Zoraptor

I don't see reasonable people having a problem with her being a Hindu, but, this is a political climate which has been pretty toxic; and a lot of people aren't reasonable. I mean, people criticised John Kerry for going to Vietnam when the alternative (sometimes) attended the National Guard; such things aren't really logical in the normal sense of the word. It's definitely not anywhere near the top of her current problems in any case, as with most candidates getting exposure in a crowded field (especially one with two credible women candidates) is her biggest problem.

IIRC the quote is quasi genuine and comes ultimately from one of Napoleon's marshalls' memoirs (though you'd think some of his marshalls were in completely different battles based on their recollections, so it may be made up by that Marshall), but was creatively translated to english as something Napoleon 'should' have said. It was in regard to the Allies pulling troops off the Prinzen (?) Heights during the Battle of Austerlitz to attack his flank, heights Napoleon then took so winning the battle comprehensively; one of his commanders wanted reinforcements to defend that flank and N refused based on it potentially meaning the Allies would stop moving their troops from the heights. Doubt Gabbard could win, as she's Hindu and religion still seems to matter a lot to many in the US.

At this point ASCII games mostly remind me of 2080Ti RMA memes. Had a lot of fun with various roguelikes and other ASCII games back in the day though.

All modern warplanes crash a lot, especially fighters- two Eurofighters collided a week or so ago for example. They're over engineered, but they still have very little margin for error. An F35 crashing is pretty expensive but not really unexpected. If they start crashing like John McCain is flying them it would be a problem, but a crash or two is literally inevitable. (OTOH the Israeli F35 being hit by an ancient S200 over Lebanon was probably a bit off putting, even if it wasn't brought down)

S-500 is designed mostly as an anti missile rather than anti air platform. Ballistic missiles don't generally go sideways, since they're ballistic, and the missiles that can 'dodge' also have to be slow or they can't dodge (for anyone wondering, it's the same principle as why a fast moving speedboat that tries to turn will broach/ flip/ tumble while a slow moving one won't- you can't have it both ways). If it functions like the S400 its abilities will also depend a lot on the missile being fired. I'm personally of the opinion that the Russians/ Indians/ Chinese have scaled down their stealth fighter plans because they aren't actually all that stealthy and against a decently teched foe will be little more useful than a conventional plane and in some situations, worse. I'd be surprised if the Chinese could not outright clone a F22 or F35 if they really wanted to. The US only has itself to blame for the situation with Turkey over the S400 though, they genuinely did try and buy Patriots multiple times and were rebuffed. Can't really expect them to use the antiquated and not much use even when it wasn't Hawk forever; and throwing a wobbly when the Greeks got the S300 is not going to go down well with Turks on principle alone.

Should have switched to Ion Lady first, then they could have had the Thatcher Estate sue for added exposure before settling on a permanent name.

The hand in process hasn't formally started yet- and there won't be 1.5M eligible guns anyway, there will be a lot less than that. But, those quibbles aren't that significant, practically it will be a disaster as there are mutually contradictory aims and a bunch of ideological hand waving/ wringing. Having rushed the legislation through parliament without thinking it through they now have to actually implement it and they plain cannot do it the way they've promised. Everyone knows it will cost a billion dollars- minimum- to do properly, but they cannot justify that when teachers and nurses etc want pay rises so instead they've budgeted $200 million- and topped it up, ludicrously, from the state 'insurance' fund (ACC) as there will be less accidents to pay out (there are very few firearm related accidents in NZ anyway). As such they either expect max 20% of the weapons to be handed in, are going to offer 20% of the value or are lying about the expected cost. Probably a bit of all three. Plus they decided to change the definitions again just before passing the legislation with no notification, which did not fill anyone effected with confidence. So they've lost a significant number of people who they want handing in guns already as they know they're being outright lied to. I have to admit I've found the reaction to the backlash kind of hilarious though. I'm not directly effected since I don't own a semi auto but I have had a lot of fun needling anti gun zealots with the unworkability of it and their own logical contradictions- laughably, illegally owned firearms are excluded from the amnesty for example, so literal criminals have no incentive to hand their weapons in. Amazingly, none of the people who thought buying a gun back for 70% of its value was a great offer would accept my equally great offer to buy their cars for 70% of their value, though to be fair most also accepted that the offer only sounded good if you didn't think about it for more than 5 seconds.

That's just the english, they'll also call kiwis australian, dutch germans and kanadians americans just to mess with them. They'll especially do it if you look annoyed about it. The Japanese always had the bulk of their external army in China rather than the Pacific, the soviet invasion took Manchuria in a week with the best part of a million Japanese losses and cut the rest of the 3 million odd Japanese soldiers off in China and greater Asia. There wasn't a realistic imminent threat to the Japanese mainland from the soviets and they lost a lot of men in the Kurils despite most of the Japanese defenders obeying orders to surrender; but strategically it removed the last vestiges of power and prestige for the Military Men who wanted no surrender and the last hope for those who wanted a conditional rather than unconditional surrender.

