Zoraptor

DPRK wouldn't get elected to it for the same reason they don't get onto the UNSC, they don't have enough friends to and aren't in a bloc, let alone an influential one. Congo or Saudi get onto the UNHRC much the same way as Ivory Coast or Kazakhstan or Ethiopia or Equatorial Guinea gets onto the UNSC- they have enough political friends, leverage or influence to get there. That's not ideal, but then nothing is whether in the UN or anywhere else, the question is whether there is anything that is better, practically, and whether the current situation is better than nothing (it is). Frankly, given Trump's popularity with erstwhile friendly countries I suspect that this withdrawal was plain inevitable whatever happened, as the US faces a re-election next year that they might well have embarrassingly lost. This way at least the isolationists/ manifest destiny types get to think that Trump is being 'strong'.

WWDITS is getting two TV spinoffs, one centered on vampires and the other on the werewolves. I always wonder how well things like Boy or Hunt for the Wilderpeople or WWDITS translate overseas as they have a lot of in jokes and specifically kiwi stuff (eg Huia and Crumpy's Ute in Hunt) without being quite as... direct as something like Once Were Warriors, but most people seem to like them anyway.

The UN Human Rights Council could definitely use some integrity itself, that would be a massive increase over its current zero integrity. Mostly though, having Haley and Pompeo give masturbatory speeches about how great the US record on human rights is and how principled they are when literally the previous story was about kids being forceably separated from their parents in the US as a political lever is slightly jarring. Nevertheless, if that was the reason the US withdrew I'd be applauding them, but it isn't, they've withdrawn because it won't act as a rubber stamp for US positions- and, once again, they've failed to even get their friends on board with said positions. It's clear that the UNHRC has problems, but the number of countries who believe they can be fixed by taking their ball and going home while whining about the injustice of it all is... not very high. To paraphrase the common saying with a smattering of Seymour Skinner "if you have the occasional disagreement it's probably not you; have nothing but disagreements and it probably is you who is the problem, not everyone else" On a more practical level, excluding countries from the UNHRC as the US wants would not improve things. Israel cannot get support even from staunch US allies for a reason, and that won't be 'fixed' unless the US and its appointees are the only countries with a seat at the table- or Israel stops its quite genuine abuses of human rights so they can at least get support from US allies. As for excluding the DRC or Saudi etc, preaching down to the disenfranchised seldom works and has some... unpleasant historical overtones, especially when most of DRC's population was literally worked to death by a particular modern western bastion of human rights, without any repercussions at all, and not that long ago either. So if you're going to exclude DRC do you exclude Belgium for slavery, genocide and leaving Congo as a complete basket case, or was that too long ago/ accidental/ too white man's burden? Do you exclude the US due to the School of the Americas, rendition, coups, invasions, drone strikes etc? Britain due to the Opium Wars or Churchill's Bengal Famine, or forceably deporting Diego Garcia's entire population etc? France due to Libya and the plethora of coups and strongmen its supported in Africa etc? Even little old NZ let a plague ship into (then) German Samoa and systematically nicked land off brown people. Apply any exclusion principle equitably and we end up with the UNHRC being... Bhutan, maybe? In the end you just get a variation on the Genocide Olympics but with Human Rights and people arguing about the quality and reasons for all the abuses and which should be exclusionary and which not.

A country which has appointed a torturer to head of its spy agency has decided to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council in "shame". Nice to see some integrity for once. (Always amusing to see Haley act as if everyone else is an integrity vacuum except the US and Israel, then complain about how she's Nicky No Mates without the slightest trace of irony showing)

It's Vice, they're a corporate stooge so long as it's the right corporates. They'd also be concerned saying anything that might put gamers in a positive light lest said gamers turn out to have 'gator' at the end. You can get addicted to gaming for sure, I very much doubt it's unique enough to deserve a separate category though. You can get addicted to pretty much anything that has a reward reaction, as it's the reward reaction you usually get addicted to.

Mattis didn't like it and the Senate ignored it last year if the radio report I heard earlier is accurate so it was to be revisited later; later apparently being now.

