The reptoids will stop at nothing to prevent humans from finding their homeworld!

But seriously, bummer. Many years ago (1997!) I went to a NASA Ames / Moffet Field open house. Various working groups had set up displays showing the mission concepts they were working on. One of these was Kepler.

If you read the Mars One, you'll see that they're counting on revenue from a reality program to fund the project.

So, the candidates must not only be emotionally stable and qualified, but be photogenic and charming enough to sustain the interest of viewers.

Imagine the horror if, after three years, all of the surviving colonists turn out to be phlegmatic, agreeable, no-drama workaholics and stable family-minded folks.

"These rating are terrible! My God, it's turned into The Waltons in space! Can we ship in some ninjas or a killer robot to liven things up?"

I wrote several of the old V&V adventures. I have many fond memories of dropping by FGUs offices and seeing guys like Jeff Dee & Bill Willingham toiling in the art hole . . . sometimes working on art for my RPG adventures!

For several years dealing with FGU was a good enough gig, but the publisher just sort of disappeared after the late 90s.

I had given up hearing from him ever again when Jeff pointed out that the company was still in business, sort of, and selling my stuff.

I eventually got back royalties, and even had a trunk manuscript (for another game system) published, but it is an uncomfortable situation. V&V aside, what other rights are up in the air?

I hope the appeal gets processed quickly so Monkey House can start work on V&V e3 and I can work on new editions of my old stuff for them!

. . . Mar 12 11:57:03 hedvig kernel:WILL I DREAM?

I clicked "Fixed-lens digicam" because it is the closest choice to what I use most often. It has a optical zoom, but is nowhere near being a DSLR or even a faux-DSLR.

I have better cameras than my Nikon E5600. Better resolution, better zoom, more features. But the E5600 is "good enough" in all categories, uses AA batteries (I pack spares), can fit in my shirt pockets, and since it only cost me $10 I wouldn't feel broken up about losing it.

Here it is!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/6946063784/in/photostream

Scanning through my photostream, a solid majority of my photos were taken with it.

I use a refurbished Fuji FinePix "faux DSLR" to take pictures of stuff I'm building, stuff I'm auctioning off, etc.

. . . he needs an official declaration that he was never guilty in the first place, and should never have been prosecuted.

Between '89 to '95, I went to multi-dozen trade shows. Four a year sometimes. COMDEX, CES, E3.

I stood around in my cheap suit, in horrible dress shoes, and show off CD-ROM multimedia software.

It got a little better after other, larger companies started putting show personnel in casual-dress uniforms. Golf shirts with logos, khakis, black sneakers, that kind of thing.

What made it all incredibly frustrating is that, while I was working in "high tech" (I mean, gosh, multimedia CD-ROM), it was all about selling and sales and making deals. There was no real interest in the technology, and what it could do, and how it worked.

I eventually got my ass in gear and went to grad school so I could actually work on a development team. While I miss the travel sometimes, I'm so glad to be through with trade shows.

It would be expensive, because of the high delta-V required to match Mercury's orbit around the sun, but we should really get a lander down there.

One that can take core samples, and that has a sophisticated chemistry lab.

Or perhaps several landers / core samplers, with the ability to send samples to a central lab module.

The ice, and the carbon material covering it, would contain a history of comet impacts, captured dust samples, and other events.

Why are we being asked to worry about this when Americans are facing REAL problems, like the War on Christmas, and Michelle Obama wanting to replace our children's cafeteria pizzas and sloppy joes with brocolli and whole wheat bread?

PRIORITIES, PEOPLE, PRIORITIES!

It's not like this problem is going to get worse and worse if we just ignore it, until there is a massive collapse of marine ecosystems leaving nothing but oceans full of algea blooms and teeming hordes of jellyfish.

I'm about to buy a house, and there are a few things I actually need. Laundry appliances, a refrigerator, a step ladder, maybe a space heater.

If the prices are right -- that is, if the items are actually on sale -- I'll make a few highly selective forays.

I have no need or desire to compete for limited-quantity "doorbuster" items.

This has been going on for a long time, and no, it isn't just public schools.

George Orwell mentioned getting mocked -- by the headmaster's wife, for cripes sake -- for being part of a group that collected insects. ("Such, Such Were the Joys.")

But the OA made me think of this Freeman Dyson quote:

"So it happened that I belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess, interested in other things besides football, and squeezed between the twin oppressions of whip and sandpaper. We hated the headmaster with his Latin grammar and we hated even more the boys with their empty football heads. So what could the poor helpless minority of intellectuals, later and in another country to be known as nerds, do to defend ourselves? We found our refuge in a territory that was equally inaccessible to our Latin-obsessed headmaster and our football-obsessed schoolmates. We found our refuge in science. With no help from the school authorities, we founded a science society. As a persecuted minority, we kept a low profile. We held our meetings quietly and inconspicuously. We could do no real experiments. All we could do was share books and explain to each other what we didn't understand. But we learned a lot. Above all, we learned those lessons that can never be taught by formal courses of instruction; that science is a conspiracy of brains against ignorance, that science is a revenge of victims against oppressors, that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred."

-- From "To Teach or Not to Teach," 1990

They're all hiding out in a black hole waiting for all those slacker main sequence dwarfs to die off. Damn pirates never contribute anything to the interstellar medium. Eliminate capital gains taxes now!

snarks > /dev/null

I graduated High School in 1980. Personal computers were exotic, expensive things. I knew no one, in a fairly affluent town, who had one.

What we got: A DEC PDP-8e. A bit wider than a refrigerator. OS and languages loaded via magnetic tape.

Five teletypes with rolls of beige paper. Two-character variables. Program storage on strips of yellow paper.

...any experiments along these lines will lead to the subjects developing terrifying mental powers, leading to a series of events ending with the callous lead scientist having his head explode.