Enoch

Minority votes against gay rights have more to do with unrelated corellations with religious affiliation. Latinos are heavily Catholic; Catholic doctrine is anti-gay-rights. Ditto African Americans and the Baptist church (and other evangelical protestant denominations).

Meh. I'm more or less what you get if you average out you, gromnir, and hurlshot. No need for a seperate data point. Also, this endeavor is doomed to failure. Funny topic to talk about, but will be decidedly un-funny, and a little bit creepy, in practice. (Not unlike ventriloquists.)

I'm approaching 35 hours, having done only the Dalish, Mages, Redcliff pt. 1, Shaletown, and some assorted "we couldn't bother to write quest-giving NPCs so we just stuck them in a sack" quests. But I'm a notorious combat pause-whore, and I have been known to leave the game on and paused for extended stretches while meandering about the house, fixing drinks, chatting with the wife, etc. Oh, and to update a post I made a while back, I did finally get the Leliana music video. Turns out that I had a backlog of conversations that trigger when entering Camp in the queue. Comedy gold.

I had a similar issue for a little while on the party selection screen. To select a character, you needed to click about 3 screen-inches above it. But it hasn't recurred since.

So, we're trading a reduction in heart disease for an increase in liver disease and highway deaths. I guess I can drink to that. (Tonight, it will be some Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA.)

Me? No. But in the case of marriage it would be asinine for each state to have their own laws - hell, if you want examples of this look at the race laws and how much trouble they were. States already have different marriage laws-- requirements to get a blood test, filing fees, parental consent requirements for the underage, the degree of relationship that constitutes incest, rules for inheritance of property, rules for the custody of children, rules for separation and divorce proceedings, etc. Personally, I have little doubt that bans on gay marriage will be pretty universally considered unconstitutional 30 years from now. But the lesson that the Supreme Court has learned from the abortion wars is that it does not want to be the institution leading public opinion on issues like this.

Yeah, but, like, 14 of those were Dick Nixon...

No and no. Really, the trend for the last 25 years or so has been in the other direction. The Rehnquist Court in the late 80s to early 90s had a number of cases renewing federalism jurisprudence. (e.g., the "Violence Against Women Act" didn't have a sufficient grounding in interstate commerce and thus was beyond Congress' power.) Most of the justices who were in the majority back then are either still on the Court or have been replaced by Bush appointees who are unlikely to disagree with their outcomes. I don't think that these holdings are in jeopardy of being overturned anytime soon. On the legislative side, there have been a number of increases in federal spending (Medicare prescription benefit, bailout, stimulus, etc.), but not so much in regulation. It's likely to bounce back soon in areas of finance and insurance, but there are enough parochial interests in the Senate that state-level options and control will likely still be a feature of whatever ends up passing. Mostly, I think this kind of fear is a case of politicians using scare tactics to motivate their political base. ("Come out and vote for me, or the bureaucrats from Washington will be goose-stepping down Main Street!") And people tend to be eager to believe what they fear, and eager to attribute nefarious motives to people they disagree with politically.

Dude, it was a joke. The 10th Amendment is a grant of residual power-- the power not discussed in the other parts of the Constitution. No single right or power was "clearly and specifically" reserved by its language. The Commerce Clause happens to be in one of the other parts of the Constitution. The scope of the power it grants the Congress has increased, but this corresponds with an enormous increase in the portion of the nation's "commerce" that has interstate effect. And singling out the Court isn't entirely fair. The Commerce Clause is used by Congress to pass legislation, which then is signed by the President. SCOTUS's involvment is in ruling on whether the law is constitutional in the event that a petitioner challenges said constitutionality in a case that is appealed to them. So, while it's tempting to blame the 9 unelected, life-tenured justices for thwarting your righteous views, it never would have gotten to them if the other two (democratically elected) branches didn't also think you were wrong.

Area Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines Constitution to Be

I have to laugh at the population over there that howls "OMG go back to WOW" at any poster who points out any of the game balance issues that DAO has.

MIA @ CAR: MIA PIT @ KC: PIT NO @ TB: NO ATL @ NYG: NYG BUF @ JAC: JAC IND @ BAL: IND SEA @ MIN: MIN CLE @ DET: DET WAS @ DAL: DAL SF @ GB: SF ARI @ STL: ARI NYJ @ NE: NE CIN @ OAK: CIN SD @ DEN: SD PHI @ CHI: PHI TEN @ HOU: TEN

You don't even have to look overseas-- we've tried Dagon's idea right here in the USA. Then there was a war. The conservatives lost. American federalism has worked pretty well over the years, with authority split between national, state, and local governments. Yes, the scale has tilted towards the national level over the last century, but that's a natural consequence of growing technological interdependence, the rise of the US as a world power, and the increased prominence of national issues that require the resources of the whole country to address.

