Zoraptor

Because it leaves off his qualification- he didn't serve them because they were gay and wanted a wedding cake, if they'd asked for a different sort of cake it would have been fine. If an asian couple asked a muslim baker to make a bacon cake and he refused you couldn't say it was because they were asian, it would be because they wanted him to use bacon. There is in that he got banned in a coordinated manner by multiple companies simultaneously, companies that- coincidentally? 'coincidentally'?- have been under pressure to make sure news only comes from mainstream sources. Doesdn't really matter if it isn't the government technically doing the banning if they're getting others to do it for them. Jones has definitely been asking for it for some time and is essentially worthless as a source of information, but the obvious coordination is a problem and it could easily be used against, others in a progressive slide- indeed 'unfriendly' news sources are already targeted via soft methods to suck up to US and other politicians.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dj7bIrFWwAELwlw.jpg Saudi Arabia: funny things or politics thread? The eternal question. (meh, twimg won't embed. Fake News/ SAD!)

Unless they really massage the schedule I can't see Stewart being in every episode. He's pretty fit, but he is over 70 and doesn't need the money. Him shooting main character length for 22 episodes of the notoriously grueling US TV schedule is not likely. If he's a main character then an X Files type limited season is most likely, otherwise he'd likely be used mostly for framing narrative while featuring in the big episodes- more like Mitch Pileggi in the X Files than Duchovny/ Anderson. In universe, Picard should be an Admiral and that also limits what he can realistically be doing week in week out. There's a reason why all the characters followed in TV trek have always been below flag rank.

Pretty much entirely facade. They aren't letting women drive because not doing so is regressive, archaic and stupid; they're letting women drive because they cannot maintain their economy- or at least their massive spending on arms, influence and enormous luxury yachts- with 50% of their workforce inactive and they're burning through their reserves at a ridiculous rate*. Most of the Saudis who called for the driving ban change have been jailed for doing so. *Hence them wanting to annex Qatar, which has huge monetary reserves and huge natural gas reserves (largest confirmed in the world, iirc) with natural gas being a lot more sustainable for the future as well since it's cleaner burning than oil.

I wouldn't be surprised if Dorn were in it since it could be the long rumoured (maybe pitched is more appropriate, since Dorn was pretty vocal about wanting it) Captain Worf series. That would also fit a hypothetical Admiral Picard role for Stewart where he could be as prominent or absent episode to episode as he wanted to be.

Supposedly Trump didn't even know that Qatar had the biggest US base in the Middle East, and that is what changed his mind. Don't think Trump was egging them on though, more along the lines of he was fine with them 'fighting terrorists' or 'Iranian proxies' however they saw fit, and that Qatar having a large US base probably meant they weren't actually Iranian proxies or terrorists; or at least were friendly Iranian proxies and terrorists. I have no doubt that any talk with Saudi or UAE about it was not even slightly nuanced/ accurate on their part and Trump simply doesn't have the base of knowledge in international affairs to know when he's being gulled.

Supposedly it's not going to be a reboot, that was just the assumption made by pretty much everyone in the press; it's going to be a new series in the same universe. Which at least makes a modicum of sense. It'll still likely either be garbage, or canned before actual production like Xena and various other 'reboots'.

You just cancel the subscription when there aren't any/ enough games to play. I got Origin Access for a year and that will be it until there's enough new stuff there to justify subscribing again in x years time- and that's how it should be since it encourages EA to improve the service and offer more titles. I don't have the slightest problem with subscriptions services that are genuine subscription services, they're certainly better than subscription services that are purchase services calling themselves subscriptions so they can legally disclaim all sorts of responsibilities (ie steam).

The ultimate end point of Bethesda's dialogue progression game to game is communicating entirely in emoticons. I can hear Todd and Pete hyping the concept as revolutionary even now. You could also be a porn star You could pimp your spouse out and make them a p0rn star as well. F2 really was well ahead of the curve. It was even early enough that same sex marriage didn't trigger claims of teh SJWs taking over.

The Turkish Interior and Justice ministers have been sanctioned by the US at least ostensibly over the detention of a pastor post coup attempt, though it probably has as much to do with Turkey being mean to Israel most recently over Israel's Apartheid Law which passed last week, plus backing Qatar (and hence annoying Saudi) and buying S400 from Russia. First time a NATO ally has been sanctioned by the US, I believe.

That's flat management for you. While people love to hate middle management and bad middle management is infuriating it exists to solve a very real problem- someone has to identify issues and have the authority to get said issues fixed in a timely manner. Allowing people to go where their enthusiasm leads sounds great in theory, but all too often their enthusiasm leads to eventual boredom at the hard work of fixing bugs. It's the old problem where if you make everyone head chef then you end up with everyone designing new meals and no one chopping onions and peeling potatoes for existing recipes day in day out.

