It's an ingenious tactic, but it brings forward the possibility of companies flooding Napster and Gnutella with spam MP3's containing advertising, rather than the alleged contents in the name.
As many people burn CDs with MP3's, and as many CD's are NON-rewritable, once you burn that ad in, you've got it for the next 200 years (the lifetime of a CD not exposed to UV light).
So, for crying out loud, listen to the song once before you burn it. If you burn to CD without checking even for poor copy quality first, you deserve to wind up with a CD full of ads!
So, I don't see why AIM being open or not matters, as long as everyone is using the same system. We use the MSN Messenger service at my work (for work communication). It's fine. They may be the biggest fish in the pool, but they're not the only one.
I've actually got AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Pager on my machine, because I use MSN for my cow-orkers, AIM for some friends, and Yahoo for the one friend who cannot get anything else out through his firewall.
You know, I'm not usually a Katz-basher myself, but, please!
Anyway, as far as Mage goes, I'd rather Ars Magica anyway. What's Ars Magica? Well, among other things, it's the system they took a lot of the philosphy and backstory from (back when White Wolf owned the system). Me? I thought it was better done, and it doesn't bog under the trendy cyber-goth woe-is-me-woe-is-my-world tone. Ever wonder where they got the Order of Hermes from? Why there is a clan of Vampire called the Tremere?
Methinks somebody's been paying attention to White Wolf's own hype. After all, everybody knows Vampire is about the struggle with darkness within (which is naturally why so many people play it as superheroes with fangs). And Changeling is about the sorrow of our lost childhood. And Werewolf is about the sad demise of our environment. Just because they take themselves that seriously doesn't make them deep.
It's a game. It's a game that's been out for years! This sort of article reminds me of the magazines in the early nineties touting their "new" discovery - the internet, as if it had only just begun to exist because they noticed it.
#define XENOPHOBIC_RANT_MODE ON
So that would explain why the US has country code 1, because Alexander Graham Bell was... no wait a minute, Scotland has country code 44.
No, the USA has country code 1 becuase AT&T (formerly known as American Telephone and Telegraph) assigned the numbers. Go fig.
And then there's the curious fact that everywhere else in the world, longitude East is positive, (as you would expect from the usual Cartesian coordinate system) and West is negative, but in US maps, West is positive.
You... You mean... New York City isn't the center of the universe?
And your maps of the world, with the USA in the centre, which means the break has to come somewhere in India. Everyone else puts the break in the middle of the Pacific, where it doesn't matter, but that would put the USA off on the edge, can't have that...
That's funny. I live in the USA, and none of my maps look like that (well, ok, the USA is pretty centered on my maps of North America). I remember the maps in school splitting along the Pacific, too. Where did you get this data point?
Then there's your curious attachment to a system of measurement that even the stick-in-the-mud English have abandoned (hello NASA, are you listening ?)
Interesting trivia point: They tried to make us use metric. They ever passed laws. The unwashed masses wouldn't go along, and the govt seems to have given up.
While the careful calibration of video-game feedback devices may be useful in 'fixing' ADD, it still gives the impression that 'hyperactive' kids are somehow bad and need to be cured. Some of the best and brightest people I know have ADD and to think of their curiosity and their mind being 'cured' is disconcerting, to say the least.
Okay, the "symptoms" that characterize Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, have a high correlation with the "symptoms" of giftedness. So, yes, treating it as simply a problem to be solved is probably not the best strategy.
On the other hand, the knee jerk "Don't treat creativity/individuality as a disease" response is just as wrong in the other direction. When I am medicated for my ADD (admittedly in conjunction with major depression), I am more productive and creative, because I'm actually able to follow through on what I think of.
It might be a bit different for GMs, but I had no major problems.
It is, in fact, different for GMs. That is, for tabletop GM's. Last year, we also had issues with card players being invited to cut in front of tabletop players in the registration line, as well. They also scheduled RPGs at the same table at the same time (this year) and moved Chaosium's area without notice. It's a lot of little things that add up.
The issue with the time cards is that it works well enough for shift-based work, in areas where there are managers (like the tournaments rooms, the dealer's room, etc), but not so well for the gaming rooms, where you only ever see the redshirts running by.
I have a lot of negative things to say about the way Wizards of the Coast (WotC) ran parts of the con this year, so I wanted to start on a positive note. And I did, in fact, have a good time. Here are some things I liked, in no particular order.
