Zoraptor

The Daily Mail (AKA, Daily Fail) is a garbage tabloid, though it is better than the Sun. I think it's still owned by the same family who gave it a pro-fascist slant prior to WW2, but I'm not 100% sure on that. It's certainly not Murdoch owned.

I thought the reason many PS3 games perform relatively poorly is because very few programmers have really taken advantage of Cell with it being relatively easy to do an OK job but far more difficult (especially for a multi platform release) to do a well optimised one. I don't think it's an accident that you cited Killzone 3 which is a PS3 exclusive and hence will have been built more or less ground up for cell. ARM's great, but I couldn't see anyone going that route for a mainline console, yet. And given that both Nintendo and Sony use ARM in their portables going for them might not be good for 'variation'.

Apparently the UK does have 'public good' exceptions for some crimes- that's how they justified blagging Gordon Brown's bank details. I don't think (well, hope that) good journalism won't be effected. Especially since this whole kerfuffle kicking off is largely the result of some good investigative work by a Grauniad journalist and as otherwise Mr PI's diary probably would have sat gathering dust in the Met archives forever.

Yeah, and germans impaled Belgian babies on their helmet spikes in WW1, Iraqis turfed babies out of incubators in Kuwait etc etc. There's no evidence for the accusation, and that's pretty much a direct quote of the actual UN official on the ground investigating, Cherif Bassiouni. The main problem with citing Gaddafi being a nasty guy as a reason for intervention is that most of the Transitional Council guys (all except two, iirc) had been senior members of Gaddafi's government. Hardly a good indication that they'll lead a glorious pluralist democracy. Plus they've done some fairly unpleasant things themselves (murdering black africans, for example) Part of the Libyan people. Whatever the west may say (and fairly obviously thought) he enjoys a great deal of popular support in many areas of Libya, or he wouldn't still be in power. Not really. It ain't similar militarily but tribe vs tribe in Libya ain't fundamentally much different from Tajikh/ Hezara/ Persian/ Pashtun in Afghanistan or Kurd/ Shiite/ Sunni in Iraq. Taking sides in such things makes a mess in even the best of circumstances.

I was going to say that the Kanye West/ Ray Charles analogy was one of the most vapid things I've ever read but on reflection it's not 100% rubbish. RC will probably still be well known and respected in ten years while Kanye will likely be a footnote in the great morass of disposable stars so there may actually be something valid in the comparison since that's exactly what it looks like will happen to X-COM vs XCOM. More likely they'll just make the NextBox a fixed/ closed hardware PC running a cut down win8 variant. Give them a chance to leverage the bits of the xbox which actually make money (licensing, Live, streaming) while largely avoiding the parts that have lost money hugely (hardware research, production, development) and may significantly reduce the horrendous reliability issues the 360's custom hardware has had.

Primay skills can be changed, IIRC, though you are still limited to the default number of skills (ie you can't make every skill a primary one, only three at a time). You can find the files with the armour stats etc and change them with a hex editor, but I never got the changes to work in game.

Nope, this is primarily a French mess. Nick the Hungarian backed his good buddy ben Ali in Tunisia and the Libyan mess is the result of him scrambling to get on the Right Side of History after ben Ali got his marching orders, and in what was supposed to be a quick and easy win with the road strewn with flowers. The US was always pretty reluctant and has had very little direct military involvement outside the first couple of weeks. On the positive side it has really exposed the bias and impotence of the UN and World Court (censure for the French breaking the arms embargo? ohoho, tres amusant, rules are for the little people) and with any luck made any more imperial adventures less likely. Sadly only NATO's credibility will be a casualty- it's one thing to fail against a relatively crafty and prepared foe in good defensive terrain like the serbs but quite another level of embarassment when 90%+ of the action takes place on a nice, flat desert with a few million people stretched over millions of square kilometers, but there's no prospect of NATO actually losing outright which would be the only thing that would cause it to break up short of someone deciding to nuke Tripoli. Also, what is it with half the population of the internet calling it Lybia? The BBC news sections have been absolutely woeful over Libya, parroting the party line as much as ITAR-TASS in soviet times. They must be really worried about more funding cuts. In contrast their opinion shows have actually on occasion pointed out things like the Rebels Council consisting almost entirely of people who were so shocked and appalled at Gaddafi's government that they were high ranking members of it for years- no doubt working to bring it down from within [/spindoctor].

