Zoraptor

That's an interesting observation. Is it your own, or do you have a reference? Not my own, no. It actually comes from the TV programme QI, primarily, though I did try looking it up to confirm it's the sort of thing that google etc are generally poor at finding specific information on beyond supporting the basic premise. (And on rereading I should probably make sure to clarify that the Chinese did have some glass, it was just massively less sophisticated and less used than in the west)

I'd handwave much of the stuff publishers do as 'just the way it is done' because it is true. Publishers do not have any 'moral obligation' to fairness any more than department stores or supermarkets or politicians do. A publisher's obligation is to sell their product, and to do so using whatever techniques they think work and are legal. Morality only comes into it when it collides with public perception, so DMCAing bad reviews for using copyrighted material may remove the bad review but will court a huge backlash/ Streisand Effect while supporting charity or offering free upgrades is due to Good Will, not good will. Ultimately publishers are not your friend, they are not your buddy and they will exaggerate, obfuscate and spend influence to get what they want. Large corporations are basically sociopaths, they exist to make money first and foremost, everything else is window dressing. Anyone thinking different is living in fantasy land. Journalists on the other hand do have a moral obligation. The difference between a journalist and a PR agent is that a journalist is meant to look at things objectively and resist any blandishments and influences thrown their way by the PR agents- who are expected to try and influence the journalists as it's what they're paid for, as part of influencing the consumer- look at things subjectively and offer such blandishments as they can get away with. If a PR agent does that stuff they are doing their job, if a journalist falls for it or worse, encourage and actively/ passively condone it then they are not doing their job. Practically speaking expecting journalists to behave as they are supposed to may be fantasy land, but it is a fantasy land they theoretically do exist in. Indie studios do not have a moral obligation either, except in so far as they are happy to label themselves as being Independent rather than being Large Evil Corporate Publishers and setting themselves up on the moral high ground. Practically though there is little difference between a small company and a large one in those respects, Indies love playing the free thinking underdog precisely because it is good PR, and they're not big O Obligated to be hypocrisy free. For example Brain Fargo trashes publishers because his consumers lap that up- but if the KS dollars dry up and he cannot self fund does anyone seriously think that those 'principles' will be worth the photons used in sending this post and he won't go looking for a publisher? And that, really is why not focussing on publishers is by and large the right approach. They're just doing their jobs, if you get taken in by them then diddums, you should always take what they say with the proviso that their only real aim is to sell you stuff. OTOH journalists are supposed to be sceptical themselves, and are supposed to be impartial, if you get taken in by them or find their conduct to be disgraceful (for want of a better term) you have a right to be angry even if you know practically that many don't live up to those standards.

Yep. The Chinese make an interesting example, they invented a bunch of absolutely crucial things and had a huge number of inventions overall but they missed out on other stuff because they never really needed it- glass being perhaps the most notable. While you can do a lot with porcelain, enough that glass doesn't seem fundamentally necessary you cannot do things like make lenses or complicated chemical apparatus out of it. In that respect having something that was 'good enough' was a disadvantage in the long term.

The theory that I had heard about revolved largely around diseases and much of Africa being 'linear', having an easily accessible coastal strip but little else. Compare to the Med, where you could take a compass bearing and hit a different civilisation on most bearings in Africa you could go up or down the coast only. Plus Nubia (ruled Egypt at various times, built far more pyramids too), Mali Empire (~1.3 million square km; six times the area of Great Britain), Benin Empire (which had a longer continuous existence than almost all European countries), Zimbabwe and a fair few others. None of them apart from Egypt are particularly well known though.

I could understand that, depending on circumstances. If you get stopped by the police and produce your ID you'd probably be fine, at least on the way in and they'd have no reason to do anything further (search etc) assuming you were not stupid and didn't have your RPG7 on the back seat. It would be pretty stupid planning your attack and then getting busted because you were nabbed speeding or at a licence/ DUI check. It also really depends on whether they were obviously going to attack someone. If they were armoured up and wearing balaclava while driving around Paris they were liable to be stopped anyway and there would be no point having an ID, if they put their armour etc on close to or at the attack site they would have the extra option of bluff at least on the way to the attack. Still, I don't think I've forgotten my driver's licence in the past ten years and it seems just plain obvious to burn the car in some prepared place with few people around and with a handy second car available; you burn it precisely because you may have forgotten stuff.

The only really contentious part conspiracy wise is how one of the Kouachis managed to leave his id papers in an abandoned car. Given that they were not suicidal in the way many islamic extremists are and went to pains to avoid being killed/ captured initially, actually picked up a shoe when leaving plus that the rest of their operation was very professional having it all fell apart due to a spectacularly amateur mistake seems rather unusual. Not leaving identity papers around/ torching the car seems like criminal 101- or perhaps criminal kindergarten- to me. Even so, it's by far the most likely that that was just a fortunate mistake, rather than anything else.

