Can you imagine a country where the leaders preach that women have natural defenses against rape, having nukes? You wouldn't credit such a country with having electricity.

It is not just cream that rices to the top.

and the sales.

> lots of great software that a lot of people simply do not like.

Yeah and I am really famous but a lot of people don't know that.

I am also a fantastic cook but many people don't the taste of my cooking.

But you sound like an idiot, you judge a product on its technical merits, not whether it has any use or value. Your the kind of idiot who would implement an idea because it sounds noble and fuck whether it has actually does anything useful.

Burning Man looks like a tentative near-future where robots work the menial crap for us and as we dip our toes in the waters of Culture-like leisure everyone experiments being a hippie and a DIYer artisan and a stoner and a furry and a badass craftsman all at once, and you know what? I'm glad it exists. Bring along the rabbit ears, I'll bring the swiss army knife, and let's see what we can make work.

You mean the company that had widespread child abuse in its building for decades and everyone looked the other way? That BBC?

Oh, good example. Y'all probably know that already, but Star Control 2 is now available freely under an open source license, just under the different name of Ur-Quan Masters due to trademark issues.

Since the idea is that this universe is a simulation, who says it is a simulation of reality? Maybe we are some kids crazy fantasy world in which the container has to be larger then its contents! FREAKY!

The trick to thinking outside the box, is to stop thinking the box is real.

IF this is a simulated world, there is no reason to assume the rules in the simulation are the same as the ones of the world in which the simulation is running.

I almost want to believe he's deliberately teasing the authorities into increasing the surveillance around the embassy, at a time when that ongoing expense is causing angry murmurs the general public. That would be pretty clever.

Whenever this topic comes up, we end up discussing what publishers really do.

Every time, someone with some knowledge of how the publishing industry works turns up and explains how there is this long road between the author's draft and the book in your hands, made of editing, copy-editing, typesetting, cover design, marketing and more, and the publisher is the truck driver that sees the draft to the end of that road. That's correct.

But I've come to the conclusion that none of that is the one irreplaceable service publishers perform in the system.

All of the above can, to some extent, and for a fee, be performed just as well by independent contractors. (There are great independent editors out there, and aren't we all glad for that.)

The one important thing publishers do is: they take the loss on books that don't earn out.

Now hear me out.

I know how we, Slashdot readers, tend to think about those things. In our minds, if the book doesn't earn out (that is, it brings in less money than the publisher gave the author as an advance), then it's got to be someone's fault, right? Bad writer, bad publisher. Something.

Wrong.

The thing is, a successful book requires a lot of factors. Great writing doesn't suffice. The public is fickle. Yesterday, supernatural romance sold by the truckload, now it doesn't. GRRM was a great writer for decades before you even heard of him. Harry Potter didn't start hitting it big until three or four books into the series. Word of mouth matters, but only after the readership has exceeded a certain critical mass. And until then... someone has to take the loss.

Because, here's the thing. GRRM, Rowling, they're outliers. Many books -- most books, AFAIK -- don't quite earn out. Many deserve to, but don't, because that's not how the world works.

But they still got written, you still read some of them, you still loved some of them, and that only happened because someone, somewhere, was willing to pay an author to keep writing, and take the risk that the great book in their hands may not earn that money back.

And that, friends, is what publishers really do.

Goddammit Slashdot. That was "cp book.epub <your device>". That's what I get for not previewing, I guess.

The publisher does the funding, editing, copy-editing, typesetting, marketing, legal registration, cover design on the book, and that's not even the one most important role they perform in the system.

Amazon does cp book.epub .

Which one here is the middleman exactly?

I hate to state the obvious, but right now Amazon is attempting to muscle in a 43% markup just to do, basically, cp /publisher/book.epub /customer/. There is no reason I can see to explain this large a margin for digital distribution. So I wouldn't necessarily trust them to keep prices all that low once they get free run of the market.

I've tried a lot of desktops over the years and always returned to KDE as the most able to be useful when I need it to and stay the fuck out of the way the rest of the time. (Unity, despite its reputation, is good at that too.) But the love was no longer really there. Like a favorite old workhorse that you just no longer really ride for the pleasure of it alone.

So I've not kept track of KDE 5 developments, and honestly I expected to be way underwhelmed. It was, after all, supposed to be mainly a port of the same old thing to the new Qt 5.

But I just tried the live CD linked in the article and, uh, whoa. It looks so *tidy*. Full of that orderly neatness that Gnome, for all its faults, has generally been better at than KDE. And I find myself excited for the first time in a long while, and that's a very nice feeling to rediscover.

My salary has been steadily increasing and I certainly haven't found that there are skilled developers sitting idle at home. I can collect a small fortune in placement fees, if only I know some out-of-work developers I wouldn't be ashamed to recommend.

The simple fact from where I am standing is: There is a lot of work and there are not enough skilled people to do it yet we are only using 50% of the population.

But the sector has a massive negative image. Not even so much anti-women as anti-human. If you don't fight for yourself you won't get raises by just doing a good job and managers will happily have you do 80 hours with no compensation if they can get away with it. So a LOT of good developers I know have started their own businesses to get out of the rat race. You really got to love coding to stay with it when you can make money in consulting.

But part of the problem is the gigantic hatred you see on this site and sites like tweakers any time a story of this kind comes up. "The girls are getting some money, UNFAIR!". Crybabies. There are tons of initiatives to promote coding in general, plenty of competitions if you so wish, plenty of events to visit often with booth babes. No booth boys.

Let it go! Or at least accept that if this news story makes your blood boil, you got issues. And your issues are poisoning your work place or are even the reason you can't find a job despite your leet skills.

Nobody with real skills fears competition. If you see a new employee as anything but "FINALLY, some HELP, here is ticket 1000-9999, I take the remaining 1 million until you are up to speed", you are not a developer, real developers don't have enough spare time to worry about their jobs.