Agiel

Back on this point again, I've been of the opinion that the Libertarian Party could finally get off the ground in the Orange County area, a place in California which if one had told me in 2012 would turn Democrat I would have laughed in his face, unable to contain the spittle spraying onto him. However as the 2016 election has shown with Clinton beating out Trump in that area, in spite of it voting heavily in favour of Romney in 2012, and having turned completely blue in 2018, the only conclusion is that the current Republican party has left the educated, upper-middle class (people who are amenable to low taxes and fiscal probity, and at the best of times can take or leave the conservative commitment to the "Culture War" and at the worst hostile towards it) that has been the lynchpin of their strategy in suburbs behind, something that in spite of vehement claims demographics cannot fully account for (as Orange County's own Republican Party chairman has said "Significant numbers of Republicans we turned out, look to have voted Democrat.")

A while back I laid out the theory that we were going to see the KGB get involved as pay-off for the Jon and Nancy storyline in season 2. Looking at some IMDB credits I think we're going to see a Red Dawn-type story thread, with KGB operatives and VDV Spetsnaz dropping in to snatch up everything related to MKUltra, including Eight and Eleven.

Given how famously poor broadband is in Australia I have to wonder if Stadia is going to be a wash there. Hell, I can imagine bandwidth caps being a real damper on its viability in the US.

I can think of one potential upside of the whole Epic Games debacle: If it manages to succeed in taking a big bite out of Steam's market share (and it's an "if" that's the size of the Seawise Giant) then perhaps it might persuade Valve to finally get off their fannies and get on with making a killer app people actually want that might move the goalposts again, be it Half-Life 3 or Left 4 Dead 3. Granted this is easy speculation on my part; the games I'm looking forward to likely won't be made exclusive to the Epic Launcher (like Digital Combat Simulator or Slitherine's wargames) or are pretty much guaranteed to be available on another platform (Cyberpunk 2077 on GOG).

And some say the Swedes are soft...

I should like to point out since 1976 the American people was 6 for 7 in voting in the Presidential candidate that banked himself as the ultimate beltway "outsider".

Metro: Exodus. And having just wrapped up the Volga level, it's... really, really, really good. Probably the most narratively tight story FPS I've played in years (For instance, why do religious nuts call electricity evil? Well, humans being pattern-seeking mammals, what do they make of scary, unexplained balls of electricity floating about and randomly zapping everything in their paths? "Demons," of course). The Volga free-roam map certainly isn't quite as expansive as many "Zones" in STALKER, but it's close enough that it scratches that itch for me. Perhaps the only two things that bug me thus far are some navigation bugs when it comes to clambering over stuff and a few typos in the text.

Before Bezos Fight, Enquirer Publisher AMI Faced Steep Losses It'd be something if Bezos picked up that venture, and the words that would greet customers at the checkouts for supermarkets across America are "TRUMP: SIX MONTHS TO LIVE!" or "IVANKA BACK IN REHAB!"

Certainly I can imagine if at an earnings call for Activision or Take-Two Interactive that they announced that they were going to adopt CDPR's approach to piracy their shareholders would in short order move to vote out the leadership of those companies.

Perhaps ActiBlizzard should take some pointers from Simon Sinek:

For those like myself who are eagerly awaiting Metro: Exodus...

STALKER-likes seem to be the craze these days.

Not playing right now, as there's other stuff on my plate, but I suppose for some that's not much of an excuse given the only $7 cost of entry: Be interesting to see this get polished up some more, as it looks to shape up to be stronger than many AAA FPS showings. Assuming that the purported sole developer doesn't get snatched up by one of the big names and further development of this gets put on hold indefinitely.

Oldie, but goodie:

Aegis BMD has much wider coverage than either THAAD or Patriot, as it is purpose-designed to intercept warheads outside of the Earth's atmosphere, so in addition to providing coverage to both Romania and Poland it can provide several more opportunities to intercept notional Iranian missiles targeting cities further west that may also be defended by other BMD ships (among them some frigates in the Royal Danish Navy). The Romanian site is perfectly positioned to defend France and Germany for this scenario, ditto the site in Poland for the UK and Norway. Cruise missiles may have proved to be potent first strike weapon... in the 1980s when Soviet look-down/shoot-down shoot-down capabilities left something to be desired. At sub-sonic speeds a Tomahawk cruise missile would take close to two hours to reach a target using a dog-legged flight path, which is simply too long and provides too much time to be detected early (even assuming there isn't an SVR/GRU mission out of the embassies in Poland and Romania to monitor the sites) for what is a time-sensitive mission such as a decapitation strike against Kremlin and military leadership. And if it does have Moscow in its sites, well, which is it? The vaunted double-digit SAMs that ring Moscow can easily knock out cruise missiles out of the sky? Or the Tomahawk is such potent weapon system that it so dangerously undermines Russian security? If slotting in existing Tomahawks into the Aegis Ashore facilities is the fastest way to add offensive capabilities then it would make more sense to use W80-0 warheads that used to arm old TLAM-N, all of these warheads have since been dismantled in 2013. Even if there had been some W84s kept surreptitiously in reserve it still doesn't change the fact that re-introducing nuclear armed versions of these weapons is far easier said than done, as these weapons would require significant re-design to accommodate PALs, safety features, arming mechanisms, and additional electrical systems to provide power to all of the above, as compared to the SSC-8 missile of which it is generally thought that it could reach INF ranges simply by the crews topping off the fuel tanks to the brim. The minimum time to introduce such a weapon has generally been pegged to be at least five years, if it would ever happen at all since as Paul Selva has said the US military has long favoured air and sea deliver methods.

