Zoraptor

The whole thing is utter madness. I never thought I would have sympathy with Tony Abbot of all people, he's a terrible human being, but the Euro response is an utterly unmitigated disaster waiting to happen and which will actively encourage massive migration not of refugees but of anyone who can half way plausibly claim to be Syrian and will actively exacerbate the problem rather than help. It isn't merely likely that there will be ISIS infiltrators there under these circumstances, it is completely inevitable and it isn't just likely that there will be a swarm of economic migrants rather than refugees in this situation it too is inevitable. For all the utterly stupid crap that Europe has pulled in the middle east they don't owe millions of people anything- except the Libyans whose country they so blithely crapped on with the worst combination of naivité/ political based stupidity since Iraq2003 at least, but they make up a tiny proportion of the refugees. The current approach is the complete opposite of the Australian approach, while that is devoid of humanity but highly effective this has only 'humanity' without even an iota of effectiveness. And anyone who does anything to mitigate things gets criticism. I loathe the Australian system with its extranational concentration camps and guards there who will, literally, be thrown in jail if they talk about said camps but if anything the Euro approach is actually worse.

Fundamentally, Breitbart is no friend of gamers and never has been. They've got a particular political slant which sees them dislike the sjw press on philosophical grounds, and as competitors. The main common ground with gamers is a common enemy, not common views in general.

Yes, very brave that a woman on her third marriage with children born out of wedlock while married to another man stands up for the sanctity of marriage because as she states she will be damned to hell if she doesn't. If there was such a thing, her seat would have been reserved a long time ago. If this is who you respect for taking a stand... I thought it was married #1, had baby with yet to be #2, divorced #1, married #2, divorced #2, married #3, divorced #3, remarried #2. In which case it at least wouldn't be an out of wedlock birth from (yet) another man but from one she actually married, albeit belatedly and not the man to whom she was married at the time. And who she then divorced and remarried with another bloke in between, but what's one more conjugal contortion to that list. Of course I may be misremembering as it's nowhere near as catchy and easy to remember as "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived" even if it's technically less to remember. Still, she's about as appropriate a source as Henry VIII for lecturing others on the sanctity of marriage. Then again I've always disliked the combination/ conflation of secular and religious marriage, I'd far prefer every marriage as they're called now was a civil union and if you were religious you could combine it with a religious ceremony if you wanted.

Fig badge? It would have to be a Fig Leaf, surely. Especially if there's going to have an Adam involved.

16x8088 overclocked to 4.4 Thz (liquid helium cooled) and 128 TNT2 cards run in parallel is my current set up. Or might as well be. While I've done upgrades the heart of my computer is nine years old in October, it could play TWitcher2 OK but the only response I'd get if I tried 3 on it would be "mate, you're dreaming" and melted components. It'd be like raiding a rest home to get workers for a 19th century coal mine.

TW3 is on sale for 30% off at GOG for the next week. Though I'm still a month of two off having a computer to play it on...

It isn't wholly an old testament thing, Paul is the main new testament justification for anti gay christianity. Though it is, of course, questionable as to whether his word trumps all of Jesus's "Do unto others"/ "Turn the other cheek"/ "Love one another as I have loved you"/ "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" type stuff. That's the thing really, people will use stuff in the OT (mainly) and NT to justify their views, historically most christian atrocities were couched as 'saving the souls' of those being force converted/ killed and it really hasn't shifted much from there in some people's minds. They either decide that Jesus was basically a hippy making things to aim for rather than live for, or decide that he just didn't intend [group name] to be included in his blanket statements.

The jet pictured is probably a MiG-29, not a Su-34. Impossible to be sure from a low res photo, but Syria actually has MiG 29s and has had them for a long time so logic dictates they're Mig 29s unless there's compelling evidence otherwise, which a low res image sourced from Al Qaeda really isn't. Indeed, from that picture alone it could be an F-15 about as much as a Su34 or a Mig29. It also seems unlikely on several other levels as there are very few Su34s, full stop. Their existing planes can carry out highly effective precision strikes when give the opportunity to, such as when they hit an Ahrar ash Sham ('Al Nusra lite') leadership meeting and killed most of their leaders last year. Drones seem pretty likely though, and general military supplies are pretty much a given.

They're not really a feminist website either, they're more a straight clickbait website like all the other Gawker sites. Which is actually a fairly important distinction if you consider them to be trolling for views, one of the more important/ frequent trolling techniques is to be 'accidentally' inconsistent so as to get a reaction by being called on it and that is something Gawker sites do with great frequency. That was oddly appropriate, given that it was **** Cheney and he's about as much of a cartoon villain as you can get. And you can always write stuff like 'Richard Cheney thinks that Joe Biden should join Democrat race' if you need to.