Hollande is a monumental twot, but he isn't wrong on that. If the attack on the supermarket were carried out by a white supremacist christian it would not be labelled as a christian attack, it would be 'antisemitism' (a term I dislike for technical reasons, since arabs are semites as well). That attack would not be condoned and would be actively condemned by the vast majority of christians, and the actual attack has not been condoned and has been condemned by the vast majority of muslims. Blaming muslims in general for it would be as stupid as blaming New Zealand if one of the gunmen turned out to be from here and said they were doing it to avenge the Rainbow Warrior. Oh, good. So we can look forward to Anonymous hacking their machines, ruining the evidence chain, and destroying criminal prosecutions, just like they did with other criminals? Vigilante justice ...away! What, like the US government torturing people and imprisoning without trial for a decade+ (including of course a bunch of innocent people, some of whom are still held despite being known to be innocent) so much so that some cannot be tried the evidence is so contaminated and the accused are no longer mentally competent; or summarily executing people including innocents via drone. Well OK, they're not really alike.

Just don't respond to Bruce. What do you expect to gain? You won't convince him if he has any good faith- his pattern of behaviour shows that conclusively- and the largest probability by far is that he's just plain trolling. In a sadly unentertaining manner. Just ignore him, and if you can't do that Ignore him.

Sigh. Why do news outlets not show the policeman getting shot in the head but blank/ blur/ pause the footage? Surely, free speech demands that they show him getting executed as well? Of course, some people will get offended and it may upset his relatives but well, asterisk those delicate flowers... Free speech is a great thing, being an arse is not a great thing. If you're indulging in free speech just to be an arse that does not make you some great crusader (hoho) for truth, justice and the American Way though you may be so, incidentally- you're still an arse. Deliberately posting something 1.5 billion people will find offensive is not brave, it's moronic and it would make them an arse. There are better ways to make any point apart from doing something just because you can, ultimately that's masturbatory- primarily done to benefit you and make you feel good, not to make any real point.

Who knows? BG 1.5 would not really be new in the same sense that a BG3 would be, but more in the way their new add ins to BG1 and BG2 were new. The D&D5 talk implies stuff, but then again saying IWD2 with its 3e is too hard also implies stuff in the opposite direction. Like Dragon Age: Origins, 'Codex RPG of the year for 2009.

As Bartimaeus intimated you should turn on file extensions as well, instructions here. That should make virus.png.exe attempts more obvious since the double extension should then become visible. (stupid Microsoft with their moronic default options)

If the capital were Donetsk or Lugansk it wouldn't. But with Kiev being run by the east's political opponents there was no prospect of those actions stopping, or of there ever being the security- fair security- necessary for the democratic process to happen. Lest we forget, former interim 'President' Turchenov took great and unconstrained glee in dissolving the Communist Party's parlimaentary faction, one of his political opponents, weeks before the election. That's the sort of person running Ukraine, they aren't even 'democratic' with air quotes, they'll allow any party to exist- so long as they agree with them. And that's the reality of post coup Ukraine, and just another way that the coup tore up the rule book.

I agree that the trash diving aspects are in general deplorable, but there is a fine line between what is legitimate and not. Is digging up Ian Cheong's old RPGCodex "I love Hitler" posts legit or not? Rather depends on whether he really has turned that page and was just influenced by a hive of scum and villainy or if he's just switched cliques depending on circumstance and being run off from the Codex on a rail. And while I don't really see any reasonable need to know whether Brianna Wu is a transsexual or not it is certainly appropriate to know whether she was lying about fleeing her home because all her videos were done from the same location. You'd have to go a fair way to find anyone fighting a 'PR war' that doesn't target prominent figures on the other side, people being people. And, given that there has been plenty of genuinely malicious and illegitimate actions such as swatting or doxxing going on I cannot really get too upset about people trawling through publicly available chat logs/ forum posts etc and bringing them up. End of the day if you make public statements they're fair game because they are public, much like putting up a physical note on a noticeboard for anyone to read.

There isn't a single fact in there that parallels except facile ones- someone has to be the most popular politician in decades, that is as much equivalent to Tony Blair as to Hitler. Indeed, Hitler never won a majority at an election unlike both Putin and Blair.

I thought ToB was OK, but suffered significantly from D&D's inherent epic level weaknesses and Epic Gnoll Syndrome as well. It was all rather cheesy, you could get immunity to non magical weapons at the end of SoA so all enemies in ToB have magical weapons type stuff. In that respect I actually thought SCS made it actively worse as well, as you get to fight something like 4 dragons consecutively at one point. Still, the story was fine, I didn't mind Melissan at all and apart from the cheese factor the fights were by and large well balanced, and some really did have that epic feel. Not really sure about that, George Lucas himself says that you cannot actually see The Force, only its effects. K2 is more like Mask of the Betrayer, you cannot destroy either The Wall or The Force, despite them both being arbitrarily evil. (Or if you prefer, Kreia is an antagonist, unlike Melissan she's not a villain because she's arguably right about The Force being an uncaring slave/ puppet master and she did not start with the intention of killing you- indeed she sees even the final fight as her helping you)

Discuss!! Fun semi fact of the day Unfortunately it seems this quote is apocryphal and it is likely Mohandas never actually said this.

