Or, you know, maybe learn from the success of Apple iTunes and start selling eBooks for a reasonable cost and maybe they won't be pirated nearly as much. I know that the publishing process costs money that you deserve to recoup, and you deserve to make a profit, but it is offensive to charge as much as (or more) than a physical book for an eBook.

When it's all overhead, maintenance fees are a very attractive number for the budget-cut knife.

My personal limit is none. None radiation.

You're not buying anything. You're temporarily renting a license. The whole idea of "buying" any form of media has been bullshit for at least the last 15 years.

First initial, last name, password is either their kid's birthday, or their favorite sports team followed by the number "1". I'm guessing fifty cents each.

The point is that they are using confusing and inconsistent terminology to report on the parameters of a scientific study. Using imprecise language muddies the results and makes them hard to reproduce, or even to draw a conclusion of your own.

>it is the few bad eggs you hear about that really do tarnish everyone

I don't think you know what the phrase "a few bad eggs" means. The actual phrase is "One bad apple spoils the bushel". It doesn't mean that if you remove the bad apple, the rest of the apples will be fine. It means corruption, left unchecked, will spread throughout all of the apples until the whole basket has to be discarded.

Prenda is a corrupt organization because the lawyers who make it up learned the behavior from somewhere else, and they in turn learned it from somewhere else. The only way to eliminate it is to remove all of the corruption, not just these bad lawyers. Severely punish those who seek to game the system. Better yet, fix the system that allowed and encouraged gaming to being with.

I think you are misinterpreting what I said. The media has a habit of misreporting scientific studies and the scientific community has a habit of falsifying data to get published. Therefore, when I hear a claim of a sudden breakthrough that is unbelievable, I...don't believe it. Or at least maintain a healthy skepticism. While these batteries may very well be exactly what the story claims, the real proof in the pudding will be if this ever makes it off paper, which it surely will if it's as amazing as the story makes it sound.

Virtually all of that magic has been incremental steps, not exponential leaps. Whenever I read a new report of a scientific breakthrough that is suddenly orders of magnitude beyond the level of what we have now, I'm skeptical of it. When there is an actual working product that is actually on the market (and not just promises that it will be there within 5 years), then I'll get excited about it. Until then, this is just another vaporware.

...Magic was discovered today and practical and affordable applications for it are now only 30 years away!

>It seems pointless to send humans to do something a machine can do better.

Because PR. People can relate to a human stepping foot on the Moon/Mars/Asteroid/etc. and get excited about it. Excited people will want to spend more money doing it. It's good for the whole program. Now, whether that is worth the extra expense is obvious up for debate, but you can't deny that there is a benefit to having a human go to these places.

*facepalm*

His one-time payout should be a game of his choice from EA's portfolio or five dollars off of his next purchase of an EA game.

But ideally I'd like to cut the cord completely as the service is otherwise useless.

Fast and Furious wasn't enough to even make him break a sweat. Hell, Waco happened and Janet Reno skated. This won't even be a blip on the DOJ's radar.