Zoraptor

They are probably hoping that someone in the army will step in and remove Ghadafi for them, else it's the equally unpalateable options of observing the resolution and not bombing except to the extent it is necessary to enforce the nfz/ stop civilians being attacked (tacit victory for Ghadafi) or having to even more flagrantly ignore the resolution up to the point opinion turns and hope that Ghadafi goes before that point; if he doesn't victory for Ghadafi. The rebels could probably deal with a random general/ regime insider as up to a few weeks ago most of their leaders would have been classified that way themselves.

They aren't surprised, they knew the west wanted regime change and would ignore the text and theoretical intent of the resolution to achieve that aim. I can't imagine anyone involved in politics is so naive as to not realise that was the tacit aim and result. The reason for their complaints are standard posturing for domestic consumption. They know that so long as they toe the line there'll be no "no fly zone" preventing them from shooting actually unarmed demonstrators (as opposed to armed rebels; deeply ironic senses of timing from the Saudis Bahrainis and Yemenis) with impunity but want to try and minimise any adverse effects in terms of their own stability.

Out of interest, have you played either System Shock 2 or Thief: The Dark Project/ Gold, Orogun?

I didn't know that the Daily Fail had bought the Telegraph.co.uk domain. A bit cheeky, people might mistake them for a respectable newspaper. That sort of article makes me grind my teeth and lament the Decline of Journalism. New study shows that 61% of those convicted don't reoffend. Can't run with that, let's go with: CRIME SCHOOLS RAMPAGING HORDES OF CRIMINALS ROAMING THE STREETS ITZ COMING BABYMEAT DIET FLEE TO THE BUNKER IN AUSTRALIA HOPE THE FLAMETHROWER DEFENCES HOLD HELP I'VE BURST MY BRIAN To actually contribute something constructive: New Zealand figures from 2009. Most of the text can be readily skipped. There are 2003 figures available also.

There are two things to bear in mind there. Firstly, magnitude is 'irrelevant' in terms of how much destuction is caused as the energy can be dissipated very easily and effectively if the quake is deep. Effective damage is measured using the Mercelli scale. The exact way in which this happens is dependant upon a host of factors, of which magnitude is a major, but not sole cause. For example, the 6.3 earthquake in Christchurch- theoretically well below what a nuclear plant is designed to withstand Richter wise- had a maximum Ground Force Acceleration of 2.2g (ie ~21m/s/s), or if you like, the equivalent of accelerating a building to around 70km/h from a standing start over the course of a second. From what I can tell this is 3 times the GFA (0.76g) even the most modern Japanese plant is designed to survive and that was from a 6.3 quake. Apparently the Sendai earthquake's GFA was ~0.5g. Secondly, the tsunami was the big thing and Walsingham's read seems to be pretty fair- they simply did not anticipate so many things going wrong at once as a result of that. While it's very difficult to be sure given the amount of contradictory information floating around it does seem that the actual earthquake proofing worked well and the reactor got 'parked' automatically as it should but even in this state it still needs cooling

Do you have a source on that? IIRC Xbox version bombed hard and I doubt PC version sold that well. Afaik it was published on the old Bioware homepage, before they were consumed by EA.. Nope, which spoke volumes. 5 million selling Baldur's Gate Series!! 3 million selling NWN!!! 3 million selling Kotor!!!! Jade Empire, a game we also made at some point... (Sold around the 800k to 1M mark, by best estimates. Cost MS a great deal as it was late in the xbox's life and a lot of people bought its loss leading console for JE and never bought another game, probably made Bioware money as MS was publisher and supposedly paid a very large exclusivity bonus.)

The exploding reactor bit is perfectly plausible and we've effectively seen reactors exploding (as a common usage definition) even if the reactor core itself wasn't breached. And while there cannot be a nuclear explosion in the classical sense there is plenty of potential for something equivalent to a "dirty bomb" in superheated (plutono-) uranic slag hitting a water source directly. I'd agree that "nuclear explosion" really should not be used though.

Well, potentially they can do that for a game purchased in Australia. The cheap resellers factor (as per Tale, reselling keys from marginal markets, though it may not be obvious that is what they are doing and some otherwise reputable vendors can be hit with the issue even when sending physical copies) and enforcing pricing zones are clearly the major parts of the picture, eg Bethesda, no regional pricing for Fallout 3, regional pricing for FONV; 2k, no regional pricing for Bioshock 2, regional pricing for all their steamworks games. They certainly can block US copies from working in Australia but it's more likely to manifest itself in something like an uncensored copy of [game] morphing into the censored version as soon as you get an Australian IP associated with it.

