Climate/Terrain: Nine Hells, Gehenna, Hades, The Abyss, PBS
Frequency: Very rare or daily at 4 pm
Organization: Solitary
Activity Cycle: Day
Diet: Little children's minds
Intelligence: Insipid (-12)
Treasure: Merchandising contracts
Alignment: Purple evil
No. appearing: 1 (may be attended by 1-100 Barney zombies, see below)
Armor class: 10 (big and plush)
Movement: 3
Hit dice: 8
THAC0: 12
No. of attacks: 2
Damage/attack: 1-10 (x2)
Special attacks: Hug (damage 3-30)
Special defenses: Aura of intolerable idiocy
Magic resistance: 90%
Size: L (8' tall)
Morale: Stupid (30)
XP value: 4,000
Barney is a demon from the lower planes, a great purple and plush deformed dinosaur. It is the enemy of intelligent lifeforms, eternally seeking out small children and feeding on their natural intelligence and curiousity.
Combat: Barney will normally attack with it's two great paws, each inflicting 1-20 points of damage. If a victim is struck with either paw and fails a saving throw versus paralyzation, they are dragged to Barney and may be hugged next round. A hug inflicts 3-30 points of damage each round until the victim or Barney is killed.
Barney may also utter a 'Power word "I love you"' once every three rounds. Any adults hearing the power word must save versus spells or flee in terror for 1-6 rounds. Any child hearing the power word must save versus spells or be controlled by Barney. He or she will thereafter follow Barney's commands with a delightful smile, and is subject to continued brainwashing. Each day that a child is in Barney's control they may be taught another lesson by Barney, decreasing their intelligence and wisdom by 1. When either stat reaches zero, the child becomes a mindless Barney zombie! Barney zombies follow his commands with love and a delightful smile, and eagerly spend gold coins on Barney merchandise.
Barney is constantly surrounded by an aura of intolerable idiocy. Any individual within 20' must save versus spells once per round or lose 1 point of intelligence. When intelligence reaches zero, the victim falls to the ground in a quivering, gibbering wreck. Intelligence may be regained at the rate of 1 point per day afterwards. In addition, the aura tends to make spells go awry, tactics to fail, and mundane items to become intelligent with their own insipid personalities.
Habitat/Society: Barney resides in a great temple and television studio on the lowest plane of the Abyss, with areas extending into every lower plane and prime material plane via transdimensional gates. He is constantly surrounded there by 1-100 Barney zombies clutching plush dolls and lollipops, which they may use as +2 maces in combat.
-From CyberLost, via AOL; original Bitnet post by Hellraiser
There's a reason for the gov't to side with the banks: law enforcement.
In particular, they'd love an excuse to go after people who keep LOTS of cash on hand and try to bypass banks, making the practice both rare (so those that still do are easier to notice) and illegal (so they can get the subpoena if it IS noticed). That's because banks are required, by law, to report transactions exceeding a certain size (and it's illegal to structure your transactions in such a way to avoid that threshold, as well).
The belief is that if people are forced to "refresh" their money, resetting the timeout (either by tweaking the chips, or by simply getting issued newer bills), they'll have an easier time catching money launderers, drug dealers, and so forth.
Trace of drugs? Confiscate the car, of course. The burden of proof of innocence is on the owner, according to drug forfeiture law, since technically they're charging the car, not you -- and cars don't have constitutional rights.
At least that's the way the DEA (and many local PDs, which will share in the proceeds when your car is sold) see it. And that's the way they act.
Guarantee? Hardly. Try suing your local PD for not *preventing* crimes -- they're not liable for that sort of thing, except for the most obvious cases of negligence (say, if a cop 10 feet away watches you getting mugged and does nothing).
Oh, and cameras don't really prevent crime. There's plenty of footage of robbers who rob and kill regardless of cameras.
One bit, 'tho, is that Kodak isn't exactly a monopoly in the digital-camera market. If they *were*, and they were trying to leverage this hypothetical monopoly into generating business for their picture labs, *and* they took measures to ensure that you wouldn't (due to inconvenience, say) use non-Kodak software, then there might be a problem.
