Zoraptor

Meh, according to the mainstream media "Assad fights ISIS" was a lie when Trump said it. They've lied about Trump's lies extensively and repeatedly. And it's not like Trump doesn't lie enough anyway without them making more up, they just cannot help themselves. Trump has definitely kowtowed to the Saudi far more in practical terms than Obama. Bowing is irrelevant except as a nicety, it only means something to people who aren't secure in their power. I'm pretty sure that Obama would have mentioned the large US base in Qatar before giving the Saudis the green light to invade instead of Sexy Rexy having to make a frantic phone call to remind MbS of that fact. If anything Obama was the least Saudi subservient US leader in recent memory.

Trailer or not I wouldn't be putting much faith in the Solo movie to be good. It has clearly been very troubled and has had director replacements, extensive rewrites and reshoots and a lead actor who supposedly had to have acting lessons (!) while shooting. None of those things exactly fill me with confidence as to its end quality. On a more fundamental level I have little interest in Han's backstory and wish they'd do something a bit different with the side stories instead of Han and How The Rebels Stole The Death Star Plans v16 (albeit R1 was a different approach to previous SW movies in many ways). Even the supposed Kenobi movie is still a very conservative and safe option.

We don't really know what happened with respect to that, nor will we, given the nature of the FISA court. Is it even possible to independently check at what time/ date a FISA warrant is issued and for what reason, or do we have to take interested parties such as the FBI/ NSA's word for it? Rhetorical question, that. There certainly seems to have been leaks made based on the surveillance which is a direct intervention by someone in the FBI/ NSA, even if was not by the NSA or FBI as organisations. So far as I am concerned as vaguely neutral that is where the strongest point of attack for Trump lies- and manipulation by the intelligence community is far more of a risk to US democracy than anything the Russians can do. Everyone who isn't a nationalism induced moron knows that the US tries to influence Russian politics and the Russians try and influence US politics; the problems are always worse when you have the state's own security apparatus deciding to interfere politically. Plus in a more general case, if it were collaboration with the Saudis or Israel that were regarded as being worthy of surveillance the only candidate in 30 years likely to avoid monitoring would be- maybe- Obama. Steele was picked by the Democrats in the first place because he was biased. if someone wrote a piece on Hillary or Bernie paid for by the Republican Party it would clearly be biased since, well, neither R nor D are interested in an unbiased scientific type analysis but in generating maximum political capital. They will deliberately employ people who will give them what they want, not a disinterested academic. Steele's dossier is replete with gossip, doubly removed hearsay and is almost entirely unverifiable even when it drifts towards direct information- and is also at multiple points self contradictory (eg, Russians cultivating Trump for 5 years, offering him deals etc and Trump turned them down; yet later in dossier (p8) saying Trump's lack of property in Russia was "not for lack of trying"). That's what they wanted and what they paid for. That stuff is also very easy to 'soft' corroborate either by using the same source speaking to a different person/ organisation or a different person reporting the same rumour.

I wasn't expecting it to do anything much, and that's exactly what it delivered. The way both sides were talking about it it would have been easy to expect it to have some actual substance though.

Trump's memo is hardly convincing. If they want to go after the FBI or the investigation they'd be far better off catching them leaking, which they've done extensively and for obvious political purposes. Bit difficult to do when the people who should be catching the leakers are the ones leaking though. Just another sign that the whole US intelligence apparatus is a law to itself and uncontrollable though. Speaking of which, using a warrant from that abject rubber stamp FISA court as evidence of anything is a joke, and is either a sign of ignorance or deliberate obfuscation from Bloomberg. It rejects one warrant application every four years on average, or one out of every 4500 cases if you prefer. That's out and out kangaroo court territory- you're more likely to have the 'prosecution case' rejected in North Korea than in FISA.

