Don't forget: Absolutely no support from a hostile Congress to the basic existence of the project.

The difference between corporations and the government, is that the government has 319,000,000 middle managers. Everyone has their own ideas of what is or isn't fair, how much value a project has and how it should be done. So we end up with layer after layer of bureaucracy and paperwork and second guessing.

I'm sure they have full copies of all the data already.

I also refuse to pay $9.99 for an eBook copy of a book that has been out of print for 30 years. There are numerous scifi & fantasy books being re-released lately at this absurd price scale and it's ridiculous.

Why is Scalzi only bringing up hardcover prices when at $9.99 the ebook is HIGHER than the paperback release, which will sell more copies than the hardcover as well. How can he argue that there is "a legitimate reason for not wanting the gulf between eBook and physical hardcover pricing to be so large that brick and mortar retailers suffer" when paperbacks sell for $6.99-$7.99?? If brick and mortar retailers can survive cheap paperbacks, why can't they survive eBooks priced $2-$3 higher? For that matter, I have never heard anyone in the publishing industry who can explain why eBooks should be priced higher than paperbacks.

Don't blame journalists. It was Apple's own anal retentive obsessive compulsive lifestyle douchetards who were freaking out over how skeuomorphism was so 2000's and getting their panties in a bunch over a numeral one being centered or not that made Apple cave in and join the flat UI look. You know the ones, they have heart palpitations and clutch their pearls when they see someone use Comic Sans.

The names are often from languages other than English, because Linux is developed internationally. Like how Wiki is Hawaiian and Ubuntu is Nguni Bantu.

Nepomuk is a town in the Czech Republic and the name of a Saint. Baloo comes from Rudyard Kipling Anglicizing the Hindi word bhalu.

So shut up with your whining. They're not hurting you.

Actually, I think that traditionally the comic book shop has been a very hostile environment for women. The average comic book nerd never believes women read comics in the first place and treat them like idiots. Then it just devolves into yet another place where guys with no sense of boundaries just treat them like shit.

Statistically, women buy the digital comics more than men do, because it separates the comics from the comic store experience.

Also, a character doesn't have to be non-sexualized to be popular with women. Women like sex. What the characters have to be are honest portrayals of women, emotionally, sexually and physically, and not some teen boy wank fantasy though.

Oh! Corporations provide 'public services'! Is it a public service when corporations under employ their workers and force them to work 'flex' schedules requiring them to rely on Welfare services to make ends meet? But hey, that welfare is paid for through all those huge taxes corporations pay.. oh right! They don't pay, do they, corporations have convinced people like you to that it's your responsibility to take over their tax burdens!

But at least corporations provide the public with the things we can't live without, like High Fructose Corn Syrup. Glad to know someone is looking out for the public.

But at least they hire people! When they're not doing rolling layoffs so their workers never accrue benefits or any sort of seniority.

Yep! We'd all be so much better off if we just let corporations have free and unrestricted reign over our lives.. nothing would possibly go wrong with that.

So not paying "much" in taxes isn't paying zero, which was obviously a bit of hyperbole without citations, but it doesn't really negate my point either. Corporations are never at a disadvantage in taxation, because they are the ones most capable of having their tax circumstances altered in their favor!

Why should corporations pay taxes? Are you 10? I suppose you would argue why anyone should pay taxes, while you take advantage of the numerous public benefits visible and invisible we receive from government. Corporations should pay taxes because they require workers with certain levels of health and education which are paid for through public programs. Because they need publicly paid for police to ensure their products aren't stolen before they can reach market, because they need a government to enforce their patents and protect them from foreign or domestic malfeasance. Corporations should pay taxes because they get perks such as access to governmentaly mandated right of ways, governmentaly secured resources, government courts, government research, government standards, government treaties.. and more.

Corporations should pay taxes because no country can last long while amoral parasites bleed all of it's resources and capital away for their own benefit while returning nothing back to it.

How can executives sabotage their company for the stock benefits? Primarily because stock prices are in no way effected by a company's profitability. The biggest movers of stock price are layoffs, mergers and expected growth.

Layoffs can seem to be due to efficiency but you can also layoff the wrong people who were the core of your business, or layoff too many employees. Then they hire contract workers with no stake in the company's success or temp workers to fill the gaps, neither of which group has the institutional knowledge of how the company functions to perform their jobs well, but it looks nice on a balance sheet at the quarterly review.

As for mergers, so many company's have been wrecked by poorly considered mergers it's not even something you can question.

Then there's the favorite 'expected' growth vs actual growth, and the demands that businesses become omniproducing ever growing conglomerations while getting further and further from the core proficiencies that made them successful in the first place. The expectation of growth is what typically drives the layoffs and the mergers. A company can be phenomenally successful in it's niche and it's stock will actually drop, unless they can project constant and unreasonable growth in their market.

There are a lot of companies that have had excellent stock gains, right to the point where they implode and everyone looses out, except of course the insiders.

Alabama's laws are worse than Arizona's, and they allow local police to arrest and hold anyone without bond who they suspect of being an illegal. Which is pretty much anyone who isn't white with a confederate flag tattoo and open carrying an assault rifle.

That would be the same Communist revolution that forced China to industrialize in the first place? They were no great economic power before Communism either, in fact they spent quite a while as Europe's colonial bitch.

I think if the revolution hadn't happened, any revolution it didn't necessarily have to be Communist but it definitely needed to knock the status quo down, China would have become Africa 2.0

Most fortune 500 companies haven't paid taxes in the US since Reagan. From getting multi-decade tax abatements for moving from state to state to transferring all their profits to their foreign offices to avoid Federal taxes, they know every trick because they paid off Congressmen to write the tricks into the laws for them.

Yeah, because once you get outside the larger city limits it's right back to banjo's and cross burnings until the next metropolitan oasis.