The Aegis Ashore system is in Romania, which isn't close to Kaliningrad. The Polish system isn't operational yet. ...or SS-N-30 launch from a Kilo-submarine of the Black Sea Fleet. Either which way both Aegis Ashore facilities are fixed sites, which make them poor platforms for offensive weapons. Ignoring the fact that I mentioned earlier that making a new, nuclear-armed variant of the Tomahawk is actually a significant undertaking, and not simply a matter of simply swapping out the payload. Most frustratingly for those in the know is the fact that development of such a new system based on Tomahawk is at minimum going to take half a decade, and far longer for some notional "Pershing III". The actions of a confederacy of dunces: a head of state beholden to Kremlin (damn the purported "pee tape," the real evidence of Kompromat has been staring at everyone in the face for over three decades) and an NSA that bristles at international agreements whatever the shape and form, against the recommendations of the United States' own military, as General Paul Selva put it: "There are no military requirements we cannot currently satisfy due to our compliance with the INF Treaty. While there is a military requirement to prosecute targets at ranges covered by the INF Treaty, those fires do not have to be ground-based.” It doesn't change the fact that Putin has wanted out of INF for over a decade, and for good reason: missile development is about the sole military arms industry that has largely remained largely intact since the collapse of the Soviet Union (the much touted Su-57 has had its procurement of a mere 12 airframes deferred yet again into 2020, with every indication out there that the can will be kicked to the right again. Translation: The money isn't there after the Indians decided to cut their losses on an aircraft that would have been state-of-the-art... in 2005). The RSVN alone fields seven different types of land-based ICBMs compared to the USAF's one, and three different types of SLBMs against again the USN's one. But hey, surely the Russian people are willing to have the pension age moved past the average life expectancy in Russia, after all, "What's good for NPO Novator is good for Russia."

And as I've said before, there's close to zero sense to put Tomahawks in a _fixed launcher_, especially so close to Kaliningrad. The US has had fairly little cost exacted upon it by abiding by INF because for the money it was willing to expend it has far better means of delivering cruise missiles by sea and by air. Without nuclear warheads for Tomahawks the amount of firepower it can put out is a pittance compared to these means (Aegis Ashore only has 24 VLS cells per facility, and any number dedicated for Tomahawks would correspondingly make it worse at its intended mission; this is compared to 16 JASSM-ER able to be carried by a B-2, 24 by a single B-1B, up to 96 Tomahawks for an Arleigh Burke destroyer, up to 122 for a Ticonderoga cruiser, and 154 standard for a converted Ohio guided missile submarine). If the concern is that at the absolute maximum a mere 48 missiles with 1000lbs conventional warheads have the potential to so cripple Russian warfighting capabilities, then that would beg the question of how their air defences, C4ISR redundancies, and force dispersals couldn't possibly have accounted for this. Vis-a-vis China INF withdrawal is also ill-conceived, since the primary theaters should the balloon go up is _air and sea_, and stationing the notional weapons system in allied countries is only going to be a re-run of the exact diplomatic debacle that helped pushed the US into signing INF in the first instance. The system is actually quite well known, given that it's based on a sea-launched weapon that might have fallen under the auspices of INF if launched from land-based platform (in fact the same launcher of the Iskander-M, which is mobile and from which much of the fear behind the SS-20, Pershing II, and GLCM was derived from). The impasse is largely derived from the fact that the Russians may have believed that it was compliant so long as it wasn't fueled to the INF range, which Article VII.4 has something to say on:

Suppose I was one of the "lucky" ones who had Metro: Exodus already pre-ordered on Steam. However, I'd like to think I wouldn't have hesitated to pick it up on the Epic store regardless since I adore the other games in the series. Having not played Fortnite I'm not exactly in a position to comment on Epic's service, but my experience with other digital distro platforms have largely ranged from "functional," such as Origin, to "actually fairly solid," such as Impulse back in the day and GOG, of which the latter is generally the best model in my mind (just an .exe to install, and no more fuss). About the sole exception to that however is GFWL, which was among the most incompetently-made products to have ever have graced a hard-drive.