Zoraptor

Some of the laptop Raven Ridges are out now, based on r5 and with a few Vega cores. They seem to be competitive vs equivalent Intel but not a gamechanger except for there being genuine competition again. There are also quite a few 8 core r5s turning up now, so people getting a 1700 in a 1600 box, which suggests that the fabrication process for Zen really does have a fantastically good reliability and they're having to pad out 6 core models with 8 core ones- and aren't lasering off the extra cores either.

Like USA where such thing doesn't exist? You're right, it's not a VAT, they call it "sales tax" and leave it to their individual states to determine which goods and services are taxable and which aren't. Shockingly, most states do have a wide assortment of taxes that we generally subsume under VAT in Europe. But sure, whatever. Let's keep splitting hairs. Sharpie can't argue his way out of a paper bag, but the fundamental point is a valid one. VAT/ GST/ sales tax is a tax on income that has already been taxed once. I'm not a fan of estate tax or 'stamp duty' or other taxes against spending that has already been taxed once; but for example a reasonable Capital Gains Tax is a good idea since it taxes added value. The really fundamental problem is that the rich, especially the really rich, almost always have access to loopholes anyway so stuff targeting them seldom works as they can use Trusts, Companies, Partnerships, tax havens, or combine them all into a Double Irish variant; and the average Joe can't. Things like VAT are also a deeply regressive tax if applied to staple items like food rather than just luxuries since if you do that it disproportionately targets poor people- who have to spend money on food, accommodation, clothes- rather than those with discretionary spending who can choose when and where to spend most of their income. Even if you exclude food and have luxury tiers/ brackets they're almost always inconsistent and still gameable by the rich; here you just bung as much discretionary expenditure into a 'business' (which desperately needs a new 8700k dual 1080 Ti system, so I can work at home!) and then claim the GST back, plus you can write off depreciation for your shiny new 100k Tesla against any income and any net loss against your personal income. It's a lot more difficult to game straight income tax or a CGT.

Elex. Not perfect, but 100% a Piranha Bytes game which is exactly what I wanted.

Seems that may be changing. Some of the things they talk about there would definitely fit Obsidian pretty well, some not so much.

Everything wasn't free, they had paid dlcs for maps and the like. They were a disaster as they fragmented the userbase and BF1 was a content poor game so boring and low interest without the added content which they provided no incentive to get. BF2 is far more content rich, and won't have paid dlcs so there should not be userbase fragfmentation and it should have a longer shelf life. The dlc revenue model has been replaced by the microtransaction/ lootbox model. However the real comparison that does the damage is to the original 2000s Battlefront 1 & 2 games from LucasArts. They had more content and game styles, and due to the time they were made no microtransactions and the like. They also hold up very well today and GOG just remastered them (they did the steam version as well, so there's even crossplay) to add a non defunct GameSpy native MP.

Yes he was an owner and theoretically at least creative manager as well. Said it last time that this stuff came up but ChrisA is not coming across well at all with the passive aggressive stuff and some of what he has said strongly implies a lot of it was his fault, reading between the lines. Only one friend left at a 150+ person company? The old adage about **** applies; if you meet one occasionally it's probably them, if you meet them all the time it's probably you. The passive aggressive stuff is exactly what will make otherwise reasonable people roll their eyes and ignore you because you're being obnoxious, even if you do have a point originally. The 'theory' is that Chris left due to clashes with JESawyer, who turned PoE into a bland overbalanced bore fest instead of the vibrant unique awesome that it would have been had Chris been doing it. It's a more prevalent theory on the 'Codex where Infinitron mostly posts and where holy war is waged over the status of PoE as a good/ bad game that makes the 30 Years War look like a sit down picnic.

Don't use steam as I don't like monopolists. Otherwise I have about 400 games on half a dozen other services. With just about everything else I have good self control but I'm never going to get through 400 games and I know it.

Troika had publisher troubles with all their titles- Arcanum got needlessly delayed for months (with a pirate version already out), ToEE had those cuts (rumour at the time was due to WotC's supposed moral clauses though, not the publisher Infogrammes) and VtMB had to be delayed until after Half Life 2 launched due to using Source and there was some disputation about funding game fixes during the delay. Wouldn't blame TC at all if he didn't want to deal with publishers with that record. That may just mean he wants management or the game producers to deal with them though and as above there are publishers who let the dev just get on with things. If Obsidian is making and retaining the IP they'd probably have a fair bit of freedom as well.

