Zoraptor

To be honest I've always found it rather odd that the term for a lesser accident is 'bent spear'. A broken arrow isn't really a big deal since your bow is still fine and you probably have lots of other arrows and can recycle the fletching and arrowhead- but with a bent spear you're a lot less likely to be carrying spares and the consequences are likely to be a lot more serious. Should really be the other way around.

42 broken arrows to 1982, from a non wikipedia book source I had handy. Difference being this is through among the world's busiest airspace, not responding to civilian ATC, transponders off so they wouldn't have shown up on TCAS, with aircraft probably equipped with nuclear warheads, flown by pilots and aircrew who meet the bare minimum flight hours to qualified aviators, and the airframes not being the most well-maintained in the world. A recipe for a disaster with casualties potentially in the thousands. I'd be interested to know if any of the US/ West's equivalent flights have transponders on since that rather defeats the purpose of them- certainly in the 2001 incident the claim was that they should be visible on radar 'because of all their dishes and antennae', not because they had their transponder on. Cannot say I'm particularly impressed by the rest as setting a case for Russian behaviour being exceptional either. At least two 'western' fighters have crashed recently due to mechanical issues (albeit the Jordanian one may actually have been shot down but the official story is mechanical trouble) and anything involving nukes has a potential for casualties in the thousands. Mainly though, suggesting that someone else shouldn't do what we do because, basically, they cannot be trusted and their equipment is crap is not going to be taken very seriously by them and may actually encourage more incidents.

Collisions do happen, certainly. Meh, it's all just one of those things where if it's the Russians doing stuff it is "grossly irresponsible aggression!" but if we do it it's "legitimate flights in international airspace being harassed!".

Yep, impossible to say really. The proxy war between Qatar and Saudi Arabia has stuffed things up for Syria every bit as much as the proxy war between the west and their allies and Russia/ Iran has so the rebels would almost certainly be more united with a bit less ideologically based 'support' from some of their 'friends'. Then again, with too little help they'd just get steamrollered, and with even more help you might have Assad gone but you'd just have Libya 2.0, quite possibly with ISIS or Al Qaederia with their capitals in Damascus and Aleppo.

Yeah, going to back this. First one since Outcast (which failed) I'm definitely backing. Won't necessarily be expecting UU3, I'd be more than happy enough with something like Arx Fatalis 2.

This is not necessarily a bad way of doing things- there are circumstances where it makes perfect sense. It is treated more like a 'karma' system from Fallout only instead of opening up conversations or whatever with good/ bad guys it means that you can intimidate or persuade because of your reputation for ruthlessness or integrity- which does make sense. ME3 is potentially somewhat better, since it has a generic 'reputation' as well, though whether it actually does anything I don't know. There's also questions such as whether it actually makes sense for- as an example- the big DS/ LS decision in Kotor to be a fully free one; and that in a game where you got very large benefits for going full one side or other philosophically. Does it make any sense really for a full DS guy to go LS or vice versa on a purely arbitrary basis, or would it be better gated through the meter mechanic... Obviously player agency should be key and railroading is bad, but it also doesn't make a lick of sense for someone to swap their philosophy around like it is possible to do, especially for a DS guy. You cannot satisfy everyone there.

In particular reusing the letters in the additional part (O, S, R) identically is pretty half hearted. Even something like that final E is better, it's clearly copied from the E at the end of 'TIME' but at least it isn't identically copied and reused. You generally cannot be sure from a cursory examination- it is after all possible that whoever was uploading the photo was just being kind to anyone stuck on 2400 baud modem and wanted to post a horrendously jpegged image so their load times would be reduced- but it is frequently possible to get a 'hmm' reaction just from a cursory examination. In this case: 1) Low res, high artefact for no good reason 2) The writing looks odd, even on a quick look 3) (meta) It's similar to the very often manipulated and memetic 'behead those who insult [extra text]' muslim demonstration placard, if you've ever seen them 4) (meta) The subject is a controversial one, some people will want to make a 'point' out of it The human eye is actually pretty good at picking up inconsistencies, even if a lot of it is just of the 'odd feeling' type- albeit such pattern recognition also has false positives such as a tendency to see faces and the like in toast/ clouds and other random patterns.

