taks

highly charismatic AND intelligent? uh, hate to burst your bubble, but no. rare is someone highly charismatic, rare is someone highly intelligent. unheard of to be both. certainly you can role-play as you wish, but putting a mage as "the speaker" for the group is not what i'd call optimal. sorceror, sure, because they're cuties, or at least very slick (charisma is not just beauty). i would think it makes more sense that being so intelligent, your mage probably lacks social skills. remember, he spends his life locked away in a room poring over tomes, scrolls, etc. since he's brilliant, he's also egotistical and short with "lesser beings of average intelligence", which is very anti-chrasimatic. also, a mage needs to be in the back of the pack for protection reasons (granted, this is not so good for rear assaults, but most in the BGs, or any game for that matter, were frontal). taks

me too. i have a mormon cousin that did family trees for his family (my mother's side) as well as what he could find for my family. since gramps came over from hungary on a ship, there's not many records pre-1910, however. i actually found out about the magyar connection from a doctor i was visiting in FL that knew about the region i was telling him about (he asked about my last name, which was changed when gramps got off the boat). oh, and grommy is right. making a-priori assumptions is a bad idea w.r.t. unreleased games. NWN2 certainly sounds cool from the descriptions, and i don't get tied up in minutae about minor rules (don't play clerics anyway), though i do expect certain rules to work properly. taks

more sense from the usually senseless. there is hope, hades, hope... presonally, however, i do not think it is impossible to uncover the true (er, nearly true) number. just very very very difficult (a fourth very might well be impossible). taks

based on what? your assumption that all of the procedures and statistics are valid? which is, again, based on what? infinitely even in the presence of sample bias? that statement alone refutes the concept of any sort of statistical accuracy, which is what is being used. when there is bias in any sample, it cannot be trusted and is therefore, inaccurate. floor to ceiling confidence intervals are not "infinitely more accurate" than a body count. if anything, they are infinitely less accurate*. i.e., if there is sampling bias, your confidence intervals cannot be calculated (properly) and your range for the estimate is therefore anywhere from 0 to the max that could have died (population of iraq + insurgents + military, etc.). an answer cannot be less accurate than "somewhere within the total population." taks * certainly the word infinitely w.r.t. the word less is not the best use of grammar, but it suffices to make the point.

grom's not saying NWN2 will fail because of sawyer (he's not even saying it will fail). he's simply saying that any problems that crop up with NWN2 will likely land on sawyer's shoulders due to the curse. taks

uh, not in that sense... taks

colbert is certainly a funny guy. stats are very easy to pervert, with or without intent. in the end, however, "going with your gut" is what happens once media (of any format) present a story to the public. both in the way the reporter writes the piece, and in the way the public interprets it. taks

i'm merely asking questions that should always be asked. sample extrapolations are very easily the easiest to corrupt, even without intent. similarly, probably even more true, poll results should be questioned for the same reasons. note that i have not passed any value judgement on the results. without an in-depth analysis (cannot right now, studying for linear algebra exam), i would be just as culpable as someone that automatically accepted the results if i were to offer opinioned criticism. taks

since i'm playing a wizard (i nearly always do the first time through), life without said character in this module is difficult. he's the closest thing to a "tank" to be found (at least, where i'm at in the module). taks

goody-goody paladin. taks

then BG2 it was... 6 years. i wasn't posting as taks before BG2 anyway. mendolf was my primary character name at the time (and still is), so none of you would have known me anyway. i was only on, in the beginning, searching for answers to various problems, bugs, etc. taks

of course, the other 99% need to be subjected to the same questions and scrutiny before being believed. taks

but that doesn't make it any less a sample bias. for the statistics to hold over all families, they all need to be randomly sampled. there is also a bias in choosing only the densest areas. geographic weighting or not, they've still limited their search to only areas that had a potential to be in the middle of conflicted areas. sampling is an art, for sure, and i don't fault them for their efforts. they simply need to be reviewed for what they are. also, how much effort is there in determining whether these were people that might have died anyway? certainly they compared death rates prior to the invasion, but how do we know that death rate would not have risen on its own anyway? correlation != causation. taks

in the end, their statistics for confidence interval are based (more than likely, i have not read) on the total number of families. however, by taking 40 homes immediately next to each other, they've effectively reduced their sampling to 1 point for each cluster (since it is likely that each of the 40 homes immediately next to each other are similarly effected as the first random choice). are there statistics based on all of the homes randomly chosen, all of the homes divided by 40? taks

