Sertou

I said I thought the perks are handy, not game changing. I usually don't go deep enough in speech to unlock investment, etc. Still, they're more useful than the lock picking perks. Depending on my role play, build and where else talents are needed, I might go as far as "Persuasion" but there are usually other priorities.

Speech has some handy perks. You can bribe guards to ignore crimes, sell any kind of item to any merchant, increase the amount of gold specific merchants have on hand, sell stolen goods to specific merchants and pass speech checks more easily.

The cast of Blacklist was amazing. The writers, less so. They spent so much time telling us how brilliant Elizabeth was, but barely ever showed us. What they showed us most often is that the only way they knew to create conflict was to have her do the absolute stupidist thing possible in nearly every situation.

“I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colon, also known as La Ultima, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.”

Quinn's Book by William Kennedy

When my previous independent pharmacist went out of business, they transfered all of my prescriptions to the nearest Walgreens. I switched to another "independent" that was part of Rite-aid's network. The staff were poorly trained in customer service communications, passive aggressively taking control of every conversation and then not listening. I had multiple instances of prescriptions being lost or delayed, in one case for weeks. The owners didn't care why I as a customer found these experiences frustrating and eventually told me I should just go to Walgreen's. I did and the customer service has been so much better. Independent isn't always better.

The beauty of open source is that Google can't take it back. The worst they can do is close source their own future development. Meanwhile, the community can fork the last open source release of AOSP. Look at what open source devs did with Audacity, for example.

The real fly in the ointment here is Google already did with device trees and driver binaries for Pixel phones; no longer sharing these with AOSP will have a very chilling effect on custom ROM developers who must now reverse engineer needed configs and drivers.

There is a Batman villain or tragic anti-hero named "Manbat" whose real name is Kirk Langstrom. Perhaps Wayne Bruce was confused by being called by the name Langstrom's alter ego.

Frodo and the party at Weathertop - in the books Frodo shouts Elbereth's name as a war cry and stabs at a wraith, rather than cowering and falling down as in the film.

Ent moot results and dramatic reversal - in the books, the Ents knew what Saruman had been up to and decided to go to war at once. They didn't passively decide to do nothing then change their minds.

Faramir bringing Frodo and Sam (and the ring to Osgilath). In the books, Faramir recognized the threat the ring posed and let Sam, Frodo and Gollum go on with their quest without hinderance.

The books had no nonsensical scene with Gollum framing Sam for illicit lembas consumption.

The books had no stupid dwarf tossing jokes.

While Aragorn has periods of self doubt in the books, none of these inhibited him from taking action. In the film he has a long sequence of scenes where he's basically paralyzed by self doubt.

No scourging of the Shire in the films. These scenes were crucial to showing just how much each of the hobbits had developed as characters and in what ways.

I could go on, but hopefully these are sufficient to illustrate the point.

The films were great with respect to casting, cinematography, art design and location. Jackson and Boyens seemed to have forgotten however that Tolkien was the master and they the students with respect to writing.

One word for Rep. Hong: "nope."

A full adaptation of Lord of the Rings that's true to Tolkien's vision.

You can also get extended service updates from Microsoft for at least a year. $30 for up to 15 computers, although there are also a couple of ways to get then free. 1000 bing rewards points, or enabling Backup to sync your settings to OneDrive are supposed to both means to get them that will become available soon.