alanschu

Yeah, Iguodala will certainly help that team. Great spacing and will definitely be fun to watch if they can keep their spacing. Bogut needs to stay healthy though!

There is a certain amount of irony of something like this happening on 4th of July. Could be a cultural thing? Here was a fun story about an RCMP officer: Although RCMP officers are hardly immune from being jerks too.

Are you referring to the one at a particular west coast school? (That one was pretty interesting) Milgram's experiments were neat too.

Does GS still have their core? Curry, Thompson, Lee, Bogut?

Did you pay for the article? (I didn't) The abstract for the article only states an estimate of 20,000 for 2009, not 2006. As for the large difference, in the same paragraph you got the 400,000 (it was actually 440,000) from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, with the US Fish and Wildlife Service itself "pointing out that it was only an 'estimate' by one of many scientists and was not officially supported by the agency." So the US Fish and Wildlife Service straight up stated that the agency itself doesn't support that number. That said, the numbers are estimates. I'm not taking them as gospel. No one here said such a thing. I will certainly grant it more credence, however, than a poster with an agenda on an internet message board that makes a loaded post with an implication to the seriousness of the environmental impact wind generators have on bird populations simply by posting that, in fact, a bird was killed by a wind generator (all the while downplaying things like oilspills because they are accidents, not a part of normal operation). That said, there appears to be a large discrepancy between the numbers. Fair enough, perhaps they aren't accurate. Do you feel that wind power generators have a more significant impact on the environment than coal and oil power generators? How about their respective influences on the mortality rates of birds and other wildlife? You are certainly skeptical that the numbers mean anything, so what do you think reality is?

LOL that's kinda funny actually, because Dwight Howard went to Houston in my NBA 2k13 game as well!

4 year deals are A-OK though

I vaguely recall playing Pacific Islands way back in the day... hahaha

I don't know. Most of the time when I see a police officer, they are driving around in their patrol car or getting a coffee at a convenience store or cafe/restaurant. My friend had his car stolen one time, and he reported it and a day or two later, they called back saying they found the car. A few years later, we once received a phone call from a constable as he was in our neighbourhood investigating a disturbance and noticed that my friend's side mirror had been busted up. We had an RCMP liaison officer at my high school, and he was bar none one of the nicest people I have ever met. Being a bunch of teenage boys, we were immediately fascinated with his sidearm and he talked a bit about the level of choice in firearms, training, and so forth. Although he refused to unholster it in part due to general safety, but I think mostly because he was proud of never having to unholster it while in uniform, and didn't want to change that for no good reason. (Every police officer I ever spoke with actually has said they have never had to pull their firearm in the line of duty, and would prefer to keep it that way). We also have the rule about high speed pursuits. In the past decade, Edmonton actually got a helicopter so high speed pursuits get called in, with the helicopter tracking visual while police coordinate at safe speeds and distances. I have seen police do some shady things. I saw one turn his lights on to go through an intersection and then turn them off (I don't know if there is any sort of operating procedure for them to do something like that with good reason, however). I remember one late night seeing two cruisers aggressively swerving in and out of two lanes, despite me not seeing any sort of obvious reason for them to be doing so. There's also the occasional charge of corruption and even more minor things like overtime abuse and whatnot, that are certainly things that need to be called out.

Yeah, it may be an "arbitrary number" but that's the way you feel. Sometimes people go "whoa, that was a steal!" Although I think Hockey fans are still a bit on the $39 million salary cap mentality as opposed to a $64.3 million, so almost all contract signings I see will have some people suggesting "really overpaid."

No it's not!

I'm pretty sure they had indicated that they'd love to do more going forward.

That seems a chicken/egg situation. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that older games are cheapened by sales, and not that the sales reflect how they cheapened naturally. Especially when consoles have similar issues of games losing their value in the tail. Really, the only decent way to grow audiences is by encouraging impulse buys. With larger franchises, people need a way to catch up without breaking the bank. And with smaller franchises, there's not enough word of mouth going around for the people on the fence to spend the full price. How else can they get people to take a chance? Especially in an atmosphere of growing consumer distrust. Prices are specifically lowered over time because the prices eventually become elastic. So yeah at some point prices need to come down. The funny thing I find, however, is that they still did this despite Steam sales. I never understood the justification for things like piracy because "This game isn't worth the full price" when eventually the price would come down. It's not quite the same, though as the biggest advantage of Steam sales, however, is that the cost of changing prices is miniscule (compared to retail), and they can literally be done for one day which can really help impulse purchases. It also makes it easier to put a game on sale on an even more extreme sale, which does happen from time to time. I do think that people will need to alter their expectations somewhat, though. It might just be personal bias speaking, but the way I approach digital purchases, especially sales, is I look at the price and conclude "Do I think it's worth that price?" If so, I'll buy it. A lot of things influence that decision, but I have learned to NOT get upset if I conclude "Yup it's on sale for $20 and that's so worth it" only to have it hit one of those one day $5 prices a couple days later.

