Zoraptor

Yeah more or less, but as Unionists they simply could not support the deal offered, even if a hard exit and hard border was the alternative. Their raison d'être is preservation of the union, they c/would as much vote for May's deal despite the poor alternative as Lincoln c/would vote (well, support/ sponsor I guess) for secession for the Confederacy despite the poor alternative. What exactly they wanted instead, well, so far as I am aware they've been a bit equivocal on it since Brexit was unpopular in NI in general and even a lot of unionists like the open borders with Ireland and to preserve the Good Friday agreement which a hard Brexit technically would break. They were just in an impossible position with no good outcomes for them.

Voting down the Brexit deal was what they wanted, so they now (already) have that. The 'backstop' provision for Irish/ Northern Irish integration was absolute anathema to the DUP as (fairly extreme) unionists, as soon as the agreement was voted down the backstop went with it so they had what they want. They never made the issue one of Confidence and neither did May so were never going to withdraw overall Support for the government over it, especially since it's been obvious it wouldn't pass since before christmas.

Where is it implied that we're talking about a trilogy? As far as I know, nowhere. There's a bit of a default expectation that a computer game series will be a trilogy- the typical life of a hardware and software cycle usually allows for production of 3 games on the same engine, and economies of scale, reuse of assets and familiarity with the technology allows for quicker and cheaper (theoretically) production of sequels. People also get attached to characters and want to see them further. If all other things were equal and sales were sufficient I'd expect there would be a PoE3, and that being the end for the watcher character and series (but not setting). The MS buyout and Deadfire not meeting expectations may change that, at least the stories for PoE and Deadfire were self contained.

Increasing sentences on appeal does happen, but it's obviously retaliation for the Huawei exec being detained. They even passive aggressively used near verbatim the same legalist ('respect the processes of our legal system please') statements Kanada used to Chinese criticism when they detained Meng. Not that I have much sympathy for Kanada there. US has regularly used its Iran sanctions to extort foreign banks, this time they've tried it on someone with clout. If Kanada didn't want to get blowback they shouldn't honour dubious and obviously politically motivated US warrants on people transiting their country and should stick to pissing off weaksauce like the Saudis instead. At least one of the Kanadians China have nabbed recently almost certainly is a spy as well (as is mr 4 passports who was nabbed in Russia, indeed he's about as obvious a disclaimable asset as you can get). It's not like the whole Huawei thing is even about having secure systems and whatnot, it's about making sure there are NSA backdoors built into everything instead. Bit better than predicted, but not in way that it matters. Tomorrow's no confident vote and next weeks new plan are bit more interesting, but if something miraculous don't happen to unite the parliament then UK will leave EU without any additional agreement. It was considerably worse for May than predicted as the worst analysis was around a -200 loss, and the worst defeat for a government in modern history. Not really 'better' for those who wanted to stay in Europe either as the Tories who crossed the floor are euroskeptics and won't vote for a second referendum or to stay which is what the remainers want. No confidence vote won't go through either as turkeys won't vote for an early christmas; the DUP already has what it wanted (no back door Irish union, as they saw it) as do the euroskeptics (what they saw as a 'soft' EU membership rather than withdrawal) so they'll vote for the government and that gives a majority. They'd need remain Tories to cross the floor which is highly unlikely as it would almost certainly end their careers.

Theresa May didn't even get 1/3 support for her Brexit Agreement, losing by 230 votes. That's more than 100 of her own MPs voting against her.

Well, take that argument all the way back and you have ... God, right? But if God created the Universe, where was He before that? In a larger Universe? Who created that? Sorry, I'm not trying to create a controversy here... Which oddly enough is the same point that science ends up at when looking at the Big Bang- no ability to tell what came before/ where it came from and what caused it plus special pleading to make it work (inflation theory/ universal constants that aren't actually constant really ain't much different from God Did It if you can't have a proper scientific reason). I far prefer the Big Bounce hypothesis since it doesn't need a before and after or beginning and ending, it just needs for the universe to exist and expand/ contract every 50 billion years or so in an overall homeostatic manner. Indeed, it's a perfect circular argument where existence is its own proof and the answer to why is because it's always been that way; about as neat and tidy and irrefutable on a meta level as you can get.

