Territories of Naught

Cool Music Video

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:35:24 GMT

This video is pretty cool. It's called "A Glorious Dawn" and there's a section where Stephen Hawking cuts in.

Not much time

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:55:43 GMT

I haven't had much time to read or write Livejournal, I'm a lot busier at work these days and a lot busier at home.

I have been following the Iranian protests, and things are continuing to look worse and worse for the reform people, I've heard a variety of things in the last little while that all point to the Iranian government slowly settling into their new role as religious tyrants.

Bad for the reformers:
The Iranian government has begun torturing some of the detainees into making false confessions which are being aired on National Television to "prove" that Britain and America orchestrated "fake" protests in Iran. Of course, this is nothing new, Iran has been using this tactic for many years to discredit anyone and anything they disagree with.

The most damning for the government was the start today of calls for the leaders of the reform movement to be put to death today because they are "fighting against God". That's clearly a bad sign for everyone. If they start following through on that action, it seems to me that one of two things must happen, either a coup or a civil war.

Good for the reformers:
The Iranian stock market has been mostly stable but only, it appears because the Iranian government has been spending a lot of money to keep it stable. As the crisis in Iran continues, the government has to spend more and more money to prop the market up. They can't do so indefinitely.
http://www.aworldwithoutspin.com/?p=647

More than half of the Iranian MPs failed to show up for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory celebration.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8118139.stm

My musings:
Religion and government are a poor mix. I'm not sure all religions are a bad match, but I am sure that at least any religion with monotheistic or absolute truths is. Once religion and government are intermingled, it becomes very easy for the government to believe that is the only legitimate representative of the religion, and that to question the government is to question the religion. And if it's easy, it will inevitably happen. The worst is that belief in absolute correctness means that the government can never back down once it has taken this position. To do so would be fail God and that can never be tolerated. It's an inevitable march towards totalitarian brutality from that point onward.

Moving

Tue, 19 May 2009 03:34:50 GMT

Moving can be a humbling experience, to see all the artifacts of your life bundled up into boxes and then put into temporary storage, is little like taking apart your life one piece at a time. Almost everything we own is going into storage until our new house is ready for us to move in. It all fits into two 10x10 storage units.

Of course our lives are more than just things, but it's still humbling.

Thought for the day

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:25:02 GMT

The difference between sales and marketing:

Sales people only lie when their lips are moving.

The Daily Show

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 04:14:48 GMT

Our governmental crisis made it on the Daily Show! Um... yay?

Canadian News

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 18:25:26 GMT

Harper intends to cut funding to political parties in Canada and/or bring down the Canadian government on Monday. Cynically, this is a good time for him to force an election, with the liberals just beginning the leadership selection process, they're in an even weaker position than the last time around. If that's not enough, the budget also refuses to engage in any "stimulus" activity to keep our economy running. I don't know whether that's absolutely vital to the country or not, but it looks like it was skipped deliberately to make sure that the budget wouldn't pass.

There's some hope, though. The Liberals, NDP and Bloc are in talks to form a coalition government to replace the conservatives on Monday after the confidence vote fails. If they can agree on an interim government, then they only need to show the Governor General that they have "the confidence of parliament" (a majority of votes) to replace the current Conservative minority.

That will be kind of weird, though, because that would, in theory, make Dion Prime Minister after he declared he was stepping down as the leader of his party. A situation which, as far as I am aware, is unprecedented. Additionally, it marks the second time this year that Harper will have intentionally brought down the government, after passing a law to prevent this type of cynical election timing. So far he hasn't broken the letter of the law, which shows that the law is a lame duck and should probably never have been passed in the first place.

Either way, I can only hope this opens some peoples eyes to Harper's utter failure as a leader and a statesman.

Fanaticism runs Rampant

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 18:15:02 GMT

There have been a pair of articles in the news recently that have caught my attention:

1) In India there has been a series of coordinated attacks on locations foreigners are likely to be and a particular attempt to single out American and British nationals during the attacks. The attacks have hit at least six different locations in Mumbai and the gunmen have taken hostages. Frankly, I don't understand the motivation for the attacks, but there are some interesting stories coming out. There's one about some South African bodyguards who rescued 120 hostages from one of the hotels (they even carried one elderly woman down 25 flights of stairs to safety).

