Battra92

Yes and no. If you just do a religious ceremony that doesn't mean anything legally speaking. The typical procedure is you go to the county courthouse and get a marriage license which is good after a 3-day waiting period, then you take that marriage license to the church and after the ceremony the married couple, the "officiant", and two witnesses sign the marriage license, at which point you are legally married. Then you have to file the marriage license back at the court house. You can also have a judge perform the marriage, but the procedure is the same except you do it in a courthouse (typically, though you could do it wherever you wanted) instead of a church and there's usually less ceremony associated with it. That actually varies from state to state. NY for example requires a 24 hour waiting period. Some states, such as Nevada, have no waiting period (which is why so many people elope in Vegas.) I don't know whether it was NY or a service from our preacher but the Pastor who married us filed the paperwork for us. We also got two marriage certificates. One from the State of New York and one from the Lutheran Church (not bad for a Methodist boy from the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts )

So here we are over a week into it and no upgrades to it. I wonder if thanks to the dickheads paying a penny before that they've opted not to have any surprises this time. So I may end up gifting my Steam code as WoG was the only game on that list that I found worth playing and I had it from HB1.

Since Sonic Colors was kicking my butt I went in my office and fired up Sonic CD and beat that. Again, I'm a little late to the party but I really enjoyed it. I think it was a bit easier than the classic cart based Sonics but not bad. Now I should dig out my Saturn for more retro Sega time.

It's the 9th Circuit Court which means absolutely nothing. It's going to the Supreme Court before all is said and done. As an addition I also believe it is HORRIBLE that gay marriage is being fought through the courts. This is something that should be decided at the ballots and in the state legislatures. To say that the state cannot create a law to govern those within its borders in terms of a legal contract is madness! To say that a state regulating marriage is illegal opens the door to incest and polygamy. I know people think that's a straw man argument but really, where should the line be drawn? Perhaps you feel the line should be drawn at two people but how can a court decide that based on a law being discriminatory? Anti-miscegenation laws were struck down in state legislatures or with ballot initiatives and that is the correct path for those who wish to legalize gay marriage.

Standard Operating Procedure for Unions, especially the teachers' unions. In fact most are nothing more than a money laundering scheme wherin money is taken from members (who are forced to pay) to give big donations to politicians who in turn send kickbacks to their union buddies.

Correction, Pseudo-intellectuals tend to vote Democrat. So do anti-religious bigots.

And if it makes ANYone feel better, the Birther stuff started in the Hillary Clinton camp. Also, I always wondered why states rights was always such a dirty word to people. Quite frankly I think 95% of what goes on in Massachusetts and needs any government action should be governed by the local towns and counties and the state. To me the Federal government as it stands is much too big and controlling. It's a huge waste to have 50 individual departments of education and then a massive Federal one. The states can take care of themselves, for the most part. The problem is we look to the Federal government to solve all woes when it should I'm backing either Gingrich or Santorum but would vote for Romney if he were the nominee. As a former (and possibly soon to be) citizen of the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Romneycare has a bad taste in my mouth and I fear he wouldn't support repealing Obamacare, which for many people I know, that's one of their main issues this election (that and seeing real improvement in the economy, not BLS adjusted statistics that say 15+% unemployment (depending on which poll you read) is really 8%. Remember when John Kerry was saying 4.5% was unacceptable under Bush? I also really question anyone who says Obama has done a good job. Hell, I know a lot of dyed in the wool liberals who swear they are staying home this November but of course, that's anecdotal evidence. Still, when I see many of my friends out of work or only working part time, my health insurance has gone way up, the military being sent on extra excursions to places like Libya (how's that for an anti-war president), seeing the debt so deep our great-grandkids will be paying it off and just seeing my paycheck buy less and less all the while the king and queen vacation in exotic places on separate taxpayer funded jet, golfing instead of legislating, regulate ours kids' school lunches, making illegal recess appointments, creating czars who have no Congressional approval or oversight and the only answer we get from the president is that it's a rich man's fault for not paying enough taxes. Really? But what do I know? I must be a racist who doesn't recycle.

I really liked Symphonia (I own but never played Symphonia 2) but people say Vesperia is great. I remember someone on the old board loved it (can't remember who, though.)

So why are you bitching again? Neither you nor I can say that since we don't work for the studio nor do we have access to their balance sheets. Sometimes cutting people is necessary. Work sucks. That's a fact of life. This isn't slave labor. After all, there are oodles of people lining up to work for free (as interns) for game companies. When supply of labor outstrips demand, why pay more for your workers? The market decides the cost of everything, including labor. We're also in a pretty shitty economy. Studios are being very conservative with their money and are betting on what they think are sure bets and aren't going much outside their comfort zones. Hollywood has been doing this for years and outside of a few indies here and there, most movies are cookie cutter shit, just like most games these days are cookie cutter FPS shit. So ... why do you hate publishers? I'm not getting that. Why are their jobs worth less than those of the developers? Games fail all the time. Sometimes a studio is able to absorb the cost and sometimes they can't. Most of the time when publishers fund a game it's to make a profit. Sometimes they lower their expectations and release something on a budget. Sometimes smaller scale can make bags of money, sometimes big productions can lose tons of cash.Even the experts get it wrong some times.

Congrats Ethan! You have passed Capitalism 101!

