Zoraptor

Bro, that's rubbish. Gaddafi was by no means a nice guy, but he'd never indulged in systematic wide scale murder of the type you're ascribing to him and there's no reason to suspect he would have. Yeah, he would have killed some people just as he always had- including when he was buds with Tony, Hungarian Nick, Silvio et alia- mostly in retaking the cities but some of the more prominent rebels too, much as the rebels killed some other people mostly in retaking the cities and, well, executed some of the more prominent Gaddafites too (actual war crime executing a prisoner btw, and one that the west was equally culpable in) as well as blacks, US ambassadors, each other etc. "does a government have a right to use its own army, police and full force to suppress political unrest" Yes, if you're, say, Britain in Northern Ireland. Or Britain in Kenya. Or Britain in Cyprus. Or Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia. Or, well, anyone safely pro western. Same as it's fine to 'annihilate' a town if it's Sirte, Bani Walid or Fallujah, so long as the 'right' people are doing the annhilating as in 80's Iraq.

The 70's called, they want their bikini back.

If you have an actual condition it is often impossible to "man the asterisks up". Firstly, you're telling children and teenagers to do it and, well, theyare by definition teenagers and children, not adults. Secondly, if there's an underlying reason for it you're not taking that into account- while not directly equivalent, if you told someone with chronic, big D Depression to just man up it cannot work on a fundamental level as it is caused not by feeling a bit down because your girlfriend left you and someone stole your horse, but by a chemical imbalance- and thirdly you're telling people who by definition have general difficulty concentrating and paying attention to, well, concentrate and pay attention. It's not that easy, if it were they wouldn't have the problem in the first place.

We've been through it before, the west lied in Libya and that is why Russia and China- ie the two permanent states on the UNSC which don't require US approval for everything up to and including breaking wind- vetoed their latest bout of White Man's Burden Neocolonist PR Tailored Woo Yeahism. All the west achieved in Libya was swapping the location of the oppressed from Benghazi to Bani Walid and Sirte, cities that somehow did not qualify for protection from heavy weapons and indiscriminate bombardment as the UNSC resolution specified, I'm not sure why, might be that the west are gigantic hypocrites, it's always a big philosophical question as to why the west feels it can break UN resolutions with impunity and aid in the bombardment of civilian targets like Sirte and why plenty of people are happy to simply ignore facts to paint them in a good light etc etc Lebanon is a better model for the war than Spain- a lot of the issues there are similar. Well do I remember the glorious western interventions in Lebanon. Well, I don't, because they were partisan, ineffectual meddling from a group of biased clowns trying to impose their solutions on people with no regard for reality that just made things worse. Plus ça change...

Not an inevitable slope though, (we = awesome) !== (you = suck). There's no need for me to think NZ = awesome ergo Swedes? who'd name a country after a pretty disgusting root vegetable anyway? In many cases in ex colonial areas having better demarcated countries based on actual ethnic divisions rather than where some 19th century toff with an immaculately waxed moustache happened to put his pen would have been immeasurably better. It isn't that I think defining countries along ethnic boundaries is a good thing per se, I just don't think it is necessarily a bad thing, and you do have to live in reality some times rather than deciding that everything will be OK if we sit around the campfire and sing Kumbai Ya (sic). Personally I couldn't care less what the ethnicity of a NZer is, though to a certain extent that is the benefit of living in a 'new' country that has had most of the good learned experiences of old countries with a lot less (but certainly not none) of the bad history it was learned from.

Georgian financed propaganda movie? Must be this then Or this.

Yeah, I know the rationale and it's fine, I don't have any issue with the reasons behind it at all, but I also don't have any problems with the reasons behind RG's approach either. All I'm pointing out is that for all the people saying that Garriott should fund himself instead of going to KS while talking up Fargo it isn't like Fargo doesn't have alternatives as well, he's using KS because it's the best option for him just as Garriott is- and at its heart they are both using KS for identical reasons, it's effectively 'free' funding with few constraints to it.

I wasn't talking of the kickstarter WL2 funds, but using money from 'retail' sales of WL2 to fund Torment. Once WL2 is released and selling on Steam/ GOG/ Gamersgate/ Origin/ Impulse InXile would have those funds to spend on Torment, doing it that way is just less 'convenient' to him than holding another kickstarter and getting free funding. If WL2 sold in the 200k+ bracket those excess sales would even provide more money than the current kickstarter- it isn't, after all, going to go into trust for the starving masses of the world or paying a rebate to kickstarter investors, it's going to be used on future commercial activities. They're making cold, logical economic decisions either way, just as Garriott is.

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+)