Louis XVI faked his death!

"Dominate" as in second place for the 360/PS3/Wii generation in North America and third place globally? Or "dominate" as in a laughingstock in the upcoming One/PS4/Wii2 generation?

I was attempting to reference Anon's Wikipedia quip... apparently unsuccessfully...

But if it's on the Internet it has to be true.

Don't go confusing everyone with science!!

There are many groups trying to figure out how to harvest methane hydrate. So far it's been an impossible problem to solve - mostly due to the resource being ridiculously deep in the ocean. The cost to extract exceeds the value of the fuel.

But then that used to be the case with all the natural gas we're now recovering through fracking. All we need is a disruptive innovation and that methane will be viable. There's billions to be made... and lots of hard-working scientists working on making it reality.

I supposed the 15-year pause in global warming has prompted alarmists to come up with even more extreme catastrophes.

And you guys thought those Clickers were fiction...

So at this point companies DON'T have to provide you insurance, but you MUST carry insurance. So all those people who would have been covered if the business deadline wasn't pushed back will be forced to buy their own insurance on the individual market. Either that or pay the "tax." This is a recipe for real disaster.

There are ardent brand loyalists who will buy one no matter what, but based on everything I've read the reaction to Xbox One's feature set has been nearly catastrophic. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibilities for the console to be an abject failure. I think fewer than a million sold is unlikely, but it could do worse than GameCube numbers.

Except that the Xbox div loses tons of money. They might be smart to sell it off before the the publicity gets REALLY bad after the Xbox One presentation at E3. After then it'll be hard for MS to give the Xbox brand away.

I'm not sure which fantasy land you live in, but it must be nice.

Yes - there is a price people are willing to pay for things, and yes an increase in costs can be absorbed by a decrease in profits - to a point. Margins on A LOT of things right now are razor thin. You can't decrease the profit to negative. So prices go up, and people pay more. And companies find ways to fool you into doing it.

Why is ice cream sold in 1.5 quart containers now than 1/2 gallons? Because the price of ice cream has gone up considerably. Ice cream manufacturers know you won't pay $8 for a half gallon of ice cream. But if they change the shape so it looks about the same size but only holds 1.5 quarts they know they can still get away with charging $5.99. This same thing has happened with countless food products.

Or take fast food. Used to be, there were no combo meals. You bought everything a la carte. And any price change was immediately noticeable. So they introduce combos - you can SAVE $.20 by buying a meal instead of the component parts. In doing so you create a more confusing price structure. And it's way easier to inch up prices across the board. These days when I take my family to McDonald's we spend ~$30. Five years ago it was $18.

So retailers are jacking up prices. If not for the shale energy boom, things would be far more noticeably bad. Cheap energy has been a savior of this economy. But if you institute new pollution controls, you add yet one more cost to everything to negate those benefits we've been enjoying. And it's the poor who will suffer the most.

Reducing pollution is expensive. If it was free, companies would already do it. The only reason to pollute v/s not pollute is because the former helps profits.

So if it costs more money for, let's say... food manufacturers to produce their goods, the cost of those goods will necessarily have to increase. And the people who need food will suffer because they'll have to dedicate more of their scarce resources to that acquisition. This disproportionately impacts the poor and lower class. Their lives become significantly more difficult.

Now expand that effect across all industries - energy, transportation, manufacturing - and the costs will be pervasive and damaging. We're not talking about $1 more for a loaf of bread - we're talking about everything.

Of course you're a well-off IT guy just like the rest of us, so you won't feel it. Who cares if the kids in the bad neighborhoods go to bed hungry, right? Praise Gaia!

Dramatically increased cost of living causing crippling economic distress on the poor.

Sony made the right decision here. If a game publisher wants to cripple their games with always-on DRM they should have that right. And the publisher will be punished through customer outrage and lousy sales. But it's all on the publisher - their games, their risk. If the PS4 gives them the option, as rumored, any game publisher is free not to utilize it.

Microsoft, OTOH, is mandating this for all games. Publishers reportedly can't opt out. The only way games can voice an opposition in this case is to not buy the console at all. Given the current backlash, I expect that's exactly what will happen.