Tigranes

Well, I read the whole State of the Union speech, but without the relevant contextual knowledge I can't make heads or tails of the policy announcements, just that he's still a very good speaker. So does the ruling actually limit this to American corporations (and whats the definition in terms of board, shareholders, etc)? Or is Obama implying that 'American' corporations with a heavy foreign influence could in turn influence the elections?

For moneys!

I'll kill you

Used the conf file to set it to windows, played a little bit. The game has class and I can already see it's gonna be a lot of fun, though a lot of pixel hunting too. Can't download Arcanum yet due to bandwidth, but for anyone doing so, here is the super final latest version of Grog's Unofficial Arcanum Patch, an absolute must. I'm sure there's a decent hi-res mod out there too...

Jesus wheeze hoi polloi. 1) Pirating a game = stealing 2) DRM does not reduce piracy significantly; it might reduce some but it also increases some Can't we stick this up as some sort of canon, then move on? why start it all over again? Nobody here said they'll pirate games, why begin the argument about 'entitlements'?

I had DOSBox installed already so just ran GK through that. Everything too fast, lots of errors and crashes. So just used their shortcut and it runs fine, though in full screen. windows 7.

Putting it back to the original quote and the original exchange, The argument is whether Fox news took a particular conversation on their program and put a spin on it, jumping on something and making the most of it to make the person look bad. Wrath's comments about Obama throwing her under a bus, etc. doesn't apply to that. The particular exchange in question is clearly intended to, and above all other things does, what Hurlshot says: "quoting Mao to make a point about not giving up no matter the odds". So the original intent was ignored, the quote's proportions distorted in order to say MAO LOVAH. At this point there is only one point of contention: is having Mao as one of your favourite political philosophers so unacceptable you should be burnt on a stick? (I disagree with Calax here, it doesn't matter if Theresa too is mentioned, if liking Mao is reason enough for condemnation.) Well we could get into an argument about that all day long, taks has opened that up, but it's not relevant and it's ultimately pretty futile. Mao is not generally accepted by society to be an 'unmentionable' person, like Hitler is in many ways. Fox isn't actually jumping on this because they always thought Mao was a horrid person, they are mobilising the most negative significations 'Mao Zedong' can have and using this to manufacture a sensational and negative representation of the speaker. You're so smart taks, take me now

Arcanum! Gabriel Knight! Sold!

aww, nuts.

Exactly, defeats the point. Why do I have to wait for some unnecessary program to cork up my tubes for 5 minutes, just to tell me it's nto actually going to do anything at all and I can finally play?

Excellent, it's sold then, provided the guesses are right. The thing with me is that I love these kind of games, but with some I just get stuck on the laborious gameplay that I simply don't find fun. Fahrenheit was a matter of turning my brain off and hurrying along with the gameplay until I got to some story, I've stopped Psychonauts because of the boring kiddie platforming. On the other hand I had no problem with more RPG-ish 'world interaction' stuff like in Conquests of the Longbow.

Never heard of Gabriel Knight, but sounds like a story-driven adventure game? Will I like it? I don't like getting stuck on crazy puzzles but I like Sierra / Lucasarts style adv games.

weeeeee....

So you're basically spending over two thousand bucks just so you have the options of Small, Medium and Large? That qualifies as 'horribly irresponsible expenditure' in my book, but fair enough, it's your money. I guess people are willing to buy in that way.

You mean Hitler is on the 'bad person' list so if you can't quote him in a positive way? The horror!

I don't really see the point, I'm not sure what use-niche it fills. It's big so it's not like an iphone 'wow it's pocket size but I can do so much stuff'. It can't multitask and has no USB, which are pretty super crucial tasks, so it's crippled if you want to use it like a laptop. Why would you want something in the middle of a netbook or high-tech phone? I mean, I guess if you find carrying 1kg netbooks around annoying..

Wait, what, I still have a 9 hour countdown.

