KOTOR MMO confirmed!!!

From Portfolio:

N. Evan Van Zelfden in Los Angeles warns, watch out World of Warcraft. In an interview at E3 this week, Electronic Arts chief executive John Riccitiello said that EA is working on the next version of Star Wars game Knights of the Old Republic, and it will most certainly have a massively multiplayer online component to it.

"We've got two of the most compelling MMOs in the industry in development," said Riccitiello. The first title, based on the Warhammer property, will launch soon. "And the one that people are dying for us to talk to them about -- in partnership with Lucas, coming out of BioWare, which is, I think, quite possibly the most anticipated game, full stop, for the industry at the point when we get closer to telling you about it."

Does Riccitiello mean the oft rumored Knights of the Old Republic Online? "Yes," he said.

Moving into MMOs is an essential component for any gaming company, and it's a big part of the reason Vivendi merged with Activision, for that company's World of Warcraft MMO.

About gorram time! KOTOR was the BEST single person RPG, and behind Tie Fighter, the BEST Star Wars game released. Making it a MMO makes so much sense. WIth Bioware doing it, it'll be good. Much better than the current Star Wars MMO offering from Sony.

In September, the Force is Unleashed

Star Wars: The college budget version.

'Deathstar' has Earth in its sights

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1878

A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays – and Earth may be right in the line of fire.

Astronomers at the University of Sydney, in Australia, first discovered the unusual and beguilingly beautiful star system eight years ago in the Constellation Sagittarius. One member of the pair is a highly unstable star known as a Wolf-Rayet, thought to be the final stage of stellar evolution to precede a cataclysmic supernova explosion.

"When it finally explodes as a supernova, it could emit an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way", said Peter Tuthill, lead researcher of the team who report their findings in the current Astrophysical Journal.

Though the risk may be remote, there is evidence that gamma ray bursts have swept over the planet at various points in Earth's history with a devastating effect on life.

A 2005 study showed that a gamma-ray burst originating within 6,500 light years of Earth could be enough to strip away the ozone layer and cause a mass extinction. Researchers led by Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, U.S., suggest that such an event may have been responsible for a mass extinction 443 million years ago, in the late Ordovician period, which wiped out 60 per cent of life and cooled the planet.

Further research would be required to determine if we are exactly in line with the axis of the system – but even if we are, we probably still have hundreds of thousands of years to come up with a solution, said Tuthill.

We can not repel fire power of that magnitude.

Death Star Cantina.

NSFW language...

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/226005/