Whippersnappers like you rely on game rules. When you've played enough (I don't care to reveal how many years it's been) you'll notice that rules just get in the way.
I've been playing for over 20 years, thanks. You've got it backwards. Most of the old-timers I know grew up on wargames and the early RPGs which were much more wargame-like than RPGish. What you describe is very much a new wave of gaming, and I don't care for it at all. It's not a game, it's more like an "interactive story", which is fine if that's the form of entertainment you prefer, but it's not really much of a game to me.
The rules don't make the game. The background, the GM and especially the players make the game. Don't let the rules get in the way of fun or slow you down.
That's exactly my point. Don't let rules, or their half-ass inconsistency, get in your way. Players want to know exactly what they can and can't do. Having to rely on a GM decision every time leads to inconsistent and arbitrary games. Having a simple rule structure, that you can apply as you like, is ideal. You can always choose not to use rules that get in your way.
Yes, but that's because there's no way to really verify what's an "expense" and where the money is going. If they're going to do it at all, they pretty much have to draw the line at "when money changes hands."
Well, yeah, gamist. I look for that in a game. White Wolf has some good fiction, but as game rules it leaves an awful lot to be desired. Pretty much everything beyond the most basic concepts is left to the Storyteller to deal with. Thanks...if I wanted to write my own game system I would.
WoD is a bit of a paradox to me. It seems to be targeted at people who like storytelling and drama, yet generally those are fairly creative people to begin with. WoD goes to great lengths to provide its own built in story, history and rich world, yet what's the one thing creative types are weakest at? Solid and balanced game mechanics. WoD's failure is that it's designed by right-brainers AND targeted at right-brain gamers. There's no left-brain in there to give them some logical base. It's far easier to put a pretty world on solid rules than to try to backport rules hacks onto an existing game, and that's where WoD falls down.
The beauty of (current) D&D is its relative straightforwardness. It scales well from beer & pretzels up to moderately simulationist. It caters mostly to the gamist crowd, sure, but you can leave out so much that it covers without sacrificing anything. Nearly any situation can be resolved with a single d20 roll...or you can choose not to roll any dice without damaging the intergrity of the system. I don't think most dramatist gamers realize that because it's cool to hate d20. You claim that D&D is gamist, but what you're not seeing is that that's what dramatist gamers need. d20 provides a solid, fairly well balanced structure for right-brain gamers to do what they do best: create a rich, well developed world that already has a rules structure to be hung on. D&D isn't perfect, but it has very little in common with the 1st and 2nd editions everyone loves to hate.
Dinobots have been part of Transformers since the mid-80's, I had them as a kid. Perhaps your innovative robot designer should have come up with a more innovative name.
Good job missing the point. When you can fit through a bullet hole, call me. When you can force enough air - at the pressures involved in the cabin and the atmopshere - through that hole to make a difference, call me. Until then, it's just FUD. Unless you're killed by the event that causes the damage, it's very unlikely that even damage on the scale of the Aloha flight would result in your death.
Blowing a hole in the skin of an airplane is really a good way to prevent it from crashing.
Come on, this is a myth. Are you seriously worried that a tiny little hole is spontaneously going to make the plane crash? The plane exhausts air much faster than this through its normal air recirculation. You wouldn't even know anything had happened unless you could actually see the hole. Even with 1/3 of its roof torn off Aloha Airlines flight 243 remained airworthy and performed an emergency landing.
Why would he want to do that? CentOS is RedHat for free without the support. As a business that will rely on these machines, they're willing to pay money for the assurance that they'll have Red Hat's assistance if necessary. When someone is willing to pay to get what they need, it doesn't make sense to offer something that isn't what they need with the incentive that "it's free".
But instead they advertise $47 which doesn't seem right.
It doesn't? When does the advertised price ever include tax? Have you ever walked into a store and paid exactly what the price tag said? While some things like clothes and food aren't taxed in many jurisidctions, in most cases you're paying a sales and/or service tax to at least one jurisdiction (and sometimes two or three are taking a cut) every time you step up to a cash register. The company is only charging you X dollars. The government happens to be charging you more, which is entirely out of their control.
