Oh, don't worry, I double-checked Wikipedia too. :) If those were truly multicellular (and the evidence is inconclusive as to whether or not some of them were even cells) then it's very likely they developed it independently. Continuing to quote Wikipedia:

...and that's without discussing pluripotency, which is the ability to differentiate various kinds of cells. It's very unlikely that Metazoa separated from Protozoa more than a billion years ago.

(Better luck next round, hero.)

The oldest known animals only go back 665 million years. It's relatively unlikely that our cell differentiation mechanisms are much older than that, so "billions" is a bit overambitious.

...wouldn't those all be out of copyright by now, regardless of country?

He's apparently just a WW2 geek, RTFAing suggests:

I don't think they're very concerned with easily-divisible numbers—4*7-day months and 13-month years! At least the crazy Soviet calendar reform from the thirties prioritized getting rid of 7-day weeks.

After the humans rejected it, they had to rebrand to reach a wider audience.

It's not about whether the game is fixed or not, it's about the business's management decisions. Lots of people won't buy EA games, for example, regardless of the quality of the title itself, because of the business's conduct in the past. The simple act of shipping a fixed game doesn't equate to the necessary cultural shift from the developer that would merit returning to the game. It's not as if they've gotten rid of Bobby Kotick as the head of Activision Blizzard, or said they'd commit to a long-term fan-driven model across their titles. It's essentially a boycott.

On top of that, we're talking about rewarding them with more money for what is, at its heart, an old product with some refreshes. Expansion packs and other forms of non-free DLC are only really effective at drawing in consumers when the base product has something the player wants to continue. Many people (myself included) got sick of the repetitive, imbalanced structure of the game a year and a half ago, when it first came out, and we have no desire to relive those memories or anything tightly associated with them. D3 had a breathtakingly uncompelling story; the adventure RPG equivalent of a cookie-cutter save-the-cat blockbuster, only without any character development whatsoever. (Unless you can think of a game with a lamer ending cutscene?) Even without the auction house, crazy elite monsters, terrible loot rates, failure to learn from competitors and clones like the Torchlight and Dungeon Siege series, the total lack of character personalization, and the extensive balance issues, I think the exploitative, sequelitis-infested anti-plot would be enough to keep people away from any continuation of the franchise.

I believe the obvious message is "the bridges are burnt," not "we want more crappy games." Publishers may be incredibly, unbelievably stupid, but they are stateful enough to know when they've killed brand trust. It is one of the few things they are indoctrinated in, since they are little more than marketers run amok.

(Sure, but PacBio in particular is quite new on the market still. Three years ago they were borderline vaporware!)

And, yeah, most serious sequencing projects I've seen do use a mixture of methods, particularly 454 stuff. But I'm sure they'll switch to IonTorrent and PacBio as opportunities allow.

You're right, it's not an entirely ubiquitous phenomenon. But amongst the plants that do have large, repetitive genomes, fine-grained epigenetics and averaged-out mutations tend to be the primary benefits, IIRC.

The hardware platform of choice is a matter of availability. Here is a map of where most/all of the NGS platforms are in the world; Illumina sequencers are the most common amongst the newer systems.

63x total coverage with from Illumina hardware using a mixture of paired-end libraries, ranging from 200 bp to a whopping 40 Kbp. I'm pretty sure that's sufficient information to estimate the number of large-scale repetitions. Sequencing projects of species for which there is no good relative to scaffold against are typically much more rigorous than what you'd see in cancer research.

...perhaps your hatred towards trees has something to do with these auditory hallucinations?

Yes. All old things are superior. Like typewriters, glaciers, and expired milk.

While the set of large-genomed organisms does include some very sophisticated trees and flowers, it also includes several species of amoeba... so I wouldn't panic just yet.

All a big genome really means for certain is that you're good enough at finding food that you can support it. The substance is a lot more important—some species of shrimp, for example, have 88 or 92 chromosomes, but they're mostly redundant duplicates. Wheat has five copies of every chromosome, too.

Plants tend to have large genomes because they reproduce so rapidly—a field of corn has enough offspring every season to mutate every nucleotide in the whole kit and kaboodle at least once, and because they have very static, slow existences, they can afford to tune themselves very well to their environments. That's what the genes and duplicates are for—giving the plant very fine-grained control over things like how it prepares for the next season based on the weather from the last one.