Yes, I have heard of philosophy of religion. I don't see how religions having philosophical aspects and vice versa has any impact on whether the concepts are different. Christianity and Secular Humanism share many moral ideas, but that doesn't mean Christians are Secular Humanists.
That's really interesting. It's still influenced by previous things (After all, we're defined by what we deliberately aren't as much as by what we are, sometimes), but I do think that it's purposely designed to separate the victim's ideas from those of the mainstream, to better control the victim.
Also questionable, but we're talking vastly different levels of damage here. Female "circumcision" is equivalent to removing the entire glans, not just the foreskin.
Also, I didn't make any judgments about male circumcision, just like I didn't make any judgments about spanking, doping, or human sacrifice. Just pulling out first example that hits.;-)
Religion is for those who are insufficiently honest to build their own philosophy.
Really? I think it's a bit of a stretch to declare anyone following an established religion (or philosophy, by extension) dishonest. Besides, in "building a philosophy," you have to use preexisting ideas, many of which come, directly or indirectly, from established religions.
Nothing comes from nothing. Any philosophy or religion someone has is developed based on known predicates. While all known predicates are not equal (Oppressive beliefs, while still genuine, can be less valid by overall consensus standards {A.K.A. If you practice female circumcision, stop. It's not ok, regardless of cultural imperatives.}), all known ideas have predicates. And I, personally, am not arrogant enough to say that all religious ideas are stupid or invalid, just because I don't share them.
Also, philosophy and religion are, in fact, different things. They are often closely linked, but a religion by definition deals with metaphysical concepts that a philosophy doesn't have to. And, emotionally, the need for God/god/gods/~ to worship is a different need than that for a philosophy to follow.
So... Raytheon's latest products include a death ray and a system for organizing your spy data? Methinks the real world Pentex I spy, else maybe a New World Order?
To those who aren't huge roleplaying dorks, I apologize for the inconvenience.
The only reason diagonal movement is longer is because of the shape of the tiles, which are there solely there for simplification of the game mechanics, arguably this change brings it _closer_ to the physical reality, and as such, makes it more accurate - reality is not constrained by invisible hexagons, and there is obviously no time penalty for stepping in any given direction, they're all equal.
All things are arguable, but this is a poor argument to make. The 1.5 speed rule in D&D is specifically to make movement WITHIN A SQUARE GRID make more sense. Making it so that, at the same speed, moving diagonally on an arbitrary (but universal and enforced) reference frame causes you to cross half again as much space (move 1.4 times as fast)... that's stupid. And if you don't get it from my broke-ass explaining, try this experiment:
Make a square. Larger will make it easier.
Measure it across the middle of one side to the middle of the other. Or just measure one of the sides.
Now, measure the distance from one point to the opposing point.
Subtract the first from the second.
Multiply whatever you get by 5 ft.
You now have the difference in movement between 3.5 movement and 4E movement over some space.
Assume a square is 5ft, as is standard in both systems. In both systems, to move 100 feet directly "up" on the grid would take 20 squares. In 4E, if you move diagonally 20 squares, you move 140 feet. Calling it 100 feet doesn't change the fact that you just put a major space-warping effect into your game there.
As long as you're using squares, not dealing with diagonal movement specially is going to produce differences from physical reality. Furthermore, 3.5 (and 3) dealt with the "You can step in any direction" problem by making your first movement 5 feet, and putting the adjustment on the second step. Doesn't interfere with steps, but prevents long travel from being ridiculous.
Remember, the squares are shorthand for distance. The extra rules D&D has concerning movement over squares are to keep it synced up with distance. D&D 3.5 is already cartoonish enough without dropping basic compatibility with real movement in space.
Wrong Wollstonecraft. I'm speaking of "Vindication of the Rights of Women" Mary Wollestonecraft, married to William Godwin, and mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Switching to hexes is, in fact, an example of a good solution to this problem. A bad solution is dropping the adjustments you have in place to maintain some sense of reality;-)
D&D is already so far to the "Abstraction" end of the "Abstraction/Modeling" continuum, that I feel it doesn't need that much more of a jump to be entirely over and past the shark, if you catch my drift.
