Why aren't they worth that much? What do you value them at? The value of Minecraft is way, way beyond those 50 million copies sold. Minecraft has a metric fuckton of merchandising out there - people love the merchandise more than they love the game. It would also give them control of the IP to use it in marketing elsewhere as well. Picture, instead of Clippy, we could have Microsoft Creeper.

"a willfully incomplete game"

I don't know which cave you've been in for the last decade or so, but a great deal of games are now sold before completion. Developers, especially indies, realized that people absolutely love putting down $20 for a alpha/beta game that's getting new features added every few weeks/months. I have to say, having Minecraft add new features every few months gave me significantly more interest and play time than if I just started with all of those features already there. It doesn't appeal to everybody, of course, but neither does any finished game.

Last I knew, Microsoft was still the second largest developer of software for Mac (after Apple, of course). There's always hope in that direction *if* there's a market for it.

No, they want to go way past 2014 to a magical time in which no smartphone every experiences glitches, bugs, and has infinite battery life thanks to magic fairy dust.

I don't think "treason" means what you think it means. Or "arresting". Or "suggestion". Actually, I'm not sure if you speak English or just pissed on a dictionary and strung together whatever didn't get wet.

You'd have more of a point if the US wasn't so often concerned with the domestic policies of other nations.

I'm not really sure that Opera counts as a "mega" corp. Also, I believe that Chromium is still open source.

I'm on Windows 7 right now and that's almost exactly how my Chrome looks. The only difference is that my title bar has very slight transparency.

What if we're a simulation being run on a really advanced iPhone?

Siri, end program.

In a lot of ways, modern breweries are like priest guilds, with the administrators/owners the Pharaohs and the Master Brewer the head priest.

The Middle East is not another continent - it's a region that includes parts of Asia, Europe and, yes, Africa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

That picture is of moving a statue, which I would assume couldn't be moved by most of the other methods mentioned. They could very well have used different techniques for transporting different objects. Personally, I'd like to think they planted pyramid seeds and grew them in the rich Nile soil.

It took somewhere between 1500 and 1700 years from the time the first steam engine (aeolipile) showed up until it was practically applied. If that's your idea of instantaneous development, then fusion should be no problem for you.

Likewise, depending on where you want to consider the development of the internal combustion engine beginning, it took somewhere between 60 and 2100 years to develop it into a practical application.

The key difference with fusion is that we're not saying "here's an invention, what can we do with it?", we're saying "here's what we want to do, what can we invent to do it?". It's a very different way of approaching things, and should explain why your development idea of "here's a prototype" obviously doesn't apply. It's more akin to the well-known anecdote about Edison's "ten thousand ways that don't work" - you know your goal, you just need to figure out how to get there.

One other thing to keep in mind is that fusion, if we can find a way to make it work, could potentially outshine every other technological achievement in human history up to this point because of the possible applications. It's very much a high-risk/high-reward endeavor.

Isn't that true of pretty much every technology that's still in the development stage? There was a time when microprocessors weren't worth the materials they were made with, but they seem to have paid off in the long run. If we can get fusion to pay off, the benefits could potentially far outweigh what we've gotten from the microprocessor.

Not to be confused with a spherical taurus in a vacuum.