Perhaps not perfect for a 3 year old, but worth looking at are Atomic Robo and Axe Cop.

Atomic Robo is very much a 'child appropriate' comic.

http://www.atomic-robo.com/

Axe Cop is created by a 30 something year old cartoonist and written by his 6 year old brother.
http://axecop.com/

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The reason to upgrade the hardward generally comes down to improving graphics and processing power. The added work for things like high end physics and AI is not an especially big hit in terms of development expense though. What is driving the cost upward is primarily the high res 3d graphics.

Creating high quality 3d art is extraordinarily labour intensive, and the tech to improve the toolset for the artists is not advancing as fast as the ability to push more content to the screen. If you increase the polygon count of your scene from 100 000 to 10 000 000, the labour requirements get difficult. Just watch the credits from a game made in 2001 and compare to a game made in 2012. The size of the art teams have gotten proportionally much larger compared to the size increase for the programmers.

Also, the assumption that the CEO's are getting hookers and blow is not universally true. If you produced one of the top 3 games of the year, sure, people are getting rich. If your outside the top 10 though, the development costs are eating enough of the profit that its a crap shoot on whether or not your broke even.

Used games and piracy have eaten a great deal of the profit margin for games that were good but not great. Lowering the price might actually be a good idea, but if your barely breaking even your going to have a hard time justifying the move to share holders who are seeing only marginal profitability.

In any case, change is coming because the iPhone / iPad is forcing it. All the companies that cannot compete at the $60 a game core market are starting to chase the lower dev costs for the mobile devices, and the bigger companies that see 'easy money' are following them. In any case, the long term move is to cut the retail outlets out of the game distribution entirely. Once that happens, your pretty much F*cked for buying used games anyway.

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I had no idea what FRAND was, but a wikipedia search indicates it covers patents. This is a copyright dispute, not a patent dispute.

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Nuclear Power has its issues. But the alternatives are not exactly free of cost either. At the end of hte day, the costs of nuclear power are arguably less than anything else that is capable of generating power at that scale. Wind / Solar would be optimal, but they do not have the scale yet to be seriously considered as alternatives unless you are content to live at a level of technology comparable to 1910.

From an environmental standpoint, I think it would be a better choice to try to deal with the accumulated nuclear waste than to deal with trying to undo the damage of the toxic emissions from using fossil fuels. The nuclear waste is at least highly localized and it can be collected and contained. You cannot really clean up all the emissions from burning coal or oil.

The problem with Nuclear power is that the costs associated with an accident are so massive (environmentally and financially) and they are incurred all at once. You will never convince most people to buy a car for $30 000 in one lump sum, but it is easy to sell someone on paying $40 000 if you tell them they can pay a little bit each month.

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Part of the article reminds me of the 'Captain Hindsight' from the Cthulhu / Coon and Friends episode of Southpark. The article basically says that the risk assumptions were incorrect and they should have prepared better and made better assumptions in order to prevent the meltdown.

I disagree in part with the premise article.

There are two approaches to taking something that poses a risk, and making it safe. The choices are prevention and mitigation In this case, the problem is that a Nuclear Reactor poses a risk of dangerous meltdown. The typical safety measures are to make sure that a melt down will not happen (prevention). That approach generally works, and all risk management calculations are based on the prevention working.

Prevention is great up until it fails. If we change the discussion to sex / pregnancy, prevention of the sort described in the article is using a Condom. Its great when it works, but condoms break. If the penalty for pregnancy is death, your still taking one hell of a risk.

I think that nuclear power is a technology worth pursuing, but I think that the safety measures should start from 'if this thing melts down as soon as we turn it on, what can we do to contain the damage'? If a nuclear power plant can be designed in a manner that guarantees that a meltdown event does not endanger anyones safety, then it can be called entirely safe.

Otherwise, they are only safe until they fail.

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The game development market has become very competitive and very expensive.

Game became increasingly expensive to make because everyone was trying to add more and better content to their games in order to set themselves apart. As the price to develop went up, profit margins disappeared. Piracy and used game sales made the problem worse. To preserve the profits, the publishers and the developers are trying everything.

