Humodour

The scribbley childs drawing of a tree is for the conservatives. The red rose is labour. What kind of moron thought up those symbols? Ha, I thought it was the reverse!

How is debt an essential part of that setup? Surely the expensive delays could be prevented by purchasing the spare tanks with funds provided from current revenues, no? It's a weird example because NASA is itself a government entity. But suppose you've got a private space organisation whose budget is fully tied up with day-to-day expense. How do they then account for these spare tanks without taking out a loan? Sure you could argue that they should budget better, but that ignores the reality that it often IS a good idea to borrow for growth, and works quite successfully for organisations.

I guess the overarching question in this thread for Obsidian is: why on earth did you or your publisher elect to use Uniloc on Steam rather than Steamworks?

That's hilarious, but it would be more hilarious if I knew what some of the party symbols represented which party.

Not that I think it'll change your mind but I've to point out that no, if you format or replace hardware you're not screwed, since you can de-activate an installation from Uniloc's website. They also promised to patch the DRM out, so assuming they keep their promise, the only advice I can give you is buying it after they do. Sucks, I know, but the DRM scheme has been already decided, the only thing I can see them doing is patching it sooner if they see it is affecting sales. Well, this is the most uplifting post in this thread by far. I'll consider it. Hopefully in the not too distant future I can buy the game without any form of DRM. God knows I'm a huge GOG fan and always check if a game is on there before I buy it on Steam. Who told you "they promised to patch the DRM out" BTW?

****ing insightful post. Interesting example, too. Cheers.

I'm kind of like you. When the election in Australia pops up later this year, I'll be voting for the Greens and then preferencing the Coalition. Essentially this means that my vote will go to the Greens, and if they can't take a seat, it will then flow to the conservatives. This makes me feel all dirty inside, but there's no way I'm voting for Rudd again. Even if I agree with him on the majority of policies, his disdain for civil liberties is not something I can tolerate. He's also shown a bit of a careless disregard for private industry and the free market, which rather irks me - and I'm clearly no economic libertarian. The problem is that the Coalition is only marginally better when it comes to civil liberties. But at least their internet censorship was opt-in. And regardless of who wins (I can tell you now it will be Rudd unfortunately) I can feel content knowing the Greens will hold the balance of power, so at least things like Internet censorship won't get through. Uh, anyway, this is neither here nor there. I've had a few beers and it felt spiritually important that I share this with you.

Correct and perhaps most Westerners (other than local western countries like Australia/NZ) have never heard of Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia. If Jemaah Islamiyah had the same tabloid reporting like Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, and Iran than you would also have Indonesia in the spotlight as well. Slightly off topic, I thought the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in my link had a funny acronym. I'm sorry but that's not true (OK, I probably misread your post - I'm drunk). Indonesia is far more democratic and secular than almost any country in the Middle East, and they also make a habit of consistently making terrorist crackdowns. They are a close ally of Australia and not just the government, the people too. They have no patience for extremism. Don't get me wrong, I loathe Jemaah Islamiyah, but so too does the majority of Indonesians and its important that Australians understand that. Heck, the Indonesian government took out one of their leaders (Noordin) in a covert op just this year, and Indonesia's newspapers could do nothing but sing praise for his death.

A singular currency? Are you ****ing ****ting me? That's one of the worse ideas you could come up with. I'm surprised the Eurozone has held together as long as it has. There's a difference between a political union and an economic union. Heck there's a difference between an economic union (see Australia and New Zealand) and a single currency! Seriously, I'm all for free trade and economic unions and open borders and political unions and what-not, but single currencies just seem a smegging bad idea. Edit: The most decisive factor against a singular currency is the inability for individual central banks to set interest rates. Examine Australia and New Zealand currently. Australia has had 6 interest rate rises to 4.5% since the financial crisis began. New Zealand has had none and is still stuck at 2.5% I believe. That's a whole 2% difference, almost double. And it's to account for the different paces of inflation and economic growth, and that's entirely fair. But you couldn't do that with a single currency.

Hahahah ****ing wow. In both ways.

*facepalm*

I have 4gb of ram and I've never gone above 2.5 gig in usage at any one time, and that's with both a game and an entire operating system running at once. And often a bunch of tabs in Chrome in the background (which is half a gig to a gig). Edit: Still, it does seem a bit ludicrous to use something like Flash/ActionScript in place of something more standard and designed for the task (any common game scripting language). But, you know, whatever works for the game (and it clearly did work fine judging by Moose's post).

See if you had preferential voting, you could vote for the third party of your choice and preference Labour last (or just Conservatives second) so that you could guarantee your vote wouldn't help Labour win. :D

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSGE64505X20100506 What are your thoughts on the existence of government debt? Is there anything wrong with a country being permanently in low levels of public debt? Indeed, would it be a bad thing if it weren't in debt? If it were consistently in surplus wouldn't that be bad too? Would it not mean that either people owe the government money which the government is making interest off (bad) or that taxes are too high (bad)? Could more informed minds enlighten me on how government debt is used by private industry?

You guys count votes and release live tallies of counting progress after polling closes right? I.e. will we know the probable election result in 12 hours time?