2) In Britain some Muslim prisoners are forcing other prisoners to convert to Islam or face punishment ranging from beatings to torture.

I don't know what to say, I know most Muslims are probably nice civilized people, but these extremists are not only attacking groups they think are enemies of Islam, they're creating people who hate Muslims. They're isolating Muslims from other people and they're impoverishing Islamic communities. True when they're attacking foreigners it's less worse than when they're carrying out doctrinal genocide against other Muslims, but really, it has to stop and it has to be other Muslims who put an end to these hypocritical fanatics.

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:34:08 GMT

Stardock (Wikipedia) is quickly becoming my favourite game company. They used to make games for OS/2, but moved to windows in 98 when OS/2 ended up going nowhere. Recently they've been in the news for their Gamer Bill of Rights which they announced at PAX.

As if that wasn't enough, they've tried to revive 3 of my all-time favorite computer game series:
Master of Magic
Master of Orion
StarControl

Unfortunately, Atari owns the rights to those franchises and isn't interested in developing anything for them or letting anyone else develop anything for them.

It also doesn't hurt that Stardock made "Galactic Civilizations" which is a pretty awesome 4X game in it's own right. That reminds me that I need to get the latest expansion for GalCiv 2.

The key with Stardock is that these guys seem to get it. They seem to understand that it's never in your long term interests to piss off your customers. It's a lesson EA, for example, should learn. The mediocre reviews of Spore weren't enough to stop me from buying it, but the mediocre reviews plus draconian DRM was frankly made Spore not good enough for my money.

Movie Preview

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:19:10 GMT

I managed to get free passes to "Zack and Miri" for last night. It's a View Askew production so there was a lot of profanity and scatological humor. But over all the movie was one half hysterically funny and one half awkward bickering. Overall, a good movie. If you enjoy Kevin Smith's movies, you'll like it, if you don't you probably won't.

Operations "Snow White" and "Freakout"

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:36:51 GMT

An interesting bit of Scientology history I stumbled across today:

Operation: Snow White

In the 1970s, Scientologists deliberately infiltrated and destroyed negative documents about their church held be government and international agencies. In Canada, they were found guilty of infiltrating the OPP, the RCMP and the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

Operation: Freakout

As a result of the investigations launched into Operation: Snow White, Operation: Freakout was discovered. It was a concerted attempt by Scientologists to frame their critics for serious crimes. For instance an author, Paulette Cooper, who had written a book critical of Scientology was consistently harassed for years by the Church culminating in a church member stealing Paulette Cooper's stationary and sending the Church fake bomb threats written on the paper. Paulette Cooper was actually indited on the charges and arraigned by a grand jury. However, it was the investigators who were looking into Operation: Snow White who found documents indicating that the Church had deliberately set her up. They'd neglected to destroy the status reports that the underlings had faithfully submitted to their leaders.

Additional methods of framing Paulette Cooper (who is Jewish) included impersonating her and delivering death threat to the embassies of various arab nations, and to the U.S. President.

So I guess, that's my bizarre history for the week.

Schaudenfreude... again.

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:23:36 GMT

After Jack Thompson's storming out the court room in Florida during his disbarment hearing, the judge has recommended against disbarring Jack for 10 years. Apparently, 10 years are not enough. She has ruled in favor of a lifetime ban plus an award of nearly $50,000 to the Florida bar to cover their legal fees.

Top 100 Books? Ha.

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:01:54 GMT

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ, or not, as you see fit.
(Don't forget to remove the comments in brackets)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Jack Thompson and the Enhanced Disbarment

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:23:27 GMT

Apparently, the Florida Bar is so pissed off at everyone favourite Legal Reprobate that they're not only disbarring him, they're disbarring him with prejudice. 10 years of prejudice before he can even think of applying to be a lawyer in Florida again. Naturally, Wacky Jacky wasn't pleased and walked out of his own disbarment trial screaming "You're not the boss of me!". According to him the judge is incompetent because she can't see what an awesome lawyer he is, the Florida Bar are fascists for holding him down, and everyone who disagrees with him in any way is also a Nazi.

