From the article:

"The FIT is the lifeblood for the industry until photovoltaic prices fall further to levels similar for conventional power production."

"FIT for solar power adds about 2 cents per kilowatt/hour on top of electricity prices in Germany that are already among the highest in the world "

"Critics also complain growing levels of solar power make the national grid more less stable due to fluctuations in output."

More expensive and less reliable electricity is hardly anything to brag about. That's not a sustainable trend.

As a nuclear weapon, it was not designed to go "out of control". The layers of failsafes built into nuclear weapons are far beyond one button.

For a Skynet to be a threat, you don't just need a Project Plutos, you need completely automated Project Pluto manufacturing facilities with a level of reliability (!) to run without human control.

That last part is what makes Skynet so unlikely. We're technically capable of launching enough "robot" ICBMs to destroy human civilization, but if that event occurs, it will be completely intentional on the part of humans.

What do you think happens if these "killer robot" self-driving cars attempt to overthrow their human overlords?

4~5 hours of road rampage later, they run out of gas/energy and are rendered useless.

Ah, but what if they can refuel themselves at a specialized automated refueling station? Assuming the engineers deliberately designed it without a kill switch (off button), that's an easy target to blow up, with the same effect of utterly disabling these robot cars.

It's going to take a lot of human effort to create a killer robot system of systems that is even capable of running out of human control.

Because people are complaining about their physical books taking weeks to ship.

What portion of the Internet do you reside in where it takes weeks to deliver an ebook?

Hachette's monopoly on the intellectual property they publish - which is why Amazon cannot sell Hachette books without a business contract.

Amazon has a digital copy of all those ebooks they can make infinite copies of - but if they tried to sell that right now, the government would enforce Hachette's monopoly and shut down Amazon's illegal selling of Hachette's IP.

That I even need to explain this to you at all demonstrates something ...

a.) "Everyone" does NOT have an Amazon account. Why are you making shit up to attack Amazon?

b.) This does not make Amazon a monopoly, only a superior business.

Neither of these things have to do with barriers to entry - which on the Internet, is as low as it is possible to be for any type of good, in any type of market. That you think Amazon can create a retail monopoly on digital products (infinite supply!) is laughable.

Hachette's inability to run itself profitably is not Amazon's problem, and its situation is most definitely not due to Amazon having a "monopoly".

If you feel sympathy for Hachette's monopoly - by all means express those emotions - but there is no need to baselessly attack Amazon for something that it is not.

Again, not Amazon's problem. It's not illegal to give certain customers a discount due to the nature of their business relationship. BN.com or Kobo should negotiate harder - if they are in fact paying more than Amazon at this moment.

Currently, they're selling Hachette's books for profit while Amazon is not. They're probably gaining a large number of customers from all the people who can't buy the books they want on Amazon. What a monopoly.

What you think is inevitable is rather questionable.

What do you mean by "giving up direct control"?

You think that one day, someone can just hit a "Power on" button, and that will turn on a killer drone that automatically patrols the skies, launches weapons at algorithmically chosen targets, resupplying itself and continuing until deactivated or destroyed?

That is the hardest part.

That "automated" drone takes thousands of hours of man-hours to keep running - the operator, the mechanics, the builders, and that's not even looking at the weapon system or the materials.

To get to the point where an AI system can construct, maintain, and resupply an automated weapon system without human intervention, we need to hit the Robot Utopian Future - where robots are so cheap and ubiquitous they replace human labor at all levels of society.

That's a really big assumption - IF we get to that point, we'd have to smack the head of any engineer who suggests, "Hey, let's take human control out of the loop of this killer robot system of systems."

Until then, killer robots don't kill people, people kill people.

Now we're getting closer to something that is defensible. You want to argue that Amazon is developing a monopoly on eBooks, which is far more limited a market than book sales.

Which still makes it nonsensical to complain about Amazon's activity "lowering supply" or developing a monopoly. ebooks have Infinite. Digital. Supply.

The barriers to entry of an ebook store are practically non-existent, so I'm not sure what you're afraid of here. How does one abuse an ebook monopoly? Does Amazon hold a gun to Hachette's head and force them to sell their books for a minimum price?

If Amazon tried to force Hachette to have an exclusive ebook selling contract with itself, that *would* be monopolizing behavior - but that's also not what Amazon was doing.

The reason I'm harping on definitions is because you're using words nonsensically. I'm trying to figure out what you actually mean, since I'm making a good faith assumption you don't actually believe nonsense.

You simply cannot label Amazon an monopoly using an economic definition. Legal definitions are looser, but they still don't seem to qualify, and I can't help notice you've avoided creating any objective definition which can be objectively evaluated.

In short, you're using "monopoly" as a "badword" accusation, instead of an informative descriptive label. That is the core of my complaint here.

In all this talk about the harm of monopolies, I find it humorous how much fear you have of Amazon's potential "monopoly" on online sales, in defense of the only party with an actual monopoly - Hachette. (Copyright: government protected monopoly of intellectual property)

Hachette is the only one with the ability to monopolistically determine price and restrict supply, and you argue that they're the victims of Amazon's non-monopoly.

If your core point is that monopolies are bad, your choice of criticism is ... odd.

Who were working together, a scenario covered under the Anti-Trust act.

