Actually that's fine, too. If they start blocking people who don't spend enough money pre-emptively then suddenly they've sent potential future customers directly to their competitors. If you stop someone from even being able to be your customer, you can be certain they will never change their mind.

It's the same thing that happens to sites that have a following, then erect a paywall and discover nobody reads the site any more. They take the paywall down, but the users never come back. Any site that tries to block people based on their non-consuming will find themselves abandoned.

Oddly enough, people were suggesting that the price for the iPad would be $800 or $900 or so, and yet it came out at $500 or $600. Samsung hasn't officially announced their price yet. Speculation is that it will be high, but it might not be.

An Atari 2600 is so amazingly simple that there is little in there to fail. The PS3, on the other hand, has a bazillion failure points by comparison...

Numeric grades are just as prone to inflation.

Shareholders don't invest money into MS to get no return on their investment; they want to see growth in the stock price and/or dividends, because that's what matters to them. If the stock price stays flat even while profits soar, investors are right to ask where the hell the return on their investment is.

Yes, games exist that teach kids things besides how to use computers and how to play games. 360Ed makes some. (Disclosure: I work there.)

Murdoch doesn't want a paywall. He wants Google to pay him, not the end user, because Google has deeper pockets and it's a battle that can be fought once and won. Getting users to pay would require winning them over constantly and is more work, especially when they're already used to free.

Stop playing your driving games in third-person view.

If only it were that simple. Users (a) aren't always aware that they're using an outdated browser and (b) will therefore simply blame your site rather than their browser. Unless you tell them explicitly their browser is at fault, they will not know.

The only reason for CHAP to exist is so that you can avoid sending the password in plaintext over an unencrypted channel. Proper encryption fixes that problem without introducing the greater problem of requiring plaintext password storage.

To be fair, many systems involving end users do store passwords in plain text because a frequent tech support issue is forgotten passwords. I have never built such a system because I've always disclosed up front that this is a bad idea, and we create alternative solutions that don't involve giving out passwords (just resetting them).