Zoraptor

That article is just a tad over positive. The ones announced at the CES so far are a more expensive approx PS4 equivalent from CyberPowerPC (minus optical drive, doubleplus ugliness) and something that costs ~1800USD. Neither is particularly competitive either with consoles or with the pre-existing PC paradigm which can at least in theory be converted to a steam machine without buying a set option. When they come up with both a compelling reason to buy the hardware at all and a competitively priced offering then it will have earned the positivity.

I always thought Kensai/ Mage was the fromage du fromage of builds. Certainly it's the one I've seen cited most often for soloing.

Are any of them made by people who weren't bought out by Valve? And a lot of those seem to have caught the delay disease once their buy out titles were released.

It certainly wasn't an armed coup if Hamas won the election and Fatah illegally kept power, it was a... well, there isn't really a word for it. If the international community had honoured its commitments there would be no WB/ Gaza divide but they disliked the results, so set them aside for to favour their horse in the race. Accusations of 'selective stance taking' and the like are not in the least bit constructive either, since your 'selective stances' will tend to be anything said that you (or indeed I, if operating in reverse) disagree with. To illustrate, you, for example, ignore that half of Jordan's population is Palestinian refugees, you want them- a poor country with little in the way of resources- to basically "deal with it" and absorb them no matter what the practicalities are. I dare say if the US got 300 million refugees, or the UK 60 million they'd happily accept them... let alone Israel allowing them their right of return to and integration in their actual country. There is an argument that refugees should be integrated, but it's usually made by those far separated from the actual place expected to accept them and by those who do not have to deal with the problems associated with such a policy, and always seems to involve them being integrated somewhere 'over there', Not In My Back Yard.

I'd think it's more common than people believe, for older games there would simply be no way to know it was happening. But even such high budget and high profile titles as the GTA3s have been pulled- temporarily, in their case, and due to music licensing issues supposedly. Might be a bit less common going forward as there may be enough financial reward to buy perpetual licenses since DD means that even old games can still be offered for sale easily and financially viably, but if Marvel or Warners want to be able to offer 'clean' licenses for their properties every few years they'll still time limit them.

The belief that the Israeli right is not interested in peace is based on a tricksome thing called 'reality'. They have what they want already, any peace would require compromise and giving stuff up, which they don't want to do. You're also countering someone else's opinion based on your own opinion as if yours were generally accepted fact. Even your facts aren't actual facts. Hamas won the last Palestinian election which people like George Walker Bush and Condoleeza Rice described as fair (the day before the results were announced, of course) while strangely enough Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas has been able to get away with having zero elections since.

The GOG announcement for the free copies of 1,2,T specifically said that they were being removed 31/12 due to Interplay's rights expiring and that was republished fairly widely (eg RPS) including the note that would be removed and why. I'll freely admit that that doesn't make the technical definition of everyone, but it's about as good as you can get in terms of notice and minimising the impact. I cannot think of any other reasonable way they could publicise it.

Everyone knew that was coming due to the rights switch over- and at least everyone had a chance to get them free beforehand and they're still available if you did. More surprisingly they apparently should have been removed from steam as well as GOG, according to Pete Hines.

Well, when I saw Dark Post Apocalypse I did think 'yes, Garrett in a post apocalyptic version of his world would be great. What if the Trickster won?'. Post apocalyptic steampunk, basically, there ain't enough (any?) of it.

Americans had an oddly prosaic naming convention for many of their weapons. It took the Brits multiple tries to get naming tanks after generals to stick and most of the weapons they did name after designers or manufacturers were militantly unpoetic. "Browning Automatic Rifle" could hardly be closer to "Beige Infantry Support Weapon" if it tried. And the current trend towards horrible, horrible recursive acronyms... Though Russian and German weapons have the advantage of sounding exotic because they're foreign even when they are using generic type names. Panzerkampfwagon IV just sounds cool even if it only really means tank type IV to most practical purposes.

