Zoraptor

There have now been 10 years of cheeki breekis and getting out of there Stalker since Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl is now 10 years old. Still has the best atmosphere in any game I've played, and the best 'dungeons'. Even worse for making me feel old, Baldur's Gate will be 20 (!) years old next year.

Medical insurance itself is perfectly fine both theoretically and practically. The US system is... non optimal, I think everyone would agree, but that is due to more reasons than it being primarily based on medical insurance. There are efficient healthcare systems based on medical insurance, albeit most have a compulsory element to them and more regulation than the US likes.

Another game sponsored by nVidia with massive and utterly pointless amounts of tesselation specifically to asterisk with AMD cards? OK, that's about as surprising as an AMD sponsored game with huge amounts of async compute to asterisk with nVidia cards but I do wonder if the money is worth it just to annoy x% of your user base. Titanfall 2 reviewed fine, its problem was being released within weeks of another MP focussed game from the same company (Battlefield 1) and since it is primarily a MP game it needs to have a decent playerbase to promote further sales; hence the discounts. Pretty much everything I've heard on Titanfall2 has it as being a good game. There's a bit of a difference though between lo-fi graphics and 'bad' graphics. Something like Stardew Valley has a graphic style from the early 90s, but it is a consistent style that works with the game and game play. System Shock 2 has shonky animation married to basic models, but is also 17 years old and has good gameplay and atmosphere. Certainly the problem with MEA looks to be that it's way, way down the uncanny valley with some people (not universally/ mostly women, to be fair) who look like they were extruded from plastic and faces with completely unconnected muscles/ expression sets. It's also the 4th game in the series, you'd expect improvement. Plus also also it will, whether fairly or not, be compared to the best games out there for animation and models. It certainly doesn't look like it compares favourably to, say, TWitcher 2 in that regard, let alone its sequel. (And no, I have no idea how Bethesda gets away with ocean wide, puddle deep games that have deep technical flaws because they're still using the same basic engine as Oblivion did 11 years ago and won't or can't fix their issues. It's inconsistent but in the end massive sales numbers have a quality all of their own)

It is a newish studio doing their first game as well as being a major release from a big publisher. I'd say there have definitely been production issues there. It looks like the animations just plain weren't ready when the rest of the game was and the choice was to wait for the animations or ship the game as is and they went for the latter. That's definitely a production issue where a Producer didn't do their job properly- make sure others did their jobs properly and stuck to deadlines. It's even possible, though unlikely, that the problem is not the animations themselves but the rigging of the models. I think I said a few pages back that perhaps they outsourced to aliens who'd only had humans described to them rather than seen them. After seeing a few videos I'm not absolutely sure that isn't exactly what happened. And to be fair to the animators/ modellers even the voice acting seems to be, uh, off shall we say. Even when Bioware's writing has been shaky to shonky the voice acting has been generally good to excellent despite it. I've only seen videos, but their voice direction seems to have largely deserted them as well.

The chip structure is not really a problem per se, it's pretty much an inevitable consequence of how they are manufactured, and communication within a 'node' (ccx) will be faster than between different ones. It is able to be improved by better scheduling from OS and/or per program basis, there certainly seems to be an issue where it is detected as having 16 physical cores rather than 8/8. Though AMD has rather equivocated on whether it is/ isn't working as intended it certainly isn't working optimally; the equivocation may be to stop rabid fanboys annoying MS to 'fix' their scheduler to take Ryzen into account. Base RAM speed determines the speed of the inter core communication so yeah, going from 2400 to 3200Mhz will make a huge difference. If you were unlucky enough to have a MB/ RAM combo that didn't like each other or wanted to use 4 sticks of RAM then there will be a large performance increase at some point when the MB/ BIOS revisions are released. Most of the ASRock and Gigabyte MBs seem to already be capable of getting decent quality RAM to 3200Mhz (in 2 stick set ups, 4 are still at 2400 max so far as I know), the ASUS and MSI ones were lagging.

They've taken outsourcing art assets too far this time, and got aliens to design their AI skins based on a verbal description and a few photos? Or perhaps only the females, since most of the males seem to be relatively fine. To be fair to ME:A though, ME as a series hasn't exactly stayed away from the uncanny valley when it comes to women before, both Miranda and Ashley v2 had issues and comical animations have been a persistent problems as well. The running animation in ME3 was... Prosperous and in real life could only come from someone who had most of their spine and hips fused yet was the one animation you'd see most often in the entire game, and Shep's amusing facial animations are still used as a meme.

You don't understand how our system works. Wilders was one of the big winners and his party gained a significant amount of seats in parliament. His influence has only grown. Yeah, nobody has any prospect of winning outright in a proportional system except under very unusual circumstances*. Since everyone said they wouldn't have Wilders in government he could not 'win' the election in that sense as he had no prospect of getting 50.1% of the vote, he could only win by getting lots of votes. Which he largely did. He may have got less than he hoped for but he still got 2nd/ 3rd by the looks of it and even if he's given the cold shoulder officially other parties will be looking to attract his voters, which almost inevitably means moving closer to the more acceptable of his policies. Though the main problem there is that he does seem to have mostly bluster and rhetoric rather than actual policy. *Ironically (or maybe not) the post apartheid elections in RSA would all have had a clear winner under a proportional system, even the last election with Zuma saw the ANC get 60+% of the vote and all the Nelson and Thabo ones had even more.

