Zoraptor

Typical Gromnir, 50 people dead and the most important thing is trying to nitpick. And you even manage to fail at that. It's almost like the misleading stats I debunked were your misleading stats and you've been nursing yet another grudge for years. But anyway, it's not even grammatically incorrect since most of the AR15s sold here aren't actual AR15s, they're knock offs. So are the AKs for that matter, most are Norinco copies rather than Izhmash (as was).

No kidding, but the AK on the other hand is notoriously an auto weapon even if the models sold here are mechanically s/a same way as an AR15 is. No disambiguation and people would think I meant full auto AKs were legal. Point is, of course, that the AR15 looks like a M16 and an AK semi auto looks like an assault rifle version. Neither version sold here is automatic, neither can be retrofitted to their military equivalent. Can't say I'm surprised you'd try for a zinger, equally unsurprised you missed. Don't think I've ever opined about US gun laws either except in an abstract manner, as it isn't my business. I debunked some doctored pro gun statistics someone posted here once, but then I'd debunk doctored stats on paint drying. And since I didn't state it explicitly last post, literally nothing has changed legally in the past 3 days as parliament wasn't even sitting over the weekend.

FFS, we haven't banned assault weapons in 2 days. Watching overseas ignorami opine about our gun laws etc etc has been far from an edifying experience since they fail to get even the most basic facts correct most of the time- and are far more interested in firing off zingers at their domestic political opponents than getting things right. Assault rifles have been banned here for ages, all you can buy is a semi auto that looks like an AK or AR-15. The main problem in Christchurch was that while it's illegal to own 30 round mags with an A cat license it isn't illegal to sell 30 round mags, so 30 round mags got sold. That's the sum total of the loophole which was exploited, albeit it's a ludicrously moronic loophole to allow. 30 round mags can only legally be owned if you have an E cat license, and you're not getting one of those as a member of the general public. Honestly, if you lined people up here- or most places elsewhere- and asked them to ban two guns out of our semi auto AK/ AR15 models and a WW2 M1 Garand they'd instantly pick the 2 'assault rifles' despite the Garand being far more dangerous, because the Garand looks like a bunny buster and not an assault rifle.

That would be Alexios. The only reason I'd play through AC: Od again would be to see if Kassandra (whose VA and scripting is 100% fine) was quite as jarring as he is when their roles are switched around.

Anyone willing to recommend or otherwise Watch_Dogs (2) since it's on sale at the moment? I've enjoyed/ am enjoying AC: Odyssey well enough but I definitely wouldn't want to play another similar game immediately after* and the rep of Ubisoft games is that apart from their more niche titles like Anno they all have a similar approach. Plus the premise of Watch Dogs seem to be one of the more interesting ones. *AC: Odyssey is just too repetitive at its heart, then again if you're getting tired of a free game after near 100 hours you don't have much to complain about in the greater scheme of things. I wish there was more mission variety and a bit more substance to the war- being able to murder hordes of Athenians and Spartans with no consequences makes little sense and you can kill leaders, steal their money and burn their supplies then turn up to their army recruiter 5 minutes later and all is forgiven. OTOH the visuals are great, I like Kassandra and the historical angles are mostly accurate and add a great deal of depth to what could have been a fairly shallow game.

Given the "Origin read my medical records" FUD* I'm going to be a bit skeptical about such accusations- if it's privileged information then fundamentally it ought to be encrypted by steam and thus not be publicly accessible. *He was storing his medical records in the programdata folder for some weird reason- well, I always suspected it was recursive and he put his medical records there deliberately because he'd chcecked Origin scanned the folder. Plus there was the "Origin will sell your private info to 3rd parties" FUD, when actually Origin's policy was way more stringent than steam's which specifically excused 3rd parties from following its privacy policies, unlike Origin which made them follow its more stringent ones.

