Zoraptor

The great British public should not be bothered. British interference is one of the factors which has left Iraq a mess, at some point you just have to stop and let them sort things out themselves. 1918 would have been good. They don't have any chance of achieving their Caliphatic dreams in any case, they can aim for the moon but it doesn't mean that the little green men should be worried. As soon as they try inflicting their vision on the gulf states- which they'd have to, can't have a caliphate without Mecca and Medina- their funding will dry up instantly; they lack sufficient support and have only achieved anything in areas where the existing public authorities are already massively compromised by other factors. Their narrative has a certain cachet in being similar to that of the actual Caliphate- bands of committed men fired by religious fervour sweeping out of the desert to supplant the decadent [Roman and Persian] Empires, against all odds. But it's not a good actual parallel in reality, it's just a recruiting tool. They don't have a Khalid ibn al Walid and they don't have two empires that have fought themselves to the brink of bankruptcy and implosion in the decades previous. They may be aiming for a Caliphate but the best they can achieve is a (localised) Timur. Anything concrete they achieve will fall apart at the first sign of weakness. Syria would crush ISIS, if they weren't also fighting a bunch of other groups. Iraq would crush ISIS, if they weren't also fighting tribals and ba'athists. And as Syria shows, ISIS are allies of convenience to other groups, they'll naturally end up fighting their allies as well at some point. The only thing which can convert ISIS into a long term threat is something like couping Saudi Arabia.

Trouble with RTD's run is that if I look at the episode list from those years practically every episode I like is written by... Stephen Moffat. RTD had some good ideas as well as Moffat did but... hmm. Best way I can put it is that while some of Moffat's ideas seem confusingly resolved/ not resolved/ just confusing in retrospect RTD's ideas went south in a rapid and utterly linear fashion. For example, Derek Jacobi as The Master is a brilliant idea, and that was brilliantly played even if the base premise of the episode was moronic (and largely cribbed from Blake's 7). John Simm being smug, ok, chewing scenery and being shouty, not so much. And the denouement, everybody thinking of The Doctor fixing everything was one hundred billionty percent worse than anything that has ever been on TV, ever. Just cringeworthy. Might be a slight exaggeration on the last sentence, but that whole arc just about sums up my feelings towards RTD's run perfectly, promise followed very rapidly by disappointment. Having said that, RTD's involvement did include Children of Earth which was very, very good.

Finished a TWitcher plathrough favouring the Order, for the first time. And it took some time as well- as I suspected I felt like a Very Bad Person and a Bit of an Idiot at the end of it. Siegfried may be a bro and Yaevinn may be an arrogant... chap but that is literally the only plus in picking the order, all your true bros like Zoltan hate it, you're complicit in genocide, an abject moron for believing Jacques and you've basically been supporting the polish fantasy equivalent of Al Qaeda/ the nazis/ Torquemada. Nice job Order Geralt, you're an utter tool and should be ashamed of yourself. I actually decided to replay because I hadn't played since TWitcher2 and apart from not having an Order save game I wanted to check how well the two games held together, I was under the impression that the Wild Hunt and other stuff really wasn't foreshadowed much at all in TW1. Overall I think that impression was not entirely correct or incorrect, the foreshadowing is far better than, say, the complete lack of Catalyst foreshadowing in the earlier Mass Effects, but not really enough to suggest that it would be the thread holding the trilogy together.

Oh gods no. One more of his 'power of love saves the universe' deus ex machina and farting aliens and I'll... be mildly annoyed and post about it years later on an internet forum. Doesn't help that I was nowhere near as enamoured of Tennant's doctor (or Rose) as most of the internet. Moffatt's problem's are the same in Who as in Sherlock. His writing starts out seeming subtle and nuanced, with a plan, but ends up looking an incoherent mess once you've seen enough episodes- and that feeling travels back through time to effect episodes I previously liked as well. Too much 'this is going to be awesome', not enough actual awesome. While he was certainly the logical replacement for Davies in retrospect he was far better as a writer than as a show runner. I actually still like his run better than Davies overall, but it has left a feeling that it could have- and should have- been a lot better than it turned out.

BitComposter owns Jagged Alliance. They won't have given away a licence so Full Control will be paying for its usage. I don't really need a source for that, bC is a company rather than a charity it's common sense. So one way or another bC will be making money off of the property and they will have paid (or be paying via percentage) for the right to use the name. That may not be a classic publisher/ developer relationship, neither is the Obs/ Paradox one fro PoE, but it is relevant if "[you] have to make sure [publisher] does not get any profit from [you]".

