Zoraptor

What is this conclusion based on besides 'this is the viewpoint I want to condemn'?

For the Tories no confidence votes can only happen once a year, so she's now safe until Dec 13 2019, assuming she doesn't resign in the interim. Even if she had lost it would only have resulted in Prime Minister Alexander B de Pfeiffel Johnson or whoever instead of May. Personally I want PM Michael Gove, simply because he looks like Evil Harry Potter. The government itself might not last that long though, given there's no way the DUP will support May's Brexit plan and she needs them for Supply and Confidence. If that happens another general election might be unavoidable.

Well, Intel is already offering 8-core CPUs that don't employ the CCX concept. It is more complex so probably more expensive to implement, but I don't think it would affect yields much. Plus the 7nm chiplets are approximately 1/3 the area of the 14nm chips, so that will offset much of the loss in yields of an immature 7nm process. That said Voldemort has retracted his claim on the IO chip; Now he is claiming that these Ryzen 3 products use 7nm chiplets only. More likely that they have slightly larger 7nm chips with IO integrated for PCs, at maybe 1/2 the area of 14nm chips each. This also makes more sense with the combination with Navi which I think would have IO integrated because of bandwidth and energy requirements. Infinity Fabric 2 will do what, 100 GB/s between chips? That may be enough for an integrated GPU, but not for any discrete GPU nowadays. The Intel 8 core is very expensive though, in part because you need to have 1x8 'perfect' cores when using ringbus rather than 2 perfect lots of 4 as with the infinity fabric/ ccx system; and it's also expensive on a very mature and refined node. Assuming linear error rates 8 core ccx would double the number of 'bad' ccxes (who knows though, depending on how the intra ccx stuff is handled complexity may go up non linearly and some stuff will have the same error rate whatever the core count). That might remain within acceptable levels, but it's all speculation at the moment. At this point I'm not really sure what to make of the I/O situation at all. Too much rumour and I don't have the technical expertise to evaluate the relative likelihoods.

As friendly as necessary, considering kids will have access to it. Seems so odd they'd make it like that. Why not do it like Netflix and have a kids filter? That way they could have both the kid shows and the more mature shows within the same umbrella, increasing the potential number of subscribers. The Disney brand is Family Friendly, the stuff which Disney the company does that isn't so family friendly has different branding- silly maybe, but that's always been their approach. They may also believe that by splitting their properties across Disney+ and Hulu they will get more money from both than they would from having a centralised system. A Star Wars series being family friendly is pretty much a no brainer even if it is live action instead of animated. A lot of adults can be guaranteed to watch anyway as they did for Clone Wars/ Rebels. Kids also get toys off the shelves, and they don't tend to vociferously complain about Luke Skywalker having a personality transplant.

Epic doesn't require/additional DRM in their store, but the way their store operates is intrinsically DRM by most people's definition of it.

Sure it was, otherwise MS couldn't have bought them. Sure they did. They were wholly owned by MS, now they're now privately owned with a minority MS stake. That's bought out, by those who own the company- including for example the original studio founder, so bought out by themselves. Exactly how and why that happened can only be speculation, but it seems extremely unlikely that MS just decided randomly to let their most successful gaming acquisition go. MS allowed them to split for [some reason] despite them being responsible for the games that popularised xbox. And you know how MS would have made even more money? Own Destiny outright, or have Bungie do Halo until Ragnarok. Instead Activision gets a big slice of money MS doesn't, and it's on PS as well as xbox. Except Bungie is now independent, Lionhead etc aren't. Bungie was Microsoft's most successful acquisition, yet they let them go indie... out of the goodness of their heart? Or because they wanted to retain failing studios rather than successful ones? I mean, a lot of people didn't have much time for Steve Ballmer as a CEO, but he isn't that stupid. They made truckloads more money than the games cost and shifted a lot of xboxes, probably more than any other franchise. It would be like 2k deciding that Rockstar should become indie because GTAV and RDR2 would be expensive games then patting themselves on the back for saving that 200 million dollars; never mind missing out on the billions of revenue the games brought in. They probably could have, but we don't know. You spend 90% of the post saying that MS could do anything they wanted to with Bungie, anything at all including subsuming its IPs and shutting it down. So, why would MS be trying to get goodwill from and settle for a minority stake in their own wholly owned subsidiary/ division/ whatever their legal definition? Just keep the ownership of everything, no need for goodwill or settling for one additional Halo title, you can have them churn Halo titles biannually till the end of time and Bungie would have no say because they're wholly owned and have no independent existence. Fact of the matter is the situation with Bungie is far from clear, but it clearly wasn't the same situation as Lionhead and the like. It's also not the only management buy out, I/O Interactive management bought themselves out from under Squeenix (albeit Squeenix wanted out, still seems highly unlikely MS wanted out of Bungie).

