If a non-Christian harms you, you are to accept the abuse. Love your enemy. Meet me by the flag pole after school. We shall see how long that attitude lasts.
Second, Ron Paul advocates the repeal of the individual income tax, which accounted for roughly $1.04 billion of the $2.40 billion overall tax collected by the Federal Government in 2006. I think you mean trillion?
Yeah, that is pretty much a staple DM tool.;) Sadly, this is about the thing that makes a player pack up his stuff and leave. I was having enough trouble keeping this particular guy interested anyway as his only 'role-playing' experience was from WoW and he was treating this game about the same. In a pen and paper game I could have put him in a plausible lethal situation from which there was no escape, a stealth mountain if you will. Unfortunately, this was not possible in NWN because I was bound by the rules of the game as more of a privileged client than a real DM.
When I was playing not so long ago, my group felt that there really was nothing wrong with 2nd edition and 3rd edition was pretty much a useless money grab. I don't want to hear any crap about negative armor classes and such, because if you cannot do some basic math, I don't want you in my group anyway.
The nice thing about 3rd edition was you could pick up just about any 2nd edition book you wanted on eBay for cheap, such as the multitudes of various player handbooks. I expanded my library quite a bit during this time.
As others have already said, the rules ultimately don't matter that much as roleplaying creative solutions to creative problems is far more interesting. So why fix something that's not broken?
I tried this out with a small circle of LAN gaming friends for a while. We got networked together as usual, loaded up NWN, and I played the DM on some pre-made campaigns for the online version of this. The nice thing about it is I was able to add the actual role-playing interaction of impersonating various characters to the fast combat dynamics of NWN.
IMHO, one of the worst things about pen and paper is the sheer amount of time it takes to get through battles. With NWN most encounters are over in seconds. However, as the DM I have the power to adjust the difficulty of the battles on the fly. Either add more monsters if things are too easy for the PCs, or make up an excuse for some allies to show up or place some extra healing loot if the PCs are getting hammered.
That being said things got out of hand sometimes. I think the NWN DM interface is rather clunky even with some rather hackish script additions by players to give the DM more power. One time the players accidentally attacked a key NPC (unfortunately very easy to do in NWN) and no matter what I did, I could not make this NPC's faction neutral or friendly to the PCs. I had to inhabit that particular NPCs' body every time the players came to talk to her so that she would not attack on sight. Another time one of the players had managed to swipe a suit of armor that made him nearly invulnerable to everything in the campaign. This pretty much ruined all of the battles, and I didn't really have a plausible method for rectifying the situation.
I still think this is a great way to run a campaign. Real DM + computer gameworld and combat + actual roleplaying. I think there just needs to be better tools for accomplishing such a game.
Actually you might find those books given that Amazon has 3rd-party sellers selling used books. 50 years is a bit of a stretch, but in this case Amazon is not competeting with these stores anyhow.
demon 1387, from L. dæmon "spirit," from Gk. daimon (gen. daimonos) "lesser god, guiding spirit, tutelary deity,"..
Source
English inherited the Latin pronunciation and later underwent the Great Vowel Shift raising/e/ to/i/ (long 'e' as in ape to long 'i' as in eat),/dem@n/ became/dim@n/ and thus daemon and demon are the same word.
For the record, I pronounce and spell it the Latin way (without using an actual ae-ligature, naturally).
p.s.: pardon the X-SAMPA, Slashdot's lack of Unicode support is rather pathetic for '07.
Demons? Now that would be incredibly confusing.. What happens when someone tells you that mysqld is down on crond because it cannot talk to ntpd probably because the inetd config is buggered and things did not failover to nfsd but is nfsd even up??? So, you go to check what has come out of syslogd but by this time your brain has melted. CHAOS!
but WTF is 'LG'? I was RTFA and the author used this acronym several times without defining it. Looking at the Wikipedia disambiguation page for 'LG' only left me more confused.. Is it:
a South Korean electronics and petrochemicals conglomerate?
the acronym of Lietuvos gelezinkeliai, the railways of Lithuania?
a female member of Order of the Garter, used as post-nominal letters?
