Yes please do static compiles! I have a few old Linux games from Loki that won't work on anything higher than Linux kernel 2.2. With my XP box, I stick in even an old game and 99% of the time it'll work. I've only had problems with one game so far, and it was able to have a third party patch to get it to work.
You can expect your taxes to be higher... if you make more than $200k as an individual, or more than $250k as a couple or business. This lowers taxes on the vast majority of Americans that buy from the various companies in the country. Giving tax breaks to corporations goes to the CEOs and shareholders. Very rarely do rarely do corporations employ more people as a result of having more money. They're in the business of making money, not employing people.
And just like capitalism is great, in theory. In practice you get cutthroat business practices, only looking out for short term self interest, competition crushing monopolies were owning everything isn't enough, consolidation of power into the hands of a very tiny minority, and an almost complete disregard for the general public.
The USA was founded in large part to control corporate interests, and to go against companies like the monopolistic East India Company. In the early days of the US, they strictly controlled or ended any corporation that didn't act in the interest of the general public.
Now we buy the falsehood that what's good for a corporation is good for the US. Even if it includes firing US workers, doing away with pensions, leaving people uninsured or underinsured, manipulating markets so that it takes more and more money to get buy, while the people at top make more and more profit.
People are greedy and inherently flawed, yes. Capitalism is like releasing a bunch of hungry tigers into a room together and telling them to play nice. Unless you keep all the tigers on a very short leash, you end up with a mess.
As a libertarian socialist (as opposed to an authoritarian socialist), I would be happy if Obama was a socialist. He's not. He's slightly right of center and slightly more authoritarian than libertarian.
It's muchmuchmuch easier to avoid a crash in the first place in a small, maneuverable vehicle than in a big one with a lot of mass. Semi dodges a kid in the road, swerves into another lane with oncoming traffic. Now try to get that huge mass to swerve back into the proper lane. Try the same dodge in a motorcycle, small car or something similar.
This is why I don't enjoy computer RPGs, only a subset of tabletop ones. Computers can do RPGs, sure, but not the type that I like.
RPGs can mean a variety of different things. The character that you take on the role of overcoming challenges that come before them (the most classic of which is the dungeon crawl), exploring the world and content of the game (Morrowind or Oblivion would be examples that are decent at this), or playing a story that your character is the protagonist in.
Since it is flatly contradictory for one person (say a game developer or GM) to author a story, and another person to determine the actions of their protagonist in any meaningful way, this leaves the player of the protagonist to author the story. The GM exists to facilitate this story. Computer games can't react to the limitless potential of human authorship without having a true AI. At best such a game run by a game designer (such as in a CPRG) can only railroad a story (be it a multi-track railroad, a very well disguised railroad with the illusion of choice, etc... but railroad none the less).
Progress in types of games I enjoy would mean conflicts that either introduce complications to the story, events which get the protagonist closer to their goals, conflicts that illuminate the thematic content of the game, or similar story oriented events.
Not even the most open and flexible of computer RPGs even start to cover this style of RPG. Final Fantasy series is often the classic held up for story telling CRPG. It's railroaded as far as the story is concerned. The content is there to provide challenges and to explore the world the game designers built. You can't play out the protagonists story, because your choices don't affect the story in a meaningful way.
So called open ended games like Morrowind are similar. You can't affect things in a meaningful way... you can just go on one of several pre-selected railroad tracks the game designers built into the game, so far as the story is concerned.
Congressman Brad Sherman claims that himself and several other members of Congress were threatened with martial law if the bailout did not pass. It's not hogwash, these statements are on record.
Yeah, ignore the fact that Posse Comitatus was struck down in 2006. Ignore that fact that the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, trained in anti-riot techniques and urban warfare, have already been used in the US as a police security force. Ignore the fact that Presidential Directive 51 allows Bush to declare a national emergency in case of economic crisis.
