I always though the ideal might be a code number or the like, concealed from casual view (under a sticker, etc) in the printed books. If you enter the code number, you get a watermarked copy of the PDF either free or for a nominal cost. (2-3 dollars)
I suppose I'm imagining the three stores I go to locally to buy my P&P books then. (And I'm stuck in semi-rural Indiana, too.) I'm clearly very deluded. I wonder what they are really? Vacant lots? Porno shops? Seedy biker bars? I may never know...
As to my unfamiliarty with the gaming market...I've been actively writing in it for six years. I'm well aware the b&m market is dying, but it's not dead yet, and anything which can be done to revive it...or just keep it on life support for as long as possible...is a good thing. If the hobby is reduced entirely to PDFs (of which I've also authored a few), there will be no new blood. You have to know you want something to look for it online.
A lot of people here seem to be sans clue about the 'costs' of physical books. Books are sold to distributors at about 25% of retail cost (and there has to be a small profit on that), so, if you just cut out the physical costs of the books, you will save about 15-20 percent. Furthermore, if PDFs are significantly cheaper than physical books, this undercuts retailers, who get angry, and stop ordering the product. If brick-and-morter stores stop buying, this cuts out the main source for new players entering the hobby. Keeping the physical distribution chain alive is key to the long-term survival of the genre.
Back in 1977, 1978 or so...around the time of the Bakshi film, they had a seven page "Lord Of The Rings Musical", noting that since the books had been made into everything else, a musical was inevitable. It's taken 30 years, but reality has outpaced satire. IIRC, it was entitled "The Ring And I".
And I bet the songs in the MAD version were better.
Automatic lights on/off. If I'm in a room, I want to see what I'm doing, otherwise, save some power, dammit.
All my books digitized, and detachable reading screens everywhere, so I can read any book I own in any room of the house.
Automated laundry. I drop clothes down a chute. A scanner (or possibly RFID reader) determines color and compositon, and as soon as there's enough of one type to was and dry them, does so.
Voice-controlled grocery list. I look in the fridge. I notice we're out of carrots. I say "We need carrots!", and it's added to a list. I push a button to get a hardcopy. (I don't want it to order groceries for me, because then I'd never discover this week's new flavor of Doritos...)
Harn was, as you note, dull. Iron heroes isn't. It's a sword&sorcery setting with the 'sorcery' pretty much in the hands of NPCs or suicidal PCs. The focus is on Cool Combat, not on how many hecatres of wheat you can grown. Think Conan or Thieve's World.
While Usenet's population is way down from the 'glory days', especially compared to the more popular web forums (compare alt.games.warcraft to the Blizzard boards, for instance), I still find plenty of good, useful, forums for debate and discussion. Maybe my news service (Newsguy) does better spam filtering or maybe I'm not hanging out in alt.sez.weasels-in-drag.
IAE, a Usenet replacement is needed. Usenet is the only decentralized threaded topic-based message forum I know of. Communities based on web boards are vulnerable to servers being seized, hard drives being wiped, or domain names being hijacked. A new, distributed, model is needed, a way in which 'web boards' or 'forums' or what-not can be multiply hosted across hundreds or thousands of servers, with messages propagating across them. Take down any one server, and the community -- and the content -- remains. This seems like an obvius application for P2P technology -- call it a P2P Web Forum. Add some kind of cataloging/hierarchy method to organize boards, and, presto -- new Usenet. (Build in some sort of anti-spam/anti-identity theft protocol while you're at it...)
I'm sure the k00l open-source d00dz who hang out at slashdot could code up a prototype in an hour.:)
True, but part of disproving a theory includes a better theory which explains all observed phenomenon. Quantum theory has been used in real experiments -- quantum computing, for example. A new theory has to explain why phenomenon predicted by the OLD theory work -- and also explain new phenomenon which the old theory can't.
The whole "Well, I don't understand medical jargon" (etc) argument misses the point dramatically. If you WORKED IN A DOCTORS OFFICE, and the "jargon" was PART OF YOUR JOB, you'd bloody well BETTER understand it -- or be fired. Could you imagine this exchange?
"Nurse, I asked for a hypo full of adrenaline. Why did you give me a bottle of aspirin?" "Oh, I just find all those medical terms so confusing!" "OK, well, I guess it's not your job to know all this fancy doctor speak!"
