Zoraptor

US to withdraw from INF Treaty in 180 days if Russia doesn't do, well, it's irrelevant since no one actually knows if Russia has the system it's accused of while the US has definitely been violating it for at least two years (and by the text itself, for literally literally decades). And since no one in the media has bothered to read the treaty, craftily hidden away as it is on the State.gov website, some selected highlights for those who get their geopolitical analysis solely from the stupid, lazy, paid off, or all three simultaneously journalist polity. Article III This text obviously includes drones. Doubt it was intended to, but a drone is 100% an unmanned self propelled vehicle that sustains flight through the use of aerodynamic lift and is in the case of Reaper/ Predator etc a weapon delivery vehicle. No way to weasel it. Article IV This is blatantly violated by Aegis Ashore and it's tomahawk capable VLS. Note again, being merely nuclear capable and not using that capability/ not having warheads is not enough for compliance, otherwise every single launcher would be compliant including the one the Russians are accused of having- just by saying that you don't have nuclear warheads for it. Conventional ground based launchers and missiles are banned; and that 100% includes Tomahawk launchers based on land. Yet all you'll get from the media is some mumbling about Russian claims, when their accusations are extremely easy to verify as being true, if you can be bothered to. Note again again, since no one in the media seems to want to mention it, 'nuclear' missiles only being covered is not specified at any point in the treaty text. Conventional missiles and launchers are banned same as nuclear, anyone with even vestigial knowledge of military matters knows anything else would be pointless. And of course China, while not bound by it, couldn't get close to hitting either western Europe or mainland US with ground based IRMs. The threat there is entirely from China, uh, treacherously putting their country near US bases in a dangerous escalation?

I laughed loudly when they beat the UAE in the UAE to get to the final. Doubt think it's their academy system though, if it's anything like their successful athletics program it mostly consists of poaching people from other countries rather than home grown talent. Suppose it's good news for the World Cup, since Qatar was at risk of being the weakest team ever to be in a WC via their automatic qualification.

To be frank, what a load of old bollocks. PR and politics 101 is to repeat what you want to be true ad nauseum because some people will believe anything if told it authoritatively enough times- and those who won't, won't believe it anyway. Every single politician in existence does that and a quick viewing of any interview will show politicians saying what they want to be true and repeatedly answering the questions they wanted asked rather than the ones that were actually asked. Trump wants 3 million illegal voters all voting D because it would mean he won the popular vote, not because he's going to send them to the ovens or deport them in cattle carts, indeed his compromise proposals involved most illegals having a path to citizenship. Goebbels, Hitler and pals said Jews caused Germany's WW1 defeat because that's what they wanted to be true as it meant Germany was still Undefeated Champion stabbed in the back treacherously by [convenient enemy] rather than getting curb stomped fair and square; and it's little different from the far more mainstream theory that civilians in general caused Germany's defeat by not being hard enough and just quietly starving to death; but that discourages many people from voting for you as you're saying it's their fault. US claimed Iraq had WMD because they wanted that to be true and knew that enough people would believe it if they repeated it enough times from enough sources, May claims her Brexit plan is the only one possible because she wants that to be true (in that case, it probably is, but that's coincidental not fundamental), Democrats claim repeatedly that Hillary lost because of Russians not because she was dreadful, Bolsonaro repeatedly claims that all of Brazil's problems are due to Lula and friends, Israel claims all Palestinians they kill are terrorists, Soviets claimed only to kill enemies of the state involved in grand conspiracies against the revolution etc etc. You can literally project whatever you want onto each of those. Clearly the US producing a load of cow pats to justify the war on Iraq was a smokescreen for their clandestine creation of ISIS and the death of 100,000s of people, and thus anyone else who talks about chemical weapons to justify attacks in the future wants to recreate ISIS and wants to kill millions. Yeah, nah, they fudged or outright fabricated the evidence for the invasion using tactics Goebbels would have been proud of, but that doesn't make them literally nazis; it just means that everyone uses the same PR tactics including literally literally nazis.

That is basically what Windows already is on a gaming PC. As far as I know that was a byproduct of Aspyr's Android port. It's a bit weird though. Compare to, say, NWN1/2 and Beamdog. It would be the equivalent of Beamdog doing an android NWN1 port but leaving NWN1 PC alone; yet releasing a patch for NWN2 PC and doing nothing with it on android. I presume there are Legal Reasons for how it's turned out but it's an odd situation. Especially since GOG has 'patched' K1 to get it running.