The mysticism was always the worst part of BSG, such a shame they doubled down on it rather than dialed it back. There's probably a bit less of it in the second season, but even more in the 3rd and especially last seasons. And yeah, definitely used a crutch to avoid having to write things logically. People make dumb decisions throughout the series. They also repeat the same mistakes, there's an obnoxious love tetrahedron that goes on far too long, massive hypocrisy and as above they handwave stuff with deus ex machina- and think they're being 'deep' doing so. But when it does stuff well it does it very very well. Despite not being a massive fan of BSG by any means Exodus I & II is one of my absolute favourites 2 parters, better than even Best of Both Worlds or Chain of Command in TNG. In terms of Sci Fi I thought BSG was as good as or better than SG or ST, when it was trying to be Sci Fi. Both SG and ST have massive amounts of handwaving as well, they just dress it up in trektechnobabble rather than mysticism, and they tend to forget the technobabble when convenient. Without the mysticism BSG was pretty believable and consistent, tech wise, far more so than Warp Drive destroying the fabric of the universe for one specific week or the galaxy being liberated by half a dozen plucky US airforce personnel with P90s and a healthy dose of mcguyverism.

Yeah, I wouldn't be too sure on that. It also depends on whether they actually 'removed' the Denuvo DRM or just... 'neutered' it so it never triggers. If it's still doing its DRM functions but they've been set to always return as 'OK' then there would be no effect on performance- since the checks etc that effect the performance would still be being done. That's how the hax solutions to Denuvo DRM work, and indeed how most removals of SecuROM's limited activation system worked as well (SecuROM was still there, it just accepted any hardware profile as legit once it was 'removed'). That method requires limited testing as opposed to properly removing it. Having said that, the reduction in loading time suggests that at least one part of Denuvo's DRM system may have been genuinely turned off at least, since it was doing constant read/write as part of its DRM encryption cycling, leading to accusations it was trashing SSDs prematurely.

If it discredits the investigation then of course Trump wants it released, but, if the investigation deserves to be discredited then that should not be a consideration in its release. There clearly have been issues with the investigation (people on it getting fired for anti Trump emails etc) and with the intelligence community at large with respect to Trump and they clearly preferred Clinton as a candidate. It's clearly going to be political, but everything is- questioning the accuracy of the memo is political, the investigation and IC leaking like a sieve is political etc etc.

Must be due to Russian Hax. In further Mohammed bin Sultan- shining light of Saudi Arabia- news, the quagmire in Yemen got even worse as the South Yemeni separatists who were the only organised native force fighting the Houthis predictably decided that what they really wanted was an independent southern state rather than to pointlessly fight and die in the north for Saudi and just overthrew whatever dregs of the formal government remained in Aden. And, of course, they used their MbS supplied weaponry to do it. Truly the man is Reverse Midas. Sadly that sort of thing happens pretty much every week- last week it was a hotel attacked. The security situation in Afghanistan is still dreadful and not improving.

Unions are useless right up until the point you don't have them, or need one of their services. Much as insurance is useless, unless you crash your car or burn your house down.

They all depend on how much strain they put on the CPU- what you're using the program for, how demanding the program and its functions are, whether it's multithreaded or not and whether it uses the GPU and for what. If there's a different bottleneck than the CPU there shouldn't be much effect unless it hits one of the other areas Meltdown/ Spectre fixes effect like certain types of disk functions. From what I remember Photoshop is badly optimised and has no effective multithreading at all and little (only with a couple of functions, iirc) GPU based acceleration so I'd suspect it would be adversely effected especially for intensive processes; IIRC the others all have some degree of multithreading andor GPU acceleration built in so are likely to be effected less, dependent on what exactly you're doing with them. It will also be dependent on what your hardware is, a well threaded program on an 8700k may be slightly slower than before but still faster than any other non enthusiast platform (though a very well threaded app on a r7 will likely be faster since SMT>>HT and the r7 has 2 extra cores). OTOH something a little bit older, less powerful and with fewer threads is likely to take a bigger hit since it's more likely to be struggling already.

There aren't many turn based games, and even fewer where there is a significant AI 'turn' to take into account, hence "almost all" games being GPU limited by the ability to draw and fill polys and apply effects. It may also have an adverse effect on frame rates if you're playing at 720p low details with a 1080Ti, but that combination is also pretty rare and practically only used if you're trying to make a point or doing CPU testing.

There will need to be BIOS updates to fully implement protection as well, so the exact performance loss is still unclear at this point. But yeah, certainly shouldn't be much if anything for games since they're almost always limited by the graphics card power rather than CPU; and most basic productivity and home computing tasks are not taxing on modern CPUs either.