"Once the start house was selected, an interview was conducted there and then in the next 39 nearest houses." sorry, but that's a sample bias. taks

one of the problems with this study is that they are extrapolating from one study, apparenlty limited to the surveyors' choice of where to inverview. while on the surface, it may seem plausible, it cannot hold to any real scrutiny. why? sampling bias. hades has a relatively lucid comment regarding this, probably true. taks

i have nothing else to go on. besides, being my favorite source of inconsistency, lunacy and a host of other "cy"s, i feel compelled to interject such subtle (or not so) jabs when i can. it's just plain fun to pick on visceris. a note to others, i've been listening to ole visc here probably since BG1 came out in 1998. volourn and visceris used to really go at it back in the day... a good 8 years of amusement i've had. taks

broken mirror. taks

very good. it could have been a standard expansion pack ala SoU or HotU. been either too tired, or studying, which has prevented me from playing any further (at least since i got my henchman to level... the bug only effects one guy, btw). taks

some of you guys are waaaay too kind to hades. and as for hades himself, well, ignorance is bliss, eh? cool short, btw. josh can write, IMO. taks

uh, what do you mean by that last line? anyway, i just completed the, uh, "fort" quest to advance the story a bit. i was suffering the NPC levelling bug, so my level 10 wizard was fighting right along side a level 8 paladin. we'll just say i had to reload often on the "normal" difficulty setting... of course, i found the fix right after finishing the hardest part. i also suffered an alignment setback (lost a point towards evil) for one of my actions that i felt was actually "good," but in the grand scheme of things, i should have chosen differently to maintain my alignment as the world sees me. it wasn't an easy choice, either, given that i actually felt i did the right thing, but knew it would penalize me (there's no real repurcussions, btw). the cool part about some of these situations is that you get an option to consult your companions. they have dialog to convince you one way or another. very slick. i have no idea how far i am. i know most of the main plot now (at least, who is behind the troubles and some inkling as to why), but i think there are several major areas left to tackle. i'm 11th level, btw, and i've put in maybe 8-10 hours not counting the reloads (when an NPC dies, he's dead). supposedly there are more NPC options, but i have only found three so far... taks

btw, if anyone does get WCoC, there's a bug with one of the henchmen, detialed here. the fix is in the link. taks

i quit after the stupid wizard's tower. i'm sorry, but the "logic" they used in the julap portion was retarded. someone needs to tell them that "infinite" does NOT mean "infinitely small, or infinitely large." there is another word for infinitely small: infinitesimal. "infinite" does indeed mean infinitely large. infinitely small is one over infinity. duh. morons. one of the other riddles was devoid of proper logical reasoning as well, but i don't recall which... taks

again, hard to say. in the end, it is NWN. however, it has a good story, good mechanics, lots of fun. the nice thing is that it is NOT very BG-ish. at least, daggerford keeps getting compared to BG-style play, which i think is silly. the ONLY way NWN could ever be BG-style is if you had a party, not just a couple henchmen. daggerford is BG-ish simply because you get 50 stupid quests dropped in your lap immediately upon entering the town. not so with WCoC. there are certainly side quests, and at one point i had several stacked up, but the order in which i received them made sense, and many are tied in some fashion to my overall goal anyway. in fact, the one that i can no longer get to (because i have a certain party member which precludes the informant from tipping me off), is a direct result of contact with another informant that is advancing the story line. he gave me a side quest as a thank you, i.e. "i trust you, do this favor and i will pay you in spades!" dunno what else to say... engaging, maybe, but most of all, fun. taks