Swiped shamelessly from the funny things thread. Did you ever hear the tragedy of Battlefront 2, the Star Wars game? I thought not, it's not a story that DICE would tell you. It's an EA legend. Star Wars Battlefront2 was a computer game so anticipated and desired that PR could manipulate buyers to create preorders. They had such knowledge of human nature that they could even promise not to have any paid DLC* to not fragment the user base when planning on having lootboxes instead. Concentrated PR is a path to many purchasing decisions some consider to be impetuous. The PR strategy was so successful the only thing they feared was not making as much profit as they could from their players- which eventually, of course, they failed to do. Unfortunately 40 hours to unlock a hero and a reliance on lootboxes caused many to cancel their preorders and save their money. Ironic, they tried to shamelessly milk their userbase but ended up reducing it instead. 2kgames: is it possible to learn this power? *so the one thing BF2 won't actually have is literal high ground dlc. Isn't it ironic, don't you think?

Can't really make any serious predictions about who a publisher is until more is known, which may well be when the game is announced anyway. We don't know much at all concrete apart from it having a publisher, everything else is hints that it's a new IP, possibly some sort of post apoc. We don't even know whether it's AAA and what that entails- the big AAA games often have teams that are far larger than Obsidian's entire dev staff. AAA also has no proper set definition, it's a marketing and expectation management term. As such I wouldn't exclude anyone from being a potential publisher at this point. The best 'fit' for the type of games Obsidian makes would be either Paradox, Nordic ('full' AAA highly unlikely from either) or Bethesda (and FONV is probably still their best '3rd party' seller), and you cannot even exclude someone like CDPR if they decided to get into outright publishing. Most of the big publishers- EA, Ubi, 2k, Activision- rarely use external studios, unless they're interested in buying them up. WB distributed TW3 as well in the US, iirc. It was distribution though, they fabricated the media rather than funding the game. Atari Europe/ Namco Bandai distributed all three Witcher games outside the US, and TW1 inside it. I'd agree that neither is a realistic prospect anyway.

Yep, despite all the protestations that ISIS should be "destroyed on the battlefield" rather than bused off elsewhere (per the spokesman of Operation Inherent Resolve Letting ISIS Get Away Repeatedly; said the one time someone else allowed an ISIS withdrawal) fricking 3750 ISIS members and family were allowed to leave Raqqa in a 8km (!) long convoy, mirroring prior coalition backed happenings in Manbij, Tabqa, and the escape corridor from Mosul. And yes, the Raqqa deal included foreign fighters, plus weapons. All explicitly denied at the time- the local ISIS people were supposedly to be taken to Tabqa Prison rather than bused off to ISIS territory and that never happened. And of course a bunch of ex ISIS joined the western backed SDF. The SDF campaign in Deir Ez Zor was even lead by an ex ISIS guy, up until it became publicly known he was ex ISIS when he was quietly removed for 'corruption'. Which he definitely was, indeed his brother was executed by ISIS for corruption- that was why he left them rather than any ideological qualms- but if everyone else knew he was corrupt beforehand then there's no way the SDF didn't, nor the reasons for him leaving ISIS.

In terms of prosecution Hillary got away with it because she was only provably incompetent, not grossly incompetent or provably deliberately sending classified emails. It seems very likely that she knew what she was doing and didn't care, same as she knew that setting up a private server was wrong but she did it anyway to avoid archiving requirements. But proving that against a 'befuddled granny trying to cope with technology' defence would be impossible to do. However, the FBI accepting examination of the DNC servers by an interested 3rd party instead of themselves is deeply suspicious and should never have happened.

It's certainly a stalemate, but the Saudis are still trying stuff- they've been trying to set up a coup and there are still some pretty bizarre stories coming out of Al Arabiya (Saudi 'Al Jazeera', but worse in every way) about Qatar, intended to sway opinion and build a base for more action. If they got a chance they'd hot it up as it's a fat target with a tiny army, they're just stymied by the US and Turkey being there. Their proxies have also been fighting each other a lot in Syria, with the main Saudi one losing so badly that they're just about irrelevant now and that no doubt stings. Yemen is a similar situation- kind of a stalemate, at the moment, but still lots of potential to flare up.

It was a standardised drop down menu for country selection, though very much iirc. So yeah, some of the results were probably misclicks or edginess. There were also an unspecified number of respondents from North Korea and only a few hundred North Koreans have unrestricted internet access. Though to be fair, Mr Kim is rumoured to be a bit of a gamer.

