Zoraptor

And in that case the Tigers lost largely because they weren't an insurgent force any more. When they were an insurgent army they were extremely successful, perhaps too successful since that success led to them formalising all their structures and basically setting up a mini Tamil statelet complete with all the trimmings and a regular army during the truce- an army which then got steamrollered when the conflict resumed because, as a regular army, it was no match for the Lankan one.

Ah, but your dialogue is also different, and that is where most of the hints and in jokes come in.

Meh, the problem with the balkans stuff is that it's never even handed in its coverage. Pretty much everyone there was highly unpleasant at various times and places and there were no good guys, that's always true in any civil war- "what's so civil about war anyway?" to quote the great philosopher Axl Rose. But media loves a nice, simple story with identifiable good guys and bad guys and will, as always, hammer the square situation into the round hole when establishing that narrative. The usual response to something like the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Krajina varies from "they voluntarily moved out" (!!!) to "well, they did it first" (which rather ignores the conduct of Croatia during WW2- which is actually quite a nice parallel to Ukraine, to bring things back somewhat to topic, since you have at least some in Croatia lionising the Ustasi much as you have some in Ukraine who think Bandera and the UPA were wonderful) to simply pretending it didn't happen, when the only proper response is to deplore such things whoever is the perpetrator and not let geopolitical stuff trump ethics. And that, ladies and gentlemen, puts me well over my RDI of naivity for the day, and it's still before lunchtime. Oh, and the chopper the Ukrainians lost in Slovyansk is confrimed to have been shot down by small arms fire- so much for them having to have sophisticated missiles supplied by Russia to shoot down helis as claimed last week. I'd be keeping count of how often the pro Kiev propaganda has been wrong, but I ran out of fingers and toes some time ago. Pretty sure. You don't see western politicians talking about revolution and uprising in that manner and he was stating quite plainly that it was planned, we have no reason to doubt him. Now, you can say that an interview with the third most important opposition leader doesn't constitute evidence and you need to hear the same from Yatsenyuk and Klitschko, or that he really meant have a bake sale and do some door knocking instead of "revolution" and "uprising", but I'd be far more confident that that interpretation is your bias than mine is mine, because instead of bake sales and door knocking we got, well, the uprising and revolution which my interpretation supports. Your interpretation has its flush busted by the 2 of reality, mine is the ace of trumps (suit, reality), since I'm into mixing metaphors. If we hadn't got revolution and uprising it'd be open to interpretation, certainly, but less than a year after that interview that is precisely what we did get. Planned for, played for, and got. Quod Erat decidedly non passively Demonstrandum.

Hey guys, I hear that the cab driver is proven undeniably to be Cain! (Don't play either Malkavian or Nosferatu on the first play through, unless you're sure you'll play once in which case Malkavian is OK. Apart from arguing with TV anchors and Stop signs the Malkav quite obviously knows what is going on, and is more entertaining if you know what is going on as well)

Those sheep need a good crutching, not something the average consumer would put up with. Unless rebranded as a ewe brazilian, perhaps. Plus one of the lambs looks like it has fly strike. Yes, I am awaiting Sheep Shearing Simulator 2014, now that you ask.

What I think is utterly irrelevant and completely meaningless (though I'll give it below since you seem so interested)- it's pretty obvious to anyone what Tyanybok meant and he's far more important than I am, because whatever I say will be speculation whereas what he says speaks directly as an actual leader. It's like disputing something about black holes, having an interview with Hawking given as a reply then insisting you want to know what I think about black holes, not Hawking, and it's only one interview so Hawking was misquoted or the interviewer had an agenda. You can insist that when Hawking says singularity he means something different and when Tyanybok says uprising or revolution he means something different- even despite actually getting an uprising and revolution- but in neither case does the evidence support you. Now since you're so interested I have basically no doubt that they decided they were going to try and flip Yanukovich if they got the opportunity, from the start, it's a tactic they've used previously and successfully and Tyanybok outright states that they've been looking for an issue to trigger something, and I have no doubt that they were actively encouraged to do so by the EU and US as that is a tactic they've used successfully in their various colour revolutions, hence the EU's intransigence about agreements when the Russians were willing to compromise. And power blocs are always looking for opportunities to flip countries, anyone who thinks theirs is lily white in that regard is deceiving themselves. But I doubt they expected or planned for what they've now got. They give the distinct impression of being a bunch of headless chickens stuck in the headlights to mix a metaphor- now- that they distinctly did not when the revolution was in progress. They, and the EU/US thought they saw a golden opportunity to permanently alter the facts on the ground in their favour, gift themselves the next set of elections by crippling the PoR and Communists, and get Ukraine's western track so far in advance that it wouldn't matter what the eastern parts wanted as by the time they had a say it'd be irreversible. They critically miscalculated just how much importance Russia puts on Ukraine, how reliable the eastern parts of the state apparatus would be having spent so much of their energy slagging them off and in some cases sacking them and, well, thought that their opponents would just suck it up and didn't really believe strongly enough to really react. Now, they don't have a clue what to do, they've broken their country, probably permanently.