Pic is manipulated. And not manipulated very well either. They get some points for using horrible jpeg compression* to reduce the quality and hide the manipulation artefacts under jpg artefacts** but that reduction in quality is itself an indicator of trying to hide manipulation- there's no way the picture was taken on a 2000 era cell phone. Overall, anyone believing it was accurate should put some points into skepticism next time they level up. *plus a local blur effect most probably since the background quality isn't any where near as bad as the foreground **Yo dawg, Xzibit.jpg etc

Well, I could believe that they were all hanging back in specialist rear echelon positions (running artillery and the like) or only used as shock troops when absolutely necessary if the rest of the propaganda surrounding it wasn't quite so ridiculous. I've seen apparently serious claims for 4000 (!) dead russians from places like euromaiodenpr and kyivpost- in a conflict that supposedly has killed just over 5000 people total and in which apparently 2% of those captured by Ukraine have been of Russian nationality; if the figures on wikipedia are accurate that's about 40 Russian nationals, total, captured for those 4000 killed. And that's out of what is persistently claimed to be up to 10,000 Russian troops, out of the claimed 15-20k total rebel troops- rebel troops that are supposedly outnumbered more than 2:1 by UA troops... Plus of course the repeated misidentification of equipment as being exclusively Russian which isn't by 'experts' who should know better. Basically none of it makes a great deal of sense unless seen as a hodge podge of PR positions each taken to support whatever the subject du jour is.

Dunno about best slapdown but it'd be close to most ironic. Also, old and posted before, though it does make a nice break from pro Donbass propaganda. Going by that all the Russians have to do is stick all their military hardware into Kaliningrad to achieve complete surprise in any fight with NATO. I'd hope there are a few people in NATO more aware of what is and isn't Russia than whoever runs Canada's twitter feed, if you're going to be all snidey about geography you really need to be accurate yourself and not do something that would get you a big fat zero in even a school level test. Plus, of course, the only actual Russian soldiers we've seen captured are still the ones who quite probably did blunder into Ukraine accidentally, since they surrendered without a fight- Ukraine has been singularly useless in actually producing any others- lots of talk, but Russian soldiers might as well be UFOs for as much as they've actually appeared- so they're either losing so badly they aren't getting captives or there are at best far fewer there than Poroshenko/ NATO claim. And there's some odd blob just east of Montenegro on their map too, hope someone hasn't gone around splitting bits off of countries without their permission or anything like that, I'm told that's Really Naughty.

Yeah, I think if I were to sum it up it would be all about the implementation. Something like HDR is a 'real' visual effect and should make things more realistic, but its usage in games tends to be so over exaggerated that it often makes things look less realistic. I'm not really sure about normal and bump mapping not so much because they don't (generally) improve things but because I'm not sure whether I'd class them as being trivial or not. The 'intermediate' step of something like full colour per pixel transparency/ alpha channel tgas (as opposed to something like pallettised gifs with 0 entry full transparency) or equivalent I'd certainly take as trivial. Completely agree about animations though. At least the more ridiculous early ragdoll problems such as in Deus Ex: Invisible War have largely been fixed. The other areas I'd cite is audio occlusion and the like, bitrates and the like go up but implementation and 'realism' wise something like Thief 2 is still superior to most recent stuff, certainly including Thiaf- and AI, albeit that in particular is a very difficult area where huge amounts of effort could be expended for little practical benefit.

