TheMightyEthan

What? I thought they were going to make it to where you had to register guns at gunshows? No, just that you had to do the background check. The feds wouldn't keep a registry of the owners though.

No it wasn't. The new bill actually had specific provisions AGAINST creating a national gun owner registry.

I'm sick of the NRA's tireless stance in support of guns. Why can't we see some balance here?!

It's something like 6.5% where I live, where I went to college it was like 7.5%, and where I went to law school it was like 9% which seemed ridiculously high. All three of those places are in the same state. I don't know how other states do it, but in Kansas sales tax is set by local government (city and county) with there being a state-law maximum on what it can be. The local government is also the one that gets the money from the tax.

The President's veto isn't an absolute kill to the law, it just means that Congress has to vote again and get a 2/3 majority in both houses. If both houses can pass it with a 2/3 majority it overrides the veto and the bill becomes a law anyway. That's where the balance comes in.

Fines on local roads are set by local government, other roads the fines are set by state government, so while a lot of places do have fixed fines for various offenses it still can vary a lot from place to place. The same offense might be $50 in one city and $500 in another.

CISPA has only passed the house, it still has to go through the Senate.

I bought that the Knife of Dunwall and was going to start it today (having finished Bioshock 1 last night) but decided I should probably dive into Bioshock 2 while I still have the desire to play it, otherwise I'll probably never go back and it will sit in my backlog forever.

Bioshock 2. I'm on a roll.

I think NSMBU looks great, but otherwise I'm kind of inclined to agree with you.

I did read an article several months ago that was talking about how in the US voter turnout is up among younger people, and they hypothesize that one of the reasons is that slacktivism is a thing now and voting is very similar. So the idea of "Liking" Facebook posts to make a difference might actually be encouraging people to vote more, which I guess is one positive thing.

Mass Effect 2 (on Origin) is one of the games you get for paying more than the average, that's why it's the Mass Effect bundle.

Yeah, this. It's either your thing or it's not. I tend to like them, but can definitely see why some people wouldn't.

My favorite is when chain letters say "Snopes even says this is true" and link to the Snopes article, which in actuality says it's completely false.

I guess the oxygen production area in the first one was pretty much intact, so maybe that crazy cult group is defending/maintaining it, and I can accept that maybe I only saw the really fucked up districts in the first game, and that there are still some areas where people are living more or less normal lives.

Question: Throughout Bioshock 1 it seems that society in Rapture has completely collapsed, there's nothing even remotely resembling civilization. Is it explained in Bioshock 2 how the fuck anyone survived down there for 10 years, and why it's not just a complete ghost town? It's not like a land-based post-apocalyptic wasteland where people could conceivably hunt/scavenge/whatever for the stuff they need to survive, Rapture by design requires a society to maintain it.

Bioshock 1. The ending was... abrupt.

I actually like the hacking in BS1.

I think the primary theory atm is that they're rebranding it to be not XCOM anymore.

I only read it if I'm specifically linked to an article, which isn't very often.

As someone playing Bioshock 1 for the first time right now, I can say it has aged well. The shooting was terribad originally, before I messed with settings. It was always terribad on console (no separate x and y look sensitivities, and y was not nearly sensitive enough, not even close), and the only way to make it okay on PC was to go edit ini files to disable the look acceleration. Even editing the ini files was less straightforward than it should have been.

I don't think their actual faces look much alike, but their expressions are pretty similar.

I certainly missed that, other than the big expansions like University, Night Life, etc.

Preordered: $45 on GMG with the new 25% off code from the blog. Steam activation, as per usual.

My new working theory to make the voice something I can accept: Sam Fisher is not his actual name, it's a code name, so this actually is a different person. I'm sure the game will torpedo that theory though by making references to him doing things in the previous games. *Edit* - Wait, WTF? "Silence" is killing everyone in the room? Do they honestly not understand what people want when they say they want the ability to ghost the game? I ghosted Dishonored and it was AWESOME. I ghosted (for the most part) the old Splinter Cells and that was was awesome. Let me ghost this one too. *Edit 2* - On further thought I guess I didn't really ghost the old Splinter Cells, I just knocked people out rather than killing them.