Anti western? More like pro reality. You don't even actually dispute it, you just claim that the french and AU don't have enough troops as an excuse. Well, they had enough to change the facts on the ground by threatening Seleka and getting them to withdraw, just not, apparently enough to do the same when it's muslims getting killed instead of christians. If western involvement was a panacea for all Africa's ills colonialism would have been a wonderful era of enlightenment and prosperity, after all.

Right, so opposition goes on about revolution, about how some are being too "passive" and we then get a revolution- but he actually meant normal electoral stuff like making phone calls and putting up posters? Hmm. You even establish form in your interpretation, the Orange Revolution may have had some legitimacy in that the election was disputed, but the last one was not and the OSCE even went out of their way to say that rumours of it being fixed were wholly unsubstantiated. The only then current justification was sour grapes from losing in the first place- and that is not usually seen as a good justification. Who cares that the interview is with Tyanybok anyway? He's proud of himself, so he's honest about what he's doing because he thinks it's right and will appeal to people, much as some of the Right Sector people in Odessa were quite open about setting the Union building on fire because they thought it was fine to do so and despite Yatsenyuk trying to blame everyone except his supporters for it. He talks about fomenting a revolution and pre revolutionary atmosphere, about trying for an uprising, others being too "passive" and stuff like that and then non passive revolution is what happens. It's borne out by history that he was not talking revolution in some sort of abstract way. Or, it seems, it's "only one link", an interview with only the third most important leader. Apparently, only signed affadavits from Yatsenyuk and Klitschko (who I'd actually let off personally, since he's had the good sense to stay out of the clusterasterisk that is the Yatsenyuk/ Turchenov 'government' and was specifically called too passive, a veritable badge of honour considering the current circumstances) will do as evidence.

Neither Frank nor Francis is meant to be a sympathetic character, certainly. They have some amount of the anti hero about them when taking on those you suspect are equally immoral but they are pretty much outright villains by any objective measure. I find I can cope with that OK, so long as the villainy is done in an interesting manner and with style.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone describe prokul harem boko haram as anything other than a standardly unpleasant Al Qaida like. There are some fair reasons for muslims in Nigeria to feel discriminated against, and the violence has certainly not been one way as the western press tends to simplify it to- but then Nigeria is so corrupt as an entity that pretty much everyone is discriminated against in some way. Even so, boko haram don't have huge support even amongst the muslim population, they just have enough to be effective in a country that is still massively underdeveloped and has porous borders with equally underdeveloped countries. As for western interventions, well, CAR is a good example in all the wrong ways. Having got their favoured group (Christians, in this case) back into power the French are largely sitting on their hands while they settle scores with their muslim neighbours who were in power previously- french colonial and post colonial policy in a nutshell, get their favoured group into power and (try to) keep them there whatever they do, as was so shamefully on show in Rwanda twenty years ago. Yep, the practical effect of the Stingers was massively overstated, with the number supplied and the size of Afghanistan there was very little probability of running into one on any given sortie. The vast majority of Russian air losses were due to wholly conventional stuff like AAA and even small arms. But the presence of some stingers did change how the Russians behaved which made them a lot less effective.

Vampire Diaries is basically Beverly Hills 90210 with supernatural themes. Most of that network's output is Beverly Hills 90210 with [theme x] though. I've been watching the US version of House of Cards and to be honest I'm not all that impressed. I think it's due to two things, I just don't find Kevin Spacey particularly convincing when compared with Ian Richardson* and I did like the British version a lot. Overall the feeling is rather like the US version of Cracker, Fitz, where it was obviously based on the same source material but was just a bit worse in every meaningful respect. And it's just too long as well, another common complaint I have with US adaptations of brit shows- though at least it isn't 22ish episodes like a standard US season is. *the upper crust English accent delivering his disdainful soliloquy just works so much better, for me, than Frank's rather slight southern drawl. Plus, I don't like what they've done with his wife who in the english version is probably worse than Francis himself.

