Zoraptor

Usually if you're going to crash into a wall you don't have people convinced that the wall doesn't exist or that the car can take any crash impact in its stride trying to control the car as well as yourself though. Ignoring it is of short term economic benefit, and politicians love short term economic benefit because it gets them re-elected or keeps the ruled quite and subservient, and they simply don't care if everything goes to the brown stuff decades down the track. It's the climatic equivalent of sub prime mortgaging. Runaway feedback on earth is pretty much impossible as there are too many buffering systems. It mainly comes up because Venus makes a convenient example (the convenient example, even) of atmospheric insulation. Even there it isn't a continuous positive feedback, it is not still getting warmer but has stabilised, albeit at a point that is bad from the perspective of life.

SoC > Pripyat. Pripyat is more polished by miles and a far better sculpted experience, but I don't really care about such things except as added bonuses. And simply put, there were just too many people there and it was too 'friendly'. The atmosphere in SoC is unparalleled in its evocativeness and the X labs are the single bit of any game that makes me nervous just thinking about them and there is a sense of all pervading bleakness to everything. Pripyat is a good game, don't get me wrong, but SoC is one of the best games of all time! Of all time! (finishing the 'scorcher, so I thought, with a .45 and 13 rounds of ammo left, my armour in tatters, my G36/ 5.45 Groza and Vintorez out of ammo and a couple of shots shy of disintegration. Massive feeling of relief and accomplishment- then a metric asteriskton of Monolith invade. Awesome, and not in the butan sense. Best gaming moment since 'nice jump, human' in System Shock.)

That you're playing Clear Sky rather than Shadow of Chernobyl?

And therein lies the problem. You say "show me the evidence for runaway feedback", you're shown- albeit with some snark- and it doesn't count because the situation ain't exactly equivalent. The situation can never be exactly equivalent, all we know is that Venus is roughly earth sized, in a 'temperate' planetary zone where it ought to be theoretically of habitable temperature yet the temperature there is enough to melt lead, and that is excellent evidence for runaway feedback. All the basic evidence points to increased CO2 meaning more retained heat, all of it. So much so that in a scientific sense the burden of proof may actually be reversed since denialists (coldists? don't know what dismissive term I'm meant to use and that makes me feel funny) keep saying that basic observable phenomena just don't count because. That's an abuse of scientific principle- you have to assume basic observable phenomena apply or else you end up with every experiment trying to take account for the possibility of gravity not working, this time. I don't even think there's much point to carbon limiting laws anyway. Big emitters will avoid doing anything because the economic damage will be too great and smaller ones doing anything simply won't be enough. Humans gonna human.

Venus r00fles!

I've always thought that gravity is a better example than QT to use when talking about scientific theory. Consistently working observational/ predictive models, easily observable consequences to everyone, yet nobody knows how/ why those observable phenomenon occur. In any explanation of gravity you end up at some purely theoretical stuff (mass curving space, OK, after that it's all gravitons!!! infinite expansion pressure!!! and suchlike) as an explanation after about two questions. QT is both too broad and too specialist/ hard for lay people to understand to really make good points about. Bro' it's got a vast amount of evidence backing it up- it's just theoretical and historical evidence which seemingly doesn't count, for some reason. More CO2 retains more heat as a basic tenet of physics and historical data shows that, as a general rule, higher CO2 concs mean correlate with higher mean temps. You might be able to argue whether it's absolutely conclusive evidence, barring the base physics stuff, but it's certainly a lot more than the purest hyperbole of 'no evidence'.

I remember some people were looking to get World of Xeen a while ago, it's on sale in the M&M six pack at the moment ($5, MM1-6). Plenty of other good Ubisoft titles there as well.

They've recently joined the Euro, so the obvious answer is bankrupt or part of Germany. Realistically though, in the absence of responses from actual Estonians you'll get limited usefulness from this thread if you're seriously considering moving there as everyone's experiences with it (including mine; backpacked through about a decade ago, nice country to visit but I cannot entirely disagree with oby's description either) are more tourist orientated. It'd be like getting views from tourists to New Zealand, they can only really say that the dollar is high and Queenstown is nice, they probably won't know important residential things like that housing is massively overpriced (cheers, overseas speculators/ supine government papering over cracks) and economically everything except things that go moo is a bit dodgy.

