It's striking how well that works. It's common to see wrecked cars where everything in front of the passenger compartment is crushed, but the windshield is unbroken and the passenger compartment is completely intact.

Amen... even ~15-20 years ago (the time is pretty fuzzy to me now), I was involved in a head-on (at about 30mph for each car) in a Honda Civic. My entire family was in the car with me, and had fortunately decided to put on their seat belts (which was kind of rare those days).

After the shock wore off, I got a chance to look at the totaled car. The engine compartment had perfectly crumpled underneath the passenger cage, and all of us passengers had gotten away with nothing more than bumps, bruises & a black eye or two (from smacking heads on the backs of the seats).

Damn impressive given the kinetic energy & momentum involved, and this was even before stuff like air bags & recent advances in material science, dummy testing & extensive computer modeling.

So, no problem if someone installs a proxy on your machine & uses it to surf child porn? I'm sure that it won't take long or have any impact on your reputation for you to explain to the nice law enforcement agents that it wasn't really you doing that sort of thing.

Yeah, after posting my comment, I thought about it a little more & realized that you wouldn't be able to pick up any more momentum via gravity slingshot after reaching the escape velocity, but I didn't know what the exact escape velocity from the Solar System was.

I see you completely ignored the overall point of my message and went immediately to the part of the comment that fed your own biases.

A big company doesn't need to buy off legislators if they can legally control enough vital resources. Once they have that control, they can force people to do things simply by threatening to withhold those resources. (I'm assuming that you'll agree that it is the usual "right" of a private property owner to be able to withhold access to that property from others.)

Microsoft or Comcast may be evil, but they can't force me into jail, suck dollars out of my paycheck, or draft me to go die in 'Nam or Iraq like government can.

Sure they can, if they gain enough power. If they gain control over some vital resources that you need for your survival (drinking water for instance), then you'll do pretty much anything they tell you to, or die. And that's just using basic private property rights; it doesn't even touch what they can do when they're rich enough to buy off legislators.

I wonder how long it would take to reach 25% of c by repeatedly slingshotting a large multi-generation colony ship around the Sun...

Trade is always mutually beneficial in the long run

The fact that you think so is an indication of how simplistic your view of economics is. It took me only 30 secs in Google to find this, and I believe there are other arguments still out there against the "trade is always mutually beneficial" overly-simplistic view.

...if they had allowed you to play as a Little Sister, the target of every Splicer, crawling through the ducts for safe transit, popping out here or there to try and drain some Adam from a corpse, scampering around various Big Daddy's for protection (or deliberately drawing enemies to Big Daddys to get them killed), perhaps being able to set traps or sabotage things.

I suppose a scenario like that would've made the game more puzzle-like rather than a shooter, but I think it still would've been pretty interesting to play.

I'm amazed that some people seem to think being able to import cheap crap from overseas is somehow meaningful when a huge (and growing) percentage of the working population is having a problem finding a job. As long as you have a job, then you can cope with rising prices. Without jobs, then the fact that imported goods are cheap merely means that you are spending your reserves a little slower than you would otherwise - and the money is STILL going out of the country, to a place with a lower standard of living, which means you probably won't be seeing again anytime soon (except maybe as a loan).

I'm skeptical about the specific forms of protectionism being proposed nowadays, but the idea that allowing all our money to flow unimpeded out of our country (without having any dependable mechanism to bring back equal or more value) will somehow be net beneficial for the country is just laughable.

because unless you've got something of actual importance (in which case it shouldn't be on your home computer)

You mean, like having a functioning always-connected-to-broadband potential attack platform?

Right to privacy & control over your own private property.

It might not be quite at a level of right-to-not-get-lynched-for-the-color-of-your-skin, but it's not as different as you're trying to make it out to be.

Whoa, you're good - you caught me fiddling with the date/timestamp on my universal simulator.

Actually I am the Creator, and you're just an AI running on my simulator. Now don't be skeptical - there's no way you can prove that I'm not.

I'd ask you how you're doin', except that I already know, and frankly I don't care too much about how a simulated being is doing anyway, especially on a insignificant little dirtball like Earth.

There's a much more interesting bunch of sentients that have developed around Beta Epsilon III, who has figured out that they're just simulated beings and who are trying to develop techniques to let them hack their way into the simulator's core routines. I let them fool around a little, and when they start feeling smug, I throw the simulator into debug mode, change a few variables in their experiment & get a laugh at how frustrated they get.

I think the "BetterPrivacy" Firefox add-on also helps with Flash cookies.

Don't be a fascist. Try and keep an open mind, and when you disagree, simply be polite about it.

Just don't open your mind so far that your brain falls out.

If your debate opponents aren't even willing to concede the existence of physical evidence or the relevance of basic logic, then you are not going to achieve anything useful by pretending like their arguments have any sort of useful information in them (unless you're studying the psychology of the willfully ignorant).

And politeness works best when it is being practiced in both directions (referring to common reactions by people who think their faith is being attacked, not your post).

I, for one, have spent many years trying to be polite to certain aggressive creationist relatives. I have not seen any evidence that my politeness has caused them to consider my views with any more validity. On the contrary, they tend to regard my politeness as evidence that I do not have confidence in my arguments, and that encourages them to attack.

On the other hand, if I go out of my way to make them look like idiots in the eyes of their peers whenever they open their ignorant mouths, I can at least get them to keep quiet when they are within my earshot - which has done wonders for my stress levels & for the general level of discussion at family gatherings.

Wouldn't that just make the robot zigzag until the brain reached room temperature?