All the Gamers
According to the news report I saw, there were twenty thousand of us in town for the con. Let me repeat that - twenty thousand! There's just something great about having that many like-minded folk around. Very cool.
The new Badges
Badges this year were of the hang-around-your-neck instead of the pin-to-your-shirt variety. They were sturdier, unlikely to lose the paper insert, and easy to put on and remove. They must have been especially nice for people in costume, who wouldn't have to worry about sticking a pin through their art (or, for the very scantily costumed, finding a place to pin it in the first place).
The Anime Room
As with last year, the Anime Room was in the Hilton, across the street and caddy-corner to the convention center. While directions could have been a bit clearer, that is more a flaw with the onsite booklet than with the Anime Room Itself. I only made it there once, and rather late, but they were playing something I wanted to see and the staff (even for the late hour) was enthusiastic. I can't speak for crowding, as I was there late, but the room seemed spacious enough, and the video/sound quality was good, even from the back of the room.
Game Locations Listed in the Onsite Book
Last year, the onsite book did not have locations listed, causing all manner of confusion. Kudos to WotC for listening to attendees' complaints and acting on them.
The Safe House
I love this place. Everybody loves this place. It's the one think I really will miss about Milwaukee when the convention moves to Indianapolis in 2003. And the password is... [DELETED].
Now... the problems...
Running as a Tabletop GM
Last year, I left the con with the distinct impression that they were *trying* to
make pencil-and-paper GMing so unpleasant that the tabletop players would
just go away.
This year removed all doubt.
I arrived bright and early Thursday morning and was able to pick up my
pre-reg packet smoothly. At least, I thought so until I opened it. There
were my player tickets, the onsite booklet, my Pez(tm), my 4-Day player
badge... Hey! I quickly checked the rest of my materials. Nothing anywhere
indicated that they had any idea that I had registered as a GM, nor was
there anything about the games I was running. I was a bit worried - I knew
I hadn't made the pre-reg book deadline, but I had specifically telephoned
two weeks earlier to make sure they got my events (they never sent me a
confirmation).
I found the Information booth and asked what was going on. I was told to go
to "GM HQ" on the third floor. Now, having been through this runaround last
year, I knew that there was no such thing as GM HQ. I went to the third
floor and found the booth marked "Tournament Registration" (which was not
then, nor at any time during the con, labeled "GM HQ").
I stood in line behind three or four other disgruntled folk and was handed a
sealed manila envelope from a pile of similar envelopes. This, apparently,
was my GMs packet. I asked about my events. The man behind the counter
told me that if I told him my event numbers, he could look up whether I had
sold any tickets. How, I asked, was I supposed to know what my events
number were? They're listed in the on-site book.
I obtained a GMs badge at the point by sounding like I was about to lose my
last shreds of patience and make a scene.
I wandered off and looked through my packet. It was so generic, the
introductory letter inside welcomed me to Origins (another convention
entirely). Notably lacking were GMs instructions or any other useful
information. There were event proposal forms for Origins 2001 and Gencon
2001, and a time sheet.
It was at this point that I remembered why I did not bother to get a
reimbursement last year.
The time sheet, I should add, needed to be initialed by a "manager". Out of
the four games I ran over a cumulative sixteen hours, I was checked in on by
a manager exactly once (five minutes before game time, and so could not initial my sheet) and was able track one down once (and it took some doing).
Fortunately, the second one was kind enough to initial all of my events for
me, without checking.
By Friday midnight, I had run all of my games, so on Saturday, I checked in
on Tournament Registration. The person there couldn't help me, but we
eventually found someone who initialed my form and told me to come back
Sunday. All reimbursements would be done Sunday, regardless of when the
events were finished.
Sunday I showed up to a very slow line and watched two GMs in front of me
give up in disgust. I made it to the front of the line and got my
reimbursement. I felt like I'd GMed for free and earned the money for
putting up with WotC.
I'm going back next year, and I'll even GM again, but if you're wondering
why the number of games run keeps dropping, even as the people who want to
play keeps increasing, here's your answer.
A few years ago, Time magazine did an excellent piece on the problems to today's society. One of the things they pointed out is that the privacy of a modern household has greatly increased the incidents of child abuse. In the society that we evolved in, one large factor that stopped people from abusing their child was the fact that there was no privacy--if you abuse your child, the whole village knew about it.
