Yes. But GW isn't releasing new figures, or even maintaining all of the old figures. Specialist Games was for a while, but they seem to have been folded back into GW proper, and some of the things they released have gone missing. For instance some of the Mordheim figures, which are the ones I care about -- there are also blood bowl teams that no longer have cheerleaders, as far as I can tell, and the ref figures are no longer available individually, though they may be in the box... I'm not sure about that. It looked like some of the BFG ships were also removed, though I'm not sure.
They're selling what they have easily on hand, but they're not really supporting the games anymore.
Very true -- Mordheim is much the same, actually. It's being supported by a bunch of third-party groups, even though GW dropped the ball.
The point still holds true, though. GW introduces new games, runs them for a while to draw in people who want to buy just a few minis and have a game to play with their friends, and then drops them. The fact that other groups are picking them up and running with them doesn't change that.
I started playing Warhammer in about 1995, and have played off and on since then. In that time, they've modified the background on most of the world they ripped off... er, created so much that a lot of the original miniatures and rules no longer work. They've also introduced, with great fanfare, and then eliminated a whole lot of games. What are some of GW's best games? Mordheim (discontinued), BloodBowl (discontinued, though I expect it will come back now they've got a computer version), Battlefleet Gothic (discontinued)... there's also Space Hulk, WarMaster, Epic 40K, Inquisiter, and others, all released, pushed until they got popular, then canceled. THAT was why I gave up on GW.
I'm much more interested in small skirmish-type games than army-based games, and every time GW created one, they waited until they'd gotten a lot of new players hooked, then shut them down. All just part of a plan to get people over to WH and 40K.
There seems to be a cultural clash, tribal perhaps, where commentators here disparage what they seem ignorant of. And speaking of having time on their hands - what about all these comments?
No, no... it's just that the culture here mandates that you disparage what you're ignorant of. It saves people all that wasted time actually learning about things. It's much easier this way.
Besides, it's hard to start a flame war if everyone involved actually knows what they're talking about.
True. However, if after a few months of exercise I realize that all my pants, even freshly washed, are looser than they used to be, and I'm buckling my belt a few notches tighter, that's a pretty good indication that something has changed. Sure, it's not a precise measurement, but I don't really care about precision in this instance.
For someone in good shape, yes. I've been unable to exercise seriously for years (bad knee injury, no pool available. It's absurdly difficult to get a good aerobic workout in a gym without using your legs...), and I'm finally starting to be able to work out again. 300-350 calories on an elliptical machine or exercise bike is about as much as I can manage, but, combined with an awareness of what I'm eating (and a slight improvement in diet), I'm starting to see improvement after only about a month.
I disagree. The easiest thing to measure is "how loose are my pants." I have to put them on every weekday to go to work, and I have no reason to step on a scale other than to check my weight.
Which is a very small part of why my goal is to lose inches around my waist, not pounds. (The pounds will be a nice side effect, but they're certainly not the goal.)
The problem is that most Americans don't appear to believe this. They'll tell you they've found a miracle-cure pill that will let them eat nothing but cheetos and chocolate cake and spend their day sitting in front of the TV, and still lose weight. They'll say it doesn't matter that their diet sucks, because they're walking for half an hour a day. They'll tell you it doesn't matter that they never exercise, because they're not eating anything except lettuce. Ok, that last one will work, but only if they NEVER eat anything but lettuce. The minute they go back to their old diet, they'll gain weight again.
For whatever reason -- probably too many late-night-infomercials -- most Americans just don't understand that you need to balance calories-in with calories-out.
Why not use a paper notebook in class, and just enter the equations into the computer later?
If you absolutely insist on a technical solution, how about:
- using macros. Use something like OO.o's auto expand feature (whatever they call it), so that when you type exp-1 it translates to ^-1, or intl expands to integral.
- using shorthand. Find a set of shorthand layouts that work for you, then run search and replace later to make them what they're actually supposed to be. The same examples as above work -- just without the macros.
