Zoraptor

You really have to split Gulf States into Saudi and Qatar, as one hates the MB and the other is its main patron. Plus, of course, the MB that Assad hates is not (quite) the same MB as in Egypt but the home grown Syrian variety, and Assad now hates Hamas as they've swapped sides, but still likes the other palestinian groups that haven't. It's so complicated that it'd probably be as accurate dropping cooked spaghetti onto a diagram to map the relationships. If it were written as fiction everyone would talk about the massive plot holes and how the author didn't have a clue how to keep his world consistent.

'Oh the humanity!' is trotted out every time the west wants to intervene and it's got pretty devalued. I think most people except possibly Bruce agree that it clearly isn't a battle of horrible monsters vs brave heroes but bad guys against bad guys, and civilians- albeit often different groups of civilians- are targeted by both sides. As a justification Remember Rwanda! simply does not hold water because it is used so inconsistently and when intervention has other primary reasons. And like a policeman who only helps good looking women hoping for a 'reward', or powerful people because they owe them a favour, it is not a sign of great integrity but actually the opposite- an utterly cynical act which fundamentally debases moral authority. For example, in Libya under the terms of the UNSC resolution all civilians should have been treated equally and protected from indiscriminate attack. Except those in Sirte or Bani Walid (where the ex rebels used chemical weapons, with as much certainty as we have about the recent usage but without much reportage, and with condemnation an attempt to mandate a peaceful solution, even, blocked by...) were fair game so far as the west was concerned. Civilians must be protected except those in Congo where more than a million died with nary a murmur. Rwanda cannot be used as any sort of justification because the west still sits on its hands when it isn't otherwise in their interests to intervene and the- worse, and later, and ongoing- losses in Congo were and are ignored because, whatever, we still get the coltan for our phones at a knock down price.

I remember it. Rwanda isn't a good comparison though, fully ethnic conflict, outright mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands over a short time with the main weapons being low tech, no real organised resistance on the ground. Ex Yugloslavia would be better- and Lebanon's civil war even better, since the issues were similar (minority religion in power, mainly sectarian rather than ethnic, lots of regional proxies etc). And in Lebanon the foreign interventions failed dreadfully, except ironically, the Syrian one which eventually succeeded. And even then it only worked because the Lebanese themselves got sick of fighting each other.

The major appeal of consoles over PC is that they're meant to be less complicated (e.g: pop in the disc and play) I don't think that they would be willing to actually deal with choices, much less deal with manual installation. You don't need manual installs, just imagine software installs with you pre clicking 'OK' a half dozen times and that is what you'd have. Manual installs are useful for PCs because you want options on where to install and the like, with a closed box PC it is basically a console, no need for install options and you can have an auto installer. After all, the PS4/ On3 are both built on fairly standard PC hardware, and they won't have any significant manual install options. It's... a bit more than that, as Ocelot says. It'd actually make it easier to do HD remakes if the hardware had been standardised and iterative between generations.

Can't say that I have any problem with 'lazy' when used in proper context. There may be reasons for reuse of maps or spawn mobs in DA2, but from the outside it looks like a simple straight line to the quickest solution, and from the general end user's perspective that is what it is, whatever the actual reasons. On the other hand something like the end of ME3- whether a particular person liked it or not- was not lazy, since it would have taken equal effort to take an alternative approach. Funnily enough I've always considered butthurt to be with regards to those suffering from hemmeroids haemerrhoids haemorrhoids, since people with that most unfortunate and totally unhilarious affliction are typically grumpy and looking for things to be grumpy about. Never even considered the alternative. Karpyshyn's (sp, no doubt) Star Wars books must have sold decently since they got sequels and they weren't all TOR tie ins, so it was successful on that front at least. Though I read the Bane novel a while back when I was stuck in town with nothing to do, and was not impressed with it quality wise.

Same games play on both systems, basically, have the xbox be a tech specification for a specialised, cheap, gaming PC and revise the tech spec every four to five years. You'd have the advantages of the PC system (lots of vendors, hardware competition) remove the loss leader in the equation (making the hardware yourself) and keep the bits which are profitable like online services and (potentially) game licence fees. There would be other potential advantages like better back compatibility and thus longer shelf life for games.

Rather the opposite- 5 days is a very quick amount of time considering the issues, and a delay is pointless in terms of a cover up anyway. Where the attack occurred is outside the government's control so it isn't just a matter of driving the inspectors to the area in a car and while if the government controlled the area it could theoretically sterilise it the rebels do so there's no chance of destroying any evidence, there will be residue all over the place and plenty of samples. While the nerve agent itself will go inert fairly quickly (one of the reasons it's useful militarily) the residue left does not decay particularly quickly, certainly not enough to matter in a matter of days.

