Mr. GOH!

I generally tip a dollar a drink if I order from the bar. It's just polite. Plus the bartenders are likely not paid a living wage and depend on tips. You don't have to tip everywhere, ThursdayNext. Just table service (although there is a small, but growing trend for medium-to-high-end places to ban tips and to pay their staffs high wages), cabbies (but not Uber drivers), valets, coat room attendants, porters, non-independent barbers, and food delivery people. I prefer the European system, but I nonetheless try to tip well. 10% for table service here is low. The standard here is 15%-20%, depending on where you are and the expense of the service. In NYC it seems like 20% is standard even for adequate service, while elsewhere 1% is standard. 10% is cheapskate territory, unless the service was awful. If the food was awful, you can also tip 10%, but I always try to let the server know that s/he should take the tip and cut out the kitchen, even though that's almost never possible due to staff tip pooling.

Re: Nintendo and Amazon - Two dickish companies just being dicks to each other.

DA:O had a storage chest in DLC and DA2 had a storage chest from the get-go. DA:I mixes what you like from DA:O with the streamlined combat from DA2. My biggest gripe with DA:I is that there are so many throwaway quests rather than involved and interested follower quests or meaty sidequests. I also never liked the very limited number of enemy types in the DA games since DA:O. It's such a shame; there should be a much, much, much wider variety of demon enemies, at the very least. Bosses and even mini bosses should be unique demons and should look unique and have unique attacks.

France is home of the Foreign Legion, which remains hardcore. Foreigners who join and are wounded or killed are immediately made French citizens under the concept that they are French for having spilled blood for France.

Please, folks, don't encourage Nintendo's bullshit behavior. Let it die with dignity.

Upgrade to Wii U or 3DS and you'll finally be able to play all the games you played to death when you were 10! Plus, buy some tacky plastic figures, you idiots love that shit, right? Nintendo is truly innovative.

That "Nintendo" branded 3DS looks really good. It makes me think of 70's and 80's sci fi movies, like Alien or the Abyss. I like it.

TLoU had one of the strongest narratives and best characterizations of any game I've ever played. Not that it's my favorite, but that it is probably one of the best-crafted games ever made. It's odd to see a review that dismisses it without really making a case as to why it sucks. The game is ultimately about Ellie and Joel's struggle to survive and their relationship and not about the decade or so between the prologue and the story proper. The game reveals enough information about their pasts for the player to have a pretty good idea as to who Ellie and Joel are as characters, and good idea about how Joel spent the years between his daughter's death and the main part of the game. A formal, prosaic recounting of what happened would be far less interesting than what is in the game now. And the enemy design was quite good; the combat and stealth sections always felt tense, but fair. Naughty Dog also does an excellent job of using limited enemy types in different configurations and in a variety of excellently-designed gameplay spaces to make every encounter feel different and exciting. TLoU may be the most tightly-designed AAA game I have ever played. It's not my favorite game, but I cannot deny it is an all-around excellent game. Edit: Also, Kreia might be one of the most surprising and interesting characters in all of the Star Wars universe. She is definitely one of the best female characters in popular media in the past few decades. Still tough for a video game character to rival those in the best novels, but Kreia compares quite favorably to any movie, TV show, or video game character.

Selma Great look at Dr. King's involvement in the Selma march in 1965 as well as how the Civil Rights Movement organized and operated as well as the tension between King's organization, local activists, and President Johnson. Quite relevant these days, too. Some critics, including some historians, say that Johnson is not portrayed fairly, but I disagree; Johnson had tried to avoid a fight in Congress regarding Jim Crow laws because he felt he was wasting political capital he needed to either get out of Vietnam or pass more Great Society legislation. He also felt that revisiting voting rights a year after the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which forbade states from restrciting the right to vote based on race) passed would squander political capital on an issue already addressed. The movie highlights this and humanizes Johnson quite well even though the aforementioned critics seem to want Johnson lionized in every portrayal.

RE: DA:I ending hate - I think the final battle could have been better, and that's the criticism I see most. The battle felt rote and unexciting. I also wish there was more in the game to show how the Inquisition you built affected the otucome of the battle. Something along the lines of the Denerim fight in Origins where different sets of allies would appear depending on the choices you made. Or, even better, something like the suicide mission in ME2 (even though the final boss in ME2 was dumb as hell). The DA:I ending really felt like a standard video game boss fight and did not live up to the excellence of the rest of the game. Hell,

The GTX 970 was the best GPU purchase I have ever made. Welcome to the club, mbm!

