Zoraptor

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.

Social media accounts are and should always be suspect anyway. In this case it's pretty clearly confirmation bias but in general principle taking stuff from social media as a good source is distinctly flawed. Too easy to manipulate if you have any knowledge of propaganda techniques, too frequently no way to verify who is actually giving the information let alone the info itself. I find the supposed intercepted messages rather... suspicious. Ukraine- and more tellingly, the US- got totally blindsided over the annexation of Crimea because they could not intercept Russian messages, but now they suddenly can? If Russia is actually running agents in Ukraine they certainly won't be doing so en clair, they'll either be encrypting out the wazoo or using other techniques. The editorialisation (X talking to 'unknown terrorist') doesn't help either. Similar thing happened in Georgia as well, conveniently selective ability to intercept military messages, and in that case the 'independent' observers (OSCE) said that the supposed message did not reflect reality even if it were legitimate. Too early to tell who was involved anyway. All the planes the rebels have shot down have been at far lower altitude and it's unclear whether the rebels even have to capability to hit at that altitude- an advanced SAM system is a far different kettle of fish to a shoulder mounted SAM or activating/ using mothballed tanks, even if the rebels had a Buk there's a fair chance they couldn't operate it or maintain it- and if it were run by Russians then... Both the Russians and Ukrainians should be able to tell the difference between a civilian airliner and a military one, even if the Ukrainians have form for not being able to. And I find it difficult to credit that the Ukrainians were after Putin even if it has some logic behind it (it would explain why a civilian transponder warning might be ignored) as that would be utter suicide and I find it difficult to credit that even their current leadership is that delusional.

Against the rules of war too, viz collective punishment "Article 33. No persons may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against persons and their property are prohibited." The whole GCIV wikipedia article is worth a read actually, since it makes it pretty obvious that Israel is not following its provisions much at all. Also the bombing policy is pretty dumb because they claim too much accuracy, and those things always end up with massive holes after meeting reality. We already had a bunch of people with cerebral palsy getting blown up because someone from Islamic Jihad supposedly lived in the building 3+ years ago and groups of militant Hamas operatives who were actually 10 year olds getting blown up on the beach in front of international journalists, too many of those (and assuming they actually get reported) and the whole narrative falls apart rapidly.

Praying is probably more constructive than some of the approaches tried. If the US and Europe really wanted things fixed they'd put sufficient pressure, including sanctions and arms embargoes on Israel, if the arabs/ muslims really wanted it fixed they'd put sufficient and similar pressure on from the other side; and things would be fixed, so far as they could be fixed. Instead you have Obama, Cameron et al tacitly/ openly supporting Bibi and Saudi, Qatar and Iran tacitly/ openly supporting the Palestinians, so both sides think they can win by fighting which actively prolong things and make them worse. At least praying won't make things worse. Besides, there's nothing genuinely constructive any particular random internet person can do.

That's the big thing, the tendency to end up saying stuff you don't intend to. Certainly not just a Bioware problem though, it's a more general dialogue wheel problem as it happened in Alpha Protocol a couple of times. But it is less with full sentence options.

Good game overall, actually found Argentina rather more entertaining than Germany for most of the match. The best team of the tournament won in the end though. Also, the officiating was pretty good overall for a change. Rather annoyed that the start time wasn't the same as the other matches even if I only ended up missing five minutes. And yeah, Messi wasn't player of the tournament. He was very well marked in most of the elimination matches so didn't get many opportunities, but that final free kick really summed it up overall, lots of promise then 5m over the bar.

Yeah. The crowd certainly seemed to be more angry with their own team losing than with the other team beating them, in both the semi and play off they appreciated the other team's play. Can't say that of all crowds. Not sure what the reaction would have been if they'd handed out 4th place medals though, I suspect the burst of booing when Blatter appeared would have been a drop in a thunderstorm in comparison. On one hand I feel a bit sorry for the Brazil team because there may have been inflated expectations, but on the other... the didn't play at all well in either the last two games and worse, at times they looked like they weren't even trying.

Sure you do. Plenty of crappy games with >87 on metacritic. Subjectively crappy, but then if someone says why they (dis)like something you are going to get subjectivity, key is to accept that people may quite genuinely dislike stuff that others like. He gave the reasons for disliking it, that's all that can be asked even if you disagree. I thought Halflife was pretty rubbish, and it got more than 87, for example. Can't convince me it was actually great by citing what its metacritic score, either critic or popular, was or even by saying what you liked about it, any more than you could do so for CoD: Iteration or Bioshock 2. (Have no opinion on DivOS, have to wait for the patching to slow as I'll have to borrow some bandwidth from friendly urban type peoples to get it)

By misleading you mean "they don't show what you want". The statistics themselves simply are what they are and you were happy enough to use them when you thought they showed what you wanted, that they don't actually show what you want is unfortunate, for you, but that's all. There are very good reasons for using stats and maps with properly defined regions; it's far more rigorous and objective than appeal to emotion and what any person wishes was true. If you run around arbitrarily defining demographic areas based on particular agenda you can 'prove' just about anything you want, right down to the Armenian family down the road having an ethnic majority in their area, so 32 Jones Street shall now be known as the Republic of Armenia Really Minor heretofore. Easy, I wouldn't have a partition.

