Don Edwards

I have redacted the offending post and hereby apologize. If mlooney and the moderator would care to similarly redact their replies...

Also... even if immortals were required to materialize before they can make other things materialize... we know Pandora can do a creepy-kid form. Just how small can an immortal go? Can one materialize with a height of a millimeter or so, i.e. almost impossible to casually notice, and then make other larger things materialize? We don't know how long Rhoda has had those spells. She knew she could change her own size, and change the size of Kitty's sleeves without changing anything else - she did not know she could change Catalina's size and simultaneously change the size of her clothes to fit, and she did not know she could change her own appearance in ways unrelated to size. Just like Elliot didn't know about the secret-identity forms embedded in his superhero spell. This doesn't imply that she didn't have those spells some days earlier, just that she hadn't ]i]used[/i] them. Of course, one valid reason for not using a spell is that you don't have it - I am consistently unsuccessful in using a flight spell - but there are other valid reasons for not using a spell. And if you have a spell but don't know it, you won't use it on purpose.

I'd say the note is: 1. A gift card specifying which one of them it's for, and 2. An explanation of why she should read a book titled "Biology of Extinct Marsupials".

redacted

It predates PERL by a huge margin. For example, YACC1. For something even worse, XINU2. 1 Yet Another Compiler Compiler. And it was following an already-established trend in naming. 2 Xinu Is Not Unix

Once I was offered a special deal on high-end shoe inserts: three for $20. I calmly asked the guy if he had many customers who needed three. After a moment he did a double-take and clarified: three pair.

I'd suggest she imagine into "existence" a blanket-like object that, when thrown over a person, makes that person partly transparent (and most of the blanket also becomes transparent), with a dial on it to adjust how deep the transparency goes. (It could be extended to objects as well. Even the ground, creating a virtual window into possible underground openings.) Note: there's no need for such a blanket-like object to exist in real life. With such a blanket she could check for, say skull injuries, then dial it up a bit and look inside the skull for brain injuries. Since all she's doing with it is trying to extract from the simulation information that the simulation does in fact contain, there shouldn't be a big issue with the magic involved.

I'll leave to someone else the task of explaining the physics by which the shorter one was tossed upward while the taller one was tossed downward.

I agree that it's a complex situation, and there's no reason to think it's more harmful now than when Obama did pretty much the same thing for twice as long. Also no more illegal than it was then. Just how harmful or illegal it is now and was then... that's arguable.

Alar, a fungicide once used on apples, was banned on a similar basis. They routinely test chemicals as possible carcinogens at a dosage level called "lethal dose 50" - which means that if you give that dosage to 100 laboratory animals, 50 of them will die of direct chemical overdose. It stands to reason that the other 50 will mostly be pretty sick. Now, out of those sick survivors, how many develop cancer? With Alar, this test determined that it isn't a carcinogen. Then they did something pretty much unprecedented. They tested at "lethal dose 75" - you can figure out what that means. And at that dosage, it's a carcinogen. So it was banned. Now the thing is, Alar was applied to the *outside* of apples, in very minute doses. You'd have to eat a few tons of apples in a short period to get even to "lethal dose 50". And that's assuming you don't wash the apples before peeling them. Washing in water will remove most of the Alar. And the flip side is that many of the fungi that Alar keeps from growing on the apples, are themselves carcinogens - that would dramatically fail and be banned at "lethal dose 50" if they were industrial products rather than natural parasites.

Well, the latter bit is absolutely correct. Calling something that allows Muslims to come to the US from around 40 Muslim-majority countries and any number of other countries a "Muslim ban" is, indeed, nonsense.

She could easily find an arm hovering in space at the edge of her spell.

Dang, I was trying to see how long I could go without knowing who won and the final score.

The horror stories of saccharin were a lie, or at best a serious misrepresentation, to begin with. Kind of like the horror stories of birth control pills causing cancer in lab animals. (The claim was true... for one specific strain of lab animals, carefully selectively bred to have an elevated probability of developing cancer when injected with a nearly-lethal dose of the medication. You know, it's a lot easier to study cancer if you have a reliable way of getting cancers in front of you to study.)

