Enoch

Huh, what?! I don't know where he got the "Bethesda as a publisher" but funcroc speculated that Obsidian might be doing Wasteland 2 because Brian Fargo is followin Feargus and Avellone's twitter. Kind of a flimsy connection but yeah. I doubt that Bethsoft would see much business sense in bringing two separate post-apoc RPG franchises to the marketplace.

Strolling is for gardens and week-ends. When going about in the streets, offices, and mills it is best to walk swiftly and decisively, with a grim look on one's face. Show the world that you are not overly hurried, but also not particularly willing to tolerate the wasting of time.

Yeah, it's a weird little balance thing that Obsidz did with energy weapons. Rather than have some high-end rare ammo types like Guns does (45-70, 12 ga., etc.), they have the top-end weapons use the standard ammo, but take multiple units per shot. (Also, if you're on hardcore, energy ammo is relatively heavy.) I don't think there's anything else as extreme as Pew-Pew, but some other weapons like the Gauss Rifle take 4 or 5 per shot. My E-weaps character used the Q-35 as his primary weapon. Good for all-around use-- decent DAM, pretty high RoF, slow degrade rate, pretty common repair parts, and only takes 1 MFC per shot. Pair with a scoped LR to use at range (and a Gauss or its unique variant in the late game), and you have most of your bases covered.

I just clinched 1st place in the office NCAA basketball pool. Hooray for dumb luck!

Also, when you run the launcher, click "Data Files" and make sure that "DeadMoney.esm" is checked.

Here the churches are tax exempt so they get to keep every penny of the tithe and are usually very affluent. So priests earn an actual wage in Denmark? Here, I believe, priests are given free room and board but do not receive a pay check but I could be wrong on that. Depends entirely on the church. I think that most of them get some kind of salary, unless it's only a part-time position.

kir or one of the other Scandies can probably answer better, but as I understand it, the answer is no. In some European (mostly Scandinavian) countries, where the governments are largely the heirs of the winners of various 16th-19th Century religious wars, there are established churches ("established" in the same sense as the "Establishment Clause" of the U.S. 1st Amendment), funded by dedicated taxes collected by the state. (The churches also sometimes perform duties that we would normally think of as governmental, like keeping and maintaining some official records.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

Making enemies follow the same rules would also break the threat mechanic. Which I think would be good, because combat tactics that depend on AI routines being stupid AI routines don't make for satisfying battles. But this would also force the player to use some thought in tactical positioning, and force the developers to write a respectable tactical AI. The most powerful ability in the DA universe is Taunt. It exercises infallible insidious mind control on a mass scale, and it may only be used by the PC or one of his/her companions. There's your Awesome Button.

There's no ideal solution at this point. Look for the least-bad outcome. Leaving Qaddafi in charge, fighting a continuing struggle to eradicate those who rebelled against him probably does at least as much to cause terrorist activity. (Hint: Without support from U.S./Euro, where else can the rebels get weapons, bombs, tactical advice, and reinforcements? What manner of tactics are they likely to embrace after Q's air power advantage drives them out of their strongholds?) And allowing the civil war to continue also takes the Libyan oilfields offline indefinitely, which is an important factor, particularly for Europe. Add in the Q government's terrible humanitarian record, and it's tough to see any advantages to allowing his rule to continue.

Who needs pictures when you have such poetically evocative names as those?

People tend not to vote for candidates who have "I am a huge sap, please take advantage of me" stamped across their forehead.

Meh. Polls are funny. Ask people about the "healthcare reform law" or "obamacare" in general, and they come out like that. Ask them about the major reforms that were included in the law, and they are pretty strongly in favor. What eventually passed was pretty thoroughly watered-down, tarted-up, and easy to demonize as a whole. And it is disappointing that the medical industry was pretty effective in kicking out the provisions that would do anything to actually control costs. But wiping it all out and starting over is a glib response to an incredibly complex issue-- what works well on a bumper-sticker almost never makes for cogent policy, and the while it's probably too early to judge the post-HC-reform system, we know that the pre-HC-reform system was unsustainable. Amend the mistakes out, keep the good parts, fill in the gaps, etc. In short, do the work to make things better, rather than indulge the purely political "the other guys won, so now we have to undo it" reflex. IMO, The biggest need for reform is end-of-life care. An enormous portion of American GDP is spent on keeping a bunch of 82-year-olds alive to see 83, which has almost no effect in helping the rest of the economy. (In terms of international competitive advantages, healthcare costs in general beyond what is necessary to keep the present and future workforce healthy enough to live, work, and learn are wasted.) I love my grandfather, but the fact that the bill for his $20,000 hip replacement was paid out of the public fisc should be scandalous-- the country is no worse off if that man has to be in a wheelchair.

Mordin does some hand-waving about humans having greater internal genetic diversity than other sentient species.

I'm guessing that those "comfortable black jeans" have a large hole in the posterior that he hasn't noticed yet.

Would you rather get less money? Yes. A tax return means that you've been overpaying the government in your payroll deductions. The return is just you getting that money back, free of interest. (Not that interest rates are particularly remunerative for savers at the moment, but that's beside the point.) I'd prefer that they never took that excess money to begin with, rather than provide a voluntary interest-free loan to the Feds. Of course, they don't make that easy-- IRS knows that it gets the strongest tax compliance when taxpayers over-withhold, and thus have an incentive to file their returns, so they engineer the withholding categories to achieve that end. The problem in our case is that I last filled out a W-4 before we became homeowners. Switching to itemized deductions and deducting those fat mortgage interest and property tax payments made our tax liability much lower than it would be under the basic W-4 calculation based our personal exemptions + standard deduction. You can alter your W-4 based on estimated itemized deductions, but IRS doesn't make it easy.

