Worse, it was fucking boring. The Hobbit would have made a fine two hour movie, maybe two 1.5 hour movies. But there is not enough plot for seven and a half hours.

And by the time the last film is released, will be about 4.5 hours too long.

And what would you define something that didn't ingest, metabolize, excrete, reproduce and have some sort of system of heredity? Other chemical processes; like fire and crystallization, might hit some of these marks, but we don't call them living systems. So while the precise chemical processes, heck maybe even many of the chemical elements involved may be different (silicon-based life on Titan or something like that), I think at the end of the day if it going to be called life, it has to have the same basic features as terrestrial life.

If it's life, it's going to have a metabolism, it's going to reproduce and it's going to excrete. It may not, at first blush, look like life, but there will be chemical processes that in some way replicate processes found in terrestrial life.

Yep, at least, our real biology- as opposed to a made up biology from a bunch of "sexual revolutionists". It is important to separate the sane from the insane, after all.

It doesn't have to be linear to be useful. It simply has to be able to sort a set of choices into order -- like movie reviews. Nobody thinks a four star movie is "twice as good" as a two star movie, but people generally find the rank ordering of movies by stars useful provided they don't read to much into the rating. In fact the ordering needn't be unique; there can be other equally useful metrics which order the choices in a slightly different way. *Over certain domains of values* minor differences in orderings may not matter very much, especially as your understanding of your future requirements is always somewhat fuzzy (e.g. the future cost of bandwidth or computing power).

The problem with any metric occurs outside those domains; some parameters may have discontinuities in their marginal utility. A parameter's value may be good enough and further improvements yield no benefit; or the parmater's value may be poor enough to disqualify a choice altogether. In such cases such a metric based on continuous functions will objectively misorder choices.

For example Suppose A is fast enough but has poor compression ratios; B is not quite fast enough but has excellent compression ratios. There's really only one viable choice: A; but the metric may order the choices B,A.

On the other hand suppose A has better compression ratios than B; B is faster than A, but A is already so fast that it makes no practical difference. The rational ordering of choices is A,B but the metric might order them B,A.

This kind of thing is always a problem with boiling choices down to a single composite number. You have to understand what goes into that number and how those things relate to your needs. You have to avoid making your decisions on one number alone. But some people *will* fasten on a single number because it makes the job of choosing seem easier than it does. Just don't be one of those people.

Wish I had mod points. Your post is very interesting and insightful and one of the only posts I've ever felt a strong compulsion to mod up.

Well, if you put yourself in his shoes you might well play hardball with other games in the hobby.

D&D as a system wasn't really all special; there were competing systems back in the days he was at TSR which were every bit as enjoyable and arguably easier to play. But D&D had two big things going for it. First, when the three basic manuals for AD&D were published it had by far the best organized and written materials. The Monster Manual was particularly useful. Second it had the network effect: it was the best system to learn to play because everyone else knew how to play it. You could start a campaign at a drop of a hat -- no need to bring everyone up to speed on yet another set of rules.

So put yourself in his position. The future success of D&D is contingent on no other game reaching critical mass. You're completely dependent on D&D, you have no other marketable skills or assets. You have a company with over a hundred employees (which is surely a mistake on your part), and that company has nothing else bringing in cash *but* D&D products. You've made D&D your life work. It's not a situation to bring out the best in people.

No, that's me. Or maybe Railgunner. For about half the Christians out there, Natural Law is a concept that went out of vogue with the Reformation.

Even the enumerated powers are too centralized for me. As has been proven ever since Shay's rebellion, subsidiarity and solidarity with close neighbors, will not be tolerated. The good part of the old pre-Westphalia kingdoms was that assassination was always a solution.

I suspect they're not producing these kinds of phones simply because, despite the author's assertion, very few people actually do want such phones.

A writer and a submitter does not constitute some vast ignored market.

True enough. I've never smoked, but I am overweight, and realize it is a form of suicide- if a very tasty and slow one. But I'd point out that if we had more localized solutions for food (eliminating the need to ship and store food except for famine protection) we'd eliminate much of that.

I was talking more about the Declaration of Independence with its enumeration of "self evident" rights in a specific order, and using those to interpret the Constitution. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights is a more specific application of this; but is a federalist, central government solution to a basic problem that I believe would be FAR better handled locally.

Different requirements drive different designs. Before WW2 seaplanes were common because of the lack of runways. After WW2 airports proliferated, and seaplanes couldn't keep up with technical advances due to the compromises involved in allowing them to land and take off from water. But that doesn't mean there aren't applications for aircraft with a flying boat's capabilities, it just means there isn't enough of a market in places like the US to support an industry. Even so, here in North America there are some 70 year-old WW2 Catalinas being used in aerial firefighting. China is a vast country which is prone to many kinds of natural disasters that could make airlifting in supplies difficult, so they may see potential applications we don't.

It's also interesting to note that seaplanes were highly useful in the pacific theater of WW2, and there hasn't been a protracted struggle for sea control *since* WW2. Also, China is a country with no operational aircraft carriers; aside from its training ship the Liaoning, it has a handful of amphibious assault ships that can carry a few helicopters. The US by contrast has ten supercarriers and nine amphibious assault ships that dwarf the aircraft carriers of WW2. The technology and expertise to run a carrier fleet like America's would take many years for China to develop. It's conceivable that the manufacturers imagine a military market for aircraft like this in the interim.

...or if he's using shell style wildcards, he could mean "pure and utter sherbet."