They could stand to be a LOT more proactive with these older games. For instance I got the original Fallout and... yeah, its useless out of the box on steam. Yes I love staring at the 256colour rainbow shotgun effect over half the game on my Windows 7 gaming box.

Thats on my todo list actually. But I use both, though the more i use Gentoo, the harder it is to really enjoy FreeBSD like I used to when I used it as my main desktop oh so many years ago.

In the hope that when fighting a more sophisticated enemy both similarly honorable in that they are also a signatory of the Geneva Conventions and capable of adequately taking care of POWs, that the enemy will show mercy on captured and now helpless servicemen in the hope that further pointless bloodshed will be avoided.

Its like "why shoot the guy trying to kill you in the foot, knee, hand, shoulder, etc... when you could have just as easily shot them in the face or heart".
Its about being human, and showing mercy to those you hope would show you the same mercy in kind. Because no one wants to be shot in the face, while unarmed, wounded and completely helpless after a harrowing firefight.

Which could be done really cheaply.
Comsats are pretty much off the shelf these days, and GEO comsats are already hardened to more radiation due to their increased height. Further hardening might not be necessary depending on the design and capabilities.

I still dont know why we havent built a Lunar comms and navigation satellite constellation. It would be trivially within the budget of a number of nations, companies, and could have even been incorporated into the budget of several large science missions. This doesnt need to be an irridium scale network of dozens and dozens of satellites, continuous coverage could be accomplished with just 6 sattelites like the small and cheap (by satellite standards) SN-100s from Sierra Nevada in order to keep the weight down since the lunar orbit boost would cost even more. But since they are small enough to be secondary payloads they could be bunched together on a single booster and sent to the moon together to cut down on launch costs as much as possible. And thats before exploring options like using hall effect thrusters like the SMART-1 mission did and getting to the moon the long slow way to be even more efficient for launch costs.

This sort of 'flocking' and 'schooling' behavior like birds and fish do, is pretty well understood and I would expect some sort of standard would develop pretty quickly to provide the same sort of 'mob behavior cues' that animals have that enable them to decide when they should follow versus when they should make their own decision.

Like for instance all the cars pulling over towards the edge of the road together to let through the fire engine or ambulance on the way to respond to an emergency.

See the problem is as you said...

After these and the base cost of the car and the typical fuel for the life of the car assuming how you intend to use it since thats the best way to deal with the fuel running costs.
After all those, at the moment... your paying anywhere from 125% to 200% the cost of a single car to have 1 normal and 1 super green short trip/commute.

The 2 car idea only works in limited scenarios like, you already have 2 cars, and are planning to sell one off to replace it with a more fuel efficient one, you drive a H1 hummer where the fuel cost will pay for the more fuel efficient car 2 times over, the new electric car is a Tata Nano from India at Indian market prices ($2500 or so) or like the original VW Beetles made in Mexico that cost what would be $10k factoring for inflation and all that stuff.

Its the best solution for the 'it doesnt do everything I want' problem but unfortunately, its also at the moment, way more costly. Personally I'd like to see more cheap low end electric vehicles. If you could buy a $5k electric car, that did 50miles on the battery and had a tiny tiny little petrol generator to recharge the batteries enough to crawl home another 50-100 miles if you got stuck, somehow I think if this sort of thing was available, it would sell, probably really well to new teenagers, parents of newly driving teenagers, and greenies, etc... also possibly golf courses... either way, its going to take cars like this to instigate 'massive' change. Otherwise it will be a very slow process to reduce the number of miles driven each year by 'bad' cars.

Note: - raised Catholic, sacraments and all, no longer call myself one and no longer practicing, yet I'd still probably pray to god with a big G at the front when life throws me in a foxhole so to speak, old habits are hard to break.

Don't abbreviate the quote please. It loses meaning in the process.
"Judge not lest ye be judged" does imply as you said, that you will be held to the same standard you judge others.

And as for the matter of how the foolish can reconcile this. Its rather easy for them to follow a train of though like this "I'm not gay, so its perfectly fine for me to expect no one else to be" as they are either not fully cognizant of the fact or simply don't care (this is worse) that the reciprocal judgement implied by their religious text, in fact refers to matters less mundane, its about their thoughts and actions, not things like being Muslim, or being gay (a lot of them contextualize by claiming that being gay is a choice and using that to try to lump it into the thoughts and actions category). The issue however is that the rest of the new testament implies a couple of things most of the vehemently anti-gay group seem to be ignoring:
1st> You shouldn't expect them (sinners, etc) to change
2nd> Its nice if your words and actions get them to change their ways... BUT
3rd> Your supposed to 'lead by example', your not meant to keep chanting 'god hates gays' and protesting them getting the same rights as everyone else since above all the previous things your supposed to be treating everyone else with 'love'
John 13:30

and
4th> If you browbeat someone into 'not being gay' or 'pretending they are christian' for instance people hiding the fact they practice something like Wicca or the 'lavender marriage'/beards among gay and lesbian groups... If they are doing this, then you pretty much failed in the worst way, you've convinced them they have to hide from your religion and thus probably guaranteed that they will never 'come to god' in the way that your supposed to accept him completely as savior light of the world, and so on, that is required of most Christian faiths.

