Why would they need to keep a straight face? They can afford better lawyers than anyone they're likely to sue or be sued by. The kind of business Zynga is involved in has nothing to do with ethics or image. If it was they'd have been out of business long ago.

Agreed. Kickstarter is already too permissive with its projects. I have seen projects that were physically impossible, or that 10 seconds consultation with an engineer would have reduced the instigator to tears.

Now Kickstarter has made the problem slightly worse by requiring a "donation" to the project before you can post a public concern or complaint to the project's boards, but c'mon--a place where anyone can ask for money without oversight? If I want that I'll check my spam folder.

Nope, don't have to back them up with paper originals any more. A lot of things don't have paper originals. The Macbook I'm typing this on? Apple store emailed me the receipt. The Adobe software I'm running on it? Same. My phone and monthly phone service? Ditto. Yet these are all allowable business expenses. No paper needed. If the IRS needs a hard copy that's what a printer is for. They'll take it. I know.

(or will be when they get back into the heavy lifting business.)

Get a press pass to a NASA launch. You're close enough that the temperature in the room almost immediately goes up by 20 degrees. Fortunately you're in a reinforced bunker.

And by that I mean tons of people, all who think they're smarter than all the others seeing who can piss the furthest up a rope.

Yes, it needs more press, but not for that reason.

The word "hacker" is already synonymous with "Skeevy computer criminal" in the mind of the general public â" despite the fact that's not what the hacker community means to those who actually make up the hacker community.

Call criminals who use computers criminals. Don't call them hackers. It makes hackers look bad.

For a lot of jobs, this is all the consideration it's worth. Call centers, clerks at most chain stores, someone moving pieces of paper around an office, you just need a literate piece of meat in a chair. You don't need an outside the box thinker or a cunning strategist, or even anyone with training in any special field. You need a warm body who can follow a flow chart and count. A game can figure that out better and faster than a human being.

Not your job of course. You were hand picked from the billions of people on earth to be the one special person who does your job and are irreplaceable.

It's still equivalent to saying that if I make a PDF with Adobe Acrobat that I can only distribute it through Adobe's services. Or that I write a Word DOC that can only be hosted on a Microsoft service.

Proprietary formats already have deeply annoying lock-in, this is taking it one step too far.

I thought about this when I first read the Target story, and it's pretty simple. You make what's there easier and/or better than generic Amazon.

Here's what I'd try:

I'd put wifi throughout the store. One connection point for each department. The first page you would see when connection would be a pleasant (made for mobile devices) storefront for the department you're in. It would have random in-store coupons and offers that you could only get by connecting to that hotspot. It would have a search tool that would let you find exactly where on the shelf your item is. It would link to accessories or alternate versions available in its own online store. It would let you buy things online if they were out of stock. (Again, from the store's online storefront.)

And it would also let you connect to the rest of the internet so you can Amazon it if you want. But if you had all that why would you?

I stream probably 3% of the entertainment (If measuring by time spent). But of the entertainment products* that I consume I download 100%. I don't buy DVDs or CDs. Or books. How do you stream a book? I don't watch TV in the sense that I watch shows broadcast over the air, cable, or satellite, and I don't listen to the radio.

So I don't stream my entertainment, aside from an occasional live v-cast. But I do rely almost exclusively on the internet for it.

*Leaving aside for a moment all the entertainment I get from in-person humans that I don't have to pay for. Or pirate.