it behooves us to give a leg up to those trying hard to do it for themselves....no?

I vehemently agree on this. I merely argue that giving the leg up shouldn't be based upon race but upon lack of opportunity. The two fellow black students you mentioned, who were nearly as advantaged as you would have similarly destroyed other black students from crappy inner city schools, but a race based system would give no quarter to the inner city kids in that insistence, still favouring privileged kids over the unprivileged, just so happens these privileged kids would be black.

I agree fully with helping out the disadvantaged. If a race is grossly over represented among the poor, then policies to help the poor will also grossly provide more assistance to that race. I don't consider that discriminatory though, it's just a historical consequence.

In the Canadian model, direct assistance or compensation for past harm is also something I can get behind. Of course, proving and carefully adjudicating what that should mean is a tough nut, but our courts are expressly for that kind of dispute.

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I got interested in that question based on the Elder Scrolls series. Morrowind had a basically static world, Oblivion was basically entirely scaled to the player, and Skyrim is scaled to the player but within a min/max range.

To me, Morrowind was great because it could put appropriately powerful rewards in difficult (or just plain obscure) areas. Oblivion in particular was bad at making leveling feel like a treadmill because every time you leveled up as the player, pretty much every enemy would be that much more powerful also. Skyrim was better about that since an area would generally set its difficulty scale based on the first time you visited it, so you could leave and come back later if it was too tough, but it still felt a little off.

Another associated problem is how loot gets influenced by those leveled lists. In Skyrim, loot in containers and in the inventory of leveled enemies generally scales, but loot sitting out in the open in the game world generally doesn't. Which is really annoying, because all generic loot pretty much everywhere ends up being crappy low-level iron. God forbid there's some steel, elven, or dwarven gear in places where it would totally make sense to be (say, dwarven gear in dwarven ruins) that you might venture into before that gear becomes "level appropriate".


In a related issue, one beef that I have with general RPG mechanics is how they all feel the need to make you drastically more powerful at level 5 compared to level 1, and again at level 10 compared to level 5, and so on. By the time you're near the level cap, you're probably 100-1000 times as powerful as you were at level 1, which gives a good sense of accomplishment but just doesn't seem realistic, and leads to this problem with fixed difficulty or level scaling. Western RPGs (boiling back to pen and paper DnD rules) certainly aren't great about this, but JRPGs are completely ridiculous about it, which is pretty much why Final Fantasy 3(6) was the last one that I enjoyed. In my adulthood, I just can't handle them -- even going back and trying to play FF3 that I *loved* way back when.

I'd like to see more games where you get more skills, polish, and versatility as you progress, but overall you aren't more than 3-5 times as powerful at max level as you were at the beginning. Mount and Blade is one of the few games I can think of that comes close to that.

Crappy even for *spam

Some day purely digitally created sound will be better than foley, but not yet in most cases, imo. If foley dies before it is better, we're left with a limited set of recordings to edit together or crappy pure digital sound. I prefer the randomness of reality in sound. That's all I mean.

As crappy as Jobs was, was he really also a patent thief?

I still haven't seen the crappy reboot.

Fair enough. Between the crappy audio quality and his accent, I honestly couldn't understand much of what he said.

Oh, that explains a lot. The closer you get to downtown and to UT, the rent/sale value rises exponentially on houses I wouldn't let my pets live in. I've seen crappy 1940's houses that are falling apart listed for 400k and up that close to UT.

Yeah, Austin is pretty tame. I live in one of the sort of 'bad' areas and we never have had any issues. The closest I've ever come to real trouble is when I walking away from a music venue in south-east Austin a few years back. Three guys asked if I wanted to buy a knife and I, like a total idiot, was like "Sorry, I might have but I spent all my cash inside the club."

It was only after finished walking to my car and left that I realized they were kind of attempting to mug me.

Edit: On the flip side though, unless you live in a district the city keeps the taxes artificially low in (IE, east Austin), you get reamed. Our house is from the late 50's and is valued at 215k, but our yearly property/school taxes run over 4k. Since they just took out another huge bond, I expect next years will be closer to 5.

10m with a rifle seems too easy. Even with a crappy air rifle (BB gun, really, so not even actually rifled and probably much lower velocity), I can put every shot in a one inch circle from that far away. They are shooting pretty small targets though, and you can make a competition out of mm differences so I guess it works.

I've never watched the shooting part of the olympics, but pistols seems cooler.

I wonder if there are groups who do this sort of thing around me. I like shooting, but since I live in the city, I don't really want to own a real gun. An airgun might be an interesting alternative.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

T3 was pretty crappy - this scene is great though, the film could have used the help.