but when I do, I assemble it myself.

Stay thirsty, my friends.

And a guest appearance on Sophia the First.

<shudder>

But how many professional programmers are academic?

Most of us work for business, government, ngo, not for profit. Where we really don't need to cite your work, just as long as it works and you are not stepping on someones patent or license you are OK.

John Scalzi isn't selling iPhones; he's selling e-books. Those actually do earn more profit--for everyone involved--when they don't cost more than a hardcover.

Unlike price elasticity, autorectogenesis is entirely responsible for that tortured non-expression and the verbification of "pence." Idea was that there hasn't been that much shilling since before decimalization.

Exactly! Or from seeing Valve's success with their Steam sales, or Apple's success with lower iTunes prices, or from any other number of things obvious to you and I and everyone but John Scalzi.

It's almost like Amazon is aware of that:

While we believe 35% should go to the author and 35% to Hachette, the way this would actually work is that we would send 70% of the total revenue to Hachette, and they would decide how much to share with the author. We believe Hachette is sharing too small a portion with the author today, but ultimately that is not our call.

Even if you don't have a background in economics, nothing in Amazon's statement should be particularly controversial. Price elasticity isn't something they pulled out of their ass, and the idea that lowering prices could make you more money (by selling even more units) is something the thinking slashdotter should be able to intuit form first principles. "Books aren't perfectly interchangeable units of entertainment" is a nice straw man, but it doesn't change the fact that entertainment spending is highly discretionary, or that his $20 e-book has an entire universe of competing alternatives vying for your attention.

Yes, publishers and middlemen have all kinds of rationalizations for trying to kill e-books, but calling any of them "legitimate" is shilling so hard you could pence a crown.

I am a Libertarian. I haven't voted for a "winning" candidate in a very very long time. You talk about the "one party" yet vote for them. You are the problem because you're a hypocrite.

Economy Recovering (For Wall Street, mainstreet still at unacceptable unemployment)
Debt Going down (Sequestration, in spite of horrors by Liberals about "government shutdown')
Pulling out of wars (while Russia invades multiple countries annexing them at will, Hamas/Israel, Syria, Libya, Iraq ..... )
Health Care for all (Not watching the news about Federal Case regarding Fed Exchange ...)

How about Open Boarder Invasion from the south, causing massive harm to the environmentally threatened South West? (Check)
IRS Lying in attacks against conservatives (check, check, check and ... "Not a smidgeon of corruption" .. check)
Support of Islam at every step, while ignoring the plight of Christians (and others) world wide. (check)
Golfing and fundraising instead of actually doing his job (Check)
Another Multimillion dollar Vacation (check)

And the "other guy" (Romney) was mocked for saying exactly what is happening today in Ukraine. Obama is the pigeon on the chessboard of the world, strutting around knocking pieces over.

Yes.

It may have been necessary to break the barriers, but at some point, the barriers are gone, and the only thing holding people back are the people themselves. There is NO REASON why black people can't succeed in America. After all, we have an unqualified "black" (half) man as President, simply because we're still threatened by "Racist" reverse slur being tossed out. After six years in office, he still can't seem to figure out when it is his fault when the shit hits the fan. I mean, still holding "race" or "GWB" or those "evil Republicans" is pretty lame leadership technique.

I was actually hoping that we'd be turned into Dean Martin. Even if he's long dead, he's cooler than the entire TOR user community and node operator community combined.

I was SAC, and that statement is laughable.

I was USN SSBN missile systems and have talked with many SAC (Minuteman) launch crews over the years, and it's the dead simple truth. Your systems are much simpler than ours (even without figuring that we had sixteen tubes that we operated individually while you mostly just watched lights) and you didn't (couldn't) operate them or intervene in their operations to the level we did.

The examples of the complexities that you didn't have to deal with are legion (off the top of my head and in no particular order):

• You had no pressurization system. (And even if you did you didn't have to wait for the ship to come to launch depth.)
• Your optical alignment system was set by the loading crew rather than operating in sequence as ours did.
• You had no navigation system interface to deal with as your tubes were fixed in position. (And equally, you didn't have to coordinate your countdown with the ship coming to launch speed or wait for the ship to commence hovering.)
• You did not test the missiles in sequence the way we did. (And unlike us, you couldn't do anything about faults even if you did, the weapons were miles away and maintained by a different crew).

Etc... etc...
 
So yeah, the jobs of the prairie dogs waiting in their holes (which is the subject of this discussion) were (are) pretty dammed simple. You punch buttons and swap drawers. If a tube goes down, and it's not at your end, you're screwed because there's f all you can do about it except to wait for a repair crew to be dispatched. (The liquid fuel guys? Yeah, I'll agree they were the real deal. But they're long gone.)

While I am not trying to belittle your hobbies. But Model Trains isn't for everyone, and a lot of peoples hobbies are not about making toys.

Sure if you are making toys, then fine, If I was a 7 year old kid, and I had access to a 3d printer, I would be printing out all kinds of cool stuff, from guns for my action figures, to special Lego blocks.

But my hobbies and interests today do not require too much plastic parts. And the occasional replacement part isn't worth the expense.

Theory and Practice. In theory, you are correct. In practice, you are not.

IMHO, there will be a nominal number of widely accepted crypto-currencies. I fathom perhaps 4-6 "standard" coins will be adopted, and another 6-10 in secondary/limited adoption. The 4-6 "adopted" will have "regional" flair being accepted widely in some geographic locations, and might not be accepted everywhere. There will likely be 2-3 Dominant currencies accepted most places, making them "default".