Because I should be able to have a glass of wine with dinner when I dine out and drive home after wards. I completely disagree with your implied message that the average person is a hazard to themselves or others under conditions like these. Even considering the fact that you're driving a vehicle that's more dangerous to the operator then a car, 12 hours is just crazy unless you just got smashed the evening before.
Awesome, so I'm looking at some kind of future map that defies what we know of current plate lines!? I was hoping something like this would be labeled with the locations of the human concentration camps so I could know where I will be living after the great robot revolution
The treatment in this case was so stupid it really seems as if the doctors were simply milking money out of some poor dying person. It's not as if this was a botched surgery or something. The problem here is that they charged a good deal of money selling snake oil.
Where is that line? How does a treatment cross that line from 'complete unknown' to 'experimental'? Is animal testing enough, or theoretical modeling, or what? And how would said regulation be enforced?
While I'm not qualified to draw the exact line I'm pretty sure injecting stem cells into completely stupid places on a person crosses the line from ethical medicine to unethical.
Right, not an expert but your several pages of thoughts should be heard and regulations based on that.
Pages of thought? I hope you're a non English speaker and got your wording mixed up. I wrote a couple of sentences.
The doctor might has just messed up, plain old malpractice. The doctor might have some animal testing that backed this treatment up, first human test just doesn't work; sucks but that happens and you would never hear about it if it happened in an accredited test in the states. Maybe the doctor played a hunch based on accumulated research, doctor blew it.
How on earth would some one with a medical degree make this mistake? It's like putting oil in the radiator.
Medical treatments are experimental. That's part of medicine. Years from now, a standard method of treatment will be seen as barbaric. Years after that someone will find a reason why it might be useful and how to better refine it. Along the way people will die. Medicine isn't magic, where sick people walk into a hospital and, if they get there in time, they walk out healthy. Regulation might cause fewer people to die as a result of experimental treatments but those regulations are why people are, right now, going over seas to get the treatments they think will work. Do you really want some agency to step in and tell you that you can not do research your self and decide if you want to take a risk?
I think it's safe for me to say that medically experimenting on humans at this level is considered appalling on a fairly universal level (yourself excluded of course).
I hate to sound callus, but the woman did live two years after the treatment. No mention if she was in pain from the treatment or not, or if the decline happened similarly to what she would have experienced without the treatment. Only that, at time of her death, the doctors found that the treatment had not helped her. Not that it killed her, not that it accelerated her death; at least that is what the linked article stated, I have no clue about the full paper.
Yes but if the stem cells were growing bits completely out of place from where they should be and disrupting proper organs with odd growths it seems to me that she lived two years (i>in spite of their bullshit medical practices.
I honestly just don't see how a person can not see this as at best obscene human experimentation and at worst profit mongering at the expense of human lives.
I just looked at the map for a second but why on earth is Oakland 200 miles North of San Francisco when the two cities are basically right next to each other?
Some regulation should still apply in instances like this. At some point these types of things cross the line from "experimental" to "taking advantage of some poor soul who'd dieing and will try anything". For instance, from TFA
"However, the Thai clinic didn't inject the stem cells into the patient's blood stream, instead they injected them directly into her kidneys. That means the stem cells did nothing to stop the immune system's attack on the organs-and they instead produced never-before-seen side effects."
Now, I will freely admit that I don't have any medical expertise at all but this certainly sounds like snake oil to me. Her immune system is attacking her kidneys so they just pump her kidneys full of stem cells? Again, not an expert, but I could write several pages worth of thought as to why that doesn't seem to make any sense.
Much of this slide has taken place because of foreigners belligerently mucking about in the region. Afghanistan was a fair bit more liberal than the Taliban and even a bit prosperous prior to the Soviet invasion. Likewise, before the United States helped overthrow their government to install their own puppet, Iran wasn't doing too bad on these counts either. Both the Taliban and the Shaw rose to power in reaction to these events.
This is very worrisome given that it is coming from what is supposed to be the crossroads country between the west and the middle east. If a country like Turkey is engaging in acts like this, what hope does the rest of the Middle East have?
