Zoraptor

As per Barti, Sanders did say he'd support the eventual nominee, ie Hillary, when the time came and if he lost. He did that, and nobody has seriously complained about him doing so half heartedly. Had he decided to shank Hillary instead it would undoubtedly be him being blamed for her loss, and being accused of being disloyal or whatever. That would be the perfect excuse for a 'no change' policy from the Dem's establishment- which we've kind of got anyway, with Putin being blamed and Hillary winning the popular vote, but not to such an extent. If he actually were a socialist firebrand then might have gone kamikaze on Hillary anyway but when it comes right down to it he was a fairly standard Euro style social democrat who would fit in fine with Labour here or in the UK, and he'd probably be a bit too right wing for the traditional French Socialists. He's only a radical socialist by comparison with mainstream US politics where things like Single Payer Health is just wacky, crazy talk rather than mainstream like most of the rest of the developed world.

Nah, that would be Trump. Winners always end up doing the most about faces as they have the biggest potential by far to do so, and Trump isn't draining the swamp as he promised. Hillary would have flipped on stuff as well, of course, had she had the opportunity. All Bernie did was pick the least offensive corporate candidate over the more- and in the US system that's about all you realistically can do. Anything else is like, well, puling about winning the popular vote when everyone knows that it's not how you measure victory. In theory it's a valid complaint, in practice, that's just how things work. On the supposed Russian hacking, I am somewhat amused that the reason given by Michael Hayden for why Putin would be involved was that when the US did it the President had to give approval. Not exactly a claim to moral superiority there, either.

It probably had more to do with bad weather and thus limited air support being available and the Russian sapper team and their supporting troops finishing their job and withdrawing a few days before the attack started. ISIS is opportunist, and can pick their place to attack in a situation like Palmyra where a large area has to be defended by relatively few troops so can get local numerical superiority every time. Palmyra is also far more useful to ISIS than the government since it's a road junction and they controlled most of the roads into it already; it's only really useful to the government as propaganda or if they wanted to try and get to their besieged troops in Deir Ez Zor (which they don't, at present, as that involves 100km of utterly undefendable desert road through ISIS territory). If ISIS really committed 4000 troops to the attack there was no practical way they weren't going to take it, the government simply can't have similar numbers of troops in the dozen or so vulnerable spots on their front line with ISIS. Some of those involved in the attack may well have come from Iraq though, via the road that was deliberately left open from Mosul until the shia militia stopped it. While that was a deliberate US policy to funnel ISIS towards Syria it's also a perfectly legitimate strategy to minimise fighting in Mosul as well. It definitely wasn't an attack to try and derail the Aleppo offensive, Palmyra just plain isn't important enough and Aleppo was to most purposes finished already; if they wanted to do that an attack on the Kanasar/ Ithiriya road would have happened instead as it's the only route into Aleppo controlled by the government.

They weren't frontal hits, so armour would be considerably less. There's some variance in sources for how much armour Turkey's Leo2's have, but it seems that a Konkurs could just penetrate their Leo2A4 even from the front- so practically, probably not- and both Konkurs and Fagot (plus Toophan which ISIS may have some of) could from the side/ rear. Kornet (and TOW2) could destroy them from a front angle, and so could even some recoilless rifles/ RPGs. The Leopards are certainly a lot more protected than the Pattons that are the alternative though, especially when it comes to crew survivability if they are hit.

If the benchmarks for Kaby Lake are accurate it may well be a good time for an AMD release since there seems to be (very close to) no improvement at all over Skylake. Presumably- hopefully for me since I'll be buying Q1 2017- Intel will cut prices as a sweetener, depending on how Zen turns out Kind of amused with the renaming though, since Ryzen is ~'zero' in Japanese (eg Mitsubishi A6M 'Reisen' == 'Zero' WW2 fighter) and thus doesn't have the best connotations- and it doesn't sound that much like 'rising'. Should have gone for Zenpai, or better given it a trademarked code name in the first place.

Cornets captured from the Syrians? I doubt they have a whole lot of them. Consensus seems to be Konkurs or even Fagot rather than Kornet- so soviet era rather than more modern like the Kornet. I don't think there's any video of the launcher so no proof either way. They seem to be short enough on ATGMs that they're rationed and they don't 'waste' them on soft targets, but they do seem to be able to produce them when needed against armour.

