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Government

Submission + - UK govt fires drugs adviser for telling truth 2

David Gerard writes: "Professor David Nutt of Imperial College was chairman of the British government's advisory committee on the misuse of drugs — until today. On Wednesday night, he gave a speech ahead of a paper noting that on the basis of harm, alcohol was far more dangerous than ecstasy or cannabis. Today, Home Secretary Alan Johnson has fired Professor Nutt, saying that "It is important that the government's messages on drugs are clear and as an advisor you do nothing to undermine them." Such as inconvenient matters of reality-based thinking, apparently. He did this just in time for the six o'clock news, and the press is up in arms. Channel 4 journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy notes with amazement that "nobody will come on to defend Alan Johnson. They all prefer to issue statements that can't be questioned." It's already being tagged the War on Science."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - Rich Germans Demand Higher Taxes (bbc.co.uk)

spun writes: "A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes. talk about civic minded, here in America the rich expect to not pay any taxes, get huge bonuses, and get bailed out if they fail. As Adam Smith wrote in "Wealth of Nations" regarding taxes, "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.""

Comment Re:worst shortcomings are usually crappy stories (Score 1) 241

The system used in the roguelike Linley's Dungeon Crawl (and its currently-maintained fork, Stone Soup) mostly takes care of that: when you get XP, you also get an equal number skill points; whenever an action practices a skill, some number of points from that skill pool are transferred into the skill, and eventually the skill levels up. If the pool is empty, you don't gain skill. (Also, in the skill screen, skills can be set to not be actively practiced, which greatly reduces the skill points consumed by using them; this is for things like if you're using a given type of weapon but don't plan on specializing in it.)

In practice, there's still some incidence of "victory dancing" --- after a big kill, standing around repeatedly casting some spell to make sure that the points go into some particular magic skill(s) --- but not much, and because the points would have gone into something useful anyway, it's more a question of whether the player actually wants to do that kind of powergaming.

Comment Re:It's Comcastic (Score 1) 281

inet6 addr: fe80::***:****:****:****/64 Scope:Link

No need to redact that. It's a link-local, non-routable address []

The lower 64 bits almost certainly contain the interface's MAC address; while it's not as bad as a globally reachable network address, some people still might not want to post it openly on /.

Comment Re:2^13? (Score 2, Insightful) 175

The idea is that programs are written in a heavily restricted subset of x86 that can be proven safe, where "safe" here basically boils down to not being able to make system calls or otherwise interact with the world without going through the sandbox library. The program might still be compromised by a third party if it's badly written, but then the attacker won't be able to escape the sandbox either.

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