...the problem is that they aren't treated like other sorts of patents.
If I file a patent for a new type of chair, I have to explain how it works on public record, and in return for society getting new and useful information, I am granted a limited monopoly.
If you want to uphold the concept, you really need to require companies that file software patents to present their complete source code trees for the software that they wish to patent. Society really isn't getting any benefit by granting amazon.com a monopoly off of 'one click checkout' bullshit. but society might benefit if amazon open sourced its code after seven years of monopoly.
If companies don't like this, they are free to keep their code as a trade secret. It's worked quite well for the Coca-cola company and their famous secret recipy.
I think you're missing the point, which is that Powell in some sense falls into both parties and this is WHAT makes him (at least according to this) such a good candidate.
And I think you hit the nail on the head there, but there might ba a deeper insight there.
Powell has always struck me as an excellent choice for a presidential candidate: He has spent time 'on the inside' in the whitehouse, so he understands the job. He does not aspire to power (or he covers it far better than most), he is intelligent, and he does not seem tied too closely to the idiology of either party. In short, a competent guy who isn't a professional politician.
Now, if a VP candidate has qualities like this that are desireable to the public at large without a strong tie to the political left or right, they will of course be desireable to both parties. The interesting thing is that qualities that make Powell an good candidate (intelligent, honest, outsider) are the same qualities that Obama seems to posess.
McCain is a war hero, and a passable senator but I think hes going to get stomped in November. An interesting election would have been if the Republican had put up Powell.
Absolutely not. The general shape is fixed, however the specifics are not. Per Eric Flint, sales of his old books spike whenever a new book of his is printed. Thus the curve would have additional peaks rather than a single head w/ subsequent fall off.
What he said. The general properties will be that the curve is large on the left, and small on the right. You cannot even say if the curve is going to be concave up or down. beyond that, it will depend on the market and the prioducts.
In a lot cases, the general outline will look like something based off of a 1/x graph, but only in the most general sense.
Despite how bad it may sound, this is more or less not a big deal for the average person. It is like video game companies going after people who host ROMs of copyrighted games... Not that bad. Now if they won for a downloader or innocent uploader... That would be different.
No this is horribly bad. First, it is a basic travesty of justice. Prison time for P2P? Unless he was putting nuclear weapon designs on P2P, there is no reason for this. lets put people in jail for twenty years if they steal a loaf of bread. That's progressive thinking!
Second, the legal system loves basing later decisions on prior landmark cases. this has just told every judge for the next fifty years that criminal punishment id ok for civil infractions.
Third, the economy is in the dumps, and every peerson we imprision for piddly ass crap like this is costing taxpayers $$$. Ten years is not cheap. The people responsable should be dragged into the street and tarred and feathered for such frivilious use of taxpayer money.
Finally, bad laws erode respect for good laws. The more people become acoustom to breaking laws that are poorly written, the more acoustom they become to breaking laws in general.
Draw a graph of every product sold in a given market, and arrange it left to right, by sales volume in a given time frame. It's shape will vary by the market, but generally it will be big on the left and little on the right. Calculus says the total sales volume is the area under the curve.
conventional stores want to stock the few products on the far left, because then tey dont have to keep very much money tied up in a lot of stock to satisfy the needs of the customers on the far right of the curve, who dont buy as much.
The long tail theory, was that by having a specialized store on the net which crosses vast physical distances, you could reach a lot of customers who want products from the far right, but I'm sure you know this.
Basically the whole argument hinges on the shape of the curve, and the products you sell. Does the curve look like a reverse exponential curve or is it flat? Where is the cut-off point for the tail? What is the cost of maintaining stock along a segment of the curve? Some cases, the tail could be vastly more sales than the head, and in others there may not be a 'tail' on the graph at all.
Actually, I suspect that this will only be an option for the obscenely wealthy for *quite* awhile, so dont worry too much about overpopulation. After it becomes cheap, I expect that the famine riots will resolve much of the overpopulation problems.
I have to wonder, if there really is a god, will he/she/it/they be laughing their ass off when we perfect a method to live forever and never get into an afterlife?
