All of your arguments against DRM make sense, but they're arguments against DRM, not against open source software that implements hooks for DRM hardware. The GPLv3 would, for example, rule out allowing a company to ship a Linux distribution on a hardware platform that required the software to use secret keys in order to run, even if the code that had the hooks were open source. This does not hurt the hardware vendor, but does hurt the open source project which will be passed over by anyone who needs to interact with that platform.
Linux became the default choice for many business server and embeded applications because it DID NOT make these kinds of arbitrary decisions about the rightness or wrongness of the use to which you put the OS. That menas it might be used to kill people (which I find much more problematic than DRM) or to sniff out file sharers or to record international phone calls, but that's something that you fight outside of the tool. The tool is just a tool and improper uses should be sanctioned by dealing directly with those uses, not invalidating the tool.
Put another way: if the Linux kernel COULD be put under the GPLv3 tomorrow and WAS, I expect that we would all be using FreeBSD in not so very long. That really doesn't make the statement about DRM that I think Stallman was trying to assert.
I'm not sure that I see how Google was "punished". Their stock price fell from absurdly speculative to foolishly speculative levels because they didn't do as well as people thought they would.
Makes perfect sense to me. The only insanity is those companies where the board of directors holds the CEO and the rest of the executive management responsible for hitting arbitrary numbers invented by the street. Fortunately Google doesn't do that, because they have been very careful from the start to make it clear to their investors (public and private) that they don't play that game.
Here's the thing: there are probably limitations in the SOFTWARE (not the computer itself, of course) that the IRS uses to handle personal tax returns. Gates moves GIGANTIC amounts of money through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (the Foundation is the only reason I have any respect for him, since it has done nearly as much good as his company has done ill... nearly). He's probably the country's highest-spending philanthropist, and the Foundation is just as likely to hit arbitrary limits in the IRS' software as anything else.
That they would need to have special tweeks made to the software (and obviously you don't want the headache of deploying that new version on all of the systems) is not shocking at all.
Rather, I would expect to see this marketed as a "Google appliance" in a hardware + software pair. We know that they are working on distributing the core hardware on which Google Search runs into widely ranging datacenters around the world. Offloading some desktop processing to diversely located hubs would explain some of the reasons for that. I could see Google developing a suite of desktop tools which take advantage of those compute resources in ways that no software-only vendor could.
When it comes to Google, it seems the only mistake you can make is thinking small.
You're both missing the point, and quite correct. Wikipedia often has conflicting statements in a single article. Sometimes it's of the form "X claims that A, but Y claims that B," and sometimes it's sectioned out. That's not what zelotish vandals want, though. They want the "truth" (their truth) to be the only text on a page, and if quaralsome "facts" that they don't approve of must appear anywhere, then they will blank, vandalize and otherwise deface that page in an attempt to remove it.
You are not dealing with "my version" you're dealing with "the correct version". Between those is a vast gulf of point of view that cannot be brooked on Wikipedia.
I'm very glad taht WP was willing and able to send such a strong message.
I'm under NDA, so pardon me while I dance a little... a certain large company with whom I have done business in the past, and which maintains a large stable of popular sites, once sent us their cookie documentation. As a partner site, we were required to play ball with this document, and I can only describe it as vile. It was a manual akin to the anarchist's cookbook, but for subverting the trust of our users. The information coming out about cookies is not "theoretical", it is practical and widely used by the largest sites.
If you don't believe me, turn on manual cookie accepting, and start visiting the largest sites on the net. Accept all cookies for just the session and see what you get. I assure you that you will see these games played, not by disreputable hackers, but by the companies that many thought they could trust. You will see your personal information (to the extent that company A has it), handed off to company B in ways that HTTP was not supposed to allow for. You will see a great many interesting things.
Of course, a global temperature drop of 5 degrees C could cause the Greenland ice sheets to melt (since global temperatures do not have the same first derivative at all locations -- far from it).
That said, we're at the top of a massive rise in temperatures that goes back over 100,000 years, and while we have no concrete idea what triggers those changes, we're CERTAIN that a global rise of 2 degrees celcius is right around the corner.
Still, no one has answered my question that I've asked here on Slashdot many times. We know that water has far more impact on retaining heat than CO2, and we know that millions of gallons (more?) evaporate every day over farmland. Now, that's going to percipitate out, but it will be replenished. You have a static (and growning rapidly) supply of water that has been moved from low-surface-area environments (lakes, ocean, streams, etc.) into high-surface-area irrigation. We're essentially creating permanent, low-density cloud-cover over a huge chunk of the temperate world. Has anyone ever done the math to determine just how much of the "hockey stick" is a result of corn, soybeans and rice rather than SUVs? Or are we just happier lashing out at the wealthy and uncomfortable with a problem caused by our need to feed billions?
