No matter what, I don't think Notch wants the code back. Read his farewel lpost.

However, they could make it a binare, and develop and publish an API that supports their language of choice, whatever that might be. A recruitment tool for their dev platforms and languages that entices many thousands of 7-15 year olds to get involved coding for it could be worth the $2.5B all by itself.

Having a few satellite operations like their Skype business unit developing widely cross platform products like Skype is more valuable than one would think. It allows Microsoft to keep a toe immersed in a lot of their competitors' platforms. That's valuable wether or not there's even any profit in providing Skype on those platforms.

If Microsoft pulls it off right, they could even get positive mindshare, or at least some goodwill with the youth demographic out of this.

If you check the Minecraft forums today, there are some very hardened anti-Microsoft players venting in the 'MC buys MC' thread. Filtering these people out and actually earning some cred with other portions of the community would be gold for Microsoft. Also, if Microsoft bungles it, the fallout will be more severe than the marketing people at MS could imagine.

The Android app stores tend to reach further back. There isn't a team behind Android app development vigorously encouraging app developers to recompile all updated versions against the latest API. So people aren't forced into OS updates because of their apps leaving them behind. But thats exactly one of the things Apple makes sure to do.

It makes good business sense to force your customers to upgrade as often as possible. And I bought an iPod Touch new at the store that it wasn't possible to OS upgrade slightly more than a year later. So cut with the bullshit about 5 years.

My intent was sarcasm.

With this technology in place, all gun control laws can be removed, so long as its one of these magic guns. Which does not mean all guns to be legal need to have this feature. These special guns are just a new class of gun to introduce.

Every school teacher should have a handgun secured by this means in a holster on his/her hip. We should make that mandatory, as its for the safety of the children.

Yes, but you see, this technology is not designed to become mandatory on all guns. What it is for is to make guns safer for those who at present don't have one in their household.

If the technology is further developed into a product, more guns can then be deployed into households where people were previously afraid to keep guns.

You don't know anybody like that. We know your posting history. You made that up.

Tc/ip networking on Win3 was a driver addon from Microsoft that was free. I think you are referring to a dialup slip/ppp extension, which was a commercial 3rd party thing.

Do I need to add or enable a mod to get the mobs? Because I just started playing minetest last week and am liking it, but want there to be mobs. I guess I'd better just roll up my sleeves and dig around their forum and get more involved...

That just means Apple has to come up with new reasons to obsolete the current-2 versions of devices running their iOS. Which won't be a problem. They're good at that.

I'm sure Apple will be able to come up with artificial means of obsoleting their older hardware when the bottom line demands it. It's something they have an expertise in.

But the flood of older small screen iPhones into the used market will crater Apples general sales. They don't make ANYTHING on the sale of a used iPhone. I guess they'd better accelerate the release of iOS updates to force the 5s into obsolescence faster.

Right now Tesla's Gigafactory does nothing, because it's just some hype that's been used to get funding.

We need to wait for it to be built and see some results. Otherwise, we might as well be discussing the environmental soundness of the warp drive on the starship Enterprise, or the predicted efficiencies from the dreams any other capitalist has spun up.

Show us results before saying more.

Base NetBSD installs just work, too. Actually as good or better than Linux. You just install the 300-500Megs that a base install consists of, then configure your network and X and install packages. And edit your ~/.twmrc file so everything is in the menu.