A few days ago I had the ability to vote stories up and down. Now it's gone. I wish I could vote this one down, it's utterly pointless.

Yes, that's breaking a cease-fire. What they were trying to do was cancel it in a more politically-friendly way. You've played Civilization, right?

Actually, there's an awful lot of parents who are wary of introducing the Narnia books to their children while they are still maximally impressionable. It's a fun mythology but I'm at least waiting until early teens to give them to my kids. Maybe people don't complain loudly but there was at least a dull roar of uncertainty when the movies came out. You bet your ass there'd be an outcry if anyone bothered to make a movie out of the final book, where C.S.Lewis goes full psycho. But Hollywood is not that dumb.

The difference is that people don't say it about OSC. It's him saying it about other people. The crazy bastard really thinks that armed revolution is an appropriate response to the legalization of gay marriage, apparently.

Before the Internet was a big thing, I happily recommended his books to people. 'Pastwatch' is still one of my favorite books ever. Unfortunately, when I recommend him to people now, they inevitably trip over his *disgusting* hateful personal editorials. It's beyond mere political opinion--he goes on the warpath and makes it really, really personal. Some of his editorials really go over the sanity cliff too, we're talking Timecube-type stuff. It could be funny but when it's pointed at you or your friends, and he's trying to incite real political activism against you, the humor is lost.

Because of how distasteful that stuff is, I can't recommend him anymore. After all, his hate is just one click away through the search engine of your choice.

Raises a good point in my mind. If we theorize some more and discover that yes, it's possible for us to 'crack' part of the universe hard enough to push it out of the metastable state, well then it sure is a damn good thing we theorized it before we did it by mistake while testing something else!

Having the ability to do that seems unlikely, but we do keep pushing boundaries for science.

If you want it to fly, you might want this: http://www.openpilot.org/products/openpilot-coptercontrol-platform/

Yes, yes, it takes the "fun" out of building your own flying code, but your machine will be a lot more fun to play with when it's actually stable. Put whatever other board you want on it, but for your own sake, use a dedicated flight board if you want to go airborne!

Players who study all the insane crazy words can play Zs and Qs wherever they want anyway, players who don't will never be able to. And at the highest levels of the game, individual letter values don't matter all that much anyway because people are always getting those nutty "use your whole hand" bonuses.

I generally play with a non-scrabble-fanatic judge instead of a dictionary to determine word correctness. Sorry, "Qat" is not a word.

For those who are hoping to see it, that distance puts it at two arcseconds wide (if my calculations are decent). This is roughly the same width in the sky as Neptune, or 900 times smaller diameter than our moon on an average day.

My '99 Escort has an OEM alarm and, much like Golddess says, it can only be turned on by the remote, and only turned off by the remote OR by key in the ignition.

On a roadtrip with my ex, we had one remote and two keys. It was very annoying when she kept locking it using the remote, leaving me to either find her set of keys or set off the alarm if I needed to get into the car in the middle of the night.

For reliable quality I'd go with Schlock Mercenary. It's not-too-soft sci-fi, consistent and pretty good art, a daily update schedule, very good pacing, and nothing about it annoys me.

Not collecting much of new data, and it's one agency allowed to centralize it instead of every little local agency keeping it forever. I'd rather have one agency with a long time limit than a hundred agencies with long time limits...just keep the others low.

Build chips out of silicon and metal. Also, Ruckingenur II, where you reverse-engineer things. Both by ZachTronics. http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/play-kohctpyktop/ Neither of them are very long games, but the early levels of Engineer of the People could easily accompany a couple days in a high school science course.

You can build simple electronics systems in it. Or not-so-simple, as I'm sure youtube videos by people with too much time on their hands can illustrate. (I've seen some very impressive adders.)