To quote NOAA:
"Overall, land precipitation for the globe has increased by ~2% since 1900, however, precipitation changes have been spatially variable over the last century. Instrumental records show that there has been a general increase in precipitation of about 0.5-1.0%/decade over land in northern mid-high latitudes, except in parts of eastern Russia. However, a decrease of about -0.3%/decade in precipitation has occurred during the 20th century over land in sub-tropical latitudes, though this trend has weakened in recent decades." -http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming .html#Q5
Just in case you needed something concrete to go on.
This is a serious question, and if anyone has hard numbers that they can point me to (not an arm-wavy, "it just percipitates, so it's not a problem," answer), I'd love to see them reply. I'd be the first person yelling for reform if I honestly thought that there was a serious danger (though I think lax controls around shipments and disposal of toxic chemicals are a bigger problem).
This is yet another attempt for artists to justify themselves to themselves. It's very much like the old "what makes us better than animals," foolishness. What makes us better than animals is that we're not eaten by them on too regular a basis. What makes art art is the appreciation of an audience (sometimes that audience is only the artist). These are simple facts that will not change, regardless of how hard we try to classify those things that we like as art and those things that we do not like as whatever else we want to call them.
Now, that said, I'm not sure I see modern videogames being any better art than the fairgrounds of the early-to-mid 20th century. They are entertainment for the masses, and while both a fairground and a videogame are canvases on which art may be painted, we WILL look back at both as the pop-art of a generation in their own right.
Ebert can stuff his "movies are art but video games aren't," foolishness.
"Ah, but this too falls down. The GPL does not govern use, it governs distribution.
"It's not directly covered, but it's indirectly covered to an almost complete extent."
No, you're still incorrect. There is absolutely no restriction with respect to use at all. Period.
Restrictions on distribution are not (even indirectly) restrictions on use. If you hand software to someone else, that is distribution. If you hack it up in-house and cause it to launch missiles at the FSF, you can do that, and the GPL has nothing to say about it (the law, on the other hand might take a dim view of missiles in Cambridge, MA). Of course, if the missiles are open source, you're going to have to offer source to the FSF, since you "distributed" the missiles to them;)
Seriously though, no matter how you feel about the GPL—like it or hate it—you need to come to terms with the fact that it starts and ends at controling distribution (and allowing modification, which is a sort of touchy question under copyright law, so the GPL allows it outright).
If you can quote a line from the GPL which restricts use, or you can get an IP lawyer to claim that there's some hidden effect of the GPL that restricts use, please cite same. Otherwise, carry on with your "you can't make any money from my work" development (which, depending on how you word it, might actually constitute a usage restriction).
Ah, but this too falls down. The GPL does not govern use, it governs distribution. In fact is is titled,
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
Note the lack of the word "use" in that title.
You do not violate the GPL by modifying software covered by it. You do not violate the GPL by using that modified software (even if you fail to ship those changes to anyone who asks). You do not violate the GPL by doing a great many things, as long as you don't distribute it. Once you try to distribute it, then you have to either a) do so within the constraints of copyright law and fair use doctrine (very hard to do with software) or b) accept the terms of the GPL.
"You are so incompetent you don't know standards from popularity."
Actually, there's rarely a hard line between the two, but besides being an ad hominem attack slung at an out-of context comment, you failed to notice that I'd left standards discussions behind, and was discussing social phenomena.
I was giving an example of the limiting nature of treating any set of choices as a set of polar extremes. For a long time, for example, Linux was not a fully POSIX-compliant system. It made every effort to be POSIX compliant where doing so was an obvious choice, but many edge conditions and specifics needed work, and no one did that work because it wasn't their particular itch.
Those who argued against the use of Linux pointed this out, and I had the same response to them: you don't care about the standard. If you did, you'd write the fixes. You care about software advocacy, and that's not something I have time for.
"yet one mor ereaosn to think that the folks over at WotC/Hasborg are not even reading or playtesting their own material."
If you're that down on WotC, why do you learn the rules to their games so deeply? I've been running a pretty fun D&D campaign, and I have to say that, even with two players who are rules lawyers, it's pretty smooth sailing. I think the primary problem arises when a DM sees the game as zero-sum, and/or tries to treat the game as a contest of numbers.