But we're talking about low fat mayo and healthier chips. You're running off on an extreme tangent where all of the fat is removed from everything. There's nothing wrong (in principle at least) with reducing the fat content in our fattiest foods so people can indulge in them more.
Yeah, because me mentioning the fact that 2nd edition D&D is about as logically laid out as some metaphor that suggests illogical layout was something I had mentioned before. Oh wait, it wasn't.
So why on earth are you even bothering to comment on this article? You clearly have no need for a top of the line system. Good for you! You're just like my mom! Does it make you feel superior to brag about your single core? Are you the computer ascetic of our generation?
Is the solar panel more efficient? The green plant self replicates and has covered the entire planet, meanwhile our own solar panels are a mere novelty in terms of maintaining our own civilizations energy needs. Plants maintain both their own and every other animal on this planet's energy needs.
Hey, I don't mind it if you insult GURPS GM's. There are so many tho that I'd peg the game system first. I was insulting your GURPS GMs. The ones I've played with have had no problem running a fun and lengthy campaign, thank you. Well the good ones anyays...
I do not play AD&D 3 or 4. It's fine you enjoy using the old rules but I find the older the D&D rule set is the less logically it's laid out. Armor class starting at 9 for basic humans? THAC0? Hit points? So I'm to believe that my level 18 character can take 20 hits from a battle axe? Or did the battle axe just nick him 20 times and he bled out? Maybe he was nicked 19 times with no effect to his well being (what are the odds of that?) and the last hit actually hit him square? Armor that makes weapons miss rather than reduce damage like real armor (never mind the fact that real armor would actually make you easier to hit due to encumbrance)? How about the fact that my magic user can never effectively learn how to use an axe without duel classing and having to take on a shit ton of other baggage. I just want him to practice using an axe when the party makes camp for the night! Clerics can't use pointed weapons?! Religious people are some of the most violent people in history, why would they not use pointed weapons!? It just goes on and on...
Sometimes by limiting choices, you bring out the real differences much more distinctly. I would go the other way and say that by not restricting characters, players get the characters they want rather then their own spin on an archetype. All of the characters you describe below your comment could just as easily be made in GURPS.
Skills are picked up exactly randomly because life demands them- sort of how you pick up skills in real life after you finish college. If you need to learn to sail- maybe your character has it in them-- but maybe they don't have the willpower to finish it and wander off halfway through training. Sort of like how people really behave (as opposed to how they would like to behave). If skills were picked up randomly in real life there'd be a ton of people who would know how to shoot and maintain a flame thrower, fly a jet plane or build a nuclear reactor for no reason at all. Most important skills individuals posses to any real degree of sufficiency are intentionally learned and practiced. I know how to drive because I watched others do it and payed attention, went to driving school, and then practiced a whole bunch. From there I got even better by using said skill regularly. All of this was done intentionaly.
Me choosing for my character to learn "axe wielding" is me role-playing my character as practicing using an axe while the party is camped for the night or perhaps some other likely scenario. My character randomly picking up "singing" as a skill even though my character, as I've created him, has no interest in singing, just makes no sense at all.
Also, I don't know why you keep bringing up Champions, I certainly never mentioned it as an alternative to D&D. If I want a super hero game I'll plug in the GURPS Supers book with a Modern Tech book and then throw in PSI, Robots, Aliens, Sci-Fi, or whatever else I can think of for added flair that fits my vision for my campaign. I've heard bad things about the Champions rule set and so have never tried it.
I don't mean to sound insulting but what it sounds like is you're dealing with bad and/or lazy GMs. In offering GMs more flexibility they do up the amount of work required to get a game running properly, but it's worth it in terms of providing a better experience to both player and GM by not micro managing every aspect of the game, often in nonsensical ways, and in providing a rule set that is organized both to be as complex as the GM wants it to be and organized in a fairly logical manner. Plus, if a GM really needs a game world provided to them there are game world modules they can buy and then trick out themselves should they desire.
Due to the 'level' and 'experience' nature of D&D and the restricted number of archtypes, you invest in characters who become extremely rich over time.
