Zoraptor
-
Posts
3490 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
20
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Blogs
Everything posted by Zoraptor
-
Funny, the only 50% land nonsense I can remember is someone (now who was it, I know he had some sort of posting schtick and it deffo wasn't Bruce or Volo...) claiming many areas of Palestine had greater than 50% ownership by Jews. Which was nonsense and shown to be false even within proposed partition Israel, done with maps and stats that tend to make things believable and true but for some reason were unbelievable and false in this case, even the one he posted himself, thinking it proved his point.
-
You can currently get the Sims 2 (Complete, or whatever the full edition is called) for free with the code I-LOVE-THE-SIMS For both the people who aren't already aware. Not particularly keen on the sims personally, but you really cannot beat free. And apparently Peggle is still free as well.
-
I am enjoying the accents but I'm not sure how accurate the Australian accents are? Have you played Dead Island? If they sound anything like that, they are bad, very bad. Hmm, I'm getting flashbacks to Deus Ex (1) with its token Australian eksent that was perhaps the most awful attempt in the history of gaming. "Thanks for getting me in", sure lady, now shut up, please. It's like the VA listened to Kath and Kim as a baseline then took it up to 200% to make it more 'authentic'.
-
Nah, it's a good game, and a useful illustration. It is an abstraction, but then so is anything except what actually happened. The approximate front lines and important place names would be useful though, for obvious reasons. But in any case I don't think there's much disputation that the rebels may- or even probably- shot the airliner down, nevertheless that accusation has to be actually proven and it hasn't been. The rebels need to have the relevant capability, skills to use it, it has to be functional and, most importantly they need to have actually fired it and hit MH17. First seems likely, next two are still unproven, the last and most important one has no actual proof at all, at this point. There are plenty of theories, plenty of assertions but as it stands there's less actual evidence than the Iraq WMD case from 2003. Any alternative has been dismissed out of hand, and most on the mere say so a directly involved party, Ukraine. For example, I find it literally incredible that they have no SAM coverage in the area. An S300 stationed near as far back as Dneprop' could theoretically have hit it, one anywhere near any part of the front line definitely could, let alone their own Buks, which contrary to their claims have been seen near the front lines (Slaviansk)- and, they have repeatedly said that there are Russian planes crossing the border including allegedly shooting down one sukhoi earlier on the day MH17 was shot down, so they do have (at least in theory) a good reason for having SAM coverage. On a side note, I do find it rather funny and completely indicative of press attitudes that the sukhoi being shot down today were initially being described as being the rebels violating the ceasefire zone around the crash, as if flying military jets through it wasn't also a violation, and a prior one.
-
It's Volo, why bother arguing? I imagine that Obsidian would be ecstatic with a million sales and would be hoping for such a figure, but they need nothing like that to be successful, and that's fact.
- 563 replies
-
- 1
-
-
- dragon age
- inquisition
- (and 1 more)
-
Some of the strikes certainly are legitimate military strikes, even if most/ many are simple collective punishment. A direct ground invasion would have had far more losses than Israel have suffered at present, and that is far more important to Israel than Palestinian losses. In the end Lebanon 2006 ended without Israel achieving their aims because they lost too many soldiers and equipment, not because they were killing lots of Lebanese civilians. Even as a rhetorical question that's... pretty leaky, whichever way you look at it. Ah, the answer is Israel! Of course! Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, the first PMs from Likud, were both leaders of Lehi/ Stern Gang, Ariel Sharon was convicted of complicity in genocide in Lebanon and was widely rumoured to have bulldozed Egyptian prisoners in trenches in 1967 as well, various Likud coalition partners in government have or have had ludicrously policies like deporting the entire arab population (in cattle carts perhaps, for maximum irony). Complaints about electing terrorists are pot/ kettle/ black, at best. Plus there's actually dozens of other counters. Nelson Mandela, designated terrorist of the ANC; Gerry Adams et al from Sinn Fein, political arm of the IRA etc etc.
-
Can't see any real reason to think that this particular delay means that the game will be crap/ in trouble any more than any other delay means any other game is crap or in trouble. All it means is that I might actually get around to buying myself a new computer to replace my eight year old faithful before its release. If I were forced at gunpoint to speculate I would say that it will have co-op as an MP component. But since I'm not being forced at gunpoint I won't.
-
There isn't much point to doing it as he just stands around with one bark line, but it is possible.
