demagogue

That reminds me of one of the ancient Greek's argument for why the earth doesn't fall: Since it's in the middle, there isn't any preferred direction for it to fall to. It just hovers there, not being able to fall one direction or another. I get the same image from your idea.

Well, I guess it depends on whether we're talking about crypt zombies or pirate zombies here, doesn't it? (not sure that anyone can say that sentence entirely seriously...) ANYWAY, sort of a silly debate. I don't have a dog in the race. The traditional zombies were fine with me.

I think Freud is telling you that you spend too much time thinking about video games.

Interestingly enough, Yandros just put out a new zombie set with weapons for T2. So I guess Odd's not the only one that thought they could use a little more muscle.

Well, to be fair, every country's situation is a little different, so it's not good to generalize too much. First, I didn't mean to suggest that it was a such a stark choice between coal versus something else. Solar panels, so far as I know, aren't really a viable option. Things like natural gas, ethanol, and clean coal are becoming competitive because the price of oil is so high, and are also cleaner. And as Macsen just said, there is technology to burn coal relatively cleanly. So there are lots of options opening up as petroleum stays expensive (perhaps a great irony of the Iraq War that it's indirectly greasing the wheels of climate change reform by keeping oil prices high). As for the different situations of different States... If we are talking about Eastern European countries and other "transition economies", the big issue is diffusion of technology to refurbish their soviet era power plants, which are really dirty, and as an added bonus they'll be more effecient power supplies as well. (Of course, an open secret is that Western Europe got off easy in the Kyoto Protocol by counting the whole EU as one unit. They are going to get under their mark just by giving the former East Germany new power plants that they were going to build anyway. If each country had to cut individually they'd have been a lot less receptive to Kyoto probably). If we are talking about developing countries, though, well, first of all they aren't even in the Kyoto protocol as relevant States because they just aren't emitting enough (China and India being the only two real problem states). So we don't need to be too worried what they are doing for the time being. Let them burn away and it's still just a drop in the bucket as far as climate change goes, given their tiny economies (although there are serious quality of life issues as they industrialize that we should pay attention to, but that's a different thing). The only semi-relevant question as far as their relationship to climate change is concerned (aside from the fact that they will be hit hardest by its impact) is one of infrastructure investment. It's not just whether we let them burn coal, but whether we should invest in helping them build them cleaner plants to burn it. Anyway, the Kyoto Protocol has a section that allows Western donars to get emission credits for investing in these sorts of projects. I think it's a good provision ideally, just as long as they have a good system for computing the amount of credit the investing State should get so it can't cheat (not as easy as it may sound). Actually, the by far biggest issue with developing countries (aside from China and India), much bigger than their miniscule power plants and industry, is deforestation to make farm land. Burning forests is a double whammy because it not only releases all the carbon in the trees into the air, but it also lessens the number of trees that are taking carbon back out of the atmosphere. (This is on top of the problems with lost biodiversity, future cures for cancer, etc). But it's also a problem for farming in the long run because the soil is so poor; it leads to inefficient agriculture. Everybody would be better off (them included) if ways were found to make the soil more productive, rather than just cutting down more trees.

