Zoraptor

There were- as always- people going slightly over the top in response, along the 'kill yourself plz'/ 'get cancer and die' variety to outright threats of personal violence. OK, we all know that 99% of such threats are just some anonymous moron blowing off steam on the internet, but it's easy to say that as someone it wasn't aimed at. The company's promotion of the prank call contributed to the extent and intensity of backlash once it all went sour, and it all happened on their time and ultimately it is at least partially their responsibility. If prank calls had been against station policy or they hadn't promoted the call it would be open and shut, as it is though neither was the case. But as I said, I don't personally have much sympathy for her, unless they were ordered to make the call. As much as the company promoted it a lot the DJs were hardly shrinking violets either. It's certainly a far different situation sympathy wise than someone falling off some scaffolding because it was old, poorly maintained and the company knew about it but ignored it, which is what such legislation is really aimed at.

Autocorrect amuses me, and gives Spike TV ideas for its low budget infotainment shows.

Volga Bulgarians are culture group Mongol. I checked in CK2(+). So that's the definitive answer.

The company also promoted the call extensively when it was just a Haha So Classic hoax call and were happy to grab all the publicity at that time. That certainly contributed significantly to the problems once there was blowback. I don't have much sympathy for her though, the hoax call was moronic even before it was tragic- but I equally have little sympathy for a company that was happy to take the credit and publicise to the four winds when it was still 'funny' then trotted out the DJs to carry the can when it suddenly wasn't.

You can still have a thief or mage taken out by a single missile crit hit when they're level 2, quite easily. Fortunately the game is not designed around having hordes of low hp, low xp, high relative danger missile wielding enemies like kobolds (some with Extra Fire Power, ohoho) throughout much of the early game and in the first critical mission set, as that would be criminally bad given the rule set used since effectively 5% of all attacks against a mage and even a non maxed thief will kill them stone cold dead with a single hit, let alone that mages need 2500xp to even go up that first level. Every time someone complains about Bioware's encounter design going down the toilet and how things were better in the BG series I think back to the Nashkel Mines and wonder if said person actually played the BG series. I'm not much of a fan of ME2 style plinkamole combat but it could be and occasionally was so much worse.

But V for Vendetta was the best movie of all time! Of all time! I hear it even had a comic strip spin off it was so great. How else will I feel like a badass anarchist vigilante while sitting behind my computer in comfortable middle class splendour, hmm?

Meh, every time I see SR3 I wonder how I missed the Space Rangers 3 release. Damn acronyms. I wouldn't count on it unfortunately. Why not? Borked codebase that barely works on consoles and that would require major reworking, supposedly.

It won't be a bidding war since we really ought to pool our resources instead of bidding against each other, $105 will, after all, get the rights and maybe an hour of development time. Plus it's a tender process, so I've already lost. I'm not sure that Prosper's talents are best suited for Independence War, if I ever end up with the rights to Call of Cthulhu (which I think would require Lovecraft to come back to life and reset the copyright period) he'd be a shoe in though.

When it comes down to it it is probably because the Taleban was one of the (few) absolutely raging successes that the ISI has ever had- and are to a large extent linked to AlQ. They were sponsored by and originated in (refugee camps in) Pakistan and took over most of Afghanistan very rapidly. Given that Afghanistan had a lot of competing interests in it even in the 90s- Iran in the west, the various ex soviet 'stans and Russia in the north and Pakistan itself in the east getting their proxy to the pinnacle so rapidly and near completely was quite an achievement. It'd also deflect and defuse some of their internal problems with extremists if they were sponsoring the Afghan Taleban and not so actively antagonistic to AlQ since they can just send them off into Afghanistan rather than have them make trouble in Pakistan itself. Basically the Pakistanis know that the west will not be in Afghanistan indefinitely and want to hold onto influence with their old trumps.

Yep, for anything non windows it's a better deal by far. For windows though, it isn't great. I was referring to this from 2008- which basically was Atari stringing Obsidz along for a year with the promise of making BG3, albeit with only one side of the story being available.

There are very few Zoroastrians still in Iran. Iran helping AlQ in anything other than an enemy-of-my-enemy sense is ridiculous though. They might let ObL through their territory either deliberately or through some officials being bribed, but they're fighting AlQ offshoots (supported by the US, another enemy of enemy situation) both in a low grade insurgency in their own country and in Iraq/ Syria. And everyone knew Syria had WMDs, the only confirmed usage so far by independent sources- rather than USKFR sources that just happened to appear once the rebels started losing and they wanted to arm their AlQ affiliated proxies totally not AlQ affiliated proxies against Iran's proxies- is the rebels, some of whom have form for it (see Bani Walid). Pakistani officials being two faced, incompetent and corrupt plus far more concerned with India than with islamic extremists should surprise no one- and I doubt any Pakistanis would be even slightly surprised.

