Please tell that Mario shoots lasers out of his eyes, or fights Godzilla.
This time last week I bought my first new Mario game in many a long year. About eighty seconds later I yelled 'OMG COOL! MARIO-ZILLA!' and smashed up an entire level.
Mario vs Godzilla could work really well. In fact I think I'll go to one of the castles which has a proper giant Bowser, not the baby one, and go Mariozilla at the final fight. MARIO SMAAAASH!
Re:Al Queda, witches, devil worshippers, and gangs
on
Gangs on the Internet
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· Score: 1
"Witches" in common parlance refers to mythological people who sign a compact with the Christian Satan.
Umm... what?
"Witches" in common parlance refers to female magic-users, traditionally dressed in black with pointy hat, cauldron and magical flying broomstick. It's not Satanism and it's not Wicca; think Snow White's stepmother, or the Wicked Witch of the West. Lots of cackling. Double double toil and trouble.
Satan doesn't enter into it. That's a completely different horror story.
Even 30 years from now, Iran will still not have sufficient capacity to credibly deter the US
Are you sure?
USA: "We're going to invade Iran, kill their leaders and convert them all to Christianity."
Iran: "Try it and lose New York."
USA: "Do that and we'll destroy you completely."
Iran: "You're going to kill us anyway. What have we got to lose?"
USA: "Er... fuck."
Iran's hypothetical nuclear capability, even if nowhere near capable of destroying the US entirely, is still enough to raise the costs of invading Iran to an unacceptable level. If the costs of invading Iran are 'billions of dollars, and a lot of Iranians getting killed' then Bush will probably do it. If the costs of invading Iran are 'billions of dollars, and nearly all the Iranians getting killed, and a big radioactive crater where Manhattan used to be' then Bush will probably think twice...
If an Iranian bomb went off in Tel Aviv or New York, they know they'd be toast within a week.
Sure. But that's not the real reason they won't hand them out to random terrorists.
Islamic terrorist groups are... well, remember The Life of Brian? Remember the People's Front of Judaea, the Judaean People's Front, the Judaean Popular Front (he's over there... SPLITTER!), the Judaean Popular People's Front...
The thing with these people is that they're all about the purity of their particular interpretation of Islam, and are quite prepared to kill anyone who disagrees in the slightest. Osama bin Laden's genius was to persuade them to struggle together against the common enemy (THE JUDAEAN PEOPLE'S FRONT? No, no... the Americans! Oh yeah, them...) Before that they'd been mainly trying to kill each other off.
So, you're the Iranian government. You think it a bright idea to give one of these people a few nukes. Are you sure that's a good plan? Because if there's one thing a selfrighteous terrorist with a Messiah complex really hates it's someone claiming to be an Islamic government but really being a heretical backsliding apostate liberal. You see where I'm going with this? If Tehran gives nukes to the average al-Qaeda militant, they're likely to find that quite high up the list of 'People Who Aren't Hardline Islamic Enough' there's an entry saying 'Those so-called Islamic Revolutionaries in Tehran'...
Producing a nuclear explosion is tricky (getting into the uranium refining business is the hardest part), but it isn't as difficult as making a bomb you can deliver with some reliability to the desired destination, which is extremely hard.
Note, however, that if you're Iran, you might not be too worried about delivery. Consider: they've been named by Bush as part of the Axis Of Evil, and so have good reason to think that the US might be planning to invade. Very well; in that case, why worry about the delivery of the bomb? The enemy is coming to them. Plant the thing in the path of the invading American army and back off.
Assuming they're looking at nuclear weapons as a deterrent to any rogue superpowers on a tour of the Middle East, then that works quite well. If Israel's the target, then they need an accurate missile and a small, light bomb, but if it's to frighten off American invaders then size doesn't matter too much.
We can survive a nuclear exchange with Iran if we have to, we can wipe out their arsenal preemptively if we decide we have to.
