Nevertheless, the actual, non-hypothetical, vast increase in game sales on Steam as price points can down from $20 to $5 or so are well documented.

If you're writing a detailed scholarly work, you quite likely have your scholarly day job as your primary source of revenue. Similarly for most technical books. The few "must have" technical reference manuals that cost a fortune just to typeset and will only sell a few copies don't need Amazon eBooks as a sales channel - the engineers who need them will buy them without Amazon, as they have for a century or so.

Technical books are different, but anything that busts the current obscene textbook scam is a win for society, hands down.

So, wait, the problem is that the wrong minorities are doing the jobs? This is complicated.

There are plenty of open developer jobs in the US. Heck, we have several on my team we can't fill. I strongly suspect people complaining about this either just don't make the cut, or don't want to move to where the jobs are.

Visa has to keep the merchants, and the banks. The cost of fraud to the merchants is likely less than the cost to the merchants of an alternative system.

Slashdot, OTOH, is full of people who are convinced the professionals in some field are idiots because they're not doing what 30 seconds of thought showed was the obviously right thing.

Tell me that this doesn't scream for implementation with porn?

What must be done to change the status-quo with minimal violence or bloodshed is to unite people under common values, such as the massive & ongoing civil rights violations/infringements that most people agree are wrong, regardless of what political stripe they self-identify as.

Likewise, the militarization of domestic police forces and their gradual shift from a community law enforcement role to more resemble a national occupation force complete with armored vehicles and heavy crew-served weapons.

Start focusing on what we have in common, not what divides us. Despite what those with power would like you to believe, we have much more in common than we have differences. Those commonalities are also those of a much more fundamental and essential nature than our differences.

Extremely few on any side of the political spectrum in the US (barring government & MIC) wants an Orwellian surveillance//security/police state.

I'd have no problem at all standing side by side in public protests and demonstrations with almost anyone from TEA Party member to PETA and/or LGBT activist and beyond who also was willing to postpone our arguments for our common interests in a free and open society without mass domestic surveillance & data analysis and a militarized police force performing military-occupation and wealth-confiscation roles more than any sort of community-based & controlled "officer of the peace" roles.

Look, people, yes we have beefs over stuff *BUT*, unless we unite and curb government power and size, it won't matter because very soon none of us will have any choices about anything nor any meaningful rights at all.

Strat

There's very little DLC going on on Steam (this isn't the app store article, that one's that way --->). This was straight-up market experimentation. Game devs found that dropping their price from $20 to $10 could generate 10x or more as many sales, and a drop from $10 to $5 could generate another 10x increase in sales.

I'm sure part of that it getting below where some people are willing to pirate the game, but I suspect most of it is just getting to the impulse-buying threshold. $20 game I don't know much about? Even if it looks good, I'm going to read some reviews on meta-critic and think about it. $5 game that looks good from the store page? What the heck, easier to just play it and see.

Why? As long as there are 3 or more, why care about anything but price and selection? If you can find what you want, then it's just about price, no? At least, it is for me.

For physical goods it's important that there are places that sell more expensive goods, too, because sometimes there's too much quality sacrificed in the cheap stuff, but there's always someone selling the high-margin stuff. The price may be unappealing there, but, hey, what do you expect?

I have no problems at all with Amazon using their muscle to get me lower prices, middle-men be damned, but it's an interesting question whether this means more or less money for authors.

What we've seen from Steam sales is that lower prices mean more revenue - often vastly more. Are books the same? I rather suspect so. Top-tier authors can demand the price they want, but there are only a handful of such in any genre. For the vast majority of e.g. SF authors, a SF book really is much like a $5 game: they aren't completely interchangeable, but I can find more that look good than I have time for.

I am a Libertarian. I haven't voted for a "winning" candidate in a very very long time. You talk about the "one party" yet vote for them. You are the problem because you're a hypocrite.

Economy Recovering (For Wall Street, mainstreet still at unacceptable unemployment)
Debt Going down (Sequestration, in spite of horrors by Liberals about "government shutdown')
Pulling out of wars (while Russia invades multiple countries annexing them at will, Hamas/Israel, Syria, Libya, Iraq ..... )
Health Care for all (Not watching the news about Federal Case regarding Fed Exchange ...)

How about Open Boarder Invasion from the south, causing massive harm to the environmentally threatened South West? (Check)
IRS Lying in attacks against conservatives (check, check, check and ... "Not a smidgeon of corruption" .. check)
Support of Islam at every step, while ignoring the plight of Christians (and others) world wide. (check)
Golfing and fundraising instead of actually doing his job (Check)
Another Multimillion dollar Vacation (check)

And the "other guy" (Romney) was mocked for saying exactly what is happening today in Ukraine. Obama is the pigeon on the chessboard of the world, strutting around knocking pieces over.

It's easy to cheat at Missile Command- use a touch screen.

The person you are talking about was Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall who wrote "Men Against Fire" about WWII experiences, which is where the low direct fire ratio theory came from.

And yes, it was very controversial and got debunked, but I've heard that factoid repeated to the present day. I think it gets repeated because it sounds both interesting and believable at the same time to people who haven't been shot at. For those who have been shot at (and shot back), it obviously does not ring true.

For extra irony, here's his Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Yes.

It may have been necessary to break the barriers, but at some point, the barriers are gone, and the only thing holding people back are the people themselves. There is NO REASON why black people can't succeed in America. After all, we have an unqualified "black" (half) man as President, simply because we're still threatened by "Racist" reverse slur being tossed out. After six years in office, he still can't seem to figure out when it is his fault when the shit hits the fan. I mean, still holding "race" or "GWB" or those "evil Republicans" is pretty lame leadership technique.