Bull's Strenght and Cat's grace should last for hours, not minutes.
That line of spells were probably the second most over-powererd (read: broken) spells in 3.0 (after Haste). No 2nd level spell should replace an 8000gp item. If you want a permanent stat buff from a spell, take the "Persistant Spell" feat (from Tome and Blood - it will probably be in Complete Arcane too), and cast your 24hr buff as a 6th level spell.
That and not Bards can't have Mage Armor But they ignore arcane spell casting failure in light armour, which more than makes up for it
Nah, "two squares" doesn't work to flank creatures that take up more than one square. For those, the rule is actually quite good: If the line joining the centers of the two creatures attempting to flank the large creature passes through non-adjacent sides of the larger creature's square, it is flanked. Try using the facing rules (or even better the hex-map based rules) from Unearthed Arcana (the d20 version, not the old AD&D one).
The Times of India and Khaleej Times articles look to just be Reuter's press releases. Tehran Times seemed a different viewpoint. SCMP wanted me to log in:(
I heard a report that in one of the planes, a pilot had a microphone on when the hijacking took place. Flight control heard a voice saying "Don't do anything stupid" (in English - no report on any accent). And the microphone went off. Shortly afterwards the transponder for the plane went off. With an act this well planned it would not surprise me if the terrorist knew the location of black box recorders and destroyed them before crashing the plane if they wished to do so. Certainly the transponder going off is disturbing evidence that they knew something of the plane's equipment.
Re:I Hope You Keep Bail Money Near Your Gun OT
on
Fight Virus With Virus?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Country
% at-home
% gun
homicide
burglaries
ownership
rate
Netherlands
48
2
0.9
England
26-59
5
0.7
Australia
10
20
2.0
Canada
10
31
2.1
USA
14
49
8.8
The Australian "at-home" burglary rate is actually for Victoria. The range given for England is because the rate is 59% for attempted burglaries and 26% for completed burglaries, so the overall rate must be somewhere in between.
When one looks at the Australian and Canadian figures, the relationship between gun ownership and "at-home" burglaries isn't so clear as some like to make it out. The correlation between gun ownership and homocide rate is much clearer.
I compiled a summary of some of the info I found on renewable energy sources recently. Got some interesting data on the cost of various means of producing power. Photovoltaics seem to be one of the more expensive renewable resources, but still justifiable on cost grounds alone in a lot of situations, especially where grid power is expensive or not available.
> The only way I can see this happening is if the NSA installed their own undersea
> fiberoptic cable to send it back to themselves on.
Of course not!
They have specially trained teams of hyperintelligent octupi down there analysing the data in real time, then the brain waves of the octupi are picked up using a reverse feedback effect of the orbital mind control lasers, which then beam it back down to your brain, where it leaks out into your mobile phone (even when it's switched off and not in the room) and they recover the signal from there.
Heard some really interesting comments in some interviews with police recently here in Australia. A while ago I heard a South Australian officer in charge of the drugs unit or some such, say he'd much prefer to make sure that the clubs where people are out partying on E had easily available (free) suplies of water to stop people dehydrating, than stop the people taking the pills - it removes the main danger thereby possibly saving lives. And it's much more feasable than trying to stop people taking the drugs in the first place.
I think some police officer in Sydney got in big trouble for saying that perhaps one of the reasons there was so little violence on New Years 2000, was that so many people were taking ecstacy rather than alcohol, and were therefore a lot less aggressive.
And even in Queensland, a senior officer recently said that the "war on drugs" isn't working. It's basically a simple economic case of supply and demand. Drug busts simply put pressure on the supply side of things (and don't seem to be terribly effective at that). That might up the price on the street, (forcing more drug related crime to pay for it), but it won't solve the problem. His suggestion was that the only way to get rid of the drug trade is to change the social conditions that create the demand.
Basically all these people who are supposedly fighting the war against drugs are saying that the way it's currently being fought doesn't work, and "getting tough on drugs" won't help. One choice is to try different tactics. There's currently a big campaign on at the moment to educate children about drugs. Another option is to change goals. Rather than stop drug usage, stop the some of the harmful effects to society that surround it. Decriminalisation or legalisation (however you wish to name or describe it) would take control of the trade away from the criminal rings, and put an end to many of the drug related crimes. 'Twould also make it possible to make the drugs much safer, by being assured of the dosages and purity.
While prisons themselves may not be very profitable, they are profitable to the people that they employ (corrections offciers). They are profitable for companies that sell supllies, and contract companies that BUILD prisons (or do any sort of upkeep work)
Also quite profitable to the drug dealers who sell to the prison wardens, so the wardens can keep control in the prisons by controlling the drug supply.
