Its powergaming, not roleplaying. Roleplaying is taking all the good and the bad of a character and making due with it. When you powergame, there is no role being explored; it more like fun with statistics.
I understand what you find Roleplaying to mean, and that's cool. However, the guy saying powergaming is roleplaying is right. It's taking on a role enacting things you don't normally do. Does it lack character depth? Sure, yeah, but it's still playing a role that is not one's normal life. You're just into two different types of roleplaying.
That reminds me of a time our DM had us prepped for a really 'heavy' campaign one night, he had hyped up how incredibly hard it was going to be. He had characters too, that had various things, and one of them gave me a wish somehow (don't remember, wand scroll whatever) to take along in case we needed it bad. He wasn't playing any characters that night. So I burned the wish right near the beginning *grin*, when we ran into his big uber-puzzle that we were supposed to be incredibly frustrated with for a long time.
As we hemmed and hawed on what to try, I muttered, "I wish I could figure this thing out.."
The DM responded, "Well, you guys will have to figure it out, I told you this was going to be hard."
I clarified: "No, I said I WISH I could figure this thing out!"
The look on his face was priceless. "You fucking bastard!" He'd apparently forgotten about giving me the wish earlier, from one of his characters. He let it work (I think it was even a God Wish), he had to.:)
I don't think you understand what access means in this context either. Access to a service does depend on whether or not one is physically able to use it. You are looking at it from the wrong side, assuming access is like having the password to a computer system or something. It's not like that here, we're not talking about that kind of access.
Why doesnt it surprise me that someone not only found a questionable use for them...
It's that "Good/Evil is in the user, not the tool" thing though. I would love to be able to fly a tiny little thing and wear goggles that let me see where "I'm" going. Sure, one could spy; or one could just have a grand ol' geeky time exploring hard to reach caves or condemned buildings or even network plenums.. Seems like having a camera on it is just a sensible way to control the thing. If the first ones didn't have that, well yeah, the tech was early still.
I, for one, welcome our acronym-subverting overlords.
Just a matter of note. Your boyfriend has just as much access to the telephone system as the rest of us.. without the relay service. Noones preventing him from having phone service, or even calling whoever he wants without the relay service.
Access.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
My guess is, that if you can find enough people to be phone sex operators, you can find enough to be phone sex intermediaries.
Ummmm, this is the Internet age, where cybersex is free and everywhere. I seriously doubt that using a TTY to go to 900 numbers is a generally chosen route. No webcams on those things either.
Maybe we need to rethink the whole 'equal access' thing. Why jump through hoops to give the disabled to nearly every segment of society? So they can feel 'normal'? They aren't... that's part of the definition.
It's not about Normal, there's no such thing as that, really. Average, maybe, but that's a broader term that easily includes people with disabilities. Why make efforts to let disabled people participate in activities that their friends enjoy, and like to talk about? I don't know why anyone would question this. And you or I could become disabled tomorrow. For myself I'd be consoled at least to know that, with a new disability, I have a chance at continuing most of the things I'm accustomed to doing now. How could anyone not want to have that kind of 'safety net for the soul' looming ready, should life decide to throw a really shitty card at you?
I didn't pay for a "vision" of the director. I paid for a piece of polycabonate with an aluminum sheet sandwiched in. According to the MPAA and RIAA *THAT'S IT*. I didn't pay for anything else at all, apart from the shiny box it came in.
But of course you did. Are you saying then that any old piece of polycarbonate with an aluminum sheet sandwiched in will do for you? So if you went and bought The Matrix DVD, got it home and played it, discovering that you actually got The Sound of Music, you'd be just fine with that, since you weren't actually trying to get any director's vision, just a disc.
Uh, they aren't taking boobies away from you. It only gives that option to those who want to see the movie, but don't care for the "naughty bits".
