{"id":1106,"date":"2010-01-29T23:14:35","date_gmt":"2010-01-30T03:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1106"},"modified":"2010-01-29T23:14:35","modified_gmt":"2010-01-30T03:14:35","slug":"odd-lots-98","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1106","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/gadgetlab\/2010\/01\/ipad-books-are-us-only\/\">The iPad&#8217;s ebook store is evidently US-only<\/a>, less likely because of copyright laws themselves (as many are claiming) than because a lot of books are licensed to publishers by country, and if an author did not contract a book for distribution in Asia (for example) it can&#8217;t legally be sold in Asia. Some authors think this will allow them to contract separately by country or language and make more money&#8230;when in fact it only means that people outside the US will have yet another reason to steal the damned book. The only way to reduce content piracy is this: <em>Sell it cheap, sell it easy, sell it everywhere<\/em>. Anything else is wishful thinking.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s a great short piece by nanotech guru Eric Drexler on <a href=\"http:\/\/metamodern.com\/2010\/01\/20\/why-fusion-won\u2019t-provide-power\/\">why tokamaks won&#8217;t ever be widely used in commercial power generation<\/a>. My favorite line in the whole thing: &#8220;&#8230;[the Sun] puts out less power per unit mass than a good compost pile.&#8221; Fortunately for us, the Sun is a little bigger than a compost pile. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>When I finally worked up the courage to go to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.meetup.com\/Paranormal-Erotic-Romance-Book-Club-of-Colorado-Springs\/?gj=wg2_ej1b\">the Meetup Web page for the Paranormal Erotic Romance Book Club of Colorado Springs<\/a>, I discovered that one of the topics they list for the group is &#8220;New in Town.&#8221; I belonged to the New In Town Meetup for awhile in 2003, and I&#8217;m guessing that that&#8217;s why I got the email mentioned in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1105\">yesterday&#8217;s entry<\/a>. Lesson: Never ascribe to vampires what can be explained by simple spamming.<\/li>\n<li>And while we&#8217;re talking weird emails, I got one the other day thanking me for using <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Minitab\">Minitab statistical software<\/a>&#8230;which I had never heard of until I opened the message.<\/li>\n<li>If you ever had the urge to click on a cloud formation, <a href=\"http:\/\/yayeveryday.com\/post\/8684\">this is the kite for you<\/a>. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The iPad&#8217;s ebook store is evidently US-only, less likely because of copyright laws themselves (as many are claiming) than because a lot of books are licensed to publishers by country, and if an author did not contract a book for distribution in Asia (for example) it can&#8217;t legally be sold in Asia. Some authors think [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[17,15,62,16,54],"class_list":["post-1106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-ebooks","tag-hardware","tag-kites","tag-publishing","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}