I'm suspicious this is a hoax (after all, doesn't the iPad's screen detect capacitance- not visuals like patterns and shapes?) ...but even if it's real, I noticed the guy was consistently pressing down pretty hard with everything it detected. I wonder if the object's own weight isn't enough to trip whatever sensor they're using.

I'm glad you took my question at face value, instead of seeing the point I was making. Yes, technically if someone were to cover the entirety of the planet's surface with solar panels (of course ignoring the fact that there's nowhere near enough resources, manpower, or time in a person's life to actually accomplish such a feat) then most of the sun's energy would not reach the surface (I'm sure a little of the warmth the panels soaked up would reach the surface via heat transfer) but no country, or even every country combined together, could actually pull that off.
Likewise, the amount of wind turbines required to sap all the wind energy from the atmosphere would be staggering, and you couldn't just put them on the surface, you'd have to stack them so they reached the higher levels- the atmosphere's moving around up there, too- and you'd have to pack them densely enough that no air could get past any blades.
I would hope you don't actually consider either of these things to be even remotely feasible, even if they are theoretically possible.

See, saying QED after a post really just doesn't make you sound any smarter at all. It tends to have quite the reverse effect.

A follow-up question- would it be possible to build so many solar panels that all the energy from the sun gets sucked up and the planet freezes over?

Yes, I sure am glad that the English language is a static thing, exactly identical in usage to when it was first spoken!

Wasn't the Sony ps2 the first major console to have this? (the eyetoy- I know it sucked, but the idea was there)

I'm sure many teenagers would disagree with your one-step-at-a-time analogy; I myself used to climb the stairs in about 4 steps.

That's what many people said about about a little game called Guitar Hero, and look how that turned out.

I find a joystick tends to cover too wide a range of motion, and the number of buttons and variable configuration of a keyboard are lost with any analog stick I've seen, though something like one of the more expensive 3dconnexion sixaxis dealies has around as many buttons as I'm likely to use- but I don't think many gamers would drop hundreds of dollars to get a controller that's probably not compatible with many, if any, games.

Hmm, I seem to have lost all my whitespace. My post is rather harder to read as one solid mass of text...

The true strength of PC gaming, to me at least, is the combination of speed and precision that a mouse brings, which to my experience no joystick or thumbstick can match, and the range of motion no touch screen can cover (after all, you don't have to stop moving the mouse when the cursor is at the edge of the screen) However, I am not satisfied with a keyboard, simply because of the digital input. I primarily play platformers and FPS, I'm sure I would say differently if I were an RTS gamer- but when I use a controller I love the ability to move faster and slower just by tilting my thumb several degrees, and being able to pick any angle of motion rather than one of 8 directions is fantastic. Unfortunately, the thumbstick I use to aim or look around tends to fall short for a task that often requires the ability to turn upwards of 180 degrees and hit a target that's often around 20 pixels tall, before the target does the same to me. My ideal control setup would be a mouse in one hand, and a keyboard set on a 2-dimensional slider in the other- to move forward I would push the entire keyboard forward, and so on. As long as your hand remained on the keyboard the relative position of keys would remain the same so there'd be no added need to look at the keyboard to find a key after moving it. Potentially if the slider didn't have a spring one could leave it in a position while keying in commands, somewhat like an autorun, but finding the center again could then be an issue.

Someone needs to learn a thing or two from "Don't Copy That Floppy!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xfqkdh5Js4

Which is funny, because almost every phone on the market nowadays have calculators built in. People need to start taking advantage of all these features, gosh dernit!

"it-it's unique, it hasn't been done yet." hey guys, I have an idea nobody's tried before: a game where you -wait for it- shoot monsters! but wait- to make it completely original, we'll bring ancient mythology in, because it's totally new!