You only actually need a few people to contribute. Even just a tiny minority of people contributing to a project helps. In addition, I always prefer open source libraries over free and closed source libraries when coding. It is hugely beneficial to finding bugs in both my code and the library code.

Finally, you say that users are interested in only two things; the cost and if it works. How can you truly know something works like you expect it to without the source code?

I personally get the impression that John Carmack is filled with geeky pride that he got Rage running at 60fps on an iPhone. I know I would. I don't think this is really any kind of marketing strategy.

I find a 60hz refresh rate on an iPhone device impressive, mostly as a feat of engineering. Carmack tends to be a developer who tries to get every ounce of computing power out of whatever platform he's working on.

This will make it almost impossible for smaller companies to make fast video encoding applications. They will have to start paying royalties if they want to encode video using the GPU in applications such as FRAPS or any video converter. Their products will either have to become more expensive or remain inferior to products made by larger companies.

That would be pretty amusing. However, so much of modern culture is about getting a quick way to fame. We have shows on TV that essentially involve people doing stupid things so they can become famous. In our backwards society, this might actually encourage people to do stupid things in national parks.

From what I've seen of their tool demonstration, textures can be "painted" on the megatexture, sort of like a brush. With multiple layers it can have a unique effect. It's like someone painting a picture. Also, the way their shader programs (probably, since it makes the most sense) work is through multiple layers. They would have one program handling the megatexture and another handling lighting (specular, bump, etc), plus a few others for HDR lighting and deferred shading. The word texture is not really a good word to use any more, since most people think of a simple color map when they think of textures. Modern game engine materials (and probably the megatexture) reference different maps, a diffuse or color map, a specular map, a normal map, and maybe other things like a parallax map or an emission map. From what I saw in id's technology demo a few years back, painting textures onto the megatexture would also store these other maps (and could be masked if desired, if, for example, the artist only wanted to keep the color information).

Most likely the future direction of computer graphics in video games will not be straight-up raytracing. Any kind of global illumination beyond shadows (reflection, refraction, ambient light/radiosity, etc) takes too long in a raytracer, and is difficult to optimize since secondary rays (besides shadows) are not very regular or ordered. This is not even taking into account soft shadows, motion blur, depth of field, and other distributed raytracing schemes that we can already do quicker and realistically with a rasterizer. I'm sure if you threw enough computing power at it, it would work ok, but it really would not be the most efficient use of computing power. Probably we will end up with a combination of both raytracing and rasterization techniques.

Every id software game uses OpenGL. I believe only their xbox version of id tech 5 will use DirectX, through lack of choice.

"The CEO has accused workers of killing themselves for financial compensation, and the company has stopped suicide payments to suicide victims' families."

Yes, obviously the workers who killed themselves are in the wrong.

Why does it always seem that the world turns upside-down in the world of business and economics?

Perhaps you have to regard anything posted on Facebook as private, like you say. However, Facebook was not always so free with its user's data. I joined it at a time where you could only friend people in your own network and your profile only appeared to your friends. Each year since then, Facebook has been regularly increasing public availability of your account. It has been really difficult for a long time user who was used to privacy to get adjusted and to stay up to date to all their changes. Eventually, I deleted my account, and I would recommend anyone concerned about their privacy to do the same.

There is an option beyond deactivating: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account. That is what I've done, but I haven't confirmed whether or not they have erased all my data. And yes, that link was rather difficult to find. I was first tricked into deactivating my account when I attempted to delete it. In addition, you are completely right about exporting. It took me around an hour to download and save each individual photo I had.