Zoraptor

Most likely Atenism/ Judaism/ Zoroastrianism shared a similar religious 'trope' as a base. I like the Atenism theory for the simple reason that it annoys religious extremists; they're all fundamentally unprovable theories anyway. As for Joseph building a pyramid, it is more plausible. Problem really is that the only credible historic candidate would be Imhotep, and that mostly because you can hand wave his name to I(m)otef, he doesn't really fit anything else about Joseph. That's clearly well into simple belief- and not mainstream belief given most seem to put Joseph well into the 2nd millennium BC rather than 3rd- territory though, it's not exactly got evidence backing it up beyond that. If anything it's more likely that stories of Joseph building pyramids are borrowed from Imhotep's legacy with there being no link except the naming similarity.

Presumably he rugby style tackled the guy. That makes a huge difference because a lot of the explosive force and shrapnel from his belt is then forced into the ground and the blast radius is thus heavily reduced. And of course the tackler ends up soaking up a lot of the remaining force too, sadly. If you're close enough to tackle him you're likely dead either way, so might as well give the terrorist the middle finger and save others. Strangely enough the first thing I thought about when reading about that guy (couple of days ago) was Frank Burns in MASH jumping on a deactivated grenade that someone dropped as a prank.

Yeah, SS3 is just an idea for some day and there's basically nothing known about the remake. At this point it's little better than a fan remake/ bare bones Kick (hoho) starter in terms of all the really important information. They've got the concept artist and some sort of 'would be nice' commitment from the Brosii (and Terri Brosius has done some extra voice overs for ND before), but nothing on the really important technical aspects that make these things actually work like engines or coders. They have just about literally no experience with coding and the like, their prior efforts have been almost exclusively lifted from fans/ mods- New Dark for SS2 and Malba Tahan integrating stuff for the SS1 re-release. They're a lot closer to 2015 Interplay than, say, Larian or InXile. The talk now is likely to drum up interest more than anything. Having said that, I personally wouldn't be surprised at all if they did a console remake of SS2 if they do do a PC&console remake of SS1. SS2 is a legit big seller (~1.5 million) at this point.

And sadly neither does Grommy. Still getting an E for reading comprehension I see. Though in this case it is probably deliberate malice rather than mere foolishness and your imagination writing cheques reality won't cash. As you can see, one main point (1) and three subsidiaries from that first point of which being embarrassed by Russia is one. If you don't think that's a factor then fair dos, but you're wrong. Now, since some may actually gain from the illustration... Even prior to the intervention the US had dialled back on the rhetoric and were saying that Assad could stay in a transitional role, they were already setting the scene for their policy change, the US trained rebels (Division 30) had already handed weapons over to Al Nusra and been disbanded, and the sole passably moderate major rebel group in the Southern Front had already failed in their big offensive. The US simply could not be peeved about losing their influence over Syria to Russia, the alternative thing they might be annoyed about, as they didn't have any influence to lose. From a geopolitical perspective all the intervention did was reinforce/ illustrate the already existing facts on the ground that the US had no meaningful influence and their policy had been a litany of half baked mutually contradictory failures such as kind of backing the Kurds in Syria, but not enough to offend Turkey- and with the big proviso that the Kurds are mainly interested in Kurdish areas, not marching on Raqqa or Damascus. Meanwhile, regional US allies were blithely supporting the big players in the rebels, Al Nusra/ Ahrar ash Sham/ Army of Islam etc much as they had blithely supported proto ISIS earlier, and none of those groups are even remotely pro US and cannot be spun as pro US, and the US knows that. Simply put, the US can only be genuinely annoyed at the embarrassment of Russian intervention because they had no influence remaining to lose.