I had a similar conversation with a comcast rep that called me. Their service is very slightly cheaper (at face value) than my current ISP, but my ISP charge me the EXACT amount that they advertise, when i know that my comcast bill is bound to be higher.
Your current (dialup, I assume) ISP is only required to collect from you, at most, sales tax. Comcast is under a lot of regulatory and taxation umbrellas. They're required to collect all those taxes from you, despite their pricing being the same as your dialup ISPs. How is that their fault? You're blaming the wrong guy here. Despite you paying X dollars, Comcast is only getting Y dollars from you, just as your ISP would only be getting Y dollars. Even though you know Comcast is only seeing the same amount of money as your ISP in the end, it's still hard for you to come to terms with the fact that they're not gouging you in some way because more money is coming from your pocket when you get Comcast service. Imagine how difficult it would be to explain this concept if Comcast wasn't even allowed to disclose what effect taxation had on your bill. You'd really think they were screwing you. And that's exactly how taxing authorities like it.
Including taxes in the price won't actually increase the cost - it'll only bring the actual cost inline wiht the advertised price.
Yes, it would. Taxes would creep up faster, as it would be easier to hide small increases over time. Look at Europe and the VAT. They're required to price items with the VAT already included and retail taxation is absolutely out of control, with VAT ranging from 15-25% across the EU.
In a couple states you can place a credit lock on your file, which is just what it says. In some other states they have a credit freeze. That prevents your credit report from being pulled by anyone but you until it's lifted. The idea is that no one's going to issue credit without pulling a report. Neither one is a free service though.
I cant get over that telcos are happy to pass them onto their consumers. That'd be like McDonalds adding 11c to your bigmac to pay for trash collection.
You think they don't? The only difference between your phone/internet bill is that they let you know exactly how much the taxes are costing you. Like you said, taxes are a cost of doing business. Like any other cost of business you need to balance your prices to take them into account. If McDonalds suddenly had to start paying a 50 cent "junk food tax" on each burger sold, you know the price of Happy Meals would go up at least 50 cents (because there's also the administrative overhead of dealing with the new tax).
It leads to very deceptive advertising which can't be good for the consumer. Comcast and T-Mobile need to pay those taxes themselves and put sticker prices up to compensate.
Yes, the governments would love that. Hidden taxes are the best kind, bceause no one ever really notices how much they're paying. A tax increase rolled into your monthly rate would just be blamed on "those damn greedy cable companies raising rates again", while a brand new $5 "information services tax" on your bill would let you know exactly who's sucking more money from your pocket. They hate what the tel/cable compaines do, because you can see just how badly your local jurisdiction is screwing you.
No, quite the opposite. Bulk mailers subsidize the rest of us. To get a bulk-mail discount you've got to do a lot of presorting and delivery, the cost savings this gives the post office is actually greater than the discount they give bulk mailers. There was some controversy about this during the last rate increase, but in general it holds true.
I love that that was modded "Interesting", as if some mod out there is now sitting around pondering the possibility of his identity being stolen next time he abandons a shopping cart.
I've never seen a game with the sprite control of Dr. Destructo: Very unusual, z made the plan circle anti-clockwise, x clockwise, such that you could loop and bank all over the screen. Very very effective.
That sounds a lot like a game called Sopwith we used to play in the high school computer lab around 1988. Tha game itself was more simplistic than the one you described, but the control system was the same.
Favorite dedicated computer game you ask? Try Civilization 2. Civ 3 for some reason seemed more fluff and the same amount of meat as Civ 2 (hence making it slower and doing nothing really for gameplay). Though I need to try FreeCiv one day.