A cursory knowledge of our politics would reveal that the Tories will stick pins in their eyes before they do a deal with the Lib Dems. They would rather run with a minority government for a year, then go back to the polls for another GE. As it's looking this morning, the Tories might do it, or rely on the Ulster Unionists to make up the (small) difference. I expect another GE in the next 18 months in any case. Yeah, that's what the Labour government in Tasmania said about hung parliament with the Greens. Look how that turned out. It's all bluster to try and minimise the third-party vote. Politicians will almost never pass up the chance to form government, and judging by how hard Cameron has been campaigning, he certainly isn't about to buck that trend. Why would you call me a troll simply for linking to a poll aggregation and pointing out an observation many mainstream political analysts on both sides of the political spectrum in the UK have made themselves? Seriously, where is that going to get you?

So you don't buy Steam games? Uhhhh... What? When you tie a game to Steam you use up its one and only activation - if that's not an example of "activation limits" then I think we need to reexamine what we are calling "activations" and what we are calling "limits". "We" don't, you do. You have a stupid definition of activation. I'll just point out that this 'activation' you talk about is a once-off account activation upon purchase which enables you to play the game (on that account) on as many computers as you want (and increasingly on both Mac and Windows without rebuying the game, and soon to be Linux). By comparison Uniloc allows 5 installs without no benefits to the customer whatsoever. How so? While Uniloc seems rather flexible and user-friendly, Steam is rather draconian and is sometimes hostile to gamers. Yeah no. Steam requires you to login to your account or go offline. If you consider that draconian I don't give a damn - as I said: that's for another thread (one which I already made, go revive it if you wanna push your agenda). Same with anybody else in this thread who dislikes Steam as much as I do crappy schemes like Uniloc. All I want is not to be slapped with a DRM scheme that has limited installs. That we can agree on. You could have chosen a better game. Yeah, definitely not MW2 lol! Although at least the Steam version of that, like ME2, doesn't have 3rd party DRM. Just no LAN functionality. Arseholes. For smeg's sake dude, because as I keep pointing out to you people, Steam doesn't limit what computers (or specifically how many) I can install the bloody game on. That will always make it superior to schemes with install (read: activation) limits for me, which ARE CLEARLY more inconvenient than Steam because a) I have to activate rather than just load Steam, choose a game, and click play, and b) if I ever forget to de-activate, or have to reformat, or replace some hardware, I'm screwed, and I can easily see that happening more than 5 times to any game I replay (i.e. most decent RPGs). And Steam does the one thing every other DRM Steam can't: it's a DRM scheme which adds value and is hassle-free. Steam is a single repository of all my games (and increasingly save-games via Steam Cloud) which I can access from any computer (and increasingly from any OS via Steam Play). And the vast majority of such games were purchased at steeply discounted prices in American dollars which further justifies the (to me unobtrusive) DRM that is Steam. Whether you feel that way about Steam or not, I do, and subverting Steam in order to push your own 3rd party DRM as Raithe seems to indicate is happening is a pain in the ass for the customer. I have never once argued that Steam is for everyone, so don't go telling me Steam isn't for me. Wish I hadn't made the damn thread. I've already voted with my wallet. Yes because I'd make this thread solely to justify going out and illegally downloading the game. Our hatred of DRM has got nothing at all to do with civil liberties. Thank you for your input. I value it oh so very much.

Meh. People have been writing/saying that about internet/browsers etc. for the past 12+ years. Every new thing is going to revolutionize/standardize blah blah. Truth is, for browsing the average news/blog website, I've been able to use any browser to view them for ages...I've had browser preferences, but for me at least, it had little to do with viewing. Do you know WHY that is? Because all the browsers STANDARDISED (with minor deviations) on HTML4. And then JavaScript. And then CSS. And then XHTML. OK that might not be chronological order. But people have been saying this stuff for ages because it's true and happens, you just don't notice. These changes aren't revolutionary. They are evolutionary. YouTube couldn't have existed 10 years ago. Fair enough.

Look, **** it, I'll buy ME2 instead. This doesn't have to end badly for me.

The physical stores use Uniloc, kirottu. I refuse to buy games with activation limits. And Tigranes, that's rubbish - Steam doesn't contain activation limits - it is in no way worse than Uniloc. Regardless of what you think, I choose Steam as the lesser of two evils and it's a completely nonsensical move to double-DRM a game. We thought Steam would NOT contain 3rd party DRM since Steam is DRM itself.

Yes, sure, if you want, now can everyone shut up about it.

Third-party DRM on Steam - what were you thinking? If I have to put up with DRM I chose Steam, but you then go and add another DRM scheme on top of it? How is that rational? And while I doubt I'll hear anything since Rorie left, but the last thing I want to hear is "It's up to the publisher" - so have a bloody talk to them about it! This isn't a thread complaining about DRM. We've been there before. This is a customer formally complaining about the stupidity of the decision to include two forms of DRM on your game. I was about to cough up the full $70 you want from us Aussies on a pre-order, so I'm happy to pay your premium even, but this bull**** is just insulting. Reference: http://store.steampowered.com/app/34010/ "3rd-party DRM: Uniloc 5 machine activation limit"

That's up to Redmond. I suspect that for the most part they will this time. They can't afford not to.

Oh wow, I didn't know you were Korean.

Sorry, don't misread me as disliking the Greeks or having a vandetta, neither is true, but a lot of Greece's problems do appear to be of their own making from my perspective, that's all. I'm about as harsh on Greece as I am Britain really.