All of ISIS want an independent state in Iraq and Greater Syria- that's their name, that's their entire raison d'etre. They simply don't recognise borders, to them they're meaningless. It's the other more moderate sunni groups that don't want that or have a different interpretation of things. ISIS fundamentally believes in the Caliphate, and Iraq and Al Sham (Greater Syria) were absolutely integral contiguous parts of that. The Ba'athists and tribal sunnis just basically loathe al-Maliki. But Maliki could have been the Iraqi Mandela and ISIS would still hate him.

Already been done a while ago for Jagged Alliance: Flashback.

Or in other words, they aren't actually ISIS insurgents however the media simplifies things, but a generalised sunni insurgency. In many cases they're the same secular sunnis who either supported Saddam/ the Ba'ath party right to the end or the tribal groups who fought against al-Qaeda when the US was paying them to and Zarqawi and his successors had peeved them sufficiently. As always, they'll start fighting each other once/ if they actually achieve their military goals because the only thing that unifies them is antagonism to the central Iraqi state and their long term goals are largely antithetical apart from that. Stick a fork in Maliki, he's done. He might linger on for a bit as a lame duck because, frankly, who would want his job at this point- but he's lost everyone's confidence outside Iraq and the army's capitulation has destroyed his credibility inside. Will be interesting to see the reaction if Iraq breaks up though, whether it will be a 'travesty', 'against international law' etc etc. Probably yes if it's ISIS doing it, probably not if it's the Kurds- especially now they've taken advantage of the situation to grab their one major outstanding territorial desire, Kirkuk. And associated oil fields.

And we went through the tournament unbeaten, too, even finishing above Italy in our group. Though there certainly is a bit of a difference playing off for a place against Mexico as opposed to Bahrain. OFC only really exists for political reasons, a bunch of small easy to manipulate countries that'll vote whichever way they're told to. Heh, I had little doubt my memory was rubbish on this. And you even, mercifully, left out Germany - England (4-1)...

Cameroon just needs to bring on super sub Roger Milla, problem solved. Bit weird this world cup, I really cannot recall anywhere near as many large margins in previous tournaments. There was Portugal v DPRK from 2010 but that's the only one I can remember from 4 years ago.

False. It is content that is downloaded outside the standard base game, hence downloadable content. Not to mention, 99.95% chance it will be available as a separate download for $3.99 or whatever a month or two down the line. Well... sort of. If you still buy physical media a lot of the pre order dlc is simply activated from the disc rather than downloaded, or only a very small activator file is downloaded. Pretty sure that has typically been the case with Bioware's pre-order stuff and was with their last game, ME3. (Really though, it's nitpicky to make a distinction either way, the principle of pre order content is practically identical to that of dlc- but, it doesn't always obey the dl part of the pseudoacronym)

That list is... problematic. I'm probably as far from a European Integrationist as you are, but I think it has to be admitted that the problems with Europe's responses to the various crises- which there undoubtedly have been- do have two possible generalised solutions- and are largely the result of the current set up being a kludgey compromise that satisfies no one. One solution is to, basically, decentralise the EU and go back to the E(E)C days and fully independent (of big E Europe) economic and foreign policies, but the other is to go further along the integrationist route. Rostere is, for example, most certainly correct that a lot of the problems with the Euro as a currency is that it lacks the... fiscal unity, for want of a better term, that most sovereign currencies have; fair rules which are consistently applied across a fully integrated financial system with no tendency to turn a blind eye to infractions because it is effectively impossible for the constituent regions to commit such infractions. As it stands it's a kludge, a compromise. Moving away from the kludging and compromising to full federalisation would 'fix' the Eurozone, as much as any currency can be 'fixed'. Reversion to individual currencies would also 'fix' it, as much as any currency can be 'fixed'. The Euro as it stands is broken, you can either go forward or go back, and each approach has its own problems. Same is true for most of the European Project, to greater or lesser extents. But both the go forward and go back approaches are hand waving at this point- while I personally think the EU is better as primarily a free trade/ customs union type set up saying that would fix the problems in your list is hand waving every bit as much as saying that further integration would fix them- the sovereign states of Europe were perfectly capable (and regularly did) stuff up foreign relations, energy security and economic reform by themselves. And while individual responsibility for individual mistakes is in general a fine principle sometimes those stuff ups lead to truly catastrophic consequences. Really though, at least in theory a fully Unified European voice on such issues should improve all three points on the list, as the problem with all three is that the EU does not really have a unified voice or policy on any of them.