Ignore that and so many other things, like hundreds of empty but guarded FEMA built prisons, FEMA trained Pastors and other religious leaders to quell dissent during martial law, etc. Keep your head in the sand, it'll all be OK.
Yes, the vast majority think they are above average drivers. They think _they_ are special. They can handle it, it won't distract them. It's pretty much the same arguments drunk drivers use.
Of course many laws trying to fix the cell phone and drive problem are delusional too. They allow hands free phones, as if multiple studies haven't found that it's about as bad as a hand held phone while driving.
With 4th looking to be the Vista edition of RPGs, will this be enough to get RPG players to change games? Will alternate fantasy games such as the Riddle of Steel and Burning Wheel see an upsurge? I can hope. Those games go to show that you don't need to spend several million to make a highly polished game. The Riddle of Steel has the most realistic combat of any game, and has won awards based on that. It still has interesting fantasy and story aspects, and the Spiritual Attribute rules are great! Burning Wheel is one of the most Tolkien-esque in feel of any RPG, including many Middle Earth RPGs. D&D was interesting in its day, but RPGs have moved way beyond it. We have games that have a lot better rules than D&D provides... let's use them! As a bonus, you'll spend less money on the books as well.
Have any other people here moved on past D&D and found other P&P RPGs more to their liking? What are they? What are some of the things you enjoy about them that's superior to what D&D offers?
This is one of a large number of reasons I dropped D&D as a game I play. I'm currently into a lot of indie games. They have few if any supplements. These games, in addition to having actual helpful rules system that do more than just not 'get in the way' but actually work towards making a fun game, don't need supplements to make them better. They also are rather highly polished rules for the most part, needing little or no house rules to make them work. 4 of the 6 games I now have only have a single book for the entire game (often with a free PDF with the hard copy). As for character generation, many of them can be done in 15-30 minutes or less.
So I think your suggestion is very valid. There's definitely a market for folks like me who want games that you can just get into right away. My bookshelf for the 6 games that I play, including all supplements for the 2 games which have a few, takes up about 6 inches of shelf space. If I wanted to get all the books for 6 other games I've played in the past it would take more like 6 bookshelves. AD&D 2nd, D&D 3.0, World of Darkness, 7th Sea, L5R, Shadowrun... that's such a huge amount of money in the books for those systems.
I don't think D&D will ever get down to just a few books. If someone wants a great fantasy human/dwarf/elf/orc type game world with just a few books to play it, I'd suggest Burning Wheel instead. That's a fantasy game I urge all D&D fans that are searching for a non-supplement ridden system to take a look at. As a bonus, you don't have to wait for the release, since it's already out.
Was he speaking in capacity of the Vice President? He took an oath of office to uphold the US Constitution, did he not? He was under oath. I could only agree with you if he had made statements saying we should go to war after making it clear that he was speaking as himself, not in capacity of his office.
This is not nitpicking. That oath of office is _important_. Upholding the Constitution is his _duty_. Cheney has not only forsaken that duty, he has betrayed it. There is more than good reason to impeach Cheney, Bush, and their entire crew, as well as to hold them to international war crimes trials.
If they are innocent, let those trials show it. If they are as guilty as the seem to be on the face of things, those actions are long, long overdue.
Getting rid of the war criminals destroying this nation, and the rest of the world, _IS_ 'getting something done'. If the foundation of your house need reinforcing and your living room is on fire, which of the two problems do you take care of first? Bush & crew are that fire.
The difference between most R's and D's is that while the R's want to loot the rest of the neighborhood while everyone's busy gawking at the fire, the D's want to ignore the fire, ignore the foundation, ignore the looting, and put new cabinets up in the kitchen.
I started in on D&D when I was 13. The game was clumsy, the rules were aggravating, and the stories were never about anything I was interested in. And yet there was something there... something wonderful and fun. Unfortunately it always seemed just out of reach. It was like listening to great music with the volume turned down so you can barely hear it; nice music, but elusive and frustrating as well.
