If you just blow up satellites with rockets, it will put debris into its orbit, drastically reducing the usability of the orbit for anyone.

If you build a weapon to simply disable the satellite, or better yet, cause it to drop out of orbit and burn up without hitting anything, then you would have an advantage. I hope that we are keeping tabs on anyone that plans to develop that kind of technology.

I cant imagine that China didn't learn their lesson from blowing up satellites.

By posting these excerpts, you just redistributed part of their source code without displaying the appropriate copyright notice in tact. You've violated the license agreement.

Since you are consulting us regarding TheNextBigThing(TM), we will now require 30% royalties on all revenue generated from TheNextBigThing(TM).

So we need MORE clouds? The Earth is already about 70% covered in clouds.

I think the Earth already does a pretty good job of putting water vapour into the atmosphere on a daily basis.

The cloud cover is in dynamic equilibrium. I don't think that spraying some water air changes that equilibrium. Because, like I said, it's already dynamic equilibrium!.

We need to find the Earth's thermostat and turn it down a bit. I think it has to do more with the composition of the atmosphere.

And 150 million of those users are bots.

Either that or facebook has tonnes of supermodels that have only two or three friends. ...not that I've been searching ;)

Well, I learned basic interpreters first and I turned out all right! As for instruction, The first I ever had was watching "Bits and Bytes" with Billy Van and Luba Goy (Canadian TV series, some clips are available on youtube). It's (obviously) the only first exposure to programming I ever experienced. It's taken me an additional 25 years or so to get to where I am now, but I have to say it was good beginning.

It had cute little animations about bits being light-switches and the CPU being a long-nosed cartoon character putting numbers into boxes. I still think about computers like that.

For example: Bits and Bytes: Program 1

That's too bad. I work right next to the Perimeter Institute and was hoping Stephen would be able to start going to lunch with us.

speak_text.replace( "science", "hockey" )
speak_text.replace( "collision", "body-check" )
speak_text.replace( "universe", "Tim Horton's" )
speak_text.replace( "God", "Gretzky" )
speak_text.replace( "million", "813,000" )

Interesting. After reading all these replies, I'm now really hyper-aware of the 4th wall aspect to video games. I've been familiar with it in theatre for quite some time, and I am a live improvised comedy theatre actor so I know how easy it is to break the 4th wall. I've always thought of it as something that betrays the intended scope of the fantasy. I think games are interactive fiction by design, so you're supposed to be immersed, but interactively so. It's up to the writers to decide what the rules of the game's fantasy are. There's a difference between a soliloquy in a play, and a moment where the actor starts wise-cracking back to a heckler. One is intended, the other is accidental, and is beyond the scope of the play. Furthermore, i've seen desperate attempts to keep from breaking the 4th wall in improv, like when someone in the audience's cell-phone rings, and the actor mime-answers their cellphone, there, the actor deals with the situation within the reality of the play. It's clear that information is passed through the wall, but this is not really _breaking_ the wall, because it doesn't betray the fantasy, it just draws on information that is exchanged between the fantasy and our reality.

Obviously, the video game is trying to set the scope of the fantasy and the degree to which you are expected to be immersed. If that gets radically changed for some reason in a way that suddenly made the laws of the fantasy world seem changed such that they involved more of our reality that you originally thought, you could say that the 4th wall had been broken, or you could just say that the writers were going for that kind of a twist. This can be a great source of humour. I've seen some cool movies where the characters acknowledge that they're making a movie, and it's done intentionally.

Video game designers are given a hard task of justifying phases of the game like the install, the menu screens, dealing with errors, ending the game and restarting, etc.

One of my favourite goofs is when the in-game character speaks out "I have to hit the X button to pick that up" like my character is holding a game controller?!?...what exactly is the perceived reality in those situations? Sure it's self referential, but I believe that those things are just errors that lead to a less immersed experience for the gamer. A much better line would be "You have to hit your X button if you want me to pick that up." Of course it could just be a stylistic choice by the writers to blur the lines as the article said.

I'd like to see a video game that blurred the lines so much that it made me think it wasn't running. So it integrated with my outlook, blackberry, windows desktop etc. It could do crazy things like call me on my cellphone, send me emails, instant-message me. That would be FREAKY!!! Maybe the game will read slashdot and the in-game character will reference real-world events in-character.

Start writing! Be prolific and build your portfolio.

Then you have to learn how to pitch your stories. It's brutally hard -- but study a little philosophy and learn what gets and keeps peoples focus. The content is easy, VG entertainment is mostly escapism; the problem is that your best writing will come from writing what you know, which may not align with what interests other people, so just appeal to the fundamentals of human nature. Polish your silver tongue, weave a tangled web, then sell, sell, sell!

If I were hiring, I would hope to meet an inspiring individual who can capture my attention with their imagination.

I think you're going to the right places, but it sounds like you don't have self-marketing confidence.

Half my point here is: don't wait for someone to tell you to get involved -- just get involved. The rest of my point is that you need to SHOW your passion. You need to tell people some stories.

I'm picturing a movie plot where an inmate's conjugal visitor gets taken hostage and can't use her cellphone to call for help because THE PRISON JAMS THE SIGNALS! The inmate has to break his wife OUT of his own prison, and kick ass against the other prisoners.

I'll take Jason Statham as the inmate.