Yeah. I'm not a fan, and wouldn't recommend BGEE as a purchase to any windows user as you can get a better enhanced experience for cheaper from the base game, but some do rather treat it as if the grave of BG has been exhumed and the corpse given some, uh, not so tender loving. Despite not being a fan by any stretch in a battle of Trent Oster vs the receivers of zombieAtari it's Oster who'd get the support every time. Atari has been an utterly dreadful company (remember them stringing Obsidz along with a potential BG3, anyone?) recently even without the extra bonus of having receivers trying to maximise worth for creditors. PS Atari receivers, I'll buy the Independence War IP for $50, get back to me.

Astronomers detecting huge mysterious bursts of radio waves from outside the galaxy? Reapers confirmed.

There's also Hillsborough. I believe some of those responsible for it- and the utterly despicable ass covering smear campaign against the victims- not only still have their jobs, but have promotions.

No surprise there, even his name is great.

You could pay a whole extra $20 (?) to get the expansion as part of the kickstarter, so it's not exactly been sprung on people. Though it needs the fulfilment/ redemption method(s) to be up and running to actually, well, redeem it. There's also been a fair bit of talk about whether or not any sequel to PE would use KS, which was a pretty strong indicator it would be a 'franchise'.

The primary problem with police is their tendency to defend the bad apples. Expecting there to be no bad apples is unrealistic but in a (more) ideal world police would report corruption, brutality, evidence fabrication etc themselves. In practise the tendency is to close ranks and defend anything done by the police simply because it is done by the police, which ironically is exactly the sort of thing police condemn strongly in domestic violence or gang cases. I have no doubt that most police in most places are absolutely fine, it's the bad apples- and especially the tendency for even the good apples to protect the bad ones- that is the problem. A policeman who was instrumental in an absolute frame up (of Arthur Allan Thomas) was described as having "integrity beyond reproach" by the deputy commissioner here (our #2 cop, basically) and got a full police funeral. And that for someone who was bent as a paper clip.

Are there no patriotic American blokes willing to don posing pouches in celebration of freedom?

I'm less than convinced that the PS4 will be some sort of revolutionary system in terms of performance. It'll be better than the on3 pretty much inevitably since the on3's components are worse and PS4 will cost less, but things like improvements in development time are in comparison to the- frankly- dreadful and overcomplicated PS3/Cell system, not in comparison to competitors. And having access to unified memory will have a limited effect as that does not improve the underlying horsepower, which is decent enough and better than the on3, but, well it's already substantially worse than PC options, albeit currently quite expensive PC options. But, if I were looking at getting a next gen console there would be only one option and it wouldn't be the One Mind you, given the similarities to PC I can see Sony doing a bit more of the timed exclusive then release on PC, potentially. Cell made that a difficult proposition for PS3 era games but given it's AMD/ AMD now it would be practical- if they wanted to. Is much more is known of the technical aspects beyond the supposed 3/5 GB split in the on3 for the win8/ gaming OS's, given neither is released yet? I don't think Sony has said anything about how it's handling such things, yet. Otherwise there's the basic DDR3 vs DDR5 difference and latency vs bandwidth advantage issues, but that's a well known difference.

Is getting chopped into sausage by Goths natural causes or being murdered? Actually it's amazing how few Roman emperors got killed in battle, Valens was the only one I was sure of that wouldn't be being murdered by his own troops, or executed after losing. Which I guess kind of proves the point.

Hey, don't they have another kickstarter running? Oh wait, that finished a couple of days ago didn't it. Good thing they only worked out they were over time and over budget on their previous kickstarter after it ended, else they might not have got so much...

Saving my monies for the kickstarter. Moscow Symphony Orchestra stretch goal here I come. With that and Larian Belgium may become famous for more than waffles, eurocrats and the worst variant of the Brassica genus known to man. What sort of warped mind sees lots of little cabbages attached to a stalk and thinks "hey, awesome"- the sort of minds that make good games it appears...

Heh, Word point blank refused to alter some formatting for me. I ended up with about six horizontal rules at the end of the document- where they'd come from I don't know but they were undeletable by any standard means. It'd jump images around seemingly randomly, couldn't hold a style to save its life and I loathed every second I used it. Plus Ribbon, typically MS solution to a non existent problem. CS and OO 4 lyfe!

Lots of things with driving in on PC have it, at least as an option. GTA3+ for example. I found M&KB better by far in VC for car control, as I also played that on PS2 so have a direct controller based comparison, but I'd suspect that I may be in the minority there so far as driving goes- mouse precision vs autoaim on the other hand is an absolute walkover.

Don't blame me, I voted Ron Paul? (might have been interesting to see if he'd actually stuck to principles if he'd won, but that was never going to happen anyway)