Zoraptor

Have to lol at the Johnson video, why do people always post the contextless version? Rhetorical question of course, they post it for the same reason the question was asked the way it was; it was a gotcha question to make him look stupid. Here's a transcript, all previous questions were both domestic and had context in the question; the Aleppo one is thrown in contextless and was about foreign policy. His answer definitely has aged better than the hysterical media hand wringing on Aleppo did. Crimea was Russian ethnicity being 'protected' rather than Russian citizens per se. Crimea also had a big naval base (which was to have the lease to Russia cancelled and then be leased to... NATO) and a history of not wanting to be part of Ukraine per their votes to leave in 1991 and 1994-5. [and since I mentioned it yesterday, the leaked engineering report on the Douma chlorine attack showing the cylinders were not dropped but were placed has been confirmed as genuine by the OPCW. Who, being a proud independent institution, are investigating it being leaked; and not it being suppressed in the first place...]

The US shouldn't need 1.6 million troops as not even Trump would be stupid enough to try and occupy Iran. It would be a 'limited' and almost entirely air/ missile attack sold with the anti nuclear/ missile message with the 120k or whatever ground troops being involved in limited things like stopping Saudi being invaded- since the Saudi military would lose to Iranian girl scouts if such a thing existed- and suppressing dissent around the naval base in Bahrain. Maybe grabbing the Hormuz area as well for 'security'. The idea would be that the oppressed masses would throw off their ayatollah overlords and embrace the americans as liberators so occupation would not be necessary; or more realistically, once the anthill has been thoroughly kicked it isn't so much of a 'threat' any more, you can try and split off Kurd, Arab, Baluch and Azeri areas using their own ethnic militia and it doesn't matter if everything goes pear shaped since you can pull a Libya and declare that everything has gone swell no matter how bad the long term situation ends up as. Said it once recently but I'll say it again; real problem is that the US media has a hard on for war pr0n and the only thing Trump has done to near universal media approval was lob missiles at Syria. That's an awful lesson to give someone like Trump, and awful ammunition to give someone like Bolton to use on Trump.

I agree the specific circumstances are different, but not the general. If we take the fairly recent Gulf War II part of the justification was WMD which was a future threat, and part was that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and thus had 'attacked' the US already (plus other stuff like the purported GHWBush assassination plot). Same for Afghanistan, though with way better justification there. Also the cruise missile attacks on Syria before evidence was out that confirmed who did it- and indeed, apart from 40% of the victims of the first attack being at hospital at impossible times for when the 'bomb' was dropped the second CW attack now has a leaked engineering report (which could be faked, but if so it's several orders of magnitude above typical fakes) stating the cylinders involved were placed, not dropped from helicopters. The old Hermann Goering quote about manufactured consent also still applies; you don't actually have to be being attacked, you just have to tell people they are enough times and they'll believe it. If you're really looking for an excuse, you find one, and some people in the administration- and not just chickenhawk Bolton- are definitively looking. If there are interested parties who want to fight Iran to the last american- which includes KSA/ UAE as well as Israel- then to paraphrase the great philosopher Scott Steiner, your chances drastic go up. Plus Trump's foreign policy has been a mess of ineffective 'maximum pressure' operations and unilateral actions that have not been thought through properly. At some point he's going to decide that maximum pressure has to involve actual force to stop people constantly calling his bluffs.

(1) Gulf of Tonkin (2) USS Maine Wow, ctrl+enter actually posts the message. That's going to be fun with shift+enter for single spaced carriage return and my fat fingers.

They could have hired the actual GoT creator I guess, though I doubt Martin would have been available. On the evidence of GoT Benioff and Weiss would be near perfect for adapting someone else's works- KOTOR, the 1st Zahn trilogy, whatever- but yeah, can't have much confidence if they're doing an original movie series after their post book work on GoT.

That was mostly on AMD for pushing a new architecture that was slower (!) than their old one and betting on more cores being critical too early. In terms of out and out speed advantage I haven't seen much suggesting that corners were cut specifically for speed with hyperthreading- and ironically, AMD's more secure SMT implementation is also a decent amount faster than Intel's HT. Most of the flaws seem to be 'buffer overflow' or not checking/ clearing the entirety of prediction memory space type issues that would presumably impact performance a little, but not much. And when it comes right down to it, AMD's implementation seemingly does (most) of those things properly while being faster. Plus the newer Intel processors with mitigations for the first batch of vulnerabilities don't seem to have any detectable IPC drop. Intel do seem to be rather negative towards Hyperthreading, but it's hard to tell whether that's due to security or attempts at market segmentation.

