That's the point. Successful commercial aircraft also have input from Marketing (hopefully telling you what Southwest and Passengers actually want), Finance (telling you if that feature is actually worth the cost/effort), and QA (telling you if that feature will actually be reliable).

So yes, a commercial aircraft only being designed by aeronautical engineers would be a failure, IMO. And that is the problem that faces Open Source projects today.

Meh. Yours sounds like a mind-numbing grind. "Ok you go get wacked by the monster, then I'll heal you so I get more XP. But Don't KILL the monster because then we'll have to find another one".

I'd rather get rewarded for successes, not forced to manipulate the game or get relegated to your "slow exp gain".

I think that unless you continually change the rules, playerbases are smart enough to figure out the formulas behind things and turn it into a grind. My recommendation? A MMO where the rules change monthly. It wouldn't appeal to the hardcore raiders, but I'd sure like it.

I guess that's kinda pulling from the Roguelikes, but I did enjoy those too.

While that is true, I'm betting your phone number, license plate, and email address do not change on a monthly basis.

This is fairly disturbing.

It's not disturbing that the whole world isn't geeks. It's disturbing that some people think the whole world ought to be.

Well, that would be for a judge to determine. At least with this law you have the ability to argue they're unjust.

Well, that's why you don't have just one KPI. If the second KPI is customer satisfaction, one of two things happen:

1) You get 100's of complaints to your boss, getting you fired. Congrats, you win!
2) If the whole IT org does this, the CEO at ops staff gets complaints from every GM, resulting in a 20% budget cut of IT, specifically tech support. When IT looks at the worst offenders by complaints, you are one of the 20%. Congrats, you win!

What does everyone call the guy who graduated last in his class at medical school?

Doctor.

People aren't mad that the RIAA is going after copyright infringers, they're mad because the RIAA is doing it in a vigilante style with the punishment not fitting the crime.

Hmm... if I recall, a $200 used laptop and a local library card that gives you wifi access is a whole lot cheaper than what I used to pay in text books... text books that would be an "old" revision next year and completely unsellable. And by "old" i mean they changed the order of the questions at the end of the chapter to force everyone to buy the new textbook.

Is it just me, or did the article have absolutely nothing to do with the E3 question in the summary? I was expecting an article on E3's success/failure/survivability, and instead I got a Wii-Sports love-fest.

Maybe I'm alone, but I own a Wii and a 360. The Wii is fun for 5 minutes and then gets very very boring. The Xbox has games that are fun for hours at a time.

So why does everyone just assume the Wii is more fun? Because it moved more consoles? That's no better a metric than # of games sold, which the Wii loses at pretty badly.

No offense, but there's only one product in that list that actually turns a profit. If those were all separate businesses, all but one would be bankrupt.

Because most Xbox's still have the craptastic 20GB HD. Rolling out saving support is additional legal/engineering work and would be a nightmare on a system that probably has less than 3gb free anyways. They'd rather have their customers downloading demos and buying games than watching streaming TV.

The paid-for news/media is already stupid enough. I can't wait until all the semi-talented writers start charging, and 99% of america gets their news and election info from a right-wing or left-wing blog site... or worse.

Seriously, I think the easy availability of respected newspapers such as the NYTimes has helped improved American's awareness of political issues. Whatever my problems with the NYTimes biases are, they're 100x better than the local news.