But that's not $140->$70 after tax, that's $140k->$70k after tossing $24k into retirement investment savings, another $5k into healthcare savings, possibly another $1,500 towards healthcare premiums (huge amount of variability there), and then finally taxes.
Don't forget real estate tax and sales tax. In some places, real estate tax is about 20-30% of the rental cost. Sales tax is as high as 10% in some places.
I see the downsides. But I also see the delivery vans in my neighborhood that are always double parking and blocking traffic. At least in the air, traffic can be routed in 3d.
Just as the delivery vans participate with local police through FLOC, so will the drones, soon. Remember, if it can be seen from a public vantage point, it's not private, including what can be seen through windows and behind fences.
Funny line-- but I think it's important to highlight how the Brits were able to find value and unlock a history in objects that other cultures stopped caring about.
While people like to say they "stole" things, there's no evidence they ever took something that others actually cared about or took the least interest in protecting. The Elgin marbles were just flopped around a field and no locals seemed to care at all. Some of the items were purchased directly from their owner at a price negotiated with a willing seller.
I think the British museum is proof of how scholarship and gentle care can preserve our past and create something that people love to visit and learn about.
Such a kind British museum offering to maintain these artifacts to the point of denying return to the origin countries when requested. Clearly this is for the preservation of our past and the benefit of humanity.
Absent any proof that the objects were truly stolen, I don't feel any need to return something to someone in some country who suddenly finds an interest in getting something back. What does ownership mean to you?
Let's say you come to my country and buy a souvenir. Can I decide, hundreds of years later, that you must be forced to give it back?
And why do borders matter? The argument seems to be that housing an object on one side of an arbitrary political line is morally superior to putting it on display on the other side of some invisible line. Somehow someone born to the right parents is a morally superior curator compared to someone born into the wrong parents.
> Funny line-- but I think it's important to highlight how the Brits were able to find value and unlock a history in objects that other cultures stopped caring about.
Do you really think they stopped caring about? Bold claim to say this applies for every culture and artifact over there.
Or is it maybe that pillaging, which destroys what's left behind, and then having no good way to take things back other than defeating the British Naval Empire makes maintaining your own history hard?
Personally, I prefer the word "bytes", but "octets" is technically more accurate as there are systems that use differently sized bytes. A lot of these are obsolete but there are also current examples, for example in most FPGA that provide SRAM blocks, it's actually arranged as 9, 18 or 36-bit wide with the expectation that you'll use the extra bits for parity or flags of some kind.
Octets is the term used in most international standards instead of the American "byte".
"Octet" has the advantage that it is not ambiguous. In old computer documentation, from the fifties to the late sixties, a "byte" could have meant any size between 6 bits and 16 bits, the same like "word", which could have meant anything between 8 bits and 64 bits, including values like 12 bits, 18 bits, 36 bits, 60 bits, or even 43 bits.
Traditionally, computer memory is divided in pages, which are divided in lines, which are divided in words, which are divided in bytes. However the sizes of any of those "units" has varied in very wide ranges in the early computers.
IBM System/360 has chosen the 8-bit byte, and the dominance of IBM has then forced this now ubiquitous meaning of "byte", but there were many computers before System/360 and many coexisting for some years with the IBM 360 and later mainframes, where byte meant something else.
Not problematic, minor pedantry. With much time spent reading (and occasionally writing) technical documentation it's octets, binary prefixes, and other wanton pedantry where likely to be understood/appreciated or precision is required.
FTR, ECMA-130 (the CD "yellow book" equivalent standard) is littered with the term "8-bit bytes", so it was certainly a thing then. Precision when simultaneously discussing eight-to-fourteen modulation, and the 17 encoding "bits" that hit the media for each octet as noted in a sibling comment.
No. You don't need to wait half a lifetime. You only need to wait that long if you sign a contract and sell all of the rights. If you don't want to wait, just insist upon another time period. And it should be noted that the contracts only transfer ownership rights to a piece of property. It's like selling a car or a house. Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years.
My guess is that you won't find any publishers interested. Why? Because developing a work requires quite an investment and only the hits make any profit. The backlist is what keeps everyone in business.
> Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years.
Plenty of people lease. One way of looking at this is that Congress has kind of said you can only lease copyright (of certain types) and the maximum lease term is 35 years. Other jurisdictions have similar things with different names.
You could get different terms, but I'm sure you need clout first. Of course, the majority of my output is work for hire and I retain no rights and can't terminate it later; oh well.
It's true that the alternatives may not be good, but if so it suggests that maybe publishing is a business that requires certain behavior.
I think the best thing that Doctorow could do is set up his own publishing business and show the big companies the right way to do it. If he's right, he'll get the best new talent and quickly succeed.
But I'm guessing he'll discover what the major companies know: the consumer is fickle, developing a new book/movie/song is expensive, and only a few hits pay for the rest.
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