Donnervogel

Well the lack of food didn't cause any major resistance in North Korea in the past 40 years just like such lack didn't cause an active major resistance in Iraq and the reason is quite simple. Most people see the USA, Japan and South Korea to be responsible for their misery (and they're not completly wrong) and Kim is their great leader that tries to save them. By being loyal to him you get better access to food. As you might know, it's a planned economy and that means all ressources are in the posession of the state thus the state can widely control where people get enough food and where not. So any rebellious region could simply be starved. Besides there's a complete lack of any real political power that opposes Kim Yong Il (because people that would dare such "disappear"). Point is; as long as Kim Yong Il controls the country and the army so tightly there is no room for a major insurgency. There is no doubt that many people would like things to change but they have nobody to turn to. The state and the secret police is very effective in cleaning out any opposing opinion. You see insurgencies happen in places where the government has low control and there is room for other powers to form. In North Korea that is not given. The Government has total Control over the country. However. If the government was about to collapse there is a chance for rebellions but it's hard to destabilise a government that has brainwashed most of their people in fanatics. Whatever. I think North Korea is relatively save with he launch of the missile. I don't think China and Russia will support major sanctions against them and would support North Korea incase of unilateral action by the US and it's allies with basic ressources (food, etc.) just like they already do.

Well, hunger is usually a great motivator. Hunger yes but dying from lack of food goes beyond hunger

You'd have to start equipping them with food to prevent them from starving ;(

erm attacking north korea that claims to have an A-Bomb and has for a long time already missiles that easily reach south korea and japan might not be a good idea Unlike afghanistan they might make a "missile strike" of their own in return which would only provoke escalation of the conflict and as I see it none of the local powers (including USA) is ready for a war at the moment.

Uhm as I understood it he didn't say Jihad was a "peaceful struggle for inner peace" ONLY. He said it was an aspect of Jihad that is often forgotten.

Just wondering if anyone else can't get enough of the canadian indie band Broken Social Scene and related bands/artists like Metric, The Most Serene Republic, Apostle of Hustle, etc.

That may have been true in WW2 and in training, but nowadays a station broadcasting just about anything is going to see a hell of a lot of action from the sky if a real "international live-fire excercise" starts! Same for artillery. eh well of course if you fight an enemy with modern technology and air superiority the communication infrastructure is one of the first targets. But it doesn't change the fact that service in these facilities isn't action packed unless you consider getting blasted to pieces by a bunker busting bomb action

well just saying singal troops are much needed for every troop branch and unfortunatly for action lovers most needed for leadership support and that means most of them get deployed doing what eizei describes in some HQ/Command post far away from any action and with all luxuries of the civil life - luckily for me Of course there are also radiomen and such with combat units but those are rather the exception and - depending on army - often just specialised memebers of the combat unit branch and not from the signal corps. We at "work" (notice the DVDs)

Hmm how is it in Canada. Can you chose your role when you sign up in detail or do you get you function later. Because I'm a (conscripted) singal troops member of the swiss army and my job doesn't involve much running around with radio on the back or anything else that one would call "action". I operate directional beam antennas, all kinds of radio antennas, radio access points and integrated military network nodes and it's ususally very boring and involves sitting in a hidden bunker with all the high ranked guys for a week or more. Persoanlly I'm quite happy as I can have fun watching movies on army computers and don't have to annoy myself with the "infantry crap" we had to do in basic training. that way service goes by fast and I can go home again But if you're looking for some "action" you should take care to get some frontline function because there's allways a HUGE infrastructure in the background of any frontline operation these days and that is especially true for data communication infrastructure in modern warfare (My brigade is the biggest of the swiss army).

Overall you raise certain good points and I congratulate you to this good (even if somewhat freakish ) article. But there are some things I don't totally agree with. Me being a conscription soldier, not even slightly motivated to do all that real world army crap but still having somewhat of an experience seeing/working with fellow conscripts aswell as professionals I don't share your point of view that in games everything should be modelled like if the player was an highly trained operative. I think simulation of skill is something the game also needs. Plus even highly trained soldiers sometimes simply aren't very good shooters... this might have various reasons but I don't really want to discuss this to death. What I say. Every person has certain specialities it can do well and others it can't. And this needs to be a part of the game implementation somehow. Now I have two systems in mind. You either make some semi RPGish aproach of "classes". Like if you play a special operative you will have more accurate aiming or what I would prefer... the abillity to get your aiming right more quickly (because in reality the problem isn't necesserily that you can't aim but the time it takes you to aim correctly - especially in combat situations). This system can be much more worked out. I think you get the idea. The other system is more "mission maker" responsibility. Like you assign a skill to every person that is going to take part in a mission. This is of course assuming we use a somewhat similar system to OFP player slots. That way you could assign medium skill to soldiers that are supposed to be conscripts like when you play with FDF mod or something like that. And you could assign high skill to soldiers that are supposed to be professionals. This would impact sevral things ingame like your abillity to align your aiming correctly in less time. Now I see the general problem some people might have. They don't want to have their aiming "skills" restricted by the game. I see that problem and to a certain way you can't get around it if you want reality. Real world shooting (not on firing ranges) is something that rarely is extremly accurate even with professional soldiers. And I have yet so see system that would even slightly simulate the difficulty of correct aiming in stress situations... soo we either end up in a sniping frenzy or we have to accept that the game is going to artificially limit our aiming capabillities in some way... EDIT: concerning real world accuracy in combat... what I mean with "not extremly accurate" is not that it's very difficulty for a highly trained soldier to hit someone on typical engagement ranges of 30-150m but that it's not "pop pop pop pop - yeah baby all headshots with my trusty ironsights while under enemy fire" - you get the idea...