It may be inconclusive about the primacy in a natural cycle. But it seems pretty suggestive that there's a mutual relationship between the two either way, so that if you increase one you can very well expect the other to co-determinately rise with it. In a sense, it doesn't matter so much which comes first. We mooted it by pumping up one side of the equation. Where you are right that the press is misrepresenting things, even from an avowed global warming advocate's p.o.v., is that the effect is a statistical one. It would be a mistake to attribute specific climate events to global warming. So they are wrong when they say *this* specific storm, or *this* specific record high year is directly attributable to global warming. The most you can say is that the chance for that event is increased across a timeframe. But it doesn't mean much unless it's in the context of a reasonable period of time. To give an obvious analogy, if you're rolling a dice and suddenly you change it so that two sides have the number four; it would be the same kind of mistake to say that the next time you specifically hit four was *because* the extra four was added. (Or if you want an even more neutral argument, if you haven't rolled four in the last 50 rolls, it would be the same kind of mistake to say the next specific time you roll the four was *because* you didn't roll it for 50 times.) The statistics aren't changing according to the rolls; you'll have just the same likelihood to roll a four before and after the last four you rolled or 100 rolls since the last four you rolled. But the rolls do evolve according to the statistics if the dice is being stacked. What is significant is the pattern over a span of roles, which converges to a number over time; any one specific event doesn't tell you much (although its more politically charged, of course). So in that respect, the popular press often misrepresents global warming my focusing too much on specific events as the tale-tell signal, especially in the context of the recent natural disasters. While it may be good press, a real problem with it is that it deflects attention from the fact that the real bite of global warming is in its gross economic effects, and those effects will hit developing countries the hardest. It's their agricultural economies that have the most to lose, and here we are (in rich countries) worrying about a few severe weather events, and maybe nostolgia for lost glaciers we might have seen on our Alaskan cruises. Economically, rich countries will be able to adapt much more ably than poor countries, even though of course, rich countries contributed more to the problem*. So there is an unfairness element to how global warming is being (incorrectly) characterized by the press, IMO, which leads to misplaced attention. The press is focusing on the wrong problems to be really worried about. But even if you don't care about poor countries, even for rich countries, saying that they will adapt better, it is still important that people focus on the bigger scale gross economic effects and not this or that hurricane or record high. Otherwise they are going to make poor decisions on how best to respond. * although that doesn't let some developing countries like India and China off the hook because they'll be large contributers in the near future. By the way, on the "it's unfair that we don't let poor countries use their coal like we did" argument, like the other guys said, burning coal is dirty and ultimately unproductive (costing more money, e.g., in ineffecient energy production and pollution externalities, for fewer widgets). We have good reasons to upgrade them to more effecient, cleaner burning plants even without global warming.

My professor (Michael Oppenheimer, about as authoritative as you get in the field) said the real smoking gun was from ice core studies ('Evidence of Global Warming' page with graph). It's far from the only evidence, but it makes the point in maybe the clearest fashion. You can tell from the compactification pattern what the mean temperature is at each level, and from the chemical composition (trapped C02 bubbles) what the C02 levels is, and with that the researchers found practically a one-to-one pattern between the two variables at each layer, consistently the whole way down. This is a simplification, C02 and Mean Temperature have an interrelationship; they move in tandem. When C02 rises, you get warming from a greenhouse effect. The warming does things like melt ice and cause more fires, releasing more C02, increasing the warming effect, and so on ... until it reaches an equilibrium. If the temperature begins to cool, things like more ice and less fires means more of the C02 is getting sequestured, which takes even more C02 out of the atmosphere, leading to more cooling ... and you get a down-cycle until you reach an equilbrium. Normally, there is a grand cycle to the periodic release and sequestration of C02 along with temperature change (there's a finite amount of C02 on the earth, well a little addition over time by things like volcanic activity, but not so much now as earlier in geologic time -- as someone else said, I think. But with that consistent amount, it's just a matter of if it's in the atmosphere or sequestered); but that's been clearly knocked out of balance by anthropomorphic influence. Anyway, the point is the fact that the causal primacy is ambiguous isn't as important as the fact that they are co-determinate. You increase one, the other one goes up in tandem, and vice versa. (here's a short article explaining it). As for the 800 year jump-start that temperature rise has on C02 release, as far as I know that stat is being cherry picked to make the point, because I recall from the core studies, on the whole, sometimes temperature rise is before C02 release, sometimes the C02 is before tempature rise, and the chances were pretty even which took primacy. More generally, though, the argument doesn't much affect the critical point that they are co-determinate variables; they always come together and mutually accellerate the effect of the other until an equilibrium is reached. As for the 1940-70 statistic you gave, I mean, look at the top graph on that "evidence of global warming" page I linked and you can clearly see that you are cherry-picking a period to make a point that dissipates from a broader perspective; it's not nearly as statistically important as you think it is; e.g., notice that it is a wobble in the context of a larger than expected spike from 1930-1990, which maintains the statistical pattern you'd expect with global warming on the larger scale.

