You should stop giving them money. Besides the inherent silliness in paying for a product you know to be broken, you're also financing the next ACTA or TPP.

Buying DVDs is donating to the Taliban of copyright law.

Same reason anything has value: supply and demand. The supply of dollars is essentially determined by the Fed, and demand is driven by its ability to buy things (think: why do you want money?). At the intersection of supply and demand, you have the "price" of a dollar, found just like the price of a bushel of corn or a neglected Beanie Baby.

So, how does a Bitcoin come to bear the price it does? Supply and demand again--except supply is controlled by an algorithm instead of the Fed, and demand is driven mostly by speculation and its utility in sending money without having it all stolen by PayPal. Increasingly, you can also buy things with it.

No one, which is why you don't. There's no reason to keep your bitcoins in an "online wallet," or maintain a balance in an exchange, just like there's no reason to keep your life savings in PayPal.

The community has done a fantastic job raising that barn in no time at all

http://www.altslashdot.org/wiki/index.php?title=AltSlashdot

Check out ##AltSlashdot on Freenode IRC network for more discussion.

Well, that's what makes it interesting. Nobody objects to selling a high-end model for a high price, and a low-end model for a low price. Under highly idealized circumstances, feature-keying would let us sell both models for less due to savings in manufacturing and supply chain complexity. Isn't that cost reduction a healthy sign, even if both cars are the same underneath and we've converted tangible, physical differences into pure price discrimination?

But, like you said, feature-keying implies it's still profitable to sell the high-end model at low-end prices, since the high-end model is the low-end model now. And, as you also said, we'd expect the price of the high-end model to fall if the auto industry is the least bit competitive.

However, if it now costs the same to manufacture the high- and low-end models, why manufacture the low-end model at all? Now, we've lost consumer choice: Before, if you were price sensitive, you could pick a lower-end model to save money. Now, there is no lower-end option, even if the higher-end is no longer as expensive as it once was. Sounds unhealthy, doesn't it?

To wit, the only company that made this work was IBM, and they definitely weren't charging market prices for hardware.

You mean the MTBF and AFR published by every hard drive manufacturer since the dawn of time?

...MINUS the cost of having n-many manufacturing lines and trim options. Which, like I said, would have to be significant to make the "in theory" option believable.

I must have missed the part in your political non-sequitur where you had a point. s/libertard/libtard/g, and you'd fit right in with the bastion of intellectuals that comment on Fox News articles.

This could, in theory, work out if producing a single model with all the features saves money over manufacturing every permutation of radio/seats/trim/etc. The high-end would cost less, while still allowing more spartan options for those who want to save money.

In practice, I suspect it's a way to jack up the cost of new vehicles and turn every "sale" into a rental. Not sure if this will help or hurt dealerships--if all the options are already in the car, how will the middlemen get their cut of the value-adds?

Good thing the government forced Blackblaze to publish statistics, then? What fuckwit modded you up?

I once got asked a question which I found hurtful and offensive, and felt tempted to 'blow up' the interview at that point. Fortunately, I resisted the temptation. As it turns out, the question was his way of introducing the next thing, which was telling me that he was offering me the job.