Walsingham

I don't know who Sephiroth is. But I don't think people were flaming him. In fact I didn't know you could flame a fictional character. If so, I'd like to flame Darth Vader in ep III. "YOU SUCK!" In a few moments I managed to lose all respect for my favourite bad guy of all.

I don't hold with knocking Chelski. They do provide some interesting football on occasion. Newcastle for me though. Good team, good fans even if they do beat up mackhams whenever they find them.

I doubt it, but it sounds like something Hellboy or somesuch would have to stop : "Seize the Nazi weather control device and hold it for the duration of our landings." heh.

IIRC it's 'muai thai'. I think you just ordered a ****tail. Best ask Steve. My Thai is so rusty I recently confused a waitress nearly to tears. :D

Civ 3 was a lot of fun for me ...until I worked out I was getting screwed. The improved terrain, the culture conversions, the strategic resources, the variety of units. These could have been awesome. But the laziness in coding the Ai just ruins it for me. I have only played on high difficulty setings once, to see if I could. It was tedious and excruciating. I have had more fun doing business accounts, and at least there I was getting paid. There was no room for flair or imagination. You just had to be retentive about never forgetting to do anything, and following some simple rules. I think what we really need in these games is a bit of a rethink about why we play them,and what we would find enjoyable. We do it to test ourselves, certainly. But we'd also like a bit of enjoying our power when we have it, and enjoying our own ingenuity when we compose novel strategies and tactics. This means things like AIs making teh odd mistake, unevenly defending, launching distraction operations, launching all out offensives, and so on. It means a range of tools, but not having to be a bloody accountant in order to get them. I dunno. I'll still play the game, but on warlord setting. But like I say I'm not buying the next one. Not after what I've read here, and seen myself. In particular, one of my freinds pointed out that the AI in the original Panzer General released in 1995 is smarter than the ones in Civ.

IMO squaddies and jarheads of every stripe need brains. After all they have both the enemy and their own officers trying to kill them.

Welcome aboard, Junai. It does have to be said that I was recapping my knowledge of WW2 recently and noticed that with the exception of 6th June 1944 the weather uniformly went against us, and for the Nazis. Sometimes ridiculously so, with winter weather being felt in May, teh fiercest storms recorded in 50 years and so on and on.

*Draws his side-arm, brandishing it above his head, and shouts "Hell yeah!"*

I showed Fight Club to my aged parents last night. My stepfather hated it, by my dear old mum thought it was fantastic. Absolutely cracking film.

I direct our newer users to a cracking example of voice acting that i have used before: http://www.big-boys.com/articles/fewgoodmen.html Tell me that the scene would have been the same with text only. Jack Nicholson for next Obsidian bad guy!

IMO you need an antagonist not just a villain. I played BG as a rather evil young woman, not so terribly dissimilar to Jon boy's utterly driven campaign for power and independence. I hated the elves so much I would have joined in killing them if it hadn't prevented me getting my mitts on Irenicus. This was the genius of Irenicus. He was just so all fethed arrogant and selfish that you had to kill him. For God's sake he nicked all my stuff and sold it, probably to buy more pairs of leather pants. AND he was a wizard, and we all know what we do to wizards. Plus he seemed to change his mind about you at several points in teh game, unsure of whether to destroy you or exploit you. More marks of a fantastic bad guy. The mark of a good villain is how much you enjoy seeing them die. Jon gets this vote.

We certainly do not have enough men on teh ground in teh classical sense. However, at present levels we arebr relatively unobtrusive, which is how the majority of Afghans want it. We should be focussed 100% on training the ANA and local police forces (and making sure they get paid on time). HURRICANE: I saw a clip from the US Daily comedy show or somesuch comparing Katrina with the Lewinsky scandal. This is just sad. No-one died because the Chief couldn't keep his wang in his pants. Yet Bush will ultimately catch less flak than Clinton did.

Irenicus. Because I so wanted to kill him by the end, just because I hated him so much.

I agree. I also think that the war correspondents in Iraq ought to put down the mic and grab a rifle. Nothing like untrained people in a crisis situation. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I remember seeing a program in which some news guys said that if all the journalists had been armed with guns at Tora Bora in Afghanistan, Osama would have been dead or captured by now. There were more reporters than US soldiers around that mountain. (according to them anyway) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I wouldn't want most reporters to be armed. war is dangerous enough without drunken egomaniacs of suspicious intellect being set loose.