Overall you raise certain good points and I congratulate you to this good (even if somewhat freakish ) article. But there are some things I don't totally agree with. Me being a conscription soldier, not even slightly motivated to do all that real world army crap but still having somewhat of an experience seeing/working with fellow conscripts aswell as professionals I don't share your point of view that in games everything should be modelled like if the player was an highly trained operative. I think simulation of skill is something the game also needs. Plus even highly trained soldiers sometimes simply aren't very good shooters... this might have various reasons but I don't really want to discuss this to death. What I say. Every person has certain specialities it can do well and others it can't. And this needs to be a part of the game implementation somehow. Now I have two systems in mind. You either make some semi RPGish aproach of "classes". Like if you play a special operative you will have more accurate aiming or what I would prefer... the abillity to get your aiming right more quickly (because in reality the problem isn't necesserily that you can't aim but the time it takes you to aim correctly - especially in combat situations). This system can be much more worked out. I think you get the idea. The other system is more "mission maker" responsibility. Like you assign a skill to every person that is going to take part in a mission. This is of course assuming we use a somewhat similar system to OFP player slots. That way you could assign medium skill to soldiers that are supposed to be conscripts like when you play with FDF mod or something like that. And you could assign high skill to soldiers that are supposed to be professionals. This would impact sevral things ingame like your abillity to align your aiming correctly in less time. Now I see the general problem some people might have. They don't want to have their aiming "skills" restricted by the game. I see that problem and to a certain way you can't get around it if you want reality. Real world shooting (not on firing ranges) is something that rarely is extremly accurate even with professional soldiers. And I have yet so see system that would even slightly simulate the difficulty of correct aiming in stress situations... soo we either end up in a sniping frenzy or we have to accept that the game is going to artificially limit our aiming capabillities in some way... EDIT: concerning real world accuracy in combat... what I mean with "not extremly accurate" is not that it's very difficulty for a highly trained soldier to hit someone on typical engagement ranges of 30-150m but that it's not "pop pop pop pop - yeah baby all headshots with my trusty ironsights while under enemy fire" - you get the idea...

well... IMHO BIS doesn't put much important on such accuracy. I think they're just gonna throw in pretty much all of the units/vehicles we know from OFP/VBS plus some shiny new ones to get funky pics in game magazines and to sell their game. I don't have much hopes for the campaign also... it probably will be some massive onslaught where they try to include all kinds of units for the "boah" effect to new players. But to be honest I don't care much about that also. I want new features for the modders/mission makers and then, hopefully we will get everything we ever wanted from the community After all there is reason why I only played FDF mod in the last 1.5 years where there aren't many BIS units/mission left

well whatever. tha main "problem" is that the UN does not want to become a confict party no matter what it does. and thus the rules of engagement (and equippment) of UN forces are often very limited not allowing them of actually do much if some aggressive group decides to do something against another. mostly UN forces are just there to either observe or to "show force" and hope that will be enough. but eventually the conflict parties know the UN won't really do much against them in short term if they decide to have a frenzy. those things are not to be confused with foreign troops operating in a country under UN mandate but not as a UN force per se. Like the NATO (SFOR/KFOR/IFOR) in the balkans. It was/is a NATO (or EU --> EUFOR lately IIRC) mission under UN mandate and not a UN mission.

now that argument is wrong. The low memory is of course a problem performance wise. So if you have a OS that uses up more memory for improvements you don't need it's obviously the better choice to use a OS that gives you everything you need and uses less memory. When you have limited memory you will end with better performance despire the "superior" ressource management of XP (XP on my computer just makes it a pain to use as I have to wait longer for everything to happen and when I work with some program that requires more memory than the editor the whole system is crippled) I agree that XP has some unique features that some people might need and thus I don't say "don't buy XP because it's crap". I just say that if you have limited hardware ressources be sure to check if you really need what XP offers (I know I don't). If not you might be better off with w2k. This might change in the future though as w2k isn't supported anymore but so far I never ran into problems as the w2k architecture is so similar to win XP. My guess is that w2k will allways be able to run virtually all XP programs as I think it won't take too long until Vista (or whatever else will be "the new thing" and then they probably will also cancel support for XP.)

