots would be put at unnecessary risk.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI got to watch the Superbowl on the BBC, which meant no commercials - they take the CBS feed and then cut to a BBC studio whenever CBS goes to commercial.
I'm sure the BBC studio was pretty terrible, but I had a book for those bits so I really couldn't tell.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetOh, one of my friends was 30 yesterday. She's been a member of (our national) parliament for the last five years. I'm six years older than her.And the rest of you think you feel old?
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI note that my Tory opponent in Worsley and Eccles South (Iain Lindley) has denied this on Twitter.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Tweet24:
Of course, they would need to provide the services of a publisher, but I imagine that such expense would be quite worth it for them. All they need to do is offer a better deal than current publishers and they can easily woo away author and musicians who are out of contract.Will they read slush? If they only take on authors who already have a name then they will be parasitical on the existing publishers.
Just ploughing through stacks of slush is an important service to the customer. Indeed it is getting through this process that separates the published author from the rest of us. If you've ever read slush then you'd happily pay someone else to do it. Yet reading slush is the only way we've yet found to identify competent authors from the rest.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetThe differences between the two treaties are only cosmetic.Nevertheless, you try to tell us that the Lisbon Treaty was something else.The Constitutional Treaty was a new constitution for the EU - a "delete all and replace with" amendment. 90% of the Constitutional Treaty replaced the Treaties of Rome, Luxembourg, Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice, etc. with new language that did that same thing. While they were consolidating the treaties, they did a little bit of tidying up at the edges and fixed a few problems with the operation of those treaties in practise. The vote on the Constitutional Treaty was a vote on a principle - "should the EU be operated by a constitution or by a series of international treaties?", not on the specific wording of the changes.Lisbon was a new treaty that took that "tidying up at the edges" and packaged it on its own. Of course the effect was substantively the same - which I'm sure was what Giscard d'Estaing was talking about in context - but there was no longer a question of principle at stake, just the practical changes in the treaty.As I've already said, I think that all such treaties should be voted on in referendums, but to pretend that just because the practical effects of the two treaties was the same means that the issues of principle are irrelevant is just disingenuous.
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I don't want to read slush, and I prefer to read novels that are professionally edited, copy-edited and proof-read. I like my novels to be in correctly-spelt grammatical English and to be written by someone with an understanding of plot and character.
Self-publishing doesn't put a filter between me and the author to remove the people that can't write to that standard, and I'm quite happy to pay for the existence of that filter - and I recognise that there is a real cost to that.
The approach I'd like for the e-book industry is this:
The e-book manufacturer allows you to directly install e-books from your PC (for free) if you want. Publishers have a direct-sales option.
The e-book manufacturer supplies a marketplace; they collect a standard percentage of every book purchased through the marketplace (something like 10-15%, but the marketplace can choose). Publishers can pay more for marketing / product placement within the marketplace like any other retail outlet.
Any commercial publisher (ie SFWA pro market or equivalent) can add their books to the marketplace at whatever price they choose. Non-commercial publishers (self-publishers and vanity) can too, but they appear in a different part that the readers have to positively choose to look at; books won't appear in the advertising / marketing parts unless they are pro published or have pro-equivalent sales levels (the rare breakout self-published book). Yes, this is a ghetto. Find a publisher that will take a commercial risk on your book if you want readers to take a chance on it.
Publishers release books for simultaneous e-book/hardback release, with the price to the distributor being approximately the same as the price to the ebook marketplaces - this should result in ebooks being cheaper than physical books, but the publisher getting the same revenue (actually more margin, because the printing costs are included in the wholesale price but not in the e-book price). They can run their own marketplaces if they want - which would give the reader an advantage that they can be certain that a book bought from a generic marketplace will be usable on their next e-book from a different manufacturer, and the publisher an advantage that they can either get more margin, or they can undercut the e-book manufacturers.
Later on, e-books drop in price as the book ages, while the physical book goes from hardback to trade paperback to mass-market paperback, also dropping in price. Eventually, the book becomes backlist, permanently available for something like £3/$5 as an e-book and intermittently reprinted as a paperback for a retail price of about twice that.
Authors get royalties as a percentage of the wholesale price instead of the retail price, so they get about the same for a $15 ebook as a $25 hardback.
