And you don't seem to realize that the works of the individual are built upon the foundation of society. They are not achieved in a vacuum and their fruits are not born in a vacuum.
Your whole manifesto (well, Rand's, really) is based on the false assumption that, somehow, a producer magically produces and the efforts and sacrifices of others haven't made it possible.
Remove that faulty assumption and the whole house of cards not only collapses but seems silly.
Honestly, they're tough questions. I think it's clear that the answer isn't "a person owes nothing to their society", and I think it's equally clear that the answer isn't "a person owes everything to their society."
Gray area questions are difficult and messy, but life usually is.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that trying to attach labels or segment society is inherently about destruction or jealousy. Or that my own situation needs improving, for that matter.
Financially I'm a lot more well off than most of the country. If for the purposes of a discussion it makes sense to call that rich, I'm not going to freak out about it.
And of course, none of that answers the question: Just because I am "rich", why does that automatically mean I should be soaked to provide government benefit/program X? Why is it that if the government takes from "me" and gives to others, under threat of force, that is okay. However, if you the individual did the same thing, or as some group that isn't the government, that is theft? Why?
If no one really knows what the rules are or is taking the mechanics of the game seriously, pretty much any RPG set of rules or lack thereof is fine.
Personally, I spent a lot of the 3E/3.5E era going to gaming conventions, or playing home games with people who were also of that crowd. That kind of environment is a serious crucible for any rules set for a few reasons.
First, because mechanically, adventures are written to standard and at least some significant percentage of your DMs will play the game fairly rather than charitably, which means that if you're the person who made the 8 con sorceress, you're probably going to die a lot.
Second, because smart mechanical ideas spread like wildfire -- it only takes one person to realize how very powerful entangle is for a level 1 spell for most of the community to realize it, because that one person keeps playing with different people and as people see an effective idea they'll also incorporate it into their repetoires.
Third, because the campaigns are locked to a fairly close read of the standard rules. There's (mostly) no personal DM to say: Thorn Spray as written is ridiculously broken, it's out of the campaign, or we're making X changes to it.
I think you draw a false dichotomy between RP and fun on one side and mechanics and balance on the other. Some of the best RP I've seen in the game was in that convention environment. The best stories I've ever seen told using a pen and paper game were certainly in that environment. (Imagine an interactive event in which 50+ PCs are each pursuing their own unique goals, some at cross purposes with one another -- that's a kind of cool thing you just can't achieve in a normal game environment. Or an event in which 20 'tables' of a half-dozen PCs each are engaged in pieces of a mass battle, each affecting the others.) I had a lot of fun with all of that, too. But it's also mechanically more rigorous than most home games, and I think that enhances rather than detracts from the fun -- if you survive a tough adventure, you know there are other people who faced the very same thing and didn't, and in many cases you'll know you survived because you were clever and worked well together as a team, rather than because the DM just didn't want the campaign to end and felt sorry for you.
A lot of the favorite characters I played with in that era, incidentally, were NOT numerically optimal and certainly would fit great in any rag-tag group of misfits -- I think having to exist against a somewhat unforgiving/unaccomodating backdrop made those characters greater and more vibrant exactly because the "bad" choices they made did have consequences.
Finally, incomes are highly correllated with high land value areas so costs of living are usually much higher (with most of the real benefit (economic profits) flowing to the well established land owners surrounding those high land value cities. Most of these land owners are high asset but low income folks again.
Sure, but even after you adjust for cost of living, someone who makes $250k/year working in Manhattan still makes vastly more money a year (or has more disposable income, or however you would like to look at it) than most Americans, even if they're not living in mansions or anything.
I think at some point you have to still call that rich, or you're left with a definition of middle class that encompasses virtually everyone. I don't think that would be useful.
I think in evaluating these kinds of things you need to draw a careful line between "advocates for extreme political positions that, for various reasons, are just not workable in practice" and "believes in facts that are simply, demonstrably false."
Right now the Republican side of the world has a lot more vocal people of that second category (e.g., recent what religion is the president poll), but I think you could make a pretty good argument that whichever party is out of power always leads that category.
