Zoraptor

There's a big difference between 'taking up' 1 GB and practical applications occurring with 1GB though. You'd never actually run a win7+ computer on 1GB RAM unless it was unavoidable; MS presumably wants quick response times, quick boot times, quick load times etc rather than a disk thrashing lag fest. I'd presume that a lot of stuff will be preloaded- and I'd presume that there would be some sort of compulsory firewall/ AV system in addition to the full time kinect, having IE without that is a recipe for absolute disaster. Imagine people streaming kinect feeds from hacked/ trojaned on3s, for example. Desktop win8 is also a better comparison, the on3 ain't ARM and has far more in common with PC architecturally than any cell phone. Any dual OS set up is going to be complicated memory wise and require more than the base line memory- you might, for example, want to play a game (shock! horror!) while streaming something to watch later in the background. If the set up described by MS is accurate then that would require both OS to be loaded and managing competing resources at the same time, and people will not want their game skipping because the win8 portion wants to use the HD or whatever simultaneously to the gamer OS.

It's not so much about them liking the US as having something better to do than sit around listening to firebrands tell them how everything wrong is the fault of The Great Satan. For example, a lot of the 'Taliban' in Afghanistan aren't even radicals, they're just being paid <5 USD a day to shoot their guns as that is the only way to get money in a country with something like 40% unemployment. Most islamic/ ME countries have very high unemployment especially amongst youth, even in rich places with lots of oil there often aren't enough jobs for everyone. That [economic development] won't effect home grown stuff directly, but the external is the trigger for a lot of the internal.

It is Win8 (basically) plus the more pared down gaming OS. I could easily see it getting to 3GB since they've stuffed just about as many features into the on3 as baseline windows has- Kinect, IE, video handlers, internet handlers, network handlers, updaters, hardware drivers- and Win7+ really requires 4GB RAM on PC. And it will have to dynamically handle RAM and other resource allocations across the two OS. It really isn't the pared down specialist gaming system that consoles used to be. Surface would a good parallel- 32GB storage? More than half isn't available even immediately after purchase...

As an example it's a Jain symbol and millenia old in that context. Wikipedia has actually removed the swastika symbol which was there (rofles) but you can still see them third picture down. Jain's are pacifists, which adds a certain level of irony to its recent uses.

Residence time typically just measures the period of the carbon cycle- it's almost completely irrelevant for CO2 in a CC context. For some other stuff (eg methane) it's highly relevant though- methane is a far better insulator than CO2, but it breaks down in air fairly quickly. That is relevant because there have been various attempts to introduce 'fart taxes' on agriculture which is stupid andor money grubbing* in most cases since methane doesn't last long, breaks down into CO2 and the animals are eating feed which, wait for it, are made from atmospheric CO2 in the first place. Pure carbon cycling. The only case it isn't stupid is when you are burning fossil fuels to transport the food, and if that is necessary to tax in some way then a fuel tax is perfectly fine. *Ultimately I think that is what does most damage to Climate Change acceptance, when it's subverted into political expedience. Government wants extra money, looks around for politically acceptable method, goes for something they can justify as 'green'. Anyone with knowledge knows their reasoning is flawed, sceptics point and laugh at another example of pseudoscience.

Even if true then it won't be the On3 in most cases, as it is a completely voluntary purchase. It'll be either a 'proper' computer or a device you already have like a phone or tablet- or the TV you already own. Is much of anyone, seriously, going to pay hundreds of dollars to get the On3's TV centric features plus pay additional monthly costs over what the cable/ channel providers charge when most of those features come bundled into your TV? Unlikely, gaming has to be the big selling point and it's been positively downplayed, and apart from WiiU the On3 looks to be the worst option there by a fair distance. And even worse, for all the emphasis MS put on TV etc at the launch they're US only features. No doubt they'll come to other places eventually, but as a launch item the thing you've gone overboard in emphasising doesn't even apply to 70% of the world market. It's the height of insularity- it's just moronic. MS: hey everyone! You should turn your computer into a smartphone! Everyone: If we wanted a smartphone we'd buy one! And it wouldn't be a Win8 one... MS: hey guys! Now you can pay extra to do stuff you can already do, just on our new Xbox! It might also play games, maybe! Everyone: ... It may be some sort of unifying strategy at work but its implementation is just baffling. If you want to use win8 across multiple systems and 'synergise' them then do so, but don't do a half arsed job, don't go off on tangents and don't throw out the stuff that is done well to tilt at the Android/ iPhone/ smartTV windmills.

And you don't do it on a horse, so it cannot be an RPG Oblivion-type game.

Strange as it may seem it can happen, and not just in a zoo sense. Possum's are Protected status in Australia (genuine noxious pest, here) and there are at least one Australian frog species and a British Bumblebee that are endangered extinct, as it turns out, at home but relatively common here. The bumblebee at least has actually been reintroduced into parts of Britain, from here.

