Don Edwards

The solution to reliability issues: get rid of the scriptwriters. And on the software side, you'd be amazed what percentage of code is dedicated to preventing the users from screwing things up. Software would be much easier without users.

I doubt we'll see her at the mall; she works at Swedekea. That's in quotation marks, do you have an attribution? I *think* it was AVERAGEJ0E over at Motley Fool... let me go check... nope, it was ptheland. And I had some minor errors in the wording. Should be: "I thought my dryer was shrinking my clothes. Turns out it was the refrigerator. "

"I used to think the dryer was shrinking my clothes. Then I found out it was actually the refrigerator."

AFAIK we have no information on how a wizard learns a spell from someone else, only that they can. My theory is that wizards can only learn spells from (a) other wizards - possibly indirectly via wizards' spellbooks* - or (b) seers, like Tedd. The logic behind this being that wizards have to know how to apply the magical energy, while Marked and Awakened individuals, and magical devices, just make it happen without any understanding of the means by which it happens. Maybe some few wizards specialize in studying magical physics sufficiently that they can, with difficulty, analyze the casting of a spell and learn how to cast the same spell to the same effect, but a seer has the talent to do that almost automatically with greater accuracy and even to identify what could happen. Of course, I could be 100% wrong. That's pretty much my normal for non-obvious predictions about what's going to happen in the future in a webcomic. * And if you think an Awakened person's spellbook is detailed, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.

Yes.

For an inertialess drive, it depends on where you want to go. If you are heading away from the sun, launch at sunrise to take advantage of how fast the earth is already moving. If you're just going into orbit, launch more toward sunset and let the earth move out from under you, then juice to the desired speed and direction.. (There may be some particular time when progressing in a straight line as the earth continues on its curved orbit happens to be a really big help on getting the correct orbital speed, but the math to evaluate it is beyond me.) Another advantage of inertialess/massless space travel is that, over reasonable distances, you can point your ship at the place you want to go and not worry about orbital mechanics.

Someone on another forum said something on the order of "it's disconcerting to have a Republican politician, once elected, show some inclination to do what he claimed he would do while campaigning... but I could get used to it".

But the problem with being genderfluid is that you have to take many readings on that over time and either look for the extremes or average them (your choice). Which would be easier if we had an accurate and reliable way of measuring someone's gender on the correct scale properly calibrated... we're currently weak on identifying the correct scale, calibrating it, and measuring people.

It certainly looked like she'd taken a bit of a physical blow - and I doubt that the fairydoll was in physical contact with her when she detonated it. (And there was only one. Imagine three simultaneously.) Also, dazing, confusing, and deafening an enemy at a critical moment can grant a HUGE advantage to whatever other forms of offense one might apply. This is why cops use flashbangs.

Or, since they are magical anyway, a spellbook could be an ebook display device using a decent ebook format*. Everything is being reformatted to fit the display every time you read it anyway, page numbers are determined at viewing time, so there's no change in behavior when a spell is added or revised. * PDF is not a decent ebook format - in fact it isn't an ebook format at all. It's a printing format.

On the object model of spellbook, in most object-oriented languages there isn't a problem with destroying an object that used to receive events from another object. When an event happens, the triggering fails (for that receiver) silently. (In fact I don't know of an exception to this.) As for reformatting when a spell is acquired/updated, the maximum that is ever truly necessary is reformatting the one affected spell. Just have each spell start at the top of a page, with the other side NOT being a different spell, and there's no problem. The book will sometimes have new pages added...

A few studies have looked at *news* reporting (ignoring editorials and talk shows) and found that Fox News is the least politically biased of the major commercial news sources - the big tv news networks, the news wires, several major newspapers. It is also the only one NOT to the political left of the US public as represented by the makeup of Congress in Obama's first couple years (when the Dems had a majority of both houses). Now if you drag in the explicitly-political programs, of course, *everybody* is a lot more political... and you aren't talking about news.

Oh, I didn't just mean that Elliot wasn't getting the training at Greg's dojo. I meant he wasn't getting it up until just a couple days ago (comic time).

Elliot certainly WASN'T getting any training in flying combat, but I bet he starts PDQ. Since Tara made the lack rather obvious.

That would depend on location and time of day, and in some parts of the world (polar regions) it would also depend on time of year.

It's gotta be either Catalina or Rhoda.

I once read a story where they achieved immunity to both gravity and certain aspects of relativity (so they could do at least light-speed, possibly FTL, I don't recall that detail with confidence) by temporarily shifting an object's mass - but not the object - into an alternate universe. Unlike turning off the earth's gravity in a small area, the energy cost of doing this would likely be proportionate to the mass of the object. However, the notion that this wouldn't have some nasty short-term side effects, possibly even on the nuclear level, is... problematic. The story did not address any such side effects.

