Zoraptor

Google+ popping up everywhere didn't save that, Google's list of failed products is pretty extensive; and theoretically at least the EU would kick Google's teeth in for skewing search results to favour themselves. Mostly though it's just plain too early and offers no real advantages for many potential disadvantages. It won't be that cheap, and relies on both a high throughput connection and low latency which most people don't have. It will be like streaming a TV program on a weak connection with no buffering for most people; you either get a stuttery mess at a decent resolution or a low resolution blur that doesn't stutter.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if resting goes full stop for not being a 'fun' mechanic, let alone per rest spells or abilities. Larian's philosophy with DOS1/2 is pretty much entirely on per encounter stuff (and at least their encounter design tends to be good most of the time) and that is by far the easiest way to do design.

I'm not Gorth, but since the Folau thing is a big deal here (his wife is a prominent NZ sportswoman who has semi publicly supported him) I would say that most people are bothered by him suing over being sacked rather than who is funding it; especially since the funding source is a direct consequence of who he is and what he did. He got warned previously about his behaviour and chose to ignore it and literally no team in Australia wanted to be associated with him in the end so the ARU had very little choice, while Israel could have just shut up for a year. There were also a lot of rumours that he was fishing for a buyout of his Australian Rugby contract so he could go to France or elsewhere for bigger money. He's simply not a very sympathetic guy unless you're a fringe christian. Having said that, he may have something of a case as his contract was, apparently, not very well written when it came to social media expectations. IMO the post he got fired for was a lower end issue, but he'd definitely primed the situation and knew what he was doing.

They make more money by selling full priced games. The 'rent' equivalent is the actual subscription service which is their selling point, but that won't get all the new release games to encourage people to buy instead. It's the same general theory EA has with Access: you pay a bit per month to get older games, you pay more per month to get newer games and perks, you can still buy the new games; and it's best for EA if you both buy the new games and subscribe since you're double dipping on the costs. But then Origin Access is also very good value, so long as you're sensible, and I doubt Stadia will be for most people. It's kind of exploitative, but the average tribal gamer moron is pretty much asking to be exploited.

The Australian Royal Commission on Banks was an absolute classic; a lot of people would love a sequel here where, apparently, exactly the same banks are whiter than white... Australia has a divide broadly similar to that in the US when it comes to 'Liberals'/ 'Conservatives' (note though that their equivalent to the Republican Party is... the Liberal Party). A lot of the people in the bigger cities are what might broadly be referred to as progressive, a lot of the rural areas and smaller towns tend to the more redneck and religious side.

Similar time as the Project Veritas/ Alphabet and Facebook stuff breaking, and like it or not reddit is a major internet site. For the more right wing, same time and left leaning subs with similar behaviour ('encouraging violence', hiding buttons) regularly escape censure.

I prefer the "A Kangaroo cannot get enough energy from its food to move by hopping!" example personally. (Neither can happen based on rigid mechanics, but both work if you take elasticity into account. There was also 'proof' that thrips couldn't fly either, because fluid dynamics/ Bernouilli's Principle was ignored but they are small enough to 'swim' through air rather than fly so get a lot more lift than calculated without taking it into account. And as noted- and this is why it's taught in some curricula- no scientist believed that they actually couldn't fly or hop based on the equations, they thought the equations/ assumptions made when using them were wrong and needed revision)

A full blown war vs Iran would make Iraq look like a stroll on a Miami beach. They've had decades to hone their asymmetric warfare skills and there will be no 'coalition of the willing' to unload duties onto, and that's without the population, geographical and equipment differences. You won't get a cruise missile with better evasion and a larger payload; there's a limiting trade off to manoeuvrability/ sensors/ payload/ range which means that if you increase one you have to decrease the others. If you want cruise missiles that 'cannot' be shot down you need to go hypersonic (which as with everything has another load of trade offs). Pretty much exactly that. There's only really one country that can trace a longer history as a country than Iran (Egypt) and that fosters a sense of identity most new countries have difficulty understanding, though really the US should- many people in the US may not like Trump, but if China invaded to get rid of him they won't be waving red flags along Pennsylvania Ave welcoming their liberators. It's very easy for Bolton and friends to try and say that the Ayatollahs aren't popular with the youth and that the US is popular- and it is even somewhat true, so far as it goes- but that goes straight out the window as soon as they get attacked. True, though Syria is about 70% sunni- but ISIS was also not solely an Iraqi/ Syrian group but also had a lot of expatriate jihadis. The problem would be that in any significant fight Trump would want as many non US troops as possible, and given that the coalition of the willing for an attack on Iran would fit in a broom closet he'd have to take whatever the Saudis would offer- and the Saudis would offer rabid takfiri militia in the hope they'd permanently mess up one of their rivals while getting rid of a potential problem at home. Plus, Saudi conduct in Yemen does not exactly fill one with confidence of their good intentions.

