> No, the stock price is relatively high because a relatively large number of shares have been purchased recently. Stock price has nothing to do with the company's profitability.

The high demand for Apple's shares has absolutely nothing to do with their staggering profitability. Not at all. Totally unrelated. People would be willing to pay just as much for Apple shares if they were losing $13bn a quarter rather than making $13bn.

The cost of the people who built the factory, made the parts, mined the raw materials, drove the trucks... There is a hell of lot of labour that happens before you get to the person who clips the screen into the case.

Yes trolling, yes FUD, no it did not happen. There was a distorted image, but the judgement was not made based on that image. You are factually incorrect and none of those links support your claim.

I hope you're spoofing your MAC address. Not that it's very likely random open networks will keep the log for very long, if at all, but if you really care you'd want to be sure.

I'm evidently cleverer than you if you think the Wii could be, let alone is, capable of light-gun-like pointing without any real calibration (top or bottom is not enough) and without knowing the size of the TV.

I've tried all sorts of things. It just doesn't offer a light-gun-style aim-down-sights 1:1 mapping - which it could, approximately, with a little calibration. I know where something I am holding is actually pointing, so the Wii is horrible to use for FPS because it doesn't work the way you expect. Physically it appears to work one way - as a direct pointing device - but actually it's more like a mouse. A dirty, low DPI ball mouse. There is no calibration beyond saying it's above of below the TV. You can't even tell it how big your TV is so it just doesn't have enough information to know where on the screen the Wiimote is actually pointing.

The PS3 does 3D already.

The Wii would be good for FPS if the fucking cursor actually pointed where the Wiimote is pointing and it had sufficient precision. Alas, neither of those things are true. It's just a big, clumsy, imprecise floating mouse. For FPS it's worse than an analogue stick, let alone a mouse.

Probably a tax dodge rather than a real indication of the cost. The store will buy it from a distributor which is another part of Best Buy, but is based in some tax-friendly territory quite possibly in another country. The distribution part makes all the real money and pays virtually no tax, the store part makes a token profit and pays normal corporate tax rates.

The most draconian DRM is on the consoles and it's extremely effective. Piracy rates on consoles are minuscule compared to the PC. DRM on consoles is also non-intrusive and gives you more freedom to resell and lend your games. The future is DRM baked into the hardware. As PC makers shied away from TPM the solution is obvious, and is already happening - just sell your games on platforms built around DRM: consoles. Many developers have stopped investing much money in developing for PCs, hence the console ports. Some games already aren't released for the PC. Soon even more developers will just stop developing for PCs all together, which will make people who want to play games buy consoles and buy the games.

EA own DICE but not Crytek, for whom they are just a publisher. I doubt there is that level of technology exchange between the two developers.

Since I got back into PC gaming last year I haven't pirated anything (games or otherwise) and I have bought several AA/AAA titles. I even bought a legit copy of Windows (the first time I've done that in my life).

The fact is, 15 years ago when installing Windows 95 and Quake 2 required nothing more than a keycode for full functionality I would never have considered paying for software and I never did pay for any. Why bother?

Now though, DRM makes pirating more hassle than it's worth and digital download services make legit purchases quick, simple and often very cheap. Torrenting is more effort than hitting a few buttons on Steam. Legit copies don't have nearly as much hassle with patching, getting online play working, worrying about viruses and trojans etc.

x86 is a a huge, complex instruction set. All else being equal. implementing it costs more silicon and more power than ARM architectures. Intel's great engineers and unmatched process can make up for this somewhat, but it would be a good effort for them just to achieve parity with ARM. To do so they're likely going to need to stay one process step ahead of the competition, which has cost implications.

People using Google search and Chrome aren't Google's customers, they are their product. Their real customers are advertisers.

If Google decide not to have you on their search engine they can pretty much destroy your online business. If Google decided that everyone had to have some special tags or use some particular technology on their site to be listed or to get preferential listing, people would do it because Google are sufficiently powerful that people wouldn't really have a viable alternative. For example, Google could kill Flash by refusing to list sites with Flash or take advertising from sites with Flash. Flash would be gone from the web in a couple of months because the vast majority of sites couldn't survive without a Google listing. That power, power which comes from their dominant market share, is what makes them a monopoly.

> How far am I really then because I'm only 0.005489685% the circumference of the Earth from my place of birth?

You know your place of birth accurate to the millimetre?