Suppose Iran builds half a dozen nukes, and a delivery system capable of hitting Israel but not the USA. Iran then goes about its legitimate foreign policy which is contrary to the interests of the US / Israel axis. It does not declare war on anybody, it does not invade anybody, but it supports assorted regimes unpopular with the US, it openly supports the Palestinians, it makes use of its oil resources to enrich itself rather than Western corporate shareholders, and it prices that oil in euros... all that business. They don't actually do anything openly aggressive, but contrive by peaceful means to fuck up America's policies. They act, in short, like a sovereign independent state and do not kowtow to the Almighty Dollar.
What do you do? Let us say that the final straw is Iran's deliberate creation of an oil crisis, which produces vast profits for Iran but causes a run on the dollar. Well... if Iran was like Iraq, you'd pull some phony intelligence out to scare your population into supporting a war, then you'd invade.
But! Iran has nukes. Not many. Not enough to destroy the United States, but certainly enough to massacre any army that crosses its borders. Do you really want to invade? Because now, to successfully attack Iran you must launch a nuclear First Strike to eliminate that arsenal. And what do you want to bet that they've put their launchers in and around cities? Are you going to slaughter millions for your oil?
No. Suddenly the price of war with Iran is too high. You back off. Iran's nuclear capability has protected them from invasion without having to fire a shot.
The Federation is a military dictatorship. Deal with it.
No, it isn't. The Federation is run by the Vulcan shadow government.
Think about the situation at the time the Vulcans first contacted Earth. They've had their schism with the Romulans and have fought wars with them, and had the worse of it; and now there are Klingons prowling the dark places of the galaxy. Now the Vulcans contact a planet that's just developed warp technology. A planet full of creatures with a horrific record of murder and mayhem, who are capable of justifying the same to themselves in terms of 'pro patria mori' and similar bullshit, who could easily be a terror on the galaxy to make even the Klingons fear... but who are at a very impressionable stage...
Bingo! The Vulcans, in a paternal, imperialist sort of way, take Earth under their wing. They help humans build better starships, they advise and guide. In time, they join with Earth to form the United Federation of Planets. Coincidentally, the enemies of the Earth are the same as the enemies of the Vulcans... How did something like that happen?
So now the Romulans and the Klingons are kept off the Vulcans' backs by Starfleet. By the mighty space navy of the United Federation of Planets. A fleet of ships built at Mars, crewed almost entirely by humans from Earth, now guards a planet of decadent philosophers who are free to pursue their ideals of pure logic and reason. Humans fight and die in huge numbers for the protection of Vulcan. And every Starfleet ship we've ever seen has a single Vulcan, as a highly-ranked officer but not as captain... remember how Soviet ships used to have a 'political officer' to make sure the captain didn't do anything ideologically unsound? Yeah.
And whenever we see Starfleet command, the concentration of pointy ears is so much higher, don't you notice? Oh yes. It's all humans on the front line, but back at base it's all green-blooded bastards.
The entire Federation is a sham, concocted and perpetuated by the Vulcans for their own cowardly ends. Deal with it.
Oklahomans also flock into Texas to buy beer which is not held to the 3.2% content by volume law Oklahome has, IIRC.
You. Fucking. WHAAAAAAAAT?
Is this some twisted remnant of Prohibition or something? Because I could handle the idea of banning alcoholic drinks entirely; you do the same with many other recreational drugs, after all, and the principle is at least consistently adhered to.
But permitting drink, but banning just about all the beer that's actually worth drinking... ugh. Don't you guys have something in the constitution about Cruel And Unusual?
FWIW, if you want to order one, Amazon have 'em for £100. Personally, I've got a lovely black mp3 player which I carry around pretty well everywhere, so I've ordered the white DS just for a nice bit of contrast. Plus, I don't want to look like I'm playing on a PSP...
For the record, with 83% accuracy, Brazil will beat Italy.
