Enoch

Why does everyone keep saying that Oblivion was Morrowind "dumbed down for consoles"? Does nobody else remember that Morrowind was released on the original XBox as well as on PC? Shockingly, every change in game development that you don't personally like can't always be blamed on console gaming.

This reflects my feelings about the game perfectly. Interesting world on paper, which had me enthusiastic going into the experience. Getting into it, the writing turned out to be mediocre, which was a disappointment, but not a killer. Later, once I figured out that the game had the most horrendously and obviously broken character system I'd yet seen, it quickly went on the shelf.

What logic misses is that financial motivations are generally not the primary motivation for people to do things to improve their health. People don't say "I'm going to go jogging today so that I won't need a $40,000 coronary bypass operation in 20 years." They say "I'm going jogging so that I won't be such a lardass" or "I'm going jogging because I don't want to die of a heart attack." Financial concerns can, however, be a barrier to getting things like regular checkups and assorted minor treatments. The thinking is that if more people would do stuff like this, illnesses could be caught earlier when they are far cheaper to treat.

There's no real trick to dressing game. The fundamental point is to remove the digestive tract, which you anyone with a basic knowledge of vertibrate anatomy can find. Ideally, you want to do so without allowing its contents to spill onto the stuff you're going to be eating. You want to be eating primarily muscle tissue (perhaps with some fat for flavor), which is easy enough to identify. Other internal organs should be eaten only if you know what you're doing. Once you've got the parts you want, cook it, make sure it doesn't smell like it's spoiled, and eat up.

Most such ideas involve the consumers forming their own pools of coverage, and allowing the providers to bid on coverage for the entire pool. This is essentially just like the current employer-provided model, but without the involvement of employers. (The tradition of employment-based health coverage in the U.S. is a significant inefficiency in the labor market, as it is a major disincentive for people to change jobs or start their own business.) Taks' "gold rush" analogy doesn't work for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the main upward pressure on prices in gold rush towns wasn't rich buyers, it was monopolistic or oligopolistic/collusive sellers. With multiple suppliers competing on price (as you have in the US health insurance market), the price increase corresponding to an outward shift in demand would be limited to the degree to which the supply curve is upward-sloping. (Which would be driven indirectly by the increase in the cost of medical services as more people use them. Long-term, the hope is that universal coverage would increase the use of preventatitve care and decrease aggregate per-person costs.)

Yeah, I've got to agree with CG. Rather unimaginative stuff. And if they had any balls they'd take one or two of the overpowered existing perks (Grim Reaper's Sprint?) away from us and put it back in at level 28 or so. Edit: The point to the higher levels is so that you continue to hear the "cha-ching" sound when XP is earned above the game's original cap.

Nice to hear that there will be a pause option in dialogue. Keeping things tense is all well and good, but the outside world does sometimes interfere with our gaming time. ("No, honey, of course you don't look fat in that...")

Agreed. I'm in favor of all credible, talented developers eschewing D&D releases. The underlying rule system is not very good, and it comes with the additional drawbacks that the existing fanboys and rules lawyers bring. I.e., when you're dealing with D&D, you spend way too much time on silly fan-service like getting everyone's favorite race/subrace/class/kit/monster/god/feat/ability/spell/item/famous NPC/whatever integrated into the game, and far too little time on making it an actually good game. Games like BG2, PS:T, IWD, and MotB were enjoyable games in spite of their D&D content, not because of it.

Do we really know that yet? Maybe 'none of the above' isn't a choice. "You must pick one of these dangerously sexy ladies to bed, or the plot will not continue! Choose!" It has been confirmed that a life of celibacy for MT is a supported player choice. (In fact, I recall someone saying that the 'achievements' include one for bagging all the chicks and one for keeping it in your pants.)

After much delay, frustration, additional tool acquisition, swearing (an underrated lubricant for corroded nuts), and soreness, I have replaced the kitchen faucet.

Well, we've already got some government accountants working over there.

Johnny Cash -- Ghost Riders in the Sky

They'd be voting against their self-interest unless every other state does the same. Legislative term limits are a good idea for the same reason presidential term limits are. It doesn't matter how talented one is if he's corrupt. Well, sure. But where's the evidence for the connection that you're assuming exists between time spent in office and corruption? Despite what Frank Capra would have you believe, I suspect that first-term legislators are just as likely to be corrupt as 20-year veterans (but somewhat less likely to be competent).

I didn't mean to imply support for term limits, which I think is an unnecessarily broad restriction. (While I have no problem in churning hacks with hacks, they would also exclude some talented, dedicated individuals in favor of second-tier talent, which is seldom a good idea.) If the people want a term to end, they can vote for the opposition. I was simply postulating how odd it seems that a 79-year-old is so strongly motivated by concerns about his career in the future.

Here's the other angle on the Specter thing: The man is nearly 80 years old, has a fairly impressive run of legislative accomplishments, and has had some serious health issues in recent years. Why is he so worried about re-election? Why can't he just call it a career and walk away? Politicians are strange beasts in how so many of them cling to their positions well into their autumn years.

