Enoch

Something in me really wants to see how New Vegas reacts to a character with a 1 in Luck.

Yeah, they essentially want people to plug their TV into their laptop's 'video out' port, pick up a wireless gamepad controller, and then use their laptop just like a games console. (Without the license fees for Sony/MS, and with the games coming from publisher downloads to capture the gameshop markup and kill the current secondary market for console games.) Sadly, if this come true, it probably means that the games will end up even more 'console-ized' than before. They'll be native to PCs so there won't even be a 'porting' process wherein the game is made desktop-monitor and mouse-and-keyboard friendly.

Because refusing to back up an assertion and instead demanding that the questioner prove a negative is such a totally legitimate debating tactic! And casting "creative thinking" as a universally positive end is rather dubious, too. Chemically tweak your brain's pattern-recognition levels too high, and you end up spotting patterns where none exist. That's how you end up with maddening paranoia. Or free jazz. [ ]

Honestly, I think the on-screen portrayal that mirrors Alpha Protocol the best isn't a film. It's a '90s straight-to-cable TV series: La Femme Nikita. Sure, the protagonist is a bombshell blonde, but the trust-no-one environment with focus on personal relationships between field agents, handlers on an earpiece, and the mysterious motivations of the organization they all work for is spot on.

Honestly, when I'm watching a film (or whatever), I find sound coming from anywhere but the speakers on or right next to the screen I'm watching more distracting than satisfying. Once the quality gets above 'noticeably terrible,' additional improvements really don't do anything for me.

"The wrong kind" could be an issue, but I highly doubt that it's too much. AFAIK, he's a rather irregular toker (largely for the reason I described), but has used The Pot off-and-on over the last 35 years or so. More likely, it's simply that brain chemistry effects can be unpredictable from person-to-person. Much the same way that there are angry drunks, gabby drunks, quiet drunks, sloppy drunks, functional alcoholics, people prone to hangovers, people resistant to hangovers, etc.

Anecdotally, I know of at least one occasional smoker who feels some lingering negative effects for a day or two after ganja use. Mostly he "feels stupid" when he tries to write any kind of lengthy correspondence.

American tourists can go to Nevada for that though. Anybody in the U.S. with enough money to fly to Amsterdam probably doesn't have much trouble getting his or her hands on some reefer domestically. It'll be a tricky balance, but I think that with the focus on enforcement and incarceration costs, we can get to a point where it is politically palatable to decriminalize marijuana without appearing to celebrate its use in doing so.

Muddy Waters -- Howling Wolf (Live)

From on the rules of the union that Hollywood directors all belong to, it's the one pseudonym that directors are allowed to use if they don't want their real name associated with the end product. E.g., David Lynch's adaptation of Dune was officially directed by Alan Smithee.

In addition to all the stuff Archmonarch pointed out, that's a big ol' red flag right there. Americans use a comma between the thousands and hundreds digit-- anyone actually hiring for American workers would know that. Some dude writing spam somewhere in Eastern Europe, though, might not. Today I successfully replaced the dead ceiling fan in our bedroom. Much swearing was involved, but I eventually emerged victorious.

Anybody have any idea how easy/hard/impossible it is to get Thief to work in a post-XP version of Windows? $3 is a small risk to take, but it'd be helpful if anybody's got some personal experience to go on.

Someone needs to adjust their privacy settings...

Happy 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)!

Because FO3 and BG3 were cancelled, and most of the Black Isle staff had been laid off. (Or whatever you call it when an employee stops coming to work because his last payroll check bounced.)

My argument is to make the process of legitimate legal immigration easy enough that it can satisfy domestic labor market demand, get businesses employing legitimate guest workers rather than under-the-table illegals, and try to figure out the least-bad way of dealing with the millions of undocumented people already here. Do that, and won't be any reason to sink billions into fences. Also, I have no idea what this means.

Um, what? You do realize that roads have positive externalities on the rest of the economy, right? Goods purchased everywhere end up being cheaper if the cost of moving them and their component parts around the country is lower. Fences don't do that. And have you got any kind of source for that cost estimate? A city like, say, Houston, employs 5400 cops, and has a budget of about $650M/year. Apply that to the border, and you have 2 3/4 people per mile. That would certainly catch some people, but coverage would be well short of 100%. Then, you've got to consider the other half of the equation-- what would be a fair dollar-figure estimate of the benefits of "securing the border"? (Accounting for the costs, too, like how much more expensive domestically grown produce will be when the industry is forced into using a wholly legal workforce. And construction. And childcare. And on and on. The prevalence of the illegal workforce is a bad thing for a lot of reasons, but getting rid of it does mean that costs for a lot of things are going go up.)

