Zoraptor

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.

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.