Oblarg

Anyone who is an avid music listener can easily confirm this - it's a HUGE source of exposure for bands that would otherwise be unknown.

Forgotten demo bands can pretty pretty good. Seriously, this is some awesome heavy metal.

I really, really don't like where they've taken the plot of the trilogy. It just seems that they never really extensively planned out the story arc beforehand and are scrambling to make something coherent, as the reapers, as they were introduced in the first game, were simply too powerful a foe to be plausibly defeated.

Here's a great look at piracy, too: http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/303512/Piracy_PC_Gaming

Probably not a day-1 purchase from me, as I'm not too pleased with the trend of merging twitch-gaming with stats (the two are at cross-purposes in almost all cases), but it does look interesting. Reinhart certainly looks like a more interesting/difficult character than the others I've seen. The art direction is fantastic - that entropic magic looks great.

Is this even worthy of discussion?

*shrug* Why did WW1 start? Why did the Tunisian revolution start? Fair enough - I'm certainly not arguing that the book burning was the true cause of the slaughter, but simply that it would do a lot more for their legitimacy if they didn't feel the need to mask reasonable causes behind utterly absurd ones. Then again, they're probably not doing it consciously, which leads back to the somewhat scary fact that many people in that part of the world, on some level, feel that the burning of a holy book can justify killings.

Yes, but when those very afghanis are claiming the deaths were due to the burning of a quran, that should be irrelevant, right? I'd probably feel more sympathy for them if they'd just come out and say "we're fed up with our country being ****ed over by foreign powers and decided to vent our anger."

Actually it'd work but it'd probably be more one way communication than anything between two very specific points. Basically you'd entangle your particles and then cause them to "read" a message on one end and that message would appear at the other end at the exact same time. But you couldn't do it like Shepard where you could order the other guy to shut up. Not really. Sure, once you observe one entangled particle you know the state of the other, but that state was still randomly generated. Only the people who observed the particles first would know the states of the other particles, thus the "senders" in this case are the only ones who know the message. You don't "set" the state of an entangled particle so much as you observe it and from what you observed then know the state of the other particle. Thus, entangled particles alone cannot really send a message. The main interest in quantum communication, as far as I know, is accurately conveying the quantum state of a particle which you have not already observed (quantum teleportation), and this requires the use of standard, light-speed limited communication.

Quantum entanglement, as far as I know, isn't too useful for communication. Basically, all it does is create two particles which share the same waveform, which means that if you observe one of them, then the cross-terms disappear for both and you know the state of the other.

Redemption - Something Wicked This Way Comes You know, this one song probably has more good musical ideas than the rest of this band's career put together. It's really annoying when an overall mediocre band has one truly great song, as it just leaves you wondering how good they might have been if they had written more like it.

The problem here is not religion itself, no - religion is fairly benign, as long as it is interpreted in a largely metaphorical sense that does not contradict observable fact. The problem here is absurd fundamentalism, and it's abundantly clear that Islam has a disproportionately high number of fundamentalist nutcases relative to the other major religions. Sure, Christianity has its fair share of them - those still attempting to push creationism into science classes come to mind - but it's nowhere near the scale observed in Islam.

The blame for the deaths cannot in any way be placed on the pastor, no matter how stupid his actions were, or even if they were intended to incite. Killing people is not a reasonable response to the burning of a holy book, and if you place the blame on the pastor then you are basically saying we all have an obligation to cater to the whims of unreasonable people (in this case, radical muslims). If I were to tell you that I'd go shoot up a local school if you ate a cheeseburger tomorrow, and you proceeded to eat a cheeseburger and I shot up the school, would that make you in any capacity responsible for the shooting? It's an extreme example, sure, but the concept is identical. Anyway, these scumbags don't do much for the whole "religion of peace" aesthetic that legitimate Muslims seem to be aiming for. A pity Islam has such a disproportionate number of absurd fundamentalists - I can't think of any other religion with followers that would react this way to something as trivial as a bigoted pastor burning their holy book.

Griffin - HEAVY METAL ATTACK!

Massively underrated band.

It's all in my video (check sig). No matter what I did or didn't do, failure just ain't option. I've done total of 6 runs and tried various combos (if available) in different runs. I'd say the ending where is pretty much a failure, if you're judging by what's good for the American people.

From what I've read, Chris Avellone sort of went into it with the purpose of inverting most of the standard star wars tropes. Kreia was pretty much his personal commentary on how silly the entire light side/dark side dichotomy is. My favorite part about the game (apart from Kreia) is how he retconned Revan's character into being far more interesting, by introducing the whole "distinction between a fall and a sacrifice" concept and implying that Revan had some ulterior motive which mandated his "fall." I really wish I could have seen where they'd have taken KotOR3 along those lines. Of course, BioWare decided to **** all over the whole thing with SW:TOR, which reduced Revan to a simple, uninteresting character again.

KoTOR>>>KoTOR 2 Rofl, wat? If you're a fan of horrid writing and shallow, one-dimensional characters, I guess.

I'd sure like it if he weren't taken seriously, but there are a lot of morons in this country. The "global warming caused Katrina" crowd aren't much better, mind you - if anything, they're worse, as they make it hard for anyone to take a reasonable look at the effects of climate change and what steps (if any) should be taken.

Fair enough. This situation is pretty scary, tbh - a few days ago it seemed they'd have it under control, but now it's looking quite bad.

Nah, the redundancies were most likely perfectly fine for coping with the sort of disaster the plant was designed to cope with. You seem to be caught up on the fact that it was the tsunami that caused the backup power to fail, but do you have any reliable source that the same could have happened in the type of 8.2 magnitude quake the system was designed, at most, to cope with? I find it very hard to believe.

Wals, with all due respect, I don't think you quite appreciate the difference between an 8.2 (what the system was designed to cope with) and a 9.0 (what the system got hit with). It's a logarithmic scale - the difference is a factor of 8. That's nearly an order of magnitude. Expecting a system designed to cope with an 8.2 to be able to cope with a 9.0 is, quite honestly, completely absurd. A 9.0 magnitude quake is almost impossible to deal with under any circumstance. If anything needs to be questioned in this situation, it's the wisdom of building nuclear reactors in a quake-prone area, not the efficacy of the safety measures at the plants themselves.

Ah, irony. Reread the second sentence of my post. I'll be honest, I hadn't read that. *coughs* Nonetheless, I don't see how you could have said that as if it helps your case. I'm saying that the repair mechanism wasn't designed for this sort of accident, and that the industry consensus prior to the incident probably was that it bloody well should have been. If you disagree that's your prerogative, but I'd suggest that disagreeing with such a slew of opinion would make even me stop and wonder. No - it's not trivial to design your system to cope with a quake of this magnitude, and I think it's very easy to say "it should have been" without appreciation for how hard it is to do.

Ah, irony. Reread the second sentence of my post.