I updated Windows for my dad (well, rescued the WinX installation; he had 1.5GB of space on his root drive, and he's supposed to be fairly tech savvy...) and found the number of 'would you like to send Microsoft your entire hard disk?'/ 'OK, just most of your hard disk' type settings to be outright funny considering that I know most people will just go for the default 'oh, your hard drive and all your keystrokes, friends, online information, fingerprints plus DNA sample, sounds good!'. I am surprised that MS hasn't done it previous- Google, Apple etc have been doing it for ages- and it's pretty much inevitable considering how much the typical tablet/ phone user gives away for free and their degree of lock in and walled gardening. Better back Linux it's the coming thing let's all switch just like we've all switched every year for the past decade or so.

Throw Fiddy Cent in there, we could have the first case of VP assassinating actual P. Or maybe Ice Cube. Then in 15 years time we can have updated lyrics for 'Today was a good day' and a 'Straight out of Washington' biopic.

Scrubs is one of the few US comedies that I genuinely liked, but I may be in the minority there. After all, "No Scrubs" was a #1 hit for TLC so a fair number of people clearly hated it.

I played both games with a USB/ game port converter on an old MS Sidewinder joystick and that at least was fine in terms of reliability and control fidelity. Definitely needed some keyboard input as well though.

I'm not Keyrock, but they're both worth buying. The first in particular is hard and both use 'proper' physics rather than the arcade physics you get in something like Wing Commander though the 2nd is a lot more forgiving in that respect, and you need a decent joystick for both. They both still look great as well.

The Guardian has increasingly become dominated by opinion pieces from what I can tell. Perhaps I'm being uncharitable, but I find most opinion pieces to not be worth reading. Their actual news is still mostly the same as it was, their 'lifsetyle' and 'tceh' sections have become infested with sjw doupleplusgoodthink though. Those get a lot of hits from the pro/ anti sides as examples of doubleplusgood/ doubleplusungood think as opposed to who will be Ed Milliband's replacement or Boris Johnson's latest zany antics. An ombudsman? Good luck getting a supra-national ombudsman going, as that is what would be needed- especially for games journalism. And most bloggers and the like can hide behind 'opinion' and being Schrodinger's Journalists- if they want embiggening they're journalists, if they want to hide from consequences they're bloggers or just stating an opinion with their free speech rights. Unfortunately good journalism doesn't sell as well as bad journalism does, hence used toilet paper like the Daily Fail or The Scum being the highest selling brit papers. It's not surprising that most media is following their example, it's cheap and easy and financially viable to write sensationalist tripe, actual journalism is hard and may piss off powerful people to boot. I'm charitable guy, just the other day I gave some Belgians panhandling on the internet some spare change. And you never know, something eventually may come from CON, apart from dropping to lower case.

More than one million activations/ purchases on GOG was mentioned, so that suggests around two million PC sales total at a rough estimate. That's about the same proportion as when it was 1.3 million PC out of 4 million total in their previous estimate.

Though that was not really an altruistic act to help the victims per se, it was largely done to stop false flags and 3rd party trolls who'd drop in with "[person] needs to die!!! #Trump2016 #Gamergate #ISroolz" on their burner accounts. The Sarkeesian bomb threat one was certainly more than significant than simply a 3rd party troll on a burner account though, since it explained why the police didn't take the threat seriously as well and it wasn't a burner account either, but most have been. And to be scrupulously fair I suspect that some people would point to the GGautoblocker and CON or whatever it's called as examples of prominent antiGG people getting off their butts to do something even if I would regard them more as donation trolling with little actual utility.

Interesting article here on the rights issues surrounding the Gold Box/ SSI D&D games recently released on GOG. No mention of the unreleased classic D&D games there that I can see like the Dark Sun games or Stone Prophet but it seems that the ownership rights were with a pretty random company who did sell them outright to GOG, so they are probably coming at a later date. Will be interesting to see if Bethesda does release any of their later games. Oblivion and FO3 were both effectively drm free on disk release already- so long as you avoided the launcher but it would be pretty nifty to get a DRM free Dishonoured or FONV eventually.

