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Ok so about 12 months ago I had a leak in my bathroom. It was a small leak due to a faulty seal in one of the pipes.

You knew about the leak for 12 months and did nothing.  If it was your responsibility to fix it or your responsibility to tell someone else to fix it then not doing so could be considered an act of negligence.   

Surely it's just a matter for the insurance and I couldn't be personally liable for the damage.

Your leak caused the damage and if your are responsible for fixing the leak then you are also responsible for repairing the damage.  If your insurance covers it then by all means turn in a claim.   The other guy's insurance is likely not obligated to pay for damages caused by third parties.  Even if they were, they would still have a cause of action against the thrid party who caused the damage.

When the guy downstairs told me about the leak, I immediately turned off the water and then isolated the problem and stopped the leak more or less immediately so I wasn't negligent in repairing the leak.

This is about the only thing going in your favor.  The damage to the downstairs apartment didn't occur instantly; it occurred gradually over a period of time.  You had no way of knowing that damage was occurring in that apartment but it's occupant did know.  He could have informed you much earlier in the process but choose not to.  If he had informed you when the damage first started to occur there would have been much less damage.   

A case could be made that you should only be liable for a portion of the damages.

All of the above is of course highly dependent on the specific laws in your jurisdiction, the terms of the rental/lease contract, and even the political fashion of the day.  Unfortunately you will have to hire an attorney to find out wassup,    Bear in mind that plasterers are usually much less expensive than lawyers.  Good luck!

Spanish Anger at Megaupload Closure

MADRID  â€" A prominent Spanish lawyer is threatening a lawsuit over the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s decision to shut down Megaupload Ltd., one of the world’s most popular file-sharing website.

Barcelona-based Carlos Sánchez Almeida, a veteran of Internet privacy and piracy fights in Spain, says he’s upset at the move because it endangers the legal contents stored in Megaupload, now inaccessible for company customers. In a post in his Jaque Perpetuo blog, he’s recommending that Spanish users of the service gather information about the files they may lose due to the FBI shutdown, in preparation for a legal claim.
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http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2012/01/20/spanish-anger-at-fbi-megaupload-closure/

By the way, if a person identifies as female it's a polite gesture to refer to them with female pronouns. Calling them by the opposite is rightly considered a big "fuck you."

Trap thanks for bringing me into the 21st century.  I didn't intend to be impolite to anyone.   When I went to school  it was taught that "he" is also a gender neutral pronoun and should be used in circumstances where the person's sex is not known.  I have been goggling around and found other suggestions such as using one, they, or he/she none of which seem appropriate (he/she sounded pejorative to me in this instance).  The most helpful advice I found was at the following link:

http://answers.grammarly.com/questions/186-is-the-word-they-used-correctly-in-the-first-sentence-should-i-reword-the-sentence/

DDQ is a master of debate.

He certainly is.  We should award him a couple of Larrys for his win ---  hehe,    or do I have it backwards, maybe I should get the Larrys for having lost in such a spectacular way?      LoL

That's a video of an articulate and intelligent child. If you watched it out of context, would any of you be horrified or declaring the kid a "suicide waiting to happen"?

But Ali, there is a context that is un avoidable.  The parents here have allowed their child to make a permanent and ill informed decision that he will have to live with for the rest of his life.  
- doesn't know what transgender means
- doesn't know what sex means
- doesn't know what having sexual relations means (not same as above)
- hasn't thought about career
- hasn't thought about having/not having children
- hasn't thought about meaning and purpose of life
- hasn't thought about lining a meaningful and purposeful life (not the same as above)
- hasn't thought about death, mortality of self, parents, & other loved ones
- hasn't thought deeply about anything yet
- doesn't have many skills or accomplishments
- hasn't had to suffer consequences of bad decisions
- hasn't had to deal with failure
- doesn't know that someday mommy, daddy, and teacher won't be there to make everything better
- etc, etc, etc

It's just my opinion and I certainly could be wrong, but I think that a day will come when this person is extremely unhappy with the way life turned out.

How happy, proud, satisfied would any of us be if we were stuck for life with choices we made when we were 7 years old?  

[edit]
Hehe,    .... and then there's ddq (who posted while I was typing) who makes everything I said irrelevant with just three words.   

This song seems somehow appropriate 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuSilWHnczA

Please post here if you have legitimate files on MegaUpload.  Give a brief description and a file list if you have it. 

@Progz:  Agreed.  It's a suicide waiting to happen, IMHO.

Darth:  My printer does have evil paper-stealing creature.  He is covered in black & white fur and has sharp claws and teeth, evil whiskers and a mighty tail, otherwise know as Bambino my cat.  Whenever he hears the printer startup he comes running from the other side of the house or even the basement and pounces on the paper tray where he periodically peeks inside the machines various openings anticipating that magical moment.   And when the paper begins to emerge he goes into a predatory frenzy; clawing, chewing, wrestling, devouring ect that irresistible sheet of paper.    As far  as he's concerned it's the next best thing to Red Dwarf's food dispenser when he can continually order "Fins!", "Fish!", "Fish!" ...

My other kitty, Gigi, a little girl and my guardian angel keeps the evil spirits away from me that lurk  inside the answering machine, fax, and cell phones in the house.  Whenever the offending machine comes to life she dashes there and thrashes the evil thing to within an inch of it's life.  If not for her eternal vigilance I surely would have by now been spirited away by some malevolent apparition to so horrific fate.   

Lo, in the twilight days of the second year of the second decade of the third millennium did a great darkness descend over the wireless internet connectivity of the people of 276 Ferndale Street in the North-Central lands of Iowa. For many years, the gentlefolk of these lands basked in a wireless network overflowing with speed and ample internet, flowing like a river into their Compaq Presario. Many happy days did the people spend checking Hotmail and reading USAToday.com.

