Zoraptor

I quoted one, Col. Dave Lapan, a couple of pages back, and he seemed fairly definitive. Also, coalition casualties have actually declined since the release of the first batch of leaks, as opposed to last year when they stayed roughly equal throughout the summer months. While there are certainly other factors at work that does very strongly suggest there has not been a significant increase in risk to coalition soldiers caused by the Afghan release. Lapan could be lying in the belief that admitting to deaths could discourage future/ current informants from supplying information, of course, but at present there isn't enough independent evidence to decide either way. That's something we'll only find out if a media organisation does some proper investigative work to check. So we probably won't find out.

It isn't really, is it? Isn't it still just what Patrick Mills believes* at this point and there hasn't been anything official either way? TESS/ USPTO still lists AP as being Sega's, with the confirmation date being only about six weeks ago (Sept 14 2010). While that ain't the be all and end all it is a fairly decent indicator in general. *I'm not saying he's lying or anything, he could simply be mistaken.

FTR that is pretty much exactly why I picked Fox News, ie solely because it is not likely to be accused of being anti American. It was a report on freely available public comments and I initially read it on the BBC, but a link from there might face an accusation of bias or not telling the whole story. There's no malice intended in the correction- normally a link from Newsweek (or the NYT, for that matter) would be fine as a source and there's no reason to expect it to be inaccurate. It just happened to be 'provably' wrong on this occasion.

Ye Gads Di, not everything is an Evil Plot to defame the US. If anything, as the debunking of that NYT article shows, the misrepresentation has been against NZ. There was never any serious chance of the production going elsewhere. They'd already spent $100 million on it which would almost all have had to be written off, pretty much all of the people Jackson has ever used on the technical and production side are NZers and changing places would delay the project by anything up to a year. There isn't so much a sense of entitlement as a feeling that the whole thing is a fiasco which could and should have been sorted out amicably six months ago over a beer and fish and chips if there had been a modicum of goodwill shown rather than an immediate leap to see who had the bigger Cheney followed by a series of typical vested interest pile ons.

EDIT: A quick read of the Ukraine Famine indicates that it's probably a great example of LoF denying an atrocity. You just did it right now XD Not read on wikipedia I hope. Their article was (and it seems, still is) of simply dreadful quality.

Technically GO did fight for the communists (POUM militia = militia of the Partit Obrer d'Unificacio Marxista). They were just the wrong type of communists for Stalin. The great irony being that he was simultaneously fighting for and against communism at one point.

Yeah, it's the sort of thing anyone who lives here instantly knows is wrong. To be fair though, if you don't live here you'd have no reason not to take what the NYT said at face value.

There's already an option for fewer fetch quests. Say "No sir" when asked to do them or just don't do them if received. [Really though, I know what you're saying and agree to an extent. But there's no point having something bug free and polished if everything else about it is small and mediocre]

New Zealand law allows collective bargaining. Reference (please note: .govt.nz in URL)

Bugs suck, but bugs can (and should) be fixed. They're also the inevitable consequence of any sufficiently complicated set of systems. A boring, generic, vanilla, unmemorable and unambitious game will be those things for all eternity. The one way to make sure you never reach the stars is to never even try shooting for them in the first place.

Actually the NZ union only asked for a meeting to discuss conditions. All the other stuff- boycott talk etc- came from the Australians so your claims that they shot themselves in the head are... incorrect. The sole thing the NZ union did wrong was not distance themselves from the Australians (by no means easy for them to do- if they were willing to try strongarming a large multinational like Warners they wouldn't have any problem blacklisting NZ union members who criticised them- quickly enough. And as I said, Warners has most certainly spun their own amount of bull. They said they'd never received assurances from the NZ union (ie, the union that actually matters) when they'd had them in writing for days and had in fact responded to that assurance asking the union to keep quiet about it. As for filming in the UK? Would not suggest one holds one's breath. If it ain't NZ then location work in Eastern Europe and post processing in NZ is far more likely.

An earlier batch of wikileaks documents dealt with Afghanistan already. Probably the most significant thing from the last few days was the rather quiet admission that there hasn't been any deaths of informants or such associated with the previous batch of leaks despite the dire assertions at the time.

Steam only cuts the middleman for Valve games. For everyone else it's just a different middleman to retail. Digital distribution makes (more) money because it's fundamentally better business wise than standard retail as its fixed costs are lower. What are these numbers pray tell? Supposedly at least the numbers for everything except retail are going up and the PC industry is growing. EX PCGA (potentially biased source, of course) In contrast, ex NPD.

