Enoch

Dumb poll question. They didn't ask people what their favorite team was-- they asked what "America's favorite team" was. Of course Dallas is going to win that one-- most people who don't follow the sport closely probably still remember the whole "America's team" marketing nonsense. In other news, it has bee 4,667 days since the last time the Cowboys won a playoff game.

This. (As well as how crappy Arcanum was.) As an addendum, my only real concern with the delay is that there is a possibility that this could be a Very Bad Thing for Obsidz. Depending on the reason for the delay and the provisions in their contract with Sega, they could be on the hook for the additional production costs, failure to meet development milestones, etc. Studios can only go for so long between releases, especially in the current tight market for business credit. The other risk is that the release of the game (and Obsidz' profit therefrom) is now dependent on Sega keeping the doors open for another 3 quarters (and doing so without the revenue that holiday sales of this title would bring). Now, it might be that all is hunky-dory in both companies' financial positions and that the game is just getting a few additions, tweaks, and lots of polish over the next few months. But the secrecy from Sega (Obsidz is almost certainly contractually bound to say nothing publicly about all this, so we can't really blame them) isn't a good sign.

Ask again in late December. That's when durability matters (and when Favre flamed out last year).

The historical analogies are pretty weak. Prior to the 1920s, there was no such thing as illegal immigration in America (with the exception of some public health statutes and exclusion treaties with Japan and China). If you could afford and survive the trip, you were welcome to stay. Although there were political movements against immigrants from time to time (the focus of much of them was anti-Catholic, based on a belief that a citizenry following the dictates of a supposedly infallible Pope would destroy American democracy), the stated policy was that America had plenty of land that needed developing and industry that needed cheap labor, and that the enormous cost and risk involved in crossing an ocean to just get a chance at American economic opportunities ensured that we'd be getting 'the cream of the crop' of the huddled masses. The economic argument nowadays is far less clear, of course. There are pros and cons, and 98% of the studies, surveys, and projections out there were constructed with the point they wanted to prove already in mind, and thus are pretty much worthless. Also, @Greasy: unsubstantiated "I've read that" and "I've heard that" anecdotes might work for talk radio hosts, but on teh inertnets, your readers are going demand a link to a reputable source before they put any faith in lines like that.

Costs required to effectively "close the border" > benefits of said closure.

Yeah, the state government is almost bankrupt because taxes are too low! Seriously, though, the reason the state has larger than average unemployment issues is because it was one of the regions where the housing bust had its most pronounced effects. Areas like Las Vegas, parts of Florida, and parts of Arizona were similarly hard hit. (Fun fact: Texas, which you'd normally think of as one of the more free-market-minded states, has been largely spared from the housing bust because the state had some of the most stringent regulations on the mortgage market during the boom years, capping all lending on real estate at an 80% loan-to-value ratio.) The state's budgetary issues are mostly a result of problems with the structure of the state's revenue sources (due to propositions that have limited property taxes, it is very dependent on income taxes) and constitution (lots of options are either off the table, decided by plebiscite, or subject to gridlock-inducing super-majority requirements).

You know, there are characters other than Thorton in the game. Maybe the cover doesn't look like Thorton because it isn't supposed to be Thorton. Honestly, I can recall more games that had their antagonists on the cover than I do games whose covers featured their protagonists. This is especially the case with RPGs...

Detroit at Chicago - CHI Cincinnati at Cleveland - CIN (The Browns are a complete freakin mess.) Seattle at Indianapolis - IND NY Giants at Kansas City - NYG Baltimore at New England - BAL (I think Baltimore's D can slow the Pats. I'm not sure if the converse is true of NE's D.) Tampa Bay at Washington - WAS Tennessee at Jacksonville - TEN Oakland at Houston - HOU (But it'll be closer than most think.) NY Jets at New Orleans - NO Buffalo at Miami - MIA (I've got a hunch that Ronnie Brown takes this one over.) St. Louis at San Francisco - SF Dallas at Denver - DAL (The JV portion of the Broncos schedule is over.) San Diego at Pittsburgh - PIT Green Bay at Minnesota - MIN (Rodgers out-performs Favre, but Peterson out-performs all.)

Hehe. I watched the early games this past Sunday at a sports bar here in the DC 'burbs. There was one brave Lions fan there. He had a fun day taunting the locals. I was off in the corner by the TV showing NYG-TB, laughing my ass off. @GD, I wouldn't blame the coach too much. Tampa's problems right now are primarily personnel-based. The good players on their defense got old and left/retired. They decided to go with a stable of young developmental QBs (Johnson and Freeman) and one veteran re-tread (Leftwich) instead of the proven (but ancient) starter they had last year. (Despite Volo's certain protestations, this is a completely valid strategy. You'll take a hit in year one, but the experience the young guys get helps them be better in years 2+ than they would if they were just riding the pine behind an entrenched "old ass" starter. Also, the count of teams who have cut Garcia since he left Tampa is now at 2-- maybe he's just not that good anymore.) Plus, their best OL and WR are hurt. Without Jeff Faine in there, Fred Robbins was eating the Bucs interior linemen for lunch. If you're going to blame someone, blame the GM for not having competent replacements in line to replace the defensive vets, for not having quality depth at OL and WR, and for not finding a better short-term fill-in at QB than Leftwich.