I just tried the GOG version on Windows 10 with a GTX 970. Worked without a hitch. Saw Taris and quit though, so that's one issue that's not ever going away... Yeah GOG version is fine- that is after all their niche- and has the 'full' suite of OS supported; it's the steam version which can be tricky to get running and is XP/ Vista only. Funny thing is that the less popular K2 actually did get patched on steam for modern OS and officially cannot be run on older than 7. Then again K2 was always easier to get running than K1.

The name is fundamentally broken when it comes to shortening. (Star Trek) Dis is not much better than STD, as it makes me think the franchise is about to get served in a rap battle due to its shortcomings instead of have their winkle drop off. I was not a fan of the S1 Klingon aesthetic so that's one change I can get behind.

IIRC the main problem is not with xp/ vista vs 7/10 per se but that the version of OpenGL the engine uses is not supported by any modern drivers and hasn't been for nearly a decade- and I've been told that it's non trivial getting it working on modern GPUs due to hardware changes as well, though I have no way to verify that. I guess the fundamental problem is that steam is now selling games that require (or at least 'require') OS that they no longer actually support. K1's system requirements are for XP/ Vista, neither of which are supported any more by steam, and while it isn't that onerous a task for someone with some computing knowledge and confidence being able to set up a VM to play a game is not something most people would be comfortable with.

"Steam has alot of haters but they are very few and far between.." Most Sonic start to a post ever. All companies that try to compete with Valve will have a 'bad' reputation. Example: GOG probably has the best reputation overall at the moment, but in order to really compete with steam in the mainstream arena they'd have to cave on the DRM issue to attract the big titles. Once they do that their point of difference, their reputation and goodwill is gone; and they're in the position of having as bad a reputation as Valve has, probably worse since they would have 'lied' all that time about hating DRM. So they pick up 5-30% of steam's sales on almost entirely low volume titles and get some big titles 2-10 years after their release. Which is nice and is an alternative for some titles, but in terms of actual competition it's very insignificant. Valve set the standards for competition in the PC gaming sphere by being sharp or shady, depending on your pov- doing things like trying to bundle steam with every game in existence. If you want to genuinely compete with them you can't do so with one hand tied behind your back because the market is way too distorted and steam has far too much ingrained leverage.

Is the Speaker of the UK Parliament the best ring announcer since Michael Buffer? I think so. Ayyyyyes to the left twooooo hundred and EIGHTY nine. Noooooooos to the right threeeeeee hundred and twenty ONE. The Noooooooooos have it, the nooooooooos have it. UNLOCK!!!! Next amendment from Rrrrrraaaaaaachel Rrrrrrreeeeeeves...

Fortnite is a lot bigger than ME3 though; of EA's properties maybe the Sims and FIFA would come close but that's about it. EA came up with Origin because Steam tried to strongarm them into essentially becoming a subsidiary of Valve on PC- a tactic which worked for smaller players like Paradox who had to drop Connect or be kicked from their most lucrative store. The reason they did it is simple enough, if they sell 5 million copies of a game on Origin it's the financial equivalent of selling more than 7 million on steam even without taking into account them being able to control their own product instead of being beholden to Valve. As for security, let's not forget that apart from the myriad of long term minor issues steam has and had they were also outright hacked, multiple times. On the more fundamental level, all this stuff illustrates perfectly that a lot of PC fans and game franchise fans are actually just steam fans. They want the fripperies and appearance of competition so long as no one offers an actual alternative and so long as any 'competitors' can be shut down by Valve at a moments notice by revoking their right to steam keys or are niche like GOG. There'd be a decent amount of overlap; it's pretty uncool for a 'core PC gamer' to admit to playing Fortnite but also 'core PC gamers' are nowhere near an actual majority of people who game on PC and are a self appointed and self selected group.

Well it has a serious edge over Steam - Deep Silver needs to make like 10%(?) less sales for the same profits. At the same time, exclusivity is the strongest leverage that'll bring people to use Epic store, therefore allowing Epic store to cut more exclusivity deals. They will be paying them directly for the exclusivity as well, I don't think there's any doubt about that. Given the success of Fortnite Epic already has a very large install base to leverage much as Valve had after HL2. I suspect there will be some deep sales on their exclusive titles during the year of exclusivity to really test how committed people are to steam. And let's be honest, PC gamers have not exactly got a stellar record of sticking to boycotts...

