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Why not? What's the worst that could happen?

That's one of the reasons government exists. Obviously these kinds of things would be regulated just like they are today. Just because the guy next door makes a billion dollars a year, doesn't give him the right to build a giant tesla coil on his roof. Rationing will always make sense, especially in the long run if Earth resources start running out. That only makes sense to a point. Eventually 'want' just becomes ridiculous. "All you can eat" for example. Why would anyone buy a hundred tomatoes if 90% of them will rot before they get around to eating them? What would you do with ten cell phones? And, ideology? I'd rather be a slave to that than be a slave to worrying about whether or not I'll still be good enough next month to be worthy of having a paycheck to buy food with. I don't know if that really matters. There are plenty of people who can afford to go to a restaurant, but still, only one of the groups is going to get that "spot by the window" that everybody likes.

Since the main point of automation is to reduce the number of humans needed, this will NEVER provide enough jobs for the population. Not by a long shot. And that's assuming every human is even capable of the kind of technical knowhow to maintain and service machines. They're NOT. Jobs themselves will become a rare commodity. The number of workers required to complete a task decreases by the day, yet the number of people who need jobs increases by the day. Something in the capitalist system will have to give here. Either money itself becomes obsolete, or public companies need to be done away with. Shareholders will always force a business to keep the line on the graph moving upward, and that means layoffs, replacing workers with robots wherever possible. Slave labor won't even be practical, because "mindless physical work" is the stuff that is easiest to replace with robots. There's a machine that exists now that can run an entire fast food kitchen on its own. It flips the burgers, adds the condiments, and spits them out at the end of the line. Where's that leave us? Nobody can afford the services that the 0.0001% of people who own the robot empires can offer. At that point we either become a utopia, or things start swinging back in the other direction.

Big CME's have been pretty rare as of late, so it's really not that surprising that the news was on this. And this isn't exactly like making a snow flurry look like a blizzard. Predicting auroras (or even the arrival of a solar flare) is sketchy at best, kind of like meteor storms. I can't even tell if they know we've been hit by both bursts yet or just the first one. There was some thought that they'd arrive at the same time and create a even bigger show, but it turns out that wasn't going to happen. Did #2 (the big one) hit yet or not?

Crystals don't 'evolve' into other varieties of crystals.

Even taking the legal speed limit into account, preventing a car from going higher just isn't a good idea. There are circumstances where speeding is necessary for safety. Just imagine driving along a mountain pass in a 25mph zone, all of a sudden you see a landslide coming at you. What's your bigger concern at that point? Getting a ticket, or getting buried?

...and our definition of life is just as 'concrete' as a scientific theory. They can end up being wrong. Somehow, I find the idea of virii NOT being life, more terrifying than the alternative.

Get ready for some possible auroras. And... some possible issues with electronics. More data is needed before they can be sure of when it will arrive. http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/news/view/9/20140910-x16-solar-flare-from-sunspot-region-2158

Both, since politics decides what is allowed.

Ehh... they do explode. Oh, they definitely do. There are other comical ways to present death though. I for one always would've liked for a "Wile. E. Coyote" style crater to be left behind after a Kerbal hit the ground too hard. Perhaps in the exact shape of the Kerbal?

That wasn't seen to happen until after the occupation though, right? And, yeah, I really need to go through it again. My perception of the sequence of events has been greatly screwed up by all of the films completely leaving out "Book 2" and sticking a few events from there into what is essentially just Book 1. The scene involving hiding from the 'periscope' I'm pretty sure was during the occupation, and not the invasion as it is usually shown (as is the death of the Martians, obviously). I believe the occupation lasted for a least a year though, which in the case of a virus or bacteria having a field day in an organism with a compromised immune system is a considerably long time. Which is why I figured 'something' more was going on. It's not specified if anything was done with the human blood before they used it. But it's enough to assume they might have boiled, purified, etc. that as well. That's another technicality that may or may not have been covered, whether or not they were witnessed extracting human blood and then injecting it with the same needle. RTS game, right? I knew about it but never tried it. That style of game tends to irk me, even when its done really well (and most aren't). And on a little side rant. Yeah, if I ever had the opportunity to see it, I'd certainly see that show live. But that pastel-colored "house fly" tripod design... it drives me absolutely flipping mad.