Proper storage is a requirement, checked by police at the same time as a firearms licence is issued/ renewed*, here. It is of course possible to ignore the rules when the policeman isn't actively checking but that's an argument that literally everything is pointless legality wise- speed limits? pointless, people may only adhere to them when a policeman is actively checking. You have to store the gun in a secure, unfireable state with no magazine/ bolt present and a trigger lock or similar; ammunition and said bolt/ magazine must be kept separate and also locked away. That has two purposes, it makes it far more difficult to steal a workable gun and it makes it far harder to do spur of the moment stupid stuff, especially suicide, because you typically have to get three different, locked, pieces of equipment. *not always a sworn officer, last guy we had was retired and doing it for an income top up plus tea and biscuits. They also do an interview at the same time, plus you have to have two character references and no significant criminal record. The interview is pretty laughable from both sides, on one it's pretty much "is X a drug addict or an axe murderer" on the other it's "are you a drug addict or axe murderer".

I'll be quite interested to read the second part of that article, to see if it comes to the same general conclusion I have. While I don't really like the Cultural Marxism label I do think there is a fair bit of 'Cultural Stalinism' which explains why you have two predominantly left leaning groups fighting each other. Stalin was about as much concerned- if not more so- with fighting the wrong sort of leftist as with fighting rightists, and with purging those who were disloyal or ideologically impure leftists. That is pretty much what antiGG is about, purging the wrong sorts of left leaning people so only proper thinkers remain. Not up to the kulaks or mass graves level though of course, except in some of their dreams.

So did Titan Quest, and it got a reputation for being extremely buggy as a result. It's a 'haha so funny' measure that is often counter productive because the cracks usually get fixed and the trageting is not exactly accurate either. I got the galaxy map bug in ME1 that was meant to effect pirates with a legit copy, and it was fixed by...

The formal non-aligned status that was recently revoked was implemented in 2010, iirc. Yanukovich mainly used Europe/ NATO to wangle concessions and benefits from Russia.

I suspect the 'is she going or not' stuff was basically just trolling and the decision had been made a fair while ago- as with Missy claiming to be the Rani in some alternative takes. My only real problem with the special was that it was derivative not just of the obvious external stuff (Alien, Inception) but of a fairly recent Dr Who episode. The whole concept is a bit too convenient given the problems Moffat's run has had with internal consistency, just blame anything that doesn't make sense on it being a dream. Cute, perhaps too cute. Still, enjoyable.

He theoretically has no money because it is all in trusts and the like/ owned by his wife who is separated (or if you're cynical, 'separated') from. Practically he still lives in the most expensive property in the country and drives some ludicrously large vehicle. The illegal spying had no effect on whether he was going to get bail or not, and hasn't really effected the extradition hearing with the US- indeed, rather a lot of people insist that it never happened and it's all a plot, and if it did it was OK because it only happened to bad people and not me. And that despite it being admitted. I rather hope he stays around, he amuses and knots the panties of many people here who very richly deserve some strangulation of the nethers.

Yeah, I suspect plenty of people are reading and enjoying. I never played any of the Gold Box games though I do own PoR, but it was a recentish acquisition, so it's good to see what they were about.

Yeah, the 'emergent stories' for want of a better term (maybe After Action Reports would be better) were the best part of Stalker. Going after the Brain Scorcher having fought my way through the Red Forest I turned it off with 17 rounds left for my one remaining decent condition rifle and armour that was falling apart. OK, I thought, that was intense but at least it's over now, I can go back and get my equipment fixed up. Heh, thirty odd new Monolith targets later I made it out having killed most of the enemies with a silenced .45 pistol only to find more enemies outside. So I did the only sensible thing and ran away screaming like a little girl while popping whatever medkits I had left. Overall Stalker fits right into my intersection point of 'reality' and 'fun'. It's realistic enough that I can suspend disbelief but not so realistic that it becomes a chore. I put it in the same sort of category as Thief, it isn't hyper realistic but then I don't really want hyper realistic from either. The only immediate advantages I can think of the AI having were no ammo limit and that radiation didn't seem to damage them. Otherwise AI sprayed bullets all over the place at any range, outright missed with high accuracy weapons and fairly frequently got caught in anomalies and the like if in a firefight. Grenades were certainly annoying, especially in CS, but obeyed basically the same rules for AI and you. The problems were mainly those you get in any game, the AI doesn't have to think about self preservation at all so has no sense of resource management compared to you.

Pigeonholing all SJWs is about as sensible as pigeonholing all GGers, and really is drawing a long bow. Some will do it for ideological reasons, some for bandwagon jumping, some for deeply held beliefs unrelated to any formal ideology. There are some general observations (GG tends more towards libertarianism, antiGG more towards authoritarianism) that are true, but they're pretty broad distinctions and applying them broadly can be... annoying, I find it annoying when people label GG as being 'right wing' for example. Hot wheels has totally trolled Brianna Wu by claiming that he needs patreon to hire an assistant to look after his cat! It's either a travesty or the funniest thing ever.