213374U

Can... can they do that? Isn't the IP owned by someone? $30 is a bit steep for a KS, but what the hell. edit: cool, MCA is involved, doing somethingorother... <3

Hahaha. Classic. He's for free circulation of goods, but obviously not for free circulation of labor. That's not how free trade works, per Adam Smith. And there you have it, the plutocracy scored another one, and the workers will pay the price no matter what happens. "To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament — this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics." The "trade deal" was a red herring. The strategic objective has always been the same: the encirclement of Russia, as evidenced by the expansion of NATO, the missile shield, etc. Ukraine has historically been a buffer zone between Europe and western Russia. Literally, it's where offensives go to die. Tearing that huge chunk of land off the Russian sphere of influence is a huge blow because in one fell swoop you do away with a large part of the problem that traditionally caused European land wars against Russia to fail. On top of that, you take away Russia's ability to operate in the Black Sea. Next to that, any trade deals are a mere footnote.

Yeah, I don't get it. He's butthurt about having a referendum to begin with, and the perspective that elected officials will have to... do work? Gotta love these (super-)statist leftards. Democracy is only cool when it goes your way, hmm?

You've got nothing but irrelevance on the subject at hand. Bring something to the table, or go away. Sorry your ego was bruised. I had thought you were above projection. That's some delicious irony coming from you, talking about irrelevance and bruised egos, considering that you can't seem to write two words without reminding everyone of how well read, well traveled and intelligent you are. So yeah, looks like I was pretty much spot on, and my advice to you bears repeating: get over yourself.

Historical context, please. The forward Christian thinkers that fought for religious tolerance and the separation of Church and state were a product of the aftermath of the incredibly bloody massacres that were perpetrated in Europe by Christians, for -on the surface- religious reasons, for over a hundred years. It is not possible to understand modern Western culture without the religion wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. So yeah, Christians. But only after they figured out that maybe, maybe, burning the heretic, killing the mutant, purging the unclean wasn't the best way to go about it. How about we try to foster the same kind of self-reflection within Islam rather than going full-on Der Stürmer at the drop of a hat? --- Regarding the Muslim rape gangs. While appalling, it's a drop in the ocean, sadly. Look up the numbers of child sex trafficking involving Eastern Europe. Hint: the mafias controlling that trade are run by white kingpins, and directed mostly at Western European white customers. edit: sure guv'nor, no more talk of Muslims. For all the good it does anyway... In the vast majority of the posts I ever make on any given topic on this forum, historical context is considered (frankly, hence my point of view on many things as I have deep knowledge of the history (I don't opine when I don't know, I listen)). The one you reference, is not one of the exceptions. I'm more than well aware of the situations which you bring up, however, in the context in which I was writing, they are a combination of acknowledged and irrelevant to the point I was making. Get over yourself.

What?! You mean votes on Twitter weren't counted? What's the world coming to? Oh, I am so pissed right now. I'm going to write the angriest 140-character post ever, just you watch. edit: oh great. He's at it again.

Historical context, please. The forward Christian thinkers that fought for religious tolerance and the separation of Church and state were a product of the aftermath of the incredibly bloody massacres that were perpetrated in Europe by Christians, for -on the surface- religious reasons, for over a hundred years. It is not possible to understand modern Western culture without the religion wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. So yeah, Christians. But only after they figured out that maybe, maybe, burning the heretic, killing the mutant, purging the unclean wasn't the best way to go about it. How about we try to foster the same kind of self-reflection within Islam rather than going full-on Der Stürmer at the drop of a hat? --- Regarding the Muslim rape gangs. While appalling, it's a drop in the ocean, sadly. Look up the numbers of child sex trafficking involving Eastern Europe. Hint: the mafias controlling that trade are run by white kingpins, and directed mostly at Western European white customers. edit: sure guv'nor, no more talk of Muslims. For all the good it does anyway...

From the link Zoraptor posted. Download the zip, from what I can gather, it's the "Clinton Foundation Donors (from Free Beacon).xlsx" file sorted by amount donated. (Free Beacon? Searching brings up a conservative newspaper. Did they post it themselves previously...?)

