Most of the good apps have already been mentioned, and this thread is already days old, but you might still want to check out my webpage for other ideas.
Domesday, like the Bayeux Tapestry, seems to me like it should be in the public domain. It's a cultural treasure of the whole world, right? But the photographs of it are all modern, so they're protected by copyright, and the governments holding the documents keep them under strict lock and key so you can't take your own photos, and therefore the documents stay out of public ownership. Is my analysis of the legalities correct? If so, is there any way out of this conundrum?
Two other versions are currently being designed. One, which requires that users give the company some of their intellectual property in exchange for additional software packages, and another, which allows users to exchange a few hours' work for a robust Linux-based system. The first version will be called Inspire; the second, Perspire.
The company is also thinking of donating free software to relatives of the recently deceased. This will naturally be called Expire.
The parent post is exactly right. The grandparent post seems to indicate that choice of class = choice of weapon. The thing that is probably your character's most defining characteristic, and it boils down to just a choice of weapon? No thanks. That's neither interesting nor realistic to me.
Hacker, Detective, Fighter Pilot, Translator, Zero-G Marine, Terrorist, Media Star... any decently fleshed-out SF background will allow for far more interesting character professions than a fantasy setting.
The trick is, as others have already pointed out, that fleshing out an SF background is way harder than slapping together a pseudo-Tolkien setting with a couple additions. "Elves are blue! You can be a centaur! Swords in this game are EVEN BIGGER!" It's lazy world-building, but it's what the masses prefer.
It seems like about half this thread is arguing about which SF TV series is best. Why? Can't you like different shows simultaneously? Yes, maybe you can only spend your money on a limited number -- but then, why do you have to try to convince everyone else to spend their money a certain way? Why can't we all just relax and say "We're all cool and we all like SF TV"? Why don't we all talk about why all these shows are cool instead of instantly starting to compare dicks?
Friends, now buy one get 95 million free. But they were made in China, so it's best if you speak Mandarin. But then, IM-speak is almost universal.
(More seriously, I wonder if Mallwart will find some way to work cheap labor into it. Maybe the Justice Department will contact them to start creating fake under-age accounts, and Mallwart will farm the work out to China. New work for all those gold-miners: now, instead of pretending to be minotaurs, they get to pretend to be 16 year old girls from Indiana.)
What I've done so far is change the target file to a rather large.gif that says "I'm an asshole who steals bandwidth" and give the original file a different name. It's worked pretty well so far.
I'm a woman, and the so's the person who got me into Linux in the first place. In fact, she manages a set of packages for Debian and is a sysadmin in a major educational institution.
If you believe women aren't into Linux, you should take off your blinders.
Two porbelms with your post: One, as others have already noted, you mean "rogue", not "rouge"; two, there's no such thing as the Democratic People's Republic of China. Perhaps you're thinking of the full name of North Korea (DPRK)? With mainland China, the correct/full name is People's Republic of China -- no "Democratic". Thus, the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are officially the PRC and the ROC.
And yes, I know there's a typo in the second word of my post.:)
I had Hinet as my ISP my entire time in Taiwan. Terrible, really terrible. There are other ISPs around, but they're even dodgier, and hey, Hinet is the government, so it's gotta be trustworthy, right?
The book and the movie have the same theme: Dick's question of what it means to be human. They also share an answer to the question: to be human means to have compassion. They differ on whether or not replicants have the capacity or possibility to develop compassion, and of course on many specific plot points, but the core meaning of both is the same.
The programs I listed are not CRPGs. They are computer-assisted RPGs: chat-based RPGs where multiple real people interact in real time to play a real RPG. CRPGs like NWN are cool, but their flexibility is limited (you get a limited number of choices in any given situation, for example in NPC interaction, unlike in an RPG where anything is possible), and there aren't actual other people involved. Computer-assisted RPG programs like the ones I linked to are basically the same as real, face-to-face RPGs -- they only lack the facial expressions and other advantages of direct face-to-face conversation.
Problem with your first point: Blizzard doesn't do much to keep things in the game "setting-appropriate" -- speech isn't really restricted, for example -- so they clearly aren't that focused on creating an immersive fantasy world. If they wanted to keep the focus on the gameplay and on entertaining people, they should stop people from referring to everything as "gay". Not everyone likes that kind of talk, and I bet almost no one finds that immersive. I'm not saying that they necessarily should restrict speech, just that doing so would make a lot more sense if they're concerned about immersiveness and fun than telling GLBT people that they can't try to find like-minded people.
Problem with your third point: Most civilized governments restrict private companies' rights to discriminate against certain groups. It's illegal, for example, in the US to make your restaurant inaccessible to handicapped people just because you don't feel like serving them. It's illegal in large parts of the US to not hire someone because they're female. In many places, it's illegal not to rent an apartment to someone because you think they might be GLBT. Why do we allow laws like this? We realize that making life shittier for some groups is always wrong, even if it's slightly inconvenient to others. In other words, because we're civilized. It's kind of sad how few people see the logic in this.
