Well, "anyone who wants to do research" would include anyone looking it up on Wikipedia (excluding those using the "Random Article" link), wouldn't it?
Likewise in Germany, although our public law stations (yes, they're called that) is of somewhat questionable value. In theory our fees guarantee free, unbiased public law media that deliver high qualita programming. Let's see what ARD (the most important public law TV station) has on today... Two daily soaps, one docu-soap about a zoo, three purple prose-ish movies, a quiz show and five times the same news. Oh, and actually one magazine that has actual reporters in its editorial staff. No, the news don't have real reporters working for them; they just take their info from news agencies and cut out half of it, often only presenting one half of the story.
Not every day is as bad as this but seriously, I don't quite think that that's worth paying a fee on every* TV set (PCs count as TV sets) and radio for.
* Actually you pay the fee once. If you have at least one TV set and/or internet enabled PC you pay the fiull fee and if you only have a radio you pay half of it. And yes, a TV set that can't possibly receive a signal still counts.
Houses can end up on the market for surprisingly small amounts. Not too long ago there was a story on TV about a family who got screwed over by the mass bank suicide - the bank they had a mortgage with went belly-up, their mortgage was sold off to another bank and that bank managed to put the house up for auction. In the end the house was auctioned off for some thirty thousand Euros, if I remember correctly - and I think it was a two-family house, which (in Germany) means construction costs of about 200.000 Euros and up, not including the land it was built on. Let's assume 300.000 in total. So we're down to about a tenth of what the house was actually worth.
The GP also pointed out that the house was vandalized within a year foreclosure, which sounds like it wasn't in the best of neighborhoods. If the neighborhood used to be better when the house was built that might have contributed to it losing value.
In the near future, we design artificial intelligence and put it to work for us. In fifty years, biodegradable robots packaged in ecofriendly human hide take over. This'll just make it easier for them to recycle their dead while we work as horribly impractical and physically unfeasible living batteries.
There's always Quebéc (if you want to stay in a francophone area, otherwise there's the world). Seriously, with that kind of laws I'd really think about skipping town.
You think of KITT, the Knight Industry Two Thousand. The GP wrote "kit", which is the Knight Industry Two. Think "bicycle with a cassette recorder taped to it".
I'm a time traveler and let me tell you, you're in for a wild ride. One of the biggest things was (er, will be from your point of view) when the first lesbian got elected president. Mostly because due to her lobbying plastics were finally banned worldwide. (Good riddance!) This was possible because stem cell research has enabled the development of equivalent biomaterials... Let me tell you, in ten years you won't see connective tissue with the same eyes. Especially not since most of it will come from the African Federation, which formed around 2016 when the various warring factions in Africa realized that their newfound biomanufacturing wealth has put nuclear weapons into so many hands that any further conflict would end with localized MAD.
The advances in bioengineering still didn't stop the Human-Canine Immunodeficiency Virus pandemic of the late 2010s. Let's all agree to not judge the era on that one.
eBay is currently testing a new article page layout. If you get to see it you will also see a link to an "info tour" about it. Said info tour is a Flash animation that reliably crashes both Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 under OS X; I suspect that it hits a bug in the OS X Flash Player.
Me neither. I actually tend to involve the dice too much by randomly improvising checks (for example I'm known to construct "spite checks" out of the Charisma or (in TDE) Violent Temper attribute) and we even changed the TDE rules to make critical successes/failures for skill checks much more likely (1/20 instead of 1/400). This goes so far that in my TDE round we have a new demigoddess whose specialty is bending the rules and screwing around with die rolls. She's actually the most powerful deity as we blame her whenever a player rolls something funny.
As for diceless combat, I already pointed out that combat is one of the situations where you do want randomness and thus dice even in an otherwise diceless game. Except if you really like predictability. As for critical failures/successes, some people don't like those, so not having them may actually be an advantage. I'd miss them, though.
ext2 is nontrivial to install under OS X and it's hard to tell which combination of Windows release and ext2 IFS will be compatible (although that just means you might have to install two IFSes before it works). And that's already ignoring the fact that neithe MacFUSE nor IFSes are native support.
ext3 is only supported via ext2. ext4 is either essentially ext3 or not downwards-compatible with ext2 and there are neither MacFUSE modules nor Windows IFSes for it. Reiser3 has an IFS, IIRC, but I don't think it it's represented in MacFUSE.
