Oh, it can be an "investment" all right. Take my parents, for a start. No, seriously, take them ;)

They used to take trips into France and whatnot every weekend, buy the most expensive cameras to photograph stuff, etc. It cost a bunch, lemme tell you. They used to be in the red as far as their credit card limit went every month end.

Then I got them addicted to WoW. Fast forward some years of being on WoW every waking hour when the servers aren't off for maintenance. No really, they do most of the shopping on Wednesday mornings. And now they actually have money for a change :p

Sounds to me like getting to keep one's money would technically qualify as a return :p

Plus, with Blizzard skipping maintenance on some Wednesdays, I think they even lost a few kilos. Think of the health benefits, man. Surely that counts as a return :p

Or take my getting them addicted. Sure, I had to sink some time into answering stuff like "HELP! I'M DROWNING!" followed by (I swear I'm not making it up) "WHAT CAMERA TO TURN UPWARDS? NO, I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA! I LOOKED IN ALL BAGS AND I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA!!!!" But after that? They've been out of my hair for years now. Plus now mom has more interesting stuff to talk about when she calls. Not that she calls as much, either. Those newbies aren't gonna just kill themselves in the warzones, you know?

I don't know about you, but I'd say that's worth something. That's my return on investment right there :p

Or as the Bored Of The Rings version goes...

"He would have finished Goddam off then and there, but pity stayed his hand. 'It's a pity I've run out of bullets', he thought"

Actually, the funny thing is that just about everyone agreed that dodo didn't taste very good. In fact, the accounts seem to be in agreement that while the breast and stomach were good enough, the rest of the bird was some rather tough and insipid meat. We have accounts like

"These we used to call 'Walghvogel', for the reason that the longer and oftener they were cooked, the less soft and more insipid eating they became."

Or

"These were given the name Walghvogel during Van Neck's voyage, because even with long stewing they would hardly become tender, but stayed tough and hard"

If the dodo had been most excellent eating, they would have been bred like turkeys. But as it was, the small amount of tasty meat on one made it not worth it. Or rather, it was worth every penny only if it was free. If you could just go club a bird over the head and make a bad meal out of it, well, it was free meat anyway.

But even so, actually there is very little evidence that they were hunted for meat much. There are actually very little dodo bones found around the human settlements. Even when they were hunted, a lot of times it was more or less just for the lulz of killing a mind-bogglingly defenseless and passive bird. I.e., humans being fucktards.

But be that as it may, the MAIN reason for the extinction of the dodo was more like habitat destruction and the inability to compete with animals introduced on the island by the Europeans.

But, really, think about it. It was a bird that was already as domesticated as you can possibly get. It was passive, flightless, didn't have any reflex to run away from humans, etc. It would have been even more trivial to keep in captivity than chickens are. I mean, you wouldn't even have to clip its wings. They were even trivial to get all in one place, whether for feeding or locking them up over night, or just to pick the most plump one, due to the fact that you could make one squawk a call to the others that made them gather.

If it had been tasty, SOMEONE would have put a few in a pen and raised them for meat, same as they did with turkeys elsewhere. Again, bearing in mind that it was trivial to do so with dodos, if you wanted to.

In fact, if it had been tasty, instead of being extinct, nowadays there would be millions of dodos raised on farms all over the world.

I don't think for many people it was about "cool". I've never used Foursquare myself, but I would assume I'd treat it more or less like a game.

In fact like any other game. Just because, say, Star Trek Online gives out achievements, it doesn't mean I'd define my self-worth based on those, or on anyone knowing I have those.

If I were to define anything "cool" about myself based on a game, it would be more like helping decrypt the binary .esm format in the early Fallout 3 days, before there even was a construction kit for it. Or stuff like making the first lightsabers for Fallout 3. (Yeah, I'm the same Moraelin as on the Nexus.) Or helping a buttload of newbies get started on modding.

Or my tens of thousands of hours sunk into studying history. Which, for game purposes, does give me enough knowledge to recreate an exact replica of a high-medieval European arming sword, or exactly an Edo period lady's naginata.