Pretty much what I've heard too. Heaps of systems from CK2 and EU4, but they're all very bare bones- so you feel little connection to the characters compared to CK2 nor can you develop your country in a 'unique' fashion as in EU4. Suspicion being, of course, that those systems will get fleshed out via later paid dlc.

And another one. Fixable by yet another microcode update that will effect performance. Intel's HT really is an utter cluster. Note: contrary to some articles (hello Tom's; though to be fair they've fixed it pretty quickly) almost all modern Intel processors [with hyperthreading, if it wasn't clear from the top line] are effected, but Intel is not recommending that everyone disable hyperthreading, only those at high risk.

I'd have to disagree about STD needing more episodes, I think it had enough time it just didn't use it well. There was enough time to, say, develop Airian or whatever cyborg lady's name was gradually in S2 prior to the episode she died in but they crammed the development into that ep instead. Whether through bad planning or bad writing is kind of moot, point is that more time would not help if the fundamentals of plotting and characterisation are poor, you'd just get more poor plotting and characterisation. Having said that though, side character development was better than S1, by far, overall, but they failed at it when they most needed it. Plot driving the characters was definitely a big problem in STD though, and in similar fashion to GoT. OTOH, I think GoT probably did need more 'physical' episodes, but maybe not more running time. Part of its problem IMO is that everything happened too quickly, in real time. I was not a fan of all the 'X talks to Y' for the sake of it that made up a lot of two episodes as I found it gratuitous fanservice, so streamlining some of that for more time on significant plot developments later could have solved some problems; and if they'd cut the 80 minute episodes and had maybe 2 extra weeks season length the pacing would have felt far better measured and it would have given people more time to adjust to some of the more... abrupt plotting elements.

A game's upgrades should be free forever vs a game should be upgraded forever, for free. People are saying the first, not that Richard Garriot should now be updating Akallabeth to run on win10 w/raytracing, gratis. Children do have to take some responsibility for their actions as well- if they don't then that's bad parenting. If a parent is giving a child a credit card and not monitoring what they do with it then that's bad parenting; if a child is stealing their card then there isn't much they can do about it except stop it happening again. I'd put money on it being the former most of the time, with a dash of technological ignorance too; parents simply not realising that credit card details get saved to accounts unless you opt out.

Well, that episode was just kind of weird, much as the whole GoT season has been. I think the plot overall would be salvageable with proper build up/ exposition- and I don't really care about things like prophecies not being fulfilled, if they're philosophically going for prophecies being bunk- but the specific plotting and characterisation has been all over the place. What has happened is the logical conclusion of magical mystical teleporting Euron and Littlefinger in the previous season(s); the facts are dictated by whatever the plot needs at the time rather than the plot flowing from the logical progression of facts. They also seem to have no real clue how to explain their characters' motivations properly any more.

I kind of agree in that I suspect they take the backlash a lot more seriously than they claim(ed) to, but the only semi public effect Solo flopping had was the cancellation of other 'Starwars Tales' inter big release year stand alones which weren't formally announced anyway. Johnson still supposedly has his own trilogy in development so it seems that LucasFilm management more or less maintain their opinion that TLJ was great, the backlash wasn't bad and only came from neckbeards and misogynist bullies, and that Solo was just an aberration with no longer term implications. The big shift will be if Episode IX (heh, I can't even remember its name without duckduckgoing it) does poorly as well, then I'd expect some sort of acknowledgement and actual change.

Has filming even started yet? We get a decent amount of Avatar news due to Cameron living here now and I feel like he's announced the scripts are finished and filming is about to start half a dozen times. Wouldn't put Solo and TLJ into the same category personally. Solo was ill advised- Han Solo without Ford, about a dead character, not really any demand for it- and had developmental issues but was an adequate movie that was generally regarded by the fans who bothered to watch it as more or less decent, just pointless. TLJ was even more deeply divisive than Phantom Menace was back in the day, and a big (only argument is how big) proportion of the fanbase actively loathed it instead of just being indifferent.

That's also one of the reasons why they're desperate to have lootboxes not be classified as gambling- if you start manipulating the results of your formally defined big g Gambling to give a 'first hit is free' result you will get in a lot of very real trouble in many jurisdictions as it would be both 'unfair' and seen as an attempt to addict. If it's just little g not real gambling honest guv then you can get away with manipulation with little to no oversight.

James Cameron does have a history for massively delayed films but the Avatar sequels are getting ridiculous. Presumably the SW films are the Rian Johnson ones. Though Benioff and Weiss from Game of Thrones have a SW project on the go as well.