Will the world fill up with quadrillionares, as long lived people clean up on low yeild long term investments?
I am pretty sure overpopulation won't be a problem, who wants to try score with a 495 year old chick? (I know, a 697 year old man. December-june relationships will be the big thing in 2150.)
It is so much easier - and takes so much less thought and introspection - to just label Bush evil, with no redeeming qualities.
Hey, while we are at it, lets not forget that Hitler built the autobahns. Just think of all those great roads that would have never been built if he hadn't come to power. It just makes me wish I could have been there to vote for him!
Yeah, Bush may have done some things that had a net positive impact on the country as a whole. And yes, people tend to demonize their political opponents these days. But, as I was trying to illustrate above, at some point a person's negative qualities far overshadows their positive ones.
Without intending malice to the man, Bush is a closed minded, controlling, and weak personality that should not be in control of the country. I'm sure that he intends nothing but the best whenever he does something, and I am almost equally sure that his personality traits will cause no end of problems for any democracy that he was in charge of.
Going back to the example of Hitler: Most anyone will agree that he was 'evil'. There a number of people that have maid claims that he was mentally ill. If he was, would this extonerate his crimes? Most people would probably say no.
Suppose that we can agree that Bush isn't a particularly competent president. Would being inept extonerate him from either allowing or ordering the use of torture on suspected terrorists? I suspect that most people would consider torture to be an 'evil' act. If Bush didn't advocate it, he certainlly was aware of it, and was involved in it. He sure isnt 'good'. At best the man is morally weak, and inept. If he isnt 'Evil', what would you call him?
This might be too late to be noticed by anyone, but I have a friend who's father is a medical doctor. We got in a debate one day over the term 'Disease'. Apparently, there is the sense of the word that I was using to indicate a viral organisim that is passed from host to host (a literal disease), and there is the version of the word that he picked up from his father, an agent of discomfort (a figurative dis-ease.)
While I don't think it makes sense to classify any sort of physical ailment as a 'dis-ease', that is apparently the deffinition that some/many/all medical personel use.
IANAD, but are there any other Doctors out there that can shed more light on this?
I am going to come right out and say, whoever posted this story was an idiot. (notice they posted it anon..)
Microsoft is a huge company with dozens of divisions, and thousands of teams. Development cycles for a company like this can last years. Don't expect them to adopt some new technology like silverlight on every single public site they posess in a heartbeat.
Moreover, just suggesting that they would re-write an existing portal (that may not even really need SL technology) simply because a new technology came out makes no sense. Programmer time is expensive, so what business justification do you have spending money to rebuild a portal that is functioning just fine in the first place?
MS does stupid shit that they deserver to be bashed for, such as the whole Open XML fiasco. Posting stories like this just destroys the sites credibility, and makes look like you engage in mindless MS bashing, rather than really looking at issues that are critical to tech savy people.
You realize that if the entire world switched to *nix tomorrow, you would have almost the same level of virus, spyware, and malware infections, right? The botnets would still exist, and probably in the same numbers you are seeing today.
It will probably ruffle some feathers, but the problem isn't MS products, its user knowledge and ability. While MS has produced some craptacular software, most of the problem is people using computers that don't have a clue what they are doing.
Millions of idiots using MS == rampant botnets. Millions of idiots using *nix == rampant botnets. Be glad they aren't switching, it is keeping your boxxen safer through obscurity. Half the reason *nix is so 'secure' is because it is more daunting for idiots to use.
I have to agree in a way, I've always liked the Warcraft series games and have always felt Warcraft III had one of the best storylines of any game I'd played.
Did you actually play WOW? It is teppid. The only story that it has are one paragraph snippets of text that accompany quests, and rare scripted events. Sure there is more storyline than say, a game of pac-man, but you have not played many games if you think there is a detailed storyline there.
Perhaps if you are a lore freak that has read every book that they have churned out the quests might might make more sense, but I think I learned more about the world's lore reading a single article on wowwiki than two years of playing the game itself.
Wow your comments are full of fail. Systematic deconstruction and demolition of them below:
"Attack is the best defense" did not work for Germany in the 2nd world war.