It's absolutely a non issue. Pushing that person, whoever he/she is, into being a crazed Mao worshipper is logically bankrupt, it's nonsense. It's one of those cases where the media need to just shut up a little.

Doing it now, it's not that bad. Depends on your job, though, and uh, you can't really do a lot much else with your life. Yeah, I wondered why I kept getting rogue ant journeymen near the laptop. At least I don't have a desktop case. fire ants are terrible, and as you say a lot more tenacious. But then you have varieties in warmer climates that can reduce your shoes to dust in minutes.

If it is, I'm sold - I don't have a copy of Arcanum around anymore.

Heh, 3 pages while I sleep. For me, Dragon Age came pretty close to pushing me over the edge. I don't mind if I"m playing multiplayer or it's an MMO, so that there is actually a reason. If not, I don't want a game to connect to the internet. I don't want to have to sign up to some random useless website to play my game. I don't want it to check for updates. I don't want stupid popups. I don't want achievements, I don't want my screenshots upload to my profile, I don't want my playing reported in any form. They are all unnecessary for me. I'm actually of the opinion that if all this 'meta / contextual' stuff actually amounted to a healthy and productive gaming community, and there are clear and simple options that let you opt into it (I tolerated DA cause you can 'opt out' of most/all of this eventually). e.g. sharing user-made videos, screenshots & let's plays quickly and in an easy and centralised manner. Not "achievements for learning to walk", or automating everything so that it's more annoying when things break. By the way, for all the Americans, Swedish and whatnot out there, consider that I can't even use Steam, because with my useless NZ internet, it takes +5 minutes, without exaggeration, for it to even connect initially. That means 10+ minutes total until I can actually play Empire: Total War. Patch downloads hang and cause trouble as well. Thankfully ETW was piss, so I've gotten rid of Steam, but all this internet DRM stuff is moronic when you consider the internet situation here. And it's not as if I'm living in Burkina Faso. Yeah, I can see myself not minding all this as much if I was, I don't know, in Korea with the superfast internet. But for all of us, there will come a point where it does matter, and it's gonna be like having a miniature suit-head shoving sticks up your butt all the time.

Huh. The gameplay stuff sounds interesting, actually.

New blanket Ubisoft DRM forces you to be online all the time to play. -Got to be online to play. Always. If connection lost, game 'pauses' then... unclear. -Saves remotely. Like an MMO. -Notes when you play, etc, and maybe other info. -Will patch if online servers go down. -No CD in drive, unlimited activations.

I wonder what type of ants they were, actually - if I were anywhere near the planet's midriff I wouldn't dare deal with ants with anything other than hair-raising cautiousness. Honestly I think the easiest solution would be to coat several peaches in the liquid anticide, place them strategically in the bushes at the centre of the grass patch, and cause a mass genocide of such proportions that the current ant population would collapse. Then repeated anticide basins in my room and regular sprays should let them know to look elsewhere. I'd rather not do that unless I have to, though. In that last hour, they seemed to have taken care of my glob problem; they've slurped it all up and gone back to the basin, where there's enough now for a quiche.

There's an ant army invasion in my room going on. Building is built with an open grass patch in the centre. Room faces said patch. Thus, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of ants live just below our carpets. I really don't mind and I don't like killing them, but they come out in hundreds even to raid half a banana in the bottom of the rubbish bin. So I sprayed the whole place and then placed two small basins of liquid anticide near the carpets. Well the first basin has so far attracted.. I don't know, there's at least 2-300 dead in/near the basin and probably double or triple that dead after they've gone back to their nests. I was moving the second basin to the first to support when I realised it leaks! I threw it outside onto the grass patch (genocide, there... oops) but spilled a couple of globs on the bloody carpet. Impossible to wash out completely. One glob is only 30cm away from the basin so the ants have already found it, if they get the other glob 2m away then they'll be all over the room. It's 1am so I'll have to leave it all till the morning, spray like hell and throw the basin out, then vacuum vacuum. I'm thinking the liquid wasn't a smart idea, since I'll never kill them all anyway.