If you work in a typical office, then knowing what "Excel" is, how to tell how big a file is relative to how much storage space you've got, and the basis of "firewalls" and "viruses" *is* part of your job -- as much as knowing how to forward a call on your office phone system or work the copier is. No, IT people probably can't diversify a portfolio -- but doing their job doesn't require them to know how. No one is saying Joe Cubicle ought to be able to configure an Oracle server or write scripts to manage sendmail, but he ought to be able to use the basic tools he needs to do his job. Asking a bus driver to know how to drive a bus is different from asking him to be able to assemble the engine blindfolded.
If a jeweler leaves out fake jewels, and a thief takes them, does the thief have the right to be upset?
It only suprises me it took them this long to figure it out. Massive media companies have massive money, which means massive hardware and bandwidth. They can flood the networks with garbage at an incredible rate. Hell, they could just ask their employees to allow the company to use their (the employees) home machines as ersatz servers, meaning, the fake files would come from tens of thousands of sources. Give everyone who signs up for this 'Share the Trash' program a shot at a free dinner or an extra day off, and most of the workers will be happy to go for it. Don't even bother trying to keep it secret -- making people believe there's nothing valuable on the P2P networks will be part of the strategy.
What are the odds of the sequence you just rolled?
One in six^10 trillion.
Since this is so mind-numbingly small a probability, this must mean you didn't roll the dice.
See the flaw in your logic?
For that matter, what are the odds of YOU existing? The sperm which made you was one of millions. The sperm which made each of your parents were likewise one in millions. And your four grandparents. We already at a million in a million in a million chance of you being born. And this is just from the sperm! Ask your parents how they met, and think of all the hundreds of thousands of coincidences which led to them meeting. A missed bus, a minor change of plans, a stubbed toe, any of these things would mean you would not have existed.
But there's six billion people on the planet, each of them the result of a trillion events which each had a one in a trillion chance of occuring.
If there are a trillion star systems in the universe (and there are far more), then, if there is a one in a trillion chance of intelligent life, it will be on one of those systems. Why is it here? Why us? Because it had to be someone. Why one number in the lottery, instead of another? Why one sperm instead of another?
Why are we here? Because we're here. Because if we weren't here, there wouldn't be anyone asking the question.
People who install software whose primary purpose (don't lie, now) is to let them steal other people's property are crying because the software is stealing *their* property (their CPU time+ their privacy).
For some odd reason, I am not feeling especially sympathetic.
'Cause it would be a pretty lame fansite. I mean, I remember the shows name, that they all talked with really thick accents, and the basic premise. That's about it. I mean, doesn't the net have enough no-info sites?
I have never been able to find a fan site for an ancient Scottish(!) children's program called 'Super Gran', which was about, well, a little old lady with super powers and Scottish accents so thick the show ought to have been subtitled. It was shown briefly on PBS in the mid-80s. I did find a review of the video game BASED on the show, however.
Anyone who believes Bill Gates wrote that, please, sign over your bank accounts to me before someone more deserving cons you. It's pretty clearly satire, expressing a Linux advocates justifiable frustration at the 'ideology over productivity' attitude that tends to taint Linux development. Unfortunately, the writer isn't quite up to the levels of Swift or Lewis (thinking of the Screwtape Letters here), so the humour falls a bit flat and the justifiable criticism is dulled.
Of course it's self-serving. The whole idea of representative democracy is self-serving:You vote for the person who you feel will best represent (i.e, SERVE) you. Government exists to serve the people, does it not? And 'the people' is nothing more than the sum of the PERSONS.
But it fails. And there's nothing voting will do about it. A very wise man (wish I knew how) once noted that if voting could change anything, it would be illegal.
For someone as clearly over-the-hill as Jon Katz (I swear, he reminds me of some 50 year old going 'groovy!' all the time to prove he's still 'with it')[1], it's odd that he doesn't remember the countless literary failures of the past. The traditional novel is not about to be killed by incoherent ramblings, no matter how many typefaces are used. The past century, and especially the past 50 years, are filled with similair stream-of-unconsciousness 'novels' that attracted a lot of praise from self-proclaimed literati and ultimately failed to spark revolution. A century from now, people will still read ER Burroughs, and will have forgotten WS Burroughs.
