Zoraptor

you said you'd prefer to believe that they'd lie, actually, which is what i replied to. I'd prefer to have a finger cut off than a hand. Having a finger or a hand cut off are not necessarily the only options. I wouldn't like to have a finger cut off either. Yes? In any case it is patently obvious that they did lie, (eg "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction", "We know for a fact that there are weapons there", "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat" ) even if they thought that while they were lying about the details they would be right on the larger scale.

Even though I actually think May I'm getting this weird urge to vote July for some reason...

IIRC the technical 'heir' to the British throne at that time would have been the Crown Prince of Prussia. Not 100% sure, but the first Kaiser was (IIRC again) Victoria's nephew. [edit: nope, unless Victoria died at a very particular time and her daughter still married the future Kaiser even as heir presumptive. If she'd died prior to ascending the throne Hannover would still have had a union with Britain and if she'd died without issue it presumably would have been reestablished]

So it basically cost about the same as original game but ain't stand alone game. It better have the content of the full game with that price. If not, I'll wait for some Steam megasales. According to Gamestop, who EA link to from their official Dragon Age site it's $30 for PC.

I should have been more clear, I don't think it's bad as an analogy per se, but that it's a bad comparison because it kind of implies that there is something about religion which needs curing, along the lines of "take two lithium morning and night and you'll be an atheist in no time (actual results may vary)" Have to agree with Hurlshot, that second analogy is real nice.

Brian bought Wasteland five (?) years ago and hasn't done anything with it (yet, and if rumours are true is in the process of changing).

That's an invalid implication- interviews can be conducted in a "scientifically valid" way (I've personally conducted them) but that in no way implies that the results of those interviews reflect scientific "truth", only that it reflects a statistically valid body of data. If you conducted interviews at the Salem Witch Trials you would (likely) end up with most of the interviews saying that the accused were witches and it would be scientifically accurate to say that. It would not though be accurate to say that this was proof that they actually were witches. As I don't think anyone has been arguing that belief in God is not a real belief your point is not really relevant. I'd also point out that putting belief in God in the same boat as diagnostic interviews for psycho-physical disorders like depression is inherently not a good point to make. Hezbollah (est ~1982) retroactively started the Lebanese Civil War (started 1976)?

China certainly has a very high proportion (relatively speaking, and depending a bit on whether you use 'renewable' or 'low carbon') of energy from renewable sources as a lot of the technology for things like solar and wind power are produced in China- there's a lot of solar powered hot water heating, for example. From memory the only ones ahead of it are a few smaller European nations- almost all Scandanavian- and a couple of others. If talking strictly low carbon rather than renewable then a few others with very high nuclear power supplies are also better like France. Unfortunately the non-renewable stuff China spews out tends to be highly unregulated and very 'bad', though, as it's coal fired.

Churchill also advocated the use of poison gas against people so long as they were brown and had a funny religion (well, "uncivilised tribes" at least- Saddam was not the first person to gas Iraqis, WSC thought dropping mustard on Iraqis from planes was an absolutely fantastic new innovation). He was good as a figurehead leader, but pretty much everything he himself developed like the aforementioned Gallipoli was a dreadful failure of the highest order.

You could argue that, but you would be wrong, at least if you are talking in more than the most basic instinctual level (hoarding/ stealing). "Greed" in the capitalist form is a socially evolved construct related to the development of money and advanced social structures, almost all evidence is that 'default' human behaviour is hieracho-cooperative and based on a "tribal" structure of mutual help and protection rather than a dog-eat-dog struggle of individuals against the world. Greed needs a bunch of socially evolved constructs (typically money, individual ownership, laws to protect said ownership) and a level of economic development above subsistence in order to function. Social evolution does not obey Darwinian rules- "culture" is not coded genetically and like other aspects of "extelligence" is passed on and "mutates" by strictly social means. Ironically, the idea that culture was effectively genetic (~Lamark-ism) was especially popular amongst communists because it meant that if you had good communist parents they would, ipso facto, have good communist children- fortunately people don't really work that way.

EA simply shows no interest in getting their old titles on any download service for some reason. I would have thought that there was a decent market for old Ultimas/ Wing Commanders/ System Shocks/ Dungeon Keepers etc which could be exploited with minimal effort but EA seems to like pretending that they never made anything prior to 2005, let alone 2000.

