Amazon and Hachette Bury the Hatchet

Amazon and Hachette Bury the Hatchet

Sort of...

Amazon and Hachette have abruptly ended a very bitter months long battle over pricing, just in time for the holidays!

However, Amazon and Hachette have not disclosed the terms of their new multi-year deal, that goes into effect early next year.

Originally Amazon wanted to set a $9.99 price ceiling on e-books, while Hachette, wanted a range of prices between $12.99 and $14.99. We won't know what prices we'll get until January of 2015. In the meantime Hatchette titles will become available without delay before the new terms take effect. I'll believe that when I see it!

Amazon was also asking for a larger cut from each sale, they wanted up to 50% for each e-book sold. Again, the actual terms have not been disclosed, as such I view this as a rare victory for the publishing industry!

Dave Naggar, Amazon's Vice President of Kindle, said in a brief statement that - “Amazon is pleased with this new agreement as it includes specific financial incentives for Hachette to deliver lower prices, which we believe will be a great win for readers and authors alike.” Despite this statement, the agreement in fact allows Hatchette to set prices.

As far as I am concerned here, e-book prices should never be above $10 and I don't care who writes them. E-books are digital replications and are not worth more. Even at $9.99 they are terribly overpriced!

Why is America's Internet So Slow?

Why is America's Internet So Slow?

What do Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Romania. Lithuania, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, Iceland & Denmark all have in common?

They all have faster internet than the good ol' U.S.A. - that's right faster than America's internet despite the fact that the U.S.A. had it first and invented it!

So, why is America's Internet so slow? It is because our Government has allowed a few giant conglomerates to rig the rules, raise prices and kill competition!

What has happened and what most people don't realize is that these big telecommunications companies such as, Comcast and Time Warner who control the wired, and AT&T, along with Verizon who control the wireless, have divided up the markets for themselves in a 'gentleman's agreement' type of arrangement and they have put themselves in a position where there is no competition and no oversight from any regulatory authority, and in this manner they are able to over-charge us for second-class Internet access and Americans are unable to do anything about it.

If that was not bad enough, it may still get even worse, because these same conglomerates want to abolish net neutrality and set tiered prices for bandwidth and if they don't get their way, their projected profit loss would exceed the expense of upgrading the infrastructure... and therefore such upgrades just won't happen (a veiled threat). They figured a way to beat the laws of monopolization and have been gouging customers with inferior technology! Now they want to put prices on bandwidth and allow some big companies to buy more. In the end customers would have less bandwidth and their internet will become even slower than it already is.

Americans are stuck with old fashioned technology and few options. And these big companies threaten us, they lie and say they'll make it possible for you to have faster streaming by allowing companies like Google and Amazon to buy more bandwidth, giving them priority access they'll deliver faster downloads and streaming. That's all a pack of lies and bullshit! The average customer will soon be faced with, out of control priced internet speed packages and will find their internet gets even slower.

“In Hong Kong right now you can get a 500 megabit symmetric connection that’s unimaginably fast from our standpoint for about 25 bucks a month. In Seoul, for $30 you get three choices of different providers of fiber in your apartment. And they come in and install in a day because competition’s so fierce. In New York City there’s only one choice, and it’s 200 bucks a month for a similar service. And you can’t get that kind of fiber connection outside of New York City in many parts of the country.” - Susan Crawford

These companies are out of control and it's time to do something about it!

If you want to find out more, I recommend that you buy this very good and informative book, "Captive Audience" by Susan Crawford

Captive Audience by Susan Crawford

Some further information about Susan Crawford can be found with these links below.

Bio About Susan Crawford:http://rooseveltinstitute.org/people/susan-crawford

Time Magazine: Is Broadband Internet Access a Public Utility?http://ti.me/WWIMhU

Washington Post Blogger Promotes Crawford for FCC Chair http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/katrina-vanden-heuvel-susan-crawford-for-fcc-chairman/2013/02/04/809b9a10-6ef5-11e2-ac36-3d8d9dcaa2e2_story_1.html

Here is an OP-ED by Susan Crawford from last month: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/opinion/how-to-get-high-speed-internet-to-all-americans.html?_r=1&

MLK's Suicide Letter from the FBI

It's no secret J. Edgar Hoover wanted to see Dr. King discredited.

J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI authorized many operations that sought to discredit alleged opponents of the United States Government that included covert campaigns of disinformation, blackmail and harassment.

“We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the negro and National Security” - FBI Domestic Intelligence Chief William Sullivan.

“You have just 34 days. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

Extensive surveillance failed to show that King was a Communist. However, the investigations did produce evidence of extramarital sexual liaisons, and they were recorded on tape.

Copies were later sent to King's home and discovered by his wife, Coretta Scott King. Dr. King assumed the letter and tape were from the FBI and a little more than a decade later, the Senate’s Church Committee on intelligence overreach confirmed this suspicion.

This should serve as a reminder of what Government Surveillance Agencies are capable of.

And by Government Surveillance Agencies, I am really talking about all of them, because they are all capable. In this day and age, there is no true personal privacy, unless you decide to disconnect from the real world and live under a rock.

New Pizza Hut – Logo – Makeover

New Pizza Hut – Logo – Makeover

Apparently motivated by eight consecutive quarters of reported sales drops the corporate brain-trust at Yum thinks a major makeover is long overdue.

