Zoraptor

It depends on exactly what 'based on a certain race' means. There are plenty- just about all, really- countries in Europe which are based on the geographical lines of a 'certain race'- anglo saxons speaking english, celts speaking french, germans speaking german, bulgars speaking bulgarian, turks speaking turkish etc. There's no intrinsic problem with it as a concept, sometimes there are problems with the application, and the tendency to stick with and lionise what you know and are familiar with is certainly a key trait in humanity.

He doesn't need $5 million in the bank though, he needs $900k, at least in theory. They're both doing it for the same reasons, kickstarter money is effectively 'free' investment capital with very little obligation and most every businessman alive loves free money. Fargo doesn't need to kickstart Torment either, he still has funds from WL2 to pay his employees and excess sales from that title will mean excess profits usable for funding future projects. He needs to do it 'only' so as to run his business most efficiently and not drop employees as they become, er, redundant to WL2. They're both making decisions for business reasons. They aren't identical circumstances, of course, but they're comparable enough not to be a strawman.

So, the Age of Wonders series is on sale this weekend along with a bunch of other strategy titles (Dragon Pass, Pharaoh/ Cleo etc) and I'm looking at picking one of them up due to AoW3 and having meant to play them for ages (as well as Eador and HOMMIII which I own on CD, but not the XPs) any recommendations for which AoW is best?

They're horrendously expensive though. More or less BG: EE but at double the price. Shame, A Bridge Too Far was a great game and it would be nice if more people played it and The Russian Front, flawed as it was, deserved a replay as well.

It's not on the same scale as Outpost, which was outright fraudulent. Not on the same scale as, say, WarZ either really- they've just monumentally stuffed up the launch, if they can fix those issues it will be product as described.

Had to stop my BG2 playthrough, probably permanently. Something AI related in the Abazigal series of levels in causing consistent lock ups. I could get around it to an extent by cheat killing the AI (and really, 6 additional dragons? 4 in a row? Epic Lizardmen? Not my favourite changes, by any means) if there were a bunch on screen and save scumming, but having got past the 'final door' any AI on screen at all is causing freezing. Prior to that I'd had two crashes in the whole of BGT.

The Catholic church is left wing conservative.

Nerd drama and angst about someone not liking something others do. I do tend to wonder if the "support all RPGs!" brigade has the same opinion of, say, DA3 and universally hope it will be successful. I also have some sympathy with Boo because my immediate reaction to EM's "Thief" after reading the GI article was actually pretty similar.

Uh, Venezuela is one of the US's largest oil suppliers.

Arab Israeli citizens certainly can vote, though many do not.

Currently I'm unemployed, at least in theory, and looking after/ fixing up my parents place hence why I've been posting a lot more over the past month or so. Formerly I've been an Ivory Tower Intellectual/ professional smartass (ie worked for a university) and general computer type person (programming, modelling, data input and analysis) amongst other stuff (managing a petrol station...) In direct monetary terms the value of gold would tank if the economy got really bad, but at that level of bad it would be probable that 'monetary terms' would have lost most meaning, and pretty much everything else would have tanked worse. If things were that bad at least you could use your gold to buy food, because you almost certainly could no longer use paper or electronic money to do so. That isn't the primary reason why most people buy gold at the moment, but it is the primary reason why gold has intrinsic worth in the first place, it's a historic underpinning of the trade system.

It wasn't an authoritarian dictatorship in anything other than a purely rhetorical hate on principle manner. He was probably less authoritarian than, say, Uribe was in Colombia- and they both abided by decisions of referenda that they lost. Rather different than, say, Honduras where elections were held at the barrel of the military's guns and with anti coup media suppressed completely yet somehow contrived to be a 'fair' election in the eyes of the US, no doubt coincidentally the Right party won. That sort of thing started pretty early. A lot of Saul's stuff was sticking asterisks on the end of things Jesus said and it's only carried on from there. "Love thy neighbour*" *unless they're gay

True, every investment is a fundamentally a risk else everybody would be rich, but end of the day if you put a million into gold you'll still have x ounces of gold even if the market crashes, if you put a mill into Enron or the Zimbabwe dollar you'll have best part of nothing at all left.

Probably the best way to think of it is that they have intrinsic value, rather than just face value. Currency, shares and the like are, in practice, dependent entirely on people having confidence in them and if the confidence drops their value drops, and if it drops too much their value is zero. The value of commodities is at least partly independent as, for example, people may not need Apple, but they do need to eat. Precious metals are a little different from that as their intrinsic value is based upon them being valuable since time immemoriable even prior to real currency, not on their need to be used. They tend to go up in price in low confidence times because people are hedging against problems getting worse, eg at present the US stock market is inflated because money is very cheap to borrow, but that money is cheap due to (effectively) running money off the presses and it is quite likely that the current boom is a bubble rather than sustainable growth. If the company you have bought shares in goes bye bye so has your money, if you've bought corn or milk or iron ingots or gold those are not going to disappear- or at least the circumstances under which they would are ones where investments are likely to be the least of your worries.

