Zoraptor

Review bombing definitely happened, it happens for all sorts of reasons. Nevertheless, the SoD character was not generally defended by actual trans people- indeed, many seemed to think Beamdog's approach trivialised the issue as much as Hainly in MEA- but by the Polygons and Kotakus of the world. The response from actual trans people seems to be fairly similar to the two characters, the press response and review bombing accusations publicised the issue in SoD's case and made it look like it was only an issue for 4chan types. For MEA, Bioware has not doubled down on the issue and blamed 4chan (even though they have done that before). Personally I'm of the opinion that such issues are almost always insultingly trivialised in gaming media, and like most things should be avoided unless you're actually going to do them well instead of as a once over lightly for 'political' reasons. Using a long hibernation sleep to transition is actually a pretty good concept, but if you aren't going to do it justice then just don't do it at all.

I don't think the actual trans community was particularly pleased with how SoD handled the issue either, and for much the same reasons. In that case it tended to be the usual suspects in the press defending it, and largely because Beamdog blamed antiSJW neckbeards/ 4chan/ gamergate for review bombing the game, which got it mileage.

You can only playtest what is put in front of you anyway. For all anyone knows the playtesters were all over the problems and produced a beautifully formatted and indexed triplicate hard copy and database bug report collection that already listed every problem so far detected. If their suggestions/ observations were either ignored or not able to be acted on then they might as well have not existed. It's difficult to believe that someone didn't catch the problem with animations for example. It's far more likely that they were not a high enough priority or there was not enough time to fix them then that testers thought they were fine. Have to say though, I'm vaguely looking forward to playing Andromeda at some point, despite its problems.

Pretty sure everyone is sick of global powers taking dumps in regions except said global powers. In the mess that is the SCW it's not actually impossible that the rebels manufacture chemical weapons for ISIS, especially in the specific regional context. Liwa (formerly Jund) al Aqsa was the group that previously held Khan Sheiktoun, and they've (literally) joined ISIS having previously and temporarily joined Al Qaeda/ Al Nusra (Hayat Tahrir al Sham, formally). There are still extensive links between LAA and HTS and LAA has, despite having a thousand or so members, disappeared completely so far as anyone can tell. Plus HTS apart from literally being Al Qaeda was also literally ISIS up until Feb 2014. So rebels supplying ISIS with CW is probably bollocks, but not certainly so especially if they were meant to supply LAA. HTS/ AQ also gets a lot of 'Friends of Syria' (NATO/ Gulf States) sourced supplies as they control the supply routes, and whether NATO acknowledges it or not. They're the best supplied rebel force in Syria- by a fair margin- despite theoretically being embargoed by everyone. There has been at least one occasion in which the rebels very likely used sarin in an attack- on government held Khan al Assal in 2013. In an interesting reversal, the official western position is that it was the government gassing people on their own side that time. That was primarily on a military target though and killed more soldiers than civilians, for what that's worth.

Eh, they'd just drop conventional bombs if they wanted to randomly kill lots of people, same as anyone else would. If you don't have an air force you go to some village and shoot it up semi randomly as our SAS did when the Taleban killed an NZ soldier; plus it'd be a weird way to strike back at an ISIS inspired Kyrgyz with no other apparent link to Syria anyway. Mostly though, the rebels say that the chemical bomb/ missile was dropped by a Su22 which Russia hasn't operated for years and nobody suggests they have in Syria. If the rebel story is accurate it was definitely Syria rather than Russia. I'd be reticent about assigning blame at this point anyway, apart from it being pretty stupid to potentially provoke intervention and utterly pointless militarily, MSF have said that two chemical agents were present with the second probably being chlorine or a similar derivative. That definitely means that there was either more than the one chemical bomb claimed by witnesses or a secondary source on the ground.

Yeah, if you're anti Trump you fixate on the term 'wire tap' and the claim of Obama himself ordering it directly, both of which are highly unlikely, and ignore the broader meaning. If you're pro Trump you instead look at the broad meaning of the tweet rather than the details. In that broad meaning Trump is clearly- and always was, for anyone who has read Snowden's or wikileaks' stuff- correct that he and his campaign were being monitored by the US government, but his details are not credible. Which is pretty typical Trump really, he's often right in the broad sense with bad details, or vice versa. It is somewhat amusing to see the same newspapers that have been publishing huge numbers of articles 'sourced from anonymous members of the intelligence community' then claim that Trump wasn't 'wire tapped'- because there was no physical device applied to his land line. It is technically true, of course.