...

Ok, some parts of that report may be slightly exaggerated, but the essence is true. Jack Thompson walked out of the disbarment hearing when the Bar asked for the additional ten year "timeout" before he can reapply for certification, he did threaten the judge and the bar, and they didn't file a recommendation that he be disbarred after he walked out.
http://snagwiremedia.com/consolepatrol/2008/06/jack-thompson-walks-out-on-hea.html

Ah. Schaudenfreude.

Microsoft's War

Fri, 30 May 2008 14:49:10 GMT

The linked PDF below is a series of Microsoft's own memos and training documentation that outlines Microsoft's basic approach to Public Relations. The short summary is: This is War. Do anything, say anything to bring victory to Microsoft. That is why you can never trust anything that Microsoft says until it has been verified by a reliable external source. Even then, you should check to see if Microsoft is paying them off.

Microsoft Evangelism

Stunningly Stupid

Wed, 28 May 2008 13:40:28 GMT

It's been a while since I've felt compelled to comment on something like this. It appears that TJX the company that owns TJ Maxx has decided that it doesn't really need to be that protective of it's customers credit card numbers. You may (or may not) remember that TJX is somewhat famous for having been the victim of the biggest theft of credit card data so far. 94 million credit card numbers were stolen from their databases because everyone's password was automatically set to the be the same as their username. I know, I know, that so tricky that crackers should never have been able to figure it out. But now they've hatched a new scheme. The crackers can't crack what isn't there. Now all of TJX's employees have blank passwords! This will surely keep their customer's credit card numbers safe and secure.

So rather than implement actual security policies, they've decided to hire a team to try to whitewash their image, after all. It's not their fault that their executives are careless, lazy and stupid. It's the fault of the reporters and insiders who have exposed their carelessness, lazyness and stupidity. Get rid of the reporters and insiders and everything will be hunky-dory again!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/23/tjx_fires_whistleblower/

DoNotCall Canada

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:56:11 GMT

Micheal Geist, a Canadian Law Professor interested in Ecommerce Law, Privacy and Digital issues, has created a site to help Canadians opt out of telemarketing calls.

Complete 9/11 Timeline?

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:19:49 GMT

This page bills itself as the Complete 911 Timeline, it starts with rise of Saudi Arabia due to the formation of OPEC in the 70s and works its way through many of the background events that prompted the rise of Islamic Terrorism. I have no idea whether anything (let alone everything) on the page is true. But it's certainly interesting.

Monitoring the Network

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:17:14 GMT

So I've been evaluating network monitoring software for the last little while.

We started by installing the SolarWinds Orion demo and seeing how it works. It's pretty slick, auto-detected our network and I've got it reporting on CPU and Memory usage on most of our servers. However, it's a bit on the expensive side, especially when you throw in the fact that they've taken some otherwise basic snmp functionality and moved it into $1000-$2000 (per server) add ons.

So I'm looking at a few of the altneratives to try and make sure that we really want to use Solarwinds. So far the contenders are:

SolarWinds Orion	Review
ManageEngine
Nagios
Zenoss	Review
Hyperic HQ	Review
Groundwork	Review
OpenNMS

Right off the bat, after checking out the demos on their web sites, I decided to drop ManageEngine from the running, I found the displays confusing and unhelpful when compared to the other products. With so many to choose from, it's an easy elimination to make.

Now out of these products, Solarwinds and ManageEngine are closed source projects. The others are all openSource or hybrids (meaning there's an open source version, and an enterprise version with additional features).

The 5 Open Source contenders have download metrics available from SourceForge and according to this blog entry, Zenoss and Nagios are the most popular downloads. The same guy also did a Google Trends analysis.

[Update: 2208/01/30 4:46 PM]

The strongest looking candidates are Hyperic HQ and Zenoss. I never added mrtg to the list because it's old technology that is widely reported to be out classed by the newer offerings. Also, I'm eliminated Groundwork for similar reasons, according to Network World the basic version lacks features that are in the free versions of Hyperic HQ and Zenoss (like automated discovery of network switches?). I'm skeptical of Nagios, especially since GroundWork appears to be a fork of it, but version 3.0 of Nagios is almost ready for release, so I'm not eliminating it immediately.