One might observer that it didn't work for them in the long run, because they WERE NOT TRYING TO DEFEND when they started the war. Their goal was conquest, not defense. They perfected the tactic of the 'blitzkreig', which involves an aggressive drive to cripple you opponent's communication, organization, and logistics, which gave them overwhelming success in the early parts of the war. Their loss wasn't a strike against the attack strategy, so much as proof that you shouldn't attack EVERYONE at the same time.
It didn't work in Vietnam or Korea.
It worked fine in Korea. The US was on the defensive at the beginning of the war, and after the Inchon landings, we pushed NK forces to the Yalu river. Only China engaging in a 'Attack' strategy prevented us from unifying Korea.
Vietnam was also another poorly chosen example. The US actively chose to not invade the north, and played a defensive game fighting NVA attacks and vietcong insurgencies. Even when nixon took the gloves off, we never tried to take Hanoi. We simply dumped silly ammounts of ordinance on them from 50,000 feet. Had we invaded the north in 1967, I suspect that things would have turned out like Korea. US crushes NVA, China jumps in and smacks US around until treaty is signed. An attack strategy might have prevented the massive loss of life of US servicemen and vietnamese civilians and shortend the war by 6 or 7 years.
It's certainly not working for the US at the moment.
Um, technically, it did. For better or worse, Sadam's regime is gone. He cannot attack us now. (Not that I actually believe the WMB bullshit that president fucktard spewed, just making the point that if the goal was to prevent Sadam from attacking the US, we accomplished it very well.)
If you are speaking about the insurgency, that is another story. We know who is supplying them. It is quite easy to attack the manufacturing and logistics that supply them to disarm them at the source. The question about the wisdom of doing so is another discussion all together.
The point is, your facts aren't really supporting your argument. Aggression is a fantastic defensive strategy. If your opponent is dead before he can even draw a gun, you are *quite* safe. The only rule of war is 'win'.
First, its all the hacking into our government and
Wait, you don't think that our government is trying to break into every military computer system in China? That the Chinese are engaging in spying on the US, and that we don't employ spies outselves? Interesting...
Bush cannot pardon anyone who hasnt been charged or prosecuted with crimes. I'd like to think the the Democrats are playing this one smart, and wating for president fucktard to leave office before they begin their prosecution of administration officials in earnest. I am willing to be that none of the statue of limitations will run out before he leaves office. Once he's out, they can get some real justice as opposed to 'scooter libby justice'.
Personally, I would like to see som legislation that double or tipples criminal penalties for crimes comitted while in federal office. These people are in a position of power, and it is to server the people of the united states, and not themselves or further some idiotic agenda.
Well, the point of war games is to simulate real-life scenarios, so cheating is not constructive, no matter how clever it is.
...and the point of war is to win, by any means nessecary. The only rules that wargames should have is to protect the physical safety of the participants. (otherwise it would't be wargames but just simply war.)
You cannot 'cheat' at war. Anything goes, that is the point. So, the only 'cheating' that could occur in a wargame, would be doing something unsafe. Say like using live ammunition rather than blanks.
The point of wargames is to prepare for possible situations, and train people how to react to them. If you fail to anticipate a situation, you have a weakness that can be exploited.
I think this was a great ploy by the attackers, and a valid case to considder: what happens if in cyber-warfare, the attackers choose to attack your information gathering organs on the internet, rather than just selected assets?
D&D is a social game. You get together with a bunch of friends once a week and explore your imagination. There are rules, but the game is played differently by everyone, depending on what aspects of the game they enjoy.
The current version of the rules version 3/3.5, but don't worry about the version so much. Go find a bunch of people playing it, and join their group. Play whatever rules they are playing. Really, the version doesn't matter that much, its still basically the same game.
Hi,
I started playing D&D in 1st edition, and I have seen the game grow over the years to what it is today. I have have thousands of dollars of books from 1st - 3rd edition, and now you are comming out with yet another edition. I can see that some overhauls were needed, since the game has come quite a distance from the old 'blue book' rules that came out in the 70's. However, there are some publishers in the industry, that are little more than money grubbing whores (*cough* Games Workshop *cough*) who come out with a new version of a game system almost anually in an attempt to re-sell their customers the same product with new formatting. Why should I invest in 4th edition at this point, and how do I know you arent going to just start publishing 5th edition two years from now?