Sure, you might have built the world's most competent monk, but you've taken a vow of poverty and you derive your special attacks from divine intervention... that sounds like a wonderful opportunity to me! I'd allow that player in a heartbeat, and I'd build story lines around him that would really challenge him and give him back as much fun for having taken the time to build the character as he was willing to take advantage of.
I have a Cleric who is really pumped up with respect to undead turning. At first, I was a bit taken aback, since I like to use undead as grunt adversaries / minions etc. But, after thinking about it, I realized that it was an opportunity. I've toyed with him a lot. I've given him opportunities to "save the day" by turning / destroying undead, but I've also given him situations where he jumped into the middle of the room of undead, held his holy symbol aloft and... did nothing for reasons that he would discover later, and tied into the back-story of that scenario.
Are those books unbalanced? Well, perhaps. If they break the CR system, then yes they are, but it's hard to say that MC's stuff is unbalanced, since 3rd edition is was largely his baby. But, even if they are unbalanced, you can compensate by just making everything that the players take advantage of, also available to their adversaries, and/or building story around them so that the odd stupidly powerful monk or the earth-shattering cleric just isn't as much of an issue.
"I mean, if all the game is about is killing things, it's faster and easier to play WoW or Diablo II."
I think the primary advantage to playing tabletop is that the DM can react to the events in the game, and tailor the results to the play style of the players.
Take The Shackled City Adventure Path for example. This is a series of 12 modules published in serial form by Dungeon Magazine (they're now doing a sequel called The Age of Worms). In it, there's something that bears a passing reseblance to the kinds of quests that one sees in games like WoW or Diablo or Dungeon Siege, but here's the difference: it's designed to play out across the course of months with a DM who uses the modules as a framework. Development tips are given on how to shape the progress of the campaign while continuing to run the modules as presented. There are possible hooks for player backgrounds, NPCs which the DM can expand on, and even involve in the campaign in different ways. There are notes on using the entire campaign in a different setting or as pieces of a larger campaign. Players can go completely "off-script" and decide to leave the area; forge ahead into areas that don't enter the story-line until later; you can even have a party that decides to turn to the "dark side" as it were, and help the antagonists to succeed. None of these things are terribly easy to do in a video game, because you have to plan for all of the contingencies ahead of time.
You are entirely missing the point of the exercise. It's a profit source, for sure, but it has little to do with charging money for services. File sharing of video and audio is a HUGE impact on the backbones right now. If "legitimate" (read, "paying") traffic can be identified, then everything else can be QoSed into the ground. This is a direct attack on file sharing, mark my words on that.
So much for those lightning fast OS distribution downloads via BT....:-(
1. It and the Book of Exalted Deeds are meant to be used together or not at all, and 2. The creatures in it are meant to be used in a game that involves characters similarly empowered.
Those two books modify the nature of your game, and expand it. It's not unbalanced if used as intended, but if you treat it as an appendix to the Monster Manual, you're going to unbalance your game.
"This book is only for rollplayers* with at least three advanced mathematics degrees"
First off, there's no need for anything beyond basic grade-school math in the game, and even that's pretty tame (no long division, even).
Ok, hyperbole aside, this game is really not that complex, but you need to REALLY GET d20 before you even think about looking at it. You need to understand why the feat system is the way that it is, and what it is that you're trading off in terms of progression by removign magic items. You also need to have the combat system pretty well in hand.
Once you do, this is not that bad. There's a feat-tree, and there's an armor-base damage-mitigation system. It's really not that bad. Yes, it's combat-focused; that's the point to the book, I imagine. Yes, it also has some complex feat progressions, but for the most part, they're easy to understand if you look at how normal d20 feats and normal d20 magic items interact. For example, the Two-Weapon Combat feat has a progression that's intended for rogues. It adds extra dice of sneak attack damage at higher levels. You get the same thing in raw d20, but you get it through magic, not feats.
Above all, you have to treat the rules as a framework, not the game itself. You learn them and then forget them, letting the game itself guide your actions as the game master, not the rules.
You don't actually play GURPS or you're thinking of a much more constrained version of "super hero" than I'm used to in GURPS. Your average 200pt super in GURPS might well be vulnerable to physical attacks like a grenade, but they might also be insubstantial, have a massive force field, or any number of other forms of limited invulnerability.
In a 500pt game, I'd be shocked to see a character that found grenades bothersome.
Of course, I'm using 3rd edition as a benchmark. I never read 4th (by that time, I was locked into running a D&D 3.5 game under protest, which I eventually learned to love).
