So if I am in possession of a Stinger missile and am nicked for the illegal possession of dangerous weapons that is a ridiculous thing to do? If I am in possession of large quantities of sarin gas It's ridiculous to arrest me and charge me for possession of dangerous chemical weapons?

Your examples are not analogous. The missiles and the sarin gas allow you to cause harm to others at some point in the future. With the porn you're talking about evidence of abuse (ignoring the sexting, etc... cases) that has already occurred. It'd be like arresting someone for having pictures of the results of your stinger missile or sarin gas attack. Not something most of us care to see, but it's not obvious how additional harm is being caused by the pictures.

It's actually kind of ironic if you think of it in the bigger crime context. How much easier would most crimes be to prosecute if pictures of them were readily available, yet here we have a case where possession/dissemination of evidence that a crime was committed is itself illegal. The law basically "If you're going to abuse children keep it quiet."

if making possession of such material illegal gives police leverage then need to force me to tell them who supplied it or even to force my cooperation in stinging the perpetrators?

If the person giving you such material is dumb enough to give you any information that can lead back to him, the police don't need your help. And besides, Obstruction of Justice is a crime itself.

less grindy than other MMORPGs at the time.
Missions that consist entirely of [Go here|Kill some things|Click on something]{pick 1-3} were painfully boring so grinding was the way forward for a lot of us.

It helped that I played a Tanker, which was a horribly unbalanced class at the time. I remember forming a team, and single-handedly holding aggro on an entire instance worth of mobs, herding them into a corner, and letting the blasters let loose all at once. Good times.

I remember that too, it lasted a month then got nerfed, but it was CoH at its best - pulling and killing (no exaggeration) 200 monsters at a time is an epic and awe inspiring experience I have yet to see replicated in any other MMO.
Speaking of nerfing...
The method I used to grind my scrapper to 40 (Underlings or some class of tiny monster) got nerfed.
My Fire/Radiation Controller got nerfed.
Power leveling by forcing the average party to a middle player and using a high level player to kill high level monsters got nerfed.

If there ever was a game that was "You will play our way or not at all" it was CoH. NCSoft did a good job of making my heroes feel less powerful with each successive patch and for me that made the game forgettable. And I only played from [release] to [release + 3 months].

Pregnant women still seek sex.

I heard this explained recently using the example of horses (I think this came from a cracked article, so take it with a grain of salt). If there are multiple males around and a male will kill any offspring perceived not to be his own, then the female will mate with all the available males so that they all perceive the offspring as their own. Obviously this is not perfectly applicable to modern humans, but it doesn't seem far fetched that the biological urge would still be buried in our DNA somewhere.

The logical course of action then is for sex-deprived people to start killing all offspring that isn't theirs so that the opposite sex will put out more for fear of not passing on their genes.

I am a southpaw (AKA lefty) who started using the arrow keys and "" for strafing in the Doom 1 days and haven't found a reason to switch except for the occasional wrist pain when I go on a serious FPS binge. I actually just picked up Orcs Must Die 1 about a week ago when it was on sale and found the transition to WASD surprisingly easy - enough that I am reconsidering my keys.

Back on topic, these games get a thumbs up from me too.

So, if life sprouted on this planet, it stands to reason it's happened everywhere. Ergo, we most likely are not 'alone'.

Continuing that line of thinking, you may find these two articles interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Filter

My apologies if you're already familiar with these concepts.

you don't need to claim Windows XP compatibility

In an ideal world, yes. In the real world there are stakeholders and business requirements influencing this. I know of a case where a certain in-house web app was built such that it only worked in IE6. It isn't hard to imagine this influencing the OS installed on new hardware. Hardware requirements can be influenced by the feature set. Between the two I assure you it is possible to get new hardware/old OS combinations.

you shouldn't be installing it on new hardware at this late date

This is naive. If you're a software outfit and you claim your app supports XP you need to verify it'll actually work under XP. Doing so requires an XP installation. If your hardware requirements dictate recent hardware, you need XP on new hardware.

I hope these things are at least carrying transponders so they even make a blip on the radar at all.

They'd still show up on radar without a transponder and it would make no sense at all to not have a $200 transponder on $200,000 drone. Without a transponder ATC just wouldn't have any altitude data (if turning off your transponder was all it took to hide from radar, radar would be useless in a war situation where the enemy is trying to hide - obviously not the case - and there would be no need for stealth aircraft). Aircraft are required have to be carrying an altitude reporting transponder to enter most controlled airspace for safety reasons. Aircraft are required to contact ATC prior to entering, and/or stay in continuous contact with ATC also for safety reasons.

The FAA isn't stupid when it comes to safety (you might even say they're borderline paranoid). They won't give arbitrary exceptions to safety-related regulations.

I'm confused - when did pubic wigs enter the equation?

I believe we can simplify out 'gynecologist' from your boolean expression, because consent is not optional even if 'gynecologist' == true. Apparently current implementation substitutes variable 'TSAagent' in its place however.

whoops - There were suppose to be <Off-topic rant> tags around those last two paragraphs. Darn HTML stripping.

people are still spending a LOT of time playing in order to earn this kind of money.

Not necessarily. If you have ISK to invest it doesn't take a lot of time to make more. I've made about 600 million ISK each of the last couple months by spending 15 minutes a day managing my investments. I guess you could argue for 7.5 hours invested per month this is not a very good pay rate but in the MMO scheme of things this is virtually no time at all.

I've come to a point where the game is actually boring because I have more cash than I need and nothing left to work for because skills take so long to train. I have the best gear I can buy for my skills, and my progression to bigger and better things is limited entirely by the flow of time rather than anything that gives me an incentive to play the game. I consider this an immense design flaw. Level 4 missions are boring. Mining is boring. Exploring is marginally interesting in the same way as a sudoku puzzle but ultimately futile because it just nets me more money. Switching to a PvP clone slows down skill training which is admittedly a tough decision in the face of mounting boredom. There is no reason for me to even log in besides managing investments and talking to corpmates. Needless to say I'm looking forward to Diablo3.

Cue some tool replying to this saying "If you can buy everything you need with under X bajillion ISK then you must not have faction module ABC which offers 0.0001% better stats than your meta-level 4 ABC module."

Run-off voting also deserves a mention in this context and combats the same problem described in the parent. It provides a ranking system for candidates rather than a simple binary approve/disapprove, at a cost of extra complexity that would probably confound the stupid 40% mentioned in the parent.

From an anecdote I heard somewhere recently (I think in 'The Knight' episode of Terry Jones' Medieval Lives [highly recommend it, was on Netflix instant, these days who knows]) not only was he hard press to run away, he was hard pressed to even stand up again. The armor, however, was so good at its job you couldn't hurt him while he was on the ground until you brought out the boiling oil.

The article is wrong. The protests are *NOT* in reaction to buying in game items. They are in reaction to buying skill points and faction standings (which is currently NOT possible) and the absurd prices of all the vanity items (lowest end items are around $20). Currently the rate at which you gain skill points is currently determined by your characters ability scores and the absolute best gear you can buy only increases this rate by around 20%. It takes several months worth of skill points to fly the best ships. This is the ONLY factor currently keeping day-1 players out of the game's best ships (money is not a factor because of PLEX as you noted). The WoW/other MMO equivalent would be buying completely leveled and elite geared character directly from Blizzard.

Amusing tidbit: several alliances have declared players wearing the $68 item to be Kill On Sight. Spending that $68 is currently tantamount to putting a bounty on yourself, and the only place in EVE you cannot be attacked is while docked in a station.