Correction: there isn't a partnership, willing or unwilling, mentioned. An aberration is not (as far as has been stated) a collaboration between a human and some other entity. Sirleck is a former human who also chose to give up his shape to become a more classical parasite. Most aberrations just commit murder. Sirleck's method has a couple of big advantages: he doesn't leave a steady trail of corpses, and it doesn't become obvious that he doesn't age (because his host *does* age). The disadvantage is that every few decades he has to change hosts, during the course of which he's usually going to lose control of some of his wealth and possibly put all of it at risk... but then I suspect that most aberrations don't survive that long.

"Inertial blockers active?" "Check."

The proposed method of turning off gravity isn't significantly affected by the mass of the thing being lifted. An examination of the formula* of gravity - (M1+M2)G/D2 - in relation to the mass of the earth and the mass of anything humans would want to lift reveals that the energy cost at ground level is 99.999999% determined by the mass of the earth. So if antigravity is feasible for the proposed use, it's a source of free energy. And the proposed launch system is based on the presumption that it's feasible. * Ignoring relativity, since we'll be dealing with speeds low enough that we would need extremely sensitive instruments to detect its effect at all. Oh, that's easy. A few major alternatives: 1) Leave the energy source on the ground. Rockets carry both their reaction mass and their energy source - usually the same substances. But there is no substance that is a really good high-density source of energy *and* is, or produces in combustion, really good reaction mass; everything we have is a compromise. But put your spacecraft on top of a really big ice cube, and blast the bottom of the ice cube with very-high-energy pulsed lasers, and you can get quite a bit of acceleration. The lasers will convert ice to plasma on one pulse, and cause the plasma to hugely expand on the next. And there may be better choices than ice cubes. 2) Leave the energy source *and* the guidance system on the ground. have your spacecraft climb a tether that reaches from the ground to beyond geosynchronous orbit. By sticking to the tether there is no need for guidance, and energy can be delivered through components of the tether. The energy cost of getting up there can be regained, at least in part, by extracting energy from things coming down via the tether. Since the tether has to extend beyond geosynchronous orbit (for balance, so it doesn't fall down), it can be used to assist space launches further - anywhere past geosynchronous, the tether is traveling *faster* than orbital speed. 3) Have *part of* the energy source and guidance system already in orbit. Since we don't (yet) know how to build the tethers needed in #2, let's use much shorter tethers centered in LEO and spinning, with the bottom of the spin in the upper atmosphere - within reach of aircraft. The end of a tether near the bottom of its spin would be traveling relatively slowly (compared to the satellite) relative to the ground, sufficient that an aircraft could dock with it. This system will lose energy, so the tethers will occasionally need to be spun-up and therefore refueled...

My take on this is that you are basically creating an ability to launch a real rocket from an imaginary platform X feet above the ground - X being the altitude where the people on the ground can't *reliably* block the gravity lines - and with some small amount of upward momentum. This will take less energy than launching from the ground - however, X would have to be quite large to make a BIG difference. Probably at least 30,000 feet, and the higher the better. (This also has the advantage of significantly reducing air resistance, because you're starting out with fewer miles of air above you and thinner air around you.) So you might want to look at ways of enlarging X. Like, oh, make sure the rocket is well-lit even when its engine is not going full-blast, and launch on clear nights. Put some people in helicopters or specially-designed lighter-than-air craft (give them observation rooms on the *tops* of the craft, so they can look *up*) at a fairly high altitude in a ring around the launch site. Starting the engine on/near the ground will kick up a lot of dust and smoke at ground level, which might be a problem for the blockers. The other factor is that a huge amount of the energy spent on getting into orbit is not about getting *up* there, it's about getting up to orbital speed. Lots of things in low orbit have orbital periods of 3 hours or less, and they travel many more miles in one orbit than a spot on the equator travels in one day, so they have to move horizontally a LOT faster. Blocking gravity won't directly help on that, although it could indirectly. (If you can temporarily turn off gravity, the spacecraft - in space - will travel in a straight line at constant speed, and you can arrange for the direction to be away from earth. Then when you let gravity return, the spacecraft will fall toward earth and accelerate, at no energy cost. You'll still have some trickery to get it going in exactly the right direction at exactly the right speed at exactly the right altitude, but you have that *anyway*.) (By the way, the above reveals one of the problems with antigravity. If you have antigravity, you have a perpetual-motion machine and free energy. There are a variety of reasons that physicists give a firm NOPE to that.)

I figured out what I find wrong with that picture. She needs to be further from the mirror - and, unless she's leading a class, facing the mirror. Actually, if she's in a ballet classroom (she does play ballet, after all), she REALLY needs to be further from the mirror, because there's a handrail about 8 inches from the mirror a few inches above the top of the picture and she is definitely going to hit it when she stands up.

Here you go.

Hugs for CK and Pippin.

If you look at the major commercial news sources, and look in their NEWS articles for thinly-disguised POLITICAL POSITIONS, you'll find that (a) Fox has less than most, and (b) nearly all of them agree - Fox being the biggest exception.