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Thanks for the two links you posted, the Fukushima report will take a bit of reading, but I have to say I'd never heard of Kyshtym, and the details as presented in that Wikipedia article, are jaw-dropping to say the least, particularly the silence from the USA.

As far as the Steam DRM thing goes, that's not really an issue with KSP. Steam is used to distribute the game, but that's as far as it goes. You can launch the game without being logged into Steam - navigate to the KSP folder and run the executable directly.

I don't disagree, but consider that reducing risk has costs associated with it. If you want something that is infinitely safe, you had better be prepared to throw an infinite amount of money at it.

I'd be suprised if it's anything other than Minimus. I've seen it myself, and thats what I assumed it was.

Had a look at it, thought it looked highly reminiscent of Black and White, looked a bit harder and some googling turned up the fact that indeed it is a Peter Molyneux game. That makes me highly suspicious. Bullfrog made some great games (I'm thinking in particular Syndicate), but Molyneux has a history of massively hyping the games he's producing, and they usually don't live up to the hype.

Backup saves: Not generally. Limited Saves: Hardly ever see them on the PC, maybe in badly ported games. If it was a huge issue to me, I'd dig through the filesystem and move saves around as needed. Shared saves: No. Multiple PC's: Yes, but separate saves on each. Generally there are few games that I'd have installed on more than one PC simultaneously.

Robert Anton Wilson had a bit he was rather fond of repeating in many of his lectures that seems rather relevant here:

I don't really think that sort of 10GB figure is necessary at all. Games as old as Frontier managed it in less than a megabyte, and more currently Space Engine manages it within a fairly small footprint as well.

I believe that some of the exclusion zone restrictions have already been lifted, but they are encountering issues getting residents to move back, which doesn't exactly surprise me. http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/decontamination-of-fukushima-hotspots-costly-and-complex

Yeah it's more a case that the radioactive isotopes pass into the food chain that I'd be worrying about. Not the radiation itself.

You might also wonder about the relative lack of publicity that Sellafield's dumping of nuclear waste into the Irish sea garners. Consider this bit from wikipedia's entry on the Irish Sea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Sea#Radioactivity): Compared to Chernobyl, the Japanese seem to be handling Fukashima quite well in my opinion.

Not 100% sure what you're actually asking here. You don't necessarily have to run gnuplot from the command-line, although the scripting format is relatively easy to get your head around once you've done it a couple of times. Just to give you an idea of how powerful gnuplot is, I once wrote a little script to give me a decent visual display of some ideas I was prototyping in PHP - it was easier than working through the myriad of issues I had getting PHP's implementation of GTK to work: There are a few programs available that will give you a gui frontend for gnuplot too. Of course you could also go with MS Excel or LibreOffice Calc for plotting the graph itself.

Frankly this would be a far more Kerbal way of cooling your PC:

This is what I do. It's also essentially what ABS does as far as I know.

That looks a lot like a graph produced by the gnuplot package. As for getting the data, you might have some success using the Graphotron 2000 mod, and exporting the data in csv format.

The helmets are awesome!

I'm up for this, using the rover I've sent to both the north and south poles. You may have seen it in the JATO challenge. Mods in use: Mechjeb, Chatterer, Graphotron 2000 Here it is on the runway, the eagle-eyed among you will notice that the clock's been running 26 seconds, the reason is for some reason I've not put my finger on as of yet, the mission clock doesn't seem to start till I get some air. Using the runway as a ramp seems to do the trick:

Dang it, I came here expecting to see the actual dwarf. Good luck though!

Ideally use a can of compressed air to blow the dust out of the PC. Failing that, something like a clean paintbrush. A lot of people use hoovers to suck the dust out, but you run the risk of inducing static. It's a theoretical risk, I've never actually seen a computer damaged by it in my experience, but worth being aware of. As to speeding the PC up, depends exactly on the chip you have, but a bit unlikely. Most modern processors will stop dead once they hit a thermal threshold to prevent physical damage to the chip. Some of the newest ones will drop the clock speed as temperature increases. However cleaning out the PC is most likely going to extend the usable life of the thing either way.

Don't know about adding reputation, but the quoting and whatnot still work for me under Internet Explorer, it's the most I've used that program since Windows 98.

I've vague memories of watching the early parts of the Iran-Iraq war on breakfast TV back in the days when you had to sit through a lot of grown-up stuff before the channels started showing cartoons. The first real event I remember was Chernobyl, that scared the hell out of me, or more specifically what scared me most about that was hearing my aunt claim that most of Europe was going to die from radiation poisoning. I would have been 7 at the time.

It is a bit of a pain to delete multiple pieces of debris. What might be a middle-way solution would be to be able to select multiple pieces of debris, and then delete them all at once, keeping the confirmation dialogue.

Well I don't know about being serious, but I play every game I play for fun. If it wasn't fun I probably wouldn't label it as a game, I'd probably have to come up with some other term entirely to describe the activity.

Funny you mention that, Ride of the Valkyries was meant to be covered as part of the Volkswagner project, but I can't find that particular track for love nor money.

Elite on the ZX Spectrum Frontier Elite on the Amiga, and then later on the PC (where it ran so much smoother) - I must have spent upwards of 4 years playing that game, eventually discovered the bug/cheat that let you fill the largest ship (the panther clipper) with mining machines, exchange your ship for the Eagle MK2 and still have the mining machines. Sell them, and you've now got a tiny ship with an improbably large cargo hold. Fit the largest hyperdrive to your ship, and the universe is your oyster. Eventually I made a valliant attempt to fly to the centre of the galaxy (yes, an entire galaxy in less than a megabyte), but never quite got there. If you're curious, the game is now shareware, alternatively there's the oolite remake www.oolite.org Elite 3 - This is probably the best example of why you don't release a game till it's finished, good but basically just a content patch for Frontier The X Series - Great games, bought all of them. Close to the spirit of Elite, but leans a little too heavily on the trade-empire building imho. (This is not a criticism, just an observation.) Freelancer - To my mind came closest to a modern update of Elite. Galactic Civilizations 2 - so good I couldn't resist repurchasing it on sale via steam a few days ago, easier than digging out the licence details (I remember having issues registering the game the last time I played it.) Homeworld 2 - Didn't really get into it, but I should probably give it another look, I don't really think I gave it the time it deserves. Spore - Such a disappointment. I'm sure there's been others. (Oh and that Hardware:Shipbreakers does look good.)