I've been playing Civ since it was just Civilization, and I can assure you that Civ3 was a huge improvement over Civ2. While there was certainly a graphical upgrade, a lot went on underneath too. If you played SMAC (Alpha Centauri) you'd see it was a sort of testing ground for Civ3, a lot of things that debuted there showed up with Civ3 (and some that sucked, didn't). Things like Culture and Resources are major changes, for example, and fundamentally alter how you play. There are also plenty of small changes that generally balance out some of the more annoying things about combat and city management and make an all around more enjoyable experience. I have absolutely no interest in going back to previous versions or to FreeCiv, and that's in spite of having to play Civ3 through Wine on a PIII-866 with crappy onboard video. It's that much of an improvement.
FreeCiv, sadly, is stuck in the past and flat out refuses to implement most of the Civ3 improvements. I suppose if you like Civ2 then you'll like FreeCiv with the Civ2 modpack, but frankly, if you like Civ2 you probably already own the real thing anyway. FreeCiv seems to be mostly popular with people who like to screw around with options and settings (like most OSS projects), rather than people who just want to sit down and play a good game.
The one thing Civilization had going for it that was lost in Civ 2 and 3 was the "conquer the world before lunch" aspect we would always go for. Game have become a lot more like epic weekend adventures. Civ4 plans to address this though, and I have a lot of faith in Sid Meier as a game designer (though I have no idea how I'll play it on this box). I also liked the unit building aspect of SMAC, but I don't expect to see that back soon.
The NSA claims to have invented public key crypto in the 60's, before it was known to have been invented in the UK in the early 70's and "reinvented" as RSA in the USA in 1976. Considering their history with DES, among other things, it's entirely feasible.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the thrust of this ruling. California did not unilaterally decide that they suddenly have jurisdction over web merchants whose only contact with CA is the address label of a package. They simply ruled that the Borders online operations group, which had been "spun off" purely to avoid this tax collection liability was in fact the same entity as the Borders retail group which has an extensive physical presence in CA.
This ruling could not possibly be "enforced" on you because you do not have a physical presence in California. If you at some point get one, then of course you'll be subject to California law.
I meant that if I don't specify anything (http or https) it will redirect me to https for both login and mail. I'm sure you could force it to send in the clear if you really wanted to.
And recovery is very very unlikely -- there's no Torah Police to go around inspecting everybody's scrolls.
Apparently, there is!
But experts say Torahs are stolen more often than you'd think. Geoffrey Haber, rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, learned the hard way in 1998, when a burglar swiped two scrolls from his synagogue in Englewood, New Jersey. They were recovered by an NYPD Torah-theft task force in a sting operation after the thief, a maintenance man working in the neighborhood, tried to sell the scrolls to a New York rabbi, claiming they were part of an inheritance.
Yes, it is a fact. Spending a couple hundred dollars on parts and then requiring a diverse range of skills from welding to electronics assembly is by no stretch of the imagination considered "easily".
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I've been playing for over 20 years, thanks. You've got it backwards. Most of the old-timers I know grew up on wargames and the early RPGs which were much more wargame-like than RPGish. What you describe is very much a new wave of gaming, and I don't care for it at all. It's not a game, it's more like an "interactive story", which is fine if that's the form of entertainment you prefer, but it's not really much of a game to me.
The rules don't make the game. The background, the GM and especially the players make the game. Don't let the rules get in the way of fun or slow you down.
That's exactly my point. Don't let rules, or their half-ass inconsistency, get in your way. Players want to know exactly what they can and can't do. Having to rely on a GM decision every time leads to inconsistent and arbitrary games. Having a simple rule structure, that you can apply as you like, is ideal. You can always choose not to use rules that get in your way.
Yes, but that's because there's no way to really verify what's an "expense" and where the money is going. If they're going to do it at all, they pretty much have to draw the line at "when money changes hands."
WoD is a bit of a paradox to me. It seems to be targeted at people who like storytelling and drama, yet generally those are fairly creative people to begin with. WoD goes to great lengths to provide its own built in story, history and rich world, yet what's the one thing creative types are weakest at? Solid and balanced game mechanics. WoD's failure is that it's designed by right-brainers AND targeted at right-brain gamers. There's no left-brain in there to give them some logical base. It's far easier to put a pretty world on solid rules than to try to backport rules hacks onto an existing game, and that's where WoD falls down.
