Zoraptor

I never saw him race (well, so far as I'm aware) but his tenacity after the Lauda Air Crash probably saved a lot of lives. Even if he'd done nothing else that would be worthy of the highest praise. Shame Boeing didn't seem to learn much from it though.

[minor editorialising] I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Epic Games Store. A vendor where the artist would not fear the distributor's cut; where the publisher would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by GabeN! And with the redistributable binaries of your software and a signed guaranteed minimum sales agreement, EGS can become your store as well.

GoT spoiler of course

Good choices there. The Wire is an interesting comparison to GoT, S5 was easily the worst of its seasons in most people's minds but the final episode was one of the best in the whole series. I personally liked the end of the Sopranos too, though that's on reflection and it was certainly... polarising at the time. Thing is, it wasn't bad per se and the show overall does remain good, just disappointing. And that as someone who was never a superfan. Indeed, it not being bad is part of why it was disappointing; you're not going to feel disappointed watching an episode of Days of Our Lives because you don't expect anything from it. In general things like the cinematography, acting/ casting, costumes, general direction and the like were all still good and many were excellent the whole season even if I might have some specific criticisms. I personally didn't even find the Battle of Winterfell too dark (because I watched in a fully dark room maybe?). So it wasn't like the production values turned it into an episodes of The Hexer or Hercules. The only aspect which was genuinely bad was the writing- and more specifically the plotting- and even then it was bad at least in part because there was so much squandered potential. If you're giving it an aggregate score based on all its aspects you probably end up giving it a 7/10; that's just made up of a bunch of 8-9/10s and one, rather important, 1/10. I have absolutely no qualms calling it stupid though.

I'm glad I read the spoilers. That was, in many ways, the most stupid ~75 minutes of tv I have watched but at least I was prepared. And yes, there was definitely some potential there which just makes it more stupid. GoT spoilers of course

Thought it was six of one, half a dozen of the other. Firewine ruins had instagib traps- a nightmare with narrow corridors plus the IEs awful pathfinding- and kobolds with fire arrows iirc.

"Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts.. " Sharpie ain't american, so he'll have to visit Bolton or Eliot Abrams and try to get a coup organised instead.

Watched the first two episodes of Chernobyl. It's rather good and has a fantastic creeping sense of dread equivalent to that of the Stalker games- though it remains to be seen if there will be any more historical revisions to increase the drama quotient.

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.