... But why replace it at all? Why not build both? You haven't come up with a single logical reason why both should not be built, you just, heh, deflect by, hmm, strawmanning it into being a one-or-the-other argument when it clearly isn't. White stream and south stream are/ were projects under concurrent development, after all. That's what you need to explain. And I'm afraid "oh no teh Russians!!!" does not in any way constitute a logical argument.

El Oh El indeed. Yeah, so I underestimated the value of the deal to Russia by a factor of 2 in a throwaway line on a subject I had no intent to discuss further, big deal since the net result was that the deal was larger than I stated. Indeed, the preponderance of expert opinion is that the deal is pretty fair overall, and in the absence of compelling evidence otherwise that is what I will go with. I regard this as fundamentally peripheral issue to the primary subject anyway, so I'm not going to nitpick. Well, not much. Though I certainly can. If you're going to say that Europe's market is, to quote "500+ bcm/ annum" and then use as your example something which is, to quote "18.1 bcm/ annum" and whose costings do not include any of the field development you were saying was important ("most of those costs are for developing Russian gas fields", to quote) in the costings a post or so ago I most certainly don't think you've scored a home run with your analysis.

Oh please. You decided to arbitrarily apply infrastructure costs against only one side, of one deal, to show how poor it was, for that one side, which just happens to be the side you've consistently argued against*. You've got about as much room as I have to throw the 'apologist' tag around unironically. If you're going to do comparisons and you want to do it properly then you have to do it consistently for all sides and all deals to generate that fair comparison, otherwise it's not actually a comparison, it's manipulation to get a desired result. So, not only do you have to apply Chinese infrastructure costs against the price they are paying to get their 'real' cost, you have to apply the initial costs of all their European destination supply infrastructure and gas fields against Russian costings/ the European supply rate as well- after all, the fields and pipelines supplying Europe weren't created decades ago by the natural gas pixies in a fit of philanthropic fervour, they too had to be paid for; and the 'real' cost of gas supplied to Europe or China to Europe or China includes their gas infrastructure every bit as much as Russia's infrastructure is a cost to Russia. Arguing that infrastructure costs must be applied only to the Russians, and only in this single deal, is a comparison designed whether consciously or not to make this deal look worse than it is. There's no need for a doctorate in economics to know that's the case- basic common sense and logic is sufficient. I note that you have no response to the price comparison to Ukraine, or it being a bulk deal, so I guess they are accepted as being valid rebuttal at least. *Right down to arguing that the Ukrainian Constitution didn't really say what it says when you were arguing that Yanukovich's removal was constitutional.

Well now, this has got interesting in the last three minutes. Still find Sturridge's (vague) resemblance to MC Hammer disconcerting.

Yeah, but that's not how democracy works, at least in theory. By that measure someone voting Labour in a safe Tory seat or vice versa just shouldn't bother to vote since there's no chance their vote will change anything. People in 'liberal democracies' simply are not (generally) conditioned to think that way even if a lot of the time it reflects reality; it is though quite likely why there is declining participation and voting rates. Voting for UKIP- and I'll caveat this as not being resident in the UK nor having ever voted for them- certainly appears to be near pure protest vote, and protest votes are not really expected to do anything other than show dissatisfaction with the status quo. And it's a protest vote from a bloc that will only get more strident if they feel they are being ignored, which they undoubtedly will, and in a political climate in which dissatisfaction with the status quo, whether justified or not, is high and growing that will get them more votes. UKIP aren't really expected to achieve change at this point, indeed, once they do achieve change their entire reason for being becomes redundant. And they will spin any lack of action into being the fault of 'EU bureaucracy running mad and stifling British Liberty under their smothering continental regulatory blanket etc etc' rather than them themselves, so powerlessness actually enhances their standing rather than weakens it.

10% discount on a bulk long term deal would not be considered unusual at all if it were anything other than gas (and Russia) involved, and that is the figure pretty much everyone is using. And it's far less than other discounts. The old Ukrainian figure that Tymoshenko/ Yanukovich negotiated was considerably lower than that or even the lowest estimate you've provided ($234 total cost or around 35% baseline discount), for example. Doing anything with the infrastructure costs is questionable as well. We don't know who is paying them or how much they will be. Plus, if the 'real' cost that Russia is getting gets lowered by their infrastructure costs then, logically, what China 'really' pays has to have their infrastructure costs added. So, a new natural gas distribution network across China, hmm, make it easy and say 50 billion dollars and the 'real' price is... back up to ~$350, again. Sadly that is not accurate, the government is actively recruiting neo fascists volunteers for direct use as shock troops- see Al Jazeera going to visit the Azov Battalion. It isn't widely reported in western media, for some unfathomable reason, but it definitively is happening. This is the unit that is being widely and absolutely deliberately used in eastern Ukraine, and could not be better designed to reinforce exactly the 'Kievan junta/ Banderan/ Fascist' stereotype that Kiev supposedly wants to avoid.

