Zoraptor

Viconia is the best dusky elven lovemuffin in existence. It's not a crowded field though. Have to admit I also liked the much maligned Leliana. Perhaps because I don't think she ever sang to me and some residual guilt for saying that she had a ludicrous accent- then meeting an actual french speaker with almost exactly the same accent. I even thought her dlc was pretty good.

Personally I've known about Echelon for ages, there's a nice big satellite dish outside Nelson which was part of it. I mentioned it fairly recently too with respect to it being used for industrial espionage (Airbus v Boeing) when the subject of chinese hacking came up previous. There are very important- absolutely fundamental- differences between it and Prism though, as much as between a Brown Bess musket and an M2 machine gun. Echelon was a self limiting system- you had to target it specifically. Why? Storage and computer power. You simply cannot archive every phone call via analogue means, and you cannot sort them in any practical way. Stick them on hard disk? In the 80s or 90s, or even early noughties? Won't happen, cannot physically happen as there simply ain't the storage medium available to store everything. Even if there were and you need to do a search on whatever you've got digitally? Hope you've got a lot of time while that Cray with 8MB RAM and less CPU power than a current era cell phone chugs away at it, or your DEC Alpha array with 32MB RAM from the 90s. In those circumstances intelligence has to be gathered, well, intelligently as a drag net approach is fundamentally impossible. That is not a problem now, mass storage is cheap, processing power is cheap and you can feasibly store all communications, index and search it. And that is why Prism is far more dangerous than Echelon ever was, there's no longer the technical limitations providing intrinsic safeguards that there were with Echelon and the system can be used as a general purpose drag net to suck up everything, not just relevant stuff.

No, and it wouldn't in, as another topical example, Turkey either. But if the milestone comes down to "at least we're better than CountryName" then it's utterly meaningless as much as everything always being about 'protecting the people'. Bring in chopping a finger off people as punishment? At least we're better than Saudi Arabia, where they'd chop the whole hand off! Surveillance of this type is very useful to make sure you can get the right people into positions. Worried that someone else might pull a Manning or Snowden? No worries, run a security check and go back through X years of their history looking for anything ideologically questionable, or any questionable associations. Want to make sure you get Proper, Right Minded People into governmental positions? Run the same 'security check', go back and make sure they're all good pro life recumbent transcendentalist communists in favour of gun ownership, veganism and nuking Canada as the only way to remove Celine Dion from existence efficiently. What wonders might Joe McCarthy have achieved in his quest to 'protect the people' had he had this system? Because at some point he will get hold of it, he just won't have the same name.

Poland blows everyone out of the water when it comes to things Witcher! I'm surprised a movie andor TV series was never made... (FTR, if Poland were to have made a Witcher movie or TV series I'd bet it would have been better than Diplomatic Immunity or Melody Rules)

To take it away from Manning (true hero and patriot that he is) and focus solely on Mr Snowden's stuff (#1 awesome dude in the universe) If it were a Chinese guy, or an Iranian guy, or a Venezualan guy from their NSA equivalents leaking equivalent details of their surveillance he'd be hailed a hero by exactly the same people currently suffering strangulated gonads at the thought of someone having the temerity, the sheer effrontery of doing it to a western country who stand for truth and justice by unquestionable definition and only ever does stuff to 'protect their people'- a statement so meaningless that it has been used as justification by such luminaries as Hitler and Stalin, 'protecting their people' against commies, jews and counter revolutionaries. Same old same old, and it ain't ever 'protecting the people'. The 'crime' ain't informing the Chinese or terrorists or whoever about it- if they have so much as a smidgeon of sense they already knew; sheesh, season 2 of The Wire could be used as a manual to avoid the worst of it. The crime is informing the general population and especially ostensible allies* of the fact, and, of course, the cardinal sin of embarrassing the government and showing complaints about chinese hacking are hypocritical (US just makes it legal in their pet court that never turns down warrants) and claims of internet freedom self serving. *Would anyone use google docs/ cloud/ email to do anything commercially sensitive now, knowing that it's just a click away from the eyes of some anonymous US contractor?

