Zoraptor

It's also illegal to import unrated (or more technically, 'refused classification') items. Not that anyone is likely to be caught unless stupid or unlucky but the penalties can be quite severe, IIRC, especially if you do so for distribution purposes.

Yes. So long as it's the "right people" doing the threatening/ kidnapping/ killing and the "right people" on the receiving end it has always been totally fine.

An HIV positive mother has HIV negative children- in the vast majority of cases HIV is transmitted during and after birth rather than in the womb. This is particularly tragic because you can actually stop 99.9% of mother-child transmissions very cheaply and very easily.

No, it isn't as awkward.

Actually, yes I do. IR absorbtion and reradiation is a well understood phenomenon. It is literally impossible to accurately model the earth's climate- it's a fundamentally Chaotic system. Hundreds of years of weather forecasting and they still regularly get it wrong, and that's a relatively simple system with truly gigantic amounts of available data and the ability to monitor in real time. All you can do is make approximations and adjust as and when more data arrives. For long term climate prediction there is basically a century worth of hard data with a few points being able to be extrapolated from other stuff (ice cores, tree ring systems etc) in a system in which changes are measured, one hopes, in the minimum of decades. If you wait for 'proof' you will never, ever, ever, ever.. ever stop waiting. Sea level rises, desertification, more extreme short term climatic events, increased competition for water resources etc are the most likely. Some things like sea level changes are very easy to calculate; if a given volume of non-floating ice melts it will generate around 90% of its volume in water, while other things are inherently more questionable (if permafrost melts will it release huge amounts of methane and CO2 and have an 'exponential' heating effect? Theoretically the gas release is extremely likely, at least). No doubt there will be increases in rainfall and productivity in some places but they are unlikely to balance out- if for no other reason than the earth having a lot less earth at higher latitudes. I personally doubt most of the apocalyptic scenarios, we've had far greater levels of CO2 previously and the planet hasn't gone Venus and the seas haven't died off permanently, but that isn't really the point. It only takes a few small changes, or changes in a few important places, and suddenly you have a lot of people with no food and or water and or sitting up to their necks in sea water- and potentially little cheap and easy energy sources either- and that will make the planet a very unfriendly place. As it happens I think most of the preventative measures are silly insofar as they are meant to prevent changes, if the theories are sound it's far too late to do much. It is eminently sensible to move away from oil though, as the easily extractable reserves will run out and that will cause enormous problems if something isn't done to mitigate it- not least because it will mean bye bye to cheap plastics as well as cheap, convenient power. And the facts have to be faced that even if climate change is bunk we cannot continue to grow indefinitely in population and energy use as if the earth has unlimited resources when it obviously doesn't.

I doubt anyone, even the most extreme climate change advocates would dispute that. I like the smoking analogy for a couple of reasons- you can isolate compounds from tobacco and show that they are toxic/ carcinogenic, and you can isolate chemicals in the atmosphere and show that they do have an insulating effect, so the basic science is sound in each case. At the same time there will always be some smokers who never seem to get effected and live to a ripe old age, and some places on earth seem to get different effects (ie cooler, wetter) to what is thought of as standard (hotter, drier) in the 'accepted' climate change model. The difference being that most people now accept that smoking will significantly increase (layman: cause) cancer even if there are exceptions, but people tend to jump on any exception to the global warming effect as 'proof' that it's unfounded as a whole. And that is largely because PR monkeys and scientifically ignorant or naive pundits tend to control the debate. I don't agree with attempts to silence dissent or massage data at all, but I do understand why it is done in a climate (haha) where every single exception or variation is jumped on as proof that climate change as a whole is bunk.

To clarify, floating ice doesn't matter much, from a water level perspective at least, though there are potential effects on things like currents- it's already displacing water so the arctic ice itself shrinking has little effect. The big problem is when the melting starts over land- such as the gigantic glacier which is Greenland- because that has an exponential type rate of increase, the more ice melts the quicker the remainder melts. The really big problem with climate change is a fundamental one of when the Philosophy of Science clashes with PR and public. The problem being that it is impossible to prove positives with science, even something as simple as a DNA test doesn't 'prove' identity (testimony in court tends to say things like 'one billion times more likely to be from X than a random person', and it can prove it wasn't someone). Unlike in court however, these limitations tend to be used to say things like "climate change is just a theory" or "there's no conclusive proof smoking causes cancer" in order to justify doing nothing. In some cases it's getting to the level of saying that there shouldn't be safety railings on high structures because it's the theory of gravity and it hasn't been conclusively proven that every time someone 'falls' off a height they inevitably drop- which, scientifically speaking, is actually true. That isn't the case with climate change, it's far more complex than basic physics because the earth is far more complex, though the basic science for the theory is 'proven' and there are plenty of examples of significant environmental change on a more local level that have been effected by man. And it's eminently sensible to be precautionary about such things when the consequences are so potentially huge. I really wish those in charge of the answers didn't appear to be showing such an obsession with naked tax grubbing and stupidities like Emission Trading Schemes, which will try to smash the square peg of 'capitalism'- and not even proper capitalism- into the round hole of environmentalism, though.

The dates are all over the place, the retailers have probably been given a vague Q2 2010 timeframe. I've seen dates from late March to June depending on what source you check.

