Nah, this is intentional. PETA PR technique has been 100% strident and ridiculous for many years, because they long ago figured out that it gets them coverage.

The original article addresses this in a footnote:

The Moon has no oxygen atmosphere, so how can something explode? Lunar meteors don't require oxygen or combustion to make themselves visible. They hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that even a pebble can make a crater several feet wide. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site.

the final frame of every goatkcd comic. NWS, and as good a comment on XKCD as anything it's thrown up. Seriously, people: wikis; thousands of posts on a message board. Get some perspective.

Giving these idiots the benefit of the doubt, how the Hell does something like this get past the planning stage, let alone into the release client, before someone realizes 'Hey! This could cause drama'? Fuck, Uber Entertainment apparently did the same thing with Super Monday Night Combat, but at least they had the guts to announce it, and offer company scrip in return for putting extra wear on your hardware and power bill.

"Those bastards at the military, they took it and... and they twisted it! My invention was intended only for peaceful purposes, and they turned it into a weapon!"

Reminds me of the infamous Deus Ex boat bug.

For those that aren't aware, the original Deus Ex was released when pirated games were heavily distributed via sneakernet and usenet in the form of spanned 2 MB (or 2.88-- it's been a while) RAR images. Needless to say, this was a lot of diskettes for the games that were coming out on CD at the time, so the cracking teams would cut out every ounce of fat that they possibly could: cutscenes, non-vital sound effects, you name it. The games ran, but you were likely to miss a lot of story and fluff.

An early Deus Ex rip went through the same process, but for some reason would just stop at an early point in the game-- specifically, when you hopped on a police boat and sailed off to the next level. It turned out that the scripts used to drive the in-game cutscenes weren't designed to fail cleanly, and one of the missing sound effects caused this one to hang partway through.

People with pirated copies started complaining and looking for tech help with this baffling bug. It didn't take the devs long to figure out what was going on, and only took slightly longer for people who'd paid for it to start leaping down the throats of anyone asking for help getting past the 'buggy' cutscene.

...for this to go down in history with the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.

...but only so I could find out when they actually had any decent leads, or found the perpetrators. Between rumours on the Internet and rumours being thrown up by the traditional media, there wasn't any point in seriously following things until then.

The problem with your suggestion is twofold, simply stated:

A) People are easily convinced of falsehoods, and nowhere near so easily convinced otherwise when the truth comes to light.

B) Companies that can afford to throw tens of thousands of dollars/sterling/euros at someone for complaining about less than two hundred can just as easily afford public relations efforts to concoct and reinforce damaging lies about people they feel are a threat, feeding back into A.

Later, Kerrigan discovers that she's the only entity in the Swarm that can handle a bra clasp.

I really wish I had mod points, because White Flame hits the nail right on the head. Small local businesses need the Internet like a fish needs a bicycle. A blogspot page for events, maybe a simple '90s style page to show off bits of inventory and provide contact information, and that's really all they need at most.

Shit, I'm a gamer and I've spent on average a hundred bucks on upgrades a year for probably the last decade. With the exception of the occasional Cryengine game, there's been very little released in the last several years that demands (or even just begs) for regular, massive upgrades.

That was my reaction. I suspect they're going to wildly misread the 'subversive Star Trek' theme and make it so Roj Blake has more space-sex than James Kirk.

I hate to break it to you, but under that kind of model you'd probably be watching four channels worth of serene blue nothing. Cable packages subsidize less-popular channels, which includes... Syfy, TLC, the History channel, not that they're huge losses at this point, and basically anything else that isn't driven by one of the major basic networks or popular premium channels like HBO. Even they'd be impacted, because while advertising is a huge source of income, contracts with cable providers provide steady baseline funding as well.

In a nutshell: A lot of the crap you don't watch is ultimately funding the stuff that you do.

Anyone with the gumption to claw their way out of an unmarked grave deserves an interview at the very least.