"The only thing either strike on Syria accomplished was boosting Trump's approval, that the US lied blatantly about the results was more than proof enough of that." Try reading it again, slowly, and maybe get someone nearby to help explain it. The lies obviously aren't tied to Trump's approval, blowing up random brown people by itself is more than enough for that. They lied about accomplishing anything significant apart from that. If they'd accomplished anything significant they wouldn't have had to lie about things like destroying more planes than were even present. I was even kind enough to drop a hint by mentioning 'either strike'. The great irony being that- as often happens- your rush to get in a zinger combined with your ignorance to make my point for me since you forgot there were two sets of strikes, didn't take the hint and talked about the first like it was some glorious deterrent that taught those evildoers the error their ways. The Shayrat strike accomplished nothing except for a boost in Trump's ratings. Didn't stop airstrikes, didn't stop the base being used the next day, it destroyed a handful of aircraft that were mostly derelict enough to be present on satellite photos from a year earlier and blew up some sheds and aircraft shelters (which everyone knew wouldn't stop modern bombs anyway). And it didn't even work as a deterrent to stop Syria using CW again, according to the US itself. Completely ineffective slap that humiliated no one; all it did was give flag wavers and Trump himself a chubby.

Well, I gave you a way out, can't say I didn't. I'll come to your latest reading comprehension fail later, but for now: You've forgotten one rather important thing. It was US strikes, not strike. Shayrat was only the first. So yes, bombing Shayrat was so effective an object lesson that a year later the US had to bomb Syria again... Does its effectiveness as a 'slap' really need any more refutation than that? Rhetorical question, I don't want another random youtube link. Syria was so scared and humbled that they did the same thing again. Of course, no nerve agent found in Douma and the first Khan Sheikhoun attack had 40% of its victims in hospital before the supposed bomb (and it's still rocket rather than bomb debris they showed) was dropped even according to the OPCW-JIM report. That the JIM decided to ignore causality when assigning blame was also why it got its mandate rescinded, not that you'd know that from media either. As for your reading comprehension fail, US lies were proof of the ineffectiveness of the strikes as if they were effective they wouldn't have needed to lie but could have just told the truth. That the average US citizen loves Michael Bay style news of explosions and Old Glory being waved while Brian Williams climaxes live on screen to tomahawk launches needs no supporting evidence beyond having eyes and ears and being alive over the last 20 odd years. Lies being: 20% of Syria's air force destroyed at Shayrat (20% wasn't even present), all missiles bar one arrived (Airbus satellite shots- not publicly available unfortunately- indicate only one set of thirty arrived) and of course the airbase was back in action the next day. 2nd attack: Barzeh research centre was CW related (cleared of such by the OPCW and pretty recently before the strikes too, indeed iirc the opcw was based there at one point), every missile launched hit its target (at least one was trucked off to Russia) and using 76 missiles at 120 million USD to not even fully destroy a 5 storey building is at very best suspicious. Still, better than the French who it seems only had one missile successfully hit in the end which is why we never got satellite images or proper identification of their target. That's brief and there were smaller lies too, but I cbf listing all of them.

The only thing either strike on Syria accomplished was boosting Trump's approval, that the US lied blatantly about the results was more than proof enough of that. The whole argument has been done to death before though, and I have no stomach for another round of 'but I went shooting in Dakota so I know everything about New Zealand' style stupidity. Even I have a cooldown period.

I'd blame the US media for a lot of Trump's sabre rattling foreign policy- the one thing that media near unanimously approved of was him lobbing missiles at Syria. Indeed, approved of is a pretty severe understatement of its reception. Anything Trump does domestically has two sides to it with the media mostly being against what Trump wants; but blowing up random brown people gets near universal celebration. In even gets celebration from Trump's anti intervention base, so long as it doesn't cost too much and there aren't US casualties. I'd presume the 'threat' from Iran was Zarif's mention of closing the Straits of Hormuz to countries friendly to the US or something related to it (minelayer movement or YJ-7 anti ship missiles being moved into the area as examples, though you'd have to think they'd be there as a matter of course). But it's not like US carrier groups are a stranger to the Persian Gulf and it's most likely just more posturing.

GoT spoilers

They do load on startup (66.0.3 at least) if you use that solution despite the option being labelled as 'temporary'. Edit: needs to be done once per day apparently.

Big spoiler, don't read Frame handling is a bit annoying as it is now. You also cannot add text above a quote in standard reply if the quote box is at the top. You have to select the box element itself, not its contents, then cut it. Easiest way is to select the drag and drop tab at top left, if you move the mouse cursor away the frame turns blue showing it is selected and you can then cut it, add text and repaste. May not work on mobile (and I suspect selecting the frame would be near impossible even if it could theoretically work)

No you can't, it seems that at present having a box element at the top means you cannot add text above it. If you cut (standard ctrl x command) so that the top element isn't a box though you can add text as normal. You then paste the cut stuff back in after the added text. It's definitely a workaround and more trouble than it should be though.