Wals' advice a few pages back is really all anyone can say at this point. This flu seems to have a higher transmission rate than most influenza strains, but it also seems to be less deadly. Now, further mutations can always change that 'deadliness' factor, but for the moment, everyone should be going about their normal life, perhaps with a little more attention to hygiene concerns. (Note: I spend about an hour every day on a crowded subway, so if this does get bad, I'm screwed.) (Note2: The fact that all the news about this has happened to correspond with a dramatic uptick in tree pollen levels in my area has not been good for the general level of alarmism.)

I'm guessing that this has to do with previous videos being made from the Xbox version, while this video was made from either the PS3 or PC version.

That particular anecdote probably says more about how crazy the human mind is.

Focus, people. Moderator-Emeritus Walsingham has given us an important task here. Question for discussion: Where should we be targeting on the "honest-manipulative" scale? It's probably not hard to catch a girl's ear if you're talking about how much you love committed relationships, scrapbooking, and being kind to small animals. But it probably isn't going to take her long before she figures out that you're full of ****. On the other hand, too much honesty risks shutting off interest in our humdrum nerdy lives.

Then again, the counterpoint to what Pop and I are saying is what happened to the Democrats in 2000-- focus on winning the middle, and watch as a minor candidate emerges on the Left (arguing that the Ds and Rs are all the same) to take just enough votes to swing the election to the other side.

The GOP's current weakness is good for the GOP. As Pop implies, the party leadership has screwed up royally over the past couple decades. The whole idea of the 2-party system is that the parties are "big tent" organizations, trying to draw support from as many areas as possible without having too much internal ideological strife. As the party rose by emphasizing social issues to defeat the holdover (mostly moderate) Democrats in the South (one of the better ways to analyze national politics over much of the post-WW2 period is to look at it as a 3-party structure-- Republicans, Democrats, and Southern Democrats), the socially conservative activists who consequently rose to power within the party became less interested in keeping the "big tent" open and more interested in policing the party's ideological purity. If the party takes this lesson seriously and works on broadening rather than narrowing its appeal (RNC Chair Steele has made some noises in this direction, but they were either laughably awkward or shouted down by the far right), becoming more pragmatic and less ideological, they'll be back in short order.

Hey, if you're going to make an accusation like that, at least show where I did that. My point was actually quite similar to yours, any solution proposed seems to introduce as many problems as it solves. I was referring to the whole "America subsidizing pharmaceutical research" argument. It's weaksauce. Yes, the U.S. is the only major country where individuals make the purchases and usually pay retail prices, while the rest of the world buys in bulk at a heavy discount. The argument implies that, were the U.S. to switch to the bulk-buying model, the pharma companies would cease or reduce their research, which is ludicrous-- research is their core moneymaking function. Their whole business model is to keep coming up with new treatments and make money on them before the patents expire and they have to compete with generics. What would really happen is that the bulk buying discount would decline for everyone around the world to make up for the loss of all the retail-price sales in America.

Well, this has gone predictably. Doctrinaire Euros belittling the U.S. Some accurate facts thrown about, as well as some less so. Taks pretending that an unregulated free market for healthcare wouldn't be plagued by market failures and negative externalities, and sticking to the dubious ideology that every dime collected in taxes by a representative government is somehow an affront to basic human rights. WoD picking a talking point and driving it into the ground. As I see it, the basic problem is that healthcare in the U.S. is expensive, and is getting more expensive every day. (Quality increases, too, but not nearly at the rate that costs have.) So long as costs are high, the people paying those costs-- be they insurers, governments, charities, wealthy relatives, or whoever-- are going to have a strong incentive to deny services to people from time to time. Most people don't like this outcome, and in a democratic (notice the small "d") government, that matters. But, as shifting the payer from private insurers over to the government would only change the identity of the person denying service, IMO, any feasible plan to solve this should have as its first goal the reduction of costs. There are a lot of theories on how these costs could be controlled. Some would argue that market discipline is the best way, but there are reasons to believe that this may not be as effective (huge informational inefficiencies, moral hazards and adverse selection in insurance markets, the 'immediate need' nature of many decisions that consumers of medical services make, etc.). Others argue that more governmental involvement can help, using governmental 'bulk buying' power, cutting out the insurers' cost of capital (shareholders' ROI), putting high-paid providers (i.e., surgeons) on salary instead of doing piecemeal work, etc. There are other reasons to believe that these efforts may do more harm than good, too. I'm willing to admit that I'm not nearly expert enough in the field to really have a handle on what a good solution might look like, though. And it's bedtime, so I'll leave this post at that.

Hint to Krezzy: A link to Urbandictionary usually means that somebody is trying to make a joke (usually one in poor taste). Admittedly, my poor choice in emoticons probably doesn't help to elucidate the undeniable hilarity of my post, so we'll call it even. Anyhow, I don't know about anybody else, but my desire to muck about in caves has been pretty well satisfied by just about every other CRPG ever written.

Siren Blood Curse