But that's hypothetical; Microsoft's monopoly on the PC operating systems market is not, at least according to the Findings of Fact. Ergo, they're legally constrained when it comes to exploiting that market share to spread into other markets (such as digital photography).
Patients getting it aren't expected to live more than a few months, let alone years -- after all, initial trials will be conducted in those with 30 days or less expected (w/o AbioCor; they hope to double that for now).
There's an internal battery backup, 'tho, to serve when the external battery (power transmitted via induction coil) is replaced. There's an audible alarm, IIRC, that should sound when power is low. And ISTR that once a patient lasts a few years on it, the heart itself is meant to be replaced periodically.
Camera footage can be recorded -- or forge in a way that still makes it look reliable. Memories aren't nearly as good in that respect, and are far harder to abuse.
The same way the adding of cameras to convenience stores meant that their clerks now feel safe, right? Or that cameras in banks and supermarkets mean that those don't get robbed, either? Or, for another astonishingly successful bit of legislation, how there are not shootings in D.C. thanks to the complete prohibition on handguns?
Naah. It *may* help nail the perps long after they pick up what's left of you, but that's about it.
Yes. But you do need anti-trust, because competition is clearly NOT the most viable option for a company.
If you combine
1. Market domination by a few major players, and
2. Very high entry costs,
then my suspicion is that collusion, especially in the form of price-fixing, becomes the 'natural' thing to do if unregulated -- since the high entry cost proves to be such a barrier to any new competitiors trying to undercut them. And in that case, society is likely *not* served well.
For instance, suppose Intel were the only game in town. They could gouge people fairly readily, because it probably costs a lot of money for the research to develop a microprocessor (even if you're trying to start small, in a local market) and the chip fabrication facilities probably aren't cheap, either. There's no such thing as a "regional" car company for another example, because economically, it doesn't make that much sense. This means that for a new player to enter, they need a lot of resources at the start to break into a LARGE market against an established competitor.
Hence, some anti-trust is necessary. It does have to be administered fairly, however, and should not involve judges who apparently desire stardom and forgo any judicial propriety to attain such.
Should it, 'tho? It's not like this radically changes the fundamentals such as a reduced demand for high-tech products (everything from PDAs to fibre optics to desktop computers... probably non-high-tech luxuries as well) and a generally slowing economy... perhaps there'll be a bump, but more from mob psych than economic theory.
There's probably more evidence to suggest that the PRC funneled money into our previous President's coffers than there is that Mr. Gates and friends managed to influence Mr. Bush who then managed to subvert the Appeals Court.
Get back to us when WinCE dominates the handheld market, eh? They're trying, but not doing too hot in that field if memory serves -- and that's because PalmOS provides a competitor that consumers find good enough to use, and good enough to keep rather than switch. Throwing money only goes so far when you've got competent rivals.
No. The lesson is that a biased judge should be smart enough not to constantly demonstrate it to the entire national media if he wants his rulings to be accepted.
If they really wanted to be careful, they could require periodic cryptographic-based challenges. For instance, the server could require an RSA-computed signature of a random set of bytes (perhaps the concatenation of two contiguous sections of the binary), where the binary contains the encryption key in some obfuscated form, and the server retains the decryption key for verification.
Bypassing that sort of system can be done, but it'd be a bear requiring disassembly of the binary to find out the key, and would require embedding the binary with any workaround -- or, finding some odd proxy-based solution to use the official client to answer, without letting the server know that there are actually *two* clients running.
I would suggest then, that all modern food be labelled changed, because it's been evolving ever since they arose. Radical environmentalists who wish to be able to eat *something* are encouraged to dine on all-natural (and therefore Good For You!) mushrooms, belladonna, and grasses, secure in the knowledge that they're not directly hurting cute animals.
The fact that the very first reason why "Quake changed the world" is NOT a quake innovation does not inspire confidence in the rest of the article. There were Internet games such as Netrek that allowed players to join and leave games in progress at arbitrary times, and likewise did not have scheduled time limits -- a game was over when one side lost its last-planet stand.
