Zoraptor

I'd just point out that the question itself is potentially at least a perfectly sound one in the context of a survey. It's basically asking what percentage of respondents are religious fundamentalists without forcing them to self identify as such and without making the question denominational- you'd get the same answer most likely from strongly religious Jews, Muslims, Christians and even some of the more ideological adherents of eastern religions. There are a bunch of techniques used in surveys to get accurate information that is not always going to be disclosed willingly, and to do things like check for people who are just filling in stuff randomly. Or of course it could just be a loaded question in a bad survey.

The primary point was that most people who would support some sort of crackdown on piracy would not support having other bits of real world law applied like the ability to match real/ virtual names for purposes of civil defamation suits from random disgruntled online acquaintances. That it was frivolous was entirely the point- I don't particularly care about indirect insinuations of supporting piracy but some people will and they would abuse the system. Especially if it had the same "ok, then prove your innocence" provisions most industry sponsored laws have with respect to internet cutoff; you'd have to prove that your comment wasn't implying I pirated. I fundamentally disagree- if it's bad law then the blame is squarely on those who make the law, not those it is aimed at. To make extreme examples, if they were having a law to make it compulsory to have DNA samples and fingerprints taken from everyone, or behavioural correction chips implanted to "fight/ prevent crime" that would be the lawmakers' fault rather than criminals.

Ah yes, another popular excuse by the apologists... not stealing, just violating a bit of copyright. It might be easier to pursue in a court room, but semanthic obfuscation doesn't change the fact that you are stealing. What you are stealing is the depriving other people due payment for the time and labour invested in their work. To bring back my original example of the hairdresser, walking away without paying him is not really stealing either, is it? Try telling the plumber that fixed your broken water pipe that, thanks, but since I now have what I need, why should I pay you for your time, etc. Only the anonymity in stealing digitally distributable stuff makes lions out of whimps. The same whimps indulging in self pity if somebody wants to make it harder for them apparantly. I still think it's wrong, and I don't pirate (it'd take me 4 months or USD240 in download cap excess to download an AAA game on my crappy internet even if I wanted to pirate, but in any case I'm happy buying and get my money's worth), but if we're just going to run around calling something with a perfectly good definition something else why not go the whole hog and call it terrorism or drug running or something*? In both the examples you cite it still wouldn't be stealing. Doesn't make it right, doesn't (necessarily) make it acceptable**, but it ain't stealing, except if excess physical components are removed. It's breach of contract***. The primary point is that most people who would support some sort of 'crackdown on piracy' would not support having other bits of 'real world' law applied like having the the government have a database with the ability to match real/ virtual names for purposes of civil defamation suits from random disgruntled online acquaintances. It's too open to abuse**** and frankly I have zero faith in either copyright holders not to abuse any provisions nor any government to apply them fairly or accurately. Potentially you could have sites banned for relatively 'benign' things like linking to abandonware, or suggesting getting a nocd if you're having drm problems, or for being hacked and having torrent information, or for 'advocating' piracy, or for hosting Daemon Tools, or for having advanced burner software, or for having thread trace/ stack reader/ decompiler software [etc]. Partly though it's that while I don't like pirates I also don't care much about them either as I do my bit by buying stuff, the only bit I can control. I do care about, and have pretty strongly negative opinions on, RIAA/ MPAA/ BSA etc because they provide no benefit to me, treat me like a criminal and attempt to remove as many basic purchase rights as possible all of which have no impact on those that actually pirated. *the MPAA actually do this, of course. grr MPAA gnash gnash **though there are plenty of ways not paying could be acceptable, of course, none of which are 'allowable' in the digital world. If you ask for a trim and they shave your head or dye your hair green, if the plumber ignores instructions and installs and charges you for a gold plated toilet etc you are perfectly within your rights not to pay. ***mileage may vary in different jurisdictions ****and potentially avoidable by something as simple as torrent seed lists being posted as jpgs so as to be defined as artworks protected under first amendment, as per the DVD master key.

