Amazon is working on a new service, Kindle Worlds
Here's a pretty good write-up about it.
The big takeaway in the details is that Amazon gets full copyright rights to your work, and no crossovers either.
Well, something is better than nothing and maybe a lawsuit.  

Hey Dartz - here's one that should amuse you. Heh. 
The background is straightforward: Congressional investigators discovered that Apple's been using an unusually complex -- but apparently perfectly legal, and decidedly clever --  cluster of international tax shelters to lower its tax burden. For example, they have a holding company incorporated in Ireland that keeps its bank accounts in the U.S.; because Ireland assesses residency based on where the company's assets are while the U.S. assesses residency based on place of incorporation, the holding company effectively exists nowhere for tax purposes. Apple saved $44 billion since 2009 from tricks like this, which, averaged over four years, means the lost tax revenue last year could have paid for a single day of federal spending. But again -- all perfectly legal. Even if you think it shouldn't be, you run into Paul's point in the second clip, namely, why not just have a Senate debate on tax reform rather than try to shame Apple with hearings for doing what literally anyone else in their position would have done (potentially at the risk of being ousted by shareholders if they didn't)?What's especially bizarre about this is Democrats attempting to make an example of a company that's universally respected for its innovation, even among the lowest of low-information voters. If you want to demagogue corporations for lightening their tax load, politics 101 says to find a company that's far removed from the average joe or, at least, whose product reliably produces grumbles about the cost or quality. Defense contractors and oil companies are always easy marks. Instead they chose the one corp above all others whose products nearly everyone likes, and whose late founder has become a symbol for can-do entrepreneurial success -- a point Paul was shrewd in emphasizing today:

I guess the Dems figured that it'd be better to focus on a household name so that people would pay extra attention to the hearings. I think that's a miscalculation. We'll see.





The fault doesn't lie with Apple and the completely misbegotten sense of patriotism that they are ostensibly supposed to display by pouring as much money as they possibly can into the federal government's coffers; rather, it lies with our wildly burdensome and noncompetitive tax code that gives companies a clear incentive to do otherwise. We are living in an increasingly global economy, and we better man up and deal with it -- and I do not mean by persecuting the individual companies looking to streamline their taxes, because watch them close up shop and move abroad at your own peril.
Ireland is one of the supposed culprits that Apple used to their tax-strategery advantage, and while the country certainly has a heck of a lot of economic and fiscal problems on their hands, there is nothing illicit going on with low rates that make it appealing for multinational companies to do business there. An Irish official today paid the obligatory lip service to the trumped-up need for ‘robust international agreements' to prevent tax-dodging to appease the Euro-bureaucrats, but they are not apologizing for having a tax code that attracts people and companies to their shores -- nor should they. Via the NYT:

Quote:Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore of Ireland told reporters in Brussels on Tuesday that his government supported efforts to close "loopholes" in corporate taxation, but said these did not stem from Irish taxation policy. ...
Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5 percent, less than half the level in many larger European countries. American companies with their European headquarters in Ireland often pay considerably less than this on their European earnings because of accounting techniques that permit them to shift revenue to subsidiaries in offshore tax havens -- as Apple has been accused of doing in a report prepared by Congressional investigators. ...
While Ireland misses out on some tax revenue, analysts say its economy more than makes up for this in other ways, including the tens of thousands of jobs that American technology companies have created there – and the income taxes that well-paid programmers and executives contribute to the Irish treasury. Apple alone employs more than 4,000 workers in Ireland, while Google employs more than 2,500 there. ...
Discrepancies like this have given rise to growing frustration among European policy makers at a time when governments are cutting budgets and struggling to make ends meet.

It seems that with the launch of Beneath the Raptors Wing (aka season 8, Aka the great Romulan expansion) Enough players are trying their hands at Romulan charecters (or maybe restarting their klingon carreers from Lvl 1) that the servers are FULL!
I've NEVER seen that happen before.  Well, not with STO.  CoX, yeah, we've had that happen...
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

Co-founder of The Doors, and one of the best keyboardists out there...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2013/ ... -obit.html
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

It looks like something's messed up in the stylesheet for the top-level forum page, in a way that only shows up in the Android native (default) browser.
The specific problem is that top-level page don't show up as a table, but instead with the things that should be elements of the table rendered as consecutive lines of text.
Individual forum pages work fine.
This is on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, running Android 4.2.2.
I've attached screenshots showing the problem -- sorry they're big.  In both cases I've zoomed all the way out to show as much of the page as possible, but the problem occurs no matter how I'm zoomed.
The top level:

The individual forum:

http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php ... 288.0.html

You can't do anything but walk around at the moment, but god it's good to see the old place.

Do you know who I blame for this?..The Supreme Court. The IRS may had ham handedly been trying to determine who has been worthy of tax exempt status, but I would not be calling it a conspiracy.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/ ... right.html
I just got off duty officer this week. I am tired and irritable. Five 10-11 hour days of answering complaints, requests, numerous minor crises and interruptions. So forgive this rant:
I am tired hearing of tales where employers allegedly making employees work in unsafe conditions. I am tired of ex-employees telling me of atrocious working conditions of the places they worked. And then get mad at me when I tell them that I need a complaint letter from a current employee for an inspector to go there. It would have been better if they had made a complaint while they were still working.
I will give a pass to the current employees who called a complaint in, tell me that they will send in a signed complaint letter.   And then it does not show. And this goes on 5-10 times an hour. The only way to keep up is to skip lunch.
Lastly I am tired of people who denigrate government agencies, starve them of funding and personnel. And then rail against them for not doing their job.
Believe it or not, there is a history of U.S doing that. The U.S. army had no funding for a year during the post Civil War when it had its hands full trying to fight off the Indians who are attacking settlers and railroad workers crossing across tribal lands previously guaranteed by treaty. Which Congress allowed the settlers and the railroad to do.
So I will take the long view. We have had our cycle of stupid before. Maybe we can survive this current cycle. God takes care of fools, drunks and the United States after all. Least, I hope so.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

Welp, it is out & having seen a late show at the local Alamo (an experience I highly recommend if there's one nearby btw; instead of the usual dopey trivia cards and adverts they showed a mash-up reel of old fan films and cartoons) here's a quick and dirty capsule review.

* The plot's pretty straightforward; once you get past the big twist (recommend not going into this one spoiled fwiw) it's not very complicated. But it moves fast and doesn't waste a lot of time on explaining shit. Think of it like an expanded TOS storyline.
* And like a TOS story, it's got a Message and it's about as subtle as a bag of hammers with it. Be prepared to roll with it.
* Acting's stepped up a couple notches from the last movie. God's honest truth, Chris Pine has a couple scenes that I didn't think he was capable of pulling off period, let alone as well as he did.
* Into Darkness does a surprisingly good job of making the future look like a place where people live in, not just starships and the occasional alien.
* That said, the Enterprise is a sexy beast and Abrams knows it, considering how many (glorious!) fanservice shots there are of her.

All in all, I would recommend it. How much you'll enjoy it probably depends on how much you like Trek '09 or how tightly you cling to the original canon.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

Hey all,
It looks like I won't be on Neverwinter, STO, or CO in the near future. Someone hacked my account, and I haven't gotten control back.
Hopefully this is cleared up soon.
Randy

Well, if anyone was waiting to try the game out, seems like a good time is just around the corner.
http://community.riftgame.com/en/2013/0 ... e-to-play/