Way too many game books, a couple system shifts into FASA, White Wolf and other game companies, and nearly a couple decades later I finally found that something I had always been missing in games. I've been having a blast playing since. The volume's been cranked way up.
I'm not really interested in tactics and cool powers and advancing in skills and such. What I am interested in is cool stories. I like to get together with people and put together a collaborative story. So now I buy games that help me do that.
Most of these games are single book games. One book, and that's it. No unending stream of supplements, just a good game that's fun to play. These games aren't ones that you have to tweak the rules for constantly either, with everyone playing the rules a different way. These games haven't just been thrown together. They're play tested hard, and they do what they're supposed to do. The rules work. These games are usually very accessible to casual gamers as well as outsiders to RPGs.
The latest game I picked up like this is Dirty Secrets. It's a game of the hardboiled detective genre. You play an investigator and solve crimes. The location? Your home town. The time? Last week. And there's crime and murder in the air. It's a one shot story game, taking approximately 3-9 hours, depending on the type of game you pick (short story, novella, novel). Much more fun than Monopoly or Risk that many might play instead. High replay value too, since of course every story would be different.
Sorcerer is another one I like. I've been running this game weekly for the past year. We're almost done with the first campaign, and it's been a blast. Arrogant mortals taming the dark powers and creatures from beyond our reality and forcing them to their will? Faustian deals gone awry? If you ever wanted to play a character like John Constatine, this is the game for it.
Dogs in the Vineyard makes a great old west game. Personally I don't care for the setting, but the game system is fantastic. It works well in certain other settings as well, so that is what I use it for. For the old west style standoff, I've yet to see a better system.
Love great TV, and always wanted to do a series? This game structures your stories as if they are TV episodes in a series. SF, fantasy, western, crime drama, spy drama... all are possible. The game system does really well at modeling what's important to a TV series, and resolving the problems that result for the conflicts you introduce. Shows like Firefly, Buffy, Gilmore Girls, Heroes, and the new Battlestar Gallactica are all good examples of the type of shows this game models well.
If you want a Tolkien-esque FRPG, and like a good bit of rules crunch in your games, I would suggest you try out Burning Wheel instead of D&D. It has a great story based character creation, not just number crunching with maybe adding on some story as a side note.
If you instead want a game focusing on combat tactics and advancement of powers, and where story control is in the hands of one player while the other players are along for the ride (if there is even a story there at all), then this new D&D might be for you. It's not a bad game, it's just not suitable for all types of gamers.
Yeah... and speaking of sound, WTH is there no audio toggle for Firefox yet? It's been requested by tons of folks. I guess everyone that has the know-how to program it isn't too interested? If I'm listening to music and web browsing, I don't want some audio to come blaring out at me suddenly as I hit a page that decided they want to be annoying and add audio.
Um... what were we talking about? Oh yeah, Ubuntu...
I loves me my Kubuntu laptop. It's what finally won me over from Debian and Window Maker. I like the UI better even than my OS X box!
It wasn't always that way. It used to be that US corporations were forced to, in addition to making money, do something that was in the public interest. If they didn't, the state that they were incorporated in would end the company. The founders of the US were fighting against corporate control, as well as the British crown. The Boston Tea Party is one of the more known examples of this.
Unfortunately New Jersey, and then Delaware, started giving up these practices. Corporations once again run amuck after that, as more states fell into line. This lead to the Rail Barons, then to the rather ugly mega-corps we have now.
I would be pretty surprised if anyone in the US picked up Torchwood. It's a much more adult show than Doctor Who. An adult show in Britain isn't so afraid of a little skin and naughty language as the US is. If Torchwood is picked up, be ready for it to be censored.
This is nifty chemistry, but nanotech it ain't. Molecular nanotechnology is precise control of matter at a nanoscale level. This tech is extremely imprecise at that level.. the particles, nanoscale size or not, are let go willy-nilly into a solution to bond with other things as they will. Sounds like straight up chemistry to me.