Problem with your second point: There is no "wrong place" to stand up for human rights. Everywhere is a good place to take a stand against hatred.
RPG gaming has already had celebrity endorsements. The forward in the D&D anniversary book is by Vin Diesel, who games.
The problem, though, is that gaming is a weird activity in many people's minds. Spending your time imagining things is "child's play". That, and "role playing" has a whole other association in this society.
TSR tried to make D&D legit back in the 80's. There was even a commercial on regular TV. In the past decade or so, the White Wolf games have done a lot to make RPGs more mainstream. They've certainly attracted more women to the hobby (I'm one ofthe strange ones who was in it almost from the beginning -- blue box D&D), and there are many more subcultures now where RPGs are "cool".
But making it truly mainstream is going to be really hard. You'd basically have to overcome the insidious anti-intellectualism in the US, as well as several other problems (probably including homophobia, as you noted in your other post), before RPGs could truly be accepted.
I've had some awesome games in Harn. In regard to one campaign where I used Harnmaster rules but not actually Harn (I used a campaign world of my own devising, with a similar level of magic), a player I met again about a decade later told me she missed the campaign and that it was one of the best she'd ever been in.
Harn doesn't usually predispose itself to high adventure -- it's usually more about politics, mysteries and exploration than killing ever-greater numbers of orcs -- but that doesn't mean that it's not fun.
The original manga had Fuchikomas, puckish AI tanks. The Ghost in the Shell movie sorely lacked them. The series finally got this right (in a slightly modified form as Tachikomas). In fact, the movie lacked a lot of the manga's cool innovations and feel, while the series came much closer. It almost seems like Masamune Shirow had more input into the series, but it's hard to know.
Personally, I think the two big problems are a) light gathering in most astrophotography is far better than the human eye is capable of, and b) there's a lot of 'false-color' imaging that isn't adequately labeled as such. The famous 'Pillars of Creation' image isn't a real-light image; it's a combination of several (non-RGB) filters. (Of course, it's still beautiful.)
Many books now, though, give real depictions of what objects will look like through scopes and binoculars, or at least point out the difference. I'm thinking specifically of The Year-Round Messier Marathon Field Guide by H. C. Pennington and The Backyard Astronomers' Guide by Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer. These books show M42 are a slight blotch of white against the black, and explain that that's what you'll see when you're not using cameras with long exposure times.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the good apps have already been mentioned, and this thread is already days old, but you might still want to check out my webpage for other ideas.
Domesday, like the Bayeux Tapestry, seems to me like it should be in the public domain. It's a cultural treasure of the whole world, right? But the photographs of it are all modern, so they're protected by copyright, and the governments holding the documents keep them under strict lock and key so you can't take your own photos, and therefore the documents stay out of public ownership. Is my analysis of the legalities correct? If so, is there any way out of this conundrum?
Two other versions are currently being designed. One, which requires that users give the company some of their intellectual property in exchange for additional software packages, and another, which allows users to exchange a few hours' work for a robust Linux-based system. The first version will be called Inspire; the second, Perspire.
The company is also thinking of donating free software to relatives of the recently deceased. This will naturally be called Expire.
The parent post is exactly right. The grandparent post seems to indicate that choice of class = choice of weapon. The thing that is probably your character's most defining characteristic, and it boils down to just a choice of weapon? No thanks. That's neither interesting nor realistic to me.
Hacker, Detective, Fighter Pilot, Translator, Zero-G Marine, Terrorist, Media Star... any decently fleshed-out SF background will allow for far more interesting character professions than a fantasy setting.
The trick is, as others have already pointed out, that fleshing out an SF background is way harder than slapping together a pseudo-Tolkien setting with a couple additions. "Elves are blue! You can be a centaur! Swords in this game are EVEN BIGGER!" It's lazy world-building, but it's what the masses prefer.
It seems like about half this thread is arguing about which SF TV series is best. Why? Can't you like different shows simultaneously? Yes, maybe you can only spend your money on a limited number -- but then, why do you have to try to convince everyone else to spend their money a certain way? Why can't we all just relax and say "We're all cool and we all like SF TV"? Why don't we all talk about why all these shows are cool instead of instantly starting to compare dicks?
Friends, now buy one get 95 million free. But they were made in China, so it's best if you speak Mandarin. But then, IM-speak is almost universal.
(More seriously, I wonder if Mallwart will find some way to work cheap labor into it. Maybe the Justice Department will contact them to start creating fake under-age accounts, and Mallwart will farm the work out to China. New work for all those gold-miners: now, instead of pretending to be minotaurs, they get to pretend to be 16 year old girls from Indiana.)
