Obviously you've never worked in a highly competitive mass-market industry. $1 billion R&D / tooling cost is pretty normal for a mass market GM vehicle platform. If you're selling 1+ million vehicles at $50k then $1,000,000,000 is chump change. If you spend $100 million on development / tooling you'll either lose out badly on unit costs, lose out badly on quality or both against someone like Toyota, GM, Ford, Volkswagen, etc. who are plowing the $1+ billion necessary into each platform. This is not news purely because GM went into the volt expecting to lose money the first few years. Its not the million vehicles they sell over the next few years that they care about (that's tiny compared to their pure petrol / diesel volume), its the several million hybrids or all-electric vehicles they expect to be selling every year by 2020 that they're focusing on.

I don't know what is most ironic, the pope's original statement, your post being modded informative or the moderators demonstrating some of the pope's concerns in action by moderating your post as informative.
"The idea of living 'as if God didn't exist' has shown itself to be deadly: The world needs, rather, to live 'as if God existed,
Hence, the Pope urged Catholic journalists to be well-rooted in a decision to always keep God at the top of the scale of values.
The Holy Father exhorted the journalists to "constantly renew your personal choice for Christ, drinking from those spiritual resources that the worldly mentality underestimates, despite the fact they are valuable, more than that, indispensable."

Technology (if not communication technology specifically) will doom us all and repent ye sinners are exactly the interpretations I came away with.

Source: Catholic.net article on the Pope's comments.

Yes of course, because 3D Realms (legal name Apogee Software) have no experience publishing games at all. How old are you, 12?

Duke Nukem Forever is not a case of developers needing a "publisher". Its simply an inside joke. Everytime 3D Realms work on a prototype, they call it Duke Nukem Forever and the artists throw in a few silly Duke Nukem assets for the programmers to work with until they actually have a real game plan.