Epic Store is literally, literally literally- banned in China though. Unlike Steam. The accusations about Epic Store are even more nebulous than those against Huawei- where it's increasingly looking like the complaints are because there aren't NSA backdoors built in rather than there being Chinese ones present. Bit of an open question though as to how many/ what proportion of customers are outraged about it or have a negative perception of the Epic Store. Some certainly do, but whether it's enough to generalise about customers in general is certainly not clear. I'd suspect most don't really care or don't know and only the enthusiast social media types care. From Epic's POV Tim Sweeney has seen Steam as a negative for years, them leaving Steam is hardly surprising and per the Borderlands 3 hints I wouldn't suggest anyone hold their breath for it not being Epic exclusive, I'd guess that's half the reason it's being made and it will be ES's Halflife 2/ Steam equivalent. You don't generally hear devs complain about Steam publicly, but then you wouldn't expect most to since Steam is the biggest and by far the most powerful store so you have to be careful about offending them, but there have been issues bubbling under the surface for a while. Very few devs like the current approach to Discovery for example and the inundation of low effort shovelware burying their products for example but without an alternative what can they really say about it? Similarly many question why Valve takes a near retail sized cut despite being being a digital store with digital store overheads. Game journalists on the other hand are just utterly useless and a fair few literally literally hate gamers and will think any outrage from them has to be unjustified and any criticism of anything by them has to be entitled gamers throwing toys from cots.

You know, one could just as easily question where did you get that 25% number from.It's oddly specific and reputable people that promised to benchmark the thing didn't deliver so far. Perfectly fair to question where it came from. 25% is the highest drop observed and yeah, it's 100% anecdotal. Various drops have been observed by pro reviewers with ~12% being the highest and lower single figures being more common, but then even when doing a proper CPU limited scenario at very low resolution (which only the ~12% youtube review bothered with) the reviewers still had high end hardware in the 8700k class with lots of threads, rather than more typical hardware. With 12 threads hardly any program will use them all so Denuvo overhead can largely be offloaded onto an empty thread, with proper coding- but the case is quite different if you don't have any spare threads as is more likely with an i5/ minimum hardware set up. Nobody has formally tested that so far as I am aware though, there are only anecdotes which show the big frame rate drops. It won't effect most people (much) because the vast majority of people are GPU limited rather than CPU limited; it's brought up because mkreku previously claimed denuvo had no effect at all.

Meh, people who support DRM being stockholders in Denuvo is a bit conspiracy minded really- it's any sort of drm that gets defended and iirc Denuvo is made by a privately held Austrian company. Far more likely he just hates pirates for whatever reason, so since pirates are bad any countermeasure taken against them has to be good, and if you're not for said countermeasures it has to be because you're pro pirate rather than being annoyed that you as a legit customer have to suffer through bad drm. End of the day that would be a very human logical progression.

Or.. these developers implemented Denuvo poorly. Or are you suggesting Denuvo has a 25% performance hit every time? Well, you said there would be zero hit under all circumstances so that is already out the window. It will have up to 25% performance hit dependent on CPU type and whether the computer is CPU or GPU limited. If it's GPU limited there will be no performance hit unless the extra overhead pushes it into CPU limited territory, albeit 25% is a lot of extra overhead. The amount seems reasonable for a system that requires on the fly encryption and decryption plus multiple hook monitoring, they could never realistically do that for 'free'.

