Agiel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfmEjI7Eo3E I would have thought the name lent itself to a good backronym.

Teal Group's eminent Richard Aboulafia's latest piece on India's MMRCA deal with Dassault almost gave me a chuckle, were it not for HAL raining on Dassault's parade and almost holding the deal hostage:

I did not particularly object to the concept of paid mods. The Grey Wolves Mega-mod for Silent Hunter III required a one dollar donation fee to the devs in order to get the download link (though admittedly that was a bargain of the century compared to some of the stuff we saw on the Workshop for the amount of stuff it added) and the Microsoft Flight Sim series has had paid planes developed by third-party developers, which is a practice continued with Digital Combat Simulator. The issue was that Valve adopted a "Sink or Swim" approach when putting this out there. If there was a spiral testing approach and a slow roll out of the system as was done for Team Fortress 2, then hardly anyone would have raised a stink, and the problems (which are still many) associated with this system would have been worked out early and rather painlessly as they came rather than everyone having to deal with them all it once. In the words of Rear Adm. Wayne E. Meyer:

For those who want to pull "Crazy Ivans" at depth 800 feet, the old Sonalysts sims are on sale for $6: http://store.steampowered.com/sub/199/?snr=1_7_7_weeklongdeals_150_2

Given that the "only" 25mm APFSDS-T round fired from the Bushmaster autocannon compares extremely favourably to contemporary 30mm rounds fired from the 2A42/2A72 used by today's BTR-90s and BMP-2/3s, and the upgrade proposal entails mounting of the 30mm Bushmaster, I'd hardly call that Gypsy Wagon "toothless". http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbwiki/index.php?title=Ammunition_Data#Autocannon

Hopefully we won't see too many lawsuits arising and stinks being raised over the nudity and "better sex" mods for Skyrim. After all, who wants to let their attorneys know they watch virtual TnA on their off hours? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjj8eMNxivM

Finally decided to move on from that old chocolatey goodness of Presto-based Opera 12.17 to Opera 28. I absolutely loathe, loathe, LOATHE how it works, but it's getting to the point where Opera 12.17 is becoming too big of a security liability now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02pWbr9bgbA#t=99

Hell, it even had Tyranid Trygons in it, so CA's been beat in getting a Warhammer game to the engine.

I loled at "I have nothing to play with." You can't take a step in our apartment without kicking a toy our cat got bored with.

Tried to get my daily dose of commentary from theatlantic.com on my desktop. Grrrr.... curse the mobile format fad.

April marks the 60th anniversary of the first flight of the venerable C-130 Hercules (which unlike other aircraft of that era, still remains in production). A moment of zen to reflect on that history: The Navy pilots who accomplished that feat had apparently painted on the side of the aircraft "LOOK MA, NO HOOK". Though the prospect of the Hercules being used for transport of personnel and UNREP for aircraft carriers was eventually dropped in favour of the purpose-built carrier capable C-2 Greyhound (the same basic airframe was used for the E-2 Hawkeye series of AWACS), the pilots nonetheless received the Distinguished Flying Cross for this achievement. Here's to another 60 years of flying.

A "BUFF" making like a crab (at 0:35).

Some iced tea nearly came out of my nose from that pic. I have to admit I kind of prefer the pathfinding foibles of this game over the ones of the Infinity Engine game, where I'm in an encounter and that Wizard I really needed and I wasn't paying too much attention to up that point was half of Faerun away after being confronted with a momentarily obstructed doorway.

John Carpenter at it again with his synthesizer. Complete with a video this time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyNuWCjc-bg#t=20

Pic showing off the scale of the MV Dockwise and the SXB Radar Just another Easter in Greece.

Is there anything more terrifying than the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future materialising through a wall and choking you out? "THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO..."

http://www.reddit.com/r/****CrusaderKingsSay

I find that much like the old Infinity Engine games, the two Chaos spells (one for the Wizard, the other for the Cipher which is trickier to use since she has to have unobstructed LOS on the target) is your friend. The name of the game is "Crowd Control". Unfortunately Fireball is nowhere near as impressive in PoE as it was in DnD or even Dragon Age: Origins for that matter.

I was taken aback when people on my Steam friends list who had relayed to me that they had somewhat outdated machines were playing GTAV. Then I remembered "Oh yeah, huh. This one doesn't need a Cray supercomputer to run it well like the last GTA game on PC did."

Yes. This is apparently truth in television:

And if you can name one incident in which an American naval vessel or aircraft has behaved as brashly towards the Russian AGIs that have been keeping busy off American coastlines since the end of the Cold War, I'm all ears.

I would hardly call a largely de-militarised Europe and at most 3 forward deployed brigade-sized American maneuver elements (and only one at the moment anywhere east of the Elbe, and to call them "maneuver" forces is a bit generous, they're Stryker BCTs for feth's sake) an "encirclement". If anything, with the Germans recent re-activation of 100 Leo 2A5s and the Dutch reversing their decision to retire their entire fleet of tanks, Russia's recent sabre-rattling is looking more like self-fulfilling prophecy by the day. Poland, the Baltics, et al came knocking on NATO's door because history has given them good reason to fear Russia. Perhaps if Putin had something to offer to them other than intimidation, gas dependency, and dashcam videos of horribly irresponsible driving they'd all cast a more favourable eye towards Russia.