Except they can't legally do that, unless they plan on always selling zunes at a loss, they would be in violation of antitrust legislation if they used an artificially low price to cut into the competition before raising the price again.
IANAL, but I am pretty sure that US antitrust law forbids monopolies from selling at a loss to gain market share/hurt competitors; MS is certainly not a monopoly in the music player business.
That, combined with your poor spelling and grammar, would suggest that your school needed as much investment as gp's.
You know what really sucks? When somebody tears into you and you have no defense because they are completely right. My original post is filled with errors, both grammerical and factual.
I can't even claim that I was rushed, because the final version is much improved over the one I previewed and then chose to edit. About the only excuse I have is that I was so enamoured with my own arguement that I made mistakes, both big and little. (which isn't to say that its a wonderful arguement; more like I'm an Alberta boy, who got dragged out to Ontario by his wife, and the things I've not liked about Ontario my whole life are in my face every day now and I have nowhere to vent these feelings save at some AC on slashdot)
While Fido's coverage was certainly lacking, it was nowhere near as bad as I was suggesting. (I can't speak to Clearnet, but I am pretty sure it was better than was suggested)
The OP thought that the higher population density of southern Ontario ought to make it viable for additional competitors to be in that market, suggesting that it could be considered independent of the rest of Canada. My point was that consumers have come to expect they can travel and still get coverage, so no part of Canada can be considered on its own.
And since you mention Fido and Clearnet, I think a big part of why they didn't do better came down to their coverage; I know its why I never considered them.
...and you're about to give a great example of why the rest of Canada resents Ontario (btw, I live in Ontario too, though I haven't always)
then I realized the vast bloody majority of us live in Ontario
12.8 million out of 33.1 million is a "vast bloody majority"? McGuinty really needs to get on that whole "reinvesting in schools" thing.
our population density in many areas is comparable to many states
Yes, let's compare a small part of Ontario with entire states. Forget the rest of Canada, and even the rest of Ontario (Ontario isn't even close to the most dense province population wise; remember that it not only has the largest population, but has the largest land mass too).
I would be shocked if a phone company came along with the balls to say "our coverage area will only be in the golden horse shoe". I suppose if they priced competitively it might work for a little while, but I suspect that sooner or later customer's would take a drive more than two hours from their home, and get pissed when their phone stopped working.
There is absolutely no reason that I pay $100 - $150 a month for BlackBerry service
Actually their is a great reason. Collectively we let them. When alternitives come along we don't flock to them, we just stick with the guys that are screwing us and when alternitive are not present we don't cancel the service and wait for them to be reasonable, we just pony up the money (as you are doing apparently).
Have you ever paid attention to all of those 10,000 page "free trade" treaties we keep signing? Almost every treaty has a provision regarding copyright. Generally each treaty requires stronger and stronger copyright provisions
I am just guessing based on things I have read elsewhere, but I suspect that those provisions are usually included at the insistence of the U.S. and if the U.S. asked to have them dropped, many of the treaty partners would do so in a second.
I'd happily pay 10p more for the paper if it came without any ads or pamphlets.
Newspapers make more of their money off advertising than off of the people who purchase it, so the 5% increse you suggest wouldn't come close to covering what they'd be losing. Would you be willing to pay 200% more for an advertisement free Sunday paper? I suspect most people wouldn't.
>...my lack of response is because I wasted three hours a day
>for three years on multiple forums fighting this fight...
Why on earth would you have done that?
Its a very good question, and I don't think at this point I can possibly justify it; I was wasting my time and that's all there is to it, but here is what I was thinking back then.
I was still pretty new to the internet at the time The Phantom Menace came out, and was under the misconception that fan sites for a given movie/tvshow/game/book/whatever were where fans went to enjoy each other's company and discuss the topic of the site in a way only people who love it can.