It's preparation for putting carbon taxes on imports as a type of 'justified' protectionism. Having said that, there's a whole lot of uniformed garbage floating around in the UK, perhaps the most amusing is the thought that adding a carbon tax will help home grown production in agriculture. As almost all stock feed in the UK is imported from places like Brazil it would actually make things worse when compared to places where you stick a cow/ sheep in a paddock and it eats grass 24/7/365/chop/ship/chomp. Perhaps the worst hatchet job of the last few years was when some hack in the Grauniad (same guy maybe) decided New Zealand was not clean and green because CO2 emissions had gone up when, going by Kyoto, that's only half the equation and the amount of CO2 absorbed by new forests had gone up by so much more that we were well ahead of the Kyoto target.

Oh come on, that was clearly aimed at taks' blanket claim that no one has died due to capitalism- clue being that it's the part explicitly quoted in Yuusha's reply. I don't think anyone would argue that history is not replete with examples of countries trying to "save" other ones from "evils" where the cure is as bad as the disease, whether the justification is religion, economic system or whatever, and whether capitalist or not. "We had to destroy the village to save it" springs to mind immediately and exactly as much as the Prague Spring or Afghanistan Pt1, or the Inquisition/ 30 Years War etc for that matter. The US made the rod for its own back on that one by screwing up their coup attempt, and Uribe is big enough to know exactly what the consequences would be of jumping into bed with them in a region where they are cordially loathed by most countries for their attempts to save them from the evils of leftists. Everyone knows that if you're going to try and coup a country at least make a decent go of it (see Honduras) and don't do something from amateur hour, 'cos if you do and fail you're just going to convince all the anti US types they were right all along without gaining anything. In any case Chavez is just following established "Cuban Missile" doctrine, with the difference being that no one thinks he's actually going to do anything militarily apart from some clandestine 3rd party support for Uribe's opponents (just make sure that the "proof" he's been doing so isn't some missiles that disappeared during the last US backed military government, because if one does that one ends up looking silly) and a whole lot of political posturing which is, after all, what Chavez is best at.

Nope. According to Bioware themselves Kotor was their most successful game and that wasn't published by Atari.

Careful there, trigger. I seem to remember distinctly someone who thought CO2 had to be directly warmed to have an insulating effect in that discussion, and I'm fairly sure that person wasn't Finnish.

National Socialism is roughly as socialist as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic. It's a conservative ideology as with similar philosophies espoused by groups such as the KKK, with the supposed socialism being appeals to rank nationalism- it was marketed to the poor and ignorant, who know they could be rich and informed if only [groupname] weren't keeping them down.

If that one model, one of a whole lot more, 'proves' that CC is a hoax then the solar output one with its temperatures diverging upwards of prediction over the past decade or so 'proves' denialism is a hoax too and we can all go home happy. The whole point of the climate change models is that a significant water rise would be likely to occur quickly not over thousands of years, making everything you've said with respect to Bangladesh founded upon nothing more the assumption of rote and repetitious denialism right up to there not being refugees because it will take place over millenia. If the climategate emails show more than pettiness then a whole bunch of groups- major press associations like the AP, Factcheck.org etc etc etc- are in on The Conspiracy too, as pretty much every single claim made by denialists has been shown and accepted as inconsequential (eg Jones' supposed attempts to block papers by "redefining peer review? Both papers involved made it into the IPCC report). I find the blanket assertion that one group of scientists are incompetent dishonest money grubbing charlatans happy to manipulate and fabricate data for the purposes of social engineering while another is a brave group of Mavericks standing up to The Man with support only from dedicated lay men bloggers and small Main St groups like the American Petroleum Institute to be utterly unproven and only slightly more credible than the same claims leveled against scientists by proponents of intelligent design.