See, this is the sort of Capitalist vs the Workers argument that people have been making since Marx. The problem is that it's a fundamentally flawed one due to the fact that the developers are not slaves; they are employees or contractors. There is nothing stopping them from being independent studios. Companies do it all the time. You hire workers as contractors for a project. They then freelance to another studio or project. Unless you're a developer with lots of projects going on at once (like Nintendo) you're essentially paying people to be idle between projects. To use a non-gaming example, say I have a company and we're set to build a new warehouse. Now, most likely I would hire contractors to then build said warehouse and then after the building is done, I don't need a huge crew. Unless I have another warehouse to build, they are dead weight to the company. They are now free to build something for another person. Why is it stupid? Why should a company guarantee long term employment to a developer if it can't guarantee a business need for that person. Companies are in business to make money; employing people is merely a side effect. You can say it's not fair, but really, what is?

Tales of Vesperia is $18 at Play Asia (US version) http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-dh-49-en-70-2oyi.html That reminds me, I need to actually PLAY my copy of this.

For shmups, fighting games and other PC games (playing Sonic CD with an SNES controller is odd) From what I was reading you can even gut an old Saturn controller and put the PCB of this into it.

When you work for a company you are giving up your rights to any creative design you do on your own while working for the company. This is expected. You are bartering your creativity and labor for a wage or salary agreed upon by both employer and employee. If you don't like that model, you are free to start a sole proprietorship or work for an employee owned business like King Arthur Flour. I really am not seeing ANY moral high ground in pirating a game because it's original devs sold it to another publisher.

You're assuming Americans use a teaspoon straight from the drawer. We use measuring spoons and have for decades. I'm talking about the origin of cups and tsp, tsb etc. The home kitchen scale is a very recent addition to most kitchens. Heck, a lot of kitchens who don't bake still don't use a scale. Still, a scale makes life easier for liquid measure as I can pour 8oz of milk into my bowl and know I just added a cup.

If you can't cut along the lines, I don't know what to tell you. We buy our butter by the lb (or half lb in rare circumstances.) I've seen recipes that have butter by weight (in my King Arthur Flour cookbook IIRC) but many times we also do measurements by "sticks" or quarter lbs of butter. If you're making anything with flour, that you should always measure by weight. Volumetric measurements (whether ml or cups) is always widely inaccurate. Professionals have always known this although flour also is a pain because its properties depend on the moisture in the air so one day you might need 19oz and the next day you might need 19.1oz. Of course that last little extra is usually done by feel and letting the dough kind of take control. Other than that, everything else can be measured volumetrically but if you've got the scale out and your recipe has both you might as well use them. One of the reasons for the "Cup" measurement was that scales were notoriously expensive so volumetric measurements for home cooks were devised. Since most people had cups, teaspoons etc. one could approximate a recipe using household items. I used to work in the precious metals industry so I even had to learn Troy Ounces because that's what the world still uses on that.

I know a couple people who quit smoking and went to e-Cigs. Quite frankly, I think it's as close to quitting as they will ever get. They don't get the tar and other chemicals and thankfully their kids don't have to be around the second-hand smoke any more.

approximately 98.6F or 37C. Really, there no connection with either. Yeah, this would be a big issue for me since I'm not exactly going to convert my stove over to the German system. My Polder probe will display both but I know my meat safety temps already so why relearn them? We don't buy beer by the pint. I'm a teetotaler but a bottle I believe is 20oz. We do? Gee, I just put a few gallons in the wife's car today. Hope it wasn't liters. A cup is 8oz or half a pint. In liquid form that's half a pound. Specifically, I was referring to centigrade in which case it makes no difference what scale you use. Still, what difference does it make that I use a teaspoon instead of 5ml? Besides, I thought American food was horrid according to Europeans. If you want to talk fucked up systems, look at the pre-decimal British money. Three farthings and a haypenny. Americans had Dollars and cents long before the limeys.

Fahrenheit is a much better scale in regards to daily use. 0 is Cold, 100 is Hot as Hades. It's also not arbitrary as 0F is the freezing point of a saturated salt solution (brine) with 180 degrees separating the freezing and boiling point. I don't know if it was just London but in England outside of some packaged foods most everything was still Imperial or had both. I saw thermometers displaying both F and C. I saw clocks all in 12 hour time, the cars had MPH and signposts displayed in miles as far as I noticed. Heck, people refer to their weight in stones! Unless one is a surveyor or something, how often does one need to convert square feet into acreage? How often do you need to know the temperature in Celsius (an arbitrary scale that was flipped after old man Celsius's death) and relate it to 100? I think pointing out again and again that Americans resisted metrication due to its impracticality and no actual benefit in daily life is really the sign of international snobbery. What do you care if I tell you that someone is 6'1" tall and weighs 220 lbs? Would be be more impressive to say he was 185.42cm and weighs 100Kg? Really, I don't get what the big deal is. You do your thing your way, and we'll continue with ours. Oh and Fuchikoma, I've never heard Kw used for a car. We use horsepower.

Zavvi.com will deliver European games to the US. I assume they will deliver to Canadia as well. THIS! Fuck the haters! I love Metroid and I really enjoyed Other M. Sure the story sucked and two or three times you had to play hide and seek. Big whoop! It was worth the $30 I paid for it and it's well worth the $10. On a side note, I had $5 and I'm in a Sonic mood for whatever reason so I picked up the PC version of this: Sad that it's probably the only reason to own a Sega CD system and yet here it is, for $5 at the click of a mouse.

I thought about getting one at that price but no Gamestop around me had one. Oh well ...

Organisation will set you free.