Putting my 'statutory interpretation' hat on for a moment, I agree with the article's reading that this is shoddy drafting, but not a fatal error. You read the amendment as a whole, and right up front it says "Marriage in this state shall consist," which clearly indicates that "marriage" isn't being abolished. Now, the language in the second phrase saying that the state "may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage" can be read as being facially contradictory to this. But you wouldn't do that, because of the general rule that you should not apply an interpretation of a constitution/statute to create a contradiction when there is another, reasonable, interpretation that does not do so. And there is a reasonable interpretation available here: that the subsection B only bars legal statuses that do not meet the definition in subsection A. Even if the contradictory interpretation is adopted, at best, an internal contradiction creates ambiguity. And when a statute or constitution is ambiguous, the courts reading it use interpretive aids, the first among which is always the history surrounding its enactment. Since the history here is a whole lot of "we don't like them gay folks" and has nothing to support an intent to ban marriage entirely, I can't imagine any court (particularly a Texan court) agreeing with someone arguing that subsection B invalidates all marriage.

The Mage origin has some nice connections, both with the (obvious) Mage's Circle quest, and (more surprisingly) with the Redcliff quest. But since Mage is the only class that is exclusive to one Origin, it's probably less typical than most.

FYI, someone on Bio's "social site" has delved into the toolset to look at actual spell effects. http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/47/index/217944/1

Question: Has anybody done any weapon switching based on the type of enemy they're facing? Of course, I do switch out Shale's crystals and, to a lesser extent, my wizards' staves based on damage type resistances. But I've never done any melee weapon switching. The game mentions differences between Swords, Maces, and Axes-- variations in base damage, crit chance, and armor penetration. But I really don't pay a whole lot of attention to the changes in the damage numbers that my bashers put out. My guess is that the effects are all pretty minor-- nothing on the level of D&D's "skeletons take half damage from swords" setup. So I've just been sticking with the best weapons I have, augmented with the best enchantments I can find. Has anybody found that it's worthwhile to swap a sword for a mace when taking on certain foes?

Yeah, the two spell books I've bought for my mage are the only serious expenses I've had yet. After Mages' Tower, Brazil, Honnleath, and the first stage of Redcliffe, I have spent about 40G on books, and have about 20G in my pocket.

A thought just occurred: Has anyone taken Shale along on the Mage's Circle quest? I would be most interested to see the dream that the sloth demon traps it in. Dog and Sten's dreams would also be interesting to see. (Wynne's was cool, but Al and Lel's were rather dull.) This is now at the top of the list of things that might motivate me to play the game over again.

Already done. My party for Redcliff is Al, Shale, and Wynne. Although, for variety's sake, I haven't been giving Wynne the same bunch of crowd-control spells that my PC has. I've started her down the Lightning line, to give her something more useful to do in the early stages of combat, before her healing becomes necessary. It's probably not an optimal choice, but I wanted to experiment a little.

I can still hum the main theme to M&M: Secret of the Inner Sanctum...

To get us back to some Tactics discussion, I had a hell of a time with elf leader Baldy McFishhooks last night. First I tried force-fielding him to focus on his helpers (IIRC, 4 walking trees and 2 greater shades), but they were too tough to take down before the FF ended. And he abuses Cone of Cold almost as much as I do! (Misdirection Hex was also a killer against me in that fight.) I eventually beat him on my 3rd try with what turned out to be a somewhat exploitative strategy: put everything into knocking him out first, which unsummoned all his helpers and triggered the "I surrender" cutscene. Had the others not gone away, they almost certainly would've finished me off-- Leliana was already knocked out, Shale was frozen, and Al & my Mage spending half their turns chugging "poultices" just to stay upright.

Yeah, the only complaint I had was that Zevran should really start with at least a little bit of the lockpicking skill. Chests are one of the main reasons to take a rogue at all, so he really isn't a good Leliana replacement until you level him up a couple of times in camp. The character specs and abilities fit their backgrounds and personalities, and aren't wholly lacking in gameplay effectiveness. That's all I ask. Also, wouldn't re-leveling all the companions make the game much much easier?

From what I've read over on Bio's site, Shimmering Shield is what makes the Arcane Warriors so crazy powerful. The "mana consumption" thing isn't working properly, in that the spell remains active even after your mana pool reaches 0. Combine that with the Blood Mage ability to cast spells out of their HP, and you've got a munchkin's dream. It's the Kensai-Mage of DA. (That said, like all buff-spell-reliant fighters, it requires a lot of micromanagement.)

I think my approval with Lel was decent at the time, but not especially high. (I had given her some appropriate gifts, including that flower from the forest, but hadn't had any in-depth conversations.) It also might be relevant that she was knocked out in the fight .