If you don't know about it already, go read up on the Monty Haul problem. Bear in mind that computer simulation proves Marilyn Vos Savant right.

Now, then, why exactly is she wrong?

A natural inclidng is to jump up and say "she's got to be wrong; there's no way that can be right." A scientific inkling is to say "Planesdragon, you've gone off on a silly Christian rant again. Why must you prove how stupid you are?"

The answer, of course, comes in a closer examination of the problem.

If you choose to always switch, you will win 2/3 of the time.

If you choose to not switch, you will win 1/3 of the time.

But, the desicion to switch does not come until Monty asks his final "will you switch" question. Either you've got the car or you've got the goat--a new possibility that has exactly two outcomes.

I'm just a lowly college drop-out, but I believe that this is an example of "the law of independent trials."

It's an undeniable fact that the President of the United States is at once the most powerful single man in the world and the one with the most ammount of people who wish him dead. Well, maybe we can argue that second part, but slip in "American" and we're back to undeniable.

Becase of this threat and power, the President lives in a more or less constant state of security. No one comes near him without being searched, or being restrained by a bodyguard. No one can easily stand and take a picture of him, because secuirty gets in the way.

A side effect of this, of course, is that the President can fairly easily only see and hear the people he wants to see and hear. He doesn't sit at home wondering "Gee, I've got an hour, let's flip through the channels." He doesn't walk down the street and wait in a crowd, or go to a bar and chat it up with the common man.

Especialy this President, whose political mastermind is infamously censored who could and could not come to his "town hall" style political rallys.

Doing my own hour of mindless searching, I came across an article on Snoops, in which a reporter told the President he was doing a bad job and the President replied "Who cares what you think?"

Now, this exchange is what it is--a reporter being unusually honest and a President returning the favor--and I have no problem at all with that. But what irks me is Snoopes interpretation of the event. To wit:

Our opinion? There are plenty of traditional outlets for expressing dissatisfaction with the policies and actions of elected representatives, but walking up to the President at a public function and telling him he's doing a lousy job isn't one of them. Such behavior demonstrates a lack of respect for the office of President of the United States, an honor that should be maintained whether or not one respects the man who currently holds the office -- just as the well-mannered citizen doesn't express his disagreement with the political views of a American-flag-carrying protester by spitting on the flag he bears, because that act displays a contempt for everything Old Glory symbolizes, not merely for the person carrying it. The President isn't above criticism, but freedom of speech isn't an excuse for ignoring the ordinary civilities of choosing an appropriate time, place, and manner for the expression of that criticism.

Because the President is such a powerful figure, who weilds more power today than George Washington ever did, it's critically important that the people who DO see him are under no restraint to say whatever they please. I wouldn't even mind if the President replied in kind--it wouldn't make for good TV, but it would be a refreshing change of pase from the scripted talking point Presidency we've had since, oh, Kennedy beat Nixon.

If you've been in the same forum as me just about anywhere but /., you've probably heard me shill for Mindcraft -- my own take on how Psionics should have been. Well, this week I finally got the good news that the product is done, on (electronic) shelves, and ready to buy. It's avalible for $7 at RPGNow, DriveThruRPG (no DRM), and, if you're in Europe, 5.79EUR at Arima.

Since the subset of "friends circle" folk and d20 gamers is so small, I'll link to my discussion over at the dnd3e Livejournal. (Yes, that is my ugly mug on the icon there.)

If you strike, strike truly. A false swing only encourages your demise

This is for everyone on my "fans" list who isn't where they want to be in their lives at the moment.

For everyone who thinks that life sucks.

For everyone who doesn't believe that there is some benevolent, all-mighty thing out there watching them and handing them a script.

For everyone who is growing, and scared of what the world around them is becoming or what they are growing into or growing out of.

The lives that we lead are not to be spent in any particular way. Our lives are not destined to be spent in prasie of a dead man, in study of arcane secrets, in droll labor to enrich another, or even in the creation of a legacy of industry or family.

Our lives are to be spent living. We were all created to be, first and foremost, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to deprive you of the wondrous freedom that I happen to believe God gave us and wants us to exercise.