Some people might appreciate a decent standard of living, good pay, a nice range of educational institutions ranging from vocational tech to top-notch research groups, and a government that isn't likely to abuse you just for ragging on officials or for refusing to bribe them. Quite a few people apparently want to enter so much that they're willing to bypass the legal procedures and sneak in illegally.
Well, er, war criminals tend to be surrounded by well-armed henchmen, quite possibly with local sympathizers... so it's non-trivial to get ahold of them without killing them.
Placing liens on overseas property, or simple arrest warrants (if you ever step on their shores, say), should be considerably easier.
Yes. And, er, one wonders how some of these dynasties ended -- the first Han dynasty, if memory serves, ended in the disintegration of the nation into disparate kingdoms ruled by warlords. Not exactly a model system...
Right. We'd still be mucking about with spontaneous generation theory, treating diseases via bleeding people, heating our huts and caves with campfires...
For those who don't like to do something unless they're certain: Don't eat or drink anything until you can prove that it is perfectly safe. Hint: it's never been done before, and is impossible to do so under the standards that you're proposing. The rest of us can move on once you're gone.
Journalists can write to a non-technical audience -- that's fine.
But it's unclear to me that they should constantly exaggerate benefits and dangers to the point that science is shown as some bizarre melodrama. Just about every article that shows a touch of progress on cancer treatment is blown up into a "potential cure", while far-out dangers are also maximized when described on paper, or even more so, television. And they *rarely* if ever seem to bother doing any independent verification, such as checking second opinions.
Processes, such as deduction and induction, of course. You don't need to see anybody step in front of a truck to realize that it's harmful, if you have some basic ideas about the mass of such vehicles and the general effects of collision.
Slashdot Mirror
Dungeons and Barneys
Barney by AD&D Rules
Barney
Climate/Terrain: Nine Hells, Gehenna, Hades, The Abyss, PBS
Frequency: Very rare or daily at 4 pm
Organization: Solitary
Activity Cycle: Day
Diet: Little children's minds
Intelligence: Insipid (-12)
Treasure: Merchandising contracts
Alignment: Purple evil
No. appearing: 1 (may be attended by 1-100 Barney zombies, see below)
Armor class: 10 (big and plush)
Movement: 3
Hit dice: 8
THAC0: 12
No. of attacks: 2
Damage/attack: 1-10 (x2)
Special attacks: Hug (damage 3-30)
Special defenses: Aura of intolerable idiocy
Magic resistance: 90%
Size: L (8' tall)
Morale: Stupid (30)
XP value: 4,000
Barney is a demon from the lower planes, a great purple and plush deformed dinosaur. It is the enemy of intelligent lifeforms, eternally seeking out small children and feeding on their natural intelligence and curiousity.
Combat: Barney will normally attack with it's two great paws, each inflicting 1-20 points of damage. If a victim is struck with either paw and fails a saving throw versus paralyzation, they are dragged to Barney and may be hugged next round. A hug inflicts 3-30 points of damage each round until the victim or Barney is killed.
Barney may also utter a 'Power word "I love you"' once every three rounds. Any adults hearing the power word must save versus spells or flee in terror for 1-6 rounds. Any child hearing the power word must save versus spells or be controlled by Barney. He or she will thereafter follow Barney's commands with a delightful smile, and is subject to continued brainwashing. Each day that a child is in Barney's control they may be taught another lesson by Barney, decreasing their intelligence and wisdom by 1. When either stat reaches zero, the child becomes a mindless Barney zombie! Barney zombies follow his commands with love and a delightful smile, and eagerly spend gold coins on Barney merchandise.
Barney is constantly surrounded by an aura of intolerable idiocy. Any individual within 20' must save versus spells once per round or lose 1 point of intelligence. When intelligence reaches zero, the victim falls to the ground in a quivering, gibbering wreck. Intelligence may be regained at the rate of 1 point per day afterwards. In addition, the aura tends to make spells go awry, tactics to fail, and mundane items to become intelligent with their own insipid personalities.
