Slashdot Mirror

Well, it's a great day for science! Not only we have this news item, but we have an illustration of it too!

This is turning into one of those plans, isn't it?

Hey. What about Heterodyne Spark Roast Coffee?

What I'm waiting for is a Mimmoth (see center panel)

(That was SUPPOSED to be a preview while I got the links right. Here it is with the links fixed. View them in order...)

You know, that IS impressive but... Can it figure out how to brew the 'perfect' cup of coffee?

I think you meant tea.

No, I think Xaedalus meant the 'perfect' cup of coffee.

(That was SUPPOSED to be a preview while I got the links right. Here it is with the links fixed. View them in order...)

You know, that IS impressive but... Can it figure out how to brew the 'perfect' cup of coffee?

I think you meant tea.

No, I think Xaedalus meant the 'perfect' cup of coffee.

(That was SUPPOSED to be a preview while I got the links right. Here it is with the links fixed. View them in order...)

You know, that IS impressive but... Can it figure out how to brew the 'perfect' cup of coffee?

I think you meant tea.

No, I think Xaedalus meant the 'perfect' cup of coffee.

(That was SUPPOSED to be a preview while I got the links right. Here it is with the links fixed. View them in order...)

You know, that IS impressive but... Can it figure out how to brew the 'perfect' cup of coffee?

I think you meant tea.

No, I think Xaedalus meant the 'perfect' cup of coffee.

You know, that IS impressive but... Can it figure out how to brew the 'perfect' cup of coffee?

I think you meant tea.

No, I think Xaedalus meant the perfect cup of coffee.

You know, that IS impressive but... Can it figure out how to brew the 'perfect' cup of coffee?

I think you meant tea.

No, I think Xaedalus meant the perfect cup of coffee.

I don't use RSS feeds for webcomics, so here is the set of pages I regularly visit:
XKCD We probably all know this one.
Cyanide and Happiness Somewhat twisted humour.
Errant Story Excellent art and storyline.
Bunny Strange humour about bunnies.
QC Indy rock comic of social interaction.
Megatokyo Megatokyo. Has gone downhill in recent years, but still good art.
Penny Arcade Gamer comic, quite famous.
PBF Perry Bible Fellowship hasn't updated in some time, but very funny when he does.
Edible Dirt is a series of single-panel jokes. Very funny, often somewhat twisted.
Ctrl-Alt-Del is a comic about a few gamer roomates.
LFG WoW/MMO/D&D spoof. Quite funny, good art, interesting plot. Many references break the 4th wall.
Two-Lumps is a comic about cats, 1 smart, 1 very, very dumb. I think the artist is stalking my cat to get ideas for the dumb one.
Gunnerkrigg Court Beautiful art, excellent story. And robots.
underpower hasn't updated in some time, great single-page art pieces recently and an actual story before.
Girl Genius is all about Mad Science.
Bunny System is a comic about psychotic rabbits.
Something Positive is very, very cynical. It actually has 5 webcomics on 1 page. Very much worth checking out.
Head Trip is... a head trip.
FLEM hasn't updated in a while, and has a strange and rather violent storyline. Back to single-panel shorts now.
VGCats video game cats is excellent, if you play video games.
Clan of the Cats Author is going blind, will continue if she gets better. Great story and art.
Dr. McNinja The adventures of Dr. McNinja. Clean art, good story, ninjas on fire.
Code Name: Hunter Magic/technology interaction in a world strangely dominated by talking animals. Excellent facial expressions, especially for being animals.
Awkward Zombie gamer comic similar to vgcats.
No Need for Bushido Samurai story, well drawn and reasonably well written.
Giant ITP hosts both The Order of The Stick, a D&D spoof, and The Battle For Gobwin Knob, a comic about a GM who gets sucked into a world of his own design, on the losing side of a no-win scenario.
Last Blood Zombies have taken over the earth and killed nearly all humans, so now the vampires fight to protect their dwindling food source. Excellent drawing and unique story.
Chopping Block Butch the serial killer. Sick, twisted humour, but very funny.
Dominic Deegan Oracle for Hire, is a good story with pretty good art.
The Traveling Gnome Great art, story seems good so far.
One-Liners may be offensive to some, or funny to those with a sense of humour.