Probably more appropriate here than in 'what you're playing', so I'm shifting it here. Ignorance. Lol. Could just be a difference of opinion, y'know. I clearly don't hate old graphics so long as they do the job, after all. No, I think most of those are trivial, or if you prefer a synonym for trivial: 'simple'. Much like colour depth and resolution- I clearly wasn't making an exhaustive list there. Indeed, of those I'd definitely say that dynamic lighting and antialiasing are trivial; as is the move to 3d and higher poly models since they are inevitable improvements as much as are resolution and colour depth. SSAO in particular I'd already dealt with, every time I've seen it all it does is stick an unrealistic dark outline around stuff. Can't speak for anyone else but to me that isn't realistic in the slightest. And sadly, when I think of bump/ normal mapping I end up thinking of things like the Bioshocks where they were used to make models that were decent enough technically look like some sort of dampened plasticene caricatures, more technical wizardry but also far less visually realistic even than plain old 'flat' but hi res textures. Frankly the most realistic graphics- ie graphics that most closely resemble what I see in real life- in games that I've seen are still probably from Stalker, albeit Stalker with some custom shaders. Other games like TWitcher 2 have better graphics, but the insistence on having lashings of effects for the sake of it all too often does not actually make it more realistic, often it just makes it less realistic but more complicated and more taxing on hardware. Though of course, no doubt there are effects that do work and I don't really notice because they're properly understated.

Sadly, Mugabe has better democratic credentials than many African leaders- you just don't tend to hear about most of them until they get overthrown because they tend to not rock the boat vis-a-vis western economic interests. That's why you only hear about Burkina Faso's French supported dictator when he runs away on a french helicopter just in front of the mob he'd been oppressing for decades, or never hear much at all about dictators in places like Equatorial Guinea who have been fleecing their countries of oil wealth while their people live in poverty. Mugabe on the other hand has very much rocked the boat on western interests so you do hear about him. Previous recent heads of the AU include Ghaddafi albeit when he was a nice pro west guy, said president of Equatorial Guinea, and the leader immediate previous to Mugabe was installed by military coup... Don't get me wrong, Mugabe's no true democrat and has sacrificed being remembered as a genuine freedom fighter and father of his nation on the altar of cronyism, corruption and a desperate need to maintain control and power. It would just be nice if the Beeb etc applied those criteria evenly instead of only ever against people the west doesn't like for other reasons than their democratic credentials.

For graphics whatever works, works. I find it far more important that there is a consistent art direction and style than any specific technical criteria. I'd tend to have three classifications: good, OK and badly implemented. Something like Fallout 1 would be OK as an example, it wasn't very technically advanced even when released but it does the job, sets the scene consistently and has no really jarring problems that break immersion. Something like TWitcher 2 would be good because it does what Fallout does but looks better, while something like Oblivion- despite having many technical advancements over, say, Fallout- would be badly implemented because it had numerous issues that broke immersion such as the poor hdr/ bloom implementation, massive LOD/ texture pop issues etc that always said 'this is a game you are playing, do not forget it' In the context of a pseudo European forest I'd agree, I've never seen a Euro forest of that type either live or in pictures, but it is quite similar to the sort of subtropical forest you get here or in Australia. Enough so that I would think it was based on that rather than the more well known tropical rainforests.

I actually have difficulty thinking of a single* 'graphical realism' effect that consistently makes graphics look more realistic beyond the trivial ones like better resolution/ colour depth. Bloom/ hdr all too often ends up with people looking like they've been living in the Chernobyl Sarcophagus/ been smeared in vaseline or has objects that are quite matte in reality that shine like a localised supernova if there's so much as a candle nearby; SSAO puts weird black outlines around everything and lens flare is used in situations where it shouldn't occur at all and in a manner that would shame JJ Abrams. And motion blur... well yeah, not exactly what I experience in real life, albeit my eyes are pretty borked. No doubt there are effects that do work and I don't really notice because they're properly understated, but yeah, it really does seem like the programmers and artists doing video games really do want to make sure you notice all their effort rather more than they want their effort to give a realistic visual result. *Fog and weather usually seems to be OK, but even then there have been some rather prominent overdone examples.