Based on the evidence so far, we're going to try out a Zenoss install. That's something we decided yesterday and I've spent most of the day installing Centos 5 on a new server and bolting the hatches down. I've just finished downloading the Zenoss installer and I'm running it now. Unfortunately, I couldn't run the Zenoss installer on our regular network monitoring machine because it wanted to replace some of the MySQL libaries under Centos 4. If Cacti weren't currently using them, that wouldn't have been a problem. One thing I liked about both Zenoss and Hyperic is that they both allow you to skip the registration forms, and go straight to the download page. I find those forms tedious especially when trying out new software. I will be adding more stuff as I find it.

xkcd on Evidence For and Against Supernatural Powers

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:41:10 GMT

The Data So Far

That really is an excellent chart.

Politics as their supposed to be

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:49:22 GMT

From a discussion on video game censorship on Slashdot my thoughts on the politics:

Conservatives are people who don't want things to change, or if they must, want gradual changes over time. They are strong believers in the traditional way of doing things.

Liberals are people who want to use the government to guarantee personal freedoms and equality of opportunity. They are generally attempting to work for equality and personal liberty.

Libertarians are against any government interference (for good or bad) in the lives of the people, excepting, of course laws against fraud and theft. To a libertarian, stupid people who starve death have earned their fate, the government has no right to interefere in what is, by thier definition, justice.

Statists believe that the government has not only a right, but a duty to interfere in the lives of the governed. They want the government to stop bad people from doing things that are bad and reward good people for doing things that are good.

Now, the groups pushing for censorship are mostly like to be statists, but most likely to call themselves conservative. That's even partly true, the U.S. government has a long history of censoring objectionable material.

This often gets people confused about who wants censorship, because the censors call themselves conservative, liberals tend to think it's conservative groups calling for the censorship. Conservatives think that it's liberals who call for censorship because it's obviously not conservatives.

In general however, liberals are not for censorship because it is too often used to promote injustice and inequality, and thus lessen freedom. Hate speech is a special case because it is seen as a way of decreasing the liberty and prosperty of the targetted people and thus allowing hate speech is not in line with liberal ideology and goals.

So the real problem is that politics are never as simple as we wished they were.

The Credit Game

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:35:01 GMT

I recently watched "Maxed Out", an interesting documentary on credit in the U.S. It certainly shows how the "credit system" in the U.S. is completely corrupted and inherently unstable. U.S. Banks are invested heavily in bad debt. I'm not just talking about sub-prime mortgages either, though that is a part of the problem. They're addicted to getting other people addicted to credit.

These corporations are seeking that choice segment of the population who can afford to pay back some of their debt but not all of it, mostly because they can charge interest and "failure-to-pay" fees on the part that doesn't get paid back. It's really all about "money for free". Once these people are trapped in a debt cycle they end up only making the minimum monthly payment on their debt, which virtually guarantees that they'll never get out from under the debt.

The real eye-opening part of the documentary was when they went into the lengths that these companies go to to trap people. There were blatant examples of Bank using lies, deception and trickery to attract people who had no hope of ever paying back their loans. On prominent example was an unemployed woman and her mentally retarded son (44 years old). She explained how her son was tricked into giving up a government subsidized mortgage for a more expensive private mortgage. The the whole tim the agent was telling him that it was a good thing and he'd save money on new mortgage which was, of course, utterly false. The loan agent who "helped him" had to show him how to spell his own name and then let him copy it out onto the contract in big block letters (I suspect the loan was in his name in order to qualify for the subsidy, because otherwise that doesn't make a lot of sense). Apparently this in entirely legal in the U.S. and now the mentally retarded son will lose his house because he can't afford the unsubsized mortgage.

Interestingly enough, one of the reasons that Banks don't mind high risk loans is because they can sell the debt to debt collection agencies. I don't think I understood until I saw this movie that those creditor companies that harass people with bad debt do so because all the money they recover belongs to them now. They bought the person's debts from a creditor. This debt selling business helps to make high-risk creditors more attractive, because you can soak them for as much interest as you can and when you can't make them pay anymore, then you still get back some of the principle you loaned them by selling it to a collection agency.