It's a logical argument and people aren't always logical at the best of times, but it is a massive leap to use chemical weapons now rather than in the initial attack on Aleppo or something important. The access to the governmental stocks is tightly controlled, as everyone agrees, so it cannot have just been Major El-Bloggs getting peeved and deciding to lob a few rockets in frustration. It's not just that it's a foolish thing to do, it's both monumentally foolish and monumentally convenient, even if Assad were using chem weapons in a minor capacity I cannot imagine any situation in which he wouldn't order everything dropped while the inspectors were there. For kgambit: Daily Fail, but it took ages to find given that the first half dozen pages of search results dealt with the current incident. Yeah, not absolute proof, but then William Hague et alia are hardly waiting for proof absolute either.

The only confirmed use of chemical weapons- by the UN- was by the rebels though. I won't reply to the rest in detail except for a couple of things. Syria's manpower problems are largely 'fixed' now. There are very few defections, they've got a lot of manpower and material support from Hezbollah and Iran and certain groups in the rebels are either as intent on fighting each other as them or are having defection problems themselves. The real crisis phase is arguably over is and pretty much everyone agrees that they are winning, now. If it were a critical situation such as that army base mentioned it would make more sense, but it's an area that has been in rebel hands for a year. Conventional bombing and using rockets is an entirely different matter, they aren't banned and are expected parts of warfare. So there is simply no point in playing chicken with the US as the one thing that can ensure the US intervenes is attacking their prestige- making it so they have to respond or be ridiculed. They are not going to gain the ability to use chemical weapons in general and would have been told so by the Russians at the least, and they don't at this juncture need to use them. Plus the 'baby steps'/ gradual argument does not really hold water here as it's a massive leap rather than a small step from occasional, very small scale use to gassing a sizeable area while inspectors are there. You still want as much plausible deniability as possible, even if you did do it, and a big delay while inspectors fly into the country and negotiate everything is far better than 4-5 days delay from that perspective. As for whether they have been used at all by the government, I'd suspect they have been on occasion, as they have by the rebels, on occasion. I just don't buy the current situation at all, it's too convenient on one side, and the other doesn't have any pressing reason to jeopardise everything on a gamble reliant on guessing someone else's intentions.

Bro, that's all been dealt with. Assad has been shelling that area of Damascus on and off for the past year, and attacking pretty much consistently for the last month. There's nothing special about it being shelled, that's what happens to rebel held areas- why does the US bomb stuff? Must be to cover up [something], can't be because they think there enemies are there. He has no reason to use chemical weapons, when he's winning, when there are weapons inspectors in the country (who were only staying a matter of days, prior to this), when he doesn't want western intervention since that's the only way the rebels can win, when he supposedly used them a few miles away from the inspectors rather than Aleppo, Homs, Deraa or somewhere else hundred of miles away and when there are absolutely essential and crucial government held areas nearby for the gas to drift into on a wind change or get effected if you have a misfire or a rocket goes haywire. It makes no sense, if you were going to launch a gas attack, when you're already winning, you launch it when there aren't inspectors nearby or even in the country, in isolated areas where it is difficult to get information out of, there's no chance of an own goal, and which have as much plausible deniability as possible. If Assad were really so cretinously stupid as to use weapons now and in the way he allegedly did the argument would be irrelevant as he would have already lost due to moving his troops to the Med to defend against a possible attack from the Carthaginians under their despotic pairing of world renowned gourmand Hannibal and Dido, warbling her greatest hits as she comes. Every single thing about the attack is nothing short of moronic, if it were the government doing it. Oh, and for 'conspiracy' theorists, someone bombed Syria's anti ship missile emplacements at the beginning of July. Exactly why Israel would do that was never explained since Hezbollah actually has decent ASMs already (and sunk an Israeli ship with one in 2006). Mighty convenient if you were planning on firing some tomahawks off ships though.

Actually, there was one who worked for Beth, in QA. But (supposedly) Bethesda employees aren't allowed to post on boards other than the ones owned by Bethesda, now.