But then one gray morning did Internet Explorer 6 no longer load The Google. ...

An entertaining read:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/in-which-i-fix-my-girlfriends-grandparents-wifi-and-am-hailed-as-a-conquering-hero

I like the idea of characters (and other "entities") being able to have their own script, but I don't think that the character events (or any other events) should be required to exist within any specific script.

I didn't mean to imply any requirement as you describe.  I was thinking in terms of the way modules currently work where for example they can handle mouse click and then pass it on to to other scripts or not.  So presumably  there would be some kind of priority in handling order.  Consider for Game contains Room and  Room contains Character.  Character events would first be handled by the Character script, then Room script, then Game script.   Each of those scripts would have an opportunity to have a handler and to capture the event so that it was not passed on.

We should really make forward declaration of functions a priority IMO.

I agree this would be nice to have but I wouldn't want to give up lighting fast compiles to achieve it.  So as long as the typical incremental compile-test iteration was adversely affected I would be for it.

Can you decribe a use case? I can't visualize it. Maybe if there were some events associated to characters, like, let's say "has started speaking".

The way I visualize it the character script would be just like a module.  It would catch all the character's events if so scripted.  Currently this stuff is just appended to the global script.  Beyond this use,  any kind of  NPC  autonomous behavior could be scripted in this way.   

It would be the same for other entities as well.  Door would know how to open and close themselves for example.  The would handle their own events and so could be copy and pasted into the same or different rooms. 

I even think removing the header script would be justifiable

I wouldn't agree and think it's still needed.

That's actually the poet Juvenal.

I stand corrected.    Thanks.  

The point isn't that I trust the government more on some things, it's that I think certain exercises of government power (some of them decried by libertarians) are legitimate and benign. There should always be accountability.

But governments are hardly ever accountable and almost always oppressive.  case in point:
http://www.cdapress.com/news/local_news/article_c17a5b7e-3aea-11e1-bcf0-001871e3ce6c.html

[edit]

That is definitely true for small companies, but it doesn't work so well for big ones with a multimillion dollar legal department.

I don't agree ...
Consumer: http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/boycotts/successfulboycotts.aspx
Civil:           http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants
Criminal:     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff

Corporations are not necessarily anymore trustworthy than governments but they are more accountable criminally, civilly, and mostly in the marketplace. 

If a corporation screws you over you can easily refuse to future business with them, if they have been negligent or cause damage they can be sued, and if they commit fraud or other crimes there officers and employees can go to jail.   

Try refusing to do business with your government and see who goes to jail.  You can't sue your government except when the government has given permission to do so in their prescribed time and manner. 

The proper role of government is to enforce the rules.  But when they break the rules who will enforce the rules?  How many policemen do you think ever give themselves a citation for having a burnt-out tail light or inadvertently going 5 mph over the speed limit?  In the words of Cesar "Who will guard the guards?".   

[Game-in-game]

Wyz, thanks for the compliment.  Here are some more thoughts.

Game-in-game
The game itself could be an entity and so could have a collection of other games.

Entity (more)
First of all just to be clear.  Entity is pretty much the same as an OO Object/Class or Thing.  Entity is being used for the purpose of this discussion so as to eliminate confusion between language elements, AGS room objects, and Wyz's Things.  

There would be different types of entities of course.  There could be restrictions and requirements for each type.  On such restriction, for example, could be what types of entity collections a particular entity type could have.

As TimothyRyan was saying if an entity is exported then all of it's resources would go with it  Importing an entity then would include all of the needed resources.  There would also be a possibility of importing entities at runtime.  For example, if someone wanted to have an episodic game where episodes are created and released over a period of time.   One could easily imagine an in-game catalog and download system for such a game.  

Game Specification Language

If this concept was expanded to included a directory structure containing all the resources, sprites, backgrounds, sounds, etc, their  import properties/instructions and the scripts that comprise the game, the AGS editor then be able to read/write this file.  The file could then be input to stand-alone compilers to port any given game to different game engine back-ends.  

Please let me know what you think about having a genar;lized/defined editor output like this.  It think this may be a way to work/cooperate with ScummVM without all the licensing hoopla.  

[edit]
Related thread on ScummVM forum
http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?p=71107#71107

I've always been concerned with civil liberties and civil rights, and particularly with the dangers of unaccountable power. The hollowing-out of established protections in the US has been worrying me since the PATRIOT Act. I nevertheless differ from the libertarian position in that I don't see many other aspects of government regulation and exercise of power (including much economic policy) as illegitimate, nor do I see a danger to liberty from supranational bodies and treaties.

Snarky,  I think many people have this same point of view and I have always wondered how they  can trust government on somethings but not others.  Unaccountable power is always a danger to liberty, IMHO. 

Apparently Anonymous took down the DOJ and a number of other websites in retaliation.  I think a "Boycott The Movies" may be more effective.  Imagine if movie theaters went empty for 1 or 2 weekends?

And then there is this bit from Iran:
https://plus.google.com/114124708527697564422/posts/gB8VnoQHy6Y#114124708527697564422/posts/gB8VnoQHy6Y

Dave, I think the only thing you may have left out is moderating discussions about future directions which I think is within the skill set you describe.    Also being a bit reluctant makes you highly qualified in my book.   

You have my vote     

Here is a good explanation of what's in the bills by the EFF:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech

(That's probably not the intent of most of the people driving the development - I think few politicians are actually malevolently set on destroying freedom - but that's what they're setting up the foundations for.)

I do think that most politicians have good intentions. But that's not enough. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just because they mean well doesn't mean they act well.

I don't think they concerned about it or ever give it much thought!

I guess that with every over controlled society a underground equivalent rises...

I call it the Free market