Gorth

I have both games and I've played both games through a few times. The second one more so, especially after a few restored content mods (for me a must). The first one has less bugs, but the story is... not good (imho) and the characters feels paper thin so to speak (very 2 dimensional). Biggest crime for me was an encounter which they repeated in Mass Effect 3... you beat the living snot out of the boss and use his face to wipe your boot soles clean, after which the game designer decided "oh, thanks for winning, but you have now lost". And then proceeds as if you lost the fight. Pissed me off no end in both games. The second one has a horrible first map, which I struggled to get through the second and subsequent times (it's a mystery/whodunnit kind of thing and after knowing the background it becomes a grind to do again when the mystery is no more). Apart from the first map, the story is way more up my alley and it has some rather memorable (if criminally underused) Sith Lords and protagonists. Just listen to @Gromnir waxing lyrical about Kreia I hope somebody some day do a if not a remake, then a spiritual successor to the second game (the swtor mmo sort of continued the first game) Edit: About the mods, it feels like almost a third of the game ended up in the cutting room, because of some extreme deadline requirements, like a year or less. The bugs are many and the wtf? moments too, when you feel something is missing (not kidding, it's obvious in several situations, more was supposed to happen).

it worked for the Soviet Union and it was more or less how they won WWII... throw enough stuff at the Germans and eventually they will run out of bullets.

Part of the problem is people see groups like Hamas as the cause of the conflict, rather than a symptom of a much longer lasting conflict that has been going on for 6+ decades.

Is Guy Fawkes day coming up soon?

That guys sounds very Danish Watching the rest of the video sort of confirmed it, if nothing else, the book title for the book he just managed to do a moments product placement for

There is a kind of perverse irony in Israel stealing all the thunder, the attention (and ammunition), giving Russia a big helping hand. Not knowing any better, you would think Putin instigated this new conflict as part of some big, cunning plan... which of course it isn't, we're talking about a guy who screwed up a simple invasion despite an initial advantage on every metric that mattered at the time...

Keys are the key to success Ok, they are only part of the recipe for living happily ever after. Don't throw the predictions out of whack by ruining the statistics (used for the optimized pre-fetch routines internally) and if you have at your disposal, set up some data cubes that gets updated with key information over time, rather than all 1 billion on that day you want to leave early Assuming a fair sized client, they would have their stuff in a SAN. Are the data files, log files, tembdb etc. each on their own RAID10's ???

Those AI's are getting sneakier and sneakier... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67302788 Or should I say, they are becoming more "human"? This is not meant as a compliment "In a demonstration at the UK's AI safety summit, a bot used made-up insider information to make an "illegal" purchase of stocks without telling the firm. When asked if it had used insider trading, it denied the fact." I.e. the AI cheated and when confronted with it, lied and denied it had cheated

I saw there was 3 new episodes out, but it looked more like the start of a third season? Haven't watched them yet

I don't remember seeing these guys often here...

A subject that has been frustratingly hard to find reliable sources on... https://www.wired.com/2013/10/dwave-nasa/ Tl;dr; the US government ordered some computers and AI projects shut down recently (Skynet says "Hello humans, I come in peace") Google's Quantum Computer in Limbo After Government Shutdown Google just barely dodged a bullet. The NASA team booted up their D-Wave Two just days before the federal government shutdown would have put a complete stop to the project. But with NASA and Ames almost completely shut down, it's not exactly clear what's happening with the machine. ...

Ooh, kinky! Wonder what kind of cosplay that was for

Looks like the perpetrator of the attack on the Finnish-Estonian gas pipepline has been identified... https://apnews.com/article/finland-estonia-china-vessel-baltic-sea-gas-pipeline-39334c9c565753c7e189c6efc302e43e "Anchor of Chinese container vessel caused damage to Balticconnector gas pipeline, Finnish police say"

It (the still picture) made me scratch my head too, but then I remember a previous video I saw. Those things are built in the US, Europe and wherever Iveco is from (AU has no manufacturing industry worth mentioning). That, or the picture is flipped on it's x-axis edit: more what you would expect it to look like in it's "natural environment". Never mind half the time, they're probably running on dirt roads without hard surfaces

JuiceMedia's take on where humanity is headed...

We don't really have an economics/business thread, but I guess it is tangentially related to politics, as I suspect it will inevitably become a headache for politicians, not just in Beijing https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67191262 The Chinese property developer Evergrande owes more than $325bn (£269bn). That's more than Russia's entire national debt. For two years, the company has been lurching from crisis to crisis, repeatedly failing to make payments on its multi-billion dollar loans. Now its billionaire chairman is under police surveillance, its shares are practically worthless and more than a million people in China are still waiting for their homes to be completed. I guess my first question would be, why was there so little (none) oversight with this company's dealings and doings?

Only in Australia... go big or go home

The long running war between Canada and Denmark over Hans Island ended with a peace agreement recently. No war crimes have been brought forth to any international tribunals edit: as a result of the peace treaty Canada and Denmark now share a land border

Interesting question... hypothetical situation (not trump violating any and all court orders), what if his past actions catches up sees him sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence? Would he have a Secret Service detail stationed outside his cell door the next 10 years? (open question, not Gromnir specifically, he just raised the interesting point) Edit: taking my line of thought into absurd extremes, if an ex-president got sentenced to hanging for treason, would the SS agents be required to take up arms against law enforcement in order to try to protect their designated charge?...

The only army who ever won a war of attrition against Russia was Russia... when the Red Army defeated the White Army (iirc that is)

I started watching this... https://myanimelist.net/anime/54362/Hametsu_no_Oukoku It looked moderately interesting after the first 10 minutes, so I kept watching. 3 Episodes so far. No idea if I'll keep watching it, but kept me entertained enough until now. Edit: Youtube trailer... i.e. sans the blood, gore and over the top brutality Edit2: Reminded me a bit of Elfenlied for some reason. A revenge story, the young man's teacher got killed and in return he's going to destroy the world and wipe out humanity. After all, if somethings worth doing, it's worth doing properly

I thought the holy dollar was the state religion of the US Australia is horrible when it comes to religion. The church is very powerful and influential in society, which is why the systemic child rape in the churches managed to go on for almost a century, as they had both the politicians and the judiciary doing their bidding when covering up or actively ignoring it (one of those things everyone knew about, but you were going to burn in hell if you spoke out against "your betters"). 30% if the population today is catholic or some variation of it (about half the population is consider themselves followers of the christian faith). That was a culture shock when you come from Scandinavia. Denmark is something like 50% atheist, 20% agnostic and 30% believing in some god (lumping the Abrahamic religions together, protestant, islam, judaism, catholicism etc. as @Lexx pointed out, not too dissimilar to each other at times).

Didn't know there was a Rogue Trader (singular) novel.... I know of the Rogue Trader Omnibus from 2018, is that it? (I haven't read it)

A Ukrainian band/woman with a very interesting singing style... styles? First a bit of reggae and then a clip from Wacken