I'm sure it was an evolution. It all started as barter and some common items became the first money. Then all of the things that make bad money made the others fall away and we were left with metals.

The microkernel is going to catch in any day now.

I guess doing the mash in a cooler and sparging with a shower head isn't going to be consistent?

All value is subjective.

The real purpose of the Second Amendment requires you read the whole thing.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Then look at this power of Congress
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;

The whole point is that in order to have a free country you can't have a standing Army. Standing Armies are very dangerous because typically leaders end up using them on their own people. So how do you stay secure without an Army? Have everyone armed like Switzerland. Nobody want to invade a country full of sharpshooter insurgents where everyone has a rifle and there is no command structure to surrender. Also you tend not to get in aggressive wars if your soldiers can just stay home.

We would be much freer and richer if instead of a standing Army when people turned 18 they were given basic training and a rifle and sent home. The purpose of maintaining a Navy is because it takes a while to build a ship and you can't invade with a Navy.

It ends when juries refuse to convict based on evidence collected this way. If I was on a jury and email was submitted as evidence and there was no warrant I'm not convicting.

I tried to get MS to take my money. I had 4 machines with XP or Vista on them. But for some reason it wouldn't let me download a copy of Windows 8 64 bit to a machine I had running XP. Told me I had to buy a disk. Oh well. Still running XP.

I've worked in automation. When you are proposing an automated system the financial calculations are heavily dependent on the interest rates. In a free market this is set by peoples time preference which also affects their savings and borrowing. You wouldn't have money to borrow if there wasn't savings to borrow. This provides a natural feedback mechanism. As peoples time preference moves into the future they are consuming less and saving more and production can shift from consumer goods to producer goods and longer lines of production. This is typically what happens when there is low unemployment. But if there is high unemployment people have short time preference and they consumer more and save less and production should shift to consumer goods and shorter lines of production.

The problem is when you have a central bank that is keeping interest rates artificially lower than would be set by peoples time preference. When an company is looking at how to structure production there is always a trade between automation and labor. In a natural market when there is high unemployment there is a high interest rate. This makes investing in automation more expensive and hiring labor a better choice. But with artificially low interest rates it makes automation cheaper even though there is labor going unused. This is exactly the situation we have today.

I am not assuming anything. People buy and usdd games and trade games with friends. All of these are represent something of value that people take into consideration when they buy a retail game at full price. Like I said what this actual value is I don't know. If we go to DRM games we are going to find out.

You are missing the point. The resale value is factored into the price people are willing to pay. Same goes for cars, watches, etc.

It shows how bad at economic these companies are. It all depends on the total cost. The cost to play a game is what you pay minus what you can sell it for. If a game coss $70 new but you can sell it for $40 in a month the cost to you is $30. That is what you are willing to pay. If they kill the second hand market then the real cost will be $70. You will now sell a lot fewer games because if the higher price. If they kill the second hand market but drop the price to $30 they will sell about the same as before. Now the trick is to figure out which gives you the highest total revenue. I don't think DRM is going to help.

Cheaper production always reaches the consumers unless there is a regulation preventing competition like a patent. That's the nature of a market. Food, cars, housing, computers, energy, cell phones, water, clothes, media all get cheaper in real terms.

I would love to see an experiment. Take two groups and give them the same job. Group one would be based on a typical American corporate structure with a Boss, Scheduler, budget person, middle management, supervisor, and finally people doing the work.

The other group would have the same number of people but only those that work. No schedule or budget just work until it's done. I wonder what the results would be?

I think is is a bit different. There are different skills in life. A big breakdown is dealing with people and dealing with things. There are careers based on this.
If you are good at dealing with people but not things you go into careers like teachers, caregivers, educators, or nursing.
If you are good at dealing with things but not people there are careers like the trades, physical sciences, and engineering.
If you are good at both there are careers like law, medicine, and human sciences.

Where does gender play? I think women tend to be predisposed to be better at dealing with people. When you have a woman that is also good at dealing with things she will tend to go into law or medicine. Women don't typically go into stem not because they aren't smart enough but because they are too good at dealing with people.

This is the same reason you don't see many men in education or care giving. They are predisposed to be better at working with things. If they are also good at dealing with people they go into law or medicine.

The men that go into care giving or women that go into engineering are strange because they go against their genders predisposition.

None of this should be construed as to support barriers or stereotypes to prevent people from doing what they are good at. People are individuals and should be treated as such based upon merit.

I don't live in Germany but if it is at all like the US you won't get anything except a form email if you email your representative or Senator.