It's unlikely anything will actually go down, though you never know as the Saudi leadership's ego is only matched by their incompetence. They'd fight Hezbollah to the last Sunni Lebanese if they could, but even their main supporters in Lebanon are annoyed at having their leader kidnapped- and won't accept that he's resigned until he's back in Lebanon. That removes the one significant Lebanese group which could be pro Saudi, the rest are a few moronic Phalangist Christians and a few salafis. Mostly though, very few Lebanese want another civil war especially to benefit a bunch of stuck up Saudis. Any logical analysis says nothing significant should happen and things like the recalls of nationals are economic in nature- gulfies love doing all the vices in liberal Beirut they can't at home, plus invest there heavily- but then there are stories about KSA being all set to literally invade Qatar until Rex reminded them that there's a massive US base there, or Saudi announcing an anti Houthi/ terrorist coalition that none of their supposed partners knew about. With three crises at the moment (purge, Yemen, Qatar) a rational player would not seek a 4th, the real question is exactly how rational KSA is. If anything their policies have been more erratic than Trump's.

For CAR there's a very strong probability that they're foreign peacekeepers or maybe diplomatic staff. It's the poorest country in the world per capita (iirc) and they have a civil war going as well. The vast majority of the population has more pressing issues to worry about than how much they'd be willing to pay for dlc and what type they prefer.

No Italians answered the survey, but 2 people from the Central African Republic did?

I get juice and a biscuit for mine. Or a cup of tea instead of the juice, if you're that way inclined. It's sheer decadence here in kiwiland.

Forms like passports or IDs? They don't have IDs, only driver licence IIRC Yeah, so far as I am aware no anglo country has compulsory ID cards, only voluntary ones like passports or driving licenses. It's a bit of a cultural hangover, even in somewhere as 1984esque as the UK there was a colossal stink when they tried to bring in compulsory IDs.

The gun control movement can rename itself 'pro life', as they don't want any more deaths from gun violence. Then the NRA types can become the 'pro choice' movement, as they want people to be able to choose for themselves whether to own firearms.

They did a poor woman's Magneto last year, might even have been the equivalent episode number. I'm pretty much done with the CW superhero shows anyway, all their crises being solved in the first fifteen minutes of their seasons finally killed them for me. I probably will binge them sometime but it's four hours of the week I can do better things with at the moment.

There are definitely a lot of people in Saudi who'd love for the crown prince to be gone. There's a lot of potential for bad outcomes whether he stays or goes, they differ mostly in the way in which they are potentially bad.

Chances are they aren't going to do anything and it's pure rhetoric. Don't know whether it's meant to distract internally though, there's been some pretty dodgy goings on to distract from internationally as well- the 'ex' Lebanese Prime Minister's main Saudi business partner was purged and died (!) while being arrested, for example, which ain't a good look when you've got accusations of the resignation being forced and the PM being kidnapped. And the most prominent guy arrested is the best known liberal Saudi prince (he owns chunks of Twitter etc) which also isn't a great look for a modernist reformer. If they did go ahead it would be difficult for them to do. Jordan alone isn't enough as they'd need them and Syria or Israel. Syria and Iraq would definitely refuse, Turkey would almost certainly refuse, Egypt has already refused (though a bung might change their mind), Jordan would probably have to accept but would fervently hope not to be asked, and Israel is deeply problematic- no diplomatic relations, it would look terrible to Saudi's population, and the idea of Israel allowing armed Saudi planes to fly over their country seems... fundamentally unlikely. Saudi also need US support and refueling to bomb Yemen, their direct neighbour. As such they'd probably try something like using Syria's airspace without permission. If they really want all out confrontation with Iran they might as well go for Syria as well, that also makes it a lot easier politically for Israel and the US to get involved if things escalate.

Saudi Arabia says that Lebanon has declared war on it. Yes, seriously, though given Saudi's wildly erratic foreign policy- King Salman has Alzheimers, but it's his son running the show and they've spent PR millikons trying to make him look vaguely sane and competent- that could result in anything from being instantly forgotten about to several billion dollars worth of military equipment being incompetently applied in a semi random manner while the rest of the world facepalms. That's after kidnapping Lebanon's Prime Minister and forcing him to read an obviously Saudi written resignation statement (Saudi arabic and Lebanese arabic are pretty distinct; plus they did the exact same thing with Saleh from Yemen) which could easily be an act of war against Lebanon; and in the midst of one of their periodic bitter inter family feuds and while still in a cold war with Qatar and Turkey as well as Iran, and while fighting an embarrassingly badly run war in Yemen.

If owning some shares in a company that does some business with another business that is partly owned by someone on a sanctions list is a big deal then the vast majority of rich people of any type are going to be in trouble. People don't do that level of checking, nor should they. I'd bet any amount in the world that HRC has the same level of business relations with some Russians as that- and god forbid any politician in the UK go to a Chelsea match, since the club is owned by someone with multiple connections to people on the sanction list. You'd kind of hope that these sort of revelations would have some effect on tax havens and trusts and all the other tricks used by rich people to hide their wealth (and which normal people don't have access to to hide theirs), but turkeys don't vote for an early christmas and most politicians' donations come from the people who use tax havens and the like.