It can be used to block cheap parallel imports or key resellers. Buy a copy of [game] in the US for 50USD and it may not work on an Australian IP as they want you to buy the 90AUD/ USD equivalent price. Or any other cross border key use you may want- see for example British copies of FONV reportedly not working in Poland (which, amusingly enough, is illegal under EU regs).

Choice is bad. Compulsion is good. People hate options, they just get confused by them. Don't know that Steamworks has been officially confirmed by Squeenix, though its box art being used by Valve to advertise Steamworks is kind of a give away.

You may be right Krezack, as there may well have been multiple similar announcements- I don't really follow the subject that much. I'm fairly sure the one I was thinking of was from the same guy, per Enoch's article: "Another concern of mine was that he is basing a lot of this on the shape of the structures he sees… but looking like a microbe doesn’t make them a microbe! And Hoover goes farther than that. In an earlier work, he states flatly that these objects are fossils, and that they have bacterial structures inside them" Which is pretty much exactly how I remembered it.

Yes. It is indeed a ludicrous number and is unsupported by anything other than recursion, is what a gaming journalist has reported rather than having an official EA release, implies that ME2 sold a cool 3 times the number of ME1, and that EA deliberately underestimated sales in a legal document by the small matter of 5 million copies and underestimated shipped items by 4.6 million. That's roughly $100 million of missing income. Whereas, typing in 6.6 instead of 1.6... Sheesh, the 6.6 million doesn't tally remotely with greylord's own quoted figures which he's been making so much of without actually providing any evidence for. He should have taken option 4. In any case this this is boring. ME2 sold fine, even if not as well as its fans would like. On the other hand, seeing the user ratings for DA2 on metacritic is rather interesting.

That was debunked, iirc, though not fully- ie they showed that you could get something that looks like fossil bacteria without actually starting off with the bacteria. So it wasn't exactly disproved but it was shown not to be at all conclusive. [Actually that is talked about in the link from Enoch, apparently it's the same guy making both claims].

Sadly, I spoke too soon about not knowing anyone. One of the dead (well, technically missing still) was my best friend in primary/ intermediate school and one of my sister's school friends was killed on one of the buses that got hit. The place I used to live is also evacuated and apparently two people died on a walking track almost directly behind it.

Heh, I'll give you a shiny dollar coin if you can show one single instance where I have lied. Everything I've stated as fact has had a link, and where I've used quotes I've provided the link to the context too. In contrast, with Volourn style quoting... DA:O sold [in] 2.7 [million] Agreed (note: link added by me). ME2 selling 3 million+ [citation needed] Citation from EA states 2 million sold in worldwide while EA quarterly report says 1.6 million sold through] for Q4 2010/ calendar Q1 2011; FY 2010 ends March 31st according to the same document therefore the ME2 sales figure is for- as best as can be ascertained- approximately its first 12 weeks of sales. Retail, DA:O sold 1.3 million [citation needed], with around 500K[citation needed] on PC and the rest on Console. ME2 sold 500-600K [citation needed] on PC with the rest on Xbox 360 at retail. At this point you can either post your sources, concede with dignity, go off the rails or choose not to reply.

It's easy, even I can do it. Whether the miniscule performance increase is worth it, on the other hand... When I said three years old I was talking about the 8800GT. Yeah my bad, I was thinking of the 4 1/2 year old 8800gts/x and forgot they had an extra letter. 8800GT is 3 1/2 years old.

Dude, and you are comparing the shipped to sale through. That number (2.7 million) is comparable to at least 3 million for ME2 (and they shipped even MORE later...some estimate upwards of that). For actual sales you are comparing it's 1.3 million to 1.6 million...DUDE. No, that 2.7 million is equivalent to... the 2 million shipped figure you linked to earlier (and which never got a "we've shipped more!" announcement), not some 3 million figure that materialised out of the ether. If you ship 2.7 million, then another 500k it's a fair assumption that the vast majority of that 2.7 million sold* as the alternative is saying that EA likes producing stock destined to sit around in warehouses- that's why you can fairly compare the 2.7 million shipped with a sell through figure, as I said in the original post. If we want to get picky about things then I could just add a [citation needed] after every one of your figures since I did actually provide links. Simple fact is that EA is bound by law to release accurate figures. They said they sold in 2 million copies of ME2 and sold through 1.6 million. That has to be, legally, as accurate a representation as it can be. NPD (presumably where you are getting the comparison from as they do US only figures; if it's VGChartz then I'll have a quiet laugh at the wasted time and move on) does not have to be accurate by law, and their figures are indicative and based in part on estimation and survey. *Alternatively, if you like maths, 2 million shipped (confirmed) -> 1.6 million sold (confirmed) therefore 3.2 million shipped (confirmed) -> 2.6 million sold (speculation; still a cool million above ME2 though, and matches well with most of the initial 2.7 million having been sold...) It's hardly difficult to find, first page of a google search. "Rob Bartel, the principal designer at BioWare, has told MCV that last year

