Raithe

The Orion plans don't exclude it. But it's pretty much a problem throughout Nasa. Cost overruns, project management that gets massive delays, political shenanigans. Obama laying out great speeches of "We're going to go to Mars" and then slashing NASA's budget even more. If you can't get your house in order in the first place, your chance of getting to Mars in a decade doesn't really feel that good to me.

Clean up the bureaucracy. While I'm impressed with a lot that NASA does, pretty much most things I read about things they do at the moment are seriously wrapped up in red-tape, bureaucratic coverings, and cost overruns.

So when their budget is slashed, and they're buried in red-tape, they're still making plans to get out there... MSN - Innovation - Orion ; Nasa's Plans to Land Men on Mars

Yeah, the main trouble of that is I spend most of my time killing the continuous swarm of 4 or 5 droids that are turning up to help heal / recharge him, rather then actually fighting him. If I take time to hit him more then twice, there's four droids respawned.

Just got stressed out by the Revenge of the Archon mission on Makeb. I know it's pretty much the last one of the Imperial Makeb storyline, so I was thinking "hm, it's nearly going one am, this point should take me at most 10 minutes to do the boss fight". I recognised it, pretty much the same style as the Republic version, use the same sort of tactics. Then everything goes wrong. repeatedly. The robots that recharge him swarm, so there's a continuous 4 or 5 of them, there's never a moment they aren't there. I have him facing away from me, when the glowing lights for the insta-kill death ray show up.. I think "hah, I'm behind him, I'm safe".. and the freaking beam fires in reverse out the Archon's arse. Then when I get back, the droids don't drop the isotope you need to destroy the recharging bay, so you can't stop the big bad from getting recharged to full health. The glowing lights of area effect targets show up on the floor, so I use force speed to get out..and even though I'm a foot away from that area effect, I still get blown up and thrown across the room. My healer companion keeps getting stuck next to some pillar and stops actually healing me. I've got a 55th level Sith Inquisitor and I spent 40 minutes being repeatedly killed anytime I made a little progress. I decided to give up for the night before I wake everybody up screaming curses at the pc.

roast chicken breast, with baked bacon slices, home made bread sauce, honey glazed carrots, diced roast potatoes, salted sprouts, some broccoli, and some caramelised onion chutney...

I mean c'mon, even with the toned down more "realistic" body type, Lara still had the biggest chest of all the women in the game. It just wasn't as noticeable as it was in earlier games.

The question then becomes.. just where does Dorothy Lamour fit in?

BBC News - Pilots and Skydivers escape mid-air crash Well, if you're going to be involved in a mid-air collision, I guess it works best if you happen to be a group of skydivers...

I always shift power to lasers to take out the two merc ships quickly, shift power to shields just before you hit the first layer of minefield, dodge a lot, when you hit the second layer with the frigate in missile range I snap off missiles at the frigate and turn on the "do not get hit for 30 seconds" doohicky. As I'm just passing the frigate I hit the EMP, then shift power to lasers so I can take out a 3rd merc ship as fast as damn possible on that turn, throw a few missiles at the frigate as you go through that curve (if you get it right the frigate should blow up then), take out the 4th merc ship on that run through, and you'll have plenty of time to hammer away at the mandalorian shuttle and it's guard. The main problem is getting distracted and bouncing off an asteroid or two.

It's always about Chewbacca.. http://youtu.be/OuMQYFDAPyc

Pathfinder per se, is a rules set. Paizo ran with it when you had all the fan kick-off over Wizards creating DnD4th Ed. (Which I have to say has some pretty art, but some pretty goddamned awful mechanics). http://paizo.com/pathfinder However, Paizo have also created a Campaign Setting to go along with it. Part of what helped push it is they had the big online shop set up, and they print the books but also publish pdf versions are much reduced prices as well. They also do the "loyalty" thing that if you have an account and set up a subscription you get reduced prices. There's the "Pathfinder RPG Books" which are pretty much core mechanics and interesting variations, the "Campaign Books" which are purely setting stuff, the "Player Companion" stuff which are a mix of player options, ideas, and more fluff all wound around the Campaign setting but a lot can be used easily enough outside, and the Adventure Paths they run (which are long arc stories, publish one adventure a month, done in 6 month chunks).