83%, huh? Last I saw (before the opening matches) Brazil were the favourites to win the World Cup, at 5-2 odds; England were second, at 7-1, and Germany and Argentina were both on 8-1. That's a 28.6% probability that Brazil will win, saying nothing about the other finalist. Now these guys think that it's an 83% probability that Brazil will win, specifically beating Italy in the final?
Well, I for one will trust Ladbrokes and William Hill's judgment of the odds. 83% is _really_ high. If they're so sure of it, I'll see them on betfair.com...
Granted, I wasn't attending especially thug-heavy English matches
England really isn't the centre of hooliganism any more. After the notorious Heysel incident, the 1985 European Cup final at which some Juventus supporters were killed as a result of the behaviour of some of the Liverpool crowd, all English clubs were banned from European competition for several years, and the entire English football establishment cracked down pretty heavily on the whole ugly side of football fandom.
These days the trouble tends to be from Eastern European teams. Unfortunately, since the old reputation still lingers, a lot of foreign thugs want to have a go at the English to prove how hard they are, and so England games still attract a greater security presence.
There are actually two other kinds of football, Australian Rules football, and Rugby football (which was the progenitor of the A.R. and American varieties; hence *three-fourths* of all footballs are actually played primarily with the hands)
You missed Gaelic football. Which also uses the hands.
According to this article, about 130 million US viewers watched the 2006 Super Bowl. The Worldwide figure is about 1 billion (or, as you would put it: 1,000,000,000). Not bad for a sport that's played at a high-level professionally in only 4 countries (and even in the European countries, played primarily by Americans).
That's... quite amazingly implausible. One billion? That's a sixth of all humanity. A bit more than three times the entire population of the United States. Even in the USA, the game only attracted about 50% of the population, and interest in the sport drops off exponentially with distance from North America.
You seriously think a billion people watched the game? No. Perhaps, as other replies have suggested, a billion people had the game available to watch. Perhaps a billion people saw a brief clip from the game on the next day's news round-up. Perhaps a billion people were aware that there was a game of American football being played that day called the Superbowl - I was one - and perhaps a billion people even heard who won - I wasn't one. It's stretching the meaning of 'broadcast to a billion people' quite a lot, but Americans are good at marketing.
But there's absolutely no way a billion people watched the whole thing. Not unless the Chinese and Indians have really gone mad for gridiron without me hearing of it. Other than a World Cup final, probably the only thing that could attract a global audience in the billions would be a moon landing. Over to you, America...
It's crazy that they would let anyone on to a plane without showing their passport. What's wrong with you people?
And here I was thinking that passports were necessary only for international travel, and that needing special papers for internal travel was something they used to do in Soviet Russia...
Although nothing currently stops a technically savvy hobbyist from turning a personal computer with a TV tuner card into a ReplayTV 4000-like video recorder,
I would be willing to bet that there is a "classified rule" in that educational system, "thou shalt not teach of crypto that we are as yet unable to break".
I doubt it. That requires too many people to know the secret. If you've broken Popularly Used Cipher X but not Popularly Used Cipher Y, you keep the fact deadly secret. You want people to keep using the broken code, rather than switch to the unbroken code.
Now, if you try to ban people teaching Y because you can't break it, then you have to let every crypto researcher know about it so that they can know what not to teach.
But that kind of negates the secrecy, doesn't it? Suddenly the fact that Cipher X has been broken is public knowledge; you've just told hundreds of civilian professors about it, and someone's going to leak. The world switches to Cipher Y, and your great advantage in cryptanalysis is gone.
It's possible, of course, that you might try a double-bluff: ban discussion of the _broken_ cipher, and try to trick people into switching _away_ from the stronger version. But in general, it's probably better practice to keep silence as far as practical. Let 'em keep guessing. Every move you make, every public word you say, will be analysed by your adversaries, and whether you're lying or telling the truth it's all information that might be useful to them in ways you can't predict...