I agree with just about everything LadyCrimson said. Separate from her statement I'd reiterate this is about comparative treatment of the issue. If alcohol and tobacco are legal then marijuana makes sense. Even if it is not freely legal, it should at the very least be available on prescription. 1. Ender, you're damn right that it ahs an effect in the short term. That's the point of taking it! :D It is not safe to be doing it while in a position of responsibility. Agree with you there. 2. The long term lung implications are complicated by the fact people mix dope with tobacco. Moreover, since it is illegal you have no idea how it has been grown or what it has been treated with. Legalisation could be accompanied by the use of non-tobacco based mixes treated with hashish oil, and hashish in consumables. Bear in mind teh latter would be the mode used in legal medical use. 3. I'd be interested in the studies you mention on long term motivational effects. I'm not saying anecdotal evidence can outweigh it, but all the same I know many very highly motivated users of marijuana. I might also point out that because of the short term effects lasting quite a long time high levels of marijuana use would not be entered into as a behaviour by people who didn't already have motivational issues. 4. Since the jury is still out on precisely how erectile functioning works I can't suggest a confounding factor. Marijuana and particularly very heavy marijuana use may lead to poor sperm counts etc, but again some very heavy users may be *ahem* losers to start with. Unfair? Possibly. ~ Compare this with the consequences of getting incapacitated with alcohol on a daily basis. You'll have all the above, plus cirhossis of the liver, and be dead in years. Should alcohol be illegal? No. It is up to each of us to choose not to go down teh road of chronic alcohol abuse.

Well, I'll double check out of of respect for your experience, but I'm telling you I know what I saw. And yes, the Celts are in Play the World. They have a 3.2.2 swordsman as their special unit. Given you experience, as I say, I am prepared to be wrong about magic production. However, the rates of production are just ridiculous, bearing in mind this was on a deliberately low setting. There is precious little excuse for this laziness now that so much work is being done on AI. I won't be buying Civ IV as a consequence.

http://www.oxan.com/display.aspx?StoryDate...B&StoryNumber=1

Don't even bring a gun if you don't intend to shoot to kill.

We are not talking about a few here. We are talking about THE journal for the British Medical establishment. If you really insist I will try to find the issue and so forth, but i'll only do so if you swear to actually read it. Otherwise I'm going to ask you take my word since it woudl be a really stupid way to lie. The BMJ concluded there was no evidence that marijuana was physiologically addictive (psych addictive is something else), and could not be regarded as harmful to health, especially when compared with alcohol or tobacco. The review did discuss some of the studies which have shown harmful effects and their conclusion was that the institutes responsible were 'contaminated' by funding from right-wing think tanks who had been funding eugenics programs. By itself this might not be so bad, but the fact that no studies showing harm had arisen outside these groups was suspicious. EDIT: a colleague also pointed out that dope use in Holland (where it is legal) has actually fallen, and is far lower than the US, where the penalties are among the harshest in the world.

The British Medical Journal.

Throw me a hard one. "The Weight" From the album "Music from Big Pink", by 'The Band', released in 1968.

You can go looking for it, but I was reading a copy of the original resolution when I mae my mind up on this. For fairness sake the UK Attorney General felt the resolution did not provide sufficient case in its own right. However, in the same report he said that intervention would be legal in th event of a humanitarian crisis, but knew of no reason that Iraq could be called a humanitarian crisis. I found this amusing. (Man checking remains recovered from mass grave)

"Gimme some lovin'"? Done extremely well by the Blues Brothers.

The fact that the French attempted to get an amendment passed to change the original statement sews it up for me. They knew the resolution obliged action, and were trying to avoid it.

I apologise, but i haven't time to go through the current state of Iran at this time. Find some Iranians and ask them about home. Find some Afghans and ask them about home under the Taliban. Iraq isn't only about oil, either. There are cheaper ways to get oil than war. If we didn't care about freedom we could have done what the French did and just buy the stuff. Moreover there are plenty of weaker countries than Iraq with oil which we could have invaded.