Zoraptor

El oh el. Even OSCE agreed that Georgia attacked first and disproportionately, and that there was no Russian build up beforehand- and HRW state unequivocally that Georgia ethnically cleansed around 200,000 ethnic Ossetians in the 90s civil war. The west has no obligation to help someone who starts a fight, nor to help ethnic cleansers even if they are their friends. Georgian War of Wanton Aggression in South Ossetia was in August, 2008 Barack Obama, inaugurated January 20, 2009. Obama, so bad he retroactively turned the Bush administration into a bunch of peaceniks!

Playing Dead State. It's enjoyable enough and I certainly don't regret spending the money on it (might have, marginally, if I hadn't kickstarted it but bought it full price) but it is what I'd call an 80% game- it's 80% of the way towards being excellent but everything is just a little bit more flawed than it should be, from combat to conversations and the character system. I haven't hit a single bug so far though, so in that respect it is excellent.

Or I think those that remained loyal to the occupiers were Quislings and those that didn't were True Heroes and Patriots. I actually think that the circumstances don't matter much at all so didn't mention them- as I said, there's always a justification that can be had for barbarity. You can try to (further) justify it if you like, but that really just proves the overall point. Strapping people to cannons is a punishment designed to give a painful undignified end beyond the mere punishment for a crime, for mere execution a bullet suffices.

Team America was OK. The skewering of the Mike Moore/ bandwagon celebrity culture was pretty good (as was the supermarionation overall), but unlike SP: BC&U they rather ducked the reciprocal skewering of gung ho militarism. Should have been better. Don't really know what to think about Sony though. On one hand I tend to think that doing a movie about assassinating a real world head of state of another country is generally bad taste, even as a comedy, on the other that's not enough reason to want things banned. In the end I don't really feel sympathy for either the DPRK or Sony. The DPRK could have at least gone after the egregiously bad Red Dawn remake though.

Unreliable information is almost always worse than no information because resources have to be wasted either checking up on or worse, acting on that unreliable information to determine that it is unreliable. WW2 is replete with such examples, Hitler convincing himself that D-Day would be at Pas de Calais due to the inflatable armies or Operation Mincemeat convincing him that Greece and Sardinia would be invaded rather than Sicily. Though it is absolutely certain that some- usually large- proportion of information gathered by any intelligence method will be unreliable and that much of the rest will be irrelevant. The problem is very seldom too little information, it is almost always too much information and determining which bits are accurate or even relevant.

More or less, the British Empire ran on basically three different approaches. Get native leaders to run things for you with tame soldiers/ police. If not that then support the second strongest ethnic group against the strongest. If neither of those two work then the gloves are well and truly off, including torture- though the British were hardly the worst* and despite the White Man's Burden rhetoric were considerably more prosaic and realistic about things than the US with their manifest destiny/ messiah complex and uncomfortable and incompatible mix of naive idealism and sociopathic application. *US ain't the worst either by a decent amount too, comparatively speaking it would probably be Belgium, or early Spain. But, Britain has had a long history of doing things at very least equivalent to what the US has done, up to recently and historically- as have most imperial powers. The counter insurgency work against the IRA certainly employed a lot of informants and such which were effective, but also employed arbitrary arrests and torture. The response to the Maomao insurgency in Kenya involved copious torture which has only recently been somewhat admitted, and for which there will be no punishment. They essentially invented modern 'legal' collective punishment via the Boer War concentration camp. The Sepoy rebellion in India involved such humane punishments as tying prisoners to cannons then firing them through their bodies. And of course ten of millions of Indians starved on the British watch. It all tended to get justified similarly as well, as being stuff that at least 'worked'; even when it didn't. People argue so strongly that torture works as a moral insulation; it is essentially cognitive dissonance, not wanting bad words applied to people/ countries you like, wanting them to be better than others and yes, to have done bad things for The Greater Good (the greater good). The Harvard study on the use of waterboarding as torture illustrates it pretty well. Prior to 2004 waterboarding was almost always referred to as torture by the US press- afterwards it almost never was. That is why some people so desperately want the US either not to have tortured or for it to have all been worth it. But if it doesn't work and provided no usable intelligence then you have to accept that you just had a bunch of our guys waterboarding and raping prisoners with dogs for absolutely no gain. It doesn't make a lick of logical or objective sense, but makes a whole lot of subjective sense. There's also pretty much nothing you can do to persuade people that they're wrong about it precisely because it's so interwoven into a person's fundamental beliefs.

