Enoch

Yeah, it's a free one-month loan, with an emergencies-only option to extend into longer-term credit on unfavorable terms. I've never made a car payment, but I've also never bought a new car. Actually, I don't own a car at all right now-- the wife and I are a 1-car household (an '01 Corolla) and it's in her name. (Note: All this rambling about my virtuous frivolity would be wholly undercut if I told you what our monthy mortgage payment is.)

I'm on a Civ4 kick. The bug bites me every 6 months or so, and I play the game thoroughly for a few weeks before some of the more tedious aspects start to get to me. I DL'ed the Risen demo this weekend, but haven't played it yet.

As someone who has done some investigating for Congress, I'm crying foul here. The Constitution requires an appropriation from Congress for the expenditure of funds by the government. (Art. I, sec. 9, cl. 7) It doesn't matter if these funds are drawn from sources other than the general fund of the Treasury, funded by tax receipts. (E.g., Nat'l park charges admission, but it can't spend that money unless Congress passes a law saying that it can.) So there has to be a statute somewhere saying that AP agents can acquire funds in the field and spend them in support of their operations, or the agency is illegal. And if there is such a statute out there, oversight comes with it. (Note: Temptation to register a twitter account and point this out in a reply is high. But not high enough.) Clearly, Obsidian needs to hire an expert on federal appropriations law to check this stuff for them. I'll send my resume in momentarily.

The NFL doesn't do streaming online video because their contracts with the TV networks won't let them.

At least that's one accomplishment, they actually got someone to invest in interplay. For some reason, I can surprisingly keep a straight face at the mention of this. Well, it is only 6 cents per share right now.

Pretty low bug queues, and most people have moved off to other projects? Dun dun dun. So, does that mean then that Sega have basically stopped funding for AP as far as development costs goes? I mean, aren't there areas that could be improved in that timespan like the graphics? Are they just fixing bugs that's it? Seems like a waste to me. This sounds like another MOW - sits on shelf, publisher has no clue what to do with the game. I read "design staff" as a qualifier, meaning people whose job it is to design characters, areas, quests, cinematics, etc. Their work is usually concentrated early on in a project (although, as I understand it, everyone pitches in "crunch time" situations). That doesn't mean the people whose job it is to focus on programming, art, gameplay, etc., aren't hard at work on refining AP.

Without a peek at the actual language of the contract in question, it's really hard to say much about this. It seems like the guy who posted this has read a filing IPLY made and assumed that every factual allegation in it is completely true. A dubious approach, to say the least. (It could very well be IPLY's litigation strategy to throw everything at the wall they can think of, hope something sticks, and get a quick cash-out settlement before they drown in legal costs.) I don't see how anybody is better off with the IP in the hands of a company so lacking in the financial and personnel resources that would be necessary to make use of it.

Houston at Cincinnati: CIN Detroit at Green Bay: GB Baltimore at Minnesota: MIN NY Giants at New Orleans: NO Cleveland at Pittsburgh: PIT Carolina at Tampa Bay: TB KC Chiefs at Washington: WAS St. Louis at Jacksonville: JAX Arizona at Seattle: SEA Philadelphia at Oakland: PHI Tennessee at New England: NE Buffalo at NY Jets: NYJ Chicago at Atlanta: ATL Denver at San Diego: DEN

I can only really stand Metal in certain circumstances. But one of those circumstances when it is quite enjoyable happens to be while driving a souped-up hot rod at unsafe speeds, though hordes of undead beasts. So I am curious to play this game.

My situation is a little different, in that I work at a government agency, so there's no great threat of termination. Raises and promotions are somewhat competitive, but the portion that is based on performance is pretty limited. There is a union at the agency that fights over this stuff rather a lot. I'm not a bargaining-unit employee, but the policies are pretty similar to the ones worked out with the union. In a general sense, I recognize that standard-form performance evaluations are a necessary evil in large organizations to ensure that people are being treated reasonably fairly across the organization. You simply can't have a supervisor making decisions on people's pay, promotions, etc., without some uniform, objective criteria, applied across-the-board. The reviews create a record that can be used to justify any number of actions (from termination to selection for promotion over another candidate) that could be the subject of future disputes. (Of course, due to the general creep of 'grade inflation' with divisional supervisors trying to get their people a larger share of the promotion resources, the effectiveness of any system has a pretty short half-life, beyond which everybody seems to get top marks for any performance short of lighting their office on fire.) The self assessment portion feels silly, but it probably does help the supervisors come up with their ratings quite a bit (at least in reminding them what you've been doing for the past year), and also probably helps in assuring that the employees are aware of the company/agency's expectations with regard to their performance. In my particular situation, though, I have enough trust in my immediate supervisor that if I wrote up a quick list of the major projects I've done as a reminder, he'd rate me fairly. (As a counterpoint to GD's experience, based on large advantages in both experience and work ethic, this guy could do my job 5X better than I do and not break a sweat.) But I'm sure that my experience is far from universal.

You may be right about the Bucs, but I can't see the Redskins trading for Quinn. Also, in case we needed any other examples of the Browns being a poorly run organization, here's a model of how not to run a NFL franchise: trade up to draft a QB in the first round, give him a grand total of 6 NFL starts with terrible teammates to develop and assess his performance, then try to trade him away when his value has never been lower. That means one of two things: either you're not giving the guy nearly enough of a chance (how did Drew Brees or Eli Manning or Donovan McNabb look after 6 freakin' starts?), or you were completely insane to think that the guy was worth the draft investment in the first place.