Being a bit old isn't a problem, being from someone who uses Resetera is. That site is utter cancer. I'm still disappointed they didn't get kicked entirely for their doxxing and harassing rather than just being given a final warning by their host. If cut were such a big deal... everyone would run their own store and get 100%? Then again, if cut were irrelevant then nobody would run their own store and everyone would just use Steam, and Gaben could put his cut up to to whatever he likes? It's almost as if the situation is a bit more nuanced than he's letting on. Itch.io and Humble aren't even the cheapest options anyway, direct selling via BMTmicro is so far as I am aware, and in reality they're all selling slightly different things- BMT is cheap as chips but completely bare bones, Humble is high(ish nowadays) volume but very low margin, itch.io is tiny; and the bigger players have services with more features. Having said that though many Steam features are designed not carefully to appeal to developers and customers but carefully to promote the maximal amount of lock in to steam as a service- same for Origin (Access especially, though it si very good value if you're willing to cancel your sub when not using it), uPlay and to a lesser extent GOG. Bags of money to throw around is a pretty massive plus to have though. Practically it has a different market from most of the smaller players including GOG (all of whom's greatest competitor is Steam), Humble has a different sales model, while Origin and Uplay exist to sell EA and Ubisoft titles. Epic Store is completely irrelevant to some of those stores and mostly irrelevant to the rest. GOG is hurt by CDPR not having a recent release and still being mostly an old game site where most people have bought what they want. GOG is also not primarily in competition with Epic and Epic Store may actually be better for GOG- as they may well end up getting titles like Metro Exodus the same day that their main competitor (steam) does instead of well after.

You can easily see why they did it, and it's a good approach for Epic as well. Gamers are abject morons fickle as a group and couldn't stick to principles to save themselves (COD_boycott.jpg), a decent number will receive the Epic Store keys and just decide to use them as they're 'free'. (4) is wrong though as it's "if we exclude the drm, then it has no DRM" just like arguments that Steam is DRM free. An extraneous program for download, install and updating is 100% DRM if it's Epic Launcher or the steam app. Yellow Peril is so cringe; whether it's 10c or Huawei. As if Steam hasn't sold out 100% to the US and other governments- and was planning on selling out to China as well. Fig/ Kickstarter are not sales, technically neither are standard pre-orders as a sale is a contract for goods receive in exchange for money, until you receive the good it isn't a sale. In many places cancellation should be available after 28 days and right up to release (and given they've clearly varied terms they would have no standing for cancellation fees etc). Investors should be ecstatic with a minimum sales pledge though, assuming they're really investors rather than super fans.

DirectX12 support has been added to Windows 7 (!) Given that Win7 is meant to be non supported inside a year that really is pretty random video game news.

So it looks like Denuvo actually does eat your CPU cycles, thanks to DMC 5's Denuvo free developer fork being public for a few hours alongside the standard denuvoed exe. Up to 25% of your precious fps go straight to the DRM anti tamper. I haven't been so surprised since I last dropped something and it was accelerated towards the object of greatest local mass. Or maybe it's all a plot by dastardly pirates to slander Denuvo's good name...

I've been playing AC: Odyssey, having never played an Assassin's Creed game before. It's good fun, though it's basically Witcher 3 but a little worse in every respect, and I find myself appreciating the effort put into the historical aspects plus it's clearly had an equal effort put into the world building. I do wish other games would take a leaf out of Witcher 3's book- hoho- and make their places of interest, well, interesting rather than just being another place to clear out. The big world building strength of Witcher 3 was not that it was huge, nor was it its somewhat (and at times very) stilted main quest line, but that it gave a good impression of being a real world where its points of interest may have been templates but had always seemed to have some unique features about them to keep interest up instead of being make work/ padding. The variety of quests AC: Oy is also just a bit worse all the time and are almost always just to kill everything or deliver something. But it is certainly nice having a more or less full cast out of Thucydides and have them be recognisable as such and the world is huge, pretty and detailed. OTOH I haven't even been to half the world- about half the islands, 'Macedon' and almost the entire Peloppenese including Sparta is unvisited- and I'm lvl 49, top merc and have all the sensible usable skills maxed out; and that seems a tad excessive for having half the content remaining.