Not that even those would be my first choices to base self-worth on, but, you know, it's still actually involving more skills than visiting the same Starbucks every day. Stuff that if I were to brag about, it would still show, basically, "look at the skills I have! Look at the things I can DO!" Or something like that.

You know, stuff that takes some RL knowledge and skill.

Now I don't doubt that some people do base their self-worth on a game score, but not everyone, and in Foursquare's case I don't suspect there were that many who actually thought that their "cool" factor is based on how often they visited the same Starbucks. Even hipsters tend to think they're hip, you know, for doing other stuff than the rest of the population, not by some random thing that everyone else is doing.

What I'm getting at is that I don't think many people now deserve having their privacy violated and their personal data sold to the highest bidder, just for using a silly automated GPS game. Chances are a lot of those didn't even think they're "cool" for it, nor really used it for more than some silly lulz,

Apple's terms of service prohibit doing exactly this. There's a most-favourable-price clause.

Speaking as someone with actual experience in this - DirectX is a monumental improvement over OpenGL; there's more to it than just being able to look at the underlying code (and frankly, 90% of both are just shims to pump commands into the drivers which is where the real magic happens -- drivers which generally tend to be very closed.)

Start with;
- A (arguably) better shading language (HLSL vs GLSL - I tend to find HLSL is easier to work with)
- A scenegraph representation that is not built around a 1980's pre-acceleration stack based renderer. (e.g. Objects are represented as full OO objects - complete with materials, rather than a matrix pushed onto a stack followed by a few vertex buffer array calls)
- A suite of excellent debugging utilities - which give you useful feedback (looking at the code != the value of a good debugger suite)

Leaving the 'free software' arguments aside, DirectX is better - by virtue of the fact that it's kept up to date with modern programming techniques. OpenGL needs to be replaced or at least significantly overhauled -- something which Khronos has not in the past actually been willing to do. OpenGLES improves the spec marginally, but it really needs a replacement to be on par with the ease and power DirectX offers you with far less effort.

That said; if anyones doing things at the DX/OGL level, they probably need to be hit over the head - anyone serious is using one of the many decent engines out there.

The problem with CFC is that it's duration is an insignificant blip at cosmic scales. We've used it a little, we're phasing it out because it ruins a rather important layer of the atmosphere.

Our planet will continue to exist for about 5 billion years after the point where we reasonably reached a point that some aliens could contact at all without coming all the way here. (For most of our time on the planet we couldn't receive radio and didn't have telescopes.) Out of that, we've been abusing CFC heavily for maybe 50 years.

Let's say that t would take a while to get weaned off them, and for the upper atmosphere to gradually clear of them. Like maybe 500 years instead of 50. But it's still 500 years out of 5 billions.

That's a chance of of 1 in ten millions that if a civilization is there, you'll detect it by CFCs.

My first guess would say no; and this is an uninformed opinion - but that is probably structured as a non-poach agreement, e.g. IBM is not allowed to poach employees from CDI.

That does tend to be legal - although the punishment is relatively thin. IBM would only have to pay for a recruiter to find someone of similar calibre to CDI in damages if it ever went to court/arbitration/settlement.

Not really. And here's why:

We're just a little over a month before Christmas, a MAJOR point in times when people buy stuff. Even people who couldn't be bothered buying something for September, are likely to buy stuff for Christmas. Either for themselves or for someone else.

So I'd say expect to see more of this kind of advertising over the next month. Or actually more accurately: PR firms and departments generating buzz. In fact expect it to ramp up over the next month.

Besides, if we're making up hypotheses, maybe Cthulhu mugs and posters also actually make programmers more motivated to finish the project before Great Cthulhu rises from R'lyeh to kill us all with tentacles. See, it's not just coincidence that so many of us nerds are cultists of the Great Old Ones. What? Are you saying it's just me? ;)

I have no problem with trying to find out. It's just when something as wide-spread as drugs overlaps with pretty much everything happening at the time, just the overlap doesn't say much.

I mean, equally a lot of politicians did drugs and... err... wait, it would explain a few things ;)

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.)

Well, I should, but I spend far more time on an UBB based site, so by now it's a reflex to write things that way.