QuantumTom

Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that “publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy” comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were “loaned” last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself.

via Go To Hellman: Offline Book “Lending” Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion.

Vice President Joe Biden said at a Florida fundraiser Sunday that the 60-seat threshold for passing legislation in the Senate put a dangerous new roadblock in the way of American government.

“As long as I have served, … I've never seen, as my uncle once said, the constitution stood on its head as they've done. This is the first time every single solitary decision has required 60 senators,” Biden said. “No democracy has survived needing a supermajority.”

via VP: Constitution ‘on its head’ | POLITICO 44.

This guy on Reddit has a crazy story regarding some shenannigans by Verizon and Microsoft. Apparently, he uses his phone as an alarm clock. Normally, it works great. But when Verizon decides to install spyware on his Blackberry it crashes his phone’s operating system. Consequently, the alarm clock fails to go off and he misses work.