Yeah, the fundamental problem is that there is no wider context to the battles used for rankings. Win one battle comprehensively against massive odds and you don't count, win lots of battles that you should win and you rate well. A lot of the later battles in the USCW Lee could not realistically win and Grant could not realistically lose due to the disproportionate resources. Same is true to a lesser extent for Zhukov- who was at times profligate with his men's lives in battles he could not realistically lose- and is true in reverse for some Germans like Rommel and Manstein; who were also hamstrung by having to follow Hitler's idiotic orders. There's also the problem that both Napoleon and Caesar were extreme self publicists, and especially for Caesar that bleeds over into the wikipedia sources. And after all's said and done, if you do a statistical analysis of battles fought with no context then the conclusion is that the US comprehensively won the Vietnam War...

There isn't funny maths in the manipulation sense, but it isn't measuring the best commanders. They are measuring the best resourced battlefield commanders who weren't incompetent, not the best commanders full stop; and a competent and well resourced battlefield commander describes Grant in particular perfectly. It also excludes brilliant strategic commanders like Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck who fought very few actual battles and overvalues strategic idiots like Napoleon. End of the day a raw statistical analysis results in Sir Harry Rawson being history's greatest commander- winning a war in less than an hour and with [divide by zero error] times more enemy casualties than his own. That it was the British fricking Empire vs Zanzibar is irrelevant, statistically.

Wait what? Napoleon came first and he gave Napoleon a positive mark for Borodino, an utterly unnecessary bloodbath largely so due to Napoleon's moronic bash the middle tactics and refusal to commit reserves? Have no fear you will be spared a full scale rant about Napoleon's many and varied shortcomings due to the fact I have to do real world stuff, but... bet he gave Napoleon high marks for Jena-Auerstadt as well when Nappy fought a crappy little army he massively outnumbered and it was Davout who bet the main force- and Davout was hugely outnumbered- and Waterloo where Wellington had a green, scratch army- not Peninsular veterans- with a lot of potentially unreliable Dutch who'd been fighting alongside the french up until a year or so earlier. Napoleon got an entire army needlessly slaughtered near to a man twice in Egypt and Russia, never learnt from mistakes and repeated the same tactical mistakes multiple times across multiple battles. If Rommel gets marked down effectively for being a strategic doofus (which let's be frank he was) and losing when he had bad supplies, too few men and little support Napoleon should be marked down for his myriad strategic blunders. Guess I should just be glad it wasn't Fredrich der Moron ranked first, saved as he was by Elizveta dying at an opportune time and that idiot prussophile Petr succeeding. Best generals were Subotai, Khalid ibn Walid, Alexander (and pals, since he wasn't quite the same without Parmenion), and John Churchill. Early Napoleon up to Austerlitz, great, and I'll even let him off for Egypt if it were a one off; later Napoleon was herp derp and barely above average without all the lionising and historical stat padding from fanboys and Nappy himself.

The effected memory system dates back to the pentium pro (!) so in theory everything since- apart from Itanium- should be effected. Choice of not so good writeups I'm afraid as at the time I posted none of the sites I'd usually cite had anything available.

Apparently there's (yet) another security flaw in Intel chips- 'Spoiler' (that's its name, not a warning for GoT S8 leaks etc). Similar attack vector to Spectre/ Meltdown but this one's a real doozy as well, since it seems likely it cannot be fixed except via direct hardware alterations and can at least theoretically be exploited via javascript. AMD and ARM chips not thought to be effected, albeit they only tested an archaic A6 on the AMD side.

NHS in Britain performing badly is a meme thanks to the Daily Fail/ The Scum and the other garbage daily papers, but it does its job fine especially when it isn't being deliberately hamstrung by Tory politicians for ideological (and donor, financial type) purposes. It does have one fundamental advantage over the US in providing healthcare- far higher average population density.

And will happily suck up to 500W from the socket, with no manual overclock... An industrial aquarium chiller ought to do the trick cooling wise, luckily Intel has one sitting around.

