Zoraptor

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.

Actually, I'm saying they're irrelevant. Maybe he leaked the stuff because he was gay, confused and bullied, what he is saying now. Maybe he leaked it because he was disgusted by the lies and brutality, as he said then. Most likely it's a bit of both. But we cannot know the real reason why, and saying one, now, gets him less time in prison, saying the other gets him more. I'm not saying one or the other is true, I'm saying that I don't really care if he's emphasising certain things now to get a reduced sentence, a situation that happens nearly all the time because it is the defence's job whether it's Manning or not I'm also well versed enough to know that important stuff is given high classification which basically none of Manning's stuff had, and that the best way of learning contextual information by far is to be actually fighting the enemy not trolling through tens of thousands of pages of stuff looking for that one time, in Kandahar Camp, potentially years ago, where something relevant happened. This was a war where the Kemp who wasn't in Spandau Ballet, a Prince of the Realm and various others got themselves embedded with journalists throughout the course of it, no doubt there was important operational info given out there too, if you're looking for it. The vast majority of the stuff he released dealt with stuff that was not really (military) secret, just embarrassing. I doubt the US's views on Sarkozy came as any surprise to anyone, least of all the french, and the Iraqis/ Afghans knew that the US regularly shot up civilians and then obfuscated the matter to cover it up using the "we shot up militants, for defs.. maybe we'll investigate.. OK, just getting round to the investigation.. everyone forgotten yet?" method- the Iraqis know when civilians are killed because it's their civilians and people know them as something other than a short paragraph on page 47 of the NYT. But some people would simply believe the first part of the narrative- the whole point of having it in the first place- anything to shake their confidence and complacency is of benefit to society as a whole. You cannot show death and destruction caused by Manning and we both know it, which makes the whole thing an irrelevant appeal to emotion. "Something didn't happen in reality, but if it did then the person would be bad, wouldn't he?". Well yes, he'd be bad, and if Pope Francis is a child killing cannibal he'd be bad, if Valve powered Steam by the tortured cries of a million baby bunnies they'd be bad and if Graeme Smith won a cricket match by beating his opponents to death with a set of stumps then he'd be bad. But none of those happened though (well, not sure about the Steam thing) so they aren't bad.

Steve Erikson .. The riddiculous cases like Jordan and in a lesser extent Martin aren't so common. Hang on there a minute, for a second I though you were implying the Erikson had a well planned series. Say it ain't so, Malekith. His series has some of the most massive continuity errors of all time! Of all time! I'd be pretty certain that both Jordan and Martin planned their series as well, sticking to the plan on the other hand... Sticking to the plan is probably one thing the game story development process does better than the book process.

Shrug. Most of the people tried by Stalin 'confessed' and asked for forgiveness when the vast majority of them did nothing at all. He did the 'crime', the only thing he had left was going for mitigation and as low a sentence as possible. His only options were standing up and saying he was proud of what he did, and getting the book thrown at him, or saying what needed to be said and getting out sometime relatively soon. There's nothing cynical about that, and everything sensible about that. All that could be asked of him was not to drop others in the asterisks to save himself, and he did not give the US what it wanted on Assange. Most of the time being a martyr is stupid, not principled- unless you have no choice. He owed no one, not me, not Assange and not the US public he served so well decades of his life just to prove some sort of point. putting the lives of thousands of people at risk? Post Proof Or Retract. That was one of the more amusing things about the whole situation. The whole "sky is/ isn't falling" depending on what and who was being talked to. If they were going after WL then it was a horrendous travesty and jihadis would be camping on the Whitehouse Lawn in time for bicentenary of those northern barbarians burning it thanks to all the horrible secrets contained within, but other wise "no sensitive intelligence sources or methods were compromized by this disclosure." Robert Gates, Secretary of Defence

His defence team is tasked with getting him a minimum sentence, they'll do what is best for that as every defence team does. If that means emphasising his personality problems or whatever else then fine, he didn't do the really easy thing that would have got him a really reduced sentence and lie about the role of Wikileaks and Assange as the US wanted. He's already done more good than most people ever do, I wouldn't begrudge him reducing his sentence from 90 years to 35 years. Hope he gets the Nobel Peace Prize, it would be far more deserved than certain recent recipients.

