First point first - ALL movies, TV shows, books, songs and video games (made commercially) ARE funded in advance - usually by publishers. The change is from the single publisher/financier model to the self-published crowd-financed model. Having the cash before producing things hasn't changed. I can also tell you than in the game industry (and there isn't a significant difference for the others) you have to do some good, small, sometimes free works first before the publisher will touch you. Second, why would you think people will jump from a flash game to AAA? There are many small games on kickstarter looking to get $1000 and hit it, then next time create a bigger game for $2000. These guys already delivered several AAA games, and were looking for 400k, not millions of dollars. Copyright is automatic and has nothing to do with how a project is funded.

It doesn't have to encrypt the saved files, just the save/export function.

I'm European and in NYC for the first time this week. It's astounding how many people expect a tip for what is mediocre or poor service (or at least would be back home) because of the "social contract". If people expect me to pay a tip no matter what, it would be easier to just pay them properly, charge a little more, and pay tips to people who actually deserve them.

No. As soon as you decrypt anything to use/view it on a compromised system then that data is compromised, as is any other data using the same key. Anyone with secrets worth protecting shouldn't be storing them on a phone or accessing them from an insecure device.

PCI SATA cards are a really, REALLY bad idea if you have any care about IO performance, and especially if those drives are part of a RAID. Use PCIe SATA cards.

I seem to remember someone using laser engraving to produce colours...

I like it - it just rolls off the tongue...

It's simple - you add up the cost of outages (revenue and reputation), ops overhead (support staff and time lost using clunky UI's) and correcting mistakes caused by errors in the code, then you compare it against the cost of resolving the technical debt. If you're constantly getting told it's not possible then there are either good financial reasons for it, or the project manager needs to start writing business cases which don't suck.

Design Patents are absolutely about how things look.

Bakulina 12 is an address in Kharkiv, in Ukraine. Anyone can pick a random city or country, but picking a specific street in north Kharkiv is less likely. Start there.

I do.

Not where I work, they don't. I/O on VM's (ESX, etc) is generally woeful, and it's significantly faster to pass through a FC card and access LUN's on a DMX or VMax than to use local storage. Hadoop uses local storage for a completely different reason.

How is this even slightly different to the banner adverts we've had since the 90's? Remember doubleclick? How is a Like button different to a Digg button, or SU, or even a Slashdot button? It's not.
If I got to a website that has adverts or articles I EXPECT it to have tracking for either advertising or social buttons (as well as it's own metrics). Clean your browser and see how many cookies are set by slashdot, or CNET (shudder) or MSN.
You know, I don't mind cookies - and here's why: They're going to show me adverts ANYWAY - I might as well let them show me something appropriate.