I understand where you're coming from, Fred, and I want to be clear; my intent is only to explore what is considered an "act of war," because I feel it is a very nebulous phrase that is used in an incredibly jingoistic fashion as if it were as plain as day. We are in total agreement that the term 'war" can be stretched to cover a very wide variety of situations. An economic war is very different from one involving the military; I would say economic warfare, consisting of sanctions, tariffs, and other policies is a different beast than the sort of military warfare the term "act of war" implies, at least to my mind. That said, if someone were to say that they believe the Sony hack is an act of economic war, I don't think I would argue or investigate further, except to comment that it's an inept act of economic warfare as it really does nothing to deprive the US of any meaningful strategic resources; the US is not appreciably weakened by the Sony hack. I am assuming that the DPRK is ultimately behind the attack for the sake of the discussion. I harbor doubts about the extent of the involvement of the DPRK and think it's likely we'll never know the extent of its involvement. I would definitely consider the hack an attack and psychological operation (psy ops). I could be persuaded it was also a species of terrorism, though I dislike the term "terrorism". I do not think the term "illegal" implies that whatever act characterized as illegal could also be construed as legal. Chopping off the head of an innocent bystander is illegal and everyone knows it, as is hacking a company's records and publicizing them.Yes, there is an international legal framework for tariffs that could legitimize certain tariffs or at least determine whether a tariff is illegal or legal. There is not, however, an international legal framework for for unilateral economic sanctions, especially against nations that are not party to any treaty. I think the US sanctions against NK, or even those formerly in place against Cuba, might qualify as acts of war under your definition. I do not think any operation that attempts to deprive an opponent of a resource is military; it is more apt to say any operation involving the military is military, and not all aggressive military operations are acts of war. To go back to me earlier examples, there are many military intelligence operations that seek to deprive an opponent of information that I do not think necessarily constitute acts of war, in the sense of the definition I have proposed earlier in this thread. You seem to be saying a unilateral action intended to damage another nation without a commensurate advantage to the attacker is more warlike than an action that also measurably benefits the attacker. I do not think that works out in reality; wars have historically involved the attacker seeking to gain an economic advantage over the defender. If anything, an attack that seeks only to economically harm the defender falls more in line with what popularly constitutes criminal behavior or terrorism than military conflict.

I remember a lot of good reviews tempered by moderate to mild criticism of the humor.

The damage to the nation state is very attenuated and is equal to damage caused by what you term economic policies. Many tariffs are illegal under the WTO agreements as well; why is one method of economic conflict an act of war, while the other is not?

Anything that might disrupt another nation's economy is an act of war? So our import tariffs on cars are an act of war against Germany, Japan, and South Korea?

Destiny is a bad game; get over it and play something good, folks. That said, here are all of my recent Steam game purchases: Thief Transistor Jagged Alliance: Back in Action Resident Evil 6 Child of Light Age of Wonders 3 Bioshock Infinite Season Pass I'm too tired to find pics, sorry.

Saturnine Tenshi went and also got me The Evil Within. Thank you, Saturnine Tenshi, for your unbridled generosity!

I know that's a very vague, political, and subjective definition, and it isn't mine alone. Essentially, any act could be an act of war under that definition, and the interesting thing to me is the nature of the arguments as to why a certain act, such as the Sony hack, would or would not justify an armed response.

What strategic resource did the Sony hack remove or seek to remove, Fredeffinchopin? There is no real usable legal definition of an act of war on its own; there are legal definitions for what constitutes an act of war when the phrase is used in context in the text of specific laws, such as under US Code section 2331, which pertains to federal terrorism laws. To my mind, "act of war" means one of three things: (1) an act giving rise to a legitimate declaration of war against the actor (bombing Pearl Harbor); (2) an act undertaken during armed conflict between nation-states that advances the interests of one participant in the conflict at the expense of other participants; and (3) an act intended to provoke a war. These are, of course, general categories. But to call something like the Sony hack an act of war would dilute the meaning of "war." Nobody was killed. Nobody intended anybody to get killed. The ability of the US to wage war was not seriously affected. If anything, the hack was an act of cyberterrorism or even a psychological operation, but not an act of war.

Still not an act of war.

I don't think government disclosure of business secrets of a foreign corporation would have been considered an unambiguous act of war in olden times, either. I do not think England would have gone to war with France just because a French spy released the entire scripts to Shakespeare's plays (entire scripts were hot intellectual property at the time) with author's and thespians' notes.

As noted by several analysts, there was no indication early on that The Interview had anything to do with the hack. It was only after rampant speculation in the media that the alleged hackers began to reference the movie and threaten Sony should it be released to theaters. There is also some indication that the bad English in communications from the hackers is faked bad English in which the errors are not like those made consistently by native Korean speakers. The attack seems squarely aimed to damage Sony's reputation, which is not really an act of war. Sure, anything can be used to justify a war to a bloodthirsty or fearful populace, but that does not make everything an act of war. As far as cyber-attacks go, most intelligence-gathering operations involve hacking or overcoming security measures; are they not acts of war simply because the general public did not have access to the data gathered or the method of the hack? Hacking foreign businesses and governments to gather intelligence harms the target in that information thought secret and secure from the hacking party is no longer secret and secure from the hacking party and the hacking party may act on its new-found knowledge in ways that are against the target's interest. Both intelligence gathering and the Sony hack seek to damage their targets, just in different ways. What makes the Sony hack an act of war when intelligence gathering is not?

My guess is that the government is basing its statement on bad data or interference from interest groups within the government who see blaming NK as a way to get more resources, influence, or funding.

That's what I'm asking Ethan. My own view is that "act of war" is a descriptive category, not a prescriptive category. I do not believe that the Sony hack is an act of war because: (1) it was not intended to provoke a military response against NK; (2) although the US and NK do not have a mutually recognized peace agreement, they are not currently in armed conflict, so the hack isn't an act undertaken during a real state of war; and (3) I do not think it is sufficient grounds to justify an armed response from the US. Edit: I'm also somewhat skeptical that NK is actually behind the hack, after reading several articles by security experts criticizing the thin evidence presented by the government.