While it could have something to do with character 'job hopping' usually has more to do with hiring budgets. When you take on a contract there is often a small chance that you'll get hired full time, but more often than not when the contract completes there is no hiring budget -- so off you go. I would be nice to think that a performance would get a phone call when a hiring budget opens up, but it doesn't work that way.

This is of course region by region. On the West coast contacting is the norm. It's a crappy unpredictable life, but it's almost excessively common. In the Midwest I'd suspect the practice is less common, but I haven't worked there in 10 years so I have no idea.

For jobs like the ones in this article perhaps screening on 'character' as you suggest might be useful since these are fairly entry level jobs. However even for entry level 'job hopping' does not denote character...

A friend of mine finished law school with no less than 3 internships over one summer. I think one of them only lasted a few weeks. It had nothing to do with her skills or character. In fact when she graduated she moved to a small town as the count seat DA for a few years. I visited her it it was a pretty miserable town, but it got her some experience. She stayed with it 2 years. Her friends stayed in the city and continued to contract for those 2 years never gaining much experience they may still be doing that for all I know. She has now moved back into the city and is a successful trial lawyer. This has little to do with character. If my friend stayed in the city she would have accumulated numerous short term contracts despite having an immense character. Even the small town job was a bit of luck. The pattern for those towns in one slot every 2 years and you'd better hope you aren't tied to a lease/family/other responsibilities.

Just bear this in mind before you go applying blanket judgements of character over people. Get some context and think about your location, before you judge.

More of a time/budget issue than anything. Pixar has an enormous staff of tool coders to make stuff like footsteps in the snow work just right. This project had 2-3 coders helping out, but they split their time between various thing like rendering, simulation, etc. There was certainly no time to have one person tweak snow deformation (you can read the Sintel blog to learn about what went into making cloth simulation work for the dragon wings). So yeah they used tricks, but that is common to all lower budget movies. Also note that this had a 6-8 month time line -- which included script writing. Pixar has a 3-4 year time line for such things. They have separate crews working on various projects so they can knock one out every 2 years or so.

So yeah with only so much budget you can shake the camera and probably should if needed. Unless you like unfinished projects.

It's not the number of fingers that makes playing piano hard. It's the combinations. The chords are the hard part. Also the independent use of each finger. An interface like this and most other multi-touch interfaces use simple clenching or releasing motions. These are movements that anyone with fully functional hands will have already mastered. They are baby movements.

As for FPS games I don't see the issues I'd say my finger tip is roughly the size of a baddies head. Panning would be a breeze. Group selection in RTS games would be much nicer. If you combined this with a pen for drawing then I could easily see a mouse becoming obsolete.

As for palm interference I doubt that is a hard thing to treat as noise in the input.

The biggest problem is replacing a keyboard. That wont happen any time soon. Though for many tasks (like Gimp/Photoshop, or 3D animation) you could replace the small key combos with larger key areas. Replace 3D mice with circular panning areas and such. I would prefer that the touch screen to display an abstraction of the interface -- window outlines, key areas. Nothing too detailed and distracting -- maybe an e-ink level display.