Insurance companies should (and do here even though we have universal/ single payer healthcare as well since they have to give value added over that system) subsidise basic checks because insurance companies should be concerned about the far higher ambulance-at-bottom-of-cliff costs associated with operations, stays in hospital and long term stays on expensive medication than the minimal fence-at-cliff-top of going to a doctor once a year. That's especially true for young children since they're both more susceptible to problems and will have to live with any long term ones for a long time. Prevention is almost always cheaper. Meh, I'd give everyone one free GP visit a year, I'd bet the incidence of the very costly but mostly preventable stuff with high prevalence here like late onset diabetes would plummet.

Wonder if Valve will ban Hotline Miami retrospectively now, for the children. (They should make Hatred: Steam edition with all the humans replaced with skeletons. It'd make me laugh.)

It's rather indicative that the west thinks it's going to work anyway. Hitler couldn't break the Russian spirit with Stukas and Panzers, yet Obama thinks sanctions will work? Plus, of course, it's a balancing act: the best organised opposition groups are not the pro western groups which are largely seen as stooges and 5th columnists outside of the very restricted circles in which western people orbit in Russia, they're the Zyuganov/ Zhirinovsky Communists/ Nationalists. Or the military. And from the western perspective they're far worse than Putin, far far worse. They shouldn't be aiming for 'regime change' because it's a stupid policy by any measure- but then western foreign policy is hardly replete with nuanced and well informed examples of sense, rather it's full of stuff they could hardly have done much worse if they'd tried.

To many practical purposes France left NATO once already, in 1966 under De Gaulle. Retained political integration but removed its military, indeed its military was only reintegrated by Nick the Hungarian in, iirc, 2009.

The question looks daft to those of us not indulging in the "skeleton journalists are controlling popular opinion" conspiracies. According to the graph/ stats it went up 2192 places in a day and got all its 13000+ votes, in a day- albeit Valve's graph making skills are about as bad as an unedited MSXL abomination from a 10 year old/ the software engineering in their client so it isn't absolutely certain that is what it means. That would certainly and already count as 'positive reception' from fans, indeed that is theoretically/ supposedly what GL is actually intended for in the first place, to gauge fans' reaction and desire for the given game. Plus of course Valve's absolutely deliberate monopolism makes it very difficult to succeed without them in the first place unless you're minecraft, Blizzard or EA and puts it into a whole different kettle of fish from Target/ Te warewhare banning gtaV from their shelves. When people talk about curation on GL/ Steam they almost always say it in the context of all the shovelware RPG maker rubbish and yes even outright scams/ broken games which Valve is happy to stock. WarZ (or whatever the scam DayZ clone was before its name eventually changed), Unity based Early Access 'games' using only stock assets, old games that cannot be played because the copy protection is still active yet the developer has not supplied even an emanual to get the answers for it out of. That is what people want curated, not a bunch of morality goons running around inflicting their morals on others and telling people what to think. FTR I think Hatred looks moronic and I have no desire whatsoever to play it, but asterisk me if that means I think other people should be prevented from playing it.

Apparently the Dail Fail is the most read enewspaper anywhere. No, really. It is accurate, China > US economically, for PPP rather than raw size at least.

Because they aren't progressives, they're authoritarians first and foremost. Oh gods yes. Seeing GG/ antiGG portrayed as being right v left makes me, as someone who is pretty far left by most measures, grind my teeth. Wanting to tell other people how to think and how to act is independent of the right/ left dichotomy- you have the classic leftist SJW (or 'cultural marxist', though I dislike that term precisely because of its overt politicisation) as well as the classic old enemy of the rightist Moral Majority, they may be almost diametrically opposed in terms of the left/right divide but they're both authoritarian and use arbitrary yardsticks to determine morality. And, of course, both groups hate games like GTA about evenly though for slightly differing baseline reasons.

have you been to china or the middle east or are your horror stories from the "news?" Bruce has certainly* been to Saudi Arabia. It was a wonderful place full of freedom and those wonderful western values. *As certainly as you can take anything from Bruce, so there's the standard 90% chance he was just trolling as usual. Maybe not about being there though, just about seeing the little gated community he stayed in as indicative of the whole of KSA.

Arrow mid season finale = rofl.

