metadigital

What a bunch of wimps. " <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Meh. What's a DM to do? They prefer swords and sorcery, it just turns out. To tell the truth, I'm kinda happy about it, since it's given me the opportunity to use the super-evil Tainted Sorceress I'd planned as the central villain of the new campaign. A proper evil-to-the-core bitch. Can't wait. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I hope she appears butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth sweetness and light, and even offers to "help" them ... and she is soooooooooooo comely and charismatic that I'm sure they will have no qualms about her assisting them in any way ...

Yes.

I don't agree with big governments. Group responsibility equals no responsibility. In the UK at the moment the New Labour government has been trying to increase productivity in the bloated public sector (millions of new middle managers since 1997) by issuing rafts of targets, to everyone. It is so bad that teachers and police spend more time writing reports about their jobs than actually doing them. (The UK has -- for the most part -- a particularly antiquated public IT infratructure.) For example, there was an edict that all patients had to be seen by a doctor within 48 hours. The result was that doctors' surgeries refused to make bookings more than 48 hours ahead, to meet the target! There is only so much management that can be achieved centrally. And only so much that people will achieve working procy for someone else's interests. The problem is that there are entrenched lobbies of special interest groups (like, but not limited to, all those inefficient public sector workers). And when a new government gains power, it has to re-imburse the backers in some tangible fashion, whether its allowing more coal power stations or giving a big tax break to a foreign car manufacturing plant to keep it in the country. And there are also a lot of people who think that modern society is some sort of free handout, where they don't have to work their share. (Witness the cult of celebrity, which gives the little people the hope that they can be famous for being famous, like the vacuous Hilton child.) Also, an interesting ethical issue not touched on yet is the principle that a democracy has to deal with parts of it that would cause its downfall in decidely undemocratic ways, whilst still maintaining the democracy. Like keeping a free press, but preventing incitement to riot and hate crimes. (Individual privacy is a very recent development, only in the last two hundred years.) People aren't votiong because they're complacent; they're actually voting for "none of the above". I suspect there's another major global adjustment about to happen. We're about due.

Yeah, the traditional monarchy (and by extension, the nobility) derives the genetic traits of existing leaders (whenever a dynasty is surplanted, there is a natural born leader), with a conducive environment for hot-housing leaders, to hopefully produce the best leaders of the next generation. Even Lenin, with all his attributed credibility was just a bourgeois who wanted to replace the decadent monarchy of Russia with a government with him in charge. Ditto for Mao Tse Tung (who was born into a moderately prosperous peasant farming family in Hunan Province). I once read an anthropologists study on the political structure of a large tribe of chimpanzees. He noted that the next-generation males of the middle ranks would form bonds in order to topple the existing power structure and replace it with themselves. It seems we share more than just 98% of our genome with them.

ButchagottalikeDALEKS, Shirley?

Neither do I, I wanted my female avatar to have the option of canoodling if she wanted to.

Sccinct to the point of irrelevancy. Could you expand a little, on such a terse start?

So there's a GBA emulator for the PC ?

Please explain. (linky?)

Lots of points there, none really about democracy, except the first and last. I agree, governments seem to have taken the distraction tactics to help cloak there real behaviour, whether out of fear of identification, or just avoiding malpractice complaints. And that is all governments. The biggest problem is that anybody who actually wants to be a politician is the wrong type of person to be one. Arthur C Clarke described a couple of brilliant techniques in his novels, one was for truly secret ballots, whereby everyone could vote and comment electronically for a referrendum type issue with total impugnity, to encourage honest and meritocratic appraisal of the issues. The other -- I don't think he was the first, or will be the last -- was the concept of a lottery for the role of president. Sort of like a one person jury, just an average person chosen at random to fill the role for twelve months. Well, maybe one person is a little dangerous, so maybe a real jury of twelve people would be a better idea. Anyway, one point of the few you made, I would be concerned that if drugs is permitted in sport, then those entering competitive sport will necessarily feel obligated to take drugs to win. And that means teenagers in Pro Foorball taking steroids and needing a kidney transplant on their medical insurance, followed by a lifetime of medicine. (You don't work for a multi-national pharmaceutical company, do you? )

