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What a laugh.
Our current (new) government wants to re-introduce the so-called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" - the storage of all phone, SMS and Internet meta-data of everyone for no reason at all, just so they have that data (going back half a year!) in case they ever think it might help them catch a criminal.
You're guilty until proven innocent.
You speak only for the stereotypical overweight gamer. Some of us keep fit and look for opportunities to be active while gaming.
Or, you know, just want to have fun.
I still play tennis on my Wii with full-motion swings, because it's a lot more fun that way. And I play for fun, not to win (winning is fun, so it's a secondary path, but not the primary goal).
I would absolutely love to run through Skyrim. Maybe not every morning, but just for the cool factor. Also, I do own a Unity 3D engine. Being able to build your own environment to run around in and stuff? Wow.
And then... when I go really crazy, I'm imagining playing pen & paper roleplaying games and having something prepared for this for the hacker who goes into the matrix, or the shaman who goes on a dream journey or whatever...
I'm sorry, I'm not here to teach basic economic theory.
Sources are plentiful and Google is your friend, if you really are interested, it is very easy to find material in abundance.
The ultra-short version for the interested reader is that disposable income is what drives progress - economic, technical, social. If everyone is barely scraping by and needs all his money for essentials, there's nothing left to pay artists, inventors, etc.
The ultra-wealthy do drive some of this and for most of history, they did. But a middle class, where lots of people have disposable income, drives so much more and desires so much more diversity that more paths are explored in parallel.
The mechanism, just so nobody can complain about me not answering the question, is called "investment". And while, again, the ultra-rich do that as well, there is more diversity and dynamics in the system the more people are involved.
Go through the list of Fortune 500 companies and remove every company that would not survive if the options were reduced to selling to the super-rich only, or selling life-essentials only (food - essential food, not sweets or luxury wines; clothes - but not fashion, just basic clothes; etc.).
You'll end up with a very, very short list. I'd be surprised if you had a Fortune 50 after this.
To fix this issue, the GSMA has developed a non-removable SIM that can be embedded in a device for the duration of its life, and remotely assigned to a network. This information can be subsequently modified over-the-air, as many times as necessary.
What this seems to do is take control away from the user, who could swap SIM cards, and give it to some carrier. This looks like something where you beg and plead with your old carrier to let you switch your device to a new carrier. There's a lot of elaborate key management in this system, and compromise of certain keys could break the whole system.
People who use an OpenMoko will love this.
There's something to be said for what the FSF is trying to do. The problem is that they're too slow in doing it.
There was a time in England when you paid fire fighters insurance. They marked the houses that had paid. Houses that didn't pay - well, picture two Mafia heavies sauntering up the driveway, making comments about how combustible things are and what a pity it would be if an accident were to.... happen. (Terry Pratchett made a reference to this in his books because it is such a sick, evil and yet utterly predictable outcome.)
The service became one of the first truly national services because organized crime syndicates, even firefighting ones, are not approved of.
By moving mills away from slicing the arms off children to being run by trained adults interested in mill work, those children got to have this thing called education. Instead of being a burden to others, they became valued members of society, including scientists and engineers.
The left was arguably a major factor in the Enlightenment, without which no science could be done except in secret from the conservatives.
A large proportion of schools and universities in Britain were founded, funded and run by the left. No left, no Faraday, no Rutherford, no Turing, no Crick or Watson - name something you can't live without and I can show those components that would not exist without left-wing establishments, left-wing idealists and left-wing philosophies.
Can you name anything, anything at all, developed because of right-wing ideology?
The really interesting science, that is, there is no guarantee of a return accountants would recognize as such. (Scientists consider no result a result.)
In space science, this is worsened by rockets failing, the harsh conditions of space wrecking probes, the hazards of space junk, the very long-term nature of the work, the fact that all costs are up-front and the commercial rewards beyond satellite relays are never tangibly linked to space research by the public, creating the illusion that space has done nothing.
Just cut back on projects. Starting with those involving spending money in districts whose politicians work to cripple NASA. Remember, we're coming up to yet another election year and there's no news like bad news to shape the outcomes.
Your computer account is overdrawn. Please see Big Brother.