Humodour

You, sir, like to live on the edge.

Have you not read xkcd? Haha. Here is a guy who used an evolutionary algorithm to solve the optimisation problems above: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~beck0778/velocirapt...ociraptors.html

He would rip your head off and feed it to his chicks.

Oh god, I actually bothered to visit that quote site and I am so depressed. How can people be that stupid?

Pfft. I think this one is pretty cool:

Everytime I try to save the flickr image, it saves 'spaceball.gif' instead - a 1*1 blank white gif image. So I just took a screenshot instead - same quality. Take that flickr.

http://www.gemtowerdefense.com/instructions/ Just skip straight to playing if you want. Basic idea: kill monsters with gem "towers" - they shoot at the monsters, with the circle being range of tower. Less basic idea: building towers alone isn't going to work too well later on. Try to think of ways to increase the amount of time a monster spends within the range of a tower. Hint: build a maze. It's based off a very awesome warcraft 3 map, but this version has almost of the same elements. It's lacking only maze tests, slates and gambling, really - all fairly superfluous features. Go play play play! It's awesome fun. Like single player chess.

Game companies like Blizzard get paid and do that as their principal job. These people do this in their free time for free. There is no parallel. I hope you get bored of waiting before they release the product. You don't deserve any fixes or improvements they might produces.

Juno. I liked it?

If America is so concerned about terrorists and cults, why hasn't somebody done something about Scientology yet?

Agreed. The same is true of Torment, which was quite successful in the eyes of IPLY/BIS, especially over time. And yes, I would consider BG1 to be a 'critical' success. Certainly not BG2, though. It was more of the same with quite a bit of movement backwards in some areas. Fun, sure. Financially successful? Sure, like NWN1 OC. I haven't played MoTB or NWN2 so I can't comment on those, but KOTOR2 certainly had more depth and complexity to it than KOTOR1. Which one did I enjoy more? KOTOR1, probably because KOTOR2 was unfinished in my eyes - it had great potential. But perhaps also because I just loved KOTOR1, though it has an unfortunate lack of replay value (as with KOTOR2 IMHO). NWN1 OC, Volo? I thought we'd already agreed that a bigger bunch of rubbish for an OC was never seen? How you can call it intellectual or complex with a straight face is anyone's guess; it was one of the most ludicrous and forced campaigns I've played in a CRPG - the only thing which saved it in my eyes was exploration of a lost ancient civilisation. If you'd speak of SoU or HotU it'd be a different matter. Whose games do I enjoy more - Bioware's or BIS/Obsidian's? It depends on what mood I am in, though BIS/Obsidian has made more games that interest me. To Morgoth: I can't understand you. You often use double negatives and contradict previous sentences. Coupled with your intentional use of sarcasm, it becomes near impossible to distinguish what your actual stance on something really is.

Hahaha. So he hated Australia too? Do our 200,000 or so Jews run the country, perhaps?

I liked Star Wars (of old) more than just for "intellectual garbage".

Morpheus, is that you? Dammit, Everett needs to put tighter security on you. Disconnect your from all network access. Yeah. But attempts to introduce learning to games sound very interesting.

That makes no sense at all. What on earth are you trying to say here? I guess it was sarcasm. It doesn't translate very well through the internet. I was picking up on the fact that both of you were talking about what games reinvented/revitalised CRPGs, yet you both neglected to mention Fallout 1 and 2. No biggie. :S

If you're of the opinion that T.rex wasn't feathered, even though its ancestors and relatives were, that's totally cool with me.

Yeah and birds have scales on their feet, while feathers themselves are modified scales. On all specimens of clade coelurosaurian, at least one fossil specimen of each species has been found with feathers. There is only one excepytion to this rule: ornithomimosaurians, and all evidence indicates that's only because we haven't found any fossils which preserved the feathers Do fossils without feathers indicate lack of feathers? Certainly not, considering the immense chance occurrence of the fossil occurring in the first place, let alone fossilising somethinh as soft as a feather. That's like saying fossils without skin indicate lack of skin. screw science when drunk arg. EDIT: oh an p.s.: we've found fossils of t.rex with feathers. some stupid link: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...thery_dino.html

where is political forum? petition.

but they were wrong because trex and raptros didn't hsave feathers

BG along with Diablo revived a die'in genre, there hadn't been a noteable release of an CRPG for years until that point, well some people may say M&M was, but meh, it didn't reinvent the genre. CRPG's were well established before this dying off period (see Ultima's, bards tales etc...) but between around 93-97 it was a bleak peroid, where RPG's almost died completely at one point, and what was released was generally extremely poor, BG and Diablo breathed a breath of fresh air into the genre and pushed the bounderies of what found be expected. But it didn't really estalbish the genre, just gave it a jolt. It's like saying WoW was the first established MMO... Everquest and Ultima Online would be better responses and more accurate, WoW is certainly the first widely popular MMO, but it didn't establish them. Ok, so Fallout 1 & 2 never existed?