Doctor Who The Doctor goes into a pseudo-reality tv show. It looks like a cross between The Weakest Link and Big Brother (with Anne Robinson doing a voice for the MC robot). Actually, the highlight is that .... it's really the DALEKS deploying a cunning plan! The Daleks are back, and there are lots of them. OOOOOOOOOOOOO Happy happy joy joy. *Does happy dance* *Does another jig* :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

Also, it is 1024 MegaBytes of RAM, with the Si abbreviation of 1024MB. A bit, being 1/8 of a Byte, has the Si abbreviation of "b". So 1024Mb is actually 128MB. Hint: bits are used in baud rates for modems and networks; Bytes are used for memory and storage. Just a personal crusade of mine. Nothing to see here, move along.

We get a reminder of behaviour but no word on the progress of the patch that was due "in a couple of days" ... I see no problem with the PC patch for the higher res FMV, the resolution of the monitor is already superior to the tv (even at 800x600). It is just a due-diligence workflow thing. Maybe they have bundled a couple of extra bug fixes in the patch, as well?

I agree with the purging of vestigal or embrionic contra-indicated urges. ... If I played myself I would be a shining avatar with Light Side Mastery ... as far as you know ...

"Noteworthy Equipment: An axe. A giant axe. A giant axe which has seen lots of use in combat." ... a giant, battle-scarred, dried-blood-smeared-on-the-handle, vorpal massacre-loving, serrated, painfully sharp axe of many incisions ...

Gwen Stefani

Incontrovertible assumption: Truth often hurts. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> :'( betrayed! (Yeah, babies are really "cute" ... until you can't give 'em back to someone. Then the little psychological trainers are merciless egotists ... )

Action Item: Kaftan: work on linguistic interaction with parental filial unit.

Oh wow, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (-Bohm) phenomenon. That is a cool concept for theoretical quantum cryptography.

Pah! I just cast a disable droid three or four times and it's scrap. Singlehanded.

I've also wondered about that mysterious open tenth slot in your party screen. I, for one, am glad. At least on Telos, she was quite the obnoxious, though her character model is quite spiffy.. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Um, isn't the tenth spot for HK-47?

For reasons I can't explain, this idea amuses me greatly. I may have to try it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Perhaps it's my rakish pseudo-Austrian accent transliterated to English ... :D

Sure, but that interest could be a morbid fascination in what makes someone want to be evil. It doesn't necessary follow that the person investigating is evil, or will become evil. I would suggest that current evidence is we develop our ehtics pretty early in life (say by seven years old), with scope for only minor modifications later (barring some life-shattering event, like a loved one being raped or murdered, which may send the person off on a behavioral tangent, or not). You are basically arguing that screen violence leads to real violence. I hope you are wrong, or our children's generation are in for the apocalypse. (But those who have experienced real violence, like a war, are seldom violent -- apart from those that were psychopathic before the experience). Otherwise the 50s in the US would have been like the Balkans in the 90s. I think you're making the mistake of either / or. Either you don't like to roleplay against type (e.g. evil), or you harbour urges to be that type (evil). I think the situation is slightly more complex than black and white.

the only negative I can see with complex multiple interlaced IP ownership is the logitical nightmare involved in agreeing revneues when producing a new game. Other than that, sa long as the dev team have a long leash, I'm all for it.

one of the main Force powers you see being used in the movies is, in fact, using the Force to throw debris at your opponent. We haven't seen that yet in the KOTOR games (not sure if we've even seen it in cutscreens). I would like to see that. Perhaps the main reason we haven't seen it is, when you think about it, this would be a little tricky to implement since you would have to select which object to throw and at whom and how forceful, etc. But it would be cool if they found a way to do it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> How is it any better / different to Force Lightning / Force Push ? Or: what's the point? I don't see any need to implement it. I would much rather the extra effort went into plot and character develpoment!