Oh, don't get me wrong: the US 'intelligence community' is rotten to the core, as are its major corporate collaborators, and some theoretically not intelligence agencies that have taken on the ugly trappings of one (Is there any aspect of the 'war on drugs' that hasn't been a total clusterfuck for America and Americans, much less some of the poor bastards in countries we don't even pretend to care about?) are in the same boat. The FBI, of course, never really had a non-dangerously-corrupt-and-abusive period in its entire history, so it's harder to say that it has 'rotted' in any meaningful way.

However, I'm hard pressed to think of any countries where pissing off the clandestine services is legal, or where they don't treat legal restraint as an inconvenience to be avoided (at best, some lucky countries may simply have relatively vestigial and underdeveloped ones); and I'm hard pressed to think of countries that don't also have additional restrictions on speech (whether it be Britain's ghastly libel laws, 'hate speech', being a nazi, assorted vague 'materials contrary to social order and security' things, blasphemy/offending religious sentiments restrictions, 'gay propaganda', etc, etc.) that the US doesn't have.

We (among others) need to shoot a lot of spooks if we want to even pretend at rule of law, representative democracy, or other cute concepts; but we have atypically narrow restrictions outside of that context.

Indeed, comrade, we agree and are just moving to harmonize our regulations of the internet with our repressive system of informants and physical surveillance!

Depressingly, they do tend to bat above average RE: free speech: The feds are unnervingly interested listeners; but the list of subjects you can't talk about is very short.

o the government lies

o corporations lie

o hiring practices favor imported, low-cost labor

o older, sicker technical people are treated as unemployable and fireable if already in place

o arbitrary degree requirements place artificial barriers between employment and many technical people

o HR departments operate by rote and bean-counting, not "find a great employee"

o congress sets the immigration rules for imported tech labor

o congress is wholly corrupt and beholden to corporate direction via funding pressures

If you want to be truly successful, you'd better cultivate some creativity and start your own thing. The employment situation is horrible and constantly getting worse, with no end in sight. And if anyone thinks an artificially inflated number of STEM grads is going to do anything to alleviate any of this, they're out of their minds. The slope is only getting steeper.

If you want a less whiny and picky fanbase don't, Just Don't base your game's appeal on a continuously-developed-since-1984 tabletop-wargamer-nerd cult hit. Especially not one with several successful-but-now-dated PC game interpretations already built by other developers.

If you have made that mistake, don't double down on the stupid by systematically alienating players and pushing the game toward the direction of being a generic action/arcade title (because that's not a crowded genre where better-funded franchises will crush you like a bug or anything...)

If you want to play the "This is my goddam gameworld, you don't have to like it, the door is that way!" strategy it's idiotic to base the game on a well-established franchise universe: it severely limits your creative options and ensures that you'll have a pack of fanboys with reference materials rules-lawyering you on every point. It's not as though there isn't a market for 3rd-person robot-blaster games, it just isn't called Battletech.

If you want a prefab fanatical player base, (which you can get by adopting an established franchise universe), be prepared to keep in mind that, so far as the gamers are concerned, it's your job to turn the universe they care about into a game that does it justice. You are just the means. If you can do that, you get the advantage of having the buzz done for you to some extent; but if you try to push against them, they'll quickly take the stance that you aren't doing your job.

It's hardly 'throwing them into a meatgrinder'. Nobody seems to know why a degree in theoretical physics gives you the power to single handedly cut your way through alien swarms, military black-ops teams, and some of the most horrifying violations of OSHA guidelines ever built; but it does.

It will be an interesting test of the fungibility of brainpower. You don't become some sort of high-powered physicist by being an idiot; but the process that produces physicists doesn't necessarily groom or evaluate candidates for doing not-physics, so we'll see what sort of not-physics they end up getting up to.

Their attempt to build a giant, destructive, black hole with the LHC didn't work out, and now most of them are too depressed to try again.

When the resonance cascade occurs, we'll be able to just zerg-rush the bastards with PhD-and-crowbar equipped theoretical physicists. Aliens won't stand a chance.

The cheap seats use pretty simple sensors (which is fair enough, when per-unit costs are a serious factor, you want to avoid the use of metal, and long-term reliability in harsh conditions is important); but some of the fancier ones, especially anti-vehicle and naval mines, have pretty sophisticated mechanisms; both for anti-tamper purposes and to ignore spurious signals from demining flails, explosive demining, or vehicles too small to be worth killing.

It's ultimately a somewhat pointless endeavor to decide exactly where the cut-off is; but these arent' just pressure switches.

"Only if they dig themselves up, move and then rebury." Ideally they'll have spider-legs and make a horrible scuttling noise during this process.

Not just carbs, but incompatible carbs. Real sugar is better than HFCS or even eating processed grains. They aren't all that compatible with our surgar processing organs and lead to strain on them. Another effect is those foods take longer to trigger our satisfaction response signaling us to stop eating which leads to overeating.

Cancer will reduce when our food intake becomes better... also as people learn to avoid other problems. Hip replacement and others are under the category of weird cases. They are, relatively speaking, rather rare. But also, some problems associated with bodily wear and tear? I have mixed feelings about those in the first place. The whole point of being healthier is managing things better. Being too sterile leads to a weaker immune system. A large mix of carbs and fats lead to choleterol which leads to heart problems. Lowering carbs reduces strain on sugar processing organs. (Carbs from fruits and real sugars are better because the body processes them more easily and more quickly)

Still, industry wants what is best for industry's bottom line, not what's best for people. It doesn't matter than industry is run by people. It kind of makes it worse because competition forces a game of chicken among them where the first one who makes a healthy or humanitarian change in the way they do things loses because the profits and prices of the others will attract more buyers -- people don't shop with conscience. They shop with as few dollars as possible. Only government can force quality changes on industry without harming competition too badly since (in theory) what affects one, affects them all.

Seriously and honestly though, I didn't stop drinking milk because I thought it would make me not sick any longer. My brother recommended it because my allergies resulted in a lot of mucous and he informed me stopping milk reduces mucous. It did. And other benefits were merely a surprise. And on top of that, my seasonal allergies essentially disappeared! Weird right? It was only later that I learned about the antibiotics in common homogenized bovine milk. And it explained a lot as well.

Do land mines count as robots? They're pretty dumb, but autonomously so.

I'd be protesting if the jerks moved close enough to disturb me with their off-key calls to prayer. It's damned rude. (Yes, I feel the same way about church bells, vibro-bass thumping cars, harleys with those pipes and all that.) Your right to religious freedom does not extend to my ears.

BTW, truth is not personal.

Truth is "discovered" while lies and fiction must be "created." You are confusing "truth" with point of view. Point of view is often refracted heavily through a lens of emotion.