Zoraptor

Pft. You're meant to do a user:Volourn forum post search then post the link to that with a pithy comment about helping people to find moranic posts on the Obsidz forums easily or summat. (Don't really see any reason to dislike their quotes particularly, Bioware's "I want to be a Whedon" approach has been apparent for some time and those quotes are just more of the same in that regard)

Real fans support Portsmouth, even when they managed to go bankrupt three years in a row and go from winning the FA cup to whatever the old fourth division is now called in five years. Just remember guys, it's Play Up Pompey, not play down. Meanwhile, I shall cling to New Zealand being the only team undefeated in 2010, and indeed having an undefeated record at World Cups since 1982. All completely factual, indeed we allowed ourselves not to qualify this time, to let others have a fair go. Have no idea who I shall actually support. Probably Old Blighty, as inevitable disappointment is in my DNA, plus whatever team's style I like best.

That WP article is pretty much exactly what I would realistically expect, that the organised 'trolling' was pretty much unsubstantiated accusations and actually pretty typical for any emotive topic- unsurprising that those making the accusations lack any real intellectual rigour, even here it was a go to accusation that anyone with an alternative view had to be Russian, and paid. Good to see an actual mention that the US had its own 'troll army' as well, though I'm sure the usual suspects will consider that to be A Completely Different Situation. Or ignore it, as their employment by the CIA precludes them from commenting, hoho. That's hardly an equivalent situation. Britain was involved directly in Iraq and eventually took a leading role in the invasion, it's at best involved peripherally in Ukraine or Syria. A million protesters on the streets of London was ultimately unsuccessful as being Bush's Poodle was far more important to Blair than the will of his people, but at least in theory those million people could have made a difference. A million protesters in London trying to 'fix' Syria or Ukraine on the other hand, aren't even theoretically likely to have any effect on Assad, Poroshenko or Pushilin, and you'd have to presume that those protesters probably don't want Britain to invade either place- which there's no prospect of in any case. Still, I for one would like to know where all those people who were appalled at the potential of Benghazi being attacked are now, and why they aren't so appalled at the indiscriminate shelling, use of airpower and MLRS on Slovyansk. Clearly, a no fly zone and destruction of the Ukrainian army's heavy weaponry is required to Save Civilians!

UKIP's biggest recruitment tool has been 'unfair' treatment from Europe (and the British political establishment) so that would not weaken them at all, if anything it would strengthen them domestically as being outsiders is pretty much their whole, er, raison d'être. Very easy to spin anything based on rather arbitrary rules such as the party groupings as being unfair, and they'll do it relentlessly because it innately appeals to the kind of people who they target to vote for them. The people who will see such treatment as a fair and balanced implementation of sensible rules, on the other hand, are never going to vote for UKIP anyway. Yeah, it would be a problem for UKIP as a European party, but they don't really see themselves in that context. Domestically they have plurality support per the last Euro election, they're not dependent upon European funding.

Your maths is terrible. You're giving the G7 nearly 50% more GDP share than they actually have. The G7 is irrelevant because there is zero additional anything from being the 'G7' than there is in being 'USA, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada'. They aren't even the seven largest economies any more, and they aren't ever going to be the seven largest economies again.

It's not a CDP/R product, outside of Poland. It's distributed by Namco-Bandai (WB in North America) who most definitely do operate that way, hence the reason it has regional pricing at all. But I should have clarified that it is- so far as I know- exclusive to EB/ Gamestop in Aus/ NZ only. Regular edition is certainly available for preorder everywhere here, CE ain't. Yeah, it ain't going to effect me in any case as I know how to get around such things, and it was always likely I'd go cdwow or equivalent if the price differential was too high. It's just irritating, arbitrary and stupid that I have to get around them. I don't particularly care about getting a CE (don't like the included model, plus it is just too expensive to justify even at the US/UK price) in any case, but... how on earth can anyone justify that ludicrous mark up as anything other than gouging? And that makes part of me want to tell them to asterisk off just on principle.