Licensed. It's a limited license too, don't think that mobile or (current) movie tie ins are included nor pre-existing agreements, hence things like Lego Force Awakens from WB rather than EA and no TFA tie in game from EA. A new Kotor would have to come from EA though. At this point I'd just expect new games (or perhaps remakes), TOR and the Revan novel muddy the waters too much and would have to be either incorporated or fully and permanently invalidated. On the positive side there are certainly people quite high up who do know and care about the Kotors, SW Rebels last season used Malachor (and a variant of the Trayus Academy no less) as their finale location.

All it needs now is an animated gif of Trump wiggling a sausage suggestively.

To be fair, that is exactly what you would expect those fleeing to say if their well being depends on pleasing the government, as it is what the government would want them to say and means that they didn't actually support the rebels so should be just left alone after fleeing. I have very little doubt personally that many east Aleppo residents were forcibly held, but such statements have to be taken with a grain of salt. As do wholly unsourced (well, there are some pictures provided but they're clearly of bodies that have been recovered, not massacred as there's too little blood in situ and some are decomposing while others are, uh, fresh) accusations of 'massacres' and 'genocide' from the other side, of course. Parroted acritically by the non 'fake news' media, of course, who will then be baffled by why nobody believes them later. Looks like ISIS has knocked out 2-3 Turkish Leopard 2 tanks in Al Bab as well. 2 seem pretty definite (video evidence) and one has been admitted to by the Turks which seems to be a separate incident. It's fairly significant because they are Turkey's best tanks and they don't have anything better protected.

I agree, more or less- and especially because a lot of the same people seem to like Deus Ex Original's ending, which was functionally identical- but there are some pretty big differences between the endings with respect to AI and the like. Having the Reapers stay around to help with reconstruction and everyone (?) being part synthetic is one ending, that's hugely different from having all AI destroyed which is another. triggered

The funny thing is that they will have to address this in the games to come, if any more are made at all after this. Timetravel. I bet the next Mass Effect series after Andromeda will be about timetravel. Just so that Bioware don't have to do choice and consequence from previous games or come up with new setting. Going by current industry direction there'd be remasters of the original Mass Effect series, then remasters of ME: Andromeda after that... As it is if they do want to revisit the Milky Way they'll have best part of a decade (assuming an Andromeda trilogy) between the end of ME3 and any revisiting. Most will either have forgotten what they chose or not have save games by then, so problem solved and they can just pick whatever one they like. Can't say I really care much either way, so long as they don't go the Deus Ex: IW route and decide that all the endings happened despite it making no sense.

Looks like Aleppo is fully back under government control. Pretty quick in the end, about the same amount of time as Manbij or Fallujah (2008) once the siege was established and despite even the rebel held areas being bigger than both those cities combined. Their biggest win of the Civil War since 2013 at least. The government did manage to lose Palmyra to ISIS, though it's strategically irrelevant unless they want to get to the Euphrates and pretty hard to hold unless they were willing to commit lots of troops. ISIS supposedly committed about 4000 troops to taking it so 10 times as many as they captured Ramadi or Mosul with. On the other hand the T4 (Tiyas) airbase a few km up the road is extremely important (if of limited functionality at present due to ongoing runway upgrades), if ISIS can take that it would be a major win.

There isn't any. Even the 'anonymous source' on whom the reports are based actually says that the only evidence they have is that a private Russian hacking group was involved. That's why you have the dichotomy between what the FBI and CIA say- the FBI is concerned with what can be proven legally, which is ironically how Hillary didn't get charged, while the CIA is concerned with what they think happened rather than what they can prove happened. The last is equally ironic (more so, with regards to the CIA complaining about others interfering in elections) as that and politically mandated group think was exactly how the Saddam/ WMD BS happened. Podesta's password was- literally- 'p@ssw0rd'. It wouldn't exactly take Skynet to hack him.

