This game failed in big part because of their extremely poor server performance. Who cares how they did it?

Capitalism has anyone that does what they 'like doing' by the balls. It's not just research, look at the situation commercial airline pilots are in.

In Arizona, for example, where I'm currently going to school, the government repeatedly made tax cuts to "help the economy" and is now going bankrupt in a huge shocker. This state is loaded with wealthy people, yet it's somehow on the brink of not being able to pay for basic social services. The public school system here is basically going down the tubes so the rich can keep from paying too much taxes and become even more disparately wealthy.

This country is sounding more and more like every period history class. The rich increasingly refuse to pay any taxes. In response, the government, powerless against said rich people, turn on the poor even more.

This is why I've been using chrome as my primary browser lately, no add-ons so far. I switch my relatives and friends as well. It's like the OS X of browsers. Constantly disabling add-ons that other programs conveniently installed for them is really annoying. It's like cleaning out the windows malware their PCs always manage to accumulate. Just a few days ago I dealt with a PC that was running incredibly slow, a few seconds of lag for each letter typed. A quick look at the process list and I see firefox is using 99% cpu. I take a look at the add-ons and disable an add-on winamp snuck in and problem solved. Who knows what the winamp addon was doing, but it's really fucking annoying.

You can't go two minutes in this game without being thrown into a long cut-scene. I like to play my RPGs, not watch them.

So, you think any jackass manager should be able to whip together the companies site and not require a consultant that with the accumulated knowledge of working with it everyday?

It doesn't. This, like most IT books, is just going to be a lot of copy/pasting from the online documentation and a list of what modules to install. There's handfuls of Drupal modules that are pretty much must-have for most sites that cover this kind of 'missing' functionality. Each major release of Drupal incorporates more and more of them into the core download, but it's really not that hard to untar a couple extra modules each time.

Why the sales pitch? The app is from NASA isn't it, and this is slashdot right? A headline like that, on this site, makes me not trust it at all...

Why all the Acer slashvertising lately? Acer produces the biggest piles of shit in the industry...

I think you're just confused about what money actually is.

Plus it lets other people come in and subsequently be trained for the same things, thus adding to the pool of similarly skilled individuals. Having the same guys take up the same positions for life does not seem even remotely good for the world/country.