Interesting thread for Obsidianites over at the 'Codex , stories and bromance abound.

****ing leftist warmist communist maoist orientalist totalitarianist conformist/ nonconformist hipsterist anarchist scientists! I'll shoot it with my assault rifle or counter it with a video from that nice well informed Rush Limbaugh or a quote from the Bible (Leviticus, probably) or a study from Saudi Arabia hand picked to back up my views. Why it's enough to get me to write a Strongly Worded Letter to the Torygraph or go through my huge collection of Daily Fail back issues to make sure I'm still right and they're still wrong. Scientific concensus is that anthropogenic climate change is reality, eg Yeah right, those communist scientists with their collectivist theory of relativity, hippy quantum theory etc etc, what will they come up with next in their quest for one world government, forced sterilisation and unremitting promotion of Justin Bieber. Thank the lord we have plucky little companies like Exxon/ BP/ Texaco to tell us the truth and save us from misinformation from those perfidious scientists and their hidden- but not to me of course- realityist agenda.

A lot of players like XCOM as well as reviewers so it's polarising more than anything (and doesn't seem to have that many haters really). It's certainly no Aliens: CM where at least early reviewers gave it near universal good marks, while the actual players almost universally loathed it. I've been playing IWD2 as well. The modified UI is very annoying on a big wide screen as you have to drag the mouse across 2/3 the screen area to pick up your 23 GP of reward, but I still think it has the best overall balance of any IE game difficulty wise as almost all fights are challenging without being silly hard. It certainly lacks a bit of personality compared to IWD1, but having said that I'm still slogging through assorted gobbo equivalents in chapter 1 at this point.

Yes, Thailand has a disfunctional democracy- at present- since the power of both the military and King is both significant and applied in a partisan manner. Malaysia is disfunctional because much of the state apparatus is designed towards supporting the ruling party and Pakistan has both a powerful couptastic military and a bunch of political violence.

It is wrong to kill someone, no matter what. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen at all though, sometimes bad things are also necessary things, and sometimes there are worse alternatives- but that is a choice between bad and worse, not bad and good. It was necessary to fight Hitler, doesn't make all the killing in WW2 right though. It's also not the case for capital punishment, where my primary concern in a 'practical' sense is that it is irreversible and you cannot unexecute if you find out you were wrong, but you can unprison and compensate from a prison sentence. I have few to no illusions that if it came down a situation where it was me or Someone Else for the last lifejacket that while I might like to think I'd be all 'women and children first' it'd likely be me and only me if it came right down to it. But I'd also have no illusions that it'd be Wrong to save myself in preference to another in those circumstances- it might be understandable, it might be necessary to survive, but it'd still wouldn't be Right to do so.

Heh, somewhat amusing seeing the Inscrutable Oriental line coming from a Serb, given that the WASPs it was particularly popular with happily lumped slavs into exactly the same category. There's as much chance of Britain reverting from 'democracy' as Japan or India. But for all the problems in places like Thailand, Pakistan and Malaysia there are also places where democracy has happened more or less spontaneously and with very few problems at all in asia- Indonesia, for example, while not perfect is a lot better than anyone would have thought a decade or so ago.

Don't know how hands on Sid Meier is with anything any more, only thing I've heard him being directly involved in was the recent mobile game whose name escapes me. Certainly other names have been primarily associated with the design of Firaxis's recent games, even if he is 'Creative Director' on all of them.

Couldn't have that, not after the outcry about Ned giving Lady the chop in S1- apparently more people complained about that than Ned himself... Though in the above case it was probably because it'd be difficult to do well more than anything.