Yeah but it sucks anyway, because if you've ever watched a movie that has been poorly edited for content, it's full of weird little breaks. What you need to do is make your content with dual scenes like they did for the TV series "Dream On". During the shooting, they knew they were going to be on Pay TV (boobies! swear words!) as well as regular TV (no boobies). So any scene with nudity or foul language was shot twice. Exact same story, nothing missing, no weird edits, watch either version of the show and enjoy seeing it as the director intended. You could do that with DVD. Retroactively 'editing' by skipping certain points is just lame.
and to see comments like "the average windows user can barely tie their shoelaces" bullshit irritates me. To be quite honest, computers to the average joe are scary. Just because they don't know how to mount a drive or know what shl ax,1 means doesn't mean their stupid.
I understand there's a fear factor, I work face to face with the average windows user every day, in their home. Not knowing how to mount a drive is one thing, very forgivable. Not even eyeroll-worthy. It's when they get in a panic because their sound card 'stopped working' only to discover that they had been turning the TONE control rather than VOLUME on their speakers. Now that's sad. I don't say *most* average users are like this (well, not without data to support me), but they do certainly abound.
I hate OS wars too. But the fact is, the average Linux user (oh, I should mention, I'm not one) is a Linux user partly because they are comfortable with having to know some things about their machine in order to use it. You know, Old School, like back in the day when you simply didn't HAVE a computer if you weren't interested in delving into it. They would tend to be the sort of person that enjoys having to learn something in order to make good use of it. I believe that the majority of people do *not* want to keep filling their heads. To many people that's what school was for and that part of their life is done. It's sad, but it's a choice made for the sake of comfort. I can respect it that way, there's a lot of other things they know perhaps.
I did an install once for a Lawyer (an intelligent man, one must presume), who became upset when he discovered that our high-speed access advertized as "One click and you're there" (or something) wasn't true. Because you have to double-click a desktop icon (to open a browser or whatever) he was almost going to cancel the service. He was getting installed purely on the pressure of friends, as he had gone years without email. And he was mad as hell about the whole thing. He got really mad when I didn't have paper documentation for Internet Explorer to leave with him. I pointed out where the Help was, and that just seemed to piss him off more. He *resented* being forced to learn something new, and I tried to tell him that anything worthwhile requires some learning. I asked him if he had ALWAYS known how to drive a car. No of course not, at some point he had to do a bit of reading, get some experience, do some practice. From the look in his eye at this point I realized I was traipsing into sass-mouth territory and just dropped it. The computer was given to him by a friend, and thank every god that it wasn't running Linux.;)
There's no fixing them, but at least they pay us to fix their stuff for them.
Yeah, but their official advisory (pretty easy to get if you are a registered customer), says to install a firmware fix. That fix, be-it an actual removal of the userid/password, or a paranoid password change, is just as installable, either way.
And that advisory will probably be read and followed by as many people as the ones that pro-actively protected their systems against the Code Red worm. Code Red flourished for months, it was bloody ridiculous.
But the truth is, on Mars there is soil that's more than just powered rock, and there's an atmosphere made of useful gases.
But if the Moon is made of powered rock, then why don't we tap that and fly the Moon to Mars? Wouldn't that be cool? We could also strap a huge frickin' laser-beam to it and have a proto-Deathstar.
It does seem to make sense to launch things to Mars or other planets from the moon, as the initial thrust needed to get you going would be much much less. But (and I really have no idea), I wonder about whether it would be possible to knock the moon a bit off its orbit by applying thousands of pounds of thrust to it. It's pretty big, but is it big enough for there to be no adverse effect?
Are you proposing yourself as a guinea pig? That might not work too bad, as BeOS can live in just one big file in your native nervous system, so we wouldn't need to overwrite existing peronality/ies.
You subscribed to Slashdot, you picked a nick like AssProphet, , you haven't been here that long and you expect me to share your moral outrage at the lameness of michael's story selections.
Now, I know absolutely nothing about this AssProphet guy, but I do wonder how you can be so sure that he 'truly' has a high UID. Look at mine for example, it's reasonably low for most griping, but maybe I decide to make a second account for trolling or something. I'm still the same experienced slashdotter, just with a different guise. Because I create a younger account, do I lose my right to fondly recall how "Beware of Fake Monkey Automata" was a ridiculous story?