If 4e was returning to roots, they'd have four classes and that's it. Instead, they're giving us four roles that are MMO-inspired and layering lots more than four classes atop those roles. That's not anything like D&D used to be.
Lets see....Blizzard claims to have ~ 8 million subscribers, at about $15 per month. That works out to about 120 million per month net. Of course, regional pricing and exchange rates will throw this off a bit, but thats a whole lotta moolah any way you stack it.
...so I am going to guess, yes, WoTC is trying to be more like WoW. As close as they can without getting sued.
but they didn't mind misleading the public to get somebody fired for planning ahead for this event.. that's pretty evil.
you are missing the point. Who is 'they'? You can blame 'MS' all you want, but at some point, somebody is making decisions. I claim that that behavior like this is a result of people not communicating, forgetting stuff, changing jobs, etc. I have worked there, nobody gave a damn about running enemys out of bisnuess. Most people were overworked and just wated to get the next release out the door. Perhaps the upper management is 'evil', but I will bet on people being stupid, lazy, and inept over deliberate malice any day. Money in the bank.
Their sneaky brand of evil is saying two conflicting things and making us believe they work together.
Ok, I love to MS bash as much as the next guy, but I cannot fault them for what you are mentioning. The thing that a lot of MS haters forget is that it is a HUGE company, and the right hand often really doesnt know what the left hand is doing, and often seperate teams have their own agendas.
Modern MS is like the government: There might be a few people that are trying to pull shit, but for the most part it is just a big, slow, beauracracy.
Slashdot Mirror
...the problem is that they aren't treated like other sorts of patents.
If I file a patent for a new type of chair, I have to explain how it works on public record, and in return for society getting new and useful information, I am granted a limited monopoly.
If you want to uphold the concept, you really need to require companies that file software patents to present their complete source code trees for the software that they wish to patent. Society really isn't getting any benefit by granting amazon.com a monopoly off of 'one click checkout' bullshit. but society might benefit if amazon open sourced its code after seven years of monopoly.
If companies don't like this, they are free to keep their code as a trade secret. It's worked quite well for the Coca-cola company and their famous secret recipy.
I think you're missing the point, which is that Powell in some sense falls into both parties and this is WHAT makes him (at least according to this) such a good candidate.
And I think you hit the nail on the head there, but there might ba a deeper insight there.
Powell has always struck me as an excellent choice for a presidential candidate: He has spent time 'on the inside' in the whitehouse, so he understands the job. He does not aspire to power (or he covers it far better than most), he is intelligent, and he does not seem tied too closely to the idiology of either party. In short, a competent guy who isn't a professional politician.
Now, if a VP candidate has qualities like this that are desireable to the public at large without a strong tie to the political left or right, they will of course be desireable to both parties. The interesting thing is that qualities that make Powell an good candidate (intelligent, honest, outsider) are the same qualities that Obama seems to posess.
McCain is a war hero, and a passable senator but I think hes going to get stomped in November. An interesting election would have been if the Republican had put up Powell.
It's not the shape, the shape is fixed...
Absolutely not. The general shape is fixed, however the specifics are not. Per Eric Flint, sales of his old books spike whenever a new book of his is printed. Thus the curve would have additional peaks rather than a single head w/ subsequent fall off.
What he said. The general properties will be that the curve is large on the left, and small on the right. You cannot even say if the curve is going to be concave up or down. beyond that, it will depend on the market and the prioducts.
In a lot cases, the general outline will look like something based off of a 1/x graph, but only in the most general sense.
Despite how bad it may sound, this is more or less not a big deal for the average person. It is like video game companies going after people who host ROMs of copyrighted games... Not that bad. Now if they won for a downloader or innocent uploader... That would be different.
No this is horribly bad. First, it is a basic travesty of justice. Prison time for P2P? Unless he was putting nuclear weapon designs on P2P, there is no reason for this. lets put people in jail for twenty years if they steal a loaf of bread. That's progressive thinking!