This was not a "D&D thing". Go pick up an issue of Dungeon Magazine, and you'll see that the art of the dungeon crawl in modern D&D is not dead. In fact, it's now more popular than ever. There are, however, a practically infinite number of ways to run a game, and your DM might decide to run a ROLE-playing game, rather than a role-PLAYing game. That's their call, and you should let them know what you think.
For old-time's sake, I ran the first session of my new D&D game (my first D&D game in most of a decade) as a dungeon crawl, and I was shocked that my players actually liked it. Sure, I was unsteady with the new rules and taking far too long at combat, but sometimes players just want to go kill something.
Of course, they also enjoy the role playing, but it's not an either-or proposition at all.
I've done a lot of tabletop role playing. I've played D&D in many forms (Basic, Advanced, 2nd ed., and d20-based 3.5). I've also played GURPS, Traveller, Champions (as "Champions", but I've also played a number of Hero System variants), World of Darkness (a few Mage games and a Wraith game), Shadowrun, some home-grown systems and some other stuff I'm probably forgetting.
While I don't want to enter into the flame-infested waters of "what's best", I will say this: good role playing and a creative GM/DM/storyteller/what-have-you is far, far more important than what system or setting you choose. If everyone knows D&D, by all means use it, but don't feel constrained. Focus on the quality of play.
I tend to avoid single-genre systems, which is why I'd written off D&D for many years (I was barely aware of 3.0's release), but the fact that I was dragged out of GURPS and Hero System into some World of Darkness games made me remember that, even using a system that I despised, role playing was fun. That's why, when I asked my friends to join a game I was planning, I reluctantly chose to use D&D 3.5...
And now, I'm hooked. d20 is everything that D&D should have been from day one. The Microsoft of games? I think not... perhaps the Linux of games would be more like it. It's based on a rich history going back to the early 70s, and yet it's completely new. It retains some of the quirks of the original (e.g. classes), but for the most part, it's a ground-up redesign with modern usage in mind. It's also free (though in the case of d20, it's a non-commercial sort of "free", but you can still run a pretty good game from nothing but the d20 SRD).
This was about Iron Heroes, of course, but if you thought my review sounded like something that would interest you, I suggest taking a look at all of Malhavoc's books. Monte Cook has his name on Iron Heroes, but Arcana Evolved is actually his work, and it's equally good, IMHO. They both have their own setting, but AE takes it a bit further. It has some published fiction to give you a sense of the world, its own spell lists (many of the spells being core d20, but some are removed and many are added), and it's more compatible with the core d20 classes than IH is.
This is purely a matter of meeting the demands of your users. If you feel that a product should be punitively ignored because it fails to meet a standard that large numbers of users have no need for, then fine. Ignore it. The rest of us have work to do, and use PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL or whatever other database tool is the best fit for the job we have at hand. The moment you put your zelotry before the work, the work is called into question.
I can't count the number of people who've seen me using Emacs at work, start to launch into some sort of vi-advocacy rant and then stammer as they see me switch windows to a vi session. Oh well.
jamie, I'd already pulled down the latest tar ball by the time you had said that (CVS seems to have been down with an EOF error on login). I'll look it over when I get home tonight. It seems like the array of moderation types needs a new value, and the code that deals with that needs a bit of tweeking to understand that there's now a "+0" that constitutes an actual moderation. Then, of course, the preference entry for Meta (I HATE that name a lot, but can't think of a good one otherwise) display and the appropriate UI changes to support it.
All told, not much work, I would think. Anyone see a hurdle?
"China [is doomed] by the fact that their younger generation's research seems to depend on the archived wisdom of random people on the street"
As far as I can tell, no one who says this (and it's said often) actually knows how to use an encyclopedia for research. Let me explain how you go about this mysterious process:
First, you establish your topic (let's say, "history of dog breeding in Europe").
Now you need to work out the specific topics in the reference source that pertain to your topic. For example, in this case, we find that Dog breeding gives some overview information and sends us to Purebred and a number of dog breed pages. On one of thos dog breed pages (Greater Swiss Mountain Dog), we find a side-bar with breeding standards pages, etc. This particular breed also has some historical context that's quite useful. All of this is encapsulated in the researcher's notes.
Quickly checking the history of edits on the pages in question also gives us some detail. We discover which topics are controvercial, which have changed recently, what references have been removed, etc.
By this point, you have some notes, some terminology you may not have been aware of, and more importantly, on each one of those pages, you probably have a wealth of on and off-line sources and new topics to check up on.