The RROD killed the 360's profitability something chronic. If you're selling the hardware at a loss it has to be reliable because it's the opposite from something like a toaster where if it falls to pieces after warranty you're laughing, because the person has to buy another toaster which you make money off. Planned obsolescence is only feasible if you're making money off the sales. They are making (some) money off the base hardware now by all reports, but every failure up to that point meant either full replacement plus courier fees and admin/ distro costs (maybe $300-400 US a pop), repair plus courier fees, someone buying a new loss leading 360 or someone swapping to PS3. All bad options. MS should have learnt their lesson from the 360's hardware problems this time, and the overall on3 approach once the DRM shenanigans were dealt away with is way more sensible- far better to synergise with your existing products than compete against them*. Plus, if the rumours are true, there will be no more loss leading on the base hardware so out of warranty failures won't cost either. *Personally I'd have had unified xbox/ PC gaming from the start, probably with 3rd parties making the x boxes under licence.

I copied the installed files back from my external HD and it works absolutely fine for me without even setting any compatibilities. Get WESP's patch and if it still doesn't work... I'll probably have to blame steam. Though to be fair, I'd blame steam for global warming and bubonic plague among other things.

I doubt the other MS divisions were very happy about the xbox project at all. Lots of attention, lots of cash spent, and in the end they would have made considerably more money if they'd left the investment in cash reserves, if they've even broken even yet since they wrote off a huge amount on the original xbox and (allegedly) buried costs into other divisions. 360 would have been decently profitable if they hadn't had the RROD- selling your box at a loss in the first place; then having to replace/fix, courier etc got very expensive very quickly. But for all that they still came third in a 3 horse race. Cutting the losses is completely sensible and would have likely been done earlier had some big egos not been tied up with it. Pretty typical MS venture away from their core competencies really. They only really have two approaches, copy flagrantly (CPM/DOS; WordPerfect/ Lotus/ Word/ Excel; MacOS/ Windows; PS/ Xbox) and decide what people really want based on the current fancy of their hothouse in Seattle (Ribbon/ Win8/ Clippy/ On3 Original Approach).

Yeah, going to try installing outside of program files too. Hopefully that works. I could never get the compatibility mode/running as admin to work. If you've installed to PF and are not running as admin then that will be a problem, if not the problem- it wants to write stuff to its folder and won't be able to. You should be able to set compat/ admin settings by creating a shortcut, right clicking it, going to properties and there should be a compatibility tab there. Whether that's enough to fix the problem who knows, but it can be essential for running other games in Vista+ so is good to know anyway.

Pretty sure my retail version worked on 7/64, not that that's much help. Else you can try the usual fixes, setting compatibility mode to XPSP3 and avoid installing to program files if you've done that, as even as admin it'll sometimes decide it still really doesn't want you doing anything there, or give other random faults (sound dropouts in System Shock 2, for example). I don't think I've tried anything that flat out doesn't work in 7.

I'd basically just swap the justifications around, and say that stuff should not be classified by default, though I think you have to take a certain amount of safety first. It's a bit difficult to define exactly how to set things up properly though, as public good would be a reason not to classify but much of the stuff Manning leaked was of public interest mainly- or only- because it contradicted or significantly expanded official accounts. It's doubtful there'd be as much interest if they were more honest in the first place. I guess the best illustration I can give is that the military regularly declassifies 'guncam' or 'bombcam' footage when it's showing something 'good', so the footage itself and its existence is not secret. If it's a public good to see the footage when it goes right, and give the impression that it always goes right, I'd need a very good reason for why it isn't a public good to know and see that things go wrong as well. Because one is state propaganda, the other is having an informed public.

So, what was it he leaked that was so valuable for the public not to know? It's like that fundamental difference in viewpoint I was talking about... In other news 'Snowden' releases information on a UK Spying base to the Independent. To a newspaper he has no links to, and a leak which he denies unlike all the other stuff he has released. A certain Grauniad reporter gets grumpy and accuses the UK government itself of leaking it.

The last figures I saw and which I thought credible (so take with a grain of salt) was around 1/3 of the rebels being broadly in the 'jihadi' groups. The problem though is a bit like that in the Spanish Civil War where theoretically the communists were a relatively small proportion of the Republican side- but they had most of the well armed and more successful units as they were actively supplied by their benefactor, and got a lot of extra volunteers due to their underlying philosophy. So you had a general shift into communist affiliated units even amongst those who were not communist simply due to them being more effective, plus committed communists from other countries being attracted as well- replace communist with jihadi and you've got pretty close to the Syrian situation. For the last year or so probably 3/4 of the time you hear about the rebels doing well, as opposed to losing, it's Al Nusra or similar doing well. The west may hope that arming the rebels more generally will help even out the balance a bit more. It's pretty forlorn though, there's already a fair bit of infighting between theoretically allied rebel groupings, much of the attractiveness the rebels had for minorities is going if not gone (eg Kurds vs AlQ, whatever Turkey may say there's likely to be kurdish formations from Iraq or Turkey fighting against the 'rebels' soon if not already) and it seems that die has already been cast.