Preface note: coupled fluid dynamic GCM's- the 'inaccurate' ones- are not the only climate change models, though it's easy to get that impression from wikipedia and there's a fixation on anthropogenic warming. Even a CC denial site like climatehoax.org has a model for climate change- prediction of fluctuation using solar output. It predicts that as we are ~at a solar minimum this year ought to be ~the coolest of the decade, so we'll find out if that model gets thrown off a cliff soon (it shouldn't, of course, it's historically a pretty good indicator even if all indications are that this year is going to be far warmer than it predicts). No they don't, and you've already written that they don't. A scenario is a macro prediction. You're seriously asking me to prove that the majority of climate scientists believe that little gw global warming is happening? Even the vast majority of CC skeptics accept the warming is happening, including you earlier in the thread. Dunno, but if you disbelieve their expert opinions, as with numbersman the onus is on you to provide reasonable evidence they're wrong beyond mere rote restatement that the models contain errors. If you think a RNG could do as well provide evidence that is true, if it's as self evident as you imply it shouldn't take too long. In any case, even models of 'simple' systems like the solar system tend to throw out things like Mercury crashing into the sun, Earth/Venus orbits crossing, moon crashing into the earth etc so the range of possibilities even in that simple model can be... odd. Ain't a shade of emotion in that. Bangladesh has a high population and a lot of very low altitude land area. If nothing is done and sea levels rise they will get displaced. Much like insurance, there does not have to be certainty over the bad thing happening in order for some action to be sensible. Ideally if the levels rise you have had enough time and preparation to make sure that as few people get displaced as possible. That ain't emotion, it's sense, unless you think potentially millions more refugees in south asia is a good thing. No need to, I'm well able to identify the fine art of insinuation. I've read the supposed 'smoking guns' and they aren't, and just about everyone outside the strict denialist camp agrees that while there's a fair bit of pettiness exhibited that's pretty much it.

Deserves a separate reply since it is an important point. You do realise that is what I have been saying all along, right? That you cannot tell specifics from the models but they can be used for macro predictions? The majority of scientists are of the opinion that they are good enough for it to be sensible to act on the scenarios they generate, not that the scenarios are gospel truth that will occur- any stochastic model inherently generates ranges of possibilities. There is no requirement for absolute accuracy when making predictions, they are a model for generating risk assessment primarily. And as such it is eminently sensible to act on some things at least, like deciding where and how x million Bangladeshis will live if the sea level does rise significantly. And that's why I've used comparisons to things like hurricanes, where the processes for predicting their formation and paths are rather poor on an individual basis yet still people act on those predictions, and pointed out that even in simple systems you get divergence and need for correction. And as I've said multiple times, there's barely anyone who doesn't think the earth is warming, the disputation is over how much it will, whether we've caused it and whether we can do anything about it. And to reiterate, I think the 'solutions' suggested for anthropogenic climate change are silly and won't work.

Though my formal qualifications are in science, the stuff I worked on (I'd stress it was not me alone doing the work) was related to tourism, to predict things like changes in transport and infrastructure needed, so not pure science. No, I'm just pointing out that (1) even really simple models are inaccurate (2) inaccuracy does not, ipso facto, mean that they are useless or every model would be useless (3) while most scientists think the climate models are inaccurate they don't think they are useless and you need something more than antifaith or antibelief to justify your opinion that their expert opinions are wrong. And no, rote restatement of base factors endemic to every model, complex or simple, does not count as evidence. Sheesh, even with something as 'simple' as the solar system model they correct for variations from observation and as more and better data becomes available. Glaciation "to cover with ice or glaciers; to affect with glaciers" can of course refer to the micro (single glacier) or macro (large scale area/ global/ ~ice age) process. I simply answered referring to as many variations as possible as I knew if I left one out that would be the one you "really" meant. I have faith and belief that they are, so do not need to provide evidence from those pesky science type fellows with their lieberal biases and need to transfer wealth massively to the third world. Alternatively, the evidence was already posted in the thread showing that the great majority of monitored glaciers are either ~static, or retreating; by taks of all people, who (questionable knowledge of statistical sampling aside) had the sense to make the credible argument that the retreat is natural rather than reiterating rote denial of it happening at all and demanding links for things which had already been provided pages ago or can be found by 2 seconds on google.

Probably- in a lot of cases they may need source to get it 100% compatible and in some cases problems may be quite obscure- though it doesn't explain why some things aren't there (XCOM is available on every (?) digital distributor except GOG using dosbox for its compatibility) and some things seem to just be the publisher, I don't think they have any EA games on there despite it being a natural home for a lot of the old Origin games.

Really, the communist government of China is roughly as Communist as that of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic. ie it isn't. Totalitarian, for sure, it was communist in the past and the state retains a lot of controls but otherwise it's basically standard capitalism with private ownership, stock markets etc. They just haven't got around to rebranding the Communist out of their name yet.

