While I didn't get to the "Ruling Party" panel, the transcript doesn't support your claim that the Green panelist took any criticism personally.
In addition, your use of the egregious and inappropriate dog-whistle "watermelon" against someone I have known for over 20 years as being in no way any shade of red really makes we wonder if you know what you're talking about in this case.
]]>I think you'll be on safer grounds than all the MilSF authors in the early 1990s who had to hastily varnish their MSS with variations on the theme of "Glasnost was dead, and the Neo-Communists were heating up the Cold War..."
]]>Didn't think so...
]]>Expect the royal palaces and other places to have Intrusion Detection installed - unauthorised smart cameras will be disabled if they're inside a "do not photograph" area, remote sentries on the lookout for aforesaid drones, cameras outside the zone but pointing into it, any unauthorised wireless signals emenating from inside to be jammed/tracked. (This will be SOP for celebs' pads and places where "intellectual property" is traditionally consumed - concert halls, museum galleries and the like, so it's not that much of a stretch to provide a high-quality variant for a VVIP.)
]]>No truth. This surfaces every ten years or so (IIRC the last time was Pravda in 2010 - make of that what you will).
Could the Germans have developed what today we call a "dirty bomb" - radioactive material encasing a standard explosive designed to spread radiation and fallout?
It's possible, but there's no proof they even considered it.
Did the British commando raid on Telemark (Rjuken?) in Norway really save us from the above scenario, or was German heavy water research wrongheaded to begin with?
The latter, definitely. The Nazi nuclear research program was hampered by the perception that it was a Jewish idea, which meant they had to reverse-engineer everything Einstein and co. had publicly published in a way that would be politically acceptable.
By the end of the war they may have managed to carry out a self-sustaining chain reaction, but that was it - the reactor was a pitiful piece of work.
]]>"Harry, every paperback you've bought new in the past 20 years is a trade paperback. The size (A-format) is the same as the old mass-market books but they're distributed on sale-or-return, i.e. as trade paperbacks."
Yeah, well, feed me a straight line, you know what happens next...
]]>"...despite centuries of striving there are few sub-sectors of trade fic publishing where a reader might go to a store and buy half a kilo of a particular publisher's product range without reference to the authorial brand."
There are several boxes of well-known TV show spin-off books in my library that give me a good idea what those sub-sectors might be...
"The US mass market paperback will die, but trade paperback distribution will still exist for beach-side reading and technophobes; hardcovers will still exist for bibliophiles: but ebooks will dominate casual reading."
Add UK to the list, and there goes my physical book-buying except for those authors I deem worthy of buying the hardback (probably in a good quality limited edition). Trade paperbacks are neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring: they're almost as expensive as a hardback, take up almost as much space on the shelves, and are far more prone to shedding pages. Hi-diddly-dee, the Kindle Fire for me!
"Once a set profit threshold is exceeded, the DRM on everyone's copy is released..."
Nice idea. It might be technically easier to email (or whatever the current channel is) all registered users to a limited-use link to download a DRM-free copy. As a bonus for putting up with the DRM, make it a special edition with an extra short story, or some other fun stuff not generally avialable anywhere else.
Artists resale rights: David Braben's mulling over the same idea for his reboot of the 'Elite' game. I'm ambivalent: it trumps the first sale doctrine (selfish version: I bloody well paid for it - our transaction is over). How it could - possibly - work is if the creator provides a reasonable alternative to the private sale / second-hand market ("Finished with an e-book? Trade it back to us for £X in cash, or £X+Y in credit towards another one. Find a better deal? Let us know, we may not be able to match it right now, but if it's something we haven't heard about before, we'll credit you with £z. Oh, and if you do sell it on and it turns up in multiple places, we remind you that each copy is individually watermarked...").
Michaelgr@9: Diane Duane is one author that I know of who issues "patches" of her ebooks if they contain typos. It'll be nice to see it take off in the mainstream ebook markets.
]]>And while you're at it the ocean liner could be a surface effect ship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_effect_ship Basically, it's a hovercraft with side walls.
No thankyou. One cross-channel trip in a Force 8 wind, with the hovercraft making its way down the coast so it could make a dash across in the shortest possible time, was enough for me. Plus, those beggars are loud.
]]>It could have been worse; I managed to get my presentation slot put back to a time where I only have to catch an oh-dark-hundred train rather than have to find a hotel room.
Also, squeeing like a fanboy over the Elite kickstarter project. I got it for the Sinclair Spectrum the day it came out, and after getting through the LensLock DRM (fold plastic prism, place over TV screen, guess the three garbled characters), achieved Elite in one minute flat by loading the game, saving it, and reloading. Yup, it was a bug, and I didn't get an Elite badge for reporting it neither (mutter mutter...)
Right, that's my tea break over: back on my head.
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