Preview gets +1 for the Our Man Flint reference.

CLE @ BAL - BAL ATL @ NE - NE SF @ MIN - MIN JAC @ HOU - HOU TEN @ NYJ - TEN KC @ PHI - PHI GB @ STL - GB NYG @ TB - NYG WAS @ DET - WAS (although an upset wouldn't shock me) NO @ BUF - NO CHI @ SEA - CHI PIT @ CIN - PIT MIA @ SD - SD DEN @ OAK - OAK IND @ ARI - IND CAR @ DAL - DAL

The fact that they've been demonstrating up-to-2-hour segments of the game at shows and media events is a pretty good sign that it is close to finished.

No need for a gambling skill, particularly in a game where Luck is a quantifiable character attribute. If you want to include some gambling interactions (which would be cool), just use plain ability checks. PE to detect a cheat, IN to count cards, AG to slip an ace out of your sleeve, EN to out-drink your opponents, CH to bluff, and, of course, LU for all other purposes.

No it's real. The chemical symbol is H3. It's been a long time since my last chemistry class but I think it can only exist as a solid at extreme low temps and it is very unstable in any other form. Would't H3 refer to a molecule with 3 H atoms in it, instead of an isotope with a couple extra neutrons in it (which is what tritium is)? I thought 3H was the normal notation (with the 3 superscripted).

Space exploration is a lovely metaphor and all, and it's great in that it helps us to increase our understanding of the physical laws of the universe, the history of the solar system, etc. But the one thing we haven't found up there is anything that makes it remotely worthwhile to go through the cost and risk of sending people.

I had forgotten that. Or maybe I never knew it in the first place, and it's one of the reasons that I only managed a B+ in that class... My point about Miller wasn't that it made the litigation easier, but that (as I recall) it was intended, at least in part, to reduce the flow of obscenity-based appeals that the SCOTUS was seeing every year. Speaking of obscenity... Prurient, indeed...

I'll be playing basketball for an hour and a half this evening, so it's probably not a good day to be timing myself doing other exercises. But I'll post some numbers in a day or two. Although I can't remember the last time I ran more than half a block without being involved in some game or another. I was doing pushups/situps with some regularity for a while a few months ago, but a bout of nasty heartburn/reflux put an end to that.

Beatles Rock Band & Guitar Hero 5

I look away from this thread for a few days, and it goes all Miller v. California? The internet is weird. Anyhow, I thought the whole point of the Miller test (including the SLAPS element) was that the Court wouldn't be asked to determine stuff like that anymore-- render it down to questions of fact to be presented to the juries at the trial level. Special on-topic addendum: I liked Torment. Replayed it a few months ago (hi-res mods are cool). I still like it.

Nothing to see here. One Sega product evaluator had some notes on the game 6 weeks ago, summarized in a statement that could mean any number of things. The "initial level is too hard" bit is more specific and substantive, but difficulty balancing is one of the last (and hardest) things to finalize in a game. Comments on that (one way or the other) are to be expected.

The cage dancers were a nice touch, too. Classy!

Restated in musical form:

I'm right there with you. There's a reason I don't gamble on this stuff...

No, they didn't. Anyhow, if DX is the barometer by which PC gamers are measured, how many points do I lose for getting bored early on in the Paris hub and quitting? Playing stealthily at that point basically devolved into a game of resource management w/r/t your charge and augmentations, which I didn't find to be much fun. I've played out my Civ IV game to the point where I generally start losing interest. I started over on Monarch difficulty (even rusty as I was, I was leaping to large leads in Prince games), and played a game as Hannibal into the Renaissance period. Conquered Persia in the Medieval period, won the Liberalism race, and am currently second in score to Charlemagne, who is immediately to my north and busy pounding his other neighbors (Babylon and the Netherlands) into becoming vassals. I'll have to take him on if I'm to win, and I don't really have the patience to manage an industrial-period war. Not sure what I'll be playing next. Maybe I'll hop back into Bloodlines again-- I haven't made any progress there since the last time I posted on it in this thread. As I recall, I was just about to go meet "Mandarin" to rescue the missing nosferatu. In case you weren't paying attention, the core message of this post is that I generally feel no motivation to finish games, and tend to quit when the gameplay gets tedious, unless there are character/plot/story mysteries of sufficient interest to keep me going.

Absolutely: Really, any football fan who doesn't hate Jerry Jones just hasn't been paying attention.