There aren't many games with a 2.5Ghz C2Duo as minimum. That's more than I technically have, though I have had my ancient e6400 overclocked to faster than that. On the other hand a 9800GT is just a rebadged late model 8800GT so it's technically a five (?) year old graphics card.

Dude, it's from an official EA shareholder release. There's no question as to its accuracy. [Edit links, first showing that DAO shipped 2.7million, second showing they then shipped an extra 500k, illustrating the fact that at the very least the vast majority of the 2.7 million must have sold: http://kotaku.com/5467174/left-4-dead-2-se...oses-82-million "Leading video game developer BioWare™, a division of Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS), announced today that Dragon Age™: Origins has sold-in over 3.2 million* units worldwide."] Sell in vs sell through. Unsurprisingly games journalists have little to no clue as to the difference hence the breathless "blah sold a billionty billion copies in one day!!!!" headlines. If you change shipped to sold then you can turn anything from Daikatana on up into great successes. Ultimately the only way to guage actual success is by the sell through. I'm not exactly disagreeing, just pointing out that you can get an awful lot of protection against a big budget if you're selling well- movie wise something like Titanic comes to mind, games wise you don't mind a GTAesque $100 million budget if you're also selling a GTAesque 15 million copies. On the subject of the 'rush', I'm actually of the opinion that it isn't being unduly rushed, as I think it's clear that a significant proportion of the DAO team started work on the sequel pretty much straight after the PC version stopped being developed, six months prior to the release. Which gives almost exactly a two year development cycle- not unreasonable for a sequel.

You can shoot Husk legs off too, though I think that also automatically kills them. I thought I noticed some dead 'genuine' humanoids missing limbs on occasion as well, though those were only occuring after death and it may have just been the standard odd ragdolling hiding limbs. Certainly it's nothing like JK2 with whatever the amputation switch was.

Per EA (a somewhat more reliable source than volo et alia parroting how ME2 sold a billionty billion copies!!! FACT!!!) ME2 had only sold 1.6 million units after three months, a full million less than DAO had at a similar time. I'd suspect either Baldurs Gate game/ NWN or KOTOR made more absolute profit even if it was distributed to a lot more parties as licenced IP/ publisher deals since the teams that made them were far smaller than those that made any of Bioware's recent games.

Bioware have used technology developed by other EA devs before- the mismemberment (such as it was) in ME2 was adapted (apparently) from the system used by Dead Space. And of course there's other collaborations like Ser Isaac's armour, the main reason anyone would want to buy DA2 now that awkward dwarf sex scenes are out.

The DRM by processor/ hardware locking was "Trusted Computing" (even earlier was Intel's unique processor identifier, whose technical name escapes me and which got demoted to default off after an outcry as well). TC's back: Steam is moving towards implementing hardware DRM in concert with Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors. On a purely optional basis and for your own protection, of course, and with the nice friendly name of Steam Guard. [Not that DA2 is using anything like that though, its DRM seems to be about as reasonable as any other activation based system now that the periodic dial homes are gone]

It's because in order to pirate the console versions you just need access to a disk from whatever source- fabrication plant, review copy, early stock delivery. Historically the same would be true for PC but the one thing the move towards activation has actually achieved is the tendency for PC games to be pirated day 1* rather than day < 1 as the exe andor other essential files aren't present on the physical dvd making early disk images a rather pointless download. On 360 and now PS3 if one has a modded console there's nothing to stop one playing early, so long as one isn't the sort of gibbering moron who goes onto Live/PSN while playing (in which case one would doubly deserve the inevitable ban or bricking which results). *Practically it's still less than day 1 for some regions due to the staggering of release dates.

Yes, it's far too complex a situation to put anything down to a single cause and anyone stating causes is really only stating their own opinion of what they think is significant. There's clearly a bunch of different factors and influences at work. At this stage though the obvious 'disprover' of the violence + anti-westernism = stability theory is, well, Libya.