NTFS has solid support via ntfs-3g but it's not native. The problem with solutions like MacFUSE (and to a lesser degree Linux FUSE) is that one cannot expect any random computer to run them, which severely deiminshes their relevance for external disks intended for data transfer. Most people aren't going to let you install a filesystem driver on their system just so they can mount your USB stick.
HFS+ has a somewhat workable Linux support although I'm not entirely sure whether Linux can write to HFS+ volumes. For Windows, however, one has to resort to MacDrive, which is not only third-party but even commercial. People are definitely not going to buy a filesystem driver to mount your USB stick.
UDF is a mixed bag. Everyone can mount it and in theory everyone can write it - however most OSes don't allow you to use the regular volume management tools to create UDF volumes and Windows XP needs third-party software to enable write support. Plus, attempting to format an USB stick with UDF via the OS X terminal didn't lead to usable results when I tried it. UDF would work in theory but forces the user to jump through too many hoops in practice - plus it can't be written to under Win XP, which is a serious drawback.
In the end UDf comes somewhat close to being a FAT32 killer but before we can seriously consider it, all major OS vendors need to decide that UDF is useful for more than just DVDs and Windows XP needs to die. Given that right now nobody cares about UDF on the hard drive and Windows XP is going nowhere fast I'd rather expect Apple and Linux to license/reverse engineer exFAT and use that as the default (as SDXC is essentially enforcing).
And before that we're essentially stuck with FAT32, the only semi-useful file system every major operating system can read, write and manage without third-party software.
If I overlooked some file system that is more modern than FAT32 and natively supported by OS X, Linux and Windows, please feel free to point it out to me.
If you call language and customs/courtesies an infringement of freedom, well, you might as well consider not being able to grow a rocket out of your ass an infringement of your freedom.
Well, I do! When I was a little dyslexic boy I always wanted a rocketshit.
By the way, you don't need to constantly frown to be hired by the Bahn. If you're a cheerful kind of asshole you can drive around the concessions cart and shout "REFRESHMENTS, SANDWICHES" into the ears of people who try to work.
a) There are few situations where, in a P&P setting, I would recommend dice. However, most of the time you can do without them. As for LARPs... Well, either have someone judge, possibly through dice, or start boffing. Or both, I don't know. I don't actively LARP either.
b) I actually conflated the regular and LARP versions of WoD; it's been a while since I was involved with the system.
However, even though WoD has the advantage of someone actually having done it, I'd expect most systems to be modifiable into a mostly diceless state with dice being reserved for situations where chance is explicitly wanted, such as combat damage.
For D&D simply ignore the die roll and lower the DC accordingly. Shadowrun 3 would be more work; I'd probably replace successes with "skill points above the target number" and try to balance that out. For SR4 I'd revert to the SR3 check rules and apply the same change. The Dark Eye would be a nightmare as every skill check is actually three attribute checks... but nobody outside Germany plays that anyway.
In the end you can play however you want, using whichever rules you want. You have to like roleplaying enough to actually work out the changes but if you do you get an experience tailor-made for your (group's) needs.
If you're insane anough you can even merge two systems. I'm doing just that (haphazardly porting the Shadowrun 3 magic system to The Dark Eye 3E) and it's really a labor of love. With a lot of labor involved. Only do this if you like messing with rules.
The question is whether there are other areas that allow those players to do what they do in the PvP areas. If not then they simply saw a greater need for a hang-out-and-let-mooks-do-the-fighting area than for a deathmatch area, so they repurposed the PvP areas.
I wionder how things would look if NCSoft acknowledged this trend and offered separate instances of the PvP areas for deathmatch and mook battle chat.
The numbers don't simulate, they arbitrate. Essentially everyone does just sit around and tell a story; the numbers only come in once you need to know whether someone is really strong/smart/adept at pottery enough to do the task they intend to. You can, of course, decide to use every rule in the book at every opportunity... but if you don't your game is going to run much smoother.
Besides, you don't even need dice. Some systems (like World of Darkness) avoid random elements wherever possible; there a skill check just means comparing your skill value to the target number.
Or you go with completely freeform gaming... Forum RPGs tend to do this. Unfortunately they also tend to show why most gamers prefer having rules and stats around - they keep people from declaring every ridiculous action their character takes to be successful (and all attacks on them to be ineffective).
