(Crap, I just realized you might be talking about a different game; I responded as if you were replying to the GP about Arkham City, but now I suspect you were referring to GTA4. My bad if I misunderstood.)

Actually no, I'm gonna chime in here as another person who owns Arkham City and does not have a live account. Your statement is incorrect.

What happens instead is, you get prompted to log into GFWL, and can click "cancel" to just work offline. Save game still works, no features lost. You can't do online scores, but who cares, really? Dunno if it'll require a login for DLC, but I rarely bother with that anyway. And, just to be clear on this point, I'm currently a quarter way through the game, have never made a live account (I dislike Microsoft), have saved plenty of times and am playing a non-pirated, bought off of steam version of the game.

I don't know where you got your information, but it's either out of date, was never correct in the first place, or something got misunderstood along the way.

Actually, omnivores are all over the map in terms of taste. Pigs are tasty, bears are edible, but nobody's lining up to try crow-pie.

Regarding carnivores, I can vouch for the fact that sharks are indeed tasty.

Might want to amend your rules to say that scavengers aren't tasty, herd animals are delicious, and seafood is exempt.

Don't be stupid, the whole point of a strategic nuclear weapon is deterrence and/or nationalistic posturing. Hiding your capabilities does not further either cause. Delivery systems may have some secrecy about them to prevent the development of countermeasures, but the actual bomb yields are no secret.

Plus, you don't know if a design works until you test it, and you can't test a nuke without essentially letting every other nation with an intelligence agency know the yield, since the math for determining TNT equivalence isn't hard, and the detonation isn't subtle.

Further to that, most of the really big designs are older and outdated, as miniaturization became the focus (smaller bombs equals more warheads per missile/bomber). Meaning the bombs from the end of the cold war are actually lower yield than the ones from the middle.

In short, you're letting knee jerk "the government is hiding secrets" paranoia get in the way of common sense, and you don't know nukes.

You're undermining your point by insisting on antagonizing the religious. Which is unfortunate, because your first sentence is entirely correct.

In the developed world, the average number of children per woman is 1-2 depending on where you are. The women with no kids and the ones with three or more tend to cancel out. Replacement level fertility (i.e. the fertility rate of a stable population with no immigration or emigration) is 2.1 children per woman, roughly. Meaning that if the entire world enjoyed a first world standard of living, the growth rate would fall below replacement level and the population would begin to shrink within a generation or three. In truth, the only reasons the population of the developed world is still growing are immigration and inertia.

Why only two kids at most? Because that's all it takes to satisfy most people's desire for children, because people no longer rely on their children to care for them when they get old, because most pregnancies these days are deliberate rather than accidental, and because if your kids aren't part of the labour force, there's no economic advantage to large families. Kids are a huge burden in the first world.

In point of fact, a long term population study carried out in 2006 suggested that the global population would likely stabilize at around nine billion by midcentury, with rising standards of living being the deciding factor. This is still a problem, in terms of supplying energy to those billions without wrecking the ecology or exhausting finite resources, but feeding nine billion shouldn't be a stretch.

Since I can't imagine the average life expectancy skyrocketing outside of first world nations, the talk of "if people live longer lives, we'd run out of food" is bunk. At best, enhanced longevity would counteract the decline in population; more likely it wouldn't even do that, since we're not talking complete immortality here.

Doesn't matter in context. You're bitching about the wrong problem for the article.

Most of the time when a web based email account gets cracked it isn't that you set your password to "password". Instead it's that you logged in from a compromised machine, and someone got ahold of your actual password, whether it's "fido" or "1xe34v3tsAad". There's a damn good reason I don't check my email anywhere other than devices I know are clean.

(Had something like what TFA describes happen to someone I know; it took her forever to realize that what had transpired was that she'd checked gmail on a coworker's computer and said coworker had been grossly lax in terms of safety. When a scan was run on the box for the first time ever it returned over a hundred bits of malware, some of it serious. The coworker, incidentally, was a private secretary to a lawyer, so this was a "holy shit" moment if ever there was one.)

Think about it for a moment and you'll see why the perpetrators use malware and/or social engineering rather than, say, a dictionary attack; there's nothing google, facebook or yahoo can do about it. They can easily limit the number of login attempts, encrypt usernames and passwords, reject really common passwords during account creation, etc, but if some third party gets the correct password from an infected PC, then when they log in it will appear legitimate.

That isn't to say you shouldn't bother with strong passwords, but if you think having a strong password protects you from everything, you're fooling yourself. The solution here also requires security software and education about admin privileges and trusted vs. untrusted sources for "free" software as it's the likeliest vector for infection (presupposing for a moment that the user needs a windows box, and frankly half the time the answer to that is "yes" for a number of reasons).