My religion is thus: God likes you, and is watching even when no one else is. He isn't a judge taking down notes, but a member of an audience glued to the edge of his seat as you live out your life.

Please keep that in mind, and live your life in exactly the way you want to live it. Only failure to do that is blasphemy. Only refusal to be yourself is unforgiviable sin.

(Feel free to tell me I'm wrong about God. But don't you dare for a moment think that you life is for anything grander than living.)

I've heard more than a few times the claim that Americans are especially prone to friendly fire. The claim is most often attributed to a friend who happened to serve in the Canadian or British military services, and I'm willing to take uncontested the fact that Americans have this REPUTATION.

But I don't believe it, and I won't believe it until some real statistics are shown.

Such as, how do these friendly fire incidents add up when you normalize for the size of the military? How about when you seperate the rate of inter-army and intra-army friendly fire?

It's an horrible event when any soldier dies at the hands of their allies. But if a country that fields 100,000 men and women DOESN'T have ten times the friend-fire incidents of their 10,000 strong ally, then I'll get worried.

Until I hear the numbers, I'm not convinced that the greater number of American friendly fire incidents is due to anything more than the greater number of American soldiers.

And the whole country breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that the only political party that could take on the Republicans has been handed over to someone who showed he knows how to remake a campaign. 2008 starts looking more and more interesting, to say nothing of the mid-term 2006 elections.

w00t!

(Even if you're a Republican, you must recognize the importance of a strong opposition to ensure that no party rules by defalt, but instead retains the will of the people to stay in power.)

Link

As I was talking with an Army Veteran friend of mine last night (in lieu of our wednesday night RPG game, naturally) I had an off-hand idea that I think deserves entry into my list of "good ideas if they could get past that wacky implementation phase."

Demilitarize the army.

By this, I don't mean throw down our guns and say "we'll never fight a war again!" Rather, I say let's turn our large, land-occupying force into something that's not intended to level countries. Either dramatically reduce the extant conventional force's numbers and create something new, or repurpose our oldest and most-maligned military branch to be a non-military "peacekeeping force."

The primary reason I think this is a good idea is to prevent any future prison torture scandals, or anything else of the kind. The new force would be closer to a massive police force that is loaned out to other countries as needed than a highly funded brute squad.

And, since it wouldn't be a military force, it could act domestically if needs be. We need to guard the mexican border for a month? Send in a few divisions of the Peacekeeping army.

The rest of the offensive military -- which would be all of the special forces and Marine Corps, and most of the Navy and Air Force -- would be a "kill it and leave" group designed purely to attack and destroy nations, armies, and giant lizards from outer space. They could drop any need to exercise respect towards the enemies of our country, and focus on executing the wars we send them on with all needed effeciecy.

And, once this stealthy fire-from-heaven shot-in-the-dark force does its work and we conqer the next country to find itself under a tyrant, we send in a different force whose every person trained and studied and views themselves as a keeper of the peace and not a killer of men.

The new force would be the left hand of American international power, intended to aid those in need be the need caused by the war-fighting right hand or some other disaster.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Pre-requisites:

1) A system with Windows XP or Server 2003
2) A bunch of local users without administrative privledges
3) Poorly written software that triggers the following issue:
MSKB 837115
4) You've enabled the option "Audit: Shut down system immediately if unable to log security audits" under Local Security Policy (i.e. HKLM\System \CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\CrashOnAuditFail = 1)

Symptom:

One day your users call you up and claim "I can't log in anymore! It says 'User is not permitted to login at this computer'". You scratch your head in confusion.

You think to yourself: Did auditing fail for some reason, thus preventing mortals from using the system? Check the security log... no, it's not even close to full. Check for low disk space ... no you've got plenty.

So then you check your System log and you see a bunch of event IDs of 1517 and 1524 leading up to the point where people couldn't log in anymore. Userenv is complaining about profiles not unloading probably.

You're thinking: shit... user profile corruption. So you try restoring the user profiles from backup... no dice. The only thing that works is adding the user to Administrator group temporarily.