Technically, the US govt has nuked the US, at least twice. Threatening to do it again sounds like an attempt to pull a Trump and get attention- any sort of attention- by throwing outrageous claims about. Difficult to see that strategy work unless you already were a celebrity like Trump though and it obviously didn't work for Swalwell.

Marco Rubio copypasta, in 2019? Nice to see the classics being kept alive for new generations.

Intel says they are going for a full suite approach to graphics cards, so everything from server to pro to consumer entries. I doubt they'll be a competitive factor short term and I suspect they may well run into legal issues as well (barriers are less to entry than for entry into the x86 CPU sphere, but there are still a lot of overbroad patents from nVidia and AMD to run afoul of). Plus Raja over promised and under delivered at AMD, albeit for a division he says was being strip mined to boost Zen development. On the question of 2070S vs 5700XT, I'll probably have something to say later in the day. The NDA came off here at 2 am so I haven't seen any comparative benchmarks at all. I suspect Keyrock has it pretty right though, given the non 3rd party benchmarks floating around.

Heh, gazumped. de Grasse really should be remembered a lot more by the US than Lafayette is.

And in response AMD has dropped their prices on the 5700/XT, before release- spawning rumours they deliberately inflated the prices to bait nVidia into overpricing their Supers. Sorry Jensen, I meant SUPERs, of course. Given that nVidia is going Samsung 7nm for their 30X0s I suspect AMD may be getting some sweetened pricing from TSMC on wafers too.

Your security settings are nuking facebook*? I get the same for twitter embeds, just filename.jpg *Very sensible if so. I'm presuming fbcdn is facebook's content delivery at least. Shouldn't have anything to do with the site change. Well, if the pictures of Tank Man in the politics thread didn't get the forum blocked in China I think this image probably did.

Nestlé are comically evil. Everything from Child Slavery- but not really because they don't know about it, honest, it's just a supplier issue- to sending out generous sample packs of baby milk formula to new mothers that coincidentally last just long enough that the mother will stop expressing milk herself. This, amazingly, means that the mother has to buy baby formula from then on. They also stack the literature with tame articles extolling the benefits of their formula over natural milk (there actually aren't any, for most people). But wait there's more, but at least it's more typical corporate shenanigans. While I certainly do understand that trivial proximal concerns tend to get attention- not like I'm storming Nestlè's corporate HQ in Auckland or anything rather than taking two minutes to write on the internet either- that sort of thing is why people laugh at gamers when they stack the voting to make EA the worst company in the US because of Origin or the ME3 ending or women in WW1 or whatever instead of the Bank of Americas/ Nestlès and Monsanto (now, technically, Bayer IIRC) of the world.

lol wut. People hated on Origin for having 1st party EA titles 'exclusively'. And they weren't even exclusive at the time, you could buy EA games pretty much anywhere- except Steam, because Steam was a special snowflake and wanted to dictate how they could be sold. There was extensive, vociferous and sustained complaining about Origin; people have just moved on to the Next Bad Thing now EGA has arrived.

They can enrich it to ~20%, they need ~95% to make proper bombs, though packing some 4-20% U235 into a rocket would be unpleasant enough by itself. Getting to 95% purity is hard and requires a lot of very specialist centrifuges which you can't simply build or order online. They're at least partially breaking the limit because... the US has sanctioned companies receiving uranium from Iran for receiving uranium from Iran. They'll probably break the D2O limits at some point as the Omani company receiving their heavy water is under sanctions threat as well. They need a properly secure black box system- US has, for example, extensively hacked SWIFT such that they can literally redirect money to themselves let alone merely see transactions. That's not an issue for little players on the fringe of the sanctions, but they will definitely go after oil transactions and the like. Europe would, over all, prefer to wait 18 months in the hope Trump is a single term president than do anything though because Europe is, when it comes right down to it, a spineless jelly devoid of principle. The Pakistani who helped DPRK make their bomb is under arrest, Pakistan gets lots of aid from Saudi (who allegedly sponsored their bomb in the first place), they're sunni and Iran is shia, they have some shared interests such as being against Balochi separatists but not much. They don't have any reason to, and lots of reasons not to- they may not be on great terms with the US at the moment but toys would really come out of the cot if they helped Iran get nukes. And above all else there isn't any real evidence that Iran is trying to make a bomb; it's just Bibi, Bolton, Pompeo and Bone Saw shouting about it in the hope if it's said enough people will believe it per Nigerien yellowcake, anthrax and WMD over London in 45 minutes.