Although to be fair, one can safely assume that even the most enlightened Victorians had a somewhat sexist view. Except Mary Wollstonecraft. And her husband. And Thomas Hardy. Well, fine. Maybe not.;-)
Well, while I do feel that he's being a bit over-emphatic, I do have to say that enough has been released to determine a fair amount about the direction the system is heading in; and I, for one, don't care for it. D&D is already, at 3.5, about as far into abstraction as I feel is workable for a roleplaying system based on combat. I feel that it's losing what little touch it has with physical reality, and substituting video-game logic for the aforementioned. This may, in fact, make the game "easier," or even "more enjoyable" to those who tend to live entirely in the rules and combat system anyway.
As an example: in 4E, diagonal movement is as cheap as straight movement. This simplifies the system somewhat, and eliminates a certain amount of annoying "busywork" from combats. It is not, in terms of power, unbalancing, since it affects monsters and humans alike.
It is, however, wildly inaccurate, and operates in a way that, visualized, just seems bizarre and ill-thought-out. In essence, you're saying that, just to make combat slightly similar, you're willing to make it so that everyone moves half-again as fast, so long as they do it diagonally.
D&D 4E promises to be a very fast, powerful system for expressing combats. But these combats will, I think, cease to be "roleplaying" combats. Cleric, Wizard, and Fighter have ceased to be abstractions of real concepts, given rules; they have become rules in and of themselves, with no thought given to the imaginary world that they are supposedly modeling.
Dood. This hit Cory Doctorow TODAY. I don't think it's valid to say that none of the OSS companies capable of doing this wouldn't step up, given the chance.
Also, as one of the issues here is Microsoft trying to use a donation to dictate LOC policy, perhaps it is to their credit that none of them have tried to use donations of software/hardware to influence government policy?
Wine is open source. Unless I read it wrong, they are funding Codeweavers to work on the Wine backend, not on Crossover specific stuff. Therefore, they are in fact not funding a piece of proprietary software.
GEGL is a great idea (on its third go-round in Gimp), but it is my understanding that CMYK color in the for realz Gimp tree is the bigger hurdle to adoption. Unless I missed something, GEGL isn't going to fix Gimp's utter uselessness for any kind of serious print work.
P.S. I know there are several workarounds, and a CMYKGimp fork of Gimp 1.{something}. But none of this is production ready, as they say.
Really? You're going to dismiss Wine as useless? I'm sorry to puncture your bizarre dream-state, but not everyone uses computers solely for the moral kick of supporting an ideology, and even less does everyone see using computers as an end to itself.
For instance, I like being able to play Starcraft without keeping a Windows partition. John Q. Workingstiff might like being able to use {Office/Outlook/Third Party Program Q} that his work requires him to use, without having to have a Windows computer or partition.
Really, a program that widens the library of programs available to a system improves the system by leaps and bounds. I suggest you think of Wine as an attempt to add backwards compatibility with older, obsolete systems, in a free and optional way, if it makes you feel better.
Tell me how it's fun for you. Are you talking about role-playing? Sure, that part's fun too, but it doesn't have anything to do with mechanics - it depends on DM and players making the fun for themselves - so it wasn't relevant to my post.
Ahhh, but mechanics and roleplaying DO in fact interact. MUST in fact interact. Because we want to pretend to be other people, and people want to do things other than fight. And you need rules to provide a sense of real achievement connected to your character's skills, attributes, and actions.
One of the longstanding problems of D&D compared to other systems is that it has always had a kind of weak and foolish system for determining the results and relevance of non-combat actions. The single-roll backed with a number as the method for everything from building a castle over the course of a week to disarming a trap in a split second is a ridiculous way to model events. But this doesn't mean that disarming a trap is boring, or that building a castle is boring. It means that the model you're using is boring.