I really wanted to have a place to log in and talk about TPM with other people who loved it, but what I found was that on every site I signed up for that any interesting thread would get hijacked by the screams of "TPM sucks!" (even discussions about the OT seemed to always turn into attacks on TPM)
I eventually gave up on site hopping, convinced that this was everywhere, and just decided to ride it out. My logic was that if these people truly felt that "George Lucas raped (their) childhood" that eventually they would move on. I couldn't then (and still can't) understand why someone would log into a fan site to express a hatred for the subject of the fansite. (as invested as I was in Star Wars, I have never logged into a fan site to express my dislike of Ep II and III)
So that's why I stuck around, but why did I argue? I never had delusions of convicing a TPM hater to change his mind. However, I had been a huge SW fan all my life, to the point it was part of how I defined myself, and so I felt obligated to defend it. (I'm not saying that it was at all healthy to define myself via a movie, but it was true; when I was in college in the early 90s many people just knew me as "The Star Wars Guy") If the critics had just been trolls passing through, it would have been easy to ignore them, but on every site I was part of they represented the majority of the posts being made.
So yes, I wasted a few thousand hours of my life, and got nothing in return except negative feelings about something I loved (via reading endless attacks of it). And as strongly as I feel that TPM was a good film, I now get very bitter at the prospect of discussing it.
I know I'll be in the minority with this view (possibly a minority of 1) but here goes.
The Internet killed Star Wars.
Long ago, in a galaxy far far away, when people didn't like a film they told their friends not to go see it, then let it go. If you look at the box office records for TPM, you'll see it continued strong in theatres throughout the summer, and hung in all the way to October. This is not the box office of a film that had great hype but no substance; it is the box office of a film that impressed more than a few people.
Of course, the internet says otherwise. For three years the only thing more hated on the internet than George Lucas was Jar Jar. I'll be honest, I have no comprehension of how people can invest the kind of time I saw wasted complaining about TPM.
Worst of all, I think that the numerous online complaints got to Lucas. I think that AotC was dubious and RotS was pure crap largely because Lucas was trying to meet the demands of a group that probably couldn't be satisfied.
I think that TPM is much more like the original trilogy than some people want to give it credit for; most likely because OT was from their childhood, and so it got rose coloured. (movie goers from my mother's generation certainly didn't have as high an opinion about OT as my gen did; perhaps that says something)
(If anyone is dying to respond to this post with arguments about why TPM sucks, my lack of response is because I wasted three hours a day for three years on multiple forums fighting this fight, and at this point I don't care any more. You think that GL ruined SW for you, well people like you ruined it for me.)
Remember when oil production "peaked" in the 1970's? How many times will we have "peak oil"?
If you mean how many more time will people predict it - many many more. If you mean how many peaks will there actually be - just one.
A mathematician whose name escapes me at this point demonstrated decades ago that humans will use up a finite resource on a curve not unlike a bell curve. Of course, countless people want to be able to say they correctly predicted when the peak happenned, though reality is that we probably won't be sure the peak was in fact the peak till five or ten years after it happens. (and also in addition to those who want the ego boost of being right, you have those who regularily predict that peak oil has been reached in order to spread fear and push their agendas)
An issue of Scientific American from the early 90s applied the curve mentioned above to convential oil production and (if I recall correctly) predicted a peak around 2012. But it is worth noting that since then oil sands have gone from being an interesting bit of R&D to being an industry worth tens of billions of dollars; so even if SA was correct, consumers may not feel the pinch on that date because from a consumer's standpoint it doesn't really matter what process was needed to get the oil to you. (it mattered in the early 90s when it cost more to produce a barrel of oil from bitumen than the price of oil, but now that problem is long gone)
Agreed. Clearly more criticism should be aimed at Canadians.
Actually, that is becoming more true everyday. As early as the mid-nineteenth century it was noted that Canadian English had become "corrupted", but that was nothing compared to where it is today; the rise of American educational tv programs such as Sesame Street has left generations of Canadian kids very confused as to how things ought to be spelt. But even proper Canadian English, such as it is, is not the same as British English.