Certainly railing against the Catholic priesthood's predilection for underage sex doesn't really count as 'persecution'. In context Poland has its own Catholic sex scandal at the moment as well that is part of its ongoing culture war, so there's a lot of 'persecution' claims thrown around there; no doubt that is where the claim originates in context, and the situation in Aus sounded similar. (Fairly sure that Folau isn't actually Catholic, so much as that matters, but is some sort of evangelical. Most Tongans are methodist iirc, and fairly conservative but not nearly as conservative as he purports to be. So far as I'm aware he also never did a Missionary Year as many other prominent religious sporting Tongans have done)

That's one of those technically correct depending on (so much) context (as to make it useless) things. For ongoing religion based displacement of persons the largest group supposedly is christians, but that is with a bunch of caveats. Religion based, so muslims in Syria/ Iraq don't count but christians do; ongoing so Palestinians don't count; and while we're at it we'll exclude the Rohingya since that's an ethnicity which just happens to be muslim being ethnically cleansed etc.

It is a bit of a frustrating game at times- in much the same way as a Piranha Bytes title you will spend a fair bit of early game time running away and being mildly peeved at the interface and controls- but if your idea of an RPG is riding around on a horse killing stuff you can't get much better with a bit of perseverance.

Most launcher makers have zero reason to do that. It's not like Battlefield V or AC: Odyssey will actually be on GOG the storefront just because Origin and uPlay are integrated- and if they were EA/ Ubi etc would only care if GOG took a cut. For companies like EA and Ubisoft their launchers exist to avoid paying fees to someone else- they're there to make money. So since you won't be able to buy the games from GOG only from EA/ Ubi, if someone else wants to provide the loss making bits of a launcher like forums etc for free then they should be ecstatic at not having to host as much annoying infrastructure with associated support costs. Steam and EGS would be different. But the problem for steam at least is they have spent a lot of time and money trying to cultivate a reputation for not really being a commercial venture but some sort of public good (which is ludicrous, but it's clearly what many of their fans actually believe) and an 'open' platform where all the lock in features are actually benefits for the good of everyone. Making it hard for GOG to integrate with that runs very much counter to that narrative- though I have zero doubt it will happen if they feel threatened; goodwill is nice, but it isn't worth as much as actual money. (I'd suspect Workshop is a major reasons for Galaxy 2, since it's gated from GOG and many game makers just use it as a default, but I'm not part of the beta so that is speculation on my part as to whether Galaxy 2 can get around that)

Yeah, the Stadia model as rumoured is like Netflix starting out as a subscription service that mailed out DVDs to people, but you still had to buy the DVDs as well. How would or could that compete with Blockbuster or just ordering what DVDs you wanted to buy off Amazon? The point of difference Netflix had which caused its explosive growth was when they moved into subscription streaming which undercut cable and the like and offered non schedule bound viewing; if you had to buy Friends or whatever at DVD prices as well as pay the sub it would not have worked, even iTunes purchase model is near dead (or is it actually dead?) now. Stadia's rumoured structure reminds me of all the pie in the sky early internet ideas from the early 2000s- and to be fair, some of those worked spectacularly well including original Google, but most didn't. I guess there is some sort of generational divide between me and the young whippersnappers with their 'i' this and their 'e' that wandering across my metaphorical lawn but I can't see how, say, someone hooked on Fortnite or Minecraft ends up thinking that having to buy the game and pay for a subscription for it as well is a good idea. I don't play Fortnite and the like due to my gammy knee and rheumatism but I believe they can be played on a phone, and that most young fellows and fellasses have phones, don't they?

I know it's what is rumoured/ said but I find it very hard to credit that you will really have to buy (most) games on top of having a subscription. I can't see how even the most out of touch Alphabet executive could think that would be a good idea, at least during the launch phase.

Sweden has one of the best internet infrastructures in the world though, and isn't typical. Stadia's main market would have to be the US, and internet in the US is often surprisingly (or maybe not) bad. There's also the question of theoretical vs practical performance- theoretically my 4g/LTE connection is very fast and more than enough for any practical use (purely theoretically it's "up to 150mbps synchronous" per the ISP's blurbs) but practically it's rare to even get 15mbps download and frequently it's in 100s of kbps; plus ping is far from great. The fundamental problem I see with Stadia though is that it's very much an 'exclusionary' product. You start off aiming at the whole gaming sphere, which is extremely lucrative; but then you exclude those who won't go subscription, you exclude those whose internet is bad or think their internet is bad, you exclude those who don't want the games you offer, or already have a console/ pc solution they're happy with etc etc until you're left potentially with a very small target market. And that's without dealing with all the significant potential technical issues that may put off those who would consider it, and competition from others. At this point I simply don't see the streaming model working unless they're willing to suck up a lot of early losses. Which Google traditionally has a spotty record with for products they don't see as core.

His stated position near word for word is "wrongfully terminated as a result of religious discrimination", though whether that's actually what he goes for in court... as previous, the intimation from his lawyers is that they will go for simple breach of contract due to Rugby Australia not having an enforceable social media clause in their contract. He's more than capable of claiming to do the first to get funding from fundies and paint himself as a victim while actually going for the second, as previous he is really not a sympathetic figure unless you're the sort of hard line christian who prefers to fund a multi millionaire rugby player on GoFundMe instead of children with cancer.