The point of roleplaying is to play a role. To be, for pretend, a hero/villain/other-thing-than-you. And the more that D&D turns into simply a combat-abstraction, the less and less connected you become to the characters you make. Because once it's just a combat system... why aren't you just playing the videogame? There all the math is done for you!
I call shenanigans on the 3rd ed has no value. 2nd Ed's problems werent't complexity, they were A) the degree of crippling limitation built into the system (especially the weapon proficiencies system) and B) the places where abstractions failed to either simplify reality or reflect it in any way.
Also, the flight rules for second edition D&D are the worst thing I've ever read in a roleplaying system, including HoL, which is a parody system.
That being said, I totally agree with you on the creative roleplaying aspect. A good group fixes (or has the potential to fix) any system. That being said, rules sets do have relative strengths and weaknesses, and can be useful shortcuts. The D&D family have always been strong in two areas: abstraction of combat, and relative completeness of physical modeling. Thinking of RPGs as languages, D&D is one where you can do combat fast (relatively), and you can mostly cover whatever a player wants to do under the rules. The rules make it easier to run dungeon crawls in an arbitrary world than it would be in, say, White Wolf's Mage.
If you want to run a social game... it's not really helping you out much.
Am I the only one who is a little worried and/or sad that D&D 4th Ed seems to be written entirely by combat wonks, and seems to be pressing firmly further and further from any world-modeling aspects at all, further and further into the realm of pure mechanics.
I see the Warblade as the symptom of this: powerful, fun in combat, and yet, without any real connection to modeling any sort of real or even imaginable ability or scenario.
D&D has always been on the far abstract end of the realism... abstraction continuum, but this is going a little overboard; now, the fighter will only be able to do THE NON-MAGICAL THING HE LEARNED HOW TO DO three times per day? Or four per encounter?
I feel that D&D has jumped the metaphorical shark. It is no longer a useful modeling system for pretend games, and instead is merely a mechanic system for the next generation of D&D based videogames.
7. TERMINATION AND REVOCATION. Without prejudice to any other rights, CapstoneBlack may terminate this EULA if you fail to comply with the terms and conditions of this EULA. In such event, you must destroy all copies of the SOFTWARE. Additionally, CapstoneBlack reserves the right to revoke any or all licenses issued to you at its sole discretion. If the license is revoked by CapstoneBlack where you are not in default of this agreement and the revocation occurs within 2 years of issue, you may be entitled to pro-rata compensation up to the maximum of the current prevailing purchase price when purchased directly from CapstoneBlack.
Runtime on this particular google search: 20 seconds.
Again, all I'm saying is that it is a thing that happens. Not everyone does it, but EULAs are commonly abused to provide unreasonable control over a buyer's use and management of software.
As far as the Microsoft EULAs go, "vague wording" is perhaps inaccurate. Let me say then that the conditions of breach tend to be very open-ended, and the conditions of reasonable use tend to be unnecessarily restricted, resulting in a great many circumstances where Microsoft can deny license use unreasonably. Of course, now they just shut off the product by remote control.
Actually, I believe most places have laws concerning sale of known defective property in addition to warranty (i.e. "Lemon laws").
And you're assuming that the thief (A) provided no warranty to C. And C, in the preexisting set of assumptions, bought the car under the understandings that it was legal. He is a victim of fraud, and has as much right to either the car or his money back for the car as the owner of the car has.
In both cases, of course, the guilty party is B. My suggested course is return of A's car (And recompense for damages caused by theft and by lost time) for A, and his money back and lost time caused by his needing to buy a new car, to be paid by B and or seizure of B's assets.
I suppose a license such as this (Herein referred to as the DAVEcense 1.0) would do the trick, essentially:
This (Software|Text|Whatever) may be used in all ways as if it is in the public domain, and all rights attached to public domain usage devolve to all copiers, users, readers, and all other persons.
