"I know some pretty dedicated people. But I can't think of anyone in a right frame of mind that would actually welcome the experience after a week. Its going to be really tough to find someone willing to do this."

Really? Really?

You obviously don't know any dedicated people, or many people at all. I could walk around my office (I work in the aerospace industry) and find easily 12 people willing to do this. I would be one of those 12. If I went over to Johnson Space Center to ask, I would have people beating down my door to go.

Here's what you don't get: some people do things for the sheer thrill of exploration. No other reason. Some people realize that the earth is 6 billion years old and they are going to die in 50. Whether they die now or then isn't that big of a difference, really; but if they can do something dramatic in that time versus "just getting by" then their time on Earth actually meant something.

Also, it isn't like we'd be sending them in a sensory deprivation chamber for 6 months. People already spend 6 months up in space stations, and the vehicle we send to mars will probably be built up over time in orbit so it can be much larger and better equipped. They'll have computers for movies, email, internet (the lag will suck), and games. They'll have mandatory exercise periods, scientific research to be done, food cultivation work to be done, etc. They will also go as a team of 6-12 people, so your notion of them having "no one to interact with" is moronic. Even when they are all the way out at mars, the lag is only 28 minutes so emailing isn't that bad at all.

You seem to completely forget that just 100 years ago people wrote letters back and forth that took weeks (not minutes) to be returned. You seem to completely forget that just 100 years ago it took people weeks to get from Europe to America. Even today people will sail SOLO from Los Angeles to Hawaii, which takes around a month. Every year people solo sail around the earth for 120 days nonstop in the Vendee Challenge, which is 4 months completely alone where people die on a regular basis.

Hell, people climb and die on Everest every year and that's already been done.

This is exactly how I feel about the situation. I'm not happy about all the new systems companies force us to use to play their games, but I'm not going to go out of my way to circumvent them.... I'll just not buy their product.

I wasn't happy with the Steam idea when HL2 came out, so I didn't buy anything from Steam until I read enough reviews saying it was OK and had friends tell me it was fine. I'm not happy with Blizzard forcing everyone to use battle.net accounts for WoW, so once they start enforcing that I'll just quit playing the game. There are plenty of other diversions out there that I don't need to create ANOTHER login account when I have one that works fine already... especially since all I ever here about battle.net is people getting their accounts hacked all the time and that it doesn't connect well with Comcast cable internet.

Did you actually read what you linked?

I hope you didn't, because then I'd have to come to the conclusion you are a complete moron.

The story you linked NEVER EVER ONCE said their protests or what they were saying was unpatriotic or anti-american, nor did it say they should move protests into free speech zones.

What it does say is that HOW they are protesting is unpatriotic and anti-american. The story talks about the protesters going into rational discussions and screaming so loudly that no free speech can occur. It talks about protesters using threats of violence to silence the rational discussion.

You are 100% correct, it only makes it more difficult.

Of course, how much more difficult is the whole fucking point. The fastest man in the world is a full 10% faster than the fastest woman in the world, moving to around 15% faster at longer events. The fastest woman in the world wouldn't have even passed the slowest male competitor in the last Olympics.

So while the absolute fastest women in the world could compete with most men, they have no chance at all to compete with the best men.

And this is in running, a sport that isn't contact based. How many women can compete with men at football, basketball and baseball? Sure, there is the odd female high school football player, but you don't see them at the college level for a reason (even though they are allowed) and when they do appear (3 total as far as I can tell) they are only playing kickers with little to no contact. Basketball and baseball are better, but women still can't compete with men at higher levels of competition.

There's a reason boxing and wrestling have weight classes.

Then you go to Fry's or Best Buy or some place that sells computer parts. Radio Shack doesn't sell anything but mice and keyboards. Furthermore, their hours are typically worse than Best Buy or Fry's.

"Works of fiction are now cheap" ????

Hardbacks are up to $30 or $40 these days and even paperbacks are $8. I'm not that old, and I can remember when both were around half those prices.

Either your disposable income has increased to the point where that seems cheaper to you than when you last paid attention, or you buy used books.

Used books save a retarded amount of money. You can go to www.abebooks.com and buy any paperback for around $4 with shipping.

It's true, fat people are more stupid than the rest of us.

How's that for a generalization? If every fat person talked like you, that would be the stereotype.

It's unbelievable how unbelievably stupid you are.

Let's break down YOUR arguments, since you think that's the way to win:

At the age of 3, who controls what goes into your body? Your parents. Yes, it is completely their fault you got fat. Here's the thing: just because your body works differently than mine or theirs doesn't mean they couldn't react and change your diet. If I had a kid and saw he was becoming obese at THREE YEARS OLD, I would be all over that shit trying to figure out why. Is there a medical condition? Am I feeding him too much? Is he eating the dog's poop? Now, is it their fault you stayed fat? No.

You insult him by saying he has no numbers to back up his claim that only a small percentage of morbidly obese people are that way because of obscure medical issues, but then you don't provide any numbers to back your own argument up. You are just as bad as him. You insult him for ignoring people who most need help, but there you are being a huge fatty and ignoring your own problem. Once again, you are just as bad as him.

You ask him to explain to your boss "what the fuck I'm doing." You do realize that your boss is legally required to let you take that break? Just like your boss is legally required to let smokers take 5 min smoke breaks every hour, you are allowed to take 10 min walk breaks every 2 hours. Dumbass.