Or, alternatively, the increased outside exposure (such as the public school system) has increased the amount of reported child abuse, making the numbers look higher.
Reminds me of the BBS days of file ratios - 'course then we'd just take an image, resize and upload it, so that idea didn't exactly work as intended.
Ahh, file ratios.
An anecdote:
I was too honest to rename files, but didn't have a worthy collection to upload to keep my ratios up. Finally, in what I thought was surely a nasty trick, I uploaded a collection of short stories I had written, one by one (all dreck - because everything written when you're fifteen is dreck).
Imagine my surprise at returning to the board weeks later to find a story I had deleted from my archive for being exceptionally lame marked as a sysop-preferred download.
The moral:
One man's trash is another's treasure
-or-
Fifteen year old boys are as bad judges of writing as fifteen year old girls are writers
-or-
At least file ratios get things out there that might otherwise stayed buried (even if maybe they should have).
It's no wonder that almost all software projects are over budget and late, the budget and timeframe were unrealistic to begin with and the requirements and specifications never existed!
This isn't just a coding issue. I run into this in other fields. There is a real tendancy for people (particularly managers) that anything they don't know how to do a) is easy and b) takes very little time. The managers look at you working and think "all they're doing is sitting there typing - that's not very hard" because nothing they do on a computer is very hard.
I used to have managers hit me with extra task after extra task, claiming "It'll just take fifteen minutes", because any task they didn't do themelves must be trivial. I developed a much used mantra "Nothing, ever takes 'just fifteen minutes'".
The shame is, people managing projects rarely understand what they want or what the job entails, only that they've been told to produce a project. And, since their bosses don't have to deal with it, they've been given the same too-short deadline, too-vague instruction problem they're passing on to you.
I'd say that individual rights are pretty important here in Canada, just as they are in the USA. For example, IIRC there is a court case currently underway to prevent a citizens' group from distributing a list of names and addresses of known sex offenders. The rationale? These pervs^H^H^H^H^H people could be attacked, their houses burned etc. If that's not "individual rights over the collective" I don't know what is. I personally would be happy to see them castrated and hung, but that's not the way a civilized society works and I accept that, because ultimately it protects me too - what if someday, somebody thinks (wrongly of course) that I molested their child?.
Now, where I live (New Jersey, USA), we, in fact, have a law requiring notification of released sex offenders to the neighborhoods where these persons live. It's known colloqually as "Megan's Law" and seems very popular.
Shortly after it was first passed, a "vigilante" attacked the house mentioned and beat up the first person he saw. Turns out the released sex offender wasn't even home at the time.
The problem with these laws is a) it constitutes "double jeapardy" (being punished twice for the same crime - jail time is supposed to be considered full punishment) and b) people are so irrational about this (and, yes, it's a terrible thing) that they wind up committing even more crimes.
Maybe it's different in Canada, but in the US, at least in theory, everyone is supposed to have rights, even the vile disgisting people.
I depends a bit on who will be using it. I'll admit that I'm coming for from a user perspective than a programmer's, but I've run into problems in the past.
I used to customize any machine I worked with for an extended period of time to best match my work style. I'm not even talking terribly complex stuff. I was customizing toolbars, adding directory structure, etc. And then, sometimes, someone else had to work on my PC and they were paralyzed (even the ones ostensibly from IT - feh!). I've since learned to do all my cutomiztion in ways that can be easily toggled with the default.
It may be better to have a standardized desktop interface, and then make it optional/toggleble than to ignore the need for one altogether.
I understand your frustration. How hard would it be to make the filter let you specify To: addresses to be allowed?
Otoh, depending on how big the list is, you can make exceptions based on the From: field. I have one mailing list that goes to my hotmail account and a good 95% of it gets through since I made exceptions for the most prolific posters. I just glance at the spamcatch from time to time to see if I've missed anyone new.
I suppose that they're giving to to me for free, and I've blocked the ads that they think will make up the cost, so I haven't too much room to complain...
It still does, at least in theory. They released Gabriel Knight III sometime this year (with awful looking 3-D figures. I know that's what computer games look like these days, but - ew!).
Their latest King's Quest, though, was a shoot em up. I was very annoyed. KQ used to be the defining example of adventure games, and then they released the world's most boring slog and shoot experience?
Even worse, the ruling throws into question the legality of search engines. Imagine a future in which certain Web sites, backed by the power of the law, can control which services can search them. It's hardly beyond the pale to conceive of a situation where the big Web sites would first demand payments from search engines before they allow their pages to wind up on any index.
