In searching the internet for an audiobook version of Stealing Harry, as mentioned in the Newest Eyrie thread, I stumbled upon a website dedicated to archiving fanfiction audiobooks called http://audiofic.jinjurly.com/]Audiofic. It's remarkably extensive, though I can't speak for the overall audio quality of the books and, frankly, the layout needs some work. Each podfic (as they are referred to) is a zipped MP3 file, though some are in iTunes own audiobook format.

From the CoX Facebook page, a little hint of whats coming up.

So can we get one to cough on the other guys and make them sick?

For those of you who don't know, I recently rolled a toon called "Unknown Test Hero" to answer some questions I have that has cropped up regarding some things in COH.I have based this character's looks on the Top Gear persona "The Stig" and herald him as "The Stig's super-powered cousin".
For those of you who don't know ANYTHING about the Stig, his Wikipedia page is here.
Now, as mentioned in the article, whenever the Top Gear announcers introduce The Stig, they say some rumors about him, known as Stiggisms. These rumors always start with start with "Some say" and always end with "All we know is, he's called the Stig!" I find these amusing and make it a point to come up with one every time I bring him out or mention him in chat.
Because people asked for it, this post is going to include all the "Stiggisms" I made thusfar for Unknown Test Hero. I will keep addng as I come up with new ones. Enjoy.

• "Some say that he was created by Crey to fight the oncoming Praetorian threat, and also that he's the only guy that we could find to fit in the suit."
• "Some say that without his helmet he bears a striking resemblance to David Bowie, and that he once won the International Weight Lifting Championship using only his penis."
• "Some say he eats Hellions roasted on a spit, and he once thought Statesmans's Mask was used for contraception."
• "Some say his secret weakness is Cheez Whiz, and he once thought "The Leak Song" was a form of bathroom behavior."
  

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.