Sorry, this is a total aside and I guess we've left the original topic behind. But when I was doing the ranking in my last post, I wasn't going to just put Thief just because of this site. I justified my top five as the ones I spent the most time and affection on playing them. Looking back, I realize they are the games I mapped (except for civilization for obvious reasons, and not really Deus Ex ... it gets in on story alone). Then it suddenly occured to me just now that after the C64 days, the only game I've ever really had to map was Thief, because it was the only game that ever had even the potential for me to get lost. It was suddenly a very telling moment, so I thought I'd share. Ok, I'll leave you guys back to your M.O./existential debate now. I don't need a reason to be here.

I don't always trust myself trying to rank stuff like this, but five games that have meant a lot to me are (the numbers to be taken with a grain of salt): 1. Thief Dark Project 2. Deus Ex 3. Civilization II 4. The Pawn (an old IF game that really captured my imagination) 5. Bard's Tale II Honorable Mentions: System Shock 2 Tomb Raider 2 Metal of Honor Space Quest (and Police Quest ... and Quest for Glory for that matter) Another World Grand Theft Auto 2 (and much later, 3) 1080 (snowboarding) VirtuaFighter (actually at the arcade in Austin) Auto Duel and a lot of the old C64 games for good measure (Tai Pan, California Games, Ultima, Project Firestart, Guild of Thieves, Hilsfar, Fist, Shogun, Wizball, Mercenary, Paradroid ... damn, as simple as all these games were, they tended to capture my affection better than games today can.)

Au contrair, that's the beauty of the term in that context. Anyway, I know more gay republicans than democrats, to be honest ... it may be a contradiction in terms in the South, but in NYC it's quite common (with the wall street crowd). The point is that I have opinions that can be consistent with both the left and right (depending on the issue), and for me it's not a scitzophrenic position at all but quite cohearent in my mind, although I realize that orthodox types from either side might not be comfortable with it or understand what I'm on about. So the analogy made sense to me. As for off-topic, I don't know. Lots of people have considered communism more like a religion -- with its stretched, epic metaphysical claims -- than a political theory ... so it's not so out of place. But I guess I could just start a new thread on it. As for all this jibbing and jabbing at religion in this thread. I was going to post in the "religious debate" thread a reply, and I could here but don't have much time to spend on it now. I think I could sum it up in four words from a book title I saw recently: Religion isn't about God. More specifically, it isn't about unsupportable metaphysical claims ... heaven, God, the soul, the rapture ... Religious people surely use these terms, but from my perspective they are actually talking about something in their own experience about themselves, the universe, and other people ... not something literally "out there" in the universe (which anyway would *still* have to have access to people's experience or it could never be God or any thing else "spiritual"; the buck will always stop with experience, so why not focus all the attention on that?). The only really necessary metaphysical condition IMO for most religious ideas at their core is that the mind have a transcendental relationship to the world and other people, and that's a pretty easy sell... It just means the mind doesn't have immediate, unfiltered access to information about the world; any information has to be filtered through a system that invariably imposes some meaning or value on it. The fact that the core of religion isn't really about wacky metaphysical claims render most of the whining about religion ITT irrelevant. The real challenge is to focus on the core experiences that religious people are really referring to in religious talk (whether they themselves realize it or not), and on that count I think this and the other thread is getting low marks. But I realize I'll need to give some examples to show what I'm talking about. I'll have to do that in another post. I also realize that there's plenty to say by focusing on the metaphysical claims of religious people confused about what they are actually talking about (IMO), for entertainment or cultural-education purposes or whatever. But from my perspective it's sort of missing the point about what religion is really about, what experiences are really grounding it, which is the interesting question for me.

Yeah, I was petrified every time I could hear a haunt coming from another room in RtoC. I remember very distinctly standing just inside from the back exit as haunts and zombies casually went in and out the door, frozen for what felt like hours, waiting for an opportunity just to get out of the door. Now I know just to give a haunt a whack in the back of the head with my sword.