Somewhat of a variant, but Pathfinder is done by Paizo and works a bit more smoothly then D&D3.5 did. In a lot of ways its more a decade of fan tweaks and house rules collected together from a huge chunk of the fanbase, tidied up and then run through some professionals. Had some very Escher-esh dreams. Mixture of perception and weirdness, and then dreams about dreaming, and dreaming about waking up, only to actually wake up, falling asleep, and dreaming about trying to get to sleep and realising that I already was (due to weird dream stuff), and repeat through the early hours of the morning...

Comedy Central's short "Loki" clip, treating annoying cutsey-kids like they deserve.. http://popwatch.ew.com/2013/11/04/thor-the-dark-world-kids/

This sounds like it should be a title to a Heavy Metal inspired rock Epic. No, it can't be a "Road to" unless the companions turn out to be Bob Hope or Bing Crosby.... and there are musical comedy numbers involved. Edit: And that's what happens when you go to catch up on the forums after a couple of days without reading here and make a snap quote reply without having read to the final page.. you find someone's already done the same form of reply.. darn.

I remember a few years ago there was a poll of large number of hospital staff (doctors, nurses, janitors, etc) on which tv programme most accurately captured what went on in a hospital. ER was one of the lowest on the list. Scrubs was the one that was noted as most like a hospital environment by a large margin.

Heh. If history was presented as facebook feeds... http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6650094/facebook-news-feed-history-of-the-world-world-war-i-to-world-war-ii

Oh I don't know if they've changed it. Last time I did it was a couple of months ago. But it used to be possible to set it up so that if you had the right knockback powers and the grenades, it was possible to knock him into the chasm within about a minute of the fight starting.

Of course, with Malgus it's all about finding the timing right to hit him with the knockback that throws him off the edge...

Babylon 5 started back up on UK tv tonight. Not the pilot-pilot, but the first episode of the first season, so Ivanova and the toned down Minbari makeup. "To my mind, a good leader should have a strong chin. He has none. And his vice-president has several. This, to me, is not a good combination."

Annoyed at my mother and the nhs. She finally admitted to me that she hadn't been able to renew her prescription last week, and she was actually out of her meds last Thursday and hadn't told anyone. I have to admit, I tend to sort out her doses a week in advance, but rely on her saying "oh, can you set up the next week now", for some reason she didn't do that. Or admit that she hadn't managed to get them to sort out the prescription for this month. So I've pretty much been trying to find any short stashes of left over drugs and pretty much been standing over her to make sure she takes the morning, lunch, and evening ones we still have in the house. Of course, besides all of that, without the diabetic portion of her meds her blood sugar level is now up to 15.4 And she was bitching at me for not letting her have any of the dessert I made the other night. And the nhs prescription line has been locked solid today so can't get through. Bloody silly they shut it off at noon as well. Was using three separate phones pretty much on continuous redial over an hour and couldn't get through. Bloody nhs. Edit: Also, my ipod wasn't syncing properly, so I've had to reset it to factory settings in an attempt to get it to work. Now it's going to take bloody hours to resync my music collection back onto it. 25,831 tracks does just take a wee bit of time.

And that, is the big difference between a solo RPG and an MMO. Any major world altering event, can't actually happen with a choice. It has to be something that every single player does or the MMO aspect starts to fall apart. Unless they had the ability to start splitting into complete difference "universe instances" depending on that choice. You get to make choices in your class story because that never actually has an effect on the world(s) outside, but it just wouldn't work otherwise.

Yup. Illum's storyline is all about what Malgus is up to and sort of why. His wanting to create a version of the Empire that's not sith/humano-centric and is all equal to all the alien races within it. That and for his own personal power..