I think main challenge is the interaction between player and environment. On something like MW3 that is limited to blowing up the odd chicken, window or set piece designed into game.

I want to swish my ( virtual ) hand through a river and see ( and feel ) the water flow around it.

Any true physics model would require awesome cpu capacity. We have at one end mindcraft ( where the atoms are decidely blocky ) and second life ( where behavioural programs can be attached to objects).

My dream would be a virtual universe with atoms large enough to fit 1000 times current cpu capacity but behaves like a 'real' experience.

By 'atom' i mean the simplist construct in this universe which satisfies greatest potential complexity but still cpu possible.

In conclusion future 'games' will not be about fps or polygons per sec but model calculations.

Agree with above. Why not record at max available then downgrade to 48/16 bit for delivery?

Every generation wishes the one before had recorded in format which at time was useless but adds oodles of additional data for future 'high fidelity'

I got first job doing COBOL back in 1995. Second code change I did I got called into managers office.

He asked how I felt about change. I stated it was easy being only 2 line change to 1 module.

That change saves us 2 million ukp a year he says.

Ever since tried to write as little as possible . Amazing what you can do when you understand the problem , understand the code and find the one change that does it.

Not sure my method of wandering through code, chatting to everyone and then submitting a 4 line commit would fit with IBM

As an ex-employee with no direct experience of this project but experience of this culture they will take great care of this data.

But mistakes are possible so any security flaws etc make sure they know quickly to correct.

If they haven't already they are probably more than happy to provide info on exactly what data points they are recording

Internet last time I checked was just a commonly recogised way of routing ip packets.

I think they security is whatever protocol you choose to use on top of that.

I hear that ssl Is a popular choice these days. Does suffer from being 'open source' rather than a nice secure private protocol you can buy but seems to be quite popular.

Never got my head around river silting before so thanks for above as makes perfect sense ( particularly bit about the race between higher levees and silt level ). Can you point me to dummies guide to river and flood plain management from engineering perspective?

Google have ones needing a hydro-electric plant to power.

Our it team call the locked cabinet downstairs as another

quite effective at deep packet inspection and other man in middle attacks.

1) a true swf to html5/JavaScript engine on the fly - believe that when I see it running

2) slurps out any rtmp url's it finds doing dynamic conversion to h.264 - won't work with sites using dynamic logic inside swf to assemble resource URL

3) virtual machine on server running flash which then streams result to iPhone - huge expense for app owner

Plus not sure sites using rtmpe like hulu would work

Is worst case for redundant secure two site storage for volumes over 2tbytes