you've never heard of one....except of course for the one you linked to which included all sorts of categories of those who willingly removed themselves from the workforce. which was rather the point.

the unemployment rate is 5.8% at present time. your belief in it isnt required.
the definition hasnt changed: a person is unemployed if he/she is without job and have actively looked for work within the past four weeks.

in case you missed it, there was a recession. that always triggers a reduction in the laborforce participation rate, as people find alternative avenues, such as going back to school, enlisting in the military, retiring, or staying home. there are also other avenues of work that wont show up in the any of the employment statistics, since they rely on businesses reporting numbers.

so yes, people HAVE willingly dropped out of the workforce in recently years.
the labor force participation rate is in a slump.
that doesnt change that the unemployment rate is 5.8%.

and you said "start a war".
that is a completely different thing from "committing an act of war."

Let me clarify what I meant by that. Touchscreens built into the console of the car should be banned. Stand-alone GPS receivers are different, because you mount them in the corner of your windshield, so your peripheral vision is still on the road while you're looking at them.

In-dash GPS systems should be banned, both because they seem to universally suck and because using them to figure out where to turn is inherently less safe than using the ones mounted to your window, because you have to look down so far.

Of course, the absolute worst GPS systems are the in-car GPS systems that detect when you're moving and won't let you search or enter a destination location. That makes sense if the driver is operating it, but it basically makes them utterly useless if you have two people in the car and want to figure out where to stop for food (the single most common use of GPS devices, in my experience). Those should be banned because they encourage non-emergency stops on the side of the highway. :-)

Unless you mean the old e-ink Kindles (pre-KF8), that runs contrary to my experience. All the modern Kindle readers are based on WebKit, and WebKit's SVG support is generally very solid. What problems are you seeing?

Yeah, a rate of 1.1 hyphenated words per thousand isn't excessive at all. I grepped my own fiction writing, and determined that I average about four hyphenated words per thousand in fiction, or almost two per average printed page by your metric. One every 2.25 pages is nothing. :-)

So unless there is something more to the licensing terms than you're suggesting, there shouldn't be any problem with creating your content in an open format, and then using KindleGen to generate the content for the Amazon store.

At issue is the fact that Kindle readers can only side-load content in MOBI format (plus non-reflowable horrors), and MOBI-format files can only (usefully) be produced by KindleGen. So the fact that you can sell the content in open formats through other stores is mostly irrelevant; you can't sell the content in open formats to Kindle users because they can't side-load an EPUB, and you can't sell the content in MOBI format because the license for the tool that trivially translates your source files into MOBI files won't let you resell those MOBI files outside Amazon's stores.

So short of you selling it in an open format and telling your users to run a command-line tool, or telling them to install Java and then install Kindle Previewer (which, among other things, provides a crude GUI for KindleGen), what you're advocating isn't a realistic solution.

With that said, Amazon's licensing changes annoyed me enough that I've seriously considered making the Kindle edition of my books available "free for registered EPUB users", so that users submit a web form and provide a copy of the EPUB book obtained from any EPUB store, and a script on the server verifies it and emails them a free copy of the MOBI book, thus effectively selling the MOBI book through every other online store, while still strictly complying with the terms of Amazon's license by only using it "to format works to be distributed at no charge". But although that would be easy for me to do, that's the sort of thing that 99% of writers out there couldn't pull off.

Well, yeah, in this case. But Amazon doesn't generally make it a point to edit books for people. The assumption is that the Kindle MOBI file isn't the original source content, so if Amazon were to monkey with the MOBI data, their changes would just get stomped on the next time the author fixes anything. For Amazon to fix this in a way that would have any permanence, they'd have to add that script as part of kindlegen, and then it would break millions of other books. Better for them to ask the author to fix his or her source content and rebuild the derived MOBI.

Auto-hyphenation is built into WebKit, so unless they took steps to deliberately break it, it should work in all readers based on WebKit. To my knowledge:

• iBooks supports it (in iOS 6 and later, and all versions of OS X)
• Kindle previewer supports it in all the KF8 modes which should mean newer Kindle readers support it unless somebody at Amazon screwed up pretty carelessly (e.g. by failing to copy the hyphenation dictionaries into the right places while building the firmware images).

I was not aware of Nook supporting it. That's surprising, given that they're based on RMSDK. Hmm. Upon digging further, RMSDK egregiously violates the CSS specification by using "adobe" as a vendor prefix, then proceeds to also use the wrong CSS property name, resulting in the property "adobe-hyphenate" instead of "-adobe-hyphens" as it should be, with values of "none", "explicit", and "auto" instead of "none", "manual", and "auto". Nice, job, Adobe.... [redacted swearing at what feels like the hundredth instance of Adobe flagrantly violating the CSS specification that I've run into personally]

I think you have that backwards. If you have fewer than 6 holes, it didn't originate in California. If you have fewer than 10, it didn't originate in NYC. If you have fewer than a hundred or if the hubcaps are still intact, it didn't originate in East St. Louis.

There are human beings with severe learning difficulties who have a similar legal status. They have basic rights but can't, for example, enter contracts or be held accountable for certain illegal actions that they cannot comprehend. Others make important decisions for them because they are incapable of doing so.