I suppose that the market has to rotate. Right now, as we, all know, companies are paying to get listed on the major engines. And I honestly don't ever see a big site/company refusing to be listed at all. I could see the big sites refusing links to anything but their splash/ad page.
Can't you see the engine/portal ads now: Go directly to the page you want in Companys X Y and Z without wading through their interface - only at Engine A! Ick. Welcome to the World Wide Billboard.
Several characters from X-Men are identifiable in the School, for example, Jubilee is seen wearing her cool yellow raincoat.
And she was identified as such in the credits. It makes me wonder if she had some lines that went to the cutting room floor. (Kitty, also, was identified in the credits, but she was called by name onscreen).
I think those were the only two cameos mentioned by name in the credits (I don't consider Bobby to be a cameo because he had an actual effect on the plot.) I was pretty sure I saw Mirage, or at least a girl of the right ethnicity and hairstyle. The kid with the lighter had the same powers as the villain Pyro (who never, ever, attended the Xavier School). There was also a tallish blonde kid who might have been Cannonball.
Oh, and how's this for a nit-pick: I would have liked to have seen Kitty have her Semitic kinky hair instead of being generic looking. That was as much her identifiable look for most of the comic's run as Jubilee's yellow shirts.
Actually, I replied as a female. The mannequin you get in the profile screen does indeed pop up as female.
I wonder if everyone (out of our extremely large data pool of two) is getting Wolverine's powers because he's meant to be the viewpoint character of the film.
I did back when it was first announced. (Warning for those with less than lightning-fast net connections: this is a resourece-hog flash-heavy site). The quiz was cool, and I got a mutant ID and everything (I have enhanced physiology, enhanced senses, rapid healing, and possible structural implants - I wonder which X-man that was templated from). However, when I got to the "training" portion, I can only do the first exercise. Levels two and three tell me "Insufficient training to receive clearance. Your mutant abilities need time to develop.//Try to gain access again next week."
Am I a tremendous lamer, or have they just not fully implemented the site? Has anyone else gone further? For that matter, did we all get the same mutant ability, or did they actually bother to vary it. I know the Mutant Watch site id's you as a potential mutant no matter what you reply.
"It's the electronic equivalent of listening to everybody's phone calls to see if it's the phone call you should be monitoring," Mr. Rasch said. "You develop a tremendous amount of information."
This guy is right on the money. This isn't about targeting a suspect and confirming other evidence (as wiretapping is meant to be), but about trolling for suspects. Why should electronic communication be legally less protected than telephone communication?
I wouldn't much mind if this sort of thing required a warrant and if they were required to toss any data without a specific person's (or IP, at the outside) name/id on it. There's no need for this level of invasion. I also suspect, rather like the cybersensor filters, they're going to pick up more false hits than real crime, and wind up investigating and harassing uninvolved people.
Ah, the forty-hour week, a modern middle class myth. The people who believe that we used to have a lot of leisure time are the same people who think that the 50's style non-working housewife was the "normal" way to be.
A hundred years ago, if I lived on a farm, do you think I'd be sitting around with the time to read three books a week? Would I be able to take more than a day or two for "vacation"? Who would watch the kids? the livestock? Do you think I's never pull an all-nighter in the barn for a sick animal?
A hundred years ago, if I lived in the city and didn't have the fortune to be upper or upper middle class, do you think I'd have any leisure? Did the women and children working sixty-plus hours a week sewing in dimly-lit sweatshops with chained doors take vacations? Did they even take sick days?
Don't think the past was such a bed of roses. The freedom technology gives us is what lets us have the leisure to whine about how little leisure we have.
On a smaller scale [Re:Public needs to stop p...]
on
CNet On Online Freedom
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· Score: 2
Nearly a decade ago, I made a conscious decision to not use my first name online. It's not because I like my last name that much, but because until then, I'd been drawing annoying correspondence from net.romeos. Some of it was flirting, some of it was abusive, and all of it was aimed at me because they could look at my name and know they were talking to a "gurl, huhuhuh."
So, in a way (bear with the analogy, folks), I "encrypted" my name down to my first initials.
I found out later that this was a common feminist ploy in business circles used by women who wanted to avoid discrimination and by men who wanted to show solidarity with those women. You can apply many of the same anti-encryption arguments against this practice [e.g. "Do you have something to hide? Are you ashamed of being female? Don't we have a right to know who we're dealing with?"] but it was a useful and often necessary practice at the time.
