Kwispelbier has been around since 2007.

Have you considered buying your groceries at a grocery store?

What kind of idiot would use his real name for a Slashdot account?

So let me get this straight... The question that you are asking is "Is a platform really open if it is open to everybody and only a small percentage of people take advantage of that openness?"

Is a restaurant really open if only 1% of passersby enter? Is a store open if only 1% of customers make purchases?

Yes. If something is open then it is open, regardless of the percentage of users that take advantage.

Whoops, meant to reply to the parent.

Ah yes, I, too, remember the day in Econ 101 when they covered Mercantilism. Fortunately, Capitalism is a whole different ballgame.

If the wars were really about that smoking hole in Manhattan, then we probably should have gone after the guys who caused it.

Honestly, it just rankles me to have people point out the lack of inherent value in any activity where the inherent value comes from entertainment. It seems that there is a common attitude that if something is at all enjoyable than it is not intellectually stimulating, and that if something is not intellectually stimulating then it is utterly devoid of value.
Anyway, this is neither here nor there, as the use of "intellectual" in this case refers to "intellectual property," which has as much to do with matters of the intellect as lightning bugs have to do with lightning. To wit: not effing much.

Christ, sanctimonious assholes like you need to learn to just shut the fuck up and let other people have their fun. So you don't like video games - so fucking what? Not only are they a legitimate hobby and form of entertainment, they are booming as a business when dozens of other industries around the world are foundering. The fact that you can't wrap your head around people finding entertainment in things that don't entertain you says more about your "intellectual" capacity than it says about anybody else's, Sony executives included. Go read some penny dreadfuls and maybe catch a talkie at the nickelodeon, and leave the rest of us alone to enjoy ourselves as we see fit, grandpa.

The most obvious reason to develop for a home console in this day and age is money. Quite simply, video games on consoles outsell games on PCs by a very wide margin. With the video game market poised to top $10 billion in the US alone this year, it should be fairly obvious why a developer would choose to develop for consoles instead of the PC - sales are higher than on PC, piracy is almost nonexistent compared to PCs, and consoles are both more popular and visible as gaming devices than PCs. You can argue that everybody plays Flash games on PCs and that the PC gaming market is larger than the console market, but I would argue that for people who actually pay money to play video games, consoles are the go-to destination. Some developers are unconcerned with programming as a political statement and just want to develop something that will pay the bills.

But you also rely on other people playing those games as well. What if I find a niche game now that allows players to run dedicated servers, but at the game's peak there are only 150 people playing online at any given time? You can bet that no matter how much I love the multiplayer, I just won't be able to get the same satisfying experience five years down the line when most of the playerbase has moved on. I could either spend a good deal of time and effort trying to keep a multiplayer community alive or I could just accept that all multiplayer games have a lifespan limited by player interest. There is no similar limit to the lifespan of a single-player game.

A huge part of the allure behind home video games in the 70s and 80s was that people could now pay a higher initial cost for the games that they wanted to play and then no longer had to endure microtransactions. It seems that if EA and THQ have their way, we will slowly slide back to the days when we paid for a couple of minutes with a game rather than buying the game itself. After all, it would eliminate the used games market and ensure that developers and publishers get more of our money for less of their product. For a corporate bean-counter, that's a win-win!

Perhaps it is due to the effect of having two tectonic plates in close proximity to each other. For instance, in the immediate vicinity of a subduction zone the satellite would essentially see two stacked tectonic plates, which could account for the differences in observed density.
Anybody with more than a freshman-level understanding of geology want to correct me?

Get a full sleeve of the Mandelbrot set drawn with (literally) painstaking detail and accuracy. That should keep you and your tattoo artist busy for a while.

The Web is a subset of the Internet. Exercising greater control of the Internet implies exercising greater control of things that fall under the heading of the Internet.