I've been told that the CE is an EB/ Gamestop exclusive, there will be copies in Australia for the cheap price of 200AUD and NZ- $329, which is... around 250USD (not a typo, I went to ebgames nz and checked, it's $329, $349 for consoles) at current exchange rates, so only around 100USD more expensive than in the US. And for some reason near 80USD more expensive than Australia. Farcical. Plus not only do we get to pay Aussie rates on digital games, we have to pay Aussie dollars too, so don't get even get the benefit of no currency fees. Utter asterisking joke. Not an issue for me personally as I have a britty credit card as well as an NZ one and know what remailers/ VPNs are, but the whole feeling is of someone giving one's corn flakes a golden shower, of the non compressed maize meal variety.

Said it once, said it a million times, if oby does it for any other reason than the basic satisfaction of getting a reaction from compulsive buttock clenchers I'd be extremely surprised. Nobody cares about the G7 except the members of the G7. It's the cool kids club shouting about how important they still are, most people grow out of that sort of thing by the time they're 12 or shrugged and went off to play with China and India. Sheesh, most of the G7 members are still meeting Putin anyway, it's a sign of exactly how impotent they really are that they're bigging up something so utterly trivial. Still, hilarious to see how much propaganda is being spun out of the G7 instead of events on the ground. Just watched the BBC news, five minutes of stuffed suit irrelevancies pontificating, and not a single mention of what was actually happening in Ukraine. It's embarrassing how much better Al Jazeera's coverage has been, not only do they actually have two people on the ground but they're actually covering events on the ground like the repeated and indiscriminate shelling of hospitals and other civilian buildings, instead of spewing PR like a emetic popping bulimic and calling that coverage. Can't have the brave Ukrainians attacking medics and civilians be mentioned on the beeb or cnn though, that would give completely the wrong impression.

And the Ukrainian government has got caught telling porkies again. On the heels of people gassing themselves with chlorine and setting themselves on fire (reminder, this is the president elect's pet theory, not some random nutbar from right sector or Svoboda), shelling themselves etc all just to make Ukraine look bad the separatists have now blown themselves up with AA rockets and said it was an air strike. Except not only do the independent journalists such as the Al Jazeera reporter actually on the ground say that it definitively was rocket fire from a Sukhoi, they say that it targeted a building that was not actually occupied by any fighters, as well as hitting various other nearby places. Still, got the story out first, and got it uncritically reported* too. I look forward to the UNSC resolution, sponsored by the west, for a no fly zone over Ukraine to prevent further attacks on civilians. Perhaps even a NATO intervention to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe, as with Benghazi. I'm sure that they can count on there being no Russian or Chinese veto, as with the Libyan resolution, so there's nothing stopping them from putting their principles to work this time and help liberate another people from oppression. It might even turn out better than the clusterasterisk they left Libya in. *Particularly amusing was the CNN reporter who had 'reviewed social media' and come to the conclusion that Kiev's propaganda was correct but had somehow managed to miss things like spontaneously exploding trees and tarmac plus multiple craters from the supposed single malfunctioning AA rocket in her 'review'. Sun, rocket, fire into; ignorance--.

Alleged Prey 2 concept documents were leaked last week, with it being basically a rebadged System Shock 3, by Arkane. Still some question as to whether they're actually making it, though it seems likely. Which is kind of ironic, as Arkane were working on an actual System Shock 3 (obligatory concept art link) for EA that got canned in 2008- unsurprisingly, as SS3 would be seen as far too similar to Dead Space, which already had some pretty blatant similarities to System Shock 2, eg the hydroponics in DS is very similar to the original concept of hydroponics in SS2.

The problem with the 13% figure is that it is not the whole story, even its increase is not the whole story. The really big deal is that it is increasing and is not evenly distributed throughout the union, but is granular, the largest country has almost no eurosceptic component at all. But if the eurosceptic vote gets to 50%+ in any specific country in a general election it suddenly becomes a very big deal. While UKIP has no realistic chance of winning a general election in the UK it most certainly can make sure that the Tories lose, if they get 5-10% of the vote that would otherwise go to them, and that automatically pulls the Conservatives further to the sceptical side than they've been in years for anything other than lip service. Same with Greece, the eurosceptics (or at least the Euro sceptics) came extremely close to winning there in the last general election(s) and would have won (I think) based solely on the Euro election results. While countries leaving the Euro or even the Union is not at least in theory a mortal blow to the European Idea it only has to happen once for it to become possible and conceivable (well, almost certainly inevitable) that it will happen again. At the moment integration has had 60 years of uninterrupted momentum, anything like a drop out and it certainly would not be uninterrupted momentum any more.