These days I've switched to using feminine handles, but I still try to avoid using my first name much. These days I want it to be just that much more trouble to track me back to RL (I have a common last name and many searches ignore initials - If I'm going to be stalked I'd rather be stalked by someone competent.)
You don't always have to have something to hide to want to keep some information private.
HTML doesn't define how a web site should look to the pixel, and this is one of it's strong points. It's up to the user to decide how to view a site. If the user doesn't want images, your site should look just fine without them.
The minute you start checking to make sure your site looks the same on all browsers, you should re-think your entire site.
I don't care so much about my pages looking the same on every system -- I care about my pages being legible and navigable to as many systems as possible. And that still takes a lot of tweaking. Plaintext pages with no formatting at all quickly become hard to read on large screens. What worked five years ago may not still work so well now.
Presentation is not, in fact, a waste of time. Poor presentation is a waste of time. Color, formatting, and illustrations can help communciate in ways black on white text (or was that amber on black?) simply cannot. The big mistake I see in web design is the confusion between eye-catching and informative.
I'm reminded a little of my social training as a young lady. A great outfit can make a wonderful impression, but in the long run, you want them to remember the lady, not the dress.
Slashdot Mirror
So, for crying out loud, listen to the song once before you burn it. If you burn to CD without checking even for poor copy quality first, you deserve to wind up with a CD full of ads!
So, I don't see why AIM being open or not matters, as long as everyone is using the same system. We use the MSN Messenger service at my work (for work communication). It's fine. They may be the biggest fish in the pool, but they're not the only one.
I've actually got AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Pager on my machine, because I use MSN for my cow-orkers, AIM for some friends, and Yahoo for the one friend who cannot get anything else out through his firewall.
You know, I'm not usually a Katz-basher myself, but, please!
Anyway, as far as Mage goes, I'd rather Ars Magica anyway. What's Ars Magica? Well, among other things, it's the system they took a lot of the philosphy and backstory from (back when White Wolf owned the system). Me? I thought it was better done, and it doesn't bog under the trendy cyber-goth woe-is-me-woe-is-my-world tone. Ever wonder where they got the Order of Hermes from? Why there is a clan of Vampire called the Tremere?Methinks somebody's been paying attention to White Wolf's own hype. After all, everybody knows Vampire is about the struggle with darkness within (which is naturally why so many people play it as superheroes with fangs). And Changeling is about the sorrow of our lost childhood. And Werewolf is about the sad demise of our environment. Just because they take themselves that seriously doesn't make them deep.
It's a game. It's a game that's been out for years! This sort of article reminds me of the magazines in the early nineties touting their "new" discovery - the internet, as if it had only just begun to exist because they noticed it.
No, the USA has country code 1 becuase AT&T (formerly known as American Telephone and Telegraph) assigned the numbers. Go fig.
You ... You mean ... New York City isn't the center of the universe?
And your maps of the world, with the USA in the centre, which means the break has to come somewhere in India. Everyone else puts the break in the middle of the Pacific, where it doesn't matter, but that would put the USA off on the edge, can't have that ...
That's funny. I live in the USA, and none of my maps look like that (well, ok, the USA is pretty centered on my maps of North America). I remember the maps in school splitting along the Pacific, too. Where did you get this data point?
Interesting trivia point: They tried to make us use metric. They ever passed laws. The unwashed masses wouldn't go along, and the govt seems to have given up.
Okay, the "symptoms" that characterize Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, have a high correlation with the "symptoms" of giftedness. So, yes, treating it as simply a problem to be solved is probably not the best strategy.
On the other hand, the knee jerk "Don't treat creativity/individuality as a disease" response is just as wrong in the other direction. When I am medicated for my ADD (admittedly in conjunction with major depression), I am more productive and creative, because I'm actually able to follow through on what I think of.
It is, in fact, different for GMs. That is, for tabletop GM's. Last year, we also had issues with card players being invited to cut in front of tabletop players in the registration line, as well. They also scheduled RPGs at the same table at the same time (this year) and moved Chaosium's area without notice. It's a lot of little things that add up.
The issue with the time cards is that it works well enough for shift-based work, in areas where there are managers (like the tournaments rooms, the dealer's room, etc), but not so well for the gaming rooms, where you only ever see the redshirts running by.