I think that could work, since I expect the book to ebook transition to be very slow, and there to be a large physical book market for the foreseeable future - even a lot of people in their twenties prefer paper, where it's mostly older people unfamiliar with technology who prefer physical CDs; the last time I bought a CD was a present for my Dad, but I buy paper books all the time.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetToo many people see Republican vs Democrat as if it was a football game. I don’t know if it’s just my personal perspective, but this seems to have taken place along with the rise of cable news.I've been reading Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty (1789-1815) recently and there are quotes from Adams and Jefferson about Federalists vs Democratic-Republicans that are every bit as partisan as anything Fox News can throw out.Every generation seems to think partisanship is a new problem. I suspect Optimates vs Populares in the 150s BC was just the same.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Tweetattempt to charge $15 (or more) for an ebook for a brand-spankin’ new release to service the folks who just can’t wait, drop it to a lower price point (say, $10) later on in the run, and then drop it again to $8 or so when the paperback hits. That’s how I would do it, in any event.As most of us know, Baen Webscriptions sell e-books at sane prices; in part because AIUI their contracts with the authors give the authors a larger percentage royalty of the retail price of e-books than they do for paper books - I think the idea is that the e-book gross margin is the retail price less the cost of running the webscriptions site, where the paper book gross margin is the wholesale price less the physical cost of printing, and that authors' royalties should be based on the gross margin.Baen, the only mature e-book market, sells new e-books for $15 (they call them e-ARCs) - these are ARCs about three months before the hardback comes out, and are replaced by the released version when the book is released; they then drop the books to about $6 when they are released, or you can buy a "webscription month" for $15, which are normally seven books - two new ones and five older ones of varying ages. The webscriptions effectively let you get a book that's in paperback for about $3.I think there are transactional-cost reasons (ie credit card companies kill you on small transactions) for not selling individual books for less than $5-6 outside of the webscriptions model.I suspect that some markets would bear a higher price - something like $25 for an ARC, $15 for the released version at the same time as the hardback, drop to about $10 when the paperback comes out and $5-6 for backlist.One real advantage of e-books is that they keep backlist available much better. That $5-6 is competing with "not available" or "out of print" or booksearch prices, not with the paperback.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI'd love multiple Exchange accounts, but it's never going to happen. Microsoft's licence terms don't allow a single device to connect to multiple Exchange accounts.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetI didn't think that the reasons why they were different were particularly compelling, and I would certainly say that I would have favoured a referendum on Lisbon too - but I don't regard it as a breach of trust.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetLet’s remember the last general elections in the UK. Then the Lib Dems were led by Charles Kennedy. They also promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.No they didn't. The Lisbon treaty wasn't signed until 2007, so making that promise in 2005 would have been rather remarkable. The promise was that the Constitutional Treaty would not be passed without a referendum. The Constitutional Treaty was withdrawn before reaching that stage (because of referendum results in other countries, notably France), so it never got to the stage of a referendum.The Lisbon Treaty was not the same thing as the Constitutional Treaty. Some people think it was similar, others that it was very different, but it wasn't the same thing, so a promise in respect of one thing did not apply in respect of the other.I think we should have demanded a referendum on Lisbon too - indeed, I think that any constitutional change should require a referendum, as a matter of principle - but the promise was not broken.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetIf you’re doing a Spartan logo, why not use one used by the actual Spartans? The actual Spartans had a lambda (for Λακεδαίμων, ie Lakedaimon) as their logo, which would be quite cool to have as part of a logo.
Reply | Original | Permalink | Tweet>Policy-making should not be left to politicians.
I prefer to express that as "all citizens are politicians" - there isn't some separate group of people who are politicians; anyone with an opinion on any policy issue is, by the fact of having a view, a politician.
In the EU, they tend to make a distinction between "policy making" and "policy implementation". One of the improvements that the EU has been trying to make in the last 20 or so years is to put more focus on policy implementation (ie making sure that what you want is actually done) and less on policy making (ie deciding what to do). To some extent, that's a power grab, in that implementation is a member state activity where policy making is an EU activity; on the other hand, this is where the anti-corruption initiatives sit.
Reply | Original | Permalink | TweetIain, I agree that the constituency sizes should be equalised, though that probably means a large number of deeply unnatural constituencies. If you're going to do that, you should probably bring in the American system of numbering constituencies instead of naming them; that would reduce the local dissent.
But all that effort will have a net effect of about 20-25 seats, not 60-65 like the real difference between the parties.
