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Well... more like, "numbers that oscillate wildly between extreme values without good explanation should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism". Mind, the figure was, in Wiki, 22.23 per 100k until march 2015. Then someone used an Economist article which in turn references a HK uni study (which interestingly is nowhere to be found) to revise the figure down to 9.8 per 100k. But even the sourced article is far from convincing: "Paul Yip, director of the Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong and a co-author of the recent study, says no country has ever achieved such a rapid decline in suicides. And yet, experts say, China has done it without a significant improvement in mental-health services—and without any national publicity effort to lower suicides. The most dramatic shift has been in the figures for rural women under 35. Their suicide rate appears to have dropped by as much as 90%. The Lancet study in 2002 estimated 37.8 per 100,000 of this age group committed suicide annually in 1995-99. The new study says this declined to just over three per 100,000 in 2011. Another study of suicides, covering 20 years in one province, Shandong, found a decline of 95% among rural women under 35, to 2.6 suicides per 100,000 in 2010—and a 68% drop in suicides among all rural women." "Scholars suspect that the number of suicides is underreported in official figures (the official suicide rate nationally was 6.9 per 100,000 in 2012) and they make adjustments for that in their calculations. But in several studies, as well as in official data, the long-term decline in suicides has been marked across the spectrum, in rural and urban areas and among men and women from almost all age groups. The only notable exception is the suicide rate among the elderly, which declined overall but has crept back up in recent years, a worrying trend in a rapidly ageing society." "Twenty years from now, the story of China’s suicide rate could be grimmer than it is today. But rates seem unlikely to return to the levels of the 1990s." Not to mention, if you're going to start believing Chinese figures, you have to believe ALL of them for the sake of consistency, including their projected economic growth, military capabilities as advertised, etc... edit: oops, the Economist article.

Nope. Certainly not a dumb idea. Sadly not an original one either, however. As for the rest of your post, I think you are simply arguing past one another. Nobody is disputing that history is what it is -- but the argument that events couldn't have occurred much differently is unfalsifiable, so not very useful. The fact that some good may have come out of <empire> does not invalidate the observation that empires, by their very nature, are sociopolitical constructs that are exploitive and predatory. You are no doubt going to find resistance trying to get some people to accept any particular view of what constitutes "good", as well.

Team Dragonpunk? Hmm. They got a C&D letter from Take Two for some seriously ill-conceived funding scheme for one of their XCOM mods. I'm not one to take the side of greedy publishers but they really did screw up. And their coop mod seems to be largely abandoned after their proposed code changes weren't approved by Firaxis. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence that they could handle something of the scale they are pitching, sadly.

Credit card numbers aren't random -- they have to conform to a checksum or some other algorithm. Entering an incorrect card number should prompt an "invalid card number" error, unless somehow Majestic managed to erroneously enter a valid credit card number that wasn't his own, or otherwise not good for the transaction. I work with this **** and it's a PITA to make the system accept fake card numbers so I can run tests... not about to use my own, obviously.

"Representation is important!" "Promoting healthy lifestyles is important!"

*big boned

Not surprised that Heinlein was mentioned, but no love for Asimov? There's apparently a Foundation TV show in the works, so if it catches on, it may yet get made.

See, I don't need to slide needles under my fingernails to know that it hurts like a bitch, your comments to the contrary notwithstanding. A significant fraction of those 5k releases will likely be shovelware, and your listing of a full two titles "that actually matter" doesn't change that one bit. Even if a thousand of those turn out to be good, you'd still end up with an 80% trash ratio. GOG is starting to go that route as well, since they haven't restricted their catalog to "Old" games for a while, and it's debatable whether they were ever strict in adhering to "Good". An online storefront called simply "Games" just doesn't pack the same punch, I guess.

You only had one cd or dvd on console. That's not a lot and unlike PC every kB counts. And a skin takes up to MB depending on resolution. A model takes significally more. Things get cut/reused. And no lead would allow to have a separate model if it could be a standard one. Actually, female argonians without breasts would likely be indistinguishable from male argonians, allowing for re-use of the male model. Much like you can't tell at a glance the female lizards from the males. If they'd wanted they could simply have made "females" be .7 scale males and call it a day. It'd even be verisimile! The real reason is, obviously, that they gave them **** so they'd look good in boobplate. Duh. edit: lol, colloquial for teats is censored but "boobs" isn't? Stay coherent, Obs profanity filter. edit2: "verisimile" apparently isn't a word in English, but "verisimilitude" (a derivative thereof) is. Because reasons.

OMG are you serious? it's <currentyear>! I hear someone wrote a paper on it, so it's right up there with the Coriolis effect and Van der Waals interactions!

I'd like to read the guy's actual posts on the KKKodex before joining the (latest) crusade of the righteous -- on either side. I sure as hell am not taking Exitium's word for it.

"Need" is a bit of a strong word. You need very little at all, but that's a whole 'nother story. The MP/SP divide is often fake, though. It's different teams handling each portion in games that have specific MP content, with separate budgets. Shoehorning MP in a game just because the latest market research craze says so is probably going to suck, but that holds true of anything. RPG-like inventory/stat progression? Microtransactions? VR support? Whatever. I wish devs would just focus on making good games with a strong mechanical and narrative foundation where applicable rather than ticking boxes. CREAM, though. But when it does work, it's just awesome. BG2/IWD, D:OS, DoW2 are examples of games with a focus on single-player action where the added multiplayer functionality makes them even better.

