The thing is, if IBM patents the planet, eventually the whole system will implode and they'll lose value. So having a big pile of patents will be worthless and all the money thrown at them, as well as fighting them is gone with no value. I don't think we're quite as critical mass yet, but I expect it will happen eventually. The destruction of the patent/copyright system I'd think would be the next global commercial crisis after this financial one, I hope. But that's just me being a cynic.

I believe they're adding a nickname system for replacement of the whole RealID thing for gamer friends that you don't know IRL. I think they called it BattleTag, read the preview a little while ago but here's what I remember:

Essentially: battle.net account - account all your games are tied to, login for WoW, SCII, D3 etc.
RealID - aimed at people you know, handles cross comms between games - you add them once and then you see/can chat with them in other games, lets you see friends of friends too.
BattleTag - hand out to guildies and random gamers who you don't hate, to communicate without them knowing your real name, email etc. Should have been added with RealID communication stuff, still in testing I think.

Some things might be a bit sketchy in explanation but that's what the bits are I think.

or just monkeying around.

Maybe. But total Market domination is certainly a feature of capitalism. Once you hit that point the only way out is to break it down carefully or nationalise it. You can't have a monopoly for profit ultimately without screwing over your population. You can regulate to prevent it getting dug in that deep and keep competition open but there are lines that get crossed that are almost irreversible.

This is a fundamental property of capitalism: when a corporation gets lucky it can dominate the market so strongly that when it gets unlucky it gets bailed out by the tax payers.

Good point, on another note I wonder if there is a maximum attainable amount of natural renewable energy sources before capturing them (and thus dissipating the energy) becomes detrimental to the planetary existence as a whole such as limiting wind/tidal motion to ineffective lows. Maybe that amount or energy is so high it's almost irrelevant because we should be off the planet by then.

Clogs in the cogs and beers in the gears?

Energy will still be a major cost I think, in the form of electricity. Of course we could probably try to defeat that with nuclear power, or at least reduce the cost of electricity towards costless levels. I'm not sure what the cost of creation vs value of energy produced is of a nuclear powerplant today. I figure it must be worth still building more as we never stopped at one. If you can move the cost of energy down to near zero levels, we really are sorted.

Excellent point, I honestly hadn't considered how vastly different the idea of an explosion vs surface displacement was when it came to moving something like water. Now my sensationalist statements seem quite daft. Would it be possible then that an underwater nuclear explosion would be less devastating than an overground one due to absorption of energy by the water?

I wasn't quite being as literal with the touch of a button statement, just the idea that it can be used is terrifying enough. You could probably drop it in the sea and create a tidal wave so big it would cover a medium sized country. It wouldn't just reduce navies near by, it would eradicate anything near the entire ocean.

I for one am glad I have only existed (for all intents and purposes) post cold war, which does make me a young-ling compared to some of you lot, but everyone should know about what could have happened. I always believe history is there to be told, known and learned from. I certainly appreciate not living in a radioactive mud pit. In fact I certainly appreciate existing.

A bunker buster, providing your bunker is within a few hundred miles or so. It was a city leveller. This is the bomb you drop to lose, not win. Noone should have that much destructive power at the touch of a button. The idea of it being used is beyond scary.

I don't know, that'd be about 80-odd people at $40k. It's not impossible to think he has a small workforce and overheads to run an office or something similar. $3.5M really isn't that much money if you have a few employees too.

If you have an idea, try and prove it wrong (alot), if you can't, then your idea stands. This goes for relativity too, but dancing around just saying "it's wrong, haha!" gets you a Cool story bro award attached to a tin foil hat.