Caveat:I have not read the stories Katz recommends. But given that he can't even get the name of an RPG right (It's "ShadowRUN", not "ShadowRUNNER", Jon) and tends to make 'discoveries' nearly a decade after the fact (M:TA was released in 1993, Jon), I'm less than trusting of his literary judgement.
[1]Granted, I'm an old fart(tm) in net-years, too, but I happily admit I'm out of touch with you young whippersnappers. Back in MY day, we had 8-bit processors and 6-color graphics (if you counted 'black' and 'white' as colors, and we LIKED it!
In almost every community, there are a minority of 'producers' and a majority of 'consumers'. A handful of people write novels;millions read them. A handful of people compose and play music;millions listen. Even when economics is no object, this ratio holds. How many people surf the web, versus how many people have their own websites with any content on them? How many people take from charities versus give to charities? Hell, how many people bother to send 20 bucks to PBS, versus how many use Sesame Street as a babysitter?
The perfect world of everyone sharing equally will never occur. If your own ability to contribute is hampered by "He's not pitching in!", then, that's your problem. Deal with it.
One, the main problem is cultural, and Mr. Katz isn't helping. There needs to be a cultural acceptance of the concept that creators (not evil corpobeasts blah blah blah) but CREATORS, deserve to be paid for their work, and the man who uses a creators work without just compensation is utter scum. Don't tell me it's all about 'fighting the giant control machine, man!' -- when I see people on newsgroups asking for 'krax' to high-quality, well-written, useful, 10.00 shareware programs authored by lone individuals, I know the problem isn't "they're charging too much" or "I'm making a statement" -- it's a basic lack of common decency.
Two -- could you post the URL where all of your published works are available, in complete and unabridged form, online, for free download? (ASCII for easy online reading and PDF for printing, ideally, but I'll settle for plain ASCII) I'd like to read some of them at my leisure, and I assume you have an FTP site where I can get them. Thanks. (I tried the obvious 'jonkatz.com', but I got a lookup failure...)
Iron Chef, the cult hit from Japan and known favorite of some slashdotters, often features live ingredients -- and I don't mean very fresh mushrooms. Last Friday, the theme ingredient was octopus -- and it was swimming quite enthusiastically in the tank as the contestants ran up and grabbed it. One chef decapacitated one of his on-camera;another beat one to death (or at least tenderness) with a radish. Yes, a radish. Severed tentacles continued to twitch and wriggle, even as the dishes were being cooked. (My girlfriend and ex-girlfriend, watching it with me, squealed in enthusastic disgust the whole time. I maintained a suitably macho calm.)
Other episodes have featured live carp and giant eel. "Not to be shown in the US" episodes have featured turtles.
Frankly, I think it's probably healthier for a culture to be aware that its' food was once alive. This doesn't make me any less willing to eat it. All living things exist off of other living things -- soil is just rotten bugs and worms. All PETA propaganda (and BTW, Jamie, what do you think of PETA hypocrisy in suing over one false domain name while using one themselves for political purposes?) does is make me want to go to McDonalds.
Slashdot Mirror
The full rules are already available online, legally.
s rd35
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/
I always though the ideal might be a code number or the like, concealed from casual view (under a sticker, etc) in the printed books. If you enter the code number, you get a watermarked copy of the PDF either free or for a nominal cost. (2-3 dollars)
I suppose I'm imagining the three stores I go to locally to buy my P&P books then. (And I'm stuck in semi-rural Indiana, too.) I'm clearly very deluded. I wonder what they are really? Vacant lots? Porno shops? Seedy biker bars? I may never know...
As to my unfamiliarty with the gaming market...I've been actively writing in it for six years. I'm well aware the b&m market is dying, but it's not dead yet, and anything which can be done to revive it...or just keep it on life support for as long as possible...is a good thing. If the hobby is reduced entirely to PDFs (of which I've also authored a few), there will be no new blood. You have to know you want something to look for it online.
Given the majority of the rules material is already free online in the form of the SRDs, making the core rulebooks downloadable is a bit redundant...
A lot of people here seem to be sans clue about the 'costs' of physical books. Books are sold to distributors at about 25% of retail cost (and there has to be a small profit on that), so, if you just cut out the physical costs of the books, you will save about 15-20 percent. Furthermore, if PDFs are significantly cheaper than physical books, this undercuts retailers, who get angry, and stop ordering the product. If brick-and-morter stores stop buying, this cuts out the main source for new players entering the hobby. Keeping the physical distribution chain alive is key to the long-term survival of the genre.
