The AI in terrorist hunt mode might actually be the best I've ever faced in an FPS. I play that mode more than the PvP tbh.

They react to sound like people, shoot blind through cover to probe for you, attack you where your are weak, pull back where you are too strong etc.

Bastards even recognise your choke points and sabotage them by opening other routes and or destroying obstacles. (Or recognise you are outflanking theirs if you make too much noise etc.)

Make you think and move more in terms of what makes real world sense than simply what will outfox the AI.

TBH they are often smarter than the human players who play like they are in COD or BF and wonder why the tactical players keep shafting them.

@Asmo

On your comment:

The CIA's role in the 1953 Iran ouster is generally exaggerated. Several things - (1) by 1953, the Islamic clergy supported Mossadeq's ouster, something they have been suppressing ever since in inflating their anti-US stance (2) by the time of his ouster he also lacked the support of either his parliament or the people, (3) prior to it that year, he deposed his disapproving parliament with a clearly fraudulent 99% of the vote in a national referendum, (4) strictly speaking Iran was still a monarchy and the shah deposed his PM legally under the constitution, something that Mossadeq refused to abide by.

Did the UK put economic pressure on Iran when it threatened to nationalize its oil and usurp its remnants of imperialism? Sure. Did the UK then convince Eisenhower to mount a political and propaganda campaign against Mossadeq? Sure. Was that instrumental in fomenting a popular uprising of the parliament, the clergy and large portions of the 20m general population against him? Probably not.

Also I listened to it. Really, it's a meandering, probably scripted (the parts where he feigns surprise at the questioning is particularly humorous) that tries to generalize US actions, some of which were obviously harmful and support his argument. Putting Stalin in a positive light relative to the willingness of the US to use the bomb is, amusing? I'm not sure what to call it.

That the US needs a common threat to unite against holds some grains of truth in the present day but is really part of a wider narrative by Putin to construct the US as imperalist and domineering when by all accounts since the end of the Cold War, excluding GWB's term, it has been pulling back. It hardly needed to invent Iran's covert nuclear ambitions in the early 2000s, NK's saber rattling or China's stakes on the South China Sea islands.

Modern US foreign policy largely relies on reciprocation. The US provides a military alliance and counterweight to China's military for small SE Asian nations at a hefty cost to itself, and presumably gets various trade concession and voting support in various international agencies. The key word being reciprocation, something that Russia could learn a fair bit from in its own foreign policy.

Lol, you're joking right?

We're only seeing more of it now because cameras are everywhere. Portability and minaturisation are pulling back the veil, but police brutality has always been a thing. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that.

It might be more frequent now but it's not a new thing.

Except she's not holding it at full pull during most of the video. We hear her pull back at 1:16. Admittedly the perspective and focal distance make it hard to see, but again the noise at 1:16 indicates she was holding it at half pull most of the time.

Funny you should use that comparison...because I do consider the WWF to be a con-game. Possibly because I was raised by people that honestly believed it was real.

I'll pull back my statement if it turns out that they don't claim this to be real...I don't believe I've ever actually heard one of these guys make a statement that it is, or is not just an illusion.

Well, Syriza is an acronym for Coalition of the Radical Left (roughly), and everything left of the Berlin Consensus is considered to be radical left. So they are going to call Syriza a radical leftist party until the political landscape itelf has been pulled back towards more leftist positions. But you're right, if they were judged by their positions, they'd be centre-left in theory, if centre-left hadn't turned into corporatism by taking up the Third Way of Schröder/Blair/Clinton.

They are, without a doubt, radically democratic though. As your Grauniad article points out, they haven't turned on their election promises yet, which is quite unheard of for a major European party. Francois Hollande in particular was a major letdown in this regard. Few people expected him to bow down to German demands so quickly. Aside from his 75% special tax for the rich, he dropped just about every single part of his program that could be considered socialism.

Grexit... that's a tough one.

Syriza cannot enforce any troika demands that relate to the programmes of the Chicago School of Economics. Friedman ain't welcome anymore. No cuts to wages or pensions, to privatisation of infrastructure, no cuts to the healthcare system, nor any other form of financial oppression of the lower class. That is non-negotiable. In fact, even increases in welfare programs and the healthcare system are pretty much non-negotiable. Even if Syriza wanted to put any of this on the table, and they sure as hell don't, they couldn't make it part of any deal without further damages to an already devasted democratic system in Greece.

So with that in mind, what's the point of all the negotiations?

Varoufakis' suggestions are very reasonable. The growth-linked bonds, for instance, are used very successfully all over the world in debt negotiations, as just about any bankrupty expert would testify. Like Krugman wrote today, Syriza is merely asking to "recognize the reality everyone supposedly already understands". His caveat about the German electorate is on point as well, we haven't had it explained to us yet – and we chose to ignore what little was explained to us.

Yet the troika insists on something Syriza cannot and will not provide, as just outlined above. Some of the officials still expect Syriza to acknowledge reality, to come to their senses and to accept a deal provided to them. Good luck with that, but don't hold your breath. Similarly, Varoufakis is aware that Berlin is almost guaranteed to play hardball all the way.

