Consider how much investment you want from a developer to entertain you while you poop? Personally I wouldn't be willing to pay for a game that only gets my attention during that period of the day. So having said that, why should the developer try to create the next big blockbuster with an enormous amount of development time to capture the same market that they'd capture by developing a mini-game?

If you're getting these free games to occupy an hour or so of your free time and complaining about repetitiveness I think you need to reevaluate what you spend your time with because these games aren't supposed to make you want to book time out of your day to play them like console games with multiplayer and the like are.

I've posted this previously but I keep thinking it deserves merit:

Dead Man's Switch

Its a project that emails you periodically. If you don't respond it fires off a pre-defined message to a set of individuals you've chosen. Full disclaimer here, I have nothing to do with the project and I have not yet tested it myself but it doesn't seem like a difficult system to set up.... cron job + mail server + port listening app.

Or you know.... google

Little Johnny is allowed to refine that vision as he's provided more experience and insight afterall... There's such a thing as getting 1 or 2 years into a degree and going "Maybe this isn't for me" or "I don't think I can do anything with this degree."

Check this out: http://beta.deadmansswitch.net/

Its a service that you register with that periodically sends you emails you must respond to. If you don't respond to the email the service assumes you've passed away and then sends out an email to the people you indicated previously. I haven't given it a try yet but it might be handy to have for when I keel off and business partners need access to my data.

Its simpler than that I think. Apple TV tied into an iPad or iPhone works pretty fluently with the provided apps (not 3rd party). The example I can think of witnessing is the MLB app where you watch the game(s) but your iDevice shows stats that you can browse and interact with relating to the game.

Extend that idea to an "app" being a game and your iDevice being the controller and Apple TV being this "Mystery Box" and you suddenly have a game console.

The hardware would need improvement to be a true gaming experience but that's not to say it is a stretch.

Yes the vendor did screw me but it was in such a way that if I had paid through a real bank or credit card service I wouldn't have been bent over.

I'm over being sour about it and moved on. I just reiterate that my experience with PayPal was that they could do anything. The situation was that I paid for certain items and the vendor sent the wrong stuff, refusing to accept that they were in mistake because "their records" showed everything correctly (shipping screwed up). When I contacted PayPal the agent said that I was out of luck because the vendor only has to provide a proof of shipping to refute any claims I had against them. The agent supposedly tried to contact the vendor but received no response and then said "well, I guess that's that."

Again, all fairness to you, the agent was very helpful and kind. You deal with numerous issues daily and I can't expect my hand to be held along the way (shit happens) but I was upset with the response of "they provide shipping notice -> you lose". There was no "acceptable" record of what the items I was promised was because the contact leading up to the transaction was not on ebay and was done though a web forum.

My personal experience is the lack of effort to do anything about transactions gone wrong. I had an issue with the vendor and was told that since it was not done through ebay they couldn't do anything for me. "You're S.O.L. for $300" is what I got from Paypal... with a credit card I could at least have fought the charges but Paypal takes your money with the guise of a credit card company while providing next to zero actual resolution.

I've learned my lesson and this isn't a "whine" post but I'm just pointing out what you asked for.

Not really? They're thriving at the rate they're charging now. Having that the "lower bound" of their costs wont push people away unless they get hung up on the figurative value of what they "could" make.

Cost to run in-house IT/etc.:
- Personel wage
- Facilities
- Administrative costs
- Training
- + others

Cost to pay contractors:
- Wage/Contract cost

Typically they're similar or the contract will come in lower. Wage is not the only variable in the entire equation

Exactly! People forget that its not necessarily *what* the art is but rather who did it first. There's a boat-load of abstract art I could replicate and arguably improve upon but it doesn't make it note-worthy because I wasn't the front-runner. This guy made a statement (as much as I think its crap) and was the first to really do it, he deserves the credit for it and any copycats afterward are just pissing in the wind.

THANK YOU! I'm seriously sick of this entitled attitude where a company/person/group puts tremendous effort into some system only to have a chunk of users go "WHY CAN'T I USE IT THE WAY I WANT THAT WASN'T INTENDED FOR!?" If you don't like Google+'s rules then stay off, its not a necessary service by a long shot and if you're so damned concerned about privacy wtf are you doing with Social networks in the first place?

Or:

They *don't* have sensative data stored on networks accessable to the internet. I certainly believe its possible for a NATO web server to contain 1GB of documents... The same kind of crap that you find on publicly owned company intranets, documents and documents of rambling and meeting minutes and useless garbage stored because they're being transparent to the public. For all we know at this point Anonymous *hacked* a bunch of files that were accessible by a internal search engine to the site.

I worked for IT to a company that had a client using keyfob entry. After a while part of my job became finding 'griefers' who would call in frequently with random excuses about how they lost their keyfob, or left it at home, or at work, or at the dog house, or whatever and needed a "temporary passcode" to override the system. (Yes that's possible). People simply refuse to accept the need for security. You give them a simple (and secure) method and they start to game it because they find it inconvenient.

You'd assume that 15% have an immunity based off of the title "Snail Discovered...."