Look, I'm all for Open Source, GPL, and all that smooth and creamy stuff, but the bottom line here is that the d20 system is just old news. I mean, if Cobol and CPM were GPL'd, would we all rush out to use them? There are much better ways to do a RPG than d20, ways that make the game simpler, more intuitive, and more realistic. Take, for example, the IGS system. These guys are a tiny company that no-one has heard of, but they have written a game system that beats d20 hands down, is fun and fast to play, and is as universal as GURPS without being as broken at the extremes. Check it out at http://www.igsgames.com/ - I dare you.
No, this is real stuff. One of the hot research topics in dynamical systems is network structures. I think it was Stanley Milgram that did the famous "Six Degrees of Separation" experiment. People like Steve Strogatz and Duncan Watts have followed up on that with small world networks, scale free networks, etc. These network structures appear in places like the electrical power grid for southern California, the neural network of the flatworm C. Elegans, and the network of movie actors (the Kevin Bacon game.) See Duncan Watts's web site for more (and more accurate) information.
So I think studying the networks in games like Everquest is a great idea. I don't think that they think they will actually start to pick up coded messages from real terrorist cells, but rather they want to see how these people interact and connect in the network. And this is not the pentagon themselves, but a funded think tank doing the work. Big difference.
Anyway, if the Feds start busting Everquest players, I'll be laughing my ass off. But I don't expect it to happen. However, the rich structure of the networks formed in these MMORPGs has to be worth at least a look.
Here's the problem with refutation. There are just so many crackpots out there that NASA would have to have a division of people to refute them all, and that division would consume 80-100% of NASA's budget.
I'm a grad student in Physics, and I get 2-3 e-mails a month from crackpots with "The Real and Actual New Theory of Whatever" that the scientific community is actively supressing or some such story. My advisor gets about 10 times as many of these as I do, and he's not that well known. I can only imagine that people like Steven Weinberg and Michael Barry must have serious filters set up if they want to get any work done at all.
I mean, even slashdot has been in on this. Remember a few years ago, when they had a post about that South American guy that claimed to have a partially working antigravity machine - got lighter, but he couldn't actually make it float because of lack of funding. Took a look at the science behind it; started with a few equations from a paper that was completely unfindable, and then did some mathematical razzle-dazzle that showed that temperature decreased gravitational mass while it increased inertial mass. Then, his device didn't do spit with the temperature, it generated some low RF. Load of horse crap. I'm just pissed off that I wasted half an hour figuring out that it was hooey.
Anyway, there are probably tens of thousands of people out there who had their mommies tell them that they were the smartest people in the world, and now they have to go out and prove mommy right for either their own ego or something else (or they have some other motivation to prove they are smarter than the scientific establishment.) And the only way they want to do it is to have their own theory of everything.
Peer review and the scientific method is not perfect, but it keeps out these crackpots. And the bottom line is that if something works, there are plenty of legitimate scientists that will happily document it, verify it, improve it, and try to publish, and enhance their own reputations and careers. This is a good and normal thing, except that it means that the crackpots are left on the outside looking in, so they keep whining.
Bottom line - ignore them. If they can prove that they are right, power to them. Until then, I put my faith in science with the theories of Einstien, Newton, Dirac, Gell-Mann, and so forth. Publishing in the popular press is not an option for scientific reporting of results. Heck, even Sci-Am is now on thin ice in that area.
Look, I know that all us *nix anti-M$ types like the open source model, but the facts in this case are that D&D was a fine game for it's time, which was over like 10 years ago. There's bigger, better, simpler, less patched, and more well designed games out there now. It's the accursed marketing machine that has kept D&D/d20 going despite it's flaws (sound familiar???)
I mean, seriously, if all open source code had to be in COBOL, while commercial coders all wrote in C, java, and perl, would we be anywhere?
In this case, I'm rooting against d20, open system or not. There are better ways to skin that cat, and if the free market really works, we won't be hearing anything about d20 games in 5 years, IMO.
Games like TFT (a contemporary of D&D), GURPS, the IGS system, Shadowrun, and even TWERPS are all better. I hope they don't get buried by the tidal wave of d20 offal that's out there now.
OK. Here's the deal. Photons have no REST MASS, but they do have mass. As was stated above, E=mc2, so they have mass, and are affected by gravity. If they were held at rest in your frame of reference, they would have no mass. That's (in part) why lasers can work. The coherent photons have no attraction to each other, so the beam propigates in a nearly lossless manner [this is not entirely correct, but mostly right, and should cover the topic for laymen.] If I throw a baseball, the velocity that I impart to it gives it a little extra mass. This change is negligable until the velocity is a significant portion of the speed of light, but it is nonzero nonetheless. So the fact that photons have energy and are moving guarantees that they will have some mass. But they have no rest mass. Contrast with an electron, which has a mass of 511 keV (in energy units.) Accelerate an electron to 0.9 c, and it will have a total energy of 1172 keV, or 1.172 MeV. So the total mass will be 1.17 MeV, and the rest mass is.511 MeV. For a photon, the total mass is a function of frequency, just like the energy, and the rest mass is 0. Hope this helps. P.S. - I am a physicist. Regards, Aeronaut
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I'm all for Open Source, GPL, and all that smooth and creamy stuff, but the bottom line here is that the d20 system is just old news. I mean, if Cobol and CPM were GPL'd, would we all rush out to use them? There are much
better ways to do a RPG than d20, ways that make the game simpler, more intuitive, and more realistic. Take, for example, the IGS system. These guys are a tiny company that no-one has heard of, but they have written a game system that beats d20 hands down, is fun and fast to play, and is as universal as GURPS without being as broken at the extremes. Check it out at http://www.igsgames.com/ - I dare you.