A nanotech version of this might be something like a patch with an array of nanoscale robotic 'arms' on one side, each holding onto one of these nanoparticles. The patch would get slapped on a surface they wanted a print off of, chemical sensors would react to the fingerprint and deposit their nanoparticle. You could build in a computer interface and upload the results directly into a computer, too.
Now give that 'patch' legs and make it self mobile, and a way to resupply the gold nanoparticles, basic AI to hunt down most likely spots for prints, etc... now we have a police crime nanobot that's worth being called nanotech.
The most recent generation of games has been fantastic. The last few years has seen a revolution in RPG design, and has opened up a whole new line of story oriented games. We have games that are designed to be truely player driven now, not just slightly influenced by the players, or even only given the illusion of influence in the story.
RPGs have massively broken out of the old mold in the last few years. No longer do we have something that's just a step above a computer game on paper in terms of narrative control of story.
CRPGs? They're still stuck in the old model, as far as story is concerned... the only way to fix that is to have real AIs. You need imagination and creativity for it.
California's better? Oh man, sorry it hear it. California's highways are in such horrible state that yours must be nearly unusable. One of the lamer reasons they give for Cali's highways being bad is the water table damaging it. Funny how Netherlands has such good roads, then.
I see them repairing roads a lot here. They never do it right. 2 or 3 years later it needs repaired again. It's cheap in the short term vs. rebuilding roads right, and keeps the road repair folks in work.
Yeah... funny how they did well in other hurricanes, with the same people in charge. Having everything ready to move in before the storms hit, etc. It's almost as if with 'Korina' they wanted to have the region decimated and cleared out of poor people in order to build a lot of resorts and such that many people have been wanting to put in there for years. And almost as if they want to only give any rebuilding contracts to non-local corporations that have ties with some of the people in charge of managing that whole disaster, rather than having contracts with local companies. And it couldn't possibly be to get government programs to be seen negatively by the public so that private corporations can then move in and take over.
But of course our loyal leaders (they're not public servants, of course) would never give contracts to their own companies over others, or manage to lose hundreds of tons of cash, or mismanage billions, or be willing to have people die to increase already swollen pocketbooks. That never happens. And you're a crazy consipiracy theorist if you even consider it.
Heh... California's pretty much a seperate country right _now_. It has 4 or 5 very distinct and very different political states within it, as well... Jefferson state (far north), greater SF bay area, SoCal, and rural nowheres-ville. It's also the only state in the US with its own border stops. Splitting it off from the US would be sweet.
Oh, and Silicon Valley, one of the tech centers of the world, 768/256 DSL for $80 (adding in a few static IPs). My cell phone coverage isn't great either. I got better signal out in a little 1000 person town in the middle of desert in Utah. At the edge of town. They had cheaper and faster DSL than me too.
No, this isn't too big to be a bot made with nanotechnology (a 'nanobot') and dealing with things at a nanometer scale. You could have something like that the size of a human, a jet plane, a city, etc. It is, however, too clunky to be a nanobot. Nanotechnology deals with something being built with precision at the nanometer scale... each atom in proper place.
Take, for a boring but perfectly valid example, steel. Normally you would melt things down and mold it or bang it into shape. Microscopic cracks and bubbles might form, but that's below the scale you're dealing with. You might do some things to minimize it, but it's indirect, imprecise control. Now imagine building up that sheet of steel atom by atom, each one in precise arrangement with the proper atoms of all the various elements that you want in the steel. You don't have any cracks or bubbles at all, from the nanometer range up.
Nothing resticts the size of the steel piece you make, nor the shape. We've said nothing about how we build it either. All nanotech says is that it's precisely built to a certain scale.
This is just one of the way too numerous examples of people misusing the term of nanotech.
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Yes please do static compiles! I have a few old Linux games from Loki that won't work on anything higher than Linux kernel 2.2. With my XP box, I stick in even an old game and 99% of the time it'll work. I've only had problems with one game so far, and it was able to have a third party patch to get it to work.