In my original post what I really ought to have said was "I am a Canadian who would rather use the Canadian spellings which are also the British spelling over the American spellings that have become accepted in Canada in recent years because darn near everybody my age and younger learnt them at a young age from tv and never truely unlearned them."
I'm sorry I don't have the time to track down a better source, but here's what wiki has to say:
In the early 18th century, English spelling was not standardised. Different standards became noticeable after the publishing of influential dictionaries. Current British English spellings follow, for the most part, those of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Many of the now characteristic American English spellings were introduced, although often not created, by Noah Webster in his An American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828.
say it happened when our former colonies broke away and has been getting worse ever since
Being Canadian I have a fondness for British spellings of words over American (in most cases), but the elitest attitude towards American spelling found in most English speaking countries only shows an ignorance to the history of the English language. During the 18th century and earlier, there was no such thing as a correct spelling, and many words had multiple recognized spellings. Attempts to standardize spellings began only a few decades before the US declared independence, and were not truly complete till well after. Contrary to popular belief American spellings were not dreamed up out of thin air, but were spellings that had been considered correct for centuries. Yes, American spellings were picked precisely because they were not the ones being made standard in Britian, but my point remains that Americans did not invent said spellings and don't deseve all the critism they get for them.
Note that none of the add-ons for Opera allow blocking of ads.
Unless, of course, you count the many built in settings that together provide all the functionality of an ad-blocker even if they aren't labelled as such.
Ok, so you only recently noticed the common practice of product placement.
But please, don't be their bitch, stop giving them free advertising by spreading the trademarked brand name.
Unless you're willfully giving them free advertising to reward their sponsorship of the show you enjoy, in which case you'd have a legitimate reason to act this way.
Most people, however, just unwittingly participate in viral marketing for no good reason whatsoever.
Your logic is that anytime anyone mentions a company's name they are said company's bitch? While I have nothing against Dell, there are likely more people who would read my comment and get pissed at them then those who would read it and be pushed into buying a product from them.
By your logic Slashdot is the biggest peddler of MS products on the planet.
So he's pleading guilty to avoid... what, a way harsh punishment, like 65 years in prison and $2 million in fines?
I don't know about the US, but here it is typical for criminals to serve 1/3 of their sentence, unless they are considered a danger to society. So if pleading guilty means the difference between a 60 year sentence, out in 20, and a 300 year sentence, out in 100, then he likely made a sensibly choice.
The technology already exists to almost completely avoid adverts.
As you point out yourself, its all about being devious, though I wonder from your choice of words if you recognize how much this is already going on. Obviously many of these deals are made away from the public eye, so you can only guess as to their existence, but if you watch closely there are clues; on a couple of my favourite shows I have noticed that anytime a character is using a computer it is a Dell, and since noticing this I have come to realise that a good clean shot of the Dell logo occurs at least once per episode.
Your point about the MS patent makes me wonder if the difference between home and business versions of the next MS OS will be ads vs no-ads.
could enough smokers be untruthful with him to skew the results?
I don't know, but your post got me thinking about another explination for the lung cancer results. If you discount smoking, the biggest reason for people to get lung cancer is that they have spent a large portion of their life working a job with toxic fumes. The sorts of jobs that are prone to these conditions are almost never seditary ones, and so the only people working them would be average weight or less.
The XBox was a failed console? Sorry but that is just weird view of the world. The XBox was very popular.
I don't really agree with the idea that XBox was a failure (though for different reasons than you I suspect), but is it really that alien to you that someone might think so? Just to play devil's advocate, here are some very good reasons a person might consider it a failure:
Though very popular in North America it was a distant third in most other markets, especially Japan
It was largely seen pre-launch, with plenty of help from MS, as the Playstation killer; the box that would do to Sony what had been done to Nintendo a generation earlier. This, of course, was nothing like what actually transpired.