Erdogan gonna Erdogan, basically, all his pet groups in Syria are named after Turkish sultans like Murad and Zengi and he thinks that- and Putin- is the template to follow. The bombs were from TAK- Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, deniable PKK splitter group that uses suicide bombers. It pretty clearly wasn't ISIS once you knew they waited until there weren't civilians around, ISIS would have just blown up police and fans without blinking while TAK at least target military/ police targets with their terrorism. Citing a wikipedia article (!) in which the single line supporting you has citation needed (!!) is at least more imaginative than your usual efforts. It's earned you an actual response, well done.

He means the Mehdi Army and similar shia militia. They still weren't significantly supported by Iran since they supported Sadr's rivals Al-Sistani and Nouri Al-Maliki but at least Iranian support for them was plausible and made general sense unlike the ludicrous 'Iran supports Al Qaeda!!!/ Taleban!!!/ ISIS!!!' story some try to push. End of the day Iran didn't even need to do anything to the US in Iraq, as soon as they held an election they'd get a friendly leader. Which is exactly what happened.

Dunno about that, the internet also makes fact checking relatively easy for most things. The ultimate problem is people; we tend to make decisions based on emotion, not have much in the way of critical faculties/ desire to be actually informed and then tend to believe what we want to whatever the evidence shown. The internet has made it far easier to make stuff up and get it looked at, but it has also made it far easier to debunk stuff as well; it's just that no matter how thorough the debunking some will still believe. It certainly doesn't help that the media who should be doing a good job are doing a poor one, I certainly can't blame people for being deeply sceptical when there's so much to be legitimately sceptical of even from supposedly respectable sources. As for being old, it's pretty ancient and almost certainly is a direct consequence of writing. Pharaoh Thutmose's depiction of the Battle of Megiddo certainly fits the general category of propaganda and presents the narrative Thutmose wanted, with no practical way for the average Egyptian to challenge it.

It is an Express article- if their articles are better than the Daily Mail or The Sun's it's mere coincidence. It's also about 2 weeks old as news- eg rather less sensationalist Independent article from 29 Nov. It's only resurfacing now because of the WaPo's 'anonymous source' article and Obama's investigation order. If actually true that Russia is supporting Nazis in Germany it would be the highest form of highly ironic. Retro like August '39.

Funny thing is, "Putin did it" as an argument was a spectacular fail pre-election, why they think it will work now I don't know. Even if they did hack Podesta or the DNC instead of it being Podesta stupidly falling for phishings and Seth Rich it hardly matters, the substance of the leaks was not faked. The stuff that did the damage was stuff that actual democrats wrote, hardly matters whether it was Karl Rove, LoF, zombie Beria or a time traveller from the future trying to stop World War Hillary who leaked it. They lost because Hillary was rubbish, their plan was rubbish and to quote Powell: "hubris". If they'd have picked Bernie it would have been irrelevant. The WP report is also based on 'an anonymous source', again. Everybody seems to be treating it as being an official release though. They'll then be surprised that 'fake news' citing 'anonymous sources' gains traction, for some reason.

Yeah, I think that trope was even worse in the Star Treks if you thought of the _X_ as being living rather than an object. The NG Enterprise spent about half an average season broken down, about to be destroyed, with people being kidnapped off it, being captured, trapped in [phenomenon] etc and it was meant to be at least partly a warship and a top of the line star ship in general- not the rough equivalent of a garbage scow or container transport like Moya. It was probably even higher than half the time for the Voyager. It's just too useful a plot device in general when you have a restricted environment and want to drive the plot with something urgent.

To be fair the quoted sentence is not entirely accurate, I just didn't want to go full Longknife and write paragraphs being entirely accurate on a throwaway point. (The tweet only mentioned the fact that the bonus existed and they missed it by one point, that there would be accusations of manipulation would seem to be a obvious and inevitable consequence of the tweet- and it would have annoyed Bethesda it's safe to say- but it was not actually a part of the tweet. Virumor is doing a decent Volo impersonation, at least)

He's at Bethesda now, he worked on the new Prey. So he's at Arkane then. Working on a watered down version of the original Prey 2. Sad! Watered down version of System Shock. It's a retooling of the system shock project they were doing in 2007-8 for EA that got canned by John Riccitiello when he took over and has little to do with HH's Prey or even the original Prey. And it is of course ironic that Chris Avellone- the guy who accused Bethesda of stiffing Obsidian on FNV's metacritic bonus- is now working for them, even if it's temporary. There was corroboration of the Human Head version of events, ironically from what happened to Arkane. The reasons for cancelling weren't political and stupid; they'd have cost Beth/ Zenimax basically the same amount of cash for development and got them an owned developer from that money as well, if it had worked. That's of questionable morality, shall we say, but if you leave that aside it's an excellent idea from a financial perspective.

