First, they look at it differently: each second hand sale is a sale they earn no money from. They consider that a lost sale. This is debatable.

Second, you make the assumption that you payed for unlimited service for an unlimited time. In practice, however you have a limited amount of time you can play games and a limited amount of time you are willing to spend on this particular game. This is calculated into the price of the game. Each second hand gamer increases this particular amount of time per original sale of the game and thus increases service costs.

In the end, a second hand sale is not only a sale that does not bring in money, it actually costs them money.

Interesting, can we store power on that level with compressed air?

You have a point about the size of Belgium and weather. We do use above-ground lines but we have rather dull weather...

The fact that I live within 10km from the nearest nuclear plant probably doesn't hurt either...

We can not really store power at the levels we consume. One of the best ways we have to store power is to pump water uphill to some storage basin and then later generate power from having it flowing downhill again... not very efficient, limited in capacity depending on location and not feasible in all locations.

Routing power is a bit more complex than routing a packet.

For one, a packet is a discrete amount of information, while power is a complex analog phenomenon. You can put a packet on a link and hope it gets there, you can't just put a kilowatt on a power line...

A more conceptual difference is how demand is distributed. A network client talks to a few distributed servers on the Internet. A power client just demands power and does not care where it comes from or if the server cannot deliver it. When a server gets overloaded, the clients just have to wait. If a power plant gets overloaded and the power cannot be gotten elsewhere, the service of the whole network goes down (voltage drops) unless some of the load is cut. If a certain network link is overloaded, packets get dropped. If a power line is overloaded, (hopefully) circuit breakers pop and ALL power transfer is interrupted.

Some practical problems you will run into with power switching:

• power conversion - the power grid is not uniform. There are several types of high-voltage lines and power needs to be converted to route power between them. Those conversions introduce losses and have capacity limits.
• transport losses - each length of power cable introduces loss.
• power plant characteristics - each power source has its own characteristics. For example, the output of a nuclear power plant is more or less constant and cannot adjusted to changing demand.
• changing demand - power demand changes drastically over the course of a day, both in level and geographically. During office hours, power is needed in office buildings, during the evening in households, ...
• load characteristics - inductive load vs capacitive load. In ideal situations, you would combine them to get a resistive load as much as possible as this leads to optimum power efficiency.
• politics - which, I have read on the Internet, is one of the major sources of blackouts in the US.

As an aside to the last point, I wonder why blackouts happen so regularly in the US while the are exceedingly rare in Europe. I am in Belgium and I get a "blackout" once every decade or something. I do sometimes experience glitches where you see the lights dim and computers with lousy power supplies reboot... once every few years or so. It suggests to me, whatever the problem is, it isn't technical...

He just has Reason

Am I the only one that thinks 0.002 Watt x 500 does not make 100 Watt?