Red

It's actually closer to a Kenyan accent. Specially since the VA is Kenyan, IIRC.

This frustrates me. It is not the same game. They alter setpieces and plotpoints with the Call of Duty gameplay mechanics. "Same game" means everything is functionally the same - same plot (granted, much of the plot is), same locations (I think you can already guess this is wrong, unless you played one CoD and assume that its the same for all because gameplay alone makes a game). Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 3 are a LOT closer to being the same game than Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3. Hell, "Every other year" would be more accurate because of the content of the games. So, let's make a deal. I'll stop comparing CoD to games you like, you stop saying it's the exact same game, and everybody just moves to a new damn game.

Then you're gonna have a problem. Mario, until Super Mario 64, was functionally the same. Zelda on everything before the N64, plus on Gameboy, was functionally the same. Half Life is functionally the same across the series. Assassin's Creed is functionally the same across the 4 "main" games. Uncharted 1, 2, 3 is all the same. They change locales, settings, setpieces, plot points. They add some new mechanics, while keeping the base mechanics the same. In Mario, you had new powerups. In Zelda, new weapons. In Half-Life, new ways to abuse the physics engine. In Assassin's Creed, mechanics that alter how you play the game without changing the gameplay (Second added jumping to slightly out-of-reach places, brotherhood added the parachute and intakill button, revelations added the hook claw so you can jump wider gaps). In Uncharted, it's mostly been to polish the mechanics. The gameplay is slightly altered, but the core stays the same. You know, how about this. We have different perspectives, nothing I'm going to say will change your views on what you think is a franchise that just milks money from the customers, and nothing you're going to say is going to change the fact that for me, there's sentimental value in the series. I may be a fool for throwing $60 at each new game, but I do it willingly and happily because I enjoy the games.

I think there's a difference between Call of Duty, which creates a game more optimized for a console because they can make more money there, and an actual threat to PC gaming such as Ubisoft, who wants to stop developing for the PC because piracy. I don't play the multiplayer in Call of Duty, either. I'm weird, I have about 150 hours on the single player for MW2. I just don't like multiplayer for most games. The only one I play with any frequency is Team Fortress 2, and I haven't touched that for months. Like I said, I'm weird. I like the story of the MW trilogy. "They're the same!" Maybe, but couldn't that be said of plenty of sequels? Aren't the Half-Life episodes merely small bits of Half-Life 2, with some new mechanics and locales? Isn't BioShock 2 just BioShock but as a big daddy? Isn't Metal Gear Solid 2 just Metal Gear Solid, but on an oil rig and as a whiny bitch? Yeah, arguments are made against each, largely relating to story. -The Episodes continue the HL2 saga so that the Half-Life universe is more fleshed out -BioShock 2 is just kinda freakin awesome, nothing changes that -MGS2 completely destroyed the universe of Metal Gear In an analogy, not all movies can be deep in story or artistic value. Sometimes you just gotta watch a popcorn film for distraction. Sometimes, I'd rather watch Indiana Jones 4 than Forrest Gump. Sometimes.

I may not have clarified why I buy Call of Duty games despite the hype. It's because I'm basically thanking the series for introducing me to PC gaming. Might be the "same game", but I have fun with it, and it's the least I can do for the series that started my PC gaming addiction.

Like I said, it seems to be the exception, not the rule. For general, rocky asteroids, it's best to assume that a 5 kilometer threshold is a good start. Otherwise, a red alert would be occurring every twelve hours. There hasn't been a Tunguska-like event since Tunguska. How's this. Split the difference, only look for asteroids 1 kilometer or larger in diameter. This says that even those events are rare. Last impact event that was 1 kilometer or greater in the original rock was 65 million years ago. Fact is, most asteroids aren't even that big. 30 million estimated to be less than a kilometer, as compared to maybe 1.25 million to be more than a kilometer. I mean, I don't see the point of looking for every asteroid when it'll cause widespread panic because one's gonna be in Earth's orbit. Waste of resources. My point still stands. Never make a policy around an outlier. Just trim out the outliers, prevent skewed data.

You admit that there are many hypothesis to that event. Why say earlier that it was an asteroid event? It's an outlier - any good astronomer would throw it out when discussing the threat that asteroids play on Earth. There's just too much that makes the event weird - Tree bark samples point to asteroid, but eyewitness events of clouds plus the most recent study point squarely at comet. There's no right answer, and we shouldn't look at the one event that has too much conflicting evidence when we have thousands of events confirmed as asteroids or meteoroids. It's a simple thing. Don't make policy on conspiracy. (For the record, I don't consider Hydrogen core reaction to be the least likely explanation. Come on, Wardenclyffe tower, a UFO, an anti-matter comet, and a damn black hole are the least likely/fringe ones. Deuterium core is unlikely, but it's certainly more likely than things that break the laws of physics.)

Tunguska is also assumed to be a Comet, and that's a whole different story. Since it was a mix of rock and ice and perhaps a core of deuterium, well, what happened was nuclear fusion. Comet enters atmosphere, shatters because the ice burns away, and then you got a very fast moving glob of extremely reactive material. It's a different story. Different materials. Different results. Like taking a jawbreaker and smashing it into a wall, then a hunk of granola and smashing it. They might both break, but one is going to be far more explosive.

