It doesn't even have to be people who are trying to scam the system. If, for example, a young, relatively inexperienced driver (read: child) borrows a car from another driver (read: parent) and crashes it because they hit the gas instead of the brake, well, the perfect excuse is just sitting there in the news. Why wouldn't they jump on a chance to shift the blame?

Same here. In fact, this is the reason that I tend to stick to the main storyline. I mean, here you are, racing the clock to get somewhere before the bad guys destroy the world, but instead of heading there directly you decide to take some time off and help an old lady get rid of rats in her basement. This really just kills the feeling that your character is part of the world with real world constraints. As an example, I'd love if after Lothering you only had time to go to 3 of the 5 next locations before the other ones were overrun.

Well, not sure about everyone else, but the moderators and CMs are going to be going by their real names.

Extending this a bit, if you don't swear off all Chinese made products you're a hypocrite, but if you do swear off all Chinese made products you are effectively doing your part to weaken the Chinese economy which of course keeps those wages low and people poor. 113 euros a month is pitifully small to us, but in China it's (probably) a living wage. No they can't afford much in the way of luxuries, but they're doing much better WITH that job than without a job at all. In fact, all of the Chinese made products and companies like Foxconn are actually helping to create the largest middle class in China in modern history.

Well, the whole point was that if you tell someone to draw a "something"-man, they will be more likely to draw a male than female. Perhaps "fireman" was a bad example. Mailman is maybe a better choice since it is a job performed much more often by women. In this case it makes sense to choose a name that is more politically correct. You know, like Personman.

Nah, I think it should be moved to about 6 minutes to Noon.

Well, that isn't really a fair comparison. The tape player only has 5 static buttons that the blind person has to learn which are easy to remember and switching tapes can be done using touch only. I could run a tape player as a child with my eyes closed. There was no on-screen menu and the navigational controls were simply fast forward and rewind. In fact, a walkman was so simple that someone could swap tapes with one hand without taking it out of their jacket pocket.

The Kindle requires more than that. Context specific buttons and a menu screen mean that a blind person would need a lot of practice before they would be able to navigate around on one, if they could even manage at all.

And from TFA...

"he Kindle DX has the capability to convert text to synthesized speech, but the device does not include text-to-speech functionality for its menu and navigational controls, the DOJ said in a press release. "

Well, actually it's YOUR faked comparison. You said "Go to Monster.com or Dice.com and do a search on Java/J2EE/JEE versus .NET/C#.". So he did. He's being a bit tongue-in-cheek and obviously you missed it.

Well, all users that don't care or don't understand are going to pick one of the first 5 browsers. The other 7 are going to be initially hidden and no one who doesn't care is going to bother scrolling down. (Ok, "no one" is a little strong. I'm sure there are some people who will do it).

Actually, I have a feeling most of the users who don't know what they're doing will look for "Internet" and find "Microsoft INTERNET Explorer".

What does your hair style choice have to do with anything?

Well, first of all the only events that you listed which could potentially make the human race extinct is the meteor(ite) and gamma ray burst. All of the other ones will have major consequences but aren't going to destroy human life on the planet.

the Yellowstone volcano is fascinating; it hasn't exploded for 640000 years and, perhaps coincidentally, it normally erupts every...640000 years. So we're due for another one at anytime. It's pretty scary to think about except that it could be off by 10-20 thousand years. So it could blow up tomorrow (it's already showing warning signs) or it could be another 10000 years. That's about twice as long as all recorded human history which means we'll have plenty of time to "become spacefaring people".

A large enough impact event could certainly destroy life as we know it. The last one was 65 million years ago (ok, it's up to debate if the K-T was because of a meteorite, but let's say it is for the sake of argument). There is a huge span of time between these events. In fact, it's such a large amount of time hardly anyone can really comprehend how long that really is.

As for a grb, well, the chances of one originating close enough to us and being pointed in our direction are also very very low. They estimate we should get one once every billion years or so. Again, that is a long time.

So really, what is the point of living in fear? It may happen tomorrow and we don't have time to do anything about it anyways. In this case hiding in your basement isn't really going to help and neither is any amount of money we spend on space travel. It's more likely that something as monumental as this is going to hit us anywhere between the next 10000 to tens of millions of years from now. Space travel IS advancing, albeit slowly when compared to a normal human lifespan. In 10000 years, though? I think we'll get off the planet in time.

I am, and I did!

I'm a CS university grad and even though I did a database course in school, the practical database knowledge I acquired in that course was almost non-existent. I only realized how little I actually knew when I looked back at how much I learned in my first 3 months of work.

I was thinking we could give them our nukes so that they can fix them up for us.