Agreed. This has to rank up there as the single most fucking retarded story Slashdot has ever posted.
It's more useful for us to be warned of the dangers of carelessly installing Linux on zombie creatures, than it was for us to be warned about Fake Monkey Automata.
Yeah the accent changes the phase of the electrons ever so slightly, and so they were not affected by the cascading surge. I mean, the anglo electrons didn't even bring any cheese, and refused to learn French, so they had to be turned away.
Well no, what I've found with ripping a DVD (to DivX, to go on an ordinary CD) in fully digital fashion is that it takes often many many hours. Maybe I've just tried crummy software.. By just capturing it, I lose some quality but can get the job done in the time it takes to watch the movie. If there is software that can do this faster without the analog loss I'd be interested in knowing its name, because I'm used to a digital DVD-rip taking well over 10 hours.
The way I can get around macrovision if I want to duplicate a DVD is to simply capture it from my Playstation 2 onto my nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4600. There is of course some additional loss of quality from the recording method, it's not as sharp as it could be, but it's way way faster than decrypting and re-encoding. The PS/2 is indeed putting out macrovision, as can be seen if I run the signal through my Sony VHS. But the TV input on my GeForce card doesn't seem to be affected. An older capture card that I have in another computer IS affected by macrovision however, an ADS Channel Surfer from 1998 makes ribbons of colour across the input when macrovision is present.
Fox should take a lesson from the X-Files on this one. While I liked all 7 seasons, there was something missing when they tried to replace Duchovny's Fox Mulder. I'm glad they didn't go on to an eighth season.
To me, the 'something' missing when Mulder left WAS the X-Files. No Mulder, no X-Files. Had there been an 8th season, I wouldn't have watched that either.
As if it would be more convenient for us suburban types to walk a few miles (about 4 where I am) in the rain to get to a bus stop. And since there are only a handful of buses that come near me, I would have to forgo anything in my schedule that happens before 1100 am.
I think the assumption was that if everyone was using public transit, it would be faster, not only because there would be less traffic. It would also be because ridership would be so high they could afford more buses, tighter routes, and shorter waits. More shelters too for your rainy wait.
One of the main reasons so many bus systems are crappy or deemed inadequate by potential users is because there just aren't enough users to support to level of service we'd like to see. Remember, somebody has to pay all those drivers every day, and fuel and maintain all of those buses. That's why your rates go up and the schedules get messed with. If everyone was taking the bus everywhere, you would likely see dramatic improvements in service, and rates could possibly relax as well.
You're right that most 'female' players are really male, but are you so sure that most computer-addicted females are fat? I know 4 geeky females, and only one of them is overweight (used to be hot but two kids really took it out of her). One of them has cranked out two kids and remained ultra-hot. They go out to karaoke and whatnot, and have social lives, but when they're home, it's a good thing they have broadband or one could never phone them. Most of the overweight women I have encountered are not so much into computers, tending to be TV couch-potatoes. But maybe that's just my experience.
As someone who works directly in the cable field, I cringe at the thought of two different companies working the same plant in the street. In my city there used to be two companies, but the CRTC (this is Canada) split the city between the companies, so each one had its own territory with its own wires. Then the other company bought the one I worked at, and got the whole city, and I had to start working in the *HORRIBLE MESS* that they had already destroyed their reputation with on the other side of town. It's getting better now, since those of us from the bought company (with stricter training and higher standards, pride, etc) have worked the other side of the city enough now that it's not in such crappy shape. I can't imagine what it would be like if we were still separate, but directly in competition on the same wires. I would quit.
Slashdot Mirror
Its powergaming, not roleplaying. Roleplaying is taking all the good and the bad of a character and making due with it. When you powergame, there is no role being explored; it more like fun with statistics.
