Enoch

Good question. How about... When I'm Sixty Four by The Beatles. If you're talking Beatles tunes, the wedding staples are "Oh Darling" and their cover of "Twist and Shout." And you can't go wrong with Cole Porter in this situation. They've all been recorded dozens of times-- just pick you favorite crooner or jazz singer, and you'll probably find recordings of them doing most of the major tunes in the Porter songbook.

I can agree with that. I also miss buying a CD and listening to it from start to finish. With MP3's, even if I get the whole album, I rarely listen to all the songs in order, and some musicians create their CD's with almost a story from one track to the next. That's really a matter of your practices rather than anything inherent in the format. My mp3 listening is predominantly of the whole-album variety. My commute is roughly 45 minutes of walking and subway riding each way, so I usually queue up an album and listen to the most/all of it. Full-random is too disjointed (not to mention the jarring lack of volume normalization when jumping from album to album), and I'm not particularly motivated to create custom playlists when I've already got the artist-endorsed playlists of the original album track listing. The big thing I miss about CDs when getting music via PC/MP3 player is the personnel listing on jazz albums. Album/CD covers almost always list all the personnel right up front. That way, if you're listening to a recording headlined by a saxophonist, but are more impressed with the work of the piano player, you can see who that piano player is at a quick glance. MP3 players and PC programs just sort everything by the headline name; you usually have to jump to the internet to look up all the supporting personnel.

Ugh. I cut the grass today, and disturbed a nest of some kind of ground wasps. 3 rather painful stings (one on each ankle, and one just above my left knee) resulted. I didn't recognize the species-- they seemed smaller, more agile, and less brightly colored than other stinging wasps/hornets/whatever I've seen. And the stings hurt more.

Well, it's probably unavoidable that there be some synergies between playstyles and faction alliances. But, if Avellone's Framework keynote is to be believed (the AP stuff is towards the end), there are benefits to getting negative influence as well as positive influence with the NPCs & factions. As I understand it, while choosing a particular handler has influence on the hows of the mission (access, information, which characters are hostile and which aren't), the player is still going to have the control over the whys (what the objective is, what the player does with it, and whether their handler is happy or unhappy with the results). I could easily see a scenario where the player chooses a stealth-leaning handler, takes advantage of his support and information, and then wholly disregards the handler's wishes with regard to the objective (e.g., executing the target instead of just hacking his PC and downloading his files). End result: you've taken the stealthy approach and used the stealthy handler, but you have further moral/ideological/story-based goal antithetical to said handler, probably earning massive negative influence with him (and most likely earning some positive influence with a rival faction). Of course, this kind of behavior might make it tougher to use that stealthy handler on future missions, but to a certain degree, we're going to have to trust Obsidz to make the benefits of high/low influence with particular factions reasonably balanced across different playstyles.

Apologies. I was fishing for a metaphor, and came up with one that was a bit too strong.

I don't see why we can't keep it in this thread for the time being. We can just keep a general tally of how many interested bodies we've got to see if it would be worth our time. I'm not a fan of IDP leagues because tackle stats are among the least informative stats in football. Plus, they can be intimidating to less-experienced players because it dramatically expands the scope of players they would have to research. I was talking about core offensive player positions. E.g., with a 8-team league, I'd do something like have us start 2 QBs, 3 RBs, and 4WRs, while a 10-team would be 2-2-3, respectively, and a 12-team would be 1-2-3.

Yeah, somebody mentioned a few pages back that they'd be interested in participating in a board-denizen fantasy league. If we have enough interest, I'd be happy to get it organized. I suppose fairly standard rules would be a good idea to encourage participation by more the casual fans (in an ideal world, I like to add lots of unusual custom rules that bring fantasy performance more in-line with what determines real-football success, like negative points-per-carry for RBs and negative points-per-attempt for QBs), but I like to base the roster size & number of starting spots by the size of the league. In my view, the smaller the league, the more starting spots you should have to fill. The art in setting up fantasy rules is getting the right balance between random chance and rewarding intelligent choices. When small (8- or even 10-team) leagues have small starting rosters, you end up with the scenario where everybody is starting all-pros and the randomness of matchups and start-sit guesses ends up washing out whatever expertise each player has.

He must be the start of the next arbitrary grouping of three.

SPECIAL is a skill/attribute system. I'm no programmer, but as I understand it, unless the engine designers are incredibly dumb, no engine is locked into a particular system for how character choices in attributes and skills translate to gameplay. The question is somewhat akin to taking a blank notebook and functioning pen and asking if it's set up to use French or Swedish writing.

I think you might have missed where Matt Birk signed with the Ravens. Edit: And where Darren Sharper is now a Saint. Edit2: I'm also a little puzzled why you didn't mention Jared Allen, who is easily one of the defense's best players.

The Vikes may be a QB away, but they might already have that QB on the roster in Sage Rosenfels. He's an accurate QB who has the drawback of committing too many turnovers. Favre (who can be described in exactly the same manner) is probably a step up from Rosenfels, but at this stage of his career, it isn't a big one. Although I think whoever comes out ahead between the Eagles and Giants is the clear favorite in the NFC.

Dear Obsidian, PC owners like the left mouse button for primary fire. Please use this in Alpha Protocol, but also give us the opportunity to change and control input key we want to. Thanks! Luv teh Cratez!

So, you're saying... Switch to briefs?? I went to a CLE class (Continuing Legal Education-- a set number of credits are required annually to maintain my license) after work today. It was held from 5:30-8:45 in the evening so that the attendees wouldn't have to skip work. I walked out to find several voicemails on my mobile phone from relatives, inquiring as to whether I had been hurt or killed in this evening's Metro collision. (I was not, as I was late and my commute doesn't even take me along that track.)

