JediMaster

That reminds me of a missed opportunity for Mace Windu's dialogue in the SW prequels.

"I am sick and tired of these MF'ing Sith!"

Sum of All Fears was a great Cold War book, but the film was updated away from that, unfortunately.

I still maintain Cardinal of the Kremlin was the best Cold War film that was never made.

Considering how impossible it is to make out the ground targets from altitude in the game, I've got no problem with ground target labels. The graphics just aren't good enough to allow for anything "real" there. In air-air missions, your radar and AWACS and wingmen should allow you to leave them off.

In Il-2, for example, I find the labels less necessary because the graphics allow visual detection at a useful range!

I have a separate SF2E-only install at June 09 patch levels for NF4+. I probably should've done that for SF2V and the A&G Expansion for it, but too late now!

We got used to the nice 2 year gap between the summer 06 and late 08 patches for SF1x series games, but TK is back to more regular updates and that always leads to mod issues with updates/releases. Separate installs is the best way for mods!

Small/disadvantaged businesses. Basically a form of contracting welfare. Big companies win contracts and then the gov't insists a certain percentage (I think in my company's case it's 15%) of the business must be subcontracted out to SDBs. Could our company do that same work quicker, for less, and with greater effect? Undoubtedly, but it's not our call. The gov't passed a law to make sure these small companies get a piece of the gov't contracting pie.

I'm not sure what you're asking there.

Prop pitch and mixture won't work unless you have complex engine management turned on. If it's off, all that is done for you.

4.09m is the latest patch for Il-2:1946 only. I don't recall if 4.09 is all-inclusive or if you need to install 4.08 first...

If you have the older Il-2 games I think they stopped at 4.04.

I played (but never really got into) WC 1 and 2 a little bit. The big one was WC3, as mentioned. That was awesome. Especially with Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell, and Tom Wilson...I remember him as Maniac as much as I remember him as Biff Tannen! WC4 wasn't as good a story but it had better graphics and combat, and then WC5/Prohpecy had the worst story, almost none of the characters left, but really good graphics and combat.

I also of course played X Wing, TIE Fighter, X vs TIE, and X Wing Alliance. XWA had the best effects and all, but the mission design wasn't as good as the first 2 games. I did play XvT and XWA online quite a bit in the 90s...remember MS' Zone??

The first Freespace game was quite fun, and I got the expansion for it as well. For some reason I missed/skipped FS2 and never got around to it later, even though I had it installed a couple of years ago with the whole FS2Open thing but I still never played it more than an hour or so. Same with B5:IFH.

So I can't really choose between WC3 and TIE Fighter, or X Wing and WC4, or XWA and WC Prophecy. I'm just a fan of both!

Oh, except the WC film. That was amazingly poor for how good it should have been. Freddie Prinze Jr I guess should've been the clue.

Captain, how soon can you land?

"I can't say."

"You can tell me, I'm a doctor."

"No, I mean I just don't know."

"Can you make a guess?"

"Not for another 2 hours."

"You can't take a guess for another 2 hours?"

"No, we can't land for another 2 hours."

7th Guest...that reminds me of the time I spent playing Myst and its sequels, up until Riven I think. At that point I walked away from the series and that style of game and never went back.

I will just state for the record that I fundamentally disagree with the concept of putting platforms under the soles in order to make the heels longer. They didn't do that until the last 15 years or so and I think it's lame.

My wife almost never wears heels, either. As in more than a couple of inches, I mean.

Part of that is the ridiculous SDB legislation. You can get a quote for that $2 hammer, but then you're forced by law to contract/subcontract that purchase out to a company owned by a minority or veteran who gets to basically buy it for you and ship it to you and tack on an increased cost.

Another part can be by tying them into O&M contracts, so although the hammer only costs $2 to buy NOW, over the life of the contract the amount you've paid to have say 100 hammers in working order and available can come to $700/hammer easy.