Lol. Well for the record, I was just trying to reconstruct OHB's position based on what (I thought) he said. It didn't sound like textbook Marxism to me. I didn't represent my own thinking so much, though, esp since I was kind of caricaturizing the arguments. I also studied Marxism a bit, just to see if I could understand it, and have always been a little bi-curious with the left and right. I'll see if I can put together a good response to your post that better reflects my own thinking, Max.

I think you are totally misreading him, Nyar. Communism may be a lot of things, but I don't think "optimal" has ever been one of them. It looks like he's talking about the efficiency of production, that we can get more output (and better, contributing to more happiness) for less or equal work. That to my mind is an argument clearly in the camp of those arguing for a free market and free trade. Competition drives industry to cut costs/labor. When he says "certain manipulations coerce the others and create a economically-stratified society" that leads to inefficiency, this sounds like something like aparthied South Africa, which was incredibly inefficient for production, and it was industry that was breaking the rules so it could train black labor to take on more advanced positions, rather than spending more money for whites that couldn't do much better. He's also saying that interest politics (public choice theory) is detrimental to economic efficiency ("Such economic structures are established and ardently protect their interests"), and it is. And the root of the problem for him is "the static nature of it.", i.e., a command economy (whether racist or socialist or otherwise interest-based) that can't evolve outside artificial barriers that needs to be liberalized. When he says "First, I'm not saying happiness is proportional to the amount of goods and services one receives." First, it seems here he's thinking about an old argument that a downside to capitalist culture is the over-consumption and dumbing-down of culture, a fetish of commodities (a lust for more when more isn't necessarily better), and let's go ahead and throw in triumph of public stupidity (public choice theory & "no one ever lost money underestimating the stupidity of the public"), and reinforcing asymmetrical power arrangements, things that are actually detrimental to human happiness and flourishing on the whole. While this is one Marxist theme, it's hardly unique to Marxism. The religious right, who may be champions of the free market for other people, for themselves detest much of the vulgarization and "unholiness" of capitalist society and take pains to sheild themselves from it, and they inevitably have a softspot about injustices because of power asymmetries (if you pay attention to the big picture). Liberatarian types or a Nietzschean that thinks people should value higher expressions of culture outside mass-culture, similarly often look down on the lamentable mass culture of stupidity that capitalism fosters, and many use the freedom of free time that more efficient production provides for them to spend their time on more uplifting things like making this mod, going to opera, helping starving kids, or writing little treatises like this. I think OHB has also put his finger on the great reply of a free market to the fetish of commodities problem, and he set up the sentence as if to make just this argument. "Then again, one is more happy knowing there's always enough food rather than knowing that 20% of the population will starve to death because of some disturbance. Likewise, the goods and services or in other words work-output allows one to enjoy such happiness-inducing activities as Thief, or opera." A free market is the only way to get vital distribution information throughout the system quickly and efficiently; so it morally outweighs the alternative: People need food; a free market distributes that information much more quickly and cheaply to a self-interested capitalist that wants to give it to them (and another one giving them labor-opportunties so they can pay for it) than any bureacrat (no offense) trying to please his supervisor. And every so often, the free market lets great cultural jewels like Thief and opera pass under the radar. And OHB just worded his post as if to say that he sees these things as morally off-setting the problems with human flourishing that a free market otherwise encourages. At least, this is how I understood what he was saying. So I think all-in-all OHB, although he didn't articulate it so precisely, has intuitions that fit very well with conventional liberal democratic thinking. And when he says "...like most of you, I would like to see a change to a more optimal system for everyone", like "most of us" (in my experience), his intuition about reform is also on pretty conventional liberal democratic lines.

If you are interested in navigating outside the frame, e.g., so it doesn't go to the main screen when you refresh, then just right click on any link you want to visit and choose "open link in a new window" and it will open the page by itself, outside the frame. You'll notice that the actual site name is modetwo and is a bit longer and unweildy. "Darkmod" is a shorter, more PR friendly name that nests the modetwo site inside of it. @Macsen, lol, you should visit sometime. It's one of the few glimpses we outsiders get of the sacred inner workings.

