You realise that this quotation cuts both ways, right?

It's not the government's job to make sure that prices stay low, either. They're just around to make sure the playing field is level. Before Apple came along in the book business, there's reason to believe that the playing field WASN'T level, and that Amazon was using their clout to get themselves a better deal at the expense of writers and publishers.

The price is what everyone is focussed on, but that's just a number. It doesn't necessarily accurately represent the state or health of the industry.

Whether Apple is actually guilty of anything or not, Amazon's tactics weren't exactly nice either. In exchange for US paying less, someone else was EARNING less. That's the only way it could possibly work. I'm pretty sure Amazon isn't dumb enough to screw themselves out of money, so the publishers and authors were the ones that took the hit. I don't know about you, but I want my favourite authors to keep writing, and the (book) publishing industry isn't exactly the sort of place you go if you want to earn a quick buck. The bulk of the costs of a book are NOT tied up in the physical, paper product. There's so much other work involved with publishing. We need to stop feeling like books should be cheap just because they're digital. The new format hasn't changed that someone has to put a lot of work into actually WRITING those few hundred pages that you're reading, and then someone has to edit it, and typeset it, and so on and so forth.

Why is that bad?

I mean, other than the fact that you personally are paying more, higher prices are not actually in and of themselves a bad thing.

The prices were artificially depressed before. YOU were paying less, but that also means someone on the other end was necessarily earning less. That might seem great to you, but I'm sure the writer wasn't super hyped about it. Neither was the publisher.

You don't have a RIGHT to low prices, though you have a right to only pay what you think is fair. If the prices are too high, stop buying. If everyone thinks the prices are too high, they'll stop buying too. If these 'new' higher prices are what the market will bear, then THAT'S the price that we should have been paying all along.

Don't be fooled into thinking your personal desire to pay as little as possible is actually the fair or correct price to pay. It's just one of a nearly infinite number of options.

Even worse (as I'm sure you know) is that they actually had the food to feed people. Grain would rot in the silos. The famine in Stalinist Russia was a human-made disaster. They had guards standing outside the repositories to keep the starving masses at bay. The only 'good' thing Stalin did was help win a war against a different crazy dictator.

Is it actually better? The news that I hear about Korean factories isn't a lot better than what I hear about the foxconn factories, especially now that foxconn has been under so much scrutiny.

You don't think much of scientists, do you?

Sorry, do you have a degree in climate science? Even a BSc?

I know we all like playing armchair expert here on /., but you'll forgive me if I don't trust your word the same way I trust the word of a professor in climate/atmospheric science. You're very cavalier with phrases like 'obvious explanation'; if you know anything about science at all, you know that the 'obvious explanation' has very often been the wrong one, and it's only through study and experiment that we see that we were blinded by the obvious and remained ignorant to the truth.

I love physics, but I don't presume to lecture others on how black holes work. I've read a lot about them--books and articles and transcribed talks--and listened to lectures and watched shows...but I'm still no expert. I can only assess the physics at a layman's level. If Stephen Hawking and literally thousands of other physicists say something about black holes that I think contradicts the obvious, I have no space to argue with them.

Similarly with you (and I freely admit that at this point I'm assuming that you DON'T have a degree in atmospheric science): you have no scientific basis on which to argue with thousands of scientists that currently have a good consensus that the climate is changing and that humans are responsible. Right now, the quibble is about the magnitude of the change that we'll see, not whether we'll see a change. They even have suggestions for how we can change the course of the climate shift. Unfortunately, they also know that we missed our critical point years ago, and we can't reverse the damage that we've done, even if our emissions were to drop to 0 tomorrow. This ship turns slowly, and so the effects of our inaction will be with us for a long time.

There is a consensus among climate scientists that is so overwhelming, that in almost any other field of science, we would be scrambling to take their advice. If that many doctors told me I had cancer, I wouldn't sit around second guessing them, I'd go get some friggin' treatment.

But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you've got outstanding credentials and you're just the vanguard of climate scientists with peer reviewed, valuable work that's going to shut me up and put me in my place. If you are, do tell. I could use some good news.

Right, that's totally the same. That's why instead of getting a tattoo, I just get a friend to draw on my arm in ballpoint pen, and instead of piercings, I figured I'd just sort of balance and strap things on various body parts.

The point isn't really to do things the same or in the most common, practical way. I have a half-sleeve up my forearm; it's neither practical nor common. But that was never the point.

Some body modders do it for art, some do it because they're basically hacking their bodies. Very few of us are doing it conform.

Well, for one thing, LEDs are more robust. From the point of view of fragility, I think that's pretty obvious.

I believe that LED bulbs are okay in dimmer switch controlled sockets. I have an LED bulb, and I use it in a socket that seems to react very strongly to power fluctuations in my apartment. The CFL bulbs I've used in there make a terrible noise and really don't seem happy with it.

I don't know if the quality of light is any different, but that's not really technology dependent, per se.

I've mentioned it a few times at this point, but I agree that I wasn't clear. That IS the most correct action. My complaint rests with people that download the DRM stripped book and feel that it's somehow 'their right' to have a copy of it because the DRM was 'so inconvenient'. If you can't abide the DRM, then you shouldn't have the product in any way, shape or form. Don't go out of your way to find excuses to not pay a content creator for their work.

Yes, more irrelevant pedantry will solve the problem.

'Consumption' has been used colloquially in this manner for years. Much in the same way someone can 'devour' a book...without eating it! Gracious!

Consumers of books also do not 'consume' the books, per se. Nor would they 'consume' an iPad or a sock. And those material goods are also capable of being passed on to another person afterwards after their useful lives have been met by the original owner; in this case, 'content' isn't special in sense that it can be passed on.

I know what you mean--data isn't being destroyed or removed from the system--but again, this is needlessly pedantic and not meaningful to the discussion at hand.