Ha. Muslims aren't nice outside of "tourist-friendly" zones? Well, here you don't even have to step outside of touristic areas to find locals openly rioting against tourists Guess it must be the legacy of Al-Andalus or something.

This is pretty much how I decide what to play as. I don't mind fixed protagonists either, because I'm never really playing "myself". I have much more fun imagining a completely different character with their own personality and biases and trying to decide how they'd act than being boring old me all the time. Which is why I love when games react to characters of different sexes rather than making it a perfectly egalitarian/cosmetic only choice.

Got Dawn of War 2 Master Collection cheap, so I'm going through the campaign with a friend. Love the over the top... well, everything really. FOR TEH EMPRAH

Are you kidding? Kids are the worst, man. Pint-sized devils... Some of the **** they do to each other in the playground is downright nasty.

With good reason, too. We can't seem to stop disobeying His commandments:

Some minor bugs were met with a hate campaign, which was going even after those were fixed. EA and Bioware supported the game for 5 months and added extra content free of charge*. I am thankful for that. I don't know about hate "campaigns" -the term suggests an organized and coordinated effort- but I would certainly not call constant crashing on all platforms without even an event log entry a "minor bug". Most of the criticism was aimed at poor production values, the most egregious examples of which were bad animations, textures, and ho-hum voice acting, as far as I recall. Back then I also thought some of the foaming-at-the-mouth raging (especially from YT e-celebs) was unwarranted, but hyperbole is the name of the game, and not a single thing or topic is safe from it. At any rate, that **** is inexcusable in an AAA game, and it's pretty clear that they knew the product wasn't ready to be shipped in march -- but they did anyway. That being said, EA whatshisface's statement is so tone-deaf that it would get one in hot water in any other multi-billion industry... but this is vidya.

Karl Marx. In the grim darkness of the near future there is only (class) war.

Yep. I'm interested and it looks like devs have been busting ass. If the patch(es) don't break more stuff than they fix and the fixes work as advertised, I take what I said back. Core gameplay is pretty good and well worth the admission price.

Hahaha. So any examples aren't valid because "that was then and this is now", and obviously a mob doing it on the street is so much worse than a kangaroo court issuing a sentence with no recourse. And of course, if it didn't happen in the UK, France or the US, it's not a valid example either, because they aren't really Christians if it's "the most hardcore Catholic nation in the world" (by the way, that would be the Vatican, actually). You sure you don't want me to find an example where attackers were literally tapdancing on a cracker? Because I mean, it's not such an arbitrary prerequisite considering everything else that's enough for you to splain any other occurrences away. Careful though, keep the hand-waving up and you'll pull a muscle. As for your stance regarding "the incompatibility of Islam with the West", I take it this is your expert opinion after thoroughly researching the issue and studying the myriad different interpretations of fiqh, yes? Perhaps you'd care to share some citations, specific fatwas by Islamic scholars living perfectly well-adjusted lives in the West that help support your assertion? Failing that, you can provide hard figures that show that the millions of Muslims living in the West are actually failing to abide by the laws of their respective countries of residence, and bowing only to sharia. And by the way: toleration does not involve "accomodating whatever because muh cultural heritage". Toleration is based on and demands respect for secular law, and secular law supersedes religious doctrine whenever the two come in conflict. Read up, bro. The West isn't going to become a neo-Caliphate if you blink.

The answer would be, of course, when they last could get away with it. Reminder that it wasn't ecclesiastical authorities that pushed for secularization and the curbing of Church influence on public affairs. In fact, secularization was fought against tooth and nail by them. I like reminding folks of the fact that the Spanish Inquisition was still around in the 1800s, and the laws under which homosexuals were thrown in special prisons that were in effect until 1979 were, given the profound Catholic leanings of the Franco regime, an undoubtedly Christian heirloom. Oh, but that doesn't count because they weren't a "mob" and they weren't doing it "in public" (despite trials being public), and uh... they weren't tapdancing on a cracker! Yeah, that's the ticket.

No, it's pretty clear it's you who doesn't comprehend what you wrote. Because you pretty clearly said you had crashed while not hosting and didn't lose anything: Your crash report pic proves that you, uh, crashed. Not that your progress was saved when you got back, which would be impossible because developers have chosen not to implement a save feature for clients, as the developer quote above shows. And yeah, I'm sure that textures bugging out and appearing as blank squares, being unable to close the stash screen even after I'm knocked out and taken to the infirmary, objects becoming randomly uninteractable, inventory stuff disappearing for no reason, net desyncs etc. are also "intended" and "people just don't know about them". Good thing that you're the arbiter of what's a legit bug and what people can be rightly angry about, though. I'll be sure to tell my friend, no doubt he'll feel much better about his double purchase of this unplayable game.

Hahaha. Did you read the actual developer quote where he explicitly admits that the fact that stats are saved only for the host in a multiplayer game is a design decision? The only way you "weren't affected" is if you somehow, magically, got hit by an undocumented glitch that wrote a whole new savestate function out of nowhere and applied it to the host's game, thus preserving your character's stats when you reconnected. More likely, you're just making stuff up. As I said, I'm shocked. "Blablabla the developer released early because oh they couldn't resist the pressure from big bad gamers demanding at gunpoint." Who cares. Desyncs, instability, inventory and UI glitching, and so on strongly suggest that the game wasn't ready for release, at least as far as multiplayer is concerned. I didn't buy it (got it as a gift from a friend that wanted to play co-op), but if I did, I would have refunded it already. And what the hell has Grimoire got to do with anything?

Yeah, it's seriously second to none when I need that extra smarmy demeanor in my posts.