The beauty of (current) D&D is its relative straightforwardness. It scales well from beer & pretzels up to moderately simulationist. It caters mostly to the gamist crowd, sure, but you can leave out so much that it covers without sacrificing anything. Nearly any situation can be resolved with a single d20 roll...or you can choose not to roll any dice without damaging the intergrity of the system. I don't think most dramatist gamers realize that because it's cool to hate d20. You claim that D&D is gamist, but what you're not seeing is that that's what dramatist gamers need. d20 provides a solid, fairly well balanced structure for right-brain gamers to do what they do best: create a rich, well developed world that already has a rules structure to be hung on. D&D isn't perfect, but it has very little in common with the 1st and 2nd editions everyone loves to hate.
Dinobots have been part of Transformers since the mid-80's, I had them as a kid. Perhaps your innovative robot designer should have come up with a more innovative name.
Good job missing the point. When you can fit through a bullet hole, call me. When you can force enough air - at the pressures involved in the cabin and the atmopshere - through that hole to make a difference, call me. Until then, it's just FUD. Unless you're killed by the event that causes the damage, it's very unlikely that even damage on the scale of the Aloha flight would result in your death.
Come on, this is a myth. Are you seriously worried that a tiny little hole is spontaneously going to make the plane crash? The plane exhausts air much faster than this through its normal air recirculation. You wouldn't even know anything had happened unless you could actually see the hole. Even with 1/3 of its roof torn off Aloha Airlines flight 243 remained airworthy and performed an emergency landing.
ur just a gentoo h8r! i spent weeks pimpin my CFLAGS and now ill bet i can engineer twice as fast as the looser who submitted this!
Why would he want to do that? CentOS is RedHat for free without the support. As a business that will rely on these machines, they're willing to pay money for the assurance that they'll have Red Hat's assistance if necessary. When someone is willing to pay to get what they need, it doesn't make sense to offer something that isn't what they need with the incentive that "it's free".
Not at all. Windows still has command line ftp and Firefox can be found at: ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/
It doesn't? When does the advertised price ever include tax? Have you ever walked into a store and paid exactly what the price tag said? While some things like clothes and food aren't taxed in many jurisidctions, in most cases you're paying a sales and/or service tax to at least one jurisdiction (and sometimes two or three are taking a cut) every time you step up to a cash register. The company is only charging you X dollars. The government happens to be charging you more, which is entirely out of their control.
I had a similar conversation with a comcast rep that called me. Their service is very slightly cheaper (at face value) than my current ISP, but my ISP charge me the EXACT amount that they advertise, when i know that my comcast bill is bound to be higher.
Your current (dialup, I assume) ISP is only required to collect from you, at most, sales tax. Comcast is under a lot of regulatory and taxation umbrellas. They're required to collect all those taxes from you, despite their pricing being the same as your dialup ISPs. How is that their fault? You're blaming the wrong guy here. Despite you paying X dollars, Comcast is only getting Y dollars from you, just as your ISP would only be getting Y dollars. Even though you know Comcast is only seeing the same amount of money as your ISP in the end, it's still hard for you to come to terms with the fact that they're not gouging you in some way because more money is coming from your pocket when you get Comcast service. Imagine how difficult it would be to explain this concept if Comcast wasn't even allowed to disclose what effect taxation had on your bill. You'd really think they were screwing you. And that's exactly how taxing authorities like it.
Including taxes in the price won't actually increase the cost - it'll only bring the actual cost inline wiht the advertised price.
Yes, it would. Taxes would creep up faster, as it would be easier to hide small increases over time. Look at Europe and the VAT. They're required to price items with the VAT already included and retail taxation is absolutely out of control, with VAT ranging from 15-25% across the EU.
In a couple states you can place a credit lock on your file, which is just what it says. In some other states they have a credit freeze. That prevents your credit report from being pulled by anyone but you until it's lifted. The idea is that no one's going to issue credit without pulling a report. Neither one is a free service though.
