A Planing Guide to Taking Over or Obliterating the Earth, published by Dark Osprey a division of Osprey Books
Since I have been buying Osprey Military Books since I was in active service, I'm ordering a copy and see if it's the real deal.
Edit: I have no idea why the links keep on disappearing on me after I posted them.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

This isn't for me; it's for someone I know on the InterWebs. His wife just had emergency surgery - without it, she would have died. They're self-employed, with no insurance. The bill was $69k, but has been discounted by the hospital - to $25k. Even that is more than a year's take-home pay for both of them put together, after their business expenses.

I seem to recall that there's something like kickstarter out there for raising money to pay medical bills. Does anyone know what I'm vaguely remembering, and (more importantly) if it does exist, where to find it?

EDIT: Oh, and let's leave the political discussion about healthcare in the Politics subforum, please.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

We are proud to present...
Namco High!
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber."  --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.

I'm thinking of trying to submit to SJGames for GURPS Furries, and I'm trying to come up with something interesting for a setting.
I'm thinking of a "discopunk AIDS Outbreak" type of setup. As an Infinite Worlds timeline, "Moreau-XX" has a POD sometime in the 1800s, when some epidemiologists think HIV/AIDS split off from a strain that only affected Chimpanzees. Due to rubber science and allowing for the setting set-up, somehow the species jump became teratogenic instead of immunosuppresive. This led to many sightings of "werewolves and such rubbish" and "false missing links" until the mid-20th century. Sort of a take on WildCards and "SCABS" from Bryan Derkson's Tales from the Blind Pig universe. So the setting has "normal" humans and "furries" that are the result of a blood-borne pathogen.
"Discopunk" refers to TL 7+1 gizmoes with a strong 1970s aesthetic, where a lot of our current gadget functionality is tied into blocky plastic boxes with tacky faux woodgrain veneer. CB culture for a rough equivalent to social networking and the internet memepool, based on 1950s TV and Movies. Perhaps strongly influenced by Bakshi's version of R Crumb's "Fritz the Cat."
Stuff like this:
Since one of the things I've noticed in Furry fiction is a degree of focus on "persecution issues," and I needed a source of conflict for "native" adventures... "Furry is the New Black" may well be a sidebar.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

I have an Acer Aspire One - a wonderful little portable machine, with a keyboard and Windows XP (as opposed to a touchscreen and who-knows-what OS). The only problem with it is a distinct lack of memory and disk space.

Memory I can fix - there's only one DDR2 SODIMM slot, but the stick in the slot is only 1GB. Easy fix to upgrade to 2GB.

Disk space is harder - there's only one 2.5-inch SATA bay in the notebook, so I'll need to clone the drive onto the larger HDD. But there's only one 2.5-inch SATA bay in the notebook. How can I clone a hard drive when I can only install one drive at a time? For that matter, how do I clone a drive that has XP installed on it? (I haven't cloned a drive since the days when DOS was king...)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Quote:As I remember it, the Democrats on Capitol Hill got the bill they
wanted. They were heady, back in the majority, with a new and popular
president, and they didn’t much care about GOP support. They wanted the
credit: It was their bill. They wrote it in a way no Republican could
support. And they got no Republican support. When Paul Ryan, who had
emerged as the Republican point man, attempted to come forward with
ideas, he was rebuffed.

The new president—and this was a key historic moment—decided not to
act on the accumulated presidential wisdom of the ages, which is: Get
the other party in on all big things. Give them a stake in it, use them
for cover, show you have bipartisan juice, that you are truly national
and not only the leader of one party, show you can wield your mighty
power across the aisles. Get them bragging they passed it, with your
leadership. Make them co-own it so that when certain parts don’t work,
and certain parts won’t, they have deep motives to help you fix it.

Instead, a perfect storm of misjudgment, immaturity and lack of
historical perspective, and a perfect storm of shortsighted selfishness
(it’s all ours, it’s not even a little bit yours) brought forth a perfect storm of a health-care disaster.