What is it?!
p.s.: I cannot seem to get character code ž () to display, my apologies to any Lithuanians.
haha.. What if I told you that most of them are SuSe 9.1 and that we have not bought anything from Novell recently either? Yeah, yeah.. Old software, but it still works just fine.
Personally, I run Slackware at home, but all the new machines that I have done at work have been Debian, whose package management certainly makes my job easier. I cannot imagine how equivalents of the beautiful and simple APT have not made it into 'enterprise Linux' distros.
That makes it even worse for them to have engaged in such a bonehead deal with MS. *sigh* Must be high time to start phasing out all the SuSe boxen around the office. =/
When Pixar made their lamp-on-the-desk short the technology was not nearly as well developed as it is now. It is hard to imagine what kind of work went into that simple thing, what with the tools they had and just imagine the rendering time.. Ouch.
Elephants Dream was a good opportunity to make a high quality, open source 3D short, which they did do, but they made one that did not make a lick of sense. IMHO, they would have been a lot better off maintaining the quality and complexity of the film, yet portraying a story that was simple and to the point. But nooo.. They just had to make something artsy.
Fantastic idea! The Ogre port of Vegastrike seems to be just about dead in the water/vacuum. I am not sure how Vegastrike decided they would do the port and then have one guy work on it. *sigh* Well, I suppose the Blender/CrystalSpace people will want to start from scratch anyway..
I think you are partly right. I cannot speak for all of the places you listed, but I spent two summers studying in Germany and have gone to the Wacken Open Air festival twice and I can say that while it is more mainstream, it is certainly not mainstream like pop or hip hop (the existence of W:O:A is pretty much definitive proof that metal is more popular in Europe though). There are a lot more exclusive metal festivals in Europe too (particularly in Germany).
That being said, many of my German colleagues at the University were clueless about basic bands such as: Motörhead, Whitesnake, the Scorpions, Accept, etc.. (bands which I saw at Wacken in those two years) The latter two are German even!
Yet, every now and then a metal band breaks into the music charts in various countries and in Finland there was at least one guy doing metal songs on the Finnish Idol show. So it is a mixed bag really.
I doubt this would work for mainstream music for a number of reasons. Firstly, you just have to compare the size of the metal scene to everything else. Metal labels are not raking in billions of dollars per year. The customer base is just not that big. Thus they really have no interest in accepting royalties from some third party printing sheet music/tabs (if a third party would really be interested in printing such music in the first place).
The second reason is that metal labels have a closer connection to their customers (fans). If they do something really stupid like saying that listeners of the music they publish cannot enjoy the music in a personal way amongst themselves (i.e.: playing it and learning from it) then that is going to cost them. Not only that, the close relationship of bands to labels prevents them also from demanding such bonehead things of their community. The bands themselves look up to older bands that they have learned from (most musicians before the age of the Internet probably did it by ear though..) and really do listen to the opinions of their fans (in most cases). Does anyone really think the corporate giant reproducing Led Zeppelin has had any connection to Jimmy Page, et al in recent years?
Thirdly, metal labels do not have the legal resources to make it worthwhile in pursuing these threats. The RIAA corporations and their ilk certainly do and are not afraid to use it.
Metaltabs.com has had a long history of doing a good job of keeping the non-metal bands out i.e.: nu-metal crap like Slipknot, Disturbed, etc. who belong to corporate labels and they probably would not have been threatened at all (late though they were) if it were not for some commercialized bands of which they have tabs (Metallica, etc..).
Since most people think metal is bad.. It makes me wonder if there is a correlation between the quality of music and the type of business surrounding it. =)
"We've set an internal goal that by 2015 we will help to reach the first billion of the next 5 billion that have been underserved," said Will Poole, the corporate vice president who heads Microsoft's market expansion group." Giving them Windows XP (for a paltry sum) is supposed to help people who are underserved? Why pay $3 for an XP license when there are numerous bundles of OSS goodness with a lot more to offer than Windows XP + Office. Sounds like just more market lock-in to me.
Plus, with Windows the underserved will now be disserved.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly the solution is to torture the real answer out of them!
By the way, you are entirely right.