You think they don't? The only difference between your phone/internet bill is that they let you know exactly how much the taxes are costing you. Like you said, taxes are a cost of doing business. Like any other cost of business you need to balance your prices to take them into account. If McDonalds suddenly had to start paying a 50 cent "junk food tax" on each burger sold, you know the price of Happy Meals would go up at least 50 cents (because there's also the administrative overhead of dealing with the new tax).
It leads to very deceptive advertising which can't be good for the consumer. Comcast and T-Mobile need to pay those taxes themselves and put sticker prices up to compensate.
Yes, the governments would love that. Hidden taxes are the best kind, bceause no one ever really notices how much they're paying. A tax increase rolled into your monthly rate would just be blamed on "those damn greedy cable companies raising rates again", while a brand new $5 "information services tax" on your bill would let you know exactly who's sucking more money from your pocket. They hate what the tel/cable compaines do, because you can see just how badly your local jurisdiction is screwing you.
No, quite the opposite. Bulk mailers subsidize the rest of us. To get a bulk-mail discount you've got to do a lot of presorting and delivery, the cost savings this gives the post office is actually greater than the discount they give bulk mailers. There was some controversy about this during the last rate increase, but in general it holds true.
I love that that was modded "Interesting", as if some mod out there is now sitting around pondering the possibility of his identity being stolen next time he abandons a shopping cart.
That sounds a lot like a game called Sopwith we used to play in the high school computer lab around 1988. Tha game itself was more simplistic than the one you described, but the control system was the same.
I've been playing Civ since it was just Civilization, and I can assure you that Civ3 was a huge improvement over Civ2. While there was certainly a graphical upgrade, a lot went on underneath too. If you played SMAC (Alpha Centauri) you'd see it was a sort of testing ground for Civ3, a lot of things that debuted there showed up with Civ3 (and some that sucked, didn't). Things like Culture and Resources are major changes, for example, and fundamentally alter how you play. There are also plenty of small changes that generally balance out some of the more annoying things about combat and city management and make an all around more enjoyable experience. I have absolutely no interest in going back to previous versions or to FreeCiv, and that's in spite of having to play Civ3 through Wine on a PIII-866 with crappy onboard video. It's that much of an improvement.
FreeCiv, sadly, is stuck in the past and flat out refuses to implement most of the Civ3 improvements. I suppose if you like Civ2 then you'll like FreeCiv with the Civ2 modpack, but frankly, if you like Civ2 you probably already own the real thing anyway. FreeCiv seems to be mostly popular with people who like to screw around with options and settings (like most OSS projects), rather than people who just want to sit down and play a good game.
The one thing Civilization had going for it that was lost in Civ 2 and 3 was the "conquer the world before lunch" aspect we would always go for. Game have become a lot more like epic weekend adventures. Civ4 plans to address this though, and I have a lot of faith in Sid Meier as a game designer (though I have no idea how I'll play it on this box). I also liked the unit building aspect of SMAC, but I don't expect to see that back soon.
Hook-ed on puh-honics work-ed for meh!
Microsoft owns the trademark on the word "Windows" all by itself in many categories. Go look it up in TESS.
The NSA claims to have invented public key crypto in the 60's, before it was known to have been invented in the UK in the early 70's and "reinvented" as RSA in the USA in 1976. Considering their history with DES, among other things, it's entirely feasible.
This ruling could not possibly be "enforced" on you because you do not have a physical presence in California. If you at some point get one, then of course you'll be subject to California law.
I meant that if I don't specify anything (http or https) it will redirect me to https for both login and mail. I'm sure you could force it to send in the clear if you really wanted to.
No, I'm reading Gmail over SSL right now. It even redirects me if I don't specify https://./
Apparently, there is!
Yes, it is a fact. Spending a couple hundred dollars on parts and then requiring a diverse range of skills from welding to electronics assembly is by no stretch of the imagination considered "easily".
It's a few years old now of course, but Gladius is a great turn based strategy/RPG for all three consoles.