Ideally the DM is forced to make up new rules on the spot because the provided rules simply don't cover what the players are trying to do. And no matter how much you like to play without numbers, at some point you'll want at least a rough estimate of how fast that magical disease the players developed spreads.
As for the sibling's position: If you want to minimize the rolling, play with the World of Darkness system, which minimizes dice use. d20 is not the only P&P system.
Also, even d20 can be relatively free of dice if you simply ignore some of the rules. I know someone whose Dark Eye (essentially D&D in German with even more dice) groups never use damage rolls in combat - the attack roll and the description of the attack are combined to see who loses which limbs. The end result are drastically shortened (and much more dangerous) battles with a minimum of dice rolls. And it works well for them.
So if you think your system has too many dice, either get rid of the system (porting a setting to another system is less work than you'd think), change the game outright or just adapt the system to your needs.
As for D): World-reknowned tech reporter Rob Malda commented on the iPod launch with terms like "from the well-thats-not-very-exciting-dept." and "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame".
Well, of course. See, I don't have the money to buy any car at the moment. So all car owners should be shot and then the people shooting them should shoot themselves because I can't afford a gun either (well, theoretically I could but it wouldn't be financially responsible, which should suffice as a reason for mass suicide). At some point we can stop killing people because the world economy has collapsed and money doesn't work anymore, thus nobody can buy anything. Problem solved.
In my case because I needed an MP3 player, was buying an MBP and am a student - which meant that I could pick up an iPod Touch for 35 €. Admittedly, an iPhone is a different beast but I'm one of those people who don't see the point in spending more than fifty bucks for a telephone anyway.
I don't treat the iPod as a computer. It's an MP3 player that happens to be able to run arbitrary software. Of course my access to that software is filtered by Apple but I don't care much because for me it's not the point of the device. My ultra-portable computing needs will be catered to by the much more suitable Pandora.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, "anyone who wants to do research" would include anyone looking it up on Wikipedia (excluding those using the "Random Article" link), wouldn't it?
Likewise in Germany, although our public law stations (yes, they're called that) is of somewhat questionable value. In theory our fees guarantee free, unbiased public law media that deliver high qualita programming. Let's see what ARD (the most important public law TV station) has on today... Two daily soaps, one docu-soap about a zoo, three purple prose-ish movies, a quiz show and five times the same news. Oh, and actually one magazine that has actual reporters in its editorial staff. No, the news don't have real reporters working for them; they just take their info from news agencies and cut out half of it, often only presenting one half of the story.
Not every day is as bad as this but seriously, I don't quite think that that's worth paying a fee on every* TV set (PCs count as TV sets) and radio for.
* Actually you pay the fee once. If you have at least one TV set and/or internet enabled PC you pay the fiull fee and if you only have a radio you pay half of it. And yes, a TV set that can't possibly receive a signal still counts.
Houses can end up on the market for surprisingly small amounts. Not too long ago there was a story on TV about a family who got screwed over by the mass bank suicide - the bank they had a mortgage with went belly-up, their mortgage was sold off to another bank and that bank managed to put the house up for auction. In the end the house was auctioned off for some thirty thousand Euros, if I remember correctly - and I think it was a two-family house, which (in Germany) means construction costs of about 200.000 Euros and up, not including the land it was built on. Let's assume 300.000 in total. So we're down to about a tenth of what the house was actually worth.
The GP also pointed out that the house was vandalized within a year foreclosure, which sounds like it wasn't in the best of neighborhoods. If the neighborhood used to be better when the house was built that might have contributed to it losing value.
Saw a documentation about that one.
There's always Quebéc (if you want to stay in a francophone area, otherwise there's the world). Seriously, with that kind of laws I'd really think about skipping town.
You think of KITT, the Knight Industry Two Thousand. The GP wrote "kit", which is the Knight Industry Two. Think "bicycle with a cassette recorder taped to it".
Yes, they would. The IBM Personal Computer was IBM's idea and they would've done similarly with a different OS.
