The reason that college textbooks are so expensive is because of many reasons.

Nobody wants to write them
The market is actually quite small
People have no attachment to the books

If you think college texts are so expensive, go and write your own, and sell it to all the universities. There's not much stopping you from doing this. But writing text books is boring. Nobody does it just for a couple extra bucks because it's fun. And it's definitely not that easy. You also won't get any book signing deals, or have the possibility of your book being made into a movie. Because people have no attachment to the text book, you are pretty much forced to create a second/third/fourth edition of your book, or else after the first year, you will probably only sell 50% of the books you did the first year, and the third will be 50% of the second year, on and on until you are selling very few books. Also, I'm sure that many of the reasons why new editions are published is not only to correct mistakes, but also to appease the professors who use the books in their class. If your book doesn't cover a specific topic that is taught in the class, the professor will either have to have an additional text for that topic, or they will have to buy a different book altogether that does cover all the topics. It's kind of like how MS office 97 was feature complete for most people, and we wonder why they keep on tacking on new features. Because a small percentage of their user base wants a specific feature, so they add it on, even if 95% of people don't use that feature. If you lose 5% of your market to a single feature, and 5% to another feature, add on a few more missed features and you all of a sudden have lost your monopoly status.

I'm not so sure. I can buy 500 page printed books from the dollar store (total cost to me, $1). A paper book actually costs very little to produce, even when you count in distribution and retail space, the price is pretty minimal. EBooks aren't expensive, but the cost of them isn't 0 either. I would probably say that the fixed costs for both ebooks and paper books is probably about the same, and both are probably under $1.

Yeah, C# and VB.Net share most of the same features. I was talking about the .Net framework in general, and only mentioned that I work in VB.Net as a reference point. VB.Net has a few features that C# doesn't have (inline XML for example) and C# has a few features not in VB.Net (Unsafe code blocks). But largely most of the features are the same. Looking at this comparison it seems that there's a lot of stuff in VB that isn't in C#, but C# has very few features that don't exist in VB. However, if you're working with older versions it's important to note that many features were in C# first, such as lambdas and operator overloading.

Yeah, but Oracle has a lot of money, they do a lot of different things. They can afford to have a product or two that doesn't make them a whole lot of money. MariaDB on the other hand is run by a bunch of the guys who used work on MySQL when it was owned by Sun. They only have one way of making money. That is by selling support contracts. And if Oracle isn't making any money off selling support contracts, I have trouble seeing how MariaDB is going to make any money doing the same. MariaDB seems to me to be a higher risk than going with Oracle.

The space between the racks is really more to accommodate removing and adding servers, rather than allow for people to pass through. The servers are currently deeper than (most) people are wide. I do like the idea of a nitrogen atmosphere. I wonder what kind of atmosphere conditions you could use to accommodate better cooling? Would a vacuum work better, or would high pressure work better for removing heat from the systems? Are nitrogen, CO2, Oxygen, or other gases better at transferring heat?

I would say you'd be able to manage them even better. It would be great to be able to swap out a dead drive without have to wait for a person to be available to do the same job. You could probably even set it up to have the robot do it automatically. With some more complex robotics, you could probably have the robot replace broken network cables, plug in peripherals, and do many other tasks. If designed right, you could probably swap out an entire server with a robot. With blade-like servers this would be as simple as swapping a hard disk. You could also do a lot of things that are problematic with humans such as stacking servers 20 ft. high. I've heard that they could even run data centers a lot hotter, but part of the reason they don't is because it makes it uncomfortable for the people working there.

Well, to be fair, they don't tax 100% of your income, at least not where I come from (Canada). The first $10,000 is untaxed, then if I buy some RRSPs (retirement savings) that goes untaxed. I can get deductions for some medical expenses, bus passes, sports for the kids, and countless other deductions. If your spouse doesn't work, you don't pay tax on their $10,000 of untaxable income either. I've heard that in the US, the interest on your mortgage is deductible. That can be a pretty large sum of money right there. The corporations may have lots of ways to hide from paying taxes, but it's not as though human people can't play a few tax games as well.