No offense, but who takes the Black Panthers seriously?
Before the rise of the 24 hour news cycle, that wouldn't have even qualified as a story. You seriously can't even put that on the level of warrantless wiretapping.
A better analogy is comparing warrantless wiretapping that's going on now to warrantless wiretapping that was going on before, and there you DO have a story that's largely fallen out of the news and shouldn't.
The article is making the case that conservative bloggers aren't just paid by conservatives in general to blog about conservative things, but that further they're paid by specific candidates (in Republican primaries, for example) to blog in favor of that candidate and bash opposing candidates.
If correct, that's a little different than the situation you're describing.
All political parties utilize bloggers and forum posters to spread positive messages about their agenda (or negative messages about their "opponents" agenda.)
Yes, but...
Basically, the article explains it as, on the liberal side, there are all kinds of foundations and think tanks and what not that hire/support liberal bloggers who of course write mostly liberal things, whereas on the conservative side, because there is not that same support network to pay for conservative bloggers in general, conservative bloggers are essentially paid by specific candidates. So, in other words, they're not as much being paid to blog about conservative things in general but in favor of a specific primary candidate who pays them.
If that's correct, it doesn't necessarily say that one model is more honest or better than the other, but they are a little different.
But it's not fun to be the 13 strength fighter at the table with the 18/92 strength guy week after week, having to work twice as hard to contribute half as much.
My point is that the various things a player can play are relatively balanced against each other in 4E -- they each have strong points and different things to contribute, but all around they're roughly "as good" as each other. That's not the case in previous editions -- there are always some player options, even in the core rules, that are much, much stronger than others. If D&D was football, it might be fun to be the running back or the lineman while another player at the table is the quarterback, but it's not fun to be the waterboy while other players are being quarterbacks and wide receivers. (The 3/3.5 druid, of course, breaks that analogy entirely, being so powerful that he's essentially a quarterback that simply cannot be tackled. He doesn't remotely need the rest of a team to win.)
1) If a 3/3.5 druid is not the toughest character at the table at level 1, he is doing something wrong. It will just get worse from there. By level 7, the druid, played competently, is tougher than the other 5 guys in the party put together. The game devolves to watching the druid do everything.
A genuinely well-played druid is even worse. I've seen a ~ level 10 druid (this is in regulation/tournament play -- no weird house rules in play, etc.) respond to the appearance of a pit fiend in an adventure that the players were clearly not meant to fight by grappling it and pinning it before it even got to go.
2) 3/3.5E wizard is weak at level 1-2. By 3, it's pulling its own weight as a party member and it only gets stronger from there. One hint is: if your wizard is doing damage in combat, you're probably playing it wrong. Level 2 wizard damage spells kind of suck. Conversely, blindness (to pick one malediction/debuff style spell) is hugely crippling and permanent. A properly built wizard will already be throwing out spells at that level that will almost never have their saving throws made.
2) Wizards have not ruled the game since 2nd ed, and clerics have never been other than a support class. Druids still kick ass, but everyone gets their moment to shine. Are you sure you played 3.5? A cleric who spends five full rounds buffing himself can be a mediocre fighter, but still can't beat a fighter two levels lower than he is (we put this to the test.) But a similar range of buffs on the tank can turn him into a Dragon slaying god. Spellcasters are good at taking out hordes of grunts, but for bosses, there's no saving throw against a good axe.
With all due respect, your players are not very good at playing spellcasters. (You should be happy about this -- seriously, their incompetence makes the game more fun than it actually is.) Hell, if your clerics are even wasting rounds buffing they're not very good. One round of buffing (usually while closing in anyway) is pretty standard at the low-mid levels but that phase doesn't last very long, level-wise. You fix the buffing problem in a number of ways -- for example, spells that last either all day or plenty long to clear a dungeon or whatever, possibly with extend spell to turn hour/level durations into 'all damn day', quicken spell to get short-turn combat buffs out fast. Pearls of power allow throwing the 10 minutes/level spells like barkskin (plant domain as one example -- there's good stuff for other domains as well, of course) as many times as you need to. Bead of karma and other casting-level mods to jack up the casting level of buffs, increasing their bonuses, increasing their duration, and making them harder to dispel.
