The DDO Store has been balanced so you can NOT make in-game money from store transactions. The items bought with Turbine points are bound to character or account, and cannot be traded or sold. There are no items purchasable through the DDO store that cannot be found in game with the exception of the cosmetic items that have no gameplay impact. For less than the price of a year's subscription, you can buy every Adventure (Content) Pack, Warforged, Monk, a shared bank tab, and have enough left over for a couple of extra character slots, making your account access the same as a VIP (subscriber), while keeping access to this content without ever paying again. With Turbine running sales just about every weekend, you could likely end up will all content for less than that if you are patient and vigilant. I like being able to get the equivalent of a lifetime subscription when I know it is a game I would have spent that much on in the long run anyways. You can also get access to Adventure Pack material without committing to the entire pack's purchase by someone who already owns the content getting a guest pass for you. VIPs who already have all content and get the 500 bonus points a month, and are not total social reprobates, are usually willing to get a guest pass for guild mates or friends to run a particularly good quest chain with.

Apparently you were not paying attention, as they were using the planet's symbol for point of origin and it did not work until they changed to the Earth symbol. The 9th chevron was obviously not a point of origin, rather a code lock, as was stated in the episode,

Over 100,000 years, not 10,000, this was launched long before the Ancients even left for the Pegasus galaxy, which was, interestingly, the first leg of Destiny's journey. The scrubbers were using a chemical reactant for cleansing the air, which would degrade over time even if not used, though with the amount of damage to the ship, it is likely there have been inhabitants on board in the past.

The ship would only have to stop by a planet with a suitable atmosphere and remotely dial the gate on the planet to get an incoming wormhole to the ship, pressure differential would allow air to flow from the planet to the ship..

1) The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss is a very enlightening book, if a bit outdated, that discusses the physics behind the warp drive, inertial dampeners, transporters, and other things. Warp drive is a localized warping of space-time which allows the vessel to travel faster than the speed of light relative to distant objects, local objects within the warp field are relatively stationary with respect to the vessel.

2) Photon torpedoes use an impulse drive for propulsion, not a warp drive. If they used a miniaturized warp drive, there would be no need for a warhead, just initiate a core breach, and no variable yield to the torpedo either.

I do agree there were some solutions to problems that could have made the ship more powerful, such as combining replicator and transporter technology to beam replacement parts into place as soon as they were damaged, but this is a fictional show, and would grow quite boring if the ship was nigh indestructible.

As for SG:U, the Senator's sacrifice was a dramatic plot element, which will have a greater impact than just cutting off one of the air leaks. The ramifications will reverberate through the characters' relationships, and will serve as motivations for the future. If you insist upon a technological explanation, consider that the Ancients were an intelligent race of engineers, who would not want something as important at the rear hatch of a shuttle to be opened or closed by a falling object, and would likely include biometric sensors to determine if the contacting appendage was living or not. For remote operation of the door, there were internal systems of the ship itself, that have obviously degraded over the hundreds of thousands of years the ship has been traveling.

Destiny is not traveling through hyperspace, as I have seen some say, rather it is moving faster than light through normal space. Some would say this is impossible as it requires infinite energy to accelerate any mass to the speed of light, and they would be correct except that Destiny does not appear to accelerate at all. From the visual effect used, I would venture a guess that there is a form of transporter beaming technology being used to shift the entire ship instantaneously from sub-light speeds to FTL without acceleration.

Just because a formula is unknown does not mean it does not exist.

Chaos is simply something of a high enough order as to be too complex for current knowledge to accurately describe.

Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.

If we knew all the laws of the universe, and the current state of all variables involved, we could accurately predict the outcome of any situation. There is no free will, only the guise of such due to a lack of understanding of the underlying mechanics.

Heat is only transferred through conduction or radiation, with radiation being the most efficient, convection is a movement of heated materials, but the heat itself is only ever conducted or radiated away.

The key to the operation of any type of thermo-electric device is temprature differential, the greater the difference in temperature from one end to the other, the greater the power output. Sitting in the sun on earth, there would be a maximum of about 20-30 degrees difference in the most ideal situations from the sunny side to the shaded side.

We try to be a bit more careful with our astronauts these days, few applicants are test pilots any more, we like getting people back safely. There is no cold war or space race driving us to take risks to achieve goals. When we lose people and equipment, we now take sufficient time to understand what went wrong and how to fix it. And the budget hasn't been broken so much as drasticly slashed by people who have no concept of the benefit of space exploration.

That was simply one of my statements establishing tone, I believe that attempting to divert fom the issue at hand is a major roadblock to good communication.

I was referring to before the action is taken, as in the planning stages. Certain technologies should be kept secret for as long as possible to enable defenses to be developed before rogue states or hostile governments get ahold of them.

I personally appreciate the DEA busting the meth lab in the apartment next door before they burn down the building, I like knowing they are trying to keep dangerous chemicals like PCP, GHB, MDMA and others out of the hands of people who would abuse them and cause dangerous situations for others. That said, there are certain controlled substances that have no proven medically detrimental side effects, or certainly less so than alchohol or tobacco, which should be legalized and taxed.

And the less likely things like the space program, satellite communications, GPS, nuclear medicine, and numerous other technologies would have been developed.

No, we don't. Are you one of the misguided people who believe the military should announce battle plans to the world before they are carried out? Should the DEA hold a press conference to let us know the details of the multi-million dollar drug ring they are about to bust? That anyone who wants it should be able to get information on what secret defense projects we are working on? Information is valuable, and some information loses value when shared, while others gain value, the trick is being able to recognize which is which. There are certainly some areas where total transparency should be enforced, areas where security and safety would not be compromised, but to demand the information when its dissemination could lead to someone getting hurt or worse, is tantamount to injuring the person yourself.