Actual Cause:

Unknown... but the real problem seems to be that sometimes when userenv tries putting off unloading a profile, it can cause auditing to fail. I can't figure out why. The result of auditing failing is... the system immediately shuts down and reboots, and then no one but Administrator can log in.

That is until you disable the CrashOnAuditFail setting... reboot, then re-enable it, and reboot again. At this point users can log in. (Incidentally, you _still_ need to do this if auditing fails because of a disk space condition, deleting files to make space is only the first part, then you need to do the disable->reboot->re-enable->reboot dance)

Problem 'solved'.

I've had this happen twice so far, and that UPHclean tool that Microsoft has doesn't seem to really do anything that I can tell. Anyone have any experience with this or have any insight?
We'd like to get to the bottom of this and really fix the problem.

Thanks.

Just FYI.

I no longer work for UWNYS. My job of long suffering is over, and I no longer dread waking up to go to work in the morning.

I am now a bonna fide State Employee, albeit with a temporary contract instead of the regular "permanent" thing. Ah, well. Five months to convince them to keep me, and if not that then I get a new addition to my resume that doesn't have "secretary" attached to it at all. Yay!

(For the curious, I now work for the Tax Man.)

Nothing to see here. I came to my senses.

• Glaciers swim - like meat.
• In and Out - More meat than you can shake butter at. A stick of butter.
• of meat that looks like genitalia. - or vice versa.

More useful stuff!:

Fill in the blanks: a loaf of ___, a container of ___, and a stick of ___.

Something that is fun to say: "the angry man has tiny genitals."

$ stty sane

I'd reply to your last journal entry, but one of your friends has me marked as a foe. Well, three of them -- GMontag, jcast, & superyooser. The first two of which also won't be able to post in your journal, since I have them marked as foes in kind.

Were I able to reply, my reply would be along the lines of teh following:

Please explain what you mean. Do you want to connect to the 'net via your apple through your palm, or via your palm through your apple?

Though I don't have the fortune of using a Mac, my understanding is that (1) you cannot use a non-smartphone Palm to provide IP access to anything, even with a modem and (2) that if you can view it with the palm web browsers, you can view it with anything else that happens to share the same connection.

I know there are SD adapters for WiFi for the Palm, and if you get 'net access via a PC (or Mac, or phone) with bluetooth I don't know of a theoretical reason why your Palm couldn't access the 'net the same way. I do know that if your PC (et al) is blocked, your palm will be just as blocked as the packets have to pass through the PC to get to the 'net.

spell your name backwards.: treahcsreeM (Skip the "c" and all but the first "e" when you try and pronouce it)

• have you ever had a song written about you? Nope.
• what song makes you cry? The National Anthem
• what song makes you happy? Most of what I listen to.
• what's your all time fav. song? Don't know. New songs come out all the time.
• what do you listen to before you go to sleep? *CENSORED* (I'm the luckiest man in the world, remember?)
• height? just under 6"
• hair color? Brown
• piercings? one, in the ear. Blame Mrs. Planesdragon
• tattoos? None. Thought about one, can't find time + money + determination

r i g h t _ n o w . . .

• what color pants are you wearing? blue jeans.
• what song are you listening to? "Am I Evil"
• what taste is in your mouth? saliva
• whats the weather like? Dark & Rainy
• how are you? annoyed at work & looking foward to the weekend
• get motion sickness? Nope.
• have a bad habit? coming into work late.
• get along with your parents? Kind of.
• have a big regret? Yes.

f a v o u r i t e . . .

• tv show? New TV shows come out all the time... but I have a fondness for fantasyish american dramas. Enterprise, Stargates, and Andromeda are all up there.
• conditioner? n/c
• book? From Darkness Into Light has a marked tendency to capture my imagination. Now only if I could find a publisher...
• non alchohol drink? Coffee
• alchohol drink? Irish Coffee
• things to do on the weekend? Write, RPG, and just hang out.

h a v e _ you _ e v e r . . .