It only even matters so much what items you even choose to let the players have because of craft wonderous item.
That's all out of the core PHB/DMG. If you allow other books into play, it gets even worse fast. Divine metamagic is probably the most broken feat in the whole edition and drastically increases the cleric's ability to throw out big buff spells or combat spells while full attacking. Divine spell power makes the aforementioned casting level problem worse. Sudden metamagic feats make all of the above worse.
A fighter is a better fighter than a cleric at very low levels. Get into the midlevels and it's over -- if your cleric gets into any fight without about 10 buff spells already up, he is doing something seriously wrong. Get into the high levels (16ish) and throwing out 500 melee damage in a round as a cleric with no combat feats, no magical weapons or especially combat-focused magic items, and a 10 strength is very possible with no prep time (outside of spells that last literally a day or longer.)
I give you, the fighter always has feats on the cleric -- but that's about it. Divine power fixes the base attack deficit, and that's out at level 7. Past that point, it's not very satisfying to be the fighter when the cleric puts out twice the melee damage you do AND has the full wack of cleric things to do.
That being said, I have seen nothing good at all about the 4th edition, and frankly no, it's not really D&D anymore other than the name. IMNSHO
The great things about 4E are:
1) It's extremely DM friendly, especially for making up adventures on the fly. To crunch out the stats for a fight that would be interesting and challenging to veteran 3/3.5E players would easily take an hour. 1/2E didn't have that level of complexity, but it was really easy to guess wrong about how tough a fight would be. (And sure, you could fudge it from there if you wanted -- *rolls behind the screen* "Damn, the terrasque rolled all 1s... again." but that's not particularly fun for anyone.) 4E makes it ridiculously easy to throw together an encounter on the spur of the moment that's actually interesting and balanced.
2) It's actually pretty balanced. Earlier editions are fundamentally imbalanced even with just the basic books. For example, in 2E, dual classed humans are ridiculously more powerful than any other kind of character you could make. In 3E, wizard/cleric/druid are ridiculously more powerful than any other kind of character you could make. (People like to say that those caster classes were weak at first and grew strong over time, but as your players have a stronger grasp of the game, the level where the pure casters are equal to anyone else gets lower and lower. By the time we stopped playing 3E, it was about level 3.)
And sure, you can just sort of agree amongst the players that you're not going to play anything especially powerful, but how fun is that? I think it's perfectly reasonable to say, we're not going to pick one level each of 10 different prestige classes from 8 different books, but how fun is it to say, no one can play a spellcaster?
People sometimes turn that criticism into a strawman that I think D&D is about building the strongest character you can and how that's not the way the game's not meant to played. And that's true, it's not -- it's a team game. Team games are fun if everyone in terms of character strengths has something to contribute. It's not fun to be the 3.5E fighter in a party with a 3.5E cleric, who's a much better fighter than you and can cast a ton of spells. (On the other hand, you can have a lot of fun with 2E/3E/etc. until the point when the players start figuring these things out.)
The bad thing about 4E is this:
Sadly, it turns out that a rigorously balanced version of D&D isn't all that much fun to play if you're used to previous editions. Balance is achieved by making each character class fairly similar in, not every way, but a lot of ways.
Additionally, the non-combat abilities of your character are drastically reduced. In a sense, this was necessary, because again, who wants to play a fighter (who has basically nothing other than a couple skills maybe to contribute mechanically outside of a fight) when there's the druid who's not only a much better combat character but also has 100 creative things he can do outside of combat.
Uh... you know there's more to Open Source than Linux, right?
There's a huge, huge gray area between "Let's open source all our software, make all of our patents public domain, and port all of our software to Linux" and "Open Source is the cancer and we're going to burn that shit."
The problem (for us) is that these things take time. I'm guessing office and windows have another 10 years before microsoft can't milk them anymore.
I'm just really skeptical there because people were saying that ten years ago, too.
A lot of people who post here seem to simultaneously think that Microsoft is a white cat away from being a Bond villian, and stupid enough to watch helplessly as market share in their big moneymaker industries just evaporates.
