I would think that given the choice between a) curing oneself from being quadriplegic and increasing one's risk of cancer tremendously or b) staying quadriplegic and cancer-free, I think nearly everyone would choose the cure + cancer-risk route.

This issue with this invention is that it requires user interaction to work. Bifocals don't. You just look in a natural way (slightly down for reading and computer screens, straight ahead for distance) and the right adjustment is right there for you. With today's progressives, after a day or two, you don't even realize you have a multifocus lens. Having to adjust the focal distance is a cool idea, but way too much work for something that you do thousands of times a day without thought.

Now pair this up with a computer and a laser range finder to know how far away the object you are looking at is and some miniature mechanicals to have the glasses do the focusing for you and you are talking some serious cool. Who wouldn't want to be seen in a trendy Picard/Borg laser outfit?

Google does not have a search ad monopoly.

They do have 2 things that are competitive advantages, but neither is a monopoly. First, they have the largest online search audience. Much as in TV, this audience is not permanent, not locked in any way, not paying and subject to flight at any time, if any competitor builds a more compelling search experience. Second, they have a very efficient advertising logic, that figures out how to pair up the advertiser with the best fit to a given search, thus allowing them to find the advertiser that has the most to gain and thus be willing to pay the most to advertise on a given search result page. Again, this is not a monopoly, as any search engine could do something similar for each of their search results.

Your concept of the original development team continuing to be paid long term for work they did once, is an idea that really runs counter to economic theories of "free". Once the content is created, it can be duplicated electronically for a marginal cost of zero, and therefore is considered an infinite good whose cost will tend towards zero in a free market. Therefore, you should be concentrating on being paid fairly for your scarce good. In your example, your scarce good is the time, effort and expertise put in to the creation of the software. Get paid fairly upfront for your efforts and let the software go for free after that. Or, alternatively, if you want to be paid long term, you must invest in a long-term scarce good, such as product support. Any attempt to be paid for each transaction involving an infinite good is really futile, without artificial constraints (like copyright law, government-mandated monopolies, etc.)

So, in order to improve the satisfaction level of non-paying "customers" who pirate the software, they are going to foist even more draconian validation measures on actual paying customers.

On what planet is a person who steals your product called a customer?

Shouldn't they be leaving the pirates with their so-called poor product experience (assuming MS is right about this, wouldn't they then hopefully learn the error of their ways and gratefully fork over a few bucks for the real deal). Then they can remove the annoying validation measures from paying customers, to improve the customer satisfaction of people who are actually customers.

Assuming you are right and the industry shakes down to a handful of players, let me pose a question. In that instance, which of the 4 new sources will you personally use - one of the 3 that charge for content, or the 1 that provides similar content for free? I think the answer for 99% of people will be the free one. Even after a huge shakeout, the answer is still that the free model wins consumers. And yes, you can monetize people if the content is free. Broadcast TV does it. Many local newspapers do it already today. Craigslist does it. etc....

You are confusing creation of content (which is a scarce good) with electronic distribution of that content (which is an infinite good as the marginal cost of distribution is zero or near enough to zero).

It's usually harmful for a website to trade in 1,000,000 non-paying viewers for 1,000 paying viewers. Loss of brand recognition alone will pretty much ensure that long-term growth will be stifled if not killed.

As much as newspapers would wish that it wasn't true, the marginal cost of an infinite good is zero. Attempting to get paid for an infinite good is a bit of a tilting at windmills exercise. News organizations need to focus on getting paid for scarce goods. Some of the scarce goods they have are:
=>physical printed editions - difficult because the internet is undermining the percieved value to the public for thisthe attention of the
=>audience - this can be sold to advertisers (in fact, this is the current model for most physical newspapers, the cost of the edition to the buyer usually doesn't cover much of the cost of the paper)
=>complementary goods - for example, a financial focus newspaper could use the audience base to sell branded seminars
=>creation of content. While the economics of infinite goods make it difficult to get paid for information, it is possible to get paid for the creation of information, which is a scarce good. While difficult to imagine how this might work for a newspaper, you could imagine a scenario where a local chamber of commerce perhaps funds local newsroom salaries. In return, they might get free advertising in the newspaper.

