Enoch

Nah, it was the smart move. Hardcore terrorists are going to hate us regardless, but there's a pretty broad swath of opinion in the muslim world that may dispise bin Laden's violent tactics but that has some sympathy with his cause. If the U.S. hadn't observed proper islamic burial traditions, it just throws more gasoline on the "America wants to destroy Islam" theories.

Nah, I think Numbers is just determined to argue from the high ground of moral clarity and talk down to all who oppose his position. It's a fair point to question who gets to make the decisions about when/where/how to punish evil actions, as well as who gets to determine what actions are 'evil' enough to deserve retaliation. And it is certainly a source of frustration among those outside the U.S. and other major allied powers that those decisions, which often affect the whole of the civilized world, get to be made without their consultation or review. And that frustration and general inertnetz argumentativeness sometimes leads people to take the logic of that fair point beyond the point of reason, and to the point of throwing personal insults around. (IMO, in the real world where the choices available are often between "bad" and "less bad," U.S. hegemony works out a heck of a lot better than most of the other organizing principles the world has yet tried. Also, rarely, when dealing with instances of proven evil past actions and intent, hegemonic killings can be the least-bad outcome.)

Coming out of the subway this evening, a gust of wind blew into my face, bringing with it for the first time this year whatever pollen it is that my sinuses and eyes most dislike. I've never actually had an allergy test (I never really suffered from seasonal allergies at all until I was well into my 20s), but whatever is in the air right now is something that my eyes and nose object to most strenuously. So now I'm sitting at my desk listening to some Bowie (Hunky Dory) and drinking some bourbon (Woodford Reserve). Luckily, there's some rain in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow, which should help knock the pollen out of the air.

I don't really care if the others are mid-campaign or not, but, from its description, I really feel like Lonesome Road should be post-main-quest. It just feels like a classic hero's farewell-- the triumphant protagonist not celebrating his victory, but instead marching off into no-man's-land on a much more personal mission, never to return.

If you're aiming for a F:NV completionist run-- exploring everywhere, doing all the non-mutually-exclusive quests you can, and playing all the DLC-- you should go get the mod that lets you raise all the XP thresholds for leveling up. I've found that a 40% increase makes for a reasonable pace of level progression, although additional DLC might alter this.

Apparently it was a mechanical issue, so they just torched it themselves. Given how the choppers were able to get within easy striking distance of the Capitol without drawing the attention of the Pakistani military, and given how much care was taken in destroying the crippled one, I'm guessing that those birds had some tech that the U.S. would rather not let into the hands of the Pakistanis. Come to think of it, what would you be thinking today if you were a Pakistani military, political, or ISI leader who also did dealings with AQ and/or the Taliban? Sure, the ferocity with which the U.S. went after Bin Laden was rather sui generis, but, still, the capacity to act that was shown this weekend amounts to a pretty big warning not to piss off the people who command the SEALs.

Sorry. Even pagan religion is still the opiate of the masses.

Really, if there were forces loyal to Bin Laden capable of retaliation, they wouldn't have been holding back until now. Either there was a major operation in the works, or there wasn't, and it's either going to go forth as planned, or it isn't. The death of ObL probably doesn't change things one way or another in that regard. It probably does help in that the failure of the U.S. and its allies to find the guy for so long probably added to his legend and appeal in recruiting more suicidal crusaders against modernity. So, America, **** Yeah, I guess.

Slept. Ate oatmeal. Played some CiV. Weeded. Mowed the lawn. Showered. Marital relations. Snacked on some cheese. More CiV. Grocery shopping. Cooked dinner. Ate it. I do enjoy making a nice shrimp scampi, but when I do, I find it difficult to not eat about 3/4ths of a pound of shrimp in one sitting. I think I need to make more linguini next time-- I was hoping that there would be something left that I could re-heat for lunch tomorrow. Also, I'm beginning to think that fertilizing the lawn was a mistake. I put down some pellets mostly because they purported to prevent crabgrass from germinating, but the fertilizer they also contained is making the grass grow rather quickly, and now I need to mow more often.

California.

True, Americans can afford roofs under which to make out.

