Zoraptor

I wouldn't even say that Bush deserves the blame for the bad intelligence and its presentation- that was clearly the brainchild of the Cheney junta. The blame that attaches to Bush is that of believing and appointing Cheney et alia in the first place, and a bit of not being questioning enough. Then again Bush was clearly not overly encumbered with that sort of intelligence so I guess the blame defaults back to those who elected him. OTOH Blair knew exactly what he was doing, slimy little louse that he is. Coercion wise we'll never know if anyone in US intelligence/ government was forced to make stuff up on threat of their CIA wife getting burnt or similar, but we do know with certainty that was used as Chilling Effect post facto. If they were willing to do that to someone working for their own country believing they'd actively threaten others is no stretch at all; though by its nature it would be more likely to be coercion to suppress since it's usual to just pay someone greedy or immoral to write what you want rather than coerce them to by more stringent means. And we absolutely know that coercion was tried on Hans Blix and El Baradei, they're just not american so don't count.

That's part of it, see below, but from the financial side Jade Empire mostly got canned because it didn't sell well after its initial launch window*. Jade Empire was a 20 hour game that somehow felt like it was a 200 hour trudge and with a unique setting that somehow felt more generic than the fricking Sword Coast. I'm sure there's potential for a good Chinese RPG in the vast and varied history and mythology of that country, I'm equally sure that JE will not be the franchise to bring it to us. *and allegedly cost MS a lot of money, not so much because it sold poorly in absolute terms but because MS was selling the xbox hardware at a loss and had to sell ~4 games per unit to make the loss leader back. Lots of Bioware fans buying an xbox just for JE (and maybe KOTOR if they didn't have it on PC already) cost MS more money than just the amount they paid for exclusivity.

Definitely, pipelining is essential for efficiency and that's partly why they've gone to 2 teams- but I'm of the opinion that they wanted to transition to a 2 team/ 2 project studio starting with W3 and C2077 rather than C2077 and [unannounced], and that's why C2077 has been announced so long. Witcher 3 had a big team and a fair few of its personnel should have finished there once the plot and bulk art assets had been locked down, and they should have then transitioned to C2077 at that time, now they should probably be on [unannounced] getting its art assets, world/ systems design and writing done. If they still had all of W3's modellers, world designers and writers working on W3 at time of release there was something wrong with how it was managed. I wouldn't say they realistically expected C2077 to come out 2 years after W3 did as some transition problems would be expected, but I would have thought their reasonable expectation was for a release inside the last year with late 2019 as approaching worst case.

Yes, but 2012 was when C2077 was announced which makes it look delayed, and they are shifting to a release every 2 years. I'd be near absolutely confident that late 2019 was near the very latest release expectation back in 2015. The other trouble is that if they're releasing 'Witcher 4' (or whatever it is) in 2 years time it ought to be a full two years into development now, and there's no indication it is.

You can't have a no questions return policy if you're drm free as it would be open to obvious abuse, so they're limited to the system they have. GOG also has a lot of staff, a dozen is not much of a loss for them. Curation and proper support needs time and staff which is why steam does neither and outsources as much to its users as possible. I suspect they (and CDPR themselves) aren't very sensibly organised/ managed though and the visible GOG functions are a bit of a mess. Their forum software is Geocities era, their website redesigns get progressively slower and less functional, they've managed to annoy both sjws and anti sjws and more. Definitely not in any danger of folding though, before Witcher 3 it was GOG propping the game studio up and they've been running at a (small, too) loss only in 2018 without the most profitable quarter counted. The big CDP problem is Cyberpunk taking so long to be produced while W3 sales are finally fading, and there's nothing the GOG side can do about that.

Last Discovery episode was a vast improvement, to roughly forgettable standalone S2 TNG level. Got brutally murdered again in comparison to The Orville*, but still an improvement. *

No. Or at least presumably no based on their analogue. (Red Blood Cells don't have mitochondria as they lose them along with the cell nucleus at hmm, erythrogenesis (iirc), so they- presumably- don't have midichlorians in SW either. You would get some mitochondria from WBCs but there are far fewer of them than RBCs in a blood transfusion)

Or latish Roman Republic: immense capite censi with low political engagement, lots of gerrymandering and back room deals, a political system that was designed well before the country got so big, huge vested interests that effectively controlled the Republic, colossal income disparities, massively disproportionate weight of military enlistment on a specific subgroup of the population and a lot more long term military engagement than was ever considered at the Republic's founding. Which probably makes Bernie Sanders Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus reborn, hopefully without the getting beaten to death by Mitch McConnell part.