I found it to be incredibly grating, for reasons I've more or less elaborated on here. Does the writing get less edgy and one-dimensional later on, or should I just write it off as Not For Me? (Never managed to finish a Fallout game in my life either.) No, no I don't think the writing changes in that sense. Everyone is pretty much a **** in this game, and I don't think I've ever come across a single genuinely nice character who doesn't intend to rip you off somehow or has some skeletons in the closet. It's part of the mood-setting, but I can't find fault with your criticism. The game certainly doesn't lack things that may potentially piss you off, so if the writing feels outlandish, forced, or you just don't like it, don't bother. Time is too valuable to waste doing stuff you hate on your own dime, and this is one of those "love it or hate it" products.

Oh, there is a thread for this game? So, any good reason why the most important choice the player will make is the character build? That alone determines most of the consequences you will encounter. I've read this is justified because the game "is not a power fantasy", and "C&C bro" -verbatim from the devs- but this is absurd given a) the bodycount you can end up with and, b) the plot itself. It is also ill-advised on a conceptual level because by definition it is the complete opposite of an informed decision. This extreme fixation with locking the player out of not only certain quest and plot branches (understandable) but basically everything that is not their sphere of specialization right out of the character creation screen really baffles me. Apparently it is anathema to the designers that somebody could be a Navy SEAL *and* hold an engineering degree. One might argue that such a person will probably never win the world heavyweight championship or the Nobel Prize, but they will be reasonably competent in both fields. Not in this game: as a generalist, your experience will mostly consist of a long string of [failed] checks, interspaced with the "Game Over" screen. If in Fallout 3/NV it is hard not to be an unstoppable Gary Stu swimming in money and mastering every conceivable sphere of human activity, this game is the extreme opposite. As a specialist fighter, you will barely survive the toughest, optional fights, RNG permitting. You won't be able to make much sense out of the lore of the game with such a build, though. As a more social-oriented character, don't expect to survive an ambush by a bunch of hobos. That is, of course, unless you take metagaming and savescumming to the next level, learn exactly the what, where and when of the minimum checks you need to pass to open up options leading to more skill points, and exploit that. That's probably the only way to make it with a jack-of-all-trades character, and the Steam playthroughs I've seen seem to confirm it. With that out of the way, I'm enjoying it sufficiently not to put it down. After accepting that I will suck at everything except <build focus> I'm having fun and will probably replay once or twice. It is true that different character backgrounds and skillsets allow for different resolutions and outcomes, the lore is interesting enough to carry the story, and the game manages to portray decadence pretty well. I've even felt that "Fallout with swords" vibe a few times, inbetween fits of blinding rage. I'm actually digging the music too, but it can get repetitive especially in the cities. The division between social and combat skills is brilliant in its simplicity, and it's great that you get rewarded with combat/social points depending on how you handle problems. Combat is... serviceable albeit uninspired, as are most characters I've come across. Areas are generally small, both in scope and actual size, and the largest city in the world is large in name only. Skill/stat checks are ubiquitous but also wildly inconsistent in difficulty and application. I'd say worth the discounted price, but approach with the mindset that this game has some seriously rigid design, and unless you are willing to cheat, there is no way around the limitations imposed as a result. It's a role-playing game, provided you play strictly the roles the designers allow; otherwise it's an exercise in frustration. Tigranes' post describes the game well enough, but one has to wonder to what extent stuff that sounds good on paper actually makes for fun games... even if the execution were flawless. Still, an excellent effort for an indie studio's first game. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with for their colony ship RPG.

Well, we have this cavalier tendency to tell you how to run your country every day of the week and twice on sundays, so I don't think anyone will hold it against you. However, if you are still uncomfortable, you can always do it like a boss a member of royalty, and frame it as a leading question.

Thanks. By your description, it sounds similar to one of my favorite games -- Starfleet Command. I'll be sure to check it out... if it's ever released outside of Steam.

Huh. Never played a WH40k game -- not a fan of WH in general. But that trailer made me want to go fight space heretics, dammit. Is the game actually any good?

See, it's increasingly difficult to understand what you are talking about, when you keep moving the goalposts around. Now we are to refer to a video of something in Turkey, to understand some obscure overarching point regarding what second-generation muslims living in the US want? What "policy" are you talking about? By the way: Turkey's regression is chiefly the work of Ottoman fetishist and reactionary extraordinaire Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, which is, as you well know, a valued ally of the west in the fight against communism terrorism illegal immigration. edit: oh boy, GD linking Alex Jones' site. The seventh seal has been broken.