Things I liked
I have a lot of negative things to say about the way Wizards of the Coast (WotC) ran parts of the con this year, so I wanted to start on a positive note. And I did, in fact, have a good time. Here are some things I liked, in no particular order.
All the Gamers
According to the news report I saw, there were twenty thousand of us in town for the con. Let me repeat that - twenty thousand! There's just something great about having that many like-minded folk around. Very cool.
The new Badges
Badges this year were of the hang-around-your-neck instead of the pin-to-your-shirt variety. They were sturdier, unlikely to lose the paper insert, and easy to put on and remove. They must have been especially nice for people in costume, who wouldn't have to worry about sticking a pin through their art (or, for the very scantily costumed, finding a place to pin it in the first place).
The Anime Room
As with last year, the Anime Room was in the Hilton, across the street and caddy-corner to the convention center. While directions could have been a bit clearer, that is more a flaw with the onsite booklet than with the Anime Room Itself. I only made it there once, and rather late, but they were playing something I wanted to see and the staff (even for the late hour) was enthusiastic. I can't speak for crowding, as I was there late, but the room seemed spacious enough, and the video/sound quality was good, even from the back of the room.
Game Locations Listed in the Onsite Book
Last year, the onsite book did not have locations listed, causing all manner of confusion. Kudos to WotC for listening to attendees' complaints and acting on them.
The Safe House
I love this place. Everybody loves this place. It's the one think I really will miss about Milwaukee when the convention moves to Indianapolis in 2003. And the password is... [DELETED].
Now... the problems...
Running as a Tabletop GM
Last year, I left the con with the distinct impression that they were *trying* to make pencil-and-paper GMing so unpleasant that the tabletop players would just go away.
This year removed all doubt.
I arrived bright and early Thursday morning and was able to pick up my pre-reg packet smoothly. At least, I thought so until I opened it. There were my player tickets, the onsite booklet, my Pez(tm), my 4-Day player badge... Hey! I quickly checked the rest of my materials. Nothing anywhere indicated that they had any idea that I had registered as a GM, nor was there anything about the games I was running. I was a bit worried - I knew I hadn't made the pre-reg book deadline, but I had specifically telephoned two weeks earlier to make sure they got my events (they never sent me a confirmation).
I found the Information booth and asked what was going on. I was told to go to "GM HQ" on the third floor. Now, having been through this runaround last year, I knew that there was no such thing as GM HQ. I went to the third floor and found the booth marked "Tournament Registration" (which was not then, nor at any time during the con, labeled "GM HQ").
I stood in line behind three or four other disgruntled folk and was handed a sealed manila envelope from a pile of similar envelopes. This, apparently, was my GMs packet. I asked about my events. The man behind the counter told me that if I told him my event numbers, he could look up whether I had sold any tickets. How, I asked, was I supposed to know what my events number were? They're listed in the on-site book.
I obtained a GMs badge at the point by sounding like I was about to lose my last shreds of patience and make a scene.
I wandered off and looked through my packet. It was so generic, the introductory letter inside welcomed me to Origins (another convention entirely). Notably lacking were GMs instructions or any other useful information. There were event proposal forms for Origins 2001 and Gencon 2001, and a time sheet.
It was at this point that I remembered why I did not bother to get a reimbursement last year.
The time sheet, I should add, needed to be initialed by a "manager". Out of the four games I ran over a cumulative sixteen hours, I was checked in on by a manager exactly once (five minutes before game time, and so could not initial my sheet) and was able track one down once (and it took some doing). Fortunately, the second one was kind enough to initial all of my events for me, without checking.
By Friday midnight, I had run all of my games, so on Saturday, I checked in on Tournament Registration. The person there couldn't help me, but we eventually found someone who initialed my form and told me to come back Sunday. All reimbursements would be done Sunday, regardless of when the events were finished.
Sunday I showed up to a very slow line and watched two GMs in front of me give up in disgust. I made it to the front of the line and got my reimbursement. I felt like I'd GMed for free and earned the money for putting up with WotC.
I'm going back next year, and I'll even GM again, but if you're wondering why the number of games run keeps dropping, even as the people who want to play keeps increasing, here's your answer.
Or, alternatively, the increased outside exposure (such as the public school system) has increased the amount of reported child abuse, making the numbers look higher.
Numbers don't always mean what you think they do.
Ahh, file ratios.