Assad was always going to be included once Russia intervened, the recent significant victories on the ground and accelerated defections from the small remaining actual moderate opposition has just ensured that people are talking about it now, rather than next year. The US wasn't really annoyed about Russia intervening per se since their favoured proxies were almost exclusively outright embarrassments already- it's all about dialling back the expectations and making their policy not look like a hapless clusterasterisk at this point while trying to make sure Russia gets no credit. Russian intervention was the no-clothes-on-emperor moment for western Syrian policy and the US wanted time to at least get a posing pouch on before the illusion went. OTOH the Russian intervention sent the Gulf and Turkey into a splenetic rage since they've committed far more than the US both in rhetoric and in practicality. Realistically sanctions would last until the west needed Russia again, and that's that. Ukraine simply ain't important enough to anyone in Europe except Poland/ Balts and opportune jingoists like Cameron/ Hammond. They're important enough to get a response, but not important enough to maintain it. This kind of hyperbole will be paid for in blood, though probably no terrorist would bother with Slovakia. I'm guessing you've never lived under communism. He said he lived under communism. Not sure how you could have missed it. Really though, it's deeply ironic that someone who uses 'Obola' unironically wants Obola's NSA mates to have free reign to sniff his undies in order to protect him from terrorists. Pretty sure Jefferson had something relevant to say there. Hint: a Russian has quoted it to you...

Thinking pyramids were granaries is demonstrably wrong for two reasons- they indeed only have small empty spaces, and they can only have small empty places. As the 'bent' pyramid shows they didn't have much engineering wiggle room for the empty, massive chambers a granary would necessitate. The other bizarre assertion was that Joseph built them. I can only imagine how he'd respond if anyone suggested the (actually quite plausible) theory that Judaism and hence Christianity were descended from Egyptian Atenism, albeit around a thousand years after the pyramids were built. The odd bizarre belief doesn't really mean you wouldn't be a good president, though sticking with a bizarre belief in the light of proof to the contrary might. And at least it's a harmless belief.

It's actually ironic that for all the fear about Caliphates when they did exist the areas they ruled were ruled far more moderately than now, and for most of their time far more moderate than christians were at the same times. Historically, Caliphs of the 'Ibrahim'/ al-Baghdadi type have been a rare aberration. It's also rather ironic that while islam had both temporal and spiritual power, unlike christianity, the largest sect largely lacks any actual power structures similar to Patriarchies or Popes within itself. At least with shia islam you have somewhat more of a hierarchy, with sunni islam when lacking a Caliph it's pretty much open season on interpretation and seniority with a very few exceptions. So yeah, Islam could actually do with a Caliph or a 'Pope' so long as it were the right person, as it is it is far too easy for some nutbar to persuade others that their view is right, especially since so much of the Koran was written during what was a particularly vicious war and thus open to (il)liberal interpretation.

Woah, what? Did they really say that? To be fair, it's a lot better on page 2 which I didn't initially read because p1 is mostly Alec Meer (who hates Twitchers for some reason, b00bies in the prologue of TW2 maybe?) waxing lyrical about F4 and producing gems like: It would probably be more accurate to say that Meer made me lol rather than Adam Smith especially or even John Walker/ RPS in general in this particular case since Smith calls Meer on the above and Walker calls him on the dialogue/ story. I read RPS still mostly for Tim Stone, who is indisputably great.

I've noticed a trend towards at least mentioning the problems, they just dismiss them as not being important or not detracting from the experience- "everyone knows that Bethesda plots are a bit dumb, but you don't buy it for that, do you?" type statements. I had to lol (literally, for once) when RPS managed to make F4 sound like it had better graphics, worldbuilding and simulation than Twitcher3 because somehow F4 was 'convincing' or somesuch while TW3 somehow wasn't.

