Drive a little faster than that and you could see us sooner.

The reason it still needs to be reported regularly is because there's still a large chunk of the population that pretends that this sort of Rent-an-Expert shenanigans never happen. Scientific integrity is certainly relevant this site.

"An exclamation point above his head? He must have a quest for me." - Final thoughts of every MMO character who got accidentally teleported to the Metal Gear universe.

And in other parts of the world, all the sinners are saints. Those tend to be more fun.

It's probably talking about geothermal energy released in proportion to the planet's size. If you're talking about two rocky planets of the relatively same size and mass, the one with the greater content of heavy radioactive elements like Thorium will have the hotter core. This expands the planetary habitable zone outward since the higher internal temperature can compensate for the reduced solar radiation, so you'd have a wider range of planets that are capable of sustaining liquid water. A hotter core will also take longer to cool, which means the planet will remain geologically active for a longer period of time than a planet that started out with a cooler core.

Now that you mention it, people were saying the college degree was a waste of time in the mid-to-late 90s as well, although tech jobs were so plentiful then that they actually were hiring people right out of high school.

Then when the bubble burst, the lucky ones found themselves in a dead end job with no degree. Most of them didn't get to keep the job.

But then he'd find a base to neutralize it and clean it up with a mop.

Union Aerospace Corporation. Usually their system glitches result in dimensional breaches that demons use to invade Mars, or its moons... so just losing some school data seems rather mild by comparison.

We've discovered the Dread Particle Roberts?

I see your point, but I would suggest it's not so much a 'took on the pirates and won' situation so much as it is a 'remove some of the incentive for piracy and discovered it worked' situation.

DRM does provide some incentive for piracy when it reduces the usability for their legitimate customers. When a publisher is releasing software that installs a rootkit or has limited installations that counts down every time you perform a hardware change, finding a copy of the same software without all that crap on it becomes much more attractive.

The bulk of the criticism wasn't so much over the look and feel of the game as it was the repetitiveness of the gameplay. Further into the game there are a lot of long gaps between plot points where you're dealing with nothing but long hallways full of monster closets. It had the combined effect of killing the suspension of disbelief and making the game tedious instead of scary. There's only so many times anyone can go through whoosh/ROAR/KA-BLAM/thud before it gets old.

Correct. Those who have heard of the internet wait until (Cyber) Monday. Now that it's spread over two different days, the shopping craziness is reduced compared to the pre-internet days.

However, between camera phones and the internet, the inevitable "Jingle All the Way"-style conflicts over in-demand merchandise that show up on YouTube can provide some quality entertainment for those of us watching from the sidelines.

His backup weapons aren't bad either. The Sonic Screwdriver and the Deadly Jelly Baby.

Or the Samantha Carter maneuver...

"You know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water."

Exoplanets use a different set of definitions according to the IAU