I am not sure what you mean by "value ", but I am going to make 3 points.

First, does money have value at all? The minority view is the "Metallist" (a.k.a. hard money or gold bugs), which believes that money has (or should) inherent value. The majority view is "Chartalists", which view money as a type of credit – chits to be used for trading and have no value in itself. But this point might be more philosophical than what you meant.
Secondly, there is inflation / (deflation), which is what you are thinking about. That is based on the change for the demand in money divided by the change in supply of money. So you can pump new cash into the system, but as long as the demand for money increases you won't see any change in value. Demand for cash is closely tied to the economy. As productivity grows the economy grows. As the economy grows, demand grows.

Third, there is a subtle but important difference between currency and money. There is about 2 to 3 trillion in United State in "M1" currency. The Federal Reserve has a strong influence over this. But remember, anything that looks and acts like money is money. So the money in your checking account technically isn't currency but it does act like money. So the USD money supply is closer to 12 trillion. I point this out for 2 reasons. First, adding 10m to the money supply via cryptocurrencies does nothing – it is a rounding error. Second, cryptocurrencies are not being treated as real money. You can't readily make deposits at a bank with them, borrow them, sign long term contracts with them, etc. Until that happens cryptocurrencies will remain a curiosity and have little impact on the real economy.

Maybe. While your points are valid, I would be careful about using the Space Shuttle as a key exhibit because it was the result of a stupid compromise.

The Space Shuttle was designed to land at the Vandenberg Air Force Base, which is much further north than Kennedy. In order to reach that far north the Space Shuttle needed a delta wing and had to come in screaming fast. The civilians at NASA would have preferred a straight wing. While it could not have reach Vandenberg, it was lighter and landing the thing would have been easier since it would have been at lower speeds.

I personally think this one of those stupid compromise decisions that morphed the Space Shuttle from a cheap reliable pickup truck into one of the most complex and expensive machines to run and set back our space program by 20 years.

I have a semi-related questions – why not add wings and land the first stage like a airplane or done?

Is the extra weight for the fuel needed to land the first stage really that much less than the extra weight for wings? Even if the wings weighted more, I would think that the simpler design would win over. Of course, I am assuming that balancing a multi-ton pencil on a pillar of flame is hard.

Sculley said it was his mistake - which is not saying that Amelio didn't say it as well. Here is the old Slashdot link.

http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

When I was talking about "investments" I was actually referring to this type of arrangement. Not all investments have to be equity. Some can be simple short term loans to finance inventory and production. That being said, some of the arrangements can be huge, complex, and multi-year and can get pretty near the line of equity. But if not the marriage of equity at the very least it is a very deep partnership of cohabitation. See GT as an example. Of course, the accountants make sure it never crosses the line into equity – that tends to open a can of worms - and often it must be publicly disclosed.

As for Corning I was a bit lazy when I said that Apple invested billions in Corning – I don't know the exact amount or level of involvement. I do know that Apple did help Corning with cash in order to ramp up production in exchange for a limited time exclusive on the glass.

That is not true. Apple has invested billions in Corning, Samsung, Foxconn, etc. You have only heard about GT because it blew up.

It is not uncommon for a customer to help finance a vendor's factor. Why should a company (let's day Corning) build a huge, risky, cutting edge factory? It is a huge risk. Why should a company (let's say Apple) design a product around cutting edge technology that might not be available in mass quantities?

So Apple pitches in cash to finance the new factory and in return they get preferred pricing / exclusive rights of the output for 6 to 12 months.

As an example, Tesla's "Gigafactory" is actually a Panasonic factory.

Actually, they may not. It boils down to what you define as "Samsung". "Samsung" is a lose collection of companies with crossholdings. IIRC, the fab plants are in a different company than the company that does the cell phones. Besides, just because you can make one bit of the phone (CPU) does not mean are the best at making other bits of the phone. I think they have farmed out the cell network bits out.

I read an interview of John Sculley, ex Apple CEO, 10 years after he left Apple. (There is a link to it somewhere here on Slashdot. ) He said that one of his great mistakes was to choose Motorola's PowerPC RISC chip over Intel's x386 design. All of Apple engineers pulled for the Motorola chip, pointing to its better architecture. And it was true, for a given bit of silicon Motorola was better than Intel.

