Zoraptor

Yep. I think India was the example I heard being suggested as a post brexit trade target that would be hard to impossible under the EU. It's also kind of telling who is supporting the stay side- basically all the status quo corporates who have been lobbying extensively for deals like TTIP in Brussels. The small business side is far more divided. Then again, I'd pretty much definitely be voting leave if I were still in the UK.

Well, that clears up the ISIS link, in that there isn't one and the fealty is entirely self declared. A true Caliphate follower would surely pledge to 'Caliph Ibrahim', not some 'Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi' bloke... Pretty moronic redacting the transcript in the first place though. It's not like anyone with two brain cells couldn't guess instantly what the redactions were, and that they'd get unredacted real quick.

I don't really like the Cannae comparisons. Sure, it's a shorthand reference but Cannae was genius because of the numerical imbalance, remove that and it's 'just' an encirclement/ double envelopment. Which is far, far more common since a larger army 'naturally' outflanks a smaller one by simple dint of being larger. Mainly though, a comparison to Jon or Ramsay would be insulting to L. Aemilius Paulus or G. Terentius Varro, let alone Hannibal. Both bastards were abject morons, at least Varro had a plan based on the little that worked at Trebia and Trasimene and was fighting one of the greatest of all time. Of all time!

That works fine in an "'infinite' expansion'" situation like the industrial revolution, not so much in the current situation. In this situation they'd be illegal jobs they got in a lot of cases; underpaid, no job security, prone to exploitation and depressing the local labour market even more- worse, those conditions would bleed through to the legitimate workforce as well since you could always replace that pesky entitled citizen with some immigrant who has literally no option but take what is offered or... starve, be expelled, turn to crime or whatever the end game is for a no social program system. We already have a situation here where a lot of workers are imported for generally quite unskilled jobs (fruit picking, agriculture, sheesh even waiters plus perhaps the worst example, fishing where outright slavery sometimes happens) which the internal unemployed could easily do. Why? Because the imported workers will accept really bad- or dodgy as- conditions and there's a lot of nudge nudge wink wink exploitation like employers renting accommodation to their imported workers at multi 100% mark ups, where an actual citizen could easily complain about it as being 'extortion' but all the imported worker would get is their salary withheld to defray the cost of the flight home or not employed in the first place. Thing is, immigration is actually great. If you have a shortage of skilled workers you can fix it quicker than X years of training can, and the inflow of new ideas and concepts is crucial to a healthy as opposed to ossified society. But it is a balance. It's not great when we import all of Fiji's nurses while all ours go to Switzerland, the UAE and Qatar because our pay is so low but higher than Fiji's, not great for us since we subsidise the education of our nurses and not great for Fiji as, well, where do they get their nurses from once we've nicked theirs? But there's absolutely no forward planning except of the most inane kind to make sure that we have enough carpenters or whatever we're short of this week. But cutting off social programs is not the answer to problems with immigration because it will exacerbate some of the underlying problems such as outright crime and illegal work and not really solve anything, it will just shift the costs elsewhere. Solving it requires a proper approach that limits numbers to those which are maximally beneficial for the country, with room for legitimate humanitarian cases; that is not exploitable and which does not make new immigrants prey to the unscrupulous who would use and discard them in an unending chain. And it all has to be enforceable, and enforced. Blunt force approaches appeal because they are simple and make an emotive point, that's their strength but in practical regards it's also their weakness. No subtlety nor nuance, just blanket application. Of course it's easy for me to say that, I'll never be called on to put my vision into action and New Zealand is about as remote as you can get for illegal at least immigrants, short of Iceland.

Yeah, one can't help but get the feeling that if there were three options available in the referendum with the 3rd being basically 'European trade bloc only, thanks' that 3rd option would win with a landslide; and certainly not just in Britain either.

How does that solve anything? It probably doesn't solve anything or at very best 'solves' some bits while making other bits worse. But doing something makes people feel better, and that's what's really important. It's one of the great ironies that the 'right' accuses the 'left' of doing and saying impractical things to make themselves feel better and then does exactly the same thing themselves- and, of course, the 'left' does the same. That suggestion also has the advantage of being self fulfilling. If there's extra crime or whatever from immigrants who cannot send their children to school or get healthcare or whatever then that 'proves' immigrants are criminal and the policy is justified. It's also utterly useless at best and almost certainly actively counterproductive in doing anything against someone like Mateen, or most of the French attackers etc, who are citizens already- unless the policy were made retroactive or something but I doubt you'd get many supporting active disenfranchisement, at least. For terrorism there isn't much at all from 1st gen refugees/ immigrants as they are by and large both worried about being sent back and grateful for being somewhere safe where they can live decently, it's the 2nd generation of citizens from whom almost all terrorists have come. The real problem is that the world is run by politicians, and politicians focus on being elected so have awful forward thinking for anything not related to their (re-)election. There isn't much in the way of practical alternative to that and it may be pie-in-the-sky idealism speaking but I wish that there was a bit more honest discussion rather than soundbites, catchphrases, massaged statistics and focus group mediated press releases so that the undoubtable good bits of immigration can be balanced against the bad bits while recognising there isn't a magic wand to tell who is 'good' or 'bad' any more than there is for existing citizens. And yes, that includes things like Merkel (though she's certainly not alone) admitting that Germany needs immigrants to maintain pensions and the like a few years longer for an ageing population that votes for her party or our government admitting they need immigration because otherwise our economy is shrinking rather than growing, house prices would drop and they'd lose the election next year. And specifically for Radical Islam it doesn't help that politicians simply will not deal with Saudi elephant in the room and ignore their export of a deliberately retrograde sect which is deeply intolerant of everything not itself, because Saudis have lots of money and aren't shy about spending it.

