Posts by Rustident Spaceniak

Re: The puzzle of the Skies

Nope, the island gets invaded every summer, by tourists. That's what they live off.

no-none would own an iphone?

Considering that 500 million of the things had been sold by this March, a lot of people for whom price *ought to be* a significant factor must have bought one anyway.

Creation and Duplication

You mention the salient point, mouse. It is only fair that the creators of intellectual property should be paid by the users of the same. For the distributors, it's a bit different. Producing a copy of a technical book with many graphs on dead trees once cost real money - far more than typesetting, and the books, with short print runs, were correspondingly expensive. Now that's no longer the case, so the price structure of textbooks (and sheet music) should rightly evolve to reflect technological progress. Strangely enough, that reflection appears quite faint in many cases.

For an editor like the house of Eugen Ulmer, the world has changed drastically in the last 20 or so years and I can understand they lag behind in adapting. Nonetheless, the first editors to find a universally accepted business model that enables easy duplication but provides a fair income per reader for the author and for the editor, will stand to make very serious money.

I have some volumes in the rack next to me that cost nearly as much as the laptop I'm typing this on, but most of that really goes into production and distribution; if I could buy newer electronic copies for 20% or so of their price (whatever reflects the fair cost of electronic publishing), I almost certainly would; and I guess the total number of electronic sales would dwarf the printing run.

Re: Sarcasm

Hm, OK - maybe try a different flavour next.

Incidentally, I think it's rather a good idea to enable mobile banking for the poor - although you need to be careful with it. The many Grameen-bank-like microcredit projects of recent years had a rather mixed record apparently. It's probably best to limit your target group first (I think people who can actually afford a mobile phone might qualify) and try payment first in regions where the rest of a transaction - the actual delivery of goods as ordered - can reasonably be relied upon.

Re: SquanderTwo @ Rustident Spaceniak

Actually, a lot can be done to increase social mobility - and at the same time to promote it and show people it works. Education is an important point, possibly the most important one - on all levels, from childhood to universities; but so are public-service careers, diversity, even public employment schemes in some cases (probably not in Britain right now).

Mind, I don't exactly agree with Mr Piketty's ideas and proposals, but I still maintain that his book raises a few rightful concerns. Where I live, the idea of solidarity is quite popular; the rich (mostly) accept relatively high taxes, though far below 80%, as a necessary evil; and those taxes still don't stop most of them from becoming richer, even if maybe at a lesser rate than those in London. I think Mr Piketty has a right to provoke discussion; and if he can do so in such a sedentary and purely academic forum as El Reg, he might have achieved something.

Re: Mystic Meg

In general, German unions never expect to get all they ask for. They will typically negotiate with the employers for weeks and then settle for between half and two-thirds. Nonetheless, it's their business to first ask for a lot.

Of course, as some others have pointed out, the point in case here is really "retail wages vs warehouse wages". I don't expect Amazon to give way there, and I don't expect they'll have to. Re seeking employment elsewhere: It's not the 90's anymore either. Amazon is in pretty much the same situation: They need someone to run their warehouses after all. So there's a kind of balance of power, or of risk. Which makes it likely the unions will get at least some of what they ask for.

Re: One moment.

That's perfectly correct. Nonetheless, at least for muon neutrinos, the detection rate should be measureable with the OPERA and Icecube detectors. Not sure if those have detected enough neutrinos yet to evaluate a decent daily rate.

Concerning electron neutrinos, as I hinted at above, the results from Supermario should now be correlated with those of other detectors looking specifically at solar neutrinos, then we'll be able to judge whether it's the Earth or Jam Tarts that cause the more energetic ones to deteriorate into electron neutrinos. Failing that, a different theory would have to be established that accounts for a 24h variation cycle in the number of neutrinos detected.