If you don't know who Paul Ryan is, why do you care?

Your comment makes, from logical point of view, no sense

Exactly because I don't know who it is, I don't know if this is important enough for me to care. Google search brings up at least some actors and one(?) talk show host, one cinematographer, some politicians and a ton of other people by the same name - no wonder, it's a rather generic one. I guess he must be some politician in some country, given the context, but this still doesn't give me the nearly same info "Paul Ryan, proposed for the next free seat in Canada's highest court" or whatever would do without checking a bunch of results to see which one could match.

Would it kill the editors to write half a sentence about who the hell this "Paul Ryan" guy(?) is supposed to be?

"...as they get ready to download a new version of the flight software on the Mars rover Curiosity..."

Flight software? She flying back too?

"Flight" as in "fight-or-flight response". You know, in case Curiosity encounters Martian life which think it's delicious ... or at least interesting enough to study and take apart.

Those people at NASA think of everything ...

What would you do?

I'd grab a beer, start up the BBQ, prepare some T-Bones with some olive oil and some spices, and lay out in the sun.

Did I win?

Possibly the "balls of steel" award for doing that in the middle of winter. As mild as it might be at the moment, the evenings can get frosty. ;)

The thing is, even if the thread is empty and just meant to help another crime (extortion or worse), if only one person gets murdered, even in a totally unrelated act, and the police didn't say what they said, they'd face a public shitstorm. So they say what they say, put a person or two to try and track down the senders (which will likely fail), maybe set up a sting operation for them, and otherwise ignore the illusionary danger.

I hope "almost certainly" is droll understatement.

It certainly is. On the other hand, assume you can send SMSes in a way which is not traceable and comparatively cheap. Assume you want the entire police force of some place - say, New South Wales - to be too busy and way less effective. Assume you want to commit some other crime which would greatly benefit from the police force in that place being too busy chasing phantoms.

What would you do?

I was unaware that Hades had a Wall Street too. :P

It's in the rather shady part of Hades and they don't like to talk about it.

Try using Google Maps to display a map of Venus on your site. Or, for that matter, try using it to display a map of FaerÃn or Tamriel.

While it's not impossible - setting up your own mapserver bound to a PostGIS database is a lot easier and a lot more flexible, especially for updates to the data.

Many of the game distributors use P2P as well - in the specific case of BitTorrent, for example Blizzard, Square-Enix and anyone who uses the Pando Media Booster (NCSoft, Riot Games, ...) are using it to deliver the games and their patches. Given the popularity of games like WoW, Diablo III or League of Legends, that's not really a "minor share"

Also, Pando Media Booster is basically just a BitTorrent client (really - run their PMB.exe through IDA Pro to see the protocol strings for yourself). This is used by a lot of game companies and others to distribute their files and updates, for example NCSoft (Lineage II, Aion, City of Heroes/Villains, Guild Wars, ...).

Hardware is just physics and physics is just applied mathematics, so everything can be reduced to a mathematical problem ... if you're willing to be silly and unhelpful enough.

FPSs are not the owners or even the originators of co-op multi-player. The original Neverwinter Nights for example had it and it worked very well (a RPG similar to ME).

The original Neverwinter Nights? Of course it hat multi-player. It was a pure multi-player game after all (too bad it was restricted to AOL customers). That's like saying Ultima Online, Everquest or Meridian 59 had "some" multi-player capabilities and it worked for them.

Wake me up when I can finally use 16, 32 or 64 bits per channel, and the channels aren't restricted to RGBA or integers ...

By killing Jews he did not put himself into conflict with the Christians, 5 min. looking into European history will tell you; Killing Jews is the great Christian pastime.

Yeah. For us in Europe, it ranks second only to killing other Christians.

My question would rather be, what does planting my seed in some hoe have to do with sowing?

> What makes them think the moon's crawlspace is not already in use?

By whom? Cat Women? :D