Humodour

OK. I'm a Sega representative. Basically, we've asked Obsidian to quietly delay their game and take the time to add more crates, barrels, and container-like objects. They've been such good chaps about it and you really shouldn't blame them for the delay. I suppose you can blame us at Sega, but trust me, the extra cratey goodness will be worth it!

Actually, that's not entirely true, is it? Not enforcing a trademark risks it becoming generic and being lost. C.f. Aspirin. S'pose that's tangential, though. Cheers for the second part of your post on the various levels of genericism for gun names. Interesting, but what has Obsidian chosen to go with for AP? And what did you go with for Aliens?

I've given up on this series. It's ****. I never was a die-hard Wedon fanatic like some people appear to be, though.

I refuse to ask questions of those who use blatantly religionist terms like 'thrice-damned' when claiming to be good communists. It's poetic license. Huh? But I thought we rounded up all the poets under the guise of a government-sponsored national poetry contest and had them all executed? Are you a dissident, son?

Heh. The polls taken in Australia during his election, on who would be preferred if Australians were voting, had numbers like 70% for Obama and 20% for McCain. In Australia, and I suspect much of Europe, the Democrats would take up the position currently occupied by the resident right-wing party. Anyway, Nobel prizes are silly and they don't award the real intellectual discipline anyway - maths. Give me a Fields medal any day. Although I suppose an Abel prize is a more direct analogue now days.

No he hasn't. But I guess in your black and white world, everyone on the show is either 'good' or 'bad'.

It's sunny here. I went bushwalking in the Blue Mountains today. It rained briefly but that just made it more beautiful.

lol yeah, because you're really one to talk.

Fun how? Read (because I concede you might have missed it): not fun at all, and desperately sad.

I'm on the ticket, though. Visceris is advocating social Darwinism, and about the only ideology that managed to even briefly survive on that in the past 100 years has been Nazism and its fascist allies. It's a barren ideology and it's galling to see him championing it. Nobody in their right mind these days should want to see another state (especially not a neighbouring country) fail just because, sitting in his chair in front of his computer screen, he doesn't think it is strong enough to deserve to persist. If Mexico collapsed or degraded, illegal immigration wouldn't be just a problem in the headlines every 2nd week anymore, it'd be a full blown national crisis for America that would cause persistently constrained economic growth (and more likely a prolonged depression), let alone the social impacts.

I get that. And it's also a big incentive for him to keep his foreign policy promises. But it has no place in a Nobel prize.

Thanks for the lesson on social Darwinism. Thankfully, the world left the Nazis behind long ago.

Yeah, I guess those peacekeepers dying in Darfur trying to prevent the exploitation of children as soldiers don't really deserve a medal like this. If I were Obama, I would refuse it. Fun fact: they feed child soldiers a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder to make them more aggressive and psychotic during battle, since the gunpowder irritates their stomachs and the cocaine's effects are obvious.

...

If a nation cannot stand on its own then it should fall. God you're barbaric.

Curiously, which law did they break exactly? Since you seem to be so keen to speak authoritatively about this law, one would expect you have a thorough understanding of it. Otherwise that would be rather hypocritical, no?

Well, that's the first season. Most likely Flash Forward will do well and the company in charge (ABC?) will decide to milk it for all its financial worth, make it a 24 episode run in season 2, and destroy the show.

I realised that a large part of Lost's problem, and this applies to many TV series (except Stargate SG-1), is that its seasons are too long. I think the quality of any one Flash Forward episode is going to be a lot higher because the season's length is 12 episodes rather than 24.

Do you rock from side to side every time you repeat that to yourself or what?

Oh, so you still have a game? Hasn't been cancelled?

I doubt think Visceris even knows the difference between civil and criminal law. You expect too much from him. I know the difference. I just don't care. You don't care about the difference between civil and criminal law? Seriously? My god, people like you are the reason millions of America's taxpayer dollars are wasted cramming prisons chock full of people who did nothing more than burn a plant and inhale the smoke rather than on pursuing prosecuting real crimes like rape and murder.

They're going to build it off the coast of Western Australia to access the massive but hard to reach natural gas deposits there. Apparently it'll be far larger than an aircraft carrier and will be able to withstand a once-in-the-existence-of-human-civilisation strength tropical cyclone.

Legally, it can't be done. Oh? Has anybody ever been sued for using them in their games? As far as I'm aware, it's not done anymore purely out of fear. And even that's a lie: a bunch of games still do it. Just not ones by Obsidian, evidently. It probably wouldn't be hard to get permission either, if you were a real paranoid, since it's decent marketing for your guns, like YouTube. Then again, music companies keep trying to sue YouTube, so I think I'm giving these guys too much credit.

That's never stopped the open source movement before (both making a profit off open source, and coding an open source alternative to a proprietary product).