For a few months, maybe. There's still Hillary vs Donald to look forward to and I'm confident they can attain patheticness that will make Dave, Boris, Nigel et al look like they've been taking part in an Oxford Union Debate.

Do Americans have a problem with Radical Christianity and what is the FBI doing to keep arms out of their hands? Thing being, of course, that if it were one of his congregation who did the shooting instead of a 2nd gen Muslim Afghan you'd have most of the people who want it to be all Radical Islam insisting it wasn't a religious issue this time and most of the people who don't want to mention Radical Islam insisting this was a religious issue, this time. Weirdest panel conversation I've seen in ages was over the question of whether the Orlando shooting was ISIS inspired or an attack on the LGBT community, as if they were wholly separate concepts and it had to be one or the other but not both. Because apparently ISIS isn't anti gay or something andor someone cannot be inspired to be anti gay by them or join them because they were already anti gay, I couldn't follow either side's 'logic' but they seemed utterly committed to it. And, of course, both sides insisted that the other was politicising the issue...

In 2004 (?) Hulk Hogan got fired by Vince McMahon and a bloke called Mr America turned up next week who was masked, had an America asterisks yeah shtick and skin like an overcooked low quality sausage. Many suspected he was actually Hulk Hogan- but he wasn't as he passed a lie detector test! Indeed, many years later he was shown to be some bloke called 'Terry Bollea' (ridiculous, made up sounding name that it is) instead of Hulk Hogan.

Obviously the next blockbuster epic fantasy has to be The Witcher. Given the huge amount of source material and enthusiastic fan base it would be a slam dunk in quality and success.

Cameron saying he'll resign makes me wonder if he's secretly for an exit. Especially since Osborne would have to go as well if that happened.

I presume he means that any indictment would be politically blocked. Get the federal prosecutor to decline to prosecute? Say that the emails are inadmissable since they were obtained illegally? Claim any incriminating emails were planted by hackers? I'm sure they could come up with something. You'd kind of hope that even a recommendation to indict would kill off a presidential candidates chances, so maybe something prior to recommending an indictment... There are certainly plenty of people who'd happily spike the investigation for political reasons. In any case, not like Wikileaks has actually released anything yet. Except chemtrails, I hear reliably they're up to their necks in that little attempt to mass medicate the world clandestinely. Why else would Assange spend all his time inside, hmm? Unless he was trying to avoid the chemtrails! Quod erat demonstrandum.

Overall I have to agree strongly with Guard Dog on the press coverage. I'm no Trump fan and no fan of the GOP but trying to blame them* is politically inspired contortion of the most extreme kind. When it was Dylan Roof shooting black people because he was a self confessed racist that was accepted as his reason without question- maybe not as the only reason since plenty of people are racist without murdering people and you'd suspect an underlying mental issue separate from __ in most mass shootings, but it was certainly the reason he chose the people he did and why Mateen chose the people he did. Yet when it comes to Mateen we're supposed to accept that he pledged to ISIS as an irrelevant delusion or something, if it's even mentioned at all. They seem almost paralysed by the possibility that using the words 'radical islam' will be used as an attack against non radical muslims or boost Trump. The closest direct parallel is probably the Australian Shia (!) Man Haron Monis who joined ISIS and took over a cafe in 2014. There were other underlying issues, but you cannot simply ignore their own stated reasons as if they don't exist. *exc gun control, perhaps

Somebody claiming to be a (non Russian) hacker of their server has stuck some files on wordpress. The pictured docs at least seem plausible so if faked it's a pretty decent effort, though there's nothing in the known universe that would get me to click unsolicited links to doc files from a self confessed hacker to check those. He says he's forwarded the haul to Wikileaks too.

