What he's talking about is tabletop gaming design. He just uses FreeMind and MySQL to track what he's doing with it. It's no different than building out skill sets in a spreadsheet and writing up the actual books in a word processor.

When I was young, I played games from SJG, TSR, Palladium, R. Talsorian, ICE, FASA, and a bunch of one-off studios I can't remember now. Some of the systems worked really well, some required some tweaking, and others were essentially unplayable. But it was easy to see links between systems. Despite the occasional legal threats, there seemed to be a lot of borrowing each other's ideas. Palladium clearly was influenced by TSR (and I think they've admitted that the first version of their rules was essentially heavily modified D&D rules), and R. Talsorian's old D10/D6-based system seemed to have some influences from FASA.

When you're designing a game, what external influences help shape the game? How far can you adopt someone else's ideas before you have to start worrying about lawyers getting involved, and has that changed as the pen & paper RPG has waned in popularity?

It wasn't that long ago that celebrities were blamed for making the sex tapes in the first place. That seems to be changing now, and for the better.

This will expand as people look around and see that we have foibles. Some people are still going to be jerks about it by not hiring someone because there's a picture of them from 20 years ago holding a joint or by hiring someone because they found the nudies posted a couple of years back and want the chance at seeing it for themselves. But past drug use isn't going to be nearly as much of a deal-killer as it is now, and even current drug use (at least for marijuana) is probably going to subside as a major concern as long as someone isn't high while on the job.

There will still be reasons people don't get hired for things that end up online. Posing while hanging out with the local Klansmen, for example, is going to make someone wary about hiring them for fear of having to deal with racism in the workplace. But being caught toking, flashing a nipple, or even engaging in sexual activities isn't going to be as important.

My wife and I test drove one recently when we had to get her a new car. Aside from a visibility problem for her over her left shoulder, she loved it and we would have bought it. We had it for about a half-hour, and she put it through some good paces, testing acceleration, braking, and essentially slaloming through a mall parking lot. When we got back to the dealer, we realized that the car wasn't even in performance mode. Had that visibility issue not seriously bothered her, we would have bought the car right there instead of getting the Prius-V (which is certainly more practical but a lot less fun).

I'd love to get one, but I work from home and drive *maybe* once a week, so there's no sense in dropping $35K on a new car that will get a few hundred miles put on it each year.

In the short term, we're still struggling with embarrassing things that we did 5, 10, even 20 years ago. But as time goes by, there is slowly growing acceptance that people do things in private that are publicly considered to be taboo, in bad taste, or crude. One of the interesting things I observed when the Fappening was in the news is that the subjects of the hacking were, by and large, not blamed. The blame was placed on whomever stole the pictures, and few calls for apologies from the various victims were made, and I'm not aware that any of them did apologize for taking the pictures in the first place. Someone is likely to bring them up should any of them run for office, but I don't think voters will care. If anything, it makes them look a little more normal.

When Clinton's reported past drug use was reported (where he claimed not to have inhaled), people made a short fuss and then shrugged their shoulders. Less was made of the younger Bush's drug use, and even less of Obama's. Character imperfections that are shared by a significant minority (or even a majority) of the population are looked past. Where once there was a fear that the only candidates that could run for president were those best able to hide the skeletons in their closets, I think that will fade over time as many of those skeletons won't matter. Within my life, there's a good chance that someone in the White House will get there despite a sex tape being available. A fuss will be made, but ultimately, most people will care more about other matters than that someone recorded their sexual activities.

If you mean the puff toward the top of the stack around the time it went supersonic, I think that was just a vapor cone from the transition to supersonic flight.

Possibly, if it was programmed to do so. But they probably don't program for that because no recovery ship would have been available anyway.

It's initial incident analysis that doesn't need quarterbacking from people who don't have access to internal data. With SpaceX, so many people are anti-Elon that within minutes, people were declaring the company a failure and wondering how long it would take for the entire company to collapse. Orbital Sciences has the advantage that far fewer people even know who they are and they don't have legions of people hoping for them to fail, so being more open up front doesn't carry as much of a downside.

I woke up to the news of this (I usually watch but entered the time wrong on my calendar), and the first thing that I thought of was the docking adapter, IDA-1. I imagine an IDA-3 will be built and flown, but I wonder how long it will take to build and if the delay will impact future missions.

Dragon tore clear, but was tumbling far too much to be able to deploy parachutes.

The same thing happened with the Volt when the look everyone loved turned out to perform poorly in the wind tunnel. They've since cleaned up the look a little, but it still doesn't look nearly as cool as the concept car did.

That's the concept car, not the test car. Concept cars almost never make it to production looking like they did at the initial roll-out. Even with the camouflage, it's obvious that the body has undergone some major design changes including a lower angle from the front of the hood to the peak of the roof. The grill is also different, and the windows have a slightly different shape.

GM doesn't put the money into these things to fail. Designing a new car costs tens of millions of dollars. GM is still behind the curve on efficiency, too, so it needs the credits against its fleet mileage. That doesn't remove the possibility of just bad design (the Pontiac Aztek made it through to production), but I expect that they want this to succeed badly, if only to get a start on competing against the Model 3. If they can get something acceptable out first, the first redesign will probably hit right after the Model 3 hits the market with its own teething problems, and there will be stronger competition for the electric cars that average people can afford.

In Bob Lutz's book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters, he discussed the inception of the Chevy Volt, how it progressed through design concepts, was unveiled to the world in 2007 to widespread acclaim over its look (but with very mixed responses to its then-new lithium-ion battery design, something Toyota called "dangerous"), and then when the production version was rolled out was called ugly and dismissed by many. The problem is that what looks great in design can fail miserably when it gets into the wind tunnel. (Lutz says that when they started wind tunnel testing, the results were so bad that they wondered if they put it in backward.)

It's relatively easy to make a car that gets good numbers out of a wind tunnel, but the Pontiac Aztek was able to do that and it's widely regarded as one of the ugliest cars ever made. It's difficult to make a car look really good and still keep the cost down, especially when you're trying to integrate it into existing production lines. GM may be better off making a competitor to the Model S in its Cadillac line, but by making an inexpensive but potentially not as attractive car, it can sell more and lower its fleet mileage, giving it breathing room with less efficient cars like the Camaro and Corvette and its truck lines.

A lot of things have been seen as unethical but are commonplace now. Snipers were considered unethical for centuries but used widely in war, often with the units disbanded after the war; that ended with World War II when most of the involved nations established sniper schools that are maintained to this day. Guerrilla warfare was seen as unethical, but it helped win the Revolutionary War, and most nations have units that train in it (or its euphemism, asymmetrical warfare) to this day.

Spying is a part of international life. It's even a part of diplomacy. It's about gaining an edge over the other guy. You can't stop spying: it's as old as civilization, and probably as old as humankind. Whether it's scouting ahead and reporting back on the enemy formations or stealing their nuclear designs, it's part of what nations do.

If a spying incident starts a war, it's just an excuse because a war was going to be started anyway. Espionage ramps up when tensions do, and whether it's a spy getting caught or a stray round or someone says the wrong thing on TV, some small thing will always be the last straw.

I've played plenty of Civ. If you keep spying, then yeah, even he's going to get mad. But if you get caught spying on an ally, you get a chance to apologize. That doesn't change the point that if one spying instance starts a war, then it means that a lot of other things led up to it.