I feel like people really underestimate all the different directions they're going in as a company and how all of those efforts build off each other and support each other. Sharepoint is a perfect example of something that's gone into practically every business I've worked for in the last five years (I've never done and would not want to do Sharepoint-related work, but I notice that it's there). Everyone's quick to dismiss it as a shitty CMS, point out better CMSes, or just turn their nose up at it because it's not sexy technology and most of us would rather do just about anything than do work with it, without really taking in the full scope of what it does and how it integrates with Office, etc. A company that's using Sharepoint (MOSS) to manage workflow can't easily replace it and probably needs/wants Windows on desktops to go with it, Office on those same machines, Windows servers, etc.
There's dozens of things out there like that in some way drive people to Windows or Office and even if a few stick they'll live past your ten years.
I don't think it's impossible for free software to overtake either of those products, but I don't think they can do it while pretending it'll be easy, inevitable, or that they're not chasing a moving target. You don't win a war by pretending your enemy is stupid if they're not.
Postgres is quite good, but has almost no market penetration.
Out of curiousity, do you have any idea why that is? Is it just that MySQL for a long time had the mindshare as "the free database", LAMP stack and all that?
It seems like everyone I talk databases with agrees that PostGre is pretty good and a great alternative to post-Oracle-buyout MySQL, but no one seems to actually be using it for anything.
Slashdot Mirror
And you don't seem to realize that the works of the individual are built upon the foundation of society. They are not achieved in a vacuum and their fruits are not born in a vacuum.
Your whole manifesto (well, Rand's, really) is based on the false assumption that, somehow, a producer magically produces and the efforts and sacrifices of others haven't made it possible.
Remove that faulty assumption and the whole house of cards not only collapses but seems silly.
Honestly, they're tough questions. I think it's clear that the answer isn't "a person owes nothing to their society", and I think it's equally clear that the answer isn't "a person owes everything to their society."
Gray area questions are difficult and messy, but life usually is.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that trying to attach labels or segment society is inherently about destruction or jealousy. Or that my own situation needs improving, for that matter.
Financially I'm a lot more well off than most of the country. If for the purposes of a discussion it makes sense to call that rich, I'm not going to freak out about it.
And of course, none of that answers the question: Just because I am "rich", why does that automatically mean I should be soaked to provide government benefit/program X? Why is it that if the government takes from "me" and gives to others, under threat of force, that is okay. However, if you the individual did the same thing, or as some group that isn't the government, that is theft? Why?
Somehow this seems topical.
It depends on how you're playing the game, sure.
If no one really knows what the rules are or is taking the mechanics of the game seriously, pretty much any RPG set of rules or lack thereof is fine.
Personally, I spent a lot of the 3E/3.5E era going to gaming conventions, or playing home games with people who were also of that crowd. That kind of environment is a serious crucible for any rules set for a few reasons.
First, because mechanically, adventures are written to standard and at least some significant percentage of your DMs will play the game fairly rather than charitably, which means that if you're the person who made the 8 con sorceress, you're probably going to die a lot.
Second, because smart mechanical ideas spread like wildfire -- it only takes one person to realize how very powerful entangle is for a level 1 spell for most of the community to realize it, because that one person keeps playing with different people and as people see an effective idea they'll also incorporate it into their repetoires.
Third, because the campaigns are locked to a fairly close read of the standard rules. There's (mostly) no personal DM to say: Thorn Spray as written is ridiculously broken, it's out of the campaign, or we're making X changes to it.
I think you draw a false dichotomy between RP and fun on one side and mechanics and balance on the other. Some of the best RP I've seen in the game was in that convention environment. The best stories I've ever seen told using a pen and paper game were certainly in that environment. (Imagine an interactive event in which 50+ PCs are each pursuing their own unique goals, some at cross purposes with one another -- that's a kind of cool thing you just can't achieve in a normal game environment. Or an event in which 20 'tables' of a half-dozen PCs each are engaged in pieces of a mass battle, each affecting the others.) I had a lot of fun with all of that, too. But it's also mechanically more rigorous than most home games, and I think that enhances rather than detracts from the fun -- if you survive a tough adventure, you know there are other people who faced the very same thing and didn't, and in many cases you'll know you survived because you were clever and worked well together as a team, rather than because the DM just didn't want the campaign to end and felt sorry for you.