I feel that someone should at least Correct The Record on where the term 'Bernie Bros' came from. Ideally, someone should get the Senate Committee to visit /pol/ if they really want to know where most of the anti Hillary memes came from. That, at least, would be good for a laugh. (Good lord that article is appallingly bad. Certainly does nothing to dispel the notion that there's a massive, and distinctly non Russian, psyop going on)

It is only in dx12 though, because nVidia are comparatively rubbish at dx12. There are also very few dx12 games to this point. DX12 is far more parallelised than dx11, and the nVidia drivers- and to an extent the cards themselves, fundamentally, for things like async compute where they don't support the feature properly- are rubbish at that while AMD is far better. Should be noted though that the big benchmarking increases of the last few days- RoTR and Division, also Ashes of the Singularity via a patch- have all been for games where the Ryzen was performing unexpectedly poorly. The up to 30% increases look great but they are generally bringing performance to expectation and still just behind the 7700k.

Even with the teething troubles it's a compelling option for some uses and extremely competitive on price performance with Intel options. The current weaknesses are with very top end gaming where price performance isn't really a factor, the general teething troubles- which are rather less serious than some Intel has suffered- and not having any budget chips for the next two weeks. The last one is definitely being fixed in the next two weeks though.

Does anyone know where that $40 million figure comes from? 40 million seems to be inordinately low for ~5 years even excluding marketing and quite possibly also excluding external costs like any time DICE spent on engine customisation, texture farming from EA Low Wage Country etc, and tax breaks from the Quebec govt. I still reckon that MEA looks like a badly managed project rather than a badly funded one.

I'd definitely add K** L*** to the list of bad bits of ME3. Just dreadfully executed. I can see what they were thinking but just chucking that character out there and saying "he's cool! and dangerous!! and he'll kill a tier 2 friend who'd already dying then later beat you in a cutscene no matter how badly you're roflstomping him" is pretty indicative of the worst aspects of Bioware's storytelling. Much as with the catalyst, and the ending, if you've set them up over the course of the three games per Rannoch and Tuchanka then you can end up with a good pay off- or at least an understandable one- instead of having them all pulled from the posterior in the last game. The ending is, basically, the ending to Deus Ex after all, and they had a prime opportunity to introduce the concept of the catalyst in the first game when you meet that Prothean encyclopaedia. Or any time at all in ME2. Pretty pointless criticising it anyway, it is what it is; it's just more annoying than if it were wholesale rubbish because those mistakes were easy to avoid and it should have been better. Gues it's a bit more constructive than complaining about dlc costs at least.

I have a code too, 50% off. Haven't actually played Tyranny yet but since the code is Steam only I won't be using it when I do buy and someone else might as well get the benefit.

Yeah, nah. ME3 costs $25 here, and the Origin dlc costs... $24. At least you can buy the proper amount of krazee kurrencee through the Origin app now rather than having to spend $32 buying more than you need. If they sold an ME3: Ultimate GOTY Collection Enhanced Edition it would have been on special for less than the individual DLC by now, DAI is more recent and its Ultimate Edition has been less than $25 already. The Origin DLC sounds like something I'd like- plus I liked ME3 well enough anyay- but their pricing and lack of discounts on it is just mickey taking at this point.

It would definitely be nice to know what the premium speed wise is for the increased price and how it balances out for timings and frequency, so more testing of that aspect would be very welcome once they've worked the kinks out. I'd be confident buying 3200Mhz RAM that it will consistently work as stated, eventually, but I can get 3600 or even 3733 Mhz for not that much more- less than it would cost to get a cooler for a 7700k- and if that ends up adding, say, 5% performance it would be worth the premium for sure. Plus it would be better if I need to add RAM in the future, current computer uses downclocked RAM since I couldn't find any RAM slow enough (!) to match what it already had once I wanted to upgrade. I've got probably a month further for things to settle down before buying anyway, since at this point I'll definitely be waiting for the R5 (just about certain to get a 1700 though) and 5 series graphics cards. Probably too soon for revised MBs, but hopefully the BIOS revisions and updates will have largely been rolled out by then.

Shame that fast RAM is so expensive (and here pretty unavailable, I can't source any 3200MHz CL14 from reputable sources at all) and anything 3200+ isn't officially supported, and it's still a bit random as to whether it will actually work at rated frequency. Being faster than a 7700k at games, albeit marginally overall and dependent on the game, is one of the last tick box Ryzen needs to fill.

Not really, the point of a fact check is to be factual; a fact check that isn't factual is just a polemic wearing authoritative clothes. It's pointing out that some of the trees in the forest are actually plywood cut outs. And the forest is there, there's no need for fakery. I don't really care who did the fact checking (ironically, last Time article I read was the 'Total Meltdown' one on Trump per election), that's the least important aspect. I don't need to be convinced that Trump lies. For a 'fact check' the target audience has to be those who believe Trump- proving to them that he lies. Instead, practically, the target is people who already believe Trump lies and who want that belief reinforced, for anyone else that fact check is counter productive. Indeed, the effect it had was such that I didn't even notice that the author had doubled down on #6 with #14 as I'd been turned off completely. Worse, the quote in #14 even has Trump mention the internet edition specifically. You'd have been far better off without the graphic.

