Rearrange the summary for all the answers

They pushed the copyright law to over hundred years (just to make sure they will make money of writers even after they are dead), now comes our big brother Google to the ring to resurrect all the OUT OF COPYRIGHT books -- meaning those dead books that publishers no longer exclusively distribute. What an offense against the poor publishers. Google is creating a real e-Library of enormous proportions of virtually free books, what a threat. I bet I am not alone who wants to see the Newton's books on physics e-published again and searchable.

Hold on, most code signing CA's include both the codeSigning and msCodeCom usage extensions in the same certificate so there's no need to buy multiple code signing certs. Unless you're conducting an e-commerce transaction (in which case you're no longer a hobbyist), there's no need for a website cert -- and even then I've found website certs for as little as $15/year. Mac OS X/iPhone code signing certs just require the code signing extension, so they just work. Ditto XNA. To join the iPhone developer program is $99/year, so we're up to $280/year, or about $24/month. This is well within the budget for most hobbyists. Most hobbyists won't be faced with multi-platform issues anyway. I sure as heck don't have the time to write and maintain a cross-platform app -- keeping up with Mac OS X is enough for me.

--Paul

As someone who majored in English Literature in college, I can tell you that academics love getting their panties in a bunch over what is Scholarly Publication and what is not. Some teachers will actually have special assignments that have to be written entirely using Scholarly sources, or in response to a Scholarly article.

Before the advent of the internet, I can see how it might have been useful to have an in-group comprised of people who had some sort of qualifications to write about something, but it seems antiquated in light of the ease with which we can independently verify claims.

Usually, if someone's going to write something that's actually useful, they'll write an actual book. Soon thereafter, a bunch of "Scholars" will come along and write a bunch of journal articles and tell us all about how the useful work was one of three things: misogynistic, code for a religious statement, or arcane, carefully-hidden innuendo.

Sorry if I sound bitter, but I spent a lot of time reading this crap, and very little of it was as insightful or interesting as even my classmates' comments.