Reminds me of the Jaffa in SG1.

In one episode, SG1 is showing some faction the difference between the staff weapons and the assault rifles that SG1 uses. They show a Jaffa trying to hit a target perhaps 20m away - he misses several times, as you can imagine the staff weapon is rather inaccurate. One of the SG1 team then proceeds to shoot the shit out of it with their P90.

The relevancy is thus:

They explain that the staff weapon isn't made for battle - it's made for fear and intimidation. The same could probably be said for storm troopers: the blasters are loud, inaccurate, and give away your position like nobody's business. Their armor is for show, to embody intimidation and quell resistance.

It doesn't make much sense in the SG1 universe, however, as it seems like the different Goa'uld are constantly skirmishing each other. You'd think they'd use the staff weapons to intimidate their slaves, and something a little more efficient for actual battles with other Goa'uld.

In Atlantis, Ronon has a pistol that seems to shoot the same kind of energy as the staff weapons, with the caveat that it can be set to stun. Because it's a pistol, he's much more accurate than a Jaffa ever would be with his staff weapon. ... but this is only marginally related to the topic at hand, which is: Why was a wookie living on endor?

Readability bookmarklet is your friend: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Feeding them after midnight - THATS when the problems start!

FWIW, WordPerfect is the defacto standard in the legal world. Don't ask me why...

Full-scale language support isn't that much more difficult. All it takes is making sure there are no plaintext strings in your html output - every UI string is run through the translation engine (and cached). Strings in the translation table typically look like, "{0} days remaining" - then you just roll the entire table out to a third party (or volunteers) who can translate.

For RTL languages, you may need to include an additional stylesheet or two.

The hard part is converting an app with tons of static strings to a translated app.

(Worked on one app that needed to be completely converted; worked on another app that was in the process of being converted and was almost finished. Both global B2B webapps, so accurate translations were very important - we had a division whose job it was to not only make sure everything had translations, but that the translations were accurate; actual translations were taken care of by a third party service)

Actually, the BBC has a less slanted article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7341336.stm

Wouldn't really work. This isn't true steganography; it just generates an image based on the torrent file. tag should be "!steganography" not "steganography"

Shadowbane had a lot of other problems.

For example, to grow your city you needed hordes of people sitting in the killing fields grinding things. You couldn't really make money as a merchant. (by merchant, I mean ferrying goods - not putting shit up on the auction houses).

Because the gameworld was largely empty fields for cities and a smattering of about 5 different types of terrain squares (they literally were squares) with only semi-unique things to do in them.

The grinding might not have been so bad if the environment to grind in was uh, a little better than 'fucking awful.'

There's evidence that cannibalism only begins occuring once a culture is stressed beyond the norm. An example being archeological evidence showing that the Druids, while not typically cannibalistic, performed ritual cannibalism when they were being wiped out by the romans. Speculation has it they they used it as a last resort - one last thing that might make the gods smile upon them and let them drive out the invading roman forces.

There's also evidence that tribal cannibalism elsewhere has only become a recent development, starting with british colonialism.

Fallout 3's IP was bought by bethesda from a faltering Interplay.

Homeworld's IP is owned by Sierra, who published both Cataclysm and the original. Cataclysm was developed by Barking Dog, while the original was developed by Relic.

The difference would be if Barking Dog saw the concept that Relic did, and felt like making a better version. Without permission from the IP holder (Sierra).

True enough!

I wonder if there are any articles out there describing key aspects of different dice systems and why some are popular and others are not. For example, despite the statistical shittiness of d20, it's extremely popular. The epic-feel roll-and-keep of 7th Sea (and L5R) are less so.

What are key things to keep in mind when designing a homebrew pen and paper system?

Inquiring minds want to know...

Research into manned space exploration (especially of the sustainable ilk) will produce technologies that benefit us here on earth, much like what's happened over the past 50 years with lubricants, manufacturing materials, jet engines, and so on and so forth.

There are asteroids out there that would provide 2004's level of iron production for over a million years.

Keep in mind that up until a short time ago, jQuery itself used ugly user agent hacks. (It's also slow - just look at /. ....)

Which also explains its minimum system requirements of a 2.0ghz core duo. Seriously - wtf? I can watch hulu videos through my web browser on a 3ghz p4.... barely. I blame it on flash.