A looming lawsuit could solidify Amazon’s dominance in the book business. That might be good for readers’ wallets, but it also might be bad for readers in the long term. Here why.
If the Department of Justice gets its way, chances are that you will soon be able to purchase cheaper books on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad. The big winner, though, won’t just be cheap readers. It’ll be Amazon.com.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the government is planning to file an antitrust suit against Apple and the five major New York-based publishing houses — Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan, and HarperCollins — for allegedly conspiring to fix the price of eBooks. The case involves a series of events that took place in 2010, when Apple negotiated rights to start selling books on the iPad. At the time, Apple agreed to buy titles based on a so-called “agency-model,” where the publishers would get to set a minimum retail price for each book. “>
If the Department of Justice gets its way, chances are that you will soon be able to purchase cheaper books on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad. The big winner, though, won’t just be cheap readers. It’ll be Amazon.com.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the government is planning to file an antitrust suit against Apple and the five major New York-based publishing houses — Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan, and HarperCollins — for allegedly conspiring to fix the price of eBooks. The case involves a series of events that took place in 2010, when Apple negotiated rights to start selling books on the iPad. At the time, Apple agreed to buy titles based on a so-called “agency-model,” where the publishers would get to set a minimum retail price for each book. “>
If the Department of Justice gets its way, chances are that you will soon be able to purchase cheaper books on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad. The big winner, though, won’t just be cheap readers. It’ll be Amazon.com.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the government is planning to file an antitrust suit against Apple and the five major New York-based publishing houses — Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan, and HarperCollins — for allegedly conspiring to fix the price of eBooks. The case involves a series of events that took place in 2010, when Apple negotiated rights to start selling books on the iPad. At the time, Apple agreed to buy titles based on a so-called “agency-model,” where the publishers would get to set a minimum retail price for each book.
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GasBuddy “GasBuddy lets you search for Gas Prices by city, state, zip code, with listings for all cities in the USA and Canada. Updated in real-time, with national average price for gasoline, current trends, and mapping tools.”
Opera music has been incorporated into many movies and commercials. For example, Delibes’ ‘The Flower Duet’ from Lakme can be heard in The American President, Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life, Superman Returns, Meet the Parents, and many TV shows and commercials. Rossini’s The Barber of Seville is featured in Babe: Pig in the City, Deep Impact, Space Jam, Under the Tuscan Sun, and an award-winning Nike commercial. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
6 Historical Events That Are Way More Modern Than You Think.
Olive Garden reviewer Marilyn Hagerty goes on TV to discuss becoming an overnight Internet sensation.
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A usually dormant virus may wake up and cause MS; a protozoan parasite is tied to schizophrenia.
Might some forms of neurological illness, such as multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia, be caused at least partly by bacteria, viruses or other parasites? A largely Danish team has recently published evidence of a strong association between multiple sclerosis and a retrovirus, together with hints that a gene called TRIM5, which is used by cells to fight viruses, is especially active in people with MS.
Other illnesses have unexpectedly turned out to be caused by parasites. In the 1980s, Barry Marshall of the University of Western Australia ran into a brick wall of official disbelief for suggesting that a bacterium caused stomach ulcers. Only by deliberately infecting and then curing himself did he finally get the medical establishment’s attention (and eventually the Nobel Prize).
The virus implicated in multiple sclerosis is called HERV-Fc1, a bizarre beast called an “endogenous” retrovirus.
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Julia Tuttle – Mother of Miami
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US Soldier’s Shooting Rampage in Kandahar Draws Fury
Anti-American sentiment is running high in Afghanistan following the killing of 16 civilians in their homes by an American soldier. Among the dead are nine children and three women. Eleven of the victims were found in a single home. The soldier believed to be responsible for the killings is in custody, and an investigation is underway. The attack comes just weeks after US soldiers’ burning of copies of the Qur’an provoked outrage and has prompted new calls for the US to immediately withdraw from Afghanistan. More …
I say fuck’em! Let’s leave their country and let the taliban take over. Then we can sit back and watch the blood feuds begin!
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What looked to many at Melbourne’s Flemington Racecourse like a horse in a wetsuit was actually just Newmarket Handicap champ Hay List trotting around in a custom-made equine compression suit.
“You see a lot of cyclists, footballers and other sports people use them,” said trainer John McNair. “They are designed to aid recovery, help with muscle fatigue. We have been using them on Hay List for a couple of weeks now and it makes a huge difference.”
The Hidez Recovery Suit is composed of a high-tech moisture-management fabric and uses a “graduated compression method which helps circulation and supplies more oxygen to all the muscle groups.”
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10 Bizarre Units of Measurement.
Facebook Friends and politics don’t always mix, finds a new Pew poll.
Reporters without Borders updates “Enemies of the Internet” list, adds Bahrain and Belarus.
PayPal freezes another charity account, faces the wrath of Regretsy yet again.
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COLUMBIA, Mo. — Roger Fidler, in jeans and a black turtleneck, is watching Steve Jobs, in jeans and a black turtleneck, introduce the iPad.