Don't know why I bother really, but here is the link on the planning of the 'spontaneous' anti Yanukovich protests, again*. Tyanybok is quite open about trying to foment a "pre revolutionary atmosphere" since Yanukovich's (free and fair, since I'm recycling links) election in 2010. Oh, and he quite freely and without prompting quotes Bandera in that interview as well. *Most likely so you can not read it, again, and insist that it wasn't planned sometime down the line, again.

And, as I've pointed out multiple times, Euromaidan was not spontaneous but had been planned- admitted, again by those inconvenient self proud Nationalists- from pretty much the point Yanukovich came to power. So it wasn't really anything Russia did, it started with the 'wrong' half of Ukraine electing the wrong President and has proceeded to the 'wrong' half of Ukraine resisting his ouster and the 'right' half government deciding to do exactly the same thing Yanukovich is accused of and inflict its vision on the rest of the country. If they intervene they'll go to Odessa because the marginal cost of going there as opposed to just plain invading any part of Ukraine will be, well, marginal, and they will want to get to Transnistria which is on the Moldovan border. On the other hand I cannot see them going to Kiev for much the same reasons they didn't go to Tblisi in 2008, and if they do they won't try and hold it. They'll certainly want the Dniepr canal that supplies water to Crimea now that Ukraine has been throttling supply, and that isn't really all that far from Odessa.

Not necessarily, some of the press coverage has, as always, not exactly been straight down the middle and there has certainly been a lot of dissimulation from both official Ukrainian sources and western politicians. It's possible that there was a genuine belief that those in the building were a cadre of Russian spetsnaz and specially trained Transnistrian infiltrators which seems to be the 'official' version the Ukrainians are putting out. Of course, those with some historic knowledge know that herding people into buildings and setting them on fire was a popular past time among Right Sector's direct antecedent the UPA in their pogroms during the nazi occupation- indeed, Kiev city hall had a prominent poster of Stepan Bandera added to its decor post Maidan. Plus, some of the more honest publications (such as the Grauniad) have noted the presence of Right Sector there, as well as some of their rather proud pronouncements ("The aim is to completely clear Odessa [of pro-Russians]," said Dmitry Rogovsky, another activist from Right Sector whose hand had been injured during the fighting. "They are all paid Russian separatists"), and have pictures clearly showing UPA flags as well. It's such a shame that loony tunes fascists are actually proud of being loony tunes fascists and like boasting about it, it makes it so much more difficult to spin the kindly Kievan bunnies vs evil Russian bear narrative effectively.

Wals, you just liked a post of Tagaziel's in which he described the people burned to death in Odessa as being "heavily armed separatists waging regular war against the government" a description which is... pretty despicable since they quite obviously were not anything like that by any stretch of reality and they most certainly were at very worst equivalent to what was regularly seen at Euromaiden. I'm not sure, but I think you may have missed the point just slightly yourself.

The standard is that anything done on the company's time or equipment is explicitly owned by the company and in some cases anything done even in the employees' own time is owned ie the employee is contracted exclusively to their employer. The first certainly would apply, the second would not as Zenimax knew that Carmack was working for Oculus simultaneously with them for a while and any alternative interpretation would defy all logic. Plus whichever rocket firm Carmack was working for as well might have to worry. (I certainly remember a case where someone reconstructed functionally (but not literally) identical code from memory and it was found to be OK legally because it was not under patent, but I cannot find a narrow enough set of terms to find a ref on google, everything is swamped by links to software piracy) And, in other random news...

Yep, the novels are why I say that the story in the prequel was not actually the problem many make it out to be. I've almost certainly said it before but all of Matt Stover's Star Wars novels are worth reading, but in particular the RotS novelisation as (and despite me liking the movie version a fair bit) it shows what could have been done with George's ideas. Yeah, the prequel fights and a lot of the set pieces gave me the distinct feeling that hey were included to do something else, hooks for games/ toys or pad the movie out or showcase sfx rather than serving the story- the pod racing and the pursuit of whatshername/ Jango at the start of AotC were utterly implausible and worse, far too long. I thought most of the space battle stuff were fine though except the utterly derivative and pretty silly one at the end of TPM, but then pretty most everything about TPM was a bit silly.