This is called research. It's a very different process from "depending on the archived wisdom of people on the street," and it really doesn't vary much from encyclopedia to encyclopedia (other than in the one respect that WP can be easier to use than most). Anyone who simply copies information from any encyclopedia is not performing research, they are instead quoting, that that's not the same thing at all.
Slashdot Mirror
All of your arguments against DRM make sense, but they're arguments against DRM, not against open source software that implements hooks for DRM hardware. The GPLv3 would, for example, rule out allowing a company to ship a Linux distribution on a hardware platform that required the software to use secret keys in order to run, even if the code that had the hooks were open source. This does not hurt the hardware vendor, but does hurt the open source project which will be passed over by anyone who needs to interact with that platform.
Linux became the default choice for many business server and embeded applications because it DID NOT make these kinds of arbitrary decisions about the rightness or wrongness of the use to which you put the OS. That menas it might be used to kill people (which I find much more problematic than DRM) or to sniff out file sharers or to record international phone calls, but that's something that you fight outside of the tool. The tool is just a tool and improper uses should be sanctioned by dealing directly with those uses, not invalidating the tool.
Put another way: if the Linux kernel COULD be put under the GPLv3 tomorrow and WAS, I expect that we would all be using FreeBSD in not so very long. That really doesn't make the statement about DRM that I think Stallman was trying to assert.
I'm not sure that I see how Google was "punished". Their stock price fell from absurdly speculative to foolishly speculative levels because they didn't do as well as people thought they would.
Makes perfect sense to me. The only insanity is those companies where the board of directors holds the CEO and the rest of the executive management responsible for hitting arbitrary numbers invented by the street. Fortunately Google doesn't do that, because they have been very careful from the start to make it clear to their investors (public and private) that they don't play that game.
Here's the thing: there are probably limitations in the SOFTWARE (not the computer itself, of course) that the IRS uses to handle personal tax returns. Gates moves GIGANTIC amounts of money through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (the Foundation is the only reason I have any respect for him, since it has done nearly as much good as his company has done ill... nearly). He's probably the country's highest-spending philanthropist, and the Foundation is just as likely to hit arbitrary limits in the IRS' software as anything else.
That they would need to have special tweeks made to the software (and obviously you don't want the headache of deploying that new version on all of the systems) is not shocking at all.
I woud be surprised by that.
Rather, I would expect to see this marketed as a "Google appliance" in a hardware + software pair. We know that they are working on distributing the core hardware on which Google Search runs into widely ranging datacenters around the world. Offloading some desktop processing to diversely located hubs would explain some of the reasons for that. I could see Google developing a suite of desktop tools which take advantage of those compute resources in ways that no software-only vendor could.
When it comes to Google, it seems the only mistake you can make is thinking small.
You're both missing the point, and quite correct. Wikipedia often has conflicting statements in a single article. Sometimes it's of the form "X claims that A, but Y claims that B," and sometimes it's sectioned out. That's not what zelotish vandals want, though. They want the "truth" (their truth) to be the only text on a page, and if quaralsome "facts" that they don't approve of must appear anywhere, then they will blank, vandalize and otherwise deface that page in an attempt to remove it.
You are not dealing with "my version" you're dealing with "the correct version". Between those is a vast gulf of point of view that cannot be brooked on Wikipedia.
I'm very glad taht WP was willing and able to send such a strong message.
I'm under NDA, so pardon me while I dance a little... a certain large company with whom I have done business in the past, and which maintains a large stable of popular sites, once sent us their cookie documentation. As a partner site, we were required to play ball with this document, and I can only describe it as vile. It was a manual akin to the anarchist's cookbook, but for subverting the trust of our users. The information coming out about cookies is not "theoretical", it is practical and widely used by the largest sites.
If you don't believe me, turn on manual cookie accepting, and start visiting the largest sites on the net. Accept all cookies for just the session and see what you get. I assure you that you will see these games played, not by disreputable hackers, but by the companies that many thought they could trust. You will see your personal information (to the extent that company A has it), handed off to company B in ways that HTTP was not supposed to allow for. You will see a great many interesting things.
That said, we're at the top of a massive rise in temperatures that goes back over 100,000 years, and while we have no concrete idea what triggers those changes, we're CERTAIN that a global rise of 2 degrees celcius is right around the corner.