You are explaining yourself plenty well. It just seems that some members here are bent on equivocating by making up absurd and extreme scenarios, and filing them under tolerance, so they can more easily claim that "tolerance" is a failed idea. Religious tolerance, as proposed by such as Locke, does not include accepting religiously-mandated violations of the law of the land. Indeed, for tolerance to work, all members of society must agree that secular authorities ("the magistrate") supersede religious authorities in all matters except strictly those of cult and faith, and only when those do not come in conflict with the law of the land. This is what makes religious tolerance work as a basis for peaceful coexistence of different religious groups. That being said, there is a problem, and that is that Islam is still a religion imposed by government fiat in many countries. This is in direct conflict with the above, and it's not immediate for all muslims that such a thing is fundamentally incompatible with post-Enlightenment western culture. It certainly doesn't help that we tend to bomb places where Islam is second to secular law (cf. Iraq), and as Zoraptor pointed out, prop up regimes where the opposite is true.

Yeah... I'm not sold on the idea that being killed by a religious fanatic for religious reasons is inherently worse or more dangerous than being killed by a criminal in the course of an armed robbery, or by a former FBI nutcase. Could be that my brain is broken, but I really, really don't see how exactly a jihadi crackpot is more "at war" with society than any of the 30-50 serial killers from Raithe's post. I am more or less immune to marketing and advertising, so that may be a part of it. The point would hold water if we were talking about organized groups seeking to overthrow the current government and replace it with a caliphate, but this is in the context of lone wolf attacks, not IS gaining a foothold on US soil.

I'm sure some more can be squeezed out of Greece. Anyway. I don't know why y'all in such a hurry to leave. Wherever are you going to find a nicer evil overlord?

Have you stopped beating your girlfriend?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/euro-2016-vladimir-putin-russia-violence-england-fan-fights-doubt-a7087971.html The thread that keeps on giving.

I don't think it's the same. In those cases it's not political correctness ('cept maybe in the UK) impeding law enforcement, but something much more obvious -- those occurrences could be used directly as a political weapon against the incumbent government's immigration policies, especially in Merkel's case, so politicians did their damnedest to cover it up. Perhaps it's different across the pond, but we aren't quite at the stage where cops investigating or arresting browns or blacks automatically triggers cries of "racism!" by the twitter leftard brigades. Sadly it's just a matter of time.

Doesn't need to be a zip gun. Starter pistols can be modified to fire steel ball bearings, which can kill. I don't know about the UK but you can buy those over here without a permit. Not exactly "hand-made", but close enough.

...the article? You may not have been worried. I'm worried about the constant stirring of the hornet's nest that is the Middle East, considering that it contains the most insane nuclear player anywhere in the world.

Huh, Snave's still playing. Gotta admire his dedication. Meanwhile at Bioware Austin:

No, it very much does not work for you, the NSA, or anyone. You cannot solve the problem with today's (or tomorrow's) algorithms, and the article touches on this: Suppose that NSA’s system is really, really, really good, really, really good, with an accuracy rate of .90, and a misidentification rate of .00001, which means that only 3,000 innocent people are misidentified as terrorists. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.2308, which is far from one and well below flipping a coin. But the numbers aren't quite right because the population of the US is closer to 323 million. Let's assume that only adults aged 15-64 can be terrorists (roughly two thirds of the population). Assuming there are 1,000 terrorists, this means the probability of a randomly picked person in the US being one of them is about one in 213,000. Let's take it to 99% accuracy rate, deeply in the realm of science-fiction. This is not a system that reads your e-mails anymore, it now reads your ****ing mind. With these figures, the probability of Skynet successfully finding a terrorist is an unimpressive 32%, still below a coin toss. The problem is not how good the algorithm is, but how very few terrorists there are compared to the size of the general population, and how many false positives it's going to return. Unless new math has appeared in these past ten years that better allows to calculate probability in this fashion, the date of the article is irrelevant, and Bayes' theorem is as valid today as it was in the 18th century when it was posited. Computer science is not magic.

I got pretty addicted to it, but it took a couple attempts. What helped me was looking at the list of characters available to recruit (save) and then just focusing on finding as many as possible. That was obviously a bit spoilerish, but it kept me interested until the end. Also that biker gang was a bunch of jerks. You have a much higher tolerance than me to bad games. Combat is boring. The constant salvage runs are tedious and repetitive. Characters repeat the same 5-6 lines all the time. Resource management is an exercise in frustration. No stealth option although the game warns you "not to let them hear you". No minimap. I decided to give up after raiding an armory that had the toughest locked doors and most zombies guarding it so far, and coming out with a grand total of four (4) bullets. This game is just terrible. Anyway, on to Age of Decadence.