Surely 'forcing VR' means every PS5 hardware SKU will have VR capability rather than forcing VR into every title released. Trying to force VR into every title would be at best asinine, at worst abjectly moronic; having the capability available to everyone on the console otoh is easily justified- and presumably, like Kinect for the xbone, if it ends up being a bit of a dog it can be cut to save some $$$ whatever they say now. Ubiquitous VR is one of those things that is always a year or two away yet barely ever gets any closer practically. Same with cloud/ streaming gaming services, they've been the next big thing and only two years off for a decade.

Or time travel. We can't conclusively prove that the 'aliens' tinkering with our history aren't actually human chrononauts from the future coming back to help us with stuff and every viewer of Ancient Aliens knows what that means: if you cannot conclusively disprove it then it must be true. At least that theory has the advantage of being a Closed Circle argument.

That's a developer leak though, if you're developing for PS5 then PS4 back compatibility isn't relevant since you're, well, developing for PS5 and not PS4. There's not really any reason for either him or Sony to mention it in that context. Given it's an AMD CPU/ GPU combo and the GPU is even the same underlying architecture (GCN) as PS4 the only reason you wouldn't have bc is due to non technical issues- Sony not wanting to do it because they want new game sales, especially if the PS5 is loss leading and they need the licensing fees to break even.

That's a different aspect of support, support for existing installs and current users. Dropping support on new hardware is also only done for the consumer market where MS has more overt influence and where ASUS/ GB/ MSI/ ASRock etc may tacitly favour dropping support as it saves them costs. So far as I am aware the big corporate PC suppliers like Dell and HP and Lenovo make new computers that are win7 capable for corporate use since a lot of big volume users still use win7 and won't be pushed to win10 until it suits them. Corporate PCs are usually awful when viewed from the consumer segment though, and typically use very low grade/ conservative (though generally reliable, since service replacement is a big cost) components that are meant to be simple to support.

It's early days still. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of Sony's leaks- especially the VR one- were aimed at Microsoft, they won the prerelease PR battle vs xbox handily last time in part by having some strategic leaks that weren't accurate but which got MS into a hole- eg leaks said PS4 would be always online, it was only after MS formally said the xbox would be so as well that Sony yelled psych and said the PS4 would be offline capable. Yeah, that's way more RAM than a full desktop OS uses- win10 has extraneous guff to it that a console doesn't need and doesn't need that much RAM. Some sort of segmented memory set up where 8 is used by the GPU and 8 by the CPU (and OS and other overhead aspects) would seem a lot more likely as that could have design advantages but even then 8GB is a little shy for doing 4k/60fps properly and without tricks.

A fair few of the TPPA (as it is now) signers were not overly disappointed when the US pulled out. I mean, they weren't happy and would mostly have preferred the US to be there, but most of the really contentious issues in TPP were added at the behest of the US and it got a lot less opposition once the US was gone. Ironically, even though some of those controversial provisions were kept anyway. I don't think anyone is looking forward to re-renegotiating it with the US though. That's not really being similar to Hillary in particular though, that's basically just plain old standard being a politician. Politicians will try and make their views palatable to the largest number of voters possible, if you don't you generally don't win elections. But otherwise Hillary is pretty much a dead straight typical corporate Democrat in every respect. Gabbard is a lot less tailored to getting the party hierarchy onside and at times she's completely disregarded them eg endorsing Bernie; she's also a lot less tailored in her general and policy views whereas Hillary came across as not having had a thought that wasn't vetted by focus groups beforehand. No doubt Gabbard does have some sort of message tailoring/ control going on- as above, she is a politician- but it's a lot less overt than Hillary's was. There's also very little similarity in terms of their rise and they share some considerably differences in both policy formulation and application/ theory of those policies. They have a fair few similarities on policy too, but they are in the same party. I might agree in the future though, we've had 30 years to get to know Hillary fairly well even if you don't live in the US; if I list the things I definitely know about Gabbard it's a lot shorter and there are more gaps to be filled in.

