@Narual

That's a fantastic point. The whole idea that the world must be a tiny sphere made of SuperLead, but is also somehow totally flat gets completely Occam's Razored by the argument that it's most likely that the map isn't complete.

That lets the (lack of) curvature make sense, makes the planet much less dense, and lets Blizzard keep on adding expansions.

@Strophe

Yep. I think that's taken care of by the route they chose:

The longest straight, flat line that an adult human can walk in Azeroth without being interrupted by obstacles, mobs or the Horde stretches from the eastern end of the north parapet of the bridge into Westfall, across Elwynn Forest to the southernmost of the Three Corners in Lakeshire. An adult human walking at a steady pace will cover this distance in 18 minutes and 15 seconds. Humans walk at an average speed of 5.6 kilometres (3.5 miles) per hour, and therefore this route is roughly 1.7 kms (1.05 miles) long.

If their path is valid for uninterrupted walking, then it should be good for blinking too. Now, it's been a long time since I played WoW and I never played a mage, so I may be missing some finer details. I think it should work, though.

One other oversimplification from the study is that games often allow the player to move much faster than a human can, because realistic walking/running speeds are too slow and no fun. Given the measuring stick of the blink spell, what is the actual walk/run speed in WoW?

Um, yards, not meters.

Much of the estimation of distances in the report is unnecessary. Abilities such as blink and charge (and all projectile attacks) have explicit maximum ranges in yards.

The Blink spell is especially useful, as it teleports the user exactly 20 meters forward. Replacing the walk from Westfall to Lakeshire with a series of blinks will give an absolute distance in yards. It would be interesting to see if the numbers match up.

I think it looks really great. The moving mechanism is very clever and it's amazing what a good paint job can do. I also am a little turned off by the handle. It's that smooth leather scrap that hangs open on the top. Tuck that down, and it's perfect.

@8:Odd there's no mention of the OLPC XO.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that part of the design philosophy for the OLPC was to create a completely distinctive package to protect it from commercialization. That way, if they ended up on the black market, a community could shame any adults using them. In my mind, that pretty much excludes it from lists like this.

In response to the people who don't see the need for a development environment on the go:

I find it invaluable when I'm working on a group project on campus. It's not the most comfortable option, but my only other computer is a desktop. The more the EEE can do, the better, as far as I'm concerned. If I already had another laptop, I probably wouldn't have gotten the EEE.

I've got an EEE and I think it's really great. The biggest feature for me is the portability. I can carry it around (open or closed) like a book, and put it in my bag without it killing my shoulder.

I also love the OS. It's trivially simple to use in its default state, so I think it is a fine choice for computer newbie (if they have good eyes). But since its Linux, just about any customization is available under the surface. It's a good option for someone who wants to learn Linux because of sites like eeeuser.com. Everyone starts off with the exact same setup (software AND hardware) so the walkthroughs they have on their wiki pretty much always work.

I was even able to install and use some development tools on my machine. gEDA for circuit board creation in Linux worked fine right off the bat. I also tried the Rabbit microcontroller tool (Dynamic C) in wine. That ran, but couldn't find the right path to libraries for compilation and serial support was broken so I couldn't program anything. That one of the only things I've ever tried that I wasn't eventually able to get working, and I think it was wine's fault.

My two biggest complaints are processor speed and screen size. The 600MHz underclock makes it hard to play some intensive flash games, though I don't think I've noticed a slowdown anywhere else. The screen is a bit of sore point. It's perfectly adequate for most of the default software and for webpages. It's just not big. Asus is coming out with a bigger screen on the next version which should solve any space issues. They said a few months ago that the screens wouldn't be getting any bigger, and that influenced my decision to buy early. I might have waited if I know then what I know now.

There is also the idea that the technology will probably improve over time as it is used in more environments. I wouldn't want to bet that nobody will develop a better tag or more sensitive scanner and assume that I am safe sticking my passport in a tinfoil sleeve. Crushing the silicon sounds like much more robust option.

but that claim isn't spelled out anywhere or explicitly supported by any language in the bill of rights.

There is also the question of what it means for a right to be ambiguous. I'm under the impression (based mostly on High School US History) that the Bill of Rights explicitly protects certain rights but does not in any way limit us to those rights. I know that the government has evolved since then, but I'm interested in your take on the issue.

In your ideal of how the government should work, do you think that the space around the Bill or Rights (i.e. rights that are not explicitly protected but are dealing with similar issues) is open to legislation?

(since none of these measures are intended to prohibit law-abiding citizens from keeping and bearing arms).

A far as narrowing down the limits, I think that there is a distinction between the words "infringe" and "prohibit". I think that gun control laws can infringe the right to bear arms, even if they don't prohibit it.

Do you mean revowellers? I tried one. They are not nearly as good as a human, since the question is "What string of words would make sense here, given what I think this person is trying to say and the grammatical context?" For example, JLBraun's first post becomes:

"is registered democrat who wins in ka- and sheets in combat _pstl/rfl_ matches found target shooting quite relaxing and meditative in connote be concerned with anything there then operating the weapon i- not the _dy's_ events not _n's_ work just you and the target flow state is suggested above"

From:http://www.disemvowelment.com/reemvowel.html

It's easy to guess what he probably means, but the content was changed, and the original message is not recoverable with 100% accuracy. Especially if you consider things like misspellings (unintentional or intenshenal).

Obviously, the moderator has the right to apply moderation however she sees fit, and if there was some deal worked out that JL broke then I stop caring so much about that. I just think disemvowelling is a bad practice.

I've really got to agree with JLBraun on this moderation issue. I last read this thread when there were 130 comments and I found JLBraun's posts civil, on topic, and interesting. I come back this morning and see all of them disemvoweled. Many of the posts surrounding his failed all three of these tests and were left as they were.

I admit that I agree with him in terms of gun control, so I can't claim the high ground with the whole "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" thing. I don't think that invalidates my opinion, though.

I think disemvowelling is a terrible moderation tool. It was funny and clever the first few times I saw it, but it got old fast.

Regardless of whether or not an average human can figure out what the person was probably trying to say, the meaning of the post is made ambiguous. There is no way to be sure that a reconstruction of a disemvowelled post is exactly what the poster submitted. Yes, in most cases there is only one word that makes sense, but one can't be sure.

If we look at this from a creative commons point of view, the moderator is creating a derivative work by remixing the post, but is attributing that work to post creator is a way that suggests that they endorse that remix. The moderator is replacing the original post with a fundamentally different version without updating the attribution. I don't think that is an acceptable state of affairs, especially considering Boing Boing's "non-commercial sharing with attribution" CCL.

If I could recommend an alternative to disemvowelling, I would pick ROT13. That scheme serves the exact same purpose of making the comment unintelligible to a casual reader but still available to someone who cares enough to decode it. I doesn't change the content of the post, just the manner in which it is expressed.

I'll admit to only reading the introduction, but I don't see a significant difference between a person's hands and a brain interface device.

If I am a soldier on the ground, and I am shooting something, I issue some kind of neural command to my hands and they pull the trigger as soon as they can. If I'm a soldier in a bunker with a brain jack, I essentially do the same thing. Depending on the sophistication of the software, it might be something clunky like thinking, "Execute fire command alpha." or it might be a simple interception of the same mental "pull trigger" command. Both systems have the obvious need to differentiate between thinking, "Bang!" and actually pulling the trigger. Failure to do that would be dangerous to everyone, friend and foe alike.

Assuming that that technical issue is resolved, what is the problem? In both cases the soldier must issue a mental command that he or she knows will result in weapon fire. I don't see any interesting distinction between act and thought there.