I wouldn't go as far as saying "social disabilities are common" in at least our game Group.

But I'd definitely say it happens.

I doubt you'd be the only one :)

Honestly I wonder if it's not more likely in that direction rather than the opposite.

Or maybe it's about the same.

Back as a kid I wanted boardgames and I wanted to play boardgames. But there was little chance for both.

I've played quite a bit of video games but on PC WC II, C&C, Quake in school and later only Warcraft III and the World of Warcraft beta so not much.

I've bought lots of games but don't really play them.

With board games instead I regard them as inferior because they play slowly, are more limited in scale and variation, require more book keeping, of course people need to get the rules and such.

But still I've played more of it. Which I guess is because of the social factor.

Now I must say that if I had the chance to play video games together with someone chances are I'd pick that. And yeah, for single player of course I'd pick an electronic one there too.

So maybe video games wins, except kinda all boardgames are social events and very many video games are single player experiences and that doesn't interest me as much because they don't give me what I crave more I guess. .. so. That was a shitty answer =P

As for action games I have no solid recommendation. I bought an Infinity Operation: Icestorm starter. It's a very limited set (in options) but such a game or something like Warhammer 40k or so I guess cover the action bases for many.

Real-time will have similar problems too. Like. Escape! would be real-time, and Space Alert would be real time. And maybe those could be something?

Feel free to check Summoner Wars, Duel of Ages II, Battlelore and such for "dudes on a map fighting each other."

Check Chaos in the old World for something a little different (or Twilight Imperium III on bigger scale.)

Euro games there has already been some suggestions for. I guess for someone who have an interest in Civ and such maybe Caverna or something such is a better start.

A small game such as Coup or possibly Bang! The bullet or something such I could recommend for more or less anyone.

Coup isn't all that strategic but it has the lying / hidden identity part I like in all boardgames (Battlestar Galactica have a traitor mechanic and have a decent game around it.)
In coup you'll have 0-2 identities which are also your 2 lifes to start with. At your turn you can take the action of any of your identities, or actions available to everyone, OR any action you want if you act like you have that identity. Someone can question that though and if they are right then too bad for you. However if they are wrong too bad for them so people don't really want to question things too much... But will they really allow you to get away with anything?

Bang do the same, also very simple and with a few roles where you claim to be this and that but also show it with your actions. It's longer though and have a few other things thrown in / which happen too.

IMHO Coup is a much cleaner game and I'd recommend it higher because of that.

Quantum is pretty cool too. It's a "space struggle" kind of game. But very simplified. But still somewhat satisfying. Check it out :) .. All on boardgamegeek :) (aliquis there.)

Well, it is possible for someone to do something we don't like because they disagree with us. It's possible to respect such a person in a way you can't respect someone who lets money trump his principles. There's literally nothing some people won't do for money.

Just because *some* or even *most* profit is reasonable, doesn't mean all profit is reasonable.

The term "profiteer" is used for people who put profit above a higher ethical claim; for example a citizen selling arms to an enemy during wartime. It's not that profit per se is unreasonable, but that the citizen has a higher duty of loyalty to his country than to his profits. Likewise people who profit by helping governments undermine civil liberties can reasonably be called "profiteers".

The issue isn't *that* we dislike them. It's *why* we dislike them that makes them profiteers.

Keep in mind that the guy was probably told that he was replacing you because you were incompetent and had a bad work attitude. That's what some of them are told, they're here because of the low technical skills and poor work ethic of American workers. So why should he listen to your opinion?

Another thing to consider is that your replacement may come from a culture which is not as egalitarian as yours, and at the moment your status was pretty low. In America a junior programmer fresh out of school can tell a senior engineer with twenty years experience he's full of shit, and that's something we admire. But in other cultures accepting this kind of behavior is seen as weakness. I've dealt with this first hand. I once had to take over a troubled programming team full of H1Bs (not my choice, we inherited the team) that had been shipping really bad code. It turned out to be full of terrific talent, only the lead programmer was incompetent.

Interesting. I would just had assumed the ice left them behind :) (and more water/sea and fish.)

Well, there's that too. If there's an impoundment with houses on it some resident will have stocked it. But there's still no diversity; they're stocking it with the descendents of hatchery fish.

Meanwhile here in New England, the alewives' natural range, shad and alewives are so endangered it's illegal to take one except in a few larger rivers. The springtime herring run are largely gone, along with the massive influx of marine nutrients they brought to fresh waters.

One of the things that always mystified me growing up fishing here was the incredible uniformity of freshwater fish species across water bodies with very little geographic connection. New England is dotted with thousands of small ponds, and they all have more or less the same fish. Even tiny little ponds of a few acres with no major tributaries and only seasonal outlets will have bluegill, yellow perch, and probably a few black bass lurking somewhere and reportedly some pike or muskellenge. How did they get there? And why aren't fish like bluegill from different watersheds distinctive, the way the finches Darwin found in different Galapagos islands were different? Surely natural dispersion of these fish across the whole region would have taken thousands of years.

I was recently reading about the history of dams in the US, and got the answer. In the late 1800s inland fisheries across the country were collapsing because of dam building for powering mills, so the federal government set about restocking ponds and streams across the country. The scale must have been mind boggling, because you can find the same fish in tiny, isolated ponds that don't show up except on detailed topographical maps. Even the neighbors seem scarcely aware of these ponds, but at some point maybe a hundred years ago the federal government planted fish there.

Looked at one way it was an astonishingly successful effort. There's almost no body of water in New England larger than a persistent puddle where a competent angler will catch *nothing*. And there are ponds not ten miles from Boston I can be certain of catching a half dozen crappie in a day and one or two largemouth bass -- certainly not trophy size, but enough to put up a game fight. But I often wonder what was in these waters before we crashed and rebooted the fish populations.

I guess the GP meant a/the good classic ;D

While I agree in principle, I would consider the nature of a felony and its relevance to the job. For example I wouldn't hire someone convicted of embezzlement for a job where he has access to sensitive financial data, no matter how long ago that offense was. I would tend to overlook certain drug related charges because of the long history of overzealous prosecution of "drug offenses" in this country.

I'd also consider the amount of time since the offense, particularly for offenses committed by people when they were in their teens. Research shows that many peoples' brains don't develop impulse control until they are out of their teen years. At thirty they're almost literally different people than they were at 16. And I would strongly discount misdemeanors that occurred a long time ago.

But hiring someone with a criminal record, or not hiring someone because of that record -- that's not an easy decision, nor should it be. As a hiring manager you have a responsibility to society, certainly. But you have other responsibilities, to your employer, customers, and coworkers that you have to honor as well. You should try to make a decision that is as fair as possible to everyone affected, and sometimes the candidate may come up holding the short stick, which is too bad.

I don't think criminal record should be used as an automatic screen, that's just lazy. As a manager I'm paid *not* to be lazy, and to make good decisions, so that's what I should do.

So then wouldn't it be Cisco that is brazen?

I was in the supermarket just today and at the deli "grab and go" there were packages of cheese slices labelled "LOL American Cheese".

My immediate reaction was "I don't get it."

Not snobbish, just different. The idea of tolerating people who like different things seems to never have caught on.

I'm guessing they're asking whether he's ever been convicted of a crime, and being honest these days he answers "yes".

Who is Ron Perlman? Does he have anything to do with PERL?

I'm assuming he's a movie actor. I'm a bit of an anachronism myself, in the sci-fi to me means reading. I don't watch TV or movies.