Well why not, she only lost last time because of that evil misogynist Putin and not because of her moronic electoral strategy and lack of broad appeal.

Andromeda is very similar to Inquisition. Neither are bad though neither are good either. They're not low effort games, they've got a massive amount of content but would have been far better with less content that was more memorable as after a while both games got tired and dreary. I like some of the ideas behind them but overall they both feel a bit 'off' and too much like an offline (well, 'offline') MMO in single player mode.

I only have Netflix. But, as costs for 'premium' services go I could subscribe to Netflix, Amazon, Neon* and Lightbox* together for less than a monthly SkyTV sub which is the main premium alternative. No Hulu/ CBS/ DCTV etc here, and no 'native' Amazon either so its streaming is limited to their Originals, and comes via Japan (!) *The local Netflix alternatives are a bit lol, Lightbox started using Silverlight after MS announced its discontinuation and whatever Neon was using must have been licensed from Pixelon given its reliability and resolution

Fake news. Hess was already captured by 1944.

Welcome to Project Fear 2.0: this time all the bad stuff will happen for real, promise! Trade defaults to WTO standards in the event of a hard brexit, and plenty of countries trade on exactly that basis. For food, medicine etc imports it's in no one's interests- including the EU if they're exports from there to the UK- for them not to get in. Assuming some basic competence from the Brit authorities, which may not be in evidence practically, as the UK does trade with non EU countries and has inspections and paperwork for them applying that to EU imports should be easy enough. Exports from Britain to the EU are a lot more vulnerable, as at that point once all the attempts to end run the referendum have failed the EU will be looking to stick the boot in any way they can as a lesson to others who may look to leave. Good riddance to the war criminal worshiping Bliarite scum. Should have been purged a decade ago and Tony shipped off to the Hague where he belongs. The Tories are better off with a few less wobbly blancmanges as well. That none of them have resigned their seat to allow their constituents a choice illustrates perfectly what a bunch of utter unrestrained hypocrites they are even if trying to invalidate a binding referendum didn't, and the Tory defectors claiming May is further right than the Cameron/ Osborne austerity junta is laughable.

CDPR literally already tried something like that with Witcher Tales: Thronebreaker late last year too. It sold like **** even though it had the Witcher branding behind it. Yeah, nah. Thronebreaker is just behind Witcher 3 on GOG's all time best seller list, and that after only ~4 months. They may have had unrealistic expectations about its appeal andor expected GOG buyers to preorder and 1st day buy more- badly misjudging their own user base, the essence of the gog user is patience- but it's 100% sold fine by any objective measure and barely been out of the top sellers list since launch. Whereas on steam it sunk without trace beneath their shovelware tsunami.

There are good arguments for both with the 20 series being new releases, but unfortunately it also doesn't represent much of a price/ performance shift and there aren't enough raytraced games to be worth it for 1080p RTX gaming, so... The logic is that GPUs typically improve a lot in price/ performance and you're usually better off getting the monitor first then the GPU to go with it rather than the reverse. Despite price performance not shifting much over the past two years I think it's likely to shift a decent amount over the next year or so with Navi and a shift to 7nm, and the $200 saved getting a 580 instead of a 2070 class card will go a lot further in a year.

I'd basically recommend going similar to the medium build from Sarex's guru3d article. R5 2600- can go 2600x for the better cooler and automatic overclocking, probably not worth it tho B450 Tomahawk* 16GB DDR4 RAM (3000MHz+, any reputable brand on the QVL. Don't bother with B die, not worth the premium) RX 580** (fine for 1080p/60Hz, assuming 60Hz. Think they have a pretty good game bundle with them too at the moment) 550W or higher modular/ gold PSU (any decent quality unit like EVGA G series or recent Corsair CXM, check out a PSU tier list if in doubt) Crucial MX500 SSD That would be a fair bit under budget, I'd put any leftovers towards a monitor/ GPU upgrade later on. *X470 if you need the features, but a Tomahawk's specs are as good as or better than most cheap x470s. MSI has done an excellent job with their 400 series boards. **IMO the GPU market is pretty meh at the moment, so I'd tend to recommend a cheaper card rather than an overkill card especially since RTX is still at meme level adoption/ performance. nVidia's 1660 is also close to release and may be worth consideration. If a monitor upgrade is likely within a year a 2060/70/80 (or Vega 56/64 if you don't mind tinkering, they require a good quality 550W+ PSU though) should be considered, depending on resolution.

