Looking at how my daughter handles things vs. how my youngest brother-in-law (a teenager) handles things, or even how I believe I handled things as a kid, I think most of it comes down to teaching a kid to treasure the things they have. My brother-in-law breaks or loses something, and he ends up with a new one that's better than what he had before. He's almost better off breaking stuff than taking care of it. My daughter asks for something, if it's of any significant cost and/or value, it could be a while before she gets it, and she may have to give something up for it. If she breaks it, it could be a long while before she sees a replacement. She seems to value things much better than her uncle, and she's 12 years younger than he is.

On the other hand, there are some people, like my wife, that simply don't value physical things. In a lot of ways, it's a gift, because she doesn't miss it when it's gone, and she doesn't really want much. In other ways, though, not valuing something means not caring enough to think about the way things should be treated, and generally putting more value in what she can get for something than in what she paid for it, or would have to pay to replace it.

Frankly, I'm surprised a kid in West Virginia knows which side they were on. Then again, maybe they actually teach the state's history to kids that go to school there.

That's why the games industry has been working to effectively sew up the digital distribution channels before smaller companies can come in and take over. In a lot of ways on the PC side Valve already has done this, though there are a lot of other companies making a name for themselves in this realm. Consoles aren't likely to escape the big publisher mentality, though, as someone generally steps up to risk the cost of developing and marketing the hardware in order to get a cut of the game sales from everyone that develops for the system. Homebrew games and applications are bigger than ever on the handheld consoles, but the manufacturers still get a cut from the majority of the games running on their systems.

But adding more people to content development can lead to less cohesive results. Therefore adding more people in that department also requires better skills in the management of those types of people, which are inherently hard to manage and have high communication costs. That and you have to spend more time in the design stages developing a cohesive plan for the game that can be passed on to the content developers so that they understand the overall vision to which they are expected to adhere (and which they will ignore on a whim).

EA has been closing up shops left and right, just like most other large publishers (though really there aren't many large publishers these days, it's basically EA and Blizzard/Activision for PC games).

I think the main issue is that EA specifically, and the industry in general, has spent a lot of time in the last decade complaining about the rising costs of producing games, especially in the console and PC realms, yet EA is willing to spend 3x their development budget on marketing, the cost of which is pretty well within their control.

Of course, EA is also one of the companies that does pretty well controlling their development costs for their biggest selling games. They have a very limited time frame for development of their sports titles, and they do a fair job of deciding what improvements they can make year-to-year to still meet the time constraints and still keep most of their user base happy. They also figured out that it was worth more money to them to buy exclusive contracts with the leagues and player unions than to attempt to continue competing with other publishers and developers to make a better game in those time constraints.

You may also run into greater post-release costs due to incompatibilities between the various parts of the baby, or even outright rejection of the implanted parts.

Additionally, this would require specialized developer knowledge in assembling the parts properly to avoid these types of reactions. Therefore, you may have to pay the women more to do the same job in less time if you ever want the baby to come out right in the time constraints. As it goes: we can develop it quickly, we can make it good, and we can make it cheap, but you can only pick two, and you might still only get one.

On the other hand, Google Books is also a tool for librarians when the books are not available locally, as many libraries supply internet access to members of their community that can not afford to have it at home. That, and generally librarians are always concerned about privacy issues, whether they directly impact the libraries or not.

I recently looked into possibly going into the field myself, and found that my interest perhaps wasn't as unusual as I first thought, as there is a massive overlap with computer science and information systems, including a concentration in Informatics for people going for their Masters in Library Science.

Unfortunately, most of the work for a modern librarian is focused on acquiring and maintaining funding to maintain the library, and far too many communities face losing these resources.

Essentially American DVDs have always had previews like VHS did. Unlike VHS, though, most American DVD players can be told by the disc not to allow the user to fast forward or skip certain content, which of course if the feature is used is always used for the copyright notice and sometimes used for the previews.

Disney in particular was very bad about this practice, though they've gotten better more recently (and sorry, it's one thing I can't put my foot down on, I have to let my daughter have the occasional Disney Princess movie to keep my sanity intact).

You wouldn't be asking that if you could see the papercut on my thumb.

They might delete their copy, but first they'll delete your copy, accidentally, of course, and somehow they'll manage to have a daily backup of everything else on the machine that they used to delete your data except for your data.

Really? As someone that fought cheating in a Valve game in the first year or so they were implementing anti-cheat measures in their games, I have to say it's incredibly hard to detect cheating, and one of the major problems early on was that people released the source code for their cheats, making it incredibly easy to customize the cheats to the point that they were harder to detect. What he says should be more or less true, as long as he's not leveraging an obvious hack that ends up looking like a million other cheats when Valve scans his system. The people that get away with cheating the longest are the ones that hold back and don't leverage all of the advantage they gain from cheating, and don't release their hacks. Once a hack is public, it's only a matter of days before Valve can implement detection and possibly disable the hack by changing whatever the hack is manipulating in memory. If they delay banning of cheaters, it's only to allow them to detect more cheaters, because within days of the bans starting, the new version of the cheat is released, and the cycle starts again.

While I would generally not play an FPS on a console for a variety of reasons, I will say this as an argument for it:
1) You can connect a mouse + keyboard to a PS3, it's called USB, or bluetooth. 360 users should gripe to MS about the crap they've pulled with that console
2) Console games are usually tuned to run at a consistent framerate at the console's standard resolution options, all of which makes most of the processing advantages of a PC moot, unless the game gives an advantage to players with a higher framerate than what the console is capable of, and you're running it on a PC that is capable of maintaining an advantageous framerate at the resolution at which you are playing.

There are many examples of the latter, but the problems people have getting consistent framerates out of games are not exactly new (though with current hardware and the way developers have built the games to configure themselves to the hardware on install, they're not as big of a problem as they used to be).

EA wanted lock-in on user data and the ability to decide whether or not people could access their services, which is why they refused to play nice with Microsoft until they changed the requirements. EA games don't necessarily run on their own servers on Xbox Live, but they have more access to the data on those servers than they would have under the original Xbox Live system. Originally there was speculation that EA might want to have additional charges to use their multiplayer, but there was a pretty massive backlash against that. They also saw a lot of pressure by not having online play on the Xbox, since it allowed Sega and MS themselves to compete very well on the platform vs. Madden for a year or two. In the end, they seem to have come to an agreement with MS that was somewhere between what the two had originally wanted for themselves, in part because the Xbox and 360 online services would have suffered without an NFL licensed online game.

It's definitely not a code issue in general, though it can be for specific games. Most of the games that promised 360/Windows play can be played together on those platforms. If FF11 users on the 360 can't play with PC and PS2 users, why exactly are they playing? It's not exactly massive if the only users are the ones on the 360. One could argue there were more challenges in getting the PS2 to play nice, since it had to have 2 optional hardware components (one of which is not available for the more recent versions of the console) and is a completely different architecture, rather than the 360, which is basically a PC running a different OS from the same developers as the PC OS on which the game runs. Strangely the PS2 was able to play nice all this time.

Not really. They had extra costs involved in building their own private little network that runs on top of the existing computer network we're using to access this site. They could have done it all without locking out other platforms at a lower cost, possibly even leveraging existing software to do so, such as Steam or any of a number of other matchmaking and digital download systems.

They invested the extra money to create their own system so they could control it, and then invested even more money so they could keep it to themselves. Microsoft goes one further and makes people pay for the system that keeps them from interacting with other platforms, while offering PC users access to the same network for free (because PC users already have access to so many other networks for free that they wouldn't pay for it).

There are a lot of cheaper alternatives than a 360 and an Xbox Live subscription for streaming Netflix to your television.