Yes, what he is saying is a huge percentage of the population is weak willed. I will agree with that 100%. How many people smoke and know it's bad for them? How many people have cheated on their wife/husband and felt bad about it? How many people drive the speed limit? How many people recycle everything, walk to the store instead of drive, reuse cloth bags instead of plastic bags at the grocery, turn down their AC to save energy, drive smaller cars, and all the other major inconveniences that everyone knows would help the environment? HUMANS ARE LAZY! It's a fact. I'll even repeat it for you: HUMANS ARE LAZY! Even the people who work their asses off usually do it because they get some enjoyment out of it. Obviously, there are some people who just work hard because they know they should or to obtain a certain goal, but they are the rarities. If a huge percentage of the population weren't weak willed, we wouldn't have a housing crisis or a credit crisis. Humans being weak willed also works when looking at this crossing all those demographic areas that you pointed out.

I'm not posting anonymously, because if I saw you in person I would quite literally shudder. Shudder at the kind of personality that has no care for keeping themselves healthy. Also, shudder at the sweaty fat rolls and Cheeto breath. So go ahead and explain something complicated like the venting and pressurization system of a liquid fueled rocket, and I'll probably correct you.

Google the laws of thermodynamics. If you can't lose weight by eating less and/or exercising more, then you are a medical miracle.

Is it difficult to be as incorrect, misinformed and belligerently stupid as you are? Are you able to tie your shoes properly? Just curious.

Here's an idea:
Read up on the actual, declassified documents. Read up on the methods the US used to get Mossadegh out of power. Read up on Roosevelt's cousin's involvement. Read up on how the US then decided it would be better to have a chaotic Middle East and supported the ousting of the Shah. Read up on the US involvement in the Iraq/Iran war after the Shah was ousted.

Oh man, your post is just precious. Not only do you insult someone's "learnin'" while being obviously wrong, but at the same time you make the "it's a dupe" statement that is necessary in every /. story.

Hint about photosynthesis: photo is from the Greek word phos, meaning "light." So photosynthesis just possibly might have something to do with using, I don't know, light? to synthesize (which means to combine elements into something new).

Sunlight in, elements combine together using energy from that light, food and other byproducts out.

Wow, I had no idea this would've been taken as an anti-CFL rant. Apparently neither my viewpoint nor the article's came through in the summary

Maybe if you hadn't said you wouldn't switch from 100W bulbs to 13W bulbs because the 13W bulb actually uses 28W, people wouldn't think you were an anti-CFL moron. Yes, the 13W bulb uses twice as much real power as it states.... but guess what, it is still using 1/4 the real power of the 100W bulb. And they last 5 times longer. And they aren't that much more expensive when you buy in bulk. And the start up thing isn't much of an issue these days.

And there you go showing that a higher UID means a lower IQ.

Look, moron, while I completely agree that paying $700 for a game is a lot of money, you yourself spelled out the math pretty concisely (except you missed the $50 for the original purchase). In your own misguided rage, though, you missed the part about playing for FIVE FUCKING YEARS. There are very few games I can think of where people played them for that long and only paid $50. In fact, Counterstrike is the only one I can think of right now. Aside from that, you didn't factor in how much that cost you per hour of enjoyment. A movie costs $10-$15, depending on where you live, for less than 2 hours of enjoyment. If you define a casual player as someone who plays for about 2 hours per week (that's really low for a lot of people, but I'm making a point), that comes to 400 hours played in those 50 months you quoted. $700 for 400 hours of entertainment is pretty damn good... it works out to less than $2 per hour, or 5 times better than a movie. Even for a game like Oblivion where I paid $60 and played for 100 hours, it's not too much worse.

And those numbers I just used were for 2 hours per week. That's pretty low, and I'd say most casual WoW players put in more like 4 or 5 hours per week. That puts it right in line with an amazingly large game like Oblivion. Most people buy a game like Ninja Gaiden Black for $60 and put in 20-40 hours.

Hell, you even said yourself that you haven't paid attention in the last 14 months, but you feel the need to pipe in and insult something you no longer know much about. In BC they added four new instances; 2 were 25 man raids, 1 was a 10 man raid doable by a small casual guild, and 1 was a 5 man dungeon (doable by casuals and also open on heroic for casuals). But aside from the free content they added, all the original BC 5 man dungeons had heroic modes for casuals to get epics and reputation grinds to get epics as well. Now in WotLK, all the dungeons are 30 minute short runs with heroic modes. There are reputation rewards and daily quests to get rare crafting recipes, etc. The 25 man raids are now heroic versions of 10 man raids that are doable by small guilds.

If anything, they have catered too much to the casual. All the top end raid content was cleared by big guilds in the first week. Do you remember how long it took for people to clear AQ40 and Naxx? My friend just hit 80 this week and already had epics and full blues... and he only logs on an hour or so per day, if that.

All that said, I liked WAR so much better than WoW and was hoping it would succeed. There are a lot of things I don't like about WoW, but I don't like single player games... which WAR became when WotLK dropped. So I came back to WoW to play with my friends.

There is nothing wrong with not liking WoW, but you are attacking them for things that make no sense (especially the arena system, which was another easy way to get epics for casuals).

AOC has absolutely the most fun combat mechanic of any MMO I've played. It was an interesting experiment in social gaming to have free for all PVP, as well. The problem AOC had was it didn't have a good mechanic for leveling up besides PVE, and PVE was completely ignored by the dev team after around lvl 60. There were no instances and no quests for me to do at lvl 64, so I quit the game. The instances they had pre-60 were pretty awful anyway, so I didn't hold much hope. They did so many things right (PVP was level independent with no +hit and no resists, you could apprentice a lower level player so they could play higher level content with you, separate bag for quest items, fast travel options), but with no content but grinding I had to quit the game.

WAR is a great game that allows leveling purely through PVP, has a solid combat mechanic, has a wealth of content for both PVP and PVE (except for a major lack of instances), and decent fast travel options. Their crafting is so unbelievably awful, though, and the timing of the game meant the WoW expansion took all the players out of the game.