Nicknameless

One positive change I noticed is when I'm searching for something related to C#, Google now retains the # symbol in the search suggestions rather than changing my search to C. For me that almost makes up for the missing + change.

Well summer is December to February, so April is a fair way off...

Perhaps they could do away with the stupid idea altogether and say 2nd quarter 2013 if they can't be more specific.

I'm generally pretty optimistic but I feel that I should push back against the crowd a little here. Plenty of people say "I'd use it", but who will say "I'll pay for it"?

If you're not in it for the money, are you sure it's the most interesting, inspiring or needed tool/app you could be working on, given that it seems the competition may take care of this need anyway?

I've learnt the hard way that you shouldn't let sunk costs of a project sway your decision to carry on with it.

All the best whatever you decide.

Why the down vote? The education bubble is not a global phenomenon, and there are plenty of great working educational models in other countries that the US could look to (even if it would be branded as 'socialism' etc).

I think you need to qualify your point a little..

American middle class parents. Middle class parents don't have any problem doing so in plenty of other countries.

I live in Australia, I'm in my late 20's, I've got a pretty good software dev job and I pay about 25% income tax (which includes 37% above $80k). I don't know what the real tax rate would be after factoring in all of the other taxes I pay.

For such a high amount of tax, I enjoy a very high standard of living. A four year software engineering degree cost me about $18k due to our sane education system, and I've never had to worry about whether I can afford decent healthcare or factored health insurance into career decisions.

Our high tax rate is offset by lower costs for universal services, and people generally have more freedom with their life decisions. As such, a substantially lower tax rate or major cut in social services would be disgusting on moral grounds to me, and I feel that your government is screwing its citizens by doing just that.

The big question is: would you pay for it?

Slightly further afield, communist Australia has major skills shortages. I doubt engineers would have serious visa problems.

Yes, mainly to reduce bandwidth and download quota usage. Given that I haven't bought anything through browser ads over my ten or so years of web surfing without adblock, I don't feel like leaving ads on will help much (particularly with newer flash based ads that jump around the middle of the screen etc).

I'm not sure how many people living outside of the US would actually consider it to be the 'greatest country on Earth'. I certainly don't want to live there...

Not sure if this is just a troll actually. If so, good job I guess.

It'd be one extra byte for 64k etc assuming you scrap the one byte magic marker.

If this technology is legit without problems with animation and lighting etc, what will it mean for the costs of game content creation? You still need artists to create the models, textures etc, and higher detail generally takes much longer with diminishing returns. I also find that environments with highly detailed objects also need far more objects to be convincing which compounds the issue.

In short, the tech sounds great, but will it result in better games or just more expensive games (and in turn, fewer games with more innovative but risky design)?

As an Australian living in one of the most heavily taxed countries in the world with socialised health care, education etc, all I can say is that I love my very high standard of living and freedom from any real financial concerns related to health, education, housing etc. You can keep your minarchism.

Does anyone know if there is any code available for this algorithm? I'd love to get my hands on it.