Zoraptor

Ajit Pai has some high powered support for the net neutrality repeal.

Ryzen 2 and Zen 2 (presumably Ryzen 3) will all use the same socket, AM4. The current chipsets for AM4 are 300 series ones, 300, 320, 350 and 370 iirc, with more features as you go up the numbering. 400 series chipsets are very strongly rumoured to be released with Ryzen 2, so it's likely that 500 series chipsets will come with Zen2/ Ryzen3. Theoretically all the processors and all the chipsets can be compatible due to using the same socket, so long as the MB manufacturers support them in BIOS. Intel is, as always, Intel when it comes to sockets and chipsets. Their current socket is LGA1151 and has 2 incompatible revisions but rather than renaming one they're called the same. Sky- and kabylake will work on 100 and 200 series chipsets (with BIOS flash) but Coffeelake only works on 300 series and neither of the other two do. Chipset is a very important consideration, especially for Intel where overclocking is locked to both the 'k' processors and 'z' chipsets/ motherboards. While a Z and H MB of the same chipset series have the same socket if you buy an unlocked Intel processor and put it in a cheap H series MB you cannot overclock it and lose a lot of the value. Which is not much different than the 'over-dog's' marketing. Yeah, Sky-, Kaby- and Coffeelake are all the same architecture which is why they have near identical IPCs. For Skylake and Kabylake especially there's very little to justify a new generation number and the 7700k really ought to be a Devil's Canyon like '6790k'. Coffeelake has the extra cores though, so fair enough. A 5% IPC increase if AMD manage it would also be more than Intel has managed since... Sandy Bridge from Nephalim, I think. Intel's IPC even went down from Broadwell (non E) to Skylake, albeit because Broadwell was a 'failed' gen and the only desktop chips produced from it used EDRAM.

Theoretically they're coming Q2 2018 from AMD's financial reports, which would be March at the earliest. Would not be surprised if they get pushed up to February given that the yields have been so good with original Ryzen. Probably +~500Mhz overhead on the clocks and up to 5% IPC boost which is a nice boost to both and would lift IPC to almost Sky/ Kaby/ CoffeeLake levels, albeit still with a relative clock deficit. Naming system is a little confusing though since Ryzen 2 will be '12nm' 'Zen+' rather than the '7nm' 'Zen2'. And the Ryzen (1) mobile chips are already using a 2### naming scheme as well.

Anglo countries tend to hate compulsory ID cards with an absolute passion, and an ID card to vote is pretty much compulsory. The Brittyland government, otherwise a love story to Orwellian Big Brotherism, has struggled for decades to get a compulsory ID card approved, and it still isn't. The problem with ID cards for voting is that the card may be secure from one end when issued but in order to be secure at the other end you need special equipment to check validity, even if it's only a computer to input a code into. That costs money and requires training and in many countries (no idea about the US) would require stringent security vetting of anyone using it. Our driver's licenses are theoretically very secure but fakes are frequently used by underage drinkers to get into bars and the like here; to a cop with a reader they're obviously fake but to a random bouncer not so much. I can't imagine that anyone would be too keen on having police check IDs prior to voting though. The fundamental trouble though is that anything that makes voting more secure also makes it far more easy for the government or private companies to monitor who is voting, when, where and potentially for whom as well. It also potentially makes it easier rather than harder for the government (or whoever does the monitoring or counts the votes) itself to manipulate results especially if combined with 'black box' computerised/ mechanical voting systems rather than paper votes. Most IDs of any type aren't hard to mimic, on the surface, and if you have the right equipment. Passports are usually the hardest by a very large margin which is also why they are by far the most expensive as well. As above, they may be secure on one end but you need to be able to check their validity on the other end for them to really be secure.

Vic 2 was DRM free on a bunch of services other than GOG, I got it from Gamersgate Impulse back in the day. There's probably one more tranche of Paradox games to come to GOG which would include V2 and King Arthur 2 plus maybe a few other missing titles from their DRM free phase.