Stop posting about your life being "so awful" on Facebook. Don't you dare say, "I have no friends!" Either. Your life isn't awful. You have friends, you have family. They love you. You talk to them at least once a day. I don't. I'm 2500 miles from my family, 5000 miles from my best friends. We don't talk anymore. A social day for me is when I say more than 25 words throughout the day. I have a social day maybe once a week. People don't talk to me. I'm under the assumption that I have few friends since they don't talk to me. You say it's awful that your mom doesn't let you stay out past 7, then the next day you like her because she brought you cake. I'd say, "Alright, maw," if she told me to stay in, but she doesn't because I'm an adult. Your mom doesn't give you that because, face it, you're a sophomore in high school, and high schoolers do stupid things. That's a fact. Yet it kills me each time my mom brags about how she and my sister are going out for lunch, because she's unintentionally making it seem like my sister is her favorite. Be glad you can text your friends at anytime, and that you have quite a few who say that anytime you try to pull this, "I have no friends" bullshit. I asked a few weeks ago if anybody wanted to help me with a class project. I left it up for 3 days, repeating the question 4 or 5 times. I got no damn response because, face it, people hate me. I have three, maybe four friends I can text. Of those four, two will get back to me immediately. The other two will forget about me for a day or a week or however long. Be grateful that you have a mom that takes you places, or friends you can talk to at 2 AM. I don't right now. I'd give anything in the world for that. I'm working towards that in the Fall. But I'm not clogging up people's Facebooks with manufactured drama.

An argon atom walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender says, "We don't serve your kind here." The argon doesn't react. A man in the USSR during the 60s is filling out a form in the federal building. Where were you born: St. Petersburg Where did you grow up: Petrograd Where do you live: Leningrad Where do you want to die: St. Petersburg

There's Anonymous, LulzSec, LulzRaft, and TeaMp0isoN, to name the more prominent ones. -Anonymous has really messed-up priorities. They claim to be anti-corruption, but they come off as more anti-government. Remember when the FBI took down Megaupload using powers it already had? Anon took down the FBI and the Department of Justice for something that had been in the legal process for a while. You know, the FBI was trying to get rid of a type of corruption - taking copyrighted material and distributing it for free. I loved Megaupload, but I can't pretend that their use absolved them of illegal activities, even if it was unintentional. Another thing they did was Robin Hood. They stole credit card information and then used those cards to donate to pro-OWS groups. Because the cardholders are obviously the 1%, all of them. It's just a dick move. -LulzSec splintered from Anonymous in May 2011. They seemed to have dissolved. Their best-known attack? Remember PSN being compromised? Yep, that was them. That's just illegal activity. -LulzRaft gained popular attention in 2011. Attacked a bunch of Canadian websites, notably the Canadian Conservative Party and Husky Energy. They claim to be nonpartisan, yet they've only attacked CPC. Hm. -TeaMp0isoN is straight up anti-US, anti-Israel. They work with Mujahideen groups. Releasing Tony Blair's address book, attacking BlackBerry for its support of the UK government during the UK riots last summer? That's them.

Here, it's a program that gathers together some Mass Effect 3 news with a media player and the released videos, screenshots, and wallpapers. 15 days. Ah.

Nuclear power creates the most bang for your buck. Wind - You need wind farms, entire hillsides covered by the turbines. It ruins landscapes, plain and simple. Geothermal - You have, what, like 200 places on the globe it can be used. Volcanoes only. Tidal - This would work, but at the expense of beach space. Plus you might screw up tidal ecosystems. Hydroelectric - It works, except you destroy gigantic swaths of land. Bad. Solar - You need a lot of space where it's sunny all the time. The coolest solar energy proposal I ever heard was to take the Los Angeles to Las Vegas stretch of highway and replace it with a solar cell road, but I haven't heard much about it since. Nuclear just works.

I really don't mean to sound jerk-ish, Ross, but that's, erm, impossible. Hypothetically, if all the asteroids in the night sky were lit up so that they outshone stars, the entire sky would be white. There are probably billions of asteroids in the sky, coming largely from three locations in our solar system: the Asteroid Belt, the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort Cloud. The Asteroid Belt is basically the Planet that failed. It's in a perfect position for a planet, except that it couldn't really form because of that gigantic nearly dwarf sun nearby, Jupiter. Asteroids there number in the thousands to millions, with about 400,000 kilometers of elbow room apiece, give or take. The Kuiper Belt lies beyond Neptune. The most famous object there, of course, is Pluto. That region is around where comets hibernate. The asteroids there are a lot closer together, and far more numerous than the asteroid belt, because it's basically the edge of the accretion disc that formed the planets. There wasn't a planetesimal able to create a planet, so the stuff kind of hangs out in the same general plane as the rest of the planets. Now for the fun one. The Oort Cloud. It's typically modeled as a sphere around our solar system, mostly made of dust, a few hundred light years away. Luckily, there's no real worry about an asteroid from here. So, back to the two asteroid culprits, Asteroid and Kuiper Belt. The stuff there is pretty steady and actually pretty small. Ceres is the largest, and it seems to be the exception at 900 kilometers across. The vast majority are under a kilometer, meaning they'd burn up in the atmosphere if not just slingshotted into the sun. Anything bigger, and there's some real crazy things that have to happen. First, they have to be slingshotted into the inner solar system, probably by Jupiter. Then, they have to be crossing Earth's path exactly when we're in that position. Assume it's something like a 1/365 chance, though we're moving so damn fast that it's a lot smaller. Then, it can't skim the atmosphere, it has to hit dead-on. Then, it has to be about 10 kilometers to hit the surface and cause destruction. Oh, it has to hit the 30 percent of the planet that's above water, otherwise it'd probably just cause a tsunami. It's such an astronomically small number that its better not to worry about tracking all incoming asteroids. Should be limited to anything that's, say, 5 kilometers or larger. Large enough to cause damage to the surface. Anything smaller's just going to burn up or, at worst, cause a small amount of damage. It might kill you, might ruin the neighborhood's week, but it won't destroy the planet. Sorry if that's long and boring and I sound like a jackass.

Shut up I like whales. Plus it has to be somewhat normal, this is a laptop I carry around everywhere. I also use it for work. I don't want my supervisors to judge me.