You don't think that has anything to do with density of the population? I know urban planners regard density as a main factor in success of public transportation.

car-sharing!?! That's like uberUber.
sounds good to a slashdotter. But I remember seeing lots of VCRs flashing 12:00 constantly in the 80s. I don't think tech for the masses is as ez or intuitive as we like to pretend.

I think their main problem is that they aren't looking for problems non-techie individuals have, therefore they are never going to hit to big market again.
However, the strategy of building a shitload of products and seeing what sticks is probably as good as focusing on actual problems real people have.

Perhaps instead of having the ubergeeks at google spend 20% of their time working on stuff that interests them, google would be better off having 20% of their workforce be regular, average (and below-average) joes, and janes, talking about their every day problems. Android didn't solve a problem; it's just free which is 1) why it is on 80% of phones world-wide and 2) why Apple makes 80% of the mobile app money. Android solved a problem for nerds; Apple solved a problem for consumers.

What is the problem that a driverless car is going to fix?
To paraphrase Henry Ford, it sounds to me like google is actually trying to build a faster horse,

I think a big difference with the iPhone is that Steve Jobs, regardless of personal faults, was trying to solve a problem that bothered _him_.
Same with the folks that built the first search engines, including googol.
Now the company is trying to solve social problems, not personal ones, by using engineering techniques, not political or marketing ones.
Society works according to certain principles, all socio-biological, not engineering-mechanical. Whether it should work that way or not is useless philosophizing. We got where we are today by using those processes and those same processes are going to get us to tomorrow. Or not. The results are optional; the process is not.

Newsflash. Entertainment is bigger than intellectualism. The problem Jobs addressed was how to listen to more music. The problem Google first addressed was how to find web sites, because the searchers were highly interested in finding them.The National Enquirer outsells the New York Times. Not because of the quality of the news; it is because of the quality of the citizenry.

A lot of people don't realize that. Have you heard about the Ferguson protests? Blacks make up 13% of the US population yet they are treated as an insignificant minority. In America the Black population doesn't count for that much and it is larger than the population of union workers. Draw your own conclusions or analogies using this additional point of view.

He asked about game-making on a computer-oriented site. Sorry if we offended you by focusing on the computer aspect only (did you actually read any of the posts about design with cardboard and the usefulness of Dungeons and Dragons?).

That's only half of the story.
Creative or energetic or curious people try lots of things and stick with what turns them on.
Most of the people who take up guitar or any other hobby whatsoever don't stick with it. So what?
Try it and stick with the one(s) that keep your interest over time.

For the OP, the posts on game design with cardboard and rules are accurate but if the kid ain't into them, then they are useless. I'd suggest it along with one of the game dev packages (Unity3d is my pref) and see what sticks. When my son was 11, he and a friend filled several notebooks with rules for an open world game they were going to write. It was far too big for them (but I didn't say that to them). The exercise was excellent, they loved doing it, and they're the ones who eventually figured out just how complicated it all is.
Now my son is in college and just released his first game on the iApp store. It's got a single mechanic, touch the screen or release it.

Yup. that applies to most of the comments.
Viruses mutate and flus occur regularly. Occasionally, one is deadly.
To get in front of evolution and have 50 million vaccines ready for distribution, you need to make educated guesses.
This year we guessed wrong. That's the gist of the article.

There appears to be an infinity of possible things that could happen evolutionarily.
But if you look merely at the number of stars in the entire universe, approximately 300 billion billion, that's essentially 10 to the 20th power. That means in order for life to be unique in the universe, all we need are 20 one out of ten possibilities in a row.

Absolutely true. If the hack causes users to trash their old phone and buy a new one, well there's an incentive for the company to NOT fix the hack.
OTOH, if the hack causes jailbreaking and the carrier loses money, now we're talking about terrorists trying to destroy the entire capitalist system.
Incentives are very powerful.

Lucky for all of us in America that we have the Department of Homeland Security "protecting" our private data.
(That's called sarcasm for those of you who are poorly socialized.)

Don't worry. We never do. Scientists can't be trusted because they use the metric system just like foreigners do.

Does a link to a Faux News web site count? ;-)

That must be the basic problem with physics too. The universe we live in is NOT falsifiable; therefore physics can never come up with a valid scientific theory that us internally consistent and also completely covers everything.

Is that the philosophy of science in a nutshell? Enquiring minds want to know ;-)