Yep. In PST I would have dispensed with the emo chick with daddy issues and an identity crisis, the emo demon with an identity crisis, the emo gith who was a creepy stalker and had an identity crisis, the emo burning guy who was just a guy who was on fire but at least didn't really have an identity crisis possibly because there was no rain in Sigil but small mercies, the emo robot (!) with an identity crisis, the emo suit of armour who you could actually kill with an identity crisis. And they're all co dependent on TNO, to boot. In MotB I would have dispensed with the bald emo chick with parental issues and an identity crisis, the faaaabulous emo bear with an identity crisis and issues with being a parental figure, the goth guy with an identity crisis and parental issues, the emo celestial with parental issues and an identity crisis and the burning hungry guy who was just a hungry guy but at least seemed relatively comfortable in his identity oh god he manifested as various entities including a child there's identity and parental issues there as well burn it with fire. In Kotor2 I would have killed everyone who was emo and had an identity crisis. Barring returning Bioware characters that leaves... Kreia, maybe? Though she may or may not have had issues with her identity of being a parent, so I guess she has to go out the airlock too.

You cannot simultaneously promise the same land to two peoples for their state, that isn't how states work and is exactly how wars start, because both believe they own it. The sole exclusion to the arab promise was stated explicitly as Lebanon, not Palestine. Palestine in toto was clearly included under the putative arab land. It's only later that Britain decided promising the same land to someone else was a good idea to get their support vs Johnny Turk. The Balfour Declaration validating Israel's claims de jure is and always has been a load of rubbish, because the prior claims of 90% of the population had already been explicitly acknowledged and never expunged. While it isn't Israel's fault that Britain did the equivalent of selling the same house to two different buyers it most certainly ain't the fault of the original buyer, and habitual occupant, the Palestinians. And because I believe in enlightening thoroughly plus it should help anyone who cannot be bothered wikiing the stats... Land ownership of Palestine in 1945 by district District Sub-district Arab-owned Jewish-owned Public / other Haifa Haifa 42% 35% 23% Galilee Acre 87% 3% 10% Beisan 44% 34% 22% Nazareth 52% 28% 20% Safad 68% 18% 14% Tiberias 51% 38% 11% Lydda Jaffa 47% 39% 14% Ramle 77% 14% 9% Samaria Jenin 84% <1% 16% Nablus 87% <1% 13% Tulkarm 78% 17% 5% Jerusalem Hebron 96% <1% 4% Jerusalem 84% 2% 14% Ramallah 99% <1% 1% Gaza Beersheba 15% <1% 85% Gaza 75% 4% 21% Here's the percentage ownerships, from the same ultimate source Gromnir's map came from. Again, it's not majority ownership 'in many areas', indeed, not a majority in any actually defined area*- including the area defined by proposed partition Israel. Indeed indeedy, while Gromnir is careful to explain that not all the non coloured land on his map is arab owned he doesn't explain that not all the coloured land are Jewish owned either, the dotted pink appearing zones are actually state owned, just leased by Jews. So, the 'many areas' of Jewish majority are one single area, taken across both demographics and land ownership. The areas of majority Arab population are all except Jaffa, the areas of majority arab ownership (excluding state land, otherwise some are pluralities but then the Jewish share dilutes further too) are, well, every single district. And really, that's about as definitive as the subject gets. Demographics of Palestine in 1945 by district District Sub-District Muslim Percentage Jewish Percentage Christian Percentage Total Haifa Haifa 95,970 38% 119,020 47% 33,710 13% 253,450 Galilee Acre 51,130 69% 3,030 4% 11,800 16% 73,600 Beisan 16,660 67% 7,590 30% 680 3% 24,950 Nazareth 30,160 60% 7,980 16% 11,770 24% 49,910 Safad 47,310 83% 7,170 13% 1,630 3% 56,970 Tiberias 23,940 58% 13,640 33% 2,470 6% 41,470 Lydda Jaffa 95,980 24% 295,160 72% 17,790 4% 409,290 Ramle 95,590 71% 31,590 24% 5,840 4% 134,030 Samaria Jenin 60,000 98% negligible <1% 1,210 2% 61,210 Nablus 92,810 98% negligible <1% 1,560 2% 94,600 Tulkarm 76,460 82% 16,180 17% 380 1% 93,220 Jerusalem Hebron 92,640 99% 300 <1% 170 <1% 93,120 Jerusalem 104,460 41% 102,520 40% 46,130 18% 253,270 Ramallah 40,520 83% negligible <1% 8,410 17% 48,930 Gaza Beersheba 6,270 90% 510 7% 210 3% 7,000 Gaza 145,700 97% 3,540 2% 1,300 1% 150,540 Total 1,076,780 58% 608,230 33% 145,060 9% 1,845,560 (Will the tables copy across properly, I wait with bated breath... No, but I really cannot be bothered pnging them.) *The only way to get Jewish majority 'areas' is to do exactly the sort of things that gives Estonia and Latvia and Ukraine heart attacks when done to them, ie arbitrarily define said 'areas' based solely on the criterion of ethnicity.

If it makes you feel any better/worse, literally moments after the Hand of God goal, Diego Maradona scored the Goal of the Century. The real goal of the century was Michael Thomas for Arsenal vs Liverpool in 1989. Not some fancy schmancy showboating by Diego 'smellybum' Maradona.