Americans make a mess, sure -- and we're the only country to clean up after ourselves
Whoa!!!! Sure American's might make an attempt to clean up some of their messes, but other countries certainly do as well (for example China) and many do a better job than the US. The US does the worst job of any country in cleaning up after itself in terms of greenhouse gas emissions (either per capita, or in total emmissions). I'm ashamed that my country (Australia) does second worst per capita.
Which is better -- people who just want to have their Big Macs and Budweisers
I must admit to being at a loss to understand why anyone would want either of these things. Real burger and real beer for me please:)
Of course, I was having significant difficulty connecting to several US sites from work yesterday (we use Optus) as it was trying to route through Telstra.
I've got cable connections at both home and work, with different ISPs. Both use DHCP. In the last year, my home IP address has changed twice. Maybe 3 times. Work hasn't changed in the 6 months or so since we got connected.
No way I'm trusting either ISP to provide any security. I've got an "un-supported operating system" running in both locations. OpenBSD. SSH ports are the only ones open (most of the time) and I've got a nice ipsec tunnel between the two.
... by making insurance pointless. If an insurance company does full genetic tests, and have a VERY good idea of what the likely payouts they are going to have to make to you over the cost of your lifetime are, they are going to charge premiums which add up to more than that total cost. Thus you would be silly to pay them said premiums, when instead you could just invest them. Knowing too much would eventually cause insurers to put themselves out of business. Sure there's never going to be a 100% accurate prediction, but the better they get at it, the less worthwhile it is for us to insure with them.
Reading at a high filter has it's disadvantages, can't tell if someone else has already said this and been sumarrily flamed for it.:P
What's the quote, something like "The internet routes around censorship"? You might think that routing around the whole of the US is a little unlikely, but the other day there was a period of 15 minutes or so when I could not contact any US sites (from Australia). A little investigation showed that I could however contact sites all over Europe and Asia. Traffic to Europe was going through South Africa.
Before I start, I should point out that I don't know the GPL well enough to be sure it doesn't allow this, but I dont/think/ it does. Here's a (real) situation:
A university department with a student lab full of Linux boxen. They have several research projects with CPU intensive jobs which they'd like to farm out across the labs when the CPU cycles aren't needed. If the source for a distributed client were available (maybe there is one out there, I haven't checked), it might be possible to modify it to do the jobs they want.
There could be good reasons why they/don't/ want to make the source available. Maybe they don't want all the students to know what they're researching.
If they keep it "in house", I believe the GPL lets them get away with it, but what if the want to share CPU cycles with another department? Another Uni? or make the (binary) client freely available and/buy/ CPU cycles from people?
The GPL might make this difficult. If the uni were to do this, I strongly suspect they would try to make improvements and then release the improved code/base/, (without the code for their specific research projects) back to the open source community. But if the code were under a GPL, they might not bother to start with it.
I had (maybe still have somewhere, but I bet the seals are broken), this great pump-action thing with a backpack-mounted water supply that held about 3 or 4 litres of water. It didn't use the pump to build up air pressure, and there was no trigger. Just pump the thing once per shot. The range wasn't great, and you didn't get many shots, about 10. But the target got VERY wet.
I submit that no filtering software can be applied intelligently. Furthermore, when this software becomes mandated for schools, libraries, even universities, it becomes a very clear-cut action of censorship.
And when "enlightned" governments such as ours (Australia) decide that they want to do something similar for the whole country, it's time to be terrified.
Re:MS premier alert service costs...
on
BO2K cracked
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· Score: 1
From that page:
Is BO2K like the Melissa virus? Only in the sense that both were Trojan horse programs that performed malicious actions, and neither exploited any security vulnerabilities in Microsoft products.
Does anyone else feel that the claim that Melissa didn't exploit any security vulnerabilites in M$ products, is well... if not false, at least on very shaky ground.
RSA is the most common because it's useful for signing and key exchange as well as being the fastest encryptor/decryptor (as compared to key generation, which DH is faster).
From memory there is a reason why DH or ElGamal isn't as good for signing/key exchange, but I can't recall it. Elliptic curve crypto, works fine for signing and key exchange, and is very well suited to hardware (eg smartcard) applications. The memory requirements are fairly modest (for async crypto) and being able to perform all your maths in a field which does it's ops modulo a power of 2 a big plus. IIRC, you tend to need about 20% of the transistors to get a similar level of security. On the other hand, RSA and DH have had a lot more study (attempts to break them) than ECC.