To be honest, though, you're probably best off either using pencil and paper or just improving your typing speed.
Private companies are not allowed to discriminate.
See my above comments about the Boy Scouts, private schools, and so on. Private companies ARE allowed to discriminate. It just sometimes earns them a bad name, if they're blatant enough about it.
Now this, in fact, is the first reasonable response I've seen to my comment, and you're right: if it was just Americans who were having trouble, and just American airlines (not "American Airlines", but "airlines in America"), I'd say you had no argument. As I said earlier, the airlines have enough clout to fight off the security regulations if they wanted. The simple fact is that they went along with it pretty much without arguing, because the so-called "American Public" (as represented by news agencies who enjoy reporting on panics) demanded it. If the majority of the public had responded by saying "Screw you, we're not going to let you search us, and we're going to stop flying until you give in," the rules would have reverted awfully quickly.
But as you say, a few loonies in the US managed to get rules changed for everyone, worldwide, and THAT isn't acceptable, or shouldn't be.
What nonsense is this? I guess you haven't heard of anti-discrimination laws. Just try and start a business that caters to only one race, or excludes a gender and see how far you get before you're sued.
I don't have to try: I can give you several examples off the top of my head.
1) The Boy Scouts of America. They only allow boys to join, obviously. They also openly and actively discriminate against atheists and agnostics -- just try to get your Eagle Scout rank without stating a religion.
2) Women-only private colleges. Mt Holyoke, Smith, Wellesley... three colleges in my home state that discriminate against men. To the best of my knowledge, not one of them has been sued.
3) Hair salons and barber shops. Not all of them, but some of them are single-sex establishments.
So of course people can make such arbitrary rules. They can do whatever they want as long as they do it on private property and don't violate any laws. There's no law that says private clubs have to let everyone in, or that any private business has to work with everyone. In general, I don't see that as a bad thing, either: No one is forcing me to join the Boy Scouts, or attend Smith College, or get my hair cut in any particular salon, and if I want to, well... too bad.
And my business license, if I ran a business, couldn't be revoked if I decided to be an ass. It could be revoked if I violated the law, or the terms of the license. That's about it. A lawsuit could force me out of business, but it's unlikely that a judge would side with an atheist or gay boy scout -- they never have before, and there's no reason for them to start.
I'd argue that yes, they can: they're privately owned companies, they get to do what they want. The backlash would probably put them out of business, but if they want to commit corporate suicide, that's their problem.
Note that I'm not saying they'd be RIGHT, morally speaking, to do so... morally speaking, equality is better, inasmuch as it's possible. But if we're going to say they're independant companies, they have to be allowed to make decisions we don't agree with.
True enough. Statistics without numbers are pretty meaningless, really, but the point is still valid: there's a lot more of these exploding, in an absolute sense.
Flying may not be a human right, but it is a one of the major boons of living in the modern world, and if you can meet the ticket price, you should be able to fly. Making large parts of society contingent on surrendering human rights is tantamount to taking those rights away.
I'm not arguing that it's not nice to be able to fly, but it's also not a basic human right. We don't have the right to fly any more than we have the right to drive, or to all have ponies.
Also, I see your argument all the time. It's a cop-out. I don't think a world in which large companies can arbitrarily refuse to provide service is the best of all possible worlds. Once a company, or a set of companies, becomes an integral part of our social fabric, it should be placed under a different, more stringent set of rules that ensure the greatest benefit for all.
How is it a copout? It's a simple fact: private companies aren't required to make any service available to anyone they don't want to. If you don't like it, lobby to get the law changed, but you'll need a lot of luck: forcing companies to make their products or services available to everyone is a good way to drive them out of business.
And really, this isn't the best of all possible worlds, and getting mad that it isn't doesn't change anything. Working to improve things is worthwhile, but let's be honest about what sort of a world we live in while we work to improve it, and let's be honest about what human rights really are.