Does it make coffee as good as this one? (Requires a little more reading than Dilbert to make sense of everything but well worth the effort...)

Full color illustration here!

It works! It works! It works!

Gil Wulfenbach said it best.

I'm going to be interviewing Phil & Kaja Foglio live this weekend about this very issue: why they decided to stop selling individual print issues of their Girl Genius comic book and turn it into a free webcomic to sell more trade paperbacks and hardcover collections. Call in with questions of your own.

What about forms of art and works that are simply not possible to perform live? Do they have no value?

Such as comics ? Girl Genius and Megatokyo both have dead-tree editions available, and apparently sell well enough for stores to give them shelf space, despite being freely available in the Net.

So, if an artist isn't selling, then perhaps, just perhaps, it is not because of the Internet, but because of the art.

US of A invests huge amount of money into producing top quality music, videos, and other intellectual property.

Some people are producing top quality intellectual property in the US, but they seem to be doing fine despite some horrible pirate having posted their hard work on the Web :). Maybe those that aren't doing so well simply aren't quite as good as they think they are.

Try Girl Genius. Gotta love a comic about a geek girl with glasses who can turn circus wagons into clockwork killer robots :).

Every slashdotters wet dream...

note: I'm stealing descriptions from the wikipedia articles.

• Girl Genius [wp]- Girl Genius is a steampunk tale; "a gaslamp fantasy with adventure, romance and mad science", set in an alternate history "where the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war" due to the appearance of "Sparks" -- highly charismatic mad scientists with supernormal abilities in one or more sciences.
• Gunnerkrigg Court [wp] - The comic details the strange events that surround protagonist Antimony Carver as she begins life at the foreboding, factory-like school complex of Gunnerkrigg Court.
• Lackadaisy [wp] - Lackadaisy (also known as Lackadaisy Cats) is a webcomic created by artist Tracy J. Butler, set in a Prohibition-era 1927 St. Louis inhabited by anthropomorphic cats. The plot chronicles the fortunes of the Lackadaisy Speakeasy after its founder is murdered.
• Dresden Codak [wp] - Described by the author as a "celebration of science, death and human folly," each comic generally focuses on a concept or theory from modern and postmodern philosophy, psychology, or science (particularly quantum physics)

ok, got tired of copy-pasting URL's and descriptions. just google theese, most of them have rss feed:

XKCD, Perry Bible Fellowship, Girl Genious, Gunnerkrigg Court, Templar, Arizona, Sinfest, Lackadaisy, The Broken Mirror, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Dinosaur Comics, Copper, Alpha Shade, Dresden Codak, The Curious Adventures of Aldus Maycombe, Inverloch, VGCats, Ctrl-Alt-Del, Questionable Content, Shortpacked!, Penny Arcade, The Book of Biff, Bunny, Contemplating Reiko, No Rest for the Wicked, The Devil's Panties, Girly, Penny and Aggie, Cool Cat Studio, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Johnny Saturn, 8 bit theatre, Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life, Zap! (zap in space), Mad About U, Ozy & Millie, Jack, Chugworth Academy, Marilith, Slightly Damned, The Awakened, Vampirates, Aether, Pinky TA, Orneryboy, Reman Mythology, Count Your Sheep, Errant Story, PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi (the one by bleedman), Everafter, Grim Tales from Down Below, Sugar Bits, Demonology 101, Zombies Calling, Ice, Brat-halla, The Phoenix Requiem, Last Blood, Flipside, Marry Me, No Pink Ponies, Shadowgirls, Purgatory Tower, El Goonish Shive, Badass Muthas!, Exiern, Xylia, A Girl and Her Fed, The BMovie Comic, Gone With the Blastwave, Candi, Flaky Pastry, Sorcery 101, Minus, Looking for group, North World, Nothing Better, Striptease, Handrawn Zoo, Rob and Elliot, Marsh Rocket, General Protection Fault, Rip and Teri, Maxwell the demon, Paradigm Shift, Fantasy Realms, Edwitch, The Unstuffed, Wayfarer's Moon, Undertow, Poultry Arisen!, God Mode, Kung Fool, Kill Harry, Pup

I can't guarantee you'll like them all, but I've read them all (most of them in all their extension) and I can assure that none of them make the eyes bleed (most of them are really good, in fact).