Fair few = too many to easily list individually, hence not listing them individually but by category. Certainly most of them aren't individually that 'bad'- some random indie using assets from other games is pretty low grade as problems go and things like the DayZ/ WarZ fiasco in the end require some dumbness from the buyer (and happened before the open door policy)- but valve's policy makes them and things like cryptomining trojans inevitable, because that's human nature and they're a quick and easy way to make money at minimal risk. The problem with not really caring about the quality of the stuff you sell in some sort of libertarian, charitably- or minimal effort for maximum profit, less charitably- philosophy is that you will end up selling garbage from people who cut corners and are dishonest. If you have some sort of even basic curation you wouldn't cut out all of the bad stuff, but you'd make it a lot more difficult; and that is usually enough to discourage the vast majority of scammers who are, after all, wanting to make money easily.

Lebanese Hezbollah is largely irrelevant unless Israel is involved, and perhaps even then, though their very successful tactics from 2006 would no doubt form a basis for most tactics. For the US and Saudi/ Gulf the problem would be the enormous number of Iraqi PMUs- probably 100k+- who are almost all tied to Iran, and the smaller number of Iranian backed militia in- semi ironically, the most quiescent portions of- Afghanistan, plus the more direct threat of thousands of missiles aimed at oil refineries, US bases, ships and tankers etc. Al Sadr's insurgency did pretty well against the US even with minimal Iranian support and very basic tactics and that was a fraction of the size. Given Saudi's lack of performance in Yemen their army would probably lose to half a dozen Najafis in a Toyota just as readily as khat addled Houthis in night shirts. Maybe as a ternary bonus, but the driver is clearly Kushner and Bibi plus getting arms sales/ extorting protection from Saudi etc.

Finished Divinity Original Sin 2. Enjoyed it a lot more the 2nd time through after stalling out in Driftwood last time as I was a lot more prepared for its foibles. It's still absolutely riddled with quest bugs, and the armour system and initiative systems are still moronic but I came to terms with them. The only big remaining bugbear is the fake difficulty got from starting every 'boss' type opponent with a massive stack of extra AP such that the biggest tactic in the game is often working out how to position everyone to survive the initial round where the equivalent of a nuke is dropped (90% of the time solution is: teleport a peon to your character so the big bad wastes their AP running to you). Plot is the very definition of meh and there is barely a memorable character in the game (Malady probably came closest) despite me actually quite liking the plot in DOS1. Overall, it's pretty much the definition of a 7/10 game. Don't regret playing it, but it was mostly a time killer while waiting for or doing other stuff.

People tend to blame the companies that release the contaminated food first as long as the store is active about putting up notices, removing the product, and issuing refunds once the contamination is known. A grocery store isn't a great comparison because there are legal requirements to selling food to people that are far more strict than selling them games, but if you had a grocer that allowed anyone to sell via it with no quality controls then it would absolutely end up with a garbage reputation when people started coming down with food poisoning from there, and only there. "How could we have known a dodgy Chinese supplier was selling pork meat from pigs that had died from infection?" is not a defence you want to be making for your food quality. It's the same reason the fake sellers, counterfeit goods and scams sold through Amazon hurt Amazon's reputation despite the items technically not being Amazon's most of the time- if you're selling the product you are standing behind it as being fit for purpose as part of the most basic contract at the heart of selling something in the first place. It's one thing for steam to stock its store with the gaming equivalent of custard and chocolate filled 'croissants' that are 99% fat/ corn syrup, but the inevitable result of no curation is scams, and steam has had a fair few scam or dodgy products (stolen assets frequently used in games, similarly named inferior games to, selling free mods when they had the mod market, games with monitoring software inside them etc); cryptomining trojans and the like being tried are absolutely inevitable.

Everyone including Valve thought Greenlight was an awful system. Of course, being Valve, they replaced it something even lower effort. Steam's main threat is what it's always been- MS getting their crap together and WordPerfect/ 1-2-3/ Netscaping them via their OS dominance; if one were a suspicious person one might think that they'd be looking to update SteamOS sometime nowish based on the xbox evolution rumours that have been floating about.