And once it runs out, it would be public domain anyway, for realz.
Does the phrase "This license can at any time be changed (or revoked by the issuer in any manner deemed fit" ring a bell?
Because I have to say, as a former purchaser of software and hardware computer products, it sounds pretty damned familiar to me.
Granted, this is from most of the consumer EULAs I've seen, but I believe the Enterprise ones for Word contain much the same flavor, and I KNOW that all Windows OS EULAs since at least 98 contain revocation clauses, albeit limited in allowable cause (# By exceedingly vague wording).
Of course, I live in America, where businesses have long since ceased to be sane.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I have heard of philosophy of religion. I don't see how religions having philosophical aspects and vice versa has any impact on whether the concepts are different. Christianity and Secular Humanism share many moral ideas, but that doesn't mean Christians are Secular Humanists.
That's really interesting. It's still influenced by previous things (After all, we're defined by what we deliberately aren't as much as by what we are, sometimes), but I do think that it's purposely designed to separate the victim's ideas from those of the mainstream, to better control the victim.
Also questionable, but we're talking vastly different levels of damage here. Female "circumcision" is equivalent to removing the entire glans, not just the foreskin.
Also, I didn't make any judgments about male circumcision, just like I didn't make any judgments about spanking, doping, or human sacrifice. Just pulling out first example that hits. ;-)
Really? I think it's a bit of a stretch to declare anyone following an established religion (or philosophy, by extension) dishonest. Besides, in "building a philosophy," you have to use preexisting ideas, many of which come, directly or indirectly, from established religions.
Nothing comes from nothing. Any philosophy or religion someone has is developed based on known predicates. While all known predicates are not equal (Oppressive beliefs, while still genuine, can be less valid by overall consensus standards {A.K.A. If you practice female circumcision, stop. It's not ok, regardless of cultural imperatives.}), all known ideas have predicates. And I, personally, am not arrogant enough to say that all religious ideas are stupid or invalid, just because I don't share them.
Also, philosophy and religion are, in fact, different things. They are often closely linked, but a religion by definition deals with metaphysical concepts that a philosophy doesn't have to. And, emotionally, the need for God/god/gods/~ to worship is a different need than that for a philosophy to follow.
So... Raytheon's latest products include a death ray and a system for organizing your spy data? Methinks the real world Pentex I spy, else maybe a New World Order?
To those who aren't huge roleplaying dorks, I apologize for the inconvenience.
All things are arguable, but this is a poor argument to make. The 1.5 speed rule in D&D is specifically to make movement WITHIN A SQUARE GRID make more sense. Making it so that, at the same speed, moving diagonally on an arbitrary (but universal and enforced) reference frame causes you to cross half again as much space (move 1.4 times as fast) ... that's stupid. And if you don't get it from my broke-ass explaining, try this experiment:
You now have the difference in movement between 3.5 movement and 4E movement over some space.
Assume a square is 5ft, as is standard in both systems. In both systems, to move 100 feet directly "up" on the grid would take 20 squares. In 4E, if you move diagonally 20 squares, you move 140 feet. Calling it 100 feet doesn't change the fact that you just put a major space-warping effect into your game there.
As long as you're using squares, not dealing with diagonal movement specially is going to produce differences from physical reality. Furthermore, 3.5 (and 3) dealt with the "You can step in any direction" problem by making your first movement 5 feet, and putting the adjustment on the second step. Doesn't interfere with steps, but prevents long travel from being ridiculous.
Remember, the squares are shorthand for distance. The extra rules D&D has concerning movement over squares are to keep it synced up with distance. D&D 3.5 is already cartoonish enough without dropping basic compatibility with real movement in space.
Wrong Wollstonecraft. I'm speaking of "Vindication of the Rights of Women" Mary Wollestonecraft, married to William Godwin, and mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Victorians and their names and affairs.