Habitat/Society: Barney resides in a great temple and television studio on the lowest plane of the Abyss, with areas extending into every lower plane and prime material plane via transdimensional gates. He is constantly surrounded there by 1-100 Barney zombies clutching plush dolls and lollipops, which they may use as +2 maces in combat.
-From CyberLost, via AOL; original Bitnet post by Hellraiser
There's a reason for the gov't to side with the banks: law enforcement.
In particular, they'd love an excuse to go after people who keep LOTS of cash on hand and try to bypass banks, making the practice both rare (so those that still do are easier to notice) and illegal (so they can get the subpoena if it IS noticed). That's because banks are required, by law, to report transactions exceeding a certain size (and it's illegal to structure your transactions in such a way to avoid that threshold, as well).
The belief is that if people are forced to "refresh" their money, resetting the timeout (either by tweaking the chips, or by simply getting issued newer bills), they'll have an easier time catching money launderers, drug dealers, and so forth.
Trace of drugs? Confiscate the car, of course. The burden of proof of innocence is on the owner, according to drug forfeiture law, since technically they're charging the car, not you -- and cars don't have constitutional rights.
At least that's the way the DEA (and many local PDs, which will share in the proceeds when your car is sold) see it. And that's the way they act.
Guarantee? Hardly. Try suing your local PD for not *preventing* crimes -- they're not liable for that sort of thing, except for the most obvious cases of negligence (say, if a cop 10 feet away watches you getting mugged and does nothing).
Oh, and cameras don't really prevent crime. There's plenty of footage of robbers who rob and kill regardless of cameras.
One bit, 'tho, is that Kodak isn't exactly a monopoly in the digital-camera market. If they *were*, and they were trying to leverage this hypothetical monopoly into generating business for their picture labs, *and* they took measures to ensure that you wouldn't (due to inconvenience, say) use non-Kodak software, then there might be a problem.
But that's hypothetical; Microsoft's monopoly on the PC operating systems market is not, at least according to the Findings of Fact. Ergo, they're legally constrained when it comes to exploiting that market share to spread into other markets (such as digital photography).
Meat, perhaps?
Patients getting it aren't expected to live more than a few months, let alone years -- after all, initial trials will be conducted in those with 30 days or less expected (w/o AbioCor; they hope to double that for now).
There's an internal battery backup, 'tho, to serve when the external battery (power transmitted via induction coil) is replaced. There's an audible alarm, IIRC, that should sound when power is low. And ISTR that once a patient lasts a few years on it, the heart itself is meant to be replaced periodically.
Camera footage can be recorded -- or forge in a way that still makes it look reliable. Memories aren't nearly as good in that respect, and are far harder to abuse.
The same way the adding of cameras to convenience stores meant that their clerks now feel safe, right? Or that cameras in banks and supermarkets mean that those don't get robbed, either? Or, for another astonishingly successful bit of legislation, how there are not shootings in D.C. thanks to the complete prohibition on handguns?
Naah. It *may* help nail the perps long after they pick up what's left of you, but that's about it.
Yes. But you do need anti-trust, because competition is clearly NOT the most viable option for a company.
If you combine
1. Market domination by a few major players, and
2. Very high entry costs,
then my suspicion is that collusion, especially in the form of price-fixing, becomes the 'natural' thing to do if unregulated -- since the high entry cost proves to be such a barrier to any new competitiors trying to undercut them. And in that case, society is likely *not* served well.
For instance, suppose Intel were the only game in town. They could gouge people fairly readily, because it probably costs a lot of money for the research to develop a microprocessor (even if you're trying to start small, in a local market) and the chip fabrication facilities probably aren't cheap, either. There's no such thing as a "regional" car company for another example, because economically, it doesn't make that much sense. This means that for a new player to enter, they need a lot of resources at the start to break into a LARGE market against an established competitor.
Hence, some anti-trust is necessary. It does have to be administered fairly, however, and should not involve judges who apparently desire stardom and forgo any judicial propriety to attain such.
