I have a friend who used to work at Gamestop. Situations like this happened to him pretty often. He said corporate's policy for these situations is to be polite and let the customers carry out their transaction, but to inform them that for legal reasons they need to exchange money/goods outside of the store (otherwise the Gamestop needs to register as a market or something like that) Now if you were to set up a stall or something in front of a Gamestop I think they would have reasonable grounds to object. They're paying rent on the place, after all.

Basically Gamestop knows that no one is going to waste their time hanging out at Gamestop waiting to snatch up great deals on used games, so it's not worth it to them to antagonize their customer base just to prevent the occasional customer swap.

*shrug* Sales figures contradict you. I do own an iPad (works great with my Nexus One providing a wifi hotspot =P), so there, now you know two people who own one. At work my boss and my boss's boss both bought iPads after playing around with mine, too. And I work in a country where the iPad isn't even out yet, so they had to get it shipped it from overseas.
I think tech adoption isn't evenly distributed across the country, so that's why you can find people who can honestly say they don't see the iPad phenomenon happening even as Apple posts incredible sales numbers. For example, in the SJ/SF bay area everyone has migrated to either Android phones or iPhones, but down in LA I saw a lot of people, media suit types, still walking around with Blackberries.

This line of thought crops up a lot, and Eurocentric commentators often wave the "Enlightenment" as a sort of mystical talisman without investigating very closely what, exactly, it was about the Enlightenment's interaction with Christianity that created modern civilization as it we know it today. Because on the face of it, the Enlightenment actually did very little to Christianity. The holy text didn't change. The leading institution of the faith didn't change. The number of faithful didn't change (or at least didn't until centuries afterwards).

So what, exactly did the Enlightenment accomplish that transformed Christianity from a backwards zealous militant ideology to what we know today? (And yes, the preceding sentence is a horrifically reductive caricature and I largely phrase it that way in order to paraphrase a certain way of thinking.) Well, empiricism diluted religion to the point where even if thinking people professed to be Christians, they were no longer stupid enough to actually take the written dictates of their faith all too seriously. That's it. That's all. It wasn't very revolutionary, or very difficult, and there was nothing about it that was particularly unique to Christianity or the West.

The same process is happening throughout the world, including in Islam, including in Turkey, where the cosmopolitan educated elite professes to be Muslim but finds a YouTube ban just as silly as we do. Trust me, Turkish college students want to be able to watch cute kitten videos. The problem is that the Turkey's highly federalized political structure gives disproportionate voice to fringe elements - imagine if that one Catholic dude who's always on TV bashing South Park could actually get courts to file injunctions on his behalf, and you've have an approximation of what is happening here.

Again, this is the issue of concentrated losses vs. distributed gains. After your company was bought out, lots of workers lost their jobs. Very perceptible concentrated losses. But... (a) Having sold out, the previous owners of your company are much more liquid. That's capital that has to go somewhere. (b) Having bought, the foreign owner has injected wealth into your country and not into their own another country. (c) Ultimately though, thinking about capital "here" and wealth "here" is incoherent in a globalized system. Having expanded their business, the foreign owner owner is increasing the wealth in their "home," which means a larger, stronger, overall global market for goods and services, including those from your own country. I think this is the key. You complain the "The rest of the money is... gone." The money hasn't disappeared. It's simply sitting in a different bank account now, and thanks to globalization, it will still flow through all the same places it flowed through before (though perhaps the path it takes will now change, it will still end up in all the same places). The beauty of globalization is that money "over there" is less and less distinguishable from money "over here." And I don't want to sound like a starry-eyed one-worlder, but I can't deny that the eventual social and political consequences of this growing global economic integration have their appeal as well.

Do I think you should have as much freedom of movement as capital does? Yes, I do. I think that's one of the foremost challenges to the global system right now, actually - governments should treat immigration policy the same way they treat trade policy; they should negotiate mutual lowering of immigration barriers, but they aren't. But the solution here is more free trade, more globalization, not less.

To the extent that your think that existing problems with the economic system are that it's insufficiently free, I probably agree with you. I think the solution to "immigration" is more immigration, in both directions. That said, the idea that the renminbi peg is somehow distorting the true "free" state of the market and bad for us is a convenient bipartisan way to bash the Chinese that has currency (yeah I know) only because it's repeated so often. The renminbi peg decreases Chinese buying power and increases US buying power. This is supposed to make us upset why? Yes, this means that there is stuff from China that is cheaper than the same stuff from the US. But believing this to be a problem is just the Luddite fallacy all over again. And yes, it is spurring their development - but it's also a creator of wealth here. Now it is possible, and maybe even probable, but the renminbi peg is growing China's economy faster than it is growing western economies... but then we're back to the absolute vs. relative wealth question.
If you're worried about China's rise, you should be fearing the day that they remove the renminbi peg, because that means the Chinese are confident their domestic demand is now up to Western, developed nation levels and they no longer need to be an export-driven economy. Sooner or later that day will come and China will remove the peg (the Western world's concentration of relative wealth is unsustainable), but IMO it should come much, much later (hopefully by which time China has developed a more free political system) because globalization generally works best when its a gradual process. I might find myself agreeing with the Luddites myself if someone told me 50% of all jobs would be replaced by machines... tomorrow. The economic system would have no problem processing that kind of a shift over a longer period of time, but it wouldn't survive a shock that sudden.