A lot of the favorite characters I played with in that era, incidentally, were NOT numerically optimal and certainly would fit great in any rag-tag group of misfits -- I think having to exist against a somewhat unforgiving/unaccomodating backdrop made those characters greater and more vibrant exactly because the "bad" choices they made did have consequences.
Finally, incomes are highly correllated with high land value areas so costs of living are usually much higher (with most of the real benefit (economic profits) flowing to the well established land owners surrounding those high land value cities. Most of these land owners are high asset but low income folks again.
Sure, but even after you adjust for cost of living, someone who makes $250k/year working in Manhattan still makes vastly more money a year (or has more disposable income, or however you would like to look at it) than most Americans, even if they're not living in mansions or anything.
I think at some point you have to still call that rich, or you're left with a definition of middle class that encompasses virtually everyone. I don't think that would be useful.
Conservatives think everything must be paid for,
Except tax cuts, apparently.
I'm being semi-tongue-in-cheek -- there haven't been many legitimate fiscal conservatives in American politics in at least 30 years.
... except the DoJ did prosecute the dude with the nightstick. They just gave up on the other gomers hanging around with him.
This is a non-story blown up by people who want you to be afraid so you'll keep watching their news coverage, nothing more.
Really, it's just a modern iteration of the idea that if you commit a crime, don't f'ing talk about it!
People have been boning that one since the Code of Hammurabi.
No, that's exactly the point.
This is voter intimidation like my dog peeing on your lawn is breaking and entering.
If you treat this as a case of voter intimidation, you're treating something ridiculous much too seriously.
If making more money than the vast majority of Americans doesn't make you rich, what IS your standard?
I think in evaluating these kinds of things you need to draw a careful line between "advocates for extreme political positions that, for various reasons, are just not workable in practice" and "believes in facts that are simply, demonstrably false."
Right now the Republican side of the world has a lot more vocal people of that second category (e.g., recent what religion is the president poll), but I think you could make a pretty good argument that whichever party is out of power always leads that category.
No offense, but who takes the Black Panthers seriously?
Before the rise of the 24 hour news cycle, that wouldn't have even qualified as a story. You seriously can't even put that on the level of warrantless wiretapping.
A better analogy is comparing warrantless wiretapping that's going on now to warrantless wiretapping that was going on before, and there you DO have a story that's largely fallen out of the news and shouldn't.
I don't necessarily disagree -- what I'm stating above is the point the article is trying to make, as I understand it.
The article is making the case that conservative bloggers aren't just paid by conservatives in general to blog about conservative things, but that further they're paid by specific candidates (in Republican primaries, for example) to blog in favor of that candidate and bash opposing candidates.
If correct, that's a little different than the situation you're describing.
All political parties utilize bloggers and forum posters to spread positive messages about their agenda (or negative messages about their "opponents" agenda.)
Yes, but...
Basically, the article explains it as, on the liberal side, there are all kinds of foundations and think tanks and what not that hire/support liberal bloggers who of course write mostly liberal things, whereas on the conservative side, because there is not that same support network to pay for conservative bloggers in general, conservative bloggers are essentially paid by specific candidates. So, in other words, they're not as much being paid to blog about conservative things in general but in favor of a specific primary candidate who pays them.
If that's correct, it doesn't necessarily say that one model is more honest or better than the other, but they are a little different.
It actually is a fair and accurate summary of the article. I know, it's Slashdot and we're all a little shocked, but it is.
Whether or not you think the article is fair, maybe that's another story.
To be fair, that Star Wars Old Republic trailer is cool.
Or maybe I just thought that because it was better than Episodes 1-3.
But it's not fun to be the 13 strength fighter at the table with the 18/92 strength guy week after week, having to work twice as hard to contribute half as much.