Should it, 'tho? It's not like this radically changes the fundamentals such as a reduced demand for high-tech products (everything from PDAs to fibre optics to desktop computers... probably non-high-tech luxuries as well) and a generally slowing economy... perhaps there'll be a bump, but more from mob psych than economic theory.
There's probably more evidence to suggest that the PRC funneled money into our previous President's coffers than there is that Mr. Gates and friends managed to influence Mr. Bush who then managed to subvert the Appeals Court.
Get back to us when WinCE dominates the handheld market, eh? They're trying, but not doing too hot in that field if memory serves -- and that's because PalmOS provides a competitor that consumers find good enough to use, and good enough to keep rather than switch. Throwing money only goes so far when you've got competent rivals.
No. The lesson is that a biased judge should be smart enough not to constantly demonstrate it to the entire national media if he wants his rulings to be accepted.
If they really wanted to be careful, they could require periodic cryptographic-based challenges. For instance, the server could require an RSA-computed signature of a random set of bytes (perhaps the concatenation of two contiguous sections of the binary), where the binary contains the encryption key in some obfuscated form, and the server retains the decryption key for verification.
Bypassing that sort of system can be done, but it'd be a bear requiring disassembly of the binary to find out the key, and would require embedding the binary with any workaround -- or, finding some odd proxy-based solution to use the official client to answer, without letting the server know that there are actually *two* clients running.
I would suggest then, that all modern food be labelled changed, because it's been evolving ever since they arose. Radical environmentalists who wish to be able to eat *something* are encouraged to dine on all-natural (and therefore Good For You!) mushrooms, belladonna, and grasses, secure in the knowledge that they're not directly hurting cute animals.
The radical environmentalists, considering that strutting around in a corn suit appears to be the major highlight of their lives...
The fact that the very first reason why "Quake changed the world" is NOT a quake innovation does not inspire confidence in the rest of the article. There were Internet games such as Netrek that allowed players to join and leave games in progress at arbitrary times, and likewise did not have scheduled time limits -- a game was over when one side lost its last-planet stand.
Some people might appreciate a decent standard of living, good pay, a nice range of educational institutions ranging from vocational tech to top-notch research groups, and a government that isn't likely to abuse you just for ragging on officials or for refusing to bribe them. Quite a few people apparently want to enter so much that they're willing to bypass the legal procedures and sneak in illegally.
Well, er, war criminals tend to be surrounded by well-armed henchmen, quite possibly with local sympathizers... so it's non-trivial to get ahold of them without killing them.
Placing liens on overseas property, or simple arrest warrants (if you ever step on their shores, say), should be considerably easier.
Yes. And, er, one wonders how some of these dynasties ended -- the first Han dynasty, if memory serves, ended in the disintegration of the nation into disparate kingdoms ruled by warlords. Not exactly a model system...
Heh. Look at Wyden's HTML... there's an e-mail address specified as part of the form action.
So that's senator_wyden@exchange.senate.gov, it looks like.
Gephardt, unfortunately, seems to require users to go through the "Write Your Representative" cgi-bin, which isn't nearly as revealing.
Right. We'd still be mucking about with spontaneous generation theory, treating diseases via bleeding people, heating our huts and caves with campfires...
For those who don't like to do something unless they're certain: Don't eat or drink anything until you can prove that it is perfectly safe. Hint: it's never been done before, and is impossible to do so under the standards that you're proposing. The rest of us can move on once you're gone.
Journalists can write to a non-technical audience -- that's fine.
But it's unclear to me that they should constantly exaggerate benefits and dangers to the point that science is shown as some bizarre melodrama. Just about every article that shows a touch of progress on cancer treatment is blown up into a "potential cure", while far-out dangers are also maximized when described on paper, or even more so, television. And they *rarely* if ever seem to bother doing any independent verification, such as checking second opinions.
Processes, such as deduction and induction, of course. You don't need to see anybody step in front of a truck to realize that it's harmful, if you have some basic ideas about the mass of such vehicles and the general effects of collision.