It's easy to locate jobs that are lost to free trade, but more difficult for us to immediately identify the many jobs that are gained - but they are there. Think about where you work right now. Is it a foreign-owned company? If no, does your company have any foreign investors (shareholders, bondholders, etc. etc. etc.)? If no, does your company do business overseas? If no, does your company do business with foreigners? If no, does your company do business with recent immigrants? Everyone one of you, if you are honest, should have answered "yes" to at least one of the above. For that matter, this is Slashdot - chances are many of you work at a company that was FOUNDED by recent immigrants. The negatives of free trade are intensely concentrated (factory is shut down and people lose jobs) while the positives we get from free trade are huge, but widely distributed. It doesn't necessarily follow that the positives are greater than the negatives, but it certainly creates an obvious bias. Which means that at the very least, we should interrogate our anti-free-trade intuitions very carefully.

The reflexive free-trade bashing that occurs among otherwise educated, thoughtful people frankly astonishes me. Especially when I encounter it on Slashdot, which is a community that prides itself on a generally high level of scientific literacy (and frequently derides the scientifically illiterate). Yet there's an astonishing economic ignorance that goes entirely unquestioned. Now it's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of free trade, as there are plenty of very smart economists who are similarly wary, and I am myself. But any informed critique of the system needs to account for, at minimum, the following questions:

1) How is your opposition to free trade any different from the Luddite fallacy? (Or put another way, how is using cheap foreign low-skilled labor for part of the manufacturing chain any different than replacing weavers with weaving machines?) The Luddite fallacy was that each weaving machine represented jobs that were lost forever, which is fallacious because it fails to take into account that cheaper clothes means more clothes sold AND more economic activity in other industries because consumers now have more money left over after buying clothes.

2) If free trade is exploitative, how is it that so many countries that were once sources of cheap outsourced labor have ascended the value-add chain and now have economies that contribute at the middle (Taiwan) or top (Japan) end of the manufacturing chain?

3) A straightforward application of the law of comparative advantage would indicate that completely unrestricted trade increases everyone's absolute wealth as each nation specializes in its field of comparative advantage. How do real-life factors confound this theoretical model? Alternatively, is it a decline in America's absolute wealth that you are worried about, or are you simply worried about a decline in our relative wealth? (Put another way, does it bother you if everyone, including us, gets richer if that means the rest of the world will catch up and surpasses us in wealth?) And if the latter, how do you justify indefinitely concentrating relative wealth in one country out of proportion to its global share of the population?

I don't remember the source, but I'm almost 100% positive I remember reading about research that suggested human ethnic hybrids (=P) were on average taller and healthier than the average than their parent's ethnic groups. And certainly the desire to reproduce outside of one's group is evolutionary hard-coded into us even as we are somewhat conditioned to mistrust those who look unlike us. Anthropologists have observed it's a very common practice for small indigenous jungle tribes to encourage and even mandate marriage outside the tribe, for example. It's pretty easy to see how such a practice was adaptive for the reproductive fitness of small, isolated tribes.

Shouldn't write about market trends.
Yes, the casual game market is huge, but the hardcore game market hasn't changed at all. While the industry may make some adjustments in the near-term during their period of expansion to meet this previously underserved demand, in the long term there will be just as many "hardcore" games as there were before, because the level of demand is exactly the same as it was before. Suggesting that all developers are going to go casual and in so doing ignore a long-established market (which will in this scenario have absolutely no competition, just like the "casual" market had very little A-list competition when Nintendo launched the Wii) is like saying that car companies are going to sell cars exclusively to China because that's where all the new customers are.

Far too often in these discussion I encounter ideologues that, instead of approaching each potential negotiation and evaluating it on its merits, apply ideological assumptions and assert that we shouldn't "appease" our enemies. The fact of the matter is, all negotiations have a winner and a loser - and as a global hegemon, the US is in a position to make sure we win. Reflexively spurning negotiation for ideological reasons takes one potential tool out of our hands. Part of the problem is the practical difficulty in selling a hard-nosed analysis of a potential treaty to the public: policymakers can't exactly tell the electorate "Don't worry, we're totally taking Ivan to the cleaners on this one" and then turn around and say "Please sign on the dotted line, Mr. Putin." With that in mind, I present some historical examples of successful applications of "soft" power in order to advance a nation's interests.

(1) England and anti-slavery: By the mid 19th century, there was a Western European consensus that slavery was evil. England successfully argued that since it was so evil, nations should have broad authority to investigate and disrupt the slave trade, and secured agreements to that effect. England happened to have the world's largest navy and command of the sea. Obviously, it was incumbent upon them to take their warships and investigate and disrupt your merchant shipping, dock in and poke around the coastal cities of your client states, etc. etc. to defeat the evil practice of slavery. All it all it was a great excuse to give Her Majesty's Navy an excuse to poke their noses into other people's business and ignore traditional maritime borders. (Not that there wasn't genuine abolitionist sentiment behind these agreements as well. That was the beautiful thing: the abolitionist sentiment could be exploited to emphasize England's existing strategic advantages.)