I'm a time traveler and let me tell you, you're in for a wild ride. One of the biggest things was (er, will be from your point of view) when the first lesbian got elected president. Mostly because due to her lobbying plastics were finally banned worldwide. (Good riddance!) This was possible because stem cell research has enabled the development of equivalent biomaterials... Let me tell you, in ten years you won't see connective tissue with the same eyes. Especially not since most of it will come from the African Federation, which formed around 2016 when the various warring factions in Africa realized that their newfound biomanufacturing wealth has put nuclear weapons into so many hands that any further conflict would end with localized MAD.
The advances in bioengineering still didn't stop the Human-Canine Immunodeficiency Virus pandemic of the late 2010s. Let's all agree to not judge the era on that one.
But yep, interesting times indeed.
No. USB does not support daisy chaining, even though some people manufacture USB devices with built-in hub. You're thinking of FireWire.
LOAD"*",8,1
SEARCHING FOR *
LOADING
READY.
RUN
don't use so many caps. it's like yelling. don't use so many caps. it's like yelling.
It's been a while since I last used Java; I don't really remember all Throwables correctly.
eBay is currently testing a new article page layout. If you get to see it you will also see a link to an "info tour" about it. Said info tour is a Flash animation that reliably crashes both Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 under OS X; I suspect that it hits a bug in the OS X Flash Player.
Since when does an OutOfMemoryException crash the VM?
Me neither. I actually tend to involve the dice too much by randomly improvising checks (for example I'm known to construct "spite checks" out of the Charisma or (in TDE) Violent Temper attribute) and we even changed the TDE rules to make critical successes/failures for skill checks much more likely (1/20 instead of 1/400). This goes so far that in my TDE round we have a new demigoddess whose specialty is bending the rules and screwing around with die rolls. She's actually the most powerful deity as we blame her whenever a player rolls something funny.
As for diceless combat, I already pointed out that combat is one of the situations where you do want randomness and thus dice even in an otherwise diceless game. Except if you really like predictability. As for critical failures/successes, some people don't like those, so not having them may actually be an advantage. I'd miss them, though.
None. I'm just stating what I found.
ext2 is nontrivial to install under OS X and it's hard to tell which combination of Windows release and ext2 IFS will be compatible (although that just means you might have to install two IFSes before it works). And that's already ignoring the fact that neithe MacFUSE nor IFSes are native support.
ext3 is only supported via ext2. ext4 is either essentially ext3 or not downwards-compatible with ext2 and there are neither MacFUSE modules nor Windows IFSes for it. Reiser3 has an IFS, IIRC, but I don't think it it's represented in MacFUSE.
NTFS has solid support via ntfs-3g but it's not native. The problem with solutions like MacFUSE (and to a lesser degree Linux FUSE) is that one cannot expect any random computer to run them, which severely deiminshes their relevance for external disks intended for data transfer. Most people aren't going to let you install a filesystem driver on their system just so they can mount your USB stick.
HFS+ has a somewhat workable Linux support although I'm not entirely sure whether Linux can write to HFS+ volumes. For Windows, however, one has to resort to MacDrive, which is not only third-party but even commercial. People are definitely not going to buy a filesystem driver to mount your USB stick.
UDF is a mixed bag. Everyone can mount it and in theory everyone can write it - however most OSes don't allow you to use the regular volume management tools to create UDF volumes and Windows XP needs third-party software to enable write support. Plus, attempting to format an USB stick with UDF via the OS X terminal didn't lead to usable results when I tried it. UDF would work in theory but forces the user to jump through too many hoops in practice - plus it can't be written to under Win XP, which is a serious drawback.
In the end UDf comes somewhat close to being a FAT32 killer but before we can seriously consider it, all major OS vendors need to decide that UDF is useful for more than just DVDs and Windows XP needs to die. Given that right now nobody cares about UDF on the hard drive and Windows XP is going nowhere fast I'd rather expect Apple and Linux to license/reverse engineer exFAT and use that as the default (as SDXC is essentially enforcing).
And before that we're essentially stuck with FAT32, the only semi-useful file system every major operating system can read, write and manage without third-party software.
If I overlooked some file system that is more modern than FAT32 and natively supported by OS X, Linux and Windows, please feel free to point it out to me.
Well, I do! When I was a little dyslexic boy I always wanted a rocketshit.
You're confusing "bitter" and "hostile".
