Actually, it always was a zero-sum game within any given pool of readers. Each individual has some amount of money that they are willing to spend buying books, and if they buy one author's books, it reduces the available funds that can be used to buy another author's books. The subscription model that Amazon is adopting changes the model by paying authors , not when their work is purchased, but when it is read. This changes the way a book is valued by its author; previously, once the book was sold, the author has no direct interest in how many times the purchaser reads it. Under Amazon's model, readers no longer own their books; they effectively rent them anew each time they want to read them. And a book that would have been purchased, read once, and binned to go to a second-hand bookstore has less value to an author than a book that would have been re-read again and again over time. And there are two ways for authors to respond to this change -- they can produce works that are worth reading again and again, or they can produce more books for Amazon to 'charge' for. As Scalzi points out, we are seeing authors, resigned to the lack of quality and rereadability of their work, breaking books up into chunks so that each piece of the book can be counted as a separate publication for the purposes of receiving payments. It will work to the detriment of the 'story collection' books -- why should an author publish an e-book that collects a dozen of their stories, when they can get a dozen times the 'read count' by publishing each story individually? Other authors might break up books into chapters as individual publications to artificially boost their 'read count', or write shorter stories instead of novels. By treating all works as equal, regardless of size, the payment method encourages authors "gaming" the system to artificially inflate the number of times their works have been read.

As an illustration of this attitude, there was a slogan during the development of the F-15 Eagle -- "Not a pound for air-to-ground". And look at all of the upgrades and rework to make the Strike Eagle when it turned out that the Air Force didn't have the planes to conduct the CAS operations they had to do (because they continue to hoard non-Navy fixed-wing air assets to themselves, rather than letting the Army operate their own fixed-wing CAS units, even though the USAF doesn't want the CAS role), so they had to turn the F-15 into a mud mover.

I am reminded of the fortune-file entry "/earth is 98% full. Please delete anyone you can."

And just think -- with the waste products from a fusion reactor, we can alleviate the increasing scarcity of helium.

However, we'll have to start dealing with all the environmentalists pitching a fit about people inhaling reactor waste products, or filling balloons with them and letting them float off across the countryside.

"Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
-- James Klass

There's still some DC power distribution by PG&E in San Francisco for elevators and the like, but Con Edison cut off the last DC supply in New York on Nov 14,2007.

Actually, science is the pursuit of Truth. Unfortunately, what we get from that pursuit is not Truth, but a useful approximation that works well enough for practical use within the limits defined by the parameters of the experiments. When your use moves outside those limits, the approximations may or may not hold, and experimentation to discover why this happens let us extend those approximations further.

It's not generally fatal if it's been properly aerosolized, but you're correct that inhaling quantities of liquid or thermally-vaporized DHMO is often fatal.

There is a difference between playing up teammates' strengths and covering their weaknesses, and demanding precise-to-the-microsecond-and-millimeter performance from team members and denigrating them for not being robots when they aren't perfect. Most MMORPGs go the route of end bosses that do predictable things at predictable times, with predictable responses, so fairly quickly a 'recipe' for defeating the boss gets put together... and then gets carved in stone so that it must be adhered to without variation, and anyone who dares deviate from it in any way, no matter how small, is therefore entirely and solely responsible for any negative outcome (i.e., team wipe). Each player has to have precisely the right gear to maximize their effectiveness, and has to adhere slavishly to the rotation that's been tested to eke out an additional .00000017% extra DPS... And somewhere in all of the number-crunching, the people who fixate on this sort of 'efficiency' lose sight of the fact that you play an MMORPG to have fun, not to be a fungible asset shoehorned into one of the Tank/DPS/Heal categories of a 'holy trinity' that itself limits your ability to play the way you want.

I think that the world described in the three stories in David Drake's Lacey and His Friends might be a better analogy -- a world where everyone is under constant surveillance from multiple angles and by different organizations, where buying 'privacy' pays for a room with only the single mandatory government camera, and the ability of the police to roll back surveillance footage to track the movements of a criminal result in the overwhelming majority of criminals captured within hours of their crime. I think it better describes the extreme end result of the expansion of technology allows capturing more and more actions and communications until, by law, everything anyone does must be recorded.

Exactly. The sludge that has entered the river and lake has not yet been converted into forms that permit ready uptake by plants (and from the plants to the fish and other animals in the lake and up the food chain from there). There's no assurance that it won't undergo that chemical change, and attempts to remove the sludge using current technologies are sloppy enough that, while they would remove most of the sludge, they'll spread the rest more widely.

The maximum takeoff weight of the Martin JRM-3 Mars is reported as 165,000 pounds, -- more than 80 tons, and Wikipedia's article has a photograph of the Hawaii Mars II and Phillippine Mars on their landing gear undergoing maintenance; to my knowledge, the H-4 Hercules was never equipped with landing gear, which excludes it from the 'amphibian' category.

A better and more sweeping example would be working for a "closely-held business" run by Christian Scientists, who could contend that they should be excused from having to cover any care except from a practitioner.

This premise would also make killing all but one of every set of identical twins/triplets/etc. legal.

Pardon? Every vehicle has a weight class, and it gets taxed by mileage based on the weight class; heavier vehicles impose more wear on the roadways. This has been successfully used for long-haul trucks for decades. If the taxes on gasoline are, say, $0.40 a gallon, and the car gets 20mpg, the owner is paying $0.02/mile into transportation funds. A pure-electric car is paying nothing. If they replace their 20mpg car with one that gets 40mpb, they're paying $0.01/mile into transportation funds. If the gasoline tax is raised to $0.60/gal, a 20mpg car is paying $0.03/mile into transportation funds, a 40mpg car is paying $0.015/mile into transportation funds... while the owner of the electric car is still paying nothing. If they're all driving 10,000 miles per year, the 20mpg car pays $300/year in taxes, the 40mpg car is paying $150/year in taxes, and the electric car is paying... nothing. For the same amount of use of public roads.

Now, you can say that this just encourages people to move to higher-mileage cars... and it will -- but in the process of doing so, it will also reduce the tax revenues taken in. Every person converting to an electric car effectively stops supporting road maintenance, because they're no longer buying gasoline, and therefore not paying the gasoline tax. This increases the problem that Corker and Murphy are attempting to solve by increasing the gasoline tax rate. Every person who replaces their car with one that gets better mileage, or that doesn't use gasoline, reduces the tax base -- and increasing the tax rate just makes it more attractive to get out from under it. In order to make up for the reduced revenue, they'll need to raise the tax again, and the cycle repeats itself, while anyone with an electric car is essentially freeloading their street use on the backs of everyone not driving an electric vehicle. Mileage-based taxes are more fairly distributed; you are paying on the basis of the amount of use you make of the roads, and it doesn't matter if you're powering your car with gasoline, propane, electricity, water gas, hydrogen, or happy thoughts.