GRBs clearly haven't prevented life in *our* galaxy, so the Fermi Paradox still stands.

The caluculations probably rule out life in the core of our galaxy, but systems further out would be exposed even less often than ours is. And even though GRBs can periodically sterilize a planet, their directionality means that one burst would not likely sterilize all the planets in an intercellar civilization simultaneously.

So, to modify what someone said above, we can add another term to the Drake equation, but this doesn't do much to answer Fermi.

Perhaps the research could help over time those distinctions exist and pair like-minded people together.

I thought most modern games already had systems to at least try and match players with similar skill levels.

Why not let abuse take place online in virtual environments?

Because it sucks and leads to much more offline abusive behavior by otherwise good people after they have been repeatedly harassed.

Instead, this psychology of banning and throttling likely leads to more offline abusive real-life suffering.

The opposite is true. Because the natural abuser is inclined to fight through any system thrown at them, throttling and other attempts drain their energy more than simply letting them post would, leading to more relaxed (or at least less) behavior offline.

Not to mention, we all know that trolls online are probably losers who would never in a billion years have the nerve to say or do anything offensive offline...

Something worth considering. We associate snow with cold, so it's tempting to see more and frequent snowstorms as disproof that the planet is warning. However temperature is only one of the constraints on snow. The other is moisture.

I have lived here in Boston over fifty years, and in the 60s and 70s the December climate was bitterly cold and *bone dry*. In recent decades there has been a marked tendency toward warmer AND wetter Decembers and Januaries, and thus frequent significant snow storms in December (almost unheard of) and January (rare until the 90s).

This storm was particularly intense, and in my town got two feet or more. This has happened on six prior occasions, once in 1888, and five times since 1969.

...less than any other ISP? No. Just like Google funded Mozilla this is more of a long term effort to push more people and more services online, where Google can get a piece of it. The "old media" advertising budgets are still pretty huge and people willingly sign up to Google's services so there's no need to get shady. In fact their roll-out is extremely slow if they were seriously intending to become a major ISP, they're really just trying to shame the rest of the country into demanding they get the same kind of service from their incumbents. Who needs cable TV when you got gigabit service and can watch any show, any time over streaming without hitting any caps? That's what Google is selling, of course it's out of self-interest but for tech geeks I think they're on our side in this case.

One browser that supports multiple profiles should accomplish that just fine.

You're not a web developer are you?

That you know of. Besides, I'm sure you've had many that you've caught during the standard code -> compile -> run -> segfault -> debug cycle, but the more subtle ones are harder to trigger.

Depending on what the code is doing and what kind of legacy cruft you're dealing with it's not always trivial.

More likely the other devs feel like it's bad form to drag the names of past contributors through the mud in public. Particularly when the reviewers missed the bug as well.

While that is interesting in its own right, one should be careful to read too much into the existence of such plans. In the 1800-hundreds more emphasis was put on military planning as opposed to execution in the face of what had already happened. It was thought (largely correctly) that to gain and hold the initiative you had to already have considered possible ways of conducting operations and have ready plans for what it would take to carry those operations out. (The specialised staff officer comes from this period, the general staff being responsible for this analysis and planning).

However, in order to keep the necessary knowledge alive, major engagements being few and far between, a system whereby these staff officers were continuously trained by (more or less) dreaming up new scenarios, analysing them and making the plans to support the operations that that scenario would entail. As for keeping the updated, what do you otherwise do with the new young officers that can't be trusted to do stuff that actually has an effect on anything? You put them to update "War plan Z" or something. When they're finished you get to tell them why and where they got it all wrong, and send them back to their desks which both keeps them busy and out of everybody's hair, and also impresses the important lesson on their young and impressionable minds that they don't actually know anything and should mind their tongue and manners when the grown-ups are talking.

That these plans are kept secret isn't necessarily due to military necessity, but rather to make sure that the equivalent young know-it-all- politician doesn't get wind of them and create all manner of problems getting in the way of the work the grown-ups have to actually get done. It's more of a "conveniently secret", than actually sensitive (as these plans are on such a high level that most of the data they use aren't secret/unknown to begin with. What forces are where, what their general capabilities are and what the map looks like are no great secrets.)

So, if you look through the archives there would and should be plans for almost everything including invasion by space aliens via flying saucer(s) as the plans themselves aren't that important in the greater scheme of things, but the planning process, and keeping that skill alive is very valuable.

EB games don't trade in digital games. They trade in physical media. And unless there is a registration code in the box then it's implicitly transferable.

Ah, Americans and their "mammoth snowstorms" - try living on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. You know what we call a snowstorm with gale-force winds and copious precipitation? Tuesday ;) Our last one was... let's see, all weekend. The northwest gets hit by another gale-force storm tomorrow. The southeast is predicted to get hurricane-force winds on Thursday morning.

Here's what the job of someone dispatched to maintain antennae for air traffic control services has to deal with here. ;) (those are guy wires)

I'm pretty sure it was implied that P(snowstorm) is high enough to make the cost/benefit rational.

Unless of course you think his comment would be better off at 4 times the length, detailing all of the obvious common sense assumptions he made.

You bet market power is being exercised. The OEMs all started rolling out low cost devices with free chrome OS which forced MS to cut the price of its low end sku to $0.00. And it's not a secret. They laid out in plain English what the specs were for a device to qualify.
So not only are they now responding to market pressure, they are doing so in a very transparent way. This is no longer the MS you love to hate.

A sun-like star is about 1 1/2 million kilometers in diameter. To blot out all light from such a star that's 10 light years away, a 0,75 kilometer diameter disc could be no more than 1/200.000th of a light year, or around 50 million kilometers (1/3rd the distance between the earth and the sun).

The brightest star in the sky is Sirius A. It has a diameter of 2,4 million km and a distance of 8.6 light years. This means your shade could be no more than 25 million kilometers away.

The sun and the moon both take up about the same amount of arc in the night sky so would be about equally difficult to block; let's go with the sun for a nice supervillian-ish approach. 1,4m km diameter, 150m km distance means it'd be able to block the sun at 800km away. Such an object could probably be kept in a stable orbit at half that altitude, so yeah, you could most definitely block out stars with the thing - including our sun!