To hell with Hawking! When can I use this to play Battlefield?!

Or One Time Pads.

Indeed. Seems I have heard "singleplayer is dead" (or for that matter "adventure/rpg/rts/whatever games are dead") more times than I can shake a big stick at now. First time I read that singleplayer was dead must have been back at the end of the nineties.

And "as opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours-and you’re out." while I certainly believe that there are people happy with a 25 hour singleplayer campaign I would tend towards thinking that 25 hours is so short I hesitate to pay full price for that. It would have to be as amazing as Bioshock for that to be worth it.

Well written. Personally I am tending towards the idea that, at least in the case of literature, authors should retain rights to their works throughout their lives (and that this right could not be sold or transferred). And that those rights transferred, upon the authors death, to their beneficiaries for a period of thirty years. That would allow the author to provide for their children, and family, after they are gone. The rights to publish, or in anyway profit, from their work should be by license from the author.

Maybe this would be the wrong way to go about it, but it is my belief that laws and regulation should reward effort and stimulate the continued creation of new works. HOWEVER, these laws and regulation should always balance in the favor of individual authors rather than corporate entities.

There is a BBC Horizon episode up on youtube called What Happened Before the Big Bang. Interviews with several physicists about different ideas on the topic of what might have preceded our universe.

It might be safe to predefine the acceptable range of such errors though. Getting a sandwich without the pickle might be alright. However having to deal with some sort of biohazard scenario due to the manufacturing process having spun out of control, might ruin your day to a far greater degree than missing one sandwich.

Alien Dust acquired; check.
Scientists analyzing it in labs; check.
Cue horrific mutating space monsters.

From what I recall of my own education, I am a Norwegian, we often had collaborative projects, with group members randomly selected. This might be merely anecdotal, but someone told me that part of the reason was to teach students to co-operate on various tasks and to increase socialization.

Or possibly that their world/sun/system is about to undergo changes that will make their world uninhabitable for their type of life. And that they have enough time to construct and launch a ship before this takes place.

Indeed. Though I would argue that for distributing a large amount of data through a mechanic such as torrent, or really any large amount of data that has to be moved from A to B with any regularity, what is needed is a fundamentally sound infrastructure. Some ISP's around the world seems content not upgrading their networks, but rather trying to make bandwidth artificially scare to charge more per bit and byte.

Personally I am happy that the Norwegian government is taking an active hand in ensuring broadband coverage across the entire country, and have now an increased focus on adopting fiber as the next step in increasing capacity. Maybe these goals aren't always implemented as quickly, or as well, as they should have, but at least the government have recognized the importance of such an undertaking. Reports and research referenced by the ministers seem to indicate (though no surprise that material referenced support the argument they are trying to make) that for the districts broadband is good for businesses and the local economy.