PrimeJunta

True but there's sooooo much variety in the encounters that (1) it'll take you a very long time to learn the "solutions" to all of them, and that process is a lot of fun, and (2) the cheesy solutions will often require particular abilities or items which you may or may not have, which means that some of the cheesy tactics won't be available for you even if you know them. You can't berserker-rage Kangaxx to death if you're not a berserker or don't have Korgan in the party f.ex.

The science on climate change has been thoroughly peer-reviewed and published in lots and lots of journals. Search scholar.google.com and see for yourself.

The IEEE is not a crappy publisher.

Interrupts don't break engagement, they just, well, interrupt whatever action gets interrupted.

^ I agree. Having scads of ways to deal with the challenges is the best part of BG2.

STEM fields aren't immune. "More than 120 computer-generated "gibberish" research papers are being removed from the archives of scientific journal publishers Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) after a French computer scientist determined the papers were fakes." http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/27/fabricated-peer-reviews-prompt-scientific-journal-to-retract-43-papers-systematic-scheme-may-affect-other-journals/ http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/6217/20140301/scholarly-journals-accepted-120-fake-research-papers-generated-by-computer-program.htm

I'm not that good at these games, and I don't find Hard all that hard. I did a Trial of Iron run and did not have significant trouble clearing everything up to Defiance Bay. It did make a few fights tense but in a good way, since the stakes were that much higher. I'm pretty certain I would not have done as well in, say, IWD on Core Rules. (Not at my gaming machine until a couple more weeks so I haven't been able to continue it. I haven't finished the game yet, even, so I'll probably start a new one without Trial of Iron, but just try to pretend it is.)

You've also mentioned you don't even bother to prebuff with Chaotic Commands since your toon is so hard it'll murder them by itself even when Confused. In other words, you only fight them when you're overleveled and/or overgeared to the point that they can't hurt you anyway.

Pss, everybody knows the Germans got there first.

What really boggles my mind is Opportunity. I mean, how long do they expect to keep that up?

Half the fun of sarcasm is people missing it.

Yeah, Shire/England or Mordor/Germany was never intentional nor supposed to be explicit, and he emphatically denied that the War of the Ring had anything to do with WW1 or 2. (If it had, he said, Aragorn would have taken the Ring and beat Mordor with its own weapons.) He was pretty open about flavors and influences though, in that there was a lot of his idealized rural England in Shire, and he envisioned Gondor as similar to pharaonic Egypt in architecture at least. But no, Shire isn't England in the same way that Arda is Earth "in a different state of imagination."

Evidence for quark is very easy. You can buy it at well-equipped supermarkets.

It's also possible the engineers etc. are just, y'know, wrong. I'm not a construction engineer (either) but the "official" explanation for the collapse seems pretty plausible to me. Things tend to fall down. If a skyscraper weakens in the middle, how else is it going to collapse? It's not stiff enough to keel over like a tree, so it seems logical to me that the top would crush the bottom and then collapse into rubble from the speed it's acquired when falling, like it looks like it did.

It's pretty simple really: reduce resource consumption by 50% or so. That's quite easy to achieve technically: manufacture things for recycling, then recycle them, stop wasting masses of energy uselessly, stop ridiculously wasteful stuff like flushing our toilets with purified drinking water, and phase out fossil fuels for sustainable energy (wind and solar, primarily). We'd only need to cover a tiny fraction of the Sahara with solar panels to provide enough electricity for all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Lifestyle changes that would help would be a shift to higher-quality, more durable goods rather than junk you buy and throw away after a few months to a year, as well as reuse of goods. This is already happening in lots of places. I'm living in Denmark for the time being for example and "genbrug" -- buying, selling, and donating second-hand goods -- is a national pastime. We equipped our entire kitchen by raiding the local genbrug -- got much higher-quality stuff for much less with less fuss than a trip to IKEA. The reasons it's not happening are social and political, not technological.

BTW about the 9/11 truthism, what puzzles me about the conspiracy theories is this: It's pretty much indisputable that someone did fly a couple of planes into the buildings. It got caught on video from multiple angles, tons of eyewitnesses, and so on and so forth. It takes a special kind of bloody-mindedness to argue the planes weren't real. So basically the people claiming the buildings collapsed wrong are saying that in addition to the planes, someone blew them up. Blowing up a building is a pretty complicated process. You have to plant lots of explosives in lots of places. You have to do that without anybody noticing. Then you have to also arrange to have someone fly the planes into the buildings. Then you have to set off the explosives. And you have to make sure your explosive setup works as intended even after someone has flown a plane into it. And you have to make sure you don't get caught. That strikes me as incredibly complicated. So... why? Why would someone go through all that trouble? I'd think that just flying planes into the buildings would be dramatic enough for any intention you may have, even if the buildings don't actually collapse.

A. Weather is not the same as climate. I can pretty confidently predict that the average temperature in January in Helsinki is going to be lower than the average temperature in July in Helsinki next year. I can even make a pretty good prediction of what each average temperature is going to be. (Around 22 degrees C high in July, about 0 degrees C high in January.) Yet I won't be able to predict what the temperature is on January 16 or July 12. B. It's a conspiracy I tell you. Conspiracy! NVM that climate-change denial is much better funded than the actual science, thanks to the oil industry. C. Sea level changes vary locally. You can easily find a map of the changes with Google if you like.

Personally I'm as worried about the loss of biodiversity as I am about climate change. We need to do more to address both.

in 1995 I heard a news report that claimed that "scientists" estimate that by 2005 major cities worldwide will be flooded. in 2000 I heard reports that it will happen by 2010 now they are crapping about 2015!! After working with some relevant fellas in the academy myself I now understand how the media always publishes the nutjobs and the post apocalyptic prophecies trying to influence politics and stuff... The truth is that ice takes more space than liquid water and most of the ice in the poles is under water so most models don't predict that the water levels will rise that much ,and some predict that it won't rise at all or decline. But some political parties world wide do need to scare people with their "science" to get more votes. This is the extent of much of the global warming propaganda... Most forecasts for sea level rise I've seen have it at around 1 meter per century, give or take a half-meter or so, to a maximum of 3-6 meters or so. That's pretty severe. Science reporting in media is really bad though, that much is certainly true.

I haven't said anything about limerick-gate, nor do I intend to. I have no intention whatsoever to stop posting about other political, social, or otherwise interesting stuff.

I don't believe in microwave ovens. They cook everything soggy.

I'm not saying it's Al Gore, but... :Al Gore:

Perpetual motion and the global conspiracy to suppress Nikola Tesla's free energy inventions, anyone? (I'm not saying it was aliens, but ... :aliens:)

Nah it's turned into a SIJW-vs-SJW free-for-all on any and all subjects. We have some guy who wants us to prove sociology to him, another who's wondering if it's OK to be mean to Jewish bankers, some stuff about global climate change, Ferguson, and the moon landing. Grab a beer and join the party. Only 22 posts until mods lock the thread for length.