Second, the legal system loves basing later decisions on prior landmark cases. this has just told every judge for the next fifty years that criminal punishment id ok for civil infractions.
Third, the economy is in the dumps, and every peerson we imprision for piddly ass crap like this is costing taxpayers $$$. Ten years is not cheap. The people responsable should be dragged into the street and tarred and feathered for such frivilious use of taxpayer money.
Finally, bad laws erode respect for good laws. The more people become acoustom to breaking laws that are poorly written, the more acoustom they become to breaking laws in general.
Very bad ruling.
Draw a graph of every product sold in a given market, and arrange it left to right, by sales volume in a given time frame. It's shape will vary by the market, but generally it will be big on the left and little on the right. Calculus says the total sales volume is the area under the curve.
conventional stores want to stock the few products on the far left, because then tey dont have to keep very much money tied up in a lot of stock to satisfy the needs of the customers on the far right of the curve, who dont buy as much.
The long tail theory, was that by having a specialized store on the net which crosses vast physical distances, you could reach a lot of customers who want products from the far right, but I'm sure you know this.
Basically the whole argument hinges on the shape of the curve, and the products you sell. Does the curve look like a reverse exponential curve or is it flat? Where is the cut-off point for the tail? What is the cost of maintaining stock along a segment of the curve? Some cases, the tail could be vastly more sales than the head, and in others there may not be a 'tail' on the graph at all.
Actually, I suspect that this will only be an option for the obscenely wealthy for *quite* awhile, so dont worry too much about overpopulation. After it becomes cheap, I expect that the famine riots will resolve much of the overpopulation problems.
Nature, like water, finds its own level.
I have to wonder, if there really is a god, will he/she/it/they be laughing their ass off when we perfect a method to live forever and never get into an afterlife?
Will the world fill up with quadrillionares, as long lived people clean up on low yeild long term investments?
I am pretty sure overpopulation won't be a problem, who wants to try score with a 495 year old chick? (I know, a 697 year old man. December-june relationships will be the big thing in 2150.)
It is so much easier - and takes so much less thought and introspection - to just label Bush evil, with no redeeming qualities.
Hey, while we are at it, lets not forget that Hitler built the autobahns. Just think of all those great roads that would have never been built if he hadn't come to power. It just makes me wish I could have been there to vote for him!
Yeah, Bush may have done some things that had a net positive impact on the country as a whole. And yes, people tend to demonize their political opponents these days. But, as I was trying to illustrate above, at some point a person's negative qualities far overshadows their positive ones.
Without intending malice to the man, Bush is a closed minded, controlling, and weak personality that should not be in control of the country. I'm sure that he intends nothing but the best whenever he does something, and I am almost equally sure that his personality traits will cause no end of problems for any democracy that he was in charge of.
Going back to the example of Hitler: Most anyone will agree that he was 'evil'. There a number of people that have maid claims that he was mentally ill. If he was, would this extonerate his crimes? Most people would probably say no.
Suppose that we can agree that Bush isn't a particularly competent president. Would being inept extonerate him from either allowing or ordering the use of torture on suspected terrorists? I suspect that most people would consider torture to be an 'evil' act. If Bush didn't advocate it, he certainlly was aware of it, and was involved in it. He sure isnt 'good'. At best the man is morally weak, and inept. If he isnt 'Evil', what would you call him?
This might be too late to be noticed by anyone, but I have a friend who's father is a medical doctor. We got in a debate one day over the term 'Disease'. Apparently, there is the sense of the word that I was using to indicate a viral organisim that is passed from host to host (a literal disease), and there is the version of the word that he picked up from his father, an agent of discomfort (a figurative dis-ease.)
While I don't think it makes sense to classify any sort of physical ailment as a 'dis-ease', that is apparently the deffinition that some/many/all medical personel use.
IANAD, but are there any other Doctors out there that can shed more light on this?
I am going to come right out and say, whoever posted this story was an idiot. (notice they posted it anon..)
Microsoft is a huge company with dozens of divisions, and thousands of teams. Development cycles for a company like this can last years. Don't expect them to adopt some new technology like silverlight on every single public site they posess in a heartbeat.
