Lord Ser Brightblade

Yup that will do it for sure.... At least until they swing the nerf bats but even then I think that triple threat of archery, chivalry and spellweaving will be a force to be reckoned with.

Until the nerf WoD and Archery that template will take anyone out in 2 moves. AI then WoD.

It was a joke Bal

Funny stuff ... and Bal we wont let your hoarde know you actually play Lage when your "not online".

That is too funny!

It's a good show I hope its getting a lot of viewers and survives the mid season axe. I think things might get even more interesting in the weeks to come but only time will tell! I do know if Renee was in it more it would absolutely be a hit!

I wont make it opening night but I plan to see it that weekend. Looks like it could be a bit cheesy but cheesy is ok as long as the action is intense

Bone of Hobbit-like species uncovered (AP) -- Scientists say they have found more bones in an Indonesian cave that offer additional evidence of a second human species -- short and hobbit-like -- that roamed the Earth the same time as modern man. But the vocal scientific minority that has challenged that conclusion since the discovery of Homo floresiensis was announced last year remains unconvinced. The discovery of a jaw bone, to be reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, represents the ninth individual belonging to a group believed to have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. The bones are in a wet cave on the island of Flores in the eastern limb of the Indonesian archipelago, near Australia. In 2004, scientists announced their original, sensational discovery of a delicate skull and partial skeleton of a female, nicknamed "Hobbit" and believed to be 18,000 years old. In addition, they found separate bones and fragments of other individuals ranging in age from 12,000 to 95,000 years old. The findings have ignited a controversy unlike any other in the often-contentious study of human origins. The tiny bones have enchanted many anthropologists who accept the interpretation that these diminutive skeletons belonged to a remnant population of prehistoric humans that were marooned on Flores with dwarf elephants and other miniaturized animals, giving the discovery a kind of fairy tale quality. If true, the discovery grafts a strange and tangled evolutionary branch near the very top of the human family tree. The conventional view of human evolution is that several types of primitive ape-like ancestors appeared and faded over a span of about 4.5 million years. Modern Homo sapiens developed about 100,000 years ago, and quickly overtook other large-brained competitors like Homo erectus and Neanderthals. Modern humans were thought to have roamed the Earth without competition for at least the past 30,000 years. Fully grown, Homo floresiensis would have stood about 3 feet tall, with a brain about the size of a chimpanzee. Its discoverers, led by Australian anthropologist Michael Morwood of the University of New England, speculate it evolved from Homo erectus, which had spread from Africa across Asia. They attribute its small size to its isolation on an island. However, the researchers acknowledge that the Hobbit shares a bizarre and unexplained mixture of modern and primitive traits. For example, its long, dangling arms were thought to have belonged only to much older prehuman species that were confined to Africa. A vocal scientific minority insists the Hobbit specimens do not represent a new species at all. They believe the specimens are nothing more than the bones of modern humans that suffered from microencephaly, a broadly defined genetic disorder that results in small brain size and other defects. And, at least two groups of opponents have submitted their own studies to other leading scientific journals refuting the Flores work. "This paper doesn't clinch it. I feel strongly that people are glossing over the problems with this interpretation," said Robert Martin, a biological anthropologist and provost of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Those caught in the middle of the debate say it is a real test of what we know about human evolution. Daniel E. Lieberman of the Peabody Museum at Harvard said the specimens are so unusual that they deserve a more detailed analysis in order to adequately answer the critics' complaints. "Many syndromes can cause microencephaly and dwarfism and they all need to be considered," said Lieberman, who wrote a commentary in Nature. "The findings are not only astonishing, but also exciting because of the questions they raise." In the latest Nature study, the same team of Australian and Indonesian scientists working in Liang Bua cave on Flores report finding a variety of additional bones buried at various depths. Among them, bones from the right arm of the previously discovered 18,000-year old female. They labeled her LB1. And, they report finding the lower jaw bone that does not belong to any of the previously discovered individuals. An analysis of firepit charcoal found nearby in the excavation layer suggests the jawbone is 15,000 years old. It suggests a weaker chin with smaller tooth dimensions than LB1, but otherwise shares the same characteristics. "They almost certainly belong to the same species," Lieberman concluded. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Actually they are playing all 4 episodes starting at 7pm Rewatching em all as I type. Getting the wife hooked on it

It's still legal to duel someone in the Boston Commons as long as you extend an invitation to the goveror does that make it right?