I'm glad Paradox takes care to stagger their releases. If CK2, MMtG and DW came out in close proximity to each other I'd probably not have enough spare time to breathe let alone sleep.

I know a lot of people don't like Jackson as he is and has been very outspoken on a bunch of film industry related issues, isn't afraid of tough negotiating and can come across as slightly self important. Though to be fair so far as I am aware he has been so since as far back as Bad Taste (and arguably being self important is a requirement for a good director) and from what I understand the conditions on LOTR were- broadly- the same as they would have been if unionised. Interesting (?) trivia: they filmed parts of The Frighteners on the property next door to ours and had a big half built house covered in tarpaulin like stuff there for a few months.

Someone (sorry, can't remember who) attached a psd template for adding the Alpha Protocol tag to avatar images on one of their posts. It did rely on either having Photoshop and some rudimentary skills in it or the goodwill of whoever was doing them to implement.

The whole thing is a fiasco. Australian union screws up NZers (followed by loltastic "relocate to Australia" pitch), NZ union feels it has to support Aussie union despite their spokeswomen looking like a frightened rabbit right from the beginning and the stunned and disbelieving annoyance of other NZ unions, Jackson postures and grandstands and Warners uses it to wring more tax concessions from our government- and I would have sympathy for Warners if they hadn't blatantly and provably lied about receiving assurances that there would not be industrial issues from the people who actually make that decision rather than from some smug Australian who should have been fired back across the Tasman with a RotK surplus trebuchet. Complete, utter, unmitigated garbage from the lot of them.

What, the 360 version uses Steamworks as well? (Ohohoho) Seriously though it probably wasn't a good idea to drop to the dashboard if there is any chance its writing stuff to HD (or whatever an Arcade uses) as even though an HD is more reliable you can stuff things up that way. It may be fixable by something basic like clearing the cache and or reinstalling to the HD. [Realistically though the save games are probably stuffed and it probably isn't due to non save game file corruption, sadly. Having said that I had much the same thing happen to me in Oblivion once, albeit on PC, and the save games did end up working again after a reinstall]

Can you even call them aircraft carriers when they aren't going to get planes for, what, nine years (I'm still not sure I heard that right) after their launch? The ghost of Galtieri would be smacking his chops in anticipation. Though it's not quite spending their entire commissioned life freighting oranges around the Med because they're entirely unsuited to the task they were purchased for as happened with one of our ships...

Nah, you're just part of the 1%. But let's not go off on a bitter tangent.

Did they ever get around to turning off the bonus content as they said they would? Because there was originally a time limit for the DAO bonus content (inc Shale), if I recall correctly. All preorder bonuses say to me is that waiting for the Ultimate/Awesome/Complete/GOTY Edition is 100% the correct decision*, at least if I'm interested in buying the game in the first place as they almost always seem to end up included. And I'm not sure I am interested in DA2. *Unless it's Europa Universalis 3, in which case they have two more expansions after the complete edition and I end up buying vanilla, complete and 2/3 expansions because EU3 is my personal crack and even after spending near 100USD on it I still vaguely feel like I've ripped Paradox off.

It's also made by people with a great deal of experience in and intimate knowledge of what works and what doesn't, MMO wise. LOTRO was designed specifically to be somewhat "limited"* as compared to other offerings but to make sure that what it did it did very well. It's been successful precisely because it did not promise the world on a platter but delivered what it claimed, unlike the other roughly contemporaneous examples like Conan and WH which had far more grandiose claims but far less actual achievement and capacity to deliver. Frankly, everything we've seen about TOR suggests they aren't going for the rather more limited but very well executed approach but for the blunderbuss/ shotgun try to hit every target at once and promise the stars approach, ie comparisons to AoC/ WH seem far more apropos. *To clarify, I'm certainly not saying that LOTRO is bad or limited mechanics/ gameplay wise, just that their approach- given the sort of thing which might have been expected in an 'epic' setting like Middle Earth- was rather more circumspect and scaled than might have been expected from other MMO companies. And more successful because of it.

I think a lot of the stink about the hostage rescue is due to the initial reports blaming a suicide vest for the hostage's death- something which would be manifestly untrue as a suicide vest has some, uh, very obvious diagnostic characteristics when it comes to the state of the wearer post use. The other issue is that the Afghan nationals taken at the same time had been released so the kidnappers were clearly amenable to negotiation and not Taleban die hards. Given the inherent risk of any hostage rescue a certain amount of concern in how it was handled is warranted.

The link Tigranes posted works for US people if you don't mind downloads.