Is there any difference at all between standard 2.5" SATA SSD speeds and M2.SATA speeds? I thought that was just cable management preference, ie not needing any with the M2 form factor. NVMe is faster than SATA, but unlike the difference between a platter HD and a SSD for most practical applications the difference is insufficient to justify its increased price. You get more bang for buck putting the monetary difference between, say, an 860 and a 970 Evo into a better processor or faster RAM (for Ryzen, not so much Intel) or towards a better video card (gaming); and if you're just doing general productivity stuff you'd seldom notice the difference so might as well just save the money. In terms of value for money upgrades it's pretty low priority, unless you're trying to squeeze out every bit of performance. (That was my reasoning for going for a M2.SATA Crucial MX over a 960 Evo or 600p at least, I could put the 120$ price difference to better use)

Doomguy being Doomgal is obvious designed primarily to get attention. Can't say that I have any other problem with it other than that and that being an indicator that it wouldn't attract positive attention any other way, but that's only an indicator much like game movies generally being crap is. I think anyone getting flustered about Doom's canon being disrespected is taking things a tad too seriously. While not a great movie by any stretch Gods of Egypt (probably) wasn't whitewashing, historically speaking. Best evidence is that ancient egyptians mostly looked like Copts do today, which is darker than typical european but also very far from the typical west african skin colour most people think of as 'black'. Even the 'black' Egyptians (nubians) would likely have looked like modern Ethiopians or Sudanese who are far lighter skin tone than west africans, and the Nubians only ruled Egypt briefly and lived 1000km upriver*. *one interesting side effect of that is that Sudan has way more pyramids than Egypt does.

I'd heard of the Grafton, but not the other ship involved. The General Grant would be the most famous Auckland Island shipwreck- since it was carrying gold- but that was a couple of years later.

Yeah, but the only reason Steam is a 'subscription' and the only ones to benefit from it being a sub are Valve themselves. You objectively have better terms from GOG and from old DVDs/ CDs than you get from Valve. And having to install and (mostly) play through the steam client is not a benefit to the general population, it's a benefit to Valve since it keeps their software on your computer, indeed that consumer unfriendly behaviour is the primary reason steam could take off; it was bundled and you had to keep it installed. There's literally no benefit to the buyer from it being a sub. Software being licensed is not in itself significant- it was licensed when it was sold on CDs or floppies- but the SSA is explicit about Steam being a subscription service, hence it being the Steam Subscriber Agreement. Origin Access is a subscription service by its nature since you're paying for access explicitly for a set time, Steam is a subscription service because it lessens their legal obligations.

I have no problem at all with a genuine subscription option like with Origin Access- you pay your money for x time, and after that time you renew or lose access, same as for a car or anything else. That's either worth it to you, or not. Steam however slaps the subscription label on the ownership model for no reason except it makes it easier and more profitable for them, and the benefits of that change are 100% theirs. For the buyer it's a far worse deal.

I don't see how it would have cut out a lot of the stupidity, it wouldn't have affected the schism early Islam had, for one. Much of the unrestrained US support for Israel comes from Evangelicals and Born Agains reading Revelations and deciding that Israel has to exist and be as douchey as possible so the Temple can be rebuilt, you can get a massive war where everyone else can die horribly and go to hell (including, of course, all the Jews/ Israelis they supposedly support) while they get swept up to heaven. It wouldn't heal the rift in Islam, but if you start from the belief that you want to trigger Armageddon then you can also justify all sorts of things like supporting ludicrous takfiri Wahhabis trying to trigger genocidal religious wars against shia because, well, if the war you trigger is large enough you get to go to heaven at the end of it. Which is about as un Christian in the Jesus sense as you can get, but then most of them seem to regard Jesus as a commie (rich men and eye of needle? sounds like Marx to me) to be ignored.

I've always wondered how Saul got to be so prominent in the Bible, it's almost always him who gets quoted when Jesus has said something inconvenient like 'do unto others', 'render unto Caesar', 'judge not lest ye be judged' etc. And when it's not him it's almost always Revelations instead. Shame they didn't cut that book at Nicaea, since it was pretty close to going iirc. Would have cut out a lot of the current stupidity in the Middle East if it had.

XCOM EU released with an 80% discount, tho the base price is pretty high for a 4 year old game. No linux/ mac version either (though apparently not gog's fault but the porting company's).

Maybe they'll get Hugo Weaving to do the voice over as well, and Natalie Portman for a woman. But I wouldn't be surprised if the reference to that V was deliberate in both senses, from CDPR and it being picked deliberately by the game's Hiro/ Protagonist. V's (Guy Fawkes') mask is used by Anonymous after all.

I don't think Cuba has either the means- or the political desire- to go nuclear under any realistic scenario anyway. If they had to some rockets and chemical weapons would be enough given the proximity to the US, but yeah, despite Trump's rhetoric Cuba ain't under any more meaningful threat now that it hasn't been in the past 50 years, probably less than for most of it and the main deterrent to the US acting on them is political and only likely to strengthen in the medium term so long as the boat isn't shaken. When it comes right down to it the Castros weren't Kims or Saddams and lacked their particular brand of repression and monomania; and Cuba isn't India nor Pakistan nor Israel economically or politically either.