You can expect your taxes to be higher... if you make more than $200k as an individual, or more than $250k as a couple or business. This lowers taxes on the vast majority of Americans that buy from the various companies in the country. Giving tax breaks to corporations goes to the CEOs and shareholders. Very rarely do rarely do corporations employ more people as a result of having more money. They're in the business of making money, not employing people.
And just like capitalism is great, in theory. In practice you get cutthroat business practices, only looking out for short term self interest, competition crushing monopolies were owning everything isn't enough, consolidation of power into the hands of a very tiny minority, and an almost complete disregard for the general public.
The USA was founded in large part to control corporate interests, and to go against companies like the monopolistic East India Company. In the early days of the US, they strictly controlled or ended any corporation that didn't act in the interest of the general public.
Now we buy the falsehood that what's good for a corporation is good for the US. Even if it includes firing US workers, doing away with pensions, leaving people uninsured or underinsured, manipulating markets so that it takes more and more money to get buy, while the people at top make more and more profit.
People are greedy and inherently flawed, yes. Capitalism is like releasing a bunch of hungry tigers into a room together and telling them to play nice. Unless you keep all the tigers on a very short leash, you end up with a mess.
Obama's not a socialist at all. Check out http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/campaign-2008-h.html
As a libertarian socialist (as opposed to an authoritarian socialist), I would be happy if Obama was a socialist. He's not. He's slightly right of center and slightly more authoritarian than libertarian.
It's muchmuchmuch easier to avoid a crash in the first place in a small, maneuverable vehicle than in a big one with a lot of mass. Semi dodges a kid in the road, swerves into another lane with oncoming traffic. Now try to get that huge mass to swerve back into the proper lane. Try the same dodge in a motorcycle, small car or something similar.
This is why I don't enjoy computer RPGs, only a subset of tabletop ones. Computers can do RPGs, sure, but not the type that I like.
RPGs can mean a variety of different things. The character that you take on the role of overcoming challenges that come before them (the most classic of which is the dungeon crawl), exploring the world and content of the game (Morrowind or Oblivion would be examples that are decent at this), or playing a story that your character is the protagonist in.
Since it is flatly contradictory for one person (say a game developer or GM) to author a story, and another person to determine the actions of their protagonist in any meaningful way, this leaves the player of the protagonist to author the story. The GM exists to facilitate this story. Computer games can't react to the limitless potential of human authorship without having a true AI. At best such a game run by a game designer (such as in a CPRG) can only railroad a story (be it a multi-track railroad, a very well disguised railroad with the illusion of choice, etc... but railroad none the less).
Progress in types of games I enjoy would mean conflicts that either introduce complications to the story, events which get the protagonist closer to their goals, conflicts that illuminate the thematic content of the game, or similar story oriented events.
Not even the most open and flexible of computer RPGs even start to cover this style of RPG. Final Fantasy series is often the classic held up for story telling CRPG. It's railroaded as far as the story is concerned. The content is there to provide challenges and to explore the world the game designers built. You can't play out the protagonists story, because your choices don't affect the story in a meaningful way.
So called open ended games like Morrowind are similar. You can't affect things in a meaningful way... you can just go on one of several pre-selected railroad tracks the game designers built into the game, so far as the story is concerned.
Congressman Brad Sherman claims that himself and several other members of Congress were threatened with martial law if the bailout did not pass. It's not hogwash, these statements are on record.
Yeah, ignore the fact that Posse Comitatus was struck down in 2006. Ignore that fact that the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, trained in anti-riot techniques and urban warfare, have already been used in the US as a police security force. Ignore the fact that Presidential Directive 51 allows Bush to declare a national emergency in case of economic crisis.
Ignore that and so many other things, like hundreds of empty but guarded FEMA built prisons, FEMA trained Pastors and other religious leaders to quell dissent during martial law, etc. Keep your head in the sand, it'll all be OK.