The AK is mechanically very different from the StG, which is the important part. They look quite similar due to the curved mag and wooden stock and they're both identifiable as 'modern' assault rifles but that's about where the similarities stop. It's like saying that the Panther was based on the T34 as it incorporated some of the ideas from the T34, such as sloping armour and a decent high velocity gun from the get go. But the Panther was a fundamentally different tank despite the apparent similarities, and still had far more in common with other german tanks than with the russian one it was 'based' on.

Did I miss something? There's an R4 (p)review of the AoD demo on Gamebanshee done by Eric 'sea' Schwarz which is in parts not so complimentary as the previous one he did two years ago. Some people on fair codexia agree with him, some do not. For some unspecified reason this is significant as opposed to the other 999/1000 times that people on the codex don't agree with each other. AoD is a fairly divisive game on the codex anyway, it has a lot of ardent defenders but it has snipers and detractors too. FOT's biggest failing wasn't that it was a JA2 clone, it was that it was a bad JA2 clone. Too few action points, too many enemies resulted in TB combat being exactly the turgid and stultifying affair that TTON's combat detractors fear, too many characters and too quick real time combat (plus the horrible switch between the two) meant that it was nearly impossible to use tactics properly in real time and you did need to use tactics.

Not really. If anything someone armed with an AK is far less cannon fodder than they were prior to the AK, indeed that is one of the main reasons Kalashnikov invented the thing, due to the experiences in the Great Patriotic War with unreliable and low firepower weapons. It's not like conscription or armies or training are new, all the AK did was make the average Joe with a few hours training at least theoretically comparable to a professional soldier in terms of firepower. If it were the AK41 instead of the AK47 there'd almost certainly be a lot less accusations of the Soviets treating their soldiers like cannon fodder because they'd have had the best personal weapon of the war by a mile, to illustrate the point. Cannon fodder is that whether it's armed with AKs, Brown Besses or pitchforks. Sure, if you gave them over engineered weapons they'd stop working quite quickly but the genius of the AK is that they won't. Which, if you're part of that cannon fodder is an exceptionally good thing, not bad.

If you have a conscript/ low skill army then you need a simple and easy to maintain weapon, hence as soon as automatic became important something like the AK was inevitable. If Kalashnikov hadn't done it someone else would have. The German's WW2 assault rifle type weapons had already pointed the way.

Yep, may as well criticise the inventor of the machete, or go back to those heartless bastards in China who invented gunpowder in the first place. All Kalashnikov did was make a very popular and reliable version of something that had been around for centuries; if they weren't using AKs they'd be using some other gun. Or sticks and stones, we're very good at improvising violence with whatever we have to hand.

The name is brilliant. "Kingdom Come: Deliverance- it'll make you squeal like a pig"! Best tagline since John Romero was at iD.

Don't know if anyone has a decent source for profitability of colonies, it seems to be one of the more difficult things to find decent analyses of. The colonies were nearly all loss makers post WW2- except those with extraordinary resources like oil- due to the US insisting on the disbanding of the preferential trade system but prior to that the only one I know of that made a definitive loss was India of all places. And that changed when they hit on the great idea of selling opium to China, and switched to being very profitable. Main thing is that colonies being drains is not borne out by the evidence- Britain and France were very wealthy throughout the colonial period up until at least WW1 and arguably WW2. Spain, despite having been bankrupt (ironically due to their colonies being too profitable) at one point and practically moribund for two centuries still had a huge empire/ colonies at the start of the 19th century, as did little old Portugal.

We have no way of knowing how well or not countries would have done without colonialism. It would depend on what (if anything) replaced it. But as I said, if colonialism were better balanced in terms of returns I'd swallow my moral objections, so I'm not absolutely opposed to the process, just its implementation and results. I would say with certainty that if there had been more emphasis on developing the colonies for the benefit of the people who lived in them as well as the coloniser they'd be in a better situation, else there's really not enough information to speculate.

The thing that seems weird to me is that they're suing on behalf of shareholders the entity in which the shareholders have shares. So if they win the shareholders... get paid their own money, in effect, plus devalue their own shares?

It's a bit more complicated than that, because good governance is very much in the eye of the beholder- Belgium may well have considered the Congo to be well governed as it made a good profit for them; the inhabitants not so much. Fundamentally though, good governance ought to be governing for the benefit of the governed and not some outside group, and that generally did not happen. If it had colonialism would have been more palatable.

