This reminds me of the Prisoner's Dilemma. There's a few different variations of the reward, but the dilemma goes as follows:

You have two prisoners that are each offered a chance at freedom. They are given the choice to either rat out the other or remain silent. If both rat out the other, they both get a longer sentence. If only one rats out the other, they get a much reduced sentence. If they both remain silent, then they get something in between.

Obviously a "psychopathic attitude" would be to consistently rat out the other, despite it also being the only option that has a 50% chance of an increased penalty/sentence. It's not as simple as me-first, there is also logic and planning involved in how to get the greatest gain. This is why you get some players that will help others out, become part of the group, then take the group to the cleaners (e.g. steal all the stuff in the guild bank or whatever).

What nobody seems to be bringing up here is the concept of disassociation that all people have. One reason that some people road rage and scream at other cars is that they do not see that there are other people in the cars, they only see the vehicle. Likewise with some in-game avatar, there is no personal accountability for actions, no concept of personal punishment or social rejection. People behave much differently when they aren't being judged by others in person. There may be some lack of apathy in some players, in others maybe they just genuinely enjoy being a jerk when they won't get their face punched in.I believe that this is a big reason why we get griefers and in-game chat e-peen measuring contests, it's all a sort of virual posturing because there are no repurcussions. You take the same folks and put them in a room and I can all but guarantee the 70-lb 12 year old won't be mouthing off to the 300lb biker.

Without even reading the article (GASP!) I can tell this isn't GPS, and it isn't a (pure) INS. What they are talking about is a more accurate magnetometer that have been used in stabilizing pure inertial nav systems for years. The idea being that if they cool it down and isolate it (e.g. negate many of the problems a compass has, such as changing direction when near a large ferrous object), that they could pinpoint location based on the Earths magnetic field. There has been some experimentation with this in the civilian space with smart phones using built-in magnetometers to help aide in GPS-limited environments, such as around large buildings or within shopping malls, instead of the built in inertial sensors. I wouldn't call it GPS, though I would call it some "new" form of navigation.

A lot of what you say already exists and is somewhat transparent. Here are some examples:

For years they said that cross-realm mail was impossible, that the physical segregation of hardware (despite them all being on the same network) made it impossible. Now we have cross-server group finding in the random queues. We have account-wide mail of account-bound items that are not tied to servers or factions.

The cross-realm character transfer (and faction transfer) are advertised as though they they take at most 24 hours, and some forum posts by Blizzard employees have hinted that it isn't just a switch in a database, that it was closer to taking a USB stick and physically moving character data. If you've ever paid for any of those services, you'll notice that it is typically done in minutes, as though it was done in a lower-priority task as soon as the servers in question had a few free cycles. Or maybe just a simple transact-SQL script.

Hell, they even said for years that there was no way to automatically level a character, that the process was too complex and computationally expensive. Now you have "boosted" 90's running around all over the place. They've also implemented a server-side update stream for pre-patching installations, as well as server-based changes in environments (see phasing).

Of course, this is all just speculation. They could very well still have all the separate servers, complete with little printed labels slapped onto the front of the machines separating Drak'Thul from Doomhammer. 9 years is a lot of time for software development, they might have refined their network code to make all the above that much easier. They might have also upgraded from copper to fiber. They aren't public with their server setups, so who knows what they've got going on.

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?