The 2012 Olympics keep sounding more and more exciting!

The Guardian reports that London will be deploying sonic weapons as a defense thingy during the 2012 Olympics.

I must confess myself disappointed. Previous reports chatted about missiles zooming over London, so with that as a start, I was rather hoping that between gymnastics and swimming events, we'd get to see lasers! Or, barring that, arm all of the archery teams with flaming arrows, and have the fences put their foils on fire, because that would be pretty awesome. Instead London is just going to go boom!

I admit also that having only toured the Thames on one of those little tourist boats (the trip down to Hampton Court -- that was fun) I'm not as familiar with London or the Thames as I'd like to be: are boats on the Thames really supposed to pose that much of a threat?

Meanwhile, in related Olympics news, our mail keeps threatening that we are just NOT going to TRULY appreciate the Olympics unless we get Dish TV like RIGHT NOW (presumably so I can get used to it and know how to flip the channels -- Dish TV must be quite aware of my ongoing issues with the remote for the digital receiver we currently have.) But they haven't mentioned the possibility of real live laser or sonic weapons battles. Their missed opportunity.

Agency Pricing Lawsuit: a detailed response

As most of you know, the U.S. Department of Justice instituted a lawsuit against five of the Big Six publishers and Apple, accusing them of price-fixing/colluding when they chose to set up an agency price model to sell ebooks. Three of the publishers agreed to settle.

Here is a very detailed response to the settlement from one literary agent, which also contains some very interesting statistics about ebook pricing. Long, but worth a look.