This genre came and went, and good riddance to it. Its a world-changing design innovation because it proved so clearly to be a creative dead end that everybody knows not to make interactive movies any morealthough the term is still used at times to describe the cinematic quality of games in other genres. Interactive movies taught us, by negative example, that gameplay comes first, period. The CD-ROM drive first made them possible, and in their heyday, they sold tonsuntil the novelty of watching tiny, grainy videos wore off. Best-known early example: The 7th Guest, 1993. Probable first use: Dragons Lair coin-op, 1983.
Interactive movies may no longer be the realm of serious gamers, but they still exist, largely because of the advances that came with DVDs. (since he didn't discredit any other items because they no longer are the providence of serious games, I don't know why this one should be)
When was the last time you saw a game with voice recognition on the shelves?
Brain Age. Admitedly it only needs fourteen words (four colours and single digit numbers), but it does use voice recognition and it is on the shelves today.
Sure a kid will nurture/care for a pet, but it is very different than how they treat a stuffed animal/toy.
Being an only child (and a man) nearly all my experience with babies/toddlers has come from my son, so this is admitly anecdotal, but with regards to him you couldn't be more wrong.
My son frequently feeds, kisses, talks to, and puts his toys to bed. This is in no way limited to human-like or animal-like toys, in fact, his toy cars receive more attention and affection than any others.
I happen to think that record companies are a drain on society and a negative influence on the music industry, but there is something very powerful that they do that no one here has yet given them credit for - stardom.
I seriously suspect that if you compared the incomes of artists that never signed contracts to those who did, that those who never did came out ahead regardless of the decade; if only because of the countless artists who were finacially ruined by the contracts they signed (sure plenty of the unsigned artists played on street corners for quarters, but one quarter is way more money than a huge debt). But just like a lotto ticket, studio contracts offered artists a chance at something they could never get without one - name recognition, and so artists signed them.
The changes the internet has brought to this situation are only slight. Sure, with a brilliant stroke of viral marketing you might be famous for a week online, but you can't dream of being the next Rolling Stones without a studio.
So while we at Slashdot hope and pray that this marks the beginning of the end for the studios, don't count on it. Because even if you can make a decent living off of internet sales, far too many artists aren't in it just for the love of music, they are in it for the dreams of fame and fortune; and studio contracts are the only way to the former (and perceived by those signing the contracts as a great way to the latter).
Did anyone else out there besides me find that part of the game actually fun and that it contributed greatly to the feeling of immersion and non-linearity?
I loved the sailing in Wind Waker, for exactly the reasons you say. To be honest when I first started reading people's complaints about it all I could think was "How are any of the negative things you people are saying about it not true of the endless walking present in virtually any other RPG?"
Every single video game ever made has as much or more racism as any Mario game ever made.
Absolutely, there are thousands of insanely racist video games out there, which is why they all should be banned! Heck, just look at the grandfather of video games, Pong; you have two white paddles and a white ball. Where are all the other colour paddles? Are we suppose to believe that only the white paddles are good enough? They should release an updated, non-racist version of Pong where you have option of playing with black paddles and a black ball.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but I am pretty sure that US antitrust law forbids monopolies from selling at a loss to gain market share/hurt competitors; MS is certainly not a monopoly in the music player business.
You know what really sucks? When somebody tears into you and you have no defense because they are completely right. My original post is filled with errors, both grammerical and factual.
I can't even claim that I was rushed, because the final version is much improved over the one I previewed and then chose to edit. About the only excuse I have is that I was so enamoured with my own arguement that I made mistakes, both big and little. (which isn't to say that its a wonderful arguement; more like I'm an Alberta boy, who got dragged out to Ontario by his wife, and the things I've not liked about Ontario my whole life are in my face every day now and I have nowhere to vent these feelings save at some AC on slashdot)
It isn't, I know; I just was typing without thinking.
While Fido's coverage was certainly lacking, it was nowhere near as bad as I was suggesting. (I can't speak to Clearnet, but I am pretty sure it was better than was suggested)
The OP thought that the higher population density of southern Ontario ought to make it viable for additional competitors to be in that market, suggesting that it could be considered independent of the rest of Canada. My point was that consumers have come to expect they can travel and still get coverage, so no part of Canada can be considered on its own.
