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Star Trek TNG is science fiction because it explores the social issues of living in a future with FTL space travel, alien life, teleportation, replicators, communicators, tricorders, holograms, AI, androids, insecure computers, and so on. The science in science fiction can be fictional. More notably, Trek content routinely features scientists and engineers as main characters, with exploration and scientific and social progress as core themes.

Gamasutra did a great interview with Burger a few years ago: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/...

Time to re-watch WarGames.

I am reminded of this classic New Yorker cartoon caption contest winner:
http://personalshoplifter.com/...

China once did something similar, and it lead to ecological disaster and mass starvation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Windows 8.1 mouse lag reportedly renders some PC games "close-to unplayable"
http://www.pcgamesn.com/windows-81-mouse-lag-reportedly-renders-some-pc-games-close-unplayable

Brazil is my favorite movie, and I will take your reference one step further to point out another scary thing that people tend miss on their first few viewings: there are no terrorists in the film, only routinely failing infrastructure, and the oblivious bureaucracy that places the blame on terrorism.

For completeness, I should say that Harry Tuttle does engineer one small disaster out of spite, but in general his M.O. is to go around fixing things without filing paperwork, and Sam Lowry sabotages the pneumatic tubes in his new office, but it's not suggested that everyone is as fed up as they are and therefor actively revolting against the system. The SWAT-style police entry and arrest of Buttle is also very destructive, as they fail to repair the damage, and then neglect it.

The real world does have actual terrorists, but they are similarly less threatening than our government and police and infrastructure.

Fast Company published this article about GE's Durham, NC jet engine factory: http://www.fastcompany.com/37815/engines-democracy

The plant opened in 1993 and is still running. The factory had 1 boss and 170 employees in 1999 when the article was written.

It predates Valve but tells the same basic story: doing a very hard thing in surprisingly smart ways with extraordinary people yields success. GE Durham also delivers on schedule, but they're engineering and manufacturing, not making creative entertainment on Valve time.

EA: "We are making all our future games worse."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

> You want to get up and switch out the cartridge every time you wish to play another game?

I'd love to be able to plug in 10 cartridges and leave them there instead of swapping media.

Sound may be a better analogy than you realize. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction

You can't go home again.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy.

The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.

Blindsight, by Peter Watts.

But correlation does not imply causality, so you don't know for sure that it worked!