As a big Wing Cmdr and X Wing/TIE Fighter fan (I even liked WC Prophecy, despite its lack of all the characters we really liked), I tried hard to get into X3. I got the feeling I was in a big sandbox but I had no idea where to go. I spent a couple of hours with it and finally gave up.

Unless X3 TC provided more of a "tutorial" beginning than the original X3 did, I get the feeling it's one of those games that are fun if you know it but if you don't the barrier to entry is too high for casual players. Like Falcon 4 was...only reason I still fly F4 is after 11 years of flying it I just KNOW it.

To be clear, advanced shaders are DX10-based, so if you don't have Win Vista or 7 and a DX10-capable video card, you won't see that.

Anyway, I plan on getting FE2 because TK deserves it (and so do I!)

It was quite good. However, I'm not going to go see every film released in 3d in 3d. It costs too much. Only for special films like this will I do that.

Still no ETA?

I can just imagine an entire musical number devoted to "Put...the candle...back."

L4D2 is good, improves upon the original, but in some ways is less impressive because it breaks little new ground. Well, except the melee stuff which is pretty fun.

Arma2 came out this summer, a great game after a few patches have put down the worst bugs.

FEAR2 came out in Feb I think, good game, but somehow fails to achieve what the original did despite looking better.

I didn't get MW2 because I don't play MP that's not coop vs bots (ie SP with other humans on my side, like L4D), so $60 for that short SP game isn't worth it. I still don't have CoD4 or CoD:WaW because of the same thing, I'm waiting for them to be cheap.

DCS: Black Shark was released on DVD this spring, but was technically released digitally the end of last year (although I think few people bought it then), so you could put that in the running.

SF2 was released around the same time, with SF2V/E/I this year, but they're also improvements upon SF2, which is in turn an improvement over WoI, which is in turn...

For driving fans, Race On is good, but Race 06/07/GTR Evo/STCC/Race On is pretty much like the SF2 series...each release is standalone yet will merge with the previous. Each comes with a new set of cars and tracks as well as many from previous releases if you only bought the one.

I'm trying to remember what else came out this year...

Anyway, I'm not sure what I'd consider the best!

Since the in-laws are going to NM for New Years (yeah...really), there's no one to watch the toddler, so we'll be staying at home as we usually do and just celebrate privately after the ball drops...hours after the toddler is in bed.

Don't forget they increased the price by $10, and pirates love to justify their actions by claiming it's too expensive.

Sure, I just did that yesterday. The field in the machine is calibrated especially to scramble these things.

It has to be a moving field, a static field like one of those uber magnets likely generates will wipe SOME but not all. I once tried a heavy magnet on a VHS tape, just put the tape on top of it for a few minutes...I couldn't see a single effect. Then I started moving the tape and magnet all around each other like an electron orbiting a proton...the longer I did it, the more the tape degraded.

That's why I bring my old HDDs to work now...we have an industrial degausser here that's certified for destruction of classified drives, tapes, and disks. It not only trashes the media, the motors in the HDD no longer even work properly! You can hear the stuff get thrown around inside when the capacitors discharge and the strong magnetic field is briefly generated.

No one's getting anything off my old stuff.

Tom Cruise is going to be in some action flick with Cameron Diaz next year.

As for Holmes, apparently all the Doyle-heads think the character is close to the books, even though the story is original.

I got my house, but if we'd known we'd have lived there longer than 5 years (the market was booming big time when we'd decided to get our "real" house, so we're still in the "started") we'd have had them make multiple changes to the layout so it would've been better for long-term living.

My daughter was born last year.

That's pretty much the sum of the great things that happened in the past 10 years for me. Oh, PC tech has progressed and things look better, even though I think overall I preferred the games released in the 90s as far as how they played...last X Wing game was 1999!!

So I have no fondness for this decade at ALL other than my daughter.

This is certainly the preeminent problem facing the Middle East today.

I think we can argue that the years since its retirement have definitely sucked!

I still remember her in Clueless, before she went blond. Of course, King of the Hill will never die.