andrewhhunter

Comment Threads

• Brett Dunbar commented on Cutting their own throats
  The law in European states, such as the UK, that allow a corporate person to be legally the original author treat work for hire the same way as it treats anonymous and pseudonymous works where the author's identity is unknown. Copyright lasts for 70 years from the work's creation. Where a natural person is the legal author then life + 70 applies....
• martinfr62 commented on I may be being unduly optimistic ...
  Dwave have sold a 128 adiabatic quantum computer to Lockhead Martin, and another is in place at USC's supercomputer center in Marina del Rey. http://dwave.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/historic-opening-of-the-worlds-first-quantum-computing-centre/ They have already solved some problems on the 128 qubit processor which do not appear solvable using current compute hardware. The problem I'm most interested in is the solution of binary classifier problem. (Eg is there a picture of grandma in this photo or not, or should the car make a left turn or not). To make these decision you put together a bunch of small simple questions, is that pixel blue, is the pixel...
• Charlie Stross commented on Cutting their own throats
  Could be just the shake up the publishing dinosaurs need. Remove some dead wood from the top of these organisations on the back of a negative judgement and get things moving in the right direction. Unfortunately they're not structured that way. Each of the "big six" is actually a group of companies. Within them you've got newspapers, magazine publishers, fiction publishers, non-fiction publishers (the latter two often grouped within a "book publishing" subsidiary, even though their markets and workflow are very different), and sometimes film, TV, software, and music studios. Policy is set at board level and broadcast throughout the...
• Charlie Stross commented on Cutting their own throats
  You fundamentally misunderstand how books are sold. Traditionally, books are sold via reverse auction. That is: when they first come out, the price is high. The longer they're on sale, the cheaper they get. Finally, the price bottoms out at just over the marginal price of manufacturing. You, as the customer, set the maximum price you're willing to pay and buy the book when it drops below that threshold. Because hardcovers cost a little money to produce, publishers began producing cheap paper-bound editions that cost less to manufacture so that they could cut the price after a while. And because...
• Charlie Stross commented on Cutting their own throats
  It's not just publisher royalty contracts that don't work that way; if you look at Amazon or the other ebook vendor contracts, they don't work that way either. I could do it, but I'd not only have to go indy, I'd have to write and debug my own storefront software!...