Weapons, blah blah, speed, blah blah (yawn).

It's not history. The real question here is: how much gold did they find on board?

...but their implementations do. Except for rare cases, profit is directly proportional to the amount of effort put in implementation and marketing of your idea. Therefore:

1) publish the idea. Odds are, no one will pay attention to it anyway.
2) start working on its implementation, get the details figured out, remove the obstacles
3) start making a fuss about it, attract attention
4) if someone else tries to patent it, they can't: idea is not original because your initial publication is prior art

If you make money in this endeavor, bonus. If not, you'll have learned many things, perhaps made new friends, found partners, attracted some attention, made yourself a name, found a goal in life, etc.

I suppose the trend is unstoppable by now as we all jumped right into it with our credit and debit cards. Still, I'm always amazed that people willingly pay to pay, that is, give a fraction of the transaction to some third party, just for allowing the transaction to take place. In the good old days of cash, the passing of money from one hand to another was free. Now it appears that every time I need to pay for something, I need to pay a little more. Is that really acceptable? Am I the only one who's not too excited by this?

This is something I totally subscribe to. Popularity of violent games and movies is an indication that a good proportion of the human (arguably mostly male) population has battle fever, an urge to get involved in conflict and to come out the winner. I would guess that this inclination has been present in our species for a long, long time and is not about to recede -- just look at the world today. And when there is no real action, we indulge in games, competitions, sports. Hey, aren't the Olympics (the modern ones) based on a model (the ancient ones) that is a proxy for war? Games have long been an outlet for people, allowing to fill a need that cannot be filled in reality at the moment. I can't go out and be a bad-ass hero that bludgeons hordes of ennemies? So be it, I'll rent a Vin Diesel movie or play Halo. Makes me feel good to a point that I would even stay away from the real thing. Enroll in the army and go make peace in Afghanistan? No thanks. That cowardly attitude, magnified to an increasing fraction of population, means peace, the real one. Pass the word.

[... hopeful, if naive, attempt to address this problem...] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1114137