Has anyone considered the possibility that at some stage there might be more data to process? There is more than one radio telescope in the world you know. (and it's possible to search wider bands).
(Sorry for flamebaitish tone - I'm just a bit peeved with people coming down hard on what I see as a worthy project with some teething toubles.)
Re:Scores should be inherited up the comment tree
on
Slashdot Notes
·
· Score: 2
Heh, a me-too post.
replace below-the-threshold comments with blanked out stubs
I think this sounds like
A much easier thing to implement than reparenting
A perfectly workable and sensible solution to the highly rated response to lowly rated comment problem
It won't take things out of context for those who are reading at -1
Ooo!! I hadn't seen that "Extrans" option for formatting before. I'm guessing it lets us put HTML tags in comments more easily, but since I'm using HTML here I won't try it. Nice one Rob.
The liberal party have every right to put a GST through, it was a part of their policy platform, and hence they have a mandate to pass the bill
The "logic" behind these mandates escapes me. If I had voted for the Coalition (not likely - I spent 5 hours handing out "how to votes" for the Greens), why does that mean that I agree with 100% of their platform? Perhaps the 47% or so of people whose 2 party prefered vote went to the coalition all opposed the GST but voted (or gave preferences) to the coalition because they prefered all the rest of their platform to the labour platform. (I'm sure this isn't the case, but you get the point I hope). Yet pollies continue to claim that they have a "mandate" to do everything in their party policies - most people probably don't know what all the policies of the party they vote for are. If they want a mandate, hold a referendum.
The only reason he [Harradine] got into senate in the first place was because our proportional representation system of senate elections...
And this is a bad thing? I think not. I'm all in favour of proportional representation. To me it seems much more like what democracy is all about. When everything is reduced to a 2 party system, decisions end up being made in the party room with very little input from the population, and "government" consists of two groups of people yelling personal insults at each other. With proportional representation, you get more than 2 voices in parliment, and a chance that some actual reasoned debate might occur. It happens in the senate. Sometimes. But doesn't seem to happen in the lower house. The reason for this? If you have >50% of the votes, you don't have to reason. If you need someone else to vote with you to get a bill passed, you need to convince them. Rational arguments aren't the only way - (bribery, etc) - but at least there is a chance.
The usual response to this is "So do you want more One Nation representation?" (For non-au readers: One Nation is a new-ish racist, right-wing party, getting up to 10% of the vote in the last few elections). Well, yes. I don't like their policies, and I would hate to see them running the country, but if people vote for them, they should get a say. That's what democracy is about.
3 Places with some form of proportional representation:
Australian Senate: Proportional representation. As I mentioned before, there's occasionally some rational debate here.
Tasmanian State parliment: More than one representative for each electorate. Under this system, the Greens movement really got started - yeah I know all of you aren't greenies like me, so I won't assume you agree with me that this is a good thing. But would any of the other parties have introduced a bill to reduce the salaries and job perks (travel expenses anyone?) of politicians? (No: Labour and Coalition teamed up to vote it down)
New Zealand: I beleive the system there is one representative from each electorate, and then the remaining seats (don't know percentages) distributed to make for proportional representation. Don't know much about this, but I heard about it when it was introduced and it sounded interesting. Any comments on it from some kiwis?
Of course, in a true democracy, we could all participate in the online debate, and place our electronic votes on every issue. Not that that would neccessarily be a good thing. Not everyone is as perfectly well informed and capable of determining the best way of dealing with every situation as myself:)
Slashdot Mirror
Bull's Strenght and Cat's grace should last for hours, not minutes.
That line of spells were probably the second most over-powererd (read: broken) spells in 3.0 (after Haste). No 2nd level spell should replace an 8000gp item. If you want a permanent stat buff from a spell, take the "Persistant Spell" feat (from Tome and Blood - it will probably be in Complete Arcane too), and cast your 24hr buff as a 6th level spell.
That and not Bards can't have Mage Armor
But they ignore arcane spell casting failure in light armour, which more than makes up for it
Nah, "two squares" doesn't work to flank creatures that take up more than one square. For those, the rule is actually quite good: If the line joining the centers of the two creatures attempting to flank the large creature passes through non-adjacent sides of the larger creature's square, it is flanked. Try using the facing rules (or even better the hex-map based rules) from Unearthed Arcana (the d20 version, not the old AD&D one).
More Info on security features in Australian currency, from the Reserve Bank.
