Zoraptor

Yeah, I know. It was an attempt at a meta-ironic illustration (take my opinions as fact! well actually my opinions aren't...) than a serious statement. On reflection I should have made it a bit clearer- generally anything over the top I write isn't just hyperbole.

OK... There ain't relevant facts there, or at least none that support you. There are opinions. Mr Double-Barreled doesn't like Assange = fact. Mr D-B says Assange ~ dictator, fact. But this does not, in fact, make Assange a dictator in the same way as any accusation cannot be used as proof that the content of the accusation is true. Mr D-B admits that- in fact- he resigned himself rather than being; hung drawn and quartered? shot in a Polish forest? delicately flayed and his skin used as a throw rug at Assange's lavish London digs? having... an appeal hearing in a couple of days? Golly, you're not going to make Which Dictator magazine's cover with form like that Julian. I'm fairly sure it isn't the first time two people who have worked together have fallen out and it won't be the last. Taking the word of one as gospel as to whose fault it is is seldom a good way of determining the actual facts. Personally? That Mr D-B waited until he was sure Assange simply could not make any reply due to being held incommunicado at Her Majesty's Pleasure does not speak very highly of his integrity, courage or being a technical member of phylum Chordata.

Hmm. Just out of interest, can anyone remind me what the primary exports of the Bedouin Arab nations (SA, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, UAE) is? I'm having a bit of a blank.

Heh, fact. Like an awful lot of 'facts' that is actually an opinion. You are being rather naive; though the ingenious use of and invocation of emotes like 'democracy' and 'dictatorship' indicate a good future in the world of PR... Call it what it is- a self appointed committee- and the reaction is rather different. Not really much different from a self appointed dictatorship whether it's Assange or plain old Joe Random with secrets arbitrarily deciding they should be leaked, except that turning something into a committee is a prime way of making sure that nothing ever gets done. Or in other words, it's still pointless and if you have quis custodes ipsos custodiet concerns, per Wals, then a self appointed politburo (<-My try for a career in PR) is not going to alleviate them.

Seems utterly pointless. You can already leak direct to the papers. You can already leak indirect to the papers. Can't think of it having a single use.

Shrug. The biggest hint that it really isn't that important (apart from the information almost all being publically available, and generally much more specific too) is that the US itself didn't classify the information particularly highly. Manning didn't have access to the really juicy stuff at all. It's still a mistake for WL to publish it. There's only a marginal need to know (after all, it is almost all information available already) and its primary effect has been to give ammunition to anti WL people. Collusion between the US, Ukraine and Kenya to subvert arms regulations wrt to South Sudan is a far more relevant and better use for the leaks, even if it too was strongly suspected prior.

No, we really shouldn't. The whole point of a justice system is to avoid, so far as possible, emotion and rushes to judgement and to use, so far as possible, logic and proof in a considered manner.

It's stupid too because an R18 rating does not mean anything goes. We've 'always' had an R18 rating and (a few) games get banned outright here, Manhunt being perhaps the most well known.

Nah, that list is rubbish- it's basically diplomatic make work. Most of the things there are of such huge strategic significance that their locations are matters of public record and can be found by anyone with any inclination. Better ban Snakes on a Plane PDQ if the loss of an Ockeronian antivenin facility is really going to do serious damage to the US, don't want those terrorists getting bright ideas from that. Best ban Google Earth as well, and paper maps, just to be safe and as they show important buildings and locations. Hmm, maybe a mod had better delete this post too in case a terrorist reads it and gets ideas... And you're still going to get more terrorist kudos by blowing up a McDonalds than going to Congo to try and destroy a Coltain mine.

It would be holy crap, if true, but those aren't quite the accurate facts... It's actually worse than that. The new ACs will be launched/ delivered relatively soon (~2 years or so for the first one, IIRC) but will only have aircraft bought for them in around a decades time. Prior to that the ACs will be basically helicopter carriers. Overall it's a bit like building tanks then running out of money to give them a main gun so having some highly expensive mobile machine gun nests until the Big Cannons are delivered a decade later. If you go by the length of time the last batch of British ACs lasted (~30 years) they will be spending a quarter+ of their active service life without aircraft.

I think the general consensus was that those things were controlled by the exe and not subject to easy manipulation, unfortunately. IIRC there are a few things possible to make it easier such as shortening the repeat input time for the keyboard string movement but that was all.

Interesting point. Wasn't Mendel a monk? Interesting (?) fact: Mendel almost certainly cheated and fudged his results. (Forgivable, as he was right. But his results were far too consistently good to be genuine experimental results)

It was a bit of a dichotomy. On one hand Japan had been on an extremely driven mission of westernisation/ modernisation for roughly a century while on the other she was still very strongly nationalist and had a national cult of superiority and manifest destiny to rival any western country. But pretty much every western country of that time had those characteristics too to a greater or lesser extent- Belgium's colonial record in the Kongo is about as bad as Japan's in China, for example.

Same place as Tigranes, else I wouldn't have said anything. (Not Kangaroovia, but close)

I'm not aware of any loyalty schemes of that nature operating here (in video game retailing, supermarket loyalty card discounts and similar, sure). Almost all deals are available to any and everyone.

