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at least this means I'll be dead before this idiocy crops up again.

Just the Mayan variety. The Rapture delusion is like the Energizer bunny -- The appointed time comes and goes, they change the date and are more certain than ever that this time, it's gonna happen.

http://home.flash.net/~evt/rapture.htm

In 3rd edition you would have run into similar problems with the fighter...but not so with the rogue.

...while of course, in 2nd Edition you could be flexible with either a Swashbuckler Fighter (Swashbuckler Kit from The Complete Fighter's Handbook) or a Swashbuckling Rogue (half a dozen kits from The Complete Thief's Handbook), with whatever skills you like.

For that matter, if you wanted to tweak the armour and weapon proficiencies even further, the Player's Option books allow more customization than you might have been aware of, rendering classes almost completely into custom characterizations.

I'm not entirely certain why everyone seems to think their only options are a poor 3e, a mediocre 3.5e, or a disastrous 4e... all three were ruined by the WoTC CCG-style marketing.

IMHO. :)

In 3rd edition you would have run into similar problems with the fighter...but not so with the rogue.

...while of course, in 2nd Edition you could be flexible with either a Swashbuckler Fighter (Swashbuckler Kit from The Complete Fighter's Handbook) or a Swashbuckling Rogue (half a dozen kits from The Complete Thief's Handbook), with whatever skills you like.

For that matter, if you wanted to tweak the armour and weapon proficiencies even further, the Player's Option books allow more customization than you might have been aware of, rendering classes almost completely into custom characterizations.

I'm not entirely certain why everyone seems to think their only options are a poor 3e, a mediocre 3.5e, or a disastrous 4e... all three were ruined by the WoTC CCG-style marketing.

IMHO. :)

In 3rd edition you would have run into similar problems with the fighter...but not so with the rogue.

...while of course, in 2nd Edition you could be flexible with either a Swashbuckler Fighter (Swashbuckler Kit from The Complete Fighter's Handbook) or a Swashbuckling Rogue (half a dozen kits from The Complete Thief's Handbook), with whatever skills you like.

For that matter, if you wanted to tweak the armour and weapon proficiencies even further, the Player's Option books allow more customization than you might have been aware of, rendering classes almost completely into custom characterizations.

I'm not entirely certain why everyone seems to think their only options are a poor 3e, a mediocre 3.5e, or a disastrous 4e... all three were ruined by the WoTC CCG-style marketing.

IMHO. :)

Bad Blood: http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/badblood.htm
Knights of Legend: http://home.flash.net/~rayearle/MS-DOS/Knights_Of_Legend.html

I liked those as well.

Layne

If disk swapping was your thing, Knights of Legend is right up your alley. I think just checking your inventory took something like 3 swaps on a 2-drive system.

What we need is a Spelljammer for the metaverse. That will make it better.

I believe what he was referring to was the loss of the very first Ariane V, mostly due to a lack of proper engineering review of re-used software. There are several discussions of it on the web.

Most public schools promote a materialistic secular humanistic world-view. Kids that do not come from strong homes cannot fend off the destructive effects of this philosophy.

Hook it up to one of these babies!

Ever notice how certain groups love to take the NYT as the gospel? Ever think that they sometimes don't have it quite right?

What about this one, where the NYT got hosed like everyone else?

Let us not forget that the NYT sometimes plays dirty games.

And this.

And this.

And this.

Also do not forget the "journalists" that actually fabricate stories.

The fallout.

Supporting my argument

Don't make me take out the poking stick!

Judging by evidence such as this, I think the health effects speak for themselves...

Yes, but only the Philly Main Line has a ROUND Starbucks!

Can I get a job as a professional scribe, doing nothing but copying bibles by hand? No.

Can I make a living building sextants? No.

here's a better recording of those 3 tones

But, this power has often been used for less noble purposes. It has also been used for political and economic purposes to spy on individuals who are not involved in international terrorism or plots against a national government. Some suspected uses are:

• Target calls from U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond.
• Monitor anti-Viewnam war leaders such as Jane Fonda and Dr. Benjamin Spock.
• Monitor Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver
• Monitor Amnesty International organization
• Monitor Greenpeace organization
• Monitor Christian Aid organization
• Margaret Thatcher requested to have two government ministers monitored
• Margaret Thatcher ordered observation of the parent company of the London Observer after publication of negative articles
• Kissinger used NSA to intercept messages from rival Secretary of State William Rogers
• Monitor phone calls of Maryland Congressman, Michael Barnes
• Menwith Hill station received the 1991 "Station of the Year" prize for its role in the Gulf War.
• Monitoring delegates of the five-day Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference
• Monitoring Mexican trade representatives during the NAFTA trade negotiations

For the first time you have a true alternative to the hierarchical file system at the OS level. Through the modification of the KDE shared libraries, newdocms currently works with all KDE apps!