Back in 1977, 1978 or so...around the time of the Bakshi film, they had a seven page "Lord Of The Rings Musical", noting that since the books had been made into everything else, a musical was inevitable. It's taken 30 years, but reality has outpaced satire. IIRC, it was entitled "The Ring And I".
And I bet the songs in the MAD version were better.
Automatic lights on/off. If I'm in a room, I want to see what I'm doing, otherwise, save some power, dammit.
All my books digitized, and detachable reading screens everywhere, so I can read any book I own in any room of the house.
Automated laundry. I drop clothes down a chute. A scanner (or possibly RFID reader) determines color and compositon, and as soon as there's enough of one type to was and dry them, does so.
Voice-controlled grocery list. I look in the fridge. I notice we're out of carrots. I say "We need carrots!", and it's added to a list. I push a button to get a hardcopy. (I don't want it to order groceries for me, because then I'd never discover this week's new flavor of Doritos...)
Harn was, as you note, dull. Iron heroes isn't. It's a sword&sorcery setting with the 'sorcery' pretty much in the hands of NPCs or suicidal PCs. The focus is on Cool Combat, not on how many hecatres of wheat you can grown. Think Conan or Thieve's World.
While Usenet's population is way down from the 'glory days', especially compared to the more popular web forums (compare alt.games.warcraft to the Blizzard boards, for instance), I still find plenty of good, useful, forums for debate and discussion. Maybe my news service (Newsguy) does better spam filtering or maybe I'm not hanging out in alt.sez.weasels-in-drag.
:)
IAE, a Usenet replacement is needed. Usenet is the only decentralized threaded topic-based message forum I know of. Communities based on web boards are vulnerable to servers being seized, hard drives being wiped, or domain names being hijacked. A new, distributed, model is needed, a way in which 'web boards' or 'forums' or what-not can be multiply hosted across hundreds or thousands of servers, with messages propagating across them. Take down any one server, and the community -- and the content -- remains. This seems like an obvius application for P2P technology -- call it a P2P Web Forum. Add some kind of cataloging/hierarchy method to organize boards, and, presto -- new Usenet. (Build in some sort of anti-spam/anti-identity theft protocol while you're at it...)
I'm sure the k00l open-source d00dz who hang out at slashdot could code up a prototype in an hour.
True, but part of disproving a theory includes a better theory which explains all observed phenomenon. Quantum theory has been used in real experiments -- quantum computing, for example. A new theory has to explain why phenomenon predicted by the OLD theory work -- and also explain new phenomenon which the old theory can't.
"...it almost certainly is."
/. before, and it has always been "a few months away" from unveiling its secret power source.
IIRC, this "company" has shown up on
This seems to be the week for bad slashdot science reporting (and falling for new 'free energy' con jobs).
The whole "Well, I don't understand medical jargon" (etc) argument misses the point dramatically. If you WORKED IN A DOCTORS OFFICE, and the "jargon" was PART OF YOUR JOB, you'd bloody well BETTER understand it -- or be fired. Could you imagine this exchange?
"Nurse, I asked for a hypo full of adrenaline. Why did you give me a bottle of aspirin?"
"Oh, I just find all those medical terms so confusing!"
"OK, well, I guess it's not your job to know all this fancy doctor speak!"
If you work in a typical office, then knowing what "Excel" is, how to tell how big a file is relative to how much storage space you've got, and the basis of "firewalls" and "viruses" *is* part of your job -- as much as knowing how to forward a call on your office phone system or work the copier is. No, IT people probably can't diversify a portfolio -- but doing their job doesn't require them to know how. No one is saying Joe Cubicle ought to be able to configure an Oracle server or write scripts to manage sendmail, but he ought to be able to use the basic tools he needs to do his job. Asking a bus driver to know how to drive a bus is different from asking him to be able to assemble the engine blindfolded.
If a jeweler leaves out fake jewels, and a thief takes them, does the thief have the right to be upset?