That might be how it works, but it does depends on the purchase contract and whether Obsidian is still a legally separate entity. See Bungie for example, owned by MS, but bought itself out from MS and they rather than MS own for example Marathon* (trademark serial 77953184, if anyone is interested) which they developed before being bought by MS. OTOH they don't own Halo, but that was classic work for hire. In any case, significant changes to tOW outside the scope of the existing contract such as making it a CCG would require one of three things: approval from 2k/PD, buying 2k/PD out of the contract or breaking the agreement and ending up in court. As a pre-existing contract at time of purchase MS is obligated to honour it whatever managerial control they do or do not have over Obsidian. *I was once asked to supply some questions for a Bungie Q&A which weren't standard Halo or Destiny development (at that time) ones for a bit of variety. Apparently the guy asked was quite pleased to get a question about Marathon for a change, confirmed they owned it but said there were no plans to use it.

My immediate concern is their affiliation with Take Two. Who isn't exactly well disposed to the modding community given their recent legal experience with the likes of Black Hat GTAO modders the likes of Menyoo.... OTOH Civilisation series traditionally has near full mod support, and it's 2k as well. As Ethics Gradient noted, they don't like mods that eat into their bottom line or product perception, not mods in general. As others have said, there's a big difference between no mod support and no mods. So long as Obsidian doesn't obscure the file formats (as did happen in Alpha Protocol, for example, meaning pretty much zero modding possible) officially unsupported and responsibility for disclaimed so don't ask us for help if you stuff up class mods seem fairly likely given UE4.

The USSR's penchant for disappearing people in their space program after bogus claims. In the gene manipulation case he's more likely to be disappeared if it was a genuine claim, since it's illegal in China. I don't think telling westerners a load of bollocks is illegal in China, they'd have to jail just about every business exec and Communist Party member if it were (and applied evenly, of course). Soviets barely disappeared anyone in their space program, it was too important to do that and was post Stalin (who, unsurprisingly, had swept up a lot of its members earlier in his purges though obviously they survived). Some disappeared from public life, but that would be like Bethesda deciding that Todd Howard or Pete Hines needs a break from promotional work after the Fallout 76 trainwreck. Their biggest failure was the manned lunar mission, and the heads of that lived into their 80s and one ended up heading their space agency after his rocket's earlier failure. Yeah, that doesn't happen so much here at least. Firstly commercial users just pass on the costs to their clients, and with no proper rail we have no alternatives but to suck it up. Ultimately, that cost is again borne disproportionately by the poor whose food and other essentials' costs go up front those freight costs. Secondly our diesel fuel tax set up is reversed from what you'd expect- the less efficient your engine the less, relatively, you pay. I drove a small engine diesel for 5 years and paid the same road tax as a large SUV, the same diesel price, the same licensing costs despite having 3x the fuel efficiency of said SUV and a third the weight ripping up the road. That meant I was subsidising every single large one occupant SUV that hit a cyclist because it was too big for the road and had massive blind spots, stopped half way through another car at the lights or rolled when someone turned the wheel more than 10 degrees while driving over 50kph- and the closest most got to off road was avoiding puddles in the local supermarket. Thirdly, businesses (including farms) have accountants who will set up a beneficial tax regime for any added costs, which isn't available to non businesses and mitigates the costs.

