The controller apparently incorporates a touchpad into the service to make it easier to play games designed for touchscreens. They are offering extra controllers for $30. That's a blue tooth controller with integrated touchpad for $30. It's this that screams Phantom to me. A fairly generic BT controller alone already costs around thirty bucks. How can they hope to sell their fancy version for the same amount?

In a perfect world, they pull it off, create a minor storm in the gaming world and fulfil everyone's orders, but it's entirely possible this ends up with nobody getting anything, except for the company employees who've had their wages funded for a year or two.

Until quite recently there were still people waiting to receive their Pandora console, two years late and that was, arguably, a substantially less ambitious project but one also funded by pre-orders. To their credit the Pandora devs ended up having to invest a lot of their own money and despite facing some incredible set-backs and hurdles they managed to create their dream handheld - albeit one that is now several years behind the loop compared to what the originally envisaged.

Royalties to the inevitable patent trolls that try to litigate them out of existence. $5 million would probably cover the legal department's canteen bill for the real players in this market, like MS, Sony and Apple.

Just wondering if getting rid of iGoogle, which I was never a fan of but which didn't seem heinous either, has anything to do with the "Google Now" app on Android.

They can both cause a gag reflex.

Doesn't work like that. You invest early and own 10% of the shares. Company runs out of money and needs more investment, say. Your 10% investment now become 10% of a company that won't stay afloat without more money, so you bring in a second round investor and your share gets diluted. Happens all the time. The real joke is that there's a ten to 1 bias against new shares when it comes to voting rights, so investors are effectively paying for a stake in a company that the majority of paper share-holders could still have no control over. So MZ has a large minority share-holding but 56% of the voting rights - hence the stunning Instagram decision. I really can't wait for this IPO to happen - it will be epic.

The people paying for the shares don't read tech stories off the Internet. The brokers punting the share to their customers make a commission regardless of what happens to the share after IPO. Obviously some investors will actually be hoping to make a quick buck by turning the shares around same day - and the demand suggests this will be very possible. Groupon and Glencore (mining firm) both closed above offer price on the day of their IPO, but look at them now. Of course that doesn't answer the question why so many investors are bullish on Facebook - even the fact the company is releasing more shares, when they can't possibly NEED the extra money, suggests they may see this as the optimum time to maximize their return. When tech shares fall, they fall hard.

If my great, great, great, great, great grandfather paid a thief to steal a car for him then (a) how is it MY fault and (b) who even had cars back then? Your car theory falls apart unless we stole time travel from Africa as well as the elephant feet. Pfft.

These days Intelligent Design is science and Hercules is history. Deal with it. Nothing good ever came of facts.

I wondered what all the suedeheads had been up to since the 70s.

... by throwing more money and resources at it, right?

Who is going to keep an eye on the passenger advocates?

"So nat'ralists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey, And these have smaller fleas that bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum."

With the average size of a web page getting close to 1Mb in size. So 20 page views a day and you're in danger of exceeding your subscriber data cap and heading into charged territory.

"American Inventor"

Seems like overkill for these when you can already create an infinite variety of shoes and clothing with nothing but a bunch of plastic garbage bags and a roll of duct tape.

I field calls from companies claiming to be Google at least once a week. They aren't Google, they're people wanting to intermediate between a customer and eg Adwords. It's a scam, pure and simple. Whether this is the case here I can't say for sure, but I'd be surprised if it was official Google policy.

I ask because the public library services pays a yearly fee and the small print in most books prohibits lending without permission. Just throwing that out there. I'd say go for it, but I lack moral guidance.