It only suprises me it took them this long to figure it out. Massive media companies have massive money, which means massive hardware and bandwidth. They can flood the networks with garbage at an incredible rate. Hell, they could just ask their employees to allow the company to use their (the employees) home machines as ersatz servers, meaning, the fake files would come from tens of thousands of sources. Give everyone who signs up for this 'Share the Trash' program a shot at a free dinner or an extra day off, and most of the workers will be happy to go for it. Don't even bother trying to keep it secret -- making people believe there's nothing valuable on the P2P networks will be part of the strategy.
Roll 10 trillion dice. Write down the sequence.
What are the odds of the sequence you just rolled?
One in six^10 trillion.
Since this is so mind-numbingly small a probability, this must mean you didn't roll the dice.
See the flaw in your logic?
For that matter, what are the odds of YOU existing? The sperm which made you was one of millions. The sperm which made each of your parents were likewise one in millions. And your four grandparents. We already at a million in a million in a million chance of you being born. And this is just from the sperm! Ask your parents how they met, and think of all the hundreds of thousands of coincidences which led to them meeting. A missed bus, a minor change of plans, a stubbed toe, any of these things would mean you would not have existed.
But there's six billion people on the planet, each of them the result of a trillion events which each had a one in a trillion chance of occuring.
If there are a trillion star systems in the universe (and there are far more), then, if there is a one in a trillion chance of intelligent life, it will be on one of those systems. Why is it here? Why us? Because it had to be someone. Why one number in the lottery, instead of another? Why one sperm instead of another?
Why are we here? Because we're here. Because if we weren't here, there wouldn't be anyone asking the question.
More on this.
People who install software whose primary purpose (don't lie, now) is to let them steal other people's property are crying because the software is stealing *their* property (their CPU time+ their privacy).
For some odd reason, I am not feeling especially sympathetic.
'Cause it would be a pretty lame fansite. I mean, I remember the shows name, that they all talked with really thick accents, and the basic premise. That's about it. I mean, doesn't the net have enough no-info sites?
I have never been able to find a fan site for an ancient Scottish(!) children's program called 'Super Gran', which was about, well, a little old lady with super powers and Scottish accents so thick the show ought to have been subtitled. It was shown briefly on PBS in the mid-80s. I did find a review of the video game BASED on the show, however.
Anyone who believes Bill Gates wrote that, please, sign over your bank accounts to me before someone more deserving cons you. It's pretty clearly satire, expressing a Linux advocates justifiable frustration at the 'ideology over productivity' attitude that tends to taint Linux development. Unfortunately, the writer isn't quite up to the levels of Swift or Lewis (thinking of the Screwtape Letters here), so the humour falls a bit flat and the justifiable criticism is dulled.
But it fails. And there's nothing voting will do about it. A very wise man (wish I knew how) once noted that if voting could change anything, it would be illegal.
I wrote this in 1996, and not one word needs to be changed:
Voting Rites.
Caveat:I have not read the stories Katz recommends. But given that he can't even get the name of an RPG right (It's "ShadowRUN", not "ShadowRUNNER", Jon) and tends to make 'discoveries' nearly a decade after the fact (M:TA was released in 1993, Jon), I'm less than trusting of his literary judgement.
[1]Granted, I'm an old fart(tm) in net-years, too, but I happily admit I'm out of touch with you young whippersnappers. Back in MY day, we had 8-bit processors and 6-color graphics (if you counted 'black' and 'white' as colors, and we LIKED it!
Lizard is thinking of brain-dead yuppies yacking on cell phones while they're 500 feet in the air.
Lizard is thinking of investing in TitaniumUmbrellas.Com.
The perfect world of everyone sharing equally will never occur. If your own ability to contribute is hampered by "He's not pitching in!", then, that's your problem. Deal with it.
Two -- could you post the URL where all of your published works are available, in complete and unabridged form, online, for free download? (ASCII for easy online reading and PDF for printing, ideally, but I'll settle for plain ASCII) I'd like to read some of them at my leisure, and I assume you have an FTP site where I can get them. Thanks. (I tried the obvious 'jonkatz.com', but I got a lookup failure...)
Other episodes have featured live carp and giant eel. "Not to be shown in the US" episodes have featured turtles.
Frankly, I think it's probably healthier for a culture to be aware that its' food was once alive. This doesn't make me any less willing to eat it. All living things exist off of other living things -- soil is just rotten bugs and worms. All PETA propaganda (and BTW, Jamie, what do you think of PETA hypocrisy in suing over one false domain name while using one themselves for political purposes?) does is make me want to go to McDonalds.