Well, apparently it's supposed to fit into the story. I suppose these are all our local factions? This reminds me of how disappointed I was to learn that the true meaning behind the J-Pop band's name SMAP is really "Sports and Music Assemble People". Dumbest acronym EVER.

What's unintentionally hilarious about that is how contrasting the two faces of old and new Russia are. On the one hand, Soviet-era, all women were dressed as if sex didn't exist, even when they're "out to town" (more like "out to the breadlines"). And today's Russia, Jebus!, even an innocuous historical photo collection has to be plastered with nudes sticking everything they can in our faces. Seeing them side to side like that makes you just want to sigh ... our little Russia is growing up so fast.

lol, so much for the light from heaven and a booming voice telling them to "turn around".

@Spring, I completely understand the reasoning behind the decision; it was said a few times in this thread, and everybody knows how annoying it is to lose an inventory item when trying to open a door and missing the frob. I'm not questioning that. My question was just if I understood the mechanic correctly that the decision means that the use-button is going to be taken off the mouse-button and put on the keyboard. I guess it would have to be (I couldn't imagine the other way around where frob is put on the keyboard), but I just didn't see it explicitly stated. For my mouse (which doesn't have a wheel), I already need to go to the keyboard to scroll through inventory items with Tab (or is the mouse wheel just to weapon-cycle? I don't even know), so it's already a bit of a pain when I'm in a rush. Maybe the thinking is that it is not any *more* annoying to put the use key on the keyboard than a cycle-key (or maybe it's worse because now you have to fumble for two keys, cycle and use, instead of just one?). On the other hand, with the classical system it often happens that the inventory item disappears automatically right before I want to use it (to facillitate dual frob use, presumably). Does the new system keep an inventory item always usable once it's set-up, or does it also disappear after a while?

Just a clarification question ... if you have separated a use-object and frob button, does that mean that the use button has been taken off the mouse and put on the keyboard -- so the mouse now has weapon-use & frob, but if you wanted to use a health potion or mine on-the-fly you'd have to find the key on the keyboard? My intuition was that frob and use were integrated to have a good amount of interaction kept on the mouse, particularly the stuff you might be doing on-the-fly, like running through doors you need to open, using a weapon, using a health potion as you're getting pelted, or blowing the horn of Alarus just as the burricks start charging. (I'm sure you have all thought about all the issues and have made a good decision, and have thought about the trade-offs; I'm just wondering about the mechanics and if I understand what's going on.)

Hey, happy birthday, Schatten. I can only say that turning 30 feels pretty cool, actually ... even though it was only a few months ago for me. You really can't get away with considering yourself a kid anymore!

There's a known history of music publishers bribing radio stations for play-time of songs; every once and a while you hear about it. I don't think game producers are necessarily above it any more than the music industry, esp as the whole game industry seems perpetually on thin ice. I would think that EA is a little too established and risk-adverse to be that stupid, though. But it could be like the Nixon syndrome ... so established you get paranoid.

Yes, another example of misunderstood iconography. Dragons still have a good connotation in the East; shame they lost that in the West. I'd think there are flags that are worse, though. In fact, I think a lot (if not most) flags have a little tainted pedigree somewhere or another. Turkey's flag is apparently (a metaphor for) the crecent moon that Ataturk saw reflected in the pool of British blood on the eve of its independence struggle from being a UK mandate. The German flag, I've heard, is the transformation from the black darkness of foreign rule to the gold glory of independence through the red blood of its struggle for independence ... or something. My personal favorite is Mozambique, which literally has an AK-47 emblazoned right in the middle, lol. Not much ambiguity there.

I was thinking it's already in post-production. I stumbled into a script for Indiana Jones IV once and had to stop myself from reading it because I want to see it fresh.

That would be Calendra's Legacy, only probably the most renoun FM set there is.

Wow ... I didn't notice it at all!