Zoraptor

A lot of the leaks are coming from the 'Intelligence Community' though, and they aren't generally political appointees, apart from a few of the very top echelons. Some of them do supposedly come from political appointees but, well, anonymous sources again. You have to take the media's word both that they said what they said and that they are in the claimed (always nebulous, since anonymous) position. Without a way to validate it every single leak could be coming from the career people either in the WH or the IC, rather than political appointees. And you still have to assume that the leaks are accurate and not spun, altered or made up.

It will be interesting to see if Rouhani and Iran gets any real dividends for his relative moderation. Last time they had Khatami for 8 years, got nothing out of it, and then had 8 years of Ahmadinejad. Fact is, he probably wasn't- that's the default position and as always it's up to the person who asserts to prove if they think that it was Hillary with a .38 in a dark alley. And that they won't be able to prove as there's literally no proper evidence of it. Still, 'proving' that it was just a run of the mill murder with half truths and fallacies is both worse and hardly conducive to silencing conspiracy theories nor combating 'fake news'.

Fake News. (1) Assange said that Rich was the source, so there isn't no evidence of it. Whether you believe him or not is up to you, same as it's up to anyone whether to believe anonymous leaks. (2) his laptop would never contain emails to/from wikileaks, as that isn't how wikileaks works. (3) Negative proved: "subsequent reporting by NBC News and other outlets confirmed Rich was not communicating with the group". Wow, proving he never communicated with them, now that's an achievement. Not from an internet cafe? via VPN? via TOR? through someone else's or open WiFi? nor through any of the sub 100$ devices you can buy with cash and chuck after using? (4) "..the cyber security firm hired by the DNC to investigate the breach say those emails were stolen by Russian hackers". Yes. "The DNC, the FBI, every U.S. intelligence agency.." No. The only people to actually examine the DNC servers were the cyber security firm, confirmed by Comey. What a load of old bollocks. Fake News. (there are times I wish xenforo had marquee tags...)

No. It's almost certain he told them absolutely nothing they didn't already know or hadn't already inferred. It's highly unlikely Trump knew anything that wasn't already publicly known or couldn't easily be inferred, so couldn't give anything away. It's also kind of amusing, people in general said that McMaster had a great deal of integrity but when he comes out and categorically denies the WaPo story suddenly he's lying, not the 'anonymous source', who doesn't have to face any consequences for lying and can say literally anything. Same general thing happened to Comey actually, when he declined to prosecute Clinton he was a democrat stooge, when he reopened the investigation he was a republican stooge. Partisan politics destroys critical faculties and renders everyone a little bit more stupid. It also was not an Israeli spy they got the initial info from. Which is one more reason to disbelieve anon sources in general. (UK and US got the info, Israel does not share with the UK but Jordan does. They also have no strategic interest in stopping ISIS, quite the opposite, their continued existence is to Israel's benefit, hence the presence of ISIS and Al Qaeda territory next to the occupied Golan Heights and have far better targets for their very limited human intelligence sources. Electronic monitoring, fine, surveillance, fine, standing over palestinians inside Israel, OK. None apply here. Al Jazeera is definitely right, it was Jordan's spy. All the talk of Israel is either deliberate misdirection to obfuscate the damaging info- ironically, which all publicly comes from the leaker, not Trump- or someone making stuff up for the lulz)

Flash penultimate episode was again typical for S3 Both Legends and Arrow have been better this year. Actually, Arrow S5 has been very good even without the comparison to a weak Flash season, and Legends was great for the sort of tongue in cheek fun Flash used to do (and to be fair, did do well last week).

That is actually one of the few Bioware set pieces that I'd (almost) unequivocally praise. Credit where due, for once they didn't pull their punches on dark side/ evil options. I'd have to admit to liking Mission though. If only you could have got big Z to throttle Carth instead, but no, he's got less courage than a 14 year old girl and just runs off.

And McMaster and a Russian photographer for some of the time, at least. Putin trolls beautifully. Everything from releasing the meeting pictures to offering a transcript is designed to get knees jerking through desks. And the funny thing is whatever he may or may not have done to 'subvert democracy' (lol) the US itself is doing a far, far better job than he could ever have imagined.

Why does anyone need another Witcher TV series when we already have the televisual masterpiece that is The Hexer?

Threadripper and Epyc? OK, you need names you can trademark but... The products themselves look great and threadripper looks better than Intel's enthusiast offerings on nearly every level, shame there was no real info on consumer level Vega though.

The spin off Battlefields have not gone well for the most part and recently, but the main franchise ones have all done well. They're not universally loved of course, but then nothing is. I still reckon they'll try a 'genuine' Mass Effect shooter game based on Battlefield at some point. And all this time I thought I was the only one annoyed by that. A lot of people dislike it- I've usually seen it described as a poor quality attempt to mimic Joss Whedon's humour. That sort of humour relies very much on having well written and well liked (in the appreciation sense, not necessarily 'nice') characters though, if you don't like the characters you tend to end up wishing they and all their 'charming' quirks would be fired into a sun.

