Don Edwards

Apparently someone was asking. And I see it more as like a best friend in junior high was shoved in a freezer. Since then we've finished high school, gone to college, gotten established in a career... and the best friend from junior high just showed up, *still in junior high*, and trying to fit in our life the same way she used to. It's awkward.

I'd bet on Andrea before Tara.

Spell schools (D&D definitions) and who I can remember using them - I have probably forgotten several: Abjuration: Greg, Dex, Jerry, possibly done *to* Magus, possibly threatened by Tara Conjuration: (Summoning) Nanase, Susan, Dex, spidervamp; (Healing) Elliot (superheroine), Grace, Sirleck - all arguable; (Calling) Dex, Abraham; (Creation) Nanase, Jerry; (Teleportation) Nioi, all Immortals, possibly done *to* Magus Divination: Edward, Nanase (fairy and guardian), Ellen (guardian), Tedd, Sarah, Tara, Nioi, possibly the ether-whale (for telepathy) Enchantment: Jerry, Magus, Tengu, Nioi, Pandora, the ether-whale Evocation: Dex, Justin, Terra, Sirleck, Edward, probably Tara Illusion: Nanase, Justin, Raven, Jerry Necromancy: -- and I doubt we'll ever see it in this comic Transmutation: Tedd, Grace, Hedge, Guineas, Vlad, Elliot (superheroine), Ellen (guardian), Nanase, Abraham, Tengu, spidervamp, Nioi, all Immortals Universal: Susan, French Immortals, Pandora The order of names on the above lines has far more to do with the order in which I thought of them than anything else. (Terra gets a link because she's such a minor character and I want to make it clear that I did NOT mean Tara.)

And if your function based language doesn't, you can do it in Assembler. As long as your hardware doesn't enforce a firm division between program memory and data (and possibly even if it does). It'll probably take even more work than it would in a function-based language, but it can be done. Seriously - there is nothing you can do, and no programming technique you can use, in any language, that you cannot do in Assembler. Pure Assembler is the human-readable direct equivalent of machine code - any one machine-code instruction is expressed as one line of that processor type's Assembler. Programs exist to translate in both directions. (What you get from a basic machine-code-to-Assembler translator is effectively unreadable, though. Comments are extremely beneficial. As are NAMES for blocks of code and chunks of storage space. Along with macros packaging complex and frequently-used chunks of code - such as "write that block of data to this file".) You said we should remind you to tell this story...

I don't know if I'd call that "addressed". It's both shown and specifically pointed out, but really nothing is done with it. By the way, it's also part of a comic page from the "Elliot is gay according to some idiot" arc.

The problem is that if you're willing to put enough work into it, you can do OOP in machine code on any Turing-complete computer. Therefore, the proposed ban on any CMD capable of running an OOP system is effectively a ban on CMDs that are capable of making decisions about what to do. Whatever "do exactly the same thing to everyone" means for a CMD, that's what a legal CMD would have to do.

Or, for certain of the elder gods, precisely when are the stars?

Well, I didn't say that morphs require OOP. What I said is that a system capable of doing morphs is also capable of hosting OOP. And one version of the proposed ban-text would cover any device capable of hosting OOP - whether it actually does so or not.

What do you mean "originally"? If humans couldn't have telekinetic/etc. powers WITHOUT some special sort of microorganism, how does it make scientific sense for the microorganisms to grant such powers? (Of course, it remains indisputable scientific fact that "midichlorians" were a really bad answer to a question nobody was asking.)

The latter would, IMHO, effectively eliminate any CMD that applies a modification to the existing form - as opposed to imposing a completely canned form. Not because only an OOP-programmed device could do mods. Rather, because any device capable of doing mods would also be capable of running OOP software. Perhaps slowly, perhaps even too slowly to be usable, but still capable.

Pharoah, your link doesn't work. It apparently has one extra character in it, the apostrophe. Let's see if this link posts correctly. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/excerpts-from-the-mad-scientiste28099s-handbook-so-youe28099re-ready-to-vaporize-a-human/ Edit: yep, it's good.

Ordinary humans, if describing a distance of 60 feet 3.141592654 inches - and NOT giving specifications of a part that must exactly fit - will call it 60 feet.

"I bet you don't even know what good clean fun is." "No I don't. What good is it?"

