This mug was designed by Steven Frank and printed by Zazzle. The top part of the design was much darker six months ago. Zazzle’s process appears to involve shrink-wrapping a layer of plastic over the mug and then printing on that; you can’t see it in the photo, but the plastic has started to peel off near the top of the handle. I have another such mug, printed using a different process in 2003 for the Stanford Film Society’s “Film Our Way” festival; it didn’t fade nearly as fast, and there wasn’t any plastic to peel off, but after seven years of use the design is almost gone.
The problem with these mugs is, the design is printed on top of the glaze. Truly permanent decorations on ceramic are either done with the glaze itself, or are inked directly on the unglazed piece and then covered by transparent glaze. Either way, the decoration happens before the glaze firing. Unfortunately, glaze kilns are typically designed to process hundreds of pieces per batch, and take several days to go through a complete cycle. That’s not practical for a print-on-demand outfit.
I think you could design a much smaller kiln, with space for just a few mugs, though. It’d be lined with fibreglass instead of firebrick, to reduce the thermal mass; since there’s no need for a reduction phase with clear glazes, it could use electric heat. It’s not possible to do a stoneware firing in less than about 24 hours start to finish, because the clay will crack if you heat or cool it too fast (this is why raku-glaze pieces are often fragile) but there would be no need for several days’ worth of cooling time as is typical for large batch kilns.
The privilege of the writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended under any circumstances.
This small tweak to article 1 section 9 (which licenses suspension of habeas “in cases of rebellion or invasion”) closes an avenue for abuse of authority. I can find only two cases where the exception was used; once during the Civil War and the Military Commissions Act of 2006—both ruled unconstitutional in short order.
Why bother, if it’s been used twice and smacked down by the judicial branch both times? Well, if the exception has never been used legitimately, perhaps we should not have an exception at all. Congress and the President would (one hopes) be less likely to flout an absolute prohibition.
Also, in both the above cases, it took a while for the courts to get around to restoring the privilege; meanwhile people were unlawfully detained. As the whole point of the Great Writ is to prevent detention without due process, we cannot count these as successes of the system.
Many RPGs have some basic notion of fatigue penalties, but they lack color. On the more cyberpunk end of the spectrum, you got to figure the PCs are regularly sneaking around late at night. It’s harder to stay awake for days on end in a setting without electric light, but players still do come up with those sneaky plans that involve, well, sneaking around late at night. There’s tons of amusement value being left on the table due to a lack of fleshed-out-ness.
I intend Foliomatic primarily for personal web sites such as this one. It should also be useful for projects and organizations whose Web presence is mostly static content, updated from time to time. It is not going to be a general content management system, nor a framework for highly dynamic “Web 2.0” content, but it will support some dynamic features, such as comments on pages.
Structure
Foliomatic is a site compiler. It reads a directory tree of source files and produces another tree of rendered, static HTML files, which you drop into your web server. Foliomatic is designed to take its input from a version control system, which handles access control and replication. It can, optionally, integrate history information from the VCS into its output.
Foliomatic is thus similar to existing systems such as Ikiwiki, Chronicle, and Jekyll. Foliomatic is more generic in some ways, and more restricted in others.
All votes in Congress, except on questions entirely of procedure, shall be by sealed ballot. Each Member’s vote shall be recorded under their name, but no Member’s vote nor the overall tally shall be revealed until all have voted; nor may any Member change their vote once cast.
The intent of this amendment is to cripple a variety of floor tactics used by party leadership to arm-twist the rank and file into voting the way the party wants, instead of their own conscience or the will of their constituents. I don’t go for a true secret ballot because constituents should be able to find out how their representatives voted, after the fact.
I’m not sure whether to strike the phrase “except on questions entirely of procedure,” because both houses of Congress are very clever with their procedural tricks for preventing up-and-down votes. I’d like “procedural” votes that actually determine the fate of a bill to come under this rule as well, while still permitting things like adjournment by voice vote; it may not be possible, and it may not be necessary, either. The main point of voice vote is to speed things up, but if voting is a matter of pushing buttons, that’s not any slower than shouting.
In time of Peace, the United States shall not maintain a standing Army, Navy, or other Professional armed force; nor may the Militia of the several States be called to serve outside the borders of the United States.
No appropriation of money to raise and support a professional armed force shall be for a longer term than one year.
No declaration of War shall be for a longer term than one year.
This is intended to put a stop to military adventurism, and recover some of the ridiculous amount of money spent on the armed forces. (Why do you suppose people advocating less “government waste” never propose radical cuts in the military budget?) The Constitution already contains language restricting the scope of the professional military, but as we have seen from the past century, it’s toothless.
I see no particular reason why the legitimate functions of a standing military—maintenance of a trained officer corps, defense of the country at short notice, planning and stockpiling for future contingencies, and (regrettably still necessary) nuclear deterrent—cannot be handled by the “militia”, i.e. the National Guard, or similar.
It is tempting to include an additional clause that requires increasingly large supermajorities in both houses of Congress to reauthorize a war the longer it has gone on, but only someone really cynical about the military-industrial complex would do that.
A Russian translation of this article can be read at higher.com.ua.
The CSS 3
Backgrounds and Borders module introduces
the border-radius property, which allows you to make
the border of any CSS box be a rounded rectangle.
Mozilla’s Gecko-based
browsers (such as Firefox and SeaMonkey) have implemented parts of
this feature for some time, as
have Webkit-based browsers (such
as Safari and
Chrome). Firefox
3.5 adds support for elliptical corners, and brings the Gecko
implementation into line with the standard on many details.
Over the past few weeks there has been what I can only describe as an epic flame war on LJ and elsewhere. I am not going to link to any of it or try to summarize. Suffice to say that it started out about racism, cultural appropriation, and privilege, and that buried in the turd-flinging (which I did not read all of, by any means) there were some really good points made on those topics. Editor’s note, August 2009: I am talking about “RaceFail 2009.” If you are unfamiliar with this, I recommend reading Mary Anne Mohanraj’s two guest posts on John Scalzi’s blog; these were written after it was mostly over, and are serious, constructive discussion of implicit privilege (including but not limited to racism) in fiction in general. If you want to know about the argument proper, Anne Somerville summarized it and ryda wong has a comprehensive list of links to its many pieces.
This has gotten me thinking about cultural appropriation and privileged narratives in the context of video games, and especially that roguelike I’m not writing.