Fidler is sitting in his stark white office — the late Apple co-founder adored white’s simplicity — and Jobs is strolling on stage in a 2010 video playing on Fidler’s MacBook. “There’s laptops and smartphones now,” Jobs says. “But a question has arisen lately: Is there room for a third category of device in the world, something that’s between a laptop and a smartphone?”
Fidler smiles through a scruffy gray Jobsian beard. He has known the answer for a long time. In 1994, while running a lab dreaming up the future of newspapers, Fidler starred in his own video demonstrating a prototype he cooked up that was remarkably like the iPad — black, thin, rectangular, with text and video displayed on-screen.
A narrator described technology that at the time sounded like science fiction: “Tablets will be a whole new class of computer. They’ll weigh under two pounds. They’ll be totally portable. They’ll have a clarity of screen display comparable to ink on paper. They’ll be able to blend text, video, audio and graphics together. . . . We may still use computers to create information but will use the tablet to interact with information — reading, watching, listening.”
Nearly two decades later, the video was unearthed online and went viral after Jobs introduced the iPad. Fidler, now in his late 60s and a journalism think-tanker at the University of Missouri, became an overnight blogosphere sensation. “Video Evidence: They Predicted the iPad Way Back in 1994” was one headline. A blogger wrote, “It’s not often (well, ever) that I consider the possibility someone might be from the future, but maybe Roger Fidler was.”
For Fidler and colleagues who knew him back when he dreamed the future, the video’s resurfacing generated exhilarating but sore memories — and lots of thorny questions: What if their lab hadn’t been shut down by shortsighted corporate bean-counting? Is Fidler getting enough credit, or even any credit? Did Apple (ahem) steal the idea?
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ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2012) — Despite a century of research, memory encoding in the brain has remained mysterious. Neuronal synaptic connection strengths are involved, but synaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale.
In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, physicists Travis Craddock and Jack Tuszynski of the University of Alberta, and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona demonstrate a plausible mechanism for encoding synaptic memory in microtubules, major components of the structural cytoskeleton within neurons.
Microtubules are cylindrical hexagonal lattice polymers of the protein tubulin, comprising 15 percent of total brain protein. Microtubules define neuronal architecture, regulate synapses, and are suggested to process information via interactive bit-like states of tubulin. But any semblance of a common code connecting microtubules to synaptic activity has been missing. Until now.
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The Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo closed last month after 111 years, as the thinking on animal exhibits has evolved.
THE Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo, oldest of the ornate Beaux-Arts animal houses that once lined the zoo’s stately, central Astor Court, closed late last month. Officially named the Primates’ House upon its opening in 1901, it was one of the last surviving remnants of the old city zoo. As with the Ape, Lion and Elephant Houses along Astor Court’s Neoclassical piazza (designed by Heins & La Farge, a firm best known for its elaborately tiled New York City subway stations) visitors entered through a portico limned with totemic terra-cotta animal carvings and action scenes up along the frieze. Once inside, we would pass a series of reeking, brashly lighted tiled rooms in which the only concessions to the exhibits’ natural homes were a chained log, a corner-propped limb and a front nameplate with a black dot on the silhouette of the captive’s native continent.
In the old city zoos — at the height of what might be called zookeeping’s Colonial Era — the very harshness of the animals’ anthropocentric framing was a direct reflection both of the depth of our awe over their fearsome otherness and of our complete ignorance of their rightful homes. Over the ensuing century, however, with the increased knowledge of the wild and its inhabitants that — as is always the case with humans — only comes in concert with our relentless encroachment upon them, the old city zoo began to wither and fade.
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PRIMATES apart, few mammals employ tools. Sea otters use rocks to smash clams open, dolphins wrap sponges around their noses to protect themselves while they forage on the seabed, elephants swat insects with branches and humpback whales exhale curtains of bubbles to trap schools of fish. Until now, these four examples had been thought the extent of the non-primate mammalian tool-users club. But a study just published in Animal Cognition, by Volker Deecke of the University of St Andrews, in Britain, has added a fifth and rather surprising one. That epitome of rugged wildness, the grizzly bear, seems to be the only species other than humans to have invented the comb.
Dr Deecke made this discovery while studying grizzly-bear behaviour from a small boat in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, on July 22nd 2010. After a period of play-fighting with another bear and a short bout of feeding on a beached whale carcass, a bear of between three and five years of age, sex unknown, waded into the shallows of the bay.
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The Large Bathers by Cézanne (1907) Philadelphia Museum of Art
Paul Cezanne was born on January 19, 1839, in Aix-en-Provence. His father, Louis Auguste Cézanne was the co-founder of a banking firm and Cézanne was brought up in a wealthy and prosperous environment which eventually, on his mother’s death in 1897, resulted in him receiving a large inheritance. When he was thirteen years of age Paul Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon, where he met and became friends with Émile Zola. This friendship was important for both of them; for with their youthful romanticism they always pictured themselves having successful careers in the art world of Paris and as we now know their dreams turned to reality with Cézanne becoming a highly successful painter and Zola a highly successful writer. Throughout his life Cézanne would look back on his childhood and teenage years in Aix when he and his friends would spend many heady sunlit days soaking up the Provencal climate as they would go down for a swim in the nearby Arc River. Maybe with that in mind, it is not surprising that Cézanne would recall those days pictorially, completing almost two hundred works featuring people, both male and female, bathing, sometimes in groups, sometimes singly, nearly all with landscape backgrounds.
