Apple's job is to sell devices, and to a lesser extent, sell some apps to skim off the top. Apple doesn't owe developers a living.

A torrent of Shovelware seems to be a phase each new platform goes through (I remember when CD-ROMs became popular, you could literally buy Shovelware from K-Mart that was sold by the foot), and this phase eventually pass here too. Those that suck at it will figure out that app development isn't an easy goldmine, and they'll be less me-too-ware.

And I'll echo what somebody else said: If your "marketing plan" consists of "upload and wait for the money to roll in" it's no wonder you can't make any money. You have to figure out a means of getting the word out beyond sticking the thing on the proverbial shelf.

ISTM your question is meaningless. The best we have to offer on what the electron is ACTUALLY doing is with mathematics that correlates highly with what we see. I don't know what it means for there to be an actuality beyond that.

Even your question/remarks on the "correct conceptual framework" seems to miss the mark. The best we have there is the simplest mathematics that correlates highly with what we see.

Actually, a very big part of the theory is predicting new and unexpected results that have not been seen in the lab yet. Another big part is when the same mathematics can describe different phenomenon that were previously thought to be unrelated. Lee Smolin provides an excellent description of how this all works in his book The Trouble with Physics. I highly recommend it.

No dude, your books are not so incredible that people will buy them no matter what the price. There may be a few people who are like that, but most aren't. Price matters in entertainment. Turns out, when you make something cheap enough so that people don't need to think about spending the money and even more so they feel like they are getting a "Great deal" they'll spend very freely.

Steam has figured this out with videogames and siphons tons of money out of people's pockets, and has people thank them for doing it. People get drawn in by the "savings" of the sales and spend tons. I should know, I'm one of them. Not only do I have games I haven't played, I have games I haven't installed. I see something that I'm interested in that is a good price and I say "Oh man, I should get that," and I do. If they are more expensive, I think about it more, I wait until I really want a new game, I go and replay something I already enjoy.

Cheaper books will lead to bibliophiles just collecting the things. I know my mom would. You get them cheap enough and she'll drop hundreds a month on stuff she'll never read, just because she wants to have it.

Authors/publishers/developers/etc need to get over this idea of their digital goods being "worth" a certain amount. No, you need to figure out what you need to do to maximize your profits since there is zero per unit cost. Usually, that is going to mean selling cheap, but selling lots.

You just conclusively explained Windows and WoW.

I don't really fear that you'll be going extinct anytime soon. Web designers were in that bind before. "Nephew art" anyone? Where webdesigners got fired 'cause "my nephew can do it, he's good with computers".

Development doesn't stop, especially not in a technical field so closely tied with marketing and PR as web design. What "anyone" can do will flood the market, to the point where webpages that offer it will be met with "been there, done that" yawns. What people want is something new. New ways of presenting stuff to them is the key. Because that's something those "web kits" can, of course, not offer.

And don't get me started on security...

Oh yeah, what the world needs is more advertising. If that takes off, I'll create an adblocker for the appstore and get rich, for there will be ONE app that EVERYBODY wants!

There has never been much of a market to begin with.

Given that you can today get quite decent indie games for your computer for 5-10 bucks, flashgames-gone-iPad can't sell for more than pennies. There was a bit of money in timewaster games, games you can pick up and put down at the spur of the moment as you have to kill a little time, waiting in line, waiting for the bus or waiting for your girlfriend to stop talking.

The problem is that these games are rather easy to make and that only the first handful of people who had the idea to do so actually had a market to speak of. After the flood of copycat games drowned everyone, nobody really could make more than a handful of bucks out of the 99 cent game fad.

The next step now are free-2-play, pay-2-stay games. Games that are "free" but require you to spend money (and often quite ridiculous amounts thereof) to keep playing. Considering that I now even start to see TV ads for them, I dare say that they, too, are no longer something an indie game maker can try his hand at, considering that very obviously the game mafia has cornered that market already.

So, essentially, I'd say indie games on phones are over. Get over to Steam, there seems to be a market for indie games left.

It's just reheating the American Dream: Anyone could win. Just not everyone.

So ... yes, it's a lottery. But then again, so is the Dream.

There should be far fewer "apps". Any "app" that just displays content should be a web site. Once you get rid of the appcrap, there probably is no need for more apps than there were boxed software products.

Since you're not sharing, I'm guessing you're imagining some sort of multiplexing scheme where the node would take say 100 bytes from 14 different sources and combine them into one packet and send that. It's an intriguing idea that would slow down metadata analysis but it would have a lot of overhead to keep track of, but that "keeping track of" becomes an attack vector again especially with subverted nodes, since node B will need to know that the next 8 packets from node A will have 100 bytes of data that need to be kept together and sent on to node C.

If the network is busy it should actually not be bad for interactive small-packet connections. If the network is idle there could be a timer before the node fills unfilled slots with random data and sends it.

The AHRA requires the use of serial copy management for digital copying. You aren't protected by the act if you don't follow that provision which presumably no hardware manufacturer does these days since most CD audio is handled by generic CD-ROM assemblies to permit more flexible data usage.

That's a nice result. It's in accord with theory. It doesn't match human intuition based on large-scale objects, but it's the way the universe really works. The theory in this area is well understood; Feynman's "QED" has a good overview.

Ever since the double-slit experiment, it's been clear that this stuff is real. Over the last few decades, more of the weirder predictions of quantum electrodynamic theory have been confirmed experimentally. This is another predicted event confirmed. Nice work.

Their FAQ contains:

• TBD - Solder paste dispensing
• TBD - Selective Reflow via custom ATC head

That's what would make the machine useful for prototyping. Printing a solder paste stencil can be done on a laser cutter, but you need access to one, or you must send the job out. Laying down solder paste by hand with a little syringe on each pad (probably under a microscope) takes longer than manually placing parts and is Not Fun.

Printing solder paste with an ink-jet printer type head has been done. If they can make that work, that will be a big win.

Now that would make a difference...