It's worse than annoying. I'm not exaggerating when I say this kind of thing should be treated as a crime against humanity. The cost of the resulting resource depletion and environmental damage that we're passing on to future generations may well mean the difference between our survival as a species and our extinction, or at least our decimation. And it's not as though the things we're producing as throwaway items are even essential; in many cases they actually reduce our quality of life, (although they raise our 'standard of living', which is a metric we ought to abolish).

Don't get me wrong - I love tech toys and modern conveniences, and the technology and manufacturing sectors have much to be proud of in the area of making human lives better and more fulfilling. But we really need to band together as a species, separate the good from the bad, and stop committing slow suicide.

My good sir, how dare you besmirch the efforts of those who are trying to make our economy grow ever larger and ever faster? Don't you WANT a booming business environment? Is buying overpriced junk that fails early and often, and leaves our planet an empty husk, REALLY too high a price to pay for petty amusements and diversions that further line the pockets of the already-wealthy? How selfish of you!

...and I'm generally not interested in games. But this could turn me into a convert - the concept seems really awesome, and the sample video looked very cool.

Just now I've slipped off my armour of techno-jadedness, and I'm amazed at the wonders we humans are capable of creating when we're not busy engaging in pillaging, war, and petty bickering. Off-topic perhaps, but what the hell.

That "every device" phrase sounds like a loophole to me. So long as they DON'T record the digital address of even ONE device that crosses their path, they're technically telling the truth, even as they're lying.

True. The thing that concernes me is the number of such initiatives that are flying under our radar. It may be the case, (and IMHO probably is), that there is a huge amount of this kind of crap going on that we only find out about when it's way too late, or never find out about at all.

The real solution here is NOT to fight these fires as we see them crop up. The real solution is to stop the corporations and governments from lighting the damned fires in the first place, before they burn our collective home to the ground. We need to find a way to restore the accountability they once had to us, their customers and citizens, their meal ticket - otherwise we'll continue to become more and more like animals in factory farms, and less and less like the autonomous geings we were born as.

I'll leave it to your creativity and imagination to figure out how this might best be done - there are lots and lots of approaches, and we propbably need to use most of them if we're to reverse this inexorable march toward irreversible feudal serfdom. We're already a LONG way down that road...

"Getting upset on other people's behalves" - isn't that called 'empathy'?

Except for the 'closet' part, that sounds like a disturbingly accurate description of today's reality...

That's not cosmonaut, it's confidant. None of the gals was Russian AFAIK, and probably none of them had been higher than a commercial airliner normally flies.