Procedural-generated space game - nice. I was thinking a couple days ago about whether there's a Tradewars 2002 type of game with procedurally generated warps, resources, etc. Yeah, retro. :)

It makes no sense that horse armour can't be crafted. I hope they change it. The new launcher is a step in the right direction - upgrades were a killer for bukkit servers since you couldn't play them after a client game (until the server also upgraded). Now at least you have a fairly straight-forward way to play on servers running older software. I wish horses could be summoned like on World of Warcraft. In their current form your horse is basically locked to a continent unless you want to build a massive bridge to get somewhere else. Horses also wander off too quickly. Can't even cut down a tree without having to go and chase it down. I also find the constant need to get XP to repair items is makes minecraft "grindy". I use my tools/weapons to gather resources and the XP I get is enough to keep them repaired, but more often not enough left to enchant new tools.

I was wondering the same thing. A large percentage of sites point at at least one of google-analytics.com, googleadservices.com, *.googleapis.com (and likely others). An addon like RequestPolicy for Firefox lets you limit connections to 3rd party websites (and can be educational as well).

You're right, it isn't an either/or proposition, and yet some people are clamoring for the NSA to be shut down (the "flying blind" choice). But imagine a continuum between "flying blind" and "sacrificing privacy of X thousand citizens" where greater intelligence gathering correlates with greater privacy invasion. Somewhere along the line there will be a point around which the majority of people say "yeah, this is the right balance", don't you think? Is it possible to avoid *any* collateral damage while retaining an effective level of intelligence?

I've come to think that any person or organization with an important enough purpose can get away with most things. Some examples: Even a convicted murderer can get off the hook if they help bust a giant racketeering ring; a failing multi-billion dollar company will get bailed out by the government if it is a big enough backbone for the country's economy. In this case, an agency as important to the security of the USA as the NSA will be allowed to continue operating as-is despite a relatively small number of infractions. If the choice was between "flying blind" and "having massive intelligence but sacrificing privacy of X thousand citizens" I think the choice is pretty clear.

To be taken seriously, he'd have to put Snowden in charge of this new transparency initiative. Obviously that's not going to happen.

If you can't smother the shitstorm in the media, you might as well get all your dirty work done in short order so this rash of privacy and human rights abuses can becomes last week's news as soon as possible.

Genius! Actually... I probably would watch that. :)

I'm actually not a Doctor Who fan (nothing against it... i'm too impatient to watch it) so I may be misunderstanding how "regeneration" works, but imagine for a second a Doctor who's been a man for over 10 generations who wakes up to realize he's now a woman! It might be interesting if they scripted it as if the woman still had the mind of the original male Doctor. "man realizes how some people treat women" angle. "man can't wait to be a man again" "man spends too long in the shower washing his privates" I dunno. :)

It still matters if you care where the species originated. For example, the difference between Europa (a) having originated life completely independently of Earth and (b) having been contaminated by life from earth and then evolved separately is very significant.

I read recently that NASA basically catalogs what bacteria it can't eradicate and if it finds those bacteria on an alien planet will have to assume the source was contamination. I'm not sure how they'd plan to handle centuries from now if they found a descendent bacteria that was mostly unrecognizable from the original, cataloged bacteria.

You might get a couple of freebies with his contact info but I suspect it'd be better policy for an installation this size to set up a paid arrangement with the outgoing sysadmin. I'm not in IT so I don't know what precedents there are around this, but relying on him to reply for free just seems against human nature.

There is 100 percent auditability on what we do.

How does that jibe with the recent story NSA Can't Search Its Own Email

s/idiots/people/
s/intellect/knowledge/
FTFY.

Allow users to specify tags for a story and display the most commonly entered tags. It then becomes a form of commenting, in a way. "upvote" could be just another tag.