Cardiff had Britain's entire copper smelting industry situated there, for example. There was nothing similar in the colonies, if anything they were used to supply Britain with cut price raw materials rather than using those raw materials to build up their own economies. Singapore and Hong Kong are special cases in that they're both cities rather than classic countries. They have the big advantage of having been developed as ports and as points of entry to British controlled areas- indeed, the whole conquest/ lease of Hong Kong was as an access point for opium to China. That necessitates a lot of infrastructure and administration that simply was not necessary and hence not done elsewhere. As for right of conquest, historically it was fine and accepted as such- at least if you could make it stick and get other great powers to accept it. Nowadays it isn't. It's largely an irrelevant distinction though, I don't object to colonisation because it was 'illegal', because it wasn't though post UN it at least in theory is (Israel and China being examples of where it's still being done) now. My objection is that the colonised did not benefit enough from being colonised, ie that the White Man's Burden got rather tiring and left sitting- or dropped suddenly- at the side of the road when it became inconvenient. My objection is partly a matter of principle, but mostly a matter of practicality. I'd happily swallow the principle if the end results were good, but far too frequently the end results weren't.

You'll be pretty safe, I'd have thought. The other ratings boards got it same time as the Aussie one and passed it as ok, iirc. We, on the other hand, frequently get lumped in with our puritanical trans tasman brethren and end up with no reward nookie in TWitcher2, no strippers in Duke3d and a host of other stuff historic and recent. Once Australia finally accepts the clear logic of accepting our standing offer to join us as the West Island it'll be fixed.

The main things that differentiate it are time- 12th century vs 19th century- and proximity. For the vast majority of that time Wales has been treated as an integral part of England/ Britain and has had essentially indistinguishable social and economic institutions. The same certainly cannot be said for Swaziland- it did not get much development, wasn't treated as integral, did not have the same institutions- and pretty much the only colonies where it can be said are those which had colonisers in either the majority or a very sizeable minority- Canada/ A/ NZ/ RSA- and even in those cases the colonised were generally less well off still.

Hmm. I guess the points I was trying to make were twofold, firstly that most of the post colonial countries are fundamentally compromised by their design, and that in order to have them be (immediately) successful post colonial countries is a process requiring decades of preparation rather than months or years. So whatever preparations made, no matter how well intentioned, were effectively the ambulance at bottom of cliff rather than railing at top. With respect to Nigeria (and India etc) I will happily accept that Britain did not deliberately sabotage the independence process and in latter cases probably did the best they could, but on a fundamental level the problems they had were results of colonial policies from their inception and that the only way to avoid them was to decide- early- that the colonies would be independent at some stage and to have at least some focus on getting good (native) governance and infrastructure in place from early on. That way you have people ready for a power transition who adhere to the tenets of good governance, unfortunately that was not the focus.

1) It is neocolonialism. You may not like the label but it is a real term with a real definition, and it does involve going in to non developed nations and replacing their governments with ones that are friendly towards yours, and which follow your economic models etc. Yes, it will be dressed up differently from that but it's always been dressed up as such because it's easier to sell to both Victorian and current audiences if it's in humanitarian and charitable clothes as well. 2) I'm perfectly capable of doing it, and indeed have done. I find the evidence unconvincing, and largely consisting of "Stalin was mean, therefore it must have been deliberate!" when in truth Stalin was mean, so much of the time (a) nobody had the courage to tell him anything bad (b) many appointments were made for ideological purity/ loyalty rather than ability reasons © other organisations have done similar things through a similar mixture of callousness, incompetence and greed (East India Company and British Raj included) without it being a deliberate policy (d) if it was aimed specifically at Ukrainians he wasn't aiming anywhere near as well as he could, vis Chechens, Cossacks and other minorities he targeted accurately. It's also in part because I have a very negative reaction to some of the statistical methods used to generate the higher figures- often done on a purely ideological basis in order to get Stalin's kill score high enough to surpass Hitler- such as including birth rate decrease as well.