Ubisoft has generally been the best of the big publishers at doing 'niche' titles- it's not so long since M&MX which it is very hard to imagine EA/ 2K/ Actiblizz etc doing. Outside of Civ there's very little tbs or even rts from the other big publishers now, but Ubis till do the Anno and Heroes series. They certainly give the best impression that they care mostly about titles being profitable rather than being all blockbuster all the time and going solely for the super profitable. I suspect there will be a few more WW1 games to coincide with the centenary. AGEOD is doing a WW1 grand strat for example, hopefully it will be better than their previous attempt at it which was... a mite unstable and just about took the studio down from what I remember.

That's an odd conclusion, since it's basically the opposite in my books. The weaker countries get a lot of money in subsidies or money to save them from bankrupcy. On the other hand they barely add money to the EU since they're "poor"... by which it means the citizens aren't poor, but the government is due to low taxes, high tax-evasion and rampant corruption. The strong Euro doesn't really help much for all countries in the EU for export, but as if you say export is mainly tourism, that wont be quite as affected. And it's not exactly the EU's own fault, since the strong Euro is more due to the Dollar's decline (because the economy in the US is taking a beating thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan and the exploding bubble of banks) than good EU finances. Most of the whys have already been said, but I'll reiterate. While the Euro is a strong currency, a free floating DM would be stronger hence Germany has an export advantage from being in the Euro (conversely the drachma would be far, far weaker, so is disadvantaged) and the southern states tended to have massive trade deficits with the stronger economies, which is fueled by borrowing largely from those same northern states that have large trade surpluses with their southern neighbours. The bailouts mostly were/ are about saving those who loaned the money, north European banks primarily, so the money will, largely, circulate back to those doing the bailouts anyway. They're also about saving perhaps the single biggest European Integrationist pet project from having countries leave when the Euro is supposed to be an inevitable step on the march to the USE, and definitely not something anyone should ever leave. The relative USD (and UKP) decline is due to quantitative easing/ printing money/ low interest rates to stimulate the economy and inflate away debt- while that too has its risks it is also something that Greece now cannot do, and the Eurozone as a whole won't do. Tourism is significantly effected by exchange rate, because it effects how far your money goes. To illustrate, the UKP:NZD exchange rate basically went form 1:3.5 to 1.1:2 around 2007-8, while the exchange rate with the Euro stayed about the same. I, as a tourist, had significantly more spending power in the UK when I visited than before- if I wanted to go to a 10 quid castle it's $18 instead of $35, but if I went to a 10€ castle it still cost the same and was now near twice as expensive, relatively speaking, as Britain. Same is true for someone in the Euro zone, if they go the UK for a holiday they get near twice as much bang for buck as before while Greece still gives them the same- tourism is an open market, while all other things being equal having the same currency and free travel is a major advantage it doesn't trump a potential halving in price elsewhere. If Greece were still on the drachma its value probably would have declined even more than Britain's and it would be giving even better bang for buck. (Realistically lower exchange rates mean that imported stuff is more expensive, so it isn't as simple as I've made out, but even so lower currency is a massive advantage for tourism)

In this case there is video footage showing a rocket trail, and while it is fakeable footage (which 'cannot be independently verified') it seems unlikely to have been rebadged from Syria or anything like that. While I do not know for sure, I have been told that the bmps that defected early in the crackdown near Slovyansk have a manpad complement, seems likely they would have been used. That would also explain why there wasn't much evidence of AA rocketry when the guys in Donetsk tried to take the airport despite it being sensible for them to use it if they had it there.