Not if Asuka dodges that fucking pseudospear of longinus instead of looking at it charmed
Never mind Asuka. She'd done her bit: chopped up all nine Mass Production Evas and run out of power. Nothing she could have done against a spear out of nowhere.
Now Shinji, on the other hand... he finally gets into EVA-01, comes out of HQ in a massive explosion taking out the entire top of the pyramid - and proceeds to just stand there screaming. Doesn't lift a finger to even try to stop the Evas skewering him and initiating Third Impact.
EVA-01 could have nailed the lot of them. Shinji's quite capable of it, especially since the Evas are already severely damaged thanks to Asuka's rampage, and EVA-01 absorbed the S2 engine from that Angel a few episodes back so it doesn't even need to worry about the five-minute limit. Shinji can chop these guys up into dogfood and then jump up and down on them indefinitely. But no, he just takes one look at the bloody chunks of EVA-02 and starts screaming. Shinji, you suck.
Radioactive isotopes, burning lasers, uranium, heavy water.... is this what you expect high school science teachers are buying, and Mom and Dad put in little Timmy's chemistry set? These people aren't selling black powder and aluminum shavings to make fireworks, they're selling some serious shit that I don't necessarily want my neighbor to have mail-order access to, thank you very much.
I presume you're American? In that case, your neighbour has access to firearms. If he wants to kill you, he'll do it with a gun, not with OMG TEH LASERS!!!
I suspect that if you wanted to kill somebody with the uranium sold here, your best bet would be to bludgeon them to death with it; it's heavy stuff, uranium. Getting a critical reaction going is difficult, and I think somebody would notice if your neighbour started running a centrifuge farm or a bunch of calutrons to enrich his uranium. So would the power company, for that matter; they already spy on their customers to catch people running hydroponics farms, as part of the War On Some Drugs...
First, allocate the time you specifically want; Then, set aside two or three days as "emergency sanity vacations" to use whenever; Next, literally throw darts at a calendar to pick another five or so random days (sounds stupid, but when you hit one, you will enjoy those random days more than just about any other holiday or vacation time you will ever take); finally, counting back from the end of the year, take every Monday (or Wednesday if you prefer a mid-week-mini-weekend) off to use up the rest.
Excellent plan, sir! * applause * Especially the great wisdom concerning the random days off. Had I only the modpoints...
Also perhaps keep an eye out for places where you can pad a holiday day onto a bank holiday. Four day weekends are nice. Take the Friday off, though, not the Tuesday, because then you get two short weeks. Build a bridge between Christmas and New Year too, it's a long time off for not much holiday allowance.
And for the love of God take all of it. Don't take cash in lieu unless you've got a really good reason: that's the top of a slippery slope to a horrible place where the bosses simply pay the workers less, on the assumption that they'll make up the difference to a living wage by cashing in their holiday.
Slashdot Mirror
This time last week I bought my first new Mario game in many a long year. About eighty seconds later I yelled 'OMG COOL! MARIO-ZILLA!' and smashed up an entire level.
Mario vs Godzilla could work really well. In fact I think I'll go to one of the castles which has a proper giant Bowser, not the baby one, and go Mariozilla at the final fight. MARIO SMAAAASH!
Umm... what?
"Witches" in common parlance refers to female magic-users, traditionally dressed in black with pointy hat, cauldron and magical flying broomstick. It's not Satanism and it's not Wicca; think Snow White's stepmother, or the Wicked Witch of the West. Lots of cackling. Double double toil and trouble.
Satan doesn't enter into it. That's a completely different horror story.
Not black ones, not for another week. Black DSs are coming out in Europe only, on 23rd June.
(Can you tell who's got a pre-order at Amazon and has been watching the calendar for weeks?)
They're not legally available anywhere yet. Release date is the 23rd.
The thieves could wait until then to put them on eBay, but they then lose a lot of the exclusivity value.
Are you sure?
