Enoch

I'm reminded of this. And I'm reminded of Joseph Heller's Something Happened.

Mostly, I'm interested in Storm of Zehir and Fallout 3 right now. (I actually didn't start to get excited about FO3 until I saw the ad campaign they started in the DC Metro this week. The 'local' aspect of the game to me is a fun selling point-- I'm a sucker for unexpected intersections between my "real" life and my nerd life.) Unfortunately, both come out in late Oct.-early Nov., and we're going to be moving to our new house on November 8. (Translation: all my free time will be spent packing, unpacking, shopping for furnishings, and playing handyman.) Looking further ahead, Dragon Age and Alpha Protocol are the big attractions once the calendar flips over to '09. Now that I think about it, I don't know where I'm going to get the time to play all that stuff. A 30-hour game usually takes me a month or so, and I imagine that will go up with the new house and the holidays coming up.

US Fed & Euro banks order emergency rate cut.

Criminal negligence statutes differ a lot by jurisdiction, but the general principle is that acts committed with a "negligent" state of mind are punished with far less severity than crimes committed "purposefully" or even "recklessly" (if at all-- usually, if it falls short of homicide, negligent acts are grounds for civil suits, but are not crimes). IMO, this looks like a pretty clear case of criminally negligent, and perhaps even reckless homicide. When an adult who is entrusted the care of a baby allows it to be unattended near a large open fire, there ought to be grounds for criminal action. In this type of situation, it is within the discretion of the prosecutor and jury to withhold or minimize criminal punishment if they think that a guilty conscience is punishment enough, but clearly those individuals (who know the situation and the suspect far better than anybody here) decided that jail time was appropriate. I'm not going to second-guess that.

To perform a semi-resurrection on this thread, developments so far this week have not been kind to global capital markets. It seems that, over the weekend, investors around the world began to price the strong likelihood of a potentially nasty global recession into their models. When markets opened on Monday, everything started sliding downwards, and hasn't stopped since. While earlier hits were concentrated in financial sectors and related industries that depend on cheap borrowing, the scope of this downturn in equities is far broader. So... Buying opportunity for stocks, or buying opportunity for canned goods and ammunition??

"meant to"? What the heck does that mean? Are you saying that good hygiene, nutrition, modern medical care, etc.-- all products of mankind's innate intellectual prowess-- are somehow not "natural"?

In other Fallout news, I encountered a surprise on my commute home today-- about half of the ads in the Metro Center subway station (the largest transfer station in downtown DC) are now devoted to the game. If I can get my camera to function properly, I'll take some snapshots tomorrow.

Oh, and let me add: 7) Be aware of the tax consequences. IRAs, 529 Accounts, and other devices that let you avoid or defer taxation are can make a huge difference on your eventual return on investment.

My advice would be: 1) Hooray for diversification! 2) Don't pick individual stocks unless you're willing to put a lot of research time in. 3) Don't try to time the market unless you're willing to put a lot of research time in. 4) The one thing you can control in the market is the amount of fees you're paying; keep them as low as possible. 5) Fund managers rarely produce consistent returns that justify their fees. 6) Given present market conditions, don't invest any money in equities that you think you're going to need anytime in the next 5 years. So where does that leave us? Research low-cost non-managed index funds, buy a little bit at first, and keep adding to your investment on a regular basis (e.g., $100 out of each paycheck or something). This will insulate you a bit from the swings of the market-- if things go down, your previous investments will lose value, but you'll also be getting a bargain on the stuff you're buying at the lower price.

"Well enough for an A at least"? OK, grade inflation is getting out of hand. What did top scorer get-- an A+++ with 3 stars and a ?

No, they decided to implement Lute Hero instead. Didn't they already have that in NWN2 with that guy at the Blacklake District? I always ended up cheating and make his life very miserable I think he's talking about .

It's a Vista issue. Vista changed the way that programs interface with soundcards/audio drivers, and this borks some pre-Vista games, like KOTOR 2 (but, oddly enough, not KOTOR 1). Some audio drivers still work with the game, but others give you no sound at all. I also have Realtek audio drivers with Vista, and I also get no sound when I try to run the game on my desktop. (Fortunately, I also have an older XP laptop that can run it on minimum settings.)

Fallout 3 on PC requires a system cooled by the tears of RPG Codex posters.

So, after having hear the repeated effusive praise about it for the past several years, I finally decided to play Deus Ex. (Back when it was all the rage, my response was simply "shooter = not interested.") I am alarmed to report that it is giving me motion sickness in much the way that Portal did. I had attributed my gut-based aversion to Portal to the fact that it often puts the player in situations where (s)he does not know which way is up, but that element isn't present in Deus Ex (so far). I have played other 1st-person games before without problem (e.g., Oblivion), so I'm not sure what's causing this. Next time I boot it up, I'll try turning off the option that makes the camera bounce up and down as the player moves.