I doubt that many companies properly comply with GDPR, to be honest. Well, GOG.com and Steam does. So far as anyone knows. Steam had and has some pretty dodgy wording in the SSA with respect to 3rd parties accessing data, and GOG tried to bring in default fully public profiles less than a month before GDPR would have made such a default option illegal. Hardly anyone wants to follow GDPR properly because it costs money and the more properly you do it the more it costs, and it costs money because you can't monetise your customers so easily, so everyone cuts corners as much as they can. And that's not even the Facebook and Googles of the world whose entire business model is based on selling personalised information to 3rd parties.

I doubt that many companies properly comply with GDPR, to be honest. I thought Clifford was long gone from Epic? The issue with Epic is... well fundamentally it's the issue with PC gaming in microcosm. Many PC gamers love to look down on consoles- while feeling morally superior for choosing to turn an open platform into a closed one and screeching whenever someone dares to compete with steam. And don't get me started on idiots preaching the church of DLSS who complained about checkerboard upscaling and 'fake' 4k on consoles... So the problems with Epic are that they aren't steam, basically, with some weird contortions to justify it. Stores that exist as steam key resellers are 100% competition for steam so it isn't a walled garden and doesn't have exclusives and said stores don't 100% exist at the sufferance of steam; but Epic Store exclusives make them a monopoly (!) rather than competition. Oh, and Epic are also owned- no racism of course, some of their best friends are Chinese- by China and you'll probably be monitored by Winnie the Shi himself (though tencent is a minority owner only). They also have a fair few genuine problems, but then so does everyone else. Not like with all their billions in revenue there aren't literally 10 year old bugs in steam no one has bothered to fix; or the perpetual mythic GOG Galaxy Linux version/ crappy forums/ awful reduced functionality redesign.

Metro Exodus not only has denuvo, it's now Epic Store exclusive*! Have to admit, I kind of like Epic Store. Not because it's good or anything but it's one of the best butthurt generators I've ever seen. Steamtards, RTX fanboys upset that their second raytraced game is gated, everyone is triggered who I like seeing triggered. They just need to buy GOG now and the circle will be complete. *for a year

Would they though? If Hillary runs it would be as The Anointed One again as in 2008 and 2016, and with the full support of the party's hierarchy. You'd have to be very brave or have no asterisks to give/ be outside the hierarchy to take her on seriously knowing that doing so and failing will put you at odds with the people deciding much of your political future. There would also be blatant attempts to keep problematic candidates away from the public and debates and to shield Hillary from them; and let's be frank: they'll label anyone taking her on as being The Russian Candidate and a stooge. So basically what happened in 2016, but on steroids since they seem to have decided the problem in 2016 was not that they foisted a crappy divisive establishment candidate and ran an awful campaign but that they didn't go all in enough with the terrible divisive candidate and awful campaigning.

Yeah. I've seen a lot of people say they think S2 is a big improvement but to me both have been pretty much run of the mill Voyager/ TNG S1 level, which isn't great.

I can't see it happening any time soon. End of the day there is a reason why PCs are designed as they are and why they aren't (generally) set up the same way that consoles are. Most I could see happening some time recently would be selling essentially a 'boxless' PS5/ Xbox type SoC and that won't be as competitive as either console unfortunately. Current gen 1X may use a lot of tricks to claim it's 4k ready but nevertheless it still has considerably better performance than the desktop equivalent 570/580 due to optimisations that you won't have playing the PC version; and the pricing won't have volume advantage either. Having said that, AMD is the only company with a full suite approach of CPU and GPU at the moment (frankly, I'm skeptical of Intel making significant consumer waves even when they do start with the discrete graphics) and AM4/ Ryzen has a fair bit of functionality on the chip that would usually be part of the chipset.

