Interesting project Sam. Thanks for sharing.
Can you share how your catalogue management works and w/ cover images?
Are you ingesting ONIX from publishers? Or is catalog creation downstream of the bookstore owner ordering the book?
As mentioned in the article, Salt Typhoon and the recency of this request by the UK. At this point they should know better.
My pet theory is anytime the US wants to do something illegal under US law, they simply ask the UK to do it and vice versa. That's why Salt Typhoon isn't and never will be a lesson learned.
He waited a year after receiving the intel? He is being roasted for foriegn interference at the moment? He is about to call an election? Salt Typhoon just broke? And Trump is about to light things up on the Foriegn Affairs file?
I remember when Trump had Canada re-ratify Nafta that Canada had to waive the right to require Canadian data stay in Canada.
I know Canada signed the agreement but I am not sure if that requirement was ever put in legislation or whether the requirement was universal or just for US-based companies.
The Bank of England employees he terrorized would like a word.
Carney has Julie-Payette issues in his past and probably won't leave his board seats to clean up Justin's mess, but never underestimate the ego I guess.
Were they being engineer-minded or where they being lobbied?
I would like to think they were betting on Beta -- the superior technology -- in the Beta v VHS battle of our time.
What am I missing here? Toyota's engineers have a great track record and the company isn't easily swayed by fads or Wall Street.
To take you literally for a moment: if anyone can claim land across a border, based on a historical grievance, then no border would stand. 70 years without a border war in Europe, so yeah we should try to push that water back up the hill. Otherwise a recursive "I would like my land back please."
> Something fundamental needs to change with digital library licensing
What do you recommend?
The artificial scarcity model they have now is broken.
Pay-per-use seems better if the cost per read is adequate enough.
All-you-can-eat-at-fixed-price (Oyster and Scribd) have the economics upside down.
Technically, it wasn't a bootleg. Outside the USA, Orwell is in the public domain. A public domain copy was uploaded to Amazon with 'Global' rights. People in America bought it for 99 cents. The American rights holder complained. The rights listing was changed to "the rest of the world".
Then Amazon had a problem. What to do?
They couldn't give the 99 cents from the US customers to the American publishers because it (A) belonged to the publisher outside the US and (B) the American copies were $9.99 so it wouldn't have been enough.
They could have prompted the American customers to pay the difference, then compensate the American rights holders.
They could have done nothing.
But in the end they said 'we didn't have the right to sell you this in the first place so we are taking the book back'.
Gross but similar to what happens when you change the country code for your Apple ID and things you bought disappear.
This is the best encapsulation I know of what Elon is planning for Twitter:
"We're going to share revenue with everybody and I would just get a revenue sharing program for celebrities for any verified account and I create two levels of verification. Top level of verification. Anybody can be verified if they use their real name, credit card verification, whatever. Pay 10 bucks. We'll do a background check on you. Make sure your credit cards correct and we'll know what's your name, your zip code, whatever we have your address. You typed in a code that would be like blue level and then I would create gold level which is notable people in the world as determined by our editors. These are notable people as determined by our editors, actors, journalists, musician, whatever, and we have a notable group and we have a committee that just votes on who's notable. If you're notable and you should, we share revenue with you and we give you a gold star."
If he was using Watch 4 with LTE and if he bought it, activated it, and paired it to a sim in a European country with LTE support.. the LTE would still work when he left that country to go to Turkey. No?
Khashoggi lived in Virginia so this is still unlikely but I think it is more possible than you make it sound.
Amazon has been buying the rights then doing the production for audiobooks for years. They have the data and they have the will to bring audiobooks to market that the publishers either don't care about or don't know about. In this regard their initiative to buy rights before publication is nothing new.
What is new is that other retailers are wise to audio being the only place in the industry where there is growth.
* Rakuten bought Overdrive — an audio provider for public libraries — then used that catalog to launch audiobooks at Kobo.
* Google has launched audio
* Apple has redesigned their books app to better serve audio (which is serviced by Audible)
* All magnified by smart speaker popularity
It sucks when agents/publishers sign exclusive agreements with Audible so that their books are kept off competitors' platforms.
It also sucks that once DRM-free audio platforms like Downpour.com and libro.fm have started to add DRM... this is presumably a 'level-playing-field' measure in their contracts likely brought about by the above interest in audio... this should be illegal IMO... but kudos to Audible for protecting their business.
Another great example of how Bezos' initiatives from 15 years ago — namely to start Audible productions — are paying dividends in other areas, like Alexa, today.
Small point first… eating the same amount but exercising more equals a caloric deficit in the same way that exercising the same amount but eating less does. I am not following your point about muscles specifically but I think we can let that go provided you agree that being in a caloric deficit needn’t mean you eat fewer calories. That is all I was trying to say regarding exercise.
Second point… confusion is not the same as controversy. Even though people might be confused how the mechanisms and pathways work doesn’t mean they are controversial. Hormones dictate weight gain and weight loss. See pregnancy or puberty or menopause. (You even mentioned Thyroidism.) It’s not controversial. Calling it pseudoscience seems over the top. See the green house effect (first argued in 1824) for an analog.
Third point… my claims pertain to the biology not to the marketing behind certain diets. I don’t believe that the atkins diet is ketogenic… nor do I think the Voedingscentrum is correct in saying the diet has a ‘varied and full-bodied eating pattern’, but I also don’t care. As you say… it is hype. But if your counter-examples have no explanatory power, then they are just as worthless. More on this below. In the very least don’t equate the hormone hypothesis with an endorsement for Atkins.
Fourth point… I concede that my rhetoric is not iron clad. Since science is a process and certainty is always a question… it is hard to ever win an argument about this stuff… as Katan points out doing double-blind studies is near impossible so that makes claims in nutrition science doubly fraught. Having admitted that… I stand by my statement that the hormone hypothesis is not controversial. Yes the lipid hypothesis had sway in American culture in the mid 20th century but evidence to back it up was never produced. If any controversy existed, I would say it lay with the lipid hypothesis not with the endocrine one.
As to the bonfides for sugar induced obesity I would point to Jean Anthelme Brilliat-Savarin (writing in 1825), Alfred Moore (writing in 1860), John Harvey (writing in 1861) , and William Banting (1863). Their accounts were accepted by medical schools in the US and the UK, with varied levels of understanding, through to the 20th century… where Thomas Cleave and John Yudkin were their antecedents. Does that make my 200 year claim iron clad? Not really but I think it is good enough for arguments sake.
Last point… you haven’t made a case for an alternative to the hormone hypothesis. The links you included don’t do it. Your examples don’t do it. The Katan article doesn’t say that low carb doesn’t work… let alone provide an alternative mechanism for losing weight. As I wrote above… caloric reduction is a associated with instances of losing weight… but it doesnt CAUSE you to lose weight. Hormones do.