Launch three identical, reasonably sized chemically propulsed spacecrafts into 300km orbits in KSP. Launch them into orbital planes spaced 120 degrees apart. Your goal: dock all three together. Use mechjeb and dpai if you wish. It'll dispel any such myths in one evening.

That's precisely the mental model mistake that everyone makes. If all you've got is reaction mass and relatively low Isp thrusters, the requisite orbital momentum changes make any sort of extended maneouvering impossible. If your opponent is in an orbit perpendicular to yours, good luck. It'll be trivial for them to avoid you forever until you rotate your orbital plane. With chemical engines without on-orbit refueling, you can pull that trick off once or twice and that's it. And if you have multiple opponents and they happen to understand that they should have launched in multiple orbital planes, they'll be pretty much invulnerable to any sort of conventional (chemical) propulsion pursuit by a single craft.

Call me silly, but does Vimeo actually, you know, reliably work?. Every other time I get across a Vimeo link, there's something wrong either with the link itself, or the web player, etc. I don't know what Youtube does right that Vimeo doesn't, but for me, the bad UX just doesn't justify using Vimeo. And this has nothing to do with anything that Google has any influence over, BTW, I'm using neither Chrome nor Chromium, and I'm not following google search result links either.

They are - the updates, at least. The factory image is compressed and stored in a read-only partition. Deleting anything from it is equivalent to making your own "rom" (as that's what the system partition constitutes, in a large part).

Hangouts is a conferencing tool. It's most definitely not something that was designed for teens. It's a Google alternative to Skype. It's also not true that the crapware always runs. Sure, it's part of the factory image, but it never needs any additional space, and it's stored compressed on that image. Simply uninstall any updates to it and disable it. Done and gone.

You can disable pretty much all Google services and they won't occupy any RAM (System Memory) when you do so. I thought that was like Android 101. Just because those apps are stored on the Flash doesn't mean they have to be running. You also don't need to update them if you don't use them - go to Settings, Apps, go through all Google apps that you don't use and [Uninstall Updates] followed by [Disable] on each one of them. You need to disable automatic app updates as well, otherwise the apps will get updated and will occupy the Internal Memory (FLASH).

The thing is: Android makes crapware rather unintrusive, as far as I can tell. On said $100 tablet. If Windows crapware was so unintrusive, I doubt I'd care much about it. Yeah, I've got Nook, Google+, a couple others. Big deal. Those apps don't have to be updated, they can be disabled, and they won't consume any resources other than being present in the factory image that's on the device anyway.

I think that the requirement to ship recent Android versions was long time coming and is sorely needed. The other applications aren't that much of a drain, I don't think, other than taking up some of the "native" storage. Low end devices (say a $100 tablet) that often only have 1G of built-in storage will be thus strained more. Yet storage prices keep falling, so I don't see it as that much of a problem. Cost-wise, soldered-on flash is anyway cheaper than a microSD card that has to have extra packaging and a separate controller chip.

This is feeding the troll, but the bug's importance is overblown IMHO. It is exploitable on systems that are otherwise full of holes anyway.

Of course it's pretty much irrelevant. The bug doesn't matter in practice unless you're doing other, severely braindead things.

Maybe if you insist on reading it on a cellphone :/

There isn't much fighting going on for no reason at all. Fights are usually over influence or resources. They'll be thus focused on a planet, a planetary system or some other resource - say an asteroid. Say there's a planet with resources you need. A defensive force can be assembled in orbit to make sure you're the only one who can mine it. Etc. It doesn't mean much that space is big - the battles won't be fought over the empty space, unless that empty space becomes a resource in itself. Say if there was some spacetime-bending stuff that needed vast "empty" space to operate.

Orbital mechanics are easy if the UI is built to let you deal with that fact. Given the popularity of KSP and its various add-ons, I'd say that everything depends on how you present stuff. Orbital mechanics are only unintuitive because we are surface dwellers and have no first-hand experience. Your job as a game designer is to provide a bridge between our everyday experience and the game mechanics.

I don't think it's a problem, just the physical reality. Vacuum laser-based warfare is short distance unless you've got a big ship that can support big mirrors. Duh.

With powerful lasers, the main problem in the atmosphere is most definitely not any "diffusion", but self focusing - a nonlinear optical effect. When you've got air, or really any sufficiently dense gas, even a desktop-size laser beam can exhibit self-focusing. If you're not trying to destroy things, it's actually a problem, since a self-focusing beam has this nagging tendency to destroy the optics places in its path :(