Quote:As for Landrieu’s bill, if Republicans can’t successfully argue that
Congress has no constitutional power to compel commerce (the basic point
of the successful — in that vein — challenge to Obamacare under the
Commerce Clause), if they can’t argue that Congress has no power to
compel anyone to sell an insurance plan, or, by extension, to compel a
doctor to see a patient, etc., then we’re in sad shape.

Obamacare made millions of people’s plans illegal. By passing the
Upton bill, House Republicans would be striving to make them legal again
for the next year. If insurers nevertheless choose to stop offering
those plans, it will still be Obamacare that set that trend in motion.
What’s more, the GOP would then be free to criticize those insurers and
remind voters that, over the next decade, Obamacare would funnel a
stunning $1 trillion from American taxpayers, via Washington, to
insurers (according to the Congressional Budget Office). Meanwhile,
Landrieu’s bill is more of the heavy-handed, coercive model of
government that gave us Obamacare to begin with, and Republicans should
say so.

Finally, Landrieu’s bill would undermine the Obamacare exchanges at
least as much as Upton’s bill would. So the Democrats certainly don’t
love it, and it’s highly unlikely they would ever pass it. But if they
did, and if the House and Senate ended up reconciling Upton and Landrieu
in conference, the clear loser would be Obamacare — whose exchange population would just have gotten older, sicker, and costlier.

And then around October 2014, all of those notices about losing your
health plan because of Obamacare would start being mailed out again,
just in time to help voters make an informed choice on November 4.

Quote:Now, I realize that contempt of Congress is and should be the natural order of things. “The best Congress that money can buy.” “The only native American criminal class.” “No man’s life, liberty or property is safe while Congress is in session.” And that’s just Mark Twain and Will Rogers; the rest of us no doubt have even more pungent observations regarding the collective entity known as Congresscritters.

But the notion that “lawmakers” (stop, enough already!) are worried about “careers” at the public trough ought to be contemptible to every taxpayer. And, if Congressthings had any sense of shame, to the Honorables Themselves. But, of course, they don’t. Only someone with a soul as dead as Little Nell, a hide as thick as Joe Biden‘s noggin, and the moral conscience of Bill Clinton has the effrontery to run for Congress these days, and every attempt to “reform” the system — from the disastrous 17th amendment to term limits to McCain-Feingold (nothing like a “reform” to “get money out of politics” written by the “most reprehensible” of the Keating Five) — has resulted in complete failure.

It’s true that not a single Republican voted for Obamacare upon its forced passage. But neither has the appetite for repeal been very strong since. The House can pass all the repeal bills it wants, secure in the knowledge that the Senate will never go along with them, and that the president would veto any such legislation. Moral preening is, after all, one of the attractions of the racket, and “safe” votes are strictly for domestic consumption. Speaker John Boehner’s sandbagging of Senator Ted Cruz said all that needs be said on that subject.

So I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it. If you think Obamacare is bad now — and it’s very, very bad, a direct assault on the most fundamental freedom Americans used to enjoy, which was the freedom to be left alone by the federal government — wait until the “employer mandate” kicks in. Already illegally “postponed” by Obama, it will destroy, by design, the insurance market in the U.S., send the economy into an even worse tailspin than it’s in now, and disrupt the lives and budgets of untold millions of Americans.

For John Roberts was right: in the law’s practical effect, it is a tax, only a tax, and nothing but a tax — and if you think it’s going to fund “health care” for the lame, the halt and the blind, you’re out of your mind. The gullible, naive and the mendacious may not be able to discriminate between “health care” and “insurance,” but that was exactly what Obama was counting on when he sold — barely — his apparatchiks in Congress on the notion that Barrycare would only add to the sum total of human happiness by taking care of the neediest and blah blah blah your doctor, period. That doesn’t make Roberts’ cowardly decision good — he had a chance to put a stake through the PPACA’s heart once and for all, and he choked. It’s a decision that will live in Supreme Court infamy until the day the act is repealed.

In other words, the entire flimflam was a bright, shining lie all along, made possible by the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party and its GOP wing’s continuing complicity in perpetuating the fraud. Remember, “universal health care” has been dream of the Regressives since Bismarck and Woodrow Wilson were pups, and now they have it. Make them own it, and destroy them with it.

