Practically speaking, there ARE infinite resources. The problem is that we are too busy focusing solely on Earth. We have an entire solar system we can exploit for resources. All it requires is a government to think ahead instead of leaving the space industry to flounder.

Sounds more to me like you're jumping on a bandwagon and hating what they do regardless of what they do. For example, this quote:

and you say:

Well you know what bub, was anything they said there actually incorrect? No! It wasn't! The series has a huge playerbase, sells well, engages people for hundreds of hours in multplayer. By every metric they use, the game excels and has the potential to be even better. So how about you set aside your elitist bias and preconceived notion and look at reality when it bites you in the ass. Call of Duty is popular, millions of people like this game, and the execs know that, and judging by this memo they seem to know that they need to improve their product for it to continue selling.

Your entire post can be summarized as: "Stop liking the things I don't like!"

Let's use synthetic skin that almost certainly doesn't fully reflect the effects on an actual human or animal!

What if that new face cream you've got turns out to be a contact poison that only effects the liver? This fancy synthetic skin come with a liver? Oh it doesn't?

Sounds to me like a cost cutting measure by the company that is going to result in less safe skin care products, and their marketing is playing off the animal rights angle so people don't question it.

I understand the desire to cut out animal testing, and I fully support that. But the human body is complex, some chemical that makes your skin smooth or clears your nostrils might also cause nerve tissue damage. We quite simply cannot match the complexity of the human body synthetically right now, it is foolish and naive to think that you can test a chemical on only one part of the body and ignore all the other parts because they're not related.

Um, Halo?

I mean, pretty much every single thing you're pining for is in every Halo game. Shit I can't even count the number of hours I've spent playing co-op through all five of them. On a bang/buck point alone those games have been the single best entertainment purchases I have ever made.

Why is it always Mars this, Mars that?

In every way, shape, and form, Venus is a better target to explore than Mars.

It is closer to us, it has a thicker atmosphere that allows actual sizable payloads to be landed Unlike Mars, it is closer to the sun with more usable solar energy, it has a habitable zone in its upper atmosphere that is the most earth-like environment within our solar system, it has nearly the same gravity as Earth, and there is SO MUCH we still don't know about Venus.

We could colonize Venus with simple aerostat habitats, essentially floating sky cities or zeppelins, which remain bouyant in the upper venereal atmosphere at Earth-normal pressure and temperature, with said habitats creating water, oxygen, lifting gas, and rocket fuel solely out of the H2SO4 in the atmosphere and power from the sun. We could use the increased solar flux to power orbital factories, smelters, and foundries, while putting mineral-rich asteroids into orbit around Venus for mining - a location where a mistake and planetary impact won't end humanity. We could even Terraform, in a realistic timeframe the upper atmosphere to something that's breathable to humans, and then start seeding it with Earth-based life.

On top of that we can research an environment where a run-away global warming effect has taken place and see how that compares to Earth, and explore an incredibly alien surface with robots, possibly even performing tele-mining operations for materials and resources.

Anything we could do on Mars, we can do on Venus better.

Sadly, [or not, depending on your outlook] aliens within a hundred lightyears probably won't be able to detect us by our radio signals.

Journalists, knowing very little of science, make the mistake of assuming that the only part of the equation that matters here is the speed the signal travels at, and how long it's been traveling for. Ergo you get "ZOMG we sent out radio signals a hundred years ago, that means anything within a hundred lightyears can see us!"

What they don't seem to consider is the strength of the signal. Thanks to the inverse square law, any signal we blast into the cosmos is going to get fainter and fainter the further it travels. Eventually you get to a distance where the signal is imperceptible above the noise of the universe itself. Now, said aliens could still have some pretty impressive detecting gear - radiotelescopes the size of planets? Who know! But chances are they don't, and we've gone completely unnoticed.

Except he didn't. I was watching the thread the guy posted on 4chan going "LOL LOOK AT WHAT I GOT ACCESS TO GUISE, SHOULD I POST SOME EMAILS!??!?"

And then he gave everyone the password and some whiteknight immediately changed it and notified the authorities.

