Zoraptor

Doubt it was lawyers. Disney would have been able to pay out contracts, if they had to, from their loose change. They may- very much the conditional may- have been obligated to pay for the show, they'd not have been obligated to show it same way a bunch of their MAGA aligned stations won't be showing it*. Far more likely it was the cascade of awful publicity and people threatening to cancel Disney+ and the like. Not all that often you're going to have Ted Cruz, Jon Stewart and Bill Maher agree on something let alone the parade of TV and movie types criticising it. *I particularly liked this line from their press release: "Sinclair also calls upon Mr. Kimmel to issue a direct apology to the Kirk family. Furthermore, we ask Mr. Kimmel to make a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA." Very Trumpian, demanding an apology and a bung.

Good game but hobbled initially by a bad case of Paradoxitis. Absolute content desert without the dlc, especially late game. And without the dlc you had very little reason to, well, want the dlc due to it being a very shallow game after the initial set up was done. And even with the dlc still had a fair bit of 'could have been better' about it in some aspects.

It very much depends on what the deal would actually entail. An entire country's worth of data for an AI vendor would be priceless, for example, and they'd no doubt seek to eventually monetise things in a somewhat, hmm, Googlesque way at some point. Which was of course a company that- along with Facebook- was notoriously unprofitable. Right up to the point it became notoriously profitable. Nothing like defaultism for establishing a monopoly, and nothing like a monopoly for generating profits.

27 years for Bolsonaro's coup attempt.

Not just the US, almost all the decidedly little letters 'outrage' from the collective west is performative. Except for Spain, I guess. As always the juxtaposition of having a news article about some unarmed drones toodling across Poland being The End of World Civilisation!!! vs Israel bombing yet another country- and killing its citizens- is pretty stark. Good thing we have double standards, or we wouldn't have any at all. The lack of any actual consequences makes it very very clear that our politicians are absolutely fine with genocide so long as it's their friends doing it. And if you're fine with genocide then... there really isn't anything that you're not fine with, including Perfidy and having one ally bomb another.

Simplest explanation is that the drones GPS (/glonass) got mucked around with. Similar situation to the Ukrainian drone that hit near Tartu a couple of weeks ago (with basically no fanfare). The Ukrainians certainly were able to muck around with glonass for a bit since that was why the number of glide bomb videos from the Russians dropped right off for a couple of months, and if there's anything that would still be using vulnerable transceivers it's junker gerans.

Another interesting example of how bad western media has got at regurgitating state propaganda: Ursula von der Leyen's plane hit by GPS incident. Plus dozens of other articles. Number of articles citing flightradar24's statement that it didn't happen: zero. Number of articles that had been corrected: zero. Fact checkers that had checked the facts: zero. Note that the plane's transponder includes GPS consistency values, so it indicates there was no spoofing as well as no appreciable interference. While there certainly is GPS interference close to the Russian border central Bulgaria isn't close to it by any stretch. The whole incident appears to have been quite literally made up then published without asking anyone who could refute it about it. Expectation that the record will ever be corrected: also zero.

We've got AI nowadays, why not ask one of them?

Cassandra Obsession Guy was all over multiple forums for a while. Nothing will beat the theoretical analysis of Tali's sweat as an 'interesting' Bioware fan obsession. Wonder what AI have to say on that subject... "Tali's sweat is a topic of discussion among fans of the Mass Effect series, with some humorously speculating about its taste and properties, such as it being sweet or having performance-enhancing qualities. This reflects the quirky nature of fan interactions and the creativity within the community." Not the worst certainly, but hardly worth buying Jensen another leather jacket for.

South Africa is a terrible example for illustrating the sanctity of flags. One day burning an orange white and blue flag was sacrilege and everyone should be singing Die Stem, the next burning a red white yellow black and green flag was sacrilege and everyone should be singing Nkosi Sikelel iAfrica.

While they have just started production of the 'ERAM'* it does have a pretty direct equivalent in the GBU-39, which is basically a JDAM kit with rocket assist; and Boeing has a Powered 500lb PJDAM already which is most likely to be the 'ERAM' in question. The only questionable bit there is the cost, since they claim they'll be cheaper than the gbu39 despite being heavier, but supposedly at least that is the cost of a PJDAM. Which makes no sense, since an unpowered JDAM kit is of similar cost, hence 'why would you make anything else', but that's the claim. *maybe, one WSJ article citing anonymous sources is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting. Even the acronym is wonky since up to a week ago ERAM was used for an anti air missile

Wunderwaffe_Counter++ We've had outlandish claims of accuracy and reliability before for every weapon system supplied. Now they're going to supply a jam proof long range rocketbomb accurate to 10m over 450km; at 30k a pop? That's... 3 per Excalibur, 3-17 per M3X ('HiMARS'), 2-3 per Switchblade (lol), 110 (one hundred and ten) per SS/ SCALP. Begs the question: why would you ever make anything else but these unjammable accurate 500lb bombs... well, because it's basically the ALMDB to the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb. Which has been utter rubbish.

Apartheid era South Africa did have nukes*, whatever NATO said. And for that at least it seems that the US/ west genuinely made an effort to stop them no matter how tepid the other anti apartheid measures were. *Most probably obtained in whole or part from a similarly minded apartheid state.

Three grocery companies have 90% market share? Absolutely jealous. And don't get me started on the number of NZ products- like cow juice, sold via a monopoly because obviously that's the best way to get competition per the free marketers in the government- that manage to toodle literally half way around the world to be sold cheaper than here. Two supermarket companies have 95% market share here. It's- apparently- an absolute mystery to NZ's politicians why there is not competition between those two and they make $1 million per day in excess profits. They talk a lot about breaking up the duopoly, but never do anything. They've quite literally talked about it and given their buddies high paid consulting jobs on panels for twenty years when the solution is trivial- demerge. And debundle distribution while you're at it. That latter because, aside from the monopoly cow juice supply, NZ supermarkets absolutely fleece suppliers as well as consumers, because your options are sell to them at the price they dictate- or watch your crops rot for nothing.

Ukraine could build deliverable dirty bombs in, basically, minutes given they do have nuclear reactors and long range drones, rockets, missiles etc. For all but the delivery system Fiji could build one in weeks as well. There's a lot of radioactive material around if you're a state player even without a reactor, eg in health care; even smoke alarms have some. They wouldn't be effective battlefield weapons of course, but that isn't their purpose. Their purpose is to terrorise civilians populations. For that you don't even really need them to be dangerous in reality, you just need them to be dangerous in perception; and the word radiation provides the heavy lifting for the perception of danger. Ukraine doesn't use/ build them because it would alienate everyone except the staunchest NAFOids. Indeed, 90% of the discourse about them has been about them being used as false flags by Russia or Ukraine for that very reason.