Still, no one has answered my question that I've asked here on Slashdot many times. We know that water has far more impact on retaining heat than CO2, and we know that millions of gallons (more?) evaporate every day over farmland. Now, that's going to percipitate out, but it will be replenished. You have a static (and growning rapidly) supply of water that has been moved from low-surface-area environments (lakes, ocean, streams, etc.) into high-surface-area irrigation. We're essentially creating permanent, low-density cloud-cover over a huge chunk of the temperate world. Has anyone ever done the math to determine just how much of the "hockey stick" is a result of corn, soybeans and rice rather than SUVs? Or are we just happier lashing out at the wealthy and uncomfortable with a problem caused by our need to feed billions?
To quote NOAA:Just in case you needed something concrete to go on.
This is a serious question, and if anyone has hard numbers that they can point me to (not an arm-wavy, "it just percipitates, so it's not a problem," answer), I'd love to see them reply. I'd be the first person yelling for reform if I honestly thought that there was a serious danger (though I think lax controls around shipments and disposal of toxic chemicals are a bigger problem).
This is yet another attempt for artists to justify themselves to themselves. It's very much like the old "what makes us better than animals," foolishness. What makes us better than animals is that we're not eaten by them on too regular a basis. What makes art art is the appreciation of an audience (sometimes that audience is only the artist). These are simple facts that will not change, regardless of how hard we try to classify those things that we like as art and those things that we do not like as whatever else we want to call them.
Now, that said, I'm not sure I see modern videogames being any better art than the fairgrounds of the early-to-mid 20th century. They are entertainment for the masses, and while both a fairground and a videogame are canvases on which art may be painted, we WILL look back at both as the pop-art of a generation in their own right.
Ebert can stuff his "movies are art but video games aren't," foolishness.
"Ah, but this too falls down. The GPL does not govern use, it governs distribution.
;)
"It's not directly covered, but it's indirectly covered to an almost complete extent."
No, you're still incorrect. There is absolutely no restriction with respect to use at all. Period.
Restrictions on distribution are not (even indirectly) restrictions on use. If you hand software to someone else, that is distribution. If you hack it up in-house and cause it to launch missiles at the FSF, you can do that, and the GPL has nothing to say about it (the law, on the other hand might take a dim view of missiles in Cambridge, MA). Of course, if the missiles are open source, you're going to have to offer source to the FSF, since you "distributed" the missiles to them
Seriously though, no matter how you feel about the GPL—like it or hate it—you need to come to terms with the fact that it starts and ends at controling distribution (and allowing modification, which is a sort of touchy question under copyright law, so the GPL allows it outright).
If you can quote a line from the GPL which restricts use, or you can get an IP lawyer to claim that there's some hidden effect of the GPL that restricts use, please cite same. Otherwise, carry on with your "you can't make any money from my work" development (which, depending on how you word it, might actually constitute a usage restriction).
You do not violate the GPL by modifying software covered by it. You do not violate the GPL by using that modified software (even if you fail to ship those changes to anyone who asks). You do not violate the GPL by doing a great many things, as long as you don't distribute it. Once you try to distribute it, then you have to either a) do so within the constraints of copyright law and fair use doctrine (very hard to do with software) or b) accept the terms of the GPL.
"You are so incompetent you don't know standards from popularity."
Actually, there's rarely a hard line between the two, but besides being an ad hominem attack slung at an out-of context comment, you failed to notice that I'd left standards discussions behind, and was discussing social phenomena.
I was giving an example of the limiting nature of treating any set of choices as a set of polar extremes. For a long time, for example, Linux was not a fully POSIX-compliant system. It made every effort to be POSIX compliant where doing so was an obvious choice, but many edge conditions and specifics needed work, and no one did that work because it wasn't their particular itch.
Those who argued against the use of Linux pointed this out, and I had the same response to them: you don't care about the standard. If you did, you'd write the fixes. You care about software advocacy, and that's not something I have time for.
"yet one mor ereaosn to think that the folks over at WotC/Hasborg are not even reading or playtesting their own material."
If you're that down on WotC, why do you learn the rules to their games so deeply? I've been running a pretty fun D&D campaign, and I have to say that, even with two players who are rules lawyers, it's pretty smooth sailing. I think the primary problem arises when a DM sees the game as zero-sum, and/or tries to treat the game as a contest of numbers.
Sure, you might have built the world's most competent monk, but you've taken a vow of poverty and you derive your special attacks from divine intervention... that sounds like a wonderful opportunity to me! I'd allow that player in a heartbeat, and I'd build story lines around him that would really challenge him and give him back as much fun for having taken the time to build the character as he was willing to take advantage of.
