We already see this at gas stations, though I wonder where the advertisement offset truly goes. You start pumping gas then all of a sudden this speaker starts in on the wonderful gas station hot dogs and how they're one step shy of caviar served off a french stripper. I'm already paying for the fuel, and paying as much or more then other gas stations within eye-shot, am I really that starved for amusement that the gas pump has to start talking to me for the few minutes I'll be there?

What, you're too good to program it with punch cards? and you can't tell what "Beep Beep Boop Wrrrr" means?

Yes, but where is that money going?

Winston Brooks, superintendent for Albuquerque Public Schools, makes $250k a year as of 2013. APS teachers averaged closer to $43k last year. According to CNN Money the poverty rate (lowest 15% of income) in 2013 was on the order of $51k nationwide. Granted there are some areas that bring up that average, such as Washington DC, New York and California. You can look into the salaries for teachers and assorted staff, but it still doesn't seem to add up to the overall funding line. Money gets tied up into standardized tests and the bureaucracy in managing them. Similarly to large corporations, education systems can (and sometimes do) get top-heavy with assorted C-level personnel that demand an unexplainably high salary for being little more than stamp jockeys.

This is what they mean when they say they can't be common carriers, it will cut their ability to "upgrade infrastructure". I'm not following how Merger-fest 2014 is somehow giving consumers more choice, however.

I'd attribute the popularity of the SNES in part to the resurgance of classic titles being released in ways like Nintendo's Virtual Console. In addition, those folks that grew up with the NES/SNES would be hitting their 30's now and may already have that good job and are able to go back and buy some of their childhood from their local used game store. I know I've been doing just that this year.

To give some numbers to CronoCloud:
SNES had 784 games.
Playstation 1 had 2,418 games.
Playstation 2 had 3,870 games.
(Side note, N64 had 387 games.)

Touche'. Gears of War apparently had 20 people actively working on it at any given time... but that does not include the number of developers working on the Unreal Engine, nor any of the publishing company, marketing, etc... 100 seems small when you start talking about every single person that ever had the title cross their desk, including middle and upper management whose only role was endorsing the project. The Wikipedia page for EWJ (the only thing I can access from work) shows 2 designers, 2 composers and 4 artists. Not sure how many programmers, but I do know it was heavily marketed and I'm sure some of the stamp-jockeys in big offices wanted their name on it too. Dammit.. now you're making me want to do some "empirical research" and go beat some of these games...

There is a reason that Austin has topped Forbes list of Biggest Boom Towns, and Top Tech Town. The ratio of income to cost of living, it even made it on Slashdot. A lot of big names have offices there too, such as Dell, HP, Cisco, Apple, etc...

On one hand, it's probably cheaper shipping to get those brides from Russia and China that it would be for those guys living in New York. On the other hand, they often don't put enough food and water in the crate for that two week voyage on the ship, to say nothing of the air (water) holes.

A friend and I have been going back and playing some older games just because, and it's still remarkable just how few people it took to create some of those iconic games. Or some of those lesser-known gems. Some examples:

• Legend of Zelda (NES) - roughly 12 developers
• Metroid (NES) - roughly 12 as well
• Actraiser (SNES) - roughly 50-ish
• Guardian Legend (NES) - haven't beaten it yet
• Castlevania II (NES) - Unknown, credits are a joke... watch the AVGN episode if you don't beleive me
• Earthworm Jim (SNES) - been a while since i beat it, probably 50-100 people... though I think marketing and sales are in there too.

There are certainly others, but it still illustrates the point that great games don't need stupid amounts of marketing, or absurdly large development teams.

I'm not so sure ATI does blow equally. I have two 660ti's in SLI to power 3 monitors. Anything beyond the ~2 year old 327 series drivers does not work for me. Without surround mode, I at least get three screens with newer drivers... generally I get a stupid amount of slowdown to the point where I feel like I'm running Windows 7 on a 486. If I somehow manage to turn on surround mode, all three screens are recognized, but only 2 of them display anything. The slowdown also gets much, much worse. To date I have not found anything about other people experiencing similar issues, and all of the nVidia documentation shows "this driver improves surround on 600 series and higher chipsets!". 3 fps is better than 2 fps, but still useless.

It might actually be reasonable. There are a number of businesses out there that provide blackberries or other "work" cell phones. They could also be throwing in assorted iPads and other tablets, since they too probably have some 3g/4g plan associated with them. While I too doubt that it's 1 for 1, there are some areas where it might be 2 or 3 devices for one person. Who knows whether or not those folks make up for those ends of the world without cell towers.

You're kidding right?

Do a job search on LinkedIn or Monster for "Computer Scientist" and see how many of those listings are web development. I did a search in my home town (not really CS friendly) and of the 2 dozen jobs that turned up, 75% had ASP.NET or ColdFusion in the requirements.

The real question is how do we fix what HR has broken?

I'd really like to see a reference for this. Not because I disagree with your analogy, after all it's the basis for education and classical conditioning. It's a fair assumption that certain tasks such as facial recognition and memory recollection can be associated with certain regions of the brain. However, we still don't know how we go from synapses firing to midget wrestling. Looking at it from another direction, we don't regrow brain cells, they don't change in size or form like a popular anthill path may become stronger via compaction of soil or wider to accomodate more ants. We don't know specifically if a neuron has a "firing limit", or otherwise may wear out over time. At least, in my limited research I've never come across such studies.

Agreed. Even the decay of RAM or any sort of storage medium susceptible to decay can be calculated somehow. How else would we have MTBF and expected write limits for Hard Disks, SSD's and such?

Dead you say?

Nintendo has a rebuttal with their 3DS sales. Sony disagrees as well. Each of their handhelds has reportedly sold 4 million+ units in their 2.5 years or so of being on the market. While that's no rush to 6 million of the PS4 and XB1, it's still a significant amount of hardware to sell.

Unless you mean that the hardware itself doesn't work anymore, in which case I'd have to ask what you're doing with it. My Gameboy color and Game Gear work just fine.

To say nothing of the training between MS Office versions. Office 2k3 and Libre/OpenOffice are very close analogues of one another. When MS Office 2k7 came along with it's "ribbon" interface, my work had a hayday with getting all the users used to 2k3 up to speed with how to do their job in 2k7. Hell, it even took some of the more savvy folks months to remember where things had moved to and involved a lot of clicking around the ribbon and scanning for whatever it was they were looking for. It's arguable that instead of 2k7 they could have moved to LibreOffice and done away with the training, and saved ~$100 per seat. When you have some thousand users, that savings would add up.