Any F4-3200C14D-16GTZ_ TridentZ models should work. GSkill themselves have recommended the F4-3200C14D-16GTZR model specifically, but that's just an RGB version of the base model. I'd presume that Ganrich specifically got F4-3200C14D-16GTZKW since it's the black and white model and would match the Taichi colour scheme best, but I'd stand to be corrected on that.

There have been more than a few stories about McCain not being a model pilot and being bailed out by daddy though, and from sources other than RS. While some can be dismissed as at best highly unlikely- like him being responsible for the Forrestal fire- his early record was outright atrocious and included crashing three aircraft due to either inattention or outright hot dogging. While I would not claim expertise on the matter I find it hard to believe anyone without McCain's family connections would still be employed after that record. Still, 2000 era politician McCain was fine until Rove drove him bonkers. 2008+ McCain though, dreadful. While the story of him being pictured with Baghdadi is incorrect he did visit the 'FSA' and have his picture taken with multiple guys who became senior ISIS and Al Qaeda leaders, and the guy who was misidentified as Baghdadi is currently an Al Nusra leader. And his talking points on foreign policy uniformly come straight out of either Riyadh or west Jerusalem. Yeah, that's certainly the most believable general reason, and the main reason I think it's a beat up rather than genuine intelligence concerns. The most believable specific reason is still that I cannot think of a scenario where information on the laptop plot would actually compromise anything more than the already available info. (Indie article Meshugger linked is wrong though, source was not Israel. Indeed, chaos in Syria is a big plus for Israel and they have actively helped both (!) the ISIS pocket on the border of their occupied section of the Golan Heights and the Al Qaeda/ Al Nusra one, however counter intuitive that may seem. Source was almost certainly Jordan)

The Sims is an entire division at EA, equivalent to all their sports games put together. It's successful. The Battlefield franchise is certainly also successful. Whether you like them as games is subjective, but then whether you like their sports games is also subjective.

Yeah, there's no backtracking there, and it only mentions facts, not intel. Dunno, maybe some would like another Russian airliner blown up like the one in Sinai instead? It's very hard to see what he could have said to actually compromise anything anyway. The laptop plot was announced publicly, ISIS controls one city in Syria and a bit of one other city, and an asset inside ISIS is unlikely by its nature to have any use once ISIS is done. It's not like, say, the emir of willayet Deir Ez Zor is going to be in a position to give more info once there isn't a willayet Deir Ez Zor any more. And that's if they weren't the source extracted a month or so ago. He can't have compromised ongoing military operations because the laptop stuff is purely terrorism rather than military.

"The story that came out tonight was false" seems pretty unequivocal, as does "I was in the room, it didn't happen." Both of those are direct quotes from McMaster as well, from the beginning and end of his brief statement. The first one doesn't have any potential qualifiers either. Frankly, if all Trump did was mention a city then it's literally nothing since you could count the number of cities ISIS controls on one hand even if you'd had an unpleasant accident manually loading an industrial mincer. There's also a consistency problem. Papers like the WaPo have claimed that Trump isn't a 'detail' man and have even said that he doesn't take intelligence briefings, neither of which meshes well with him giving away information likely to compromise sources. That requires the knowledge of both details and having been briefed on them. Given that the US and UK received the intelligence it's almost certainly of Jordanian origin (plus their intelligence service is actually competent and they aren't carte blanche jihadi lovers unlike most of the other suspects), and their reasons for not wanting it disclosed equally likely has its roots in not wanting retribution from the far richer countries whose airlines have been targeted in response.

well you forgetting CK and CK2, Stellaris, Europa Universalis... per quote I certainly didn't forget them. All bar one of those above are core Paradox games though, published and deved by the Paradox mothership. CK1 is the part exception, since it was a 'rescue' project from a different dev and was not meant to be developed by Paradox themselves- and it still has the severe zero morale on reload bug. Though I suspect you may have meant Hearts of Iron (IV) anyway, since CK1 is over a decade old. The discussion was specifically about publisher quality though, and there while they have had some successful published games there are not actually that many, and especially not that many when compared to the number of turkeys. Apart from Magicka all their published successes are recent as well. Fact is that Paradox has done pretty much all the standard publisher guff from excess trivial dlc to releasing crapware to shutting down servers; and there's a whole lot more as well I couldn't be bothered mentioning but can if you want.

That's not quite right- the M&M mothership franchise via M&M X specifically was generally well liked by its target audience, its target audience just wasn't big enough for Ubi ie it didn't sell well enough. In that case the franchise was 'killed' mostly by 3DO anyway, since 8 and 9 were awful. That's a bit different from the spin off HoMM (or Might&Magic: Heroes as it formally is now) where most regard most of the later iterations- and in some cases all games since 3- as being outright bad, and there have been several Ubi titles made. In that case Ubi can be said to have run it into the ground.

I'd take the 7 years one with more than a grain of salt. That's definitely an elective wait time, not an urgent one. Either it's a made up anecdote or Sharpie got scammed by the employee andor their doctor, trying to get a private op fee rather than a (lower) public one. For more scientific data. Again, none of those ops are urgent, they're all elective. Urgent stuff gets done, well, urgently eg my dad severed a tendon once and had an operation within an hour of getting to hospital. It's different for carpal tunnel say, which my mother had. A 6 week wait for someone who is retired and doesn't really 'need' the op is pretty good really, if she wanted it immediately she could always have gone private.

