Counterpoint: soda tastes absolutely fine even on the loudest airplanes. I have what I'd consider a pretty fantastic sense of taste (which is more a curse than a blessing, really) and airplane food is just generally terrible. I mean, imagine your cafeteria lunch in grade school had to be cooked in a tin can a mile…

Except the quality of life for a lot of people in 2010 is far better than the quality of life for most people in 1910, which is better than the quality of life in 1810, and so on. And scientific and technological advances are happening more and more often. Sure, it's absolutely ludicrous to rest on your laurels with…

@peasant slayer: This isn't a tracking device, why do people keep assuming it is?

@bearslayer: What? No, the device doesn't transmit its own coordinates, unless I'm reading the press release ENTIRELY wrong. You code in what you want the unit to transmit to Garmin GPS units, but it doesn't have its own internal positioning system or anything.

@gnargle: I will give you a hundred dollars straight-up cash if you can beat Chemical Plant Zone Act 2 in Sonic 2 without taking your finger off the D-Pad during the jumps on the moving platforms later on. Video game characters have a fair amount of momentum, and that's the way it has always worked ever since Super…

Ugh. I really think this game has a lot of cool concepts that need exploring further, but from everything I've read the actual overall design must've come from someone either tremendously incompetent or tremendously angry at you, personally, as the player.

@iDon't even: If this were faked, there wouldn't be magnets involved - the gun would be loaded with a blank, and the ice pop and spinning bullet would be from some street-magic-esque party tricks. This is kinda what I'm leaning towards (though I'm not claiming to be sure in any case). I don't think a .40 caliber…

@Tetsuooooooo: No, it's actually missing stages from the PS3 and 360 versions, which you'd know if you were following this at all. And there's no way in the asscracks of hell that anyone bought a Sonic game for $50 and beat it in under 8 hours - the games were pretty difficult in those days, and you didn't have the…

@Tetsuooooooo: Eh, I don't buy it. Most Mega Man stages are at least as long as entire Sonic zones, if you count by playtime. And Mega Man games had eight of those, and then several fortress levels afterwards. Hell, I would pay money to see someone beat Mega Man 2 for the iPhone faster than an average playtime for…

@Tetsuooooooo: Please explain how he's wrong, here - there's four episodes in the full Sonic 4 experience, and following the price point established by the first it will cost $40 for the full game. 4 * $10 = $40, last I checked.

Ten bucks? For the first goddamned episode of a PLATFORM GAME?! That's even missing levels from it's console counterparts?

"Hi, this is Rachel from Cardholder Services. There is no current problem with your account, however..."

@Norbs: It's hard to say without seeing the eyes and fangs, but it looks like some kind of orb weaver or garden spider, almost certainly harmless. I mean, I wouldn't go poking it with a stick or anything, but it's not going to jump out and attack anyone (and, if it did, I'd be surprised if it could pierce the skin -…

Stories like these always warm my heart - it's too bad that learning to play EVE is like ramming your head into an Excel spreadsheet over and over until the world stops spinning. And even then, "fun" doesn't seem to factor in too heavily as one of the game's design goals.

@Norbs: That is an AWESOME shot (big arachnophile, here). Thanks for sharing.

Bah. My iPhone 4 takes noticeably better pictures than my Nikon Coolpix L15 (or whatever it was) point and shoot - or at least it would, if my girlfriend hadn't dropped and broken the latter while using it in Madrid a couple weeks back. But seriously, even WITH masking tape over the flash - MASKING TAPE! - the flash…

Um, sure. Yeah, that's what happens when you leave a Happy Meal uncovered for six months.

@zombieKLNcowboy: BF:BC2 is my favorite FPS in years. I think a lot of the people who hate it (including SuicidalEarthworm below) haven't figured out that it plays completely differently than something like MW2, where the multiplayer strategy boils down to "shoot the other guy first". Classes, spotting, destructible…

Damn, what a jackass. I'm sane and good looking, why can't I find a girlfriend who pulls in enough dough to have a Porsche? I promise, I won't even run you off the road in it or anything!

What. I mean, okay, Fall From Heaven is a pretty fantastic mod, from what I'm hearing, that's great. But I'm having a hell of a time believing that an outside modder, who hasn't been using the codebase from the start (like the developers have been) somehow is more beneficial than the people who coded it in the first…