Hey, feel ready to share a picture of your gigantic games library now? No? So on "gaf", if you're a pirate and is honest about it, you get banned, but if you're a pirate and a liar, like you, you're home free? That gaf place sounds lovely. At least a slightly better policy than what we have here. Heh. If you posted the stuff you have on AP at many other developer owned boards (and the manner in which you do so coupled with throwing around "bitter tangents" and "h8rs gonna.." whenever someone has the temerity not to like something that you do) then well, you'd have been banned in some places long ago. So let's just be glad for the relatively enlightened stance here, yes? and not dream dreams of cherrypicking eLaws which suit our unique biases, yes? In any case banning people for admitting piracy is just burying your head in the sand.

Yeah, that's been widely 'known' for a long time. They also use a wide variety of industrial espionage, quasi legal 'pressure' (basically extortion- see BHP) and market manipulations (pretty much started with wool, they worked out that if they kept a large stockpile and were the biggest user then they could set the price at whatever they wanted simply by not buying, digging into their stockpiles and crashing the market whenever they wanted. They could then cheaply replenish their stockpile once the market had crashed...) to get as much of an advantage as possible- but that ain't particularly new info. It's all a bit boring really, though I guess there may be a bit more salacious detail in the memos themselves. I didn't see a single thing that I didn't already know outright or strongly suspect except the story of Ali Khamenei having leukaemia.

I hope there's a bit more to come than the startling and earth shaking revelation that the US spies on friends as well as enemies (everyone does it), Prince Andrew is a bit of a knob (OK, that was a bit surprising, I was expecting it to be another great boon to international relations courtesy of Phil the Greek), Silvio B is a touch dodgy (no doubt Italian readers fell off their chairs at the mere thought) and that radical Sunni Saudi Arabia doesn't like radical Shi'ite Iran. Grauniad, I expected better. C-, improvement needed.

There's a US version (think it's ~the same as the old one but with an installer + readme) and a separate Euro/ RoW/ DD version.

I hope you copy and pasted that Hildegard because the kind of people who inherently Believe in instanto-magic simultaneous 100% effective bombing and that the enemy are armed with wooden guns are about as likely to be convinced as people who Believe the world is flat. Not to mention perfectly willing to double down on their Beliefs with the currency of someone else's lives. Sheesh, the NK military is a joke which apparently manages to sink a modern, specialist, ASW warship in the most heavily monitored waterway in the world. That's a hell of a punchline- like that gif in Mr M. War's signature.

It's still on sale for $7.50 at Gamersgate until the end of the weekend. Number three there too. Behind a Paradox title (unsurprisingly) and Two Worlds 2 (currently only available at GG, IIRC).

Let's see: The innocent have nothing to fear? You must be a pirate to complain (thinly veiled, natch)? Failure to read links provided? Ignorance of how things work technically (ie you can be accused of piracy whether you even know what The Witcher is so just turning up to court with your receipt statement is the reddest of herrings)? Ignorance of how civil court works (ie it is not decided on 'beyond reasonable doubt' as with criminal court but on balance of probability and ignoring them/ not turning up is pretty much automatically an admission of guilt)? Most piracy demand letters are little better than Nigerian Money Scams and work on pretty much the same principle- that a given proportion of people will always pay. There are ways to get far better levels of proof (still not 100% accurate though; hopefully if CDP does decide to press ahead those will be the methods used) but since they take actual time to do and cannot be done easily in bulk they tend to get ignored even by such strident organisations as RIAA and the like.

Armchair warriors make me lol. It is truly fortunate that everyone in power knows that magical laz0r firing flag waving Anglo super duper mecha-robots don't really exist. As with the Cheonnan nothing will happen because everyone with knowledge grounded in reality rather than fantasy knows that there is no prospect of destroying NK's artillery before it makes a moonscape out of Seoul. At the least. Sheesh, the NKs have killed 40 odd (?) US servicemen since the end of the KW and nothing substantive has happened.

The problem is that the 'enforcement agencies' are lazy, use standover tactics of dubious legality- based on bulk mailing people based only on IP lists that torrent sites admit to seeding with spoofed IPs and the principle that many people will pay up rather than have a potential court case even if innocent- and have a very bad false positive rate because, well, they're lazy and doing it for the $$$. A few links blatantly stolen from RPS comments (and hence rather UK centric): one two three I'd have a big diddums reaction to pirates being targeted if the vermin doing the enforcing weren't worse. CDP would be very well advised not to associate with that sort of garbage under any circumstances as it may make them some money but a few pensioner-gets-extortion-letter type headlines will destroy their carefully built up good will very quickly.

So, if you are tech savvy enough, knowing how to forge your network pacakages, you can frame another ip address for your actions. Not to mention that infiltrating and broadcasting intent to transmit pirated software even if you don't pass along any data is sort of asking for it. Besides the entire experiment being somewhat contrieved, wanna bet that the majority of internet users wouldn't know how to? The generalised method used in that paper has been used regularly even prior to the paper being published. Various torrent sites freely admit to seeding their lists with spoofed IPs and that is how you end up with elderly couple from Bognor Regis who only use the internet for email and facebook getting a rude letter accusing them of downloading Snoop Dogg's entire back catalogue. It's a bit like the whole DRM thing- it doesn't matter how much effort you put in to it, some hacker with time on his hands will find a way to circumvent it as soon as they get motivated enough.