Amazon has maybe a third of book sales. (2012 figure showed them at 27%) That means an overwhelming majority of book sales are not sold by Amazon - no monopoly.

Since Amazon is not colluding with its competitors in these news, there's no trust (multiple companies working together to create a "monopoly"), either.

You offered a scenario of low supply, high margins, and low prices as if they came together. An artificially low supply can increase margins, but it's not going to reduce price - the price may absolutely be low, but it's going to be relatively higher than it could have been if the supply was artificially restricted.

Hachette still has the same number of authors and publishing equipment. "Permanently lower supply" may happen in the future, but you can't lay the blame on Amazon. It's the publisher's job to supply demand; Amazon is a customer of Hachette. (They pay money for goods)

You keep using that word monopoly. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Is that why its believers fail to understand the nature of their own belief?

Because I find it highly amusing to get an argument that boils down to, "I believe I have no beliefs!"

Faith is belief in something not yet proven, but "without evidence" is going too far.

Do you think the law of physics will behave the same tomorrow?

You suggested that Amazon having a "monopoly" on their own store means that they are legally a monopoly. My reference to "legal standards" was to your interpretation of the law - and I was pointing out how every business is a monopoly by your nonsensical interpretation of the law.

"IBM was ruled to have created a monopoly via its 1956 patent-sharing agreement with Sperry-Rand," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM)

"Sperry Rand had tried to monopolize the electronic data processing industry" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_v._Sperry_Rand)

IBM was convicted of being a monopoly by trying to become the sole company in control of a certain market. (by controlling a certain patent, which grants a legal monopoly on an invention)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

"Microsoft's dominance of the x86-based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly"

For MS, they attempted to monopolize their industry by attacking competitors, so they tried to become the sole supplier for their market.

Look at the plain definition of the word:

1.control of market supply: a situation in which one company controls an industry or is the only provider of a product or service

To assert that single supplier has nothing to do with monopoly is to throw away language entirely.

Now what market does Amazon monopolize? Book sales? When there's so many different sale channels for said books?

Your failure to comprehend basic economics is showing.

Lower supply increases prices.

Lower prices reduce margins.

High margins are high profit, which draws competition, unlike your imaginary universe. ("Aw man, they're making high profits, let's forget competing in that market")

Illegal like copyright and patents? Heh. You don't seem to realize that the only monopolies that do exist, exist by government intervention.

By this legal standard you have just offered, every business is in violation of this law.

If I walk into a Barnes and Nobles and demand they sell me car tires and they refuse, they have made it "impossible" for me to acquire the product I want, "restraining commerce".

Any time a company tries to discontinue a product, they have made it "impossible" for me to acquire something I used to be able to - thus violating your ridiculous interpretation of the Sherman Anti-Trust act. Clearly no one is ever allowed to stop manufacturing/sellling anything, or they'd "restrict" consumer choice.

But why stop there? If they're selling something for more than I'd like to pay for it, clearly they are restricting my options as well! Anyone who doesn't sell me everything I want for $0.01 is also in violation!

Now that we've put the ridiculous interpretations aside - Amazon does not occupy 100% of an inter-state trade, on any good. They are limited by their business model to online retail; so that leaves mail-order, retail, and any other sale channels as competition. Seeing how Amazon has not to my knowledge attempted to block Hachette from selling books through other channels - they have not attempted to monopolize Hachette's products.

Logical fail. Monopoly: Single seller.

Number of online sellers of books > 1. Thus, Amazon is not a monopoly. They do have a major market share, so they have the potential to "abuse market power" (which is very subjective), but they are not a monopoly in any meaningful sense of the word - there just isn't any mechanism for it - unless Congress passes a law forcing all online sales in the US to go through Amazon.

I'm guessing you decided to skip the IANAL disclaimer, because your legal argument is crap, and you clearly have no business judging the legal side of this issue, never mind the economic side of things. (Hint: Even if you did show that Amazon acted illegally, you haven't shown that it has economically harmed consumers)

You're only looking at this in terms of the existing reader market.

At a lower price per book, it is easier for new readers to try out a series and see if they like it. There will be more people reading books - and perhaps making a lifelong hobby of it, as well as telling their friends about the books they enjoyed.

Wrong. Higher profits, not prices, attract higher quality authors. That's how you get them to quit their day job to focus on writing.

Profits are not based solely on margin per book (price), but margin per book times total books sold.

Reducing the publisher's cut increases the margin per book. Reducing the price to the consumer increases the number of books sold.

It's hard to predict the future, and certainly the publishers add some value to their products, but self-publishing is not going to kill the book industry.

You do think it's bad. I'm pointing out that the bad doesn't make sense.

Why do you think higher prices would have saved them?

Higher prices mean a higher barrier to entry to the hobby - which isn't going to help it grow or stay alive.

If only there was some way for people to share about books they like.

Maybe they could write a blurb on what they liked or disliked, and assign a satisfaction value to their purchase on a 5 point scale.

Alas, this wouldn't be a problem if only books were more expensive.

If consumers are buying $1 books instead of $11 books, in quantities to move the market in that direction, there is more profit to be made, not less. That's not even accounting for the change in the market size as the hobby becomes more accessible.

Publishers currently take a large chunk of book sale revenues away from authors. A larger share of a larger pie is going to make it easier for authors to make money.