Oh, it can be an "investment" all right. Take my parents, for a start. No, seriously, take them ;)

They used to take trips into France and whatnot every weekend, buy the most expensive cameras to photograph stuff, etc. It cost a bunch, lemme tell you. They used to be in the red as far as their credit card limit went every month end.

Then I got them addicted to WoW. Fast forward some years of being on WoW every waking hour when the servers aren't off for maintenance. No really, they do most of the shopping on Wednesday mornings. And now they actually have money for a change :p

Sounds to me like getting to keep one's money would technically qualify as a return :p

Plus, with Blizzard skipping maintenance on some Wednesdays, I think they even lost a few kilos. Think of the health benefits, man. Surely that counts as a return :p

Or take my getting them addicted. Sure, I had to sink some time into answering stuff like "HELP! I'M DROWNING!" followed by (I swear I'm not making it up) "WHAT CAMERA TO TURN UPWARDS? NO, I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA! I LOOKED IN ALL BAGS AND I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA!!!!" But after that? They've been out of my hair for years now. Plus now mom has more interesting stuff to talk about when she calls. Not that she calls as much, either. Those newbies aren't gonna just kill themselves in the warzones, you know?

I don't know about you, but I'd say that's worth something. That's my return on investment right there :p

Or as the Bored Of The Rings version goes...

"He would have finished Goddam off then and there, but pity stayed his hand. 'It's a pity I've run out of bullets', he thought"

Actually, the funny thing is that just about everyone agreed that dodo didn't taste very good. In fact, the accounts seem to be in agreement that while the breast and stomach were good enough, the rest of the bird was some rather tough and insipid meat. We have accounts like

"These we used to call 'Walghvogel', for the reason that the longer and oftener they were cooked, the less soft and more insipid eating they became."

Or

"These were given the name Walghvogel during Van Neck's voyage, because even with long stewing they would hardly become tender, but stayed tough and hard"

If the dodo had been most excellent eating, they would have been bred like turkeys. But as it was, the small amount of tasty meat on one made it not worth it. Or rather, it was worth every penny only if it was free. If you could just go club a bird over the head and make a bad meal out of it, well, it was free meat anyway.

But even so, actually there is very little evidence that they were hunted for meat much. There are actually very little dodo bones found around the human settlements. Even when they were hunted, a lot of times it was more or less just for the lulz of killing a mind-bogglingly defenseless and passive bird. I.e., humans being fucktards.

But be that as it may, the MAIN reason for the extinction of the dodo was more like habitat destruction and the inability to compete with animals introduced on the island by the Europeans.

But, really, think about it. It was a bird that was already as domesticated as you can possibly get. It was passive, flightless, didn't have any reflex to run away from humans, etc. It would have been even more trivial to keep in captivity than chickens are. I mean, you wouldn't even have to clip its wings. They were even trivial to get all in one place, whether for feeding or locking them up over night, or just to pick the most plump one, due to the fact that you could make one squawk a call to the others that made them gather.

If it had been tasty, SOMEONE would have put a few in a pen and raised them for meat, same as they did with turkeys elsewhere. Again, bearing in mind that it was trivial to do so with dodos, if you wanted to.

In fact, if it had been tasty, instead of being extinct, nowadays there would be millions of dodos raised on farms all over the world.

I don't think for many people it was about "cool". I've never used Foursquare myself, but I would assume I'd treat it more or less like a game.

In fact like any other game. Just because, say, Star Trek Online gives out achievements, it doesn't mean I'd define my self-worth based on those, or on anyone knowing I have those.

If I were to define anything "cool" about myself based on a game, it would be more like helping decrypt the binary .esm format in the early Fallout 3 days, before there even was a construction kit for it. Or stuff like making the first lightsabers for Fallout 3. (Yeah, I'm the same Moraelin as on the Nexus.) Or helping a buttload of newbies get started on modding.

Or my tens of thousands of hours sunk into studying history. Which, for game purposes, does give me enough knowledge to recreate an exact replica of a high-medieval European arming sword, or exactly an Edo period lady's naginata.

Not that even those would be my first choices to base self-worth on, but, you know, it's still actually involving more skills than visiting the same Starbucks every day. Stuff that if I were to brag about, it would still show, basically, "look at the skills I have! Look at the things I can DO!" Or something like that.

You know, stuff that takes some RL knowledge and skill.