Yes, the vast majority think they are above average drivers. They think _they_ are special. They can handle it, it won't distract them. It's pretty much the same arguments drunk drivers use.
Of course many laws trying to fix the cell phone and drive problem are delusional too. They allow hands free phones, as if multiple studies haven't found that it's about as bad as a hand held phone while driving.
With 4th looking to be the Vista edition of RPGs, will this be enough to get RPG players to change games? Will alternate fantasy games such as the Riddle of Steel and Burning Wheel see an upsurge? I can hope. Those games go to show that you don't need to spend several million to make a highly polished game. The Riddle of Steel has the most realistic combat of any game, and has won awards based on that. It still has interesting fantasy and story aspects, and the Spiritual Attribute rules are great! Burning Wheel is one of the most Tolkien-esque in feel of any RPG, including many Middle Earth RPGs. D&D was interesting in its day, but RPGs have moved way beyond it. We have games that have a lot better rules than D&D provides... let's use them! As a bonus, you'll spend less money on the books as well.
Have any other people here moved on past D&D and found other P&P RPGs more to their liking? What are they? What are some of the things you enjoy about them that's superior to what D&D offers?
But the eclipse is where the moon is in shadow and can't be seen! How am I supposed to watch the moon if it's in eclipse?! n00b fail.
This is one of a large number of reasons I dropped D&D as a game I play. I'm currently into a lot of indie games. They have few if any supplements. These games, in addition to having actual helpful rules system that do more than just not 'get in the way' but actually work towards making a fun game, don't need supplements to make them better. They also are rather highly polished rules for the most part, needing little or no house rules to make them work. 4 of the 6 games I now have only have a single book for the entire game (often with a free PDF with the hard copy). As for character generation, many of them can be done in 15-30 minutes or less.
So I think your suggestion is very valid. There's definitely a market for folks like me who want games that you can just get into right away. My bookshelf for the 6 games that I play, including all supplements for the 2 games which have a few, takes up about 6 inches of shelf space. If I wanted to get all the books for 6 other games I've played in the past it would take more like 6 bookshelves. AD&D 2nd, D&D 3.0, World of Darkness, 7th Sea, L5R, Shadowrun... that's such a huge amount of money in the books for those systems.
I don't think D&D will ever get down to just a few books. If someone wants a great fantasy human/dwarf/elf/orc type game world with just a few books to play it, I'd suggest Burning Wheel instead. That's a fantasy game I urge all D&D fans that are searching for a non-supplement ridden system to take a look at. As a bonus, you don't have to wait for the release, since it's already out.
Was he speaking in capacity of the Vice President? He took an oath of office to uphold the US Constitution, did he not? He was under oath. I could only agree with you if he had made statements saying we should go to war after making it clear that he was speaking as himself, not in capacity of his office.
This is not nitpicking. That oath of office is _important_. Upholding the Constitution is his _duty_. Cheney has not only forsaken that duty, he has betrayed it. There is more than good reason to impeach Cheney, Bush, and their entire crew, as well as to hold them to international war crimes trials.
If they are innocent, let those trials show it. If they are as guilty as the seem to be on the face of things, those actions are long, long overdue.
Getting rid of the war criminals destroying this nation, and the rest of the world, _IS_ 'getting something done'. If the foundation of your house need reinforcing and your living room is on fire, which of the two problems do you take care of first? Bush & crew are that fire.
The difference between most R's and D's is that while the R's want to loot the rest of the neighborhood while everyone's busy gawking at the fire, the D's want to ignore the fire, ignore the foundation, ignore the looting, and put new cabinets up in the kitchen.
I started in on D&D when I was 13. The game was clumsy, the rules were aggravating, and the stories were never about anything I was interested in. And yet there was something there... something wonderful and fun. Unfortunately it always seemed just out of reach. It was like listening to great music with the volume turned down so you can barely hear it; nice music, but elusive and frustrating as well.