-
Sheesh Bruce, that has to be the shortest thread quitting in internet history, not even a day. People are spinning, but it sure ain't just RT. Link to the full story which does pretty much bears out the headline, they offered literally no new evidence of Russian involvement, no satellite or other stuff that people had speculated Obama et al were basing their accusations on, no smoking Buk, indeed there were significant admissions there like them believing that the rebels didn't have Buks at all. If they actually believed the Ukrainian intercepts and the like there'd be no equivocation there at all, since some involved them talking to actual, current Russian officers.
-
And now, apparently, US intelligence has concluded there is actually no evidence of Russian involvement in the shoot down, though they do say it was probably rebels. They also admitted they did not think the rebels had any such rockets until after the crash happened. Seems (since there ain't a web source or much detail, it's just on broadcast at the moment) they don't have much faith in the SBU and their 'intercepted' phone calls as proof of anything either.
-
Ask John Kerry, he's the expert on Israel's precision bombing and sarcasm. Still, dude does actually have a point, though a narrow one that's dressed up in rhetoric and reliant on the 'someone else did something worse sometime in the past argument' (and one which works for Hamas's bombardment as well as his). They'd still be far better off minus the rhetoric and not trying to pretend that they're super accurate ultra humanitarians when it's patently obvious they're neither though.
- 458 replies
-
- 1
-
-
- Rap News
- TheJuiceMedia
- (and 2 more)
-
Finished a replay of TWitcher2, including going back and rescuing Triss at the end instead of unmanning Dethmold/ rescuing a different helpless young lady from a dungeon, which I hadn't actually done before. The endings are really quite carefully balanced in terms of consequences, perhaps a bit too much so. On Iorveth's path I'd have quite happily skewered Shilard in Radovid's dungeon and it's not like you/ Geralt don't have ample and direct reason to- and can act such in similar situations like Malena in Chapter 2- but you just don't get the option. So, he arrives at the meeting to merrily asterisk things up further. If on the other hand you rescue Triss then Shilard's list doesn't arrive because he gets randomly killed by random named Nilfgardian for some random reason. Which is, maybe, practically, that if you don't kill him on one path when given the opportunity you also shouldn't when given the same opportunity on the other, but he has to die to generate the consequential balance of him (not) turning up with his list of names. The other flaws I really noticed are that combat is reliant on unskippable animations (or perhaps most accurately that there's some input lag/ animation lag between pressing roll or spell or throw and it actually happening, as if the animation has a second of idle at the beginning) and stun lock too often, hardly a new observation, and that Geralt frequently walks into dangerous situations involving talking to obviously dangerous men or even the Draugir, then stands around with no sword drawn. Still, an optimised Geralt really does feel like a powerhouse at the end, the story is good for a video game and well told and it has whet my appetite for TWitcher3. Hope they have Berengar in it, for those who kept him alive...
-
The parameters used by black boxes are a matter of public record, easy to look up if one can be bothered to, and indeed various experts have said they're unlikely to provide much relevant information, when experts have been asked.
-
Meh, we don't have any independent corroboration of Russia sending in heaps of stuff. You'd suspect that if they were the rebels wouldn't be in trouble. That whole line reeks of Goldilocks Theory- send in just enough support to be noticed, but not enough to be effective; send in enough agents to be responsible, but have them not act covertly and forget to use proper communications protocols; send in sophisticated SAMs and trained operators, but not sophisticated or trained enough to detect a civilian airliner. Whenever there's that much convenient incompetence I get very sceptical very quick. Plus, the one instance in which we've got supposed proper evidence the T64s in question certainly appeared to be of a modernised variant exclusive to Ukraine, not Russia (could have been a bodge job to mask Russian type T64s, but are far more likely to straight prizes from the regular Ukraine army).
-
Yep, black boxes are not going to be useful in this case except for possibly giving a precise shootdown time and whether the plane immediately broke up or not, and even that can be extrapolated from other information anyway- or so my extensive watching of Air Crash Investigation tells me (eg TWA800's breakup pattern was extrapolated from its debris field). In some cases like KAL007 they were very useful for determining why the airliner was so far off course and for largely confirming the Soviet version of what happened but civilian airliners don't have early warning systems or radar capable of detecting SAMs except in very specific cases like El-Al or semi military like Presidential jets. Far more likely to give concrete information is any bits of missile debris, obsession with the black boxes is almost totally irrelevant.
