You would only need to watch the gripping, tour de force film, "Drugstore Cowboy", and you would know all of these things, intimately, and relatively instantly. To Netflix my good scholar, to Netflix!

...that is, like, so not cool...

Being, essentially, just carbon, it probably wouldn't be all that carcinogenic. Though I suppose it could have weird effects at the "nano" scale....

You have broken my already tiny, coal-black, heart Amazon, just broken it in half...

You speak with alarming accuracy and vision Anonymous Coward, you should consider marking that with your "X"...

Also, would it be the Federal Communications Commission to whom we would express our concerns on this? Because, I for one, am ready to raise a stink...

They've come to regard the birds as a vector. It seems like a crucial facet of all this would be, how, did the birds become an, apparently, very robust, vector?

Are these brids scavenging anti-bacterials from various human food sources? are they absorbsing same from the sewer effluvia that we know eventually makes its way into many coastal waters?

I'm always suspicious of these quirky "end reports" that seem to be spread without a context that might lead to some actual solution, or at least, amendment.

..."of excellent quality". I would agree that, in many ways, these are the "Salad Days" of gaming potential. There are more bells, whistles and gizmos to make gaming experiences mind-blowing than ever before.

In contrast though, I think that the myriad pressures that studios are under against their parent companies, publishers and, to some degree, their customers, are forcing them to take less time and care to put the aforementioned bells, whistles and gizmos to proper effective use.

To a large degree, it does seem like simple market pressures are to be most clearly blamed for this. Eventually though, you've just got to call a spade a spade and accept the fact that overall gamequality is demonstrably lower than it could be.

Some large publishers and parent companies will hopefully understand this appropriately at some point and stop scaring the crap out of excellent studios with the proverbial "Sword of Damacles" that is quarterly profits (or whatever internal economic pressures; or simply greed) constantly hanging over them.

An example, which I'm sure everyone is sick of, but that I will cram down your unwilling intertubes anyway:

I was in love with Fallout 2. I believe that game was superb. A 2D, isometric view game, "dated" many people would call it now. If you go back and look at the graphical and audio assets for that game; set scenes, item art, character art, atmospheric sounds, musical assets, etc. It created an amazing "piece" in and of itself. Truly, the difference between a labor of love, and the spectacle the Fallout 3 became.

I bought Fallout 3, I played it through, I didn't even have any exceptional beef with it. But it's lessened nuance (Studio and creative staff differences notwithstanding) was a little dissappointing. With all of the 3D makeover, etc., I mean, it was quite a feat, and I enjoyed it on those levels; but it didn't have the same impact.

The artwork for weapons, ammo, and incidental items in Fallout 3 for the Pipboy and merchant interactions were monochrome, many of them generic. Just compare that aspect alone, if you've got a working copy, to the, still exquisite renderings of the items for Fallout 2, or Fallout Tactics, for that matter.

Forgive me for beating that particular dead horse, but it's a just a common example of my point. You should consider tempering the "shock and awe" of your new techonogies, with richness and playability. You could have the "perfect storm" a "Platinum Age" of gaming, if you really wanted it...

Fascinating story but, my question is, what sensory apparatus are they using to measure "stable drops a few thousandths of a millimeter in diameter" in the resulting atmosphere?

They seem to have neglected to mention their prior discovery, The Star Trek Duotronic Sensor Array...

...and I wish you would pipe down about it, so that the industry would keep pumping out hardware and driving down prices until they reach my "impulse price". I mean come on, stop tablet-shop-blockin'!

One wonders what the Field of View and other technical details on these cameras would be. That is to say, how much, collectively, of the city streets would these be able to cover above and beyond the license plate of an alleged offender? Would they be inter-networked? To the citizenry, it seems like folly, but to governments, broad data collection rarely does seem like folly. I worry about the details though, you know, where "The Devil" rents a condo...

Ummmmmmm, no.

I am also in the Linux (Ubuntu) camp as a choice. However, I would recommend the "Lubuntu" variant, which is a newer, remixed, flavor of Ubuntu designed to be lightweight, in order to accommodate "humbler" hardware. I have tried it, and it performs admirably on older (within reason) machines.

It should be put into a reasonable "cold shutdown" and pushed out to a Lagrange Point between the Earth and the Moon at least. Perhaps some future and more capable program maybe able to leverage its equipment/resources.

The idea of having expended multiple billions of dollars across the space agencies of several nations, only to have the fruits de-orbited into the ocean speaks volumes about the attitudes, planning, and thus the capabilities, of human space flight.

With this sort of thinking, a "manned" mission to Mars will forever remain a fond notion and never become the reality that it should already have been. Essentially, WTF are you people doing with our collective resources and hopes? It's absurd...

I, myself, am a "full-scale" RPG person. Mobile games, up to this point, are, at best, pleasant distractions and, more often, annoying, in my experience. I think it will be awhile before I will be engaged enough by a mobile "piece of experience", that it will prevent me from dropping $49.99 on a quality RPG. Plus a "quality" RPG is often a 1 to 4 year wait between worthwhile titles to begin with.

If I were Reggie Fils-Aime, I would hold off on the negative prognostications and just focus on making solid, innovative, full-scale titles. Render unto mobile that which is mobile's, render unto the Nintendo Lords that which is the Nintendo Lords’. Also, Reggie, more RPGs please... ;)

That is an augurous doom indeed...