Found while trawling the Dev Digest:

Quote:Originally Posted by Positron

Quote:
[table]

The Gospel, according to Avatea as of 3pm 2/2:

Quote:February 1st to February 7th - The Statesman Task Force (from
Statesman in Independence Port)/ The Lord Recluse Strike Force (from
Lord Recluse in Grandville)

February 8th to February 14th - Return of he Reichsman (from Dr. Kahn in
Founders' Falls) / Thus Spoke the Reichsman (from Barracuda in
Grandville)

February 15th to February 21st - The Lady Grey Task Force (from Lady Grey in the Rikti War Zone)

February 22nd to February 28th - Clamor and Destruction (from Sister
Psyche in Independence Port) / Pirates of the Skies (from Silver Mantis
in Sharkhead Isle or your supergroup or villaingroup base's mission
computer or oracle)

Just what the title says.  Anyone else having this problem?
So far, troubleshooting-wise, I've:
* cleared cache and cookies
* tried 3 browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE)
* rebooted
* waved my handy-dandy rubber chicken over the PC
It's not particularly troublesome, but it is somewhat annoying to have to log in every time I visit.  It just started today, and I can't think of any configuration change I've made on my end.  I haven't had a chance yet to test with another computer, which is why I thought I'd see if anyone else was having the problem.
(The fact that it's cross-browser makes me suspect it's not on my end, but I could be wrong.)

--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs

Ilya Somin has a very good analysis of Judge Roger Vinsen's ruling that the entirely of the "Obamacare" bill is unconstitutional. Here are some excerpts.

Quote:Today’s Florida district court
ruling that the individual mandate is unconstitutional is by far the
best court opinion on this issue so far. Judge Roger Vinson provides a
thorough and impressive analysis of the federal government’s arguments
claiming that the mandate is authorized by the Commerce Clause and the
Necessary and Proper Clause, and explains the flaws in each. He had already rejected the government’s claim that the mandate is constitutional because it is a tax in a previous ruling.
So far, all three federal courts that have considered the tax argument
have rejected it, instead ruling (in my view correctly) that the mandate
is a penalty.

Quote:This is perhaps the most important of all the anti-mandate lawsuits
because the plaintiffs include 26 state governments and the National
Federation of Independent Business.
One of the best parts of
today’s opinion is Judge Vinson’s critique of the federal government’s
argument that the mandate is constitutional under the Commerce Clause
because the Clause gives it the power to regulate “economic decisions”:

Quote:The
problem with this legal rationale, however, is it would essentially
have unlimited application. There is quite literally no decision that,
in the natural course of events, does not have an economic impact of
some sort. The decisions of whether and when (or not) to buy a house, a
car, a television, a dinner, or even a morning cup of coffee also have a
financial impact that — when aggregated with similar economic decisions
— affect the price of that particular product or service and have a
substantial effect on interstate commerce. To be sure, it is not
difficult to identify an economic decision that has a cumulatively
substantial effect on interstate commerce; rather, the difficult task is
to find a decision that does not....
The important distinction is
that “economic decisions” are a much broader and far-reaching category
than are “activities that substantially affect interstate commerce”
[which Supreme Court precedent allows Congress to regulate]. While the
latter necessarily encompasses the first, the reverse is not true.
“Economic” cannot be equated to “commerce.” And “decisions” cannot be
equated to “activities.” Every person throughout the course of his or
her life makes hundreds or even thousands of life decisions that involve
the same general sort of thought process that the defendants maintain
is “economic activity.” There will be no stopping point if that should
be deemed the equivalent of activity for Commerce Clause purposes.

