I'm a lumberjack, you insensitive clod!

Same as always, "three to five years". (I'm just guessing. Of course I haven't RTFA.)

Just for the sake of argument (though I agree with many of your points), I'll offer up some counter-points:

- Services - A book can't deliver the newspaper to you, without any need for intervention, or killing trees.

- Search - e-books make it really easy to find that quote you're looking for.

- Dictionary - A good e-reader lets you instantly lookup a word that you don't fully understand, in my opinion enhancing overall enjoyment of the book.

- Book price - If/when bookstores start doing things as they should be done, e-books will be much cheaper than a new, retail copy of a book.

- As XKCD happily pointed out, a 3G-enabled e-reader is essentially The Guide

- Obsolescence - Most books sold for this will be in .epub, .txt, or .pdf. I'm absolutely confident that in 5 years, all of these formats will still be easily readable, and if not, there will be many free conversion tools to make them so. In fact, the more of these e-readers that get sold, and the more e-books that people buy for them, the more important this will become, and the more of a "sure thing" this will be.

Also, I'm trying to talk myself into buying one of these things. It's just so damn cool. Now, by no means will I stop buying new books, or get rid of my old ones, but I also won't feel any guilt pirating/fair use-ing e-books of books that I own or buy. Plus, there's lots of good, freely available e-books out there, even if you don't count Project Gutenberg.

So, what you're telling me, is that DNA naturally defragments itself, in order to be usable even in an archived state?

I have to presume that we don't know the mass of the thing, since we don't know what it's made up of. I do agree, though, that mass and velocity are really the only two things that matter with an object like this. Squish/splash potential is key.

How about 1 in 250,000?

And "two football fields" doesn't tell us much about the thing's actual size. Besides "football" having two different meanings, one of which has multiple field sizes, what kind of volume are we looking at here?

Ars Technica did a pretty good writeup on it.

OpenCL isn't a physics engine. PhysX, Havok, and dx physics all are.

Admit it. You're just bitter that your neighbor finally turned on WPA2, and now you have to go to the library to read Slashdot.

You would either need heavy digging equipment (Which is far too large/heavy to be feasibly boosted into space with current techniques) or (literally) a ton of TNT.

Don't forget about Bruce Willis. You won't get far without him, and he's likely been putting on weight. Need to figure that into the cost.

There wouldn't be a tsunami. See Operation Crossroads for an idea of what happens when nukes are set off above and below water.

Accuracy isn't especially important in this situation. If Iran can detonate a nuke anywhere over US soil, it doesn't really matter what they hit. Hell, it's not even important how big the yield is. A direct strike on NYC, or a field somewhere in Kansas, or a swamp in Louisiana. No matter which one they hit, it would guarantee all-out war.

And now, it's just a little bit rarer.

Well, if you want to get technical, the astronauts aren't taking any video at 100k feet. They're still strapped in at that point, cameras stowed away.