Well, we now know what "living metal" the Robot was made out of in that old Tom Baker episode. They shot it with a laser, and it grew. Ergo, fullerenes.

From the sound of it, I almost thought "The Walking Dead" was based on a FPS to begin with.

Heck, next they'll want to make a game out of that awful "Battleship" movie. Oh, wait...

This story seems like an echo of the one a day or so ago about Linux being critical to the success of the LHC. Something with generic programmability supports something specific, then gets discussed as a tool for that specific task. Probably a lot of the comments there apply here.

Worse, the expected response might be for aliens to transmit the contents of the record back to us, to show us they're intelligent and want to start a chain of communication. Oops, but that would be considered a crime?

You know, some sci fi writer with the right wit (maybe Scalzi?) could make a really good spoof short story out of this one.

Should work fine, until the system decides the chrome-plated car driving in front of you is a glare hazard, and decides not to illuminate it...

Personally, I think Infrared cameras are a better solution; the wavelength is long enough it goes around a lot of rain and snow. Some cars have these already, but they need to make it more standard/affordable.

Wouldn't quite go that far... more like saying you and your neighbor are both being prosecuted together rather than being tried separately because you both used BT. You may be right about it holding up, but I would see the question more as one of whether you're two individuals interacting with the same technical resource, versus two individuals interacting with each other.

Sort of, but in this day and age, don't many carriers use packet-switched comms rather than circuit based for long distance telephony anyway?

Did you interact with someone if your telephone call to party A was carried on the same transatlantic phone cable as someone else's call to party B?

I hate to say it, but sometimes the global warming topics get difficult to read. The topic is sort of an instant ticket to 800+ posts with high-tension opinions on both sides.

Obligatory subthread arguments include:
--the quality of the science (both for and against)
--who's evil (whoever authored the story the thread is based on is a given, but who else?)
--how dumb the public is
--alternative energy

Let's face it. Orson Scott Card was wrong. xkcd was right

Or maybe super-deep dives, space station/vacuum suit emergencies...

...they were experimenting with Rabbits.

Of course, the truth is that of the population willing to respond to a survey about Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, the Hulk, Spiderman, and alien invasions, probably two-thirds secretly hope Bruce Banner gets elected by write-in vote.

Well, yes, for residents of countries that have that power, the Internet is, in fact already broken.

Sounds like you've done a lot on making different pieces of the IT puzzle work together on the infrastructure side. Maybe there's something there?

When it costs eight or nine orders of magnitude more to produce the money than the face value of the money itself, that's generally regarded as a design flaw. It's a sure bet that you could absorb a whole heck of a lot of losses from counterfeiting for the cost of inventing new quantum particle manipulation and testing technologies and distributing them throughout a banking/finance system. By the time it pays for itself, you'd need to have currency that can survive commerce via warp drive.

Separate point -- even if the physics don't preclude the whole concept, what do you want to bet you couldn't do the testing in a non-destructive manner (i.e., without affecting the properties of the quantum particles). "Well, it WAS a real $20 bill. Oops."