You've got it the wrong way around.

The idea of winning a war by way of killing so many of the opposition that the rest will surrender or retreat is viable some of the time, but horrific. And truth be told, it doesn't work nearly as well in real life as it does on paper; people are unpredictable creatures at the best of times, and there are plenty of cases of soldiers or entire armies fighting to the very last, horrific fate be damned, rather than surrender. In particular populations and politicians may fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy i.e. "We've already lost N soldier fighting this war, we can't give up now, else they died for nothing." You can't expect to win a war if you assume your opponents are rational actors who prioritize self preservation, because that isn't always going to be the case.

The right way to do it, and in fact the way that's had a better track record of making wars end, is to destroy the ability of the enemy to make war altogether. For a protracted conflict, you get more bang for your buck destroying logistic, communication and supply capability than you do killing enemy soldiers in a fair fight. Any modern national military is only as capable of making war as they are capable of supplying, commanding and reinforcing their armed forces. Obviously this doesn't work in a guerrilla engagement, where supply lines may be nonexistent, or against a foe who hides among civilians. Iraq is a good example of where this strategy does and doesn't work; the official conflict ended rapidly, with the army defeated in short order (and without massive casualties; many Iraqi soldiers never even saw action), but the same approach cannot be used to maintain an occupation.

For a hypothetical conflict between two nations armed with robots, this form of conflict is even more likely; infantry forces require less logistical support than drone forces. In order to win, you don't grind your enemy's robotic forces into dust in a fair fight and you don't try to terrorize their populace into surrendering; instead you destroy their communications so they can't send in the drones, you destroy their factories, airbases, munitions dumps and whatever else they need to build and maintain their robotic fleet and you prevent them from doing the same thing to you. You don't have much chance of occupying a country with a robotic army any more than you can occupy a country with tanks, aircraft or warships; occupation pretty much requires men on the ground. This does mean that a robot armed nation might win a conflict without casualties, but must be prepared to suffer losses if they plan on conquering rather than letting their foe surrender and retain their own government.

Heard the same story, only it was a ham radio. It's likely apocryphal in any case, though it would not surprise me to learn there's an actual event obscured by the retelling.

Regardless, the GP has the right idea. I've heard of blind tests of "EM sensitivity" done in the past, with results that unambiguously showed a purely psychosomatic condition - that is to say, the subjects felt sick when they believed they were being exposed, regardless of their actual exposure, and felt fine when they believed they were "safe". But to the patient, this is always going to be met with denial. "Can you believe that doctor thought it was all in my head! Where the hell did he learn medicine? I don't like being called crazy, I'm going to go to my homeopath for advice from now on!"

Partly this is the fault of our culture labelling all mental health issues under the broad brush of "s/he's crazy". Nobody wants to admit that there could be anything wrong with their head, ergo all psychosomatic illnesses are attributed to external causes, sensible or otherwise. The prevalence of quacks and snake oil salesmen ready to cash in on the latest hysterical bandwagon only makes the problem worse.

There's very little economic reason to trade in used games at Gamestop. The value you get from them is minimal; you'd have to get rid of a whole stack of games (games that are still recent enough and saleable titles for the store to want them, mind you) in order to get one in exchange. I'm quite sure the only reason the practice persists is because Gamestop has done such an excellent job of convincing people otherwise.

If you remove trade-ins from the equation, what does Gamestop really offer, or have a monopoly on? They're an upscale, specialized pawnshop that sells new games on the side.

I'm not saying it isn't an effective business model on their part mind you, just that their business model is a half and half mixture of good marketing and a target audience who's bad at arithmetic.

I'm not talking philosophy.

I'm talking about evolution.

The basic unit of life isn't the organism, it's the gene. Genes proliferate if they confer reproductive success to the organism they're attached to. They, in a very real and literal way, exist to make more of themselves, because several billion years of evolution has selected in favour of reproductively successful genes.

Genes do not go extinct when the organism they are attached to dies; rather genes go extinct when there are no copies left in any organism. There are genes that have been lost forever, and genes that have been succeeded by their own mutant descendants (erroneous copies that happened to do better than the original), but at the same time there are genes kicking around today that existed in the time of the dinosaurs.

So yes, from a genetic evolutionary standpoint, it is entirely fair to say "life exists to procreate". Just don't mistake fact for philosophy or morality; trying to find moral meaning in evolution has proven to be a bad idea, historically.

Generalists in nature have a harder time of things than specialists. Else no organism would become specialized in the first place.

