That could have been worded better. What I meant is real time object replication where state on an object one on server is mirrored on other servers. IE: If you are standing near the boundary between two servers, you on one server, your opponent on the other server. Each server is constantly updating object state to each other as well as to the observing clients. What are the other cases that this is common? I'll be happy to move the location in the future because I know on MMOs I worked on this was the single cause of the most # of bugs in the system and one reason why a lot of early MMOs were Zone based rather than open world.

To be clear, you believe that if the credit card numbers of 11 million subscribers of World of Warcraft was leaked it wouldn't be on the front page of NY Times? What percentage of the banks and utilities you are talking about there have on the order of 11 million subscribers?

And I described software complexity, not software importance.

I've always said that an MMO is literally the most complicated piece of software one can make. Take every single problem that exists in software engineering, and you have it in an MMO.

A) Every problem from a normal game.
1) Resource streaming for an open world.
2) Particle system running on 5 year old commodity hardware
3) Physics system to handle projectiles (Even if it's not havok you still need something for the characters falling from the sky.)

B) Every problem that a business app would have.
4) High availability clusters
5) Billing systems
6) Massive databases
7) Customer Support back end
8) Call center support

C) Every problem that 'internet companies' have
9) Latency kills
10) World wide datacenters mapping 1:1 and 1:many architecture pieces

D) Some nice unique problems for MMOs only
11) Cross server object replication
12) More hackers targeting it than they would some banks.

You make all sorts of assumptions here to create that outlier:

1) That this persons max rate is now their minimum rate.
2) That they can generate 2080 hours worth of work per year.
3) That generating 2080 hours worth of work takes 0 time.

Perhaps they do 10 hours a month because they spend 30 hours a month to get that time and that's the limit of their networking?

I invoke Betteridge's Law of Headlines here.

No.

I'm not sure where you're getting western coast is predominantly Hispanic and black from. The two cities I'm most familiar with here Seattle and Redmond claim 69.5% White and 79.26% White respectively... I'd say that's predominantly Caucasian...

Really? How about http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html when they did in the past? Is it still unlikely?

I do a variation of this.

I have a google notebook with every site and the username I use on the site. Sometimes it's email address, or name, or one of 4-5 handles. I also list a mnemonic for the password that I used on the site. That page is basically for me, and I update it all the time as I add new sites, change passwords etc...

In a fireproof safe in my closet I have an envelope that contains my current google password and the key to the mnemonics. It gets updated whenever I change the google password or add a bunch of new mnemonics. My wife knows where it is and what it's for.