I'd like to see a move away from the Ares-Orion stack and a move towards the more versatile Jupitor plan.

I'd also like to see us make serious use of the press and make our move back to the Moon and eventually to Mars as much as an event as the original Mercury-Gemini-Apollo missions. You have to make it romantic for the public so they feel like writing their Congresscritters to support funding.

Game FEATURES and PLAYABILITY.

Here's an example: Battlefield 1942.

BF required me to upgrade my PC when it came out. When I finally got it working decently, I found that the 'revolutionary large maps' and 'revolutionary ability to control vehicles' was no more revolutionary that tribes outside of it's 'many years newer' pc requirements... not to mention its graphics and game play were pretty much sub-par compared to tribes.

Upgrading PC hardware to move from playing something 2d sprite like DOOM to something 3d polygon like QUAKE is perfectly acceptable. Upgrading PC hardware to move from simplistic 3d polygons and textures like QUAKE to something with far more complicated polygons, 3d effects, better textures, revolutionary environment, and new game play like BIOSHOCK is also perfectly acceptable. When games come out, and the only outwardly noticeable difference from everything else on the market is the title's name, yet it requires massive hardware upgrades, then that is failure, and that market deserves to die.

I worked with Mike Connell for a year or so in the mid-1990s (before most of his work with the national GOP). He was not an angel. He was a flawed human being as all of us are. But his children (very little then, now in their teens) ADORED him. I can personally attest to this. He leaves them behind. He started and ran a medical mission to El Salvador. He leaves this behind as well. It is sad, regardless of what whatever flaws he may have had. The death of any human being always is. I do hope that the truth behind all of this comes out. I suspect it is not pretty. But first and foremost, I feel terrible for his family. They will remain in my thoughts and prayers for a long time.

Yeah, no. I call shenanigans. I put a PC together about 5 months ago for about $1700. I have a 780i-based mobo, a 3GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and 2 GeForce 8800GT's. (I just missed the introduction of the 2xx series, and the lowering of pricing on everything else.) I play FO3 at 1024x768 at "High" settings. Using FRAPS, I can see that I hang around 65-75 FPS walking around and doing things, and it can drop to the 40's when combat gets heavy. (I normally just fight and avoid the VATS thing, unless they're moving very quickly.) So saying you're running at the framelimit on "Ultra" settings on a PC that cost $450? I don't even believe that if you're talking about euros or pounds.

One of my best friends just got a Dell XPS 730. You know, one of those "multiple GPU watercooled machines." It cost $6500. I mean, he had to WORK at getting the price that high. I can't wait to get him setup to play some games on that beast! If I could have afforded it... I wouldn't have. A lot of that cost came from having a 4x 1TB RAID 0+1 disk subsystem. Another huge chunk of the cost was the "Extreme" processor, for which I'll never understand spending that kind of money. I'm thinking that I'd get really close to his performance if I just upgraded to his video cards. But that alone would be about $1000.

Reading this I'm more glad than ever that I just did my undergraduate degree and then skipped out to industry.

almost as funny as Doom 3 requirements were huh?

PC games have always had that extra ultra-high setting that nobody could run and have set the standard high.
Where you been in the PC gaming?

No, they don't. I manage a team of such developers, and I know they don't have the fundamentals. It has not caused any problems that I can point to.

By the way, I am CS trained and took all the courses you mention. Those topics influence design, not execution. I don't need programmers to understand those subjects and pay 2x for it; I need them to follow my design.

I know that's probably not the response you want to hear; you want to hear that the extra knowledge you have is valuable and needed. It is, just not in anything but a senior architect or project management role.

Explain to me why gun crime has skyrocket in the UK since their ban on handguns.

Crime is the result of poverty and opportunity, if you take away the guns there will still be crime, and there will still be gun crime. The fact that in Japan they do it with knives instead of guns doesn't make me feel the slightest bit better. Maybe I'm just a pragmatist, but I think we'd do more good in the world solving root causes than blaming inanimate objects for violence.

Over compensation for what?

I'm going to examine your post completely based just on your username and user id.

Your id is really high, I can't accurately estimate when you joined, but it must have been recently, so thus you consciously chose your username recently.

Now about your username, it's a combination of three words: mew, shi, and nya. I'm guessing here, but mew is probably Mew, the 151st Pokemon, shi is probably the last syllable of Yoshi, and nya is how cats "mew" in Japanese, and also Meowth's (another Pokemon) basic sound on the TV show Pokemon.

So you say the video game industry lost you a while ago, but your username may very well be a combination of three popular Nintendo characters. Now I can understand if you've had this username a while, but a quick Google search ("mewshi_nya" -slashdot) reveals that it is used only on Slashdot.

That is the end of my examination, I conclude that though the video game industry lost you, you still love your Pokemon.

Just make sure you distract the Captain long enough for the progress bar to complete its travel, then you casually remove the USB stick while hiding it with a manila folder. Make your way to a torpedo tube and launch yourself before he discovers that you just copied down all the ZECRETZ.