I don't think the lack of classic western style 'nationalism' was insurmountable though, if the CPA had been able to maintain some semblance of normality in services and the like they could have fostered it or at least got around the lack of it to keep Iraq stable- and once stable the democratic etc institutions they wanted would have been more likely to succeed. The really fundamental problem was that the US civil administration personified in Bremer lacked the slightest grasp of reality in almost any respect. Which is much the same thing as old world arrogance I guess. (From the national building standpoint I'd say that firing the bureaucracy was more damaging even than firing the army, as that crippled state functions utterly even where the security situation was relatively calm and even amongst those who might have been persuaded to give the occupation forces a chance to deliver. Months of no state functions would cripple 'goodwill' even somewhere 'advanced' like the UK, let alone in Iraq. And to be honest, if the US had invaded France I'd expect them to have most of the problems they had in Iraq as well if they tried the same tactics)

Afghanistan was a bit more complicated even than Iraq (!) since the US explicitly backed almost anyone anti soviet* and it was right at the start of Saudi actively exporting Wahhabi/ Salafi philosophy for political aims. So those getting US backing included loons like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, what became the nucleus of Al Qaeda, plus some of the future Taleban leadership like Mullah Omar- but it also included most of the Northern Alliance who made up the bulk of on the ground anti Taleban forces. I'd tend to excuse the US mostly for the Taleban itself, not Al Qaeda though, since at the time of its rise the US was disengaged almost entirely from Afghanistan. The Taleban was a Pakistani Intelligence project using refugee Afghans from Pakistani madrassas. Also Afghanistan was somewhat different as their outsourcing there was to Pakistan, and Pakistan was practical rather than ideological in their support for radical Islamists; Saudi tends to be both. Syria though illustrates outsourcing problems very well; Turkey, Qatar and Saudi tended to support radical groups and recommend them to the US. Saudis recommended Salafi groups, Qatar recommended Ikwhan (Brotherhood) groups and any radicals not supported by Saudi, and Turkey supported pretty much anyone who would serve their purposes including, practically, supporting ISIS vs the Kurds. They also tended to recommend very strongly whacky Turkish Nationalist groups, which had the US publicly supplying literal child beheaders at one point. That was a lot more effective in destroying any genuine moderate opposition than Assad and the Syrian government was as the only way to get good supplies was to be in a radical group. In contrast the southern areas where Jordanian influence was stronger had far better vetting and a lot fewer questionable actions by US sponsored groups, but Jordan also pulled support a lot earlier due to not having an ideological stake. In the end the US more or less learnt to ignore the recommendations after so many groups defected to ISIS, joined Al Qaeda umbrella organisations, ethnically cleansed, filmed themselves cannabalising dead alawites etc etc and went with everyone's last choice in the YPG/ SDF. Even then a lot of the arab militia in the SDF are the exact same groups that Saudi recommended in 2012/3 and who defected to ISIS in 2014 but defected back last year. *the only real exceptions were pro Iranian factions.

Shia and Sunni didn't hate each other in Iraq until Zarqawi very effectively stoked the flames. There was some score settling due to Sunnis being more privileged under Saddam, but nothing major. The concern was more about the total break down in law and order/ finance/ supplies and the other stuff that makes a country function. As with multiple other middle eastern situations the problems come from the US largely outsourcing intelligence to interested 3rd parties including Saudi; and Saudi's religious philosophy is barely different from Al Qaeda's or ISIS' (though the political one differs significantly) which means they tend to label salafi groups as 'moderate' and thus not a threat. It's a very short step from Saudi's religious rhetoric to declaring takfir ('not real muslims') on Shia or Alawites, and once you've gone that far you can religiously justify doing pretty much anything to them including randomly blowing them up etc. That's also why the vast majority of groups that joined ISIS in Syria were initially 'freedom fighters' supported by US allies and why you got pictures of John McCain et al with future ISIS leaders; outsourcing intelligence. Technically of course takfirism is frowned upon even by Saudi; technically. OTOH there's no real dispute in minority sects that Sunnis are real muslims.