Shouldn't even one stray picture of a sophomore girl with her top off automatically make this a child pornography case? They did go through all 50,000 of those shots before they dropped the investigation, right?

I believe the author is quite correct about the flaw in Kurzweil's logic. The human Genome != Brain Blueprint, and using that to guesstimate how many "lines of code" [which is in and of itself a totally arbitrary and essentially meaningless metric] is basically pure horseshit that exists only to be quoteable.

Obviously they forgot to turn on their irony detectors while they were deciding to name their extra-large special collectors edition "nano".

So, I see LucasArts is on step 8 or 9 of the Shareholder's Guide to Running Your Game Development Studio into the Ground (For Dummies!).

... why do these Spartans have different accents? Aren't all Spartans kidnapped at around the age of 5 and spend the rest of their lives living as a group on Reach receiving Training From Hell from a small pool of instructors who would presumably all be using the same language?

@Altima NEO: Probably a combination of A) not wanting to crash and/or bog down the XBL servers on release day due to a million or two people attempting to download a 7gb triple-A title, and B) wanting to stick to their disc-based DRM rather than to put a straight up digital download copy out there for easier cracking…

@JGab: If Mario = Brad Pitt, then I think obviously Luigi = Edward Norton, which just fits all too well.

Would you say that this is better or worse than "Space Rangers"? I saw an episode or two of that on Netflix a while back. Oh god, so awful.

@Ivriniel: @Stunspot: @Annalee Newitz: You know what, I was just going to shrug this off with an XKCD reference, but alright, this is a big hairy deal apparently.

@EnsignKickass: How about obscene webcam chats with 15 year old girls that you met through the multiplayer mode of Kinectimals 2? I think that's the only unannounced functionality you're going to get.

@Dennen: Why wouldn't the new Kinect be backwards compatible with the original Kinect games? If its only a capability increase, it should be able to play original Kinect games all the better. In that case, it would be exactly analogous to the DSi etc.

@jallen: Maybe they're trying to emulate the whole guitar-hero plastic guitar thing.

@Annalee Newitz: Dammit, Annalee, don't you understand? Someone was wrong on the internet. I did what I had to do.

"Because if the transgenic canola starts swapping genetic material with weed populations - something that is not unlikely..."

@HK-47: Sorta depends on your point of view, actually. The classical model holds the universe as living up to its namesake- it is everything and all-inclusive, with no outside, and because of its curvature, if you keep going in one direction long enough, you'll end up where you started.

@resvrgam: Yeah. Wasn't he just a (note: "a", not "the") level designer for the id games he worked on?

This sounds like the same sort of statistical analysis that insurance companies have been cultivating for decades. Its about time parole boards had access to that sort of thing- although as someone who was a safer driver at 18 than most 30 year olds, I did somewhat resent not being able to rent a car until I was 25…

If you think the pixel art of Doom is surprisingly pretty, load up Dark Forces off Steam. It'll also give you some of the things that Doom never had but which are now a part of almost all FPS DNA- things like a secondary fire mode for all the weapons and the ability to jump. Despite being so influential and innovative…

@bowen13:

@Zaph31: Yes, and Bioware can redub all the player dialogue with "WROROAHAORARHAAAAAHAROOOOOU"