nswango

Not sure that quote has aged well from a close personal friend and spirited defender of Peter Mandelson.

Non-energy uses of fossil fuels are not problematic from the point of greenhouse emissions.

If we stop burning fossil fuels and get energy from renewable sources, the remaining hydrocarbons will probably be used for plastics, chemicals and so on. If they aren't burnt this is fine.

It also probably makes more sense to use fossil fuels for applications where density is critical such as aviation, offset with carbon capture, rather than to leave oil in the ground and synthesize jet fuel using renewable energy.

But making plastics using renewable energy and fossil hydrocarbons for feedstock does not exacerbate the greenhouse effect, unless you burn them when you've finished with them.

Arguably plastics are a stable, cheap and useful carbon sink and if climate is the overriding ecological priority we should be making as many as we can and recycling as few as possible.

To be pedantic: I think the actual story is about V1 drones. They did not have a navigation system as such, they were just aimed in a certain direction and with the right amount of fuel to fall out of the sky over the target.

The British noticed that V1s aimed at London tended to fall a little short. This would have been to the South and East of London since that's the direction they were coming from. They reported more hits on the North West of the city, expecting correctly that Nazi spies in Britain would let the Luftwaffe know about this.

So the range was decremented further, meaning even more hits on the southern and eastern suburbs, but statistically fewer people killed and buildings destroyed as the mean moved to less populated areas.

Are you claiming that advertising doesn't increase the total gambling spend?

My comment and the part of the previous comment I was replying to are explicitly about works in copyright.

For public domain works, poor quality printed copies could never be criticized as crowding out better quality copies.

I disagree.

The bookshop would order the book from the distributor, who would get a copy ultimately from Amazon.

The books printed-on-demand by Amazon and sold directly by them are also sold via the traditional supply chain.

I mean, it will be very obvious from the physical book itself.

Agreed, the article author is just gatekeeping as far as I'm concerned.

Most books available on PoD wouldn't be available at all without it. Not just less well known reissues but also new interesting books with limited readership, and books which larger publishers would ignore because of their own prejudices.

There are more luxury editions of classics than ever so quality-sensitive book collectors are still being catered for. And it's easier than ever to find secondhand copies of old books.

It's usually extremely prominent if the book is an India only edition.

> If you have an older, low-volume book, providing a shoddy version will make you more money than letting it go out of print.

From my point of view, what you are describing is "if you're the owner of an interesting but niche work, making it available in a basic version will please a lot of people who want to buy and read it".

The alternative to most of these 'shoddy versions' from reputable publishers is simply no version at all. Not sure why the author of the article wants to enforce this on people who actually want to read these books, rather than ooh over print quality and hoard them as luxury objects.

If you order from your local bookstore a book which is being sold on Amazon as a PoD copy by a major publisher, what do you think happens?

They don't have a separate manufacturing process for mom-and-pop bookstores. Amazon do the printing and the logistics but deliver the book to the store instead of to your house so that the store can hand it to you and collect a very small amount of money.

biblio.org is a good alternative where I am (although personally I don't see the problem with having either the print-on-demand books or buying used from Amazon as an option).

sqlite is an extreme outlier not a typical example, with regard to test suite size and coverage.

For a long time the standard way of loading JSON was using eval.

So you think that the letters in the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets which are printed identically to the Latin A should not exist?

And, for example, Greek words containing this letter should be encoded with a mix of Latin and Greek characters?