How can somebody trademark a name that is a geological feature?

Because they aren't marketing a competing line of geological features, mayhaps?

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.

Our thermostat lives on an intranet page, and keeps a public log of everyone who's fiddled with it. The older buildings have a handful of climate zones per floor, but the newer ones have independent thermostats in every office.

For all the Ponzi-this, tulips-that that gets posted every time Bitcoin makes the news, this is one of the problems they're trying to solve. A prude at Chase or the DoJ can't close your bank accounts if you have no need of a bank in the first place.

So, Linksys' OpenWRT router ships without OpenWRT firmware, apparently because there is no such firmware. You could compile such a firmware yourself, if not for Linksys withholding the wireless drivers.

I can't even begin to imagine a chain of events that resulted in shipping an OpenWRT router without any OpenWRT support.

But if the Luddites start-off by demanding building restrictions before others can move-in

That's apparently not how it's working out, though. Those moving in have money, and it costs $500,000 to build a single 800 square foot unit. Guess who gets the unit?

Because, as TFA points out, the problems San Francisco has are entirely self-inflicted. It's amusing to see karma on such a large scale.

There's that rational, open-minded tolerance San Francisco's known for.

Correlation is not causation. It's entirely possible that dying natives cause visiting Europeans. I'll admit I'm unsure as to the mechanism, but maybe Hernan Cortes was a misunderstood doctors-without-borders kind of guy.

It's also possible that a third confounding factor causes both dying natives and Europeans. Perhaps they both generate spontaneously from gold and oil, or perhaps from tectonic action within countries with hats.

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.