Oddly enough you insisted that the rouble was hit mostly by sanctions over Ukraine at the time, not the oil price (that was my position, glad you've come around to it though). Nigeria and Norway were brought up to show exactly that- the rouble wasn't the worst performer, the sub saharan unsanctioned but equally oil dependent Nigeria was; Norway literally has a trillion dollar/ 200k per capita sovereign wealth fund and could send its entire population on holiday for years without running out of cash but still lost 1/3 of its currency (Krone, iirc) value despite no sanctions. The Russians have also made plenty of changes to their economy and infrastructure, you just don't hear about them much unless there's a story to be had (usually something to do with corruption, or how their bridge across the Kerch Strait couldn't be built and now that it has been ahead of schedule how it will fall down). They're not going to turn off the spigots on their oil wells any time soon, but neither will any other oil producer.

Economists have been predicting the end of China's economic miracle for literally decades at this point. It's the old "if [countryname] changes literally nothing they will have [bad thing] happen to them" prediction- it's pretty near worthless because they did and will change something. China knows its workforce will drop, that's why it's going for the higher value stuff over plastic toys and cheap T shirts. It's also a truism because at some point China will stop growing, economists just have to keep predicting it and at some point they will be correct. But overall, if anything, a comparison between the US debt problem and China's demographic problem is not a favourable one because China is trying to do something to make preparations while the US really isn't. Wanting to be more like China is a weird position to take though, because their social policies are nothing less than awful.

Shipping containers of cocaine seems an odd unit for weight, since the drone was supposed to be military rather than CIA. The drone's size is a bit misleading, while it's roughly the same wingspan as a 737 its max weight is 1/3 that of a 737MAX's empty weight despite having vastly longer flight time and range than the 737. The picture HoonDing posted was of U-2 wreckage from Gary Power's 1960 shootdown, not of the drone, and it's literally on display in a Moscow museum. There has been even less wreckage recovered of the drone, not surprising since it fell into water instead of onto land (and I'd suspect had some sort of self destruct built in as well) or alternatively, not surprising since it wasn't shot down where Iran said it was. I don't think there's been any serious dispute it is drone wreckage though. It was a F-14 making an attack dive was the initial explanation. Which to be fair- more than they really deserve in the circumstances*- the crew genuinely did appear to believe since there was a news crew aboard and filming at the time, by coincidence, and there was no suggestion that they knew what they were shooting at. (The AEGIS operator was poorly trained/ incompetent (probably poorly trained) and the system badly designed such that he had the IFF/ transponder of a F-14 on the ground at Bandar Abbas selected and associated with the A300's despite it having its own civilian transponder on, the captain was a prize knob who had already entered Iranian waters against orders and under somewhat murky circumstances (a helicopter was either shot at or 'shot at' by a speedboat and he used Hot Pursuit justification) and the crew had Scenario Fulfillment probably based on the captain being an overly aggressive prize knob which made them 'see' a slow moving and climbing airliner become a fast moving diving fighter because... that's what they expected to see) *Both AEGIS operator Scott Lustig and Capt Will Rogers III got medals from the USN for their conduct on the day, lest we forget.

A lot of games are already 'blocked' in Syria or Iran (more usually it's purchases that are blocked, not the game itself, iirc that's the situation with Blizzard.net for example). It's 100% due to sanctions in general with the companies doing so 'voluntarily' to comply with the sanctions and not due to Trump pitching a fit about drones getting shot down. Neither steam nor GOG are effected and if you downloaded GOG games there isn't anything the US government could do about it anyway. If you can route the transactions through Europe and avoid the USD you're theoretically fine as a game distributor. That's not an option for all, especially those US based. The article is clickbait, basically. It's a bit of a silly thing to get at all upset about gaming though when you have genuine issues like pharmaceutical companies refusing to sell Syria or Iran medicines because they're frightened of US secondary sanctions (which shouldn't apply to medicines and the like; but US application of secondary sanctions is seen by pretty much everyone outside the US as utterly arbitrary stand over tactics, and a way to extort money off of foreign companies).

Nice to see Trump following through on his promise to Make Iran Great Again so quickly. Though he probably thinks it would make Gamers Rise Up or something.

"Is Epic Games behind a coordinated attack on CDPR?" is the sort of title Betteridge's Law was invented for.

It's just HoonDing being his typical Edgey self.

Historically he wasn't even at the trial (nor was Scherbina) and his downfall was due to him being bad at politics rather than him speaking truth to power. It's a great series but it isn't close to a documentary, and unfortunately people tend to take it as such.

It was a very expensive drone- in the order of USD120 milllion, no typo, and excluding R&D costs that add nearly another $100 million. If there's a drone you'd get really annoyed about losing it's one of those; most drones are pretty cheap and pretty disposable, it wasn't.

So apparently strikes against Iran were ordered and then aborted by Trump last minute. NYT/ 'anonymous administration' sources combo, so probably requires a pinch of salt until someone publishes a picture of the Pentagon car park or something.