An anecdote:
I was too honest to rename files, but didn't have a worthy collection to upload to keep my ratios up. Finally, in what I thought was surely a nasty trick, I uploaded a collection of short stories I had written, one by one (all dreck - because everything written when you're fifteen is dreck).
Imagine my surprise at returning to the board weeks later to find a story I had deleted from my archive for being exceptionally lame marked as a sysop-preferred download.
The moral:
One man's trash is another's treasure
-or-
Fifteen year old boys are as bad judges of writing as fifteen year old girls are writers
-or-
At least file ratios get things out there that might otherwise stayed buried (even if maybe they should have).
This isn't just a coding issue. I run into this in other fields. There is a real tendancy for people (particularly managers) that anything they don't know how to do a) is easy and b) takes very little time. The managers look at you working and think "all they're doing is sitting there typing - that's not very hard" because nothing they do on a computer is very hard.
I used to have managers hit me with extra task after extra task, claiming "It'll just take fifteen minutes", because any task they didn't do themelves must be trivial. I developed a much used mantra "Nothing, ever takes 'just fifteen minutes'".
The shame is, people managing projects rarely understand what they want or what the job entails, only that they've been told to produce a project. And, since their bosses don't have to deal with it, they've been given the same too-short deadline, too-vague instruction problem they're passing on to you.
Now, where I live (New Jersey, USA), we, in fact, have a law requiring notification of released sex offenders to the neighborhoods where these persons live. It's known colloqually as "Megan's Law" and seems very popular.
Shortly after it was first passed, a "vigilante" attacked the house mentioned and beat up the first person he saw. Turns out the released sex offender wasn't even home at the time.
The problem with these laws is a) it constitutes "double jeapardy" (being punished twice for the same crime - jail time is supposed to be considered full punishment) and b) people are so irrational about this (and, yes, it's a terrible thing) that they wind up committing even more crimes.
Maybe it's different in Canada, but in the US, at least in theory, everyone is supposed to have rights, even the vile disgisting people.
I depends a bit on who will be using it. I'll admit that I'm coming for from a user perspective than a programmer's, but I've run into problems in the past.
I used to customize any machine I worked with for an extended period of time to best match my work style. I'm not even talking terribly complex stuff. I was customizing toolbars, adding directory structure, etc. And then, sometimes, someone else had to work on my PC and they were paralyzed (even the ones ostensibly from IT - feh!). I've since learned to do all my cutomiztion in ways that can be easily toggled with the default.
It may be better to have a standardized desktop interface, and then make it optional/toggleble than to ignore the need for one altogether.
I understand your frustration. How hard would it be to make the filter let you specify To: addresses to be allowed?
Otoh, depending on how big the list is, you can make exceptions based on the From: field. I have one mailing list that goes to my hotmail account and a good 95% of it gets through since I made exceptions for the most prolific posters. I just glance at the spamcatch from time to time to see if I've missed anyone new.
I suppose that they're giving to to me for free, and I've blocked the ads that they think will make up the cost, so I haven't too much room to complain...
It still does, at least in theory. They released Gabriel Knight III sometime this year (with awful looking 3-D figures. I know that's what computer games look like these days, but - ew!).
Their latest King's Quest, though, was a shoot em up. I was very annoyed. KQ used to be the defining example of adventure games, and then they released the world's most boring slog and shoot experience?
Actually, I'd like a Topic=Anime because I'd prefer to read about Anime. It would make finidng articles easier.
I suppose that the market has to rotate. Right now, as we, all know, companies are paying to get listed on the major engines. And I honestly don't ever see a big site/company refusing to be listed at all. I could see the big sites refusing links to anything but their splash/ad page.
Can't you see the engine/portal ads now: Go directly to the page you want in Companys X Y and Z without wading through their interface - only at Engine A! Ick. Welcome to the World Wide Billboard.
And she was identified as such in the credits. It makes me wonder if she had some lines that went to the cutting room floor. (Kitty, also, was identified in the credits, but she was called by name onscreen).
I think those were the only two cameos mentioned by name in the credits (I don't consider Bobby to be a cameo because he had an actual effect on the plot.) I was pretty sure I saw Mirage, or at least a girl of the right ethnicity and hairstyle. The kid with the lighter had the same powers as the villain Pyro (who never, ever, attended the Xavier School). There was also a tallish blonde kid who might have been Cannonball.
