Let's not. Let's compare the mobile app market to one company. The mobile app market has a number of small upstart developers making $0.99 at a time, but it also includes companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and a large number of software houses that are 20-40 years old, several of which have been on the receiving end of antitrust lawsuits.

This is, unfortunately, the case with a number of funding bodies in academia. For example, DARPA won't pay for my membership, but will pay for the conference. My institution decided to pay for membership out of a different pot of money that doesn't have these restrictions, which ends up with a saving of a few hundred dollars on one account and a cost of a hundred dollars on another.

Ah, you're in the USA? Here, most people have pre-pay plans (being locked into a contract is generally seen as negative, unless it comes with some really good deals) and so get the phone that they bought along with their SIM and then hang onto it until it breaks or someone gives them a new one. I don't think I know anyone who pays close to $40/month on a phone bill (a fifth to a tenth of that is common and it's hard for a contract that comes with a new phone to be that cheap). At that price, I'd probably do without a mobile.

Amazon's app store is a bit better, because they're good at correlating things you've bought with things you might want to buy, so have recommendations that don't totally suck. The only reason I actually have it installed though is their free app of the day (which isn't necessarily a good thing - there are a couple of games that it's given me that have wasted a lot of my time...)

$13b is a big-sounding number. But it's not that big in comparison to some other numbers. For example, there were 75b downloads from the Apple App Store last month, so even if that $13b were just for the last month, not for the lifetime of the App Store, it would amount to less than 20 for each download. There are 1.2m apps available, so $13b means just over $10K per app. That's quite a lot for a week's work, but it's a pittance compared to the cost of developing a typical program, especially when you consider the earnings per year.

Oh, and for reference, Microsoft's revenue for the last quarter was about $20b. Which makes $13b spread between 1.2m apps seem very, very small. (I'm assuming that your $13b number is just for developers selling through the Apple App Store. If it also includes Android then it's an even more laughable number).

They'll show up if you use Google Scholar. If you're using the main search engine to find papers, then you're probably doing it wrong...

There is as an academic. Apparently being a member of the ACM has a negative value, because in exchange for the $99/year membership fee I typically get a $100-150 discount on attending ACM conferences. If you go to a couple of conferences a year then that's a good deal. For people outside academia, there's less relevance. ACM Queue, which provides material for 'practitioners' section of Communications of the ACM, generally has some good material, but it's all free whether your an ACM member or not.

I like the ACM as an organisation, but they're hard pressed to justify the cost of membership.

I'm not convinced Wikipedia is somehow profoundly not an encylopedia. Part of the reason your post doesn't convince me is because you criticize Wikipedia for not being "on par with the Brittanica" without specifying what you think exactly that par is, or what exactly you think "the concept of an encyclopedia is". It's difficult to have a conversation about these things without understanding what you view those things to be.

I know that I don't get the same freedoms with Brittanica I get with Wikipedia: I'm not allowed to distribute verbatim or edited copies of Brittanica entries. These freedoms translate into practical outcomes for most people, most notably the main means of keeping Wikipedia viable and an (apparently) mainstream source of information. By contrast, if someone wants to build on what they view as Brittanica's articles they have to negotiate with Brittanica to do that (and I've never seen anyone do this) but I know of projects that build on Wikipedia. Many articles I find interesting and worth listing in an encyclopedia are simply missing from Brittanica but are present in Wikipedia, such as why Brittanica thinks "GNU/Linux" and "Linux" are the same (which is both inaccurate and unfair) while maintaining that the former is an operating system and the latter a kernel (which is accurate and fair).

I have no changelog for Brittanica, so I have nothing to point to there that compares with what I can get in Wikipedia's changelog. TFA implicitly shows the value of changelogs for identifying how long edits have remained and who edited what when.

As for editing by non-experts: I don't know who edits Brittanica's many editions (including the paper editions) nor do I know what their qualifications are. I find this to be roughly equivalent to Wikipedia because I don't know who edits Wikipedia either, nor do I know their qualifications.

I remember some years ago reading an article by a Brittanica affiliate who essentially proposed to weigh Brittanica and Wikipedia on an evaluation of one obscure point he knew something about. Not only is that bad surveying, but it invites critique that can be used against Brittanica just as easily. I recall being struck by how behind the times Brittanica was the last time I saw it, particularly on the free software movement, a topic I know something about. I found the lack of coverage in Brittanica telling. Where Brittanica had something to say on the matter, I found Brittanica made the usual errors and confusions people make when they've only been exposed to "open source" (such as attributing what Richard Stallman's actions with "open source" despite historical contradiction and Stallman's own words and deeds); open source movement's philosophy, practical outcomes, or history isn't the same as free software and it's a shame history and contemporary evidence weighs so lightly for Brittanica.

At 70 lbs, it could also double as a boat anchor.
Increasing surface area of your heat sink is a much more efficient way to dump heat than increasing the thermal mass of your heat sink.

Wikipedia has a nice table of the relevant data. Per capita statistics are a bit misleading as they don't count for different levels of car ownership. Per vehicle statistics are a bit better. The UK has 6.2 fatalities per 100,000 motor vehicles (per year), whereas the USA has 13.6. Generalising this to 'Europe in general' doesn't really work though: Greece, for example, has 13.8 and Portugal has 18.

Even that doesn't tell the whole story though, because people in the UK laugh hysterically when we hear how long people in the USA think a reasonable daily commute is and so cars in the USA are likely to be driven further, which might account for the difference. Taking that into account and using the numbers for fatalities per billion km driven, the UK has 4.3 and the USA 7.6 , so under twice as many. As the grandparent said: not too far behind.

That design tells me that you need to put a PCI-compliant hardware firewall between the POS and its associated DB server, and the rest of the internal network. And you also need to have a firewall logger that is actually looked at daily, plus you need to do vulnerability scans both internally and externally. A Windows firewall is not sufficient and won't meet PCI DSS requirements in any event, ever, and isn't going to provide any benefit if the firewall between the POS network and the rest of the store/enterprise is in place.

Any device that processes, carries, or stores ANY credit/debit card data that isn't encrypted *must* be behind a firewall that only permits it to send traffic to specific hosts that are necessary for the functioning of the system, and even then only on the bare minimum number of ports, and almost all inbound traffic is denied as well.

Getting the majority of people to vote for someone who actually held and was willing to act on opinions that they agree with, rather than the one who spouts platitudes and pretends to agree on a couple of specific issues. Good luck with that.

I'm pretty sure Ada programmers feel superior to just about anyone, yet are way down that list. I doubt move VB programmers even know what Ada is...

I can only assume that you rarely talk to non-geeks. I upgrade my phone roughly every 3 years and most of my non-geek friends have significantly older phones than me. Many of them get new phones only when a geeky relative upgrades and hands down their old device, so the least technical users end up with the least secure devices...

Because you can make more money if you invest more capital. If you have a project that has a 10% annual ROI and have $1m in the bank, then you can double your money if you use that as collateral and borrow $10m to invest. This is a big part of the reason why money tends to concentrate in the hands of people who already have money.