If you're going to school or studying at uni or something like that, there's a special offer for most microsoft programs under something that's called "student's license" here (non commercial use only). Anyway I got w2k really cheaply with that. About 1/3 of the price I pay in stores.

well for me it's kinda different. If everything turns out well w2k will be the last microsoft product I'll use. Generally I like microsoft products but their plans for interfering with my privacy are something that makes me evade to mostly open source software/OS even though I'm often having a hard time with them. I guess I'll get used to them.

I love w2k. It uses much less memory than XP (unless you heavily modify default XP theme/design but even then it still uses more) and thus my computer almost never runs into problems despite having "only" 512 MB of RAM. XP just brings many eye candy and automatation features I don't want and you can't turn them all off. It also annoys the shit out of me with the way it handles things more the "casual computer user" way even though it says "pro" on the package. For my needs it never offered any advantage so I stay with w2k and a faster system. You can tell me what you want but I never had any security troubles I wouldn't also have with XP and I haven't found any feature in XP that would make it any better considering my limited memory. XP just eats up all the memory. slowing everything down and doesn't offer anything I couldn't do with w2k. EDIT: Yes I used XP on this computer too and I have to deal with it on a daily basis on other computers with more ressources. I still dislike it.

eh? Is it just me or is this the most pointless topic of the year?

If you mouse over the different "coerce", "joke" responses etc. you'll see the character's facial expression change on each option. If a wedge is full (completely orange) on, say "boast", then you have a big effect by clicking on that. If that person likes "boast" responses then you'll get lots of points by clicking on it when the wedge is full. But don't use a full wedge when the person hates that response! The problem is that you have to click on all four responses during a round, including the responses that the person hates. So ideally, you have to click on the responses in such an order so that you use the full wedge on the best option and the little wedge on the worst option. This results in more disposition. The tricky part is that the wedges rotate each time you choose a response, so you have to choose a correct order. The wedges are randomly placed at the beginning of each round, so sometimes you are at a disadvantage from the start. But don't think on it too long, the disposition steadily falls while you wait. If you are an Apprentice in Speechcraft you can spin the wheel yourself once per round, which helps a LOT. You typically need lots of rounds to raise someone's disposition until they like you enough, when the disposition is maxed out a message will let you know. Some rounds you will fail, and some rounds you will succeed. Just keep trying the game, you will get the right feel and rhythm in a while, it took me some time to figure it out myself. it's actially quite easy. In the first round check out the reaction of the people by hovering the mouse over all 4 wedges and watching their face and then remember the two positive ones and the two negative ones (it's different for every person). Now an easy strategy for success is always to make sure you get the smallest wedge on the two negative ones and whatever is left on the posititves. If you can time it to get the biggest wedge on the most posititve or even two positives it's much better. Later when you gain speechcraft skill you can rotate the wedges once so you can have better strategies. Oh and try to be quick The disposition decreases over time so you wan't to be quick.

well for me it seems impossible to get full skill gain as whenever I fight I will very fast reach my 10 major skillpoints which will freeze my modifiers. Imho there's a huge flaw in the design that after the level up you get your modifiers frozen. Because if I don't level and devellop the skills further, when I then level later I will almost imemdiatly level again with crappy modifiers again. It's just like a vicious circle and I can't escape it. My skills progress to fast and I can't control them so the modifer freeze kicks in too early. I tried adjusting the difficulty setting but somehow it doens't work very well for me. There are some regions when I set it in those regions I see nothing really happening and then I set it only a little tiny bit to more to the left and it all gets ridicolously easy. Your modifiers dont stop Wildo Yes they freeze. After you get the level up messages you can devlop your skills but you won't be able to change the attribute modifiers anymore. So if I get my 10 skillpoints after about 2 hours playing I ususally have something like +3 on agility, +2 on strenght and +2 on speed and nothing else much. I'd really need more endurance for example. but I rarley get more. I can train other skills for that to some extend but as they always inolve fighting I rately can archieve more than +2 on endurance. The char is really messed up because it's so specialised on what I mainly do and the freeze is artificially limiting my progress.

well for me it seems impossible to get full skill gain as whenever I fight I will very fast reach my 10 major skillpoints which will freeze my modifiers. Imho there's a huge flaw in the design that after the level up you get your modifiers frozen. Because if I don't level and devellop the skills further, when I then level later I will almost imemdiatly level again with crappy modifiers again. It's just like a vicious circle and I can't escape it. My skills progress to fast and I can't control them so the modifer freeze kicks in too early. I tried adjusting the difficulty setting but somehow it doens't work very well for me. There are some regions when I set it in those regions I see nothing really happening and then I set it only a little tiny bit to more to the left and it all gets ridicolously easy.