I would say that in D&D, all you ever have is an archetype. On top of that, while everyone should play what they like, I personally loath these abstract constraints. They ruin character immersion for me.
As for your comment above: "Gurp takes the magic out of the game by letting you buy everything. Perhaps if you bought a roll on a table and every five rolls you got to pick a skill."
I don't understand how character points take the magic out of a game. In fact, what you seem to describing, leaving character development completely up to luck, seems like a great way to have a completely unfocused character having skill sets completely out of wack with what the player wants (plus this is not what D&D does at all either).
Because without those books you'd be essentially building your own game from the ground up which would take an incredible amount of time and work. GURPS gives the GM a loose framework from which to make his or her's own game. Every RPG provides this frame work, GURPS is just looser and infinitely more versatile as the rules are less focused on one specific vision of the "world" and it incorporates a huge number of themes that the GM can mix and match.
Ugh, at least suggest a good table top RPG. The D&D rule set is terrible.
Play GURPS. The rule set is far more sensible and is about as complex or non as you want it to be and the game can be whatever you want it to be just by adding in another genre's handbook. Want an invasion of robots with lasers in your fantasy world? Buy the Robots hand book and maybe a couple of Sci-Fi ones and off you go. Want your bad-ass warrior to be able to cast a fire ball? Just make your character that way as there are no restrictive classes to tell you how to make your character.
I think you could use a few basic Poly Sci 100 classes under your belt. The current administration's complete failure at implementing socialized medicine does not equate in any way, shape, or form to Communism. Calling it as such would not only imply that the rest of the industrialized world was communist (which would be retarded) but would also suggest the other logical extreme that anyone in favor of small government was an anarchist.
Slashdot Mirror
Irrelevant.
Because I should be able to have a glass of wine with dinner when I dine out and drive home after wards. I completely disagree with your implied message that the average person is a hazard to themselves or others under conditions like these. Even considering the fact that you're driving a vehicle that's more dangerous to the operator then a car, 12 hours is just crazy unless you just got smashed the evening before.
Done it, I live in Sonoma County. Oakland still doesn't add up to 200 miles north by any sane measurement.
Awesome, so I'm looking at some kind of future map that defies what we know of current plate lines!? I was hoping something like this would be labeled with the locations of the human concentration camps so I could know where I will be living after the great robot revolution
The treatment in this case was so stupid it really seems as if the doctors were simply milking money out of some poor dying person. It's not as if this was a botched surgery or something. The problem here is that they charged a good deal of money selling snake oil.
Where is that line? How does a treatment cross that line from 'complete unknown' to 'experimental'? Is animal testing enough, or theoretical modeling, or what? And how would said regulation be enforced?
While I'm not qualified to draw the exact line I'm pretty sure injecting stem cells into completely stupid places on a person crosses the line from ethical medicine to unethical.
Right, not an expert but your several pages of thoughts should be heard and regulations based on that.
Pages of thought? I hope you're a non English speaker and got your wording mixed up. I wrote a couple of sentences.
The doctor might has just messed up, plain old malpractice. The doctor might have some animal testing that backed this treatment up, first human test just doesn't work; sucks but that happens and you would never hear about it if it happened in an accredited test in the states. Maybe the doctor played a hunch based on accumulated research, doctor blew it.
How on earth would some one with a medical degree make this mistake? It's like putting oil in the radiator.
Medical treatments are experimental. That's part of medicine. Years from now, a standard method of treatment will be seen as barbaric. Years after that someone will find a reason why it might be useful and how to better refine it. Along the way people will die. Medicine isn't magic, where sick people walk into a hospital and, if they get there in time, they walk out healthy. Regulation might cause fewer people to die as a result of experimental treatments but those regulations are why people are, right now, going over seas to get the treatments they think will work. Do you really want some agency to step in and tell you that you can not do research your self and decide if you want to take a risk?
I think it's safe for me to say that medically experimenting on humans at this level is considered appalling on a fairly universal level (yourself excluded of course).
