Zoraptor

It really isn't in Russia's best interests to cut off the gas supply, certainly not just to make a point. It costs them a lot of money they can ill afford to miss out on, annoys their customers and, worst, encourages them to find alternatives ultimately reducing the effectiveness of their 'energy muscle', future income and goodwill. It's a bit like having nukes really, everyone knows that they can nuke if they want to but making sure everyone knows this by actually nuking someone is... counter productive. Unfortunately, if they wanted to deal with Ukraine's syphoning/ refusal to pay there wasn't really any alternative to cutting it off. I wouldn't say that I don't believe there was any muscle flexing involved (especially in the timing though for all we know that had to do with when the contract ran out)- it is Putin after all, and he does like flexing his muscles, and obviously I'm not privy to the details of any negotiations- but it's hardly the cut and dry it's often made out to be. As a general point, if you (collective you, not singling anyone out) are actually interested in trying to convince someone that they are being brainwashed by their government it is best to latch onto something genuine rather than something where the reporting in the western media has been obviously biased- otherwise you're actually doing the opposite and convincing them that, yes, everything the west says is rubbish with any truth being purely coincidental.

The resources thing is a perfectly valid view- the 'west' (more properly the west's companies) was perfectly happy to take all sorts of resources for a song and a quick backhander to the half dozen or so people who owned most of Russia in the 90s and the russian government and people could go starve for all they cared. Putin may be an authoritarian and is certainly no Gandhi, but he's so much better than Yeltsin it isn't funny. It's also sad because Russia probably had a good chance of actually becoming a pluralist liberal democracy (or as close as any other western country manages) if it had had a bit of support rather than suspicion, derision and a wholesale rush to grab as much stuff as possible for the least cost possible. But whatever blame the west may get is nothing compared to Yeltsin and the gross stupidity of his rush to sell everything as cheap as possible without so much as a second of thought. It's not that we hate you because "you don't want to give" -- it's that doing crazy **** like cutting off all of Eastern Europe's natural gas supply during winter to put political pressure on your increasingly western-leaning Ukrainian neighbors tends to sit badly with folks. While you would not have got the impression from the western media there was no doubt that (1) Ukraine was not paying its bills and had not been for years, (2) was understating the amount it was using/ siphoning other country's supplies and (3) had a large discount in the first place. In any case Yuchenko was a lame duck long before then- his position was terminal as soon as he had fallen out with Tymoshenko.

Litvinenko. It's almost completely impossible to tell whether he was a good source (certainly the accusation that one of the apartment bombings, albeit one which never exploded, was a set up looked solid, but that is also the one with pre-existing evidence independent of him) or utterly bonkers (Putin is a paedophile and, iirc, a vampire). Certainly the accusations he was making before he died seemed loony albeit not as loony as the British police story of who killed him and how it happened. Yes, Yeltsin was the one who sold Russia to a bunch of oligarchs for a song. Putin spent much of his time as President trying to claw some of it back. I might have some sympathy for the oligarchs if they weren't such a genuinely shady bunch of robber baron wanna-bes who were happy to gouge every rouble out of their country even if it meant reducing it to rubble. IIRC that is one thing which Uncle Joe can't be blamed for as it was Brezhnev (?) who did that, and it did involve a 'land swap' with the Russian SSR getting the Kouban ('mainland' to the east of Crimea) in return. It's certainly a potential problem, probably not in the short term now that Yanukovitch is president, more of Yuchenko might have seen it flare up quickly though

Pretty much spot on. Well, except it's South Ossetia, NO has 'always' been part of Russia. US media coverage of that particular issue was utter, unmitigated garbage, and their coverage of Chechenya was/is scarcely better. Ironically, if there's one thing 'westerners' are happy to defend Gori's most famous son to the hilt on, it's him arbitrarily carving Abkhazia and SO off of Russia and grafting them onto Georgia.

I'd take a stab at Iceland. Come now, if it weren't for the brits (or the ever under appreciated russkies) you'd be speaking francais and saluting le roi Junot.

Heh. I suspect you're going to get Wrath of Dagon dropping by to tell you that you're wrong soon. Fact that Kadyrov fought against RF in the first war is well documented, as is the fact that he's on the official kremlin payroll. Oh yes, I certainly knew that. I'm just slightly amused because that ^^^ is pretty much exactly what I said, in the general case, a month ago and was told that I was wrong (and it was OT/ irrelevant, which it was in that thread so I didn't push it further).

If you want to know what's in a preorder you should ask (1) the publisher or (2) the retailer, ie Sega or better, EBgames themselves. There will be different bonuses in different places and what they will be is at the behest of the retailer or publisher, not the developer. I don't live in the West Island but I'd suspect it would be similar to what we are getting (Stealth pack and a guidebook, apparently)- though that isn't either EB nor CE- but then I too haven't seen a CE actually listed anywhere.

Heh. I suspect you're going to get Wrath of Dagon dropping by to tell you that you're wrong soon.

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.