Yeah... Decent APUs should probably kill off dedicated low to mid range graphics cards in notebooks etc and that would hurt nVidia a lot, but there are limitations in how they can be applied in desktops and certainly in terms of getting above mid range even in laptops without some fundamental shifts. The main problem for a classic APU's graphic performance is that the graphics uses system resources and RAM which is slow. The 2400G scales very well with faster RAM but there will be a point at which system RAM will simply be too slow to keep feeding added graphics cores- especially in laptops where you'll often get single channel and slow RAM to save costs. The problems with system RAM are why graphics cards have specialist RAM on their boards, after all- well, except that execrable joke DDR3 1030 and even that at least doesn't use system RAM. So you would have to either change from DDR# to GDDR#/ HBM or put some fast RAM on the chip. Once you do that though you're greatly increasing complexity and price, and instead of an APU you're more or less making a SoC/ NUC instead. Indeed, those solutions are used by Hades Canyon and the PS5. You're also in the situation where if you want new graphics processing you have to buy a new processor as well, fine for laptops but a lot more of a problem for desktops; and in desktop AMD would potentially be doing themselves out of the low to mid range market where they're genuinely competitive. They would also have to deal with potential backlash from hardware makers- AMD would to most practical purposes then be making motherboards and graphics cards themselves, it's unlikely that Gigabyte/ ASUS etc are going to like that. I also have to say that I find his obsession with S curves a bit disingenuous. I mean, he's right in principle but it's a bit... off starting an S curve off with the GTX480 which was simply not a good card but was preceded by some good ones. Not that he should necessarily go all the way back to NV1 or anything, but GPUs have always had generational plateaux where you'd have the tail end of the last generational leap offering smaller improvements, then a big improvement that gets iterated on until it too offers smaller improvements.

The ironic thing is that despite all the collusion talk he won't be going to Trump Tower Moscow as president or privatus any time soon; since despite him wanting to build it for decades it never even got approved.

Western Powers: "We need a system of international justice!" Also Western Powers: "It shouldn't apply to us or our clients!" US: "Hague Invasion Act" To be specific the suppression of Kosovan acts of ethnic cleansing and organ trafficking was because as the occupying power NATO would be responsible for both, and we simply cannot have NATO being prosecuted for war crimes. That isn't good optics, and might lead to people questioning all sorts of things we'd prefer they didn't. Instead we must pretend that nothing happened.

It depends a lot on if aspects of the economy and advancement are tied to a dynamic economy/ player numbers, if so some sort of fudging in the demo would be inevitable as it won't be populated enough to have a 'proper' economy otherwise. You also want people to get an idea of the full range of abilities and experiences. People might complain about a 'World of Cars' type game giving you a demo with a Ferrari when in the full release you start with a Trabant, but it's obvious why they'd have a demo with a Ferrari. And end of the day the idea of a demo or early access or whatever from the game producers' perspective is always to encourage sales. From the players' perspective it's to check if you like it and if it runs OK, but from EA's pov the sole purpose is to generate hype and get people buying the full product rather than providing a realistic appraisal.

I've been replaying TWitcher 3 off and on and... Euphoria really does completely break the game with an alchemy build. I knew people said that it did but I didn't believe the extent until I tried it. I can only imagine how broken it gets with Aerondight and runes.

It was one of their RPGs of the year (3rd place behind Kingmaker and Kingdom Come). So maybe not as Codex approved as 2009 Codex GOTY Dragon Age: Origins, but it still gets a tick. Well, I've bought it since it ticks every box I like...

MacBooks' value is appallingly bad, for sure. The Vaio I have is a Z3 of some sort, so ultraportable and it cost a lot for initial purchase so my view is a bit skewed price wise. I paid a nominal fee for it to cover admin; since Sony had exited the market it had no resale value. And to be fair to Sony Vaios tended to be expensive because they did actually send new models out to here, most laptops sold here are EOL and rejects from the Australian market. And the custom models from Dell/ HP etc were also fricking expensive. It was also way cheaper than the most expensive laptop I've ever used, which was a cool 14,000NZD...

Vaios were expensive though, you paid a lot for the high specs and they sold a lot less of them than a cheap McLaptop. I actually have a 2012 Vaio at the moment, an inherited one from an end of life corporate purchase and it was ludicrously over specced for the time. But it originally cost 3x as much as a decent desktop and despite being overspecced was slower even than the old 2008 core2duo workstations in the lab by a fair bit- and it only got used as a portable workstation a few times. Really nicely put together and it's lasted fantastically (after a MB replacement under warrantee) but a cheap laptop and a modern workstation would have been a better deal at half the price.