It also seems they did so by reducing the resolution on their new sprites so the comparison isn't to the old ones at all, it's to arbitrarily low res versions of their new ones. Have a look at the colouration of the Bone Dragon on the comparison picture and the original screenshot, the original is slightly off white in colour while the new (and comparison to new) sprites are both significantly yellowed.

I don't really, I even explicitly stated that China for one wouldn't make an honest appraisal no matter what the US did. That doesn't stop others from making honest appraisals though. Countries and political systems are discrete entities, democracy in somewhere like Norway doesn't get tarnished just because the US tortures people since conflating the two isn't an honest approach.

Heh, they even cite RPGCodex as a source. Being sold by Uncle Rupes seems to have rather dramatically improved the quality of IGN's journalism.

Yeah, it's kind of baffling to be told that Sir Jerry Mataparae is of critical importance here and part of an oppressive system when 99% of what he does is ceremonial stuff like going to D-Day celebrations and opening new buildings. He may be part of an oppressive system depending on perspective, but his position is so peripheral to that system compared to basic staples like political parties and all the run of the mill political stuff (lying, pork barelling, other vested interest pandering etc) inherent in any system that it just feels peculiar and that the detractors have zero practical experience with the system they're criticising. It's just not a big deal unless you're rampant on equality, and there are far bigger fish to fry on that front. It makes perfect sense and has perfect syntax in English. Review your reading comprehension please. But since you asked so nicely, we've had a succession of extremely good Governors General specifically because the appointment is not generally a political one. But we have the usual array of utterly crap politicians, and 'celebrities'. If we had a President we'd inevitably end up with those crappy celebrities and politicians as President precisely because the people who become GG are not celebrities or politicians, and stand no chance of being elected despite being extremely good and little chance of actually wanting to stand either. Your first clause is grammatically incorrect, review your syntax please. We may well have puppets here, but the GG has so little power that nobody would bother with him. He doesn't even make political pronouncements, he isn't appointed by the Queen (also true in Aus) and he's basically there to be an apolitical head of state. He doesn't even work as a sop puppet, he just isn't important enough. It may be difficult for someone from a country with an executive head of state to understand, but ours has basically no power at all. And there are no implications in a populace being happy with a constitutional monarchy. Republics gave us George W Bush/ Barack Obama, Bob Mugabe, and of course, Adolf Hitler. Drawing conclusions on a populace via a single narrow criterion is not very sensible. While I'm unhappy about the direction we're moving I'd still put our record of overall freedom up against anyone's except perhaps the scandics*, who are all constitutional monarchies too; and the reasons I'm unhappy are down to politicians, not ER or Sir Jerry. *Plus Finland, not technically a scandic and not a CM.

China views the US as a rival and for ideological/ political reasons wouldn't give the US good PR even if she lived up to the rhetoric. And India is already a democracy, how that is viewed by Indians will be whole orders of magnitude more influenced by how the Indian democracy works rather than how the (markedly different) US republican model works; as well as by things like the US response to Bhopal. If they wanted to cast aspersions on/ slur the US then there's plenty of evidence to do so without this report, it's just a handy reference guide for stuff people already know and the local stuff will trump all. And really, if the US does torture, murder etc then it would be good that other countries don't try to mimic them, and good that they would lose influence. Because any ideal country wouldn't do such things. But, any honest appraisal will separate the good things about the governmental system from the bad things done by the governments it generates, and if the US links loss of influence or goodwill to its behaviour it may improve that behaviour, though far more likely they'll just try and make sure no one knows about it. That there's any chance at all of benefit is down to part of the system actually working for once though what should be the other parts, enforcement of rules and punishment of those that broke them almost certainly won't happen. Brazil is an interesting mention though, since a roughly equivalent report on the excesses of the (US supported, natch) military dictatorship there was released the same day as the US torture report. And that will be the report that mostly influences Brazil's vision and thoughts on democracy as a system, not anything the US does directly.

Meh, why do I get the feeling it's people who live under the system arguing with people who don't here? There is nothing oppressive about Queenie or Constitutional Monarchy that isn't inherent to government of any kind. The royal family is irrelevant and has less powers than even non executive figurehead Presidents do. Gough Whitlam was removed by a Governor General who is the Queen's representative but chosen and appointed without her input and she had no influence on the decision, and the powers of a GG are determined by the country, not the Queen. So when Australia removed the powers used by the GG to dump Whitlam the Queen and GG had no practical say in the matter, it was done by Australians. If Jamaica wants to become a Republic the Queen has no say in it either- it won't solve Jamaica's problems, it's just a sop to nationalism, but the Queen can't stop it. I might in principle dislike the idea of having a royal family and a monarch, but practically I'd have Queenie and every single Governor General we've had in my lifetime over just about every single politician worldwide in even a non executive Presidential position. It has, for once, not been used as a political position at all, but a President would be, and we'd get the usual crappy politician foisted on us. We have enough of those, thanks.