There's a good reason all that green goo is specialized; because if you took an non-specialized plant and dropped it in the soil of a specialist, it's going to get choked out by the native. There are successful invasive plant species, but even then what you've often got is an invasive specialist out competing the native specialists for the kind of environment they both thrive in.

So your non-discriminating grey goo has all the drawbacks of the non-discriminating green goo. Only it has the much larger handicap of not actually existing yet.

You misunderstand; if a "bad solution" as you call it, did arise, it would become the new normal.

Life exists to procreate. A life form that manages to cover the entire planet in it's own self-replicating mass is an evolutionary success. It won't die out; if its replication created an unfavourable environment for its own survival, it may die back, but it will persist.

I'm not talking hypotheticals here either. What I've just described is exactly what happened around three billion years ago.

Photosynthesis arose. Living things used sunlight to split CO2, and spewed toxic oxygen into the biosphere, killing the competition. This "green goo" was so successful, that it diversified, evolved into new niches and took over the world. We call them "plants".

This isn't a unique incident - there are whole eras of living organisms wiped out by competition from something better adapting at making more of itself. And it isn't a coincidence that what I've just described sounds an awful lot like "grey goo"; the people who proposed a grey goo scenario were familiar with the evolution of plant life.

I don't disagree with you that grey goo is possible; where I disagree is that you seem to think it's easy. Show me a self-replicating machine, and I'll be seriously impressed. Show me a self-replicating nanomachine, I'll be even more impressed. Nobody has that technology yet, and I'd be amazed to see it in my lifetime.

What I won't live to see, and neither will you, is a self-replicating nanomachine that can out-compete living things. Sorry, but your grey goo fears are a couple hundred years too early, and I'm not sure they'll ever be realized.

If a trivial sequence of proteins allowed for the kind of replication you're talking about, the world would already have ended. There's been living things fucking around with differing types of biochemistry for the past few billion years; if the self-replicating apocalypse could be achieved trivially, it would have. Some would say that's exactly what did happen.

What you and all the other "grey goo" crowd are overlooking is that it isn't enough to build a machine capable of self-replication. Living things do that already. The "grey goo" scenario already happened around three billion years ago when photosynthesis first arose and organisms began harvesting solar energy. You, the person reading this right now, are a form of naturally occurring self-replicating carbon based machinery. And you've had a few billenia of evolution to optimize the "self-replicating" part.

We could build self-replicating nanotechnology tomorrow, deliberately release it into the environment and it would do... nothing. If it were carbon based, it'd probably become something's dinner.

No, to end the world in a goopocalypse, we'd need to build self-replicating machines that are vastly more rapid and efficient than living organisms. Our goo would have to be better at being grey goo than the existing green goo. The competition has a three and a half billion year head start and are very good at making more of themselves.

I'm going to bold this part for anyone skimming this (admittedly long) post: To end the world with nanotechnology requires self-replicating machines (which we don't have) that are better at reproducing themselves than existing organisms . I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I am going to say with absolute certainty that it won't happen in the twenty-first century. We'll be lucky to even have self-replicating machines in a hundred years. "Grey goo" today is about as likely as a renaissance inventor building a thermonuclear weapon.

While I agree with you that overuse of antibiotics for trivial purposes has sped up the development of resistant strains, I think you're overstating it. The tone of your post suggests you blame MRSA entirely on factory farming and physician incompetence/laziness, which simply isn't the case.

To begin with, there are two more or less unavoidable problems that lead to the development of resistant strains. The first is that people prescribed antibiotics for actual bacterial infections often stop taking them when the symptoms abate, rather than taking the full course. The second is that hospitals are breeding grounds for resistant infections. Even a well managed hospital isn't completely safe.

Now, you can reduce those problems with public education and changes to hospital policies, but you can't eliminate the threat, which brings us to the larger issue; resistant strains are inevitable. In a perfect world, where no antibiotics were misused and all hospitals were entirely sterile, there would still arise antibiotic resistant bacteria over time. Basic evolution in action.

So no, MRSA and it's kin cannot be prevented, they can merely be reduced in prevalence.

Now, obviously new treatments can be devised to try and shift our antibacterial measures as the bacteria adapt; in particular if we retire treatments that have become ineffective, the strains resistant to those drugs might die out from competition, allowing us to revive "useless" antibiotics decades or more in the future.

Doing what you suggest - essentially banning antibiotic misuse - is still a good idea, but without the other solutions mentioned above, it's just a delaying tactic.

You're asking a question that physicists haven't answered yet. If I had the answer to that, do you really think I'd be wasting my time on slashdot?