USA: "We're going to invade Iran, kill their leaders and convert them all to Christianity."
Iran: "Try it and lose New York."
USA: "Do that and we'll destroy you completely."
Iran: "You're going to kill us anyway. What have we got to lose?"
USA: "Er... fuck."
Iran's hypothetical nuclear capability, even if nowhere near capable of destroying the US entirely, is still enough to raise the costs of invading Iran to an unacceptable level. If the costs of invading Iran are 'billions of dollars, and a lot of Iranians getting killed' then Bush will probably do it. If the costs of invading Iran are 'billions of dollars, and nearly all the Iranians getting killed, and a big radioactive crater where Manhattan used to be' then Bush will probably think twice...
Sure. But that's not the real reason they won't hand them out to random terrorists.
Islamic terrorist groups are... well, remember The Life of Brian? Remember the People's Front of Judaea, the Judaean People's Front, the Judaean Popular Front (he's over there... SPLITTER!), the Judaean Popular People's Front...
The thing with these people is that they're all about the purity of their particular interpretation of Islam, and are quite prepared to kill anyone who disagrees in the slightest. Osama bin Laden's genius was to persuade them to struggle together against the common enemy (THE JUDAEAN PEOPLE'S FRONT? No, no... the Americans! Oh yeah, them...) Before that they'd been mainly trying to kill each other off.
So, you're the Iranian government. You think it a bright idea to give one of these people a few nukes. Are you sure that's a good plan? Because if there's one thing a selfrighteous terrorist with a Messiah complex really hates it's someone claiming to be an Islamic government but really being a heretical backsliding apostate liberal. You see where I'm going with this? If Tehran gives nukes to the average al-Qaeda militant, they're likely to find that quite high up the list of 'People Who Aren't Hardline Islamic Enough' there's an entry saying 'Those so-called Islamic Revolutionaries in Tehran'...
Note, however, that if you're Iran, you might not be too worried about delivery. Consider: they've been named by Bush as part of the Axis Of Evil, and so have good reason to think that the US might be planning to invade. Very well; in that case, why worry about the delivery of the bomb? The enemy is coming to them. Plant the thing in the path of the invading American army and back off.
Assuming they're looking at nuclear weapons as a deterrent to any rogue superpowers on a tour of the Middle East, then that works quite well. If Israel's the target, then they need an accurate missile and a small, light bomb, but if it's to frighten off American invaders then size doesn't matter too much.
Suppose Iran builds half a dozen nukes, and a delivery system capable of hitting Israel but not the USA. Iran then goes about its legitimate foreign policy which is contrary to the interests of the US / Israel axis. It does not declare war on anybody, it does not invade anybody, but it supports assorted regimes unpopular with the US, it openly supports the Palestinians, it makes use of its oil resources to enrich itself rather than Western corporate shareholders, and it prices that oil in euros... all that business. They don't actually do anything openly aggressive, but contrive by peaceful means to fuck up America's policies. They act, in short, like a sovereign independent state and do not kowtow to the Almighty Dollar.
What do you do? Let us say that the final straw is Iran's deliberate creation of an oil crisis, which produces vast profits for Iran but causes a run on the dollar. Well... if Iran was like Iraq, you'd pull some phony intelligence out to scare your population into supporting a war, then you'd invade.
But! Iran has nukes. Not many. Not enough to destroy the United States, but certainly enough to massacre any army that crosses its borders. Do you really want to invade? Because now, to successfully attack Iran you must launch a nuclear First Strike to eliminate that arsenal. And what do you want to bet that they've put their launchers in and around cities? Are you going to slaughter millions for your oil?
No. Suddenly the price of war with Iran is too high. You back off. Iran's nuclear capability has protected them from invasion without having to fire a shot.
No, it isn't. The Federation is run by the Vulcan shadow government.