Switching to hexes is, in fact, an example of a good solution to this problem. A bad solution is dropping the adjustments you have in place to maintain some sense of reality ;-)
D&D is already so far to the "Abstraction" end of the "Abstraction/Modeling" continuum, that I feel it doesn't need that much more of a jump to be entirely over and past the shark, if you catch my drift.
Is that anything like an Electric Monk?
I made one in ::shudder:: Java for my final good college CS class.
What, good sir/madam, is the offering required to begin worship of your august self, and the fiery blade of sarcasm you so righteously wield.
Mod parent up, please. Or the enemy wins.
Although to be fair, one can safely assume that even the most enlightened Victorians had a somewhat sexist view. Except Mary Wollstonecraft. And her husband. And Thomas Hardy. Well, fine. Maybe not. ;-)
Well, while I do feel that he's being a bit over-emphatic, I do have to say that enough has been released to determine a fair amount about the direction the system is heading in; and I, for one, don't care for it. D&D is already, at 3.5, about as far into abstraction as I feel is workable for a roleplaying system based on combat. I feel that it's losing what little touch it has with physical reality, and substituting video-game logic for the aforementioned. This may, in fact, make the game "easier," or even "more enjoyable" to those who tend to live entirely in the rules and combat system anyway.
As an example: in 4E, diagonal movement is as cheap as straight movement. This simplifies the system somewhat, and eliminates a certain amount of annoying "busywork" from combats. It is not, in terms of power, unbalancing, since it affects monsters and humans alike.
It is, however, wildly inaccurate, and operates in a way that, visualized, just seems bizarre and ill-thought-out. In essence, you're saying that, just to make combat slightly similar, you're willing to make it so that everyone moves half-again as fast, so long as they do it diagonally.
D&D 4E promises to be a very fast, powerful system for expressing combats. But these combats will, I think, cease to be "roleplaying" combats. Cleric, Wizard, and Fighter have ceased to be abstractions of real concepts, given rules; they have become rules in and of themselves, with no thought given to the imaginary world that they are supposedly modeling.
Holy sh*t! They're just dusting off Xenix, renaming it, and porting Winelib to it to run MFC applications! We've solved the mystery, guys.
Dood. This hit Cory Doctorow TODAY. I don't think it's valid to say that none of the OSS companies capable of doing this wouldn't step up, given the chance.
Also, as one of the issues here is Microsoft trying to use a donation to dictate LOC policy, perhaps it is to their credit that none of them have tried to use donations of software/hardware to influence government policy?
I think this may be the first and only time I've ever seen humility on Slashdot.
Be you mortal, or some kind of crazy angelic being, sent to save us from being up our own rectories? (Or some other $word =~ /rect/ )
P.S. I know there are several workarounds, and a CMYKGimp fork of Gimp 1.{something}. But none of this is production ready, as they say.
Really? You're going to dismiss Wine as useless? I'm sorry to puncture your bizarre dream-state, but not everyone uses computers solely for the moral kick of supporting an ideology, and even less does everyone see using computers as an end to itself.
For instance, I like being able to play Starcraft without keeping a Windows partition. John Q. Workingstiff might like being able to use {Office/Outlook/Third Party Program Q} that his work requires him to use, without having to have a Windows computer or partition.
Really, a program that widens the library of programs available to a system improves the system by leaps and bounds. I suggest you think of Wine as an attempt to add backwards compatibility with older, obsolete systems, in a free and optional way, if it makes you feel better.
Ahhh, but mechanics and roleplaying DO in fact interact. MUST in fact interact. Because we want to pretend to be other people, and people want to do things other than fight. And you need rules to provide a sense of real achievement connected to your character's skills, attributes, and actions.
One of the longstanding problems of D&D compared to other systems is that it has always had a kind of weak and foolish system for determining the results and relevance of non-combat actions. The single-roll backed with a number as the method for everything from building a castle over the course of a week to disarming a trap in a split second is a ridiculous way to model events. But this doesn't mean that disarming a trap is boring, or that building a castle is boring. It means that the model you're using is boring.
