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It was wrong because it didn't break any monopolies... arguably it made things worse, as it facilitated speculation, and diversified operations also makes any wrongdoing much harder to detect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies) Yeah, yeah. I'm not taks. So sue me. What would be the point of that when they can have it be an optional component to install via Windows Update?

I can see why! Beyond some moderately shiny graphics and... erm, OK real-time combat, this game has "mediocre" stamped all over it. All right, so the first part was unnecessary, but I was trying to find something distinctly positive about the game. I suppose the areas are reasonably built, although again, nothing special, and the size and habit of including superfluous changes in level and random, purely decorative walls makes them a little labyrinthine. I'm really not seeing what the fuss is about, and as I suspected, the similarities between the Alpha Protocol dialogue stance system and the "dialogue wheel" that ME uses are purely cosmetic. Also, this game is about as well-optimised as NWN2, if not slightly worse. My laptop is supposedly well above the minimum specs, but the game still runs laggily even on mid-low settings. I'd turn the texture detail down further, but everything already looks fugly. The story is bland even by BioWare standards, and the voice acting, for the most part, is diabolically bad. Especially for Shepard. To top it all, the majority of the party members have even less personality or interest than usual. And the (bland-to-dreadful) dialogue is unskippable. Oh, paroxysms of joy. Seriously, why do people praise this game? Of BioWare's recent output, both JE and KotOR easily trump it, from what I've seen so far. I waited until price dropped to 20

You got it backwards. With the appropriate car, you do get to pick anyone. Four-wheel swagger:

Yes. Yes I am.

Since the reboot, WoD sucks the big fat one. So I'm not expecting much. And think of the hordes of Twilight and Underworld fans... *shudder*

Your ignorance and backward views are as offensive as they are troubling. Behold, the pinnacle of civilized urbanity and good taste. Yes, it's for real. *inserts coins*

Whatever would we do without your exuberant enthusiasm? am not certain, but am guessing that a handful o' you would be locked in a serious debate 'bout how transporter technology is plausible/implausible. HA! Good Fun! Aww, Grommy. Don't be so grumpy. We've already had plenty of that. Surely a few rabid canon deathmatches every now and then aren't that bad!

Oh, shi-

I don't care if it's men killing women or the other way around. Generalising is always dangerous, and this matter is no exception - the reasons why a person abuses or kills their partner are possibly as numerous as the crimes themselves. That said though, I do believe that an utter loss of respect, to the self and/or the other, is involved in most cases, and always when there's recidivism... unless there's more serious mental factors involved (unmedicated schizophrenic individuals can be violent). Surely a society in which the value of a woman is equal to that of a number of camels, this is exacerbated, but obviously it is by no means a necessary and sufficient circumstance. Don't drag me into a "nature vs nurture" debate, sir! Wow. Do you fulfill all those criteria yourself, all the time? I think I'd attain the rank of Jedi Master easier than your respect...

Whatever would we do without your exuberant enthusiasm?

The news item is "Some site down time". Good to know!

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Matthew_Dougherty http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Erik_Pressman http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Michael_Eddington http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Luther_Sloan Those are just off the top of my head. The last one is probably one of the darkest human characters in all of ST, and a personal favorite of mine. You need to watch more Trek my friend...

He was probably part of some government black project gone bad... scarred for life. For life.

So according to you, Google cannot steal more of MS' market share because further development of their web-based apps would lead to incompatibility with IE. MS is artificially stalling web browser tech development, again according to you, and trying to have people use their outdated tech, to keep their customers using their products. Um, so what? "He who dares, wins", or so goes the saying. Unless you are in the EU, in which case, institutions will do the hard work for you - and pass on the cost to the citizenry. If Google's apps are so uber, migration to their software should happen spontaneously. I fail to see how this is a monopolistic practice, in principle or legally. That's not very exact, I'm afraid. The case was awaiting the EC's ruling (funny that an executive political organ can exercise what's effectively judicial authority, don't you think? - we invented separation of powers, we can do away with it just as easily) on MS bundling IE with W7. MS went ahead and backed down on the issue that had brought about the anti-trust inquiry in the first place, which for all intents and purposes makes the inquiry baseless. Of course, the EC don't take too kindly to being made fools of. Further reading: http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2244050/...cts-ms-ie-plans

Well. Considering that the answer to this particularly unfortunate question is not-quite-so obvious to many people...

