Enoch

Yeah, I gotta agree with Grom. Fraud is still a much more plausible explanation than this guy somehow affecting a total change in the underlying chemistry of the human body.

Read this, then post here or here. And know that there's pretty much nothing that the fanbase can do about the production schedule. It was set at the beginning of the project, and a significant investment has already been sunk into the stated release timeframe.

Good idea. Someone should start photoshopping from here.

The PC version is only $50 in the US.

There is some evidence to suggest that we spend some time somewhere in Texas.

Silly Hurlie! He told us what he's going to do now: Pay attention!

The mods have cleaned this one up a bit, haven't they?

Tangentially related and entertaining: Grading the flags of the world.

And what the retail stores don't get is that they are living on borrowed time. As soon as the publisher controlled content becomes accepted and embraced by the consumer, BOOM!, the retail stores are going to get cut out and die. Publishers aren't sharing their cash with anyone they don't have to. But for the moment, they need the retail stores to enable the transition. I don't think the retailers are stupid-- they probably know better than anyone else the competitive pressures that their business model faces. The end may well be in sight for brick-and-mortar game specialty shops regardless of any deals they make with publishers. Download services like Steam and XBLA, online retailers like Amazon and publisher-run stores, and big-box retailers like Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Target are all competing for their market share. The current advantage that the Gamestops of the world have in this market is that the public sees them as the place to go to trade in old games for credit to buy new ones. This new EA policy is a direct strike at that advantage, but they agreed to this because they know that there's little they can do to stop it, and getting a tiny cut for themselves is probably the best way to preserve their business for the time being.

Harold had Bob only from 2 onwards though. Forgot about that; My mistake. I think my point still stands, though.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I see a pretty significant difference between humor attempted via entertaingly over-the-top characters who nonetheless have some thematic consistency with the gameworld (which appears to be what Obsidz is going for here) and humor based on reciting quotes from contemporary movies (i.e., most of Fallout 2). The former is fun if it can be pulled off (I'd argue that Harold and Bob in FO1 is a good example); the latter should generally be avoided.

This isn't the test-- as Nepenthe pointed out, the day-one DLC for Dragon Age and ME2 were the tests. The biggest effect will be that people trying to sell used games won't be able to get as much money for them. The interesting part is that EA has managed to get retailers like Gamespot on-board by cutting them into the distribution of these activation codes. (That is, they'll be able to sell the codes in-store to people who buy second-hand games.) That's imporatnt for EA because in-store promotions are still a part of their marketing efforts. If the policy remained a simple "FU" to used-game retailers, they risked losing window displays, advantageous shelf placement, employees pestering customers about pre-ordering, etc.

Depends on the distance between your router and your PC, and how easy/hard it is to run cables between the two. Our router is currently in the master bedroom-- the house was built in the '30s and doesn't have a whole lot of coaxial or phone jacks built in, and since our cable company is our ISP and our phone provider, the router needed to be somewhere that had both. So rather than run a new T1 line through the (plaster) walls, we went wireless. My desktop has an internal netgear PCI wireless card. I'm not happy with the driver, though-- the program hangs roughly 20% of the time I wake the machine from sleep mode, requiring a full reboot to get working. Once it's connected properly, though, it works fine.

This evening I will be participating in my first tabletop RPG session in over a decade. Any good ideas for character foibles in a mythic Greek setting?

Pffft. Let me know when they've really gone amok.

He's JE. To save anyone else the trouble of scrounging around, here is the thread. The poster with the preview build starts posting about it on page 66 (using forum defaults). Bonus quote:

Wait a minute-- since when was Tali competent? Everything she has ever accomplished in her life has been because Shepard was holding her hand (or outright rescuing her).

I generally don't buy collectors' editions of games as a rule. But I am so getting that one.

One tiny point: If it were just T-shirts, I doubt anybody would have noticed or cared. The additional obnoxiousness of wearing flag-patterned bandanas on their heads is probably what brought the attention of the powers-that-be. Hell, when I was in high school, I recall that wearing the any kind of bandana one one's head in the building was a violation of school rules.

It's a minor Mexican holiday celebrating a victory against a French army (I think) back in the 1860s. It has been heavily promoted in the U.S.-- mostly by companies that sell Mexican booze-- as a day for Mexican-style partying. Sort of like St. Patricks' day with tequila and Corona in place of Guinness and Jameson's.

Then things would be different. But the fact remains that everybody doesn't think that way. And if there were such a dramatic shift in public feeling, it wouldn't go unnoticed, and I'd have sufficient warning to adjust my thinking appropriately.

"Racially divided" meaning the recent history of the school in question. The Vice Principal cracked down on this because he thought it would exacerbate existing tension and mistrust between the latinos and the gringos in the school, possibly leading to fights. And he was probably right-- I'm sure that the students in question did this specifically because they knew it would piss people off. (That said, yes, the Vice Principal was an idiot, and everything would've worked out much better if, as Monte said, everyone was big enough to be cool with it.)

The difference between a government selling a loan guarantee (presumably prices that represent the actuarially calculated 'fair price' for the default risk) and selling a debt security directly is only one of scale. In both instances, the government is getting an up-front infusion of cash (either the corpus of the loan or the fee for the guarantee) in exchange for a liability that gets added to its balance sheet. Yes, the liability for the loan guarantee is contingent on external factors, but if you're doing this on any kind of scale, you have to expect a certain % of the guaranteed loans to default and cost the government money in the future.

Context matters. I think everyone involved understood pretty clearly that, in a racially divided high school, 4 white kids wearing USA shirts and American flag bandanas on Cinco de Mayo was meant to convey the message that "we're real Americans and you're not."

Yes it will. There's only about 1,000 votes margin. I hate to be a downer, but the only way your vote really makes a difference is if the final margin is either 0 or 1. I vote regularly, but it's really more about ceremonial civic participation than it is about the ridiculously small odds (even in close races) that my vote wil determine the winner.