Apart from the different overall systems as above you also have to consider the effects of those systems. Things like literacy and numeracy or just general education were far higher in North America, and those things tend to be highly advantageous for economic development as your potential Einstein types are less likely to be illiterate or innumerate. Unless a Cuban or Venezuelan or Colombian Einstein was born into a tiny subset of privilege they'd have spent their time cutting sugar cane or harvesting bananas. You tend to get 'socialist revolutions' for two main reasons- there are lots of poor people, and the current system tends to be ratcheted down. The US has the pressure release valve of the electoral system and knowledge that in 4 years you can vote Trump/ Obama/ Bush out. If you have a Pinochet or a Galtieri, they're there long term with no prospect of going, and you potentially have a family history of centuries of grinding poverty as well. You also tend to have literal 1% owning 99% type situations, and virtually no prospect of social mobility unless it's of the radical redistribution kind. You also have the US tending to support the interests of its companies (United Fruit Corp/ Chiquita being the best known) as a matter of policy right up to present day, per the support for the (fairly) recent Honduran Coup.

Those particular Kurds are actively supported by Turkey, who even support them in their land grabs and seemingly in their desire for independence; so long as it's independence from Iraq rather than Turkey. They're also themselves predominantly Sunni, their primary beef is an ethnic one not a religious one. Hardly a popular thing to say, but they made sure to disarm the Yezidi militia before running away to Irbil when ISIS attacked and they are certainly not averse to some active ethnic cleansing as well, mostly against arabs but also including other minorities; even Turks, albeit they're shia turks who Erdy doesn't give a manure about. They're more than happy to take majority arab areas that have oil, then claim the arabs are all pro ISIS or were artificially transplanted and stick them into 'displacement camps' while their homes are bulldozed. KDP are a definitively crappy bunch, corrupt, ethnic cleansers in bed with Erdogan for weapons and support (he gets oil, and oil that can be resold since the Kurds aren't supposed to be exporting independently) they're just the west's pretty crappy bunch instead of Iran's like the PUK or a bunch of anarcho commies like the PKK. Shia PMUs will quite happily take sunni towns, indeed they're the ones who stopped up the escape route ISIS in Mosul were meant to take to Syria through the- pretty extremist and perhaps most ISIS friendly city except Fallujah- city of Tal Afar. They just don't get any US/ 'coalition' air support and get lots of bleating from Al Jazeera, especially AJArabic, about graffiti and 'ethnic' cleansing. Complaints that oddly enough don't get reported on about the Kurds nearly as much.

WWE Hall of Famer Donald J Trump appoints WWE co-owner Linda McMahon as small business secretary or something. I guess there are no hard feelings from when Trump shaved her husband's hair or from when a WWE employee brutally assaulted Trump on live TV with no repercussions. If only he'd taken my advice and gone for Terry Bollea as vice president as well.

Looks like Aleppo city is going to be captured before either Raqqa or Mosul. The rebels have already lost >70% of their former territory and there are apparently Green Buses- used for evacuating militants under truce agreements- entering the remaining rebel controlled areas of the city now. Only likely holdouts are Al Nusra, and if 8-15k rebels cannot hold it's unlikely 800-1.5k will be able to. Not what was predicted as it was supposed to be Stalingrad; albeit that was always a stupid comparison given even half of Aleppo is bigger than Stalingrad and the most generous estimate of rebel numbers in total, everywhere, is roughly the number of german troops in Stalingrad alone. (As it happens, Turkey managed to asterisk up the Raqqa attack more than Mosul at this point, since the Syrian Kurds are now busy trying to make sure the Turkish rebel proxies + actual Turkish army don't take al Bab as a priority over Raqqa. Indeed, Erdogan has managed to get the government and kurds into a pretty unlikely and almost official alliance, which is quite an unintentional achievement)