Seems vaguely relevant, though I usually loathe propagating deliberately viral commercials as a matter of principle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mDoqrhiem0&pbjreload=10 Our antipodean vowel shifting is certainly out of hand: oil hiv sikhs beets of feesh ind two scoops of cheeps, cobbah == aussie I'll have six bits of fish and two scoops of chips, my good man/ woman == translation to queen's english ull huv sux buts of fush und two scoops of chups, bro == kiwi as a bonus Everyone struggles with some of the Indian ones. I like Indians as a people a lot, but I always groan inwardly when someone's tech support is run out of India as they struggle with our accent (understandably) and we struggle with theirs just as much. OTOH my Hindi (Gujarati/ Marathi etc etc) could certainly use some work.

Eh, we're nothing like Portugal (or the US). We don't have net neutrality but it doesn't matter because there's proper competition and the bulk of the network infrastructure is decoupled from ISP ownership* and can be used by any ISP. If you don't like your current ISP's policies you can swap near instantly, so ISPs tend to compete on price and added value neither of which is compatible with Portugese style price gouging. With a dozen or so ISPs if someone tried charging you to access netflix or whatever you'd just go to a competitor. I'm on rural broadband (so mobile data, basically, not even fibre or ADSL) and the competition with only 3 options was enough to get me free access to a netflix equivalent, upgrade to 4g and a quadrupling of cap within a year- plus a permanent $10 discount on the list price. Internet is relatively expensive here, but that's a 'genuine' cost of being in a country the physical size of the British Isles with ~7% of its population, difficult geography for infrastructure even without the low pop density and isolated from the rest of the world by a few thousand km of ocean as well. We're always going to have relatively expensive internet. *Wasn't always that way, indeed it used to be that Telecom favoured its own ISP significantly. Now they're split though, 'Chorus' owns the infrastructure and 'Spark' is the service company. We don't talk about those dark days though, before the split, when there was The Empire. Truly dreadful service at a high cost with horrible anti competitive tactics like undercutting Clear's cable service on a street by street basis as it was rolled out.

I had CK1 over 2 as well. For me it was because even at the point I stopped playing CK2 it was obviously going to be a load of 'cool' ideas slapped together randomly and an excuse to have one million and one dlcs. There was always something broken that was not fixed before the next set of features came along in the next dlc and introduced more bugs, and which would thus not get fixed. CK1 had bugs, certainly, but it was also focused solely on the fantastic base idea at the heart of the series. I liked CK2, but it left a nasty aftertaste. Win98, I think, but on a laptop. Other computer had either NT4 (or Windows 2000) which were notoriously hard to run games on.

Trump just wanted to be born on Bastille Day, that's how committed he is to the principles of freedom!

Personally, I played Dungeon Keeper 2 before the 1st and had a lot of problems getting the original to run (no sound, iirc). I'm not sure I ever finished DK1 as a result though I replayed a lot of it when EA gave the game away a year or so ago.

The missing US troops pretty much certainly exist though. To be fair to Iraq, most of its phantom troops existed at one point but deserted piecemeal due to their COs pocketing their wages (some of those COs have been sentenced to death as well for their corruption). I'd suspect the Pentagon knows where most of the 'missing' troops are but they're not politically expedient to acknowledge. eg it was obvious that the Syria deployment had more than 500 troops (I suspect it's more than 3000 and maybe even more than 4000 rather than 2000) but that deployment has a number of difficulties associated with it where minimising troop numbers is an advantage. If nothing else you wouldn't want Iran to know how many men were there, let alone Turkey being peeved, potential complaints from home and the rather sketchy international legality of any troops at all being there.

