metadigital

The queue starts to the left and forms down the street, across the city and down the river and across the continent, beyond.

Played the first one (bought it by mistake) for several hours straight: my monk made it to level 5 before I wandered around the humungous city into a dark underground area and was killed, dead, in a single attack by an obviously very-high-level naughty person (and their pet). At this point I was bored with the constant level grinding, uninstalled the game and never touched it again.

Noam Chomsky? OMG! Kaftan, would you expand a little on why you think "the world is gradually comming to a point where we dont need them anymore."? Are you talking about the (bias-neutral) technology that allows the lexa scripta to be policed in the open, without need of an oversight force to clean up the margins that might be able to escape justice?

Cheer up! It's a game, and a pretty darn good one to play!

I have hit upon the method of play: don't level up just because you can, level up when you want to change the game (to get better equipment, different monsters, etc). Just because the PC can reach level 158, doesn't mean that is the best stratedy to adopt. The advantage to the Oblivion model is that the PC can reach whatever level the person playing wants to in the time allotted ... whether that be staying at level one, or reaching the teens by the end of the game. Simple, really.

Do you think it is a good idea to have a "secret police force"? By that I am encompassing all the security and counter-intelligence forces, like the CIA, FBI, MI5/6, KGB/FSB, Mossad, etc. Now, assuming that our healthy democracy needs a scret service, what would you: want them to be able to do? not want them to be able to do? For example, would it be okay to allow them to act "above the law", as long as they maintain everybody else's compliance with the laws? Should there be penalties for the members of the force, e.g. they would not be permited to own anything (the state would provide for all their needs) to minimise personal gain from the system? QVIS CVSTODIET IPSOS CVSTODES? Most importantly, who would police these police? Another body? (Who polices them? etc) As oxymoronic as it is, I don't think it is possible for a free society to exist without such a conceit ... but does it follow that the freer the society, the more powerful the secret police (and the more controlled they must be)?

Do humans have souls? Well you, certainly, think that you are possessing of consciousness. But bracket that for a moment and think about everybody else: would it be that much of a stretch to believe that they were all intelligent (or not so intelligent) machines? Ever heard about Searle's Chinese Room problem? http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDi...hineseroom.html The ontological questions aside, whether we can exploit robots depends on the cost factor. As someone else already said: humans are cheap. Genetically engineered "humans" are even cheaper. Do you consider a genetically programmed organism that happens to look like a human a robot? What line do you draw, given that they might very well be the equivalent of mentally disabled people? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Huxley's Brave New World, even though it is approaching its centenary, describes the easiest fascist state to make, using a hive/colony analogy to create the necessary "Fordistic" (assembly line) of societal members to create an optimal society. Brain-damaged / genetically enhanced humans are a cheaper alternative to million (billion?) dollar robots, at least until production reaches some sort nirvana that isn't even conceivable at the moment. This would be (and is) ofset by the individual > society mantra that libertarians have been decrying for centuries, however. PS Searle's thought experiment suffers from the reductio ad absurdum: specifically a computer is just "a CPU and a look-up table": this is only true of computers and not the later neural networks, which are more closely aligned with the parallel processing model of the human mind.

What's with the plush toy creating a character near a white plastic Christmas tree?

Wow! What's not to like!

She likes me more than you anyway, I was just easing you down for the big fall ...

... Mainly crap. "

Those Danes have a royal family, don't they? And a couple of young princesses? That's what we should be discussing ...... not Dutch harlots!

How oddly you must sit at the computer ... Nevermind, I'm off to play Oblivion, ta-ta!

Can't be much of a stalker if you don't have pictures on hand...

And not just computers! Am I right, fellas?

Which is precisely why I don't use an either-or nomenclature for Fantasy and SF, but rather a spectrum. After all, as Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law states "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Those Dutch always look like they're sucking a lemon ... "

Yeah, Volo makes do and he's mentally-challenged!

Those rats are big suckers, too!

Haven't seen it. What do you think?

Talk to an agency: here in Britain one needs to be a member of Actors' Equity.

It's also a question of human resource management; having an external body doing the QA for several developers/publishers allows the hiring of fulltimers, rather than just the short-term contractors required for a single project.

Set your PC clock back before the deadline ... "

Lorne Greene was kewl! What was the question?

Because you use the mouse with your left hand (don't answer that if you use some other part of your body)?