They asked (or are currently asking, if Google's metatext is accurate) for beta sign ups, don't know if there's any progress beyond that though.

rofls, any article with "free and fair elections have come to Ukraine" in it is hopelessly biased. Do I have to drag up the OSCE report on the 2010 election ('free and fair', they just happened to elect the wrong guy) yet again? Asterisking partisan hack reporters, fire the lot of them into the sun and increase the IQ worldwide. Spouting such obvious rubbish is an immediate red flag, as is using sourcing from one interested party. The SBU and Ukrainian entities in general have been about as reliable as Muhammed Saeed Al Sahaf was in his heyday (Transnistrian and Russians set themselves alight in Odessa- and even gassed themselves with chlorine. No seriously, that's what the President elect actually believes).

Uhh, Half-Life 2? Yeah, and that's pretty much it in a nutshell. I'd bet every last cent in my bank account that the vast majority of people using steam are doing so because of 'blockbuster games exclusive to the platform' rather than having optionally downloaded the client and deciding to do their purchases there in a manner completely free of influence or compulsion. Getting steam from HL2 or Skyrim or whatever is every bit as much being 'forced' to use steam as origin is for recent EA games or Uplay for Ubi games, but for some reason people seem to think it's been freely chosen because... well I'm never sure exactly why, there's certainly no logical reason for it except Valve being the first to do it and most successful at it. Defaultism is not free choice, quite the opposite. The sad thing is that PC gaming was an open system, and it's largely been closed off now by 3rd party bundling of steam. At least you don't get uplay or origin bundled on 3rd party games.

TLDR: nobody including the major economies paid any attention to the financial criteria for Euro integration, and in a currency union the currency is always run for the strongest member(s), not the weaker. That's great if you're the stronger members, if you're the weaker it sucks. There isn't really any debate about it. Yes, Greece did cook the books. They weren't alone in that, nor in there being little to no oversight or auditing, while other countries simply ignored the criteria- France was over the annual debt/ GDP limit, for example, for every single year except 2006, but since it was France nobody cared. So too, at various times, was Germany. You can check out the adherence here, in the member states by SGP adherence table. Long story short, the only long term EU member and Euro user to adhere to the guidelines was wee diddly Luxemburg. And maybe Finland, depending on if you set the 'long term' bar at less than 20 years membership. They wanted the Euro launch to be a success more than wanting it to be sustainable and work for everyone, indeed as set up currently it is, basically, a money siphon that pumps cash from the poorer regions into the richer. As for the specifics of why joining the Euro is a bad idea for a weak economy that is simple economics. With a floating exchange rate for your own sovereign currency the value is set by several different factors- economic strength (or perceived economic strength, says I from a bubble currency country. NZD volume is only slightly less than the Chinese Yuan, utter madness even considering the Yuan ain't floating freely), interest rates, money supply ('quantitative easing', also related to interest rates) among them; and you have considerable amounts of control over the rate even in a theoretically freely floating system. Generally speaking, a weaker economy has a lower exchange rate relative to a stronger economy which makes exports more competitive, while a sovereign currency also allows debt reduction by quantitative easing, ie printing money. Neither of those is available to the PIIGCS. In a monetary union the exchange rate is determined mostly by the strongest, largest economies, as they contribute most to the unified pie. For them it is an advantage in fact, because the weaker economies pull down on currency value which makes their exports more affordable than they 'should' be in a sovereign currency situation, ie the Euro is lower valued than the Deutchmark would be given the strength of Germany's economy, because Greece et al pull down on it. This makes Germany's exports disproportionately competitive worldwide, and they are disproportionately competitive within Europe too. But that is exactly reversed for Greece, their exports and tourism are uncompetitive because the stronger and far larger German economy pulls the Euro value up from where their sovereign currency would be, Greece cannot become more competitive as they do not control their currency value at all, nor can they cannot inflate debt away as they cannot print money.

OSCE. There's a slight difference. If it's like last time we'll hear lots and lots about the poor non NATO Swede, a bit about the NATO members, and pretty much nothing about the bunch of Ukrainian military officers they were taking for a tour of rebel defences. And there are also reports that they've been shelling themselves to smear the brave and courageous Ukrainian military! I hear there are reports that the rebels turfed babies out of incubators and impaled them on their spiked helmets, then ate them! With horseradish sauce! Made from real horses! Funny though, rebels 'using human shields and staging false flag operations' is straight out of Bashar Assad's PR play book from 2011, right down to blaming external sources for everything. Oh by the way, since I've been reminded of monumentally crap propaganda regurgitation for some odd reason; number of Transnistrians burned alive in Odessa, zero. Number of Russians burned alive in Odessa, zero. Number of actual Odessans burned alive by Banderans in Odessa, well, all of those who died. Pro Ukrainian sources couldn't lie straight in bed.