Quote:Judge Vinson has a similarly compelling answer to the government’s
claim that choosing not to purchase health insurance is an “economic
activity” because everyone participates in the health care market at
some point:

Quote:[T]here are lots of markets — especially
if defined broadly enough — that people cannot “opt out” of. For
example, everyone must participate in the food market. Instead of
attempting to control wheat supply by regulating the acreage and amount
of wheat a farmer could grow as in Wickard, under this logic, Congress
could more directly raise too low wheat prices merely by increasing
demand through mandating that every adult purchase and consume wheat
bread daily, rationalized on the grounds that because everyone must
participate in the market for food, non-consumers of wheat bread
adversely affect prices in the wheat market. Or, as was discussed during
oral argument, Congress could require that people buy and consume
broccoli at regular intervals, not only because the required purchases
will positively impact interstate commerce, but also because people who
eat healthier tend to be healthier, and are thus more productive and put
less of a strain on the health care system. Similarly, because
virtually no one can be divorced from the transportation market,
Congress could require that everyone above a certain income threshold
buy a General Motors automobile — now partially government-owned —
because those who do not buy GM cars (or those who buy foreign cars) are
adversely impacting commerce and a taxpayer-subsidized business....

As
Vinson explains, both the “economic decisions” argument and the “health
care is special” argument ultimately amount to giving Congress the
power to mandate virtually anything, and therefore conflict with the
text of the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent.

Quote:Judge Vinson also notes that the scenarios he raises are not merely a “parade of horribles,” but have a realistic basis,

Quote:Turning to the Necessary and Proper Clause, Judge Vinson concedes that
the individual mandate is “necessary” under existing Supreme Court
precedent, but argues that it isn’t “proper” because the government’s
logic amounts to giving Congress virtually unlimited power.

Quote:Vinson also notes that the mandate probably runs afoul of the five part test recently outlined by the Supreme Court in United States v. Comstock, though he ultimately does not base his ruling on this point. ...  Overall, Judge Vinson’s analysis of the Necessary and Proper Clause is a big improvement on Judge Henry Hudson’s performance in the recent Virginia ruling striking down the mandate.
Unlike Judge Henry Hudson in the Virginia case, Judge Vinson ruled
that the mandate is not “severable” from the rest of the health care
bill, and therefore invalidated it in its entirety. I think this may be
somewhat too sweeping. However, Vinson is on strong ground in ruling
that the mandate cannot be severed from the bill’s provisions forcing
insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions. As he
emphasizes, the federal government itself has repeatedly stressed this
point in the litigation.
Finally, Judge Vinson rejected the 26
states’ argument that the funding provisions of the bill are
unconstitutionally “coercive.”

Quote:Ultimately, the issue of the individual mandate will be resolved by the
courts of appeals and probably by the Supreme Court. Still, Judge
Vinson’s ruling is a victory for opponents of the mandate. It’s also
extremely well-written, and thereby provides a potential road map for
appellate judges who might be inclined to rule the same way.

Quote:'If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels
were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government
would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered
by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first
enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place
oblige it to control itself."


Federal Judge Roger Vinson opens his decision declaring ObamaCare
unconstitutional with that citation from Federalist No. 51, written by
James Madison in 1788. His exhaustive and erudite opinion is an
important moment for American liberty, and yesterday may well stand as
the moment the political branches were obliged to return to the
government of limited and enumerated powers that the framers envisioned.

The weekly Task force/Strike force for the first week starting today is the Statesman Task Force and Lord Recluse Strike force!
Terr is now +1 *glee!*

Well, as anyone who's visited it knows, I use the top page of my site as a rather infrequently-updated blog.  After (re-)compiling a wishlist of new features for my site, I decided that implementing it as a dynamic page with its contents (past and present) in a MySQL database was one of the first things I wanted to code up... and that led me to think about exactly what I wanted in that dynamic page.  I'm certainly going to have the latest entry, tags, history and search...  but should I implement reader comments?  After all, that's really the kind of thing the forums are for, and it's a level of complexity (what with user registration and validation and all kinds of other crap such as input filtering and cleaning) that I'm not all that keen on dealing with, not to mention the everpresent joy of blog spammers.  So I'm inclined to make it simple and one-way. 
Even so, I'm curious as to what folks here thought on the matter.  If enough people say they want it, well, hell, maybe I'll do it.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

This doesn't seem to be public news yet, but Yuku has been acquired by an outfit called Inform. I've gotten two messages about this in the last six weeks (this one, sent on Christmas Eve, which I missed the first time around, and then this one, sent 13 Janunary; these links should work for everyone, but if they don't, let me know and I'll post their contents as plaintext).
I don't yet know any more than what those messages have in them about what this means for the boards.  If/when I do know anything I'll share it with you all right away.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

And I don't mean the Metro:  the catacombs and caves underneath Paris.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

From a comment on the IRC that triggered a flash of inspiration. An unnamed and thus far unknown Fen scientist working on some random project, notices a rather strange side-effect. Tagged Infinities because of what that effect is.