And since you mention Fido and Clearnet, I think a big part of why they didn't do better came down to their coverage; I know its why I never considered them.
...and you're about to give a great example of why the rest of Canada resents Ontario (btw, I live in Ontario too, though I haven't always)
then I realized the vast bloody majority of us live in Ontario12.8 million out of 33.1 million is a "vast bloody majority"? McGuinty really needs to get on that whole "reinvesting in schools" thing.
our population density in many areas is comparable to many statesYes, let's compare a small part of Ontario with entire states. Forget the rest of Canada, and even the rest of Ontario (Ontario isn't even close to the most dense province population wise; remember that it not only has the largest population, but has the largest land mass too).
I would be shocked if a phone company came along with the balls to say "our coverage area will only be in the golden horse shoe". I suppose if they priced competitively it might work for a little while, but I suspect that sooner or later customer's would take a drive more than two hours from their home, and get pissed when their phone stopped working.
There is absolutely no reason that I pay $100 - $150 a month for BlackBerry serviceActually their is a great reason. Collectively we let them. When alternitives come along we don't flock to them, we just stick with the guys that are screwing us and when alternitive are not present we don't cancel the service and wait for them to be reasonable, we just pony up the money (as you are doing apparently).
I am just guessing based on things I have read elsewhere, but I suspect that those provisions are usually included at the insistence of the U.S. and if the U.S. asked to have them dropped, many of the treaty partners would do so in a second.
Newspapers make more of their money off advertising than off of the people who purchase it, so the 5% increse you suggest wouldn't come close to covering what they'd be losing. Would you be willing to pay 200% more for an advertisement free Sunday paper? I suspect most people wouldn't.
Why on earth would you have done that?
Its a very good question, and I don't think at this point I can possibly justify it; I was wasting my time and that's all there is to it, but here is what I was thinking back then.
I was still pretty new to the internet at the time The Phantom Menace came out, and was under the misconception that fan sites for a given movie/tvshow/game/book/whatever were where fans went to enjoy each other's company and discuss the topic of the site in a way only people who love it can.
I really wanted to have a place to log in and talk about TPM with other people who loved it, but what I found was that on every site I signed up for that any interesting thread would get hijacked by the screams of "TPM sucks!" (even discussions about the OT seemed to always turn into attacks on TPM)
I eventually gave up on site hopping, convinced that this was everywhere, and just decided to ride it out. My logic was that if these people truly felt that "George Lucas raped (their) childhood" that eventually they would move on. I couldn't then (and still can't) understand why someone would log into a fan site to express a hatred for the subject of the fansite. (as invested as I was in Star Wars, I have never logged into a fan site to express my dislike of Ep II and III)
So that's why I stuck around, but why did I argue? I never had delusions of convicing a TPM hater to change his mind. However, I had been a huge SW fan all my life, to the point it was part of how I defined myself, and so I felt obligated to defend it. (I'm not saying that it was at all healthy to define myself via a movie, but it was true; when I was in college in the early 90s many people just knew me as "The Star Wars Guy") If the critics had just been trolls passing through, it would have been easy to ignore them, but on every site I was part of they represented the majority of the posts being made.
So yes, I wasted a few thousand hours of my life, and got nothing in return except negative feelings about something I loved (via reading endless attacks of it). And as strongly as I feel that TPM was a good film, I now get very bitter at the prospect of discussing it.
I know I'll be in the minority with this view (possibly a minority of 1) but here goes.
The Internet killed Star Wars.
Long ago, in a galaxy far far away, when people didn't like a film they told their friends not to go see it, then let it go. If you look at the box office records for TPM, you'll see it continued strong in theatres throughout the summer, and hung in all the way to October. This is not the box office of a film that had great hype but no substance; it is the box office of a film that impressed more than a few people.
Of course, the internet says otherwise. For three years the only thing more hated on the internet than George Lucas was Jar Jar. I'll be honest, I have no comprehension of how people can invest the kind of time I saw wasted complaining about TPM.