Yeah, foreign elements of the rebels seem most likely. Using chemical weapons with inspectors in the country would be utter madness, let alone that the place where they are supposed to have used them is completely unsuitable for their military use- relatively close front lines, and close to areas you hold yourself including absolutely crucial areas; not vs human wave attacks like Iran v Iraq or trenches like WW1, it's certainly not some outright terror/ extermination attempt like Anfal, and the Syrian army is winning without needing to resort to chemical weapons. Either desperate use as a last resort, or calculated use by the rebels seems likely. It wouldn't have to be deliberate though, chemical weapons have always been prone to own goals if weather conditions change and it is likely that any chems used by the rebels would not be... reliable, but there are certainly groups that wouldn't care even slightly about killing some civilians for The Greater Good (the greater good).

I suspect that the reticence shown by the military was related to two things- firstly they didn't mind democracy, so long as it didn't interfere with their power base either in terms of their independence or economic interests and secondly they wanted to maintain their military aid despite the inconvenient 'coup' stipulation. Little c conservatism, basically, which is more or less how they're described in the quotes. Once it became clear that Mubarak would be pushing Gamal (who'd never win in a democratic election, neither would his dad either) as his successor he became disposable, and once it became clear that the only way he could keep power was a bloodbath it became inevitable.

My government is actually passing its mass surveillance law at this very time, as some inconvenient, corpulent German and a recalcitrant judge- god bless her- managed to show that our spy agencies had broken the law 80 odd times over the past few years. It won't be mass surveillance, though, because despite having nothing written into the law to prevent it (and given the way other countries have used their unlimited legislation to target reporters and Iceland with their Al Qaeda volcanoes, Banks and MMOs) the PM- who presided over the 80+ law breakings- has promised it won't happen, much as he promised he wouldn't raise GST and the like, and implemented a strong new oversight policy of him and someone directly appointed by him; having already installed an old school friend as head of the GCSB (=GCHQ, for you) and claiming he barely knew him. And anyone who has looked at the Snowden leaks knows he's flat out lying because New Zealand is listed as using PRISM etc on the slides Awesome Ed leaked. It'll be passed, with the help of two MPs who are only in parliament because the ruling party did not campaign against them. There's literally no point writing anything to any MP about it except Peter Dunne, and he won't change his mind because he wants to be minister again and wants no Nat campaigning against him. He's also got no party... except it got reinstated recently, along with the allowance he gets for it. The Nat MPs will lose their job if they vote against it, the two other MPs will lose their seats if the Nats campaign against them, everyone else is already voting against, every single opinion poll shows it's already opposed by a strong majority, and every expert asked has opposed it so much so that the government has not been able to provide a single local opinion besides its own supporting it. The really ironic thing is that Dunne had his emails and phone records illegally seized when he leaked a report on the GCSB which is why he's no longer a minister, yet is so concerned with saving his own skin and getting the ministerial post back that he'll still vote for it. I guess there's some sort of plus in that it didn't get rushed through as part of the emergency response to 180 odd people dying in an earthquake, as they did last time, but if not using the tragic deaths of your countrymen to pass unrelated legislation with no oversight or submission process in an afternoon because it's unpopular and shonky law is a plus then the democratic barrel bottom has been well and truly scraped, and you're well through the floor below. And all to stop terrism, in a place where the only international terrist act was carried out by the asterisking French Government nearly 30 years ago. A fairly decent summation, from our online equivalent of the Daily Mail of all people, for anyone interested and made it through the diatribe. The whole thing is an utter disgrace and there is completely and absolutely nothing that can be done to stop it, short of praying for a politician to grow a conscience. Well, if you're going to wish might as well make it something truly improbable.

Can I enslave nations through necromancy? I've been waiting for that for, uh, Ages. Go on Bioware, mildly amuse me.