I've said pretty much all of it for Sansa, and there it is mainly a matter of semantics as to whether she was foolish/ naive or stupid. I may sound stridently in the "she's dumb" camp but I happily accept she was also naive, or that it was her naivete that made her dumb. One thing I would say first for all of Jon, Dany and Cersei is that it would have worked better with the originally planned '5 year break'. We could assume that Jon/ Dany's/ Cersei's accumulated stupidity was meant to be spread over a far more believable 5 year stint rather than condensed into months. GRRM needed stuff to happen and for it to happen there had to be a lot of teh dumb occurring over a now condensed timeline and there could be commensurately fewer things that they did well. Cersei, hmm. She's probably the most interesting case actually. My presumption has always been that her POV chapters were meant to humanise her in the same way that Jaime's chapter's humanised him. You don't end up thinking that Jaime's a paragon of virtue but you understand where he is coming from, that he has a- to him- justifiable framework for his actions and that he is, in his own way at least, both honourable and misjudged. But Cersei doesn't really end up humanised because she comes across as vindictive, venal, quarrelsome, conceited and paranoid every bit as much as she did without the POV. The revelation that Aerys planned on blowing King's Landing up and barbecued Starks justifies Jaime's actions at least in that case, but the equivalent for Cersei is the revelation of The Prophecy and that just reinforces that her journey to stupidity and viciousness started early. If there's one thing that the show has done incontrovertibly better (imo, of course) than the book it's humanising Cersei. Book wise though she takes the Lannister's from pretty much uncontested to near war with former friends in a matter of months, and without any balancing successes. Possibly excluding Robert Strong but that seems... unlikely to end well, ultimately. For Dany and Jon it's a lot less clear that they're stupid because they're both in far more difficult situations than Cersei, so their mistakes are more easily justified and you'd expect them to have larger, less reversible consequences. For both though I would say that while they managed a decent balance between expediency and principle and were highly competent on their rise to power (Dany scammed the Unsullied off their masters as eg, Jon infiltrating the Wildings) their balance in power was off terribly and both were inconsistent in such a way as to maximise the dumbness, and ended up antagonising both their allies and their enemies unnecessarily. Jon in particular should have done better as he had plenty of direct leadership role models in Eddard, Mormont and even Mance he could have emulated.

She also lied about the incident on the way to King's Landing that ended up getting her direwolf and an innocent boy chopped as a result. She'd had a good look at the real Joffrey and Cersei rather than the surface appearance then, and ignored it. I'd certainly agree that she was naive/ sheltered, but imo that carries her over the line into wilfully or deliberately naive rather than just being an innocent, and that makes her stupid. GRRM has a tendency to overdo the stupidity on several characters to almost caricature level- Regent Cersei is at least as dumb as book 1 Sansa without any of her excuses and Sansa at least never thinks she's a genius while being a moron. Dany also suffers from it to a lesser extent when she's ruling, as does Jon as Lord 'forever alone' Commander.

Well yeah, book Sansa makes show Sansa look like an amalgam of all the best bits of The Prince, Littlefinger, Walsingham (historical, not forum) and Sun Tzu in comparison. She really is an utterly abject moron in the books, albeit mostly in the 1st book. Subsequent books she's just run of the mill dumb instead of elevating it to an art form. (To be fair, book wise I'm 99% sure it's Littlefinger who actually gets Ned the chop as (1) he's trying to get into Catelyn's pants (2) Ned knows LF betrayed him and (3) he's talking to Joffrey before he tells Payne to send yet another role to the great Sean Bean character farm in the sky)

Paying for influence. Is the US really carrying that many? As in the US military is there just for those nations not for any strategic interest of the US. NATO requires member nations to spend 2% of GDP on defense, only 5 meet that, the US, Greece, Estonia, Poland, and the UK. They don't need to spend as much to stay safe because the US provides so much. That's true, but also misleading. After all, if, say, Slovenia spends 2% of their GDP on the military they spend all of it in the NATO zone. If the US did the same they'd spend a significant proportion of it outside the North Atlantic zone, and everyone else at the 2% figure would be effectively subsidising the US within the NATO zone. That's the cost of having global power/ global pretentions- you have to project your force globally and that inherently costs money above and beyond local alliances and powers such as the aforementioned Slovenia.

Eh? The European refugee crisis has literally nothing to do with China, very little to do with Russia (Turkey has had their borders closed, so any extra refugees caused by Russian involvement are either internal or going to countries other than Turkey) and almost as little to do with ISIS since the population in their entire Syrian territory even with full pre war rather than 2014 populations barely passes a million. The only thing it has to do with Iran is that they support Assad; by that measure you can add Qatar, KSA, US etc as they support the rebels (and ISIS pre name change in some cases). It also ignores the biggest factor besides the existence of the civil war itself, Turkey, a nominal ally and friend of both Europe and the US, and the refugee crisis has had almost no effect on the US either. There's nothing US hard power could have done to alter things beyond the wanktastic daydreams of neocon fantasists. Now you're sounding like a Trump supporter. Not that it's a bad thing. That's a great post- and believe me, I know great posts having made so many myself. Posts like these will make the forums great again. You don't see posts like these from Crooked Bruce.