Anyone gonna check out the movie Doom when it comes out on the 21st of this month? Anyone hear any buzz about it yet?

Devising a method to check for EULA violations is one thing but this goes above and beyond that and in the wrrong hands could spell disaster for people. Imagine someone creating something which hijacks information being read by this little client known as warden. I had been thinking about getting WoW. This article helped me decide its just not worth it especially since this client was probably installed unknowingly and without knowledge of just how far reaching its "browsing" features go by the majority of WoW players.

A good friend of mine had 2 200 gallon tanks and a 80 gallon tank. I know he had some nice filters for them all. Next time I see him Ill ask him what he had for filters. I know two of the tanks he had were salt and the other was either brackish or fresh.

Happy Birthday Charlie and PGoH

Looks kinda neat Dragonshard

The world's oldest living tree is a 4,767-year-old bristlecone pine. It resides in the White Mountains near the California-Nevada border. An average bristlecone pines lives for 1,000 years, with a few surviving to over 4,000 years. Alerce trees and sequoias also live well into their thousands. These ages are especially impressive given that urban trees live (on average) for only 32 years and inner-city trees for only 12. So what causes mature trees to die? Apparently, they run out of energy. As trees grow and age, their size and complexity demands more energy. At the same time they're able to store less energy for emergencies. As a result, older trees are less able to respond to stress and eventually succumb to pollution, drought, insect infestation, or lack of nutrients. Urban environments are especially stressful. Bristlecone pines have a number of energy-conserving survival strategies that enable them to reserve the energy needed to survive long periods of stress. Trees don't die from "old age," but older trees eventually die from stress placed on their ability to produce energy. Species that successfully reserve energy and live in less stressful environments may live for thousands of years.

Spychips Sees an RFID Conspiracy By Mark Baard Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69068,00.html 02:00 AM Oct. 05, 2005 PT A new book by privacy advocates makes the case that corporations and government agencies are in collusion to put tiny radio transmitters on nearly everything we buy. Companies say it's about providing thought leadership, not the Mark of the Beast. Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre hope to become the twin Erin Brockoviches of RFID, by revealing the threat posed by the radio tag replacements for barcode labels. They may get their wish, if readers believe the conclusions of the privacy advocates' new book, Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID. Albrecht and McIntyre make a staggering accusation in Spychips: that Philips, Procter and Gamble, Gillette, NCR and IBM are conspiring with each other and the federal government to follow individual consumers everywhere, using embedded radio tags planted in their clothing and belongings. The businesses, who form the center of the RFID industry, hope to wirelessly monitor the contents of consumers' refrigerators, medicine cabinets, basement workbenches -- even their garbage pails, the book claims. These companies have long insisted they are interested only in making their supply chains run more smoothly. The authors, who run the consumer privacy rights group Caspian, support their assertions with company documents, records of patents and patent applications, and statements made by RFID industry leaders at corporate events. They also cite magazine articles and news reports in which industry executives appear to be rubbing their hands over the power of RFID tags to track consumers. In one example, Gillette vice president of global business management Dick Cantwell in quoted in a 2001 Technology Review article as saying he looks forward to the company using (RFID) readers "to track consumer use of its products at home." Those who have been following the RFID privacy debate will find no shocking revelations of smoking guns in Spychips. But by assembling in one place a vast amount of documentation and history, and stretching it all together into a coherent narrative, the authors clearly hope to reach a broad group of ordinary consumers -- enough, perhaps, to mobilize a movement against the technology. Spychips is published by the Christian media publisher Thomas Nelson, and a forthcoming Christian edition of the book will contain an additional chapter linking RFID to the Mark of the Beast passage in the Bible's Book of Revelation, as well as "minor updates throughout the text to reflect Christian concerns," said Albrecht. The Spychips Threat: Why Christians Should Oppose RFID Technology and Surveillance is due out in January 2006. While the authors' religious motives might make the books easier for critics to dismiss, others note that successful consumer exposés are rarely written in an academic style by researchers with PhDs. "Unsafe at Any Speed and Silent Spring were not written by academics," said Ronald Shaiko, a senior fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth. "The Jungle (about Chicago's meat packing industry) was a novel," he said. All of those books caused U.S. laws to change, said Shaiko. As described by Albrecht and McIntyre, the RFID "conspiracy" amounts to more of a marriage of convenience between corporate and government interests. Marketers believe RFID tags on goods will help them figure out what makes a shopper pick an item off a shelf and put it back, while the government may want to use the tags to monitor individuals suspected of crimes or under the scrutiny of state social workers. RFID will help officials "ensure the well-being of the people they serve" through contact with social workers monitoring people in their homes, according to one patent application filed by Big Five consulting firm Accenture, described in Spychips. The authors also relate imagined scenarios in which stalkers and lechers armed with handheld, rogue RFID readers terrorize and humiliate their prey. Procter and Gamble spokeswoman Jeannie Tharrington declined to comment on Spychips, saying the company had not had the opportunity to review the book, which goes on sale Tuesday. But she wrote in an e-mail that the company "remains committed to protecting consumer privacy while moving forward with our plans to continue testing and learning about the cost and benefits" of RFID. An executive who handles RFID business at NCR division Teradata believes the Spychips' authors took much of their source material out of context in spinning their conspiracy theory. Companies in the RFID industry are in the business of imagining every conceivable application for the technology, he said. "That's part of creating thought leadership," said Richard Beaver, director for retail offer development at Teradata. "Many of the documents we produce or use are concept documents. You can make all kinds of assumptions about the future (based on them)." --- Editor's note: Spychips cites Wired News reports by, and a correspondence with, reporter Mark Baard.