I understand what you find Roleplaying to mean, and that's cool. However, the guy saying powergaming is roleplaying is right. It's taking on a role enacting things you don't normally do. Does it lack character depth? Sure, yeah, but it's still playing a role that is not one's normal life. You're just into two different types of roleplaying.
That reminds me of a time our DM had us prepped for a really 'heavy' campaign one night, he had hyped up how incredibly hard it was going to be. He had characters too, that had various things, and one of them gave me a wish somehow (don't remember, wand scroll whatever) to take along in case we needed it bad. He wasn't playing any characters that night. So I burned the wish right near the beginning *grin*, when we ran into his big uber-puzzle that we were supposed to be incredibly frustrated with for a long time.
:)
As we hemmed and hawed on what to try, I muttered, "I wish I could figure this thing out.."
The DM responded, "Well, you guys will have to figure it out, I told you this was going to be hard."
I clarified: "No, I said I WISH I could figure this thing out!"
The look on his face was priceless. "You fucking bastard!" He'd apparently forgotten about giving me the wish earlier, from one of his characters.
He let it work (I think it was even a God Wish), he had to.
I don't think you understand what access means in this context either. Access to a service does depend on whether or not one is physically able to use it. You are looking at it from the wrong side, assuming access is like having the password to a computer system or something. It's not like that here, we're not talking about that kind of access.
Why doesnt it surprise me that someone not only found a questionable use for them...
It's that "Good/Evil is in the user, not the tool" thing though. I would love to be able to fly a tiny little thing and wear goggles that let me see where "I'm" going. Sure, one could spy; or one could just have a grand ol' geeky time exploring hard to reach caves or condemned buildings or even network plenums.. Seems like having a camera on it is just a sensible way to control the thing. If the first ones didn't have that, well yeah, the tech was early still.
I, for one, welcome our acronym-subverting overlords.
Just a matter of note. Your boyfriend has just as much access to the telephone system as the rest of us.. without the relay service. Noones preventing him from having phone service, or even calling whoever he wants without the relay service.
Access.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
My guess is, that if you can find enough people to be phone sex operators, you can find enough to be phone sex intermediaries.
Ummmm, this is the Internet age, where cybersex is free and everywhere. I seriously doubt that using a TTY to go to 900 numbers is a generally chosen route. No webcams on those things either.
Maybe we need to rethink the whole 'equal access' thing. Why jump through hoops to give the disabled to nearly every segment of society? So they can feel 'normal'? They aren't... that's part of the definition.
It's not about Normal, there's no such thing as that, really. Average, maybe, but that's a broader term that easily includes people with disabilities. Why make efforts to let disabled people participate in activities that their friends enjoy, and like to talk about? I don't know why anyone would question this. And you or I could become disabled tomorrow. For myself I'd be consoled at least to know that, with a new disability, I have a chance at continuing most of the things I'm accustomed to doing now. How could anyone not want to have that kind of 'safety net for the soul' looming ready, should life decide to throw a really shitty card at you?
I didn't pay for a "vision" of the director. I paid for a piece of polycabonate with an aluminum sheet sandwiched in. According to the MPAA and RIAA *THAT'S IT*. I didn't pay for anything else at all, apart from the shiny box it came in.
But of course you did. Are you saying then that any old piece of polycarbonate with an aluminum sheet sandwiched in will do for you? So if you went and bought The Matrix DVD, got it home and played it, discovering that you actually got The Sound of Music, you'd be just fine with that, since you weren't actually trying to get any director's vision, just a disc.
Uh, they aren't taking boobies away from you. It only gives that option to those who want to see the movie, but don't care for the "naughty bits".