I doubt it will collapse. The Kurds are still at the sidelines, but they could quickly halt Isis if they wanted to. And there's also Iran who wouldn't like to see their new bestest Shiite buddies toppled. Yeah, if Iran props up Assad there's no chance of them not propping up Iraq as well. Realistically there's no chance of majority shia areas getting taken and held, there's still far too many weapons in general circulation and many in the general population have military experience through the old Iraqi army or the previous rounds of sectarian troubles, it's no coincidence that the areas taken are all predominantly sunni so less likely to have general popular resistance.

It's probably indifferent in a game- while there would be far more than anyone could feasibly visit that should not in itself effect quality, assuming the worlds are generated efficiently so don't slow development. There's no obligation to visit all/ most/ many systems, most likely. Heh, they'll probably do realistic dynamic star fields based on the systems, knowing Braben. His physics autism could be highly annoying in FFE when you went to a binary star and the planet you wanted was on the other side of the system, took forever to get there without hyperspace.

Nope, you have absolutely no logical basis to claim that stopping the south stream improves energy security, none at all. At present if there was a pure accident on the trans Ukraine pipeline that cut supply then, well, supply would be cut, with no malicious or other intent. With south stream it wouldn't. Having an alternative source for Russian gas improves energy security, full stop, there is literally no reason not to have it and it cannot be argued that not having it improves energy security. You can have other sources as well, that is sensible, but that doesn't change the basic facts for all the anti-russian butthurt the EU may be feeling. As for China, there was the little matter of the 200 billion dollar gas agreement Russia and China signed this year, which you might have heard about if you weren't as one eared as you are one eyed. At this point it doesn't matter whether or not Russia and China particularly like each other on a fundamental basis, they have complementary economies and both certainly and fundamentally dislike western hegemony.

I would have thought they would have at least got the type of tank right, only footage I saw of them was fuzzy cam of a single tank trundling down a suburban road. Kind of funny, Al Jazeera who have usually been pretty accurate were still saying they were Russian T72s a couple of hours ago. Situation with funding and the like I suspect would actually be rather like that of ISIS in Iraq- in that case most of the money and supplies comes from 'private sources' in the UAE/ Saudi/ Qatar (or is looted) and none comes from any sort of 'official' source. Far better plausible deniability that way, main drawback is that you have less control and they may decide to go off the reservation.

Well, that is exactly how the separatists got their bmps, from the side of the road. In that case it was all filmed by the BBC and Al Jazeera. Seems rather odd and completely pointless that the Russians would give enough military hardware for it be remarked upon but nowhere near enough to actually make a difference, whereas Ukrainian armed forces had heaps of stuff boxed up in warehouses- something like a quarter of their nominal air force was boxed in Crimean warehouses for example- because they lack the funds to actually run it. Given that the Ukrainian Interior Ministry is utterly unreliable when it comes to facts there's no reason whatsoever to believe them over a more logical explanation which has happened before. If you start seeing lots of tanks and the more advanced varieties then its likely they're getting tanks from the Russians. 3 T72s though, which Ukraine itself has hundreds of? Nah.

It's more likely it is the sort of 'soft bias' you frequently get in many sports when it looks like a favoured, home team may lose and then every decision seems to go in their favour, that happens a lot and is probably subconscious rather than deliberate. Croatia winning would have been massively deflating (for Brazil that is, I imagine most neutrals were cheering the red and whites) for a tournament that is and has been... not without controversy, domestically. But outright corruption can hardly be ruled out given the state of football and the festering canker at its top. I still remember the horrible clusterasterisk of the 2006 venue award where our delegate ignored instructions and gave Germany rather than RSA the cup that time- and how basically nothing changed except a quickly abandoned host rotation policy- let alone the still unwinding mess of the Qatar bid's success for 2022 and the Blatter patronage system kicking in for yet another term. It's actually kind of ironic that the Russian bid for 2018 has seemingly missed out on the controversy so far given all the Sochi stuff was only a few months ago and it really says something about how crap the rest of the stuff has been.

I only skimmed the match but every time I did it seemed some Croat was getting booked for something that looked pretty innocuous. Ah yes, time for my quadrennial view of perhaps the only tournament x team y song I can actually stomach.