She has gone forth from us, to explore beyond the Rim.

We live for the One, we die for the One.

Entil'zha veni, in Valen's name.

I saw bat'leth dueling at MileHiCon once. That would be fun.

Among other things, the duelists tended to freely acknowledge when their opponents scored a hit. It was the honorable thing to do.

Not everything is closed source. Some mods even have GitHub repos. Example: Simply Jetpacks, a mod I used in the Erbosoft Vista modpack.

Notch just likes Java. It's not pure Java, though, it uses native libraries to access OpenGL and sound.

The fact that it's Java is why it runs not only on PC and Mac, but on Linux as well. The mods you can get for it are all Java, too, so they're cross-platform compatible. (Actually, there's a few that are at least partly written in Scala.)

My opinion of Apple is that it's become kind of like the Soviet/Russian space program: both of them produce some really impressive hardware, but you can still see the dead hand of their chief innovator (Steve Jobs for Apple, Sergei Korolev for the Russians) in all of it, and you can also see that they don't have another innovator of that same caliber to carry them forward. Chuq's describing what appears to be a symptom of that, in that they've lost the person who's capable of thinking strategically instead of just focusing on the business numbers.

Well, there are kind of four parts to the overall Callahan's saga, grouped by their main setting:

• The original Callahan's Place, Suffolk County, NY: Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, Time Travelers Strictly Cash, Callahan's Secret
• Lady Sally's House, Brooklyn, NY: Callahan's Lady, Lady Slings the Booze
• Mary's Place, Suffolk County, NY: The Callahan Touch, Callahan's Legacy
• The Place, Key West, FL: Callahan's Key, Callahan's Con

The first two parts are more or less intertwined in time; Lady Sally's House ended up closing a year after the events of Lady Slings the Booze but before the events of Callahan's Secret. The third and fourth parts basically follow on in sequence from the events of the first part.

Actually, that's right. In Stranger, World War III is set in time between the original Envoy expedition, which brought Mike's parents to Mars in the first place, and the Champion expedition, where they found Mike and brought him back. It's a "blink-you-miss" note that comes right near the start of the second chapter, something like "there would have been another manned expedition right away if World War III hadn't intervened."

Connery? I can't imagine Jubal Harshaw with a Scottish accent.

Now, if you really want to get people hot under the collar, James Earl Jones would be a sterling choice. Think Terence Mann in Field of Dreams, only more so.

If you're interested in this, there's an excellent book called The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers , by Tom Standage, that talks about the telegraph and the culture that sprung up around it. Many things we recognize from modern online culture are present: e-commerce, the use of encryption, online chat slang, and even online romance. Steampunk fans should especially appreciate it!

Somewhere, in an undisclosed location, PJ is going to her closet, and pulling out a much-disused red dress.

...they'd better not forget the Goodyear blimp.

Oh, if only I could mod you "+1 Funny" for that :-)

I was a senior in high school that day. My civics class was interrupted by the principal coming on the PA system to tell everyone that Challenger had exploded and crashed into the ocean. We were all rather stunned by that news.

After that class was our morning break period. I immediately went to my next class, which was physics. In the back of the classroom, many of my classmates were huddled around a portable radio, listening to the news. No one said much. (I didn't actually see the video footage of the explosion until I got home that day.)

Yet the gods do not give lightly of the powers they have made,
And with Challenger and seven, once again the price is paid,
Though a nation watched her falling, yet a world could only cry,
As they passed from us to glory, riding fire in the sky!
- From "Fire In The Sky," written by Jordin Kare