R5 release April 11. 1600X looks pretty good value, 100USD less than the 1700 and should be (here at least) about the same price as the 7600k, only with 3 times the threads, a decent stock cooler and no need (well, 'need' at least) for a premier motherboard.

Wow... who does that remind you of? Daily Mail readers. That actually sounds like the vast majority of opposition politicians, most seem to be waiting for the government to self destruct rather than propose actual alternatives since those alternatives might alienate potential voters.

Not even 'Bioware Points' that can be used across games? I guess at least they're selling in sensible block sizes, though it's probably a forlorn hope that if they're used for DLC purchasing that the DLC won't cost just a little bit more than the nearest single increment of points. It's John Walker and he's a big Bioware fan. He fairly regularly suffers from (and makes his readers suffer his) jilted lover syndrome, so if he does get disappointed by Bioware there will be tears before bedtime. If you liked DAI well enough then that is probably the best indicator. Realistically it also depends on what exactly you disliked about ME3 and liked about ME2 too.

Meh, that's moronism from the opposite end to the 'muslim ban' or a 'muslim registry' and makes me want to give Mr/ Miss Rose an intellectual atomic wedgie. Completely ignoring the massive disparity in deaths due to the two extremist views is at very, very best facile and specious. There are more incidents of beatnik hippies/ rainbow haired SJWs protesting in the streets and being arrested than there are muslim extremist incidents as well, somehow I suspect that would not be regarded as a 'quantitatively, significantly, statistically' large threat to public peace. A muslim registry is a stupid idea, that's a stupid and counter productive counter argument (particularly so since it can be a good counter) because anyone who disagrees has an instant indication of a - genuinely- bad faith argument being made so can dismiss it and any similar arguments out of hand.

Only thing I take into account is how well they act as a bullet sponge. I've generally found companions' only role in combat to be to distract enemies while you do 95% of the killing, at least on high difficulty. They simply don't do enough damage with any single attack to justify micromanaging them. OTOH it seems it's yet another thing that Bioware has cut rather than fix, and that's been a pattern with all of Bioware's sequels (and apart from DAO, all of their games) post BG2.

I think he means that if you use an in text link any text you add after the link gets included as (blue) link text. eg this should only have eg showing as link text not the rest of the text help how do I stop it? That happens when you add the link at the end of your current bit of writing, any text you write afterwards gets included in the hyperlink text. The way to get out of it is to use the BBCode toggle (top left of message composition box) and write some text outside the [/url] tag or manually copy/ paste the tag.

I would have thought that both 1080p (and some did 720p) and maybe 4k would be fairer, with some acknowledgement if there were differences in min frames etc. The whole benchmarking thing has been a bit inconsistent though, since most reviewers got ASUS MBs that were not ready for primetime. Not really ASUS' fault as it seems the release was rushed by AMD and they've suffered a bit for it, but fact is that reviewers with Gigabyte MBs had a better experience but they were the minority. Add to that the whole windows scheduler not playing nice with AMD's core set up and the RAM speeds being a bit of a crap shoot due to the MB/ BIOS issues and there's plenty of potential for improvement there even before Ryzen 2.0. I'm still pretty much definitely doing a Ryzen system since I still think it fits my needs best- primarily having better longevity and price performance than an equivalent Intel. I'll see if I can wait for the R5s and especially Vega/ 5x0s to see how they turn out and since they must be close (heh), but if I can't I'll be pretty happy with a 1700 and maybe pick up a cheap interim card 2nd hand since anything has to be better than a 5770. (I've been checking hardware for a potential build and most stuff is fine, but looking at cases... it must be like how old people feel when they go into a cafe and have to do a questionnaire to get a plain coffee instead a non skinny non chai latte free trade Ethopian medium roasted in a counter clockwise rotating kiln coarse grind double shot- I just want a case with good cooling and expansion thanks, rather than endless irrelevant LED and case window variants from a dozen different makers which each seem to have their own model number. At least most sites have some sort of sensible sorting options...)

WL twitter outright trolls most of the time. The information from WL itself is accurate/ real, its twitter is all over the place. The defence of Flynn can easily be explained by their loathing of the US intelligence establishment- which is fair enough, they're clearly mutual enemies- and them clearly leaking the info that got Flynn fired. The real irony being, of course, that WL didn't like that leak, albeit there's a big difference between an external group leaking information that can influence a country's politics (and the withholding of which would also tacitly influence it) and that country's intelligence community doing so. If there's anything that came direct from the Russians I'd expect the latest 'leak' to be it. Some of the stuff about the CIA looking at false flags is convenient and can easily be seen as some pre-emptive deflection, plus some of the tools discussed have been available for six months so someone has had that info at least that long and it didn't go direct to WL.

Lol, that's far too obvious Bruce. FTR Aftermath is utter rubbish. Its plot, writing and acting is even less credible than someone claiming that Dexter and SoA ended at the right time. Do not watch unless you like SyFy movies and really want one that last 9 hours.