These collection agencies have "strategies" that they use to get people to repay, most often threatening the debtors with public humiliation if they fail to make some sort of payment on the debt that's being collected. In a chilling bit of the documentary they show a self-proclaimed "kinder, gentler" collection agency where they keep a scoreboard for the collectors to encourage them to excel and compare the people they're collecting from to prisoners who are being forced to walk the plank.

It's an interesting perspective on some of what is going wrong in today's society. I'm not sure how you'd fix the problem though. The argument over sub-prime (sub-prime refers to the quality of the borrower) lending is whether it's a good thing to extend credit to people who have bad credit histories. Some people argue they'd be worse of it if they'd couldn't borrow with bad credit, and some people argue that they're only loaned money because they're expected to fail and rack up huge interest charges before their collateral is seized.

It's a rough world out there, but one thing's for sure to me, lieing to your customers should be considered fraud and should be a criminal offence.

D&d 4th Edition

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 19:26:55 GMT

I was reading up a bit on the changes in the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons as noted on En World.

And here's some of the more interesting bits:

New Class Lists
3rd Ed Classes: Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger, Paladin, Monk, Druid, Cleric, Wizard, Sorceror, Bard, Rogue.
4th Ed Classes: Fighter, Paladin, Cleric, Warlord, Wizard, Ranger, Rogue, Warlock.

It makes me wonder if they're trying to be more like World of Warcraft:

World of Warcraft: Warrior, Paladin, Priest, Shaman, Mage, Hunter, Rogue, Warlock, Druid.

However, overall, I think this is a good thing. I never felt the Barbarian and Monk classes fit well into the standard D&D settings, plus there's the Barbarian mortality problem (Once you reach level 5, barbarian don't get knocked unconscious they skip straight to dead). Even the druid, bard and sorceror classes seem superfluous, hell they could easily drop the ranger class too without doing any harm to the games most basic aspect: dunegon crawls.

Class groups are back

In 3rd Edition, spouting some mumbo-jumbo about class groups being "too confusing" in 2nd Edition, WotC dropped class groups (previously known as Warriors, Rogues, Priests and Wizards) to go with an uncategorized system. Now, they're saying that was a mistake because people weren't building well rounded groups any more. I expect this was particular problematic with the new miniature based rules for combat. Instead of the old standby groups, they made new role based groups that seem very MMO-esque:
Defenders (Tanks), Leaders (Healers), Controllers (Crowd Control), and Strikers (DPS).

The groups are still fairly analogous to the original groups, but with different names. There's some talk by Blizzard about making the Cleric more fun to play by removing most of the in-combat healing duties from the class. But I'm skeptical about that, healer/tank roles optimize the utility of healing (By reducing the amount of incoming damage you make each hit point worth more, which dramatically increases the value of healing).
- Defender: fighter & paladin classes
- Leader: cleric & warlord classes
- Controller: wizard class
- Striker: rogue, ranger & warlock classes?
It seems odd that there are 3 strikers, but only 1 controller class in the player's handbook.
Now with power sources!

This seems like a page taken from a super heroes game, but each character class will have a "power source". I'm not sure how that works in practice, but the PHB even figures the power sources on the front cover (Arcane, Divine and Martial) for the base PHB.

Of course, this first thing I noticed is that the rogue and ranger are probably both martial striker classes. Nothing else makes sense, without a making either class too radically different from previous interpretations. I would have though the ranger would have been best suited as a nature striker, and would logically appear in the same book as the druid class.

I'm pretty sure WotC received massive complaints last year when it was leaked that rangers wouldn't be in 4th Edition and that explains why they are there despite there be no other logical reason for them.
Good Bye Memorization (and Organization)!

There have been some radical changes to one of the most iconic dnd classes: the Wizard. The old magical system of dnd had wizards memorizing a certain number of spells per day and then using them up during the course of the adventure, 1 cast per spell memorized. That's no longer true. Now instead all characters (wizards included) have abilities that are categorized as "at will", "per encounter" and "per day". For wizards it sounds like they get to choose a certain number of spells for "at will" slots, a certain number for "per encounter" and a few for "per day". There may be limitations on what spells can be loaded into which slots as well.