This will probably be a bit disorganised, but meh. When it comes to refugees there are two main facets- the refugees themselves, and the (European) response to them. The specific problem is not with the refugees themselves, unless you're as empathetic as a slab of concrete everyone can understand why a refugee would want to come to Europe and accept that the civil war in Syria is a legitimate reason to flee the country. The problem is the disorganisation of the response, leaving the problem with Syria's neighbours for so long, the sheer number of refugees and especially the number of non refugees tagging along. Most of that is on the truly horrible formal response and Germany's idiotic open invitation which encouraged people smugglers and generated potentially millions of fake Syrian IDs- money for which goes either to the people smugglers or those who have captured Syrian administrative equipment, like ISIS- while functionally penalising those who went through proper channels by staying in Jordan/ Lebanon/ Turkey. Ironically, Germany and Merkel have done more to damage the EU with their open invitation than anything else, even their vassalisation of Greece. She'll be largely free of the consequences because it is Germany, not Greece, but the seriousness of the problem is largely her fault, indisputably. Having said that, it's doubtful that ISIS would have to resort to refugee infiltration, they have plenty of foreign nationals who can just go home, and especially they have plenty of support from disaffected locals, the people who go off to fight in Syria in the first place. On blaming muslims, it is about as fair as blaming christianity for David Koresh or Jim Jones. There's some beliefs there in common, but it's at very best simplistic to blame the overall group. The big irony is that ISIS themselves wouldn't even regard most muslims as actually being muslim. Not just the shia/ alawi/ ibadi and such, but also those (theoretically) very close to them in the sunni branch, if they aren't radical enough and frankly nobody is radical enough except them and their salafi/ wahhabi ex-buddies in the Gulf (who'd still be supplying them on the quiet if 'Ibrahim' hadn't gone Caliph). That's why they bring in their ludicrous laws to enforce 'sharia', because even most muslims don't follow it to their liking. In any case, all blanket labelling of all muslims does is alienate moderates, which is largely the aim of such attacks. The ISIS narrative requires oppression to generate traction amongst those oppressed and to set the scene for radicalisation. If you're making idiotic 'kill/ deport all muslim' like statements then congrats, Jihadi John and al-Baghdadi would like to pat you on the back and thank you for giving the desired response, and to quote the great philosopher Mark Henry from his retirement speech "You're all a bunch of puppets". As for what can be done to fix the problems, well, it's hard given political realities. (1) Accept that your 'friends' in the Gulf are 'friends' rather than friends (2) accept that the brand of salafi/ wahhabi thought liberally exported by KSA is anathema to western values and utterly toxic (3) rationalise the refugee process (4) stop asterisking around with regime change, you haven't got an asterisking clue what you're doing; plus see pt 1 (5) just deal with it; stop wringing your hands and wailing when people get killed by terrorism, stop jerking your knee and learn to live with it; people die every day, and in the west far more die from practically anything else than terrorism- if that's the price for freedom then be willing to pay it. Practically (1&4) won't happen because there's too much money involved and politicians are morons with delusions of competency, and (5) won't because politicians are opportunists who want excuses to accumulate power and people get irrationally scared of boogeymen more than more realistic threats.

Yep. Though the catastrophic way in which they've been handled means that it would be very easy for extremists to infiltrate Europe I'd suspect that it will be primarily or solely 2nd gen French rather than refugees, much as it was last time. There's plenty of degrees of blame to be thrown around but nobody else caused this other than those who perpetrated it. I wouldn't be surprised if some people were actually more angry at Breivik for not being muslim than for killing dozens of people. This sort of event always sends some people sociopathic, at least if you take them at their word.

Bioware Austin -> TOR, not DAI. It also fits with Lucas (Film/ Arts; the rights holders) not liking teh gayz in Star Wars at all, say what you want about EA but they certainly can't be (sensibly natch) accused of homophobia and hence the rather hacky removal of the Juhani romance a decade+ ago from kotor as well. It is a pretty stupid attitude, though it's certainly LA/ Disney's right to stipulate what they want. Though of course Bioware has indeed had transgender characters, such as the memorable Edwina Odesseiron and of course %charname% even earlier with a certain girdle.

Isn't Carson the forerunner now? Though that may be ill informed rumour, like all those Egyptologists who foolishly thought that the Pyramids were giant tombs instead of massive grain silos built by Joseph.

That is insane, what a terribly written article. Ethics in journalism indeed. Why don't you read some real articles on the issue? Print Gawker for ossified reactionaries who think every problem can be blamed on immigration and the loss of True (British) Values from True (British) People. If the Fail told me the sky was blue I'd know it was night or raining. Utter unmitigated rubbish from cover to cover. Possibly excluding the free CD/ DVDs that they have with their weekend editions, they're usually outside the covers after all. (Amazingly, The Scum is actually worse)

Either are acceptable. Posting [..] is not tolerated in these forums // [..] nonsensical posts are not tolerated in these forums. It's a grammatical oddity where there is both a collective singular term for doing multiple acts (posting) and the multiple act itself (posts) used in the same sentence. As such either the plural or singular 3rd person form of to be is fine grammatically. More on topic, you've never heard of Variety? It's pretty big in the general entertainment area, though I'm not aware of them covering games much before. Still, ignorance of no less than four previous Fallout titles- indeed, every single non Bethesda entry- that allowed character sex determination is a fairly big omission that could have been solved by, well, thirty seconds on obscure and arcane research tools like 'google' or 'wikipedia'. (Having said that it's less triggering than the use of 'Paint It Black' for CoD: Iteration++'s ads. That's Tour of Duty's music, you philistines.)

