This campaign seems to me to pointless and idiotic. I saw the propaganda video that Greenpeace produced, with is heavy handed at best, and I am at a total loss over what they hoped to achieve. Ok, so they bullied a toy company into dropping a partnership with an oil company, but to what end? Now Lego models will never have oil company logos in the sticker sheets?

Greenpeace, you have truly won a landmark victory here....

This is a great idea, it makes the whole engine room smell *DELICIOUS*.

I like VB and VB.NET. When I see a coder willingly using it over another option, I instantly know they are an inept tool. Without it, I would have to speak with them possibly for several minutes in order to make this determination.

Well said. You also want to know if your vaccine causes a recipient to contract rapid onset brain cancer, or some other side effect that might be just as bad as the thing that you are trying to prevent/cure in the first place before you administer it to everyone. The Hippocratic oath contains a line about 'Do no harm'.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" But not on other peoples property, like, say, servers not on your property.

but while it isn't your server it is someone's server, and the same rule applies to their effects. An interesting law that might be passed is that "any party that is holding property or data on behalf of another, must require that a Warrant be served before yielding control of said property or data", forcing cable providers to stop piping every damn packet under the sun directly to the NSA.

Make the punishment death of the highest ranking company member to get them to really fear it.

I got a wife, does that count as a toy? In order to expand my toy collection, I'd have to become a Mormon....

It is interesting that you mention this point about the half-life of Uranium ore. The inverse claim that you could make would be that there longer it takes intelligent life to evolve after the formation of a planet, the more difficult it will be for them to create nuclear weapons, as enrichment will become more and more costly/ time consuming as each successive billion years pass.

Consequently, the the mean longevity of a civilization on an 'old' world would be ever so slightly increased in Drake's equation, as nuclear weapons would be less likely to end it. If you are targeting SETI searches, aim for the older planets in the universe?

Galactic actuarial tables for nuclear fallout insurance drops your rates after you turn ten billion...

"A spokesperson for Ocean Power Technologies announced, that after a number of years of testing and development efforts, that Wave farms are a wash."

*ducks* *runs*

I was thinking the same thing, it would be an interesting event to witness. The only sad thing about living when we do, is we will never get to watch solar collisions from under 100 AU.

... the window (from our single data point) seems rather tight.

Except that our sun isn't the most common type of star in the universe. IANAA (Astronomer), but I recall hearing (possibly from the New Cosmos series) that dwarf stars are far more common than G type stars. Since they put out a constant volume of energy for a very, very long time, this would give life plenty of time to evolve into intelligent lifeforms. The more massive a star, the shorter a window of time for life to evolve near it, so it would make sense for us to focus our efforts looking at smaller stars.

I taught my self to code at age 8, dropped out of college, with only a 101 comp sci class. All elementary school comp sci education was self taught. I recently got thrown on a team at work with a guy who was a couple years out of college with a masters in cs. He is pretty sharp, but he knows little about anything other than elementary algorithms, was no experience with assembly, sql, and hasn't even heard of touring and has never read Knuth. Give me a passionate, self motivated coder any day. They will teach themselves whatever the need to know to solve an interesting problem.

The Soviets didn't send their enemies home on paid leave.

Perhaps they should have. It would have been so much more difficult for the US to paint them as villains with propaganda if they were refereed to as the 'Iron curtain all expense paid vacation empire of evil".

It's the rate of change of magnetic flux that does the trick.

So, in theory, standing near a nuclear explosion to get a direct cranial hit from the EMP it generates should do wonders for your mental capacity....

Don't over think this, the question is fishing for cool games that are worth investigating further. Just drops some names for people to go look up.

As a kid, had played all the good video / rpg games, and could talk about them in depth with others. Nowadays, I don't think I could even name all the game genres...

I have yet to hear a SINGLE rational objection to her critique of video game genres. Lets's play a game, called 'spot the hate-mongering'. Which is it:

1) "Women are often portrayed as helpless and passive in common video game tropes."

2) "Jews are filthy money grubbers, who are out to take over the world."

Now, one of theses statements is ignorant, racist hate-mongering. The other is a neutral observation of a fact. I don't expect you to correctly identify the one that is actual hate-mongering because of your prior posting, but for the sake of the game, give it a try.

Calling what she is saying 'hate-mongering', illustrates that you are TOO FUCKING STUPID TO BE ALLOWED TO SPEAK EVER AGAIN. So, please for the general quality of life on the planet earth, run your balls through a meat grinder and french kiss a wood chipper.