Drunken Hobo

I also have this problem. Seems a bit of a silly oversight, as it is a massive part of the early game science & funds bonus. Without it you're stuck in a grind for science & funds and it could really put off new players who don't want know any better. I don't see why every astronomical object shouldn't automatically have it's own "explore" contract. I don't really like using the debug menu in career mode, but I'm not away to restart my save just to see if I can get the Minmus contract. No part of this game should be luck based, so it's a bit disappointing to see contracts missing.

I think his main demographic is pre-teen males. Just think of some of the crap TV you watched as a 12-year-old and try to watch it now without cringing.

I don't really understand the hate for him either. I think it's just people trying to be "edgy" by picking on the largest target available. This was the first time I've watched more than 5 seconds of a PewDiePie video (I managed about 20 seconds) but his existence doesn't hurt anyone, so why should I care? It's not as if he's on TV taking up a slot that could be filled with something better; YouTube is practically infinite. It's really easy to not watch things that you don't like. You simply don't watch them. If the most popular YouTuber does a video on a game you love, then you should be happy.

Personally I didn't understand the hype at all. The first took my interest for a bit, but then the horrible FoV made me feel ill and I never played it again. HL2 just seemed a standard FPS. Mechanically sound, and I enjoyed throwing toilets around with the gravity gun but it just felt like a gimmick really. Nothing particularly special or memorable about it. I'm not really a FPS fan and it didn't do anything to change my mind. I really loved Portal though. One of the best games I've ever played. Portal 2 was very good, but maybe a bit bloated by comparison. And "Still Alive" is indeed the superior ending song. Possibly my favourite song in video gaming. Either that or Snake Eater.

Steve Jobs met a similar fate. He had the astounding good fortune to catch his pancreatic cancer early, which gave him a decent chance of long-term survival (pancreatic cancer is usually a death sentence). However instead of trusting doctors with decades of experience, he put his faith in quack healers who told him to change his diet and try acupuncture, as this would magically get rid of the cancer. After a year and no progress, he decided to do what the real doctors told him to and get surgery, but by then it was too late. He later expressed regret at not going to the real doctors sooner. He probably would still be alive if he'd trusted them first, but now he's a corpse lying in a hole. Demonstrably false. In my local supermarket, you can buy 16 store-brand paracetamol for 30p. Or you can buy 14 GSK-brand paracetamol for £3.05. People will pay extra for trusted brands. A lot of pharmaceutical adverts on TV are for drugs with expired patents (Anadin Extra for example includes caffeine, aspirin and paracetamol). You can buy similar store-brand pills for 1/4 the price, yet it's still worth their while for pharmaceutical companies to manufacture & market these drugs.

I think administering placebos in the form of a sugar pill with no active ingredient is completely fine. However, I don't think it's right to promote things that are physically impossible, such as homeopathy or magnetic healing. The former is taking advantage of someone's ignorance in order to make them feel better. The latter is actively increasing someone's ignorance in order to make them feel better. Then they've become a prime target for all the snake oil salesmen in the world.

Indeed, try growing & selling Pink Lady apples without permission and just see how quickly you end up in court. I bet a lot of people also don't realise that a number of conventionally-grown (and even organic) crops have been developed through radiation breeding, where parent plants are exposed to high levels of radiation in an attempt to accelerate beneficial mutations. I'm not sure how that's any safer than actual genetic modification, where we at least know what the result will be.

Do you work for an SSD manufacturer by any chance? I'm on to you... Don't have an SSD myself as I don't see much point yet. I had just heard the usual horror stories of them going kaput within a year under heavy use. I suppose HDDs fail all the time and people hardly think mention it, but when an SSD fails it's the fault of the scary new technology.

Those numbers are incorrect and do not take into account the mass of the hydrogen tank & fuel cell. The link you provided doesn't work for me, so I can't check that source, but at least according to Wikipedia, those are the energy densities for an alkaline battery (not the "best ion lithium on the market") and compressed hydrogen at ~700 bar, without any tank or fuel cell.

Ah, makes sense. I had assumed ultrabooks were just flattened netbooks. That's an impressive amount of performance for something so small (I'll omit he obvious punchline). I suppose a dedicated GPU would double the amount of cooling you'd need, and it wouldn't be quite so ultra thin any more. Although I'm not so sure about an SSD as the only form of storage. Wouldn't that limit it's lifespan quite significantly?

It's largely intellectual laziness. Monsanto are cited partly due to being the biggest funders against Proposition 37, but people turn a blind eye to the biggest funder in support of the proposition - Mercola Health Resources. An AIDS-denying, anti-vaccine "health supplement" company that peddles homeopathy, magnetic healing and claims that microwaves dangerously alter the chemistry of your food. A fine example of why guilt by association is a terrible argument.