I hate to sound callus, but the woman did live two years after the treatment. No mention if she was in pain from the treatment or not, or if the decline happened similarly to what she would have experienced without the treatment. Only that, at time of her death, the doctors found that the treatment had not helped her. Not that it killed her, not that it accelerated her death; at least that is what the linked article stated, I have no clue about the full paper.
Yes but if the stem cells were growing bits completely out of place from where they should be and disrupting proper organs with odd growths it seems to me that she lived two years (i>in spite of their bullshit medical practices.
I honestly just don't see how a person can not see this as at best obscene human experimentation and at worst profit mongering at the expense of human lives.
I just looked at the map for a second but why on earth is Oakland 200 miles North of San Francisco when the two cities are basically right next to each other?
Some regulation should still apply in instances like this. At some point these types of things cross the line from "experimental" to "taking advantage of some poor soul who'd dieing and will try anything".
For instance, from TFA
"However, the Thai clinic didn't inject the stem cells into the patient's blood stream, instead they injected them directly into her kidneys. That means the stem cells did nothing to stop the immune system's attack on the organs-and they instead produced never-before-seen side effects."
Now, I will freely admit that I don't have any medical expertise at all but this certainly sounds like snake oil to me. Her immune system is attacking her kidneys so they just pump her kidneys full of stem cells? Again, not an expert, but I could write several pages worth of thought as to why that doesn't seem to make any sense.
Much of this slide has taken place because of foreigners belligerently mucking about in the region. Afghanistan was a fair bit more liberal than the Taliban and even a bit prosperous prior to the Soviet invasion. Likewise, before the United States helped overthrow their government to install their own puppet, Iran wasn't doing too bad on these counts either. Both the Taliban and the Shaw rose to power in reaction to these events.
Your overuse of caps-lock precludes anyone from taking you seriously. I just thought I'd let you know for any future crazy rants...
Clearly you're baiting the question of "why?".
This is very worrisome given that it is coming from what is supposed to be the crossroads country between the west and the middle east. If a country like Turkey is engaging in acts like this, what hope does the rest of the Middle East have?
But we're talking about low fat mayo and healthier chips. You're running off on an extreme tangent where all of the fat is removed from everything. There's nothing wrong (in principle at least) with reducing the fat content in our fattiest foods so people can indulge in them more.
Yeah, because me mentioning the fact that 2nd edition D&D is about as logically laid out as some metaphor that suggests illogical layout was something I had mentioned before. Oh wait, it wasn't.
I get your points, I just don't think they're very good and explained why.
Then again, you've mounted your high horse and road off into the sunset, so what do I know, right?
So why on earth are you even bothering to comment on this article? You clearly have no need for a top of the line system. Good for you! You're just like my mom! Does it make you feel superior to brag about your single core? Are you the computer ascetic of our generation?
Is the solar panel more efficient? The green plant self replicates and has covered the entire planet, meanwhile our own solar panels are a mere novelty in terms of maintaining our own civilizations energy needs. Plants maintain both their own and every other animal on this planet's energy needs.
Your engine certainly didn't build itself either.
A bit late, but agreed upon completely!
Hey, I don't mind it if you insult GURPS GM's. There are so many tho that I'd peg the game system first.
I was insulting your GURPS GMs. The ones I've played with have had no problem running a fun and lengthy campaign, thank you. Well the good ones anyays...
I do not play AD&D 3 or 4.
It's fine you enjoy using the old rules but I find the older the D&D rule set is the less logically it's laid out. Armor class starting at 9 for basic humans? THAC0? Hit points? So I'm to believe that my level 18 character can take 20 hits from a battle axe? Or did the battle axe just nick him 20 times and he bled out? Maybe he was nicked 19 times with no effect to his well being (what are the odds of that?) and the last hit actually hit him square? Armor that makes weapons miss rather than reduce damage like real armor (never mind the fact that real armor would actually make you easier to hit due to encumbrance)? How about the fact that my magic user can never effectively learn how to use an axe without duel classing and having to take on a shit ton of other baggage. I just want him to practice using an axe when the party makes camp for the night! Clerics can't use pointed weapons?! Religious people are some of the most violent people in history, why would they not use pointed weapons!? It just goes on and on...
