Now imagine THAT but you're a corporation.

...Facebook expects their share price to land. One dollar.

If Facebook remove all the accounts using fake names they'll have fewer members than Myspace.

That's right. The NeXT assembly plant was "automated". That whole thing wasn't just marketing crap, it was really, really automated. Yup.

No.

Actually it's worse than that. If US jobs that moved to China become US jobs performed by robots you have still lost the jobs and you've also lost the potential market. Those Chinese workers? They used to buy US goods. Not any more.

Perhaps they're going to sell them for Bitcoins. The money and energy spent on hardware to mine Bitcoins must far exceed how much the entire Bitcoin economy is worth.

Are you one of those clever spambots that assembles a comment from random words that kinda form a sentence?

I would. Where's the gold pocket-lining Beta sign-up?

Asherons Call, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot - all still up and running. A lot more recent but rapidly failed as subscription MMOs, Warhammer Online, Dungeons and Dragons and Age of Conan are still going. Asherons Call 2 was the first big name failure I remember that was shuttered - somewhat interesting game that fell apart because they forgot that an RPG works better with NPCs, cities and such and not just a landscape.

Like most F2P games they had an item shop for buying character slots, buffs, customization choices, story arcs etc. I think that's where most of the income for these games comes from these days with even the subscribers having an incentive to speed over and above their subscription.

I suspect that City of Heroes was seeing diminishing returns from their story expansions. The user base had come to expect big new events a couple of times a year but they were likely making less of a return on each one.

(And I hear ya about GW2 and LOTRO both. LOTRO is still one of the best MMORPGs out there and a reasonable experience without paying a penny.)

There are about a million websites, charities, government initiatives worldwide aiming to teach kids to program. It's the essence of what drove the production of the Raspberry Pi. Plug most of the obvious names into Google and you'll see they've already been taken - in fact several I looked for have been taken, lapsed, then acquired by spam or trojan operators. coderdojo isn't a bad name, though it doesn't really speak to teaching children, and is somewhat similar to codeacademy.

You'll be able to buy a Wii Mini for $99 soon if rumours are true, and you can get a $99 Xbox 360 with loads of strings attached. The price point is meaningless. Brand is everything. There are already dozens of handheld Android gaming devices available for peanuts but none of them has reached any kind of critical mass. The Dingoo A320, a proprietary non-Android device (which can run Linux), has sold over a million units and is a big deal still in handheld emulation circles - I doubt even a fraction of the Slashdot crowd has heard of it.

I hope the Ouya backers eventually get their consoles, but a mass market Android console is going to be a moving target. Next year a rival to Ouya comes out that plays all that year's hot new games and takes advantage of whatever developments there have been in Android. And the same thing the year after that and the year after that. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony spend billions promoting their consoles, losing money hand over fist for a couple of years and making it back in the long run. Well, Nintendo not so much but even they dig themselves a hole with their advertising budget even if they're selling at profit right from the outset.

Can't say I understand why you're being so mean with your response, but you're ignoring what he said and making an entirely separate point. What he said was perfectly correct. People, all people, are hard-wired to react more strongly to negative views than to positive ones. It's how insular cultures develop through self-selection bias because people don't like to hear that they're doing something wrong, and at the other end of the spectrum it's why nobody is sure how to react if you run into a room and tell them everything is fine, whereas running in shouting FIRE has a more pronounced effect.

The X series of games trundles on year after year though I don't think they'll ever have a blockbuster hit. There's also the Evochron series, but it's even more niche. Then of course there's Miner Wars 2081 though it's determined to bill itself as Descent's closest relative. Like the article you linked to suggests, any modern Space Sim is going to have to be 100% playable with mouse and keyboard, the way Freelancer was because the joystick just isn't standard for PC gamers any longer.

If someone decided that Newton's Laws of Motion were caused by pixie dust and rainbows, and demanded that that is how it should be taught, then yes. Yes, it would be abuse to teach lies about it. Whether or not kids should learn Newtonian physics isn't even up for debate, is it? Do some kids in the US not learn that?