No, this is real stuff. One of the hot research topics in dynamical systems is network structures.
I think it was Stanley Milgram that did the famous "Six Degrees of Separation" experiment. People like Steve Strogatz and Duncan Watts have followed up on that with small world networks, scale free networks, etc. These network structures appear in places like the electrical power grid for southern California, the neural network of the flatworm C. Elegans, and the network of movie actors (the Kevin Bacon game.) See Duncan Watts's web site for more (and more accurate) information.
So I think studying the networks in games like Everquest is a great idea. I don't think that they think they will actually start to pick up coded messages from real terrorist cells, but rather they want to see how these people interact and connect in the network. And this is not the pentagon themselves, but a funded think tank doing the work. Big difference.
Anyway, if the Feds start busting Everquest players, I'll be laughing my ass off. But I don't expect it to happen. However, the rich structure of the networks formed in these MMORPGs has to be worth at least a look.
Regards,
Martin Melhus
(aeronaut)
Here's the problem with refutation. There are just so many crackpots out there that NASA would have to have a division of people to refute them all, and that division would consume 80-100% of NASA's budget.
I'm a grad student in Physics, and I get 2-3 e-mails a month from crackpots with "The Real
and Actual New Theory of Whatever" that the scientific community is actively supressing or some such story. My advisor gets about 10 times as many of these as I do, and he's not that well known. I can only imagine that people like Steven Weinberg and Michael Barry must have serious filters set up if they want to get any work done at all.
I mean, even slashdot has been in on this. Remember a few years ago, when they had a post about that South American guy that claimed to have a partially working antigravity machine - got lighter, but he couldn't actually make it float because of lack of funding. Took a look at the science behind it; started with a few equations from a paper that was completely unfindable, and then did some mathematical razzle-dazzle that showed that temperature decreased gravitational mass while it increased inertial mass. Then, his device didn't do spit with the temperature, it generated some low RF. Load of horse crap. I'm just pissed off that I wasted half an hour figuring out that it was hooey.
Anyway, there are probably tens of thousands of people out there who had their mommies tell them that they were the smartest people in the world, and now they have to go out and prove mommy right for either their own ego or something else (or they have some other motivation to prove they are smarter than the scientific establishment.) And the only way they want to do it is to have their own theory of everything.
Peer review and the scientific method is not perfect, but it keeps out these crackpots. And the bottom line is that if something works, there are plenty of legitimate scientists that will happily document it, verify it, improve it, and try to publish, and enhance their own reputations and careers. This is a good and normal thing, except that it means that the crackpots are left on the outside looking in, so they keep whining.
Bottom line - ignore them. If they can prove that they are right, power to them. Until then, I put my faith in science with the theories of Einstien, Newton, Dirac, Gell-Mann, and so forth. Publishing in the popular press is not an option for scientific reporting of results. Heck, even Sci-Am is now on thin ice in that area.
Regards,
Martin Melhus
(aeronaut)
Look, I know that all us *nix anti-M$ types like the open source model, but the facts in this case are that D&D was a fine game for it's time, which was over like 10 years ago. There's bigger, better, simpler, less patched, and more well designed games out there now. It's the accursed marketing machine that has kept D&D/d20 going despite it's flaws (sound familiar???)
I mean, seriously, if all open source code had to be in COBOL, while commercial coders all wrote in C, java, and perl, would we be anywhere?
In this case, I'm rooting against d20, open system or not. There are better ways to skin that cat, and if the free market really works, we won't be hearing anything about d20 games in 5 years, IMO.
Games like TFT (a contemporary of D&D), GURPS, the IGS system, Shadowrun, and even TWERPS are all better. I hope they don't get buried by the tidal wave of d20 offal that's out there now.
OK. Here's the deal. Photons have no REST MASS, but they do have mass. As was stated above, E=mc2, so they have mass, and are affected by gravity. If they were held at rest in your frame of reference, they would have no mass. That's (in part) why lasers can work. The coherent photons have no attraction to each other, so the beam propigates in a nearly lossless manner [this is not entirely correct, but mostly right, and should cover the topic for laymen.] If I throw a baseball, the velocity that I impart to it gives it a little extra mass. This change is negligable until the velocity is a significant portion of the speed of light, but it is nonzero nonetheless. So the fact that photons have energy and are moving guarantees that they will have some mass. But they have no rest mass. Contrast with an electron, which has a mass of 511 keV (in energy units.) Accelerate an electron to 0.9 c, and it will have a total energy of 1172 keV, or 1.172 MeV. So the total mass will be 1.17 MeV, and the rest mass is .511 MeV. For a photon, the total mass is a function of frequency, just like the energy, and the rest mass is 0. Hope this helps. P.S. - I am a physicist. Regards, Aeronaut