Oh, and how's this for a nit-pick: I would have liked to have seen Kitty have her Semitic kinky hair instead of being generic looking. That was as much her identifiable look for most of the comic's run as Jubilee's yellow shirts.
Nope. I wondered that, myself. But my account is nine days old at this point. I think they must not have activated it.
Actually, I replied as a female. The mannequin you get in the profile screen does indeed pop up as female.
I wonder if everyone (out of our extremely large data pool of two) is getting Wolverine's powers because he's meant to be the viewpoint character of the film.
Well, everybody's been to the Mutant Watch site, but I wonder how many enrolled themselves at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters.
I did back when it was first announced. (Warning for those with less than lightning-fast net connections: this is a resourece-hog flash-heavy site). The quiz was cool, and I got a mutant ID and everything (I have enhanced physiology, enhanced senses, rapid healing, and possible structural implants - I wonder which X-man that was templated from). However, when I got to the "training" portion, I can only do the first exercise. Levels two and three tell me "Insufficient training to receive clearance. Your mutant abilities need time to develop. //Try to gain access again next week."
Am I a tremendous lamer, or have they just not fully implemented the site? Has anyone else gone further? For that matter, did we all get the same mutant ability, or did they actually bother to vary it. I know the Mutant Watch site id's you as a potential mutant no matter what you reply.
This guy is right on the money. This isn't about targeting a suspect and confirming other evidence (as wiretapping is meant to be), but about trolling for suspects. Why should electronic communication be legally less protected than telephone communication?
I wouldn't much mind if this sort of thing required a warrant and if they were required to toss any data without a specific person's (or IP, at the outside) name/id on it. There's no need for this level of invasion. I also suspect, rather like the cybersensor filters, they're going to pick up more false hits than real crime, and wind up investigating and harassing uninvolved people.
Now here's an argument for better encryption.
Ah, the forty-hour week, a modern middle class myth. The people who believe that we used to have a lot of leisure time are the same people who think that the 50's style non-working housewife was the "normal" way to be.
A hundred years ago, if I lived on a farm, do you think I'd be sitting around with the time to read three books a week? Would I be able to take more than a day or two for "vacation"? Who would watch the kids? the livestock? Do you think I's never pull an all-nighter in the barn for a sick animal?
A hundred years ago, if I lived in the city and didn't have the fortune to be upper or upper middle class, do you think I'd have any leisure? Did the women and children working sixty-plus hours a week sewing in dimly-lit sweatshops with chained doors take vacations? Did they even take sick days?
Don't think the past was such a bed of roses. The freedom technology gives us is what lets us have the leisure to whine about how little leisure we have.
Nearly a decade ago, I made a conscious decision to not use my first name online. It's not because I like my last name that much, but because until then, I'd been drawing annoying correspondence from net.romeos. Some of it was flirting, some of it was abusive, and all of it was aimed at me because they could look at my name and know they were talking to a "gurl, huhuhuh."
So, in a way (bear with the analogy, folks), I "encrypted" my name down to my first initials.
I found out later that this was a common feminist ploy in business circles used by women who wanted to avoid discrimination and by men who wanted to show solidarity with those women. You can apply many of the same anti-encryption arguments against this practice [e.g. "Do you have something to hide? Are you ashamed of being female? Don't we have a right to know who we're dealing with?"] but it was a useful and often necessary practice at the time.
These days I've switched to using feminine handles, but I still try to avoid using my first name much. These days I want it to be just that much more trouble to track me back to RL (I have a common last name and many searches ignore initials - If I'm going to be stalked I'd rather be stalked by someone competent.)
You don't always have to have something to hide to want to keep some information private.
I don't care so much about my pages looking the same on every system -- I care about my pages being legible and navigable to as many systems as possible. And that still takes a lot of tweaking. Plaintext pages with no formatting at all quickly become hard to read on large screens. What worked five years ago may not still work so well now.
Presentation is not, in fact, a waste of time. Poor presentation is a waste of time. Color, formatting, and illustrations can help communciate in ways black on white text (or was that amber on black?) simply cannot. The big mistake I see in web design is the confusion between eye-catching and informative.
I'm reminded a little of my social training as a young lady. A great outfit can make a wonderful impression, but in the long run, you want them to remember the lady, not the dress.
The first time I tried, I got the 404, then I messed around a bit. It seems to be some kind of web foible. FTP works, Gopher Works, and ...
I'm glad it's not gone.