• broken the law? Yep
• snuck out of the house? No need.
• ever gone skinny dipping? nope
• made a prank phone call? nope
• tipped over a port-a-potty? nope
• use your parents credit card? Akta Gamat
• skipped school? No
• fell asleep in the shower/bath? No
• been in a school play? no
• had a boyfriend/girlfriend? no/yes
• had children? no
• been in love? duh
• have a hard time getting over someone? yep - but wasn't romantic
• been hurt? "no, I've gone my entire life without pain" (of COURSE I've been hurt, nitwit!)
• gone out with someone you only knew for 3 days? Nope

r a n d o m . . .

• have a job? Yes. Want a new one.
• your cd player has what in it right now? Don't have one.
• if you were a crayon, what color would you be? That muddled color of many crayons doodled together.
• what makes you happy? See above, under "favorites"
• the next CD you're going to buy? Probably a blank to record onto. Maybe an album or some software.

w h e n _ was _ t h e _ last _ t i m e . . .

• you got a real letter? Don't recall.
• got an email? Yesterday
• thing you purchased? Cola.
• Tv program you watched? something on the History channel
• movie you saw in the theaters? Hero (didn't like that piece of Chineese propoganda...)
• kissed? Just now (wife came to get me from work)
• hugged? Just now (wife came to get me from work)
• song heard? Well, while filing this out the song changed...
• place you were [besides home]? Work
• phonecall? about five minutes (wife, calling to say "where are you" on cell)
• you were depressed? meh
• you were in the hospital? to visit friend

w h a t _ comes _ t o _ mind . . .

• car? I need to get my license...
• murder? must bury bodies...
• cape? Cod?
• penis? *censored*
• cell? a picture of an animal cell from a HS textbook
• shoe? a picture of my rotty shoes that need replacement
• fun? Wife
• crush? RPG spell of d00m!
• music? Wife playing fife & drum corp -- which isn't something I listen to for fun, in all honesty.
• chalk? a white stick used to draw on blackboards

n u m b e r . . .

• of time you've been in love? 1
• of girls you have kissed? 4?
• of boys you have kissed? 0
• of times your name has appeared in a newspaper? 0
• of scars on your body? a lot
• of things in your past you regret? you're not supposed to count those

d o _ you _ t h i n k _ you _ a r e . . .

• pretty? hah!
• funny? hmm...
• hot? nope
• friendly? y
• ugly? n
• loveable? y
• caring? y
• sweet? no, taste salty.
• dorky? I'm on /. ...

f a v o u r i t e . . .

• actor/actress? dunno.
• least favorite day? Monday
• flower? dunno
• jello flavor? pudding
• summer/winter? winter, yo.

p e r s o n _ who _ l a s t . . .

• slept in your bed? the wife (duh)
• saw you cry? the wife (duh)
• sent you an email? Shan, I think. (you don't know him)

h a v e _ you _ e v e r

• said i love you and meant it? duh
• went out in public in pjs? does answering you door in blue ducky PJs and a shirt count?
• kept a secret from everyone? State of human existance.
• been to new york? yep. (Mom hasn't been to the city, despite living in the state for 13 years now.
• to california? Used to live on Vandenburg AFB.

w h e n _ was

• last cigarrete? At least a year ago
• last cry? when I realized I wasn't going to ever get my lazy ass into the military
• last book read? Lord of Chaos
• last curse word uttered? the f word
• last beverage drank? that coke I bought...
• last food consumed? breakfast
• last phone call? didn't you already ask that?
• showered? too long ago
• last shoes worn? my raggedy ones
• last cd played? a friend played one last night...
• last thing written? comment in Sol's LJ.
• last word spoken? forgot
• last sleep? 12am - 8:30 am
• last im? noonish
• sexual fantasy? involves wife
• last ice cream eaten? forgot - must remedy that. Then again, it is winter.
• last time wanting to die? Unless you count video games and RPG characters*, never.

*: I got so disgusted at how a friend was running his D&D game that I had a cleric decide that the shambling creatures moving towards him WEREN'T undead, and so turning wouldn't be a good idea, and so he would keep fighting until they killed him (me). So, what happened? The friend had an NPC show up out of nowhere and save the day, which convined me not to play in his RPG games anymore.