In significant numbers, yes. I'm perfectly willing to accept that there were more FSA chaps there than Rohirrim, just not significantly more. Reason is, the YPG and FSA don't like each other much. The FSA sees the YPG as barely better than collaborators with Assad as they have barely fought Assad at all since he (pragmatically) withdrew his troops from most of Syrian Kurdistan, they don't have particularly compatible aims as the FSA is explicitly anti Assad while the YPG is pro Kurd and anti anyone (including the FSA since they want territorial integrity) who opposes that, and perhaps most significantly the YPG remembers how a large number of 'FSA' people became ISIS people as soon as they became the most well armed and successful group.

I don't have any particular problem with the article in general, as the FSA stuff is minor and I haven't looked at the other stuff in any depth. But it is another example of the so very easily exploitable reference rules which allow incorrect, non independently confirmed or biased information into an article so long as it has a citeable source- rules which are open to everything from simple mistakes to gross and deliberate manipulation as a result. Whether there is any way of actually fixing that which isn't worse than the current situation, well, I cannot readily think of one except the rather specious one of having unbiased and critical editors- realistically I know perfectly well that my idea of unbiased will clash with other people's even with perfect good faith by all parties.

There is no back pedalling, there cannot be any back pedalling (for a year, at least), the decision is final, the votes are counted, the fat lady is sitting back down having a Gin & Tonic while letting her vocal cords rest, the janitor is picking up the empty popcorn containers: it is over*. In any case Ryulong self ejected before the ban was official- his attempt to get the Adland article deleted was probably a pre emptive kamikaze once he saw which way the wind was blowing and his user page now has the same message that NBSBaranof put on his. *Which may not stop people from trying to re-litigate it, but under wiki rules it's a final decision by their equivalent of a Supreme Court.

The wikipedia article is, well, rubbish when it comes to FSA involvement. It cites Facebook (!) and otherwise every single source for FSA involvement resolves to being an FSA one thus not independent and with a vested interest in over exaggerating any contribution made by them. Which is of course one of the primary problems with wikipedia, their main concern is getting citations from trusted secondary sources not getting unbiased or accurate information so for them 'CNN quotes FSA leader as saying they have a millionty billionty soldiers in Kobane' is an accurate source because it comes from CNN- not because there actually were a millionty billionty FSA guys there. At least the graphic used YPG pennants for the areas captured, but there really isn't any justification in using the FSA one beyond PR.

They've published the final decision and he's gone. The main anti-GG arb member even voted to ban in the end probably due to him trying to get a moderately GG related page deleted. Pretty sure it always had a right to appeal after a year clause and that has not changed, but they are otherwise permanent bans:

It doesn't set one. The pilot is a legit pow and was captured legitimately, he isn't a kidnapped civilian. Doing a swap for a kidnapped civilian encourages more kidnapping, doing a swap for a pow encourages them to take prisoners rather than line any captured combatants up in the desert and execute them, as was their prior modus operandi.

EA's quarterly report has DAI being the most successful launch of a Bioware game ever. So congrats Bioware, I guess.

The something else being Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, not Advanced. I suspect that Bruce is getting a kick out of everyone parroting his (no doubt deliberate) mislabelling as if it were accurate.

Ryulong has been saying pretty much exactly the same thing in multiple sympathetic places- someone fast tracked his membership onto neogaf and of course he's been sponsored by/ posting on 'ghazi for a while. His and NBSBaranof's reactions illustrate almost perfectly why they shouldn't be editing something that is supposedly a dispassionate encyclopaedia, the level of emotional involvement is too high by far. And of course if they weren't so emotionally involved they wouldn't have edit warred and ended up banned in the first place.

Shame we don't have the Sexy Men thread still active, else I could post those pictures of Sting as Feyd Ruatha in his ludicrous posing pouch. Instead I'll just link to a google image search with a mild nsfw warning: budgie smugglers detected. (I say posing pouch/ budgie smugglers, but groinal batarang is probably a better description).