Zoraptor

It was so much more simple in the days of Pinochet, Galtieri et al. Have coup, execute opponents, rape torture and murder dissidents and still get to have some nice nosh with Maggie (well, so long as you don't try to invade Las Malvinas at least) or Ronnie every once in a while... Happy days. It's sad that the modern equivalent is so girly-man: have coup, deport President, get friend of coup to stall any and all negotiations by shouting "we'll handle this, don't worry" at the top of their lungs then "oops guys, took too long we'll just have to have an election anyway", an election held with the military shooting at anyone supporting the old president and suppressing all opposition press, and with a military appointed Uncle Tom opposition figure that results in an astounding and astonishing win for the coup candidate. Then shout "fair and free" (while still shouting the opposite about Iran where the circumstances are almost identical- except of course who one's friends are). AKA the Honduras method.

Nice, because other than this, there's nothing in your post I disagree with. So, other than dotting the i's and crossing the t's in Wals' post (and sending some happy feelings my way while you're at it), what do you have to say about the OP? Heh, that did sound a touch snippy. Basically I didn't take the OP particularly seriously as there were a bunch of very large assumptions in it, namely no warming since 1998 (a canard argument and much the same sort of statistical manipulation that proponents are often accused of as 1998 was the hottest on record, and almost certainly a statistical outlier- removing it means there has been continued warming- may not be a problem with the original article but with the commentor) and that the earlier temperature changes could not have been human influenced despite a whole lot of potential CC causing stuff having already happened (eg extremely large scale deforestation of Europe, again showing the same sort of fixation many proponents are accused of, just this time on fossil fuels). Caveat: I'm only commenting on the part Wals quoted, nothing more, I haven't read the original article. And I've never been a fan of either side arguing about fossil fuels as while there are very good reasons for exploring alternatives (primarily that we will have to at some stage) CC is not one of them.

Had that "discussion" with numbersman last year. It's pointless. Since Wals actually took some of the stuff I was saying on board though... Correct, but horribly overstated both in the frequency of usage and in what it actually means which is that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. It disproves nothing and is evidence for very little as often correlation is due to causation. In other words- and I cannot think of a single counterexample short of unprovable thought experiments- the vast majority of science is based precisely on the observation that while correlation does not intrinsically = causation correlation "observation" is the only way to find causation. Throwing it out as a bon mot counterargument is a very common tactic, but it's qualitatively feeble. Which, once again, is fine as a general point, but irrelevant to the actual issue as the question at hand does not depend upon 'social' issues, but on -theoretically at least- scientifically isolatable ones. Practically it is... difficult... to model but that is more due to it being the interface of a whole bunch of individually complex systems and certainly not due to "human factors". It pretty much is, at least in the scientific sense. Any and all model are also a hypothesis even if the practical depth of the hypothesis is phenomenon X can be successfully simulated by applying mathematical relationship A to variables LMN and constants PQ, though it's slightly more fuzzy the more towards the social side you get as the variables tend to get less prone to modeling. But basically it's a poor point for the same reason that "correlation != causation" is a fundamentally vapid statement as in common usage- any worthwhile scientific model pretty much is a mathematical statement of a hypothesis. That's pretty much right, though models certainly may 'just become wrong' if the science underpinning them is simply wrong. Not strictly a mathematical model, but the "plum pudding" model of the atom certainly is wrong in every significant way, and from a mathematical perspective some of the church approved earth centric models of the solar system certainly just became wrong.

Everything I've heard suggests that Bush snr. was always against Gulf War II, as was Powell. It was the chickenhawks like Cheney/ Rumsfeld/ Wolfowicz who were the main forces for it.

Al Jazeera is an arab, sunni organisation so it actually is about as 'biased' as any western one vis a vis persian shi'ites who make up the majority of Iran's population. Basically it's like implying that the Protestant Belfast Times is as an unbiased source when talking about things going on in Catholic Ireland. (Not that I necessarily think it is biased in this case.)

You can't. Either way, not really important, is it? Yea i heard you could go through and not kill anyone. Not killing anyone is not (quite) the same thing as being a pacifist. Someone (MCA, I think) said that while going through without killing anyone was viable going through without using a weapon- the full pacifist approach- would be either extremely hard/ actually impossible.