Nope

October 4, 2005 A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom By ANDREW C. REVKIN What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money. Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation. But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea. In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan's newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation's priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness. Bhutan, the king said, needed to ensure that prosperity was shared across society and that it was balanced against preserving cultural traditions, protecting the environment and maintaining a responsive government. The king, now 49, has been instituting policies aimed at accomplishing these goals. Now Bhutan's example, while still a work in progress, is serving as a catalyst for far broader discussions of national well-being. Around the world, a growing number of economists, social scientists, corporate leaders and bureaucrats are trying to develop measurements that take into account not just the flow of money but also access to health care, free time with family, conservation of natural resources and other noneconomic factors. The goal, according to many involved in this effort, is in part to return to a richer definition of the word happiness, more like what the signers of the Declaration of Independence had in mind when they included "the pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right equal to liberty and life itself. The founding fathers, said John Ralston Saul, a Canadian political philosopher, defined happiness as a balance of individual and community interests. "The Enlightenment theory of happiness was an expression of public good or the public welfare, of the contentment of the people," Mr. Saul said. And, he added, this could not be further from "the 20th-century idea that you should smile because you're at Disneyland." Mr. Saul was one of about 400 people from more than a dozen countries who gathered recently to consider new ways to define and assess prosperity. The meeting, held at St. Francis Xavier University in northern Nova Scotia, was a mix of soft ideals and hard-nosed number crunching. Many participants insisted that the focus on commerce and consumption that dominated the 20th century need not be the norm in the 21st century. Among the attendees were three dozen representatives from Bhutan - teachers, monks, government officials and others - who came to promote what the Switzerland-size country has learned about building a fulfilled, contented society. While household incomes in Bhutan remain among the world's lowest, life expectancy increased by 19 years from 1984 to 1998, jumping to 66 years. The country, which is preparing to shift to a constitution and an elected government, requires that at least 60 percent of its lands remain forested, welcomes a limited stream of wealthy tourists and exports hydropower to India. "We have to think of human well-being in broader terms," said Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan's home minister and ex-prime minister. "Material well-being is only one component. That doesn't ensure that you're at peace with your environment and in harmony with each other." It is a concept grounded in Buddhist doctrine, and even a decade ago it might have been dismissed by most economists and international policy experts as naïve idealism. Indeed, America's brief flirtation with a similar concept, encapsulated in E. F. Schumacher's 1973 bestseller "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered," ended abruptly with the huge and continuing burst of consumer-driven economic growth that exploded first in industrialized countries and has been spreading in fast-growing developing countries like China. Yet many experts say it was this very explosion of affluence that eventually led social scientists to realize that economic growth is not always synonymous with progress. In the early stages of a climb out of poverty, for a household or a country, incomes and contentment grow in lockstep. But various studies show that beyond certain thresholds, roughly as annual per capita income passes $10,000 or $20,000, happiness does not keep up. And some countries, studies found, were happier than they should be. In the World Values Survey, a project under way since 1995, Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, found that Latin American countries, for example, registered far more subjective happiness than their economic status would suggest. In contrast, countries that had experienced communist rule were unhappier than noncommunist countries with similar household incomes - even long after communism had collapsed. "Some types of societies clearly do a much better job of enhancing their people's sense of happiness and well-being than other ones even apart from the somewhat obvious fact that it's better to be rich than to be poor," Dr. Inglehart said. Even more striking, beyond a certain threshold of wealth people appear to redefine happiness, studies suggest, focusing on their relative position in society instead of their material status. Nothing defines this shift better than a 1998 survey of 257 students, faculty and staff members at the Harvard School of Public Health. In the study, the