Yeah, that is pretty much a staple DM tool. ;) Sadly, this is about the thing that makes a player pack up his stuff and leave. I was having enough trouble keeping this particular guy interested anyway as his only 'role-playing' experience was from WoW and he was treating this game about the same. In a pen and paper game I could have put him in a plausible lethal situation from which there was no escape, a stealth mountain if you will. Unfortunately, this was not possible in NWN because I was bound by the rules of the game as more of a privileged client than a real DM.
When I was playing not so long ago, my group felt that there really was nothing wrong with 2nd edition and 3rd edition was pretty much a useless money grab. I don't want to hear any crap about negative armor classes and such, because if you cannot do some basic math, I don't want you in my group anyway.
The nice thing about 3rd edition was you could pick up just about any 2nd edition book you wanted on eBay for cheap, such as the multitudes of various player handbooks. I expanded my library quite a bit during this time.
As others have already said, the rules ultimately don't matter that much as roleplaying creative solutions to creative problems is far more interesting. So why fix something that's not broken?
I noticed that the 'nerds' tag has made its appearance. I believe that there is some irony in that, but I have not worked it out yet.
I tried this out with a small circle of LAN gaming friends for a while. We got networked together as usual, loaded up NWN, and I played the DM on some pre-made campaigns for the online version of this. The nice thing about it is I was able to add the actual role-playing interaction of impersonating various characters to the fast combat dynamics of NWN.
IMHO, one of the worst things about pen and paper is the sheer amount of time it takes to get through battles. With NWN most encounters are over in seconds. However, as the DM I have the power to adjust the difficulty of the battles on the fly. Either add more monsters if things are too easy for the PCs, or make up an excuse for some allies to show up or place some extra healing loot if the PCs are getting hammered.
That being said things got out of hand sometimes. I think the NWN DM interface is rather clunky even with some rather hackish script additions by players to give the DM more power. One time the players accidentally attacked a key NPC (unfortunately very easy to do in NWN) and no matter what I did, I could not make this NPC's faction neutral or friendly to the PCs. I had to inhabit that particular NPCs' body every time the players came to talk to her so that she would not attack on sight. Another time one of the players had managed to swipe a suit of armor that made him nearly invulnerable to everything in the campaign. This pretty much ruined all of the battles, and I didn't really have a plausible method for rectifying the situation.
I still think this is a great way to run a campaign. Real DM + computer gameworld and combat + actual roleplaying. I think there just needs to be better tools for accomplishing such a game.
Has anyone else ever tried anything like this?
Actually you might find those books given that Amazon has 3rd-party sellers selling used books. 50 years is a bit of a stretch, but in this case Amazon is not competeting with these stores anyhow.
Furthermore, Amazon does have many books that are hard to find anywhere else. Perhaps only available from the publisher otherwise. If I pop into a local bookshop and ask for a copy of Comparative Syntax of Old English And Old Icelandic: Linguistic, Literary And Historical Implications I am going to get a rather blank stare.
I would venture that Apple is potentially far more dangerous.
demon 1387, from L. dæmon "spirit," from Gk. daimon (gen. daimonos) "lesser god, guiding spirit, tutelary deity,".. Source
/e/ to /i/ (long 'e' as in ape to long 'i' as in eat), /dem@n/ became /dim@n/ and thus daemon and demon are the same word.
English inherited the Latin pronunciation and later underwent the Great Vowel Shift raising
For the record, I pronounce and spell it the Latin way (without using an actual ae-ligature, naturally).
p.s.: pardon the X-SAMPA, Slashdot's lack of Unicode support is rather pathetic for '07.
It is based on the original BSD boot system, or so I have heard.
This page hints at it: http://openskills.info/infobox.php?IDbox=1042
Demons? Now that would be incredibly confusing.. What happens when someone tells you that mysqld is down on crond because it cannot talk to ntpd probably because the inetd config is buggered and things did not failover to nfsd but is nfsd even up??? So, you go to check what has come out of syslogd but by this time your brain has melted. CHAOS!
I always knew those things were a ripoff.
- a South Korean electronics and petrochemicals conglomerate?
- the acronym of Lietuvos gelezinkeliai, the railways of Lithuania?
