http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/fi ... oop-n62266
Astronomers are suspecting that there is at least a shepherd moon that is keeping the rings sharply defined. A moon(let) around an asteroid.?
Edit: Blasted url insert!
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Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

We've all heard a version of the expression "Create new ways of doing things, but don't reinvent the wheel."
Clearly, the folks behind Common Core didn't take that little pearl of wisdom to heart, and tried to reinvent freaking subtraction.
And here's how one Math and Internet savvy dad responded.
http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/c ... 41158.html

To cut a long story short, a house party escalates until the police are called at 7:30 in the morning. The cops ask for the party to stop and the kid running it gives them lip. So an hour later they arrest the whole lot, and prosecute the kid for allowing people to smoke drugs in the home...

And if he'd just shut the party down... he'd never have even seen a judge.
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/co ... 23285.html

Quote: Gardai searched 68 people and made four arrests in a drugs bust at an out of control house party in south Dublin that has been described as "every parent's nightmare".

The owners' son, Chris Bent, refused to stop the post-Leaving Certificate bash despite complaints and ordered gardai off his property unless they had a warrant. The officers returned 90 minutes later with one and raided the house.

The 20-year-old was prosecuted for permitting his family home to be used for drug offences.

Dublin District Court heard his parents had been away on holiday and told him he could "have a few friends over" but word got around that he had a free house and things got "totally out of hand".

His father Eugene Bent -- the communications and retention director at Dublin Chamber of Commerce -- attended the hearing last week.

When asked if he wished to comment on his son's case, Mr Bent told the Herald: "I don't want to say anything about it."

His son, who is now a film student, pleaded guilty to three counts of permitting the possession and smoking of cannabis as the occupant of the house, and permitting the sale, supply or distribution of dimethoxybromophenethylanine.

The offences happened at Kenilworth Square, Rathgar, on July 28 last year.

Judge Michael Walsh adjourned sentencing in the case for nine months.

He noted that Chris Bent was not accused of taking or supplying any drugs himself. He said he would be lenient if he undertook some voluntary work as a token of his remorse.

Sergeant Zita Woods said gardai were called to the house at 7.30am following complaints from neighbours that the party had "got out of hand", with bottles being thrown around.

Officers saw men smoking what they suspected to be cannabis and asked to speak to the person in charge.

The accused came out and the gardai asked him to stop the party.

"He demanded that the gardai get off his property without a warrant," Sgt Woods said.

The gardai returned at 9am with a warrant under the Misuse of Drugs Act and entered the house. A total of 68 people were searched, as well as a room in which cannabis had been smoked.

Several empty bags that had contained drugs were recovered and four people were found in possession of controlled substances and arrested.

Bent was detained and admitted knowing people were taking drugs in his house. However, he told gardai he thought it was only in the one room and that only cannabis was involved.

He was also not involved in selling or supplying drugs to anyone.

Bent had just finished his Leaving Certificate and his parents were away on holiday at the time, his barrister Kate McCormack said.

"Word spread that there was a free house and things got completely out of hand," Ms McCormack said.

Ms McCormack said: "The facts read like every parent's nightmare, and he is suitably ashamed of treating the family home in that way."

Bent's own behaviour had been appalling and the fact that he had been drinking was no excuse, she said.

As well as film studies, the accused was involved in music and composed his own tracks.

His barrister said a drugs conviction could have a major impact on his life and career and "every window of opportunity could be firmly shut" in terms of travel.

Judge Walsh adjourned the case to a date in December.

The term 'Integrated Graphics' is something of a bogeyman. Anyone who can remember the older Intel parts from 5-10 years ago will especially have flashbacks. (Like taking seconds to render a single screensaver frame)

I don't know about you, but the latest Kaveri APU's from AMD seem to be set to turn that on its head. At least partially.

I celebrated my first paycheck ia few weeks ago by buying and building a brand new desktop centred around one of AMD's A10 processors. (A 7700k). I didn't spec a dedicated GPU because I didn't expect to use the system for gaming, just for playing films and the like quietly... and maybe some BD ripping. I used the money I saved on an SSD, and some faster RAM (2400mhz).

For shit's and giggles, I loaded up an older game that I remember giving my last desktop some troubles, STALKER... and was amazed at how well it ran on a system that was still technically 'Integrated graphics'. It ran smooth and crisp on near maximum quality. Maybe that says more about the march of hardware, but I remember it being a challenge to run for a long time.

Even Metro 2033, which - although 4 years old at this stage - is still a pretty hefty graphics muncher, looks amazing and plays amazing on a system that doesn't have a dedicated graphics card.

Needless to say, lighter games like Source games run well enough - while I haven't exactly tried anything more modern because I'm not that much of a PC gamer, the fact that it manages so well even with older games is nothing short of amazing. For a 140 euro part, doubly so. I'd say it's definitely better than an Intel i3, and cheaper than an i3 with a dedicated cheap graphics card.... it blows anything from the Leixlip chocolate factory in it's price band out of the water.