Yeah but it sucks anyway, because if you've ever watched a movie that has been poorly edited for content, it's full of weird little breaks. What you need to do is make your content with dual scenes like they did for the TV series "Dream On". During the shooting, they knew they were going to be on Pay TV (boobies! swear words!) as well as regular TV (no boobies). So any scene with nudity or foul language was shot twice. Exact same story, nothing missing, no weird edits, watch either version of the show and enjoy seeing it as the director intended. You could do that with DVD. Retroactively 'editing' by skipping certain points is just lame.
and to see comments like "the average windows user can barely tie their shoelaces" bullshit irritates me. To be quite honest, computers to the average joe are scary. Just because they don't know how to mount a drive or know what shl ax,1 means doesn't mean their stupid.
;)
I understand there's a fear factor, I work face to face with the average windows user every day, in their home. Not knowing how to mount a drive is one thing, very forgivable. Not even eyeroll-worthy. It's when they get in a panic because their sound card 'stopped working' only to discover that they had been turning the TONE control rather than VOLUME on their speakers. Now that's sad. I don't say *most* average users are like this (well, not without data to support me), but they do certainly abound.
I hate OS wars too. But the fact is, the average Linux user (oh, I should mention, I'm not one) is a Linux user partly because they are comfortable with having to know some things about their machine in order to use it. You know, Old School, like back in the day when you simply didn't HAVE a computer if you weren't interested in delving into it. They would tend to be the sort of person that enjoys having to learn something in order to make good use of it. I believe that the majority of people do *not* want to keep filling their heads. To many people that's what school was for and that part of their life is done. It's sad, but it's a choice made for the sake of comfort. I can respect it that way, there's a lot of other things they know perhaps.
I did an install once for a Lawyer (an intelligent man, one must presume), who became upset when he discovered that our high-speed access advertized as "One click and you're there" (or something) wasn't true. Because you have to double-click a desktop icon (to open a browser or whatever) he was almost going to cancel the service. He was getting installed purely on the pressure of friends, as he had gone years without email. And he was mad as hell about the whole thing. He got really mad when I didn't have paper documentation for Internet Explorer to leave with him. I pointed out where the Help was, and that just seemed to piss him off more. He *resented* being forced to learn something new, and I tried to tell him that anything worthwhile requires some learning. I asked him if he had ALWAYS known how to drive a car. No of course not, at some point he had to do a bit of reading, get some experience, do some practice. From the look in his eye at this point I realized I was traipsing into sass-mouth territory and just dropped it. The computer was given to him by a friend, and thank every god that it wasn't running Linux.
There's no fixing them, but at least they pay us to fix their stuff for them.
Can't we all just get along?
Yeah, but their official advisory (pretty easy to get if you are a registered customer), says to install a firmware fix. That fix, be-it an actual removal of the userid/password, or a paranoid password change, is just as installable, either way.
And that advisory will probably be read and followed by as many people as the ones that pro-actively protected their systems against the Code Red worm. Code Red flourished for months, it was bloody ridiculous.
But the truth is, on Mars there is soil that's more than just powered rock, and there's an atmosphere made of useful gases.
But if the Moon is made of powered rock, then why don't we tap that and fly the Moon to Mars? Wouldn't that be cool? We could also strap a huge frickin' laser-beam to it and have a proto-Deathstar.
It does seem to make sense to launch things to Mars or other planets from the moon, as the initial thrust needed to get you going would be much much less. But (and I really have no idea), I wonder about whether it would be possible to knock the moon a bit off its orbit by applying thousands of pounds of thrust to it. It's pretty big, but is it big enough for there to be no adverse effect?
A Beos Wolf cluster.
BeOS? Over my dead body.
Are you proposing yourself as a guinea pig? That might not work too bad, as BeOS can live in just one big file in your native nervous system, so we wouldn't need to overwrite existing peronality/ies.
You subscribed to Slashdot, you picked a nick like AssProphet, , you haven't been here that long and you expect me to share your moral outrage at the lameness of michael's story selections.
Now, I know absolutely nothing about this AssProphet guy, but I do wonder how you can be so sure that he 'truly' has a high UID. Look at mine for example, it's reasonably low for most griping, but maybe I decide to make a second account for trolling or something. I'm still the same experienced slashdotter, just with a different guise. Because I create a younger account, do I lose my right to fondly recall how "Beware of Fake Monkey Automata" was a ridiculous story?