Holding my breath for a Blasto the Hanar spectre, game. I don't generally get too into the Bio-bashing around here, but it would fit the Bio pattern of fan-service catering if what started as a forum joke rose past "amusing comic-relief cameo" to stand-alone product.

What is badly needed is an equivalent of the US supreme court that is able to say to any UN body"well, actually, the UN charter says you cannot do that". A judicial authority doesn't mean squat without the means to enforce its decisions. (E.g., The US Supreme Court started issuing unanimous decisions calling for de-segregation in 1955, but nobody did much about it until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in '64 and got some serious resources committed to forcing states to comply.) And enforcement means that you have to give the blue-helmets a dedicated source of funds, independent command, control, recruitment, and intel, and the capacity to overwhelm resistance from any recalcitrant nation(s). Toss in how hopelessly compromised-out-the-wazoo the UN charter actually is, and you get the recipe for a Very Bad Idea. (The UN has a role as a forum for international discussion and for the granting and revoking of legitimacy for certain international endeavors, but in its current state, the world is much better off with a toothless UN.)

So, a good hunk of my job involves providing legal advice to accountants. I am not an accountant.* However, in an effort to better understand what the heck they're talking about (my chief primer on financial statements came courtesy of the original Railroad Tycoon), I got it into my head to sign up for one of the internal training courses for these accountants with whom I work. I am beginning to think that this was a mistake. * I did, however, prepare my own tax return this past weekend. I need to adjust my withholding-- we're getting way too much money back.

Monte is glossing over the Soviet influences, particularly in the '60s and '70s, but he's certainly not wrong in his description of the current state of the world. The U.S. is in there right now because reducing the anti-air capabilities (both air-to-air and ground-to-air) of the Libyan military to cinders is easy for us, while it wouldn't necessarily be quite so easy for our allies. The Brits and French and Italians, etc., if acting without American help, would almost certainly defeat Qaddafi's forces on the field. But U.S. help at the early stages in the form of blowing up anything larger than a pickup truck that can shoot back makes the whole operation go much smoother, with fewer allied casualties. Consider it a positive check in the "international relations karma" column. (And, after the whole Iraq thing, a badly needed one.)

There's a decent legal argument to make that, in a non-emergency situation, the Prez should ask Congress for permission to apply military force. But whenever the issue has been litigated in the past, the courts haven't had the cojones to stake their institutional legitimacy on telling the Prez that his war is illegal. So there are some rather permissive precedents on the books. A cynic's view of this campaign is that the West was perfectly happy to see Qaddafi brutally beat back the protesters and insurgents ... up until the point where he attacked various oil facilities (the port at Ras Lanuf, oil pipelines to Sidra, the larger facilities at Brega). Once it became clear that Qaddafi was willing to sacrafice the country's oil infrastructure* to win, foreign governments got a lot more assertive. Staving off chaos and revolution via brutal repression is fine, but don't mess with the one reason why the outside world gives a **** what happens in Libya. * Libya's oil infrastructure isn't much. The technology of the last 25 years or so-- developed and weilded mostly by American, British, and Dutch companies-- makes a much more efficient use of oil fields, but there are a lot of countries where they don't operate much because of concerns about sovereign risk (nationalization), poor history in honoring contracts, corruption, reliability of local workforces/governments, and/or the safety of their employees. Libya has been one such place, for reasons that are now apparent. (Others include Russia, Iran, and Iraq.) But that doesn't mean that the existing infrastructure isn't worth a lot to the nation, as well as to the nations that buy Libya's oil (primarily Italy and France).

Well, there is a fairly big "what next" question. Qaddafi has been a mostly harmless autocrat ever since the mid-80s, when a cruise missile blew up his tent while he happened to be out taking a leak. He has followed the basic petro-dictator pattern: take the vig from the country's oil production, use it to buy internal stability by putting most of the country on the dole, and keep whatever is left. But there has been a big problem with this pattern lately in a lot of oil states-- very high population growth rates make buying stability increasingly expensive. Absent the central influence of the Qaddafi regime, the people of Libya are largely of tribal mindset. (I mean this in a modern context-- the people feel their first loyalty is to whichever non-governmental, quasi-familial association they were born into.) Which makes the nature of what government is to come a big question. Democracy bolted onto a largely tribalist population doesn't have a great track record. (See, e.g., Pakistan.) Qaddafi, for his part, has no incentive to compromise at all. He and his top lieutenants have long since crossed the line that would make them a target of the International Criminal Court. Since ICC forbearance requires annual UN votes to be maintained, nobody can offer them any kind of stable sanctuary. So Q fights on to the bitter end.

Don't we already have enough bitch-about-Bioware threads around here?

It has been done before. Old origin games allowed you to lose the war if you failed at too many battles. Only thing you really need is a scenario where the player can survive the screw-up. Let's recap AP Museum: Mission success, save the hostages. Mission fail, save the girl Ronald Sung: Mission success, save Sung. Mission fail, stop the riots Brako: Mission success, get the data. Mission fail save Albatross. I think those are lots of times the player survives the screw-up. Eh. The real "success" in the museum mission is getting Marburg to either . Those two accomplishments were, IMO, the most satisfying parts of the game.

Yeah, between Al's hairstyle and Morrigan's "shirt," the two marquis characters in DA:O seemed precisely engineered to make me dislike them from the moment I first saw them. Edit: At the tabletop gaming session I went to on Wednesday, there was a fair amount of exactly what Monte is talking about going on-- DA2 reverse-viral-marketing.

Man you guys are mean. :D Don't worry-- I'm sure that Humanoid made up for it by giving Al a bit of carved dime-store shelf clutter that he looted.