Helping to make Mexico a less terrible place to live is a long-term pie-in-the-sky goal, and one that Mexico itself is going to have to do the heavy lifting on. In the near term, focusing on more tangible mutually beneficial goals like helping Mexican authorities reduce the influence of the drug cartels is a good way to start. And making the rules for legal immigration and guest worker-hood more sensible would be an important step. But I do agree that any kind of thorough border policing would very probably cost far more than whatever benefit it would provide. As for dealing with the current population of undocumented immigrants, there are no practical "good" solutions available. Wide-scale amnesty creates moral hazard problems, particularly if it isn't paired with making legal immigration rules more sensible. Wide-scale deportation is expensive, has very little tangible benefit, would likely drive many immigrants deeper into underground/illegal circles, and is pretty pointless if not paired with a huge increase in border patrolling. Also, a sidenote to Gfted, your numbers have confused deficit with debt.

Well, aside from the (thankfully rare) PoR2-level cluster****s that totally bork the game, your saves, and/or even your operating system, the worst bugs to me are the ones that massively effect gameplay, but that don't alert the player to how exactly the bugs are affecting his experience. Medieval 2: Total War upon release had a few huge examples. The combat calculations were not incorporating shield defenses properly, which left the player building units that he thought would be doughty line defenders, only to see them cut to ribbons. Also, certain units being almost wholly useless because their attack animations were screwing up their melee 'rate of fire,' the battle auto-resolver's absurdly pro-attacker formula for resolving seiges, and the TW series' consistent inability to teach an AI to use ships for transporting armies. All these kind of bugs are the sort of things that affect gameplay in pretty meaningful ways. But they only really manifest in subtle oddities that a new player is likely to miss. Until the player or someone else in the gaming community really takes the time to test out what exactly is going on behind the scenes, he would never know how screwed up the game is. That's just infuriating in a way that a clean BSoD can't match.

Tip : film noir isn't as nearly over the top. But I somehow like it. It's so overdone that it goes straight from bad to good again. This is not uncommon. Noir-parody has become so prevalent as to basically be a genre unto itself.

Does the current Americans with Disabilities Act include the bolded? It must, right, or they wouldnt be trying to amend them out. I would tend to agree that those particular cases should not be considered a disability. It's ambiguous. A covered disability is a "physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity." Determining the details is left to EEOC regulations and caselaw that arises out of individual complaints. I think there have been cases wherein a plaintiff has succeeded in a suit based on HIV-positive status. I wouldn't assume that the people writing this would know the regs and caselaw all too well. From the bullet points on "one world currency" and the like, I suspect that the authors get a lot of their policy information from e-mails like the ones my grandfather forwards to me.

Actually, I think Utah is the reddest of the red states. But they're generally much more polite about it-- Texas likes to be in-your-face. But, mostly, this captures the outlook of the type of people who really want to be the people to write the platform for the Texas GOP. The people at the top of the party screwed up by not having any adults in the room, and it has earned them some rather embarrassing press. I don't think you'll see many candidates actually signing on to the entirety of that playform.

Another thought: internal Pakistani politics are complicated. Democracy in Pakistan is essentially dressed-up feudalism, largely organized on ethnic lines. The Sindh and Punjabi majority has a problem with Pashtun peoples, driven by the large migrations of Pashtuns to the area around Karachi over the last decade. The theory is that the Sharif/Bhutto crowd, acting through the ISI, wants to demonize the U.S. a bit (and, by extension, Karzai and the efforts to build a cohesive Afghan nation) in the eyes of the Pashtuns and channel the potential Pashtun troublemakers out of Pakistan and into the traditionally Pashtun areas in southern and western Afghanistan-- "go blow things up there instead of causing trouble here." To do that, they make a show of trying to reconcile the (mostly Pashtun) ex-Taliban with the Karzai government, which lets them blame the U.S. and Karzai for not listening much and for kissing up to Tajiks and Uzbeks.

I find it best to memorize a few set points, and understand that as degrees F increase/decrease from those points, degrees C move at a 9F:5C ratio (i.e., close enough to 2:1 for casual understanding purposes). Those set points are: 32 F = 0 C 50 F = 10 C 61 F = 16 C 82 F = 28 C (those last 2 are approximate, but close enough for the palindromic mnemonic to work for quick-and-dirty calculations) I also know the point where the 2 scales are equal (-40), but, thankfully, I never really have to deal with measurements in that range.

Yeah, if you're going to be complaining about the dumbing down of the games industry, the flagship Civ games are probably the last place where you should cast your ire. They are proudly wonky, and still sell quite well for it. Yes, they did a console spinoff (and soon, *gasp*, a Facebook spinoff), but Civ 5 is still going to be a PC-only (with Mac version probably following in 6 months or so), hex-based (!), multi-layered, mod-friendly, turn-based strategy game. If "It's not SMAC2" is the best criticism you can come up with, then it's still a day-one purchase for me. (For my part, Alpha Centauri was a fascinating game, but less replayable than whichever Civ is current at the time. The melding together of 4X gameplay with actual narrative content was a shockingly pleasant surprise, but the faction balance in the game isn't particularly good, so once you've seen all the narrative, the rewards upon replaying diminish pretty fast. And, moreso than CRPGs, 4X games are all about the replay value.)