I must say the game started up promising but I'm now lvl 17 and it's becoming more and more unplayable due to the system taht lets the enmies level with you. Only they seem to gain much more strenght (and of course superior gear) than I do as a total newbie to the series with a role playing oriented character. I had some thinking about it today and there are two options that come to my mind. 1. build a totally powergaming oriented character with unlocical skill settings (frome the role playing perspective) to ensure that you gain maximal modifiers for attributes each time you level. This would have you probably end up pretty much godlike in the end and doesn't suit the role I wanted to play. This would involve setting most of your primary skills you want as "minor" skills ingame and setting skills you don't really need as major skills so that you can control leveling up and continue fighting. because normally you would fight and have your combat skills as major skills. This would however lead to you gaining enough major skillpoints to level rather quickly when you fight monsters. once you get the level up messages the modifiers for your attributes get frozen and when you level you can maybe only assign 2 or 3 points to an attribute. However if you could prevent leveling up before you want it you could fight as much as you want and make sure you get +5 modifier on every attribute you want to raise. then you could get 10 major skillpoints from things you can control (like speechcraft, alchemy , etc) and level up at maximum gain of +5 attribute points. this will surely make your character a lot stronger and most combat skills rise rather quickly anyway so you don't need the bonus of setting it as major skill. 2. don't level, stay at low level until you gained adequate skills to survive in higher levels. Of course the problem there is that you won't be making very much money and the game would probably be pretty boring. right now I made my wood elf thief and marksman and it's totally unplayable. To survive in even small dugeons I need to heavily exploit the AIs weaknesses or put such heavy use on magical weapons that I can't pay to reacharge from the rather ridiculous rewards you get from most quests. But as it is now it's really no fun. After 2 enemies head back to city and recharge the weapons for horendous prices or snipe them without the AI reacting because of AI flaws/AI getting stuck in difficult terrain at cost of lots of arrows that are also expensive. I can't even travel in the wilderness anymore. If I can't fast travel to different places I get torn to pieces by the animals that even exceed the running speed of my black horse sometimes. Before you begin. Yes I use sneak attack, power attack, block whatever there is. I pretty much know how it works now. It's just the enemies grow so strong I can't keep up without exploiting. For me it's just ridicolous that leveling has almost only negative consequences to me. And not leveling doesn't cut it aswell. Also I actually need to level because I need to loot those superior armors of the NPCs so I can sell them and cover the costs I have :/ Where is the logic that some NPC farmer that never fights will grow stronger and stronger when I fight and develop my skills and he's not? It started out interesting but by now I'm pretty much losing interest because it's ruining my roleplaying and forcing me into power gaming. it takes me at least 2 hours real time just to steal together enough stuff and sell it to be able to buy the next set of arrows/potion/magical weapon recharges to clear a small dungeon of like 10 monsters.

only I'm nowhere near a hippy nor communist and at best slightly left of the centre. Oh and my origin is eastern european jewish. So much about your knowledge of people So anything to comment on the matter or just wanting to bash at me?

Or maybe they were just right with Iraq in that sense. Wouldn't running out of (cheap) crude oil be a threat to national security for a nation that is so largely dependant on automobiles with no major alternate public transport infrastructure? A nation that consumes by far the most oil per capita (dunno about total numbers but they will surely rank high up too despite the relatively small population density in the USA)? A nation that produces about 1/4 of the world's CO2 emissions and refuses to switch to major alternative power sources? Imagine the riots if, god forbid, the people would have to pay the same gas prices as europeans. Imagine the economic breakdown when oil becomes unavailable/unaffordable for many smaller companies. All that poses a risk to national security. So what you want to do when you have a strong military and no will to reform? Yes! Invade those filthy oil rich bastards and secure the oil reserves for yourself so you can continue as you did all the time and don't have to worry about making inconveient changes to your life. Ok this was a slightly onesided rant. I'm sure there are many other reasons why it was profitable to go into this war for certain people but I truly don't think it had anything to do with protecting iraq's neighbours or the oh so powerful iraqi military threatening anyone except it's own citizens.

hmm last thing I've heard was that the prosecution was going well and they were close to sentence him. Dunno where you get your information but media here, in germany, and also the mainstream english media didn't seem to be so pessimistic. It was a long process but that was because of the huge number of evidence that had to be presented and because milosevic used the court as kind of political stage and disrupted the process from time and also because of milosevic's health problems (why do all dictators/leaders that have to face trial allways become so sick anyway )