The studio gets nothing from PST sales, all that goes to the vendor and the publisher, Hasbro, now. Given the studio is pretty much Herve Caen sitting in his basement at this point that is not such a bad thing though. Even if they made 'only' a hundred thousand bucks from selling it on GOG it's still 100k, a decade plus after its release. PST sold fine (about 400k, iirc), it just didn't sell well enough to justify the extra effort required for it as opposed to something like IWD which was cheaper/ easier to make and sold more.

They'd all be Top Secret- literally; the classification class 'Top Secret', or the British equivalent. Manning didn't leak anything Top Secret and only a very little that was even Secret, most of it was just little c classified (or Confidential, if wiki is to be believed). To give an idea of how big the difference was the truth about Ultra was known to a few dozen people, a tiny number when they had to be almost completely manually decrypted so you had techs and decrypters who had to be in the loop. The stuff Manning leaked had literally millions of people who could access it in whole or part. End of the day you have to at least trust that the military won't give really important stuff a low classification which millions can access.

It isn't an area he controls and by most reports has not controlled for a year, presumably they would have to take the pressure off while the inspectors were there. More fundamentally- and assuming he didn't do it- it seems likely that there are suspicions on the Syrian side about the timing in a more specific way than others might have, he may have concerns that despite not having done it there might be credible evidence that he had ie a proper 'frame job'; or that the inspectors may be biased. There's no doubt that there are groups arrayed against Assad that are capable of doing a frame job, in both the sense of not being too worried about Martyrs going to heaven and in terms of being able to provide the needed supplies and expertise. And, of course, there's the slippery slope argument. Vary their mandate to look at this incident, next it will something else and before you know it you have UN teams, potentially infiltrated liberally by western spies, all over the place looking at everything when there's no doubt at all that's there is stuff he wants kept secret.

You're not going to get a very thorough answer since it's 130 am here and my typing is suffering a bit... Perhaps a bit simplistic, but I suspect the fundamental difference amounts to you thinking that military stuff should be default secret while I think it should not be. So while you approach the release as asking "what justifies it's release?" I approach it as "what justifies it being secret in the first place?". So you expect me to justify the release while I expect you to justify it being secret at all. So from my point of view having someone say that the stuff released was inconsequential in terms of potential damage done to military operations by itself justifies releasing it- if it's inconsequential, why is it secret? And the answer I tend to come up with is that this 'inconsequential' stuff gets classified frequently not because it is dangerous, but because it is merely embarrassing and used to regulate the message and information rather than protect operations. Nobody disputes that some secrecy is required just as nobody disputes that there are enemies who need monitoring from the NSA/GCHQ or whoever, it's just that the opinion on what is reasonable in terms of secrecy and in scope differs. Something like an enemy's bombs not detonating, per the Falklands, fine. It's definitely militarily important and knowledge of it would give an advantage to (well, remove a disadvantage from) an active enemy. Lists of civilians killed when your spin doctors are insisting they haven't been? That's spin and information control for the domestic market, the Afghans and Iraqis already know the truth. The Collateral Murder killings probably weren't murder themselves as asterisks happen in war, but equally they knew very soon after that they'd asterisked up, yet publicly insisted they hadn't while classifying the evidence. And I'm not a fan of chain of command as an absolute concept at all. The worst thing that can happen in any army is absolute unquestioning obedience to all commands, because those commands are issued by humans and human institutions which are inherently flawed, you have to have leeway for questioning, refusing and in some cases actively resisting orders. Again, that ain't a recipe for refusing all commands or complete breakdown in discipline, just a recognition that sometimes you just have to short the circuit rather than run through the same series of wires and switches again and again.

Jordan needed a jackbooted editor more than anything, someone willing to tell him when things weren't necessary, if not actively counter-productive. I actually think he planned the series out decently enough, there were very few inconsistencies and plenty of stuff set up in early books that came to fruition in later ones, all signs of good planning. But from the beginning he used about 20% more words than necessary, and from about book 6 he also had about 20% more plotlines than necessary and that really messed with the pacing something terrible because the extra plotlines tended to compound rather than resolve- so the whole thing got hugely unwieldy.

It's a bit of a dichotomy depending on who was being talked to- when talking to the press it was all blood and thunder, at other times the damage was described as 'minimal' and similar terms. But as an example of the latter, from a source that is not exactly sympathetic to Wikileaks, and in a (quoted) form in which if Gates were lying he would (theoretically) get into Big Trouble. I'd dispute the article's assertion that the leaks were of minor interest, but agree they were of minor worth from any 'enemies of the US' standpoint.