Gorgon

There is no difference between what you term social democracies and other democracies other than the level of redistribution of wealth that has been agreed upon. The important distinction is democracy versus totalitarianism. Removing the term limit on the presidency and nationalizing key industries without proper compensation are not something generally observed in democracies. It constitutes a worrying trend. Hitler was voted into power remember. Power once gained is not so easily relinquished. Although in an unstable state, perhaps these movements away from democracy are inevitable.

I'm Certain Chavez thinks he is doing whats right for the country. He's also likely to be more than a little paranoid after his coup experience.

If there are democratic elections the system of government is fundamentally democratic, not socialist. Chavez seems to be about to cross over to Socialism as a system of government, having eliminated the term limit on the presidency and moving to nationalize several industries. If his aim is to make the country independent of international banks and the crippling debt they can impose on developing nations, I'm fairly certain he is going to fail. I don't see what country could benifit from being completely isolated and completely self sufficient in today's world.

Bethesda charges 0.5$ for a suit of armor, a silly hat, or an extra quest or two as a separate download. It starred with Morrowind and they have been doing it ever since. It's not too bad since the content is invariably included in the next popper adon, you just have to wait longer.

I really hope they don't bother. Games are in the press much more than they were a decade ago, and it's simply an irresponsible decision to allow it. It doesn't add anything to the game. I would tend to think that because of the graphical improvements, it's not directly relatable to fallout 2. It would simply be too much. Unless perhaps there were no death animations other than falling down, e.i. no gore.The killing of children could be an important character driven moment, We all agree that the Karma system is hugely out of whack, we'll the killing of children could represent a real choice between good and evil, so long as the character doesn't profit from it.

Unreal Tourney 3. Graphics are beautiful, the damage is now local, you can shoot the legs, arms, head etc. Unfortunately most of the options are gone, so is the last man standing mode. You can't have translocators in deathmatch (what,,, why) I also prefer playing with both scores and lives, so you are rewarded for not getting killed, no option for that anymore. I can only describe the phenomenon as consolification, only that doesn't make much sense, without the PC modders the series would cease to have such an amazingly long shelf life. Don't care about the various objective modes, excepting CTF, they are all a silly distraction from the main business of shooting things. The weapons are a bit disappointing too. For all that though, I'm still having fun.

By the way for some reason that is hard to fathom mkreku is deeply in love with Gothic. It's best not to offend his chick, he'll go ballistic.

Imagine what could be accomplished if one could force oneself to be completely immersed, you could learn a new language in a month, paint a masterpiece. etc.

It's work week in my housing Coop, the teams started brandishing power tools today, I'm not up yet. So far they have overloaded the grid twice and one girl short circuited the intercom with a water hose. They are hammering away at the bicycle sheds now, I would not be surprised to see them collapse like a deck of cards. We used to have a couple of professional builders, but they moved away. So now we only have people pretending to know what they are doing.

I kinda liked the atmosphere in stalker, take the bunker with the scientists and the factory next to it for instance. There's lots that could have been better, especially NPC wise, but what was there was pretty decent. Towards the end the Zone got very menacing, and then kinda lost it's steam. You could tell lots of content had been cut, and the endings made very little sense at all.

In shooters it's all by ping for practical reasons, that means it's up in the air who you play with, so these things are to be expected. It's much more desirable to have a lobby where one can attempt to balance the teams beforehand to make things interesting, if once comes across people there who can't carry on a normal discussion that's a good indicator they are not someone you would want in your game. In any case it's nice to have a kick vote option to get rid of repeat offenders.

In other words extremely ambitious, quite impressive in part, and also broken in half a dozen places. I dunno, I wasn't wowed by the heavy Rain gameplay demo at all.

Guildwars on and off for a year or so. It wasn't that good, I just got used to it. Going on a long difficult mission and prevailing through cooperation, I would deem that one of the highlights. Of course 9/10 of the time you were straddled with angry brats.

Why would one assume the president is being honest, he's a politician, haven't we already established that they bend the truth for a living.

it's your job to prove he didn't, i.e., you (and every other person that makes the claim) need to provide evidence that supports your claim - the burden of proof is on you, not me. there's never been anything that indicates he lied other than ideologues running their mouths. It's just as logical to deem Bush's supposed innocence of the facts a claim. Now the onus is back on you. A circular argument ensues. I also wish to point out that I have not stated emphatically or otherwise that Bush lied, I just find it likely that analysts and detractors were purposefully ignored if they did not fit with the official agenda. In any case the evidence turned out to be false, and what is publicly known of it also very weak. I'm talking specifically about defectors with an agenda, and the laughable Blair white paper on WMD capacity in Iraq, which the Bush administration adopted as supporting evidence.

Enlighten me, I'm a little late to the discussion, what evidence supports that Bush believed what he said, and what does that matter if he is only capable of seeing or believing what supports his own agenda.

So, you were present at his top secret briefings. I can't believe the CIA would chose to blindly accept sources with an obvious motive for regime change, handmedowns from the so called 'Iraqi government in exile' some of them. I don't think the question of whether Sadam had an actual weapons capacity, or even if he was technically in violation of UN resolutions was that important to him, except to convince the UN once the decision had been made to try that avenue before going in unilaterally. Neither does it seem at all likely that what was presented was anything close to the whole picture of what was known at the time. In any case the weakness of the then known evidence has been exposed aplenty since then. Did he have plausible deniability, sure, the president always has plausible deniability.

I recently picked up Unreal tournament 3 and was a bit disappointed, the engine is sweet, the rest was, well, not as good as the name would suggest. I might check this out. The AVP games were all pretty decent, it's a bit sad that they contributed in some small way to the travesty that befell the Alien movie franchise, and to a lesser degree Predator ditto (predator 2 was hilarious) but one can't really blame a game.

The concept of deterrence is limited to the land of the living, what you are talking about is an extreme form of prevention.

There you and I agree, at least. The fact that the intelligence was wrong is plain unremarkable. The fact that the reconstruction contracts were parcelled out to cronies of the Bush administration who bungled the reconstruction and thereby made the insurgency ten times stronger... THAT's a problem. The difference between lying and misrepresenting the truth is semantics. No Bush didn't lie, he said 'go sell this side of the story' and that's exactly what his underlings did, to the point of deliberately skewing the larger picture. Also, the Bush administration does seem to have been confused as to the meaning of privatization, I'm pretty sure the point is to improve efficiency, not to hand the contracts to your republican buddies who knew the right names.

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Indeed, I think that to look on this account without feeling the compelling need to exact ferocious retribution is to deny one's own humanity. Some things need to be punished, not as a deterrent to others because they are probably beyond deterrent, but as proof that we are distinct from them. He may deserve death, but society should not be the ones to administer it. For our sake, not his. It has already been posited that it's a bad idea to sentence with emotion, and for my money that's an undeniable truth. In any case I'm sure we all agree he should not be let out, much less have his sentence reduced, and that question is much better place on which to focus attention, especially since there is no question of his guilt.

Have you tried a different mouse, that don't sound like a feature of windows. Maybe one of the buttons on the pad is borked.

The death penalty issue is not about individual cases, this much should be obvious. So, you've found a monster, so what.

dsrtdg