"Indivuduals that are profitable to retain are retained, those that aren't are not - that's what business (and life) is about."

In theory, this is how it is supposed to work. In reality, I have seen MANY instances where personalities and egos completely ignore this calculation and productive, profitable employees get tossed out the door to the detriment of the organization simply to sate the ego of the boss. Hell, I have seen people run their companies into the ground while firing the very people who could have saved it simply because they "challenged decisions", regardless of the fact that those challenges led to more revenue and benefit to the company.

Torture only works if you can IMMEDIATELY verify the information given. Otherwise, it's bullshit. Want proof? Give me 5 minutes in a room with you strapped to a table, and using only a simple blowtorch and pliers I'm certain I can have you confess the secret location of a dirty bomb somewhere in the continental US. Now whether or not the bomb is actually there when someone goes to look for it is another matter.

We see it all the time where "a few" bad cops are protected by the Thin Blue Line. To actually be good cops, cops should be incredibly proactive about cleaning house on any bad elements in their force but instead the opposite is true, in many cases the cops who try to clean house are labeled as rats.

Also, they're not factoring in that a lot of people who are buying those new games at $60 a pop have factored in that they're going to get a few weeks of fun out of it and then trade it in for $30-$35 of store credit for the next shiny thing. If they can't get that store credit to apply to that next $60 purchase they're obviously not going to make the next purchase so soon. Plus the fact that they were getting rid of older games and didn't have them around any more might have driven the cycle as well.

Wonder what the publishers will do when they find out that people who were buying 10-12 titles a year like this suddenly change to buying 4-5 per year, or horror of horrors, discover that $30 goes a lot further on Steam than it does on a console without trade-in capability.

Outliers. I have run a few of my humble bundle purchases on a couple of my linux machines and thought "hey neat", but my main workstation at the house is Windows for a lot of reasons, so I don't feel compelled to use those purchases on linux just to prove a point.

The linux version of this?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/12/

I take it you haven't read of any of the many stories of troubled iPhone software developers getting arbitrarily cut off from the Apple store or having their apps not approved at all after months of development time and money for nebulous reasons, only told to "make some changes after you read the agreement and resubmit"

But these are two different things entirely. Developing software for Nintendo's platforms has entirely different requirements. How many "home based" developers have a game released on the Xbox 360 or PS3? MInecraft, and what else?

And does this watermarking survive being converted to other formats through Calibre or other similar software people use to manage their e-readers? I doubt it.

And as a corollary to that, make sure YOU know between XX:XX and YY:YY you're on the job. And more importantly, after YY:YY you're NOT on the job. This was something I always had trouble with when I worked from home. I'd sit down in front of the computer and start working, then go and throw a load of laundry in since it was there, and then work some more, then go have lunch in the kitchen, then work, go get the mail, do a few other 10-15 minute chores around the house and as a result of that feel that I should put more work time in and then next thing you know it's 9PM and even though I took breaks I still probably ended up working 9.5 hours and I feel burnt because I've been (mostly) sitting in front of a computer for 12 hours.

That's why I like working outside of home, it gives clear work/home delineation (for the most part).

"What you have failed to realize is that the "App Store Lock-In", and even the "iOS Development Licensing" are actually there to benefit USERS"

Wow. Koolaid drinking taken to 11. Then again with a username like macs4all what else can be expected?

No, App Store lock-in benefits Apple as much or more than it does the users. Why just yesterday I was talking with a friend of mine about how to get our iOS devices to use a VPN connection to one of our servers, and we realized that in order to get that operational we'd have to jailbreak all the devices in question to get the OpenVPN client from Cydia. Why? Because Apple won't bless any of the existing implementations of OpenVPN, nor will they release the APIs to implement it so it can get the AppStore(TM) seal of approval, despite repeated promises that "it's coming". So in order to use our devices securely on our internal networks we have to jailbreak our devices. Nice.

This isn't an isolated incident either, there are tons of stories about app devs having their apps pulled from the App store for non-malware related reasons, a favorite of Apple's being that they don't want any app that "duplicates core functionality of the idevice"? Afraid of being shown up, are they? Or there are other stories about app developers spending months and thousands of dollars in development costs only to have apps rejected without a clear explanation of what caused the rejection, only being told to "make changes and submit it again". Or in some cases, the app developers resubmit it, get a different examiner and the exact same app now goes live in the app store. That's a broken system no matter how you look at it.

Hopefully future breakthroughs will be able to use organs from other sources or even artificial organs instead of relying on human donors. After all, we don't want to get into a situation like that Larry Niven short story where the demand for organs to extend peoples lives got so strong they started using convicted criminals as spare parts. And then to satisfy further demand, redefined what constituted a capital crime. Like jaywalking and littering...

David Weber's Harrington series solve the speed of light issue with an unobtainium-based drive system for missiles coupled with a very real Reagan-Star-Wars approach to generating x-ray laser fire by using a nuclear explosion as a source of energetic photons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur.

Basically you strap a bunch of lasing rods around a nuke, point the rods where you want the beams to go, and set the nuke off. During the first couple of microseconds of the nuke's explosion you'll get some unbelievably powerful beams coming off the lasing rods before they melt another few microseconds later. So in the Harrington books, the missiles close to a range where the speed of light issue ceases to be a problem, and explode, releasing a (very brief) storm of x-ray laser bursts pointed at the target ship.

Actually, it would be better to simply get rid of algo trading by adding a $0.001 "tax" to each share traded. That would affect "real" trades very little, but would completely obliterate the profitability of algorithmic extreme-transaction-volume trading. To be absolutely clear we are not talking about your ability to trade stocks yourself through something like E-Trade, we're talking about brokerage houses doing hundreds of thousands of transactions per day trying to carve additional profit for themselves. Have a look at this TED Talk on the matter that was posted to /. a while back for some further perspective.
http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html
The relevant bit starts at around 2:45.

I don't think you understand how this works. The high frequency trading is literally placing thousands of orders milliseconds apart and 98% of the orders don't get filled or get rescinded, basically it's like spam. Algorithmic trading causes values to adjust outside of normal market forces, and there's strong suspicion that it was the cause of the 2010 Flash Crash.

How about this counter? I pay ~$40 a month for my cable TV portion of the TV/internet bill. Everything you list with the exception of Game of Thrones has passed over my coax cable in the last 7 years, so in a manner of speaking I've already paid for access to it once. I see the economics as $40/month is what I am willing to pay for my television needs. I watch maybe 1-2 hours of TV a day, if that, but for round numbers let's pick 2 hours a day. For a TV show to appeal to me economically, it has to be cheaper than 66 cents per hour, because that's what it "costs" me currently based on my usage. That's why I will NEVER pay $2 for a 22 minute TV episode on iTunes. Never. Won't pay $3 for a 44 minute episode either. Prices have to come down for these kinds of shows before it makes financial sense. Everyone and their dog seems to be getting a PVR these days, which makes access to these shows even easier at the consumer's convenience, which makes the prospect of paying $2-3 an episode even less likely for a lot of people.