By the way, you don't need to constantly frown to be hired by the Bahn. If you're a cheerful kind of asshole you can drive around the concessions cart and shout "REFRESHMENTS, SANDWICHES" into the ears of people who try to work.
a) There are few situations where, in a P&P setting, I would recommend dice. However, most of the time you can do without them. As for LARPs... Well, either have someone judge, possibly through dice, or start boffing. Or both, I don't know. I don't actively LARP either.
b) I actually conflated the regular and LARP versions of WoD; it's been a while since I was involved with the system.
However, even though WoD has the advantage of someone actually having done it, I'd expect most systems to be modifiable into a mostly diceless state with dice being reserved for situations where chance is explicitly wanted, such as combat damage.
For D&D simply ignore the die roll and lower the DC accordingly. Shadowrun 3 would be more work; I'd probably replace successes with "skill points above the target number" and try to balance that out. For SR4 I'd revert to the SR3 check rules and apply the same change. The Dark Eye would be a nightmare as every skill check is actually three attribute checks... but nobody outside Germany plays that anyway.
In the end you can play however you want, using whichever rules you want. You have to like roleplaying enough to actually work out the changes but if you do you get an experience tailor-made for your (group's) needs.
If you're insane anough you can even merge two systems. I'm doing just that (haphazardly porting the Shadowrun 3 magic system to The Dark Eye 3E) and it's really a labor of love. With a lot of labor involved. Only do this if you like messing with rules.
The question is whether there are other areas that allow those players to do what they do in the PvP areas. If not then they simply saw a greater need for a hang-out-and-let-mooks-do-the-fighting area than for a deathmatch area, so they repurposed the PvP areas.
I wionder how things would look if NCSoft acknowledged this trend and offered separate instances of the PvP areas for deathmatch and mook battle chat.
The numbers don't simulate, they arbitrate. Essentially everyone does just sit around and tell a story; the numbers only come in once you need to know whether someone is really strong/smart/adept at pottery enough to do the task they intend to. You can, of course, decide to use every rule in the book at every opportunity... but if you don't your game is going to run much smoother.
Besides, you don't even need dice. Some systems (like World of Darkness) avoid random elements wherever possible; there a skill check just means comparing your skill value to the target number.
Or you go with completely freeform gaming... Forum RPGs tend to do this. Unfortunately they also tend to show why most gamers prefer having rules and stats around - they keep people from declaring every ridiculous action their character takes to be successful (and all attacks on them to be ineffective).
Ideally the DM is forced to make up new rules on the spot because the provided rules simply don't cover what the players are trying to do. And no matter how much you like to play without numbers, at some point you'll want at least a rough estimate of how fast that magical disease the players developed spreads.
As for the sibling's position: If you want to minimize the rolling, play with the World of Darkness system, which minimizes dice use. d20 is not the only P&P system.
Also, even d20 can be relatively free of dice if you simply ignore some of the rules. I know someone whose Dark Eye (essentially D&D in German with even more dice) groups never use damage rolls in combat - the attack roll and the description of the attack are combined to see who loses which limbs. The end result are drastically shortened (and much more dangerous) battles with a minimum of dice rolls. And it works well for them.
So if you think your system has too many dice, either get rid of the system (porting a setting to another system is less work than you'd think), change the game outright or just adapt the system to your needs.
As for D): World-reknowned tech reporter Rob Malda commented on the iPod launch with terms like "from the well-thats-not-very-exciting-dept." and "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame".
That should settle that, then.
Well, of course. See, I don't have the money to buy any car at the moment. So all car owners should be shot and then the people shooting them should shoot themselves because I can't afford a gun either (well, theoretically I could but it wouldn't be financially responsible, which should suffice as a reason for mass suicide). At some point we can stop killing people because the world economy has collapsed and money doesn't work anymore, thus nobody can buy anything. Problem solved.
I'm just waiting for the The Fast And The Furious sequel where they do drift races in passenger airplanes.
In my case because I needed an MP3 player, was buying an MBP and am a student - which meant that I could pick up an iPod Touch for 35 €. Admittedly, an iPhone is a different beast but I'm one of those people who don't see the point in spending more than fifty bucks for a telephone anyway.
I don't treat the iPod as a computer. It's an MP3 player that happens to be able to run arbitrary software. Of course my access to that software is filtered by Apple but I don't care much because for me it's not the point of the device. My ultra-portable computing needs will be catered to by the much more suitable Pandora.