Half the fun of playing Kerbal is watching your hapless Kerbalnauts scream in terror as your shuddering monstrosity climbs through the atmosphere.

All except Jeb. He's got nerves of steel (or brains of mud, one is never sure).

You can never seem to get enough of them!

I've been playing KSP for over a year now (since 0.8x). The best part about it is that there are NO RAILS in the game. You build your ship, you launch it, it flies. If you screw up, it wrecks. There's no fake scripted shit going on in the game. Though I believe the physics are not 100% accurate (for example, it won't do Lagrange points in orbit) they are close enough for most of the things you'd want to do, and the universe is scaled-down so that missions don't actually take months. You do have time-warp to wait out those year-long coasting phases.

The latest version is so feature-rich that I've been struggling to even try each of the new features. You can dock, you can go EVA, you can fly NERVA rockets and ion engines (though they are far more powerful than the real thing as I learned about reading after the Dawn probe).

Basically, KSP inspired me to go and look up EVERY planetary probe and mission from the last half-century. I have become far more aware of the amazing accomplishments of NASA (and the Soviets too) and I think the only real-world mission you can't do right now with it would be Curiosity, but some modder out there is probably working on it.

It is a FANTASTIC tool for education. After playing it for several months I've come to realize how silly all the Star Wars-type dogfights are, how utterly impossible and impractical they would be in a real world environment, and why it is that we don't just have interstellar travel 'cause we wanna. And I've spent a ton of time honing my math skills just to get a feeble grasp of what happens and why.

There are still a few of the old die-hards here, but it's mostly marketers and sock-puppets now.

It's down to you and me, Mr. Anonymous Coward. Welcome to Slashdot.

The group of people that use photoshop is pretty small,

I assume you've heard of these internet "memes" from time to time, have you not? And, you've heard there are often heavily-visited sites where you can post "memes" for others to jest and guffaw at. And you are also aware that most of these pictures are produced through "photoshopping."

So, I think you're not only flat wrong . . . but hilariously so.

The first thing Obama did was hand health care reform to Nancy Pelosi who took things behind closed doors and did not invite the R's in.

Horseshit.

Yeah, I'm in southern Indiana and Reddit has been down all day.

I did some reading, and the charges have more to do with creating a perception that the earthquake risk was remote and being negligent in their duty to keep the people educated

Oh, MY GOD. That isn't even a charge, or a crime.

Here's what the folks in L'Aquila have just earned: a rapid defection of scientists on the public payroll because they are now afraid to say, or not say, anything. Because an event that can't actually be predicted under any interpretation happened when they didn't expect it.

These IDIOTS have done a serious amount of damage to people who were trying to help them. FUCK EM ALL, seriously. Fucking MORONS.

So it will have a chilling effect on liars, causing them to tell the truth instead. How is that a bad thing?

You're so fucking ignorant you don't know how this is a bad thing.

It's nearly impossible to make a law that applies equally to everyone, because we're all different, in different situations. Companies, even more s

You say this, but you provide zero evidence that it is so. I'm not sure if you're making a distinction between the law or the corrupt system under which it is implemented, because those are two different problems.

On the topic of could we stop patent abuse, sure we could. Hire more and better patent clerks, pay them a proper wage and encourage them to spend time researching so that they are patenting things that are actually innovative, not just different

Make the process of getting a patent for a real innovation trivial in cost, and the expense of making a bogus patent claim uncompromisingly huge.

I think that would about cover it, though the devil is in the details. Laws are not like computer programs. When written in clear language they do not require complex debugging.

Oh, the final ingredient in this mix is to write the law clearly.

It is transfer but its really only transfer between Wall Street Entities. There is a great deal of hand ringing about HFT but I don't see much evidence it does anything to your typical retail investor.

The fact that this horseshit goes on, is one reason I'll never invest in the stock market. I'd just as soon take my paycheck and sign it over to a Las Vegas casino.

So, that's an influence.

Is Correlative science the only thing that gets done anymore?

Well, it is easier to do a quick study of how 50% of people are of below-average intelligence, than it is to figure out what causes paranoia or depression, after all. I have a feeling that the reason we see so much of this kind of relatively-useless crap is that it generates headlines and gets people up in arms about stuff, whereas actual conclusions often turn out to be boring and infrequent, unless they are revolutionary.

It's the kind of car a cartoon coyote, who is also a super-genius, might create.

All in the name of catching that skinny bird.

I see no significant opposition from the democrats, so there's no point in trying to discuss only half the picture.

No because they've only been trying to keep the fuckwit retards of the Teabag Party from shutting down our entire country for the last two years.

While I'm admittedly bothered by this, this is a direct result of caving to the "we're too BROOOOOKE" mythology of the retard right that can always find a hundred billion or two to start a fucking war, but has a full-blown hissyfit meltdown when someone tries to fund health insurance for poor kids.

In other words, you don't see any significant oppo from the Dems because they've been fighting a gridlocked, deliberately-sabotaged government for several years now.

But, trying to actually understand what is going on in your little world is probably too much effort, judging from the laziness of your thinking.

This is strictly a manufactured shortage, due to a quirk of history

Given that Helium is the second-most-abundant element in the fucking universe it most certainly is.

It's a manufactured shortage born out of FREE-MARKET STUPIDITY, furthermore.