Well, "representative" is a relative term. You could imagine it as a sliding scale from pure direct democracy on one end, up through, say, Parliament in the 13th Century on the other end. People are going to have different thresholds that they consider acceptable. To me, the sine qua non of representativeness to me is this: Do the people have the ability and reasonably frequent opportunity to throw the incumbents out of office when their performance merits it? If you get that right, the rest is details. Fair enough-- I was combining some arguments there, where I probably shouldn't have. It was tough at first for me to put my finger on why alternate voting bothered me. I think it's that it gives a privilege to the voters whose loyalties are split that is not given to the voters who believe firmly in one party and who want to support it. And it bugs me a bit that it opens the door for all manner of single-issue absolutists to set up shop and make a pitch for the "free" first-rank votes that the system creates. That, and I'm not particularly bothered by voters having to make strategic decisions. Holding one's nose and picking the enemy of your enemy can be unpleasant, but, dammit, that's politics! Get a helmet. Uh, no. First-past-the-post is more likely to lead to mob rule and the weakening of the rights of minorities than a system which is preferential and/or proportional. You'd be in a much better position to argue that your system supports the rights of minorities by referring to, say, your bill of rights. U.S. system was designed to suit a world that doesn't exist any more (and maybe never did). It was predicated on the idea that each district would select the most virtuous and intelligent local landowner, and send him to represent the other local landowners in the government. The idea of political parties never entered into the calculation (in fact, some of the founders actively disfavored them). And the idea that districts would get so large and that the right to vote would be expanded so broadly (to non-land-owners, to former slaves, to women, to 18-year-olds) that campaign advertisement and party affiliation would be the primary basis on which people decided their vote probably would have horrified them. But, yes, Krez is correct that the protections against what Madison called "tyranny of the majority" came in other aspects of the constitutional design. Mostly in bicameralism (and in the non-direct election of Senators), separation of powers, and the protections of individual rights found in the Amendments.

This is a common argument that is accepted as generally true out of the general cynicism of the electorate, but why is this necessarily the case? And, if it is the case, I'd think that a voter should prefer a system of single-member districts (whether elected via simple one-shot plurality or by some kind of run-off system) where a single candidate can make a case that they are best for the job, with or without support of a major party. Multi-member districts and similar proportional systems have the primary effect of elevating the party above the candidate-- the likelihood that the voter has any kind of informed opinion on the worthiness of the candidates declines dramatically when the candidates are simply names in a party's list. Instead, voters apply the heuristics that are provided to them-- the vote for the party with whose views they most agree, without much attention paid to whether the candidates actually on the ballot are worthy of their vote. If that's not "strengthening the hold of the parties over the electoral system," I don't know what is. (This also ties in with the British conflating of the legislative and executive power-- that one's vote for a legislator is also the only way that one influences what ministers will be running the various executive agencies. Both make the voter think more about a candidate's party affiliation than his/her personal worthiness for the post.)

I will confess that, although I'm not a total stranger to the hobby, I went a good dozen years without a pnp gaming group prior to 2010. Still, if a license's appeal is limited to an audience nerdier than I am, it really doesn't have much hope of getting the funding necessary to develop a AAA video game together.

I don't believe that the current system is represetative, infact, if you look at the numbers it most certainly IS NOT representative. Functional, well that's another debate. Well, of course you don't think the system is representative-- the candidates you would prefer to support don't have a chance of winning. Every system is going to have winners and losers. If you want to be on the other side of that line, convince more of your neighbors to vote in the manner you would prefer.

I get that a high interest and turnout in elections has some beneficial side-effects (people feel more invested in civic goings-on, are less cynical and less tolerant of disgraceful actions, etc., etc.). But addressing such nebulous voter apathy concerns by changing the whole structure of election system seems to me to be like taking a howitzer on a duck hunting trip. Yeah, you'll probably bag some mallards, but that pond sure isn't going to be the same afterwards. Putting together a government that is both representative and actually functional is, to me, a more important goal than making people feel warm and fuzzy about the process.

