...as a result of someone taking out a personal vendetta against me, I can say that the system obviously has flaws.

The Amazon Verified Purchase system is a decent idea and perhaps something that should be taken farther. Maybe not lock the system down to just AVPs, but perhaps change the weighting system.

...the importance of extension at the point of contact.

Kooks reject climate science, therefore all who reject climate science are kooks.

In 4th grade I learned that that piece of "logic" doesn't hold water.

Is the amount of altered land mass even 4.3%?

...that all the continents were lumped together into one big continent?

I'm no geologist, but that doesn't seem to pass the sniff test.

I'm not saying that continental drift didn't occur, but I have a hard time believing that everything started out as one giant continent (given the current state of affairs, for one thing).

The idea that you could end unemployment by spreading the work around assumes that people are fungible -- that they are completely interchangeable -- which they most certainly aren't. While it may sound like a good idea for Craig and Nate to share the job of coding System X, the fact is that Nate is 10X better at programming than Craig is.

In fact, it's arguable whether Craig can even do the job at all.

Maybe it's just me, but when I thought about this I thought about companies that are trying to patent genes. Shouldn't you have to have created something to be able to declare it as your IP? IMO that applies to this and to naturally-occurring genes.

They are on the way. Evidently, a shipment went missing.

Been there done that with music.

The difference, though, is how many times do you listen to the same piece of music (thousands) versus watch the same movie (maybe 10 times except for Top Gun ;-)) versus read the same book (twice?).

When people talk about this, I'm not sure they are always comparing apples and apples.

I do the same thing.

I hate to buy books unseen and found "The Talent Code" on the Internet in PDF format -- it's top-10, which has to make me think that may be a strategy -- and read it and then paid for it by buying the eBook version through the Apple store. I think that's what many/most people will do. They won't begrudge your charging a reasonable price (e.g. $5 or $10). I know I don't. Also, $5 or $10 is a LOT more per copy than you're going to make versus going through a traditional publisher.

But it's harder to do/takes balls when you're on the seller side.

There's also the issue of having enough server capacity in case you get /.ed.

The book is called "Elevator Pitch Essentials" and it talks about how to go about introducing and explaining complicated ideas to ordinary people. It grew out of work I do with scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs at Washington University in St. Louis.

Valid point.

I guess I'd be more comfortable with/less bothered by this if I had a story that I could point to where a sale was driven by a download of pirated copy, but I don't have one yet (which of course doesn't mean it hasn't happened).

I also think this may work better for authors with multiple works; they hook people with pirated copies and then make their money by selling them their new stuff. Many people seem to do this on the Apple eBook store. Of course, that could make an argument for breaking books up into smaller pieces (e.g. turn a three-section book into three separate books) so that this approach can be used.

God knows, I don't know how many times a sales guy, or some piece of legislation, proposed something that would have been awesome in theory but that was just totally unmanageable in practice. On more than a few occasions I have seen these features go into production over my protests, only to see them die a rapid death when management realized how much time it was taking to keep them up.

Having said that, I'm also an author and copyright owner and my book can be found on multiple pirate and other sites around the Internet. I would love the ability to press a button or fill out a form and have the link removed from every index.

To be honest, I don't know how many sales this is costing me, but not knowing isn't a particularly comfortable feeling. Maybe the big boys can just blow off a certain amount of piracy, but I'm still very small and every sale, or lost sale, makes a difference.

One of my most important tools -- Ulead GIF animator, which is a tool for creating animated GIFs that I use when writing about baseball hitting and pitching instruction -- is no longer available or being updated. That is a core tool for which I haven't found a substitute and it only kind of works on Vista.

Of course, this raises the problem of orphan applications; applications that small (?) numbers of people find to be ridiculously valuable.

It's called blaming the dead guy and it's common at all levels of government (and elsewhere).