Dunno about that. Internally, many in the US really do big B Believe in Truth, Justice and The American Way. The report will run into cognitive dissonance via obfuscation ("they've got it wrong in various ways we're not going to be specific about so you can disregard the report in whole, trust us, we're here to protect you from evil doers!") and special pleading ("but we only did it to bad guys!") with most clutching any straw to avoid admitting there was wrongdoing. Plenty don't Believe, but they will likely already know about waterboarding and have seen Abu Ghraib pictures etc In Europe it may appal some but it is likely that they already knew about it. It won't shift the politicians who pretty much definitively knew about it and in some cases actively encouraged and helped in it, that would require actual principles rather than smug rhetorical constructions about how much better we really are than other people. Anyone in power taking an actual stand against the US? Don't make me laugh. Peons with inconvenient beliefs can be safely ignored, as always. In the Middle East there won't be much reaction, most of the governments are US clients and most of the populations already knew about it anyway- much like Collateral Murder it may shock some softie western types who live in a bubble of self satisfaction and propaganda, but the people there already know about it and have a generally low opinion already. In the wider context there will be little reaction beyond some posturing. What are they going to do, apply sanctions? Send the US to the ICC? Yeah right... Worst they'll get is precisely what they've already got, some po faced Chinese diplomat who is rampantly trollfacing internally telling the US to live up to international norms and expectations and how very disappointed they are that the US are actually a bunch of despicable quasi Gestapo torturers who torture, oh the humanity. There should be consequences of course, the US already established that the punishment for waterboarding was execution seventy years ago when Japanese were executed for torturing US servicemen via waterboarding. There should be consequences for the lies and obfuscation. But there won't be. Instead the same people who believe in torture and that freezing prisoners to death is legal will get more powers to 'protect' their citizens from the evil doers while wilfully disregarding laws that are supposed to protect their citizens from them. Then people will wonder why police think they can shoot people with impunity, why politicians think they can imprison journalists to extort inconvenient sources from them and force ever more restrictive 'anti terror' laws, internet censorship etc upon people.

HD version of HOMM III is being made. And is looking perhaps the most pointless* HD do over of a mostly pointless craze. Graphical updates for a game where graphics are irrelevant (say different and you're implying MMH6 > HOMM3 and thus should be fired into the sun post haste to protect the integrity of the species) and no expansions; but at least you'll be able to boast about your accomplishments on steam! *Unless you want to buy on tablet, of course.

It isn't that much better at university level- albeit I was running a 1st year gen ed/ cross course which was open to all faculties/ programmes, and since you had to take 2 gen ed courses for a bachelor degree you had quite a few people who knew little about the subject or didn't really want to be there but felt they had to- I'd estimate maybe a third out of around 250 students showed anything above trivial ability in critical thinking. No doubt they'd be better in their core courses, but supposedly at least one of a university's core principles is to teach critical thinking and there were rather a lot of "I don't want to think, just give me a list of facts to learn" comments from even A grade students. On an editorial note, the worst offenders in that respect the were Biology students, I'd been through their system not that long before and it was great from a lazy student's pov since you got beautiful spiral bound course guides where everything was laid out for you but it was also terrible because you had to do very little actual research or thinking (at undergrad level) to pass since it was all handed to you. I learnt far more critical thinking from the two ancient history (!) courses I took, and chemistry of all things, rather than biology but ironically the biology courses always got the highest ratings from students and we were constantly being told we should be more like them as a result despite them essentially being polytech courses. Meh, critical thinking takes effort and most people just don't want to do it unless they have to.

Seems most likely that AbleGamers got DDOSed in much the same way we would be if Obsidz announced that KOTOR 3 (exclusive to Windows Phone) and BG3 (exclusive to Wii) were in simultaneous development but PoE development had been handed over to Double Fine while Bethesda and EA were buying them out in a joint venture. They were likely to be getting hammered by (perfectly legit) page requests from both sides of the argument, so it's most likely they just got hundreds or thousands of times their usual requests and the service provider nuked them until their bandwidth resets.