Also, how do we define a company being an integral part of our world? Personally, I don't think flying is that critical: if I had the option, I'd rather take a train. I know a fair number of people who've never been on a plane. So is air travel really a necessary part of our society? Don't get me wrong, it's a convenience, and I'd hate to not have the option in an emergency. But if you get right down to it, it's NOT critical. As it becomes more expensive and less practical, people and companies will start working around it.
In point of fact, the rate probably is increasing. Ten years ago not many consumer appliances ran on lithium ion batteries: they used NiMH, mostly. Cameras used little alkaline batteries, and film. Not everybody had a cell-phone, though it was moving that way fast.
These days, just about every tourist has a camera, and a lot of them run on Li-Ion batteries, as do laptops, cell phones, iPods, and everything else anyone carries. The percentage of batteries that explode may not have changed, but the absolute number probably has. Given that the market is probably somewhere near saturation -- there will always be people like me who don't want a cell-phone, and don't want to travel with a laptop -- I'd say the numbers won't do more than double or triple over the next three years, but yes: I think they numbers will go up.
I still travel without that. I just bring a couple of books, and try to sleep through most of the flight. Most people do, really... walk up the aisle sometime when you're traveling (if you can tear yourself away from your laptop long enough) and look at all the people in the plane. When I flew earlier this year, I'd say less than 10% had laptops or DVD players with them. Quite a few had iPods, but I doubt being unable to bring them would be a deal-breaker on travel for most people.
The key here is that flying isn't a basic human right. Those airplanes are privately owned, and the people who own them can make any rules they want about who can ride. If they want to insist that only people with purple hair can fly, that's their perogative. If they want to insist that no-one more than eighteen inches tall can fly, they're allowed to do so. If they want to insist that people submit to a ridiculous, ineffective security screening before flying, they can.
All three rules are equally silly, and all three rules are equally legitimate. If you don't like the rules, you can find a different way to travel. If they make compliance difficult and annoying enough, many people will, and then the airlines will go under. Until then, you're stuck with it.
(And yes, there's a lot of pressure from the government for them to run this level of security, but if you believe the airlines don't have enough lobbying power to fight back, you're insufficiently cynical.)
While I agree that intimidation is wrong, perhaps it's time that the people who are violently opposed to gay rights see the other side. I have a lot of gay friends, and almost all of them have been, at one time or another, harrassed, threatened, or intimidated by people who disagreed with them. Perhaps the people who are responsible for that, and who would deny them basic human rights, should have to consider their own comfort before doing so.
Intimidation and harrassment are always wrong, but they're sometimes appropriate anyway. (Yes, I know that sounds hypocritical. No, I can't explain it any better.)
So here's what confuses me... "BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered all data, but a minority are still affected." If all the data has been recovered, wouldn't NO ONE still be affected? I mean... being affected by this means your data was lost in such a way that it couldn't be recovered. So...
Depends how it's done. In some places (I think in South America, but I can't recall precisely) slash and burn was historically used as part of a crop rotation, with selected trees retained; usually trees that were valuable to local wildlife, or produced products that humans wanted. If you only clear the land every five to ten years, the burning adds a lot of nutrients back into the soil, and encouraging wildlife to inhabit the land when it isn't being used does the same. Since the land was only intensively farmed for a year or two, and then encouraged to recover (native plant seeds being brought in, and adjacent areas being left "wild") for four to eight, it stayed pretty healthy.
Even if it's not perfect, that's a far cry from the modern version, which wipes out everything on a piece of land and then uses the land until it can't support anything at all.
Mirror, no. But they ought to take that into account. After all, their purpose is to educate people and to get them ready for real jobs. That second part, at least, requires teaching people to use the industry standard equipment. The first doesn't, of course, and really ought to include teaching people alternatives, but, well... do you really expect logic from schools?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. But GW isn't releasing new figures, or even maintaining all of the old figures. Specialist Games was for a while, but they seem to have been folded back into GW proper, and some of the things they released have gone missing. For instance some of the Mordheim figures, which are the ones I care about -- there are also blood bowl teams that no longer have cheerleaders, as far as I can tell, and the ref figures are no longer available individually, though they may be in the box... I'm not sure about that. It looked like some of the BFG ships were also removed, though I'm not sure.