Regardless of philosophical viewpoints regarding the christian religious philosophy, I think we can all agree that the best example of 'doing it wrong' as far as 'Jesus related religion/denominations' goes... is the Westboro Baptist Church.

1st, you totally earned your place in my +1 modifier pile here in this thread.
2nd, there are a few examples remaining of religion that isnt violently opposed to others, most notably Hinduism. I'll steal the quote from wikipedia since it says it quite well.
Hinduism - Beliefs

Quite refreshing really.

Make it out of solar panels and solve the energy problem by beaming it down to earth.

The amount of space required for visibility of a written message assuming you dont want to just spell it out with shiny points visible in the day as tiny stars in lines, would likely be sufficient to deliver more than 100% of the power needed for the next 50 years.
And as for the geo orbit... you would need to build 3 or 4 if you put it there... some people could hide on the other side of the planet and try to ignore it.

Thank you for making the rest of your argument clear and not some kind of political rant back, you merely stated your position & feelings rather than attacking. Nice to see sanity prevail in politics of any kind, left or right.

Secondly... Unfortunately the kind of "at least this ref is cheating for my team" leads to the breakdown of the game theory assumptions behind democracy. If your only happy with someone cheating for you and they are only happy when someone is cheating for them, the system breaks down through a kind of yo-yo effect between the sides involved which will typically reduce to just 2. I'm not making any kind of political statement left right up down... vote for the start button for all i care lol. I'm a 'swinging voter' but the thing is, I vote carefully considering each time. I want the fairest ref I trust not to screw me over somehow, problem is 'everyone' (not literally but in the sense that most people are voting towards their self interests) else wants the ref that cheats for their team.

Thirdly, the second thing isnt a personal attack, i realize that your looking after your interests when you vote for the guy that cheats for you, simply because if you didnt then the other side would completely railroad you which sucks even worse for you and the 50% of the people on your side. My problem is more that it has become a matter of 'sides' in the first place. It should be 1 side... the people running the country in the best interests of its people.

Democracy these days feels like its turned into a game of football (the type of football is not relevant in this statement)

How does a person get into this area without dropping their job, moving to the other side of the country to the only University that has a good Nuclear Physics program and spending forever getting a PhD and kicking off a research project on my idea?

I've had my own high level schematics drawn for this kind of idea years ago using practically off the shelf parts, i keep the construction price updated every year or whenever i spot new developments that would change things.

The reason its not built already and destroying test samples from smoke alarms to prove it works, is 3 things
Price... most parts arent cheap when your dealing with radioactive anything. general rad hardness & reliable material properties under neutron bombardment is hard to get.
My basement isnt safe enough... Obviously.
And that without the magic voodoo bureaucracy navigator to avoid the fact without almost impossible to obtain permits, I'd be breaking a boatload of laws many of which would probably create a terrorism scare soon as the media saw the report, because people wont think far enough to understand the difference between trying to transmute down to non radioactive material and making things more dangerous. Since Australia has remarkably thorough nuclear regulations. They basically say dont do anything to do with nuclear material unless we say you can, then define nuclear material as anything radioactive. Its loophole free from what I can tell, no room unless your backed and sanctioned. Which is why I havent done more than draw the plans.

Would love an insiders perspective on how hard it is to do research in this area... What are your thoughts on the glacial pace of innovation in the nuclear industry. While it has to be done safely, I don't think it should take 25 years to tinker with small ideas like this sort of stuff.

Yes its a manufactured shortage... But your forgetting the one small detail...
The source feedstock for the helium extraction process that the private industry manufacturers will need to use to produce it in commercially viable quantities is still a limited resource. A fossil fuel no less.
Helium is at present obtained through fractional separation of 'crude' natural gas where the natural gas contains a greater than 0.3% helium by volume due to current commercial costs.
Natural gas is a limited resource. The % availability of helium in the different types of natural gas deposit differs immensely based on geology and since I cant narrow the approximations down how I would like without more time consuming research I will have to use some USGS data as an approximate.

Since were dealing with petroleum related data I'll do the unit conversion here to keep things clear for anyone trying to check my math with the source data. (And where I'm using m^3 and ft^3 I'm referring to cubic volume not a math formula)
With typical natural gas fields measured in Barrel of Oil Equivalent and the typical BOE for natural gas stated by the USGS as 170m^3 (6000ft^3) of natural gas for one BOE we can work out roughly what the currently available and currently wasted helium is for the planet.