Hahaha Oh WOW. Rush Limbaugh and Charlie Krauthammer?

I'd disagree, publishers probably do know that demand exists, they just think that insufficient demand exists for their purposes. Most publishers simply do not care about projects at that scale, as their fixed costs are set up for $20 million games selling 2 million+ copies, not $5 million games selling maybe 500k. If you look at something like P:E or WL2 they are scheduled to take less time than, say, Mass Effect 2 or 3, but not proportionately less time- the ME game may have 4+x the budget but it does not take four+ times as long to make. As such they will always target a high absolute return over a high relative return. Such titles, especially retro ones, are also fundamentally contra the sorts of things that publishers like EA, Valve, Squeidos or whoever tend to like- lots of dlc, monetisation, drm and lock in. You won't get many publishers disowning those things (last I can recall was Paradox, lying blatantly, and CDP/R, who actually lived up to it) as many kickstarters do.

Chavez was a magnificent troll, and he targeted people who absolutely deserved to be trolled harder than diamond- Goat W Bush, the sort of people who would call him Stalin or Mao etc, and his best troll was waiting until the US said they supported the 2002 coup before jack-in-the-boxing out of the presidential palace with his paratroopers. He wasn't exactly Gandhi and would have been better to temper some of his reforms with a bit more reality and a bit less hyperbole, but he did a lot for the poorer sections of the population than previous governments had done. As for press freedom, the ain't many places in SA that don't have problems, you just don't tend to hear much about them when it's the pro western governments doing the repressing (see Honduras 2009+)

So did I. $20 felt a bit less like taking the mickey than $25 did after the WL $15 entry, and that removed most of my objections. Might up the amount later, but it would need something stellar to get more.

There are insufficient asterisks in existence throughout the multiverse to adequately convey my thoughts on this 'Thief' reboot. If there were a checklist for the 12 Signs of Impending Decline they've managed to check just about every one.

A bit too simplistic. Really high sensitivity targets ought to be on a wholly separate network, though this does not always save them eg the Iranian nuclear infrastructure hit by stuxnet, but for practicality you tend to want people to have access to the internet, email etc without too many hassles. You will often also want to have other devices (phones, pads) to have access, and by their very nature those are prone to wander onto unguarded networks. Given that, you have to balance security against reducing the all the advantages networking gives and make a decision about exactly where you draw the line on that equation. You will also, of course, get assurances from your security people that they are competent and everything is up to date. It should be noted though that it is hardly just the Chinese who do that sort of thing- the classic example being the alleged siphoning of information to Boeing by the US government from Echelon so they could outbid Airbus.

They all (exc the Britties, who always increase indirect taxes instead) have increased VAT, which is the classic consumption tax. Since two of those rises are directly referenced in the links and you've accepted it's the case with Greece (and it's a not directly on topic) I'll not provide more links, if you want to check it out yourself you can always google Portugal VAT rise (2011, IIRC) and Ireland VAT rise (2012, IIRC). VAT increases are particularly bad because they always hit those with less discretionary income hardest, those with discretionary income can simply stop spending- which, of course, is bad for the economy- while those who have little to no discretionary income find themselves with even less.

They have: Britland Portugal Italy (recent elections notwithstanding) Ireland Greece Spain At the very least France and the Balts as well. While it is pretty stupid the ultimate problem was overspending in the good years, now they only have a selection of various poor choices. They've gone for the one which best matches the fiscal orthodoxy du jour, which is of course coming from the same people who completely missed the crisis (encouraged it, even) which is largely responsible for the problems being so bad.

Can't say that I particularly liked Risen 1, something about the progression seemed a bit off. In Gothic 2 if I ran into low level enemies after a certain point there was no way they stood a chance, but in R1 my high level guy still contrived to lose to things like vultures (and those gnomes, those horrible horrible gnomes). I think it was the locked camera perspective if you dodged, way too easy to lose where your enemies were. Played a bit more BG2, got past Suldanesselar and killed Gromnir- Ha! Good fun- who proved that it isn't just my party that sometimes suffers hilarious saving throw failures. Yaga Shura's fire giants are absolutely brutal for guys that don't cast spells and with better calls for help, plus the inclusion of a dragon (can't remember him being there in previous playthroughs) really puts the molten sulphur on the cake.

Pretty much ^^^ exactly. Most governmental spending, even 'wasteful' spending tends to at least get spent directly in the economy. If you do as has been happening a lot in Europe and both cut spending massively- thus raising unemployment- and increase taxes then you aren't going to get growth any time soon because you're hitting your core employed workforce at both ends by shrinking it and by wringing more tax from it. There's only a finite amount of money and those policies reduce how much is available. The flow on to businesses that rely on that discretionary and even non-discretionary spending just depresses things further, as they fail because their customers have no money or confidence. The amount of pandering to credit agencies and the like- who were singularly useless at very best when it came to correctly rating the institutions largely responsible for the financial problems- is pretty ridiculous.

It's true, there's notabl elack of typos in stuff Volo quotes, so he clearly uses Ctrl+C/ Ctrl+V rather than transcribing it himself.