Zoraptor

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.

The main reason Mosul took so long is simply its size. It's a 2 million+ city and has a big river running through its middle. It's a focus point that has to be attacked and that plays into ISIS' defensive strengths- IEDs, snipers, suicide attacks. Mosul was a pure majority of their population so losing it further crippled their economy and manpower. They cannot replace losses as they have no money and no access to ideological recruits, plus their aura is gone and they're constantly losing population centres rather than gaining them. Much of their remaining holdings were desert, and river valleys with lots of small to medium towns surrounded by desert- and desert tends to strongly favour whoever is attacking as they can pick and choose their targets while the defender has to defend their entire perimeter. All of the SDF, Syrians and Iraqis have systematically chopped the ISIS holdings into bite sized chunks by outflanking their defences, then the surrounded groups are killed or captured and the whole thing repeated; and there's no way for ISIS to stop it. Their ultimate problem is that when they defend in Raqqa or Deir Ez Zor or Mosul they lose. They might cause casualties and delay things, but they lose and the defenders die (or switch sides), and that makes defending what remains progressively more difficult. Then again, the alternative is what happened at Al Qaim, losing a 150k city with probably half their remaining population with barely a shot fired. Result is probably them going back to insurgency, and probably in Iraq rather than Syria.

And ISIS is now down to one decent sized town (Abukamal), and that will likely go today or tomorrow; every other town they have is pretty small with populations in the thousands. Both their last big holdings went yesterday, Al Qaim (~100k pop) in Iraq in less than a day and Deir Ez Zor in Syria- ~250k pop, about the same size as Raqqa- which went from about 40% ISIS held to 0 over three days so it's looking like utter collapse and it's unlikely they will have any significant holdings at all by next week let alone 2018. Presumably there will be some sort of insurgency to come, but as a conventional fighting force holding territory they're finished, and in Syria at least they lack the sort of deep connections to the population that have kept the Taleban alive in Afghanistan. Indeed, there have been a lot of ISIS defections to (ironically, given the rhetoric they produced) the US backed SDF much as the FSA rebels defected opportunistically to ISIS in 2014 previous*. Bit of a different story in Iraq, where it depends a lot on how well Abadi handles the sunni/ shia divide and where ISIS was a lot more of a home grown phenomenon. *and some tribes were literally forced to cooperate with ISIS, plenty of massacres against anyone who resisted them

It's nothing to do with the graphics card anyway, ACO is putting high load even on to 16 thread R7s* and is murdering Kabylake or less i5s like Chinggiz Han with the mother of all hangovers. Up until this year i5s were considered absolutely fine for gaming, there's no way that Ubi is deliberately excluding them and they'd never aim for game release targeting only i7/r7 owners as that's a small proportion of gamers. It's also dreadfully unbalanced, because the CPU load is in some cases so heavy that changing graphics presets has very little effect on actual performance- because it's the CPU bottlenecking, not the video card; which also makes the 1030 reference spurious. It's almost certainly due to the DRM implementation as that would be one of if not the last thing added, so they'd only become aware of the problem at or near release and have a choice between fixing it via no DRM or releasing with poor performance- no doubt as to which Ubi would pick there, even without the evidence. *It's currently one of the oddest releases ever, since it's giving ~70% load on 16 thread r7s and near 100% on anything below that, but also won't work on some threadripper/ i9s as they have too many threads. Ironic. Finally a game that uses lots of threads heavily, but then it won't work if there are too many.

Manafort was always going to be in trouble as he would always get shanked by post coup Ukraine- for supporting and being paid by Yanukovich- if they could. And they could, since Manafort chose to launder the money and Ukraine could and would hand over their side of the paperwork. After openly supporting Clinton it's not like they had a relationship with Trump to preserve, after all. Most of the other charges look like fishing expeditions though. I'd bet anything that there are literally thousands of 'unregistered agents of foreign powers' running around Washington, and a fair few of them are in Congress. No way that people aren't getting bungs from Israel and Saudi, though it may be the internal US Israeli lobby doing the bunging in their case.

And the GOG version still has restrictions on how many cores your processor can have- I presume that turning cores off allows it to run (and that's easy enough with Ryzen, if you can be bothered) but the GOG version is certainly just improved, not fully fixed.

I am clearly a gamer rather than an alcoholic, as first thing I thought of was:

Yeah, they sure did a good job of not making there be an obvious choice for the factions. The way things are going in my playthrough I wouldn't be surprised if I got rejected by all of them. Berserkers ought to be good because they're fixing the planet, but they're doctrinaire and inflexible luddites; clerics have the same rigidity but are pro tech and outright brainwashing; and the outlaws are completely the other extreme, a mess who would end up fighting each other all (even more of) the time if they didn't have to worry about the other factions.

