If you've sold the laptop, or given it away as a gift or a donation, by what right do you have to limit what the recipient can do with it?

And, yet, fantasy where 'anything goes' is usually terrible, in my opinion. I think good fantasy remains consistent to its own internal laws, whatever those laws may be.

Plant some Roundup Ready corn around their building and send Monsanto after them.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill:
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"Forget the drunken skipper fable. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker's radar was left broken and disabled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was [in Exxon's view] just too expensive to fix and operate." -- Greg Palast, BBC

At the time of impact with Bligh Reef, Captain Hazelwood was asleep in his quarters, having left Third Mate Gregory Cousins in charge of the navigation bridge and Able Seaman Robert Kagan at the helm.

Captain Hazelwood was accused of being drunk at the time of the accident, though at trial he was cleared of this charge.
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Exxon used him as a fall guy.

Pipelining was invented by Douglas McIlroy, not Dennis Ritchie. But that, of course, doesn't lessen Dennis' status one bit.

Many moons ago I was playing an old game called Midwinter. One of the ways to win the game was to blow up the building where the commander of the invading army was staying.

The game involved warning NPC's about the invasion and also recruiting them to help. But some of them didn't get along and could only be recruited by specific characters. You could play from the viewpoint of any recruit, and you had to worry about supplies, routes of attack, and other various strategic bits. I imagine playing the game as intended would take a long time to win.

I fired up the game, simply ignored the invaders completely, skied all the way to said building and blew it up with the initial character. Total time, 15 minutes.

I wished I hadn't done that. It ruined the game for me since I then didn't want to play it The Proper Way, with all the recruiting and grand strategy.

Space Pirates and Zombies is on Steam, unlocking on August 15th.

Congratulations on your achievement, and may there be more in your future.

Won't it make them think "stay off his lawn"?

-1 is the only way to browse. Otherwise you let modders with axes decide what you get to read.

The line between insightful and flamebait is often blurry. Why let someone else draw the line for you?

you == generic && != The_Moof

I'm reprogramming Below the Root from the ground up to run on modern computers. It's an as-is clone: same graphics, same sound, using the Commodore 64 version as my baseline. I've extracted all the sound and music, most of the graphic blocks, and I've re-created the sprite sheets. It's taken me longer than I'd have liked, but I'll get there (my sig strikes home).

The author of the books gave me license to clone the game. Years ago someone bought the rights to make a movie and possible new game, so the author couldn't give me permission to redo the game with new graphics and sound. Alas, whoever bought the rights has apparently done nothing, or at least not that the author knows of.

I grew up in Prince George's county Maryland and now live in Kent county Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay. The entire county has less that 20,000 people (the smallest population in the state) and it's almost all farmland and waterways. Yet Kent County had its roads cleared very quickly after the big snow this year and our power went out for maybe 2 hours. Kent county has the most efficient emergency crews I've ever seen and I'm willing to bet they only have a fraction of Montgomery County's budget.

The two words are not derived from the same place.

Definition and history of "niggardly". Possibly Scandinavian origin, 14th century.

Definition and history of "nigger". French and Spanish origin, 17th century.

Quirkz, I think a thoughtful, moving story could be created off of the roadmap you've provided. A skilled writer could make the "worry about the peace" absolutely gripping.

And perhaps the "ugly damsel" is the most beautiful woman in the world to the main character...Niafer from "Figures of Earth" by James Branch Cabell springs to mind.