The toughest part for news organizations is that they are trying to change their model. Most newspaper revenue comes from advertising, not subscriptions. The fact that a physical newspaper is a scarce good allowed them to get both sources of revenue though. With the internet, the ability to charge for subscriptions is pretty much killed, but they can still use advertising.

The choice they have is to either a) continue to charge for an infinite good via subscription (which economic theory says is a tough row to hoe) and abandon the largest part of their revenue stream (since with a much smaller number of subscribers, their advertising revenue will likely dissapear) and pretty much throw long term growth and brand recognition out the window or b) abandon the smallest part of their revenue stream (subscriptions), continue advertising to a large population, use the free distribution model of the internet to grow the viewer base to a much larger size than was possible with a physically printed paper, and work on selling/creating some complementary scarce goods.

For AOL shareholders, it should go down as one of the best mergers in US corporate history. They got to trade a shrinking pile of bits and bytes for 1/2 of a real company.

I've been a high-end buyer for 20 years now. My experience has been that the cost of purchasing a high-end system has steadily declined over the years. I used to spend $2,500 on a pimped out machine. The next one was maybe $2,000. Then $1,800. Then $1,500. I recently spec-ed out a real nice Core i7 rig for about $1,200. I think this is the more important trend. A few more iterations like this - say another decade - and a high-end PC might run $500. That's the point at which commodity economics really start rolling. It's not so much about the low end being usable. It's about the high end becoming increasing affordable. When the high-end drops enough, that's when good-enough computing really arrives. The price difference between low-end and high-end becomes so small that there is no room for additional costs (e.g. expensive software).

Your line of thinking is very much tied to the current obsolete model. You need to think about the ways non-news content is created. For example, if you want content about new technology, you go to Gizmodo, or Engadget - these sites are doing front line journalism by seeking out sources, calling technology companies, attending PR events, etcs. None of their content is released via print and none of it is behind a pay wall. Best as I can tell, their writers are getting paid - probably via the large advertising revenue their sites generate. Good original content will attract a good audience, which will allow for monetization via advertising or other add-on services. Bad, repetitive or copied content will get little to no audience and will monetize poorly. If I were trying to monetize "news" today, I'd go for original content in a narrow niche, covering just politics, or just the economy, or just local news. Of course, such niche new sites already exist and many good ones are very successful. The "problem" is that the large media companies have no niche and no original content, and are therefore getting outclassed by the more nimble, more relevant and more original niche sites.

Maybe global warming deniers should get over it. Sometimes species have a huge impact on the environment. And sometimes that impact isn't very good for the species that makes the impact. One simple example: cyanobacteria. Way back before Earth had much free oxygen in the atmosphere, the anaerobes thrived. They thrived so well that they filled the atmosphere with tons of oxygen (their waste product). Which allowed aerobic bacteria to thrive and outcompete the cyanobacteria.

Humans are doing a great job of altering the environment. Those alterations will likely be beneficial to some species, but there is no gurantee that humans will be one of the species benefiting from the alterations.

One thing game studios should be doing more of is better leveraging of their work. They should build a software platform that they can use for multiple games. My impression is a lot of the work that goes into a game is of the one and done variety and never gets recycled for another game (except on occassion for sequels if a product does well enough to warrant one). If you don't build long term reusable assets, you are perpetually in a situation where you are trying to recover sunk costs from a single product. Companies that build "engines" (which could be a 3D engine, a RTS engine, a MMORPG engine, etc.) that can be used multiple times will do substantially better in the long haul, even if their games have to sell for a bit less due to being less innovative for having reused programming.

Except that the act of the computer speaking the words doesn't create an audio book. The ebook is unchanged - it is still in the same format and if transmitted to another person, still has no auditory information embedded in it. It is the Kindle that has the ability to take text (which is all that is in the ebook) and convert it to understandable speech. An audio book IS speech - this is text (the ebook). This is not an audio book, nor the creation of one. It is an ephemeral act akin to reading a book alound to oneself.