That's pretty much what the trading card system is though, isn't it- a parallel system to the achievement one with a randomised generation event attached similar to loot boxes? Sell them, buy them, craft badges, inflate your epeen steam level etc and every time they're traded steam and the game's publisher get a cut.

I'd hardly forget that photo, it has given me endless amusement to see McCain posing with a bunch of dudes who ended up as ranking members of ISIS, even if the one in the background isn't Baghdadi (and it definitely isn't) as many claimed. Supporting the then FSA was easy though, as Jordan and Turkey could be used and at that time you had a broadly cohesive sunni support group as well. They have support available for the Baluchi and Arab minority areas, but Iran's Kurdish area cannot count on any outside support.

Not directly, certainly. But the pro Iranian PUK were mostly in charge of defending Kirkuk and withdrew without firing a shot after making an agreement with the government brokered, almost certainly, by Iran. Iranian general Qassem Suleimani was in Sulaymaniya, the capital of PUK held Iraqi kurdistan, immediately before they made that agreement.

The west doesn't want independent Kurdistan, they want the threat of independent Kurdistan to keep the regional countries in line as supporting Kurdistan practically means losing Iraq and Turkey. Israel only supports it to troll, their support is actively counterproductive politically. Can't see the US backing PJAK in Iran which is the only major Kurd rebel group as they/re KCK/ PKK affiliates and it would annoy Iraq and Turkey without having the anti ISIS fig leaf; they and their allies would far rather support the arab and baluchi minorities. Russia was neutral on the issue, and kept as quiet as they could away with. Whatever way it was resolved would be good for them- so long as they didn't take sides- since it's primarily a fight between nominal US allies; support of one side results in alienation of the other. The US had to pick a side, they didn't. It's also complicated by Crimea, much as the US could not be seen to be for secession due to Crimea Russia cannot be seen to be against it also due to Crimea.

Because it has long since been debunked, it's the latter. Where is the debunk part in the link? Don't think it has been debunked as it's new information. Hillary denies it, but that's not surprising. I can't imagine too many people thought that she or the democrats weren't involved in the dossier creation at least. Well, they were on losing side of Civil War IIRC Being on the losing side doesn't mean much though, if anything the lingering hostility from Franco is one of the driving forces for secession amongst the catalan populace. The situation at the start of the Civil War was rather different, since the new government was left wing and it was the right wing (including much of the military) that rose up in revolt. That meant that both sides had access to a lot of weapons. My personal opinion is that Puidgemont etc are pretty happy they don't have weapons, and this is still intended to be primarily posturing and a negotiation tool rather than a serious independence declaration. In that sense it has similarities to the Kurdish referendum as well, which wasn't intended to result in actual independence but in proroguing Barzani's rule even further past its expiry by causing a crisis.

Well, wouldn't mind being this Took me a suspiciously long time to realise what the animal painted on the side was, wasn't expecting a Russian heli to reference the NATO designation. I particularly like how it looks like it's drinking from the minigun cupola.

Levine is far more self deprecating than, say, CliffyB. His tendency to embiggen his games is pretty much the same though, but then you don't usually get to be head of a studio with more grounded descriptions- and he had the misfortune to have a bunch of talentless gits in the gaming press hanging off his every word and labeling him an auteur and similar for Bioshock Infinite which is his only real turkey. End of the day he did the story for three* of the more memorable video game stories, and that's 3 out of a list which would barely stretch beyond the fingers on two hands so not a bad effort at all. *Well, Bioshock up until Andrew Ryan meets a golf club. After that it was a question of why they metacommentated on the railroading then continued it despite pointing it out plus some bollocks with a giant Oscar statuette. Still better than most other game stories though, and Thief and System Shock 2 were fab.

You could argue that Levine is pretentious and doesn't deliver what was promised but there's no way he's anything like Ayn Rand. Firstly he clearly dislikes objectivism as Bioshock is an out and out critique of the practicalities of objectivism with dozens of clear and unflattering references to Rand's literature; and he's done similar critiques of other philosophies in his games (Pagans/ anarchists in Thief, Many/ communists in SS2) so he isn't pushing any particular approach. Rand would criticise other philosophies for sure, but not her own. Ken Levine would almost certainly know Harvey Weinstein. Gaming Ken Levine probably not though.