Think about the situation at the time the Vulcans first contacted Earth. They've had their schism with the Romulans and have fought wars with them, and had the worse of it; and now there are Klingons prowling the dark places of the galaxy. Now the Vulcans contact a planet that's just developed warp technology. A planet full of creatures with a horrific record of murder and mayhem, who are capable of justifying the same to themselves in terms of 'pro patria mori' and similar bullshit, who could easily be a terror on the galaxy to make even the Klingons fear... but who are at a very impressionable stage...
Bingo! The Vulcans, in a paternal, imperialist sort of way, take Earth under their wing. They help humans build better starships, they advise and guide. In time, they join with Earth to form the United Federation of Planets. Coincidentally, the enemies of the Earth are the same as the enemies of the Vulcans... How did something like that happen?
So now the Romulans and the Klingons are kept off the Vulcans' backs by Starfleet. By the mighty space navy of the United Federation of Planets. A fleet of ships built at Mars, crewed almost entirely by humans from Earth, now guards a planet of decadent philosophers who are free to pursue their ideals of pure logic and reason. Humans fight and die in huge numbers for the protection of Vulcan. And every Starfleet ship we've ever seen has a single Vulcan, as a highly-ranked officer but not as captain... remember how Soviet ships used to have a 'political officer' to make sure the captain didn't do anything ideologically unsound? Yeah.
And whenever we see Starfleet command, the concentration of pointy ears is so much higher, don't you notice? Oh yes. It's all humans on the front line, but back at base it's all green-blooded bastards.
The entire Federation is a sham, concocted and perpetuated by the Vulcans for their own cowardly ends. Deal with it.
You. Fucking. WHAAAAAAAAT?
Is this some twisted remnant of Prohibition or something? Because I could handle the idea of banning alcoholic drinks entirely; you do the same with many other recreational drugs, after all, and the principle is at least consistently adhered to.
But permitting drink, but banning just about all the beer that's actually worth drinking... ugh. Don't you guys have something in the constitution about Cruel And Unusual?
FWIW, if you want to order one, Amazon have 'em for £100. Personally, I've got a lovely black mp3 player which I carry around pretty well everywhere, so I've ordered the white DS just for a nice bit of contrast. Plus, I don't want to look like I'm playing on a PSP...
The exchange rate's a bugger, but you could buy one from the UK. They're out on June 23rd.
83%, huh? Last I saw (before the opening matches) Brazil were the favourites to win the World Cup, at 5-2 odds; England were second, at 7-1, and Germany and Argentina were both on 8-1. That's a 28.6% probability that Brazil will win, saying nothing about the other finalist. Now these guys think that it's an 83% probability that Brazil will win, specifically beating Italy in the final?
Well, I for one will trust Ladbrokes and William Hill's judgment of the odds. 83% is _really_ high. If they're so sure of it, I'll see them on betfair.com...
England really isn't the centre of hooliganism any more. After the notorious Heysel incident, the 1985 European Cup final at which some Juventus supporters were killed as a result of the behaviour of some of the Liverpool crowd, all English clubs were banned from European competition for several years, and the entire English football establishment cracked down pretty heavily on the whole ugly side of football fandom.
These days the trouble tends to be from Eastern European teams. Unfortunately, since the old reputation still lingers, a lot of foreign thugs want to have a go at the English to prove how hard they are, and so England games still attract a greater security presence.
You missed Gaelic football. Which also uses the hands.
That's... quite amazingly implausible. One billion? That's a sixth of all humanity. A bit more than three times the entire population of the United States. Even in the USA, the game only attracted about 50% of the population, and interest in the sport drops off exponentially with distance from North America.
You seriously think a billion people watched the game? No. Perhaps, as other replies have suggested, a billion people had the game available to watch. Perhaps a billion people saw a brief clip from the game on the next day's news round-up. Perhaps a billion people were aware that there was a game of American football being played that day called the Superbowl - I was one - and perhaps a billion people even heard who won - I wasn't one. It's stretching the meaning of 'broadcast to a billion people' quite a lot, but Americans are good at marketing.
