I noticed you mentioned Scratch. I posted elsewhere but thought if I replied to you that you might actually notice my comment :) Stencyl (www.stencyl.com) utilizes "Scratch"-type code blocks along with actual AS3 code (as well as the popular Flixel and Box2D libraries which it is built on) to ease the learning process of programming games. It's in closed beta, but Jon - the founder - has been really interested in the potential uses for educational environments. It might be worth checking it out, I'm in the beta and I really enjoy using the program. It works, and that's what matters.

I'm pleased to be in the beta for Stencyl (http://www.stencyl.com/) and it's an excellent program that works well for people of all experience levels. I'd say I'm a moderate novice when it comes to programming (it's not my job, just a hobby) and Stencyl is powerful enough that it doesn't hold me back with simplistic expectations of what I'll want/be able to do.

Who needs be My post would be MORE insightful, but the the slashdot effect prevents me from reading the article, and the slashdot code of ethics requires me not to.

That's actually what I was just looking up myself. As best I can tell, it's speed of light for 36.7 -/+ light years. That transmissions going to take a while. I hope their "Battle Opera" is long-running enough to still be around when the get here, hah. Of course, I'm sure they have a reasonable explanation involving secret knowledge of subspace or other technologically wonderful transmission methods that were secretly used. I'm sure they can explain it "in-canon" with as frequently as the series took them to the past. There was the movie with TOS and the whales. I seem to recall some Ferengi from Deep Space 9 being at Area 51 in an episode. Somebody's got to have left something trivial (to them) behind, right? I mean, how often do you misplace your cell phone?

I bet the government would require retailers to track the "rounded up" and "rounded down" amounts and turn over any additional overage as a "Penny Elimination Tax" to discourage the whole "always rounding up" thing. For instance, over [arbitrary time period] Wal-mart has $0.75 million in "losses" due to rounding down, but $1 million in gains from rounding up. Whichever agency finds itself in the lucky position of collection it gets to demand that additional quarter million. You know, to pay someone to stop making pennies. There's money to be made in not having pennies, but it's not for us...

Honestly I think that there is only one possible benefit to this. Describing the source (via XML3D or Flash or some form of a vector format image) has the potential to reduce the size of images. Need a 1600x1200 image of Earth? That's 46,080,000 bits of data required to represent it. The same thing generated in 3D could be as simple as the number of characters in this comment (sphere plus texture). Even with the texture file needed it's still more efficient. But I don't want VRML again either.

There's a lot of money going into the gym business for new years resolutions. I've been hearing a lot of radio ads for "pick your own payments!" where they'll either let you 1. pay little or nothing up front and then rape your wallet all year long on a contractual basis - or 2. rape your wallet up front and then let you pay little or nothing all year. Obviously either way they're going to get money from the sheeple as you say. I've elected to be rape-free this year. My neighborhood has sidewalks still.

According to wikipedia Valve's Steam content delivery system was initially released on Sept 12, 2003. I didn't get it at first so I don't know what functions were available at the time - I seem to remember it being mainly used for updates - but it is definitely used to deliver "episodic" content now, particularly audio and video (interactive and otherwise). I can't imagine that Valve was the first to be doing this either.