Also, an interesting indication of quality is the WCCA.

Phil and Kaja Foglio's stuff:

Girl Genius
Buck Godot

They have RSS feeds, though I've never used them.

Despite rampant pirating of comics, somehow new models are successfully created and used. Excuse me if I don't cry into my soup for the old fuddy duddies that refuse to adapt.

FYI, that comic is not mine. I linked to it because it is the second best web comic right now, after Girl Genius.

If you take away all copyright then [url=http://www.reallifecomics.com/]these[/url] [url=http://www.penny-arcade.com/]people[/url] might stop producing work. Is this what you truly want? A society where all writers must take another job with NO possibility of making money?

Since the works of the people you linked to are publicly available, free of charge, from the very sites you linked to, it seems to me that you proved your own argument false, or at least gave strong evidence against it.

More evidence: Girl Genius (my favorite comic, web or otherwise), Megatokyo, Kevin and Kell.

The 'Vanderbilt' university even sounds like one of Foglio's ideas.

I love it when fact and fiction meet in the middle!

Read Girl Genius! A fine comic about, as Phil puts it, "Romance and Adventure in the Steam Age."

Make that:

Wonder if that's how "Mr Tock" worked. B-)

Make that:

Wonder if that's how "Mr Tock" worked. B-)

Sounds more like a complicated steam engine to me.

I did RTFA - at least the first level.

Yes, it's a steam engine. (The steam is switched through valves and pushes on pistons to achieve motion.)

Not a rocket. (No blast of burning gases out an opening causing motion by recoil.)

Not a fuel-cell or even a steam generator. (The steam powers the motion directly by pressure, not indirectly by driving a generator to power an electric motor.)

So we now have a working steampunk / gaslamp fantasy robot arm.

Wonder if that's how "Mr Tock" worked. B-)

"There's a lot of role modeling: Princess Anneliese loves to study science, but she never says anything like, "You should study science!" Rather, it's just her favorite thing to do, and it's mostly background."

Reminds me of the Girl Genius comic books.

It mostly means that I have recently re-read Girl Genius from start to current page, which is temporarily mind-warping. Possibly permanently so.

As with other work in the steampunk genre, persons with a damaged or congenitally lacking sense of humor should avoid looking at this online comic. Persons who are prone to spewing coffee, milk, or other beverages from their nasal passages onto their keyboards and monitors should avoid drinking while clicking from page to page. Do not read this comic while landing a Boeing 747 in manual mode. Do not read this comic while driving. Do not think about any of the scenes in this comic during your marriage ceremony, or during anyone else's funeral. Steampunk has been associated with psychotic breaks and states of episodic manic euphoria, and also with the District of Columbia. Discontinue use if you ever see more than one blimp or dirigible in the sky at the same time. Consult your doctor or mechanic if you begin to see steam powered robots, or pocketwatch wind-up robots, or persons of strange color, odd hats, and many pointed teeth.

This is a job for Agatha Hetrodyne

That the claims of lost revenue are inflated are directly relevant to "the elephant." You claim "that piracy is substantial...." How do we know that? Perhaps the impact of piracy is actually quite minor, largely controlled, and has little to no impact on society as a whole. Maybe it's a massive drain on society as a whole. But to make rational decisions we need realistic estimates of the damage, not the inflated numbers that the industry likes to throw around. The industry likes to throw around the inflated numbers because it wants to seem Really Important and convince government to spend more more money defending their profits. This is good for the industry (taxes are used to protect their bottom line), but if the actual damage from piracy is actually relatively low, it's bad for society as it's a handout to business. Take shoplifting, actual theft of product. While it's a serious matter, in reality it's not a major epidemic. We expect stores to largely police themselves, paying for security systems and guards.

Yes, there is an elephant in the room. But is it a mimmoth that industry should deal with themselves, or is a mammoth that requires additional government regulation and expenditure of tax dollars? To make that decision we need realistic numbers.

