This is why we can't have nice things on the Internet

[Je Nique vos Merdiers]

agrab0ekim

Je Nique vos Merdiers

agrab0ekim

but most big things are from private companies

rofl Uh huh. Like what?

The internet, boom, there, didn't think I'd point out that Stanford, MIT, and the various other colleges are all private entitles

What do Stanford and MIT have to do with the internet? It was started by ARPA, a government agency, expanded by the NSF, a government agency, run on open standards and open-source software, and the world wide web was started by CERN, an international group of scientists.
Correlation does not equal causation. Just because private companies happened to be involved with big things doesn't mean they were essential to its development.

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Otherwise, are you serious with this? I mean, look simply at either Mcsoft of Apple and tell me that 'big things' aren't coming from them. Or even look at twitter - that s**t, entirely private, is the only reason some third-world countries had their revolutions recently.

rofl Twitter was overplayed in its role in the recent "revolutions", but you certainly might be right about private companies playing a role in the revolutions, since at least some of them were NATO-funded.

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Money is a concept, not an invention.

It's a concept that we invented. You're arguing completely irrelevant semantics, money is manmade and the only thing that makes it actually valuable is support for it.

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So, how did we invent without money? Well, people often sold their ideas to various sides. Take the cannon for instance, the guy tried to sell it to one side, who had been winning for 40 years, and they refused. Turn around, sells it to the other for gold (incentive), and boom, it is in use. Notice that the payment, not anything else, is what motivated it

Okay, instead of letting you use things that you made up to prove your point, I'll just ask you a question:
How could the agricultural revolution have happened, considering that before then, we lived in hunter-gatherer societies that did not trade? There was no incentive.

Even in your terrible example, the cannon had already been invented before your main character got any incentive for it.

[Wendigo]

Old Blue Collar Joe

Precisely. Look at Zynga. Supposedly, you can play all their games for free. BUT...if you want the special items, well, that will cost cash. And they made, I believe, nearly 900 million dollars last year. For FREE s**t.

Well, that's "freemium." The free portion is just there to get you hooked on the "special," "exclusive" content that is the bulk of the product. And to get you to sign over more rights to your personal information; which is, I think, the more insidious part of their business.