I suspect this is why EA is claiming that they are going to continue making 360/PS3 games for the next few years... seeing how much of a market there really is going to be since cell/tablet games are really taking off and the current gen consoles are still pretty capable.

Best guess? Store credit. Used stores will still be able to give credit for games people want to trade in, though I do not know if that will be enough of a draw to keep the stores going.

From a publisher's perspective it institutionalized double dipping, they get to sell the same unit multiple times with no additional production or stocking costs.

That is actually an interesting question. I suspect it has a cultural answer, something about the people who rent and people who buy, and how represented each are in the various high profile forum/blogging gamer community.

This word 'unquestioningly', I do not think it means what they think it means.

While it is fair to guess that such a move would increase revenues, it is a hotly contested topic with historical economic examples unclear on what impact it would have. It might increase revenues, it might decrease them. The outcome is currently unpredictable, thus it is far from unquestionable.

Well, if it worked, it may or may not have a huge impact. Just because energy is produced does not make it cost effective for energy production. For instance there have been some interesting advances in tabletop fusion, but it requires more energy then it produces. It has some interesting applications for medical equipment as a neutron source but is hardly game changing when it comes to energy production.

You do not need a license to build just any nuclear reactor, but if it produces significant radiation then they start to take notice.

It sounds like they are trying to hurt the particular police force an its abuses of other 'little guys', but also to highlight that people should not be using SAPS's 'whistleblower' system in the first place because it tracks personal data. They really should have anonomized it before posting, but the people in the database were already probably at risk from internal misuse an corruption.

The know what makes their short term investors happy and their stock options valuable....

While we like to mock CEOs, at the end of the day they got to where they are by being good at what they do. The problem is what WE think they should be doing and what actually pays off is pretty out of sync. Right now the job market for CEOs rewards short term profits at the expense of long term viability. Investment in the future is generally punished. Granted the public and the tech community might point out that such behavior hurts the company, the people who actually influence the person's pay and future employment options do not, nor do they care. Long term stability and profits just are not considered priorities.

Farmers, unfortunately, for the most part have very little political voice outside a few very large organizations. They make a great group to trot out in order to make your point or gain points.. and sadly like small business owners they are also generally fairly easy to politically manipulate since they are both specialized and busy so it is easy to spread plausible sounding memes through the communities.

Conversely, discounting the majority of scientific finding because it does not match what a particular group wants does not mean they are right. It does however mean that they have to provide better models then the majority.

Put another way, in science, the majority usually IS right, and there is a well established method for showing otherwise. Thus using majority opinion as an indicator of correctness, while not infallible, is generally pretty good. If nothing else the probability of 3% allowing political belief to influence their conclusions is greater then 97% doing so.

I had initially read it as commenting on the pushy bronies, but I could see how it could be read that way too.

Thing is, that describes the bashers pretty well too. It is not enough that they feel such things threaten their masculinity or adulthood, but they need to loudly proclaim how disturbed the people who have the hobby are and how they should go away. I have never seen the show myself, so I do not have, if you will pardon the expression, a horse in the race here, but from a 3rd party perspective I see a LOT more of that behavior come from the anti bronie crowd then the bronies. Sure I hear of a few really obsessive types who will not let it go till everyone around them watches it, but I see a much larger group droning in the background trying to get people to not watch the show through no small amount of pressure and stigma.

Considering what I see sports fans do....

Because in many people's minds 'this threatens my masculinity' is far worse then colombian drug lords.

Wow, someone was actually able to site an example. I think this is a first in these discussions that I have seen ^_^