You need a ship, AND... more military power than you can imagine, to repel all the millions of people who didn't get picked.

I remembered how to tie my shoes!

It's quite simple. Microsoft no longer designs computer interfaces for people who use computers. They design them for people who use phones.

I wouldn't suspect that an intentional germ warfare attack would have worked against the novel Martians. They themselves used pretty nasty chemical weapons, so I would think their cockpits were sealed tight just in case winds sent anything back at them. It's been a while, but I don't think they started getting sick until after they controlled Earth and voluntarily crawled outside. Against the original H.G. Wells machines? Yeeeeah, I reckon we would've been pretty useless until WWII. Nobody had even heard of an armored vehicle when the book was written, much less one where most of the weak points are dozens of feet in the air. Artillery was useless, it wasn't designed to shred armor, and even if it was, the odds of hitting close enough to a leg to do anything would e horridly low. And good luck trying to hit an 'aerial' target moving that fast with an anti-infantry gun. AAG's are the first practical weapon I can think of that might have had any effect.

I had another thread I was going to post this in, where a bunch of folks were discussing WotW, but it was old and had a very unassuming title. So just putting this here instead, in case it ends up being one of those things that randomly gets a necro when something new comes out. A mockumentary called " ," has occasionally been airing. Both the BBC and the History channel have been running it.The premise is "What if World War I had been against Martians instead of Germans?" This means the time period is VERY close to the one that H.G. Wells intended, and is probably the most accurate in that regard. The designs for the Martians and their machines (the main vehicle anyhow) are pretty accurate as well. Still, a lot of creative liberties were taken to spruce up the tale more, but it's really neat to see Martian machines stomping around in classic war footage.

Missiles can easily be tracked and as we know with "iron dome," easily defended against. But an artillery round fired from a rail cannon? I'd say we've got quite a while to go before that ever happens.

If railguns were efficient enough, I could possibly see the Battleship making a comeback. The amount of weight required to make such a system work would probably make it impossible to put on an aircraft. The iron dome would do away with the need for armor, and the effective attack range of such a ship would be terrifying.

The trouble is, even if this works, I think it would take a VERY long time to establish a reliable connection between two people. From what I know about how the brain works, the signal from every person, even if they concentrated on the same thing, would look very different. So if two people wanted to do this with each other, they'd need to spend a lot of time on it, giving their brains ample time to interpret the signal into something they could 'read.'

Yeah, I was thinking more about its use against ICBM's rather than for offense on something mobile. It's hard to imagine wanting to use a ship (constantly bobbing up and down) to disable suborbital targets with a purely ballistic projectile in the first place. Much easier to do that from land where a ton of power is easily accessible. In the event of a full-scale nuclear strike, if any kind of mag-gun is going to be used as an iron dome, nobody is going to care about the electrical cost. And with a 'frictionless barrel,' you get a faster rate of fire by not having to clean anything between shots.

Eve is only worth playing if you think real life somehow isn't stressful enough to be entertaining. It's a bit TOO much like real life. And that's saying a lot, considering it's basically Star Wars in a capitalist-extremist (is that even a thing?) world.

This might be too tricky to pull off since you're also using it to propel the projectile, but how about suspending it in a magnetic field so that it 'floats?' Then it would never come in contact with the rails at all.

For acid-free paper? Seriously? Try the scrap-booking section. Acid-free is often a major selling point among those who manufacture scrap-book materials. I don't know about mom & pop stores, but Michaels and AC Moore both have extensive scrap-book supplies.

Wow, reminds me of when I first got my hands on a really primitive 3D modeller and started recreating my original Lego designs in CGI so I could see them fly around in space. I am SO playing this. And sorry, but a random gripe: is that all-black&white logo the permanent one for the game? I feel that it greatly undersells what the product is capable of. It reminds me far too much of many of the minimalist 2D indie games that are popular right now. Most notably it makes me think of "Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet," and I think a lot of other players will get the same first impression.

Transformative art. What we really need is the ability to design our own cars in the first place. The nearly infinite number of safety regulations makes it impossible to design a street-worthy car without an army of hybrid lawyer/engineers.