But there's absolutely no way a billion people watched the whole thing. Not unless the Chinese and Indians have really gone mad for gridiron without me hearing of it. Other than a World Cup final, probably the only thing that could attract a global audience in the billions would be a moon landing. Over to you, America...
Why do you relegate Pluto to the 'minor' list, but leave Mercury on the 'major' list? IIRC, both Ganymede and Titan are larger than Mercury.
And here I was thinking that passports were necessary only for international travel, and that needing special papers for internal travel was something they used to do in Soviet Russia...
And wii wantssss it, precioussss...
Are there any programs like this?
Yes, there are.
I doubt it. That requires too many people to know the secret. If you've broken Popularly Used Cipher X but not Popularly Used Cipher Y, you keep the fact deadly secret. You want people to keep using the broken code, rather than switch to the unbroken code.
Now, if you try to ban people teaching Y because you can't break it, then you have to let every crypto researcher know about it so that they can know what not to teach.
But that kind of negates the secrecy, doesn't it? Suddenly the fact that Cipher X has been broken is public knowledge; you've just told hundreds of civilian professors about it, and someone's going to leak. The world switches to Cipher Y, and your great advantage in cryptanalysis is gone.
It's possible, of course, that you might try a double-bluff: ban discussion of the _broken_ cipher, and try to trick people into switching _away_ from the stronger version. But in general, it's probably better practice to keep silence as far as practical. Let 'em keep guessing. Every move you make, every public word you say, will be analysed by your adversaries, and whether you're lying or telling the truth it's all information that might be useful to them in ways you can't predict...
Never mind Asuka. She'd done her bit: chopped up all nine Mass Production Evas and run out of power. Nothing she could have done against a spear out of nowhere.
Now Shinji, on the other hand... he finally gets into EVA-01, comes out of HQ in a massive explosion taking out the entire top of the pyramid - and proceeds to just stand there screaming. Doesn't lift a finger to even try to stop the Evas skewering him and initiating Third Impact.
EVA-01 could have nailed the lot of them. Shinji's quite capable of it, especially since the Evas are already severely damaged thanks to Asuka's rampage, and EVA-01 absorbed the S2 engine from that Angel a few episodes back so it doesn't even need to worry about the five-minute limit. Shinji can chop these guys up into dogfood and then jump up and down on them indefinitely. But no, he just takes one look at the bloody chunks of EVA-02 and starts screaming. Shinji, you suck.
Nice recipe. For those who don't know: ethyne is the chemical formerly known as acetylene. As in oxy-acetylene, as in incredibly hot welding torches.
This stuff has more binding energy than a dominatrix on speed. Toasty.
I presume you're American? In that case, your neighbour has access to firearms. If he wants to kill you, he'll do it with a gun, not with OMG TEH LASERS!!!
I suspect that if you wanted to kill somebody with the uranium sold here, your best bet would be to bludgeon them to death with it; it's heavy stuff, uranium. Getting a critical reaction going is difficult, and I think somebody would notice if your neighbour started running a centrifuge farm or a bunch of calutrons to enrich his uranium. So would the power company, for that matter; they already spy on their customers to catch people running hydroponics farms, as part of the War On Some Drugs...
Excellent plan, sir! * applause * Especially the great wisdom concerning the random days off. Had I only the modpoints...
Also perhaps keep an eye out for places where you can pad a holiday day onto a bank holiday. Four day weekends are nice. Take the Friday off, though, not the Tuesday, because then you get two short weeks. Build a bridge between Christmas and New Year too, it's a long time off for not much holiday allowance.
And for the love of God take all of it. Don't take cash in lieu unless you've got a really good reason: that's the top of a slippery slope to a horrible place where the bosses simply pay the workers less, on the assumption that they'll make up the difference to a living wage by cashing in their holiday.