The Russians are pretty much dependant on US and other international funding so it's at least reciprocal dependancy. Soyuz is also cheap, reliable and safe which can't really be said for the shuttles. Strategically there's very little need for the ability to get humans into space, only satellites where there are multiple alternatives to the russians.

It used to be Fosters (an execrable Australian 'beer' brewed under licence in England presumably as some sort of revenge for slights real or imagined), at least by volume. If there's one thing England does absolutely right it's the pub lunch and ale combo- nice crusty game pie or a proper ploughmans washed down with a real ale. Heaven.

Heh, I probably came across a little more aggressive than the intention was. The reason for wanting direct links to the developers is twofold; first, if you buy that way near 100% of the price goes to them. In this case I'd have complained if the links were to Impulse/ Gamersgate/ D2D/ Amazon download or whatever. Developer links also make them less reliant on vendor specific, time limited, special offers for those specifically bargain hunting. For a Grand Indie Megathread type thing links to specific offers are better made in subsequent posts, as and when the offers occur, in my most humble opinion.

Lazy lazy, though typical, links to Steam for non-steam exclusive titles (Amnesia, Torchlight immediately obvious). At least they aren't referrer links, I guess.

More likely hype via false shortage as with lots of new release electronic fripperies; SO MUCH DEMAND WE HAVE LITERALLY RUN OUT OF INTERNETS!!!1!!! HOPE YOU AREN'T MISSING OUT!!! BE IN QUICK ETC ETC. The demand would have to be more insane than the love child of Caligula and George III to trouble Google.

RPGCodex is my no 1 source for news on RPGs* and on current events in european countries like Georgia. Did you know that some B list hollywood types visited there last month and that its main exports include scrap metal and fruit and nuts? Fascinating. *actually RPGWatch is.

The South Island already produces a surplus of power from hydroelectric projects, but a large proprtion of this is lost in transmission to the north island, and since the SI gets absolutely no benefit* yet all the problems the idea of sticking wind farms there for the benefit of foreign companies or Auckland is deeply unpopular, especially as one of the main tourist attractions in the south is precisely that you don't turn a corner and run into a forest of turbines. It is more efficient to produce the energy near where it is to be used, so more geothermal plants in the central NI would be far more sensible and efficient than turbines in the south, but politicians know they'll have far more problems sticking turbines or other generation in 'sensible places' (Hunuas, Waitakeres, One Tree Hill and other places around Auckland) due to the NIMBY effect from the higher population density that makes generation there sensible in the first place. *There did use to be. Basically, the power companies love running the cheap hydroelectric power into the ground and if there isn't much rain or snow the dams run dry- they then say that they need to stick more power generation in the SI when someone attaching 2lbs of C4 to the Cook Strait Cable would solve the SI's power problems on a permanent basis. During one of the two times in which the NI was sending power south (for about six weeks) the government decided to abolish the price differential as it was a 'reciprocal arrangement'.

It's fine in a relatively low latitude place like Australia with lots of space, generally lots of sunshine and relatively constant daylight hours but once you start getting towards a UK situation where in winter the sun comes up at 10 am and sets at 4 and the climate is temperate maritime (lots of clouds and rain) it's considerably less practical. Anyone who has spent a winter in the UK can tell why solar ain't a panacea for all places- you can't rely on something that will produce minimum power at precisely the time everyone wants to run their heaters. Plus it is still, at this time, rather expensive.

It may be available on the international domain too- I think it was on the BBC World channel (I certainly saw the Ugandan officer bit while channel surfing) so you could check there.