Sadly, almost all self proclaimed libertarians are "nobody has the right to tell me what to do (but it's fine telling others to do things I agree with/ already do)". No, it isn't. You and the industry can shout about stealing as much as you like, it doesn't make it true. Everyone 'prosecuted' for piracy has been prosecuted for copyright infringement, not theft. It is copyright infringement. End of Story. Now, if you're going to accuse me or others of piracy or being criminals please have the courage to make it explicit and include your evidence for it, as well as a way to contact you under your real name for potential legal redress. After all, if we're talking libertarianism then one of the other tenets is personal responsibility, yes? so, under libertarian ideals I or others should have the right to sue you when you run around making wild accusations, yes? or get you banned for making unfounded accusations, yes? Don't worry though, I at least won't accuse you of stealing my reputation, I'd do you for what it actually is, libel, and I'm not holding my breath waiting for an explicit accusation of course. As with most internet 'libertarians' it's entirely do as I say, not as I do, yes?

Well, no. But that's because Lucas has said that that scenario is AOK and has in the past actually publicised fan projects. On the other hand, eagle eyed IP lawyers are already running around the net throwing cease and desists at unauthorised usage whether commercial or not. Try remaking an Ultima without EA's permission and despite them not doing squat with Ultima you'll still get a lovely cease and desist as soon as they notice it. Unless you happen to have got permission from Richard Garriott when he had the power to grant permission, at least. Further, shop analogies are inapt. The only real analogy to torrent based systems is a bunch of people playing collectable card games swapping and photocopying cards to get the full set rather than buying them from the publisher. Even further, it's simply not theft or stealing as both require an owner to be deprived of physical property. It's copyright infringement (by means of unauthorised duplication). Calling it theft or stealing is a call to emotion that has forever been poisoned by those inane anti piracy diatribes at the start of legit DVDs (I wouldn't steal a car? No, but I also didn't steal this DVD and its nett effect is that I would like to kick inane MPAA anti piracy video makers in the nutsacks with an iron toed winklepicker) Also, ITT WoD supports government intervention in and control of the internet...

I actually think that one of AP's biggest problems was that it couldn't decide whether to be serious business reality or super power Bond/ Batman hybrid, and the associated problem of whether to judge it as fantastic or realistic. If you view it as realistic then the fantastic parts are a negative, if you view it as fantastic then the realistic parts (like not every shot aimed at a bullseye actually hitting the bullseye) are a negative. As such it (potentially at least, personally I wasn't bothered by the dichotomy) has the worse of both worlds.

Yeah...vague statements like that I don't find very comforting. To me it sounds like "If it comes, we hope we can, but in the end, who knows." So it's a fear of mine, with things like Steam, as well. Not a huge one, but it's always in the back of my mind, making it difficult for me get on the Steam-like bandwagon. To be clear, the statement (if it were ever made) was patent rubbish. There are a host of circumstances- eg get sold or go bankrupt- where you'd have zero say on what happens; your administrators/ new owners can close it down, turn it into a subscription model or whatever and there's nothing you could do about it. In fact, if you were going bankrupt and 'jailbroke' all the games you'd almost certainly be criminally liable for deliberately decreasing the value of the company's assets. They'd pretty much need to be both closing down voluntarily and to have got the prior consent of every publisher and developer to do what they claim. That's not just true of Steam, of course. GoG's a lot more safe though because so long as you've backed up properly there's no dial home at all.

If you've got radtools installed you can run the movies (biks) from the data folder. No doubt the stills can be found on the web as well, perhaps via the arcane mystery of a google search.

DDO possibly, but LOTRO was not heading for a shutdown any time soon even before the switch to f2p.

KOTOR's compatibility seems to get broken by video card drivers having poor legacy openGL support more than operating system (but so far as I know both major manufacturers have fixed their issues with it now)

The fault is Sega's, almost certainly, though there's certainly room for other parties (could be a uniloc/drm problem as it asks me for the disk which it ain't supposed to, also WUNE's grunt problem is DRM related). Sega are meant to handle patch releases and testing and it appears that the problem is specifically with its compatibility being broken rather than it being outright broken. I'm actually at the stage of wondering whether some tech guy at Sega just got sick of it and stuck an interim patch up. The weird structure, lack of publicity, lack of localisation testing and everything else about it is so far out of usual operating procedure it really looks like something odd has happened.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/a...wing-extremism/ Shows loud and clear what the administration thinks of veterans. I mean after all they voted for McCain by a margin of 16:1 Or perhaps they just remember a certain veteran by the name of Tim McVeigh? He blew up a building in Oklahoma, I believe, along with a bunch of his ex army mates?

