But the appeal of games is they're not like real life. A game that emulated real life would be pretty boring (see also: The Sims).

I liked it most and played it most before any of the grinding! I've tolerated it since then, but with each new patch things seem to be getting more and more towards grind/pay.

You may be understimating just how long the grinding will take. 200 hours to get a random hat, of which there are 5, sound good to you? That's a lot of play time to get the one you want.

Well I guess I will not be playing TF2 again. Despite the 'it's optional defence' some of the items will give advantages. You can still get them all randomly, so it's a choice of grind or pay up. I think I'll do neither.

It's simply amazing that they thought charging more for items than the game itself could make sense.

But what about those outside the Volvo?

Maybe you should stop using analogies that over-simplify things then? Oh wait, this is slashdot.

This is my new favourite internet meBBBBBBBbbbbbbbbzzzzzzzzzttttttttttttttttTTTTTT.

It should be true that "Always lie" == "Always select a random answer"

I did not know that. However at least this user-friendly extension from the EFF will hopefully be a better solution for less technically inclined people, and be able to raise awareness of the difference between using http and https.

Oh wow, this is awesome. I've used greasemonkey scripts with facebook but it's pretty ugly, seems to load the http page before the https page. This sounds perfect. Here's the link https://www.eff.org/files/https-everywhere-latest.xpi which is missing from TFS.

But the original point of this thread was that the aliens will be 'Much more primitive' than us. If we're talking about orders of magnitude of technological evolution before getting to the one star nearest to us then I can't believe they will be more primitive than we are now.

You are not understanding the true scale of the problem. If we get to a million mph it will take (by my calculations) 3,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

Taking the most ambitious estimate of the maximum velocity from that page (3.3%) means it'd still take over 100 years to reach the nearest star. Bear in mind that this optismitic estimae required nuclear fusion propulsion, which is now known to be much harder than thought in the sixties and the cost is measured given as 1% of US GNP. This doesn't even begin to address the issue of sustaining a healthy group of humans onboard for that long.