I already failed my will save for that.

Yeah. Not even good ol' lust ( ). Really man, I don't think humanity is depicted to be nearly as perfect as you say. There's plenty of examples of Starfleet dudes going bad. Not everyone is like him. edit: lawl

...and they achieve only the most abject ridicule, as usual.

But are those the elements of a true Scots..., er, RPG, alanschu? Really, I don't see the setting as especially problematic to make an RPG. Even if the commie utopia is such (debatable), the player would still need something to trade with other races who may not be as appreciative of smiles and handshakes as currency as humanity is. That could be very interesting if handled well too, allowing the devs to design an economy which isn't based on GP disguised as credits or w/e. How about trading shipboard systems, dilithium crystals, or other stuff that has actual value for the player and can't be hoarded as GP can. This would probably rule out a "ph4t l00t" system altogether, but I tend to see that more as a good thing... A Romulan Star Empire RPG would be bliss. And suicidal from a marketing standpoint.

I agree. We need also the Techno Union and the Intergalactic Banking Clan. Awesome!

This applies to me. At least as far as second and subsequent playthroughs go, unless the game is already old enough to have good mods available for it when I first get it. I think it's awesome and it extends the life of games quite a lot... I actually installed and played through KotOR again just because of this. So little time...

Sounds like we have a clear case of unfair generalising! DDO works fine with a 3/3.5 system in which the most important departure from PnP is the addition of a "mana" pool to casters. So it's not the MMO cultists eating babies again - MMO players are the *ultimate* min/maxers, and that cannot be accomplished without deep knowledge of the rules. Also, D&D games have been known to sell pretty well for the most part, and those sales cannot be exclusively attributed to old PnP fans. So it's not "kids these days" becoming unable or unwilling to master relatively complex rulesets. Looks to me like WotC is solely to blame for driving it to the ground, in their effort to force their ****ing miniatures down everyone's throats, in their effort to make it appealing to the widest possible audience.

Yes, that's why MS was forced to pay multi-billion fines every time it was proven in court that they had been eating babies. Seriously, it's probably not a good thing that MS has such a large hold of the OS market, but that's free market for ya. You can't force a brand to advertise its competitors in their own product. What's next, forcing MS to bundle a copy of OpenOffice with their W7 packages? How about a Linux partition? What the crap? And in the end, it's just more trouble for the end user, because they have to remove all the trash that would be installed by law, because companies "cannot compete on equal footing" - and they sure as hell won't bother if this idiocy keeps escalating. It's bad enough having to clean up all the garbage and idiot-proof configurations new PCs come with. As for the article, what's there to say. Eurocommies strike again!

Well, yes. The emphasis there being on "can", which in this case is totally out of the developers' hands. Depends on whether the game manages to gather together a community large and active enough to fund, run and debug PWs and content for them on their own penny, in their spare time - the community is shouldering the burden of the effort required to provide a service which in most cases doesn't come even close to MMOs. And at any rate, those community PWs simply couldn't handle the millions of subscribers that MMOs sustain... This applies to pretty much anything. A mechanic may screw up when fixing your car, but that doesn't mean he'll always screw up or that you'll be able to fix it just as well yourself (unless you're a mechanic yourself). You are supposed to get what you pay for, and in most cases, you do. It's bad business to have otherwise. It's always funny to see people try and establish a general rule from a very skewed and carefully chosen handful of examples, and then try to use that rule to push their agenda, though. Never gets old. RE Guild Wars: GW isn't free. It's as "free" as the trial versions of the rest of pay-to-play MMOs. It's a different biz model, but by no means free.

That's right, you didn't. But then I guess you don't have a point or I must have missed it, as you quoted and answered to a post directed to somebody complaining about MMO-capable NWN not being free anymore, or somesuch... So please, what was your point again?