Worst of all, I think that the numerous online complaints got to Lucas. I think that AotC was dubious and RotS was pure crap largely because Lucas was trying to meet the demands of a group that probably couldn't be satisfied.
I think that TPM is much more like the original trilogy than some people want to give it credit for; most likely because OT was from their childhood, and so it got rose coloured. (movie goers from my mother's generation certainly didn't have as high an opinion about OT as my gen did; perhaps that says something)
(If anyone is dying to respond to this post with arguments about why TPM sucks, my lack of response is because I wasted three hours a day for three years on multiple forums fighting this fight, and at this point I don't care any more. You think that GL ruined SW for you, well people like you ruined it for me.)
If you mean how many more time will people predict it - many many more. If you mean how many peaks will there actually be - just one.
A mathematician whose name escapes me at this point demonstrated decades ago that humans will use up a finite resource on a curve not unlike a bell curve. Of course, countless people want to be able to say they correctly predicted when the peak happenned, though reality is that we probably won't be sure the peak was in fact the peak till five or ten years after it happens. (and also in addition to those who want the ego boost of being right, you have those who regularily predict that peak oil has been reached in order to spread fear and push their agendas)
An issue of Scientific American from the early 90s applied the curve mentioned above to convential oil production and (if I recall correctly) predicted a peak around 2012. But it is worth noting that since then oil sands have gone from being an interesting bit of R&D to being an industry worth tens of billions of dollars; so even if SA was correct, consumers may not feel the pinch on that date because from a consumer's standpoint it doesn't really matter what process was needed to get the oil to you. (it mattered in the early 90s when it cost more to produce a barrel of oil from bitumen than the price of oil, but now that problem is long gone)
Actually, that is becoming more true everyday. As early as the mid-nineteenth century it was noted that Canadian English had become "corrupted", but that was nothing compared to where it is today; the rise of American educational tv programs such as Sesame Street has left generations of Canadian kids very confused as to how things ought to be spelt. But even proper Canadian English, such as it is, is not the same as British English.
In my original post what I really ought to have said was "I am a Canadian who would rather use the Canadian spellings which are also the British spelling over the American spellings that have become accepted in Canada in recent years because darn near everybody my age and younger learnt them at a young age from tv and never truely unlearned them."
I'm sorry I don't have the time to track down a better source, but here's what wiki has to say:
In the early 18th century, English spelling was not standardised. Different standards became noticeable after the publishing of influential dictionaries. Current British English spellings follow, for the most part, those of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Many of the now characteristic American English spellings were introduced, although often not created, by Noah Webster in his An American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828.
Being Canadian I have a fondness for British spellings of words over American (in most cases), but the elitest attitude towards American spelling found in most English speaking countries only shows an ignorance to the history of the English language. During the 18th century and earlier, there was no such thing as a correct spelling, and many words had multiple recognized spellings. Attempts to standardize spellings began only a few decades before the US declared independence, and were not truly complete till well after. Contrary to popular belief American spellings were not dreamed up out of thin air, but were spellings that had been considered correct for centuries. Yes, American spellings were picked precisely because they were not the ones being made standard in Britian, but my point remains that Americans did not invent said spellings and don't deseve all the critism they get for them.
Unless, of course, you count the many built in settings that together provide all the functionality of an ad-blocker even if they aren't labelled as such.
Unless you're willfully giving them free advertising to reward their sponsorship of the show you enjoy, in which case you'd have a legitimate reason to act this way. Most people, however, just unwittingly participate in viral marketing for no good reason whatsoever.
Your logic is that anytime anyone mentions a company's name they are said company's bitch? While I have nothing against Dell, there are likely more people who would read my comment and get pissed at them then those who would read it and be pushed into buying a product from them.
By your logic Slashdot is the biggest peddler of MS products on the planet.