You assume DRM is necessary, but in actuality, it isn't. These people somehow make a profit without DRM (otherwise they wouldn't bother releasing the e-books). As does these people as well as these people.

Perhaps multi-million dollar movies aren't capable without DRM or Britney Spears being profitable without DRM, but the truth is that the big media cartels aren't the only people in town no matter how much they want you to think they are. And DRM isn't necessary for artists to not only make a profit, but to make a living. Not all artists will be able to make a profit or a living, but then again not all artists deserve a profit or a living. DRM isn't a necessary evil, it's just an evil.

So, I think you should add a couple of unicorns. Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

Clearly he's been taking his definition from Girl Genius

"Kneel you miserable minion!"

Assuming the comic is still online by the time you read this, don't forget to move the mouse cursor over the panels so you can actually see something other than the backgrounds.

Even so, it's not a terribly exciting stand-alone strip. It looks like they're going the route of Girl Genius and basically posting one page of a comic book at a time rather than a series of short episodes.

One that ought to be much more popular than it is, especially among the Slashdot demographic:

Girl Genius

...but then, Phil Foglio's a pro and putting this online instead of directly to print is a relatively recent experiment. Frankly, it shows; the quality of his art (especially layouts) smokes that of all but the best-drawn webcomics.

Phil Foglio is too busy with his Girl Genius web comic.

I would agree, it is utterly wretched. I feel the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the person who started this recent trend, that bastion of immorallity, Ben Franklin. If he and his gang had left mucking around with lightning in the hands of the Almighty where it belonged, it would still be doing its job of smiting the unrighteous, the proud, and any church with hubris enough to build a shiny copper steeple. But no, he had to go and invent the lightning rod, taming lightning so that Morse could use it for telegraphy, Edison could invent incandescent lighting and motion pictures, Shockley could figure out the transistor, and Kilby could pull of the integrated (shudded) circuit. Together, they're the reason for the infernal internet being infested by porn. And people mocked those who said that integration would lead to immorallity....

This evil plot of theirs MUST be stopped, or who knows where it will end?

Paper is better for long sessions, but computer screens are fine for checking the daily strips. That said, I've at various times sat and read the entire archives to Sluggy Freelance, User Friendly (when it was still funny), Queen of Wands, and Something Positive. Of course, none of them was more than a year old at the time I read through them -- I can't imagine trying to read eight(?) years of Sluggy online. Hooray for the books!

One comic that's got an interesting hybrid model is Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio. It started out as a regular comic book, but the realities of the small-press world forced it to be (a) quarterly and (b) often months late. They'd been collecting issues as hardcovers and trade paperbacks already (I think 4 comics per book), and in June they shifted their publishing scheme around. They've dropped the individual issues entirely, focusing on the books instead... but they publish a new page online for free, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So you can read it a page every few days, or buy the next book every few months. I was skeptical when they first announced the change, but it seems to be working great so far.

An interesting one is Girl Genius Online. This was a traditional printed comic. Recently, the authors put up the website. New pages are put online on MWF, and when a volume willl be complete it'll get published in paper format. At the same time, they're rehashing their old issues (GG101), again one page every other workday.

Talk about the best of both worlds :)

It is potentially provable. Imagine, for example, we live in an universe similar to that of Brin's Uplift Series. If aliens have been tampering with the course of evolution on Earth and directing it towards producing sapience, any without revealing so to the prospective client species (IE, humanity), then that would be a form of Intelligent design. Furthermore, if such aliens revealed themselves, along with details of how they've been tampering with evolution over the last couple hundred million years, then intelligent design could be proven by current scientific standards.

The fatal flaw is not that ID is unprovable, but that it is unfalsifiable . In the above situation, a proponent might always say "ah, but the aliens have not revealed themselves yet; they're more clever than we are, and still hiding until we are ready." This makes intelligent design a question of religion, faith, or perhaps philosophy, but is not Science.

In other words, the "Theory" of Intelligent design is not only not right, it's not even wrong.

Maybe this is something everyone on the net knew besides me, but I've really really enjoyed what I have seen of Girl Genius Online. Nice plot, nice graphics. Also apparently one of the authors did the covers for some of Robert Asprin's books which I loved as a kiddo.