Very cool, if true

I am liking the waste water generator.

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I was thinking of you when I posted it :->

Looks like it still needs a bunch of work, but it may well prove to be incredibly useful.

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Yeah – it could well do a lot of good. Or something that someone builds having looked at it and decided they could do better.

I’ve been thinking about mobile phone use in the developing world. Not much in the way of telephone cables being built in rural Africa or India because they are expensive and you can deliver the same benefit just by using mobile phone.

The more I think about the water (and electricity) supply issue in rural Africa the more I think the equivalent of mobile phones are needed; distributed, stand-alone solutions that require the minimum of infrastructure. The pipes will come later, if they are needed.

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skington.livejournal.com

How come "If you're doing anything on a .com domain" and "Coding tricks of game developers" didn't get tweeted?

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Good question! I'm going to blame either ifttt or BufferApp. Not sure which one of them had an issue there.

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There's a difference between "censoring" and "not selling". Apple aren't preventing the author from selling his book himself or through other publishers, they're just saying that they don't want to sell something that encourages people to buy from competitors.

That doesn't strike me as especially outrageous. I wouldn't expect one of my colleagues to provide a link to the PwC website instead of ours when recommending something to a client.

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This is why I object to vertically integrated markets. I expect booksellers to sell books, publishers to publish, etc. By putting them together you end up with a situation where a bookseller is refusing to sell books based on their content, and I object to that on a basic level.

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I agree with you on vertical markets. Of course in Apple's case, it's even worse since they sell the hardware too (certainly for music, less so for books).

On the other hand I don't have a problem with a company (or a private individual running a tiny independent bookshop for that matter) not selling something that it doesn't want to sell, for whatever reason.

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I _do_ have a problem with it, but that's my personal view. I don't believe they should be legally bound to publish things they do not want to publish, I just don't personally approve of them not doing so.

Same with their app store - if they want to censor content on the App Store then that's their right. And it will mean that I will never buy an iPhone, as that's my right.

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octopoid-horror.livejournal.com

Various of the ebook sellers do this, not just Apple.

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Really? I've not seen Waterstones, Google eBooks, etc. doing this. Got any links I can pass on?

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octopoid-horror.livejournal.com

I don't think Amazon like you doing it (though I could be wrong) but Smashwords definitely don't like you linking to the Kindle store.

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That would piss me off. And is weird, as they publish through the Kindle store (amongst other places).

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andrewhickey.livejournal.com

They don't, actually - they have been trying to get an agreement to publish through Kindle for ages, but they haven't got one yet.

*None* of the ebook sites will allow this, and they all state it quite clearly in the T&Cs, and there are various good reasons.

In Smashwords' case, in particular, they are selling the books through various different markets, and it would be very bad business (and bad faith) if, say, books they sold through iBooks had links to buy other books in Barnes & Noble.

More importantly, though, there are people who published what is effectively spam - 'books' a few pages long, but full of affiliate links. In this case, Godin is not just linking a single book, but is linking to multiple books by different authors. That's classic linkspam behaviour, and even if in his case it's not spam (though I would offer ten to one odds that all those links went through an affiliate site) because it is a proper book, the rules are there for a very good reason.

Smashwords' general T&Cs include that you won't:
"contain hyperlinks to affiliate marketing pages, especially if the ebook is published for the sole intent of publishing hyperlinked content that directs readers to affiliate marketing pages"
or
"contain advertisements for services, or contain partial books for the purpose of promoting the purchase of the same book elsewhere or on Smashwords"

Smashwords' Style Guide says:
"As a courtesy to ebook retailers who promote and sell your Smashwords Premium Catalog titles, please restrict your hyperlinks to only your Smashwords author page and book pages, or your personal home page or blog. Do not add hyperlinks to online ebook retailers that may compete with current or future Smashwords retail distribution partners.
It’s not considerate, for example, if to advertise your Kindle or Apple ebook in your ebook sold at Barnes & Noble. Such advertising will only alienate your retail partners, confuse your customers, and will cause a retailer to remove your book from their catalog."

That suggests that presumably Apple and Barnes & Noble *do* allow links to at least one competitor - Smashwords (because otherwise they wouldn't talk about putting in links to your Smashwords page). Which suggests to me that this is more about the affiliate thing than anything else.

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Moving on from the genetics / voting thing:

I wonder if anyone has ever made a study to see if there is a correlation between favourite sports teams and favourite political parties. This batty theory occurred to me the other day. Most people will choose a favourite football team long before they have a favourite political party. It's not out of the question that for some people, at some level, political thoughts in childhood are associated with positive feelings towards their team's colour.

So someone who decides to support Liverpool or Manchester United when a small child begins to see red as his colour. Does that make him more likely to be sympathetic to the Labour Party in adult life? Conversely, someone who supports Chelsea or Everton could be more likely to see blue things (and hence the Conservative Party) in a popular light.

I doubt there would be a strong correlation, but even if there was a small one, that could be enough to affect election results in constituencies with football clubs.

(It would also be bad news for the Liberal Democrats. Not so many football teams playing in yellow. Although one example would be Torquay United, and now that I think about it, there are a lot of LibDems in south Devon...)

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I would _love_ to see some study put into that one. I'm sure that a lot of influence would come from the views that people spend their time around anyway, so that would have a big effect, but it would be fascinating to see if the pure colour by itself had an effect!

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Perhaps explaining the success of the Green party in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Edited Date: 2012-03-02 01:33 pm (UTC)

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You might have to correct for the effect of the Hillsborough 96 Don't Buy the Sun campaign in Liverpool.

Edited Date: 2012-03-02 01:58 pm (UTC)

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That would be the problem - you'd have to correct for so many local issues like that (although I don't think there were many Conservative voters in Liverpool even before Hillsborough!).

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andrewhickey.livejournal.com

Everton supporters were/are just as likely to boycott the Sun as Liverpool ones though.

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