They're selling what they have easily on hand, but they're not really supporting the games anymore.
Very true -- Mordheim is much the same, actually. It's being supported by a bunch of third-party groups, even though GW dropped the ball.
The point still holds true, though. GW introduces new games, runs them for a while to draw in people who want to buy just a few minis and have a game to play with their friends, and then drops them. The fact that other groups are picking them up and running with them doesn't change that.
I started playing Warhammer in about 1995, and have played off and on since then. In that time, they've modified the background on most of the world they ripped off... er, created so much that a lot of the original miniatures and rules no longer work. They've also introduced, with great fanfare, and then eliminated a whole lot of games. What are some of GW's best games? Mordheim (discontinued), BloodBowl (discontinued, though I expect it will come back now they've got a computer version), Battlefleet Gothic (discontinued)... there's also Space Hulk, WarMaster, Epic 40K, Inquisiter, and others, all released, pushed until they got popular, then canceled. THAT was why I gave up on GW.
I'm much more interested in small skirmish-type games than army-based games, and every time GW created one, they waited until they'd gotten a lot of new players hooked, then shut them down. All just part of a plan to get people over to WH and 40K.
There seems to be a cultural clash, tribal perhaps, where commentators here disparage what they seem ignorant of. And speaking of having time on their hands - what about all these comments?
No, no... it's just that the culture here mandates that you disparage what you're ignorant of. It saves people all that wasted time actually learning about things. It's much easier this way.
Besides, it's hard to start a flame war if everyone involved actually knows what they're talking about.
True. However, if after a few months of exercise I realize that all my pants, even freshly washed, are looser than they used to be, and I'm buckling my belt a few notches tighter, that's a pretty good indication that something has changed. Sure, it's not a precise measurement, but I don't really care about precision in this instance.
For someone in good shape, yes. I've been unable to exercise seriously for years (bad knee injury, no pool available. It's absurdly difficult to get a good aerobic workout in a gym without using your legs...), and I'm finally starting to be able to work out again. 300-350 calories on an elliptical machine or exercise bike is about as much as I can manage, but, combined with an awareness of what I'm eating (and a slight improvement in diet), I'm starting to see improvement after only about a month.
I disagree. The easiest thing to measure is "how loose are my pants." I have to put them on every weekday to go to work, and I have no reason to step on a scale other than to check my weight.
Which is a very small part of why my goal is to lose inches around my waist, not pounds. (The pounds will be a nice side effect, but they're certainly not the goal.)
The problem is that most Americans don't appear to believe this. They'll tell you they've found a miracle-cure pill that will let them eat nothing but cheetos and chocolate cake and spend their day sitting in front of the TV, and still lose weight. They'll say it doesn't matter that their diet sucks, because they're walking for half an hour a day. They'll tell you it doesn't matter that they never exercise, because they're not eating anything except lettuce. Ok, that last one will work, but only if they NEVER eat anything but lettuce. The minute they go back to their old diet, they'll gain weight again.
For whatever reason -- probably too many late-night-infomercials -- most Americans just don't understand that you need to balance calories-in with calories-out.
Because my cell phone doesn't work when:
1) I'm in my house. (AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint... I haven't tested anyone else.)
2) The battery runs out.
Also, my land-line is cheaper than most cell-phone plans, and the phone is more comfortable to use.
Why not use a paper notebook in class, and just enter the equations into the computer later?
If you absolutely insist on a technical solution, how about:
- using macros. Use something like OO.o's auto expand feature (whatever they call it), so that when you type exp-1 it translates to ^-1, or intl expands to integral.
- using shorthand. Find a set of shorthand layouts that work for you, then run search and replace later to make them what they're actually supposed to be. The same examples as above work -- just without the macros.
To be honest, though, you're probably best off either using pencil and paper or just improving your typing speed.