And even when they are CORRECT in their observations, their interpretations are sometimes... interesting... Like the Bible must be completely the word of God because what it says about the distance between points A and B, and unknown point C, have been used to successfully find point C. In other words, it got the geography right. Well here's this thing I'm writing that gets the travel time between a certain restaurant and a certain WalMart, both in metropolitan Minneapolis/St Paul, right (according to Google Maps - actually that's how I determined the travel time). I got the geography right. In another chapter I got the correct travel time between the airport and a certain apartment. So obviously my writing is divinely inspired and everything in it must be true! The major characters are centaurs. The Bible may or may not be true - I carefully refrain from commenting - but THAT is a LOUSY argument for it.

I dislike them because they don't resemble English words. Go find three other standard English words (not multisyllable chemical names, names of foreign places, scientific names of species, etc.) that have "zh" in one syllable... I don't really like singular "they" but it actually is an English word; it has a REALLY long history (as a singular); and we got used to the singular "you" two or three centuries ago (the second-person singular in the subjective case was "thou"). What I wish we had in English pronouns, in addition to a proper third-person-singular neutral person (we have unperson "it"), is ordinals. "John visited Jim yesterday. He1 gave him2 a book."

My mate's ancestral tartan:

There are a lot of medical tests that are cheap, easy, and have a high false-positive rate of detecting problems - sometimes to the point where a detected problem is more likely to be a false positive than a real problem. If you get a positive result from such a test, the proper response is to order a retest (if retests don't generally repeat the false-positive results) or a more difficult/expensive test that is significantly less likely to give a false positive. So why don't they order the more difficult/expensive test first? Because the cheap test alone will give a correct, negative result for most people, saving them the expense of the expensive test. If it's a choice of having 100 people pay $2 (total $200), or having 90 people pay $1 and 10 people pay $3 (total $120)...

I usually have the same gender identity that Dan states. It wobbles a bit. If it wobbles far enough in one direction, I get mild dysphoria - I've had that for a few hours total, and even that sucks, making me very glad I am not trans. I have no similar guide to how far it wobbles in the other direction, but I suspect my normal range is fairly symmetrical. Sexual (and romantic) orientation, though, I am very solidly - perhaps unusually solidly - gynophilic. Hot-wing sauce, medium-mild. (On most shops' 5-star scales I go for 2 stars.)

Fortunately, exactly which sections those are is a matter of opinion. There's one forum I'm a regular on where I have never even looked in either of the two busiest subforums.

I think I have only EVER seen three mini CDs. One of them is right here beside me. I forget what's on it and the label doesn't really say.

I thought it was okay but not great. Perhaps that's because I never read the comic.

I'm guessing you don't know what a 45 is. You're even less likely to know what a 78 is. There were also 16s, but I don't believe I've ever actually seen one.

Actually, the general definition of a "Mary Sue" is not difficult. What's difficult is defining the boundaries (exactly how {perfect|universally loved|beautiful|etc} is required?) and evaluating edge cases (is this character just inside the line, or just outside?). But there are plenty of characters out there where it's easy to get near-universal agreement that "yep, Mary Sue" or "no, she isn't".

Yeah, but books for children (under, say, age 8) are written with specific language and style requirements that aren't really suitable for ten-year-olds, let alone adults. Also, "children's books" is a category defined by the intended audience, where "young adult books" is a category defined by the main characters. Things like MLP are not written strictly for small children, they are written for a broad range that includes small children. The subset that is intended strictly for small children gets picked up by adults for the artwork and to complete collections, not for the story. (Actually, "children's books" ought to be several categories by itself. A book for a four-year-old to read, a book for the four-year-old's parent to read aloud at bedtime, and a book for an eight-year-old to read are three rather different things.)

I HATE HATE HATE it when an author reaches that point. I recently picked up a book from one of my favorite authors, in a series that I love, and found it incredibly disappointing. A complete Mary Sue would have been an improvement on the main character. (Every decision a Mary Sue makes works out well. This can't happen if the character never makes any decisions; the character apparently only ever made one decision in her life, in the chapter before Page 1; otherwise she just accepted the first decision anyone - including what she thought was a random bit of wind - shoved at her. But every other component of MarySue-dom was there.) I can't believe any acquisitions editor would have ever bought that book on its merits. But "new book from Big Name Author"? Yep, no problem, skip editing, straight to publication. And now I'm LESS likely to get another book from that author.