This all gets to whether one wants to have a lot of political parties in one's democracy, or only a few. My theory is that a democracy with a lot of parties makes people generally feel better. People are generally unreasonable absolutists-- they want to get their way, and they don't want to compromise about it. And if there are a lot of parties to choose from, they can probably find one that they feel pretty good about voting for-- one with candidates who take absolutist positions on the issues that they care about. On the other hand, with fewer, larger, "big tent" parties in the system, it's unlikely that a voter is going to find a party or a candidate whose policy hobbyhorses line up particularly closely with their own. So, instead of having the parties up in the legislature work out the compromises necessary to run the country, the voters themselves are the ones who have to compromise. They don't like that (see, e.g., Nightshape's complaint above). IMO, a "few parties" system works better. When legislatures contain lots of little parties, you get a whole lot of single-issue extremists talking past each other, forming and breaking unpredictable coalitions, and generally being daft. Big-party systems tend to get somewhat more reasonable people into office-- people who understand that they're representing a broad swath of the population, not all of whom agree with them on every issue. (Although unrelated trends in the American electoral landscape-- gerrymandering, increasingly partisan media, etc.-- are 'extremisting' the major parties, too.)

The point of doing a licensed game is to have a shortcut into the minds of your target audience-- you get free niche media coverage, and potential buyers understand very quickly whether they may be interested when you say Winnie The Pooh: The RPG. I'm nerdier than the vast majority of people who I meet in a given day, and have no effing clue what the Pathfinder setting or ruleset is about. It's just too obscure to be a desirable enough license to pursue. (Granted, the same argument could have been (and no doubt was) made about Planescape back in 1998 or so, but the threshold for success in terms of sales and products shipped is far far higher nowadays.) If Obsidz is going to scrape so close to the bottom of the barrel, they should just go for another original IP.

Chinese leadership would probably privately agree with that last sentence, but there really isn't a path for them to do so without taking a pretty enormous hit to their productivity. It may take another year or three to play out, but something will trigger a crisis that sticks (say, for example, an report on the internal financials of a Chinese bank that actually approaches being honest). China can make statements about shrinking their dollar position all they want, but they're still caught in a vise brought on by their own mercantilist policies. 21st Century mercantilism doesn't work too well when you're getting paid in a fiat currency that your primary market controls the price of. (It doesn't even work over the long term when you control the price of the currency you're getting paid in-- Eurozone expansion was basically a mercantilist play by Germany and France, and they're just starting to catch the blowback from it now.) The dollar is somewhat screwed. But, currency-wise, there's still nothing out there that is likely to be as safe or safer over the next decade or two. The U.S. doesn't need it to be a good option-- we just need it to be the least-bad option. Also, @Gorgon, I don't know about Danish law, but in the States, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes any payment of foreign bribes illegal.

I probably shouldn't be taking this seriously, but the main difference between Russia and USA: 2010 Per Capita Gross Domestic Product (in 2010 USD): Russia: $15,900 United States: $47,400

I haven't listened to Wals' audio, but here's a fun and instructive map. Note that the 2010 panel is only through June of that year: Figure 11: Successful and Attempted Pirate Attacks off the Coast of Somalia, January 2007 to June 2010 by U.S. GAO, on Flickr

Eh. Neither country is as cool as Montenegro. I mean, how can a country have a national anthem like this and not be totally badass?

Man, the office is empty today. I'm usually one of the people working through the religious-holidays-that-are-not-official-holidays, but today I'll be leaving around lunchtime to go spend the weekend back in my hometown. It's a short-notice trip to meet my new niece, who came home from the hospital yesterday.

Press A for awesome? Just kidding, if they get the movement little less clumsy from what it was is ME2, this might be a good thing. I just wonder how that heavy melee is going to fit in.. Normally, faster-"rhythm" games aren't my thing, but I rather enjoyed playing through ME2 with a Sentinel who gets all up-close and punchy. The "shield detonation" ability is fantastic in close quarters, especially when combined with a Shotgun as the later-game bonus weapon. Husk rushes still suck, though, when you're on a difficulty where husks get an armor bar.

Yeah, one big disconcerting thing about the iPhone/iPad setup is that, because AAPL controls access to the device and charges such a heavy vig on developers who want to use it, the line between "consumer" and "product" is substantially blurred. If I'm going to be paying a substantial sum to purchase and use their shiny device, I don't want to be made to feel as if I'm being turned out as a product to be sold to people peering back through the screen like a 1-way mirror. (Facebook has this issue to a greater degree, but Facebook is free, so expectations are a little different there.) (I do have a rather antiquated ipod, which has to some degree locked me into some of the AAPL infrastructure via devices that interface with it and media purchased with some itunes gift cards that people have given me over the years. But news like this goes onto the pile of reasons to avoid further interactions with AAPL products.)