I don't know if you are who you say you are, but if so, I want to tell you that Dragonrealms still stands as my all-time favorite game!

I started playing DR in 6th grade when my parents had AOL by the minute. I convinced them to get unlimited so I could play. I played for years. I still remember everything about DR... From char creation, rat killing at the shipyard, learning how to skin, moving to goblin killing... Etc.

I still reference DR to my friends at work when we talk about online RPGs. No other game, especially graphical ones, have had anything close to the mechanics I love in DR like the stealth, stealing, and lock picking. I would lock pick all day long.

The only moral moment I've ever had in a game occurred in DR. I stole coin from someone and was caught, she chased me yelling to 'give me back my money!'. She chased me out of town and my friend killed her. I felt so bad I gave her the money and watched her grave and items. I still feel bad about it. Warcraft never gave me those feelings.

I could go on and on but I will stop. I just wanted to tell you how much I loved DR. I hope you were able to make some money off of it.

Obviously this subject has bread some interest

How many comments can we harvest from this fielded subject?

I beg to differ. Apparently you have never heard of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective? Munch on that.

The NASA team was expecting metric units and the contractor, Lockheed Martin, who was operating the spacecraft, submitted english units to the navigation system instead of metric.

Lockheed Martin, which was performing the calculations, was sending thruster data in English units -- in this case, pounds -- while NASA's navigation team was expecting metric units, Newtons. One pound is equal to 4.48 Newtons. Over the course of the journey this led to the spacecraft being something like 60 miles off course when it reached Mars.

Lockheed martin was mostly to blame, but there should have been a safeguard to detect this somehow on the nasa side.

I used to have a friend who went bankrupt and lost everything. Did this happen because of gambling? No. He would spend all his money on the latest car modifications for his corvette that he couldn't afford. Every month he was buying stuff or making mods or getting tests done on his corvette. He got way behind on his credit card bills and apartment rent but kept buying crap.

Another example is I used to have a friend who kept buying the newest and greatest home theater stuff. It never ended and our friendship ended at a time when he was getting hounded by debt collectors over who knows what.

I know lots of people who gamble, including relatives, and none of them have ever gone broke. Why? Because it's ENTERTAINMENT. If I want to spend $200 a month on poker, why shouldn't that be just as free to do as spending $200 a month on car upgrades? On audio upgrades? On a single football game?

People go broke doing anything you can imagine, it's not fair to only hone in gambling

I can tell from comments that not many of you are private pilots. They are paying for this with yet another tax on fuel for private planes. The FAA keeps raising fees on everything associated with having a private plane while giving big breaks to commercial companies. I'm sick of it.

When you consider how much you and your company spent to cover you while you were employed, and the fact you almost never used it, it's a huge financial drain with the only winner being the insurance companies.

I don't think you understand the whole point of insurance. When you buy insurance you are making an agreement with other citizens that you are all paying into this group fund when you are healthy and in return this group fund will cover your butt when you need some serious medical treatment. How is this bad? Or do you just expect someone to cover your bills when you get sick when you didn't pay when you were healthy?

I quit using Quicken years ago because of that very reason. I think it's called a Sunset Policy or something. They want you to upgrade every 3 years so they disable certain features.

I found a free, open source program that I have been using for almost 2 years now. It's called GnuCash. They have a nice tutorial to learn how to set things up.

http://www.gnucash.org/

I don't know if gnucash will do the auto-download from the bank, because I stopped doing that in Quicken a long time ago. I enter everything manually from receipts then verify my online data. I do this because I got in the habit of downloading the data and never really looking at it to see if something was messed up.

This reminded me of a commercial I saw over 10 years ago. It was a guy in a corporation staring at a bottle of olives, trying to figure out how to save money for the company. He runs into his boss's (bosses?) office and tells him that if they just remove 1 olive from each bottle, it will save them such and such millions of dollars.

So they lowered the quantity of olives that you would buy in the bottle, but kept the sale price the same.

That's what almost every single company does. When cost goes down, it's just profit for them.

Are you serious?

I actually just finished (as in last week) "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (DADOES). Since that time I have been working on "Ubik". While reading, I never once correlated the Nexus One phone to the andys in DADOES.

The kids of PKD are insane, and ugly.

I'm assuming you never saw The Da Vinci Code? The worst performance by Tom Hanks, ever.

I agree with you on Patrick Stewart.

Doh, Typo in my main response title. It should say "Complex, Yes. Overly-Complex, No." Sorry.

This system is only as complex as necessary. If it could be simplified, it would. Do you have any idea of how recovery of spacecraft components works, such as recovery of the solid rocket motors? The first parachutes, the small ones, help to slow down the capsule. These parachutes can withstand a certain amount of load. Do you know what dynamic pressure is and how it drives the aero forces in atmo? The next batch of parachutes can withstand another set of forces, and finally the huge babies are released when the dynamic pressure is just right and those 'chutes will bring the capsule in for a landing.

They don't have all those 'chutes just for the fun of it. The budget is just too tight to do crap like that.

First stage recovery has more than 1 set of 'chutes as well.

All we need is IDDQD in every game. Simple.

I'm assuming that you have gone straight through school to get your PhD and haven't had a job in industry yet. If I'm wrong, then I'm sorry.

One thing that I learned after graduating with my degrees and getting a real job is that real science and engineering is much different than school and research science.

Real science is when you are working on a spacecraft (or some other physical product) and trying to get a real vehicle in the air. School science and lots of research science is plagued by lots of bad things that get mentioned in PhD Comic. I work on trying to get a vehicle in the air and I get really frustrated with some groups out there that we work with that are mainly for research and they don't get the big picture.