All the early games I played were very "crunchy"; D&D, AD&D, Palladium, Twilight 2000 and Traveler 2300. The inelegance of such systems really began to drive me nuts, and I ended up going with Fudge and its variants like Fate. I never really played Gurps very much, but as I recall it was the middle ground between the kind of ultra-loose systems like Fudge and the very complex systems like AD&D. Now, I run a couple of PBeMs; a Palladium Rifts one and a home-brew heavily narrative game in the Harn universe, and dice are rarely used in the Palladium game, and not even part of the Harn game

Because the value of gold and silver is somehow less arbitrary than electronic bank balances.

Does your book have dinosaurs and hot android sex? I don't just read anything, you know. I have my standards.

"Now seriously..." doesn't stop a sexist joke from being sexist.

This behavior is inherent in being human. You think conservatives don't partake of hysteria?

Indeed. And he was given the chance to put his side of the story on June 10th. Unfortunately for him, he made a non-apology apology, saying:

"I did mean the part about having trouble with girls. It is true that people - I have fallen in love with people in the lab and people in the lab have fallen in love with me and it's very disruptive to the science because it's terribly important that in a lab people are on a level playing field. I found that these emotional entanglements made life very difficult."

and

"It's terribly important that you can criticise people's ideas without criticising them and if they burst into tears, it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth. Science is about nothing but getting at the truth and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science."

As for the idea that he was taken out of context, the linked article which is supposed to support that idea quotes him as saying:

"Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls?”

So yeah. He was sexist in context, he was given the chance to put his side of the story, he doubled down and said he stood by his comments and made more sexist remarks, and only then did he lose his job on June 11th.

Submitter should probably spend less time reading Brietbart.

+10 Sad but True

From Bagehot's The English Constitution:

Generally speaking, in an electioneering country (I mean in a country full of political life, and used to the manipulation of popular institutions), the election of candidates to elect candidates is a farce. The Electoral College of America is so. It was intended that the deputies when assembled should exercise a real discretion, and by independent choice select the President. But the primary electors take too much interest. They only elect a deputy to vote for Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Breckenridge, and the deputy only takes a ticket, and drops that ticket in an urn. He never chooses or thinks of choosing. He is but a messenger—a transmitter; the real decision is in those who choose him—who chose him because they knew what he would do.

One can see the logic of an electoral college that functions as a sort of independent assembly to choose an executive, but the problem is that it long ago, with the development of the notion of the Faithless Elector, became little more than a mindless formality.

That five of the SC justices don't share his bigotry and bizarre narrow version of the Constitution.

Want to see people bent out of shape, you should go to one of the hype-social conservative Catholic forums on the web. Holy smokes, you've got people telling how God smucked down a tree in their neighborhood because He's so pissed off, and predicting that several states will secede. Someone on one forum even started blaming Neopagans (that one I confess I can't quite figure out).

The constitution doesn't mention a helluva lot of things, which is why the Founding Fathers created the Supreme Court as a means of assuring that the Constitution could remain a living document.

The Christian Identity movement has produced its share of terrorists.

Scalia just wants to be keep getting free dinners. He's largely irrelevant on any civil rights matter that reaches SCOTUS and he knows it.

When are you going to finally write a proper microkernel, which everyone, including you secretly, knows is far superior?

So other than your paranoia, there is no actual advantage.

And before you start talking about "staying on the device", I had to go and actively disable all the Skydrive crap on my notebook, so they're all playing that game.