Venus isn't really intended as a scientifically rigorous example, it's more of a layman's example to make a point, and it's fine so far as that point goes. Any sensible discussion of it has to admit that it is a limited example as there are (as WoD noted) significant differences- no magnetic field, very slow rotation period/ long days, no moon; all things which might have significant effects and are not consistent between Earth and Venus. In short, it's fine as an illustration that more greenhouse gasses = lots more retained heat on a generally earth like planet, it doesn't explain how it got to that state and whether there's anything to learn from that process for here.

The really big problem is that their market is going at both ends- if you want a genuinely all purpose machine you buy a PC/ laptop, if you want something cheap or that you likely already own then you use a phone/ tablet. It's a product for a shrinking market and all the 'TV is hard!!!' stuff from their presentation is tacit admission that a traditional console box designed to play games is going to need to be subsidised by Other Stuff*, even if that other stuff is pretty peripheral to a console's primary role. Their real problem is their insularity though, if you live in Redmond it's easy to assume that everyone wants what you want and has what you have- you're in an area where that is actually true so everything around you reinforces it, after all- but if you start losing 10-20% of your audience by requiring online access and 10% by wanting to have always on kinect camera (Steve Ballmer, watching you watching pr0n! Imagine the gifs!) then you're already starting from a lower level. While I don't think Orth was particularly serious with his tweets I do think that that is the prevailing attitude in such places- "someone doesn't have internet access 24/7/10+Mbps? Where are they living, in a cardboard box in Congo?". Anything that cuts down on install base is a bad idea for a console. *which has always been the case with the xbox division, just that it has been the OS/ Office division subsidising it previously.

That's so last decade man! Yeah! Today is all about forcing patches so all your save games stop working!! So Awesoem you get to replay the game aghain!!! Oh Gabe, you sexy mountain of man... excsuer me Ill be bakc in five minutes On3 looks like a disaster, nothing learned from Win8, too much focus on peripheral crap. MS aren't Apple or Valve, they can't offer an inferior product and expect it to be lapped up on name/ captive audience alone- even on PC any more, let alone somewhere there's competition.

Usually if you're going to crash into a wall you don't have people convinced that the wall doesn't exist or that the car can take any crash impact in its stride trying to control the car as well as yourself though. Ignoring it is of short term economic benefit, and politicians love short term economic benefit because it gets them re-elected or keeps the ruled quite and subservient, and they simply don't care if everything goes to the brown stuff decades down the track. It's the climatic equivalent of sub prime mortgaging. Runaway feedback on earth is pretty much impossible as there are too many buffering systems. It mainly comes up because Venus makes a convenient example (the convenient example, even) of atmospheric insulation. Even there it isn't a continuous positive feedback, it is not still getting warmer but has stabilised, albeit at a point that is bad from the perspective of life.

SoC > Pripyat. Pripyat is more polished by miles and a far better sculpted experience, but I don't really care about such things except as added bonuses. And simply put, there were just too many people there and it was too 'friendly'. The atmosphere in SoC is unparalleled in its evocativeness and the X labs are the single bit of any game that makes me nervous just thinking about them and there is a sense of all pervading bleakness to everything. Pripyat is a good game, don't get me wrong, but SoC is one of the best games of all time! Of all time! (finishing the 'scorcher, so I thought, with a .45 and 13 rounds of ammo left, my armour in tatters, my G36/ 5.45 Groza and Vintorez out of ammo and a couple of shots shy of disintegration. Massive feeling of relief and accomplishment- then a metric asteriskton of Monolith invade. Awesome, and not in the butan sense. Best gaming moment since 'nice jump, human' in System Shock.)

That you're playing Clear Sky rather than Shadow of Chernobyl?

And therein lies the problem. You say "show me the evidence for runaway feedback", you're shown- albeit with some snark- and it doesn't count because the situation ain't exactly equivalent. The situation can never be exactly equivalent, all we know is that Venus is roughly earth sized, in a 'temperate' planetary zone where it ought to be theoretically of habitable temperature yet the temperature there is enough to melt lead, and that is excellent evidence for runaway feedback. All the basic evidence points to increased CO2 meaning more retained heat, all of it. So much so that in a scientific sense the burden of proof may actually be reversed since denialists (coldists? don't know what dismissive term I'm meant to use and that makes me feel funny) keep saying that basic observable phenomena just don't count because. That's an abuse of scientific principle- you have to assume basic observable phenomena apply or else you end up with every experiment trying to take account for the possibility of gravity not working, this time. I don't even think there's much point to carbon limiting laws anyway. Big emitters will avoid doing anything because the economic damage will be too great and smaller ones doing anything simply won't be enough. Humans gonna human.

Venus r00fles!

