Because that's the job of a CEO. To take charge of policing their company's third party developer community.
 
The fact that most CEOs don't get their hands dirty with the day-to-day work of the company is the reason that Microsoft hasn't imploded after years of being headed up by an overweight chimpanzee.

Why is 4:3 such a useful aspect ratio? Just curious because I tend to prefer wide-screen monitors that I can flip on their sides or use in landscape orientation depending on what you're doing, and it seems to me that the monitor market is going that way. I'd have thought that square-ish monitors tend to be less comfortable given that humans have a greater horizontal than vertical field of vision (I feel a bit boxed in when using 4:3 CRTs, but that may just be the low resolution).

Obligatory XKCD

No, it makes the Ontario English Catholic Teacher's Association look like a bunch of morons who are afraid of the wireless ghosts of non-ionizing radiation. Don't feel too bad, every country has people who push for insane laws to assuage their equally insane fears and suspicions (usually under the pretense of "protecting the children").

I would suggest that you are "doing it wrong" if you have a 10, 000 page document in a word processor ;)
 
You've got some good points, though. The lack of a decent CAD suite in particular is a major pain.

The same EU that almost banned cordless phones and Wi-Fi in schools because of unsafe radiation?

TAA Flight 408

An *attempted* hijacking, but I'd say this is the specific incident the new law is trying to address. I predict a dramatic decrease in the number of skyjackings by armed Communists in Australia over the next fifty-two years or so with this new technology.

Source.
 
A few years ago, a friend claimed that a member of the flight crew aboard GA-200 actually said "Stupid American" or something along those lines in an attempt to shut up the GPWS (which wouldn't particularly surprise me knowing Garuda). I'd dearly love to hear the CVR recordings for that flight if anyone knows where I can get them, I'd like to see whether that rumour is fact or fiction.

That's (currently) called watching YouTube videos in class. It only works for a small percentage of students (in my experience, anyway) and across a small number of subjects. Watching an excellent performer on a screen is not even close to a substitute for interacting face-to-face with said performer.

Where I come from it's almost impossible to find teachers at all, let alone teachers who are so much as competent in their subject area. Your suggestion seems to require *more* staff than are currently employed in delivering information by having a bunch of teachers and production staff to create the instructional material in addition to the current classroom teachers who will probably be performing more-or-less the same role (answering questions, setting assessment and grading assessment).

A jihad upon the enemies of football!

Yay for bureaucracies!

A valid point, but you contradict yourself. If there already exist two implementations of (roughly) the same game which both run on different platforms (presumably one of which is a Zynga target platform), Zynga aren't "freeing" anything.
 
As an aside, I was interested in the Tetris IP arrangements so I searched around and found this Quora question. Can you guess who wrote the first (and current top rated) answer?

Oh the irony. But I digress.

To claim that Zynga were just "throwing shit at the wall" and managed to create a 1:1 copy of Tiny Tower strains credulity. I know getting past the "threshold of originality" is practical because so many game developers manage to do it year after year. As hardware and user interfaces evolve (think touchscreens and accelerometers), there are more and more opportunities for companies to put forward unique and original experiences tailored for new devices. I highly doubt that the pool of available original game ideas is even finite, let alone close to exhausted.

To compare operating systems with games based on the criteria of originality completely misses a key difference between games and operating systems. When it comes to OSes, most users absolutely *detest* change. They can, and *will* simply ignore your product in order to stick with what they feel comfortable with. Take a couple of Microsoft examples: Vista and the ribbon UI. Both of these were widely panned by users, to the point that many people threatened to do away with using Windows altogether. But they stuck with it. Why? Microsoft certainly didn't keep their customers because of a lack of worthy commercial and non-commercial competitors, and they didn't keep their customers by immediately caving in to user demands (even if they wanted to do so, their distribution mechanisms and release cycles were far too rigid to undo their UI changes at the click of a button). Microsoft kept their customers because they had a platform, and on that platform they and others had built applications which Windows users had become attached to. Sure, everyone could have switched to something other than Windows, but that would have taken time and had a steep learning curve. The real winner there was Windows 7, because it had the shallowest learning curve available and virtually zero cost of migration for most business-critical Windows apps (which are usually more expensive than the OS itself). The lesson is that if you want people to jump ship to your OS, you need to make it as easy as possible for them. This is why (IMO) GNU would have failed if it modelled itself on anything other than the dominant (or near-dominant) OS at the time.

Games are different; your average gamer doesn't care whether or not they'll have to upgrade to QuickBooks 2012 if they buy a copy of your new game. They just want something interesting that they haven't played to death yet. In addition, moderately steep learning curves for games are often valued (think StarCraft 2) as they reward players who put effort into learning the ropes. Zynga aren't going to sell their new game to any of those Tiny Tower fanatics who change their iPhone's clock forward a few hours between restocking to make sure their skyscraper empire is progressing as fast as possibe (you all know who you are). Zynga are targeting people who have no idea what Tiny Tower is. They're using their well known name and massive resources to try and get on that sweet sweet Tiny Tower gravy train. Nothing of any real value is produced, and Nimblebit gets completely shafted by a company who could be doing more productive (and less ethically questionable) things.

A bit of each, really. Also the fact that several UNIX clones existed at the time, and that GNU was created as a response to a perceived ethical problem rather than a financial one.

The name "GNU's not UNIX" may well have been a very tongue-in-cheek response to this dilemna, but I can't say I know for sure. Zynga obviously knew that they were going to come up against this obstacle if they made a Tiny Tower clone, and rather than deciding to license the IP off Nimblebit (purchase the company, even) or simply make a different game, they opted to shamelessly rip off the game mechanics and give nothing back to Nimblebit (no attribution, no money, nothing). My qualm is that Zynga had the financial resources to go ahead with any of those alternatives, but instead went the blatant rip-off route.

Ugh. That comparison is wrong on so many levels. Let me demonstrate:

GNU: Project members like the UNIX philosophy put forward (and built on) by the UNIX operating system, but dislike the fact that users are not free to use/modify their programs and are instead bound by overly restrictive licenses. They decide to write a UNIX-style operating system (taking inspiration from the *many* UNIX-style operating systems around at the time), but make it "Free as in Freedom" for the betterment of computer users everywhere. They don't have the resources of the big companies like AT&T/Bell, but through sheer persistence and determination they finally create the GNU operating system (paying homage to its UNIX heritage with the reverse-acronym GNU's Not UNIX). True to their original vision, they circulate it for free and start what could best be termed a "F/OSS revolution".

Zynga: Realise that their income stream from years of cloning games like "Farm Town" is beginning to dry up. As they have done in the past, they simply take a successful game (from a company small enough that it does not have the resources to take legal action, of course) and make a clone with a slightly improved user interface and the sort of graphics that only a 7,000 person company can produce. They sell their blatantly plagiarised game and refuse to acknowledge the original game in any way, shape or form.

I use ABP, Firebug, Vimperator, NoScript, HTTPS-Everywhere and Ghostery. I see no reason why ABP, HTTPS-Everywhere and Ghostery should not merge into a single extension (Ghostery and HTTPS-Everywhere are both privacy related, and if you're going to have two extensions like ABP and Ghostery that simply block tracking DOM elements they may as well be merged into one), and why the NoScript and Firebug features aren't already integrated into the browser (as they are with Webkit/Webkit DOM inspector and Chromium's easy "click-to-run-this-plugin" feature). With that many extensions (*all* being developed by different people), FF will almost certainly leak memory like a sieve.