No, it's even worse. Tinfoil hats block most radio signals, but they amplify signals on certain bands reserved for government use.

It's true that war is not about preserving the lives of your own soldiers; there is a word for the context in which an army's first concern is preserving the lives of its own soldiers, and that word is "peacetime." In addition to this, though, the Pentagon needs to concentrate on sparing civilians; the US military has made no attempts to minimize "collateral damage" -- civilians killed in the process of fighting off attackers -- over the course of the Iraq War.

Of course, it would also help if they also ensured that the US doesn't begin future wars without plans to win them in the worst case -- as opposed to just hoping for the best.

I know. "We have some very good information from a warlock"?

If Sherlock Holmes and Jack Chick had graves, they'd both be turning over in them.

This might be taken more seriously, or at least might seem less silly to non-fanatics, if they weren't naming their spaceships for popular SF vehicles. What's next, the VSS Falcon? VSS Serenity? (Oh, wait, NASA did that one.) VSS Galactica? (Although I would object a bit less to a VSS Ebon Hawk or a VSS Marvelous Dragonfly, as at that point they'd obviously not be trying to hide it.)

And, heck, might this mothership's name have originally had an "Online" at the end of it? (We'll know that's a yes if they build a Galaxies or Homeworld...)

That you don't have a problem with marijuana use -- and I'm sure you're familiar with the kinds of people who are supplying the stuff to the US at present -- does not make your argument very convincing. Facebook is public space (one of the reasons I don't have an account on it); I see no reason to object to fishing expeditions there.

And I'd like to know why Cheech and Chong were never arrested after they confessed in a public forum to use of marijuana. Lack of will to enforce (and, as necessary, to reform and revise) laws is never a good sign for a civilization; how familiar are you with the history of China? It's a short and very slippery slope from not punishing those who confess small crimes like drug use, to not punishing those who confess large crimes like torture; and by that point the Mandate of Heaven is in very serious trouble. And where the Mandate goes, the people go. Stories of civilizational collapse and so on are fun, but the reality is death and cruelty and suffering.

Have you ever heard of Alboin of the Lombards and his skull cup? This is my personal favorite example of why anarchy is not a healthy thing, and a strong government with the public good at heart is a good idea. Ours no longer has the public good at heart -- but the answer is to reform it, not to overthrow it.

They do indeed have a pro-global-warming bias. Check out the apologetics on their wiki.

Seriously, it's called Mafia Wars. The dev team was just getting into character.

Not really. Ever heard of Operation Gomorrah? The whole of UK Bomber Command went out one night with the objective of destroying the city of Hamburg; they succeeded in starting enormous firestorms, but only killed about 20,000 civilians (speaking of which...) of a population of several hundred thousand, lost a large number of bombers in the process, and didn't significantly degrade Hamburg's industrial and munitions output. (And I don't need to tell you that Goebbels had a field day with it. Much of the stubborn resistance of Germany, and of Japan -- especially towards the end of the war -- was the conviction that defeat meant annihilation, a conviction strongly reinforced by things like strategic bombing or, say, the Morgenthau Plan. Defeat _did_ mean annihilation for the war criminals at the top of the military hierarchies; but they would have had an awfully hard time keeping control had the populace not had reason to go along with them.)

The US strategic-bombing campaign, which focused on industries and raw materials where the UK was explicitly targeting civilians, was a more productive one; but even then, the main result of the US-UK emphasis on strategic bombers was to leave ground forces deprived of CAS -- which the Nazis and Soviets had in abundance, while the inventors of dive-bombing, the US military, had to use P-38s, P-47s and P-51s instead of having purpose-built tactical bombers.

In the end, wars are won best by beating the enemy, especially their infantry. Read the works of H. John Poole, a retired Marine gunnery sergeant (a very prestigious rank in the Corps), for more detail on this. (As to counterinsurgency, it's a solved problem if you know how to do it -- see David Galula's _Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice_.

But the program discussed here sounds useful, but has some dangerous systemic biases. The US attitude towards civilian casualties (illustrated by a quote in Poole's Tactics of the Crescent Moon) is a disturbingly cavalier one; drones of this sort used for attack, with no weapon more precise than the Hellfire thermobaric missile, would further encourage that attitude. Drones as reconnaissance, though, would be great; it's hard to equip infantry with advanced imaging equipment and keep it in service, and you can often see things from above that are less obvious from ground level...

If beautiful women don't have children, being beautiful is evolutionarily maladaptive, and will be selected out. Margaret Sanger's not working out so well...

George Orwell wondered why it was that only English-speaking intellectuals hated, rather than loved and were proud of, their home civilization. If he had taken the time to look at other distinctive traits of English-speaking cultures, he would have figured out why: no other civilization has a despised subculture for smart people. Anime is mainstream in Japan; enormous, borderline-crackpot philosophical theories are mainstream in Germany; Fernand Braudel, who wrote The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (including footnotes) from memory while he was imprisoned by the Nazis, would be among much more similar minds at Google than at Citigroup.

Note also that if Hodgman really thinks that jockdom wins wars, he hasn't heard of the Battle of Leuctra, to say nothing of the Vietnam War.

Those neo-Nazis -- we should cleanse our racial stock of this inferior material!

(Sorry for replying to the spam, but this was too good to pass up.)

Don't we already have examples of skeletons that are mixtures of Neandertal and Cro-Magnon features?

Also note that Cro-magnons had skull shapes somewhat similar to Neandertals (prognathous, low-browed, pronounced eyebrow ridges), although they had larger cranial capacity than contemporary H. S. sapiens; and they had the same kind of stature as Neandertals. Intermarriage/interbreeding between the two species would not have been inconceivable, and would not have needed all that much alcohol.

As to inter-fertility, isn't it genus, not species, that tends to be the barrier?

A more solid style of construction wouldn't hurt, either. I remember that a famous anthropology joke/thought-experiment in the '70s -- "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" -- spoke of how most Nacerima buildings were wattle-and-daub, and that's hardly an exaggeration. If we built with brick or stone, we'd have better insulation right there; brick is the low-budget version of semi-subterranean building. (The high-budget version wouldn't hurt either, but it's surprisingly expensive to dig a hole in the ground.)

The other pitfall that you illustrate is that user-created content is a minefield of IP violations. All of your examples except the one people are commenting on could probably get a game shut down, or at least forced to defend itself legally; I seem to recall hearing about this happening to Little Big Planet, and the same problem even crops up with Spore. Its creature-, building-, and vehicle-creators are hardly easy to use, but it has a whole package of Nintendo content (a Wii-controller-shaped factory, a Bob-omb spaceship, etc.), and I myself created a herbivorous boar-person species that was basically Ganon with his serial numbers filed off and minus sixty or eighty extra pounds. (Named and tagged as such, of course...)

This was before I opted for Spore ornithology instead, creating cranes, swans and the like... but even there, I was creating creatures from an existing setting, only I was using the Audubon Guide instead of Hyrule. Birds are probably public-domain by now (assuming "life of the author" doesn't count resurrection), but the same point holds -- these are not original creations.

There was a double layer of irony in the particular case of Spore -- zealous IP protection for a bottled incitement to IP violations...

Correction -- in my comment above, I'd meant Stardock, with the piracy numbers for Demigod. (The same situation occurred with indie darling World of Goo.)