While I admit that the language takes very little time to learn, the programming API can take quite a while to learn. This is the hardest part about learning a new language, and can actually slow you down more than learning the language. I have very little problem doing code in C#, even though I spend most of my time using VB.Net, but switching to something like Java is a pain. Even though the syntax is largely the same as C#, figuring which function to call to get the job done can be very frustrating.

Add to that the nuances with some languages such as PHP (yes I'm singling it out) where you have to know really weird things about the API, like why you shouldn't call mysql_escape_string but instead call mysql_real_escape_string, but it's ok to call mysqli_escape_string or mysql_real_escape_string because one is just an alias of the other, or how "implode" lets you put the arguments in whichever order you want, which may or may not get confusing based on how the variables are named.

Also, working in VB.Net, I'd have to say the .Net framework has a lot going for it that a lot of other languages seem to miss out on. The API is consistent and extensive. You don't need 3rd party support to do things like simple date arithmetic (Java, I'm looking at you), and it has a built in support for Base10 Decimal values which makes it really easy to work with financial programming and not have to worry about binary floating point problems. Also, all strings are UTF32 by default, and as are all functions which operate on strings. I really miss this kind of stuff when I go to other languages.

I'm not sure about it requiring much less skill. What I foresee happening is that someone will eventually print one of these things off and end up blowing up their hand or losing an eye because there was some flaw in the printing process. Or they ended up using a different grade of plastic. Or they used a slighly different model of printer to what the original maker used. There's probably still quite a bit of know how that will have to go into verifying whether or not the 3D printed gun is actually safe to use, and probably quite a bit of fine-tuning and assembling of the final product after it's removed from the printer. I really doubt it's as easy as plugging in a 3D printer, pressing the print icon on their screen, and then loading a bullet into the final result. Most people can't even put together IKEA furniture. I doubt they could assemble the components of a 3D printed gun.

Exactly. They walk a very fine line between people complaining that they're locked out of their own computer, and allowing viruses to just run rampant on the system. They could probably make a very secure system, but people would complain too much because all their applications would have to come vetted from MS and it would be like running IOS on your desktop.

So, you got one large province, which has some pretty big empty expanses. But, being from Canada, I'd have to say you have nothing on us. And We probably having nothing on Russia. I mean, the Sakha state/province consists of over 3 million square kilometers. They also have Krasnoyarsk Krai which is 2.3 million square kilometers. And the size of the country is over 17 million square kilometers. Canada and Australia on the other hand both have much lower population densities than Russia.

Or possibly many of the shareholders are smart enough (or can pay someone smart enough) to find their own tax loopholes. The is the real problem as you pointed out. The tax system is too complicated. Making things too complicated allows for loopholes. Also Apple employs more than 50,000 Americans. Mind you those are Apple's numbers, so take them as you will, but I'm sure there's no denying that Apple is a doing a lot of good for the US economy.

Well, it's in the middle of the US, so it will provide better latency to people in New York than having your servers located in San Francisco. It's also not far from some "large" cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis. Also for some things latency doesn't matter so much. Sure if you're gaming it makes some difference, but if you're streaming a movie from the datacenter, it doesn't matter if your ping time is 10 ms or 1000 ms, because the movie is going to buffer at least 2 or 3 seconds before you start to watch it anyway.

No, it can't be outsourced, but it can be designed better such that

A) It doesn't break so often
B) It can be repaired without tools.

This would really reduce the need for a large number of plumbers. The only ones who would be needed are those that can install large plumbing systems in new buildings. People don't have that many problems with plumbing in their own house. As long as you aren't stupid about trying to put things down the drain that shouldn't be there. Then again, many people don't even know how to use a plunger properly, which if they learned how could probably cut out a sizable percentage of work for a plumber.

Everybody charges $80 an hour. I was remarking to my co-workers about this. This is the reason why it's not economical to get a PC repaired anymore. You might as well just buy a new one if you don't know how to do the work yourself. The bike shop charges $80 an hour for labour, but luckily they will charge fractions of an hour, so a 15 minute job will only cost you $20. I do a lot of that kind of work myself also, but also realize that sometimes it's worth paying them when the alternative is to buy a tool I would use exactly once.