Hmm. Has anybody seen Dave Gaider since?

How long. Oops. A summary: OK, Di, but it's highly unlikely your decreasing your chances of food poisoning anymore than if you used soapy water to clean your cutting board. Also, some studies indicating no relationship between decreased risk of disease and infection, and use of antibacterial cleaners. Not really. Instead of getting caught up in semantics I'll just leave this one to wikipedia: "The term originally referred to any agent with biological activity against living organisms; however, "antibiotic" now is used to refer to substances with anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, or anti-parasitical activity.". There's more definition fapping here if it matters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiseptic Point is it produces resistance, whatever you call it. One of the few exceptions to this is alcohol-based cleaners... which most unfortunately aren't, due to the inappropriateness of using alcohol in most contexts. Even then, alcohol-resistant strains do evolve. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibacterial_soap On Salmonella: Some of the best ways to prevent Salmonella are washing your hands before and after dealing with meat, keeping cold food cold and hot food hot, and not letting foods touch utensils that have been contaminated by raw meat. The utensils themselves are unimportant - cleaning them as normal with basic detergent is perfectly sufficient for removal of Salmonella. Detergent is often the most effective way to remove bacteria because the molecules used actually attach themselves to bacteria and wash them away (due to polarity). If you insist on using antibacterial cleaner to clean just your cutting board, that's fine. I'm targeting the people who deliberately buy antibacterial household cleaners thinking they are doing themselves any good. But do note that all authoritative sources on Salmonella prevention suggest washing contaminated utensils with hot soapy water, without any recourse to antibacterial cleaners. Personally, I reckon you're falling for yet another hygiene marketing trick. http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/health_advice/f.../salmonella.htm Salmonella isn't an especially deadly bacteria, either. Most cases of Salmonella poisoning resolve themselves without medical intervention (often unbeknown to the victim). And no, we won't see the resistance immediately (multi-resistance that is - pretty much every bacteria now is resistant to at least one thing we use). But future generations will soon, so let's not resort to the "it doesn't effect me" argument - especially since it may well yet, especially as you grow older and have a less capable immune system. A succinct presentation of my point is here: Here is a nice study on the usefulness of antibacterial household cleaners, for further reading: http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/140/5/321

Jesus Christ. I know that's a recurring theme in fantasy. But couldn't they try to only use it incidentally? Explicitly going for that... oh dear. Dragon Age is for hippies. Confirmed. Bioware does one thing well: well, what they do well. Bioware doesn't purport to be a maker of new or innovative games (though I'm sure their marketting department does). They know what they do well, and it sells and makes people happy. I can understand why they'd not change that. Love and friendships despite the odds was an important theme in Baldur's Gate. Considering this is a spiritual successor to BG, it makes sense to include this and hype it up. I doubt the dichotomy will change any time soon: Bioware and Obsidian/BIS = good and complementary games. Bioware churns out the fluff RPGs to sustain us, Obsid/BIS makes the brain food that makes it all worth it.

Congratulations. You just won some medals. One for tardiness, one for thread necrophilia, and one for obscure but cool Latin. Please, stay.

Also of interest is bird intelligence. As you may know, human intelligence capabilities (creativity, emotion, language, etc) are something unique to mammals. They've been exhibited in many species - dolphins, chimpanzees, meerkats (a very interesting and intelligent species - altruism through sentry duty and giving their life to save their children, creativity, lateral thinking - reaching a fruit by working together and getting on another meerkat's shoulders, jealousy, love, desire, self-image, and a differentiating language - e.g. instead of one call for danger they might say "danger snake" or "danger bird"), but all these species have been mammals. This is because mammals have a neocortex - a part of the brain which is very new (well 200 million years old - it evolved when the dinosaurs evolved) and evolved at the very end of the evolution from reptiles to mammals. Birds obviously don't have a neocortex, since they are dinosaurs. They have a reptilian cortex like mammals and reptiles, but is that all? No. Unlike reptiles and mammals, birds have since evolved their own "new cortex". This is likely due to becoming warm-blooded, and forming societies (e.g. flocks). Interestingly, although this neocortex isn't the same as that found in mammals, it is very similar to parts of it and performs some of the same functions. A very beautiful example of convergent evolution. Now, what does this mean? Are birds smart or dumb? The answer is smart. Smarter than some mammals, smarter than all reptiles and lower (fish, amphibians, insects). And some specific birds like parrots are in fact not just capable of immitation, but also intelligence. See the parrot Alex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_%28parro...Accomplishments And also a list of intelligence features of birds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_intellig...ocial_behaviour Also, this isn't entirely true: Because as previously stated, meerkats are also capable of this.