Arguably monkeying around with your currency is a sign of maturity because you can only really do it successfully (well, with minimal problems) if you're big enough to get away with it since no one really wants a confidence crisis in an important currency. That doesn't really look like it's what Gorth was saying though, I'd presume he was more meaning that China's perpetual growth cycle had to end at some point- China has been manipulating its currency basically forever, it has never properly floated in recent history because they think it would ruin their international competitiveness and they don't have enough of a domestic market to support their industries. Basically, they're worried about becoming Japan 2.0 and going from remarkable sustained growth to stagflation and atrophy. That's been the death of many governments in Japan, for obvious reasons the Communist Party doesn't want that for China. They haven't been quite as bad in their currency manipulation as the US has suggested, but they've been pretty bad at it. To an extent it is also responsible for their problems as as with many other of the manipulations in China's economy it has lead to some pretty significant artificial/ bubble growth in the manufacturing sector which has contributed to their stock market's artificial bubble. It's not like China is the only one doing it either, both the US and Europe have and are generating a lot of magic money from money printing and super low interest rates which immediately looks for a return in property (hence the ludicrous bubbles in many cities eg houses being sold four times in three months, with 33% appreciation...) or the stock market. It's supposed- kind of, at least- to contribute to more 'real world' 'productive' investment instead of 'theoretical' stuff, but the theoretical stuff has a far larger return so that's where most of the money goes whether it be China or anywhere else.

They're almost certainly using Ubisoft's in house 2d engine rather than Onyx. The look of the engine is the look of the TV series and that isn't difficult to mimic since they have the base resources from the TV series available, as well as any graphics resources Obsidian developed. Ubisoft does have a pretty good 2d engine- used for Child of Light and a Rayman game plus a supposed forthcoming PoP title- of their own available, there's no reason they'd licence Onyx as it would be unnecessary expense.

Everybody's TPP strategy is to keep it on the down low. The current security situation for reading it is not that far off viewing top secret material- no recording or electronic devices, no note taking, very limited number of people able to view it even under those conditions. That seems to be entirely about being able to waffle vaguely about it being 'transparent' and 'beneficial' with a perfect excuse for being vague about how plus claim it won't have negatives; and to shut down questioning since there's no detail. From what has been leaked of the text it's perfectly clear it has little if anything to do with 'free trade' that's for sure, but for joe public reading even the bits that have been leaked requires a visit to wikileaks.

Selling on your own website also has discoverability issues, whatever system is being used. Even in a theoretic 'flat' system where you start off without a steam/ itunes/ amazon or whatever you still have dozens/ hundreds/ thousands of potential vendors and little meaningful method of sorting them short of a self reinforcing and gameable popularity type sorting method which is likely to lead to the system we have now one way or another. You're still going to end up with some sort of skewed system because information sorting is an inherently hierarchical process- else it wouldn't be sorting- and people are not pure economic animals seeking the best mutual deal, many will settle for a decent deal/ product which is convenient over a better one that takes more effort to find.

Everybody who says that would be wrong. Theoretically near every economic system is 'fair and free' because that is what sells it to the masses who, whatever the system, will inevitably be the ones at the bottom. Yes, this is the silly argument that socialists would have to make in order to "say exactly the same thing" about socialism, but no, it's not the argument I'm making. Well.. we'll see. Frankly, I am expecting as idealised a system as 'perfect' socialism or any other kind of theoretical -ism but I'm open to persuasion. Well, I've seen, and I'm not persuaded. It's about as idealised a system as it's possible to get; where the magic hand of the market waves and everything is fair and free with no barriers, no conmen, no power aggregation or monopolies created and the glories of hard work and reticence are rewarded as they so richly deserve and laziness and profligacy are righteously punished. It's pretty much the exact (economic) flip side of anarcho marxism or anarcho syndicalism where it's easy to design a perfectly (theoretically) free and fair socialist system by hand waving- everybody gets an equal slice of the pie doled out monthly/ weekly and is free to spend that pie however they want with strict rules to prevent aggregation or graft; and enforcement officials who can only be elected once or are balloted. Couldn't get more hand waving in a Queen Liz montage- for either idealised system.

Plus socialists would say exactly the same thing (to all practical purposes) about socialism. My ideal system would be so good that no repression would be needed, everybody would be so ecstatic about living in my [econo-societal model] utopia there would be no dissenters and everyone would freely opt in to its intrinsic awesomeness!

Some interesting stats on steam usage and the PC game market via steamspy and the dude who runs its blog. eg only 1.3 million 'core' gamers on steam own 33% of all games there (107+ games); 80% of steam users own four or less games... Though I do suspect that this is one case in which steamspy's methodology breaks down at least somewhat, I'd strongly suspect that 'core' gamers and those with more games are far more likely to set their profile to private (which steamspy cannot see so don't get counted in the stats) than to public, and the stats are skewed towards more casual users as a result.