Thing is, when anarchists are smashing up banks and starbucks then the media thinks they're terrible, violent thugs, dangerous. When they're smashing up fascists they're suddenly great though. Same group of people, same philosophy etc. based antipodeans Daily Fail would love WINston. He's the closest to one of their guys we have. He's not really populist though, he just appeals to a specific segment of the population, most of whom would read the Daily Mail and which is a pretty small segment of the population overall. Critically, many of his positions- including closing immigration loop holes- were supported by the very socially liberal Labour Party even before they became the government; and the refugee quota is actually going up. As with many other places we have a genuine problem with an overheated housing market pushed up by unrestrained foreign investment. When the average house price is 25x the average wage it's a bit of a problem and increasing prices are not due to genuine demand. There are also well known and ignored loop holes with immigration where 'skilled' immigrants include occupations that aren't skilled- usually advertised locally with dreadful conditions so as to discourage locals from applying; employment consultants will then charge the skilled immigrant fees to place them, and since they can easily be deported if they lose their job that leads to them often working under illegal conditions as they cannot complain and their 'skilled' jobs sometimes being things like, literally, waiting tables- and there are a plethora of dodgy 'academic' institutions that exist to hand out student visas, then working visas, then permanent residency. With immigration consultants charging fees for that as well. Previous government loved all of that since it made the books look good on the face of it, no matter what the long term problems were. And if you complained about it you were racist. Ex government got pinged under their own copyright law yesterday for 700k odd for using a knock off version of Eminem's 'Lose Yourself' during the last election. The name of the knock off was 'Eminemesque' and they thought it was, direct quote from the guy who is world famous for being hit in the face with a marital aid on live tv, "pretty legal". Sums that bunch of clowns up perfectly and I'm not sure I've stopped laughing about it yet.

I've still only had dialogue issues as outright bugs with Elex, and some periodic quirks with hitboxes. As always there's no point buying it at full price if you're not going to play it immediately, but I'd have no problem saying that it works fine with just the day 1 patch and is more stable than many games are after being extensively patched. As with Labadal that's PC, not console, so mileage may vary by platform. I had one crash when I fired up the game for the first time. Sten's dialogues start halfway through their conversation cue list for some reason and a few other conversations are overly stilted andor seem to be missing lines. Also some of the generic responses to initiating trade and the like are clearly 'common' dialogue and done by different voice actors. Otherwise, hitboxes are fine 99% of the time but 1% of hits register when the animations show a clear miss, and the controls sometimes are a bit spongey/ unresponsive, plus the PDA UI could definitely do with some optimising for PC- and god forbid you only want to sell a few of that multi hundred stack of items as I can't find a way to specify smaller numbers except by clicking manually. I also don't think there's any way to tell exactly how many XP you have, and their choice of UI colours makes it difficult to see the level progress bar. And that's about it, so it's not exactly game break central, more like nitpick alley.

Dang, he's ambitious all right. I guess all it took for Saudi Arabia to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the state that it's in is some fresh royal blood, and I don't mean in the sacrificial sense. I wouldn't hold my breath- MbS is not averse to pandering to audiences while the Wahhabi clerical apparatus is Saudi's greatest foreign affairs weapon. And the mega city is a pipe dream. Might as well have gone the whole hog and call it Amarna while he was about it. It's the standard approach of making the right noises to western media, while saying something completely different in arabic to the domestic one. The Saud's bargain with the Wahhabis in the 80s was Faustian, but made for very good reasons that have only strengthened. MbS has effectively usurped his current position and made succession hereditary, so the list of those wanting him gone is as long as the list of Saudi princes not named Muhammed bin Sultan, ie a couple of thousand of the most powerful in the kingdom. And when it comes right down to it KSA is still the place where the army bought SAMs based on ability to shoot down their own air force's planes and there are more parallel armies than in even Hitler's Germany.

Flake is the new blood since he entered in 2013. The other Arizona senator on the other hand has been there 31 years and would be competing with the Thurmond's in terms of ossification.

Reading far too much into it. UI position, you want to take the unique differences between PC and console expectations, input devices etc into account to get the best for both. Environmental artist? You want console expertise as anything that the consoles can handle a PC certainly can. If it were a programming position specifying console only it would be more significant, or even if we still had the more PC distant Cell or PowerPC based consoles, but this doesn't mean much for whether there's a PC version or not given that both PS and Xbox are using AMD Radeon/ x86 systems that aren't much different from their laptop APUs (though they're considerably better at playing games than APU laptops, of course, and far worse at running Office).

They should though, as the blurb and any fore/after words- any editorial comments really- are often the most useful parts to see what you should be getting out of the book. If you're reading Les Miserables it probably isn't for the 82 page digression on the Paris Sewers, after all, and most forewords will helpfully tell you that you can safely skip it.