Zoraptor

Availability and cost. The direct equivalent LG (34UC99W) is ~$400NZ more in cost- well outside budget- and is also only 75Hz. There's a lower resolution 34" option from LG that is cheaper, but I don't like low vertical resolutions much and would stick to my old 1200p monitor despite its problems in preference. Main competition was from an LG though, but a standard 4k one (27UD69W) for about $750, and a somewhat more expensive Asus 4k. I do currently have a Samsung which I'm not that happy with (not due to unreliability or similar though, it's just an 'office monitor' sort that cannot cope with natural instead of fluorescent lighting), so don't have any brand loyalty. The one I bought was the only Samsung I even looked at seriously.

I tend to agree that curved monitors are a fad, but at least they're a fad that makes some logical sense. Shows how well you know me, internet guy. (Yeah, bought. Even got an extra $10 off. I think it's my most expensive single purchase in nearly 20 years which didn't involve a house or a car- I'm not exactly YOLO when it comes to the financials. Might be cheating a bit, as I've built 2 computers over that time that cost more in total though the most expensive single component was ~500$)

So, anyone want to talk me out of buying some ridiculous oversized curved screen monstrosity? Meh, I'll probably talk myself out of it anyway. Mainly tempted because it's $1100 (670USD, GST off) and for some reason that's way cheaper than it should be when compared to US and UK prices. Still 400 bucks more than I wanted to spend though, and my 580 would struggle with it in games at high settings.

So Valve lost their appeal against the Australian ACCC wrt deceptive practices, not offering refunds etc so now have to officially pay a 3 million dollar fine (well, lol) and a few other things like put a Naughty Boy Letter up on steam for all Aussies to see. (The initial legal action and the parallel EU action are the reasons that Valve now offers refunds.)

lolwut, try ~91%. In terms of Israel's neighbours, literally none of them are 98% muslim, and their largest minorities are christians. Indeed, the palestinian population of the West Bank was 20%+ christian, though most have left now- due to Israeli pressure specifically. Every single one of Israel's neighbours except Jordan has a 10% or more christian minority. Lebanon even has 40%. Most are not truly artificial countries- only Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait are. And oddly enough 2/3 of those are theoretically fairly sensible religious ethnic mixes. Turkey, Yemen, Oman, Iran and Egypt are all old countries; Iraq and Syria are old provinces. The old colonial powers drew arbitrary lines on maps where there had never been true borders before, but, say, the general principle of Iraq/ Mesopotamia/ al-Iraqiyya and its general shape including areas with a lot of Kurds and the sunni/ shia split is a very old one. 1948 proposed Israel was 100% artificial though, whether it's still artificial now is a matter of opinion.

I'd half expect an Arcanum like setting, but there's no realistic chance of it being Arcanum 2. There was never any realistic chance of it being Arcanum 2. I can however exclusively reveal that it is, in actual fact, No One Lives Forever 3. The whole 'new IP' thing is misdirection. (When it comes to Arcanum I'm with Enoch. While aspects of it are good it's not a good game overall)

There is an additional reason why it's a big deal which is related to the annexation/ occupying power stuff, though it isn't directly a matter for the UN per se; the US is meant to be brokering a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. Realistically that would end with Israel with its capital in Jerusalem anyway and everyone including the Palestinians knows it. All the recognition does with respect to the peace process is to remove leverage against Israel without any concessions granted and make the US look even more biased, while throwing 20 years of negotiations into the bin. Understandably even staunch US allies like the UK are deeply annoyed at that since they've both backed the negotiations wholeheartedly and backed the good faith of the US in those negotiations- to them the US is reneging on commitments and it's a yuge slap in the face. It's a great decision for Israel which now has even less incentive to make concessions, and it's an on the face of it great decision for Trump domestically as the response stokes jingoism and mobilises his base. It just happens to be an awful decision long term and for the US internationally, made worse by the childish threats.

Looks like the separatists have won the Catalonian elections with about the same majority they had previous, so no doubt there will be more fun to be had there as well.

Apparently everyone else in the world is butthurt over it to the point of wasting time in a non-binding resolution. That will show us! In all seriousness, politics is absolutely about 'pointless' posturing. It's wasting time when someone brings a resolution to the UNSC that they know will be vetoed yet it happens rather a lot, and it's mostly the US doing that bit of pointlessness. The whole point is to make Russia or China- or in this case the US- look like Neville No Mates and embarrass them, nothing else is expected. In this case it isn't time wasting though, the UN is founded on the idea that you cannot just conquer bits of other countries any more yet that is exactly what Israel did to get East Jerusalem, and recognising Jerusalem as Israeli capital legitimises that. It's now on the record that the UN still maintains their position, whatever the US says. As for butthurt, you can guarantee the vast majority of those voting for the resolution aren't even slightly butthurt about the US position, since it doesn't directly effect them. Instead they disagree with it since they think it's a dangerous precedent and, well, moronic. Which is completely different from butthurt. Maybe the 40 odd muslim majority countries are butthurt, but that's it. OTOH, Haley and Trump could do with a good dose of Prep H going by their response. Most of the abstentions were from those who had to take the US threats seriously- like the Baltic States. I haven't checked but I'd bet that Ukraine didn't turn up at all, for example, as they cannot support annexation by force for obvious reasons, but also can't annoy the US. I expect their ambassador got locked in the toilets or had a pressing prior engagement literally anywhere else.

Who cares what the US and a literal bunch of its colonies think either? Threats and intimidation and 9, nine, votes for. 5% support: how embarrassing. It will be even more hilarious if Trump tries to carry out his threats as that will play straight into China and Russia's hands and hasten the decline of international US influence even more. What's he going to do, cut Saudi Arabia off? South Korea? Rule 1 is don't make threats you can't or won't be able to go through with as whatever happens you end up looking weak or stupid, or have to do something monumentally dumb to not look weak. Much like Obama's Syria red line you end up with only bad choices, and Trump's judgement is so lacking that he might make the monumentally dumb choice instead. Well, a second stupid choice, since he made the Jerusalem one first, a decision even GWB baulked at making. Trump admin is the Seymour Skinner of international affairs: Am I out of touch? No, it's everyone else who is wrong!

But where does Fallout 4 rate compared to Nickleback? (I don't actually mind Nickleback personally, as my musical ire is reserved primarily for anyone relying on fricking autotune, but their reputation is probably the most F4esque of any band.)

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.