Pizza Hut is hoping to spice up the Pizza experience by giving you more options and ways to customize your pizza with some new exotic toppings, such as Sriracha and Curry. Pizza Hut is doubling its menu offerings with customized toppings, crusts and sauces and oh yea...more! Along with the internal changes in menu offerings and the new options available to customers, Pizza Hut is also introducing a new logo depicting a swirl of tomato sauce on stretched pizza dough. Just plain one dimensional red and white!? 

Oh my...boring...terrible. It's the worst logo change of all time!

Jared Drinkwater - Pizza Hut’s Vice President of National Marketing says... “As we looked to bring more flavor to pizza, we looked at our entire marketing strategy and felt it was time to bring more flavor to pretty much everything”. The new menu and offerings may look more flavorful, but the logo must go! It's a totally disastrous fail!

Unhappy with McGarryBowen the redesigned logo is the work of the advertising agency Deutsch LA. They are the ones behind Taco Bell’s re-branding and the success they had with them is what Yum and the Pizza Hut brain-trust is hoping for with the new Pizza Hut makeover.

Considering how awful this NEW logo is and how the funny fellows at Yum seem to just adore it, I think it became obvious why the company is having problems. They probably would do better with different personnel in their upper corporate ranks, instead of looking for sustainable growth with gimmicky ideas. Whoever thought that the new logo was or is good is simply a color blind person with vision that vanishes beyond the length of their arm.

Introducing a menu that allows customers to customize and be more creative, more inventive, seems like a great NEW idea, but I'm sure in no time regular Pizza Hut patrons will still be ordering what they always ordered. Not every NEW idea is a good idea!

The new changes are gimmicky and I doubt will have staying power, regular patrons are more likely creatures of habit and after the 'newness' wears off I imagine customers will feel overwhelmed and if ordering becomes burdensome, I imagine these same customers may take their taste buds somewhere else.

The new menu goes live on November 19^th.

The new logo is the worst...no more red roof, now the Pizza Hut roof is white! The design sucks, it no longer resembles a roof at all, it now looks like a lady's summer hat!

Pink Floyd - The Endless River – Review – November 14th 2014

Pink Floyd - The Endless River – Review

The Endless River is pieced together fragments from unfinished music recorded from the extra sessions of 1994's Division Bell. These extra sessions were tentatively called The Big Spliff and were a continuation of The Division Bell recordings. The original idea was to create a double album one part with vocal songs and the other part instrumental.

This new suite of music would then be the part two, the continuation of The Division Bell in a more expanded form.

The new album playfully drifts back and forth, sometimes revisiting pieces and parts of earlier work in their Pink Floyd explorative style. The album is in four main parts and the parts are pieced together from various fragments, culled from 20 hours of unfinished session work and worked on for parts of the past two years. Nick Mason reveals that he has re-recorded most of his drum work. The overall production is good and the album has all the Pink Floyd characteristics one could envision.

Overall the album is very good and enjoyable, although I won't call it ambient music in the way that Nick Mason likens it to. It would be better to just call it 'Mood Music' or 'Floyd Music'...Progressive Rock. The album is sure to remind you of the different phases from the band's recording career, parts will remind you of the Dark Side, other parts reminiscent of Animals, Wish You Were Here, The Wall and more.

As long as you don't expect any new artistic, creative breakthrough along the lines of Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here, you won't be disappointed, the new album is musically great. I rate this effort at 4 Stars and recommend adding it to your holiday shopping list.

The closing track, “Louder Than Words” works well in tying together the album title “The Endless River” from a lyric in the song “High Hopes” to their previous album the “Division Bell” that Rick Wright was a part of. The extra tracks after the final cut are the highlights of “The Endless River.”

Enjoy!

There's a great promo video for "Louder Than Words" at the following YouTube link.

Pink Floyd - Louder Than Words

Putin & China's First Lady Share A Moment - Coat-gate - Shaw-gate

At the opening banquet of the APEC summit in Beijing Vladimir Putin wrapped a shawl around Peng Liyuan, the wife of Xi Jinping.

The gentlemanly gesture that took place while the Chinese President chatted with Barack Obama sparked a flurry of off-color jokes about the real intentions of the divorced Russian President.

The warm gesture towards Peng Liyuan on a chilly evening seemed to make the biggest asshole of the year look chivalrous upstaging an inattentive husband.

The images and video spread quickly through the various social media and that was too much, as it appears, for the staunchly conservative Chinese authorities.

The incident is only significant in an overly sensitive China, the rest of the world does not even give a damn!

Coat-gate or Shaw-gate, whichever you prefer to call it, did catch peoples attention here in China and that's due in large part to the popularity of Xi’s wife, who was once a popular folk singer and is thought to be quite attractive and fashionable, a proper role model for Chinese women.

The scandalous incident was originally broadcast on state TV, that's right, shown on their own Chinese TV!

 

In only a few hours following the broadcast, the images and video began disappearing from the internet in China. It's easily available any and everywhere else outside the mainland.

After only two days, most are unaware of this and that can be credited to the machine like censoring that takes place in China.With this posting, my intentions here are to simply inform my Chinese friends and shine a light on the ridiculous insignificance of an act of kindness compared with a tyrannical paranoia!