Pretty much correct:

Here's a comment I made a while back about this same situation:

Kodak's management has always been married to consumables and services as encapsulated by the mantra "You push the button, we do the rest." It's like some creepy love affair with George Eastman. Most of the outright wrong directions Kodak has taken can be traced back to trying to that philosophy. Being from the Rochester area made Kodak's fall a bit sad to watch, but it was still very predictable.

To those people saying Kodak wasn't a camera company; Kodak made the first and best professional digital cameras, as well as medium/large format digital camera backs and other digital sensors. It was management decisions not to aggressively pursue that tech in the consumer space with gear that didn't treat the consumer like a moron. Not to mention all the custom designed software/drivers using non-standard GUI interfaces which were expensive to build from scratch and horrendous to use. Every Kodak made product or service was focused on consumables and draining the customer of as much cash as possible and not about providing as much value as possible.

Incidentally Eastman Chemical (spun off several years ago) seems to be doing just fine.

IF that's all it is, then that means sufficiently many of their customers care about privacy to noticeably affect their profits. How is THAT not at least a little bit of good news? Up till now I assumed nobody but a few hardcore geeks/techs cared at all. Maybe all this public discussion is bearing some fruit after all?

Elite Dangerous may have raised 2.5 million on the kickstarter, but Star Citizen was 6 million during the kick starter campaign. Funding has continued and Star Citizen is now up to 34 million dollars at the time of this writing and climbing fast. I'm sure you've heard of Wing Commander? Freelancer? Privateer? All Chris Roberts games, who is leading Star Citizen. Might be time to pay a little attention.

Think carefully about those statements. Here are some possible consequences of SteamMachine:

Failure - Status quo is maintained.

Success (even moderate success) - LINUX Gains a huge user base dedicated to gaming. The calculus of game developers and publishers with regards to LINUX development and Linux ports does a complete 180. Native support for LINUX games becomes something publishers might actually consider as worthwhile instead of "WTF is LINUX?".

Success and Valve turns evil - Games will be made to natively support LINUX so they run on the Steam console hardware platform of the day. DRM can and will be circumvented as always, but now they'll run on LINUX instead of Windows.

It's not wholly about return on investment. Even if you don't get the proposed 'thing' that money was spent and paid people to work. People learn from failures, maybe next time they'll be better prepared. There are worse places to put your money (e.g. Walmart), even if you didn't get anything out of it directly, your society and economy does which comes around eventually.

Order of operations makes those additional parenthesis unnecessary. They don't hurt anything, but there's no error.

It would give the location of a trivially removable communicator, which was worn voluntarily.

I'll take two of those such stereos!

Not to mention the speakers and amplifiers can't reproduce those frequency components anyway. A sawtooth is awfully sine-like when you hear it. Your ear being a physical system with a limited frequency response can't detect them either so why reproduce them?

I think the concert model is incomplete. There is the associated fandom stuff as well. I've been calling it the web-comic model but it's been around longer than that in various bits and pieces. Give away the culture. Build fans, loyalty, credibility, and goodwill. Sell stuff. By 'stuff' I mean real physical goods. The kind you can't DRM, the kind that require limited resources. T-shirts, album art, custom concert posters, limited edition signed cover art, etc. Mugs, hats, pens. Things from cheap memento to collector items (e.g. Used guitar picks, drumsticks from concerts, just signed versions of same) and everything in between.

Fans like to give their heroes money. But people are still people and like to feel they're getting something out of it. A music track no longer really qualifies as that something (if it ever did on it's own). But various bits of 'stuff' would work fine. Heck invest in a 3D printer and start knocking out one offs or limited edition bits and pieces.

Culture is what people do, who they are; you can't charge people for access to it forever. What you can do is make a living from providing access if you do it in a reasonable way. Provide value for money.

Full stop. Just change 'Bank' to 'Business' or better yet "entity".

Whoa whoa whoa. Seems a little black and white there. If I ask my daughter to do chores and she doesn't want to (there's certainly some emotional pain there) does that make me socially predatory? What about if I ground her? What if I just tell her she can't have a new [toy] when she thinks she needs one? Not ALL pain is evil, or even unhealthy. Some is necessary AND healthy to grow and mature. That might be the kind of pain the OP was referring to.

I think Zynga and any business selling shit that doesn't exist should be illegal for exactly these reasons, and the reasons you mention. THEY WILL be shut down, and people WILL be hurt. But the only way some people will realize that is to be hurt, and then learn, and then grow (well *crosses fingers*, one hopes anyway).

Speaking of skyrim mods: recently started a new modded playthrough. What a diffferent game! Plus voice commanded shouts and it's just amazing.

I'm stealing this quote!