Grammar Nazi SJW. That is still double posting. Then the definition of 'double posting' has certainly lost much of it's meaning. The definition of double posting has always been exactly what it says and what it was since usenet: to post twice in succession in the same thread. Nothing more and nothing less. That's a lot easier to do and more excusable in systems with no subthreading like most forums (especially if the built in quote function is, uh, erratic if you try and do just about anything with it) and less excusable in those which do have subthreading like usenet or its rough modern equivalent reddit- but it's still double posting if you do it.

That is still double posting. Given the ever so slightly broken state of the quotation code here it's definitely understandable double posting though, since it's a lottery whether you're going to get something usable quoting multiple people or end up with random misattributions and deletions if you try and change anything.

I don't know if that's hypocrisy but it was certainly moronic to start talking about arming a 30k 'border force' if they didn't want a response from Erdogan; and much as I dislike the guy the US did patently lie to Erdogan multiple times and their position is mutually contradictory since the YPG and PKK are definitely more than casually linked. In the end Afrin plain ain't important enough to cut Turkey loose over, neither is Manbij, and if the US has to jettison the whole YPG to keep Turkey they'll do it and rely on the ex ISIS guys they're training in Deir Ez Zor to mess with Assad instead. End of the day the US simply didn't/ don't believe they'll have to make any choice and can have their cake and eat it too. Which is a massive misjudgement of exactly how seriously Erdogan takes it. US policy towards the YPG is their overall middle east policy in microcosm- absolutely the worst combination of pie in the sky wishful thinking and cold hearted pragmatism. PKK and YPG share the same philosophy (roughly anarcho-syndicalism, not communism) and the same parent organisation in the KCK, along with the Iranian PJAK. SDF is the militia of the DFNS, the YPG is the main part of the SDF. The YPG has explicitly denied wanting independence- they also have got on spectacularly badly with the Iraqi Kurds' main party which was blockading them up until recently. They're definitely a load of dreamers, they could have avoided being attacked by Turkey fairly easily if they'd agreed to a Russian brokered offer which had already been applied in their Aleppo enclave of Sheikh Maqsoud but decided to fight instead, a fight they will certainly lose. The practical choice was whether they'd get Syrian soldiers- probably not many at all, and at least broadly 'secular'- or the ethno religious dingbats in the Turkish proxy forces after a prolonged military campaign.

Interesting, yeah. Can't quite decide whether the game is in bad taste or not, so I guess I'd go with a default not in bad taste. And as the article indicates, it was never confirmed it was one of their underwater nebelwerfers that exploded, conventional torpedoes are perfectly capable of doing so as well.

So how's the difficulty? Is it a hard game? Save vs 10 year old humour: critical failure.

I could never complain about Richard Cheney's name being censored, for some reason it seems highly appropriate. Not sure if he literally had no pulse while he was still VP or a bit after, but he was certainly not at all healthy. Statins are one of the most prescribed drugs anywhere. Not quite typical to be on them when 70+, but it's common, and fairly common even with fit people with a history/ family history of high blood pressure. In Trump's case he clearly is overweight though. Came up earlier, but while dementia tests do appear really easy if someone has dementia they absolutely cannot do them properly while someone without will ace them even if they hate tests. That's how they're designed.

I could see Trump legitimately being 108kg, though ironically you'd have to assume that he did almost literally no exercise to be so. Kind of the opposite of power athletes being 'obese' on the BMI scale while having a jacked appearance because all their weight is muscle.

I checked a couple of reviews to make sure, and it looks like around the best that can be expected practically is ~2 hours. I'm fairly impressed it made it that long.

Meh, everyone knows that Bran ends up as Bran the Builder. So deep and nuanced: he's actually named after himself!

If it's the Ryzen 1700/ RX580 one be aware that its battery life is poor since they're using desktop rather than laptop chips, though that also makes it one of the better desktop replacement models.

Wrong thread dude, this isn't the posting a funny thread. Wrong thread dude, this isn't the posting a funny thread.

Most of the games I'd recommend have already been mentioned. If I had to pick I'd say Divinity Original Sin so long as story doesn't matter too much and there's a tolerance for some silliness and Dragon Age Origins so long as there's tolerance of mid life Bioware tropes (and filler combat). It's.. ..but much like its developer it's a goneburger, as of the end of 2017. So if you don't own it now you never will. Well, until Beamdog remasters it in 5 years time.