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ScienceDaily (Mar. 12, 2012) — The world’s tallest man appears to have stopped growing following treatment at the University of Virginia Medical Center, earning the medical center a mention in the 2012 Guinness World Records.
In May 2010, 8-foot-3-inch Sultan Kosen of Turkey made his first visit to UVA for treatment by endocrinologist Mary Lee Vance, MD. Kosen suffers from acromegaly, which is usually caused by a tumor in the pituitary gland. The tumor causes a large amount of growth hormone to be produced, which can lead to gigantism if the excess growth hormone is produced before puberty begins.
The condition can cause a range of health problems, Dr. Vance says. “His skeleton just can’t support him,” she says.
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Beautiful Photographs of the Old West
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On Feb. 28, European and American scientists, including Stanford School of Medicine genetics professor Carlos Bustamante, PhD, and senior research associate Peter Underhill, PhD, announced the sequencing of Otzi’s entire genome. It is the oldest human sample to undergo such an analysis. Postdoctoral scholars Andres Moreno-Estrada, PhD; Brenna Henn, PhD; and Martin Sikora, PhD, also worked on the study, which appeared in Nature Communications. High-throughput DNA sequencing was performed at Massachusetts-based Life Technologies Corp.
The sequence revealed some things impossible to learn by studying the body: the color of his eyes, for example, (brown) and the fact that he was likely lactose-intolerant. But more importantly, it also gave clues to where his ancestors lived and how humans may have migrated across Europe during the Copper Age, which started about 7,000 years ago. The answer surprised some people:
“The Iceman’s ancestry most closely mirrors that of modern-day Sardinians,” said Underhill, who, with Bustamante, came to the conclusion by analyzing the mummy’s Y chromosome. “His lineage is very rare in mainland Europe — only 1 percent or less share the same sequence — but is rather frequent in northern Sardinia and southern Corsica.”
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Viktor Bout made his first major foray into the weapons business in 1995, on a pleasant summer day in Bulgaria. A Russian entrepreneur who was then twenty-eight years old, he had flown to Sofia from Sharjah, the third-largest city in the United Arab Emirates, where he had lived for the previous two years. Sharjah was a kind of postmodern caravansary—as Bout told me recently, it was a place with “practically no law.” Although he had arrived in the Emirates not knowing much about Arab culture, he had a cosmopolitan ability to adapt to new circumstances. He was intending to enter the field of aviation. Supple with languages, he could flip among Russian, English, Portuguese, and Esperanto; today, he says, he can “read fifteen or sixteen languages, go to the market with nine or ten, and fluently speak five or six.” He started spending time at the cargo hangars at Sharjah’s international airport, got to know the pilots and crews, and soon formed an air-freight company, Air Cess, with a small fleet of Russian planes.
In Sofia, Bout checked into the Park Hotel Moskva, a shabby, state-owned high-rise, and set out for the office of a Bulgarian arms dealer named Peter Mirchev. Bout was comfortable doing business almost anywhere, be it an Eastern European city or an African jungle airstrip. Air Cess was doing particularly well in Africa, where he sometimes worked with despotic regimes. Bout’s pilots flew televisions, air-conditioners, and expensive furniture from Sharjah to ragged African capitals, and delivered planeloads of West African francs from Senegal to surrounding countries. Air Cess had also begun shipping textiles and electronics from Sharjah to Afghanistan, a country that was then led by President Burhanuddin Rabbani. Bout had grown close to Rabbani’s defense minister, Ahmed Shah Massoud, whom Bout described to me as “a real revolutionary,” adding, “You could see the flame in his eyes.” Massoud was concerned about the advance of Taliban rebels, and one day his deputy asked Bout if he could also hustle guns.
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Some of the most illuminating discoveries dispelling notions that nomadic societies were less developed than many sedentary ones are now coming from burial mounds, called kurgans, in the Altai Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan, near the borders with Russia and China. More Photos »
Ancient Greeks had a word for the people who lived on the wild, arid Eurasian steppes stretching from the Black Sea to the border of China. They were nomads, which meant “roaming about for pasture.” They were wanderers and, not infrequently, fierce mounted warriors. Essentially, they were “the other” to the agricultural and increasingly urban civilizations that emerged in the first millennium B.C.
As the nomads left no writing, no one knows what they called themselves. To their literate neighbors, they were the ubiquitous and mysterious Scythians or the Saka, perhaps one and the same people. In any case, these nomads were looked down on — the other often is — as an intermediate or an arrested stage in cultural evolution. They had taken a step beyond hunter-gatherers but were well short of settling down to planting and reaping, or the more socially and economically complex life in town.
But archaeologists in recent years have moved beyond this mind-set by breaking through some of the vast silences of the Central Asian past.
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