Private companies are not allowed to discriminate.
See my above comments about the Boy Scouts, private schools, and so on. Private companies ARE allowed to discriminate. It just sometimes earns them a bad name, if they're blatant enough about it.
Now this, in fact, is the first reasonable response I've seen to my comment, and you're right: if it was just Americans who were having trouble, and just American airlines (not "American Airlines", but "airlines in America"), I'd say you had no argument. As I said earlier, the airlines have enough clout to fight off the security regulations if they wanted. The simple fact is that they went along with it pretty much without arguing, because the so-called "American Public" (as represented by news agencies who enjoy reporting on panics) demanded it. If the majority of the public had responded by saying "Screw you, we're not going to let you search us, and we're going to stop flying until you give in," the rules would have reverted awfully quickly.
But as you say, a few loonies in the US managed to get rules changed for everyone, worldwide, and THAT isn't acceptable, or shouldn't be.
What nonsense is this? I guess you haven't heard of anti-discrimination laws. Just try and start a business that caters to only one race, or excludes a gender and see how far you get before you're sued.
I don't have to try: I can give you several examples off the top of my head.
1) The Boy Scouts of America. They only allow boys to join, obviously. They also openly and actively discriminate against atheists and agnostics -- just try to get your Eagle Scout rank without stating a religion.
2) Women-only private colleges. Mt Holyoke, Smith, Wellesley... three colleges in my home state that discriminate against men. To the best of my knowledge, not one of them has been sued.
3) Hair salons and barber shops. Not all of them, but some of them are single-sex establishments.
So of course people can make such arbitrary rules. They can do whatever they want as long as they do it on private property and don't violate any laws. There's no law that says private clubs have to let everyone in, or that any private business has to work with everyone. In general, I don't see that as a bad thing, either: No one is forcing me to join the Boy Scouts, or attend Smith College, or get my hair cut in any particular salon, and if I want to, well... too bad.
And my business license, if I ran a business, couldn't be revoked if I decided to be an ass. It could be revoked if I violated the law, or the terms of the license. That's about it. A lawsuit could force me out of business, but it's unlikely that a judge would side with an atheist or gay boy scout -- they never have before, and there's no reason for them to start.
I'd argue that yes, they can: they're privately owned companies, they get to do what they want. The backlash would probably put them out of business, but if they want to commit corporate suicide, that's their problem.
Note that I'm not saying they'd be RIGHT, morally speaking, to do so... morally speaking, equality is better, inasmuch as it's possible. But if we're going to say they're independant companies, they have to be allowed to make decisions we don't agree with.
True enough. Statistics without numbers are pretty meaningless, really, but the point is still valid: there's a lot more of these exploding, in an absolute sense.
Flying may not be a human right, but it is a one of the major boons of living in the modern world, and if you can meet the ticket price, you should be able to fly. Making large parts of society contingent on surrendering human rights is tantamount to taking those rights away.
I'm not arguing that it's not nice to be able to fly, but it's also not a basic human right. We don't have the right to fly any more than we have the right to drive, or to all have ponies.
Also, I see your argument all the time. It's a cop-out. I don't think a world in which large companies can arbitrarily refuse to provide service is the best of all possible worlds. Once a company, or a set of companies, becomes an integral part of our social fabric, it should be placed under a different, more stringent set of rules that ensure the greatest benefit for all.
How is it a copout? It's a simple fact: private companies aren't required to make any service available to anyone they don't want to. If you don't like it, lobby to get the law changed, but you'll need a lot of luck: forcing companies to make their products or services available to everyone is a good way to drive them out of business.
And really, this isn't the best of all possible worlds, and getting mad that it isn't doesn't change anything. Working to improve things is worthwhile, but let's be honest about what sort of a world we live in while we work to improve it, and let's be honest about what human rights really are.