Agreed. This has to rank up there as the single most fucking retarded story Slashdot has ever posted.
It's more useful for us to be warned of the dangers of carelessly installing Linux on zombie creatures, than it was for us to be warned about Fake Monkey Automata.
What I love is seeing the "Designed for Windows XP" and it's got 128 MB of RAM.
I've got to give them credit for creative funding!
Disturbing claim found in your link:
This product is designed to fit juniors.
I've also heard you can get "Porn Star" brand t-shirts in 10 year old sizes. There's something really wrong here.
Yeah the accent changes the phase of the electrons ever so slightly, and so they were not affected by the cascading surge. I mean, the anglo electrons didn't even bring any cheese, and refused to learn French, so they had to be turned away.
Well no, what I've found with ripping a DVD (to DivX, to go on an ordinary CD) in fully digital fashion is that it takes often many many hours. Maybe I've just tried crummy software.. By just capturing it, I lose some quality but can get the job done in the time it takes to watch the movie. If there is software that can do this faster without the analog loss I'd be interested in knowing its name, because I'm used to a digital DVD-rip taking well over 10 hours.
The way I can get around macrovision if I want to duplicate a DVD is to simply capture it from my Playstation 2 onto my nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4600. There is of course some additional loss of quality from the recording method, it's not as sharp as it could be, but it's way way faster than decrypting and re-encoding. The PS/2 is indeed putting out macrovision, as can be seen if I run the signal through my Sony VHS. But the TV input on my GeForce card doesn't seem to be affected. An older capture card that I have in another computer IS affected by macrovision however, an ADS Channel Surfer from 1998 makes ribbons of colour across the input when macrovision is present.
Fox should take a lesson from the X-Files on this one. While I liked all 7 seasons, there was something missing when they tried to replace Duchovny's Fox Mulder. I'm glad they didn't go on to an eighth season.
To me, the 'something' missing when Mulder left WAS the X-Files. No Mulder, no X-Files. Had there been an 8th season, I wouldn't have watched that either.
As if it would be more convenient for us suburban types to walk a few miles (about 4 where I am) in the rain to get to a bus stop. And since there are only a handful of buses that come near me, I would have to forgo anything in my schedule that happens before 1100 am.
I think the assumption was that if everyone was using public transit, it would be faster, not only because there would be less traffic. It would also be because ridership would be so high they could afford more buses, tighter routes, and shorter waits. More shelters too for your rainy wait.
One of the main reasons so many bus systems are crappy or deemed inadequate by potential users is because there just aren't enough users to support to level of service we'd like to see. Remember, somebody has to pay all those drivers every day, and fuel and maintain all of those buses. That's why your rates go up and the schedules get messed with. If everyone was taking the bus everywhere, you would likely see dramatic improvements in service, and rates could possibly relax as well.
You're right that most 'female' players are really male, but are you so sure that most computer-addicted females are fat? I know 4 geeky females, and only one of them is overweight (used to be hot but two kids really took it out of her). One of them has cranked out two kids and remained ultra-hot. They go out to karaoke and whatnot, and have social lives, but when they're home, it's a good thing they have broadband or one could never phone them. Most of the overweight women I have encountered are not so much into computers, tending to be TV couch-potatoes. But maybe that's just my experience.
As someone who works directly in the cable field, I cringe at the thought of two different companies working the same plant in the street. In my city there used to be two companies, but the CRTC (this is Canada) split the city between the companies, so each one had its own territory with its own wires. Then the other company bought the one I worked at, and got the whole city, and I had to start working in the *HORRIBLE MESS* that they had already destroyed their reputation with on the other side of town. It's getting better now, since those of us from the bought company (with stricter training and higher standards, pride, etc) have worked the other side of the city enough now that it's not in such crappy shape. I can't imagine what it would be like if we were still separate, but directly in competition on the same wires. I would quit.