Zoraptor

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.

Normal belt vacuum cleaners run the risk of frying components from the static electricity a belt generates. And they do generate a lot of static electricity. Back at school the Van Wossname Sphere was charged by the belt from an old vacuum cleaner and that packed nearly as much kick as an electric fence. OTOH Dyson® brand vacuum cleaners should- at least theoretically- be fine for cleaning electronics, since they us John Dyson®'s patented cyclonic® system instead of a belt.

Yeah, I mean ST and Farscape kind of sound similar if you give a short description but tonally and philosophically they're radically different from each other. Farscape was inspired by Blake's 7, an old British sci fi show about... a bunch of convicts on a space ship running away from a galactic authority. In B7 they happened to be running away from... the Federation, who were basically an evil version of Star Trek's Federation complete with a very similar logo to Starfleet. So the similar descriptions are because B7 and Farscape (and Firefly, also inspired by B7) are near literally Through a Glass Darkly versions of Trek.

It is getting a fair way towards being 'unclustered' now. There's only really two questions left- what happens with the rebel area in the north and the kurd/ sdf area in the north east- and while they're decently large and important questions that's a lot lot less than there was. The no fly zone was always, to coin a phrase, pie in the sky. The Turkish incident was a different scale and could be (and was) dealt with by soft options like sanctions- which saw Erdogan, posturing and strutting like a pearooster immediately after, calling Putin a great friend and apologising a year later. Putin doesn't want a fight with the US as he's neither suicidal nor stupid, but it's also absolutely clear that it isn't the 90s any longer. As much as Trump threatened to bomb Russians in Syria that was in response to Russia saying they'd sink US ships and shoot down US planes if attacked (in theory pretty obvious, but as I said a lot of people seem to think nobody would ever retaliate). Don't think anyone would want to find out if Putin would back down or not if it came right down to it, but I'm thanking Mattis for going option A and making sure we never found out anyway. (Personally, I think Putin absolutely would retaliate if Trump went option C or if Hillary tried an actual no fly zone as well)

And supposedly was going to directly attack the Russians in Syria in April as well, plus threatened to wipe North Korea out. None of those have actually happened though, it was all talk (and in the Venezuela case, talk as related from 'anonymous sources' too). So long as it remains just talk it's... just talk. Yep, and they were the only times he's had close to universal praise from the press too which is just as telling. Unsurprisingly the 2018 Douma attack wasn't a nerve gas/ chlorine mix as claimed (obvious to anyone with basic chemistry knowledge) plus 40% of the victims in the previous Khan Sheikhoun attack turned up to hospital before the attack took place- never once mentioned in the press so far as I have seen, but confirmed by the OPCW albeit buried in the appendix and not mentioned in the body of the report nor the summary. I dunno how Hillary would have handled Syria when it came right down to it and she had to actually do something rather than just appear tough, but most of the rosy projections for sweeping victory for the moderate western vetted head choppers after a no fly zone was imposed involve people making the assumption that Putin would simply back down if threatened hard enough. Which betrays an absolutely fundamental misunderstanding of Putin.

Yeah, Trump's considerably worse in terms of verbal compost and near Yeltsinesque capering than GWB was (neither Trump nor Bush got arrested drunk in their underwear outside the Kremlin though, the advantage of being teetotalers). Then again, if that was the worst thing about either man, or Yeltsin, nobody would really care and either would be a decent leader. But for all his many problems Trump hasn't started a war that killed and displaced millions and left the middle east even more destabilised- well, hasn't started one yet at least- and until he does he's better than Bush. And, of course, it was the people he had the good grace to surround himself with, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfy, who really pushed for that war. I'd far rather have had any number more faux pas than Iraq War 2003.

