An entire industry got penalized due to the egregious actions of a few bad guys.

If it was just a few bad guys participating in egregious actions, then how does outlawing those egregious actions penalize the entire industry? Those who were not engaged in bad practices in the first place lost nothing by having those practices prohibited.

TFA begins by talking about Mass Effect 2, but to be honest, I had no problem playing through that to completion (and will likely do a second playthrough at some point in preparation for Mass Effect 3). Aside from the planet scanning (which you can ignore past the game's mid-way point quite safely), there's precious little repetition

Yeah, I loved Mass Effect 2, but the planet scanning was just stupid. I couldn't believe they had managed to come up with game mechanic even duller than driving around random planets in the Mako looking for mineral deposits and whatnot.

What bothered me the most about it is that it didn't make any damn sense for me to be doing it. Am I not the CAPTAIN of the damn ship? Why am I personally running the scanner? Shouldn't one of the crew do that, or perhaps, I don't know, maybe the ship's on-board AI?

I'm looking forward to Mass Effect 3, but at this rate they'll probably have poor Shepard swabbing the decks and taking out the ship's garbage.

Maybe they didn't know exactly which questions would be asked, and they would still have had to memorize the answers, . . . but that's still cheating.

So the student has a collection of sample questions with correct answers, but does not know which questions will be asked on the exam, and so he commits the material to memory before the test?

I'm pretty sure that's called studying.

If they knew exactly what questions would appear on the test, or had the sample questions and answers with them during the exam, that would be an issue. But you seem to be claiming that just learning the answers to the questions that might be on the exam constitutes cheating, and I find that ridiculous.

Of course, for the professor to construct his exams by only using sample questions from the publisher instead of something requiring more in depth analysis and understanding makes it a really easy test, but that's another discussion. Knowing the material covered by an easy test isn't cheating.

The CIA might have to break the law?? OH NOES!! Such a thing has never happened before!

I can answer that one. After every 16 hours of real time, I would pause the universe and get a full 10 - 12 hours of good, uninterrupted sleep, without actually having to waste any real time on it. I get to sleep well so that my brain can function at peak capacity, and I get to be awake and do productive things while everyone else sleeps.

Superpower Physics Question: If time stops for everyone but me, does that mean I continue to age while time is stopped? If so I'll be paying for this benefit with what to everyone else looks like premature senescence and death.

Subterranean tunnels always become infested with vampires or mutants, which drives up the maintenance costs considerably. Elevated tunnels do not suffer this problem.

Fucking yanks seem to think that having a mouth is licence to open it ad flap out any old nonsense

Well yes, we do think that. We call it "freedom of speech" and enshrined it in the first amendment to our constitution.

Thank you. This is exactly what I was trying to explain, though I was using incorrect terms and generally doing a piss poor job of it. You have clarified it beautifully.

Listen, this stuff is not easy to articulate, so I will grant that I may not be saying it clearly. But you are leaving out important information in your description, which makes it meaningless from a special relativity standpoint, namely -- relative to what?

As they approach c their time slows down relative to the rest of the universe, earth included so that c stays c. Meanwhile on earth time is moving at at 'normal' rates relative to its own inertial reference frame. That is, as described from the Earth's reference frame, the ship has experienced less time than the earth. However, As described from the ship's inertial reference frame, it is the earth that has experienced less time than the ship.

There is no universal privileged frame of reference. You are treating the ship as moving close to light speed and the earth as stationary, but it is equally valid to treat the ship as stationary and the earth moving close to light speed. Each reference frame sees the other as having experienced less time. Seriously, read the link. It will do a far better job of explaining than I can.

Your math is correct, and I do not dispute it. As I replied here : http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1809212&cid=33798980, I was not assuming anything about the planet's volume except that it would certainly not be the same as earth's. Hence, my very deliberate avoidance of giving a value for the planet's volume or radius, and my use of words like "similar" and ranges that would be "more likely" than others instead of words like "equal to."

I was "wrong" only in that I elected not to present a complete and concrete example with an assumed value for each variable, as that was not my goal. I only meant to point out why the naive belief that mass is linearly proportional to surface gravity (a belief that I've seen rampant in every news sites comments on this story) is incorrect.

What with this being slashdot, I should have realized that not giving a complete mathematical description of a specific possibility would lead to some asshole assuming I don't know shit. My bad.

No, I didn't forget that in principal, though it is true that I didn't recall the exact ratio.

You will note that I did not present any numbers about what the radius or volume would be, I only said that they would likely be proportionally bigger. I didn't specify what that proportion would be, because I couldn't remember and didn't want to take the time to look it up and show exact math, nor did I want to complicate my point by introducing an assumption of constant density.

I then estimated that .8G to 1.2G would be a more likely range than 4G, which it is. I probably should have said .8G to 2G. You are completely correct to say that 1.6 would be the exact value if the density remained constant, but I was only out to illustrate the fallacy that 4x mass -> 4x gravity.

Thank you for backing it up with more concrete values.

Thanks to special relativity, the faster they go the faster time is passing on Earth (relative to them).

That's exactly backwards. Thanks to special relativity, the faster they go, the slower time is passing on earth relative to them. And vice-versa. Time is passing slower for earth relative to them, and slower for them relative to earth. The colony ship would only find themselves to have experienced less time than what had passed on earth if they decided to turn around and come back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox

At present, discussing the mechanics of nanorobots is like discussing the biology of sharktopi.

The planet is 4 times the mass of earth; so because of its gravity, I'd weigh 600 pounds

You are probably just trolling and I'm falling for it by correcting you, but just in case you actually think this. . .

No. Four times the mass does not imply that you would weigh 4 times as much unless the planet's radius is the same as the earth's. That is quite unlikely. A planet with 4 times as much mass as the earth is almost certainly going to be proportionally larger in volume as well. Gravity is proportional to mass, but inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the center of that mass. In the end, if the planet is made of the same sort of rocky material, it will have a similar density, and thus similar gravity.

Would it be exactly 1G? Probably not. Without knowing the planet's volume, we can't know exactly. But a number between .8G and 1.2G is much more likely than 4G.

Of course, I'm assuming that you weigh 150 pounds here on Earth. If you currently weigh 500 pounds, then I apologize. . . your estimated weight on this new world may have been fairly accurate after all. :)

It turns out your common thief or buyer of stolen goods isn't really that sophisticated of a master criminal. They weren't after my data, just a normally expensive machine that they could get for free or cheap. For the guy who had my machine all those files filled with my information were just junk that was cluttering up his sweet new computer. He moved all my stuff into the trash can and moved on with his life.

I ended up not losing any of my files (important stuff was backed up, but there were some pictures and things that hadn't yet been) because he never even emptied the trash.

The real irony is that when I got my machine back, I had access to all of HIS personal data. Dude took a lot of pictures with the iSight camera. His girlfriend was pretty hot. Maybe crime does pay. :)