I don't eat meat,

Yes, that's true, animals do kill/take advantage of other animals.
But animals lack the capacity for higher reasoning.
Simply put, they don't know any better. We do.

There was a nice sentence i heard on the Discovery channel once
It went something like this.
"Out of all the life on planet earth man is the only one capable of protecting all life on planet earth"

It will never be "ok" to take advantage of someone/something for your own purposes.

When you get down to it, if something has any rights whatsoever then the first right must be the right to exist in the way it desires.

Yes, they are assumptions, but that's all any of us can do.
We look at the world through what we believe to be true.

It's wrong to torture anything. Torture by definition can never be "ok".

Plants have no nerves, so they can't feel physical pain like animals do.

A good cause for who though, mankind? definitely not that animal being tested on.

It strikes me as a bit silly to try and justify negative effects on one species by saying it producing some positive effects for a more intelligent species.
By that argument any species found to be more intelligent than mankind would have the right to do whatever they wanted with us.

Your example of flees and lice isn't the same thing because they are attacking you, killing them is self defence. It's also a lot more humane than what goes on in animal testing.

The sad part of it all is that a very significant percentage of the world population just couldn't bring themselves to put an animal through the kind of abuse that occurs behind closed doors in laboratories or meat works factories.
It's far to easy to ignore things when you don't have to deal with them.

I often wonder what would happen if the act of killing animals for food and science was assigned like jury duty

I don't claim to have the answers.
But in my opinion a good start would be limiting all testing done to strictly non lethal and non painful.

Yes, it would drastically reduce progress in the field, but so does not testing on humans directly.
One has to agree that testing everything on humans directly would yield much better progress and at a much faster rate.
But we choose to not do that and sacrifice the progress it would bring. We need to do the same with animal testing.
It may speed up progress but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.

There's no alternative animal to test on because the premise is wrong.

The bad premise being.. "It's ok to test on animals because less intelligent means less rights" or perhaps it needs to be said the other way around. "It's ok for humans to test on animals because humans are more intelligent and with more intelligences comes more rights"

It's a bad premise because we're mixing up the words "rights" and "responsibility".

It doesn't need to be anywhere near powerful enough to do any damage.
Could easily be mounted on the other side of the room.

Ever tried to sleep with the lights on, it's quite hard, you can see the light even through your eyelids are shut.
If this was flashing it would be quite annoying.

You could try a really bright led with a very small beam angle aimed at you. With enough power it should be visible through your eyelids. (I don't think you'd need that much power, maybe 1 watt). If it flashed or just did something annoying it would probably wake you up. To further cut down the stray light it could be mounted in a tube that shields everywhere else from the light except your area of the bed.

I have to disagree, Farcry failed to hook me. Crysis on the other hand had me hooked after the first 10 minutes. I've replayed Crysis and Crysis Warhead many times and it's always fun.

One game is almost never going to be appealing to everyone since everyone enjoys different aspects.

Most people are going to find one of the following aspects significantly more important over all the others, And ask 10 people and you will probably get an equal distribution over all of them

- Storyline

- Technology

- Character development

- Visual effects.

And i'm sure there are many other areas too.

The most painless way to kill an animal would be using an odorless gas that results in the animal just calmly falling asleep without noticing. However, even then you are still robbing the animal of the rest of its life, its not like the animal was injured and going to suffer. So really, even killing in the most painless way isn't humane. The most humane way to kill an animal for food is to not kill it at all and eat something else.

First, write down all the points and reasons you can think of why listing to music is good and why your boss is wrong.
You want lots and lots of mildly convincing points, a good selection of generally convincing points and one or two amazingly convincing points

Step one,
Write a formal complaint letter addressed to your bosses boss using all the generally convincing and amazingly convincing points and asking for your bosses boss to respond. Explain why your boss is wrong and his decision will cost the company money, include any official studies done on listening to music helping people to perform tasks. You can relate it to music that doctors use during surgery, that sort of thing.Your boss is probably assuming that the sort of music you're listening to is heavy metal or something equally as distracting so use this assumption against him. Say in the report that you're listening to classical or something that makes logical sense for helping you to program and you cant understand why your boss thinks this is bad.
Don't send it yet.

Step two.
Go and see your boss and explain why you need to listen to music using your mildly convincing points. Try and convince him to change his mind.
Once you've finished talking to your boss he's either going to decide he was wrong and renege or decide the rule stands, or try to stall for time and hope you go away. If he stalls just go back to him in 2 days and continue the talk.

Step three
When you get the answer of "No" whip out the letter from your back pocket and tell your boss you're laying a formal complaint and ask him to pass the letter on to his boss. Tell your boss he can read it if he wants before passing it on. Then walk out of the room leaving your boss with the surprised expression on his face.

What will happen...
Your boss now has two options, he can give your report to his boss, which makes him look like an idiot or he can change his mind on the rule to make you withdraw the complaint. Either way its probably good for your case. If he doesnt change his mind about the rule and you dont hear anything directly from your bosses boss he probably didnt pass on the report and you can get him in some serious trouble for not passing on a formal complaint to who it was addressed to.

Another of the reasons they do it is because brand new shows get an initial rating boost. Because when a new show appears people don't know much about it or if they'll enjoy it, so they watch to find out. After the first episode and throughout the first and second season a large chunk of people decide the show isn't for them and stop watching. At that point the show is over as far as fox is concerned. The initial ratings boost has fallen and its time to make a new show. It's all about the ratings, not making good shows. There's a subtle difference.