Wait, do people buy games just to get trophies? Are trophies some sort of social standing currency? Is this a thing? It's been a thing for some time, dating right back to the first x360 achievements. Not really any different from buying win button or cosmetic dlc etc to make yourself look and feel good, if you're into that sort of thing*. Indeed, it's an older meme sir, but it checks out. And I have to admit I always thought that was shopped and never once considered it was 'genuine' marketing. Targets people's innate tendencies towards platform investment and addiction, and some people really do take steam level and platinum trophies seriously. A lot of the shovelware steam releases are there for achievement farming for badges/ cards etc. (I suspect most of that isn't actually news to anyone though) *Though of course considering buying a Vega64 for a thousand kiwibux to play approximately 4 high graphics games a year is completely different, and a 100% rational consideration.

Grimoire is incline due to Cleve being a neanderthal, living in a bunker, having a titanium skeleton and actually producing a game after 20 years; not due to the game itself. OTOH certified decline games (anything Beth post Daggerfall, anything Bioware post BG2 etc) are pretty well defined, as they've been played 7 times, just to make sure they really are decline.

AMD used to own Global Foundries but spun it off, and they used to have an exclusive contract with them but bought out of it a couple of years ago. So AMD outsources its production and can use TSMC/ GloFo or anyone else's compatible fabs if needed as demand, cost and performance dictates. Intel's production is in house so they have and exclusively use their own processes; historically this has been an advantage as they have typically been ~2 years ahead of the competition tech wise. 10nm was due well before the (equivalent, despite the size difference in the name) TSMC/ GloFo 7nm process but still hasn't really arrived in any meaningful way, so the usual situation is reversed. Theoretically Intel could outsource production too, but that would be crippling to morale/ prestige and require some significant redesigns. The technicalities of which are well beyond my expertise though.

They have some good potential chips on paper, but with 14nm being in its 5th year and with the only way to improve it seemingly being to add cores Intel desperately needs their 10nm process working properly, and by their own admission it's likely to take 2 revisions to get practical performance above their current optimised 14nm process- and with their competition now being AMD and TSMC/ GloFo 7nm and not primarily their own chips that's a major problem. The 10nm fiasco is also gumming up any IPC improvements they may have from improvements to the Core architecture, since they haven't (yet and probably won't with 9 series if the rumours are true and it is just more cores at identical clocks and IPC) or cannot bring them to the working 14nm process. But yeah, the medium term positive for Intel is that when they do get 10nm working they may well get a burst of IPC improvements along with the increased density/ cores/ potential clock speeds/ energy efficiency from the smaller process.

The latest rumour for Zen2 is 8 cores/ ccx, 10-15% (!) IPC gain and 5GHz clocks. I'm... skeptical. If true it would be an utter disaster for Intel as their clock and slight IPC lead would be gone at a stroke, and they'd be potentially competing with threadripper class chips at consumer prices; but I suspect 6 cores/ccx, 5% IPC and up to 5GHz clocks would be more likely given the available information on TSMC's 7nm (with GloFo's being a bit behind both time and process spec wise), but that would still be better and cheaper than Intel's offerings until they can offer maybe 10nm++ which could be years away.

Most farmers would have voted for Trump and vote republican, and US agriculture is also mostly large corporates rather than stereotype moms and pops growing cabbages on a 4 acre block. Despite theoretically being 'free market' there have in modern times always been huge subsidies and protections in US agriculture which results in, for example, high fructose corn syrup turning up in nearly everything 'edible' whether it makes sense or not and maize being used to make industrial ethanol despite it being just about the worst thing to make it from that's still semi practical. The existing subsidy regime in the US is already a great deal more than that 12 billion.

You don't lower the static build up by much, but in reality there isn't that much chance of damaging components with static discharge- it has to be generated to sufficient charge, grounded, and grounded through a sensitive component to fry something. My previous computer I regularly used a vacuum cleaner on it, but that was 11 years old so it would have been a good excuse to actually replace it if something broke. OTOH a standard vacuum cleaner is pretty much the same system a Van der Graaf generator (since I remembered the name, randomly) uses to make its potential difference, and that is in the kV range.

Not much though as there's too much overlap between sexes. There's even a lot of overlap with hip bones. That's why you get the occasional archaeological story like the one about the big Viking warrior who was actually a woman, via DNA, having been previously identified as a man from her skeleton (albeit that sort of story being publicised owes a lot to a certain character from the TV show Vikings) Sick of the usual ancient evils, demons and angels, or becoming demons, or one of the brothers dying, or being possessed by an arch angel or all of the prior; at the end of the last season we had the shocking plot twist of Dean being transported back in time to 1920s Birmingham where he did his best Cillian Murphy impression and joined the Peaky Blinders.

Just keep sticking that one trillion on the credit card, what could possibly go wrong? It's not like a lot of that trillion dollar debt will be financed by bonds bought by a country the US is having a trade war with at the moment.