researchers, Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, gave the subjects a choice of earning $50,000 a year in a world where the average salary was $25,000 or $100,000 a year where the average was $200,000. About 50 percent of the participants, the researchers found, chose the first option, preferring to be half as prosperous but richer than their neighbors. Such findings have contributed to the new effort to broaden the way countries and individuals gauge the quality of life - the subject of the Nova Scotia conference. But researchers have been hard pressed to develop measuring techniques that can capture this broader concept of well-being. One approach is to study how individuals perceive the daily flow of their lives, having them keep diary-like charts reflecting how various activities, from paying bills to playing softball, make them feel. A research team at Princeton is working with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to incorporate this kind of charting into its new "time use" survey, which began last year and is given to 4,000 Americans each month. "The idea is to start with life as we experience it and then try to understand what helps people feel fulfilled and create conditions that generate that," said Dr. Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist working on the survey. For example, he said, subjecting students to more testing in order to make them more competitive may equip them to succeed in the American quest for ever more income. But that benefit would have to be balanced against the problems that come with the increased stress imposed by additional testing. "We should not be hoping to construct a utopia," Professor Krueger said. "What we should be talking about is piecemeal movement in the direction of things that make for a better life." Another strategy is to track trends that can affect a community's well-being by mining existing statistics from censuses, surveys and government agencies that track health, the environment, the economy and other societal barometers. The resulting scores can be charted in parallel to see how various indicators either complement or impede each other. In March, Britain said it would begin developing such an "index of well-being," taking into account not only income but mental illness, civility, access to parks and crime rates. In June, British officials released their first effort along those lines, a summary of "sustainable development indicators" intended to be a snapshot of social and environmental indicators like crime, traffic, pollution and recycling levels. "What we do in one area of our lives can have an impact on many others, so joined-up thinking and action across central and local government is crucial," said Elliot Morley, Britain's environment minister. In Canada, Hans Messinger, the director of industry measures and analysis for Statistics Canada, has been working informally with about 20 other economists and social scientists to develop that country's first national index of well-being. Mr. Messinger is the person who, every month, takes the pulse of his country's economy, sifting streams of data about cash flow to generate the figure called gross domestic product. But for nearly a decade, he has been searching for a better way of measuring the quality of life. "A sound economy is not an end to itself, but should serve a purpose, to improve society," Mr. Messinger said. The new well-being index, Mr. Messinger said, will never replace the G.D.P. For one thing, economic activity, affected by weather, labor strikes and other factors, changes far more rapidly than other indicators of happiness. But understanding what fosters well-being, he said, can help policy makers decide how to shape legislation or regulations. Later this year, the Canadian group plans to release a first attempt at an index - an assessment of community health, living standards and people's division of time among work, family, voluntarism and other activities. Over the next several years, the team plans to integrate those findings with measurements of education, environmental quality, "community vitality" and the responsiveness of government. Similar initiatives are under way in Australia and New Zealand. Ronald Colman, a political scientist and the research director for Canada's well-being index, said one challenge was to decide how much weight to give different indicators. For example, Dr. Colman said, the amount of time devoted to volunteer activities in Canada has dropped more than 12 percent in the last decade. "That's a real decline in community well-being, but that loss counts for nothing in our current measure of progress," he said. But shifts in volunteer activity also cannot be easily assessed against cash-based activities, he said. "Money has nothing to do with why volunteers do what they do," Dr. Colman said. "So how, in a way that's transparent and methodologically decent, do you come up with composite numbers that are meaningful?" In the end, Canada's index could eventually take the form of a report card rather than a single G.D.P.