Yes. The 'how' is very important.

If a plane suddenly crashes mid-flight, and I'm due to fly on that same model next week, I'd be concerned. If the crash was due to a fundamental flaw in the fuselage, I'm cancelling my flight. If it turns out the crash was due to the plane flying over rebel-held lands and being shot by a missile, my concern about my flight from Maryland to Vermont is greatly reduced.

Until I had my first child, it was quite the experiment. Lots of room for error too. But I suppose it is better to leave things to chance, and hope on that first ultrasound that everything looks to be developing properly.

How can you claim that they price older games at lower than used game prices?

Back in the cartridge years, I was able to pick up games by the BOX load from flea markets or yard sales.

Competition simply doesn't exist in a market where things are under copyright. As there is no compulsory licensing model for software, it's not like you can purchase your product from a different supplier. If that were the case, I'd be able to play Heroes VI and not have to do business with Ubisoft's Uplay crap. (or Origin for EA games, etc)

Consider that I wanted to buy a game for my wife, but that game was no longer offered for sale because original company went out of business and was sold. Under the no-resale model, I'm SOL. Unless I happen to get lucky and the company that owns a portion of the sold company (they are never sold 100% to a single party) feels like monetizing some IP, and spends the time to collect all of the other IP fragments, and remarket the game, I don't have the option to buy it anymore.

With the resale model, I could hop down to my local gamestop, or craigslist, or secondhand store and try my luck there.

I don't think you can say I hold the purse strings when my taxes are withheld before I even get my paycheck.

What do they have on her?

A husband that makes a fortune through her legislation and owns companies which profit from defense contracts?

They don't need anything on her.

It doesn't have to be large pieces.

Imagine you want to rebuild a car with 'original' pieces, but are missing something like the custom lug nuts. You can find someone with the vehicle, take a scan of THEIR lug nuts, and then use that scan to reproduce the small component.

Sure you could just use generic lug nuts, but when you are dealing with high end restorations, people do actually care about the little details like this.

Consider a company like www.hahnandwoodward.com (now Hahn-Vorbach & Associates). They focus on restoration of very rare cars (like the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing). They are starting to use 3-D scanners for a variety of situations.

For example: A client brings in their 1 of 1 roadster or a concept car that needs restoration. There aren't any easily accessible plans or drawings, so you take a 3-D model of the car to convert it into an engineering drawing that you can use to plan your restoration or modification. You could run into a situation where it just isn't possible to replace a broken differential because there was only ever 1 made, or maybe the client wants an upgraded differential. You can use the engineering drawing you built to see if you can fit a part that is currently in production. The current method without 3-D scanning is to take a lot of careful measurements or attempt to see if a part will fit. In the end, it's risky and easy to make a mistake.

Consider another situation where maybe the car comes in with some previous bodywork. Sure, everything lines up NOW, but that is because the previous mechanic just bent some things so they fit together. If you don't know this going in, you could buy the actual correct part (lets say a fender) and discover that the NEW fender doesn't fit because the frame of the car is off-kilter. You could avoid this by taking a 3-D scan of the car in its current condition and using that scan to determine if the existing car matches factory conditions.

In short: Anytime you need to do custom work on an existing product or when the product itself is custom (like an old farmhouse) taking a 3-D scan of the place can be very useful in planning out your work or retrofit plan.

I got a chance to take a look at a facsimile of the Book of Kells, the archive treated the facsimile as it would a costly rare book (because the facsimile was costly to produce). However, I don't think you will ever reach the state where it is impossible to tell a facsimile from the original. You might not be able to tell if something IS a fake if it is of something that was mass produced (like a limited print of a famous work), but there is just too much going on in anything to really come to a point where you can't tell the original from the copy if you have access to both.

It is really cool, but oh man I'd hate to see what happens if it triggers while 'misaligned'.

Why "must" it decay?

Neutron stars basically just cool off/slow down over time due to rather normal mechanisms of radiation. There's some other stuff going on, but very old neutron stars are basically just lumps of cold very old neutrons.

Good point. I really hope that Valve/Steam puts more pressure on publishers to just ditch their DRM options. Steam certainly has the clout to do so.

However, I don't see this being possible w/o Steam being a monopoly. (not a good thing either) Publishers REALLY want a piece of steams action, and if Steam leans on them too hard, they will just take their ball and make their own distribution systems. Till now, the fact that they suck at distribution systems (as they focus on DRM first, and content delivery second) and that they don't cater to third parties is probably the only things saving us from them.

It's also normal for countries to invade other countries, kill their populations and seize their resources. At least, it was normal until we decided that wasn't the way we wanted things to be.

I don't want our nations to live in a perpetual state of quasi-war.

Ugh, those 'recommendations' sound pretty lucrative... err expensive, don't you think?