That dumb people breed like bacteria? Last time I checked that was still in effect.

If intelligence was hereditary, it should be trivial to point to a family of increasingly intelligent people who should reach their pinnacle about today.

Just after Sarah Palin had me convinced it's some kind of hair growth medium...

So you're ... dirt?

Not unless human has the goal of getting it very far by artificially keeping it alive and multiplying.

Do you think the bacteria producing insulin have any snowball-in-hell chance to survive on their own?

Haven't realized? Are you kidding?

They fully realized it. But they'd be first admitting to eating babies alive before they'd willingly talk about that. And they'll fight tooth and nail against anything that could come close to merging "phone" and "data". The reason is very simple: Phone IS already data to them. But data they can sell very, very, VERY expensively.

Ponder for a moment how much data a voice call is. Realize just how well it can be compressed.
Ponder for a moment how much you pay per minute for cell plans.
Now take a wild guess how expensive a kb of that data is for you.

Multiply by a few thousand and you come close to the real value of "voice data" to your carrier.

There are of course natural entities that are lethal, but they are lethal as a by-product. No parasite, no virus, has the death of its host as its primary goal. Usually, the host dies from the unpleasant side effects of the parasite's primary goal: self preservation and propagation.

If you turn those objectives upside down (i.e. primary goal: Maximum damage, secondary goal: sustain existence) you sure as hell can increase the potential for lethal effects!

Actually drugs would be a lot more desirable without limitations that force people to resort to less and less sensible routes to cook them.

Who said I have to use my body to multiply them?

On a completely unrelated note, I have here a new breath mint you just HAVE to try...

There is exactly one reason why they do that: If they don't, they can kiss the storage business abroad good bye. Nobody would ever even think about touching any of their storage services with a ten foot pole, and, if sufficiently security conscious, contemplate moving away from MS wherever possible. At the very least in the server area, if possible at clients, too.

And I'm not that certain whether companies in the US would agree with it either.

They are popular with users, but very unpopular with studios. Simply for the same reason: Lack of control over what the user can actually do. It's kinda hard to sell addons when users can simply create them themselves. How do you sell DLC when users simply go "fffft, gimme an hour to code it an keep your overpriced shit!"

Well, after all is said and done, what remains is how you'll be remembered. Provided you give a shit about whether you will be missed at your funeral or whether people come only to see with their own eyes whether the asshole really finally bit it.

Pretty much this. There is very little in the IP itself, especially since everyone and their dog either already did a Minecraft clone or is currently developing one. The moment MS taints the IP by turning it into something its users do not like, it's gone from the front page and replaced by one of its copycats.

For reference, see Napster.

That's because nobody has his name riding on Pluto being a planet. You think this would've gone down so smoothly if the year was 1935?

That doesn't make any sense. How does it reduce competition if I bring in more people competing?