That's certainly true, though GNP arguments ultimately end up with it being better for everyone to join the EU, since it is the largest (at least theoretically integrated) economic bloc on the planet, if you took raw and literal national GNP everyone would be petitioning to join the US, or China in a few years. But it is not that simple, joining the EU has costs as well as benefits and it is the balance of those that determines it rather than a simplistic measure like GNP or even GDP/c. And, of course, there's no realistic prospect of Ukraine actually joining the EU in the short to medium term, it would just be an association agreement with most of the drawbacks but few of the benefits of full membership. As it is they saddle themselves with having their economy run from Geneva with the sole aim of paying back creditors. Though the most ironic part is that the biggest creditor is Russia, who may end up with both the best bits of Ukraine and the rest of the country still paying back loans to Russia, in penury. And, of course, Ukraine could have got both the best of both worlds if not for EU intransigence, ie both the agreement with the EU and with Russia since Russia was amenable, it was the EU that vetoed it and decided to try using the issue to flip the government instead. In retrospect they would have been far better off not listening to the US and accepting that deal.

Zenimax sues John Carmack/ Oculus and by extension Facebook for code theft. Verily, Zenimax is the Edge Games of games companies, and Bob Altman the Tim Langdell. Hopefully they have met their EA, not many fights I'd cheer for Facebook in, but Zenimax find a way... First time I've seen anyone try claiming that "know-how" developed at a company is owned by a company. It's rather like Walmart suing a sales technician who moves to selling petrol for Shell because they learned to use a till at Walmart, and it is a recipe for professional slavery. (And I don't even particularly like Oculus or Carmack, I even found doom/ quake etc boring)

Hack as compared to what, George Lucas? Dunno, I can imagine Abrams saying "jerkier, more lens flare" instead of "faster, more intense" as Lucas supposedly did. Certainly late model Lucas is worse that current model Abrams, but... I always end up comparing Lucas to McCatrney in the Lennon McCartney partnership. So long as Paul had John there to tell him when he was retreating up his own fundamental orifice he was fine, solo Paul though was a mess of self indulgent tripe all the more so because you could see where it could have avoided it. Once Lucas insulated himself from criticism you started to get incomprehensible stuff and pointless tinkering (like with 1414) that really just needed someone to stand up and say "that won't work George", but you got the distinct impression that that seldom if ever happened and was ignored if it did. The story in the prequel trilogy could have worked, it desperately needed a good script editing and better character direction, but the visual style and set pieces were still fine and even with the execution botched the 3rd makes (IMO) a better conclusion to its trilogy than RotJ made to its. But SW-RotJ is better overall because it had George's vision and strengths such as the exceptionally good and massively influential visual design, but brought others in to cover his weaknesses. (Well, not so much RotJ.) Abrams hasn't reached Lucas levels of success yet, so it remains to be seen if he'll end up with the same problems. Probably not, since Lucas had his own production company as well- but I watch Abrams' stuff and get this rather... Michael Bay feeling. It's all very kinetic and stylish, but there doesn't seem to be much beneath that.

He's actually from a post soviet country, iirc. Mor, bro, you always go to great pains to say that western media is inherently better. It isn't, because freedom of the press means nothing at all practical for the end user if the freedom is not actually used. Willingly parroting government propaganda is actually worse than parroting propaganda because you're forced to, precisely because you aren't forced to and have an at least implied duty towards balance and fairness. In equally practical terms, western media is not monolithic so you do get some who question what they are fed, and the quality is also variable depending on which issue is being examined, but on the Ukrainian issues the western media's coverage has been- in general- a rubbish laden litany of circular sourcing, acritical repeating of governmental releases and cold war style "Russian's are coming" jingoism. Nobody should be surprised that there is unrest in the east, because the west's 'democratic' revolution unseated the actually democratically elected leader they elected. The western media though, appears baffled almost to a man that it is happening because they've convinced themselves that everyone in Ukraine supported Maidan or at very least don't care enough to take action. I'm not particularly keen on getting into a pointless argument about a wholly subjective issue of which is worse with someone whose typical response to contrary views has been to accuse people of being Russian, paid shills, or conspiracy nuts though*. If it makes you feel better, simply describing both russian and western media as bad does not actually mean they're directly equivalent and equally bad, as you seem to think. It just means that neither is good. *I rather suspect a lot of that comes from being right about the predictions of the consequences of Maidan, typically the more correct you are the less cogent and more ad hominem the rebuttals become because that is all that is left. Pretty much every single prediction made by the 'conspiracy theorists' has come true- from the Russians not standing still and just taking it, to the IMF/WB/EU imposing strict austerity with gas prices etc rising and pensions collapsing, to the Ukrainian army being at very best unreliable; to the new government making stupid triumphalist decisions to appeal to its support base whatever was best for the country and the desperately needed reconciliation, handing power to their tame oligarchs, being unable to control their nationalist defence groups, and the easterners not just taking the westerners' putsch sitting down. That's an exceptionally good hit rate for people detached from reality, indeed the pro Maidan types with their road to the EU paved with gold, frankensense and myrrh have had a somewhat worse strike rate.