Except that Intel's fabs were so much more efficient than Motorola's, they were able to deliver more powerful chips at a cheaper price even with poorer design. Which allowed them to make fat profits, which they plowed back into newer fab plants, which let them sprint past Motorola.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

Fabs are incredibly capital intensive. If you build one you sort of need to run it at full hilt to make money off of them. And then you are on the tread mill of always having to build another one to have the latest and greatest.

I am not saying they should not build it, just that it is a completely different beast then design and marketing of their chips. You can't do it half way. FYI, almost everybody agrees that the reason why the x386 dominates today is not because Intel had the best or most efficient designs for microchips but that it had the best run and most efficient fabs. Intel has publicly said it want to be the "McDonalds" on the CPU world – standardized and cheap.

Are AMD and Navida ready to bit off such a big chuck? I doubt it.

While what you are saying is true, and I think it answers the question of why movie revenues are falling, but I don't think that is the full answer. I still think culture is become more homogeneous which a shorter lifespan.

In retail, there is the 20/80 rule – that 20% of your items will result in 80% of your sales. This rule is recursive. This has been true for a very long time.

Then in 2004 Chris Anderson came out with the "Long Tail" theory that he later wrote up in a book. His argument was that the 20/80 rule existed because shops had physical limits on their inventory. The internet would remove that limit and niche products would grow.

The actually experience is different. Amazon reports that as they have grown bigger with more diverse offerings, the top drivers of revenue are shrinking. This is true if one is looking at a category (i.e. books) or as a whole. It looks like everybody has to buy the Harry Potter books, everybody will be buying a ticket to the next Star Wars film, etc.

It is a though – but I am not sure if that is true. I am still turning this over in my head.

For a contra viewpoint read move review James Berardinelli's thoughts on "Once and Done". It is a 3 part essay, and I am linking only to the first part. Pop culture shelf life – movies in particular - seems to have gotten shorter. Everybody wants to see the latest thing now, know all of the spoilers before going in, have a huge box office weekend, and fad fast.

http://www.reelviews.net/reelt...

To build off of that, from what I have read, the 2 main factors are:

1. Quality of the movies – or lack there off. If there are 10 quality movies in a year, people will go out and see 10 movies. If there are 2 quality movies, people will go out and see 2. Entertainment dollars are flexible.

2. Improved quality of home theaters, Video On Demand, and TV / cable shows. Why spend $10 to watch a romcom on the big screen when you can spend less to watch it at home. Some films demand to be seen on the big screen. Others not so much. Plus some long format TV shows are doing things that film can't do. Game of Thrones is a popular example.

For myself, I go to 2 or 3 full price films each year – and only because I think the film benefits from seeing it in IMAX, 3D, so something along those lines. I will see another 5 to 10 films at the local cheap seats theater, where my wife and I can see a movie and have pop and popcorn for under $10. And that is more of an excuse to get out of the house rather than anything else. Everything else is on the home theater.

We can't build the cells yet but we can build and insert the complete genome into a bacterium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

For 2 reasons.

First, the networks are creditors. They are owed damages. Remember, this is a civil, not criminal matter. Nobody goes to jail but money is owed.

Second, the court and networks do not want a company buying the assets then relaunching a clone version.

Take a look a Netflix as counter example and you could see why it might be worse for the authors.

Before Netflix people would spend large amounts of money building up their DVD library. After Netflix, people would pay a flat rate to rent movies – often lower than what they were paying to build their video library. Thus the overall poll of money spent fell. The the financial recession was a crucial point – people were forced to start renting from Netflix, Amazon, etc. in mass and found that it was good enough. These people won't go back to building libraries.

Do you spend more than $120 a year on books? Is Amazon's services good enough for you? There are a large number of books that I read that are once and done – never to be picked up again. For lighter books I could see this service as a decent replacement for a good chunk of my reading.

Now, I do most of my reading by the library which is even cheaper than Amazon, so I don't see myself shrinking the poo9l that much.