Having physically attempted to dodge any number of flying objects that were absolutely guaranteed to miss me by at least a couple feet (being that they don't actually fly out of my computer screen), I can easily believe that having my fairydoll-avatar cut in two while I'm in it would be EXTREMELY disquieting - even if I don't physically feel it at all.

Tedd Grace Elliot Ellen Nanase (sort of) Catalina Rhoda How many does she think she needs?

The alternative to absurd and destructive levels of government involvement in healthcare and education may be complete government uninvolvement... or it could be lower, sensible levels of government involvement. The problem with reforming health care and insurance is that it's hard to realize just how deeply government-induced distortions are embedded in the system. Does it make sense to you that if your employer hands you a dollar and you use it to buy health insurance that dollar is subject to income and social security taxes, but if your employer uses the dollar to buy health insurance for you then it isn't taxable to either you or the employer? That absurdity is a relic of the World War II wage freeze. It was a major factor in creating a system where you don't care what your medical care actually costs, and can't find out how much you'll personally have to pay until a month after you receive care - and, further, you probably don't know or care how much your health insurance costs either. The consequences of that are making it impossible to sensibly manage your own health care if things get at all complicated, and impossible to sensibly manage a government program to assist the poor with health care. So there's a movement afoot to have the government abandon selective attempts to assist the poor, and instead take over health care entirely... meaning that the demand for health care will be completely unconstrained by cost, while the supply will be completely controlled by cost and politics without regard for need, with nothing to mediate between the two. Government interference in K-12 schools and an attempt to impose a universal system (which the rich have always been able to escape from) are even older and for a worse purpose. Seriously, the intent was to destroy families and to make sure that blacks could not be as well-educated on average as whites. (Definite success at the latter goal, even today.) Today a restaurant that is failing to provide a good and safe dining experience shuts down, due to either the health department (government involvement!) or lack of customers and money; but a public school that is failing to provide a good and safe educational experience gets more money, while any attempt to get students out of it into a better school is an attempt to destroy education. So how about making a sane health-care system that doesn't penalize people for paying for their own health care and insurance, and then selectively assisting POOR people as needed? And how about if we stop funding a selected monopoly group of schools, and instead fund students at any school - or substitute-for-school - that successfully delivers a safe educational experience of reasonable quality?

For starters, pick up an object and toss it...

Correct - but she would be unable to detect the movement of her body or know when it left the range of the spell. So no help in learning the range.

Which rarely happens except when the government has so over-regulated and otherwise distorted the "free" market that proper function is impossible. As is currently (and has been for a few decades) the case in the US for medical care and higher education.

Clarification: I was pointing out the need for Sarah in her time-freeze spell to get well away from her own body. Further away than can be achieved while remaining inside her home (both physically and in-spell) let alone inside a car. This does not require that her body not be at home or in a car - she can leave either within the spell. (Hypothetically of course she COULD check her range when her body's pretty much anywhere... some places for it are a worse idea than others.)

Or kicked it off and flown out a window. I doubt that she can do a range check while remaining inside her home. Or inside a car.

How do you feel about the pronouncements from practically every major media source other than Fox News, that the world is ending because of Trump?

The idea of vampires changing into bats apparently originated comparatively recently - after the vampire bat species was discovered by Europeans. The association of vampires with wolves is considerably older (and hard to explain, other than by a general tendency of wolves to be attracted to dead mammals).

But you (potentially) DO convert a group of files, even whole directory structures, into a single file. Did you know that every .epub or .mobi ebook (and possibly other formats as well) is a zip file? It is. Contains several files, some of which are HTML. The zip format is now a defined industry standard for clumping separate-but-closely-related files, such as the components of an ebook, into a single file. There were also a few instances of using zip-in-zip as an email bomb. It's based on two facts: (1) early antivirus software couldn't scan inside a zip file; it had to expand the zip file into temporary space and then scan that; (2) it's possible to create a zip file WITHOUT compression. The bomb technique is to create a huge file that should compress very well - a gigabyte of spaces works nicely - and put it into a non-compressed zip file. Then put that into a compressed zip file. Rename the non-compressed zip file and add it again to the same zip file; repeat many times. Email the result to your target (preferably to multiple people at the target company, listed in the BCC field so each recipient is a separate email) and watch their email server run out of disk space and crash.