Yes, but don't worry: that massive amount of info they're collecting on you as part of HSPD-12[*] is perfectly safe.

[*] Where NASA said we all had to submit to unrestricted background investigations -- where they could gather any data they wanted on you, from any source, whether it be your doctor, your lawyer, your priest, your ISP, or whatever -- and then a secret, unappealable tribunal would decide if we could keep our jobs. I and others sued them over this, and lost. But don't worry, we can all see that NASA keeps careful track of sensitive information.

No, I don't work for Paizo; just a fan. For my day job, I'm a librarian in North Dakota.

The changes to the rule set are rather more extensive than you suggest, though I'll grant that it's hard to see the overall effect because many of the changes are quite minor individually. Taken as a whole, though, the system is a lot smoother.

The biggest difference in terms of mechanics is the shift in emphasis towards modularity instead of multi-classing. In 3.5 if you have a character concept that doesn't fit easily into a pre-existing class, you have to do some crazy multi-classing to get it worked in. Paizo's "archetypes" approach makes that kind of thing a lot easier, because it lets you swap out class features in a standard base class in order to get something different. Not more -- just different. I used to spend ages working out how to qualify for weird prestige classes in order to get a character which matched the picture in my head reasonably well. Now I apply an archetype to one of the base classes, and never bother taking any other class. It's great.

I'd point out that Paizo has continued putting the OGL on all their new stuff, too. It applies to all of their hardcovers (though large parts of the campaign setting book are exempt), and to portions of the adventure paths as well. For example, take a look at the Sanguine Ooze Swarm. It's a monster whose stats never appeared in any of the books; it put in an appearance in "The Haunting of Harrowstone", but it's under OGL, so it's up for free.

That's exactly my point. They don't have to buy the books; the mechanics are all there online, free for use. Bring a laptop -- or better yet a tablet -- and you've got the entire rule set right there ready for use.

Dude, they put out a new adventure every month, like clockwork, as part of their Adventure Paths. Each adventure path comes out once per month for six months, then they start a new one. There are 9 finished adventure paths to date (54 total adventures), and they're two books into the tenth. The adventures themselves run 64 pages, but the actual publication generally clocks in about 92-100 pages overall once you add in new monsters, articles giving background information on the adventure setting, the monthly fiction, and the rather nice artwork. And that total doesn't even count the other adventures in their "modules" series, which are stand-alone adventures rather than part of a larger story arc. There are 50 of those so far.

Like I said -- they make their money mostly off the adventures. They're happy if you buy the books, of course, but what they REALLY want you to do is sign up for a monthly subscription to their adventure paths. That's where they make their real money. If you want a home brew game, or whatever, then you never have to pay them a dime.

The big problem with Wizards of the Coast is that it's being run by marketing specialists who don't game. They're hugely out of touch with their target market, and the result has been a crappy product that few people want to buy.

Meanwhile, Paizo -- the company that makes Pathfinder -- has taken the pulse of the d20 gaming community. The company is run by gaming geeks. Virtually everyone there plays for fun, even the CEO. Paizo makes most of its money off adventures, not rules -- their subscription-based monthly adventure modules are their primary revenue stream. All of the actual rule mechanics are available free online under an open license, and if you want pretty illustrations to go with them, the PDFs are reasonably cheap.

At Paizo, the adventure comes first, and the rules are just a framework. WotC puts the rules first, and the adventure second. Even this WotC play test strikes me mostly as the WotC marketing droids aping Paizo. Which just demonstrates their cluelessness even further.

Yeah, I know what you mean. There's this guy who burgled my house 20 years ago. And 19 years ago. And 18 years ago, and so on. Even when the cops caught him, he was never punished -- just set free to burgle my house again. But he didn't burgle my house last year, so I'm not mad.

I wonder why people around here hate Microsoft?

Nuts, forgot one.

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. 1881. A sweet fairy story -- MacDonald and Dunsany were contemporaries, I think.

The Description of a New World, Called The Burning-World by Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Late 1500s. Very strange early SF, semi-autobiographical. Requires tolerance for Elizabethan English, though it's easier than Shakespeare since it's prose not poetry. Author also composed poems about pixies responsible for moving atoms around.

The Three Impostor: and Other Stories, by Arthur Machen. Very Lovecraftian, except that it predates Lovecraft.

Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling. Not read as much as his other stories these days; basically a tour of English/European history from a decidedly British perspective, courtesy of tour guide Puck.

The Days of Chivalry,or, The Legend of Croque-Mitaine; original in French by Ernest Louis Victor Jules L'Epine; free (VERY free) translation by Thomas Hood the Younger, late 1890s. 177 illustrations by Gustave Doré. Originally a children's book, this heavily allegorical book follows the adventures of Mitaine, female squire to the legendary French knight Sir Roland. Would never hand this to a child now. Illustrations of impalements. Thoroughly racist, sexist, and every other kind of -ist you can think of. Shows illustration of Mohammed getting his teeth punched out by Roland (!!). Despite all that, fun in a horrifying kind of way. Reading this helped me understand how World War I came about. If this is the kind of thing they were raising their kids on, no wonder they killed millions of each other.

A Gift Upon the Shore by M. K. Wren -- two women struggle to preserve knowledge in post-apocalyptic Oregon. SF only by membership in post-apocalyptic sub-genre, but beautifully written.

Interesting question. Will keep eye on discussion. Note to self: must take refresher course on personal pronouns.

Try Gandi. Their contract is written for clarity, and specifies in bold text on page 2 that "You are the owner of your domain name." The phrase "sole discretion" does not appear anywhere in the document. Do note that they sometimes add some terms and conditions specific to the type of extension you register (e.g. .com, .org, etc), so you'll want to double check those.

Their prices are middling; not the cheapest but not very pricey either. I've found the service excellent in the ten years I've been using them, and I've never once come across any kind of shenanigans story about them.

They're based in France, so any political crap which affects their service is likely to be French or EU based. And frankly, both France and the EU generally have saner laws than the U.S. when it comes to Internet stuff. (Generally! Not always.)

Take a look at the Pathfinder Society. It's *mostly* focused on the US, but there are games in other countries.

Other than that, try looking in gaming forums. I'm partial to the Pathfinder stuff, and they have very active forums where you can likely find a game in your area.

Last but not least, you could bite the bullet, become a GM, and recruit some players. There are even "beginners box" type products for exactly this situation. Then you'd have a game.

No. You're not like "the majority of the population": you have a problem with authority, while most people don't.

The original poster is correct. The majority of the population is very likely to go along with the demands of someone perceived to be in authority. As evidence, I direct your attention to the Milgram Experiments, in which random guys from off the street were asked to administer electrical shocks to total strangers, starting at five volts and going all the way to 450 volts in small increments. The subjects of the experiment believed that the shocks were part of an experiment designed to test the effects of punishment on memory, when in fact the person supposedly receiving the shocks was an actor. And here are the results:

Well, how many people would go all the way to 450 volts in that situation? Milgram asked 39 psychiatrists and they all said NO ONE would. If you ask ordinary people the same question, they say only a pathological fringe element, perhaps one or two percent of the population, would go all the way. Certainly people know they themselves WOULD NOT, COULD NOT, EVER, NEVER do such a thing. So if you know that you would not, could not, that’s what almost everyone says.

Milgram ran 40 men, one at a time, in the situation I just described. All 40 shocked the Learner after he started grunting; all 40 gave the “household voltage” 120 volt shock. Thirty-four went past the 150 volt mark where the Learner demanded to be set free, which means 85% of the Teachers paid less attention to the Learner’s undeniable rights than they did to the Experimenter’s insistence that the study continue. Thereafter a few more people dropped out, one here and one there. Altogether fifteen men got up the gumption to eventually tell the Experimenter, “No, I won’t.” But the other twenty-five men went to 450 volts and threw the switch over and over until the Experimenter told them to stop.

That’s not NONE of them. That’s 62%.

(Writeup by Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians, pages 225-226)

This and similar experiments have shown repeatedly that resistance to authority is the exception, not the rule. The TSA counts on that.

Both ends of this are wrong, at least in the short to medium term: our data's not that accessible, and most things you call the help desk for are not Googlable (if that's a word). Things like JPL's internal policies and procedures, for example -- we have an internal, Google-based search engine, but it's not able to find everything by a long shot.

Also, as it happens, our help desk is very good -- even if it is run by Lockheed Martin -- and it would actually be a shame to see it go away. This might change someday, but right now, humans are irreplaceable.