The rebels have fired a scud (not technically a scud but I can't remember what it actually was; long range though so not a grad or similar) at Latakia airport already, it just missed by a lot. Both Pantsirs and S300s can theoretically shoot scuds and other ballistic missiles down if they did come close. The Yemeni situation is a bit different since most of the formal military there is fighting the Saudi/ GCC invasion rather than supporting it, so they started out with a lot of missiles.

I believe the appropriate quote is "Do or do not, there is no try". There's stakes and goals. Catch the assassin to find out who ordered the hit, protect Padme/ find Jango, find Dooku, alert the Republic, catch Dooku. Then kill Dooku/ defend Coruscant, kill Grievous, find Sidious, save Padme and the conflicting bits at the end- Obiwan's mission is to kill the lesser Sith Lord, Yoda's to kill the master which would, theoretically at least wipe out the Sith. At that stage they had certainly already lost, but that is kind of the point. While only outright stated in the novelisation the Jedi had been fighting the wrong war against an enemy who had adapted and used their own tactics and inflexibility against them, they'd been a step behind all along and paid the price. They'd already lost because they'd already lost. TPM is the only movie in which the good guys 'win', so in that sense the stakes and goals are achieved but do that and then ESB has to be classed as a bad movie as well. The problem for all of aotc/ rots/esb in that respect is that the antagonists are the ones actually achieving their goals, not the protagonists. The protagonists are stuck responding to what the antagonists are doing, and (practically) failing in that. I didn't even like the pod race. Basically, I disliked anything that looked like it was designed solely to be used in a video game sequence. Mostly though, like the Darth Maul fight they're OK so long as you don't expect them to be logical. I'd have to watch the movies again to be sure but I thought the arena fight and most of the other Geonosis stuff was OK in aotc, the first sequence in RotS, the Windu v Sidious and Yoda v Sidious fights (especially) were good as well. That's rather difficult to answer to someone who didn't like anything about it, because there's clearly little common ground. I'd still argue that so long as you accept that Anakin was a monumentally selfish manchild rather than an actual hero it stands on its own feet as a story, but you have to accept that to enjoy it. I'd still change a lot of it, personally, but it has a coherent theme, a hero (just that it's Obiwan, not Anakin), a tragic figure (though it doesn't work as well as it should given that Anakin is an abject moron) and a well worked antagonist in Sidious/ Palpatine. In the end it doesn't duck the consequences either. Again, hard to argue when there's so little common ground. AotC would need more retooling than RotS in my mind but even there the basic strands are in place, there's a plot progression from finding the assassin to the clones to Dooku and the Trade Fed army. As prior, the dialogue desperately needed editing to something approaching what an actual human would say (also a problem in RotS, though less so) but I think you could make a good movie out of the structure/ plot of the movie. That's not something I can say about TPM, it's an illogical mess pretty much from start to stop. Meh, McDiarmid was the best actor in all three movies, hands down. Star Wars isn't Shakespeare and he embraced that fully. I've said it before but he fully realises that Sid/ Palp is a panto villain for 90% of the prequel series and plays it exactly like that. I'm loathe to criticise the actual acting in any of the movies though, anybody would struggle with Lucas dialogue and Lucas direction (faster, more intense!). It's more overt in TPM due to Jake Lloyd and frankly Neeson who I otherwise like is more wooden than my kitchen table most of the time but really, very hard to make a silk purse from a sow's ear. I doubt that's the case, except initially. I've watched all three since release and I'd go near to actively avoiding TPM but neither of the others, and it isn't just for Jar Jar. Initially I think you'd be right, and in particular I think TPM suffered also from coming after The Matrix which was a similar concept but so much better executed and so much fresher feeling. If I had to summarise why I'd say that TPM is illogical and not in a fun way, in fact I'd say it is almost entirely devoid of fun and watching it is almost entirely a chore. It's infantile, and again it's not just Jar Jar stepping in poodoo and Gungans or similar that makes it so. The dialogue is stilted, the direction uninspired to say the least, the action sequences more a showcase of CGI than anything else and Anakin is both appallingly acted/ written and relies on a ludicrous plot line to 'win'. Why is Naboo important? Why is a blockade only one ship? Why blockade at all? How can a fighter fly into a ship and blow it up like that? Midichlorians? Angels? Gack, just thinking about it makes me want to give myself a memory enema to remove the stink and suck.