The top Euro clubs in the top leagues could do with at least a bit more regulation. In theory they're meant to live within their means and not overspend via being owned by [billionaire] but in practice that's not enforced and most of the top clubs are unsustainable without cash injections or leveraged up to the eyeballs. Won't take much misfortune to make them insolvent. Why ? The big team screwed up and is punished and the plucky underdog managed to work their way to the top! It's a different situation where football isn't so popular, and you also have to consider sponsorship and the like. You don't want to kill support somewhere like New York and you don't want sponsors not having access to that market; somewhere like the EPL though there's both committed fanatical fans of teams and almost always multiple teams for any large population centre as well. I'd use Australia as an example, if Perth got relegated a city of 2 million+ would have no team and the closest one would be thousands of km away in Adelaide, there are multiple other codes competing for attention (AFL and cricket especially) and it practically wouldn't be a national league any more. It's not like the EPL/ Championship where you could have a former European Cup winner like Notts Forest get promotion. (yes, the whole thing runs counter to how 'free market competition' is meant to work, but that's hardly a surprise since that's pretty much never how it does work)

Really though, Amazon at the moment is dreadful. Riddled with counterfeits, resold fake returns (especially computer components) that have never been checked and fly by night scam artists using the marketplace with no supervision. Garbage wages and conditions get garbage results from staff and they want more documentation that their scams are scams than they want to open a seller account in the first place. It's even worse than steam is, except for Amazon having a fantastic refund policy; which they wouldn't need so much of if the rest of its service- and its absolute core service- hadn't fallen off a cliff.

Did you have opinion pieces in respectable papers etc saying so or just in right wing National Enquirer/ Drudge Report type places though? Business Insider is not the best regarded, and Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies (ie no, he didn't commit treason, as anyone who doesn't have their head up Hillary's bum on the payroll of Shareblue could tell) but still, it is pretty mainstream and not pure outrage trolling like Vice etc. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of it is that the only thing Trump has done that has earned near universal praise is to chuck tomahawks at Syria, which is an utterly dreadful lesson to teach politicians.

Saying it makes think tankers heads explode with rage though, and that's such a colossal plus I cannot bring myself to care about it being 'impolite'. It's fact, and at some point it has to be stated as fact. And for all the outrage he is kind of right (facpov, of course) about most of the controversial stuff he has said; Germany is reliant on Russia for energy and won't not be for the forseeable future and that along with their military being... ill prepared gives Russia a huge advantage when dealing with them, the EU is a rival, the list of countries who have had the US interfere in their elections is longer than those invaded by Britain and included that moron Yeltsin's election in 1996 where US intervention was about as overt as you get short of an actual coup. Realistically there will be a European Army at some point, and that's fact. As soon as that happens the time is ticking on NATO, and it won't be the US pulling out. It just outrages some people to have it said out loud.

And people still vote for this douche waffle. Which douche waffle, Captain Orange or the Ankara Watermelon Seller? I'll say this for Trump, he's 100% correct about the EU being a rival of the US and anyone who doesn't accept that is naive.

6 is the one answer that can never be correct as if you have two consecutive 'none of the above are true' statements only the first one can ever be right* (since if right it consequently makes the second one wrong per its own postulation of none above being correct). So if any of answers 1-4 is correct then both 5 & 6 have to be wrong, if none of them are correct then 5 has to be correct, and since 5 is correct this makes 6 wrong. *so long as there is at least one statement above

You're an unlicensed anaesthesiologist using non specific doses on whoever you come across no matter their weight or susceptibility or whether or not they are taking incompatible medications and I bet the sleeping agent has not had any sort of rigorous scientific testing either- some anaesthetic toxicity and adverse reaction is to be expected. I for one appreciate Arkane putting this feature into their game as it widens awareness of this very real problem.

I can't imagine Juncker getting drunk and dancing in his underwear like Jelcyn though. Or maybe my mind refuses the image. Trump's obvious negotiation tactics- gotta play one side against another- and grandstanding are obvious, and about as subtle as a herd of elephant in a bottle store. After all what are they going to do, kick the US from NATO?

If it's the case I'd heard of previously his 'suicide attempt' involved driving his car into an oncoming vehicle on a motorway- killing its occupants but not himself. That's why he got the death sentence, not for a suicide attempt per se.

I'll be backing France as well, well done to Croatia getting to the final but I just plain don't like them as a team. "It's my last ever game, might as well go out doing something I've always wanted to..."

1st season was the worst, and time travel is inherently confusing hence it being 'slammed'. I haven't seen the 4th season but it's definitely worth watching up to then. I do prefer the movie, but that movie is one of my absolute favourites.