Clinton loyalists/ corporate dems are definitively holding a grudge. Going solely by people that are obviously Democrat Shareblue/ Correct the Record astroturfers: her foreign policy isn't non interventionist but really consists of loving Putin and Assad, she actually wants to bomb more muslims than peaceful mainstream pro regime change and military intervention democrats and domestically she is really a right winger and closet republican and any left wing person who votes for her instead of a sensible mainstream candidate is an idiot, Republican plant or a traitor to the party deeply misguided and not paying attention. So don't listen to them if they say anything nice about her, they're idiots closet republicans or deeply misguided; listen to me the objective voice of reason. Fortunately she's also also not got a chance, is not a threat of winning and is only running because she wants a cabinet position or to be a VP nominee so please don't bother paying attention or getting excited about her in any way because she's going to lose and drop out and is only doing it to get a cushy job later and raise her profile. Plus, plus; on the qt she's a polytheist and worships cows! Cows! Not that there's anything wrong with that and I'm fine with it, but worshiping cows! You know a lot of people won't vote for someone who worships a burger ingredient even though I would consider it if she wasn't so useless in every other respect and [mainstream candidate] wasn't so much better and doesn't worship cows. Plus Hindus have far too many vaguely androgynous multiarmed deities, very confusing*. She should worship a cloud or a burning bush like normal people instead, would be far better politically. Think I hit all the salient points in their briefing document. Pretty standard propaganda greatest hits parade. *might have added this one myself

Yeah, it's working. It's got plenty of updates so if it has been down it wasn't for long. Could be a problem with cached items, in which case a force reload of the page (ctrl shift r on most browsers) may bring it back.

It's an optional separate download of the original game versions- or at least GOG has that option, not sure about steam as the non EEs were never available there. There isn't an inherent EE 'rollback' option.

Crowd control from signs especially aard or igni helps a lot as well. Think the tips/ tutorial says you should parry humans and dodge monsters, but 90% of the time you should dodge both. The crucial thing is definitely to keep your enemies in front of you as much as possible since attacks from behind will kill you very quickly.

Caesar's Legion arrives at the Hoover Dam via vertibird, 2279AD, colourised.

Yeah, I've got a x370 MB and I'm not expecting 16 cores to even be supported on that. 16 cores at the same freqs as the 8 core demo gets the power draw into Bulldozer territory, and it would near have to have twice the TDP of the 1800x 300 series boards were designed for. Pulling that amount of power through the socket itself is very likely feasible, but I'd doubt other components could handle it. APUs lagging by a generation is kind of understandable given that margins are low and 7nm will be fairly expensive (plus there's the GloFo supply agreement), plus there's a lot of inertia in the laptop market. I really wish AMD would fix their naming conventions though as it's as inconsistent as you could get. Ryzen 1x00 is Zen1, Ryzen 2x00 is Zen+, Ryzen 2400g is Zen1, Ryzen 3x00 will be Zen2 and Ryzen 3000 APUs will be Zen+; Vega 10 and 20 are generations, Vega VII is Vega 20, Vega64 is Vega 10, Vega 3/4/8/11 is Vega 10, Vega24/32 on Intel chips is actually Polaris with some Vega 10 features...

So far as I am aware MS has stopped certifying drivers for Win7 on all new consumer motherboards to drive people to Win10. Win7 does usually work with a bit of tinkering, but it isn't officially supported and you won't get chipset drivers and the like which may make things... difficult. (Note that unless you've been very vigilant you've ended up with the spyware components of Win10 even if using Win7 as they've been stealthed into multiple essential win7 updates)

Elex is life. Elex is love. The game is pretty good as well, it is a bit janky in places still but an absolute must for any Gothic fans. The difficulty curve is more of a cliff at the beginning which will put a lot of a casual players off, but that's par for the course with Piranha Bytes games.

Not much chance of remakes of either. IWD2's modifications and kludges to IE make it hard to do and it wasn't that popular compared to Planetscape Tournament which was also heavily modified; Obsidian has copyright over game technology and toolset for NWN2 so permission from them would be needed or a rollback to NWN1EE Aurora if Beamdog were to do it. (Trent Oster may also strongly dislike NWN2, but so far as I'm aware that's hearsay)

The inconsistent wording is definitely confusing and I'm surprised it's there in a legal filing. I'd have preferred them to use nett for receipts after cut and gross for before cut but I'm not an accountant. I don't have much problem with the guy who made the initial calculation being mistaken given most people are familiar with movie or game grosses that include the vendor fees and will thus automatically think that's the case when seeing figures. Journos definitely should have checked though, the agreement is a public filing and they are expected to have better knowledge than a random person on reddit and to be more authoritative sources.

