Jevons paradox. I'll just leave that here and let you think about how it works with increasingly fast hardware, increasing hard drive space and the obvious parallell to increasing screen real estate.

Seriously though, I think that what Microsoft really wants with Skype is their userbase (and maybe their audio tech), and over time they will all be funneled into Windows Live. For some reason they don't think this is worth the money it costs as the users are unlikely to move on to Windows Live so they just cancel it.

Is anyone surprised? Microsoft has a long history of bad ideas and costly projects met with very bad reviews. However, they usually keep pumping money into them until they are successful. If that doesn't work they just use their monopoly to make sure people use their software anyway^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W in an attempt to make people use their software.

Fame can counter almost any deficiency, even having been a software developer.

Often the opponent (in multiplayer) yes, but rarely portrayed negatively. Considering how many countries should hate USA it's a little bit odd. However, I should have used "usually" rather than "always".

The enemies in FPS games are always whoever the US doesn't like at a given time (this includes most titles produced outside of the US as well), be they russians, germans, vaguely-middle-eastern-something, vietnamese, chinese, the list goes on. Now we finally get a game where the roles are changed. I can see why some Americans are upset, but frankly it's about time.

Also: how much is it going to cost them to regain the goodwill they lost among users? They've already given away games to make up for their failure (those were surely worth more than 2.21$ per user), but I doubt that's going to cover it. I think the cost of this in the long run will make 170M seem like pocket change...

According to statistics from Wikipedia, 0.83% of North Korea's population lives in slave camps and 0.75% of the US population lives in prison. One could argue that slave camps are worse than prisons, but the numbers are very much comparable.

A rolling deployment is always good, that you can weed out possible bugs and make sure your rapture machine can handle the load.

The link was broken. Thankfully I had a soon-to-be-antiquated URL bar so I could see what was wrong and change it.

Nope, but when a country bends over for the companies it might be time to think it over.

Low power compared to a regular x86 chip, sure. Low power compared to a chip built from the bottom up to give as much power/watt as possible? No way.

This is a very nice move by Japan - rather than bending their laws to maximize corporate profit, a disturbing trend, they do the absolute opposite and force Sony to take measures that protect customers (which will cost Sony quite a bit). Customers win, Sony loses. Excellent, they really deserved it!

I wish I could buy a house for just three times an average annual income. Heck, I'd be extremely happy to get a small apartment for that amount of money.

Thank you for this eloquently written post, which conveys what I actually wanted to say but obviously failed horribly with. I wholeheartedly agree with all of it. I just wish there wouldn't be a need for a Peter Finch, and that when something needs to be done it should be carefully calculated to reduce the damage as much as possible - something that is rarely on the agenda for mobs. If we all considered our actions more carefully there would be a lot less violence in this world.