360 does, PC doesn't, presumably thanks to their awesome new value added DRM.

There is for the Wii, I'm not sure about the other consoles. Or I'm sure there isn't for the PS3, since it remains uncracked afaik. I have no clue about the 360 though. PS3 has been 'technically' cracked, ie it can be done, iirc, but has a whole bunch of stuff making it not cracked in a 'practical' manner- high cost of media, low availability and high cost of writers, difficult console modding process, liable to nuking like xbox live bricking modded 360s, no critical mass, potentially enormous download sizes etc.

There's a lot of piracy on the 'closed' 360 and NintendoDS. Nope, he's right. You're right too, but less right than him Better hardware leads to more complicated code and- all other things being equal- more complicated code is harder to emulate. You're looking at the symptom rather than the ultimate cause, the better hardware.

The storyline thing sounds like something from Lost, though it's not something unfamiliar to Obsidian from previous games- sensory stones from PST, Korriban from K2, and I guess the final conversation with Kreia could count as a flash forward of sorts.

If you own the game (as I said - legitimate uses), then you already have copyright permission to own that game's files, so there is no copyright violation. But you're still wrong*, unless you think the entire population of NZ consists of librarians and other "authorised" people- rather ironically I may well qualify as authorised and my dad very likely does, but the vast majority of people certainly won't. But as I said earlier, you're pretty much certain not to be prosecuted either civilly or criminally for it as it is close to impossible to prove and nobody would waste their time trying unless it's a mass distribution type thing. Or someone has highly paid lawyers sitting around wanting to justify their stipends. Just be glad we aren't having this debate under the old laws where copying music from a CD to your computer or iPod was illegal... *I admit my wording could have been far clearer on the why though.

I've read this before, but I can't remember where. It's technically illegal though it's a copyright infringement matter rather than a criminal one (all IIRC, does not constitute a legal opinion etc.) Look, I'm sorry but that's incorrect. First, as I clearly pointed out, DRM circumvention law is DIFFERENT in New Zealand (i.e. legal for legitimate purposes), and secondarily, even in American law, DRM circumvention has NOTHING to do with copyright law - it has its own section of the law, and DRM circumvention is DRM circumvention under the law (DMCA). DRM circumvention is NOT copyright infringement in any jurisidictions that I know of. And no, IANAL. My dear fellow, I live in New Zealand. Because you're downloading someone else's copyrighted work- ie the executable/ dlls- you are infringing their copyright even though the use of cracks/ circumventing DRM is not itself illegal. So while it isn't illegal in a criminal sense, at present at least, it is in a civil sense and yes, companies can take you to court for doing so. Though it really isn't worth their while since we have almost exclusively dynamic IPs here making it almost impossible to get the basic evidence necessary.

Pretty much all of the SegaUS releases since ETW have used Steamworks- NTW, AVP etc. They've obviously got some dealy going on as they've also released back catalogue games solely on Steam (eg AVP2000) as well. But since AP is available on other digital distributors- that won't sell Steamworked games- and it isn't MP so doesn't need any match making capacity etc it hopefully won't use it. I've read this before, but I can't remember where. It's technically illegal though it's a copyright infringement matter rather than a criminal one (all IIRC, does not constitute a legal opinion etc.) [edit] Had a quick look around and it seems they've also used uniloc (which I'd never even heard of prior) on FM2010 and GfWL on their Olympics game recently.

Certainly, he was better than Obama is. Either of them are better than someone who has advocated nuking two different peoples in the past week or so for the crime of being Iranian or German. If your ultimate "point" is that Mahmoud cannot be trusted with nukes but "we" can then you haven't so much shot yourself in the foot as self amputated both legs.

Ah, yes, international politics on internet forums, the one thing which can make me look back on GWB thinking that there was a well informed rational peace loving individual who I'm eternally glad made president- because it's always good to remember that things could be so much worse.