- a female member of Order of the Garter, used as post-nominal letters?
What is it?!p.s.: I cannot seem to get character code ž () to display, my apologies to any Lithuanians.
haha.. What if I told you that most of them are SuSe 9.1 and that we have not bought anything from Novell recently either? Yeah, yeah.. Old software, but it still works just fine.
Personally, I run Slackware at home, but all the new machines that I have done at work have been Debian, whose package management certainly makes my job easier. I cannot imagine how equivalents of the beautiful and simple APT have not made it into 'enterprise Linux' distros.
Novell?
That makes it even worse for them to have engaged in such a bonehead deal with MS. *sigh* Must be high time to start phasing out all the SuSe boxen around the office. =/
When Pixar made their lamp-on-the-desk short the technology was not nearly as well developed as it is now. It is hard to imagine what kind of work went into that simple thing, what with the tools they had and just imagine the rendering time.. Ouch.
Elephants Dream was a good opportunity to make a high quality, open source 3D short, which they did do, but they made one that did not make a lick of sense. IMHO, they would have been a lot better off maintaining the quality and complexity of the film, yet portraying a story that was simple and to the point. But nooo.. They just had to make something artsy.
Fantastic idea! The Ogre port of Vegastrike seems to be just about dead in the water/vacuum. I am not sure how Vegastrike decided they would do the port and then have one guy work on it. *sigh* Well, I suppose the Blender/CrystalSpace people will want to start from scratch anyway..
Yeah, we real hackers have crazy 3D interfaces and fly through machines and networks in VR. None of this silly GNU/Linux nonsense!
See also: Hackers
Yup, American influence is rather amazing. You can have your BigMac with your cup of Starbucks while you watch MTV just about anywhere. Sad but true.
I think you are partly right. I cannot speak for all of the places you listed, but I spent two summers studying in Germany and have gone to the Wacken Open Air festival twice and I can say that while it is more mainstream, it is certainly not mainstream like pop or hip hop (the existence of W:O:A is pretty much definitive proof that metal is more popular in Europe though). There are a lot more exclusive metal festivals in Europe too (particularly in Germany).
That being said, many of my German colleagues at the University were clueless about basic bands such as: Motörhead, Whitesnake, the Scorpions, Accept, etc.. (bands which I saw at Wacken in those two years) The latter two are German even!
Yet, every now and then a metal band breaks into the music charts in various countries and in Finland there was at least one guy doing metal songs on the Finnish Idol show. So it is a mixed bag really.
In conclusion: more popular, but not too popular.
I doubt this would work for mainstream music for a number of reasons. Firstly, you just have to compare the size of the metal scene to everything else. Metal labels are not raking in billions of dollars per year. The customer base is just not that big. Thus they really have no interest in accepting royalties from some third party printing sheet music/tabs (if a third party would really be interested in printing such music in the first place).
The second reason is that metal labels have a closer connection to their customers (fans). If they do something really stupid like saying that listeners of the music they publish cannot enjoy the music in a personal way amongst themselves (i.e.: playing it and learning from it) then that is going to cost them. Not only that, the close relationship of bands to labels prevents them also from demanding such bonehead things of their community. The bands themselves look up to older bands that they have learned from (most musicians before the age of the Internet probably did it by ear though..) and really do listen to the opinions of their fans (in most cases). Does anyone really think the corporate giant reproducing Led Zeppelin has had any connection to Jimmy Page, et al in recent years?
Thirdly, metal labels do not have the legal resources to make it worthwhile in pursuing these threats. The RIAA corporations and their ilk certainly do and are not afraid to use it.
Metaltabs.com has had a long history of doing a good job of keeping the non-metal bands out i.e.: nu-metal crap like Slipknot, Disturbed, etc. who belong to corporate labels and they probably would not have been threatened at all (late though they were) if it were not for some commercialized bands of which they have tabs (Metallica, etc..).
Since most people think metal is bad.. It makes me wonder if there is a correlation between the quality of music and the type of business surrounding it. =)
Plus, with Windows the underserved will now be disserved.
Just how many light years away is this gas giant, Gazprom?