As a side note, they're limiting the wizard spell list. They're getting rid of schools (a dumb idea, in my humble opinion, categorization is good even for those who don't use the categories). This means even more space in 4th edition books will be wasted with endless spell lists to show who can cast what spells. Anyway, wizards are loosing access to the powerful illusion, necromancy and enchantment spells to make sure there's some uniqueness to the illusionist, necromancer and enchanter specialty classes when WotC gets around to creating them. Frankly, I don't like it. I was a big fan of the generalist mage classes who sacrified an extra spell per level a day for well rounded spell access. The new "wizards" are pretty much evokers who will be throwing frostbolts, fireballs and arcane missiles around. Clearly this is an entirely new idea from WotC and has noting at all do with WoW.

Many "noncombat" spells are no longer castable during combat and are now "rituals". Teleporation being a specific example given.

Warlocks are going to be similar to Wizards except they signed a deal with some force of (probably) evil to master curses and demons. I've never even heard of anything remotely similar. Warlocks will have a telekinesis ability which allows them to push small foes around the battlefield, and will also be able to dimension door (blink) around the battlefield. But the real question is: will they be able to blink uphill? Anyway, finally warlocks have an escape mechanism! Err wait, wrong game? Possibly they will also summon imps named Noknar. We shall see.

Races: I welcome our new half-dragon overlords
Gnomes and Half-Orcs are out of the PHB. Instead we get two different flavours of elves. Elves who are wild woodland guys and Eladrin who are magically delicious. Also all power gamers and munchkins will be playing the new Dragonborn race of humanoid dragons. They are a new race which will probably not appear in 5th edition, due to the inevital backlash against the new abused "cool thing". Halflings are also continuing along their inevitable path to kenderization. Of course it might not be as bad as it seems, because people will also want to jump on the Tiefling and Drow bandwagons too. Tieflings (demonic humans) will be a core PHB race, while drow will be a core Forgotten Realms race.

Overall, WotC says they want racial heritage to play a bigger part in the game, so they're getting rid of racial drawbacks (no more -2 adjustments to stat scores as an example) and adding newer more powerful racial feats. For example dwarves will be able to take a feat that gives them a "third wind" (a second "second wind", which is expected to be a 50% self-heal ability). Also apparently classes will have racial abilities built right into them. That seems to be a potential problem down the road, because for each race they will also need to amend all class descriptions. But then that might be good for WotC, because they plan to sell everyone "DnD Insider" subscriptions, so that they can download the new updated class descriptions anytime they introduce a new class.

Multi-class? And risk my spells?

Cataclysms abound!

Overall, I'm tentatively optimistic that I'll like 4th Edition better than 3rd Edition, however, there's lots in here that looks somewhat silly and fadish to this grognard.

Newsvertainment

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:08:59 GMT

I found this article on the news business to be interesting. It's first time I've really seen someone say first hand that "business" is definitely trumping "news" in TV news. He mentions how at least one story was cancelled because it didn't fit the "theme" of the station's news coverage. Specifically the segment was cut because it looked at how the bombing of Iraq was affecting the civilians and reporters in Bagdad and it was deemed to be not pro-war enough to air during run up to the invasion of Iraq.

Another choice bit is where he mentions that stories were not approved to air if they didn't tie nicely into the shows that were to air immediately after the news. Friday night? Has to be a crime story so that viewers are primed for Law & Order...

It's actually pretty sickening reading about how "synergy" with fictitious TV shows lead to the self censorship of the news.

[Edit] And another link on the ills of news reporting.

Wiki-Album Meme

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:36:01 GMT

From normanrafferty the Wiki-Album Meme:
1. Go to Wikipedia, click random article. This is your band name.
2. Click random article again. This is your album name.
3. Click random article 15 more times. These are the tracks on your album.
4. (Optional) Spend far too much time making an image of your album...
5. (Optional) Taunt frogjimmy into making his own wiki-album.

Why Religion and Science Often Don't Mix

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:12:58 GMT

Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame—the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.

Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or "butterfly-collecting" activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked.

Religious fundamentalism is always bad news for science.

From the article Science and the Islamic World by Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy.