There's more than a touch of irony in military project that reached the ultimate high ground only to show us that the world domination game was not worth playing.

But I guess you had to be there to really grasp the significance of Apollo's role in the cold war. Personally I think the 1968 "earthrise" photo from apollo 8 was the most significant contribution, it's often credited with igniting the environmental movement (along with the book "Silent Spring").

The notion of the "pale blue dot" (google it) came out of that photo and exploded in our cultural consciousness several years before Carl Sagan gave it an eloquent voice. The Earthrise photo made it very clear in a lot of people's minds that there is nowhere else to go in the foreseeable future. It was clear that mankind had run out of territory to conquer on Earth and it asked the question at the height of the Vietnam war - why are we still squabbling over the spoils?

Earthrise and the PBDot are now popular cultural icons, they say something to us in the same way a red cross says something to a soldier on a battlefield.

Extremophile

I'm thinking more along the lines of "Life that will use radio signals (or similar) to communicate in such a way that we have a chance of detecting them without either of us leaving our solar systems".

But that's a bit wordy.

Work at McDonald's or Walmart (or more likely both) for a living and get back to us.

They buy what gives them the most calories per dollar, while also focusing on foods that require the least preparation time (since their work typically leaves them with little time to spare). End result: saturated fat, refined sugar and sodium, with very little in the way of necessary vitamins and minerals.

For most of the United States, owning a car is a necessity for both working and buying food.

None of the content I watch on YouTube is paid for by advertising.

YouTube is just a file sharing site for a lot of users.

There are hundreds of university lectures on line, they haven't been paid for by advertising.

It may be a fallacy in your mind. But it does beg the question why such a huge number of poor people are in prison camp USA.

Increases in wealth in America have largely gone to the 1% since the 1970's rather than the poor or middle class. Basically the USA has reinvented feudalism.

You mean you run your economy on illegal cheap foreign labour and because criminal money is just as good as real money to you Americans you think its would be a good idea to stop providing welfare to the human beings you threw down the toilet in your own country because you displaced them with foreign slaves..

And you wonder why Putin is able to get worldwide support for his immensely successful propaganda?

He seems no worse than the US.

I still have a copy of that issue. :)

The "mankind" thing was just poetry for a domestic audience, read Kennedy's speech and it's crystal clear that the Apollo project was a military response to the "threat" posed by sputnik.

The day they landed on the moon, I landed on a plate of spaghetti. I was 10, I had put my meal on my chair and gone to get some juice, I came back and was so enthralled with the TV I sat back down on the chair without looking.

I'm not sure which came first, the fake landing theory or the movie Capricorn One.

My bones say - close enough to 40 in round numbers.

Never played myself, I was 17-18 when I first heard of it. It appeared to me to have nothing to do with motorbikes or girls so it failed to hold my attention. We did however as younger teens play a (nameless) game that used a die, a ruler, an eraser, some pencils and a roll of wallpaper or similar.

The idea was to set up a battle, drawing in pencil the units of your army on your end of the paper. To move a unit you erased and redrew it, the dice determined how far a unit could move (in inches). To shoot you put the pencil point on your unit, put one finger on top of the pencil to hold it upright, and flick it with your fingers on the other hand. The pencil would leave a line on the paper which represented your bullet. Other than that there weren't any fixed rules, you could make up your own rules for each game...how small can a unit be, how many hits could a unit take, different coloured pencils for different bullets, a bouncing bomb is a series of pencil flicks, etc, etc. Had just as much fun playing that as a kid as I do playing WoT as an grandfather.

Have no idea if the game has a name or where it originated, it seems to be quite old, my dad showed us how to play but it was not his invention since I found other kids at school who had learnt it from their dad, not sure but I think dad played it as a kid in the late 30's, early 40's. While on the subject of kids games, here's something a bit geeky that will blow a grandchild's mind.

Are you one of the people who pays no taxes?

If it really was difficult to find programmers they'd have at least considered training some of those workers in the desired skills, workers with a known history rather than some stranger off the street (or from across an ocean).

When wages go down as prices don't, that's actual hardship. It's called "cost of living" rather than "cost of luxury" for a reason.

Keep your paws off my coffee mug.