Wish I had mod points to mod that up. I also wish there was a "yes, exactly" mod catergory.
My pixel-editing app of choice is Paint Shop Pro. Krita is probably the closest approximation available on Linux.
Krita will be a truly great program once it gets some more filters. For my purposes, that's the big advantage GIMP has over Krita.
What I've done so far is change the target file to a rather large .gif that says "I'm an asshole who steals bandwidth" and give the original file a different name. It's worked pretty well so far.
I'm a woman, and the so's the person who got me into Linux in the first place. In fact, she manages a set of packages for Debian and is a sysadmin in a major educational institution. If you believe women aren't into Linux, you should take off your blinders.
Like I said, two problems: that's it, no more. Everything else you said was quite correct.
Two porbelms with your post: One, as others have already noted, you mean "rogue", not "rouge"; two, there's no such thing as the Democratic People's Republic of China. Perhaps you're thinking of the full name of North Korea (DPRK)? With mainland China, the correct/full name is People's Republic of China -- no "Democratic". Thus, the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are officially the PRC and the ROC.
:)
And yes, I know there's a typo in the second word of my post.
I had Hinet as my ISP my entire time in Taiwan. Terrible, really terrible. There are other ISPs around, but they're even dodgier, and hey, Hinet is the government, so it's gotta be trustworthy, right?
I've lived in Taipei and visited Hong Kong. No flying cars, but those street scenes pretty much already exist.
The book and the movie have the same theme: Dick's question of what it means to be human. They also share an answer to the question: to be human means to have compassion. They differ on whether or not replicants have the capacity or possibility to develop compassion, and of course on many specific plot points, but the core meaning of both is the same.
I just watched 2010 tonight... Strange synergy.
The programs I listed are not CRPGs. They are computer-assisted RPGs: chat-based RPGs where multiple real people interact in real time to play a real RPG. CRPGs like NWN are cool, but their flexibility is limited (you get a limited number of choices in any given situation, for example in NPC interaction, unlike in an RPG where anything is possible), and there aren't actual other people involved. Computer-assisted RPG programs like the ones I linked to are basically the same as real, face-to-face RPGs -- they only lack the facial expressions and other advantages of direct face-to-face conversation.
Problem with your third point: Most civilized governments restrict private companies' rights to discriminate against certain groups. It's illegal, for example, in the US to make your restaurant inaccessible to handicapped people just because you don't feel like serving them. It's illegal in large parts of the US to not hire someone because they're female. In many places, it's illegal not to rent an apartment to someone because you think they might be GLBT. Why do we allow laws like this? We realize that making life shittier for some groups is always wrong, even if it's slightly inconvenient to others. In other words, because we're civilized. It's kind of sad how few people see the logic in this.
Problem with your second point: There is no "wrong place" to stand up for human rights. Everywhere is a good place to take a stand against hatred.
The problem, though, is that gaming is a weird activity in many people's minds. Spending your time imagining things is "child's play". That, and "role playing" has a whole other association in this society.
TSR tried to make D&D legit back in the 80's. There was even a commercial on regular TV. In the past decade or so, the White Wolf games have done a lot to make RPGs more mainstream. They've certainly attracted more women to the hobby (I'm one ofthe strange ones who was in it almost from the beginning -- blue box D&D), and there are many more subcultures now where RPGs are "cool".
But making it truly mainstream is going to be really hard. You'd basically have to overcome the insidious anti-intellectualism in the US, as well as several other problems (probably including homophobia, as you noted in your other post), before RPGs could truly be accepted.
There are a lot of ways to find players (self-link, but a useful one). Just avail yourself of them. :)
Harn doesn't usually predispose itself to high adventure -- it's usually more about politics, mysteries and exploration than killing ever-greater numbers of orcs -- but that doesn't mean that it's not fun.
The original manga had Fuchikomas, puckish AI tanks. The Ghost in the Shell movie sorely lacked them. The series finally got this right (in a slightly modified form as Tachikomas). In fact, the movie lacked a lot of the manga's cool innovations and feel, while the series came much closer. It almost seems like Masamune Shirow had more input into the series, but it's hard to know.
Personally, I think the two big problems are a) light gathering in most astrophotography is far better than the human eye is capable of, and b) there's a lot of 'false-color' imaging that isn't adequately labeled as such. The famous 'Pillars of Creation' image isn't a real-light image; it's a combination of several (non-RGB) filters. (Of course, it's still beautiful.)
Many books now, though, give real depictions of what objects will look like through scopes and binoculars, or at least point out the difference. I'm thinking specifically of The Year-Round Messier Marathon Field Guide by H. C. Pennington and The Backyard Astronomers' Guide by Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer. These books show M42 are a slight blotch of white against the black, and explain that that's what you'll see when you're not using cameras with long exposure times.