Way too many game books, a couple system shifts into FASA, White Wolf and other game companies, and nearly a couple decades later I finally found that something I had always been missing in games. I've been having a blast playing since. The volume's been cranked way up.
I'm not really interested in tactics and cool powers and advancing in skills and such. What I am interested in is cool stories. I like to get together with people and put together a collaborative story. So now I buy games that help me do that.
Most of these games are single book games. One book, and that's it. No unending stream of supplements, just a good game that's fun to play. These games aren't ones that you have to tweak the rules for constantly either, with everyone playing the rules a different way. These games haven't just been thrown together. They're play tested hard, and they do what they're supposed to do. The rules work. These games are usually very accessible to casual gamers as well as outsiders to RPGs.
The latest game I picked up like this is Dirty Secrets. It's a game of the hardboiled detective genre. You play an investigator and solve crimes. The location? Your home town. The time? Last week. And there's crime and murder in the air. It's a one shot story game, taking approximately 3-9 hours, depending on the type of game you pick (short story, novella, novel). Much more fun than Monopoly or Risk that many might play instead. High replay value too, since of course every story would be different.
Sorcerer is another one I like. I've been running this game weekly for the past year. We're almost done with the first campaign, and it's been a blast. Arrogant mortals taming the dark powers and creatures from beyond our reality and forcing them to their will? Faustian deals gone awry? If you ever wanted to play a character like John Constatine, this is the game for it.
Dogs in the Vineyard makes a great old west game. Personally I don't care for the setting, but the game system is fantastic. It works well in certain other settings as well, so that is what I use it for. For the old west style standoff, I've yet to see a better system.
Love great TV, and always wanted to do a series? This game structures your stories as if they are TV episodes in a series. SF, fantasy, western, crime drama, spy drama... all are possible. The game system does really well at modeling what's important to a TV series, and resolving the problems that result for the conflicts you introduce. Shows like Firefly, Buffy, Gilmore Girls, Heroes, and the new Battlestar Gallactica are all good examples of the type of shows this game models well.
If you want a Tolkien-esque FRPG, and like a good bit of rules crunch in your games, I would suggest you try out Burning Wheel instead of D&D. It has a great story based character creation, not just number crunching with maybe adding on some story as a side note.
If you instead want a game focusing on combat tactics and advancement of powers, and where story control is in the hands of one player while the other players are along for the ride (if there is even a story there at all), then this new D&D might be for you. It's not a bad game, it's just not suitable for all types of gamers.
Yeah... and speaking of sound, WTH is there no audio toggle for Firefox yet? It's been requested by tons of folks. I guess everyone that has the know-how to program it isn't too interested? If I'm listening to music and web browsing, I don't want some audio to come blaring out at me suddenly as I hit a page that decided they want to be annoying and add audio.
Um... what were we talking about? Oh yeah, Ubuntu...
I loves me my Kubuntu laptop. It's what finally won me over from Debian and Window Maker. I like the UI better even than my OS X box!
It wasn't always that way. It used to be that US corporations were forced to, in addition to making money, do something that was in the public interest. If they didn't, the state that they were incorporated in would end the company. The founders of the US were fighting against corporate control, as well as the British crown. The Boston Tea Party is one of the more known examples of this.
Unfortunately New Jersey, and then Delaware, started giving up these practices. Corporations once again run amuck after that, as more states fell into line. This lead to the Rail Barons, then to the rather ugly mega-corps we have now.
I would be pretty surprised if anyone in the US picked up Torchwood. It's a much more adult show than Doctor Who. An adult show in Britain isn't so afraid of a little skin and naughty language as the US is. If Torchwood is picked up, be ready for it to be censored.
This is nifty chemistry, but nanotech it ain't. Molecular nanotechnology is precise control of matter at a nanoscale level. This tech is extremely imprecise at that level.. the particles, nanoscale size or not, are let go willy-nilly into a solution to bond with other things as they will. Sounds like straight up chemistry to me.
