Aside from common sense, there are other issues that may arise from unwashed pants. Fungal problems are among the first that come to mind. Ever seen a boy with 15-month jock itch spread over his legs?

They were attempting to travel down the rabbit hole...

This is exactly why I think it is negligible that no one outside of a very select group of scientists is consulted as to the safety of this type of experiment. I live very near the accelerator in Illinois, and I dread the day they are scheduled to ramp up this new one to its full potential. What if they do make the whole Earth go boom? What if there is a God, and he isn't happy about us playing with creation? Did anyone ask the rest of us before they tried? With all the problems that occurred during the various stages of building and testing the new Collider, theory that perhaps it was the universe defensively preventing its unmaking doesn’t sound that far-fetched any longer :)

One more step towards planting a bug in my arse. We haven't had privacy rights in the way we knew them as children since the Patriot Act. Your Internet, phone, cellular, Satellite, and other electronic communications are not private. In the internet of "National Security", the government as the right to review anything they want. I am not a "big brother" alarmist by any means, but if you follow the path laid clear by Slashdot alone in the last year it paints a picture of: implanted chips for kids, biometric data collection, communication monitoring, throttling, and blocking, ISP filtering, the review of everything from website traffic to text msgs in the name of preventing child porn, cameras at every stoplight and street corner, non-military UAVs for the police force, etc. Add these additional "emergency powers", and there is just one more medium that the federal government has complete control over, any time they deem it necessary. Yay for our side.... or have we already lost?

How about we create a tax on video games to support the failing board game industry? Or 20% tax on fuel injectors to subsidize the failing buggy whip market? Give me a friggin break people. It was NEVER the government's responsibility to support failing market initiatives, or outdated technology. The need creates the market. If the market isn't buying it, then the need has moved elsewhere. Imagine this: We let the newspapers die. There are no longer major news websites associated with those papers to provide material for pseudo news groups to link to for free. Other new sources will spring up, and the more legitimate and satisfying of those will flourish, and grow to become larger news sites. Those new sources of news will decide how best to be profitable, either by charging a fee for access to their service, or by using the free popularity model to drive the desirability for advertising space within their site. How do you think all these "Free" sites became popular, and then desirable, and finally powerful? (Google, Myspace, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.) Let the genre evolve how it will. Stop squeezing more money out of our @$$E$ by trying to reverse time and evolution already!

Booo hisss ..... :)

How does this affect gamers then, specifically MMOs? You are connected at a constant up/down stream connection that takes advantage of whatever available bandwidth you have as far as I know (unconfirmed). You are generally connected for a lot longer than 15 min. and you are not downloading anything p2p, yet your heavy usage is going to be punished now I assume. For those of us that purchase the higher bandwidth connections to begin with in order to game, this bytes :) Can anyone confirm how they prioritize gaming traffic over their networks?

What a terrible idea! Pain sensors exist for a reason - to let even big dumb animals realize when something hurts, so they can attempt to remove themselves from the cause if possible. I don't believe morally that removing the end-result (pain) makes causing their body harm any less inhumane.

More importantly, there are other reasons for removing the factory farm. You are what you eat folks. Animals that feed on grass and walk around becoming strong are inherently HEALTHIER, which means you are too. They require fewer antibiotics, steroids, and anything else you don't want to ingest on a regular basis.

Hey, maybe we should bring back the home lobotomy kits so that people won't be bored anymore 8)-

I force myself to spell correctly (even when typing) and can't stand what I read within MMOs, or even in the workplace most of the time these days. I also try to never use a calculator, and it allows me to retain my ability to compute in my head. The grammatical ability of the average person I game with is just atrocious. I am chastised for correcting people with "what are you an English teacher?". What they don't realize however is that to the rest of the world, they sound ignorant. I do find that I type quite a bit faster than I write these days. My writing was never great, but it has definitely declined. More importantly, I tried to write in cursive not long ago, and realized that my brain/hands have forgotten some of the letters. If you don't use it, you might not lose it entirely, but you do lose your proficiency!

If your cell carrier does not charge by the second, they round UP to the nearest full minute. If they do, they increment them all, and while you don't think 15 seconds is costing you much, multiply that by the number of times per year you listen to those messages. Then multiply that by the number of cell phone users...