The main difference is that iTunes doesn't sell stuff intrinsically linked to Windows- an mp3 or equivalent functions fine without windows- ultimately 90%+ (and probably 98%+) of the stuff bought on Steam absolutely requires Windows to run. Not really, and certainly for the most relevant parts Valve itself adopting the bundling = success model (the 'Internet Explorer' model, if you like) with no reservations and no qualms from HL2 on implies they think the situations are comparable. And there's simply no comparison to bundling with individual games vs bundling with the baseline OS in terms of penetration. As for the rest, a few Steam loyalists refusing to upgrade ain't going to upset MS in the slightest if they can get IE like market share since we all know how good computer gamers are on following through on boycotts and, really, what are you going to do? Switch to Linux? It's all predicated on MS not half-arsing it but really, how many companies have gone up against MS on its home turf and actually won? I can only think of one and it's been diversifying itself as quick as possible.

This, basically. MS has two methods: buy and integrate the competition, or if they aren't for sale make them irrelevant by leveraging their OS domination. MS controls the operating system and as soon as it gets the motivation to it can and will drive whatever competitors it wants into the ground. Steam makes a nice, fat, tasty target; MS already has the infrastructure and platform and a technique which has worked fine previously. entrerix's post is particularly apropos: I hardly know anyone who uses IE either but I'm happy to acknowledge that that is because I am an elite individual of taste and refinement; IE has still got 70%+ of the market and it was higher than 90%. 'Click butan for internet/gaems' straight out of the box is what MS will be offering and it is hugely powerful. The power of the Default is exactly what Steam has been trying to establish (getting installs is Steamwork's raison d'etre, they aren't doing it out of charity) and MS can get that at the flick of a switch.

If they have no profit they aren't a viable business, long term, or even really medium term. I rather suspect what was meant was that most businesses would be effected negatively in that suddenly a lot of people would have higher taxes and less take home pay- or become unemployed- leaving them with less income to spend and less discretionary spending and thus less to spend with those businesses; and as a consequence otherwise viable businesses will start failing.

Steam is pretty much irrelevant now that MS is going to integrate GFWL into Windows 8. Gabe's baby will go the way of Netscape/ Lotus/ Wordperfect and all it will take is a few "our latest update broke Steam? This is totally unexpected. Hope they can fix the problem soon". Better get into that iOS/ Android market soon, Valve*. Shame they couldn't get their stuff coordinated boycott wise, if the 'brave and morally upright retailers' and the other DD vendors had coordinated their boycotts to 'try to stop the infection of their customers computers by Steamworks afflicted games and distortion of the market by 3rd party bundling and loss leading' (see what I did there CVG?) they might have had a chance of success, though it'd still be MS ultimately once they got bothered enough to leverage their OS dominance. *Surely they aren't dominated by the OS makers marketplaces, after all.

EA's financials specified both DA2 and DS2 at "over 2 mil SOLD", not shipped. Sold in ~ shipped "Crysis 2, Dead Space 2 and Dragon Age 2 each SOLD IN more than 2 million units" See as contrast "Mass Effect 2 – sold through over 1.6 million packaged and digital units in the quarter for Europe and North America combined" from an earlier quarterly statement.

Similarly, why do buckets light up in Chapter 1? Presumably the answer to both is that originally Something Else was planned for them. Maybe stepping in the puddles would make more noise and there was going to be a fire (requiring buckets of water) in Chapter 1?

You may, I think, be slightly overestimating the power of the Obsidian Forums Community. Perhaps Freedom Fighter could start posting about UK military hardware on some Argentine boards, should put the fear of god into them. Unfortunately, judging by his avatar he might be batting for the other team and we may get propaganda about Exocets, Super Etendards and Main Battle Llamas.

Herman Cain <---> Herve Caen. Some might say coincidence, I say there are no coincidences. Well, he probably couldn't do worse running the US than he's done running Interplay.

I wouldn't be surprised if 2 out of those 3 die at some point, and I'd go so far as saying it is likely for one.