-like number. In the United States there have been a few experiments, like the Princeton plan to add a happiness component to labor surveys. But the focus remains on economics. The Census Bureau, for instance, still concentrates on collecting information about people's financial circumstances and possessions, not their perceptions or feelings, said Kurt J. Bauman, a demographer there. But he added that there was growing interest in moving away from simply tracking indicators of poverty, for example, to looking more comprehensively at social conditions. "Measuring whether poverty is going up or down is different than measuring changes in the ability of a family to feed itself," he said. "There definitely is a growing perception out there that if you focus too narrowly, you're missing a lot of the picture." That shift was evident at the conference on Bhutan, organized by Dr. Colman, who is from Nova Scotia. Participants focused on an array of approaches to the happiness puzzle, from practical to radical. John de Graaf, a Seattle filmmaker and campaigner trying to cut the amount of time people devote to work, wore a T-shirt that said, "Medieval peasants worked less than you do." In an open discussion, Marc van Bogaert from Belgium described his path to happiness: "I want to live in a world without money." Al Chaddock, a painter from Nova Scotia, immediately offered a suggestion: "Become an artist." Other attendees insisted that old-fashioned capitalism could persist even with a shift to goals broader than just making money. Ray C. Anderson, the founder of Interface Inc., an Atlanta-based carpet company with nearly $1 billion in annual sales, described his company's 11-year-old program to cut pollution and switch to renewable materials. Mr. Anderson said he was "a radical industrialist, but as competitive as anyone you know and as profit-minded." Some experts who attended the weeklong conference questioned whether national well-being could really be defined. Just the act of trying to quantify happiness could threaten it, said Frank Bracho, a Venezuelan economist and former ambassador to India. After all, he said, "The most important things in life are not prone to measurement - like love." But Mr. Messinger argued that the weaknesses of the established model, dominated by economics, demanded the effort. Other economists pointed out that happiness itself can be illusory. "Even in a very miserable condition you can be very happy if you are grateful for small mercies," said Siddiqur Osmani, a professor of applied economics from the University of Ulster in Ireland. "If someone is starving and hungry and given two scraps of food a day, he can be very happy." Bhutanese officials at the meeting described a variety of initiatives aimed at creating the conditions that are most likely to improve the quality of life in the most equitable way. Bhutan, which had no public education system in 1960, now has schools at all levels around the country and rotates teachers from urban to rural regions to be sure there is equal access to the best teachers, officials said. Another goal, they said, is to sustain traditions while advancing. People entering hospitals with nonacute health problems can choose Western or traditional medicine. The more that various effects of a policy are considered, and not simply the economic return, the more likely a country is to achieve a good balance, said Sangay Wangchuk, the head of Bhutan's national parks agency, citing agricultural policies as an example. Bhutan's effort, in part, is aimed at avoiding the pattern seen in the study at Harvard, in which relative wealth becomes more important than the quality of life. "The goal of life should not be limited to production, consumption, more production and more consumption," said Thakur S. Powdyel, a senior official in the Bhutanese Ministry of Education. "There is no necessary relationship between the level of possession and the level of well-being." Mr. Saul, the Canadian political philosopher, said that Bhutan's shift in language from "product" to "happiness" was a profound move in and of itself. Mechanisms for achieving and tracking happiness can be devised, he said, but only if the goal is articulated clearly from the start. "It's ideas which determine the directions in which civilizations go," Mr. Saul said. "If you don't get your ideas right, it doesn't matter what policies you try to put in place." Still, Bhutan's model may not work for larger countries. And even in Bhutan, not everyone is happy. Members of the country's delegation admitted their experiment was very much a work in progress, and they acknowledged that poverty and alcoholism remained serious problems. The pressures of modernization are also increasing. Bhutan linked itself to the global cultural pipelines of television and the Internet in 1999, and there have been increasing reports in its nascent media of violence and disaffection, particularly among young people. Some attendees, while welcoming Bhutan's goal, gently criticized the Bhutanese officials for dealing with a Nepali-speaking minority mainly by driving tens of thousands of them out of the country in recent decades, saying that was not a way to foster happiness. "Bhutan is not a pure Shangri-La, so idyllic and away from all those flaws and foibles," conceded Karma Pedey, a Bhutanese educator dressed in a short dragon-covered jacket and a floor-length rainbow-striped traditional skirt. But, looking around a packed auditorium, she added: "At same time, I'm very, very happy we have made a global impact."