Now I don't doubt that some people do base their self-worth on a game score, but not everyone, and in Foursquare's case I don't suspect there were that many who actually thought that their "cool" factor is based on how often they visited the same Starbucks. Even hipsters tend to think they're hip, you know, for doing other stuff than the rest of the population, not by some random thing that everyone else is doing.

What I'm getting at is that I don't think many people now deserve having their privacy violated and their personal data sold to the highest bidder, just for using a silly automated GPS game. Chances are a lot of those didn't even think they're "cool" for it, nor really used it for more than some silly lulz,

The problem with CFC is that it's duration is an insignificant blip at cosmic scales. We've used it a little, we're phasing it out because it ruins a rather important layer of the atmosphere.

Our planet will continue to exist for about 5 billion years after the point where we reasonably reached a point that some aliens could contact at all without coming all the way here. (For most of our time on the planet we couldn't receive radio and didn't have telescopes.) Out of that, we've been abusing CFC heavily for maybe 50 years.

Let's say that t would take a while to get weaned off them, and for the upper atmosphere to gradually clear of them. Like maybe 500 years instead of 50. But it's still 500 years out of 5 billions.

That's a chance of of 1 in ten millions that if a civilization is there, you'll detect it by CFCs.

Not really. And here's why:

We're just a little over a month before Christmas, a MAJOR point in times when people buy stuff. Even people who couldn't be bothered buying something for September, are likely to buy stuff for Christmas. Either for themselves or for someone else.

So I'd say expect to see more of this kind of advertising over the next month. Or actually more accurately: PR firms and departments generating buzz. In fact expect it to ramp up over the next month.

Besides, if we're making up hypotheses, maybe Cthulhu mugs and posters also actually make programmers more motivated to finish the project before Great Cthulhu rises from R'lyeh to kill us all with tentacles. See, it's not just coincidence that so many of us nerds are cultists of the Great Old Ones. What? Are you saying it's just me? ;)

I have no problem with trying to find out. It's just when something as wide-spread as drugs overlaps with pretty much everything happening at the time, just the overlap doesn't say much.

I mean, equally a lot of politicians did drugs and... err... wait, it would explain a few things ;)

Well, I should, but I spend far more time on an UBB based site, so by now it's a reflex to write things that way.

then Cthulhu t-shirts and mugs and solstice carols are good for programming.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for legalizing drugs. And I don't like it one bit that my tax money goes into making victims of some harmless pot smokers.

But [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cum_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc]cum hoc ergo propter hoc[/url] is a fallacy for a reason.

Even if Silent Circle is secure, that doesn't mean that the cell phone is secure. The safest mobile innernet device is probably an iPod Touch.

I think it would be more harmful to those people junking up the web if we made a browser extension that clicked on every +1, like, and follow button you surf past.

They should have released office applications for iOS at 2x the price of their iWork equivalents. Then they should have moved all that into the metro style, and released basically the same metro designs for Windows 8.

That might have cost them more than it produced in revenue, but now the result is that millions of people have been delightedly using their iPads for a couple years, and they're doing ok without MS Office. Even enterprise users. And MS still doesn't have an announced plan to bring Office to Metro (Windows 8 Style, whatever).

Including Office in Windows 8 RT might attract a lot of people to the platform. But it might also be the only way they can get Office deployed on a lot of tablets. Like, great, but also technically shovelware. I'd love to say that Microsoft has their work cut out for them, but that implies that they are working on the right things now. Dunno. I hope it works.

Uh... You aren't contradicting his valid point. He didn't say HTML5 was failed. He said it was a mistake to do HTML5 to the exclusion of other client platforms. How can you disagree with that? He's running a giant software company - they can support a few platforms. They will have different merits.

I wish HTML5 fans hadn't convinced the world it was the 2nd coming of Christ. My favorite web apps worked great with HTML4. Now every web page tries to run enough JavaScript to lift itself into orbit.

Advertisers agree to honor DNT only from browsers that display the setting behind a door labelled "beware leopard".

It's bullshit anyway - any standard based on advertisers behaving ethically is a nonstarter. Apple's default no-third-party cookies seems worthwhile, if circumventable. Why not do more of that? If there are Moz people working on the DNT standard, I feel like they are being suckered.

If it's google's display advertising business you're concerned with, I don't really understand your concerns. If it's any of the many less scrupulous parties that you are concerned with, they're just going to ignore DNT.