I don't know about the US, but here it is typical for criminals to serve 1/3 of their sentence, unless they are considered a danger to society. So if pleading guilty means the difference between a 60 year sentence, out in 20, and a 300 year sentence, out in 100, then he likely made a sensibly choice.
As you point out yourself, its all about being devious, though I wonder from your choice of words if you recognize how much this is already going on. Obviously many of these deals are made away from the public eye, so you can only guess as to their existence, but if you watch closely there are clues; on a couple of my favourite shows I have noticed that anytime a character is using a computer it is a Dell, and since noticing this I have come to realise that a good clean shot of the Dell logo occurs at least once per episode.
Your point about the MS patent makes me wonder if the difference between home and business versions of the next MS OS will be ads vs no-ads.
I don't know, but your post got me thinking about another explination for the lung cancer results. If you discount smoking, the biggest reason for people to get lung cancer is that they have spent a large portion of their life working a job with toxic fumes. The sorts of jobs that are prone to these conditions are almost never seditary ones, and so the only people working them would be average weight or less.
I don't really agree with the idea that XBox was a failure (though for different reasons than you I suspect), but is it really that alien to you that someone might think so? Just to play devil's advocate, here are some very good reasons a person might consider it a failure:
This genre came and went, and good riddance to it. Its a world-changing design innovation because it proved so clearly to be a creative dead end that everybody knows not to make interactive movies any morealthough the term is still used at times to describe the cinematic quality of games in other genres. Interactive movies taught us, by negative example, that gameplay comes first, period. The CD-ROM drive first made them possible, and in their heyday, they sold tonsuntil the novelty of watching tiny, grainy videos wore off. Best-known early example: The 7th Guest, 1993. Probable first use: Dragons Lair coin-op, 1983.
Interactive movies may no longer be the realm of serious gamers, but they still exist, largely because of the advances that came with DVDs. (since he didn't discredit any other items because they no longer are the providence of serious games, I don't know why this one should be)
Here's what a quick search found http://www.interactive-film.com/
Brain Age. Admitedly it only needs fourteen words (four colours and single digit numbers), but it does use voice recognition and it is on the shelves today.
Being an only child (and a man) nearly all my experience with babies/toddlers has come from my son, so this is admitly anecdotal, but with regards to him you couldn't be more wrong.
My son frequently feeds, kisses, talks to, and puts his toys to bed. This is in no way limited to human-like or animal-like toys, in fact, his toy cars receive more attention and affection than any others.
I happen to think that record companies are a drain on society and a negative influence on the music industry, but there is something very powerful that they do that no one here has yet given them credit for - stardom.
I seriously suspect that if you compared the incomes of artists that never signed contracts to those who did, that those who never did came out ahead regardless of the decade; if only because of the countless artists who were finacially ruined by the contracts they signed (sure plenty of the unsigned artists played on street corners for quarters, but one quarter is way more money than a huge debt). But just like a lotto ticket, studio contracts offered artists a chance at something they could never get without one - name recognition, and so artists signed them.
The changes the internet has brought to this situation are only slight. Sure, with a brilliant stroke of viral marketing you might be famous for a week online, but you can't dream of being the next Rolling Stones without a studio.
So while we at Slashdot hope and pray that this marks the beginning of the end for the studios, don't count on it. Because even if you can make a decent living off of internet sales, far too many artists aren't in it just for the love of music, they are in it for the dreams of fame and fortune; and studio contracts are the only way to the former (and perceived by those signing the contracts as a great way to the latter).
I loved the sailing in Wind Waker, for exactly the reasons you say. To be honest when I first started reading people's complaints about it all I could think was "How are any of the negative things you people are saying about it not true of the endless walking present in virtually any other RPG?"
Absolutely, there are thousands of insanely racist video games out there, which is why they all should be banned! Heck, just look at the grandfather of video games, Pong; you have two white paddles and a white ball. Where are all the other colour paddles? Are we suppose to believe that only the white paddles are good enough? They should release an updated, non-racist version of Pong where you have option of playing with black paddles and a black ball.