-
Meh, I just wish we could come up with a better term than terrorism, it really is terrible- it's something only enemies do, it's ludicrously loaded emotionally and to all practical purposes is often not actually different in anything except for (lesser) scale to tactics that are (or were) regarded as largely legitimate when done by others. Flying jet planes into buildings, sure, that's terrorism. But the people of Guernica, Coventry, Dresden, Pyongyang, Hanoi, Grozny, Fallujah and Aleppo would probably swap Hamas's unreliable low yield 5 rocket per hour over twelve days terrorist barrage for what they got from legitimate actors, in a heart beat.
-
There's very few outright neo nazis, but they're disproportionately represented where it counts as they're far more willing to kill and die for their cause than more moderate sorts. Even within those limits the outrage is being applied selectively. Many commentators/ politicians are- within the same broadcast/ speech- complaining that the rebels are leaving bodies to rot and moving the bodies too early and destroying evidence, as if it's possible to put a gigantic chiller over a 9km crash site in an active war zone. Plus of course the international experts (not OSCE, who aren't experts) aren't there yet because Kiev is keeping them in Kiev citing safety concerns, so there's simply no choice other than to either leave the bodies to rot or move them- and either option is viewed as an outrage.
-
You can easily class shooting down an airliner as accidental, the previous Ukrainian incident- a missile which projected150 km beyond the intended target and 350km away from Ukraine- was pure accident, they fired at something other than the target hit and there's no suggestion from anyone that they actually tried to hit that civilian plane. IranAir655 is still an accident, though complicated by gross incompetence. The operator thought he was firing at an F14 that was attacking, I don't think anyone sensible suggests anything otherwise; that it happened to be an Airbus that was not behaving in any other way than normal for a civilian aircraft and not in any manner at all that the operator believed was a matter of gross incompetence and bad equipment design, but neither that nor all the lies trying to justify it post facto make it deliberate shoot down of a civilian plane. Albeit, that was not at 10km altitude as it was still climbing out of Bandar Abbas.
-
Someone watched Sherlock. That conspiracy theory trope does actually predate Sherlock by ages. You can find similar accusations about IranAir655 previous, and later MH370 as examples. And most 11/9 conspiracy theories involve variants too.
-
Which is a convenient reversal, if we assume the rebels had the expertise to actually use a sophisticated SAM system that normally requires multiple trained personnel, but it ain't the only one. The Ukrainian government was claiming earlier that the rebels had no buks and had not captured any, and have said that they (Ukraine) had none in the area, both of which appear to be outright lies. Plus, they had claimed that Russian jets had shot down one of their sukhois yesterday as well, so taking that at face value they'd have a reason to have active AA in the area. Personally I'm sceptical on the last part at least because I find it extremely unlikely that Russian fighters had anything to do with that sukhoi crashing any more than they randomly bombed apartment buildings in Donbass the previous day. AlJ at least has also said that Strelkov's claim of downing a plane was actually posted significantly before the last contact with MH17, to whit "The military commander of the rebels, a Russian named Igor Strelkov, had written on his social media page at 13:37 GMT, half an hour before the last reported contact with MH17, that his forces had brought down an Antonov An-26, a turboprop transport plane of type used by Ukraine's forces, in the same area."
-
And here I was thinking the exact opposite. The skies look like something from Independence War 2 and they don't seem to be able to decide whether they want a muted palette for Euro sensibilities or a dayglo one for the US, per Gothic 4/ Arcania. Oh well, be boring if everyone has the same tastes. (plus the pedant in me hates 'photorealistic' landscapes that cannot exist, literal uncanny valley...)
-
Ultimately, the problem is that it doesn't make sense for anyone to have shot it down, yet shot down it was. That's irrelevant if the guy in question has previously said he has no social media accounts though, because in that case we have no clue who is posting under his name. For all we know it could be oby (or Bruce, or me for that matter).
-
I'd be extremely surprised if they hadn't been dedicating resources to correct the oversight since forever, that is the core reason for having the CIA/ NSA in the first place. But we also know that they hadn't corrected it as of a few months ago, so the (recent) default is that they cannot be read.
-
Nah, not really. Civilian planes still flew over Afghanistan or Iraq, for example(s), and there's no confirmed uses of high altitude weapons by the rebels, the Antonovs shot down were at less than manpad service ceiling. The Ukrainians did claim one was at high altitude, but that was questioned strongly by experts at the time since it made no sense for it to be at high altitude and indeed, there was no change in the advisory to civilian aircraft following that shoot down. 10k+ metres altitude (for civilian jets) is generally assumed to be safe from missiles.
-
Never trust a man who likes being photographed in budgie smugglers. Funny thing is that if the repeal had been blocked in the senate there's no guarantee Abbot would have won a double dissolution despite winning the last election in a landslide, and recently.