Don't know much about the artillery- though I was under the impression that by far the most common were the 'old' Napoleons and rifled pieces rather than modern types- but neither Monitor nor the Virginia were anywhere near as revolutionary as is made out in the US as the French (La Gloire) and the British (HMS Warrior) had already produced 'proper' ironclads prior to either.

Globally the 'historical outcome' ACW was almost totally irrelevant as it was almost entirely internal and its net result was a return to the pre 1860 default USA. Even the slavery aspect wasn't really much of a (global) factor as that was almost entirely an internal institution by that time. On the other hand, had the Confederates won it would have been very highly significant and would have had enormous repercussions to this day, so it really depends on how you look at it.

Yeah, that John Riccitiello chap (EA) must be really peeved at that John Riccitiello chap (Elevation Partners) for bundling the two studies together... Yes, they are the same person.

It was from the Beeb, so... From memory, HIV (and population growth problems, like famine) were the largest negative factors.

Africa overall actually has a lower standard of living now than it had fifty years ago.

That's flat out wrong. Even leaving aside storming the army barracks in Barcelona against opposition from genuine (albeit also genuinely inept) 'real' soldiers various anarchist columns seized much of SW Spain in the first few weeks of the war. It's hardly their fault that the main republican government spent most of the rest of the war starving them of resources and trying to assimilate them into their (almost always genuinely inept) military ranks, or outright trying to suppress them. There's also fairly decent evidence of the communists tipping the nationalists off to attacks involving anarchist formations.

~two months to 1 million+, ie 1 million sales for 2006 only, return for 2006-7 well above expectations (around 65% above; and if my German ain't letting me down, Google and YahooT seem to agree though). And yeah, Volo, I can link it though it's in German since it's in a report by BVT, the people who funded the game, who are German. I'm a lot less confident about the 3.25 million figure being accurate as it was based on inference, but I implied as much both by me being surprised and using apparently. Now Volo, perhaps some evidence from you that NWN1>2? Have no fear, gentle readers, I will not be holding my breath.

On the main issue, I wouldn't rule out WOTC being involved- they could have got snarky about the modules technically being sublicencing of the D&D licence to EA rather than subcontracting to Bioware now that BW is no longer independent. Oh yeah, apparently NWN2 sold more than NWN1 (I was rather surprised, as much as NWN2 is IMO far superior to NWN1 in every way I never thought it was reflected in sales). NWN1+exps ~3million, NWN2 ~3.25million- and that even excluded SOZ.

Yes, the problem is that, if you have day 1 DLC and especially if you have it ameliorating an 'artificial' limitation (ie inventory space) then it does look like it has (1) been chopped off the main game and (2) the 'artificial' limitation is there specifically to drive people to pay for its removal- whether or not that is really the case. And that perception is most definitively not limited to vocal bioh8ors.

I'm another in the wait for the GOTY camp. Fallout 3 GOTY is about 40% of the purchase price if you bought the game and DLC separately, here, and no doubt DAO will be the same. And when it comes right down to it I've got a ton more games to play than I have time to play them, no patience for such things MS (or Bioware) points and certainly no sympathy for shameless in game money grubbing.

And here I was thinking that LoF, despite his "thrice damned" and "Christ's" was a committed communist but then I come into a tropic and find him arguing for class differentiation just like a typical capitalist running dog? I am shocked and appalled.

There's always vgchartz for the general idea.

No offence taken. I'm inclined to think that it may be a country/ credit rating specific difference since the person I got the explanation from was not actually a bank/ CC employee, but someone I knew who worked for the credit rating agency. His explanation basically being that if you paid it off in full it was not considered 'real' credit- it only became 'real' credit when you paid interest on it. So, probably differences in how credit ratings work between countries by the sound of it.

They still wouldn't do it most likely [even if it were just a matter of sticking the netcode from the last one in]. For all the spin it is an antipiracy measure, if they leave out any netcode not related to IWnet it means that any pirated copies will not be multiplayer capable (well, theoretically at least, practically it would require something similar to a Steam emulator to be written, so not a trivial undertaking but probably possible in the medium term).

Funny thing is, I was told the exact opposite of that- the way to improve your credit rating was to not pay off in full every month. My own experience supports this as the only times I've ever been offered limit upgrades on my card was immediately after the very rare occasions I didn't pay it off fully. I had a credit limit of $500 for five years for that reason. I couldn't work out why my sister who didn't even have a job for most of that time kept on getting credit upgrades when I didn't and I was eventually told that because I had no loans/ HP agreements etc. they didn't know whether I was capable of paying off more (that's despite having a five figure sum in the issuing bank at the time).

The first bolded part is just GameInformer putting their 'unique' spin on it. Considering they're owned by EB/GameStop they'll be all over anything which minimises canceled pre-orders.

Yeah, it's a free one-month loan, with an emergencies-only option to extend into longer-term credit on unfavorable terms. CC transactions are also disputable, a major factor if buying online as well as offline. If your goods don't turn up, are broken or whatever you can (usually, so long as you haven't been stupid) get the transaction reversed if the vendor plays up. If you pay cash and the company you bought from goes bust or whatever good luck getting anything out of them.