Moreover, just suggesting that they would re-write an existing portal (that may not even really need SL technology) simply because a new technology came out makes no sense. Programmer time is expensive, so what business justification do you have spending money to rebuild a portal that is functioning just fine in the first place?
MS does stupid shit that they deserver to be bashed for, such as the whole Open XML fiasco. Posting stories like this just destroys the sites credibility, and makes look like you engage in mindless MS bashing, rather than really looking at issues that are critical to tech savy people.
People finally switching to Linux.
Well, one can hope.
You realize that if the entire world switched to *nix tomorrow, you would have almost the same level of virus, spyware, and malware infections, right? The botnets would still exist, and probably in the same numbers you are seeing today.
It will probably ruffle some feathers, but the problem isn't MS products, its user knowledge and ability. While MS has produced some craptacular software, most of the problem is people using computers that don't have a clue what they are doing.
Millions of idiots using MS == rampant botnets. Millions of idiots using *nix == rampant botnets. Be glad they aren't switching, it is keeping your boxxen safer through obscurity. Half the reason *nix is so 'secure' is because it is more daunting for idiots to use.
Furthermore, 300,000 soldiers are coming back from Iraq with some kind of mental disorder. You can't grow a new happy mind in a petri dish.
...YET...
I have to agree in a way, I've always liked the Warcraft series games and have always felt Warcraft III had one of the best storylines of any game I'd played.
Did you actually play WOW? It is teppid. The only story that it has are one paragraph snippets of text that accompany quests, and rare scripted events. Sure there is more storyline than say, a game of pac-man, but you have not played many games if you think there is a detailed storyline there.
Perhaps if you are a lore freak that has read every book that they have churned out the quests might might make more sense, but I think I learned more about the world's lore reading a single article on wowwiki than two years of playing the game itself.
Wow your comments are full of fail. Systematic deconstruction and demolition of them below:
"Attack is the best defense" did not work for Germany in the 2nd world war. One might observer that it didn't work for them in the long run, because they WERE NOT TRYING TO DEFEND when they started the war. Their goal was conquest, not defense. They perfected the tactic of the 'blitzkreig', which involves an aggressive drive to cripple you opponent's communication, organization, and logistics, which gave them overwhelming success in the early parts of the war. Their loss wasn't a strike against the attack strategy, so much as proof that you shouldn't attack EVERYONE at the same time.
It didn't work in Vietnam or Korea. It worked fine in Korea. The US was on the defensive at the beginning of the war, and after the Inchon landings, we pushed NK forces to the Yalu river. Only China engaging in a 'Attack' strategy prevented us from unifying Korea.
Vietnam was also another poorly chosen example. The US actively chose to not invade the north, and played a defensive game fighting NVA attacks and vietcong insurgencies. Even when nixon took the gloves off, we never tried to take Hanoi. We simply dumped silly ammounts of ordinance on them from 50,000 feet. Had we invaded the north in 1967, I suspect that things would have turned out like Korea. US crushes NVA, China jumps in and smacks US around until treaty is signed. An attack strategy might have prevented the massive loss of life of US servicemen and vietnamese civilians and shortend the war by 6 or 7 years.
It's certainly not working for the US at the moment. Um, technically, it did. For better or worse, Sadam's regime is gone. He cannot attack us now. (Not that I actually believe the WMB bullshit that president fucktard spewed, just making the point that if the goal was to prevent Sadam from attacking the US, we accomplished it very well.)
If you are speaking about the insurgency, that is another story. We know who is supplying them. It is quite easy to attack the manufacturing and logistics that supply them to disarm them at the source. The question about the wisdom of doing so is another discussion all together.
The point is, your facts aren't really supporting your argument. Aggression is a fantastic defensive strategy. If your opponent is dead before he can even draw a gun, you are *quite* safe. The only rule of war is 'win'.
First, its all the hacking into our government and
Wait, you don't think that our government is trying to break into every military computer system in China? That the Chinese are engaging in spying on the US, and that we don't employ spies outselves? Interesting...
Could the emergence interdisciplinary experts lead to another 'renaissance' of sorts?