A 512 MB SSD in 2013? That alone must have cost at least £500. Yet no dedicated graphics card at all? That seems like a very strange system to me, what was it's intended purpose?

Hah, you obviously weren't around before Steam, when people had to download KSP updates from the KSP store & it's mid-90s server. That was always an event.

I still think biofuels will be the real answer, but out of these two it's electric by a long way. Whilst batteries will keep getting better & better, hydrogen's problems are simply insurmountable. It takes a lot of energy to compress, which just reduces efficiency. It also requires very heavy-duty tanks to store it safely, meaning it's absolutely hopeless as a transport fuel as 90% of the mass is storage tank and only 10% is fuel. So if you want to transport hydrogen over any great distance, you're lugging around a lot of dead weight. It's also extremely difficult to pipe anywhere, so that's out of the question. These are problems created by the physical properties of hydrogen and cannot be changed.

You've got to get the hydrogen from somewhere, and at present that's either electrolysis of water or cracking methane. Both of which are energy-intensive processes, so unless you're on 100% nuclear or renewables, then you're pumping out CO2. The most common method of cracking methane also releases carbon dioxide. So in terms of being environmentally friendly, hydrogen is pretty rubbish.

Is $100 for a case (including shipping) not a bit high? If you're only spending $800 then 1/8th of the budget on the box seems excessive. The likes of the Corsair 200R look a lot less glamorous, but that could be $50 towards a better CPU. You'll obviously want to research it yourself, but personally I can't see the point of getting a fancy case for a mid-range machine.

I used to have a pop-up science book with a pinhole camera in it. I think my mum gave it away. Oh well, at least that could be an excuse to buy Pringles... Cool, thanks for the advice. Hopefully the UK rating is the same as US, unlike absolutely everything else. A UK 14 will probably end up being a US 6 and I'll scorch my corneas out.

Got my new monitor, built the stand, plugged it in and switched it on... nothing. No matter how hard I pressed the button it doesn't go on. I suspected it was broken - it came in a box without any fragile signs and very little padding. Seemed quite poorly built - the button barely went in when pressed and didn't even click. Then I looked round the back of the monitor and found a whole row of buttons... I'd been pressing the LED power light.

I find it funny the number of people saying they'll cancel their TV licence over this. The BBC is a horrendous organisation and amongst other things is currently embroiled in a massive scandal surrounding historic offences, but this is what people are getting upset about. I suppose it's true what they say about bread & circuses. I think the issue with Clarkson is that he used to play a character - an unpleasant, arrogant oaf who said controversial things to wind people up. The problem is that it's no longer a character; it's his actual personality.

I'm trying to think of a budget way to view the eclipse. One of my mates is a welder so I may ask him for some welding goggles... that should do, right? Either that or get a mirror and project it onto the side of my house. Or 50 times more likely, stay inside as it'll be cloudy.

Indeed. Back in 2013 the Australian government shut down their climate change commission. Rather fittingly, 2013 turned out to be Australia's hottest year since records began in 1910, and 2014 its 3rd hottest year. I'm sure that it's just a complete coincidence, and Australia's warming has nothing to do with the rest of the globe warming. Just as I'm sure it's a coincidence that their current PM's only notable place of previous employment was as a News Corp journalist...

Well, they sent two near-identical rovers. I'd say that's pretty good redundancy.

Congratulations, you've hit global warming denying bingo. You managed to cram "What if it's good?" "You can't change it anyway!" "It's natural!" and "It isn't even happening!" into one post. I think that's a record. I also tend to abandon discussions when people start trying to tell me what my own thoughts are on a subject. There's no point in discussing something with someone who is only interested in debating a straw man. - - - Updated - - - Or just plant a new tree when the old one dies? That's how forests work!

I believe a number of the instruments have broken over the years, but the main drive is still going strong. I suppose the simple answer is that it was built properly. Extremely high tolerances in building the thing, combined with some built-in redundancy (Spirit managed to drag a broken wheel for years before eventually giving up). It's not too complex a design and of course it's driven incredibly slowly. It took 10 years to cover the same distance Lunokhod 2 managed in a few months. There's a reason tortoises live so long.

By decreasing the rate that we're releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere we could slow the rate at which climate change happens. It won't be possible to stop entirely, but that doesn't mean we should put in absolutely no effort. That's the equivalent of heading towards an accident in a car and refusing to brake, because you're going to crash anyway. Much better to crash at 10 mph than 40 mph.