The Times of India and Khaleej Times articles look to just be Reuter's press releases. Tehran Times seemed a different viewpoint. SCMP wanted me to log in :(
I heard a report that in one of the planes, a pilot had a microphone on when the hijacking took place. Flight control heard a voice saying "Don't do anything stupid" (in English - no report on any accent). And the microphone went off. Shortly afterwards the transponder for the plane went off. With an act this well planned it would not surprise me if the terrorist knew the location of black box recorders and destroyed them before crashing the plane if they wished to do so. Certainly the transponder going off is disturbing evidence that they knew something of the plane's equipment.
I compiled a summary of some of the info I found on renewable energy sources recently. Got some interesting data on the cost of various means of producing power. Photovoltaics seem to be one of the more expensive renewable resources, but still justifiable on cost grounds alone in a lot of situations, especially where grid power is expensive or not available.
> The only way I can see this happening is if the NSA installed their own undersea
> fiberoptic cable to send it back to themselves on.
Of course not!
They have specially trained teams of hyperintelligent octupi down there analysing the data in real time, then the brain waves of the octupi are picked up using a reverse feedback effect of the orbital mind control lasers, which then beam it back down to your brain, where it leaks out into your mobile phone (even when it's switched off and not in the room) and they recover the signal from there.
I think some police officer in Sydney got in big trouble for saying that perhaps one of the reasons there was so little violence on New Years 2000, was that so many people were taking ecstacy rather than alcohol, and were therefore a lot less aggressive.
And even in Queensland, a senior officer recently said that the "war on drugs" isn't working. It's basically a simple economic case of supply and demand. Drug busts simply put pressure on the supply side of things (and don't seem to be terribly effective at that). That might up the price on the street, (forcing more drug related crime to pay for it), but it won't solve the problem. His suggestion was that the only way to get rid of the drug trade is to change the social conditions that create the demand.
Basically all these people who are supposedly fighting the war against drugs are saying that the way it's currently being fought doesn't work, and "getting tough on drugs" won't help. One choice is to try different tactics. There's currently a big campaign on at the moment to educate children about drugs. Another option is to change goals. Rather than stop drug usage, stop the some of the harmful effects to society that surround it. Decriminalisation or legalisation (however you wish to name or describe it) would take control of the trade away from the criminal rings, and put an end to many of the drug related crimes. 'Twould also make it possible to make the drugs much safer, by being assured of the dosages and purity.
Whoa!!!! Sure American's might make an attempt to clean up some of their messes, but other countries certainly do as well (for example China) and many do a better job than the US. The US does the worst job of any country in cleaning up after itself in terms of greenhouse gas emissions (either per capita, or in total emmissions). I'm ashamed that my country (Australia) does second worst per capita.
Which is better -- people who just want to have their Big Macs and Budweisers
I must admit to being at a loss to understand why anyone would want either of these things. Real burger and real beer for me please :)
Of course, I was having significant difficulty connecting to several US sites from work yesterday (we use Optus) as it was trying to route through Telstra.
I've got cable connections at both home and work, with different ISPs. Both use DHCP. In the last year, my home IP address has changed twice. Maybe 3 times. Work hasn't changed in the 6 months or so since we got connected.
No way I'm trusting either ISP to provide any security. I've got an "un-supported operating system" running in both locations. OpenBSD. SSH ports are the only ones open (most of the time) and I've got a nice ipsec tunnel between the two.
email is what I use
e-mail belongs to marketroids
... by making insurance pointless. If an insurance company does full genetic tests, and have a VERY good idea of what the likely payouts they are going to have to make to you over the cost of your lifetime are, they are going to charge premiums which add up to more than that total cost. Thus you would be silly to pay them said premiums, when instead you could just invest them. Knowing too much would eventually cause insurers to put themselves out of business. Sure there's never going to be a 100% accurate prediction, but the better they get at it, the less worthwhile it is for us to insure with them.
:P
Reading at a high filter has it's disadvantages, can't tell if someone else has already said this and been sumarrily flamed for it.
What's the quote, something like "The internet routes around censorship"? You might think that routing around the whole of the US is a little unlikely, but the other day there was a period of 15 minutes or so when I could not contact any US sites (from Australia). A little investigation showed that I could however contact sites all over Europe and Asia. Traffic to Europe was going through South Africa.
A university department with a student lab full of Linux boxen. They have several research projects with CPU intensive jobs which they'd like to farm out across the labs when the CPU cycles aren't needed. If the source for a distributed client were available (maybe there is one out there, I haven't checked), it might be possible to modify it to do the jobs they want.
There could be good reasons why they /don't/ want to make the source available. Maybe they don't want all the students to know what they're researching.