"Have male astronauhts ever faught in space?" There's a lot more scope for that if you're in a small confined space with other people for a long time and there's no possibility of not being in that confined space with the same people any time soon. At least if you're on the ISS you have a short, set time frame and you're likely to be in with someone you hate for a month at most before you or he leaves. Mission to Mars would be years, and you can't just hop in a capsule and go home after a few months. Then again, women are probably at least as if not more prone to non physical fighting than men. End of the day locking people up with each other long term requires heaps of work and has heaps of potential problems no matter what precautions are taken. Internet User Malcador SLAMS World's Most Read News Source as unreliable! Pinko Corbin REFUSES to invade Canada in retaliation. Another insult to our BRAVE LADS from COMMIE CORBIN. To be honest apart from their general obsession with being vaguely smutty (¡¡¡SEX!!!) yet also puritanical it seems fairly believable. It's definitely being studied.

That was only one of many tax increases, though particularly ill thought out one at that. Radical people joining in is the least surprising, though quasi fascists and anarchists doing so without significantly fighting each other as well is unusual and probably does show how much people hate what's going on. The reasons are much the same as elsewhere, just coupled to France's enormous tradition of protest. Macron's ideas of reform are precisely what you'd expect from a neoliberal World Bank type- privatise profits, collectivise costs. He's cut taxes for the rich and brought in massively regressive taxes* that disproportionately target poor working people while cutting things like money for public transport at the same time. The fuel tax was great, if you could afford to buy an electric car out of hand; if you couldn't it was awful and came after years of being told to buy diesel by the government same as they're now saying to buy electric. And in ten years they'll work out that the batteries in electrics are awful and cannot be disposed of properly so you should buy hydrogen, and you can pay 10k Euro to scrap your electric car you bought for 5k after saving for a decade now the previous owner decided hydrogen was the future after a tip off. Macron was also nowhere near as popular as media made him out to be to start with. Media love Narrative, and much like Trudeau and Ardern here Macron is a corporate friendly nu gen nu wave anti Trump, and that's what counts rather than being objective about his strengths and weaknesses. He didn't do that well against an awful opponent who would probably have lost to anyone including Mr 2% popularity Hollande if it came to it, and 1/8 of those who voted deliberately spoiled their ballots. His party won the parliamentary election, but with only slightly more votes than the 2nd placed party in the previous election with that result being a moderate landslide for the socialist winners so 2nd place wasn't that close. The reason the protests continue is, to paraphrase what one mayor allegedly told Macron to his face: they out and out hate him and everything he stands for. *why they're regressive: if you're rich you buy an electric car with cash or low interest loan and thus never pay the fuel tax; if you're poor you can't afford to do so, are more likely to be driving an old, cheap, inefficient car that uses more fuel so pay more even in absolute terms and you cannot replace it since you're, well, poor; and you are way more likely to live somewhere with poor or no public transport (and remember, Macron cut funding to public transport) because typically poorer areas don't lobby well for such things and decisions are made by rich people who either think rich people are most important, are pig ignorant and don't have a clue about anyone outside their bubble, andor are terrified of people from the banlieu invading their locale. There's also the problem of public transport in poorer areas typically being unreliable and unpleasant, so you never know when or if you'll get to work on time or in what state. eg, our local government fuel tax here is primarily being used to put in public transport in... high income areas close enough to the city that people actually could cycle and the city centre plus some tourist routes, while mostly being paid by rural people who have dreadfully maintained roads clogged by trucks carrying stuff that could be better carried by the trains which aren't in the plan (and with 1800 truck movements a day approved by ex industry consultants when the road design stipulates 100 a day; council has to pay for road maintenance of course), and poor factory workers and the like who want to go from low income housing to industrial areas, not visit The Viaduct Harbour, Remuera Foodtown or the banking headquarters and Prada outlets of central Auckland- good luck surviving a cycle from Mangere to Penrose too even if it didn't take an hour each way, for some reason the entire route is designed for and clogged by trucks. Yet all transport consultants making the suggestions have offices in central Auckland, used to work for truck companies (hmm, wonder if that's why the whole transport system is designed for trucks, might be a connection?), are lobbied by and mostly know people in 1.5 million dollar houses who drive Cayenne's without caring about tax because it's a fricking 150k$ car what's $10 a week more or have Volvos, Teslas or other premium electrics, and pass decisions on to politicians who used to be paid as much as a teacher 30 years ago but now get paid nearly five times as much thanks to their 'independent' remuneration authority, and in terms of who they care about can add only tourists to the list.

