The basic premis is to not treat the user as simply a revenue source to be squeezed. Rather treat them as a fan, one who is willing to pay within their budget for your product. When you try to squeeze more money out of them than they can afford they will look for a way to get your product cheaper through illegal means if necessary. Provide your product cheaply at a price point that is fair to your fan and they will gladly pay it.

Supporting evidence: Louis CK

They aren't mad at Dodd for saying you should vote the way your paid to vote. They are mad because he said it in public. We all know the votes go where the money is, but to blantantly state that in an election year makes it harder to hide.

"Politics, Poly meaning more than one, Ticks are blood sucking parasites." - I read it somewhere recently.

Investment at this point makes sense if you have money to throw away like DARPA. There are few actual functioning quantum computers and most are experimental concept models only. I don't see the applications of quantum computing getting past the education, institution, research and governmental use any time soon. If you were able to get a functional array of quantum computers you would likely not find a shortage of paying customers at this point, and your price point would be considerably higher than your standard crowded cloud market.

The type of people I see investing at this point are those who are also researchers.

When will the media companies and government realize that the proliferation of piracy is not the internet it is the outrageous prices they try to extract. The fact is that if they didn't keep trying to sell every stinking CD at $17 when we all know most aren't worth $5. Sell the product at what the market wants to pay for it, if you don't then the incentive to steal goes way up.

There have been several recent examples of artists releasing their work at reasonable prices with no DRM. Rather than being ripped off by the public at large, their fans have put down the money.

Louis CK has made over $1,000,000 off his most recent video. You can download it without DRM for $5. And yes he is Hilarious.

Jmorris is right to some respect. The problem is that we try to fit WAR into the PC society. Warfare is not politically correct, it is not cute and fuzzy. Gunshot wounds are not licked on by kittens. It is a sad fact that we blame our troops when these things go wrong.

The fact is they are not wrong. If you look back at the posters for WWI an WWII you will see blatant acts by both sides to make the other out as sub-human not only to their soldiers but also to the general public.

You take this basic gruesome psychology of warfare and you add to it a society which in all honesty goes much further than urinating on corpses when they desecrate our bodies. I don't see this video as anything other than War, not at it's worst but at it's norm. The thing that bothers me is that it was filmed.

Our government is trying to win a war without offending anyone. They have it wrong. Win the war, then worry about repairing the relationships and rebuilding the country. It would be much cheaper to build schools if we waited until they stopped blowing them up.

Income inequality is just envy. - Mitt Romney

Update

The background image is now gone.

The research is whether congressional hipocracy is exempt. It appears that under the law the congressman's website would have been permanently shut down for copyright infringment.

The background image on Chairman Lamar Smith own website was being used without the consent of the photographer.

I have tried to explain the value of understanding how to code and the software development process even if you are not planing on becomming a software engineer. I liken it to the benefit of anyone going into business having a basic understanding of accounting and the legal process. While it may not be your job to engineer system wide solutions, an understanding of code can make you more efficient at your job.

My employers have always been amazed how I can obtain levels of productivity above and beyond that of my prececessors. I do most of this by using C#, VB or VBA and an indepth knowledge of Logic. I leverage the common tool most offices have (MS office) to shave time off every function of my day.

My success comes from the fact that I am a coder, although I don't market myself as one. I grew up in the information age my first computer was the IBM PC (1984). I started coding as a child using basic and quicky moved to Fortran, Cobal and beyond. I view computers as a resource not a tool. A tool has a function, a resource is raw and can be leveraged using tools to perform many functions. I don't see a computer for what it does, I try to ask what can it do?

Technophobia plagues our society even today, 40 years into the computer age. The thing that shocks me is the number of people who assume that computers are for someone else, the smart and techie. I think this is what this program is trying to teach. Maybe you'll never become a software engineer but you can still learn to code and create value even in a basic office job. A few years down the road from the learning experiance you may find yourself as a software engineer, or maybe just a manager like me.

The reason why the Car Stereo is on the same network is because too many people were buying cars with no stereo or the basic stereo then going to after market shops where they could get a much better stereo for the same amount of money. Manufacturers decided that to reduce this they would just make the car stereo a required part for the whole system to work. It gives you a good reason to pay $1200 for the stereo upgrade which we know isn't worth $600.

The bill also included the fines levied by the TSA for failing to file an export declariation on the space rag.

I do password auditing for my primary employer and a few small businesses I have contracts with on the side. I would like to add:

1) Get a password vault, there are several applications for home PC and Smart Phones if you can't remember a lot of passwords.

2) Don't use the same password everywhere, or at least make sure your password for FaceBook is different from Hotmail.

3) Use a password generator if you need to have shortpasswords (8 - 10 characters).

4) Learn from XKCD

They call it the Sweetener, that is how they get you to pay for the must-carry.

I for one love my TiVo for that reason, you can manually edit your Cable Lineup. While I can't add channels I don't get, I can tell it that the shopping and other crap channels don't exist.