Huh? They're all real. You don't end up with one real and four imaginary starfish.

Your body is different today than it was yesterday. Life is change...

Heh. Since everyone is being pedantic today... not all typos are spelling errors. :p

You may be a bit too far into the geekosphere. The average Game of Thrones viewer is, at best, vaguely aware of the fact that there's a book or books written by some guy whose name they can't remember that the series is based on, but who cares, it's a great series!

Unless they happen to coincidentally be good movie scriptwriters, that's not a terribly great idea. Giving people 13-26 hours to tell a story allows them to really shine. Tell them they need to squeeze it into 110 minutes, give or take 20, and it's likely to start great, run over, and become incoherent once it's gone through the cutting room. A great novelist is not necessarily a great writer of short stories (which movies are).

Well, when you consider the plan was to start delivering planes to customers in 2007...

Yeah, the latter is more likely. In the far future, the start of the information age will be considering the effective start of history. Knowledge of events prior to the 21st century will be considered semi-mythical, due to the fact that they weren't recorded at the time and all we have are essentially second hand accounts recorded in files with timestamps from the 21st or late 20th century at the very earliest. They'll (correctly) consider any "historical" texts of time before that as the theories and opinions on history given by later scholars, whereas from the 21st century forward they'll have actual historical records, rather than speculation.

Bwah? Did you even read what he said, or are you having serious logic fail? To be consistent with what he said, he needs to release HL3 everywhere in the world, 24x7, purchasable from the convenience of your PC, without region-locking, at the same time as the US release, and not just in brick-and-mortar stores. Nothing in what he said implies he thinks it needs to be DRM-free. Unless you think he intends to withhold the release from Steam, it seems quite likely he believes what he said absolutely 100%.

It's nice how people on the internet who lack the ability to argue with real people can at least enjoy arguing with straw-men. Kudos for being up-front about it, instead of the usual quoting of someone before responding to your straw-men instead of the quoted person.

Ah, that stupid fallacy again. A measure won't completely and totally solve a problem 100%, and therefore it has no value at all whatsoever.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, where binary thinking is stupid and reality is analog, a solution that reduces the problem has value, even if it doesn't stop all cases. The kind of piracy this measure is aimed at reducing is effectively reduced by this measure. The only relevant question is, does the amount of reduction justify the cost. Whether John Obvious-Alias Doe distributes it freely on the torrents is utterly irrelevant to the question. The torrent users are mostly a lost cause, the goal is to discourage Alice from giving a copy to Bob.

Consider it a small sneak preview... ;)

The thing, we already know exactly how they figured it out -- we wrote the instructions they followed to do so. We know exactly how they figured it out, we just don't understand the solution.

Killing a dozen people at the terminal, instead of three hundred people on board an airplane. You just described the system working quite well at its job (keeping the airplane safe). Was that supposed to be an argument against it? It's supposed to be the airplane safe. It's not supposed to stop all terrorism. The people proposing this are well aware of the fact that no matter how much security you have at the airport, people can still blow themselves up somewhere (and frequently do -- busy markets are actually more frequent targets than aircraft). Not a pleasant fact, but beside the point here...

If you have a building with four entrances, and you have twelve guards to cover them, do you put three at each entrance, covering each as best you can, or do you put nine on one entrance you think is most likely to see an attacker, and only one on each of the other three?

If you're an idiot, you do the latter. If you're not an idiot, you realize the former yields maximum security, because as soon as you put all your guards on one entrance, it becomes far easier for an attacker to get in, they just use one of the other three.

If you can understand that, you should be able to comprehend why searching any particular demographic more (and thus, by diverting resources, means you search others less) makes you less secure, not more. As soon as your move resources into an uneven distribution mode, you open up exploitable holes, and you're a moron if you think your enemy won't exploit that.

Your "obvious truth" is the kind of thing uneducated people who don't really understand the problem say. Answers always seem obvious when you don't understand the problem -- but you could actually try educating yourself before spouting off idiotic nonsense...

I don't think you grasp the fundamental concepts here. To "game" the system in this context means taking advantage of features of the system to make sure your fodder has a better chance of getting through. What you're describing is just accepting lower success rates because the system can't be gamed in that way.

Well, for that matter, the delta-like feature could have been sculpted by aliens. However, it's generally safe to rule out any absurdly unlikely reason when a far more likely one is available. There aren't a lot of candidates for alternate liquids to occur in large enough quantities at that location. In fact, I'm only aware of the one candidate, unless you want to resort to bonkers-level improbabilities (the chemical equivalent of "aliens did it")...