My point is that the various things a player can play are relatively balanced against each other in 4E -- they each have strong points and different things to contribute, but all around they're roughly "as good" as each other. That's not the case in previous editions -- there are always some player options, even in the core rules, that are much, much stronger than others. If D&D was football, it might be fun to be the running back or the lineman while another player at the table is the quarterback, but it's not fun to be the waterboy while other players are being quarterbacks and wide receivers. (The 3/3.5 druid, of course, breaks that analogy entirely, being so powerful that he's essentially a quarterback that simply cannot be tackled. He doesn't remotely need the rest of a team to win.)
Add to that giant rant:
1) If a 3/3.5 druid is not the toughest character at the table at level 1, he is doing something wrong. It will just get worse from there. By level 7, the druid, played competently, is tougher than the other 5 guys in the party put together. The game devolves to watching the druid do everything.
A genuinely well-played druid is even worse. I've seen a ~ level 10 druid (this is in regulation/tournament play -- no weird house rules in play, etc.) respond to the appearance of a pit fiend in an adventure that the players were clearly not meant to fight by grappling it and pinning it before it even got to go.
2) 3/3.5E wizard is weak at level 1-2. By 3, it's pulling its own weight as a party member and it only gets stronger from there. One hint is: if your wizard is doing damage in combat, you're probably playing it wrong. Level 2 wizard damage spells kind of suck. Conversely, blindness (to pick one malediction/debuff style spell) is hugely crippling and permanent. A properly built wizard will already be throwing out spells at that level that will almost never have their saving throws made.
2) Wizards have not ruled the game since 2nd ed, and clerics have never been other than a support class. Druids still kick ass, but everyone gets their moment to shine. Are you sure you played 3.5? A cleric who spends five full rounds buffing himself can be a mediocre fighter, but still can't beat a fighter two levels lower than he is (we put this to the test.) But a similar range of buffs on the tank can turn him into a Dragon slaying god. Spellcasters are good at taking out hordes of grunts, but for bosses, there's no saving throw against a good axe.
With all due respect, your players are not very good at playing spellcasters. (You should be happy about this -- seriously, their incompetence makes the game more fun than it actually is.) Hell, if your clerics are even wasting rounds buffing they're not very good. One round of buffing (usually while closing in anyway) is pretty standard at the low-mid levels but that phase doesn't last very long, level-wise. You fix the buffing problem in a number of ways -- for example, spells that last either all day or plenty long to clear a dungeon or whatever, possibly with extend spell to turn hour/level durations into 'all damn day', quicken spell to get short-turn combat buffs out fast. Pearls of power allow throwing the 10 minutes/level spells like barkskin (plant domain as one example -- there's good stuff for other domains as well, of course) as many times as you need to. Bead of karma and other casting-level mods to jack up the casting level of buffs, increasing their bonuses, increasing their duration, and making them harder to dispel.
It only even matters so much what items you even choose to let the players have because of craft wonderous item.
That's all out of the core PHB/DMG. If you allow other books into play, it gets even worse fast. Divine metamagic is probably the most broken feat in the whole edition and drastically increases the cleric's ability to throw out big buff spells or combat spells while full attacking. Divine spell power makes the aforementioned casting level problem worse. Sudden metamagic feats make all of the above worse.
A fighter is a better fighter than a cleric at very low levels. Get into the midlevels and it's over -- if your cleric gets into any fight without about 10 buff spells already up, he is doing something seriously wrong. Get into the high levels (16ish) and throwing out 500 melee damage in a round as a cleric with no combat feats, no magical weapons or especially combat-focused magic items, and a 10 strength is very possible with no prep time (outside of spells that last literally a day or longer.)
I give you, the fighter always has feats on the cleric -- but that's about it. Divine power fixes the base attack deficit, and that's out at level 7. Past that point, it's not very satisfying to be the fighter when the cleric puts out twice the melee damage you do AND has the full wack of cleric things to do.
