... Which pretty much explains every 'Enterprise IT' purchasing decision ever.

It's not the human *touch* that people crave in a complicated interaction with a system. It's human *versatility*.

Thus more personnel does no good, if those personnel are rigidly controlled, lack information to advise or authority to act. The fact that they're also expected to be jolly and upbeat as they follow their rigid and unyielding rules only turns the interaction with them into a travesty of a social interaction.

What would work better is a well-designed check-in system that handles routine situations nearly all the time, along with a few personnel who have the training and authority to solve any passenger problems that come up.

I'm pretty sure birth control exists.

the seller has no clue about what Zorro cards are inside

I can understand the display cards and SCSI cards - those have function - but everything else (framegrabber cards and such) seems like rather hopelessly outclassed stuff?

I can only go with the experience of my friends, who've gone both routes successfully.

It's true that traditional publishers expect mid-list authors to shoulder most of the promotion efforts these days. I never said they didn't. Fiction authors are now expected to maintain a platform, which used to be a non-fiction thing. Certainly traditional publishers have become more predatory and less supportive than they were twenty years ago. I don't have an inside track on why that is, but I suspect there are several causes. One is that POD allows publishers to make an reliable though modest profit from their mid-list authors, which ironically makes them more risk averse. But publishers still provide production and editing services on a MS that'd cost you maybe ten thousand dollars if you were contracting those services out. They also get your book in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, which is a bridge too far for most indy authors, even the successful ones.

A lot of the bad feeling that publishers get from indy authors comes from two sources. First, a long history with rejection. Second the lack of respect indy authors get relative to traditionally published authors. We can see it in this discussion elsewhere, where one poster puts "authors" in quotes when referring to indy authors. And it's easy to see why because most indy authors just aren't good enough to get traditionally published. *Some* indy authors put out a product that's every bit as good as the mid-list authors from the big publishing houses, but most just dump their terrible manuscripts on Amazon with a clip-art cover and no copy editing, much less developmental editing.

The statistic that most indy authors make their investment back plus 40% didn't impress me, because (a) that counts the author's labor as free and (b) most indy authors don't invest much cash in their projects. The percentage of indy authors that clear, say, five thousand dollars in profit are very small.

It's not that indy publishing doesn't have its points, and my traditionally published friends are certainly thinking about dipping their toe in the water. But it's not as cheap as it looks if you want a comparable product, and you give up certain things. I was in Manhattan recently and went to the 5th Avenue branch of the NYPL. My traditionally published friends' books were either on the shelves our out circulating. The NYPL had *none* of my indy author friends' books, even though at least one of them has made the New York Times best seller list.

I don't think it's as simple as Amazon is good or Amazon is evil. Amazon is powerful, and that needs watching.

Now I have a number writer friends, one of whom is published both with traditional imprints like TOR and with Amazon's new in-house publishing imprints. She has good things to say about Amazon's imprints, but one thing you have to take into account is that nobody will stock your book *but* Amazon if you publish with them. That's giving up a lot, so they treat authors reasonably well. But that doesn't mean the corporation actually cares about authors. Amazon needs reliable mid-list authors to make their publishing ventures a success, and by cutting out the middleman can afford generous royalties. But if Amazon succeeds in putting a stake in the heart of traditional publishing, I wouldn't care to speculate on what will happen to authors.

Nor should what traditional publishers do for authors be underestimated. I have friends who are successful indy writers, but it's not like being a writer, it's more like running a small publishing house yourself. They hire story editors, copy editors and artists, and manage promotion and publicity. It's a lot of work; that plus actually writing pretty much precludes a day job. It's not for everyone.

It's a lot like being an engineer. Engineers are smart people who usually have a lot of insight into the companies they work for, but that doesn't mean that most engineers want to run businesses. Some do, but most would rather have other people take care of that stuff so they can concentrate on what they feel they're best at.

Many writers choose the indy market because it's the only way they'll ever get published. They just dump their manuscript on the market without editing, design or promotion and hope for the best. They rarely succeed. Others choose the indy route because they thrive on running and controlling their own small business, the way some engineers step naturally into the role of entrepreneur. They're well positioned for the future. But most writers need support to reach their full potential.

230,000 were killed by the Banquiao hydroelectric dam disaster.

Not quite. 20,000 were killed in the immediate flooding. The rest were killed in the epidemics, famines, etc that followed.

Even if the worst nuclear accident in history happened EVERY YEAR, it would still be safer than hydroelectric.

If you're going to claim indirect deaths as you did above, then I'm going to claim indirect deaths too.

http://www.who.int/ionizing_ra...

Chernobyl didn't kill that many people directly/immediately, but it has impacted the health of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. It will continue to do so, for generations. Nuclear disasters never go away.

Where X is 10-100 times larger than Y: Increasing the cancer risks for X people isn't 'better' than immediately wiping Y people off the map.

I'm sick and tired of the notion that it's OK to pollute, as long as you don't pollute "too much."

200+ chemicals found in samples of people's blood: http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/...

200+ chemicals found in newborn's umbilical core blood: http://www.scientificamerican....

http://www.cdc.gov/exposurerep...

These chemicals by and large don't go away...and time after time, we find chemicals that were thought to be "safe"...aren't. When are we going to learn that? When are we going to require chemicals be considered dangerous until proven otherwise, instead of the present situation, where chemicals are only later shown to be dangerous once scientists and environmental groups collect a mountain of evidence?

" Do you seriously think they are going to produce coal at a loss? "

Yup. One of the ways the coal industry has been fighting "green" technologies? Plunging the price.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

The coal industry has a century or two of establishment. They have no startup or R&D costs; everything is amortized; they have a heavily legislative-friendly environment.

Johhny Come Lately Solar And Wind is counting on profits within a certain time period to become profitable.

  All the coal company has to do is undercut them on price long enough to bleed them dry...or endanger investments enough that further investment dries up.

4 levels? How many direct reports do you expect one manager to effectively handle? I'm at the 3rd level in my organization (we've varied between 80-120k employees over the last dozen years) with 5 direct reports, and and additional 58 below them at several locations in different timezones. And yet, I'm still 5 levels below our division president...not even the CEO.

I'm sure you could tell me how my time could be used more effectively managing many more people. I'm looking forward to your reference to where you've successfully implemented this strategy.

And that's exactly why we pay our corporate lawyers to cover our corporate arses.

This propagation rate is positively tiny. Honestly, I don't know why it's even part of the headline. For context, this paper (PDF, sorry) shows Code Red infecting over 500,000 machines in an hour.

If 11,000 machines in a day is an event, then we should all be sitting back and breathing a sigh of relief that the bad old days are over....

(Not that I believe that they are. I just don't see any reason for the breathless headline.)

Because it's not required for the employee to read the policy in order for them to be held accountable for it. The policy is in place to protect the company from liability, and allow them to get rid of people.

I work for a large multinational with a presence in all states. Our policies are updated nearly daily as rules change, and due to the fact that laws are different in nearly every location. Nobody reads them all, nor do they have to. But, like it or not, you're still responsible to follow them.

There are plenty of things that you can get sued over that are not illegal. For example, a lot of things can be said between two private individuals, and it's simply freedom of speech, with no legal recourse. Saying those same things could be harassment in the workplace. So yes, policies do need to spell out things, and even this varies from state to state, typically with fewer requirements in "right to work" states since you can be fired just because it's Tuesday.

Citation required (seriously, you couldn't be bothered?)

I can't find anything to back your claim.