That article ignores that Vader wanted Luke captured, perhaps in preference to every other circumstance. If it had been Curtis LeMay or Arthur Harris or Cpl Hicks in charge they might have levelled the base from orbit as the only way to be sure, but Vader always wanted Luke leading to 'mistakes' like his personal presence. If a real world comparison were to be used it would be to Saddam Hussein and how the US got tunnel vision about him being the solution to their problems in Iraq. Not directly equivalent though as in that case the focus was on an irrelevance while in the SW case Luke was a key to the rebels' final victory so focus on him was appropriate, even if ultimately cutting losses and just flattening the joint would have been the better result. Still, in fantasy as in reality hindsight is 20/20.

GNNNNNNNNHHHHHHHHHH. OK, so there's no chance of the unspeakable actually happening, but it makes a Jar Jar Binks SW spin off seem positively sane in comparison.

If the state did execute an innocent man then it would be absolutely implicit in harm to victims, because the person they executed would be a victim. It's fundamentally opposing views, really. Rather like parole or bail too- some will say that x percent of people reoffend on licence, thus no licence should be granted to prevent this. Others would say that 100-x precent of people on licence do not reoffend, and in the case of bail y% are found innocent, so these people would be unnecessarily and in some cases wrongly locked up in a more punitive system. The whole notion of justice is predicated on an impartial viewing of evidence, measured judgement, and appropriate punishment, when appropriate. While it should be sympathetic to victims in good systems it is designed to be agnostic towards their feelings for a very good reason- it's meant to be objective and truth seeking, and feelings aren't objective.

I don't have the revised ending though, as I couldn't be bothered managing the bandwidth for it- though I guess they may have split the 'patch' part and the 'content' parts. One of the things I actually like about Origin and how ME3 was handled was that I never had to download the new ending, nor any MP content which I wasn't going to use.

EA does rather make a rod for its own back with regards to multiplayer/ online stuff. It's partly because of the dissonance between talking to investors (we'll make (you) lots of moolah with our online features!!!) and what the people interested in the games hear (we'll make lots of moolah with our online features, mwahahah!!!), but part of what the people hear is due to some very real mis-steps by EA- shutting down servers, the 'best'* ending threshold for ME3 being set too high and requiring MP, the problems with SimCity. That and project $10 type stuff doesn't speak to what the people making the games want themselves but it does explain why online features/ MP is viewed with a certain amount of scepticism. Really though, I haven't seen anything that suggests that Bioware doesn't care, quite the opposite. Then again I've been- generally- happy with their recent games, don't really care about Origin nor online stuff if it's voluntary**. In any case though, the only person I've heard describe games making as deliberately and methodically being reduced to a soulless exploitative experience of bean counting and endless crushing dreariness doesn't work for EA but the competition- one Robert Kotick, who gets paid $65 mill a year for that policy and whose company makes a lot of money from it. *Which I'm about 90% sure I got despite no MP, but it may have been after a patch **I did manage to accidentally upload all my DAO 'achievements' somewhere for all to see. How will I live down people knowing that I romanced Alistair? By not caring, probably.

In the nazi version of Mass Effect, Dr Chakwas was not pleased when you forgot her Space Brandy?

Given the response to dlc on GOG it's probably safer for them to ask. Doesn't cost them much and if they can say that XX% of their are OK with something it takes the wind out of the sails of 'speak for the silent majority' ragers if it's something wholly voluntary and optional.

Hmm. Have his ex lover kill his wife, execute his boss, get hooked on durgs, rob a petrol gas station, have his daughter go into a cult, blow up his place or work etc etc. Not necessarily in that order. I blame Hannibal Lector for the spate of cannibals and wannabe cannibals, personally. Guy made cannibalism cool, now everyone wants to try it, gay Germans, Russians, even cops in New York. And all for a product placement for Italian wine and a variety of legume.

The Chinese government can't do anything to me. My own government can. I can avoid the Chinese government easily. I can't avoid my own government. If the Chinese government has organ farms and forced labour and political repression it- ultimately- has no effect on me whatsoever. My own government's responses to their illegal spying is to make it retroactively legal, and to extend their powers to an almost Patriot Act level with deliberately imprecise wording that would allow spying on people based on any government official or department's say so. And if you've bought stuff online or surfed midget trannie pr0n or whatever then your government will definitely know about it thanks to their black boxes scheme, let alone all the other stuff they can gather from the saturation CCTV and the like.