Shared-library hacks are not "the OS level" even if you're talking about libc, and even less so for something KDE-specific.

this sort of innovation could never happen if it weren't for the free software nature of the underlying systems."

Wrong again. At least five years ago I was using a Windows shell extension that let me attach metadata to files and search by metadata. I don't remember the name off the top of my head, but it was similar to Explorer Notes or FileNotes or Annotater. Sure, those only work in Explorer, but that's no worse than only working in KDE. Far from being a "free-software innovation" this is something that's been kicking around for ages in the non-free world and the free-software version is (as usual) pretty late on the scene.

Do you think it will spell an end to D&D ?

Oh, you mean will D&D software survive. That has nothing to do WotC. They only control things that are called D&D. Example:

A long time ago a undergrad name Michael Toy used the D&D fighting system and monster stats to create a Curses game called Rogue, the predecessor to NetHack. (Ignore Glenn Wichmann -- he's a legend in his own mind.) TSR didn't care for this, of course, and sicced their lawyers on him. The only result was that all the names got changed to non-D&D things. Which was actually an improvement -- there's no place in the D&D universe for my own favorite player character, the Tourist

Bottom line -- you don't need the media monopolies to play games, any more than you need them to make music. Pity about Farscape though.

Long live ATASCII!!! Long Live Atari!!!!

Star is a game related to Hex but much more intricate. It was created by Craige Schensted (a physicist) and popularized in Games Magazine back in '83.

Star is similar to Go and Hex in the simplicity and consistancy of the rules. The play and tactics are those of Hex (connect stones on a hexagonal board), but there's an additional strategic element involving groups of connected stones that touch the edges at as many points as possible.

http://www.flash.net/~carlton2/telemark.htm
Just dump it on an answering machine. Easy.

Honestly you suposedly need only the first tone, but...

The beeps are SIT tones, and you can download a wav file from this page and elsewhere.

When I moved a year ago and got a new number, i was amazed my how many telemarketing calls I was getting. Working at home, perhaps I just noticed it more, but it was at least 3 calls a day.

To see if the telezapper might work, I recorded the SIT tone onto my answering machine before my message and lowered the ring count to 2 rings for a month. Screened all calls. Now I recieve maybe one a week. I don't think I want that tone every single time I answer the phone, so I just keep in on my answering machine and bumped the ring count back to 4.

I highly recommend doing this if they are driving you nuts. Here's a .wav of the SIT tone.

Here are more details along the same lines.

Thank [insert deity, deities, or lack thereof] that you can now use the Number of the Beast for all your buying and selling needs. :)

I can see the Supreme Court refusing to hear this appeal. Here is an interesting article about "In God We Trust"-- including a bit about the first case to oppose the motto (oddly finding this same circuit ruling in a much different direction).

Yeah - the kind of boat that goes under water.

You could be talking about the USS Corpus Christi or the USS City of Corpus Christi.

Both are named for the Texas Gulf Coast city.

You could be talking about the USS Corpus Christi or the USS City of Corpus Christi.

Both are named for the Texas Gulf Coast city.

I looked into using a Palm for a bike computer, and concluded that I wasn't very interested. I live in the Seattle area, and I ride in the rain. The BikeBrain solution comes with a plastic protector for your Palm, but it isn't really waterproof.

The good thing of course is that a Palm can capture a lot of data. But just capturing wheel spin data to show speed and distance isn't enough to make me buy either of these solutions.

Last autumn I bought myself a Specialized P.Brain computer. I love it; it collects wheel turn data (like the two Palm solutions) and also altitude and heart rate data. A PC interface lets you capture your data and make pretty charts. You can get a graph showing your speed, altitude, and heart rate plotted against either time or distance. Read more about it here.

The PC download software is for Windows; I'm planning to try to get it working under WINE if I can. The data is stored in some opaque binary format, but you can get the data out with Dan Connelly's Perl script (get it here.

The P.Brain isn't the only data-collecting bike computer. There are other brands. I have heard good things about the Polar XTrainer. There are even computer systems that directly measure your power output; you have a wheel built with a power-measuring hub, and the computer keeps track of power. Pro riders (including Lance Armstrong) use these. For example, the Power-Tap.

steveha

That website is down. But here is another link of our glorious Queen!