That being said, I have seen nothing good at all about the 4th edition, and frankly no, it's not really D&D anymore other than the name. IMNSHO
The great things about 4E are:
1) It's extremely DM friendly, especially for making up adventures on the fly. To crunch out the stats for a fight that would be interesting and challenging to veteran 3/3.5E players would easily take an hour. 1/2E didn't have that level of complexity, but it was really easy to guess wrong about how tough a fight would be. (And sure, you could fudge it from there if you wanted -- *rolls behind the screen* "Damn, the terrasque rolled all 1s... again." but that's not particularly fun for anyone.) 4E makes it ridiculously easy to throw together an encounter on the spur of the moment that's actually interesting and balanced.
2) It's actually pretty balanced. Earlier editions are fundamentally imbalanced even with just the basic books. For example, in 2E, dual classed humans are ridiculously more powerful than any other kind of character you could make. In 3E, wizard/cleric/druid are ridiculously more powerful than any other kind of character you could make. (People like to say that those caster classes were weak at first and grew strong over time, but as your players have a stronger grasp of the game, the level where the pure casters are equal to anyone else gets lower and lower. By the time we stopped playing 3E, it was about level 3.)
And sure, you can just sort of agree amongst the players that you're not going to play anything especially powerful, but how fun is that? I think it's perfectly reasonable to say, we're not going to pick one level each of 10 different prestige classes from 8 different books, but how fun is it to say, no one can play a spellcaster?
People sometimes turn that criticism into a strawman that I think D&D is about building the strongest character you can and how that's not the way the game's not meant to played. And that's true, it's not -- it's a team game. Team games are fun if everyone in terms of character strengths has something to contribute. It's not fun to be the 3.5E fighter in a party with a 3.5E cleric, who's a much better fighter than you and can cast a ton of spells. (On the other hand, you can have a lot of fun with 2E/3E/etc. until the point when the players start figuring these things out.)
The bad thing about 4E is this:
Sadly, it turns out that a rigorously balanced version of D&D isn't all that much fun to play if you're used to previous editions. Balance is achieved by making each character class fairly similar in, not every way, but a lot of ways.
Additionally, the non-combat abilities of your character are drastically reduced. In a sense, this was necessary, because again, who wants to play a fighter (who has basically nothing other than a couple skills maybe to contribute mechanically outside of a fight) when there's the druid who's not only a much better combat character but also has 100 creative things he can do outside of combat.
Uh... you know there's more to Open Source than Linux, right?
There's a huge, huge gray area between "Let's open source all our software, make all of our patents public domain, and port all of our software to Linux" and "Open Source is the cancer and we're going to burn that shit."
The problem (for us) is that these things take time. I'm guessing office and windows have another 10 years before microsoft can't milk them anymore.
I'm just really skeptical there because people were saying that ten years ago, too.
A lot of people who post here seem to simultaneously think that Microsoft is a white cat away from being a Bond villian, and stupid enough to watch helplessly as market share in their big moneymaker industries just evaporates.
I feel like people really underestimate all the different directions they're going in as a company and how all of those efforts build off each other and support each other. Sharepoint is a perfect example of something that's gone into practically every business I've worked for in the last five years (I've never done and would not want to do Sharepoint-related work, but I notice that it's there). Everyone's quick to dismiss it as a shitty CMS, point out better CMSes, or just turn their nose up at it because it's not sexy technology and most of us would rather do just about anything than do work with it, without really taking in the full scope of what it does and how it integrates with Office, etc. A company that's using Sharepoint (MOSS) to manage workflow can't easily replace it and probably needs/wants Windows on desktops to go with it, Office on those same machines, Windows servers, etc.
There's dozens of things out there like that in some way drive people to Windows or Office and even if a few stick they'll live past your ten years.
I don't think it's impossible for free software to overtake either of those products, but I don't think they can do it while pretending it'll be easy, inevitable, or that they're not chasing a moving target. You don't win a war by pretending your enemy is stupid if they're not.
Postgres is quite good, but has almost no market penetration.
Out of curiousity, do you have any idea why that is? Is it just that MySQL for a long time had the mindshare as "the free database", LAMP stack and all that?
It seems like everyone I talk databases with agrees that PostGre is pretty good and a great alternative to post-Oracle-buyout MySQL, but no one seems to actually be using it for anything.