Sometimes by limiting choices, you bring out the real differences much more distinctly.
I would go the other way and say that by not restricting characters, players get the characters they want rather then their own spin on an archetype. All of the characters you describe below your comment could just as easily be made in GURPS.
Skills are picked up exactly randomly because life demands them- sort of how you pick up skills in real life after you finish college. If you need to learn to sail- maybe your character has it in them-- but maybe they don't have the willpower to finish it and wander off halfway through training. Sort of like how people really behave (as opposed to how they would like to behave).
If skills were picked up randomly in real life there'd be a ton of people who would know how to shoot and maintain a flame thrower, fly a jet plane or build a nuclear reactor for no reason at all. Most important skills individuals posses to any real degree of sufficiency are intentionally learned and practiced. I know how to drive because I watched others do it and payed attention, went to driving school, and then practiced a whole bunch. From there I got even better by using said skill regularly. All of this was done intentionaly.
Me choosing for my character to learn "axe wielding" is me role-playing my character as practicing using an axe while the party is camped for the night or perhaps some other likely scenario. My character randomly picking up "singing" as a skill even though my character, as I've created him, has no interest in singing, just makes no sense at all.
Also, I don't know why you keep bringing up Champions, I certainly never mentioned it as an alternative to D&D. If I want a super hero game I'll plug in the GURPS Supers book with a Modern Tech book and then throw in PSI, Robots, Aliens, Sci-Fi, or whatever else I can think of for added flair that fits my vision for my campaign. I've heard bad things about the Champions rule set and so have never tried it.
Seriously everybody, nature's fucking awesome.
I don't mean to sound insulting but what it sounds like is you're dealing with bad and /or lazy GMs. In offering GMs more flexibility they do up the amount of work required to get a game running properly, but it's worth it in terms of providing a better experience to both player and GM by not micro managing every aspect of the game, often in nonsensical ways, and in providing a rule set that is organized both to be as complex as the GM wants it to be and organized in a fairly logical manner. Plus, if a GM really needs a game world provided to them there are game world modules they can buy and then trick out themselves should they desire.
Due to the 'level' and 'experience' nature of D&D and the restricted number of archtypes, you invest in characters who become extremely rich over time.
I would say that in D&D, all you ever have is an archetype. On top of that, while everyone should play what they like, I personally loath these abstract constraints. They ruin character immersion for me.
As for your comment above:
"Gurp takes the magic out of the game by letting you buy everything.
Perhaps if you bought a roll on a table and every five rolls you got to pick a skill."
I don't understand how character points take the magic out of a game. In fact, what you seem to describing, leaving character development completely up to luck, seems like a great way to have a completely unfocused character having skill sets completely out of wack with what the player wants (plus this is not what D&D does at all either).
Because without those books you'd be essentially building your own game from the ground up which would take an incredible amount of time and work. GURPS gives the GM a loose framework from which to make his or her's own game. Every RPG provides this frame work, GURPS is just looser and infinitely more versatile as the rules are less focused on one specific vision of the "world" and it incorporates a huge number of themes that the GM can mix and match.
Ugh, at least suggest a good table top RPG. The D&D rule set is terrible.
Play GURPS. The rule set is far more sensible and is about as complex or non as you want it to be and the game can be whatever you want it to be just by adding in another genre's handbook. Want an invasion of robots with lasers in your fantasy world? Buy the Robots hand book and maybe a couple of Sci-Fi ones and off you go. Want your bad-ass warrior to be able to cast a fire ball? Just make your character that way as there are no restrictive classes to tell you how to make your character.
I think you could use a few basic Poly Sci 100 classes under your belt. The current administration's complete failure at implementing socialized medicine does not equate in any way, shape, or form to Communism. Calling it as such would not only imply that the rest of the industrialized world was communist (which would be retarded) but would also suggest the other logical extreme that anyone in favor of small government was an anarchist.
Name calling is awesome! It's like being in Junior High again!
We know you're not a real righty because you know how to spell words! Plus, you're a faggot!
This is great!