Also, how do we define a company being an integral part of our world? Personally, I don't think flying is that critical: if I had the option, I'd rather take a train. I know a fair number of people who've never been on a plane. So is air travel really a necessary part of our society? Don't get me wrong, it's a convenience, and I'd hate to not have the option in an emergency. But if you get right down to it, it's NOT critical. As it becomes more expensive and less practical, people and companies will start working around it.
In point of fact, the rate probably is increasing. Ten years ago not many consumer appliances ran on lithium ion batteries: they used NiMH, mostly. Cameras used little alkaline batteries, and film. Not everybody had a cell-phone, though it was moving that way fast.
These days, just about every tourist has a camera, and a lot of them run on Li-Ion batteries, as do laptops, cell phones, iPods, and everything else anyone carries. The percentage of batteries that explode may not have changed, but the absolute number probably has. Given that the market is probably somewhere near saturation -- there will always be people like me who don't want a cell-phone, and don't want to travel with a laptop -- I'd say the numbers won't do more than double or triple over the next three years, but yes: I think they numbers will go up.
I still travel without that. I just bring a couple of books, and try to sleep through most of the flight. Most people do, really... walk up the aisle sometime when you're traveling (if you can tear yourself away from your laptop long enough) and look at all the people in the plane. When I flew earlier this year, I'd say less than 10% had laptops or DVD players with them. Quite a few had iPods, but I doubt being unable to bring them would be a deal-breaker on travel for most people.
The key here is that flying isn't a basic human right. Those airplanes are privately owned, and the people who own them can make any rules they want about who can ride. If they want to insist that only people with purple hair can fly, that's their perogative. If they want to insist that no-one more than eighteen inches tall can fly, they're allowed to do so. If they want to insist that people submit to a ridiculous, ineffective security screening before flying, they can.
All three rules are equally silly, and all three rules are equally legitimate. If you don't like the rules, you can find a different way to travel. If they make compliance difficult and annoying enough, many people will, and then the airlines will go under. Until then, you're stuck with it.
(And yes, there's a lot of pressure from the government for them to run this level of security, but if you believe the airlines don't have enough lobbying power to fight back, you're insufficiently cynical.)
That's one of the two things I'll be waiting for. That and the ability to load books from any random source, not just B&N.
Those aside, the presence of 802.11 and the replaceable battery are what make it tempting.
Intimidation is nothing but a tool to ensure social compliance.
Very true. Are you agreeing with me, or disagreeing?
While I agree that intimidation is wrong, perhaps it's time that the people who are violently opposed to gay rights see the other side. I have a lot of gay friends, and almost all of them have been, at one time or another, harrassed, threatened, or intimidated by people who disagreed with them. Perhaps the people who are responsible for that, and who would deny them basic human rights, should have to consider their own comfort before doing so.
Intimidation and harrassment are always wrong, but they're sometimes appropriate anyway. (Yes, I know that sounds hypocritical. No, I can't explain it any better.)
So here's what confuses me... "BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered all data, but a minority are still affected." If all the data has been recovered, wouldn't NO ONE still be affected? I mean... being affected by this means your data was lost in such a way that it couldn't be recovered. So...
Depends how it's done. In some places (I think in South America, but I can't recall precisely) slash and burn was historically used as part of a crop rotation, with selected trees retained; usually trees that were valuable to local wildlife, or produced products that humans wanted. If you only clear the land every five to ten years, the burning adds a lot of nutrients back into the soil, and encouraging wildlife to inhabit the land when it isn't being used does the same. Since the land was only intensively farmed for a year or two, and then encouraged to recover (native plant seeds being brought in, and adjacent areas being left "wild") for four to eight, it stayed pretty healthy.
Even if it's not perfect, that's a far cry from the modern version, which wipes out everything on a piece of land and then uses the land until it can't support anything at all.
Mirror, no. But they ought to take that into account. After all, their purpose is to educate people and to get them ready for real jobs. That second part, at least, requires teaching people to use the industry standard equipment. The first doesn't, of course, and really ought to include teaching people alternatives, but, well... do you really expect logic from schools?