Hm, perhaps a misunderstanding of 'design'? The design (intention) of a model is to try and take what is known ('the past') to create a model which is both accurate to the past, and predicts accurately into the future. It does not have to have the intended purpose of scenario generation though in most cases that is useful. As a simple example if you model the moon/ earth/ sun system your purpose is pretty much solely to predict exactly what will happen (for fishing charts, tidal prediction, eclipses etc which I think you'd agree are useful) and in the medium term all the "variables" (relative masses, orbital position and velocity) are set and not able to be influenced. Practically speaking the models are always designed (fabricated) imperfectly ("simplified") as you can never take all variables into account, barring pure mathematical models, and are almost always probability and range based ("we predict that at time X the moon/ earth/ sun will be in these relative positions, assuming there are no extraordinary influences and with an expected error of Z, and after date A we cannot accurately predict associated phenomenon B"). That is what I've being saying all along, inaccuracies in modeling are inherent but do not in and of themselves disprove the model. I do know what I am talking about though I am perhaps not expressing it well, I've worked on complex models on and off over the past ten years (I'd stress they are population based, NOT climate or weather). The general scientific concensus is that the models are imperfect/ need refinement but should be acted on and are not absurd, and that there is a general trend of little g global little w warming is almost uncontested. You are, of course, welcome to ignore said scientific concensus and you may even be found retrospectively correct to do so, but I'm afraid rote restatement doesn't make your opinion fact no matter how strident your belief. And no, I'm not suggesting you're just another case of someone disagreeing with scientists to further an agenda as I find the evidence inconclusive. No. It's just more evidence that you don't understand models. Whether any given glacier is gaining or losing mass is a micro scale event better predicted accurately at the local level. If you're talking glaciation on the macro scale you are either asking whether glaciers as a collective are losing mass and whether that agrees with the model (yes, and it does), or to predict large glaciation events, which is a separate model. It's obvious you were talking micro due to your other example, hurricanes, so you're just generating non sequitors, or being facetious to give the impression that you know more than you actually do.

Apparently GG's download range is actually the largest (1400+) of all digital distributors. That's according to their advertising, so take with salt. As for which is best it really depends on what is wanted. Steam has the best integration and largest community and generally has the most, best deals, does things which may either annoy or be greatly appreciated like automatically apply patches (saves time but may nuke save games half way through a game and you often cannot play until the patch is applied, patches tend to arrive later than retail) and has certain DRM/ monitoring aspects that some dislike a great deal and can lead to occasional annoyances like not being able to play your games if you cannot contact the Steam servers. Impulse is client based and its selection is limited, though in the US this is considerably less. Unlike Steam you do not need the client running to play, only to install and to update certain games. None of Gamersgate, GOG or D2D use a client which is nice if you don't like them, and their service is perhaps closest to a retail experience. GG has no DRM unless publisher mandated if that's a consideration, GOG has none on any title period. If you buy limited activation software GG is highly advised as they guarantee to get you new activations if necessary. There are other considerations if outside the US like the degree of regional pricing and availability, but since you're in the US they're irrelevant.

That's incorrect, though it's only partly germane to the discussion at hand. To take an extreme example, things like models of the universe ('big bang'/ 'big crunch'/ 'big bounce') are designed to replicate what has actually happened as exactly as possible and to predict 'exactly' what will happen in the future, and have no other purpose- obviously in that case the time scale is such that it's only of interest from a "pure" science basis and cannot be used for making any decisions. I suppose it's possible that you don't realise the bias in your thinking, which is where this misunderstanding comes from. I'm going to try, one last time. I'm losing interest fast. We have to extrapolate for the purposes of preparing for problems- it's the same principle as issuing hurricane warnings even if you're not sure where, or if, the hurricane will actually hit land and at what intensity. If the sea level or temperature is going to rise it is useful to predict in advance so preparations can be made, I think the reasons for this are obvious. The only way to do this is to model it. Models of complex systems are by definition imperfect as they rely on observations about past and present to predict the future and are susceptible to 'butterfly effects' and one off occurrences. This does not mean that you throw the baby out with the bathwater and decide to ignore them. Nor does it imply that you have to have some sort of way to 'fix' things to get an 'ideal' solution for them to be useful. All it implies is that acting on the models you have now to ameliorate predicted problems in the future is sensible and is exactly what gets done for all sorts of imperfect models from predicting bush fire paths and severity to weather prediction to population changes to disease spread to militaries having contingencies in case of the US nuking Russia and vice versa. Risk management essentially. Ultimately the 'proof' for every single complex model can only be found by time and refinement, and even then it will always be a best guess prediction when it comes to specifics. I'm afraid you just don't understand complex systems modeling, which is fair enough as it is, heh, a complex subject. Le sigh. Macro models of complex systems do not have to predict on the micro level- that is perhaps the single biggest tenet of complex system modeling since chaos theory was formulated.