Oh, I don't know. If only we had a art history & statistics dual major to figure it out...
LOL, This is awesome. Especially since depicting nazis in a videogame will get it banned in Germany...
OUR censorship isn't bad, but other people's cencorship is...
Bush cannot pardon anyone who hasnt been charged or prosecuted with crimes. I'd like to think the the Democrats are playing this one smart, and wating for president fucktard to leave office before they begin their prosecution of administration officials in earnest. I am willing to be that none of the statue of limitations will run out before he leaves office. Once he's out, they can get some real justice as opposed to 'scooter libby justice'. Personally, I would like to see som legislation that double or tipples criminal penalties for crimes comitted while in federal office. These people are in a position of power, and it is to server the people of the united states, and not themselves or further some idiotic agenda.
Of the four you listed, the most successful outcome was Korea, and that is a 53 year and growing occupation...
Well, the point of war games is to simulate real-life scenarios, so cheating is not constructive, no matter how clever it is.
...and the point of war is to win, by any means nessecary. The only rules that wargames should have is to protect the physical safety of the participants. (otherwise it would't be wargames but just simply war.)
You cannot 'cheat' at war. Anything goes, that is the point. So, the only 'cheating' that could occur in a wargame, would be doing something unsafe. Say like using live ammunition rather than blanks.
The point of wargames is to prepare for possible situations, and train people how to react to them. If you fail to anticipate a situation, you have a weakness that can be exploited.
I think this was a great ploy by the attackers, and a valid case to considder: what happens if in cyber-warfare, the attackers choose to attack your information gathering organs on the internet, rather than just selected assets?
Bravo, red team, bravo.
D&D is a social game. You get together with a bunch of friends once a week and explore your imagination. There are rules, but the game is played differently by everyone, depending on what aspects of the game they enjoy.
The current version of the rules version 3/3.5, but don't worry about the version so much. Go find a bunch of people playing it, and join their group. Play whatever rules they are playing. Really, the version doesn't matter that much, its still basically the same game.
Hi, I started playing D&D in 1st edition, and I have seen the game grow over the years to what it is today. I have have thousands of dollars of books from 1st - 3rd edition, and now you are comming out with yet another edition. I can see that some overhauls were needed, since the game has come quite a distance from the old 'blue book' rules that came out in the 70's. However, there are some publishers in the industry, that are little more than money grubbing whores (*cough* Games Workshop *cough*) who come out with a new version of a game system almost anually in an attempt to re-sell their customers the same product with new formatting. Why should I invest in 4th edition at this point, and how do I know you arent going to just start publishing 5th edition two years from now?
If 4e was returning to roots, they'd have four classes and that's it. Instead, they're giving us four roles that are MMO-inspired and layering lots more than four classes atop those roles. That's not anything like D&D used to be.
...so I am going to guess, yes, WoTC is trying to be more like WoW. As close as they can without getting sued.
Lets see....Blizzard claims to have ~ 8 million subscribers, at about $15 per month. That works out to about 120 million per month net. Of course, regional pricing and exchange rates will throw this off a bit, but thats a whole lotta moolah any way you stack it.
but they didn't mind misleading the public to get somebody fired for planning ahead for this event.. that's pretty evil.
you are missing the point. Who is 'they'? You can blame 'MS' all you want, but at some point, somebody is making decisions. I claim that that behavior like this is a result of people not communicating, forgetting stuff, changing jobs, etc. I have worked there, nobody gave a damn about running enemys out of bisnuess. Most people were overworked and just wated to get the next release out the door. Perhaps the upper management is 'evil', but I will bet on people being stupid, lazy, and inept over deliberate malice any day. Money in the bank.
Their sneaky brand of evil is saying two conflicting things and making us believe they work together.
Ok, I love to MS bash as much as the next guy, but I cannot fault them for what you are mentioning. The thing that a lot of MS haters forget is that it is a HUGE company, and the right hand often really doesnt know what the left hand is doing, and often seperate teams have their own agendas.
Modern MS is like the government: There might be a few people that are trying to pull shit, but for the most part it is just a big, slow, beauracracy.