4 cores/ ccx makes most sense since it's simplest and has fewest intra ccx connections and 8 would have a lot, but unless they planned for it back when they designed AM4 I'd question if they could go to a full chiplet design- with 2 4 core ccx- while staying with AM4. If they did plan for that I would be very impressed, and AMD did put a lot of stuff into the CPU package which would usually go into the chipset on the motherboard. That would also give an easy way to get 12 cores, threadripper had dummy ccx in gen 1 so you could get 12 core with 3x4 and one dummy. I guess if they went the 8 core/ ccx route they'd have more failed chips to pad out the lower grade SKUs as well as 7nm probably being a bit less reliable as well; my skepticism comes from the extremely low relative failure rate for Zen1. We got a lot of 8 core 1600s here due to them running out of 'bad'/ partially failed chips.

It is possible Moral objections against genome modification come usually either from religious grounds as genome modification are often seen as thing where humans are playing god, quite similar to issue as why cloning is seen as bad, or from societal grounds where there is fear that genome modifications would be used to pursue goal to achieve ultimate human and kill diversity from the population. Genetic modifications killing diversity and natural ability to adapt to changing conditions isn't necessary unfounded fear as it is something that has observed with genetically modified plants. There's an 'objective' moral objection as well- CRISPR is not by any means perfect and has not worked particularly well on humans so far when tested. Not working well consistently is not so much a concern when you're dealing with lab rats or plant seeds (to an extent, there's potential for accidentally making superweeds), but if you end up splicing genes into the wrong place in a human you will also end up introducing defects instead of removing them. Also, while it's certainly possible he has done it and his technical outline of how he did it was solid nobody is sure whether he really has edited genes as there's no independent evidence of it- it's illegal to do so in China so he would be in a fair bit of potential trouble if he has (and indeed, if recent reports are accurate he has 'disappeared' after going home).

Wouldn't be surprised if it's a Kingdom Come type situation and it does get to GOG with a delay of some kind. Will definitely not be holding my breath for a day 1 release there though, much as I would like one. Not much point having Denuvo any more, cracked first day on JC4 so you're just left with the performance degradation and SSD destroying* aspects of it. *de do de do de do do do

Isn't he an Exec Producer on it? (Which isn't a direct development position as opposed to project management, and is highly variable in terms of responsibility too, but would be involvement in some capacity)

Spoilers since I don't think Keyrock has finished the game yet.

Macron Regime APC off to suppress popular democratic, secular dissent #EyesOnParis #MacronOut Macron Regime forces mobilised and on the way to Paris. 90,000 security forces have been mobilised! How can the peaceful activists survive with tires vs armour? Also spot the obvious evidence of Barrel Bomb usage by the Regime Air Force... #BellingcatAnalysis #NoFlyZone #9K111sForFrance #LastHopitalInParis #SaveTheBoulangeries

I have to admit I set the difficulty to easy for the final battle in Elex, though then it was easy enough. I'm not sure PB has ever done a good end game battle, they'd be criticised more for it if their games didn't also tend to be so massive that most people never complete them.

Ryzen 3000 series (and Navi) rumours... Only a few things I can see there that look a bit suspicious. It seems unlikely AMD would go for both 6 and 8 core ccxs since the beauty of their current design is that basically everything from Epyc to Ryzen 3 uses the same 4 core/ ccx design which makes it both incredibly efficient in terms of (lack of) wastage while being the epitome of KISS design. Then again two complex types makes things more flexible as well, so maybe. Also the integrated graphics would be likely to hit performance limits from using system RAM under current designs though maybe cache can ameliorate it enough. And the supposed Navi improvements are at the top end of expectations. OTOH, calling their Navi cards RX 3060, RX 3070 etc is 100% the sort of thing AMD would do after their chipset namings for Ryzen, and up to 16c/32t 5+ Ghz Ryzen 3850X at 500USD with IPC advantage over Intel is exactly the sort of thing I absolutely want to be true.