For the purpose of the Due Process clause, methinks that courts would see a demonstrable difference between punitive damages that were awarded on top of compensatory damages simply because a judge and jury think it's appropriate, and damages that are awarded within the range stipulated by the Copyright Act. Excessive punitive damages sometimes are held to violate Due Process because, when judges and juries grant damages so far in excess of the matter involved in the case, it is akin to a court-ordered transfer of wealth without legal authorization. In such cases, the court essentially takes the defendant's property without providing the process that was due to him/her/it, because that excess damage amount cannot conceivably be considered to be within the scope of the trial they just held. Here, however, everyone coming into the trial has the opportunity to open up their copy of the U.S. Code and read all about the amount of damages that are authorized under the Copyright Act. Thus, everyone is on notice that the trial they are holding involves potential illegal activity that can be the basis for damages in the amounts laid out in the statute. To overturn this case based only on the level of compensation, an appeals court would have to declare portions of the Copyright Act itself unconstitutional. That ain't going to happen, particularly given that the Constitution specifically grants Congress the power to regulate copyrights: It would take a mighty powerful feat of "judicial activism" for the Supreme Court to rule that the comparatively loosey-goosey language about due process outweighs Congress' explicit authority to set whatever rules it wants in the copyright area.

I think that you use the rubber ducky and the clamp you get from the pump machine. You have to inflate the ducky and deflate it and mess with the band-aid on it and all kinds of crazy stuff. Those two are the most annoying puzzles for a long while, though. As I said, I figured that part out pretty quickly once I got my hands on the clamp. (For the record, it was ) The hardest parts of the pump machine puzzle were trying to pick up every piece of wire or metal I saw before I figured out that . That last bit got a little too pixel-hunt-ish.

The Longest Journey. Never played it before, so don't spoil me. I'm currently in Chapter 2, having just finally figured out how to work that damn pump machine outside the Border House. From there, I quickly tinkered around a bit and figured out .

Somehow, in the haze of Monday morning, I managed to put my boxer shorts on backwards today. I discovered this standing in front of the urinal in the restroom at work.

It's not so much the cliche as it is the embarrassingly predictable toadying and sexism that bothers me.

Generalized reaction to this thread: Crate jokes are all well and good, but can we turn the "embarrassingly cliched horny nerdboy" factor down just a little bit??

"Rhetorically," as I used it was intended to mean as part of an attempt to convince via verbal/written communication. As such, it's a perfectly normal practice to try to get the audience to associate one concept the audience may not know well or have ambivalent feelings towards (copyright infringement) with a directly analogous (but admittedly not identical) concept that they have deep-seated feelings about (theft). It's only disingenuous when the analogy between the two concepts is less than what the author implies. Here, the analogy between the two is near-perfect-- the only difference between copyright infringement and theft from a logical and moral point of view is that the former involves a more indirect, but no less real, harm to the victim of the illegal act. (i.e., instead of being deprived of direct possession, they are deprived of their legal right to control as they see fit the dissemination and distribution of their creation and to extract what payment the market will bear for it.)

Julian "Cannonball" Adderly -- One for Daddy-O

While it certainly is true that statutory Copyright Infringement and common-law theft are not the same thing, the two are equally illegal, and illegal for very similar moral/logical reasons. I don't see how rhetorically conflating the two is particularly objectionable.

Those fines are unconstitutional in America. I won't get into the legalities of it, but they're unlikely to be upheld when she appeals. We're talking fines larger than the combined sales of the album she shared, even though probably only a handful of people downloaded it off her - clearly that's not valid 'compensation'. And it assumes she intended to share, which is unknown. Many people don't realise they're sharing when they use torrents and other p2p technology. They're not fines. This was a private suit for damages, not a prosecution. The range of permissible damages is defined in the Copyright Act, and the determination within that range is left to the jury. They are deliberately set higher than their likely cost to the plaintiff, to provide extra discouragement and make sure that nobody ever can profit by violating the Act while counting the consequent suit as a cost of doing business. (This is much the same way that Antitrust awards are always tripled.) Edit: She already appealed once, and won. The appeals court found that the instructions given to the jury were faulty. Then, on the new trial with the correct jury instructions, the new jury found higher liability than the first.

The RIAA lawsuits were all about PR from the beginning. They know there is a hard-core of pirates out there who aren't going to be effectively intimidated. But there are also lots of marginal pirates like the defendant in this case-- just a middle-aged woman with a computer who wants to listen to Journey's greatest hits. The news coverage of verdicts like this gets the message out to these users that there are consequences. It also helps to quash the silly belief that people have about juries always having sympathy for 'the little guy' and being willing to ignore clear violations of the law if the common perception of the law is that it need not be taken seriously. (This same belief is why some people occasionally take speeding tickets to trial. They usually lose, too.) @ Hiro-- True, most people don't have anywhere near the cash necessary to pay this kind of verdict. But they usually can scrape together the couple grand that the RIAA asks for in settlement of the suit. For most people, that's a far smarter move than going to trial and then going through a bankruptcy to wipe out the judgment debt when they lose.

I would hope that unconscious guards trigger alarms when discovered, too! "Oh look, Charlie took a nap in the middle of his patrol route. And his neck is all purple. Let's just let him sleep." At the very least, I believe it is tracked for the purposes of certain perks (e.g., you can gain certain benefits for being a cold-blooded killer and different benefits for master of the sleeper hold) and for NPC/faction influence for how some missions are completed. I don't know whether there are in-game differences between corpses and the merely unconscious.