Nice nitpick on an analogy. Can we discuss the point the analogy is making instead please?

There's more than a touch of irony in military project that reached the ultimate high ground only to show us that the world domination game was not worth playing.

But I guess you had to be there to really grasp the significance of Apollo's role in the cold war. Personally I think the 1968 "earthrise" photo from apollo 8 was the most significant contribution, it's often credited with igniting the environmental movement (along with the book "Silent Spring").

The notion of the "pale blue dot" (google it) came out of that photo and exploded in our cultural consciousness several years before Carl Sagan gave it an eloquent voice. The Earthrise photo made it very clear in a lot of people's minds that there is nowhere else to go in the foreseeable future. It was clear that mankind had run out of territory to conquer on Earth and it asked the question at the height of the Vietnam war - why are we still squabbling over the spoils?

Earthrise and the PBDot are now popular cultural icons, they say something to us in the same way a red cross says something to a soldier on a battlefield.

There's a couple things here:

1. Extremophiles evolved progressively to more difficult ecosystems. They came from organisms that could manage in chemically unreactive of mostly water/salt water. It's unlikely the precursors to life, like prions or unbound mRNA chains would've "made it" in arsenic lakes or boiling lakes. But some prokaryotes could manage in environments with a little arsenic, and evolution could work its magic.

Like the creationists say, getting something as complex and robust as a modern organism "randomly" would be a bit like a tornado blowing through a junk yard and assembling a car.

2. The utility of radio waves for communication wouldn't hinge much on the physic form of an organism, just something much like sapience.

"Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning"

It is not a positive reflection on your post that I can't even tell what kind of paranoid delusion you're trying to espouse.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

We know that life has started out in an anaerobic environment with water present. Everything else is up for grabs. So if you're looking for life-as-we-know-it, it makes sense to go with the conditions we already know works.

TF Headline is, of course, hyperbolic. Alien life doesn't necessarily require conditions similar to earth. But that's were the money is. If you have limit the types of planet systems you will spend the time and money to look carefully at, you just might go with what has worked.

I believe it for a very simple reason. In most cases it will say so in site's TOS that they will not keep it should I tell them not to do so.

I find it very hard to believe that a site selling me goods would take a risk of getting hit by a contract breach and all the negative PR that would follow it just to keep my credit card information on file.

We lack the data to second-guess the judge's judgment. I'm elated by this story, personally. There was a judge; there was a warrant; that's amazing progress for email!

Slashdot.

Where even car mirrors have political and racial overtones.

How about a laser? You can do a vasectomy with a laser - how cool is that?

Of course, you could do a vasectomy with a shark. I'm not sure that 'cool' would be the appropriate adjective.

It's called 'marriage'.

If you think I'm conservative and pro-gun, then you've clearly never read any of my other posts. In fact, if your entire reply is not just an ad hominem, but one attacking views that are diametrically opposed to the ones that I've publicly stated on numerous occasions, I can only assume that you are completely lacking any meaningful responses.

You sure they were vasectomies?

You seem blind to the fact that your arguments only make sense when viewed through the "only Americans matter" lens, but are obviously false otherwise. How else do you explain it?

It's only really a concern if the cell runs Linux.