It's a "SIT" tone. "Special Information Tone" or something similar. If you put it as the first thing on your answering machine, the telemarker's auto-calling devices will log your number as "out-of-service" and won't call you anymore. You can get the SIT tone here.

Clue is a great movie, with Tim Curry as the butler and Lee Ving from Fear as Mr. Body.

Look at http://www.flash.net/~cmiller/ctgweb.htm for a great example of how a company can (try to) use a non-compete to bully you.

But of course, CTG eventually lost.

The bad PR this case generated will probably cost CTG millions of dollars of lost business in the long run. Was it worth it?

Forgive my off-topic post in response to the above off-topic post but...
This appears to be more gov't brainwashing B.S.
The gov't seems hell-bent on attempting to control people. And since the internet has got people "way out of hand" they attempt to scare those that actually know how to have a computer and have half a brain (regardless of the gov't attempts to churn ignorant graduates out of public schools). "Script Kiddy" spells trouble for the gov't because they might actually grow up with their own opinions. I have news for the Government. If they don't start training children to have half a brain at least, we will loose in information wars to those governments that are teaching their youth how to use their minds. Attacks like this could be easily thwarted and quickly by those who know how to use their imagination for something other than figuring out how they are going to pay off their "income tax debt".

As much as I am annoyed by the occasional "think-he-knows-how-to-hack" script kiddy that comes by. It thrills my soul to see that someone will be fighting the government for years to come.
SL33ZE, MCSD
em: joedipshit@hotmail.com

Isn't there some hypothesis that given the number of galaxies, and the number of stars, and the number of planets, there should still be 10^? planets with life on them?

The Drake Equation gives an estimate for the number of planets that currently support intelligent life, in our own galaxy, given guesses about various quantities. There are a few pages around that will do the calculations for you (ok, it's not exactly difficult, but they do suggest "good" values too).

Of course, that's only for this galaxy. So I guess you can multiply any number you get by a few billion ...

--
Repton.

... "politically correct "what's the big deal?" posturing"??? I'm not sure I agree with you there.

I meant that it is politically correct to be "tolerant," and it is posturing to make a public display of one's "tolerance" by condemning "intolerance."

[Comments about CAP's "rude and gratuitous" review snipped.]

You're demonstrating the "posturing" that I'm talking about. You are condemning CAP's"intolerance." Why should it offend you that they say the movie is straight from Hell? Isn't that a badge of honor in today's culture war? (Depending on the side you're on, of course. :-)

The fact is CAP is an extreme fundamentalist Christian organization.

Interesting. "Fundamentalist" used to mean a Christian arguing for the "fundamentals" of the Faith, but as J.I. Packer points out in "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God , the term became derogatory because the original fundamentalists earned a reputation for lacking -- to put it delicately -- intellectual horsepower. I would say that CAP is a conservative, evangelical Christian organization. The content of their Web site represents an intelligent and informed viewpoint, albeit a viewpoint not popular on Slashdot.

Look at the review of A Midsummer Nights Dream. I mean, C'mon, it's Shakespeare (everything they mention as bad ("other stuff") is in the script.) we should be teaching Children Shakespeare, not sheilding them from it.

I'll ask you the same basic question I asked thal -- are you a father? To assume that CAP is trying to "shield" children from Shakespeare is jumping to a conclusion. When my kids are old enough to read Shakespeare, they'll be old enough to watch a rendition of the play (or film).

And in the review of Doug's 1st movie (which got a good score, by the way), one of the bad points listed was adolescent underware...what?!

Yeah, I read the underwear comment about "Doug's First Movie," but in context it's typical of CAP's uncompromising standard of decency. I'm surprised you didn't react to their objection to the '60s peace symbol. Still, they didn't just give the movie a "good score;" they made it "the first movie to warrant a CAP 'Green Light'".

I would say [South Park is] in the same vein (but not nearly as subtle) as Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal".... Stone and Parker are sharp fellows, if you go beyond the language.

Exactly. They don't have the intellectual horsepower of Jonathan Swift, so they dumb-down what might very well be legitimate political ideas to the point of depravity, thereby missing audience members such as me. They don't want to effect political change -- they want to make a buck by shocking people.

On a related subject, I know of only one real satirical publication that works within the Christian community (as opposed to all the secular publications that ridicule Christianity from the outside). It's called The Door . Check it out.

I have had problems with some MP3's under OS/2. There's a utility (for OS/2) called UNCOOK that fixed the problem. I suspect some incoding software puts bogus info in the MP3 file and UNCOOK takes it out.

I tracked down a few versions:

OS/2

Unix/Linux

DOS

winblows