Found it pretty difficult to do a top 25, though I did eventually. I could do a top 10 or a top 50 easily- top 10 are absolute favourites but I have a lot of tier 2 titles that I like a lot but aren't quite top 10. For interest's sake here's my top 50(!) I worked down from. I also made an executive decision to exclude Elex and Witcher 3 which I played very recently. They'd probably make it in a year but at the moment I don't have enough perspective on them. BG2 PST Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas IWD NWN2 w/ MOTB KOTOR2 Stalker SoC Duke Nukem 3D Elite (original 1984) Wizardry PGotMO and 8 SimCity (original) Civ IV w/ expansions EU3 Crusader Kings (1, not 2) Victoria 2 w/ expansions Independence War 2 VtMB Twitcher (1) Thief 2 System Shock and SS2 GTA: VC Kings Bounty (Katauri) Space Rangers 2 w/ expansions after some consideration Dead Space Alpha Centauri w/o AX HoMM3 Sid Meier's Gettysburg Divinity OS (1) Deus Ex Stardew Valley Dungeon Keeper 2 Eador Genesis Gothic 2 w/NdR FEAR FTL Homeworld Lords of Xulima M&B Warband Outcast NeoScavenger Pharaoh Caesar 3 Privateer WC 3/4 Saint's Row 3 Waking Mars Jagged Alliance 2 Alpha Protocol 25 made the cut, 25 didn't.

You could always wait and see if someone has a spare key at the end of the sale. I'm definitely going past the $15 mark since I want Distant Worlds but I don't own Hard West so won't have a spare.

That reminds me of how completely horrible and cringey the narrative and characters were in that game. Too bad, given the singleplayer campaign really was actually pretty decent otherwise. Dunno, I'm rather partial to dream cutscenes involving random demoness nudity and dead people dancing with each other on ships so I thought it was OK, if a bit generic. Plot etc was nowhere near as good as randomly kicking people off great heights or onto conveniently placed spike traps but then very little is as good as that.

FEAR's AI is great and its combat barks are still the best for maintaining atmosphere even a decade+ later as well. The AI in FEAR is extensively scripted rather than being 'proper' AI though- if it were proper AI its system would surely have been used extensively in other games, and that is also why you can break the AI system in some encounters if you get somewhere they aren't programmed to respond to properly. FEAR is also a very linear game with set piece battles despite giving the illusion of freedom, which helps immensely in making the AI believable. Its system would not work properly in a more flexible setting. OTOH it ought to be flexible enough to set up different behaviours with different difficulty levels.

The game is broken. It's not delightful and you should probably consider deleting it. I admire your persistence since it doesn't even sound like your selection of bugs are the fun or surreal ones like challenging yourself for a title or the wonky physics bouncing wrestlers through the roof of the stadium, just run of the mill annoying bug bugs.

'Classic' great axes probably weren't used much if at all, no. Even 2 handed swords weren't used much outside of specific contexts. On the other hand the typical guy in a medieval or dark age army was lucky to be wearing proper leather armour and equally lucky to have a proper weapon unless they were dual use ones like bows and spears. Knights and Men-at-Arms were very expensive, most armies used pressed feudal levies or if lucky, seasonally available yeoman to fill out numbers. Any peasant levy was likely to have a lot of great axe like weapons pressed into use though such as long handled mattocks, mallets or even scythes as well as short handled axes as they were agricultural implements able to be used at a pinch as (mostly ineffective) weapons.

Do you think you can explain the humor here? I don't get it. It's an ironic lol. Dunno why it's posted now as the article is 18 months old and still has Carter as Secretary of Defence; guess they've just visited Serbia. (Specifically, going to Serbia and saying you're from Kosovo would be like going to Madrid and saying you're from independent Catalonia or Kiev and saying you're from Crimea, Russia. The views on Kosovo in the article all also a bit... controversial; when NATO's version of what happened in Kosovo and the facts match it tends to be pure coincidence)

There probably are more than ten people who think Trump's an idiot, which might qualify as being a hater. Tacitus >> that gossipy, but entertaining, hack Suetonius. So it's pretty unlikely that Nero was even in Rome let alone fiddling during the Great Fire.