Happy belated Birthday. I had been outta town for a while and off the internet (I had withdrawl!) Hope it was a day full of fun and good cake!

When I eventually get a DVD burner i could just TiVO the stuff and get it to people that way.....

24-megabit broadband launched at £24 a month Hilary Osborne Monday September 26, 2005 A new broadband service offering a connection up to 24 times faster than other providers at less than double the price began a national rollout today. For £24 a month customers of broadband provider Be are being offered a download speed of up to 24 megabits a second, three times that available from closest rivals UK Online, Bulldog and Homechoice and 12 times that on offer from BT and Wannadoo. The bandwidth offered by the new service will be enough to allow consumers to stream two high definition TV channels through their computer simultaneously, while they surf their internet or make voice calls. The service will also allow customers to upload information onto the internet at a speed of up to 1.3 megabits a second - five times quicker than any other service on the market. "This radically advanced capability will change the way people use their computers and opens up a world of opportunities as exciting as the advent of broadband itself," said Dana Pressman, managing director of Be. The company has been trialling its service since the beginning of September and it is now available across much of London. To subscribe customers must have a BT phone line and pay a connection fee of £24. Paul Smyth, a spokesman for Be, said the national rollout would begin in major cities and would take up to a year to complete. Consumers can find out if the service is available on their line on the website www.bethere.co.uk. Mr Smyth said that while standard broadband connections allowed people to download music from services like iTunes at a rate of one track in four minutes, the Be connection would enable them to download seven albums in the same time. He added that customers would be provided with a "Be Box", a wireless router including two phone ports, and that the company planned to later offer voice over internet protocol (VoIP) which would allow people to make calls using their computers. "Be is relatively pioneering when you consider people are still announcing one meg unlimited broadband and we are making available up to 24meg connections at only just over twice the price," he said. "What we're trying to be competitive on is not necessarily the price, though, but the technology." Blair Wadman, broadband product manager at comparison website uSwitch, said the deal was competitive. "It's £10 a month more expensive than the average broadband service but considering what you're getting it's a good price," he said. "If you're just surfing the internet and sending emails though you will be fine with a £15 a month broadband connection."

Too funny!

Aye! It may have happened on accident but man how cool would that be. Sure it would suck to die in game this way but man oh man talk about needing to guard your every action because you have no idea what you could be unleashing....

I agree. When Adama said I am coming to get my men and then repeated himself with the scene cutting out to vipers advancing on one another I was like oh damn here we go! My prediction.....The first officer on the Admiral's ship is gonna turn on her when she tells her pilots to go weapons free. That or the recon mission on the cylons is gonna go really wrong and they are all going to have to unite to save the fleet. I kinda hope they let the first officer kill the Admiral though.....