drplokta

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• Commented on Loncon 3: Charlie's worldcon schedule
  I assure you that all days are still available for day memberships. Once you pick the membership type on the dropdown (Adult, Young Adult or whatever) then you should get five checkboxes, one for each day. Unless you pick an...
• Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
  There's a legal fix to this, if our politicians would get their act together, which of course they won't. All it takes is a minor tweak to copyright law to say that the only regional rights that can be sold...
• Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
  There are no plausible scenarios in which UKIP go into coalition with the Conservatives, or anyone else, because there are no plausible scenarios in which they pick up more than two or three Westminster MPs. Their support is simply too...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  If an open API for wholesaling ebooks is a good idea but abolishing regional rights is a bad idea, how do you propose to enforce the regional rights with an open API? You could do it based on the location...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  Oh, and stop buying regional rights. You can't police regional rights across hundreds of thousands of tiny bookstores. Publishers would have to insist to authors and agents that they're buying world rights or nothing -- they don't have to be...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  The publishers could break Amazon's retail monopoly any time they choose to, and since there are very few of them they could probably even manage to co-ordinate it. Publish wholesale prices for ebooks, payable by anyone who sells at least...
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  If Apple and the publishers had just colluded to fix the wholesale price rather than the retail price, and established the principle that all distributors, no matter how large they were, paid the same wholesale price but could charge whatever...
• Commented on Checking in
  I'm not quite sure why Brandon Sanderson or Abigail Nussbaum should be less constrained in commenting on the shortlist than you, since they're also nominees. But congratulations on your own nominations....
• Commented on A nation of slaves
  The UK state pension age is in fact currently 65 (there's no longer a state retirement age at all). It's true that it will increase to 66 from 2019, but life expectancies will also have increased beyond 80 -- the...
• Commented on A nation of slaves
  All jobs pass your test (a), because being paid money (even a pittance) is better than not being paid money. And western capitalism is still doing really well at bringing up living standards for the poorest, it's just that they're...
• Commented on Making history personal
  Scratch the above. I've also been to La Roque Saint-Christophe in France, which is a cave-town carved into a hillside that was in continuous occupation (until a few centuries ago) for somewhere between 25,000 and 55,000 years, depending who you...
• Commented on Making history personal
  Slept in, probably Langley Castle in Northumberland, now a hotel. Built in 1350. Been inside, depends how you count "buildings". Font de Gaume cave in France had human habitation around 17,000 BC. Newgrange in Ireland was built around 3,200 BC....
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  Energy storage. Generation of renewable electricity is now a done deal -- improvements already in the pipeline will brings the costs of photovoltaic solar and probably onshore wind down to lower than grid levels within the next decade. But you...