I've always thought that gravity is a better example than QT to use when talking about scientific theory. Consistently working observational/ predictive models, easily observable consequences to everyone, yet nobody knows how/ why those observable phenomenon occur. In any explanation of gravity you end up at some purely theoretical stuff (mass curving space, OK, after that it's all gravitons!!! infinite expansion pressure!!! and suchlike) as an explanation after about two questions. QT is both too broad and too specialist/ hard for lay people to understand to really make good points about. Bro' it's got a vast amount of evidence backing it up- it's just theoretical and historical evidence which seemingly doesn't count, for some reason. More CO2 retains more heat as a basic tenet of physics and historical data shows that, as a general rule, higher CO2 concs mean correlate with higher mean temps. You might be able to argue whether it's absolutely conclusive evidence, barring the base physics stuff, but it's certainly a lot more than the purest hyperbole of 'no evidence'.

I remember some people were looking to get World of Xeen a while ago, it's on sale in the M&M six pack at the moment ($5, MM1-6). Plenty of other good Ubisoft titles there as well.

They've recently joined the Euro, so the obvious answer is bankrupt or part of Germany. Realistically though, in the absence of responses from actual Estonians you'll get limited usefulness from this thread if you're seriously considering moving there as everyone's experiences with it (including mine; backpacked through about a decade ago, nice country to visit but I cannot entirely disagree with oby's description either) are more tourist orientated. It'd be like getting views from tourists to New Zealand, they can only really say that the dollar is high and Queenstown is nice, they probably won't know important residential things like that housing is massively overpriced (cheers, overseas speculators/ supine government papering over cracks) and economically everything except things that go moo is a bit dodgy.

Interesting thread for Obsidianites over at the 'Codex , stories and bromance abound.

****ing leftist warmist communist maoist orientalist totalitarianist conformist/ nonconformist hipsterist anarchist scientists! I'll shoot it with my assault rifle or counter it with a video from that nice well informed Rush Limbaugh or a quote from the Bible (Leviticus, probably) or a study from Saudi Arabia hand picked to back up my views. Why it's enough to get me to write a Strongly Worded Letter to the Torygraph or go through my huge collection of Daily Fail back issues to make sure I'm still right and they're still wrong. Scientific concensus is that anthropogenic climate change is reality, eg Yeah right, those communist scientists with their collectivist theory of relativity, hippy quantum theory etc etc, what will they come up with next in their quest for one world government, forced sterilisation and unremitting promotion of Justin Bieber. Thank the lord we have plucky little companies like Exxon/ BP/ Texaco to tell us the truth and save us from misinformation from those perfidious scientists and their hidden- but not to me of course- realityist agenda.

A lot of players like XCOM as well as reviewers so it's polarising more than anything (and doesn't seem to have that many haters really). It's certainly no Aliens: CM where at least early reviewers gave it near universal good marks, while the actual players almost universally loathed it. I've been playing IWD2 as well. The modified UI is very annoying on a big wide screen as you have to drag the mouse across 2/3 the screen area to pick up your 23 GP of reward, but I still think it has the best overall balance of any IE game difficulty wise as almost all fights are challenging without being silly hard. It certainly lacks a bit of personality compared to IWD1, but having said that I'm still slogging through assorted gobbo equivalents in chapter 1 at this point.

Yes, Thailand has a disfunctional democracy- at present- since the power of both the military and King is both significant and applied in a partisan manner. Malaysia is disfunctional because much of the state apparatus is designed towards supporting the ruling party and Pakistan has both a powerful couptastic military and a bunch of political violence.

It is wrong to kill someone, no matter what. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen at all though, sometimes bad things are also necessary things, and sometimes there are worse alternatives- but that is a choice between bad and worse, not bad and good. It was necessary to fight Hitler, doesn't make all the killing in WW2 right though. It's also not the case for capital punishment, where my primary concern in a 'practical' sense is that it is irreversible and you cannot unexecute if you find out you were wrong, but you can unprison and compensate from a prison sentence. I have few to no illusions that if it came down a situation where it was me or Someone Else for the last lifejacket that while I might like to think I'd be all 'women and children first' it'd likely be me and only me if it came right down to it. But I'd also have no illusions that it'd be Wrong to save myself in preference to another in those circumstances- it might be understandable, it might be necessary to survive, but it'd still wouldn't be Right to do so.

Heh, somewhat amusing seeing the Inscrutable Oriental line coming from a Serb, given that the WASPs it was particularly popular with happily lumped slavs into exactly the same category. There's as much chance of Britain reverting from 'democracy' as Japan or India. But for all the problems in places like Thailand, Pakistan and Malaysia there are also places where democracy has happened more or less spontaneously and with very few problems at all in asia- Indonesia, for example, while not perfect is a lot better than anyone would have thought a decade or so ago.