Some people seriously do believe that NSDAP were socialist because of the S (and, indeed, the A) in their name. Of course, the nazis were stridently- to put it mildly- anti left wing and pretty much immediately liquidated what left wing elements they had such as Rohm and the SA after taking power... And you don't tend to get the same people believing that the DPRK is best most democratic Korea and DDR the most democratic Germany because of their names. To be fair though, the left/ right wing dichotomy is ridiculously simplistic considering the complexity of most party's policies.

It may have something to do with EA, since we don't know what their sales or submission terms are- assuming they're equivalent it has nothing to do with EA, certainly. Open/ closed seems to be one of those things like drm/ drm free where if you like the platform it's open and drm free, even if it isn't, whereas if you don't like the platform it's closed and riddled with drm. I still remember seeing people say that Origin was drm even for titles you could download and then never open Origin again for, while Steam doing exactly the same thing was drm free- while insisting there was no logical disconnect there. The only practical difference being that they liked steam and disliked Origin. Steam is not an open system. Anyone who believes it ever will be is deluding themselves.

I have a shelf of chinese teas that I get for being a good sport and eating things like chicken feet, tendons, some sort of deep fried tripe and 7 year egg. I don't know what most of them are though as I cannot read mandarin and know I would spend a huge amount of time diving through wikipedia looking for what they are if I started, but I do rather like the ones that make a sort of floral arrangement when infused as that rather tickles my fancy.

Bro, it's sarcasm. Based mainly on people and media organisations like the BBC shouting about the use of transparent ballot boxes in elections they don't like- Crimea and the Donetsk/ Lugansk referenda- and how they were a sign of them being undemocratic while not mentioning them at all when it's Ukraine, France or someone else they do like using them. There are perfectly reasonable, er, reasons for using transparent boxes- you can physically see your vote go in, if you fold it in half no one can see your vote any more than an opaque box, no possibility for trapdoor bottoms and it, ironically given the picture oby linked, can make ballot stuffing more obvious. Personally I'd go with standard opaque box standing on open bottomed table, but I have no problem with transparent boxes. If I were to have an actual rail against any voting system as undemocratic and dangerous it would be machine voting or most especially computer/ online voting. Which are various degrees of increased opaqueness, and are prone to hackery andor the incompetence or malfeasance of the manufacturer. And thus will no doubt be brought in at some time in the future.

I have some sympathy for that labelling to be honest, as there simply isn't a, er, simple term for the phenomenon. If you want a precise description you have to write/ say half a paragraph to get anything approaching accurate. Part of the problem is that you have the traditional right wing parties that are almost to a man True EU Believers so there has to be some differentiation from them, but then anything to the right of those right wing trad parties has to be at least further right. Eurosceptic is a bit better, but has the baggage of being saddled with association both with parties that self identify themselves as such but then do/ achieve nothing about it for years on end, as with the tories in the UK, and with including the more loony and genuinely far right fringe, plus, depending on whether it's a major concern or not, anti EU left wing groups as well. And 'nationalism' has picked up a lot of baggage as well, unfortunate because little n nationalist is basically what a lot of those labelled as far right are. Though again, in some ways even parties like Syriza in Greece are little n nationalists for these purposes. As a phenomenon the current electoral radicalism is understandable. You had 150+ years of old definition nationalism in Europe that has resulted in the existence as (theoretically at least) independent countries of most of the current members of the EU. The EU is, fundamentally and by its very design, not nationalist and antithetical to nationalism- it's designed as a supra national governmental entity and has been since its inception as the EU. It's going against the flow of history.

Have to admit I had a little chuckle at those super undemocratic transparent ballot boxes showing up again. And, of course, quite widely across the European elections as well.