A patch that is literally just an exe replacement, no installer, no readme, nothing else at all? I'm not sure I've seen that in the last decade. Or at least not without it being labeled an interim or beta patch or similar. Edit #2 and more amusingly*, the patched exe gives me a no disk error then Dr Watson's and needs to be killed in task manager... *as v1 has always worked fine for me PEBKAM errors relating to a changed video card notwithstanding.

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Defence receives apology after scathing report

I actually have no fundamental problem with DLC, though the cost benefit ratio so far is dreadful in most cases. The problem with Broken Steel specifically is nothing intrinsic to it, but that it is a payment required end game replacement for one of the worst* 'vanilla' end games in the history of gaming and it would have been far more appropriate/ better simply to not have had the broken endgame in the first place. *I'd use the term 'ill though out' rather than worst, except they admitted to knowing what the problems were and just ignoring them.

I could view the models fine. You need to run umodel from a command prompt rather than by double clicking it, easiest way is to install something which will open a command prompt in the correct place via right click context menu ('command prompt here' powertoy on XP, not sure for vista/w7) then type umodel [filename].upk in the command window. You'll need to put umodel and its dll into every folder you want to view using that method, but it does work.

Apart from the one (two/ three) which was a linear shooter, and the one which they forgot to include a bunch of assets leading to a forest of pings, and the buggy pointless one set on a spaceship. It was far better than Oblivion's DLC though. Broken Steel, yes, if most/ all DLC was like that it would be worth it. If only it were not essentially selling an ending separate to the game and an admission that the original ending sucked worse than being locked in a room listening to Celine Dion on permanent loop until your brain explodes.

Sir, I object to your interjection! Also, you are not Purkake. Cogar66 dear fellow, you haven't got any points at all either. Accusing AP of being stereotypical and unoriginal is fair enough since it is. Unfortunately, so is Bloodlines by any objective measure- much as AP hits just about every spy/ conspiracy trope Bloodlines hits pretty much every vampire plot trope and cliche in existence. Irrelevant anyway as unoriginal and good is far better than original but crap. And gameplay? Many if not most of AP's gameplay elements are close equivalents to Bloodlines'. The issue is obfuscated a bit by Bloodlines having active mod development and patching. Personally I'd pick Bloodlines over AP if pushed, but not Bloodlines V1. But that ain't any kind of authoritative judgment founded in logical fundamentals. Bananas > Apples because bananas have more potassium is an actual argument. Bananas > Apples because spheres are an unoriginal shape for a fruit isn't.

Darkside female can kill him. It's a fitting reward for suffering through the 'romance'... even better than killing Carth Jr. I think I may have told Carth to FOAD when I played a female as a cheaper alternative to vomiting over my computer and needing a new keyboard after talking to him. May also have been confused with the, ick, Carth redemption option which is reactivated by a mod.

Someone in the linked article played it 28 times, not Volo.

Getting Zaalbar to kill Mission = cruel. It's also probably KOTORs single largest redeeming feature. Unfortunately you can't kill Carth, mores the pity, though hopefully he gets eaten off screen by some peckish Rakatan. Carth Onasi: less balls than a 14 year old twilek girl. And yeah, I too guessed the twist very early. On the subject of ME2, some may find this article (blatantly stolen from RPGWatch) interesting.

0A, A0 is 160. You can check values with the built in windows calculator which has a hexadecimal mode and can do simple dec <-> hex conversions.

... Neither the fact that it is called "Penumbra __ Mac", nor the handy little Apple icon afterwards nor the system requirements tipped you off as to what version you were buying? I guess you've proven GG isn't idiot proof, at least. Since I'm an inherently nice guy I'd point out that you can ask for a refund and since they're in Sweden you'll probably get it too, even if only as a credit.

For negative reps it's probably just putting in FF FF FF F# (where hash is a hex value from F [gives -1] to 6 [gives -10]) in columns 2-5 from the original post.