And yet, it seems woefully under-appreciated. Most people just don't buy AMD parts anymore. I think I'm almost unique amongst the people I know in having an AMD system.

Which is a shame because the new Kaveri series definitely deserve better than being relegated to the bargain bin. For such a cheap part, it's more than exceeded my expectations as to its capability. It'[s definitely something to look at if you're on a tight budget. And if the OpenCL API becomes more common, it could be a force to be reckoned with.

The only dowsides are a slight tendancy to eat power, and being very sensitive to RAM speed. Fast RAM makes a lot of difference to the performance of the system, far more than an Intel system, because the graphics are integrated.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/25/showbiz/n ... n-overture]Neil Gaiman has written his first new Sandman material in ten years, and it comes out tomorrow.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

You know, there's a canon Harry Potter character whose name fits the http://twitter.com/user/status/406894139746172928 for naming a RWBY character...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

I discovered this from it being mentioned in the blog associated with Dresden Codak:

http://www.portlandmercury.com/Blogtown ... t-be-black]Why Batman Can't Be Black
Posted by Bobby Roberts on Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 12:54 PM

The article makes some good points about just how ... shall we say "conservative" ... fandom can be in our assumptions. Objections and rebuttals:

• "You can't just change somebody's skin color willy-nilly!" If Batman was a real person, that would have merit - but Batman is fictional. You can re-imagine him with the stroke of a pen, and many writers have re-imagined Batman.
  
• "Bruce Wayne has too much back-story - you can't make him black." DC reboots every decade or so - what back-story?
  
• "Why can’t you just create a new character?" Because most readers know new heroes usually don’t gain much traction - so this is actually saying "just create a completely separate black superhero, and put them in their own book, because that way I can easily ignore them."
  

OK, blame M Fnord and the rest of the Candle crew for getting me off my ass and working on these. I was (as always, slowly. Grrr...) working on some fic ideas involving these when I caught the latest Mk. II Candle chapter and got inspired.

Why can't this happen for my stories?!?

Ahem.

Comment would be very welcome, as per usual.

First up, the Wrist-com update...

The generation who caused the crisis won't have to pay. They never will, they'll have retired to their pensions before long. It's the ones who follow afterwards who have to pay to clean it all up.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

The current nibbler is a version of class-free skill tree, where you get your stats and seven unlocked skills out of an arbitrarily large number at character creation in a fairly standard way, but the slots to put those skills in are the trick: There are three A-ranked slots, each of which can be divided into two B-rank slots which give only half effect, and each of those divided again into C-rank slots that give 1/4th effect. Unlocked but Unranked skills, which is anything not in one of the above slots, can only be used for 1/10th effect. Your basic sword-and-board (or gun and riot shield) tank type could actually get by with three A-ranks, for Heavy Armor, Heavy Shield, and (weapon type), and leave the other four starter package skills unranked, though I think I'd want to split the weapon type to get Regenerate in as well, myself. (I like the stats and skills I came up with for YAPPIE RPG Engine, but this would probably call for a longer, skill list offhand - YAPPIE is pretty abstract and generic, and four stats with eight skills each does not make for the kind of option tree I'm looking at for this system)

Advancement would be a matter of unlocking more Unranked skills and being able to reconfigure to deal with different types of enemies or non-combat challenges, rather than real power progression, though it could include raising stats or a numerical score for each skill rather than a straight percentage bonus fixed by tier - this system would probably do fairly well for a superheroes game, where powers don't really tend to progress so much as you figure new tricks to do with them/ways to combine them/etc. Honestly, I'm picturing this as more a video game type RPG than tabletop, making lots of fiddly character options to endlessly play with on the back end and argue over in an internet forum a strength rather than a weakness.

Another possibility for advancement would be gaining a Skill Crown, that effectively shifts the attached slot one level higher, even a few of those (with A+1 as a hard maximum), or perhaps various ranks of those that boost the percentage of the slot they're attached to by varying degrees.

Any thoughts on this kind of a configurable skill tree? I know it's kind of hard to say without a skill list to plug into it, but figure that magic is typed by elements and weapons by types, with various spells in an element or special attacks with a weapon type accessible via a single equipped skill (and the actual weapon, obviously, for that) while most defenses are attached to armor or resistance skills. Perhaps it would be better to treat it as ranking the stats you'll use, and have the associated subskills grow with use, rather than basing them on a stat list external to the system.

It would open a path to having one called Sanity that holds all the magic and mental resistance subskills, to bask in the forum posts of spell-monkeys complaining "Sanity OP plz nerf!" but then I'm usually one of those spell-monkeys...
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows