I happen to be 2 m (6'6) tall and French-Irish. When I used to go out with a Scandinavian social club in California, we were always far taller than everyone else. More than 0.25 m difference in height makes for difficult conversation, so there's a tendency to only talk to other sized people. I also know a British guy that is 2.3 m tall and a Stanford chick whos 2.5 m (how does one get a date if you're ungainly tall?). Perhaps in a millennia, humans will be 4 m tall on average?
Decreasing royalties make a lot of sense for authors, as the publisher may be motivated to keep promoting books to gain increasing royalties. Any decrease should obviously be sensible without encouraging a gross underpayment situation analogous to music composers.
Some of L0pht (which was a community, which might be described now as a hackerspace/collective centered in Boston) became a security consulting shop @stake (atstake), which was the sold to B4 PwC and then sold to IBM (perhaps integrated into GBS, the consulting svcs arm that tends to accumulate exceptionally smart people.)