Drones are actually pretty easy to shoot down. The commonly known ones are (basically) for use against people with little to no anti air capability because of that. They probably didn't expect that type of drone to get hit though, as it flies high and is extremely expensive. It would be the 'contiguous zone' component of territorial waters rather than FIR which would be relevant there, for Iran they are claimed out to 24NM/ 44km; and the type of SAM used only has a range of ~50km so practically it would have to have been inside that zone at least. FIRs and ADIZ are very regularly violated/ 'violated' (ADIZ at least are completely arbitrary and have no actual legal basis, so they are more ignored than violated). Having listened to the US CentCom (?) statement on the matter two things stood out; that they said Iran was claiming it was shot down over Iran (not Iranian waters as actually claimed by Iran) and they said it was shot down in the Straits of Hormuz in International Waters (in the SoH proper there are no International Waters, you have to be in the Persian/ Omani Gulfs for that, unless you claim the shipping lanes as such which would be... cheeky, for a spy plane).

I leave Minsc in the initial dungeon to get squished by rocks minerals every time I play BG2. Bioware can do 'comedy' companions pretty well at times (eg Mordin Solus) but Minsc is the NPC equivalent of fingernails down a chalkboard.

Yeah, the wording/ definitions are used a bit too loosely to really tell anything. The simplistic implication of a publisher losing their rights to publish is that they've lost everything because a publisher minus publishing rights --> nothing, presumably. But without further clarification it's likely that what has reverted are actually the distribution rights only, with Sega holding the rest of the stuff they had as publisher- IP/ (c), trademark, etc. Without those a sequel would be impossible, and further distribution might well be too at least without Sega's agreement.

Finished Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Liked it a lot overall, plenty of minor bugs still which I didn't really care about and I thought the save game system and combat was fine. Performance was OK too, certainly when compared to AC: Odyssey (CPU limited at 3440x1440 on a Vega64? oh the glories of multiple overlapping DRM schemes) which had a lot more money behind it. There were some pretty obvious engine limitations towards the end where they clearly couldn't do stuff quite as they wanted. Mentioned it before but it does stand repeating, I thought the A Woman's Lot DLC was excellent (the rest certainly wasn't worth ten bucks a piece though, quality wise it was fine but nowhere near enough content). Gone back to ATOM RPG now, as it has been 'finished'. The 30 hours or so I put into it before stopping last time pretty much convinced me it was the best of the turn based Fallout1/2 successors even with its jankiness and somewhat stilted UI.

Dunno, half the criticism seems to be that BnW (not using d&d, too easily confused with dungeons and dragons) being too hands off and the rest is about them micromanaging. I think they may just have been terrible rather than either. "Spreading disinformation at a time like that? It was disgraceful, simply disgraceful", surely. (though it does have to be said, the TV series shafted historical Dyatlov something terrible because it needed an antagonist. Probably would have been better if they'd used a fictionalised antagonist same was as they had Khomyuk as a stand in for all the non Legasov scientists)

To be fair to the CIA at least, their assessments were in general a lot more realistic than they are given credit for. But they got end run by what was effectively a parallel intelligence apparatus set up by Cheney, Rumsfeld et alia which was designed with the sole purpose of removing every bit of nuance and equivocation from supplied intelligence about Iraq. When the CIA did believe bad intelligence it was usually a case of scenario fulfillment. And, in the end, it was CIA director Tenet (and, facpov, Powell) who took the fall for the bad evidence despite having tried to get accurate statements made on things like the Yellowcake issue; all the little asteriskroaches doing Cheney and Rumsfeld's bidding went and hid under metaphorical couches. The same was true to an extent with MI6 and GCHQ in Britain. The big issues there were the thesis plagiarisation and the 45 minute claim* both of which were almost certainly political additions. The biggest direct intelligence issue was them ending up circularising the evidence of yellowcake- the US using the Brits running with the story to reinforce their own belief and vice versa. Which is a similar situation to the Iranian limpet mine story: the Brits say it must be true because the US says it must be true, then the US points at British support as evidence they're right. *and lest we forget just how much of a whitewash Hutton was; the 45 minute claim was obviously incorrect and equally obviously manipulated for maximum effect- there really isn't any dispute about it at all- but the only people who got in trouble for it were... the BBC and its reporters who debunked it for making an unprovable sourcing claim.

The US pulling out of the JCPOA was not actually illegal. It was unjustified- and to practical purposes admitted as such- and completely arbitrary/ unilateral, but that isn't the same as illegal. The US has definitely used some extremely shady tactics, been utterly inconsistent (eg Mr Bone Saw still not officially blamed for Khashoggi's death despite everything because he bought out Kushner's debt buys lots of arms; Iran blamed immediately thanks to 120p cellphone footage from 1998) and the flagrant dishonesty and prior disregard for agreements makes Iran negotiating with them pointless- but that isn't actually illegal, just immoral. As for the rest, yeah. The amount of outright evidence fabrication is and was pretty astounding. I'd blame the media for a lot of it due to their unquestioningly supine worship of authority, but then I also remember that for all the Yellow Journalism leading up to Gulf War 2 and the various other military adventures the only publication to be significantly censured for their coverage was... the anti war BBC in a report by from Lord Hutton Haw Haw v2.0, that gibbering gobbet of sputum, which deprived the entire Mediterranean of whitewash for a decade. Pretty clear message delivered, pretty clear message received.