I have a Cleric who is really pumped up with respect to undead turning. At first, I was a bit taken aback, since I like to use undead as grunt adversaries / minions etc. But, after thinking about it, I realized that it was an opportunity. I've toyed with him a lot. I've given him opportunities to "save the day" by turning / destroying undead, but I've also given him situations where he jumped into the middle of the room of undead, held his holy symbol aloft and... did nothing for reasons that he would discover later, and tied into the back-story of that scenario.
Are those books unbalanced? Well, perhaps. If they break the CR system, then yes they are, but it's hard to say that MC's stuff is unbalanced, since 3rd edition is was largely his baby. But, even if they are unbalanced, you can compensate by just making everything that the players take advantage of, also available to their adversaries, and/or building story around them so that the odd stupidly powerful monk or the earth-shattering cleric just isn't as much of an issue.
"I mean, if all the game is about is killing things, it's faster and easier to play WoW or Diablo II."
I think the primary advantage to playing tabletop is that the DM can react to the events in the game, and tailor the results to the play style of the players.
Take The Shackled City Adventure Path for example. This is a series of 12 modules published in serial form by Dungeon Magazine (they're now doing a sequel called The Age of Worms). In it, there's something that bears a passing reseblance to the kinds of quests that one sees in games like WoW or Diablo or Dungeon Siege, but here's the difference: it's designed to play out across the course of months with a DM who uses the modules as a framework. Development tips are given on how to shape the progress of the campaign while continuing to run the modules as presented. There are possible hooks for player backgrounds, NPCs which the DM can expand on, and even involve in the campaign in different ways. There are notes on using the entire campaign in a different setting or as pieces of a larger campaign. Players can go completely "off-script" and decide to leave the area; forge ahead into areas that don't enter the story-line until later; you can even have a party that decides to turn to the "dark side" as it were, and help the antagonists to succeed. None of these things are terribly easy to do in a video game, because you have to plan for all of the contingencies ahead of time.
You are entirely missing the point of the exercise. It's a profit source, for sure, but it has little to do with charging money for services. File sharing of video and audio is a HUGE impact on the backbones right now. If "legitimate" (read, "paying") traffic can be identified, then everything else can be QoSed into the ground. This is a direct attack on file sharing, mark my words on that.
:-(
So much for those lightning fast OS distribution downloads via BT....
BoVD is not unbalanced, but:
1. It and the Book of Exalted Deeds are meant to be used together or not at all, and
2. The creatures in it are meant to be used in a game that involves characters similarly empowered.
Those two books modify the nature of your game, and expand it. It's not unbalanced if used as intended, but if you treat it as an appendix to the Monster Manual, you're going to unbalance your game.
"This book is only for rollplayers* with at least three advanced mathematics degrees"
First off, there's no need for anything beyond basic grade-school math in the game, and even that's pretty tame (no long division, even).
Ok, hyperbole aside, this game is really not that complex, but you need to REALLY GET d20 before you even think about looking at it. You need to understand why the feat system is the way that it is, and what it is that you're trading off in terms of progression by removign magic items. You also need to have the combat system pretty well in hand.
Once you do, this is not that bad. There's a feat-tree, and there's an armor-base damage-mitigation system. It's really not that bad. Yes, it's combat-focused; that's the point to the book, I imagine. Yes, it also has some complex feat progressions, but for the most part, they're easy to understand if you look at how normal d20 feats and normal d20 magic items interact. For example, the Two-Weapon Combat feat has a progression that's intended for rogues. It adds extra dice of sneak attack damage at higher levels. You get the same thing in raw d20, but you get it through magic, not feats.
Above all, you have to treat the rules as a framework, not the game itself. You learn them and then forget them, letting the game itself guide your actions as the game master, not the rules.
You don't actually play GURPS or you're thinking of a much more constrained version of "super hero" than I'm used to in GURPS. Your average 200pt super in GURPS might well be vulnerable to physical attacks like a grenade, but they might also be insubstantial, have a massive force field, or any number of other forms of limited invulnerability.
In a 500pt game, I'd be shocked to see a character that found grenades bothersome.
Of course, I'm using 3rd edition as a benchmark. I never read 4th (by that time, I was locked into running a D&D 3.5 game under protest, which I eventually learned to love).
This was not a "D&D thing". Go pick up an issue of Dungeon Magazine, and you'll see that the art of the dungeon crawl in modern D&D is not dead. In fact, it's now more popular than ever. There are, however, a practically infinite number of ways to run a game, and your DM might decide to run a ROLE-playing game, rather than a role-PLAYing game. That's their call, and you should let them know what you think.