Arkane was doing a System Shock 3 (official) for EA prior to John Riccitiello becoming boss there. nuPrey is that game with the SS3 specific stuff excised in a similar way that Dishonoured = Thief - IP and Arx Fatalis = Ultima Underworld - IP. The EA SS3 eventually did see the light of day as Dead Space, which is why nuPrey looks and sounds a lot like Dead Space as well as System Shock. After the crap Bethesda pulled with Human Head I will never be enthusiastic about a Prey game while they're involved, even if it's theoretically right up my street. I'd far prefer Avellone to be working on the Otherside SS3 rather than a knock off.

Mexico is included, as is Canada. Canada is on the pictured chart 2nd from bottom, Mexico isn't as it had too few deaths (2). It's definitely not uniquely american anyway, but I'd safely say that it's disproportionately so when compared to the other OECD countries as a whole. What constitutes a rampage killing is the biggest question. Buggered if I know, despite everyone describing them as OECD Rampage Shooting Index data or similar there's no OECD page on it and the chart sourcing for the total deaths is to a now defunct page. Presumably it involves mass (well, it includes some single death incidents so go figure) gun violence which has no 'criminal' intention except for the act itself, ie cannot be because of drug cartels fighting over territory or similar but the sole criminal act has to be the commission of the mass shooting.

Except they're not. That's completely false. Mass shootings have happened and continue to happen all over the world. In fact, if you take a ratio of mass shooting deaths compared to population, the US doesn't even make the top 5 (admittedly this chart doesn't include 2014, 2015, or 2016): Yeah, nah. This is the classic statistical Outlier fudge. The issue with these sort of charts is perfectly illustrated by Norway being so high- have one incident in a small country and it will be at the top, because it's a small country not because of any intrinsic difference. At the time of the Port Arthur massacre Australia would be at the top, when Aramoana happened we'd be at the top, with Breivik Norway is at the top. That's the nature of small sample size statistics. After all, the largest incident number of any other country on the chart is 3 compared to the US's 38 and there's not a single other country there with a population larger than 82 million. Except there actually is since it's OECD members' data. To illustrate fully the complete list is here (archive link from the same source as the above chart, shows full chart minus the convenient crop) and contains all the countries including those with zero incidents. Do a full US vs non US analysis? Well, why not. 884 million people in the relevant non US OECD countries for 165 deaths. US: 227 deaths from 315 million. The comparative death ratio is 0.19 for non US to 0.72 for the US, so you're actually 3.5 times more likely to be killed in the US as elsewhere. Big 's' Significant? Asterisk that, unless you're paying me. But for sure it's a little s significant difference. (There's lies, damn lies, and statistics; to quote a phrase. And with the proviso that I'm mainly ragging on the original source, not Keyrock for posting it since his main point that mass shootings happen elsewhere is certainly true, but they are disproportionate to the US)

The saga overall certainly did, though for the sake of anyone not familiar with the it the specific thing that got him blanked from WWE was the release of the unredacted tape with his, uh, liberal use of n-bombs rather than the initial tape of him boffing his friend's wife. The unredacted tape release was never proven to be by Gawker- lucky for them, since it was under a non release order- though it seems extremely likely that it was them and was equally likely why they didn't take the initial video down, they expected him to fold under threat of the full tape's release. Hulk hasn't quite had the full Benoit treatment from WWE. Benoit will never be rehabilitated and has had pretty much the full Stalin unperson treatment, Hulk occasionally shows up in clip compilations or is mentioned in championship lists and the like and could yet return after sufficient time and a profuse apology. Jimmy Snuka is in much the same boat and even more recently than Hulk due to a historic suspicious death accusation resurfacing.

'Assault rifle' is an emotive term though, for a medium to high calibre weapon that has an automatic, military, equivalent. A semi auto 'assault rifle' is functionally identical to a semi auto hunting rifle in everything except look and (in the US at least, and iirc) magazine size. We have far stronger gun control laws here but I could, theoretically, walk into a gun store and buy an AR-15/ AK-74/ SKS/ FN FAL. I'd only do it if I needed to control pigs or deer as the idea of trying to shoot them with a .22 is both moronic and barbaric and I'd get a proper hunting rifle, but functionally that FN FAL 'assault rifle' would be exactly the same as a .308 'hunting rifle'.

Snowden may not be the best source but he's certainly qualified enough to comment as a technical specialist. He's certainly not a great source for the procedural aspects of the Hillary server saga, such as whether the server itself was legal or not or any data preservation law breaches, but he's equally certainly qualified to say whether it was secure and whether it could reasonably be expected that it would have been compromised. There is some question of his objectivity with respect to Hillary though, I'd definitely admit that.