Was a reference to an actor addressing UK parliament about needing more muslims on TV otherwise they will join ISIS or something. Yeah, it's a pretty stupid complaint, that's all. I'm not even in the UK and I can think of more muslims on TV there than people I'm sure are christians. Albeit that's because in dramas their characters tend to be labelled as 'muslim' and have it as part of their character more, plus I can recognise typically muslim 'asian' (subcontinental) names easily. If you're looking for an english source and find The Daily Stormer keep looking. The label 'nazi' is thrown around rather, heh, liberally but that website is literally named after Julius Streicher's infamous jew baiting nazi paper 'Die Sturmer'. They'd blame immigrants, muslims, lefties and non whites for literally anything and everything.

If they could get the facts right then there'd be no issue. Writing an article about someone else lying while effectively lying yourself in an absolutely identical way is at very, very best counter productive, if your aim is to convince anyone not already convinced. Because simply put, any Trump supporter who sees that will instantly decide the rest of the article is rubbish at that point, same as any anti Trumper will decide that lying in your article about lying is a 'technicality', or some weird Putin conspiracy. It isn't a technicality and it isn't even a genuine msitake, it was clearly done with absolute intent. Someone sat down and wrote that reasoning deliberately in an attempt to justify Trump being wrong. In that case he wasn't wrong. Did the NYT change their headline? Yes they did. Therefore on that Trump is correct. The correct response is therefore to have an article with 13 lies from Trump or find a 14th (shouldn't be hard), not try and weasel a truth into a lie. Well yeah, he's a politician. And all the media needs to do is illustrate that without lying themselves. They don't get a pass just because they're media, and every time they do it their reputation drops a little more.

There actually are plenty of muslims on TV in the UK. Way more than in the US, where they do rather tend to be trotted out as the terrorist-du-jour.

At this point it's pretty much an absolute rule that any complaints about factual accuracy (from 'MSM' in particular) have to themselves contain factual inaccuracies.

Nah, don't. After all, he does think that Origin established the Jane's IP- which would involve time travelling back to 1898. It's as much a licensed product as an NBA game. Most of the rest is just standard industry practice, crappy maybe but everyone does it.

The attack took place near the Houses of Parliament which, I believe, have had those countermeasures in place for most of the duration of the War on Terror (possibly since the 7/7 bombings?). Moreover I'd imagine there are few places in the UK with faster armed response times, which may be why the attack was stopped relatively quickly. Some of the counter measures, especially in really prominent targets like the PoW, date back as far as The Troubles as a way to stop IRA car bombs. Parliament would have pretty close to instant response times as there are armed police stationed there on a permanent basis. For a Nice style attack it's actually a poor area to target for that reason.

same as Clintons Clinton's had business that took money from foreign powers when Bill was president? Both the Bushes did as well. W especially also got funding after leaving the presidency in nearly the exact same style as Hillary/ Bill did, though I'm pretty sure he actually wound up his charity once his library was built instead of keeping it going. W's VP was also infamous for his intricate relationship with Halbech Halliburton-Bechtel. In any case, Trump is not special in that regard. Don't think Obama did though*, but then Obama was (perhaps consequentially) intensely disliked by the usual suspects of Saudi, Israel, other Gulf states etc; and he was not a businessman before politics. *except the still hilarious Nobel Prize money from well known bribery black hole Norway; and that went to charity.

Can you provide a link to a US sized UHC? Id be interested to read up on this. No, but then there aren't any 300 million population countries except the US since the closest in population is Indonesia, an entire UK population away. There are plenty of countries with similar or lower GDP/c to the US with UHC though, and the limiting factor ought to be available cash, not size. UHC seems to work fine for countries from the size of, say, Japan to Luxembourg- about a 250 fold population range- and gives a qualitatively better (to population as a whole) and cheaper result so I'd suggest that any argument that the US is a special case due to its size would require evidence of why its size specifically makes it a special case. Obviously the US is a special case relative to UHC countries, due to it having a significantly different and established system, the question is more whether it has to have that system as UHC wouldn't work there or whether the US system evolved to be inefficient/ 'broken'. The size argument is certainly general case, but there's no evidence of larger socialised health care systems being less efficient than small ones right up to Japan's size, rather the reverse since despite having an aged population Japan's system is cheaper per capita than most others.