We used to think that changing Congress meant changing which party controlled it. Now we know better. Real change can’t begin until the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party is gone.

Princess Maker-like strategy game and Oh my god does the protagonist have the cutest death scenes.
At some point I'm gonna hafta do the note-taking, min-maxing route... because RP-ing the Queen-to-be properly gets you dead.
I'm having fun, but YMMV.
Warnings: Visual Novel, JRPG-like, etc etc.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

If you're not a football or more specifically a Southern College Conference football fan: You would not be aware of this.
University of Alabama (UA) Crimson Tide football team has a rivalry with their Auburn University' Tiger football tm counterparts. In 2010, a UA fan took it a little bit too far: He destroyed one of Auburn's landmarks after the Tide's loss of the Iron Bowl to the tigers:
 
"On January 27, 2011, a caller to the Paul Finebaum Radio Network
who identified himself as "Al from Dadeville" claimed to have poisoned
the oaks at Toomer's Corner with Spike 80DF, a potent commercial
herbicide containing tebuthiuron, after Auburn's defeat of Alabama in the 2010 Iron Bowl.[7] Subsequent soil tests showed high concentrations of the poison around the trees, and experts did not expect them to survive.[8] There was also some concern about the possibility of the poison affecting the groundwater,[9] but, on April 19, 2011, the University announced that tests of the groundwater had determined that it was safe.[10]

After an investigation, Auburn city police, on February 17, 2011, arrested Harvey Updyke Jr., a 62-year-old man from Dadeville, and charged him with criminal mischief, a class C felony in Alabama.[11] A grand jury subsequently indicted him on four felony charges and two misdemeanor charges.[12] Updyke originally pleaded an insanity defense, but, on March 22, 2013, as part of a plea bargain
with prosecutors, he pleaded guilty to a charge of criminal damage of
an agricultural facility. The prosecutors dropped all other charges.
Updyke was fined $1,000 and was given a three-year "split sentence"[13]
of imprisonment. Under the terms of the split sentence, he had to serve
six months in jail and would then be on five years of supervised
probation. He was given credit for 104 days of time already served. The
conditions of his probation included a 7 p.m. curfew and bans on talking
to the news media, entering the Auburn campus, or attending a college
sporting event.[14][15] Updyke was released from jail on June 10, 2013.[16]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auburn_Uni ... traditions is the link.

Now this is not the end of the story:

Judge orders Updyke to pay $500.00 dollars for the next 132 years.  That's actually $796,731.98 in restitution costs.

So my question is, he's not going to be able to pay the full amount, even assuming he lives to be 100. So, when he dies, what happens to the restitution?

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auburn_University_traditions#cite_note-16][/url]
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

The Independent: The truth IS out there (above Cheshire, that is): British scientists claim to have found proof of alien life

Quote:Professor Milton Wainwright told The Independent that he was "95 per cent convinced" that the organisms did not originate from earth.

by Type O Negative
duration 7:04


This Halloween
So unlike any other
Her final words
Don't be afraid
Of the green light

On muddy ground
I'm lying drunk on her grave
Where I must wait
Until she wakes
The soil splits Greenwood's
Ground will quake beneath me
And so shall take
Into the earth
To the green light

The autumn air
Thickly fills my lungs
So sweetly
Reminds me of
Her smoky breath
With wine and this
Bouquet of maple
And oak leaves
In death or life
We'll always be

I find myself drawn to her
Shadow domain

This moonlit night
Late October's swirling
Fog-gloom
And as promised
My love did rise
From the green light

Effect: either it makes clouds of glowing green light appear within Doug's AoE that he can direct into shapes (like a cheap knockoff of a Green Lantern, with no physical effects) or just let his subconscious form into creepy stuff, OR raises undead, which remain under his control until the song ends. The latter can be useful under Godzilla Threshold circumstances, but in general would bide on the Do Not Play list given Doug's morals and previous experience with undead, especially given that the song specifically makes mention of a loved one rising under its effect.
--
"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