X files mythology episodes being rubbish is pretty ironic given how often it's the standalone episodes of most other US TV series with an overarching story which are rubbish filler, while it's reversed for X Files. I even liked the standalone eps in S10 as well (even Babylon, and the Were-Human episode was as good as any of their semi comic standalones from earlier seasons), but the arc eps were uniformly illogical, incoherent, poorly plotted etc etc. Partly it's because the real world had left the X files' plot behind- early X files largely lead public opinion on government conspiracies and the like, now it all just seems so tame. If there were to be more X files made (and I suspect there will be at some point, it's better as an occasional rather than regular series anyway at this point in its life cycle) they really need to either get rid of Chris Carter or force him to use someone else as an editor, the quality and tonal differences are more of a gulf between him and the others at this point.

Nothing practical has changed. The only concession DPRK got was the wargames thing, and that is as easily reversible as anything DPRK have done. If it had been a full military withdrawal then it would be different, but it wasn't, and drills can be reinstated quickly if needed. It's also perhaps the single most obvious sign of good faith that could be made. Politically it's a win for Trump since to a casual viewer it looks like his policy is working and (he hopes) looks like it's the G6 leaders, Iran etc who are the problem with international diplomacy rather than him. Everybody got a bit of a feel good feeling and some purely political pluses from the meeting, nobody got much practical at all. Expecting anything else was unrealistic though. The one critical aspect to that strategy is to have a credible threat beforehand though. For North Korea it was their huge arsenal of conventional and bio/ chemical weapons pointed at the south and the US troops there that bought them time to make nukes and long range rockets. Their strategy would not work for others, Venezuela for example cannot threaten the US in the same manner because, well, any threat made is not backed up by the ability to deliver. They'd either get laughed at or it would be used as a pretext for direct intervention. It does encourage nations threatened by the US to get deterrents as quickly as possible so the US will negotiate rather than invade, but that's been the consequence of US foreign policy in general since at least Iraq 2, reinforced further by Libya only being attacked after giving up its deterrent.

Nowadays I just read summaries of E3. Gaming is a big industry with lots of money involved, and that's made everything pretty predictable. You need the Codex E3 thread for that.

It would 100% be Trump deciding not to go rather than being kicked out, losing the US officially would near kill the G7 outright since it would then be EU, plus Japan and Canada. It would also make a mess for when Trump is gone, it would potentially be embarrassing to whoever comes next if they have to readmitted. OTOH Trump already looked like he didn't want to be there this year, and it seems very likely that things will get worse rather than better in that respect. He probably looks at Putin or Modi in Shanghai getting stylin' gold chains from Xi and wonders why he's spent time with people who pretty obviously loathe him.

Well at least the final G7 was entertaining, and it ends with Trump being as diplomatic as ever on twitter. Wonder where the G6 will be held next year.

New Command and Conquer announced!!!1!!!1one!! for mobile. Thanks EA!

Create a character via Witcher school/ trial of grasses and a setting before the Geralt trilogy (but maybe with some of the game's/ book's characters where appropriate eg Vesemir or a young Geralt) was certainly one rumour. Ciri was the other rumour, though IMO the first is more likely. Ciri has the advantage of being a main character in TW3 so people will immediately recognise her, but she is too powerful and did get an ending, albeit the witcher one could easily be used for a game set up. An earlier setting has far more flexibility and allows character customisation- but lacks the immediate hook of using an existing character.

Who wouldn't want a chip that has nearly the thermal density of space shuttle re-entry, cooled by something meant for large fish tanks and a kg of VRM with four dedicated fans? The Intel cooling solution by itself is probably more expensive than a Threadripper.

That's the problem with conspiracy theories, anything and everything becomes support for the theory. Even when Trump was threatening to directly attack Russia in Syria some people thought it was all a stunt to try and disprove collusion when all indications are that he had to be talked out of it by Mattis. Trump wants Russia there to distract from his isolation and so that people would shout at Putin rather than him. No need for any 'collusion'. Yeah, that's 100% true. They also did that knowing that some of those weapons were being supplied to Al Qaeda. The trouble is that despite that there's no evidence they supported ISIS as ISIS, they just supported a bunch of guys who fought alongside ISIS and later joined ISIS, as most of the eastern rebels ended up doing (if they didn't they were killed). It's easy enough to go from looking at the stupid policy of arming islamist militias that later joined ISIS and turning a blind eye to al Qaeda's front groups getting a bunch of your weapons to there being an underground railway of ISIS operatives coming into Europe to do western intelligence's bidding. The latter has no evidence for it though, it's pure conjecture. Probably of more practical importance than the G7 but with a lot less attention given to it because it's just minnows like India/ China/ Russia attending instead of global collossi like Canada, the UK and Italy (with apologies to Canada and Italy), and there's no Trump and associated dramas.