My playgroup's biggest problem was the amount of "system mastery" required to play the game in a timely manner. When every character has 10+ abilities which are all useful in slightly different situations using keywords like push, pull, slide, daze, stun, mark, etc., it can take an incredibly steep learning curve. Add to that all the bookkeeping you must do round-to-round for 5-6 PCs plus 5-10 monsters with abilities that have durations, cause damage each round, refresh and can be re-used, trigger off actions or events, have moving or variable areas of effect, and so on. Combat took forever. We run a session once a week for about 6 hours, and found that we struggled to run two combat encounters each night. Sure, we could structure the night better so that we had everything optimized to keep gameplay as smooth and quickly paced as possible, but that's not a fun way to play a game. D&D is about sitting around a table laughing and bullshitting with friends. I don't want to organize my game session like a business meeting. I get enough of that at work!

The other issue is that such a strong mechanical focus in the rulebooks for 4E overtakes even the storytelling and roleplaying aspects of the game. Ideas like Skill Challenges work great for things like navigating the wilderness or disarming complex traps, but the designers tried to force this mechanic into any encounter that wasn't a combat encounter. Including those better resolved with talking and roleplaying (which really doesn't need rules). Additionally, often in the published encounters we found that the author assumed the players would succeed at skill challenges or that the DM should allow unlimited retries even when you're doing things like... trying to be diplomatic or search for information in a hostile town. So it became "roll dice until I say you can continue with the story" and then "oh, you failed again? what happens... it looks like you can't continue and have no hope of picking up the trail. that's lame and defeats the purpose of running a module, so let's assume you succeeded or it's game over".

Those of us in the group that loved mechanics loved the game. Mechanically combat was fantastic. It was complex and interesting. It was never just "roll a d20 and roll for damage" over and over. Problem was... those beautiful mechanics completely got in the way of the rest of the game. 4E was a tabletop war game shoved into an RPG box. It was a really good and fun tabletop war game, but it wasn't D&D.

The only mechanical issue I had with the game is that the mechanics were too delicately balanced. It was obvious that even a +1 or -1 to a die roll was immensely important. The mechanics were so tight that it was obvious while playing it. That's... too tight. The fudge factor needs to be higher.

Compare emacs to hurd and you'll see the lengths people go to to avoid doing something that looks like actual work.

"Schadenfrisky".

I've had dysthymia -- that's chronic, low level depression that leaves you prone to moderate depression -- for the past, oh, 20 years. When I go off meds or am under high amounts of stress, I tend to turtle. When I turtle, I get more depressed. I spend a lot of time alone, on the Internet browsing or watching videos, or playing video games. These activities are my natural coping mechanisms to relieve regular amounts of stress, but when overwhelmed they do nothing to prevent the progression into depression. Indeed, they make it worse by eliminating social contact and preventing me from confronting any issues in my life. I will stop taking care of myself, sleeping, and eventually eating. [That's one of the salient factors in most cognitive mental illness, by the way. Your coping natural mechanisms exacerbate the symptoms. It's a self-sustaining cycle.]

Thus, depression causes me to play video games excessively and hide in my room on the Internet. My personal experience is that excessive Internet use is a symptom of depression, and I have come to recognize that when I do this I need to take action to correct it.

Note that when I'm not depressed, I can play video games as much as I want without any problems. The video games don't cause me to get depressed by themselves. Depression is not a symptom of playing video games.

"Linked" means "linked". Don't blame the social scientists because journalists are lazy about language and fact checking, and write articles based on sensationalist and misleading phrases in order to increase readership.

As a side note, fuck Gary Gutting. He's an ignorant douche bag upset by the fact that Philosophy is too far from Math or Science into the Art spectrum to be useful for a career, and takes it out on Social Scientists just on the other side of that line by appealing to the fact that, hey, Science is pretty limited the more subjective you get. This is in spite of the fact of the millions of people aided by therapy. Or would you rather talk to your neighborhood priest when you need some counseling? Because before psychotherapy took off, that was your only source of emotional counseling. Everything today we call social services used to be church organized services.

Then who the hell is buying all those stamps?

You should have said: "The USPS is not funded by tax dollars."

Most estimates I've seen put Apple in as 60-70% of the tablet market share. They alone control the hardware channel, the OS channel, and the third party application store for their product. You can't buy an iPad without iOS, you can't buy iOS without an iPad, and you can't install an application without Apple allowing it on their store.

Who's not a monopoly now?

Perhaps I'm just hyper-evolved, but I was born with two hands. Typically then, I use the mouse with one hand to designate what I want the computer to operate on, and then the other hand to specify the command I want the computer to run. The only time I need to deviate from this is when I'm producing a lot of text-based content, which typically requires enough time that moving my hand from the mouse to the keyboard is not an appreciable loss of time.

The only time when the keyboard / mouse interface breaks down is when you need to use the mouse to designate something, then type a short word longer than a few letters, then designate something else. If you've ever watched someone log in to a computer or enter their personal information on a website who doesn't know that the [tab] key advances fields, [enter] submits the current window, and [esc] cancels it, you see how painfully tedious it is. The only thing worse than watching someone fill out a form who doesn't know these key commands is being forced to fill out a form in a program or on a website where the developer didn't understand the importance of this convention and did not implement it correctly (or at all).

I was wondering the same thing. I work at a school district, and every desktop and laptop the district has purchased in the last 4-5 years (meaning every computer in use other than a few oddball donated models) has had a TPM module. I know because we had consistent problems with them under Windows XP and they had to be disabled, only to be re-enabled when the machines were migrated to Windows 7.

Yes. Of course you do.

Then you probably can't do business in that country. There is no inherent right to do business, and no right to make a profit. If you can't do it within the bounds of the law, you can't do it.

They could request extradition, assuming the two nations have good relations and working treaties with extradition agreements. This type of thing can and has happened before.

The US is treating properties which are located in the US as subject to US law, which is the natural right of any sovereign nation. Domain names, under the current DNS system, effectively reside in the US because they are managed by ICANN, an organization located in the US. That makes DNS digital property subject to US law.

You're saying he's being anti-semantic?