339 karma · joined November 7, 2013
The best way to do it is probably For publishers to also publish books they think are good, even if they're prospects aren't great. Most will fail, but a few will win big. In a way, it's just like venture capital.
Maybe we need a venture publishing industry.
I think your time would be better spent telling MetRx or Ensure to change their names, considering they are brands which are not very successful at capturing the market Soylent is dominating (the bottled-nutrition-by-choice market).
As far as I can tell their only issue is quality control and customer communication, changing their name wouldn't fix either.
I would bet things would be a fair bit easier for them if they agreed to take things down which most people don't like, but from my position they are taking a very principaled stand for free speech. Are people on hn actually arguing we want more censorship on more places on the web?
It was written as a blog post because we were the true audience, not Alan.
There are also other historical reasons. It's traditionally the job of the pilots in the plane to keep track of its position, meaning giving them GPS was more valuable than giving position information to the ground. The US is just getting to the point where air traffic control can get GPS from planes, and that is based on ground stations which won't work over the ocean.
Which leads to the final issue, the outdated nature of the rocketry industry (and the intrinsic difficulty of getting to space), has made it very expensive to launch the satellites you need for worldwide communication. They exist, but they are much more expensive than any other way of communicating. Which means, if the airlines can piggyback on ground based comms (which they can), there's not much incentive to make that work over the ocean. Until you lose a plane.