IMO there are three big problems with 'quality' drama. I'll exclude comedy because by and large I dislike recent comedies so can't be objective about their quality. 1) Mistaking expensive with quality- too much money result in spending on extraneous guff that actually detracts from quality 2) Over reliance on auteur creators- spend the money on getting them, give them complete control, find out they really need a decent EP looking over their shoulder later 3) Thinking complicated inherently equals quality- it doesn't with the overarching one being shooting straight for Event TV, rather than quality TV that becomes Event TV. Something like Breaking Bad would be a prime example of doing it right; not expensive for the sake of it, attention paid to details rather than style, little known (in drama terms) actors who own their role, a writer who was mostly known for X Files episodes and script management- albeit quality X Files episodes- beforehand. It got its following because the acting was great, the characters compelling, the scripting fantastic and the plotting rock solidly consistent. It's not even realistic in absolute terms, but you're able to completely suspend disbelief because it's so consistently and well presented. In the end it got massive success despite still looking pretty cheap and actually being, at heart, a pretty simple and straightforward story that was just told superbly. The early seasons of GoT actually followed that formula pretty well- if it had started out with an Event TV budget from the outset we'd have had a lot of time dedicated to the Whispering Wood/ Riverrun battles etc in the first few seasons because, well, battles are cool; but they weren't really necessary to show and would have taken time from the worldbuilding that established the franchise. In contrast something like Westworld is like a game where the developer got too much money and starts packing in extra stuff that isn't necessary from the get go. It doesn't mean it's bad, it's just over engineered and over complicated in about every respect*, and mostly it seems for the sake of it. I like Westworld well enough but I can't help but think that it would be a lot better and way more sustainable long term if they'd dialed everything down a level. Ultimately if it costs that much to make and doesn't drive enough subscriptions it will end up cancelled like Rome or Deadwood not because it's bad or has no viewers but because, well, it's too expensive- and WW S2 did shed viewers. *yet I like Legion overall and it's over complicated; probably because it's more stylised.

Longevity would be OK. Weakest part would be the processor but 6/12 should last a while and except at low resolution and high refresh rates the GPU is the limiting factor most of the time. AMD also offers a decent potential upgrade path through its 3000 series (the part it showed at CES was as fast as Intel's flagship consumer chip in multithreading yet is probably AMD's mid range option) and the MSI B450 boards have very good components- as good as most others' 470 boards- that should last. Who knows with the GPU, you just have to buy what's available. My personal opinion is that this year is a poor time to buy a video card but an excellent time to get a CPU, but the GPU issue is mostly value based rather than them being bad and quick to age (early RTX specific performance is likely to age badly though). You'll have to pick your own monitor, I wouldn't even make a suggestion as it's just too personal a choice in terms of balancing the factors involved. I am very happy with my 34" curved ultrawide Samsung (cf791) but it's impossible to even recommend that in this case as it's about as expensive as your budget for two monitors (and I think it's been superceded by a new model as well).

What did they screw up? I liked Westworld season 2. HBO definitely had issues a few years back. True Detective S2, Vinyl etc left them with basically just GoT on the 'quality' drama front while the big new comedy program The Brink also failed. True Detective also got them criticised for rushing a 2nd season- something HBO as a premium channel is expected not to do in principle- with it being severely under cooked as a result and Vinyl was an extremely expensive flop that was basically HBO checklist programming: high profile show runner and associated names! nudity! drugs! big budget! success! Not. And while Westworld is critically well received it's very expensive to make and its ratings aren't great. There was also the very expensive Luck fiasco a few years previous and The Newsroom was both stultifyingly moralistic and monumentally self satisfied and overwritten- Last Week Tonight is a huge improvement since at least John Oliver is meant to be an insufferable blow hard and played for laughs. Their programming has had the same problem that Netflix has now really, trying too hard for Event TV and sometimes coming off as an parody of themselves instead. Seems a lot better now that they've relaxed a bit instead of trying to get a GoT replacement made every year.