There is an important distinction between "cost", which you're talking about, and "marginal cost", which the GP is talking about. Marginal cost is the increased cost of producing one additional unit, and for digital goods marginal cost is very nearly zero. The only marginal costs you mention are support and payment processing, the rest are more or less fixed costs. The marginal costs for selling a digital good with minimal support are very, very low. Once the fixed costs are covered, selling an additional unit for $5 will be very close to $5 profit.

There's definitely a matter of balancing opportunity costs. It would be silly for a company with a highly anticipated title to offer that game at a name-your-own-price rate. But once sales have started to taper off, it makes sense to lower the price and get something, rather than keeping prices up and get nothing. This can serve to get people talking about the game again, and may lead to sales at regular price once the sale ends.

I don't believe that pay-what-you-want is a sustainable business model, but I think it's a great way to milk some extra cash out of a title that isn't selling much and it can help bring hype to a game.

Look at phone gap. I just discovered it today, so I don't know if it's any good, but it looks like what you're talking about.

What about the myTouch? It's 100% you!

</cheesiemarketing>

No, it doesn't. People can be pardoned and sentences commuted more or less arbitrarily. The ex-post facto clause exists to prevent people from being facing consequences they couldn't possibly have anticipated when they committed an action. Letting people off easy doesn't have the same downside that ex-post facto laws do.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's equally despicable, and should be equally punishable, to represent a job as a good long-term prospect and then proceed to lay someone off after a couple months.

I think intent is very relevant. There are a lot of things that can happen that reduce a company's ability to complete a project they started with the best intentions. Market fluctuations can hurt investor confidence and reduce a project's funding, advancements made by competitors can make a product less useful, or unanticipated costs can put a project over budget relatively early on. If a company knows a project has no chance of being profitable, keeping people on the project is fiscally irresponsible. Hopefully they'll find project members positions on other projects, but some people will probably have to be let go.

If a company knowingly misrepresents the state of a project to get a person to join their team, I certainly think that's fraud. But if a company reasonably believes they'll be able to complete a project and are honest with recruits about the state of the project, but unforeseen circumstances cause the project to fail, I don't think it's right to bring punitive damages against the company.

There absolutely needs to be some kind of warning for untrusted certs. I can see an argument that the current solution is overkill (I disagree), but treating it the same as an HTTP page gives users no easy way to check whether or not they should trust the connection.

Now, I'm of the opinion that browsers handle untrusted certs as well as they can with current technology. Time and time again, end users have shown that they'll click through simple warning dialogs and send their data to phishers. When a server establishes an HTTPS connection with a client, it's telling the browser that this should be a secure communication, and sensitive data is going to be transmitted. If the browser can't validate that the connection is trusted, the user needs to know something is wrong.

Indeed. It WILL cost trillions, like the highway system does.

[Citation Needed]

According to wikipedia, the interstate highway system cost $114 billion over 35 years, or $425 billion after adjusting for inflation. Admittedly, there are a lot of state highways that aren't a part of the interstate highway system, but it's a long way from $425 billion to multiple trillions.

How is this different from corporate accounting? Most businesses budget for the long term based on projected earnings. If those earnings don't come through for whatever reason, they end up with budget deficits.

You won't be prompted for your username/password if you are already logged into your email.

And I believe if you are prompted for your username/password it will be by your e-mail provider, not by Facebook.

Those people don't just live here, they run businesses which create jobs. If they leave because they feel over-taxed, their businesses (and the jobs they create) will leave with them.

In world war II, we racked up a massive debt planning to pay it off once the war was over. There was a clear objective that, once met, would end the need for debt. No such objective exists today. We've been running deficits consistently for decades, and nobody can say when it will end. That's what makes this debt distressing to me, not that it's particularly bad as a percentage of GDP

for a steady economy, we need to get back to the higher taxes on the rich, like the 70%-90% on the highest tax brackets which were helping us pay down the WW-II debt consistently over 35 years until Reagan took office.

After WW-II much of the world was in ruins and trying to rebuild, but the US had industrial resources and a work force ready to produce. We could tax 70%-90% because there wasn't anywhere else you could go to run a successful business and get taxed less. The world has changed since then. If we tried to tax 70%-90% today there are dozens of countries around the world that would quickly become more appealing to those in the highest tax brackets. We've already lost most of our manufacturing industry, soaring tax rates would almost certainly cause more industries to pack up and leave.

The "balanced budget" was a political device. They claimed to have a surplus, but that was only true if you ignored intra-governmental holdings. The public debt, where the government sells treasury bonds to non-government entities, actually went down for a couple of years. What they swept under the carpet was the rising intra-governmental holdings; money from social security payments was being used to fund government programs. They considered that to be one branch of the government loaning money to another branch of the government, so they claim it wasn't really debt (conveniently ignoring the fact that they're still going to have to pay it back eventually).

If you really want this program on your phone then Android is open enough to let you install it, but you'll have to get it from somewhere other than Android Market.

This is the real difference between Android and iOS. I do believe the android market is more open; they're more forthcoming regarding what policies will disqualify an app, and their limitations are less strict. But even if this weren't the case and the android market had the exact same policies as the iOS app store, Android as an operating system would still be more open because it allows you to install apps that aren't in the market.

H.264 may be eternally free for streaming, but not for encoding or decoding. Companies that want to encode video with H.264 to stream on their site still have to license the encoder. Browser vendors that want their browser to decode H.264 still have to license the decoder on a per-browser basis. So you can stream video that you've already got in H.264 to people with browsers that support H.264, but that hardly solves the other issues.

Yeah, I should have RTFA. From the summary I got the impression that this was mentioned once or twice, or perhaps hidden on the terms of use site that nobody would read. If it's in red letters on every page you visit it seems less likely that "reasonable expectations" would hold up.