Having Prime makes me more likely to buy an item. In fact, when I search I generally click the "Prime" filter. Many of the items I won't buy without Prime because the extra shipping discourages me .It's not that I care all that much about the actual shipping cost, just the total price. When a retailer puts an artificially low price then tacks on a large shipping price then I get annoyed and don't buy from them. With Prime, I know the price I see is what I'll pay and have it there in two days.

I don't use the Prime video service because it sucks. I can't watch it on AppleTV or Chromecast natively and selection is quite poor.

I don't think you can say I hold the purse strings when my taxes are withheld before I even get my paycheck.

You know, I'm really old fashioned and like to browse books. Electronic browsing is not quite the same, however. What I have thought about doing:

On laminated plastic boards, about the height and width of a standard paperback but about as thick as a piece of cardboard, print out the covers of all sorts of books front and back. Use an RFID or QR Code sticker that can retrieve the book from the digital library. Place all the "books" on a browseable shelf. As a kid, browsing the local used book store or library was one of the few pleasures I could afford. I think this would meld the convenience and cost savings of a digital library with the fun of browsing a physical item.

Perl jokes aside, I have some old code written in everything from bash to C to R to Java. The common theme among these absolutely stunning pieces of literature is how incomprehensible some of it can be just a few months later. Sure, good code is self documenting, good code reads like a sentence, a proper module fits on one page of screen (I have a 24" display with better than 1920x1080 resolution, btw) but if my code were indeed prose, it would cause eyes to bleed, to hemorrhage, to explode in a fantastic fountain of blood and aqueous fluid.

Sometimes I wrote bits of code without knowing that there were easier ways. I may do a "for item in $(ls *.csv)" instead of the proper "for item in *.csv" or some furious hackery to manually rotate 20x10 matrix into a 10x20 (single command in several languages), or try to parse an XML file by regex'ing and other madness... Sometimes I was drunk. There was one class where the instructor didn't like "showoffs" so code had to be written using only the commands that were covered in the lecture. The resulting code from that class was horrid. One of my earliest bits of code from the 80s sent escape sequences to a printer and there are several strings with non-ASCII characters. There is no way to understand the code without knowing the printer. I have similar code for an Atari that stored music in a BASIC string. That might be possible to decode only if one understood how the Atari made sound.

What do they have on her?

A husband that makes a fortune through her legislation and owns companies which profit from defense contracts?

They don't need anything on her.

It doesn't have to be large pieces.

Imagine you want to rebuild a car with 'original' pieces, but are missing something like the custom lug nuts. You can find someone with the vehicle, take a scan of THEIR lug nuts, and then use that scan to reproduce the small component.

Sure you could just use generic lug nuts, but when you are dealing with high end restorations, people do actually care about the little details like this.

Consider a company like www.hahnandwoodward.com (now Hahn-Vorbach & Associates). They focus on restoration of very rare cars (like the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing). They are starting to use 3-D scanners for a variety of situations.

For example: A client brings in their 1 of 1 roadster or a concept car that needs restoration. There aren't any easily accessible plans or drawings, so you take a 3-D model of the car to convert it into an engineering drawing that you can use to plan your restoration or modification. You could run into a situation where it just isn't possible to replace a broken differential because there was only ever 1 made, or maybe the client wants an upgraded differential. You can use the engineering drawing you built to see if you can fit a part that is currently in production. The current method without 3-D scanning is to take a lot of careful measurements or attempt to see if a part will fit. In the end, it's risky and easy to make a mistake.

Consider another situation where maybe the car comes in with some previous bodywork. Sure, everything lines up NOW, but that is because the previous mechanic just bent some things so they fit together. If you don't know this going in, you could buy the actual correct part (lets say a fender) and discover that the NEW fender doesn't fit because the frame of the car is off-kilter. You could avoid this by taking a 3-D scan of the car in its current condition and using that scan to determine if the existing car matches factory conditions.

In short: Anytime you need to do custom work on an existing product or when the product itself is custom (like an old farmhouse) taking a 3-D scan of the place can be very useful in planning out your work or retrofit plan.

I got a chance to take a look at a facsimile of the Book of Kells, the archive treated the facsimile as it would a costly rare book (because the facsimile was costly to produce). However, I don't think you will ever reach the state where it is impossible to tell a facsimile from the original. You might not be able to tell if something IS a fake if it is of something that was mass produced (like a limited print of a famous work), but there is just too much going on in anything to really come to a point where you can't tell the original from the copy if you have access to both.

It is really cool, but oh man I'd hate to see what happens if it triggers while 'misaligned'.

Why "must" it decay?

Neutron stars basically just cool off/slow down over time due to rather normal mechanisms of radiation. There's some other stuff going on, but very old neutron stars are basically just lumps of cold very old neutrons.

Good point. I really hope that Valve/Steam puts more pressure on publishers to just ditch their DRM options. Steam certainly has the clout to do so.

However, I don't see this being possible w/o Steam being a monopoly. (not a good thing either) Publishers REALLY want a piece of steams action, and if Steam leans on them too hard, they will just take their ball and make their own distribution systems. Till now, the fact that they suck at distribution systems (as they focus on DRM first, and content delivery second) and that they don't cater to third parties is probably the only things saving us from them.

Fifteen years? Frickin' hell.. Has it been that long?

It's also normal for countries to invade other countries, kill their populations and seize their resources. At least, it was normal until we decided that wasn't the way we wanted things to be.

I don't want our nations to live in a perpetual state of quasi-war.

Ugh, those 'recommendations' sound pretty lucrative... err expensive, don't you think?

All of these media "giants" became giants because they offered alternatives. Yet, they all think that their business model will be eternal. The studios fought against cassette tape recorders, VCRs, video rentals, streaming TV, MP3s, torrents, iTunes, time shifting. In other words, anything that made it more convenient for viewers to -- you know -- view their content was seen as something horrible. If they had their way, we would adjust our schedules around the 6PM Tuesday timeslot to watch some sitcom. Why do they fight technology so fiercely when they should be embracing it? Find out what people like to do and offer a solution... Or, develop a new way and people will flock to it.