I'm starting to think that Muhhamed bin Salman is reverse Midas. Ali Abdullah Saleh was the power broker in Yemen for the best part of 4 decades and it took MbS 2 entire days to get him killed. Same day that Hariri fully withdrew his resignation in Lebanon and the GCC imploded. And it looks pretty definite that Trump is going to move the US embassy in Israel, which will no doubt please his son in law and apocalyptic born agains but pretty much no one else.

The only near direct analogy would be to a postal service which swaps from a mandate to deliver the mail/ parcels fairly to one where they don't have to offer a level playing field but can solicit better payment for better delivery times from both the sender and the receiver. And where the postal service is usually a monopoly, so there's no actual consumer choice except for which particular type and level of reaming they'd like to receive. You either have monopolies and regulation to stop them ripping people off, or you have no regulation and proper competition. No regulation and monopolies is always a recipe for both a rip off cost and a qualitatively bad service. We don't have net neutrality here despite most people thinking we do, and it doesn't matter. Here, if skodafone or telescum decided that you had to pay extra to use unchoked netflix- or tried to get money off netflix to prevent being throttled- you can swap to a dozen or so other ISPs within a day; it literally took me 5 minutes to change, though you might need to have a modem mailed to you so a couple of days tops. So instead of having monopolist base plans and monopolist extra costs you get offered proper bonuses for loyalty. Like free netflix equivalents, ironically enough.

Prequel hate? It's treason then. I actually put TFA into the same basket as Jade Empire. Theoretically it should be a fresh take, but instead it uses rehashed characters and situations taken from previous works- for JE its plot and characters are the standard Bioware template ignoring most of the stuff that would make an oriental setting interesting while TFA ignores the interesting stuff that should happen after RotJ for an almost direct New Hope rehash with a few bits of ESB thrown in. If you thought ME3 had masses (heh) of exposition there is a good reason for that- because ME2 failed to meaningfully advance the overarching plot at all until its last dlc. Which most people didn't play. ME2 would have been fine as Mass Effect: Recruitment but as a sequel and predecessor it was dreadful in retrospect and hamstrung the final installment terribly.

She went to Ohio and especially Pennsylvania plenty. Less than Trump, but for all his faults Trump was a fantastic and energetic campaigner. Wisconsin (zero visits, heh) and Michigan definitely were ignored or close to though in the end those 2 states alone didn't cost her the election, they just made the loss even more embarrassing. In some ways her campaigning was actually worse than ignoring them wholesale anyway. Firstly her insistence on staying on safe ground meant that she only reached those 'safe' voters who were always going to vote for her and she probably didn't even reach those who voted for Bernie- securing those votes should have been priority one. Secondly and most importantly she told a good part of the traditional democrat voter base to, essentially, curl up and die or get with the program. Her take was probably more realistic than Trump's promises (and to be honest, Bernie's too) but people in general will always take the hope that something bad won't happen over the promise that it will- and they hate being lectured by some multi millionaire lawyer politician about the 'real world'. It was a truly stupid thing (and time) to choose to be honest about.

Yeah, there's no chance of areas like the deep south switching to vote Bernie or whatever. Unlike commies the average southern voter is religious and won't vote for a godless commie- and even the democrats there preferred Hillary to Bernie by a large margin. France also had 4 candidates not two. That effect did happen in the US last election, it just happened in a near direct parallel to how it happened in France, ie you had traditional left voters in the rust belt voting Trump. The main difference being that many did so after Hillary was dumb enough to tell them they were irrelevant and offer them no hope while still expecting their vote. Stupidest mistake in a campaign replete with them.

They wanted to build on the legacy of Looking Glass Studios and the easiest way to do that is to throw in an obvious betrayal as per System Shock 2 and Thief*. OTOH Oblivion's plot actively destroyed brain cells as they revolted over the monumental stupid involved. *Aimed for LGS legacy, hit Ken Levine's signature instead. Sums up Arkane pretty well. But then again what can you do when the people in your focus group while testing refuse to try exploring your test level because the fricking guard told them to stay at the party so they just followed instructions and stayed at the party.