Steamworks = automatic no sale, and frankly it's about the only thing which would mean an automatic no sale short of some sort of Ubisoft merger in the next few weeks. Can't afford the several hundred dollars in bandwidth costs when it goes ballistic and decides the DVD isn't enough to install from, even if I didn't loathe Steamworks and its bastard stepchildren on principal. Don't think it will have it though or it wouldn't be pre orderable from anywhere other than Steam. SecuROM>>>Steamworks.

Has Steam reinstated their AP pre orders, because they had taken the page down? For that matter is there actually a CE planned? Gamersgate had the same preorder bonus as Steam (free Space Siege) which so far as I am aware still stands, though I'm guessing someone in Australia may not be too keen on a download copy in any case, due to data caps.

360 isn't even close to breaking even.

If that were the case Sony would be slitting their wrists. PS3's are sold at a loss. Buying a PS3 for a single game is not great for Sony, it's very bad for Sony. They need to sell other stuff (games, extra controllers etc) to break even on the console side of the ledger.

They had one term and we refused to accept it. And the funny (well, if you're of the opinion that it wasn't meant as "back off, Georgian Joe, OUR WORDS ARE BACKED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS" but a legitimately necessary part of war) thing is being that after the unconditional surrender that one term got honoured. Or in other words 150k people killed for no practical reason except being able to say the surrender was unconditional.

Most MMOs have it. Borderlands had it, even ME had it, but only when buying something from a vendor. ME had it automatically showing on the inventory screen, you had to click a specific button to see it when buying.

You're pretty on target here I think, Purkake. The problem is not yet overwhelmingly obviously serious enough for all the suits to get up and take notice and say "we gotta deal with this and DRM isn't working". There's no real conclusive evidence out in the public OR in the industry in general. Until it happens... "The gaming industry is doing just fine" is incorrect, and that's pretty much inarguable. The only publisher that's financially secure at this point is Activision, most of the others are either close to bankrupt (Atari, 2k, Sega US, Eidos prior to it getting acquired), have been close to bankrupt and are still losing money regularly (Ubisoft) or have been losing money for years previous even if they are in no immediate danger (EA). Even Activision has managed to have money losing quarters despite having the $1 billion a year of near pure profit WoW provides. The hardware manufacturers aren't in great shape, Nintendo excluded. MS has worked hard to bury the gigantic hole caused by half its 360's getting RRODs (that on hardware which sells at a loss, let alone is replaced at a loss) and shunted most of its development costs for the 360 onto the written off budget of the original xbox- it's unlikely they will see any overall profit from the 360 despite continuing to push out its retirement date. And that's not even considering Sony and the PS3 which has not got anywhere near the economies of scale- especially wrt to Cell- needed to get close to breaking even. Until recently their games division was being propped up by the PS2. Some independent developers are doing fine, of course, but there's no shortage of "[dev house] shuts down" headlines to balance that out. In short, gaming industry is not doing just fine unless your definition of just fine is anything which isn't actively imploding.

A little better than what I remembered, but still losing 5 to 1 against the consoles. Ignorant statement. It's not losing 5 to 1 against any single console. That's what people talking about 'the consoles' fail to grasp: the PC is a platform. The Xbox is a platform. The console is NOT a platform. The breakdown of sales is roughly 6:3:2. For this game sales on the PC lag those on other platforms, but they are still high (more than high enough to justify porting - and on that note, it'd cost more to port it from Xbox to PS3 than Xbox to PC, assuming they didn't actually code it for PC first, which they often do). It's also stats from the UK, which has the highest console penetration of any (major) country and does not include any PC digital sales of which the UK has one of the highest rates- thus not the most representative figures to use as they are pretty much the maximums for the two consoles and the minimum for PC.

[citation needed]

Frankly I'd regard that as a symptom of no Levine. The three main story driven games he's written for are Thief: TDP, System Shock 2 and Bioshock and each has (a) main antagonist(s) which you can identify with a 'big' ideology- The Trickster in Thief is Anarchist, The Many in SS2 is collectivist, Shodan is fascist, Ryan and Fontlas both in their own way are capitalists (one idealist/objectivist, the other realist/nihilist). Along with plot twists executed in a manner that Bioware has been trying to ape with little success since BG2 it's perhaps his greatest signature. Jordan Thomas just ain't as good as carrying it off as Levine.