Yep. Not everything of course as I'm not insane. Anything significant gets classified secret and above, and is not available to as many as 3 million people- what Manning had access to was the mundane and the embarrassing, not the dangerous. Basic sense says that you obfuscate the names of sources and the like precisely because you should be presuming that your information is not secure, if the US failed to do even that basic step it is their fault for not doing so and states about as strongly as possible that the stuff ain't important. And it's everybody's obligation to do as their conscience dictates, not as a self protecting government does. Governments should classify as little as possible; not as much as possible, and if they're going to try and bury everything under a veil of "oh no teh tehrorists!" secrecy they need to be embarrassed as much as possible by leaks. I dunno. Who gave any government the right either? Certainly wasn't me. Only thing I'm disappointed in is that he didn't leak our secrets as well as the US's, I'd love to see all the strategising surrounding the Trans Pacific Partnership and law sychronisations. Frankly, diplomacy and every government function would be far better off without the shroud of secrecy. It's certainly not there to protect the general populace, it's to protect the government.

Manning and Assange are both awesome, true patriots and fine human beings who should be saluted for their fine principled stand against creeping authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and a culture that classifies anything and everything remotely embarrassing. And if they'd done the same thing to China or Russia both you and Bruce would think they were awesomeness personified and asterisk their national security. (also newest stuff was six month old, none of it with a particularly secret classification, and per Sec Gates it didn't kill anyone at all) US dissident goers to China to avoid persecution from government. Ed Snowden, you rapscallion and master of irony, I love you, and wish to bear your children.

Pretty sure he's not american. Can't say I agree with him, but not paying much attention to a game you don't like is fair enough. Though I have seen people seriously and repeatedly argue that TW2 had no meaningful C&C. I think the whole thing hinged upon you ending up at the same place in the end no matter what choices were made.

The spiders from the movie Arachnophobia were a completely harmless variety from New Zealand and are about an inch and a half in size (legspan) in reality. This fact brought to you courtesy of a rainy Sunday afternoon.

He killed mine. Apparently it was part of a terrorist conspiracy. Or maybe all the moles in CTU have given him an irrational hatred of animals. (have to admit I cannot recall his voice acting in any game, and I'd think I'd recognise his voice as it's pretty distinctive)

The only poster to express it. For myself, I don't see the big deal (nor did I find it creepy - I thought she was just having fun), nor do I have any issue with her talking up Boone a lot, yet still have an opinion on the matter. Yeah, the express it part is the big thing. I've always had a bit of a thing for Shodan* personally, and could probably write a dissertation on her to make any Talimancer blush. *I like my pathetic creature of meat and bone to run panting and sweating through her corridors and I'm not afraid to say it, though I will use little letters.

She's always been a prime candidate for getting 'accidentally' hit with a crossbow bolt while being 'rescued' from her Lannister escort; even in the books. It's understandable that some stuff has been shifted around for the TV series anyway, the whole R+L=J thing was pretty big in the first book and hinted at consistently but from a series viewing alone would be a massive leap given things like no Tower of Joy. If it's going to be done there (and I'd have to presume it would be) then it has to be done closer to it becoming a major plot point- maybe if Papa Reed is met in the series, or from one of the little Reeds- as remembering a 30 second sequence from up to five years ago would be a stretch. I'd suspect most TV viewers wouldn't be able to guess what R+L=J even means. Robert and Littlefinger equals Jorah?

I'm curious about that as well and almost mentioned it with respect to the whole Darth Traya and the unused alternative ending with Atris instead of Kreia, since Atris and Kreia are just about physical opposites but similar in terms of plot function. There certainly did seem to be quite a lot of people who objected to having that ugly evil old woman being forced on them, whether their objections would have been less if she'd looked like a fashion model or been a twi'lek or something is a moot point.

Not quite true, she does have another purpose. Kreia is certainly a far better character, but it has to be said that being 'unattractive' in a physical sense is part of her character design inherited from the- pretty overt physical descriptor as well as creature type- hag Ravel Puzzlewell and part of the frequent and deliberate PST/K2 trope reversals. As such she's deliberately set up to be a counterpoint to the more typical portrayals, similar to how Atris (/Trias) reverses the typical honest paladin jedi (/angel) stereotype.

I am starting to wonder if MS is betting that Sony will go bankrupt before PS4 launches, or its stock get low enough that MS can buy them outright because there's literally nothing about the on3 that is better than a PS4 so far as I can tell.

To be honest I feel that I should have used the phrase "capitalist running bears" instead. Perfect opportunity, chance missed.