Heh, S-300s apparently. If the rebels/ ISIS had an air force they'd severely crimp their style and they cannot be ignored by anyone. Next step is US deploying F-22s and S-400s turning up. (They have already had S-300s there in some of their warships)

Have to disagree there. Both aotc and rots were good movies potentially and would have been so with some moderate retooling, TPM on the other hand had so many bad ideas and implementations that you'd have to start from scratch. The problems of the latter two movies were that almost always whenever people talked and particularly whenever emotion was required- especially Anakin and Padme- it was stultifying garbage of the highest order. Lucas desperately needed a script and story editor who he would listen too and who wasn't a yes man. The general stories of both were more or less OK, but the general story of TPM was illogical and incomprehensible requiring fundamental revision as well as having the same dialogue problems. RotS I'd actually defend as being a good movie overall, despite its faults and I'd happily watch AotC again so long as I can fast forward picnicking on Naboo and suchlike. TPM... I guess there is the Maul duel, although even that is a convoluted illogical mess if you think about it.

It's definitely the official text, that website is the official NZ government ministry of foreign affairs and trade one. Might be a question as to whether it's the genuinely full text though or if there are secret clauses/ understandings still but it is meant to be the full text. Good luck with reading the whole thing.

To be fair, the Russians do already have (albeit multirole) fighters there plus SAMs around their airbase. I can't see them responding overly much to a few F15s- which is provocative but everyone does similar- in a shooting war their Syrian deployment is already outmatched by Turkey/ Israel and at least theoretically by any Jordan/ GCC combo and it would take a very large increase to change that. Which might come if ISIS really did bomb the airliner but then it wouldn't be in response to anything the US did.

Graphics only have to be functional, but part of 'functional' is not to be obviously inconsistent and to promote verisimilitude. I'm perfectly happy with low fidelity/ dated/ low poly graphics if they're consistently applied and part of the overall aesthetic. Bethesda's problem has always been that they half arse the consistency of their approach in pretty much everything. Their motions make their models look like their joints are rubberised- I half expected waifu to do the Rick Grimes meme head telescope it was so elastic- and they have some of the worst uncanny valley effect and have ever since Oblivion- look at the bloke in the background of the chargen sequence virumor posted, fine for a 2006 era game or a retro/ small budget game but a literal lol for a 100 mill AAA title. Their AI ends with people raking their carpets and staring at walls for hours or putting pots on their heads and their RPG systems are either laughably exploitable, laughably imbalanced or (lately) laughably simplified so much so that they are barely RPG any more. And the story itself... to be fair they are at least very good at general world building so people can larp their own more meaningful story. Now, I say that as someone who hasn't played a post F3 Bethesda game and has no intent to buy F4 except in a hypothetical future where it's steam free and very, very cheap- or 2nd hand for console- but those problems are the reason why I have so little interest in buying their games. More than anything it's that they don't seem to be interested in actually fixing those problems but just treat them as part of the charm/ modders will fix it. F4 probably has more budget than TWitcher 3 and the scopes are similar, it's to that that F4 has to be fairly compared. Of course comparing the two on pre release screenshots and videos which aren't from PC is potentially a can of worms but I'd be pretty confident that TW3 will be better than F4 on pretty much every single one of the above criteria.

'Captain Worf' has been a proposal for a long time, unsurprisingly Michael Dorn is the main person pushing it. It would make sense though, since he was in both TNG and DS9 plus movies he's theoretically got a lot more draw/ hook than any other practical possibility. They aren't going to get Patrick Stewart, after all.

I'd say that's a case of the other teams improving rather than the US team going backwards, at least. What teams like the US really need are regular play and a good national administration, ironically because the US is so big both are pretty difficult to implement on a low budget in contrast to somewhere smaller like Georgia and there isn't the 'national will' for want of a better term to just throw money at improvement as there is in Japan.

There are several different possibilities (and others, such as plain metal fatigue or a door failure causing explosive decompression). Of the two linked the China 611 is perhaps the most likely since the Airbus321 involved here had also had a significant tail strike incident. This analysis brought to you by multiple hours watching Air Crash Investigation/ Mayday. Analysis of the black boxes is required to actually tell. And yeah, they would say that since it exonerates them of blame.