Israel never signed the treaty. There was no withdrawal.

If a US company has a subsidiary in Iran, they have bigger legal problems to deal with.

Lazy.

The point is that coming from that background, of being one of the few survivors thanks to a licensing regime, they're going to think much harder than someone writing one sentence saying "the console should be opened up, that would solve all their problems!".

Given that they have billions in capital and a proven track record of turning around poor initial sales with killer apps, they're not going to immediately switch to an open platform when one generation seems to be faltering halfway through. If they fail for 2 generations consecutively, and don't turn them around mid cycle, then you might see a change.

It's 1983. Atari just settled a lawsuit over Activision's ability to create games for the 2600, and did not get a restraining order against the practice. Shovelware is running rampant, and many of the companies creating the shovelware are small startups. Games are not selling because they were overall fucking terrible. Stores lose a ton of money on having merchandise they couldn't sell. Many of both the distributors and developers are going of business. The distributors that are diversified and survive, like Toys 'R Us, refuse to use inventory space on games. It's a business decision they're making based on what happens when games are completely shitty.

In comes Nintendo with a way to ensure that truly shitty games don't make it onto their console, and they rejuvenate an industry that almost killed itself entirely with too much openness.

Again, this isn't some hypothetical bullshit argument about whether open source is superior on moral grounds from someone who holds no real stake in the outcome. It's what actually happened in the industry.

The last time sharing was the norm, it caused the entire industry to collapse. There's a reason it was called the Nintendo Entertainment System, and not console. Nintendo, as it turns out, were the ones who led the industry's recovery, largely by instituting strict third party licensing. Sid Meier considers the Nintendo "Seal of Quality" one of the three most important innovations in gaming history because of the impact that it had.

Coming from that background, you can understand why Nintendo isn't going to take the decision to open up the platform as lightly as some open source keyboard warriors on Slashdot.

Your point is that games are inherently advantaged. The reason they're inherently advantaged over physical sports is because they can be designed to be amazing spectator experiences.

Go play Craft the World - it's clearly not nearly as good to spectate as any of the large spectator games out there right now like LOL or DOTA2, and in about 5 minutes you'd be convinced of it too. Here's a portion of a video specifically addressing spectator games, skipped to the relevant portion. If you feel like doing a bit more legwork instead of having the mental exercise done for you, watch this video - it points out a bunch of design features relating to the map in League of Legends, and is very easily digested by someone unfamiliar with the game. Think about each element they point out, specifically focusing on how it relates to the spectator experience. If you do that, and you genuinely believed that design was irrelevant, those 7 minutes will completely blow your mind.

The AC is right about what they are, although the point is that they're specifically designed with spectators in mind. That's not true for most games, and as a result there's a huge number of games that aren't good spectating material. These games (and others in some of their genres), btw, along with fighters, make up a substantial majority of games that are watched. People don't watch Mass Effect, or The Wolf Among Us, or the Batman Arkham games - it's very specific genres that even work for spectators, and then it's still mostly games designed for it from the start.

That's not true as a generalized statement. The games that are being played now by professionals in front of an audience, like LoL, DOTA2, SC2 and CS:GO are actually designed around being good for spectators. There's a whole lot more in the gaming sector that doesn't work for spectators.

Our third problem is that plenty of people think it's cool to blame it all on a particular president of a political leaning they do not agree with, even though the US has had African Americans in the military in their own segregated units at least as early as the Revolutionary War.

So he could take a picture of her and post it on the internet, but can't say "Samantha at Gate X provided bad service"? Yeah, bullshit.

Threatening to call the police? Totally legal. That doesn't mean the police can or will take action based on the call.

I was pointing them out specifically because they're very large, well-known companies. If someone is thinking of "closely held" and imagining a mom-and-pop candy shop with 4 employees, those companies (and plenty like them) dispel that notion entirely. These are massive employers that would easily be near the top of the Fortune 500 is they were public. For example, in the case of Koch, Forbes has said that if they were public, they'd rank in at number 17 of the list. Cargill is larger than Ford, and would have been at #7 in 2013.

Genuine question. If I employed the services of a company specializing in archiving paperwork, and the government had a search warrant for potential evidence in their case which could be contained in that paperwork, wouldn't the prosecutor (or at least someone working under the prosecutor's direction) be the one looking through it? As the argument goes so many times against the government's practices, why should we expect that, in the case of email, searches should operate substantially differently than with paper records? In this case, it seems wholly appropriate to apply it in the other direction.