Case in point, the paper that convinced everyone austerity was the answer was found to have a math error that flipped the results. Everyone knows it but austerity marches on because the top economists say what their masters want them to say.

That's why I say the sale price approaches the cost of production. It does not start right at it and stay there forever more.

As for copyright laws and mini-monopolies, those are factors that damage the health of the market.

In another message, I looked at Far Cry 3 and assuming recovery of development price over the 10 million sold and a development cost of 60 million, that would come out to $6 ea. Note that it was never $6 each or even close (even a used copy runs twice that now after they have already paid off all development costs). Because they don't know they will sell 10 million, I would expect a higher price at first and for the market to support that based on novelty. However, after that honeymoon period, a healthy market would exert considerable downward pressure on the price.

Simply, we don't have efficient healthy markets in the U.S.

Which is why I'm not offering you one :-)

They are so empowered in the same sense that I am empowered to take my neighbor's stereo. That is, I could do it if I had no ethics and the police probably wouldn't even send someone to look in to it.

I take it you have no counter argument so you have resorted to a childish ad-hominem?

That's an entirely in-apt analogy unless you believe Ubisoft is a government agency empowered to confiscate goods imported w/o paying an import duty.

We may have to disagree on that one. It tends to be the conspicuous consumers that get hit first. The 30% isn't usually comfortable enough to consume too conspicuously.

I'm not saying that anyone would have a walk in the park during an uprising (not even those with the picthforks). But note that I was primarily calling out yet another temporarily embarrassed millionaire in his own mind.

Links or someplace I could see more information about the two compared?

Over time, naturally. You do know how converging works, yes?

Consider Far Cry 3. Shipped 10 million copies, so that's $6 each for the development costs + $0.03 for the digital copy. That suggests the price to converge on is $6.03. Do you believe that has happened?

I've got 3 2 TB USB drives (encrypted -- about 700GB free). (1) Main drive with my data. (2) Backup (which get's synced nightly) and (3) one at my mother-in-laws house in a drawer.

Every year I buy a new drive to replace the (1). The old (1) becomes (2), the old (2) becomes (3). And (3) gets wiped and either given to friends/family or ebay. Also, drive (2) and (3) get swapped every week or so the "off site" drive is never more than a week or two out of sync.

I've been following a version of this procedure for 15 years (starting with IDE drive drawers) and increase size as necessary. So far I haven't had a drive completely fail once, although at the tail end of the life cycle of one I was begging to get some SMART errors.

I'm fairly certain the NSA abuses couldn't have escaped his notice. The DEA is out of the bag now, let's see what happens...