In South Africa there would be two problems with that model: firstly money from utility levies would probably end up being used on critical projects like renovating Jacob Zuma's private residence to Buckingham Palace level instead of actual infrastructure and secondly, a lot of people there are absolute poor so no matter how low utility bills are set they could not afford them. Not that things have improved without Zuma, go on strike at one of President Cyril's mines and he might just send the po po around to machine gun you... Cape Province, where the water shortage is really biting, is also being shafted in numerous ways by the national government as well as having an actual and real drought- things like their trains being 'mysteriously' sabotaged causing traffic chaos- because they had the temerity to elect someone other than the ANC to power, and the ANC believes they will be back if they can make things bad enough there so long as people blame the local government rather than them.

Yeah, that's a 100% temporary solution that ensures Erdogan has leverage for the forseeable future. It's also again the bare minimum they could get away with, anything less and Greece would have been forced by simple reality to ignore the EU rules as they are economically- and physically- incapable of dealing with every refugee so would have been forced to let them through no matter what the law says. In truth that 'generosity' has made the EU semi permanently beholden to a despot who can threaten to tear up the agreement whenever he wants something from them. They'd have been better off investing the money into Syria directly and getting people to actually go home rather than feathering Erdogan's nest. No they didn't, which is irrelevant since sure as anything took advantage of said rules and applied them selectively, depending on what was best for them at the time. They issued the invite, took the refugees they wanted to try and fix their demographic problems, then decided that the rules about initial entry had to be enforced, and used collective responsibility to get other countries to accept the excess they'd ended up with. All rules applied as and when politically expedient for Merkel and not done either consistently or fairly. The problems were caused by her invitation. It's like issuing a public statement about squatter's rights laws then being surprised and amazed when suddenly you get a load of squatters moving in who all know the law and want to take advantage of it. If you issue a statement saying that you'll treat each and every migrant as a refugee then you will get an inundation of refugees and an even bigger inundation of 'refugees' who are simple economic migrants. Reminder again, the 2nd largest number of refugees in the crisis were Kosovan, nearly as many as Iraq and Afghanistan combined. How many of them could reasonably be considered refugees rather than economic migrants in a 'country' that is basically a NATO protectorate, and if they are what exactly does that say about NATO and Europe? I'd exclude Serbs worried about being carved up for spare parts by the Kosovan Prime Minister or forced out of their homes at gunpoint while NATO ran interference from that list, but then they were all sent to Serbia rather than Germany.

What does he plan to do, give the moffs direct command of the outlying sectors? She didn't open any borders and she didn't change any rules about immigration or how EU or Germany treats refugees, she only publicly said that Germany will accept refugees according to their laws, laws which have existed over 60 years. Please, she 100% issued an invitation knowing exactly what it would mean practically. Whether she already had her fall back positions formulated at that time is an open question, it seems more likely she was just plain stupid but maybe she was actively malicious as well, who knows. She may not have changed the rules at that time, but she definitely took and has taken advantage of them to the detriment of just about everyone else in the EU and to her and Germany's benefit. Which is what is the fundamental problem with the EU as it always happens with the EU- Germany collectivises her problems while nationalising everyone else's. Merkel's idiotic invitation results in too many refugees? Collectivise the problem by sending them off to other countries to bail her out. But, too many refugees still arriving? Well they have to stay in Greece and Italy since that's where they landed, why can't those countries take responsibility and follow the rules? German banks lent idiotically to Greece? Bail them out collectively via the European Bank, then make the Greeks pay for it! Plus bonus, tons of leverage against Greece when you want the refugee spigot turned off, after all surely refugees love extended holidays on Greek Islands as much as anyone so it's win win. Euro massively overvalued for Italy, Greece etc? Tough noogies, it's wonderfully undervalued for Germany and that's what is important. That's the fundamental flaw of the EU, and it will never be fixed. Every country from Italy down in importance will be treated as vassals, and any benefits to them from the EU are incidental and not the core aim of the organisation. It's also why Britain is better with a hard Brexit no matter what, there's no chance of EU reform and the laughable 'concessions' they gave Cameron to try and stave off the referendum showed it- and, frankly, those pathetic concessions was likely a contributing factor to the referendum loss for remain. While meant to be a sop to get just enough votes to win they were actually an insult and extraordinarily tone deaf, symptomatic of the EU's technocratic rule from the top mentality.

Obviously it will be headed by Louis XX, beloved of the people and legitimate King of France, we do know that much. Shame the Brits dropped their claim to the throne, otherwise we could almost manage a super union of France/ Spain/ Britain.