Firstly it was the Europeans who designed the conventions and as they live in the north then north will be depected as being on the top .
I do have a "corrective" map of the world which shows Australia where it should be
As for the manuals.
I want JD to continue making comprehensive well written & richly illustrated service manuals and not degrade them to slightly expanded users manuals .
I sub contracted to a company that made technical manuals so have a very good idea of the sorts of costs that go into publishing them and for the JD manuals you would be lucky to get one press ready for under $ 250,000 US.
If they do not sell in reasonable qualtities then a future board will decide that it would be a better use of company funds to stop making tech manuals for domestic mowers .
Remember that $ 250,000 comes strait out of profits and not making the manuals could drop the price of parts to increase their sales quantities
In a professional photo studio you would be lucky to get 10 photos done a day. And day rates up to $ 10,000/day are common for US photo studios. We used to do a lot of this photography here because Australian studios are substantially more efficient than US ones at an average of $ 3,000 to $ 5,000 / day, labour included .
Mower photos are a lot more complicated to take than the average Joe would understand and that is without the actual mechanical work involved with removing & eventually replacing all of the parts.
Even with good dedicated computer applications , you would be lucky to do a single JD wiring diagram in a day.
So you can safely add a days wages into the cost for every wiring diagram .
Thieft is thieft regardless of weather it is two blokes in ski masks carrying cut down shot guns of some spotty faced nerd on the end of a computer so buying a JD manual and lending it to some one is fine, buying a download & putting it on a disc for YOUR use is fine but buying a copy then selling more than one copy of that manual is THIEFT pure & simple.
I am particularly sensitive to this having spent over a year enlarging some motorcycle adverts , cleaning them up, adding the detail that got lost in printing, getting permission from the trade mark holders to sell a poster with their trade mark on it then finally doing a high quality 300 screen 6 colour print run on quality calendar stock which was laminated ( 20dr cold lamination ) so it would remain colour fast for at least 5 years in direct sunlight and better than 20 years indoors then attempting to sell them on Evilpay as it was the only on line platform at the time.
I sold about 50 of the 500 print run but before I had posted the very first one, the images that I had spent well over 1000 hours on ( remember we are in the days of Photoshop 2 & computers with 5 Gb hard drives ) my reworked images were for sale on mouse mats, T-shirts , fridge magnets , clocks, mirrors, coffee mugs , etc etc etc .
So as I took a massive financial loss on the first two I never bothered to do the remaining 12 in the series .
Finally I sold the computer files to a customer who prints fabric and the remaining posters from the print run got destroyed by basement flooding in a rented house .
We just had our BSA National Rally and I did all of the art work for it.
The bannar was really good considering the motorcycle images started off as 4" and ended up being 22"
Apart from the printer, no one hd seen the final bannar till it was erected at the rally.
The 4 motorcycle images became stock images on at least 5 print on demmand T-shirt companies before I got home a week latter & I only found out about that because one of the participants ( who is organizing next years event ) asked me how much the t-shirt company charged for using one of their images & when we checked when they added the "New BSAs" it was 3 days after the rally.
While not being a violent man, I would have no problem smashing the hands of computer thieves to a pulp so they could never so much as touch a keyboard again
FWIW several Lawers approached me to ask for permission to prosecute copyright infringers within the first month .I gave them all permission realizing I will never see a cent , but the more of the crettons that get a criminal record the better .
I am by & large an HONEST person.
I do not support criminal by purchasing stuff from the boot of a car in pub car parks that was obviously stolen.
IF no one bouht stolen goods then there would be almost no thieft.
So it is we, the moral majority that allow the criminal networks to exist that we expect the police to protect us from.
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