Quote:She was tired… so very tired. She reached for a cup of coffee and took a mouthful before she recalled that it’d been made at least two hours ago.

“ugh, cold,” she groaned, forcing it down. She’d have to make up a new pot.

It could wait until this job was done. Just finish the magneto-compression coil, test it, and with any luck be in bed just in time to get up again the next morning. Goddammit was this frustrating. With no ceremony at all, she pushed the little white button on the keypad. Somewhere under the device… itself little more than a tangle of shielded cables and copper tubing around some sort of toroidal core… a relay clicked on.

And that was it.

“Well, at least it didn’t fail with prejudice,” she said with ill humour. That was always a relief. She’d be around projects that had done that before. That was why her right arm was now made of metal. She’d been half asleep for the last three hours herself, and didn’t trust her own wiring to be up to scratch.

She checked it to be sure. None of the cables seemed to be heating up or unduly smoking. There were no leaks. Everything seemed to be running just tickety-boo. Next, she checked the output from the coil.

“Eureka.” She smiled. Not quite on the money, but the benefits of the alternating field on output collimation were already being shown. It was just a matter of adjusting it that little bit, and bingo, a twenty-percent efficiency increase, all for the simple addition of a few electronic controls. A yawn reminded her that all the fine adjustments could wait until the morning. It was working, and at 5am local time, that was the main thing.

She moved her hand to turn the coil off. Not thinking, she moved her hand over the top of the device and felt something. She was quite sure what. It was enough to make her thing twice about turning it off. She swept her natural hand over the top of the device once more…

There it was again… a sensation of some sort. From the magnetic fields? She tried it with her mechanical arm. Same effect. A piece of software noted that the effort on one of her actuators decreased by a noticeable amount, right when it was over the coil. Not a lot, but still something measurable. It might be magnetic, but it’d take one hell of a field to affect even her arm… and that lessening of effort. It almost reminded her of what happened when she went swimming.

Was the coil quirked?

That was her first bitter thought. A quirked coil was a failed coil, was all that work thrown in the goddam bin. But unless somebody’d sneaked in while her back was turned and liberally slathered it with goop, the coil was entirely 100% all natural hardtech. It can’t have quirked.

She grabbed a piece of paper… just an ordinary A4 sheet. This one had a few scribbles on it, a doodle of giant robot, and some quick scratch calculations that had stopped making sense without their individual context.

She held up by one of the long edges, and watched it droop. If there was some there above the coil, then it had to affect the paper. Just to be certain, she double checked that the ventilation in the room was off. Moving it slowly towards the still running compression coil, she observed the end closest to the coil seem to lift… ever… so… slightly.

What the?

Again, from a different direction. Same effect. Magnetic fields don’t affect paper, do they? So what else could it be? On a spark of inspiration, she grabbed a weighing scales she’d normally use to weigh out her coffee grounds before brewing up a pot. She loaded it with her favourite blend, measuring out about 50 grams of it sitting on the bench furthest from the coil.

Noting the mass down in her mind, she then set up a simple platform over the top of the coil. Somewhere she could rest the scale, and take the shaking of her arms out of the equation. She placed the loaded scale on top of the coil.

It read 35.53

A drop of about 15 grams.

It was then that she said the famous phrase which accompanies all great scientific achievements.

“Hmmm…. That’s funny.”

Okay, I am completely floored by this band, The Jezabels.  Here, have a listen to this song of theirs called A Little Piece.
Done now?
Great.  Help me figure out which of Zeke's girls that song fits best!  (O_O
And for that matter, have a look at the rest of their music.  I have a feeling it's going to figure into this story pretty heavily.