If they keep it "in house", I believe the GPL lets them get away with it, but what if the want to share CPU cycles with another department? Another Uni? or make the (binary) client freely available and /buy/ CPU cycles from people?
The GPL might make this difficult. If the uni were to do this, I strongly suspect they would try to make improvements and then release the improved code /base/, (without the code for their specific research projects) back to the open source community. But if the code were under a GPL, they might not bother to start with it.
I had (maybe still have somewhere, but I bet the seals are broken), this great pump-action thing with a backpack-mounted water supply that held about 3 or 4 litres of water. It didn't use the pump to build up air pressure, and there was no trigger. Just pump the thing once per shot. The range wasn't great, and you didn't get many shots, about 10. But the target got VERY wet.
And when "enlightned" governments such as ours (Australia) decide that they want to do something similar for the whole country, it's time to be terrified.
From memory there is a reason why DH or ElGamal isn't as good for signing/key exchange, but I can't recall it. Elliptic curve crypto, works fine for signing and key exchange, and is very well suited to hardware (eg smartcard) applications. The memory requirements are fairly modest (for async crypto) and being able to perform all your maths in a field which does it's ops modulo a power of 2 a big plus. IIRC, you tend to need about 20% of the transistors to get a similar level of security. On the other hand, RSA and DH have had a lot more study (attempts to break them) than ECC.
Has anyone considered the possibility that at some stage there might be more data to process? There is more than one radio telescope in the world you know. (and it's possible to search wider bands).
(Sorry for flamebaitish tone - I'm just a bit peeved with people coming down hard on what I see as a worthy project with some teething toubles.)
replace below-the-threshold comments with blanked out stubs
I think this sounds like
Ooo!! I hadn't seen that "Extrans" option for formatting before. I'm guessing it lets us put HTML tags in comments more easily, but since I'm using HTML here I won't try it. Nice one Rob.
The "logic" behind these mandates escapes me. If I had voted for the Coalition (not likely - I spent 5 hours handing out "how to votes" for the Greens), why does that mean that I agree with 100% of their platform? Perhaps the 47% or so of people whose 2 party prefered vote went to the coalition all opposed the GST but voted (or gave preferences) to the coalition because they prefered all the rest of their platform to the labour platform. (I'm sure this isn't the case, but you get the point I hope). Yet pollies continue to claim that they have a "mandate" to do everything in their party policies - most people probably don't know what all the policies of the party they vote for are. If they want a mandate, hold a referendum.
The only reason he [Harradine] got into senate in the first place was because our proportional representation system of senate elections...
And this is a bad thing? I think not. I'm all in favour of proportional representation. To me it seems much more like what democracy is all about. When everything is reduced to a 2 party system, decisions end up being made in the party room with very little input from the population, and "government" consists of two groups of people yelling personal insults at each other. With proportional representation, you get more than 2 voices in parliment, and a chance that some actual reasoned debate might occur. It happens in the senate. Sometimes. But doesn't seem to happen in the lower house. The reason for this? If you have >50% of the votes, you don't have to reason. If you need someone else to vote with you to get a bill passed, you need to convince them. Rational arguments aren't the only way - (bribery, etc) - but at least there is a chance.
The usual response to this is "So do you want more One Nation representation?" (For non-au readers: One Nation is a new-ish racist, right-wing party, getting up to 10% of the vote in the last few elections). Well, yes. I don't like their policies, and I would hate to see them running the country, but if people vote for them, they should get a say. That's what democracy is about.
3 Places with some form of proportional representation:
- Australian Senate: Proportional representation. As I mentioned before, there's occasionally some rational debate here.
- Tasmanian State parliment: More than one representative for each electorate. Under this system, the Greens movement really got started - yeah I know all of you aren't greenies like me, so I won't assume you agree with me that this is a good thing. But would any of the other parties have introduced a bill to reduce the salaries and job perks (travel expenses anyone?) of politicians? (No: Labour and Coalition teamed up to vote it down)
- New Zealand: I beleive the system there is one representative from each electorate, and then the remaining seats (don't know percentages) distributed to make for proportional representation. Don't know much about this, but I heard about it when it was introduced and it sounded interesting. Any comments on it from some kiwis?
Of course, in a true democracy, we could all participate in the online debate, and place our electronic votes on every issue. Not that that would neccessarily be a good thing. Not everyone is as perfectly well informed and capable of determining the best way of dealing with every situation as myselfThis is one of my favourite pro-gun argument's because it's so easy to refute. Which of the the following is designed to kill people?
- guns
- cars
And why do we issue soldiers with guns, rather than cars?