There is a long history of returning zoo animals to the wild. They are not simply dumped in a habitat, they are released and monitored, given assistance and helped to adapt. Eventually they become independent.

While a zoo may seem like a comfy environment some animals just don't do well in captivity. It puts psychological stress on them and causes all sorts of issues. Pandas won't mate or carry their children to term, whales become violent... Release is the best of a bad set of options, but it is possible to do while improving the animal's life.

Who is "we"? If it's the US government then they might have started a war, but I doubt they would openly admit it. More likely it's individuals, maybe associated with Anonymous who seem to love DDOSing things and were upset over the movie not getting a release. In which case, if private individuals are willing to support the US in this way it adds credibility to North Korea's claims that it was individuals who hacked Sony to support them.

In the world where you get paid by adcash.com.

Why don't eBook publishers use a typesetting system based on TeX or LaTeX?

Let me count the reasons.

• Books in electronic form must be reflowable, to accommodate variations in device size, and to accommodate rotation. What this means is that page numbers can change continuously. If I rotate a reader from portrait to landscape mode, then flip to the next page, then rotate it back into portrait orientation, there's no guarantee that the page boundaries are the same as they were in portrait orientation previously. So imagine having to run LaTeX on your entire document more than once per second, with a page offset, rendering only a subset of the content.
• Books in electronic form require the ability to reliably link between documents. Good luck with that in LaTeX, much less in a hypothetical reflowing LaTeX.
• LaTeX's font handling and Unicode glyph handling are dreadfully subpar even in XeLaTeX. Line breaks around em dashes and en dashes are as broken as they were in OS 9, requiring use of \hspace{0.001pt} after them if you want LaTeX to wrap correctly.
• LaTeX is, IMO, terrible for anything that involves even basic custom formatting. I've used it for fiction book publishing. I have over 2,400 lines of custom LaTeX macros to prove it. By contrast, even when working around the quirks of multiple EPUB readers, I have only about 1,000 lines of simple CSS that gives almost exactly the same results as those 2,400 lines of seriously complex macro code in LaTeX. To be fair, there's a bit of Perl content translation code that replaces a little bit of macro code, so the difference isn't quite as extreme as it sounds, but it's a lot easier to do math computation in Perl than in LaTeX macro code, and a good chunk of that math was only required because LaTeX lacks some fairly basic formatting functionality, such as an equivalent for the CSS min-width property. LaTeX is positively primitive when compared with HTML and CSS, IMO.
• LaTeX is a write-only language. Like Tom Christenson said about Perl, nothing can parse LaTeX other than LaTeX. It is basically impossible to properly translate LaTeX into any other form, which makes it a terrible source language. Most people writing content want to write once and reuse in different formats, so you're better off starting in a proper semantic markup language like XML. And if you're starting from XML, it's easy to spit out HTML. It is butt ugly to spit out LaTeX. Been there, done that. I have almost 800 lines of custom XSL on top of the existing DocBook2XML code to prove it.

There are probably many more reasons I could think of if I took the time, but that's just what comes to mind off the top of my head. Knowing what I know now, if I had to do my latest project over again, I would have written a custom typesetter in JavaScript that runs in a custom WebKit-based app. It would have been faster, and I would have had more control. I can't even imagine trying to use LaTeX in an eBook reader. It would be like printing a book using a million Chinese workers with quill pens.

What math and CS book publishers should be doing is formatting formulas using LaTeX and converting the PDFs to SVG images. That should give you nicely formatted formulas whose text is still searchable. The rest of the content should be HTML, just like any other eBook. It isn't rocket science; the publishers you've dealt with just don't care about those books enough to do the job correctly. :-)

I'm not a parent, but I have observed Japanese parents with young children and they tend to recognize that 2 year olds are not really responsible for many of their actions. Maybe he lost his grip on the toy, maybe he didn't understand that the car can't catch it or doesn't like having things thrown at it. They tend not to shout anyway, and I've noticed that Japanese children tend to be a lot quieter and calmer which may be related.

Instead they will calmly explain that the cat doesn't like that. Play stops, the child is faced with their parent and even if they don't understand exactly what is being said they understand the tone of voice and facial expressions. They might try to explain that only dogs like to catch things, making it a teachable moment.

So, kinda like what you do but without the need for shouting and time-out. I see the logic - punishing a 2 year old for not understanding seems somewhat unreasonable, since being a 2 year old you can't really expect them to have understood. For repeated behaviour it goes to loss of privileges, like taking the toy away.

It seems to work pretty well. Japanese kids seem quite mature, and some of the toys they get are kinda surprising for a westerner... Fairly sharp woodworking tools, for example. I dunno, I'm not an expert, but I think I'd like to at least understand what they are saying before making a judgement and unfortunately TFA doesn't really explain it, as you pointed out.

Once again, you are assuming that the rest of the world is like America. Actually most people have a reasonable idea of what the US has been up to, since they have probably been affected by it in some way. In any case, it's hard not to have noticed it on the news lately. Most of the world has far more international news than the US networks do.