Quote from: Flee on December 10, 2015, 11:17:42 AM

Infringment cases are always interesting. Curious to see where this goes.

What's the process on these cases generally?

I would assume economic sanctions or revoking some member privileges if all persuasive dialogue fails?

Worst case scenario?

Commission: hey man, we're casually informing you that what you're doing breaches EU law. Respond within 2 months with an explanation, excuse or promise to do things differently, please.
Country: we have done no such thing.
Commission: you have most definitely breached EU law, for these reasons served as a formal and reasoned opinion. Please comply.
Country: nope.
Commission: to the Court of Justice you go.
Court of Justice: the Commission was right, you did breach EU law. Please change your laws to comply (and in particular case of infringement pay a penalty).
Country: nope.
Commission: another formal notice and back to ECJ you go.
Court of Justice: re-evaluation and potential penalty payment or sanction.

Infringment cases are always interesting. Curious to see where this goes.

Civil liberties.
Human rights.
My Little Pony toys being considered part of the girls-only Happy Meals at McDonald's while they're clearly for men as well. 
Institutionalised issues in criminal justice and law enforcement.
Unjust laws and politics.

People have been saying that this place is both dead or just days/weeks away from dying since it was founded. A year later, we still get a 100+ people on here every day, there's more active skype groups about this place than I can count, lots of members game together regularly and the site is still under active development and improvement with Cheat working on new features when he can. Seems to me that we're not doing too terribly.

It feels like Halo.
I've played every CoD since MW. I've played every Halo.

It feels like a modern Halo, unlike Reacharound and 4.

BR starts has nothing to do with anything. The only reason BR starts was a thing was because the weapon sandbox used to be incredibly shit and unbalanced up until Halo 5. The AR and pistol are actually good weapons now.

Nope, it feels even less like Halo than 4. Been playing the MCC quite a bit recently and it only makes me realize how much of a change for the worse Halo 5 is compared to 2 and 3. "Modern" is no excuse for what this game plays like, which is more like CoD Advanced Warfare with slightly longer killtimes than the first Halo games.

Good but boring is still boring. Lack of a competitive starting loadout is a major buzzkill.

Quote from: Flee on December 09, 2015, 06:36:14 PM

feels closer to CoD than it does to Halo 2 and 3

lol

Played every CoD, played every Halo. That's what it feels like a lot of the time. Girlfriend hasn't played yet herself, but "looks like the new call of duty" was the second thing she said when she saw me playing. I suspected it when I saw gameplay ages ago and can confirm now that I've put a few hours into it. Feels less like Halo than even 4 did, which is saying something. Might be different if there was a normal arena gametype where you'd actually spawn with a BR or somthing, but that seems to be out of the question at the moment.

Quote from: Flee on December 09, 2015, 01:26:52 PM

Is there any chance you can play Team Slayer with different starting weapons? I've played about 5 games so far and all of them were AR + pistol starts, which I both hate. No BR or DMR starts at all, or have I just not run into those yet?

Unfortunately, that's the basic competitive loadout start.

It's been like that since launch.

There's no MLG or anything? This is pretty disappointing. The whole new ranking system actually got me interested in playing more seriously again, but damn. AR + Magnum starts only? Not entirely sure how 343 decided that picking one of the least competitive weapons in the history of Halo as a starter for what it considers a "competitive loadout" was a good idea.

Is there any chance you can play Team Slayer with different starting weapons? I've played about 5 games so far and all of them were AR + pistol starts, which I both hate. No BR or DMR starts at all, or have I just not run into those yet?

Early mornings for the Europeans and late nights for the Americans generally aren't very busy times.

Noice

I thought about playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein

All I want for Christmas is your mom btw

RTCW is good, ET is better for the multiplayer.

Colors look a lot better and more vivid in real life but yeah, you get the gist. For those who don't get it, look at my title bar. Logos of Quake and Wolfenstein, two of my favorite games of all time. Pretty stoked about this.

Discuss presents you want for Christmas.

Cheat has to pay the mods somehow.

So how does the betrayal / booting / penalty system work in this game? Last game I got the plasma caster, shot an enemy and somehow ended up killing two team mates that weren't visible where I was standing. Got booted instantly and haven't tried to play since. Are there penalties like in Reach? Any clue what the betrayal conditions are? Because that kind of sucked, I was top of the team and hadn't even died once when my team decided to melee rush a guy with a grenade stuck to his face.

Quote from: Flee on December 07, 2015, 01:49:09 PM

high violent crime rates, high gun crime and extremely high rates of gun deaths.

FBI Data disagrees. The data indicates that there is no correlation between homicide and gun ownership.


I'm sure you can see that if there was a correlation that the higher number of gun owners would coincide with a higher murder rate.

That chart talks about homicides in general. I was only talking about gun crime, gun homicides and gun deaths. I also don't think that there's no conclusion we can draw from the chart you linked. It's true that the averages of most states are pretty similar, but there does appear to be somewhat of a trend. Out of all states in the top categories with the highest homicides, Lousiana, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee all scored an F on the Brady State Scoreboard. Maryland, Illinois and Michigan were the only outliers with similar rates of homicides but with stricter gun control. Of course, this doesn't say much as there's also 8 of the 10 states with the lowest homicide rates doing poorly on the Brady score, but I wouldn't just dismiss it when 14 out of the 17 states with the highest homicide rates also happen to score among the least strict gun laws in the entire country.

Now, if we look at what I actually claimed earlier, being that high rates of firearm ownership and loose gun control laws directly relate to higher rates of gun homicides, gun suicides and gun violence, we find a different story. The top 10 states with the highest gun death rates all rank low on the Brady ranking (9 scored an F, 1 scored a D-). Out of the top 10 states with the lowest amount of gun deaths, however, all but one (Maine) scored a C or higher. Harvard research spanning all states over the course of several years decisively found that stricter firearm laws are direclty associated with lower rates of firearm homicides, firearm suicides and firearm fatalities as a whole. In terms of other, non-lethal violent crime, statistics also show that the states with the highest rates of firearm robbery and firearm assault are among the worst scoring on the Brady list.

I never claimed that states with stricter gun control always have lower general homicide rates. There's a myriad of other factors contributing to these rates. I'm just pointing out that states with stricter gun control measures generally have lower gun deaths, gun homicides, gun suicides and gun violence, and that many states with stricter gun control find that their gun crimes are usually commited with firearms brought in from neighboring states. Additionally, within the same states, households with a gun present are linked to higher rates of homicide and suicide, and measures like additional background checks and firearm permits have been found to directly decrease gun violence. Those findings are so well established by now that you really can't argue much against them, I believe.

Held down in a doctor's chair while a surgeon cauterised (as in burned shut) an open wound up in my nose that had caused the worst nosebleed I've ever had. No anesthesia for the first 10 minutes until they realised it wasn't working. I've broken bones,  snapped my lower arm 90 degrees in the wrong direction as my elbow gave out and fell right through a solid glass table, and none of them even came close to what the nose surgery felt like. It's been 15 years and I still dream about it happening and me drowning in my own blood.