Zoraptor

Don't be silly there is absolutely NO chance of a Third World War. I can't believe you actually think this is even a remote outcome? If the Russians do supply S300s they'll be crewed or supervised by Russians. If the west wants to set up a no fly zone (without UN mandate, given Russia and China will both likely veto) those S300s will have to go as they're able to hit targets at very high altitudes and very great distances, and that means the likelihood of dead Russians. As Rostere says, it's the economy that's the weakness. The US (and other western countries) are heavily indebted and only going more into debt, at some point putting the military on the credit card has to stop and at that point it may well become impractical to have quite the global projection that the US has been used to since the 50s. They may be going for more cost effective measures, but they're untested.

Way imbalanced though. Gameplay sucks, especially the economy. No proper fast travel No quest compass- you can pay for one but only on some servers No respec- well, limited to paid and only certain servers Imbalanced economy, yep Arbitrary character generation No respawn (I've heard you get to generate a new character on death or actually get to play an entirely different game, but never seen proof. Might just be certain servers, as well) Given no respawn, the prevalence of arbitrary death is badly imbalancing and unfair Some servers suck and are really difficult to even grind your way to success, and it seems to be random as to which server you start on No magic No race selection beyond simple skin colour. Yes Volo, no proper dwarves Gender/ sex issues handled poorly, sex often reduced to minigames Access to cool weapons are severely restricted Different servers have different rules, and some of the player moderators are certainly products of unmarried parents Different languages on different servers. Sounds cool, but boy does it have practical drawbacks On the positive side there is no DRM and you can play it offline. TLDR game sucks, nobody should play it, demand refunds.

Meh, that always comes up. For better or worse EA has only continued Bioware's direction, not altered it. Bioware did dlc before it became cool (NWN) went console and RPG lite with no influence from EA and produced ME1 and most of DAO without being owned by EA. The only change was rushing DA2, and that was at least partly Bioware's own fault for having DAO take so long that ME3 and DA2 on a normal cycle would have been near synchronised in production and release date- and that seems to have been fixed for DA3. I like CDPR as much as the next guy, but it isn't like they just make the games they want to, they make the games they think will sell. They could have kept TW2 to the same formula as the first game and had (mainly) iso camera, vaguely diabloesque combat and the like, but went for a overhaul. Anyone who thinks that that was not influenced strongly by the decision to release on console need only look at the UI, and anyone who thinks that the decision to release on console was predicated on enlightening the unwashed console masses, cowering in the depths of their despair and degradation rather than making money is slightly naive- and if they really really wanted to do exactly what they wanted then yes, they would do original IPs. Cyberpunk and Wiedzim/ Witcher are licensed IPs with limitations to what can be done with them, their own IPs are more work, but there they could tailor stuff exactly as they want.

Your rhetorical construct is inaccurate- they weren't in any meaningful way 'blinded and crippled' before prism. It's a convenience, not a necessity, and it is arguable whether it actually improves things since it's not simply more data that is important, it's more relevant data. Problem is that you/ they are starting at a (n unachievable) solution and working backwards from there, ie we want (absolute) safety, so stuff done towards that goal has to be acceptable. My approach is deciding what is acceptable and then working forwards. Personally I don't have any problem with targeted surveillance with proper oversight, I have a very big problem with a blanket drag net and rubber stamp oversight because it will be- and for all we know already has been- abused. When coupled with a culture that classifies stuff because it's political embarrassing and targets anyone with the temerity to dissent to that classification there's huge potential for misuse.

Yeah, and last year the score was 1000+ to zero in terms of approvals to rejections, by that court, and there are zero counter arguments heard, ie the presentations are unopposed. The first part indicates it's a rubber stamp, the second shows it's explicitly designed to be a rubber stamp.

Nope, I was thinking of Bentham, the, er, designer of the Panopticon prison- where a single guard could theoretically watch any inmate at any time- centuries before Foucault even lived. Intelligence agencies don't do that yet, but by deity they'd love to be able to. He's being sued presumably over separation of church and state provisions so it won't be owning the book that's the crime. Think of it as being similar to being fined/ ejected from a theatre for using a cellphone, it isn't the phone that's the problem, it's it being in a theatre. Pretty sure there is an actual prescribed list though, things like the Anarchist's Cookbook* Wonder how long your company will keep using google, now that they know for sure that it's a click away from some NSA contractor having a look through everything. Hope nothing commercially sensitive is being sent. *g'day, NSA operator, hope you enjoyed reading my post

Hi. I'm. William. Hague. I. Try. To. Sound. Like. Churchill. But. End. Up. Sounding. Like. A. Bad. Impression. Of. Captain. Kirk Meh, the real Churchill would have advocated gassing the arabs for being brown and uppity, per Iraq.

And? Doesn't matter if they make it compulsory to use Live to sell on PC- something they didn't do with GfWL. If they do that the entire reason for publishers to use steam goes out the window since they'd have to pay both MS and Valve for pretty much the same service- and the MS option would give them more cash as well. Wouldn't be particularly great for consumers, but would be great for both MS and publishers.