For old-time's sake, I ran the first session of my new D&D game (my first D&D game in most of a decade) as a dungeon crawl, and I was shocked that my players actually liked it. Sure, I was unsteady with the new rules and taking far too long at combat, but sometimes players just want to go kill something.
Of course, they also enjoy the role playing, but it's not an either-or proposition at all.
I've done a lot of tabletop role playing. I've played D&D in many forms (Basic, Advanced, 2nd ed., and d20-based 3.5). I've also played GURPS, Traveller, Champions (as "Champions", but I've also played a number of Hero System variants), World of Darkness (a few Mage games and a Wraith game), Shadowrun, some home-grown systems and some other stuff I'm probably forgetting.
While I don't want to enter into the flame-infested waters of "what's best", I will say this: good role playing and a creative GM/DM/storyteller/what-have-you is far, far more important than what system or setting you choose. If everyone knows D&D, by all means use it, but don't feel constrained. Focus on the quality of play.
I tend to avoid single-genre systems, which is why I'd written off D&D for many years (I was barely aware of 3.0's release), but the fact that I was dragged out of GURPS and Hero System into some World of Darkness games made me remember that, even using a system that I despised, role playing was fun. That's why, when I asked my friends to join a game I was planning, I reluctantly chose to use D&D 3.5...
And now, I'm hooked. d20 is everything that D&D should have been from day one. The Microsoft of games? I think not... perhaps the Linux of games would be more like it. It's based on a rich history going back to the early 70s, and yet it's completely new. It retains some of the quirks of the original (e.g. classes), but for the most part, it's a ground-up redesign with modern usage in mind. It's also free (though in the case of d20, it's a non-commercial sort of "free", but you can still run a pretty good game from nothing but the d20 SRD).
This was about Iron Heroes, of course, but if you thought my review sounded like something that would interest you, I suggest taking a look at all of Malhavoc's books. Monte Cook has his name on Iron Heroes, but Arcana Evolved is actually his work, and it's equally good, IMHO. They both have their own setting, but AE takes it a bit further. It has some published fiction to give you a sense of the world, its own spell lists (many of the spells being core d20, but some are removed and many are added), and it's more compatible with the core d20 classes than IH is.
This is purely a matter of meeting the demands of your users. If you feel that a product should be punitively ignored because it fails to meet a standard that large numbers of users have no need for, then fine. Ignore it. The rest of us have work to do, and use PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL or whatever other database tool is the best fit for the job we have at hand. The moment you put your zelotry before the work, the work is called into question.
I can't count the number of people who've seen me using Emacs at work, start to launch into some sort of vi-advocacy rant and then stammer as they see me switch windows to a vi session. Oh well.
Would if I could, but cvs was down yesterday. I'll try again today.
jamie, I'd already pulled down the latest tar ball by the time you had said that (CVS seems to have been down with an EOF error on login). I'll look it over when I get home tonight. It seems like the array of moderation types needs a new value, and the code that deals with that needs a bit of tweeking to understand that there's now a "+0" that constitutes an actual moderation. Then, of course, the preference entry for Meta (I HATE that name a lot, but can't think of a good one otherwise) display and the appropriate UI changes to support it.
All told, not much work, I would think. Anyone see a hurdle?
"China [is doomed] by the fact that their younger generation's research seems to depend on the archived wisdom of random people on the street"
As far as I can tell, no one who says this (and it's said often) actually knows how to use an encyclopedia for research. Let me explain how you go about this mysterious process:
First, you establish your topic (let's say, "history of dog breeding in Europe").
Now you need to work out the specific topics in the reference source that pertain to your topic. For example, in this case, we find that Dog breeding gives some overview information and sends us to Purebred and a number of dog breed pages. On one of thos dog breed pages (Greater Swiss Mountain Dog), we find a side-bar with breeding standards pages, etc. This particular breed also has some historical context that's quite useful. All of this is encapsulated in the researcher's notes.
Quickly checking the history of edits on the pages in question also gives us some detail. We discover which topics are controvercial, which have changed recently, what references have been removed, etc.
By this point, you have some notes, some terminology you may not have been aware of, and more importantly, on each one of those pages, you probably have a wealth of on and off-line sources and new topics to check up on.
This is called research. It's a very different process from "depending on the archived wisdom of people on the street," and it really doesn't vary much from encyclopedia to encyclopedia (other than in the one respect that WP can be easier to use than most). Anyone who simply copies information from any encyclopedia is not performing research, they are instead quoting, that that's not the same thing at all.