"since I'm never needlessly rude to anyone." Well that's an interesting perspective. Not so much in a disagreement in that "No way man, you are totally needlessly rude to people" but rather that you actually appear to feel justified and that those you are rude to in fact, are deserving of it. Huh. In general your posting style shifts me away from your perspective, an observation that is actually being supported through actual research. For instance, initial research supports the idea that being rude on the internet decreases the actual knowledge people receive about discussions, while leading those people to feel they are more knowledgeable and increasingly polarizing them. Your posts do a better job of convincing me that your perspective is irrelevant, compared to someone like Malcador or Calax. Plus, you run the increasing chance that I actually literally put you on ignore, providing additional barriers to me actually seeing your posts. Personally, I have always been of the mind that you're rude on the internet because you can be, and you find it fun. *shrug*

I don't know if the sports analogy works as well (since American football is still going to be heavily influenced by luck and players will need to be adaptive to how plays develop). Something like Starcraft is deterministic. As such, winning a battle comes down purely to the tactical decisions (what units did I build, how did I focus their fire, how did I group them) as opposed to some level of random variance. So if a guy with 5 marines beats a guy with 8 marines, it means that the guy with 5 marines made better decisions during the combat to ensure victory. With more random variation, it's possible that random number generator does well for one group, and poor for another. While, over a lot of games, this all balances out (someone isn't going to be on an epic losing streak because of RNG), for isolated events they can make a difference. Sometimes for yay, sometimes for nay. Having said that, good players will still beat poor players, because even with the variation there's still going to be known expected values and a probability distribution to allow the player to make reasonably more informed choices. I'd consider it more a comparison of something like chess (capability of all pieces is known and unalterable) to poker. Good players tend to beat poor players in poker very consistently, but a poor player may get some luck and end up winning the odd round/game.

Part of me has to ask "If it causes more damage than the windmills, do we care if it's an accident?" (Note the word "if" as I don't actually know the numbers). There is also situations such as when wildlife enters tailing ponds of oilsands extractions (as an Albertan, this topic comes up a fair bit): http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2010/10/26/edmonton-more-ducks-tailings-pond.html This article refers to 230 dead ducks, although it does reference an incident that happened in 2008 where 1600 ducks were killed by landing in a tailing pond, although in both cases you could rule it as an "accident" as well. I did a google for "birds killed at power plant" and ended up at the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power#Ecology Whether or not "per Gigawatt Hour" is the best form of measurement is something I can't really agree nor disagree with. I could see having more wind power generators altering this number, but it could just as easily be an improvement as a decrease for me as I'm just guessing. A paper was written in 2009, here, that appears to conclude that wind power generators are safer for birds than fossil fuel power generators, although states that additional research is required. This was the source for the Wikipedia articles numbers.

Steam (finally!) added in the feature of alerting users that have it on their wishlist, so it's easier to not do that. Although yeah, for a developer, someone forgetting about it outright would definitely not be good haha. But the Steam sales also get people buying games that they likely will never play ever, so how it all falls down is something I can only guess at.

They still should be held to the same standard, or do you agree we should give departments in bad areas more leeway? They should be held to the same standard. My counter question would be, should the be held to the same level of contempt?

] I'm 99% sure that Starcraft is completely deterministic. What your unit says it does for damage is what it will do for damage, less any (also constant) armor effects. League of Legends is similar, although it does have a random (but predictable) element with its critical hits. There's no such thing as "You do 5-10 damage" with your attacks.

I am pretty sure that every member of EPS has to take some level of post-secondary. There were quite a few of EPS hopefuls in a lot of my early sociology courses.

What about Starcraft 1 or stuff like League of Legends? (LOL has crits, but that's about it)

Well, I'm likely not one to buy Skyrim nor Call of Duty (I haven't bought either of them), but a developer will lose a lot of of money if they opted to sell at $20 instead of $60 and you don't effectively triple your sales. The thing about your impulse buy is that it's still applicable later. It doesn't need to happen on day one if they end up doing pretty well with sales at triple the cost. If they can sell to those people at $60, and then get you at $20 later, it's much better than selling to everyone at $20. Further, while you and I may not consider a game like Skyrim or Call of Duty to be worth full price at release, a lot of other people do.

It's a perspective I can still understand. Few people are ever happy to see the police. Either they are potentially in trouble, or they are victims themselves. And people just hate it when police don't abuse their powers to their own benefit, if they've been victimized.

It's great for consumers. I actually don't know if it's good/bad for developers. I have heard arguments on both sides. I think it's great for smaller developers (well, the digital platform in general). I'm curious if there were any changes in purchasing habits for games, because I know some people that have pretty much just sworn off ever buying anything on Day One ever again, and just waiting for steam sales. This would be a case where profits would actually decline, if the person normally would have bought earlier just to ensure picking up the product. Whether or not this outweighs the increased numbers is completely oblivious to me, though I can see the logic that it may make economies of scale that much more important.

I greatly prefer this as well. And yeah, I should be clear that I was speaking about the original COH. I haven't played the second.