That's very common with MS. I got Win7 for something like $10 and got XP Pro for free, both perfectly legit. Their main revenue comes from large users who don't get those discounts, but they always offer some sort of upgrade incentive once the easy money from the early adopters is taken. Don't get me wrong, I think win8 as it stood/ stands was moronic, but mainly because it didn't give the bulk users any incentive (and quite a lot of disincentive, really, given the significant UI changes) to upgrade.

Steam actually had the same vulnerability. I wouldn't envisage them closing down the marketplace for general software, only games. The whole idea of win8 was to have, basically, the same OS running on xbox, phones/tablets and PC, might as well take advantage of it especially if your new xbox is, basically, the same as a PC anyway. They could let the publishers run their own stores via Live and charge only the console licence fee equivalent which is considerably less than steam's 30% cut is.

1984 has an excellent non speculative basis in the Panopticon theory as espoused by Jeremy Bentham- simply put, that you can control people by the belief that they are under constant surveillance. That theory has a very good basis in observation and behavioural science, simply the threat of observation is enough to get most to alter their behaviour to the form desired. For obvious reasons it is a favourite theory of any totalitarian state.

But it was the Bad Rebels using sarin, not the Good Rebels. And all arms will be going to the Good Rebels. (Whatever happened to John McCain? He used to be relatively cool in 2000, then he got curb stomped by Karl Rove and came back utterly bonkers)

And it will be pretty easy to go through caps as well. A single instance like what happened to TWitcher2 on steam- multiple 8-9GB patches inside two weeks- and it would be over unless the usage periods were fortuitous. Compulsory patching may seem to be sensible, but if you're on a cap it's a disaster waiting to happen since the result will be either throttling back so far speed wise that it will no longer be over 1.5Mbs-1 or lovely excess charges, $30 would be fairly modest, for me it'd be ~USD80 for a TW2 sized patch.

No, because the majority of them are also on steam. Yeah. There are only two things that will kill off steam or make it irrelevant/ bring it back to the pack; if MS decides to bring the closed Metro/ Live system to PC- which they ought to do, really, but won't since it's sensible- or if more publishers establish Origins of their own- which they really ought to do as well. If SimCity sold 1 million full price copies on Origin that's $20 million going to EA rather than Steam, no reason why Acti/ 2k/ Ubi/ Squee etc should not save themselves equivalent amounts. [don't think GOG keys will make much of a difference either, though it is certainly nice to see Larian offering them on their boxed copies as well as, presumably, CDPR]

That 'quote' from Valve doesn't ever seem to actually have a source- beyond recursion. It's not really relevant anyway due to the differences between the on3 and steam. But will rofl if steambox comes with a on3 equivalent scheme. I suspect some people may slightly alter their views on the matter if that were to happen.

I'm sure some would be as well, but I'd still be pretty confident most men do not think that way. Think of, er, another adult male fantasy fulfilment based entertainment from, where- so I'm told- the Mail Man or Pizza Delivery Boy regularly deliver their large packages to a Bored Housewife or Sorority House Having Party. It's very rare for Pizza Delivery Boy to be delivering anything other than the king size option or Mail Man to be delivering a postcard rather than a Big Boxed GrosserWurst, if you get my drift. Yet that form of entertainment is perhaps the most popular one on the planet with blokes. If most males did not feel comfortable with being represented by someone well blessed by genetics/ DietyName/ SurgeonName that form of entertainment would not be so popular as it'd just make them feel inadequate. It is also, of course, another entertainment form which tends to have somewhat unrealistic representations of women.

It isn't actually being done for the benefit of the player of course, but there are arguable benefits. It's the same sort of thing that people say in favour of steam- automatic always up to date games, ease of use, ability to integrate features that require online access, social features etc. Really though, they might as well have made it always online and got those 'benefits' locked in rather than making in so they have to cater to those who do only log on once a day. They won't pick up many people who are "it's an online console, but just once day so that's okay!" over those who'd just be ok with an online console full stop.

I can't even remember where I complained about Leliana's accent, just that I did it. And then felt a bit of an idiot in retrospect. Now I'm back to complaining only about Marie Delacroix in the silly french accent stakes- and even then her worst fault is not being able to pronounce her own name properly. Still, at least I didn't complain loudly and publicly about Chekhov's ludicrous Russian accent in the new Star Trek.

Yep, that cuts out a lot of data. And, of course, along with greater computing power comes better compression technology. So it's coming together from both ends, you can compress the data better, smaller, faster, and store more and more on the bigger and bigger disks. I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if all emails and txts were being archived already- voice and stuff which requires more space, probably not yet. But I've little doubt it will come and I'd strongly suspect that over a more limited time period (ie not eternal storage with no roll over) it is feasible already.

Dunno. I do have a massive bulge indicating my assets, after all, so it's difficult to imagine otherwise. :smug: Seriously though, I don't think guys think that way, in general. Most male game avatars are pretty buff alpha male types, after all. It's not really a subject to generalise in too much though precisely because it is generalisation and characterising half the population a particular way based on sex is not going to be particularly accurate. No doubt there are men who get upset about their depiction (and not in the Men's Rights! sense) and women who really don't care even slightly about ending up playing a guy half the time or having a lot of women be half dressed.

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?