This is ironically such a Russian response through and through. Whenever someone in Russia exposes government corruption the typical response from pro-Putin camp is, "But in America/Europe/etc. they do this too. You're are targeting us. You're doing this to undermine our country. You're an American agent (just like Wikileaks is being labeled a Russian front) etc, etc..." I'd like to point out that Wikileaks doesn't 'target' anyone. They publish leaks. If there had been a bunch of those from North Korea or China they would gladly have published those, but there aren't maybe because 'westerners' ,whatever that means, care more about government transparency and corruption. In other words it's a symptom of giving a **** about these things. One of the other difficulties with getting stuff on China or DPRK is that you need to have someone who can verify the information- so you need to have someone who is both technically knowledgeable of whatever has been leaked but can also speak Korean or Mandarin fluently. That's not a trivial task as compared to english language info, and given that many would love for WL to publish something demonstrably incorrect to cripple their credibility. Turkey actually supports Kurdish independence, in Iraq, because they own the Iraqi Kurdish leader Barzani wholesale. Barzani sells them cheap oil on the sly, and Turkey helps him embezzle vast sums from it which ought to go to the central government. He's also Sunni, hates minorities (remember the Yezidis? His pet militia disarmed them, abandoned them to ISIS and genocide, and has now been outright attacking them recently for having the temerity to not want his Peshmerga running their security any more), allows Turkey access and basing plus Erdogan is a committed neo-Ottomanist, an independent Kurdistan can later be invaded if the PUK or PKK gets control there via the- permanently delayed- elections. The facetious explanation of who wants an independent Kurdistan is that all four of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran want it- they just want it exclusively in the three other countries.

The obvious two are Wally and Barry himself- mostly as Sav has made a point of saying "I'm the future(,) flash" multiple times, plus we know that Flash disappears in the future. Can't see it being HR though, too much S1 redux. I like the Trajectory theory, but I think they'd have brought her up this season if she were Savitar. One of the unfortunate things about always having a masked villain is you only have a very limited set of people it can realistically be, as it's almost always one of the core characters.

That's such an every country response, really. If it's a leaker you attack their patriotism and label them a traitor and criminal, if it's external you label them an agent of a foreign power and a criminal (even obviously stupid things like Assange being a traitor to a country he isn't a citizen of) and you do everything you can to deflect from what is actually said. Someone who thinks the US doesn't do exactly the same after Snowden if not after Wikileaks' Manning releases would be... naive, or just blindly backing their team.

Actual good episode of The Flash last night as well, which shows that they can still do it.

'Tell that to the Vatican'. The Swiss themselves have conscription and are the very poster child of 'armed neutrality', they have no need for mercenaries nor a private army. Swiss mercenaries specifically (and legally) only exist now as the Swiss Guard at the Vatican, and they are both irrelevant and anachronistic since the Vatican is a statelet which relies entirely on Italy's good will and has for ~150 years. They're more a religious order of security guards (since they have to be catholic) than a practical military- The Swiss Guard could not resist Italy when The Papal State held a decent chunk of central Italy and had a proper standing army as well, let alone now.

While true that Wired focusses mostly on technology rather than science there are a lot of general publications on there- the Daily Fail is mostly focussed on blaming immigrants for all Britain's ills, for example, and only really carries science stories incidentally to that. A lot of people don't like Scientific American because it kind of has pretensions towards being a 'proper' journal, when it's really a popular science magazine. And that means that when it puts out incorrect information it tends to be taken more seriously than when a non specialist site (say, the BBC) does so. I'd be more surprised at how well the Economist is regarded, personally. Even leaving aside its blogs/ opinion pieces which are frequently ideologically driven spiels bereft of connection to reality I've read plenty of actual Economist articles which are not accurate. Suppose their specifically science coverage could be better though, I've never thought to separate their articles by type. Same for Wired, actually, never bothered to specifically separate their tech articles from science ones.

Just don't hire Ivan or Igor Dolvich, you'd be asking for trouble. To be fair, I'd bet pretty much anything that he was (and is) being tapped. I don't doubt that Obama didn't order it though- he wouldn't need to.

Well could argue it is, external server is as bad as your own. Is a fun situation for types like Pence harping on about integrity or justice or whatever moralizing hill they want to shoot from. Eh, don't think you really can. It's comparing the governor of a fairly unimportant state- with appropriate apologies to any Indiana natives- with the country's Secretary of State when it comes to things like email security expectations. In terms of civilian positions SoS is top 3? in terms of the security that is required and it's a massive deal if their correspondence is being read by 3rd parties, I'd doubt Governor Pence would come close to cracking the top 100 (and likely not even the top 1000) on the importance level. There's also the other Hillary baggage, like archiving avoidance and it being potentially outright illegal for her to have the server. Pence seems to have been nothing other than typical Internet Grandad dumb, it's pretty easy to argue that Hillary was considerably worse than merely dumb, as well as being in a more important job.

Is anyone really surprised that Pence uses AOL? Hardly seems equivalent in any way to Hillary's situation.