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Wizardry being dark, and scary encounters.

What I remember most from Ultima was agonizing over the start questions :)
http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/562...
http://www.tk421.net/ultima/
http://www.beastwithin.org/use...

And that would be the following commentary: http://www.tk421.net/gallery/sounds/haha.wav

Appropriate sound effect.

'Will the sequel be an original story? Or is there an existing (unfinished?) story to base it on?'

Jackson isn't really bothered either way. He pretty much wrote a new story for The Two Towers, with a few set pieces from the book (mainly battles) inserted to let us know which film we were watching. And a Hobbit sequel will give him plenty of time to explore the history of Lurtz:

http://archives.theonering.net/movie/char/lurtz.html

explain how the Elves developed the art of Shield Surfing:

http://www.theonering.net/scrapbook/view/7427

tell the sad story of how Denethor became such a messy eater:

http://www.tk421.net/lotr/film/rotk/img/rotk0911.jpg

get Bilbo's friends out of a tight situation with a hilarious dwarf tossing scene:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_tossing#Popular_culture_references_to_dwarf_tossing

and have Agent Elrond turn up with a sword at random moments:

http://productimages1.colony1.net/5851/Elrond%20Bust.jpg

just in time for a bit of gratuitous decapitation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=The_Mouth_of_Sauron

Ian McKellen will be excellent, though.

I think my favorite series of the genre was Steve Jackson's Sorcery! . They had georgous art, and the puzzles, plot, and writing were quite good.

Peter Quinn has obviously never seen a photo of Microsoft Corp., circa 1978. Microsoft seems to have done okay since then.

See Antispam group rejects e-mail payment plan for more reactions.

I had to read the story twice before realizing it wasn't a hoax.

While charging for reliably sending e-mail may be a good way to fight spam, putting the onus on the sender to pay isn't that great an idea.

I run an opt-in, non-profit, ad-free announcement list, for example. I just checked and there are 521 AOL and Yahoo addresses subscribed. I'm not going to pay $5 a day to reach those people!

I don't know how AOL filters work, but ideally a user could whitelist an address. But the pay-for-bypass method seems designed around reaching users that *don't* specify they want the "priority" spam.

Just how many boxes of this checklist does this plan grossly violate?

Am I the only one here with internal experiences? Eveyone else seems to readily equate the mind with a machine.

Don't get me wrong, I don't believe in mystical powers or anything. I accept the need for physical verificationism and the primacy of matter, and am a fan of Ockham's razor.[1] But there are some phenomenological properties of my experiences that sure ain't physical.

(pointing) HA HA!

It should be 'Yin and Yang' never 'Yin or Yang,' and upon looking at an actual picture you may see why.

You cannot have good without evil, or hot without cold, because if something is relative, you always have to have something to measure it against.

Also, a much better arguement, in this particular case, is that the Yin contains the seed of the Yang, and the Yang the seed of the Yin. One never exists without atleast a little bit of the other.

I wouldn't say we're 95% there yet. My doctor, for one, asks me in I'm in pain, he doesn't scan for firing c-fibers.

Furthermore many reject your belief that is is only a matter of time. There is a so-called explanatory gap that science may never conquer. Just because there's always a physical correlate/identity to mental states doesn't mean they're the same thing.

How a bat "sees" with just sonar and how it can be explained by physics are very different. Speaking of which, Nagel's bat essay and this bibliography have more on this if anyone's interested.

Wow that's a lot -- I can only see a few dozen, and I wrote it. A few are mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but I doubt anyone has caught them all. I'd list them all in the margin here but there's not enough room.

364 days a year I send out a Library Link of the Day, but like CmdrTaco here, on 4/1 I have a bit of fun.

TeleRead and ODP and Books of the Future are also good reviews.

are detailed here...

BTW if you're interested in information technology you may want to check this out. There's also several other full-fledged LIS news sources on the Web.

If you've never played Ultima IV, you should, even if you don't like RPGs. It's worth your time. Luckily, Richard Garriott (aka Lord British) has made this easy to do by releasing Ultima IV as freeware. You can download the game here and the documentation here. Also, an upgrade patch has been created that improves the graphics and sounds without mucking with the game mechanics. You learn more about Ultima IV as well as download the upgrade here.

One other thing, it's a long game and even if you don't have the time to play it, download it and play through the introduction (10-15 minutes tops). There are a series of ethical/moral questions that determine your character type and they're really interesting. So interesting in fact that fans have reproduced the 'quiz' on the web so if you're really not into downloading the game, you can still take the Ultima Personality Test.

• U4 for PC
• Graphics Upgrade
• Sound Upgrade
• Quick Reference

some more questions.

I found the attitude in this story very odd, considering online map library exhibits have been around many years. What's next, people start discovering LOC's *free* pre-Google answers service?

Get a grip, nerds, librarians are Not What You Think. (draft of a page I made a few months ago especially directed at the slashdot crowd, url published here for the first time ever!). See also a category I build at the ODP, Librarians in Society.

I've had a unlinked page on my Wizardry site for awhile now. If you read around in it you'll get instructions for the URL. Of the few thousand hits it gets a week, about a dozen people stumble on the secret page.

There will *always* be a cycical contest between hackers and security, and search engine spammers and opitmizers are no exception.

It should be emphasized that these spamming vulnerabilities of search engines are almost entirely due to their automated nature. Efforts to present search results not just based on author-presented data, such as the frequency, positioning, and proximity of search terms, but with also somehow computing more objective data based on the source domain of the indexed file, how often searchers choose the link, and especially a sophisticated type of citation analysis that charts authoritative pages and hubs by counting the number of links pointing to a page, do hold promise for offering more relevant search results (Brin & Page, 1998; Chakrabarti, et. al., 1999; Notess, 1999). It is reasonable to assume, however, that no matter how sophisticated the spamming countermeasures adopted by automated indexes become, new ways of fooling the machines could be crafted. Some amount of human editorial power therefore seems necessary.

- From a paper I wrote back when Google seemed impervious to spamming (early 1999).

As long as you're not wanting GameCube-like graphics (the 3D world compares to EQ), this is a good game. The sophisticated plot and character development is a welcome change from the likes of Diablo.

But don't take my word for it, there's a free demo available from the official site. I also run one of the larger Wizardry fan sites - check it out for more information on the series (maps, walkthroughs, etc.).

Wizardry 8 isn't widely distributed (part of the game's delay in release was finding a distributor), but it's available at your local mall's Electronics Boutique (full retail is 50 bucks) and there's also a few cheaper prices online.

Someone better mod this post based on my user name alone.

Er, you mean Wizardry II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII for PC? I think they only released I - III for the Apple. Sir-Tech is only gone in the US, and Sir-Tech Canada is in the process of finding a publisher for Wizardry VIII right now. Info on the series can be found here: Wizardry

Death is but a doorway.