Games move from cartridges to CD's as much to bring down manufacturing costs as to increase available space to content.
DRM schemes were created, and they become increasingly draconian in an effort to diminish piracy.
Online pass requirements and Downloadable content are added to diminish the impact of used games sales (used games are great for retail sellers like Gamestop that buy used at $10 and sell used at $40).

Also, why do you think the publishers are chasing the iPhone / Android market so damn hard and going 'freemium' for everything? iTunes offers a huge install base, and being freemium kills the pirate problem (who is going to go to the trouble of jailbreaking a phone for a free to play game?). Users cannot resell an iTunes game, and they developers make a good profit by turning into spammers that constantly suggest their users buy freemium content on the device.

Personally I would rather deal with the DRM software then play a game clogged with nag popups asking me to spend more money on freemium content.

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The 'pinnacle' game is not necessarily going to be the 2nd. It might come later, or perhaps the first game stands up as the pinnacle. With the Civ games, the later one replaces the older one in the series, and that is just iterating on their own success.

Also, there are not many developers going head to head with the Civ series these days, is there?

In any case, every successful genre seems to reach a point where a particular game is considered the standard to measure other games of that type against, and of course there are some instances where opinions will differ.

In any case, I do not think we disagree over the concept so much as the finer details.

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There is a reason that Starcraft 2 took about 12 years to show up.

Any given game (and this probably applies to movies and to TV to some extent) will have an initial title that proves the concept as being worth pursuing, followed by a title that effectively represents the pinnacle of the genre. For 3d Shooters you had Wolfenstien which led to Doom. For MMO's you initially had Ultima online, which gave way to Everquest, and in turn gave way to World of Warcraft. And for RTS games you had Dune which led to Warcraft 2 which led to Starcraft.

Once you have that definitive product, competitors start to back off, realizing that they have no chance to dethrone the reigning king of the genre. The expectations of the fans keep escalating, and since you can never please everyone, you have fans of the genre start to splinter off, or perhaps just get bored. Since sales fall off, the resources for sequels fall off, and that basically buries the genre.

The endgame is that the creators of the 'pinnacle' product eventually stop making new iterations, and that the competitors have usually abandoned that pursuit some time before that point. Eventually no one is making new games in that genre. Metaphorically, the challengers stopped playing the game when it was too difficult to win at it, and the champion stopped only because the rewards for victory were no longer enough to justify the effort.

But the market for that genre still exists, and after about 10 years, a new generation is available to exploit. If the original concept was strong enough, the fans are probably hungry enough that a new iteration should be successful.

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I might be overly pessimistic, but I do not think this will happen. Valve is basically talking about entering a mature market with entrenched competitors which also has a high barrier to entry. They do have one potential advantage, that being (presumably) an emphasis on streaming / downloading the content. However, that advantage is one that could be erased pretty easily if any of the other console makers adopt a similar distribution approach.

They are basically taking another crack at making the phantom. I cannot say that my confidence in them would be high.

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Lets have a fictional person called Phil (a victim) and Bob (the guy posting the info) for the purpose of this post.

If Bob posts Phil's name, address, and phone number in a message board without Phil's permission, there is most likely some kind of hostile intent. This usually happens when Phil has managed to make Bob angry for some stupid reason (flame war, abortion debate, maybe Phil is just being a jackass here. Who knows? The reason is not relevant). So Bob gets Phil's info and posts it online in that message board. Why does Bob do this?

Most likely, Bob is hoping someone will go to Phil's house and beat him up. Or break a few windows. Maybe Bob just wants someone to take a crap in a paper bag, light it on fire, and throw it on Phils porch. The intent is to make it easy for all of Phils enemies to harass or inflict harm on Phil.

Target or Walmart do not have any hostile intent. They just want to sell you stuff. They gather and analyze data, and the only objective harm thaty they would intentionally cause is filling your mail box with unwanted spam. I would agree that doing so should earn someone a kick in the nuts anyway, but it is only annoying, not dangerous. In many cases they are using info they gathered themselves for their own benefit. It could also be argued that what they are doing is of mutual benefit: Walmart gets Phil to buy stuff, Phil will have a chance to buy something he wants.

The only problem for Phil is when access to that data is then sold, shared , or illegally accessed by those whose interests may run against him. There needs to be legal protections in place for Phil, and Walmart needs to be held responsible for any harm that comes of them keeping that database.

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