A nanotech version of this might be something like a patch with an array of nanoscale robotic 'arms' on one side, each holding onto one of these nanoparticles. The patch would get slapped on a surface they wanted a print off of, chemical sensors would react to the fingerprint and deposit their nanoparticle. You could build in a computer interface and upload the results directly into a computer, too.
Now give that 'patch' legs and make it self mobile, and a way to resupply the gold nanoparticles, basic AI to hunt down most likely spots for prints, etc... now we have a police crime nanobot that's worth being called nanotech.
The most recent generation of games has been fantastic. The last few years has seen a revolution in RPG design, and has opened up a whole new line of story oriented games. We have games that are designed to be truely player driven now, not just slightly influenced by the players, or even only given the illusion of influence in the story.
RPGs have massively broken out of the old mold in the last few years. No longer do we have something that's just a step above a computer game on paper in terms of narrative control of story.
CRPGs? They're still stuck in the old model, as far as story is concerned... the only way to fix that is to have real AIs. You need imagination and creativity for it.
California's better? Oh man, sorry it hear it. California's highways are in such horrible state that yours must be nearly unusable. One of the lamer reasons they give for Cali's highways being bad is the water table damaging it. Funny how Netherlands has such good roads, then.
I see them repairing roads a lot here. They never do it right. 2 or 3 years later it needs repaired again. It's cheap in the short term vs. rebuilding roads right, and keeps the road repair folks in work.
Yeah... funny how they did well in other hurricanes, with the same people in charge. Having everything ready to move in before the storms hit, etc. It's almost as if with 'Korina' they wanted to have the region decimated and cleared out of poor people in order to build a lot of resorts and such that many people have been wanting to put in there for years. And almost as if they want to only give any rebuilding contracts to non-local corporations that have ties with some of the people in charge of managing that whole disaster, rather than having contracts with local companies. And it couldn't possibly be to get government programs to be seen negatively by the public so that private corporations can then move in and take over.
But of course our loyal leaders (they're not public servants, of course) would never give contracts to their own companies over others, or manage to lose hundreds of tons of cash, or mismanage billions, or be willing to have people die to increase already swollen pocketbooks. That never happens. And you're a crazy consipiracy theorist if you even consider it.
Heh... California's pretty much a seperate country right _now_. It has 4 or 5 very distinct and very different political states within it, as well... Jefferson state (far north), greater SF bay area, SoCal, and rural nowheres-ville. It's also the only state in the US with its own border stops. Splitting it off from the US would be sweet.
Oh, and Silicon Valley, one of the tech centers of the world, 768/256 DSL for $80 (adding in a few static IPs). My cell phone coverage isn't great either. I got better signal out in a little 1000 person town in the middle of desert in Utah. At the edge of town. They had cheaper and faster DSL than me too.
Driving needs too be a phone free situation, hands free phone or not. Studies on the subject have shown that hands free phones are little better for driving than a hand held unit. http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060629_cel l_phones.html
Yes, but not yet. You have to wait for them to be invented first. Unless you're a slashdot editor.
No, this isn't too big to be a bot made with nanotechnology (a 'nanobot') and dealing with things at a nanometer scale. You could have something like that the size of a human, a jet plane, a city, etc. It is, however, too clunky to be a nanobot. Nanotechnology deals with something being built with precision at the nanometer scale... each atom in proper place.
Take, for a boring but perfectly valid example, steel. Normally you would melt things down and mold it or bang it into shape. Microscopic cracks and bubbles might form, but that's below the scale you're dealing with. You might do some things to minimize it, but it's indirect, imprecise control. Now imagine building up that sheet of steel atom by atom, each one in precise arrangement with the proper atoms of all the various elements that you want in the steel. You don't have any cracks or bubbles at all, from the nanometer range up.
Nothing resticts the size of the steel piece you make, nor the shape. We've said nothing about how we build it either. All nanotech says is that it's precisely built to a certain scale.
This is just one of the way too numerous examples of people misusing the term of nanotech.