Current (CIA World Factbook proven reserves for 2011) global proven natural gas reserves equate to approximately 186.5*10^12 cubic meters

Using a few different estimates to average a rough range for the global percentage of content and to take into account the large number of gas reserves where the data is unavailable, the high mark of 2.5% by volume the average marks of 1% and 0.5% by volume and the low mark of 0.1% by volume i get the following prospective global total helium reserves.

High @2.5% - 4.662x10^12 cubic meters
Average @1% - 1.865x10^12 cubic meters
Average @0.5% - 932.5x10^9 cubic meters
Low @0.1% - 186.5x10^9 cubic meters

The USGS estimates are:
As of 2006 - USA reserves at 20.6x10^9 cubic meters
As of 2010 - Global Excluding the USA 31.3x10^9 cubic meters

Global proven natural gas reserves have increased since these 2 data points which would indicate the worst case low estimate is the most likely one for a global percentage. Pushing the numbers down a bit and using a volume % that is closer to the % represented by the reserve totals of the USGS estimates above - 0.05% by volume we get the following information...

Global production in 2011 was 3.3x10^12 cubic meters of natural gas.
From which using the above percentage of 0.05% by volume would yield 1.65x10^9 of helium removed from the reservoirs as part of natural gas.
USGS global helium production estimates for 2011 are 180x10^6 cubic meters of contained Helium.

Which means... That as we deplete the indisputably finite natural gas reserves from which we obtain helium, we are currently throwing away 90% of the worlds helium, literally into the air with every cubic meter of natural gas we extract and burn.

Its clearly a manufactured shortage... but the bigger issue in my mind is that were going to probably hit peak natural gas within the next 50 years... no big deal for most uses of natural gas, other forms of energy are able to fill the gaps.

However its our only practical source of helium... and when the gas stops, the Helium stops with it. Leaving us with as much as we have gathered and stored away up to that point to last us until mankind comes up with practical ways to obtain it in bulk from space.

And of note is this fact, there were 19 privately owned and operating helium plants in the USA alone in 1995 prior to deregulation of the helium reserve by the US government through the "Helium Privatization Act of 1996" (Public Law 104–273). Private companies are already supplying it commercially and making money doing so while competing with the artificially lower government stockpile price.

I would love you to back that up with a legal reference such as a particular case that delivered this as the final verdict.
You can claim it to be true and I wish it was, but I do need to see the proof.

As a 'semi-pro' photographer (Ive been paid for work but its a hobby to me these days) I totally agree. Someone taking a photo involves a lot of things that can make it unique and deserving of copyright.

However... I personally don't believe that a photographic reproduction designed explicitly for the purpose of optimum and faithful reproduction of the existing work deserves the full protections of copyright.
The principle I hold is simple, if your copying it like a photocopier would, trying to make an exact flat replica of the public domain original as if you laid it down on the glass of a hypothetical photocopier that it could fit on, it shouldn't matter how complicated your photocopier is. If your not changing the original it should stay public domain regardless of format. Retyping the works of Shakespeare shouldnt let you copyright them based on the fact you chose a different font, page width, line spacing, etc.

This kind of thing is an unfortunate grey area, while I believe the photographer deserves full credit and has a right to get paid. I don't feel that existing law properly handles 'reproduction copying' in a suitable fashion.

Personally I would licence any kind of photo-reproduction work I did with Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs by default and offer alternative licensing like Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs on request for a small cost depending on what they were doing with it, Creative Commons Attribution for a bit more, or Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike on request when it seemed appropriate.
Its my reproduction shot so I want to be acknowledged as the photographer and I don't want the reproduction modified as it is meant to be a reproduction shot, not source material for further works, however I'm not a jerk and I would happily give people needed permission if they asked and if they were trying to make money, then I would expect a payment in proportion to how important my stuff was to their work. If its litterally a block mount photo print of my photo... I'm expecting a percentage cut or big pay... if its used as a texture in a student developed game set in a museum or something like that... Id probably only want attribution.

While researching a while ago when working for something or other I have long since forgotten, these exact details stuck in my head. Its the simple truth. They would have done it cheaper if the ground wasnt a bloody swamp. The crawler doesnt need to be the way it is because it carries a rocket. It was built and designed because it was needed to carry a rocket to a the hard concrete launch pad, over several miles of soft Florida ground.

They did use rails where they found it applicable. Such as Cape Canaveral Air Force Station - Launch Complex 41 and nearby Launch Complex 40. These 2 launch pads used rail lines to transport Titan family rockets to the pad in a vertical orientation and here is photo of them in use doing just that