Yes and no - the less skilled the job, the harder you have to deal with employee turnover.

For engineers though, providing you are running things well, you'll usually only have a big burst of turnover around the national holiday in March, when everyone gets paid a 13th salary as a bonus. The rest of the year though, everyone just waits until March so they don't lose their bonus. Turnover seems to be getting better too however - we only lost 2 from a team of 20 this past March (compared to 4-5 the previous year, and 5-7 the year before.)

Unity does this actually - all shaders are written in Cg/HLSL, then cross-compiled to GLSL for OpenGL & OGLES. It's a surprisingly pleasant workflow - especially with their Surface Shader framework.

Well, intersexed persons make a bit of a mess of that. Since you can have both sets physical features in various strengths in some people. That's been where the biggest controversies have come up in recent history.

Yes - it's basically just compiling small .NET programs from your input -- which tend to be pretty portable. You should only run into problems if you use new features that aren't available in older environments (but - I'm pretty sure the latest version of .NET can be installed on XP, so that might be a moot point.)

It varies on which version you get - some of them you can (or could - been a couple of years since I used it). That is a warning sign though - some of the dev ones (with visual studio/etc) are testing only, same as MSDN.

Yep - the magic words to google are "Microsoft Action Pack Subscription" - for startups it's great. Tons of useful software for cheap. You may also qualify for BizSpark which is even better (and cheaper - although $500 isnt too bad.)

In Australia; business taxes can be reclaimed against shareholders tax through a system called Franking Credits; there's a similar (but different) system setup for foreign investors - although a company can only pick one scheme or the other. Regardless, it's a bit of a moot point.

As a manager over a team in Shanghai; I can confirm that salaries are rapidly equalising there as well; you also need to pay very high payroll taxes (up to 40%); so the cost advantage is beginning to go away. (Where 5 years ago you could hire a team for the price of a single american developer; now you only get ~2 people)

On the upside; the food is better in China.

I'm pretty sure there's several amendments to it which have brought it periodically further up to date. I thought the last was 3.5?

And it's generally not a good idea to rely on C# >= 3.5 in Mono anyway; it tends to be missing fundamental features or functions.

Kinda. C# and .NET and the standard library are a ECMA and IEEE standard. (Microsoft pushed them in as standards), I'm not entirely sure if they did that royalty free (I have a feeling they did), but even if they didn't, ECMA/IEEE requires RAND licensing at worst.

A lot of the top selling iOS/Android games are done with Unity; which also uses C#/Mono. Actually the PS Suite SDK looks very similar to Unity in a lot of respects.

(Actually to take it a full loop; Unity pushes to the PS anyway, Rochard and a few others have gone cross-console with Unity)

Amazon AWS bills you bandwidth directly. A DDoS could get very expensive.

That's because the whole thing is rather short and vague - and in general pretty poorly written; and a lot has had to be interpreted around it. (e.g. freedom of speech is inferred from the "vibe" of the document rather than the document itself.)

OH THE HUGE MANATEE!

Same here, Shanghai.