Russian bear troops use AKSU (or Groza, if Spetsnaz variant), not AK47 and PPSh (do they even make the ammo for that any more) let alone carry Jerry guns as back up. Also no stirrups, essential when using a bayonet or sword when mounted especially with bear's gait. And crypto-pedobear complete with vodka bottle? Imperiocapitalist propaganda detected.

Don't know if the US does permit such actions, one of the 'advantages' of trying to constructively bankrupt someone is that they don't generally have the cash to take you to court for a case that may take years, and especially over a contract which most likely has some sort of subjective quality clause. Such things usually work themselves out because it's in both sides financial interests not to richard the other around too much, but not if one wants to buy the other and get leverage. Didn't quite work out with HH as Bethesda missed out on a heap of already done stuff and had to start from scratch, good overall as costing them money and hurting their rep is the best prevention for them trying it again. If it worked they'd just have more incentive to try it with the next victim. It's not really any news though, InXIle's experience with Beth was meant to be not particularly great leading to some of the comments about publishers Fargo made. OTOH, Hunted was not exactly brilliant, so perhaps anything from HH regarding Prey 2's quality has to be taken with some salt.

Funny, I never liked the Troika engines- except the Fallout one, if you count that. They always felt like they were five years older than they actually were. Having replayed the IE games recently (and still chugging through IWD2) I've come to a bit of an appreciation of the advantages of 3d, things like enemies sitting in the 'shadow' of doors so that you cannot attack them unless it's them alone but only open/close the door when in a 3d engine you'd just rotate the camera, and having to loot stuff by scrolling laboriously from middle to bottom corner of screen and click on each 2GP loot pile instead of having the loot dialogue free float come to mind.

In the books there was at least an exotic connection, iirc. Her mother (grandmother?) was a foreigner or gypsy/ mystic type. Don't really know why they didn't use the book set up with the Westerlings, as it actually makes Tywin look even more clever. Also no "Jaime Lannister sends his regards?"

That view is predicated on the west trying to subvert the Arab Spring- it didn't look good that the first two AS countries were western proxies, and that Bahrain's autocratic monarchy was only propped up by considerable British surveillance tech and weaponry as well as an invasion by thousands of Saudi soldiers. Thus you aid the uprisings against the leaders you don't like because it's convenient, it's become doable both politically and practically, and as an added bonus it distracts from the inconvenient examples. I don't really subscribe to it either except with regards to Libya, and even there it was more complicated and involved a lot of stuff like Sarkozy wanting to be all France Strong! for the upcoming election and distract from internal problems. Certainly the US/ west had no reason to topple the Hoz or Ben Ali, they just weren't worth supporting in the fashion that would have been required for them to remain in power. Syria was always more of a Sunni Gulf State project to try and reduce Iran's power and influence since they'd gained (albeit a much weakened) Iraq. If they'd got a no fly zone through it may have been different, but that was pretty much never going to happen. The only americans really supporting the rebels are John "Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran" McCain and some PNAC types eager to be remembered in such glowing terms as Wolfowicz, Rumsfeld, Perl et al by asterisking up another country as badly as they did Iraq. And even they'd hesitate to actually fight the Russians, which is pretty much what it would take since they're even sending their aircraft carrier into the Med, as well as the S300s and MiGs.

"640k is all you'll ever need!": Hiro Protagonist Bill Gates Though I do have to say that improved graphics not being matched by improved gameplay/ AI etc is one of my major peeves with the state of gaming. Especially since a lot of stuff actually goes backwards in that regard. I can kind of justify an AI acting like a pithed frog in a game that looks like DOOM or even System Shock 2, not so much in something more modern.

I dunno. Given the rumours about Bethesda's conduct not getting involved may be a bullet dodged.

You could view both in reverse as well. How is the west supplying weapons to the rebels going to calm the situation and how can the rebels pay for it? First you make sure that the side you support wins, then the bills can be settled.

At that point probably not, but that was 3 years into the war. If they'd taken Washington prior to that they probably would have 'won' , and they had a couple of chances to do exactly that- Gettysburg, if Stuart hadn't disappeared off on a vanity trip or if Longstreet's alternative plan were used and very early, immediately after 1st Bull Run, when the Union army pretty much dissolved itself and left Washington with minimal defences. Alternative history though, who knows if it actually would have happened that way.