How can it be vaporware if they've already built and distributed fully-operational prototypes to several individuals/companies?

Carmack's been tweeting about specs and improvements he's been making for months now.

I've watched that talk before, and while the message is interesting, she casually (and frequently) glosses over the fact that her industry is literally about putting the clothes on people's backs. It should be surprising to no one in the audience that people buy food and clothing more than CDs and DVDs.

If I recall correctly she even talks about how their industry requested and was /denied/ copyright on the ground that clothing /was too important a commodity/ to be regulated as such. It's not that they're a group of "fashion should be free" folk, it's that they're not allowed to stifle a basic good needed for human survival.

I'll emphasize again that the talk has a lot of interesting points about innovation and reuse of ideas, but implying that leisure and luxury industries can adopt similar strategies and see similar results seems specious.

Being a magician and a skeptic often go hand-in-hand, Houdini was well-famed as both. One of his main focuses was people purporting to talk to the spirit world. I believe he even went so far as offer a personal reward for someone who could show proof of someone communicating with the dead.

This strangely echoes the fight between MCA and Nintendo over the name "Donkey Kong".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v._Nintendo_Co.,_Ltd.

MCA claimed that Donkey Kong infringed on their "King Kong" trademark, Nintendo won the battle when they showed that MCA had previously argued (and won) that King Kong and its characters were already in the public domain.

Open Source != Crowd Source

My math must be wrong then.

1962 + 50 = ...?

Whoa, slow your roll there. I'm sure lots of apps make money on advertising, but it's unfair to say that their business model is based around violating user privacy.

The biggest games (Zynga games, especially) have proven that people are absolutely willing to engage in microtransactions in exchange for speed-ups and convenience.

and the book publishing industry too.

They advance you a sum of money, and then you pay them the money back using your 10-30% royalty from sales. They get to keep 90-70% starting at dollar 1, whereas the writer or developer doesn't see anything until their advance is repaid.

Such a shame.

IANAL but isn't it the case that courts never uphold the validity of those kinds of causes in contracts? You can still do all those things, you'll just be in breach of contract (a contract you probably don't care about if you're filing or joining a class-action lawsuit).

What about those of us who have been talking/texting while driving for 5/10/15 years with no accidents?

Should we suffer because there are other people who are bad at knowing the right/wrong situations to divide their attention and who are obviously incapable of talking and keeping the wheel straight?

Doesn't the current way of things (punishing those who drive recklessly regardless of whether they're on the phone or not) make more sense?

The main focus of the argument is not that "people shouldn't be able to resell their new purchases". The focus is on some of the tactics that our retail channels engage in to convert new sales into higher-margin used sales. Since the margin on a used game sale is huge compared to a new sale, retailers like Gamestop will actively encourage people who bring New copies of a game to the register to purchase the used one instead. The secondary issue is that a person who purchases a new game for $60 is then willing to turn around and sell it a week or two later for $25 to an entity which clearly values the used title at $55, since that's what they resell it for. I agree that games should cost less money, but as long as a consumer will choose to purchase the "5 dollars cheaper" version and then resell it for 30% of that price a few weeks later it's a strange economic uphill battle.

*laugh out loud* Anyone who thinks that game development is the ghetto of programming needs to try to get a job in the game dev industry. I've worked on web applications as well as embedded systems and game development is easily the toughest job I've ever had. Building a program with a large team that has to fit in memory as well as run over 30fps no matter what the user does is a massive feat of engineering.

No, they're talking about the pattern of several red (brown) dots that appear in film frames in random parts of the movie.

The Sims is the far and away the best-selling PC game franchise in history. Every year since "The Sims" was released in 2000, a Sims product (sometimes more than one!) has held a top 5 spot in PC sales, and according to Wikipedia it's sold more than 70 million units as of January 2007.

Now I'm not saying it's the best game in world, but it's certainly a success.