The point of roleplaying is to play a role. To be, for pretend, a hero/villain/other-thing-than-you. And the more that D&D turns into simply a combat-abstraction, the less and less connected you become to the characters you make. Because once it's just a combat system... why aren't you just playing the videogame? There all the math is done for you!
I call shenanigans on the 3rd ed has no value. 2nd Ed's problems werent't complexity, they were A) the degree of crippling limitation built into the system (especially the weapon proficiencies system) and B) the places where abstractions failed to either simplify reality or reflect it in any way.
Also, the flight rules for second edition D&D are the worst thing I've ever read in a roleplaying system, including HoL, which is a parody system.
That being said, I totally agree with you on the creative roleplaying aspect. A good group fixes (or has the potential to fix) any system. That being said, rules sets do have relative strengths and weaknesses, and can be useful shortcuts. The D&D family have always been strong in two areas: abstraction of combat, and relative completeness of physical modeling. Thinking of RPGs as languages, D&D is one where you can do combat fast (relatively), and you can mostly cover whatever a player wants to do under the rules. The rules make it easier to run dungeon crawls in an arbitrary world than it would be in, say, White Wolf's Mage.
If you want to run a social game... it's not really helping you out much.
Wow. I wish I'd seen this before posting. I could have just thrown up a "Hell yeah!" You have, in fact, said it.
They should stop calling it a "role-playing game," and start calling it a "simulated combat system."
Am I the only one who is a little worried and/or sad that D&D 4th Ed seems to be written entirely by combat wonks, and seems to be pressing firmly further and further from any world-modeling aspects at all, further and further into the realm of pure mechanics.
I see the Warblade as the symptom of this: powerful, fun in combat, and yet, without any real connection to modeling any sort of real or even imaginable ability or scenario.
D&D has always been on the far abstract end of the realism ... abstraction continuum, but this is going a little overboard; now, the fighter will only be able to do THE NON-MAGICAL THING HE LEARNED HOW TO DO three times per day? Or four per encounter?
I feel that D&D has jumped the metaphorical shark. It is no longer a useful modeling system for pretend games, and instead is merely a mechanic system for the next generation of D&D based videogames.
Runtime on this particular google search: 20 seconds.
Again, all I'm saying is that it is a thing that happens. Not everyone does it, but EULAs are commonly abused to provide unreasonable control over a buyer's use and management of software.
As far as the Microsoft EULAs go, "vague wording" is perhaps inaccurate. Let me say then that the conditions of breach tend to be very open-ended, and the conditions of reasonable use tend to be unnecessarily restricted, resulting in a great many circumstances where Microsoft can deny license use unreasonably. Of course, now they just shut off the product by remote control.
Actually, I believe most places have laws concerning sale of known defective property in addition to warranty (i.e. "Lemon laws").
And you're assuming that the thief (A) provided no warranty to C. And C, in the preexisting set of assumptions, bought the car under the understandings that it was legal. He is a victim of fraud, and has as much right to either the car or his money back for the car as the owner of the car has.
In both cases, of course, the guilty party is B. My suggested course is return of A's car (And recompense for damages caused by theft and by lost time) for A, and his money back and lost time caused by his needing to buy a new car, to be paid by B and or seizure of B's assets.
I suppose a license such as this (Herein referred to as the DAVEcense 1.0) would do the trick, essentially:
And once it runs out, it would be public domain anyway, for realz.
Does the phrase "This license can at any time be changed (or revoked by the issuer in any manner deemed fit" ring a bell?
Because I have to say, as a former purchaser of software and hardware computer products, it sounds pretty damned familiar to me.
Granted, this is from most of the consumer EULAs I've seen, but I believe the Enterprise ones for Word contain much the same flavor, and I KNOW that all Windows OS EULAs since at least 98 contain revocation clauses, albeit limited in allowable cause (# By exceedingly vague wording).
Of course, I live in America, where businesses have long since ceased to be sane.