Mingus -- Oh Lord Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb on Me

If you think that's bad, this year in the States, Congress moved the start/end dates, so lots of printed calendars have the wrong ones on them and nobody is quite sure when to expect the change.

You know, if I keep hearing all youse people talk about how great Deus Ex was, I might have to go try it one of these days. And it's now $9.99 on Steam... And I do happen to have a mostly-free weekend...

I think it's because we hate sand. It's coarse and rough and gets into everything. Also, I can never remember how to spell Visceris.

Temptations -- Papa Was a Rolling Stone

Pink Martini -- No Hay Problema

Wow. The then-fiancee and I took a break from the house hunting a couple months before the wedding to avoid exactly that perfect storm of planning and stress. Good luck. And congratulations. @theslug: The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.

OK, you're not wrong. You're just advocating that a completely untested theoretical system of currency control is better that the system that has been used for the past half-century or more by all the most successful economies on the planet. which is, IMO, also unconstitutional in spite of the failed attempts to argue that in front of SCOTUS. no way to go back on that, either way. um, their independence, IMO, is an illusion, and their competence... well, we've all seen how that went. well, no, but there is no way for either of us to prove his position that the free market would solve this problem. arguing back and forth is nothing more than opinion. however, it is pretty easy to go back and see how this system does not work. adding more regulation is nothing more than the standard socialist tactic. throw money at a problem, and it gets worse, advocate more money. throw regulation on top of a problem, and it gets worse, advocate more regulation. maybe only incremental, but never ending. The mix of free markets and democratic government regulation that has evolved in the U.S. over the course of the last few centuries has proven to be perhaps the most effective societal environment for economic growth and stability in a very large country that the world has ever seen. Yes, it has problems, flaws, and mistakes, but given the baseline that history has shown us, it is absurd to suggest that "this system does not work." So long as it's being run by human beings, economic and political systems are going to have flaws-- you're pointing out a few of them as evidence dismantle a system that has been a success of monumental proportions. Also, you're talking about "regulation" as if it is a quantifiable, fungible product. It is nothing of the sort. There are good regulations and there are bad regulations (a point that you emphasized earlier when talking about transparency-enabling regulations). Good regulations can help to enhance efficiency (e.g., by reducing transaction costs or forcing firms to internalize their external costs), or sacrafice some economic benefits in favor of other goals important to the society. Sometimes the solution for bad regulations is to remove them entirely and let the market govern itself, and sometimes the solution for bad regulations is to replace or supplement them with different regulations that smart people think will be better.

it is, IMO, unconstitutional, and probably the biggest problem with our system. the fed is not a government institution, btw. booms and cycles are ultimately the result of the fed's control of the money supply. contrary to the socialist position that such regulation saves us from these extreme events, it actually causes them. Name one country of more than 50 million people that has been able to develop and sustain a modern economy without a central bank. Was Fed policy a big part of this screwup? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that central banks in general aren't an enormous help to a country's economic viability. The Dollar is the world's dominant currency for two reasons: 1) It is backed by the most valuable resource on the planet (the power to tax the American public), and 2) Control of its supply is out of the hands of politicians and in the hands of politically independent, mostly competent managers. Yeah, the people running the Fed have made mistakes and will continue to do so, but they do so with far less frequency than would political control of the money supply. To paraphrase Churchill, independent central banks are the worst form of money-supply management, except for all those other forms that have been tried. Now, I have some sympathy for the monetarist argument that, in most situations, the best action the Fed can do is hold money supply steady and let interest rates go where they may. (In chalkboard models, that policy does usually work out best, although there are outside factors-- mostly having to do with the international ramifications of shifts in the dollar's value-- that inject more complexity than the simple models can account for.) But the idea that the business cycle is caused only by government meddling and would be eliminated in the distant future when everyone realizes what is best and forms a society completely based on free-market ideas is right up there with the Marxist view of the future as a worldwide worker's paradise on the "crazy wish-fulfillment" scale. EDIT: Okay, so I'm exaggerating taks' position on that last point. But I guess my core argument is that, if you approach a situation by looking for a reason to blame (or absolve) government, you're going to find enough evidence to justify your prejudices. But if that's the way you're approaching things, what you're doing isn't analysis, it's spin. Bottom line, economies are incredibly complex things, and pretty much every effect has at least a half-dozen causes without which it wouldn't have happened. Advocates pick the causes that fit their pre-existing beliefs as to who the heroes and villains are, but that doesn't get them particularly close to a true and comprehensive understanding (to the degree that such is achievable). Question your prejudices.

I think it's more like "the greater degree to which your investments are concentrated in the financial sector, the worse hit." Diversify, diversify, diversify.