Unless someone buried Roger Corman alive, he's still very much NOT in his grave.

Can you mention some games where you CAN change the main story completely? Because I can't think of any.

So except for when it wasn't for Americans, it was? I mean, if you use that logic, then you could claim the same for 1960 to 1978, where it was only a non-American three times..and one of those was the baby-boomers. Honestly, if you look at the list, the overwhelming majority has ALWAYS been American.

Except that there's no actual article confirming that. A quick search only shows Slashdot making the claim and references to Slashdot making the claim. The WSJ doesn't have any such article. The New Yorker has an article making the claim, but with no factual explanation of how they know, other than urban myth. We do have The Straight Dope saying they asked Otis directly and got a response that it wasn't the case. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/595/do-close-door-buttons-on-elevators-ever-actually-work A quick search of the WSJ archives shows no articles about Otis Elevators admitting any such thing. It does turn up a lot of articles and forum discussions with people summing up the reasons listed on the Straight Dope article....i.e. that many of them are pre-timed, unhooked by the building operators or in need of repair.

Which is why it's called a 'prediction'. Pachter is right about 50% of the time, iirc, which makes him the most reliable analyst in the market. The prediction you quote is from 2005, before any of the consoles had come out. It was a damned good assumption and one that everyone else shared. By 2007, Pachter was anticipating more of a dead heat. The whole point of predictions is to contextualize the market, particularly for investors who know NOTHING of the industry. Pachter couldn't have predicted a $600 price point in 2005, nor could he see many of the gaffes all three console makers would make that would change the shape of the market.

Last time I saw someone (Kotaku?) do an analysis of analyst claims and their success rate, Pachter was the most often right of the five or six they tracked. Pachter's predictions are just that...and he usually couches them in terms that reflect that. He's been wrong plenty of times...but then so has every other industry analyst.

But if you actually follow the articles, you'll find the following: "The discussion has been raging about how Opera came to know that its software wasn’t going to be welcomed by Apple. In particular, iPhone fans wanted to know if the company submitted a fully working version of Opera to the iPhone App Store. So I went back to Mr. von Tetzchner for more details. He said that the development of the iPhone browser was more an “internal project” of some engineers than a product that management was committed to introducing. Indeed, development was halted after the company looked at the details of the license agreement in Apple’s software development kit and realized that it would not be permitted. “We stopped the work because of the prohibitive license,” Mr. von Tetzchner wrote in an e-mail message. In other words, they read the license and decided that Apple would not allow it without actually talking to Apple.

Apparently they radically changed Ubuntu from December, when I grew tired of wrestling with it and turned my Dell Mini into an XP box instead. Because the process of adding and updating software was, like much of the interface, very hard to penetrate if you didn't already know it.

I don't know. How many employees do you have? How much time do you have to back up their mailboxes? Archive them? Replicate them in a DR facility? Propagate them across the infrastructure? Index them on the server? Instance them? You're talking how much the drive space costs and ignoring infrastructure costs. Mind you, what kind of drive and where? Is it part of an array? Is it 15K, 10K, 7.5K or 5K speed? Is it being mirrored? And so on.

Those poor, poor mega-billion dollar corporations. So victimized.

Mega-billion dollar corporations? I guess if 'mega' translates to 2.9 (in 2007), then yes. For ALL of Activision-Blizzard, not just Blizzard...remove console sales from their and you lose between 1-2 billion. But assuming you meant 'mega' just as a pejorative, sure. Still, I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying that simply because they're successful, that they rescind all legal rights to protect their interests? That if someone steals from them, it's OK because they're a big corporation? Never mind the fact that a big corporation is funded by thousands or millions of stockholders, both individually and through portfolios (including 401K and retirement funds). That big, bad corporation represents the financial interests far beyond some CEO paycheck. And even if it did, that doesn't mean that someone else is entitled to harm them or infringe on their work, just because they don't have the good graces to not make a profit.