You'd think that if he were trying to discredit Palin he would've, oh I don't know, saved all the emails and posted them somewhere? The guy was an idiot, but a malicious idiot he was not. He wasn't part of the "left" he wasn't told to politically assassinate Palin and end her chances at election. He was an idiot who thought it'd be funny to break into a presidential candidates' email and brag about it to people on 4chan. Do you know what the catchphrase "for the lulz?" means? That's what this was at its heart. No more motivation than "oh man it'd be fucking ace if people got to see Palin's emails." She just happened to be the low hanging fruit with a bad password.

It still amazes me how this story has been twisted by demagogues to be completely different from what actually happened.

Adeptus Orthodontus comics based on Space Marines from Warhammer 40k, courtesy of a /tg/ drawfag:

http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/6194/adeptusorthodontusvscsm.jpg

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/4944/nottoothfairy.jpg

Yes, actually. You've made the mistake in assuming they're only going to go after people if the movie bombs. They're obviously trying to cover the costs of this movie. [5000 people, each sued for $2900 = $14.5 million, movie cost $15 million] So it's not going to matter if the movie bombs or not, they're going to sue people just because it means covering some of their costs and increasing their overall profit.

This is a commonly parroted meme, but it's simply not true. Helium 3 on the moon measures about 0.01ppm - you need to dig up around 100 million tons of lunar regolith to get one ton of Helium-3. Sorry to say, that's neither cost effective nor net-energy positive. The moon will never be mined for Helium-3. Ever. Especially not when there are multiple gas-giants in our solar system with Helium-3 floating in their atmosphere's that could simply be scooped up.

While I agree there are some issues with freedom therein, I can also see how taking control of motor vehicles out of the hands of the general person, and into the hands of a computer is going to massively improve safety.

Think of all the dangerous maneuvers and careless driving you've seen. That will be no more - speeds on highways can be increased, distances between cars can be decreased. You won't be driving the car yourself anymore, but you'll get to your destination faster and more safely than you do now.

Anyways, I very much doubt manually driving a vehicle will ever disappear. Driving is fun, it's something people enjoy - what this will simply do is eliminate all those times you wouldn't have fun driving, by giving control over to the computer whenever you feel like stopping.

Not enough to be worth mining. At about 0.01ppm, you need to mine a hundred million tons of lunar regolith to get one ton of Helium 3, this doesn't even begin to count the energy required to extract the helium.

It's basically pointless to mine, you'd spend more energy extracting what little there is than you'd get from using it as fuel in fusion reactors we haven't even invented yet. Nevermind the logistics required in mining a hundred million tons of rock on the MOON.

Umm... what?
This guy wasn't an extremist anything, I was there reading the thread when he posted it, he mentioned in his thread that there wasn't anything interesting in it. [Apparently this somehow gets construed as him being an evil liberal socialist hippie extremist out to overthrow the government...] Then some whiteknight went and changed the password so that nobody could access the account.

The dude was just doing what any average person in his position would be doing if they got to look at Obama's emails or Dick Cheney's emails or Bush's emails.

As a Canadian, I've got to say, this Republican vs Democrat stuff is really really getting out of hand. Are you people children or adults, FFS.

Yes, actually the range is effectively infinite, but you have forgotten one VERY important thing - The inverse square law. As the distance from the explosion increases, the amount of energy/gamma rays hitting you decreases, and it decreases FAST.

People have already put together calculators for playing around with this kinda stuff - http://www.5596.org/cgi-bin/nuke.php and generally speaking, outside of 5-10 kilometers, the worst that will happen is a singed paintjob.

Yeah, sure. So long as you aren't wearing any Nazi symbols, or showing Nazi symbols in a game, or showing too much violence/blood in a game or...

Of course, German residents will [in typical fashion] defend such actions on the part of the government, but the way I see it, if Nazism is bad enough that there's enormous backlash against it in Germany, you shouldn't even NEED to censor it. People can make up their own goddamn minds.

Really, all the censorship serves to do is flush it under a rug. The people who want to openly support Nazism [or anything else] should be free to do so, and I should be equally free to deride those people for their beliefs.

Trying to hide it under the rug doesn't work, and should not be something that a "free and democratic" society should even consider doing.