Heroes of Might and Magic.... Settlers and more than a few others For ruined franchises? Not really fair, no other large publisher would touch that type of game or something like Might & Magic X with a barge pole, with a few exceptions (eg 2k and XCOM). But then other niche Ubi titles like the Anno series haven't been mentioned on their balance ledger either. As for Paradox, people have short memories. Their history is of dreadfully optimised published games usually with dreadful bugs which are then dreadfully supported, plus more than occasional fallings out with their sub developers and some truly Bethesda level shenanigans. Their record recently has been better, but frankly it could scarcely have been worse, and they still have... problems. War of the Roses? Their dlc policy? Either would have got a roasting were it EA or Actiblizz doing it. PoE and Cities are successes, sure, much as Magicka was back in the day, but that alone doesn't make them 'nice' publishers. They tend to get a pass because their core games have a high fanboy density- not undeservedly, their internally developed games have nearly all been quality, albeit sometimes delayed quality- and they strive to maintain a reputation as an underdog. But... Gettysburg: Armored Warfare? SOTS2 release fiasco? Stealing the title Achtung Panzer, which they've since never used? Trying to steal asterisking Mount & Blade as well (ironically, for War of the Roses)? Ship Simulator Extreme? Leviathan? Stalin vs Martians (so bad they've tried to expunge every mention of it)? Defenders of Ardania? A Game of Dwarfs? Impire? They've had more turkeys than Christmas and Thanksgiving combined.

Why isn't there a game of this yet?! This thread isn't famous enough for a game yet- unless it's the dystopian setting mentioned for Tim Cain's unannounced game, that is. WoT did get a game though, and it was better than anyone had a right to expect. There were even rumours that Red Eagle talked to Obsidian about doing another one at some point.

Yeah yeah, the US only showed the same number of actual tomahawk strikes as Russia said happened. Easy to disprove Russia's claims, just show proper satellite imagery of the 59 hits claimed, but they didn't. No evidence provided of the Syrians making the CW attack that sparked the whole thing, again, low energy SAD! And you failed utterly on Iran, since you had to show explicitly military non dual use technologies such as triggers being developed, and had to disprove a proper Intelligence Assessment from the US plus one from Israel as well. Ironic, since the white paper on the Khan Sheikhoun CW attack isn't even from the IC (written by the White House instead, favourite tactic in the lead up to Gulf War 2 and we know how those turned out), yet you think that's great.

Fair enough, but as someone who used to laugh at steam users' multi hundred game collections that they'd never get through I do now find myself with 300+ games on GOG, and an extra 3 this weekend. The 'cheap as a coffee so why not buy' psychology is definitely real.

I'm pretty sure if you posted an ISIS decapitation video, serious drug use or especially a rape video it would be removed, even if it were only a link rather than inline. But I'm equally sure mentioning that they exist is OK. I wouldn't have any expectation otherwise, same for teh sexy. It's a company website, when it comes right down to it it exists for PR and to give fans a way to stay connected. Stuff which is going to pointlessly turn people off (heh) is going to be removed. While we shouldn't expect 4chan or even codex levels of non moderation we also should be glad we don't have Bethesda/ Bioware/ Neogaf etc level restrictions either.

They didn't veto a previous resolution on Aleppo early last year (not sure on the exact date, but definitely an abstention) which was written by France. It's something like 6-2 veto vs abstention, so not really a consistent policy, and I'm pretty sure it's actually 2-2 over the last year or so. An abstention when you're the only one likely to veto it- per the US abstention on Israel late last year- or voting for it would be significant, an abstention when you know it won't pass anyway means very little as there are no consequences. Bro, you restarted things, it's only a page or so back so you can easily check- and not in the right thread either. If you're so concerned go to the correct thread, and post your proof/ evidence as you were asked for, and were asked for well before you 'disappeared'. You'll notice that others don't get the SAD! treatment, because they actually bothered to post relevant sources, even if I mostly disagreed with said sources. As for the Iran deal, your evidence to refute the ~2014 Israeli and US (especially ironic, since for the CW attacks you rely on a WH Pr dept release, and think that's gospel) intelligence assessments that Iran was not seeking nukes was something from ~2004, ~ a decade earlier. Not exactly a convincing rebuttal.

The Sexy Men thread was mostly people wondering why oby (the OP, of course) posted 'sexy Russian men in silver spandex short shorts by jet fighter' who were waving decadent western G36 (or a Sig AR, cbf checking) around instead of eminently Russian Kalashnikov. Have to admit I'm not all that keen on sexy ladies threads, if you're that hard (heh) up you can always go to Google Image Search. Or Bing image search for that matter. Or various specialist internet video repositories. OTOH, the quote function is an utter nightmare. Much as I dislike people not trimming quotes I can understand it not happening when doing so results in attributions getting borked, bits not actually deleting, bits which aren't selected getting deleted and more.