If it works in Canada like it does in the States, and assuming that your policy had first-party collision coverage ("comprehensive" is for non-collision damage like vandalism, fire, etc.), your insurance company has the onus to 1) pay you according to your policy, and 2) sue the at-fault driver (who would be represented by his insurance company) to recoup both their costs and your deductible. Usually, an out-of-court settlement takes care of step 2.

I think it's the most accessible and least punshing of all PB games, while still retaining the spirit of it. Great optimisation also means loading after death (which will happen) is only a 5-second hassle (and saves are basically instant). You don't really feel lost, either. Thanks. Actually, since I posted that, I discovered that there is a demo. I'll give it that a shot this weekend, if I get a chance.

Ugh. This afternoon, I have to complete my annual "self assessment" for my performance review at work. This essentially means that I have to summarize what/how I've done over the past year in 8 different categories of performance. The problem, of course, is that tasks like this make me feel like I'm doing nothing but writing "Wow, look at how awesome I am!" which is uncomfortably out of character. (Indeed, although I do trust my immediate bosses to try their hardest to assess their employees fairly, including any hedging, negative language, etc., just gives them an excuse to rate you lower than someone who is less bashful about being boastful.) I usually tend to rate myself in the top categories in most of the competencies, but keep my narrative to straight factual reporting about the jobs I've worked on and the results achieved. That has worked in the past, but it's still a rather painful bit of bureaucratic nonsense to go through. And, really, it's got to be harder on the supervisors than it is on the shmoes like me.

What you're seeing is mostly the result on one guy who think's it's fun to be a hardcore marxist troll. Pay it no mind.

This thread is intruiging. Would ya'll recommend this game to someone who gave up playing Gothic 2 after a couple of hours? I just found the combat to be too frequent, difficult, and (this was the main sticking point) lacking guidance on how to get better.

Good call on the 'Fins. That was a hell of a finish last night. Has there ever been a Dolphins - Jets game that was not fun to watch? Not too many. What a game. I didn't have much of a preference coming into that one, but by the end, I was glad that Miami managed the comeback. I'd have hated to have seen the game decided by that awful pass interference call that essentially gave the Jets their last TD.

Good call on the 'Fins. That was a hell of a finish last night.

Much to my surprise, I was able to pull off the win in the Civ IV game that I discussed in the "What are you playing" thread. Here's a shot of my only city, closing in on victory. I shifted everything to focus on science for the screenie, although at this point the spaceship had been launched and I was just plowing production into units and gold. 727.5 beakers per turn in only one city ain't bad. I could probably do even better if I pulled some workers out of mines and made more scientists. (This is Monarch difficulty, Epic speed.) That one square of desert under the wheat is the result of some global warming. Here's the victory:

Tough week to find an upset to like. I'll go out on a limb and say that the Browns get win #1. They played Cincy tough last week, and Buffalo isn't exactly a juggernaut. Cleveland at Buffalo: CLE Dallas at Kansas City: DAL Minnesota at St. Louis: MIN Oakland at NY Giants: NYG Tampa Bay at Philadelphia: PHI Pittsburgh at Detroit: PIT Washington at Carolina: WAS Cincinnati at Baltimore: BAL Atlanta at SF 49ers: SF Jacksonville at Seattle: SEA Houston at Arizona: ARI New England at Denver: NE Indianapolis at Tennessee: IND NY Jets at Miami: NYJ

Nearly finished a Civ4 One-City Challenge. In OCC mode, you cannot build or conquer any cities beyond your capital, but the thresholds for certain improvements, like the "must build X Universities before building Oxford U," are removed and the limit on 'national wonders' in said city is increased from 2 to 5. It's a great way to train yourself to be better at certain aspects of the game, like micro-managing individual cities and (especially) keeping the AIs happy with you. I think I'm going to lose this one. I've borked up the diplomatic situation enough that I won't be elected the winner, and my rivals are too close in technology (this is Monarch level) for me to pull off a space race win. The moral victory I'm taking home is that I did successfully manage the diplomacy well enough to survive to the endgame, despite twice being invaded by Augustus' Praetorans.

I was just eating lunch in my office, and I managed to bite off one of the tines of the plastic fork I was using. I have never done this before, and it quite surprised me. I guess I was hungrier than I thought I was. On related note, with the new fiscal year (federal FY runs Oct1-Sep30), our building got a new contractor running the cafeteria. It looks promising so far. The offerings on the salad bar are nice-- decent grilled chicken, sauteed mushrooms, nice fresh peppers and cucumbers, kalamata olives, dried cranberries available as a topping, all for only $.02/ounce more than the price under the old vendor. There's a bit less variety than before (and the brocolli, which I love on salads, was there on Wed, but not on Thu or Fri), but the quality seems to be better.

does not compute. It's wholly off-topic, but so is nearly everything else on this thread, so I'll just say: Troika's attempt at designing their own RPG ruleset makes even Bethesda look like geniuses. (The characters/story/writing were passable, but not nearly interesting enough for me to keep going in spite of an RPG ruleset that colossally stupid.)

If it's a way for developers to wheedle their way around the marketing norm that all major-release games sell at the same price point, I'm all for it. I don't mind paying more for quality, and if the higher combined price of "game + DLC" leads to a higher-quality gaming experience, that's fine with me. Of course, most DLCs I've seen focus on adding quantity rather than quality. But the prospect of future DLC income can (presumably) justify designers spending more on making the initial product better, so it might still work out well.

I wouldn't go so far as to say "legal conflict." It is certainly clear that their contract with Sega bars them from making the kind of public statements we want to hear, but I don't know if there's enough evidence for us to conclude that they're actively fighting with their publisher over something.