NOBODY IS CLAIMING THAT RUSSIAN MEDIA IS GOOD. That's the argument you wish people were making because it'd be an 'automatic win' for you and it is an absolute classic straw man, constructing the argument you wish people were making, not the one they actually are- also hence why you think everyone who doesn't agree with you is 'deflecting'. The only people saying that it's good is whoever you're arguing with in your own head. It is saying there's zero point implicitly trusting either sides' media- if you're refuting stuff/ making accusations with incorrect western propagated information it's exactly as bad as someone doing the same with Russian sourced stuff, it isn't fundamentally better just because West=good Russia=bad FACT! Indeed, it's utterly pointless getting a 'balanced' view from 'multiple sources' when they're all uncritically using exactly the same ultimate source*. How many media outlets pulled USAToday up on their mistranslation? How many didn't simply repeat it as gospel? Sadly true my fellow cantabriensis, though at least in this case it was definitely any, even if it still wasn't many and the same, incorrect, accusation was still being repeated days later. Yet it wasn't exactly difficult to actually check the facts. Use your multiple sources there and you come up with a perfectly reinforced supposedly checked yet completely incorrect view because they all go back to the same, wrong, source, and very few bothered to check because USAToday is, supposedly, proper unbiased western media. Just wrong proper unbiased media. *That's particularly ironic on a gaming forum, because one of the biggest complaints about gaming journalists is how they uncritically regurgitate press releases from games companies and other site's speculation as if it's factual news and won't dissent from PR releases because they may lose access. But when the news media does the same thing...

NJO brought the world Vergere, and thus Kreia, so we should all (except Volo who should shake his fist) be thankful for that as Star Wars was far more interesting with a bit of moral ambiguity rather than with GL's incomprehensible and arbitrary moral absolutism. The quality of the writing was wildly erratic but it did manage a reasonable number of books that were genuinely worth reading.

We aren't taking the coordinated misinformation put out about Russia as if it were remotely credible, that is however something the other side of the debate does repeatedly by accepting anything anti Russian as gospel, by default. Like (mistranslated/ misattributed) stories about anti jewish pamphlets in Donetsk- the record of the western media in terms of disinformation promulgation has been dreadfully bad, the record of anti Russians accepting it automatically because it fits preconceptions equally so. The implication that because RT may be worse in the disinformation stakes everything is peachy with western media is, well, intellectually lazy. I don't really care whether NWN OC or Oblivion is objectively the worse game, they're both terrible and everything else is degree. Seriously though, go back a few pages and see how many links to RT there are which doesn't come from oby. Go back further. See how many you can find- not many, if any, to quote the great philosopher Scribe. You're tilting at windmills.

It's not a matter of Russian media scoring higher, that's a false comparison because there's no one here saying that Russian media is good. We seem to end up at this point pretty much every time, with a lot of issues. The argument should be that the Beeb is objectively good, not just better than something which you say is dreadful. We've gone through the reasons for why people think western media coverage has been of very poor quality extensively and I cannot be bothered repeating it again, you either agree or disagree at this point- and there have been a distinct lack of RT or equivalent links in the refutation as well. For what, the failure in Iraq or getting worse? I hardly think that the failure in Iraq needs much more information- the press breathlessly reported the mobile labs, the "we know where they are" comments and the rest, did very little to counter them at all, and simply have not learned from the experience as they're doing the same thing. For the Beeb in particular they were utterly cowed by that execrable hatchet job known as the Hutton Report- a report that put maintenance in the Mediterranean region back a year it used so much whitewash- and threats of funding cuts. As for why you should trust me, there's no inherent reason to trust me at all. I don't claim to be an ultimate authority on matters and have extraordinary weight. But at the same time I've provided plenty of sources for the whys and for disputations with those claiming more authority, and not a single one has been RT or an equivalent, indeed I go out of my way to use western sources to rebut western sources precisely because it shortcuts the "OMG RT link, automatic fail" kneejerk reaction- hence mentioning Mr Beardy alleged Russian Special Forces guy being at a wedding in Slovyansk as shown on the BBC itself. I just wish I could find a short circuit for the "BBC/ CNN says something so it's automatically true" kneejerk reaction as well.