From what I've seen of the blog in question, there is nothing in the blog to constitute stalking, since all information presented is a matter of public record, it is merely consolidated into a single location for easy access. I cannot say what her actions were outside the blog, if she was calling officers or showing up at their houses when they were off duty to press them about work related subjects, then that is harassment, but providing access to publicly available information is not. While true that some of the information released was of a sensitive nature, and should not, in good concience, have been posted, it was still publicly available. Maybe it is time for the police department to take a closer look at its own data retention policies to ensure that critically sensitive information about ongoing operations is not released until the operation has concluded, excepting valid FOIA requests.

And if you plant a remote detonator mine on the vehicle, the driver put the pedal down and ignores traffic laws. I recommend riding a city bus like this.

Yes, there are.

Any conceivable universe exists in some parallel. Every story written, game played, world imagined, and possibility contemplated exists somewhere in the multiverse.

That is one of the things I enjoy keeping in the back of my head as I play games like Fable, Oblivion, Fallout, and Neverwinter Nights, and pretty much any game in which you have a world you can influence. Played Black & White? You are a god to some civilizations out there, just not in this aspect of the multiverse, so don't get your ego too inflated.

This can lead to interesting philosophical questions. If the world I was just running around Bowerstone Old Town summoning up Lvl5 Undead with safety mode off and letting them roam around slaughtering everyone really exists, does that have an effect my karma? Does the world where I am loved by all and have vanquished every last scrap of evil couterbalance it? What happenes after I save and quit for the final time, does the world go on without me, or does it wait for the day I might return?

The religion of Science demands we question everything, rather than accept all on blind faith.

It is actually fairly simple relativity, the faster an object moves relative to another, the slower its time reference to the other is. Even though relative to each other from an outside viewpoint they seem to be travelling passed each other at greater than the speed of light, Each experiences a time dialation relative to mass and velocity, so in the frame of reference where the particles collide, they are moving much slower than the speed of light due to time taking longer. When the collision occurs, velocity is mostly cancelled out relative to the surrounding environment, and all of the energy that was contained in the high-speed sub-atomic particles is released in a cloud of elementary particles, which recombine into new and interesting matter. It is out of this cloud that the quark-gluon plasma is formed, which in turn is theoretically capable of forming quantum singularities at high enough energy densities. The faster you can get a particle moving, the higher its energy level is, the higher the density of energy will be at moment of collision.

You seem to be using secondary definitions of invasion that don't apply to the concept of imperialism. The primary definition, "incursion of an army for conquest or plunder," does apply to imperialism, and is not something America has engaged in for quite some time. You cite Iraq and Afghanistan as examples of American imperialism, yet in what way have we come to conquer or plunder? If conquest was our aim, why would we enable them to set up their own democratic government rather than claiming them as a U.S. Territory and institutiong our own? If plunder was our goal, would we not have taken the oil instead of buying it? In reference to Iraq, people love to toss out the "fact" that no WMDs have been recovered, which in itself is not entirely accurate, caches have been found scattered about, but nothing large enough to be news worthy. I find myself constantly having to remind people that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. We know Saddam had the chemical weapons, and we know he used them. Just because he hid/destroyed/sold them we are supposed to pretend they never existed? We also know that the Taliban supported Al-Qaeda, who we know attacked us on 9/11, we know they controlled the remains of Afghanistan, and we know it was partly our fault they were there in the first place, giving us some responsibility in cleaning up the mess. In both of these countries, the US has led the efforts to break the stranglehold of tyrannical governments that have stifled innovation and economic growth, enabling the people to make their own choices. The economies in both Iraq and Afghanistan are doing much better than they were before we intervened.

I don't seem to be able to find any instances of American conquest since WWII and the islands we took from Japan, some of which they had taken from us, and some of which were later returned to Japan. I would hesitate to call this imperialism, however, since these islands were of tactical significance in our war with Japan, both as the means for the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, and the US to attack Japan. Islands that held no military significance were isolated until after the war, rather than invaded.

I am not familiar enough with Russian history to verify or deny their recent acts of imperialism, and the atrocities I am familiar with are not germane to this descussion, and indeed are irrelevant to my point. You seem quick to deflect the finger from Russia towards the US, but provide no supporting facts to your argument, though you do provide loosely veiled hints at other facts not relative to the point you were attempting to dispute. Even if there was a long list of countries invaded by the US, that would not make it right for anyone else to do so, excepting circumstances where territory was being reclaimed by the original inhabitants, but then there are no nations in existence today that did not conquer their land from someone else if you look far enough into the past. Some would like to use that as justification of human nature to go to war and conquere others, but I would argue it is the animal nature that is territorial, and it is the human nature that seeks to improve itself, to rise above the base animal instincts and consider the betterment of the society and species along with the individual. Through intelligent discourse and sharing of information is this accomplished. Survival of the fittest does not mean survival of the strongest, those who can plan ahead and anticipate eventualities are more likely to survive in the long run than those who attempt to conquer and destroy that which they do not, or refuse to, understand. Just keep in mind, planning and anticipating don't preclude the possibility of use of force, sometimes it is neccesary despite what some idyllic dreamers might say, but there is a responsibility to use it wisely, and try not to burn down the house when breaking down the door.