Zoraptor

Perhaps an illustration of exactly why thinking someone approves wholesale of people they may "admire" is dumb may help? Beck loves the Founding Fathers. He thinks they are great Logically therefore: He approves of slavery, having children by your slaves, voting being restricted to rich white men etc etc as, "logically", because he thinks they're great he thinks everything about them is great including the slavery, the fathering of children by slaves, and voting rights being restricted to rich white men of a certain monetary value, and any and all other foibles and flaws major or minor they may have had.

Sounds like it's the two Actard owned Troika titles ie Arcanum and VTMB. Don't expect any D&D (TOEE or otherwise) while Atari and Hasbro are fighting about sublicencing in court.

Arkane recently obtained the licence for Arx Fatalis off JoWood, though it could be related to simply to them putting it onto GoG rather than being a potential sequel. The game he was talking about was not The Crossing, and was on a contract for EA, reviving an old IP that was well known and regarded but not a stellar seller.

Probably, couldn't find a publisher, and with EA yanking their other project they didn't have an option to self finance for something which would be risky at the best of times.

So is SMAC, for that matter, and it has the problem (as does SS2) of being associated with a studio that are now their rival 2k's property. I'd hope for either SMAC or SS2 as it would likely mean a bunch of other EA titles coming too- I really can't understand their reluctance as it is basically free money from their side of the deal. I'd tend to go for X-COM, especially if 2k is planning to release a new xcom title. That would hardly be huge as GOG is about the only digital distributor which doesn't have the xcoms yet.

Personally I prefer :picard: :headdesk: as I feel it brings both simplicity and elegance to proceedings.

The most amusing bit of geopolitics of the last two years was watching various western diplomats squirm when asked what the difference between Abkhazia/ South Ossetia and Kosovo was and trying to see them avoid the really obvious difference, ie "well, Kosovo is our client..." He had good reason to think that as he was told that "the US has no opinion" on Kuwait and Iraq's border dispute when he asked prior to invading. He hadn't counted on Saudi Arabia throwing a wobbly, as a combined Iraq/Kuwait could challenge their dominance of OPEC and nearly match their reserves and production capacity

Given the mission based structure a demo could probably be done relatively easily, though it probably still would not be a trivial amount of work unless there's a trade demo or similar already done.

what a bad analogy. really, really bad. besides that, you completely missed the point. No, it's simply a blunt analogy made in the hope it might succeed where any kind of nuance was failing as unlike alanschu I lacked the patience for a really detailed step by step breakdown. Afraid not- they definitively did not know where the WMDs were, at the very least, even if taking the pedant's view towards proof of their existence. Had they actually known where the WMDs were it is absolutely incomprehensible that they would not have either bombed them or seized them at the start of the war. Then proving they exist is the almost trivial task of sending a few people out to take samples or showing the stuff you've captured. Their failure to do so is as close to proof absolute that they were lying- if only about that- as can ever be got.

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.