Exactly. "A single zergling is unskilled! My elite base can easily stop one!!"

America has 300 million+ people.... and he's estimating a change that MIGHT increase fatalities by 149 per year.

Sorry, but that's background noise. We lose more people to random lightning strikes. We lose 400,000 to heart disease each year. He didn't say how many lives would be saved or improved my reduced air pollution either.

I'm with Notch on the idea that Elder Scrolls really doesn't have a lot of scroll-based IP in it nor the right to own single words, but more importantly:

Of all the company names Notch could pick to epitomize what he and Minecraft are about, why "Scrolls"? That doesn't add any brand value. Honestly, he himself has ten times the brand recognition of any company name he could make. He could make his company "NotchCo" or "Notch's Minecraft Company" and get 100x the name recognition.

"Scrolls Studios, LLC? The hell is that?"
"It's the company Notch founded, that made Minecraft."
"Oh! Why didn't you just SAY so?"

Soon we will have nothing to fear but sphere itself.

I wonder just how "similar" they really expect things can be and still be counted as infringement?

"Well, ours is sort of generically tablet-shaped, smooth and pleasing to the touch. Sooo... we're gonna need you to make yours have lots of jagged rusted metal bits on it, to be different."

The analogy is closer to, you are in a desert. You have $1000 on you. Do you give the other guy the $1000 for his canteen, or do you spend it on a solar-powered moisture condenser from local Jawas?

This would also undercut the whole "property values" argument by making all houses look the same. Hard to say solar panels are an eyesore when people grow used to seeing them on every civilized house.

As a sailor in the Navy, this made me think of the Explosive Ordinance Disposal rating.

For them, their boss wants to see them "sweeping mines" on the job!

It might not be "creation" of wealth, but prevention of wealth destruction is real. How much would it cost for the nation's banks or stock markets to go down for even one day? Then factor in the overall lost deals and reputation over the future. That's what preventing it is worth.

Spending some of our gold to hire guards to guard our giant pile of gold isn't a complete waste of gold. The guards may not make the pile bigger, but they help prevent it from getting massively smaller. And you're naive if you think there's no one would like to make the pile a lot smaller.

These kamikaze birds are SO angry that they think NOTHING of plowing themselves into buildings, skyscrapers if you will, and exploding, as long as it will kill a few of the hated pigs in the process.

But you make a good point on rate, it can take 30 to 60 seconds to set up just ONE brutal pig murder/suicide sometimes, which isn't a very good murder per minute rate.

If neurons can form fields larger than one neuron, just how big can these fields get? If they can go between some neurons in the same brain, could they send a weak signal to NEARBY brains? If humans had some wireless connection with nearby humans that would have interesting consequences for concepts like intimacy and social dynamics.

I think a point that has been undermentioned is this: all the games in these bundles are at the end of their life cycle. Aquaria, World of Goo, etc have all been around for years. Everyone who cares enough to know what they are and shell out cash has already done so. Aquaria already had plenty of sales, World of Goo already had a Pay What You Think is Fair sale. Their usual mini-markets have been tapped out.

So, along comes Humble Bundle. With absolutely nothing left to lose, each penny they bring in after that is a miracle penny from heaven, and every piece of publicity they bring in is someone they didn't reach before. New Players get to try the games "they'd been meaning to get around to" or had never heard of, now at a price they pick so will find fair. It's kind of like roasting up some BBQ beast, eating off all the meat you can carve, and then burying the scraps- only to find that you can get extra mushrooms to grow and eat even more off your feast.

Would you take a new game and bury it directly hoping to get mushrooms? That's doubtful. You'd want to tap your primary market first. Is the mushrooms phase likely to detract from the BBQ phase? Not too likely. People with a hankering for fresh BBQ game content probably don't want to wait around through the life cycle of the game to eat the older mushrooms. Everyone hungry to pay for delicious bacon still will- those willing to settle for mushrooms didn't really crave the BBQ experience enough to pay for it anyway.

Maybe PETA could give you a queasy feeling about meat by making a game where disgusting meat, blood and gore splatters everywhere every time you fail. And you can easily fail every few seconds, splattering horror all around the world....

OH WAIT THAT'S WHAT SUPER MEAT BOY ALREADY IS!

What if I don't care about The Witcher 2 enough to download it even for free? I bought (bargain bin) and played Witcher 1- for about 30 minutes.

Right now I am not over the activation energy of playing Witcher 2 even for free, let alone paying for it. If I were over that, via free demo or torrent, I'd be one step closer to thinking "Hmmm... maybe I WILL pay for it." I've grown to love and then paid for a dozen games this way. Then they face the money activation energy hurdle. $49.95? Eh, probably not. $9.95? I could be persuaded.

But hearing that they think their not-that-amazing game is so precious that they want to take money-wasting punitive actions makes me more likely to file the entire experience on the "Nah" Category, case closed. This has happened for other games I was fully willing to pay for, due to DRM, (which at least they are skipping): Spore, Command and Conquer 4, Assassin's Creed 2

Their threats of punitive letters might prevent an unknown number of piracies, but it also prevents an unknown number of legitimate sales, including mine.

I was thinking about this and: we're not ready. To this day, we have people who use what little technology they do have (chemistry etc) to make bomb vests and blow themselves up. We're still an absolutely greedy, violent species who regularly wars all the time.

The mass and energy involved in interstellar travel is sufficient to destroy planets. (I always wondered why they needed the Death Star when they could just accelerate a smallish frigate into a planet at lightspeed and accomplish the same thing. Planetary shields maybe.)

Any aliens moving amongst the stars must have a code of social justice and cooperation sufficient not to destroy themselves with their own technology. That code almost certainly includes rules for not giving technology to belligerent pre-stellar species. Would YOU start handing out laser pistols to a room of tantrumy 2-year olds?