(2)Petraeus and Iraqi Nationalists. Concurrent with the troop surge in Iraq, General David Petraeus reached out to Sunni insurgents who previously were hostile to American forces and started paying their salaries while encouraging them to oppose foreign fighters and join the political process. I suppose appeasement is OK when it comes from a 4-star general. Consequently, the "Anbar Awakening" occurred and former insurgents became the "Sons of Iraq." It may be premature to describe this as a success, as Petraeus himself readily acknowledges that our gains are tenuous unless we build on them, but for now no one - and certainly no one on the right - has stepped up to argue against the all-but-sainted Petraeus' strategy.

(3)1790s America and the Barbary Pirates:In the 1790s the US had no navy to speak of. For about a decade we paid tribute to the Barbary pirates, because it was more cost-effective than letting them sink our ships. Tribute payments accounted for up to 20% of the federal budget at that time. A full fifth of the budget: imagine the neocon howls of outrage at this indignity. Both Washington and Adams were opposed to tribute in principle and understood that tribute would eventually lead to more piracy, but saw that it was the practical solution for the short-term: transatlantic shipping was essential in growing the young nation's tax base, as there was no income tax then and tariffs were a substantial source of federal revenue. By 1800 America had a brand-spanking-new Navy built just in time for the more hawkish Jefferson to suspend tribute payments, send in the Marines, and kick some pirate butt. Many people are familiar with the butt-kicking "Shores of Tripoli" part, but tend to overlook the decade of swallowing our pride and paying up that made it possible.

You're right, whether or not pursuing a treaty is a good idea is going to come down to the issue of verifiability/transparency of compliance, and that's where intelligent policy debate over a potential treaty is going focus. (As opposed to the neocon rabble's reflexive "You can never ever ever negotiate with the enemy! Diplomacy is always a sign of weakness!" No, negotiations have a winner and a loser, just like anything else - you just have to make sure you've stacked the deck so you end up the winner.) I can certainly see that there could be a case made that it's just not going to be possible to ensure compliance, and I won't claim to have a profound understanding of the technical issues involved. But there are few modern weapons systems that have successfully been deployed without live tests working out the kicks, and live testing ASW tends to be rather noticeable when a satellite falls out of the sky. Indeed, to the extent that furtive development of ASW is possible, it seems like the US would be best positioned to conduct that development, because we're the ones that own all the satellites that make the transparency and verification possible. (BTW as a foreign policy realist I'd absolutely advocate that we conduct such development, treaty or no treaty.)

Made possible by Russian technology. Read up on the history of Iranian satellite technology - they used Russian launch pads until last year.

Which actually brings up another good point - a nonproliferation agreement has the positive secondary effects of preventing technology transfer to potential rogue states. Again, nonproliferation only works to the extend that compliance is verifiable - which, with ASW, is possible at the testing phase. Note that the Iranians had to do dummy launches, which we detected, for a full year before getting a satellite into orbit. This wasn't some sudden bootstrap of Iranian technology that caught us flatfooted, though you wouldn't know it from reading the sensationalistic press reports.

Obama wants to global ban. No one is suggesting unilaterally stopping development. I know it's difficult for neocons to understand, but there is a long and storied history of strong states using diplomatic agreements to preserve their power or bludgeon weaker states. In the 1800s Britain was particularly good at using the Western European consensus against slavery to leverage their command of the sea, for example.

Because no one will have the weapons to breach those limits. If the there were some way for the UK to successfully negotiate a no-submarine-development treaty in 1900, for example, it would have been absolutely in there interest to do so. Of course, such a treaty is infeasible because compliance is entirely unverifiable. The nice thing about ASW is that their development past the testing phase is sufficiently verifiable that a treaty banning their development is feasible. Obviously, they may try to do as much development as they can, up to the treaty limits - you can bet we definitely will. But given our comparative military spending, I think it's just as likely with a treaty in place ASW development will seem like a frivolity to the Russians/Chinese.

Iran? Certainly not, but it doesn't matter because they don't have the technology and economy required to develop ASW. Their only hope is that someone else invents it and gives it to them (like the Russians or Chinese).

As for the Chinese and the Russians, I agree that it'll be difficult to get them to sign on. But it's worth a shot. Remember, Obama is proposing a worldwide ban here, not unilaterally stopping our own development. Provided that the opportunity costs aren't too high I think it's reasonable for the Obama administration to pursue a ASW testing ban.

Keep in mind, there's plenty of stuff we could negotiate with as incentives to get them to sign on. I'd be perfectly happy to give the Russians North Ossetia if that'll make them sign on, for example. The Georgians really messed up and the Ossetians want to be part of Russia anyway. Off the top of my head I can't think of anything we could give the Chinese at little cost to ourselves, but I imagine there are a few possibilities people in the administration are working on.