As I already said, different people - different needs.
My cousin gave me an iPod Touch for my birthday. I've tried it out for a week, sold it after that. I couldn't do anything really useful with it - no multitasking, no A2DP, low resolution screen and so on. Years later Apple has implemented some functionality, but they are still not there for me.

And before dozens of Apple fanatics try to tell me that I am stupid and no one needs multitasking (as they always do when I mention the reasons why I am not even remotely interested in iPhone) and how it only kills both the battery life and little kittens, well, for me it has worked just fine. I use PDAs for a decade now. Even one of my first, a Franklin Ebookman, managed multitasking with a puny 24 MHz CPU very well and was in nearly every respect better than his contemporary Palm III, which I also had (not to speak of the - for those times - amazing display). The only real turnoff was the widespread failure of the RAM backup capacitors so on many devices the battery replacement could result in data loss. Well, the more I think about it, the more I realize that even a device so old is in some ways even better than the glorified iPhone - replaceable batteries, a memory card slot, multitasking, bigger screen...

If carrying two PDAs around makes you happy and meets all your needs then I am glad for you. HTC HD2 currently meets my personal needs better than any other available device, and because I don't have any reason to hate Windows Mobile (before WM7 that is), I'll continue to use that particular device until it fails, until something better comes up, or until my needs change.

Here's a question, though... and I mean this as a genuine question, having never done game development:

Is the networking/interconnection system part of the engine, and if not, would the former be part of Carmack's responsibilities, too?

The plot can usually be summarized as:
...
It seems to me that a lot of science fiction has an anti-science bent.

You could just as well say that all non SciFi has the same problem... Govenrment wants to do something stupid and only the maverick politician can save the day; Spouse does something stupid and only two hours of dramatic avoiding-the-real-problem can reunite the couple; Boy wants girl but it takes 90 minutes of wacky adventures and two near-death experiences before he gets the courage to ask her out.

The "best" SciFi doesn't make science out as the villain or the hero - Instead, it shows us the (possible) realities of everyday situations in a setting that extracts those problems from the limitations of "modern" science... ie, The boy will still take 90 minutes and nearly die before he gets up the courage to ask the girl out, whether he lives today, or in a dirt hovel 300 years ago, or on a colony station orbiting Jupiter in the year 3517.

I think your real complaint applies to most forced-plot movies in general... You need some artificially-induced source of tension, followed by stalling and CGI to make the story last more than five minutes, followed by a completely predictable but somehow "unexpected" resolution to the original problem. Faux-science just happens to make for some good villians without needing to really justify their motivations. Why does the god-like AI want to enslave humanity? Because, um, er, humans look weak and inefficient (and what about dogs, trees, ants, and every other lower life form on the planet that A, humans don't see a need to enslave/exterminate, and B, we must look barely better than them to this god-like AI?).

So blame Hollywood, not SciFi in general. :)