Anyway, I'm wondering, "everyone" always recommends what appears to be liquid cooling units for the i9-9900k. Does it really need that, if one isn't going to overclock? It will perform at its rated TDP (more or less) if you aren't overclocking and most decent conventional aftermarket coolers like the 212/ H7 will deal with a default 95W just fine. That will impact performance though, the 95W rating doesn't include the built in turbo so with poor cooling you may not (won't, practically) even hit the built in turbo speeds consistently. Pretty much all reviews are also done with high performance cooling even if they aren't doing an overclocking test and its strong benchmarking is predicated on hitting boost speeds. There isn't much point spending the premium on a 9900k and having it sit at 3.6 Ghz if you're doing something that takes more than 30s. IIRC under load it's a 200W chip at default settings on a 390 motherboard rather than a 95W chip, which gives an idea of the level of cooling needed to get full performance. Whether the 1300 includes budget for a monitor/ OS or not is a big consideration too.

Yeah, the maximum stress on a rope or bough would be at time of hanging, if it doesn't break then it will hold indefinitely. Guess 'God' could have done it, but if you use supernatural entities as an explanation you can explain anything. What happened to Judas afterwards is a product of the bible being written by men. Matthew's version is a good story that has the traitor dying in a proscribed manner by killing himself, compounding his 'badness' and even if he regretted the betrayal. Frankly, Luke's account implies revenge murder, "he fell down and randomly scattered his internal organs around the immediate vicinity." isn't exactly convincing compared to "someone was angry with his betrayal and killed him in a particularly unpleasant way, at the place he bought with his blood money as reinforcement". That isn't a great story to use as a foundation for christianity though.

Non spoiler: yeah, given that it seems likely they are a lot more recognisable.

Yeah, really not a fan of that episode at all. Yes, they did. When put into context with the rest of the Star Trek universe, no, not at all. Section 31 was Starfleet's Alpha Protocol back in Enterprise and it still is as of Deep Space Nine. It makes zero sense that it's an official part of Starfleet Intelligence ten years before TOS. Nor does it make any sense that the UFP would have an officially regonized and sanctioned Tal Shiar equivalent. It's not clear yet that its existence is generally known though is it? Spoilered it to be safe though I tried to be vagueish.

The ironic thing is that for most of the church's existence a Returning Jesus would have been labelled a dangerous heretic exactly as OG Jesus was labelled by the Jewish hierarchy of the time. It seems unlikely that a lot of the 'capitalist' stuff that the church did- selling indulgences, the fake artefact/ relic industry, huge accumulation of wealth and the various attempts and successes at gaining temporal power would have passed muster in exactly the same way Jews commercialising the temple in 32AD didn't pass muster. The message supplied by Jesus directly (well, 'directly' since it's not objectively provable what he said/ did and you just have to believe M/M/L/J as much as anything else) is overtly anti capitalist as it's against conspicuous consumption and wealth accumulation. Like just about everything else that message got massaged a bit by succeeding writers such as Saul to broaden appeal.

I actually don't remember if Pike knew about them. Pretty sure (but not certain) he recognised the name/ badge without prompting. As for whether it works, too soon to tell since they've only really had bits of C plot and B plot so far. Ep5 spoiler below, though it could easily be inferred from non spoiler info

Obama hadn't bombed anyone at all (yet) when he won, so there's precedent. Trump winning for North Korea would probably be more legit than Obama's win since Obama had done precisely nothing apart from not being GWBush at the time.

Obviously_this_comment_didn't_age_well.jpg That was... Threshhold level bad. The contrast against the last Orville episode could not have been more stark.