Of course, nothing is certain and they might strike a deal during their meeting in Wednesday that offers Greece a way out of misery. Or maybe the ECB decides that to stabilize to Euro, as is their sole purpose, they need to keep Greece within the EZ and away from default. That would allow them to back Greece, to provide them with financial support, at least until they present their program in June/July. Everything is possible. However, I see very little evidence in support of it.

Therefore Grexit might actually be just a question of who to blame it on. Syriza is not going to exit the EZ willy nilly, they need clear pressure from outside, so the record will unequivocally show that it wasn't them who made the call. No country can be thrown out, they have to leave of their own. Additionally, Merkel will not be the person to initiate the unravelling of the EU, as might be the consequence of a Grexit. That's leverage for Greece, the only leverage they have. But it has to be played right or else the blame will be put squarely on Greece, even more so than it already is.

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Edit #1: What cannot be overstated is the ability of the EZ to muddle through one crises after another, always on the brink of collapse, yet never actually collapsing. They are determined to hold this thing together, whatever the cost.
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Speaking of blame, Yves Smith linked a fantastic article the other day: Syriza and the French Indemnity of 1871-73.

The author makes a convincing case why the suppression of wages in Germany led to disaster in Spain, why it was not a choice on the part of Spain to engage in irresponsible borrowing and how it is a conflict between workers and the financial elite rather than nations. He also offers historical precedent, with Germany being the recipient of a massive cash influx, ending in a catastrophe similar to Spain's nowadays.

It strikes me as a very objective dissection of what happend, what's going on, and what needs to happen to get things back in shape. Then again, it agrees with many points I made on that BBC videos last week, so it's right within my bubble.

This was really good! It's pretty obvious now that most or all the history was invented by Lars, instead of studied. However, there are a few points that she didn't touch on or completely dismissed.

She makes a quite unsubstantiated claim that ancient people cannot measure time, and dismisses the entire speed advantage of the technique Lars is using. I would have liked to see how she would have addressed the account on the native american chief's abilities at speedshooting, where Lars pulled (invented?) an account that the chief could shoot 10 arrows into the air before the first one hit the ground, and Lars managed to break that record. Despite that a great deal of historical drawings are indeed poor at describing technique (just look at how many drawings depict the horse's gallop incorrectly), this is a metric that is easily recorded. Unless another modern archer has managed to come close to shooting 10 arrows into the air before the first hits the ground, the chief's technique has indeed been lost, and has potentially been revived through Lars.

Additionally, she mocked Lars a bit, calling out, 'where's his horse?', as if his technique wouldn't work on a horse. But, she then showed videos of people rapidly firing at targets while riding on horseback. Again, Lars' technique has a tremendous speed advantage, and he makes it obvious many times over that this firing technique can be performed during acrobatic stunts. If archery truly is about 'what works', this would work better.

Finally, she did a great job at pointing out how Lars was shooting with relatively little force compared to full draw on heavy bows. Indeed, where Lars shows he can pierce chainmail, he was shooting substantially slower, likely to pull back more weight. However, against unarmored or lightly armored opponents, it may not be necessary to pull back 80+ pounds. Instead of trying to invalidate his entire technique by saying he wouldn't be able to pierce full platemail without extremely high force, it would be more accurate to say that the tremendous speed comes at the price of lower force per arrow.

While Anna Maltese brought up many great points about historical fabrication and showed that Lars is overly sensationalizing his technique, she is committing the opposite sin by entirely dismissing the technique's advantages.

At the end of the movie, the camera pulls back to a frazzled old man in an insane asylum talking to his shrink. "And that's how it really happened!", he proclaims, before being led back to his cell. The screen cuts to black, an image of a middle finger fades in on screen, a chorus of fart noises blare out and the credits begin to roll.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Great post - good discussion.

Maybe they also hate us for our hypocrisy. Supporting autocratic leaders like Saddam and Mubarak with money and weapons - while spouting the virtues of democracy. That certainly bugs the shit out of me.

George Washington, Woodrow Wilson and Ron Paul would like to see the US disentagle from foreign entanglements - close bases, pull back troops, stop military support.

At first, I say Yes! Then I think about it ... Nature abhors a vacuum. In a unipolar world, what happens when the pole removes itself from the game?

>> ^spoco2:

>> ^Drachen_Jager:
>> ^spoco2:
It's so hard to not anthropomorphise anumals, but man that lioness looks sad

Animals can be sad. That's not anthromorphic at all. Do you think animals don't have emotions, or their emotions aren't often expressed in similar ways to ours?

No, I'm not saying animals can't be sad. What I'm saying is that the expression... it looks sad, so we think of the lioness as sad. But that expression could have nothing to do with sadness, it could be interested, hungry, angry... we don't really know, it's applying human facial characteristics to an animal to assume that the look means sad.


I agree. Animal expressions can be very similar to ours, but mean completely different things. When we smile we pull back our lips and reveal our teeth. This is seen as a friendly expression by humans, but in almost all other animals it's a threat response, something you do when hurt or threatened yourself. How do you make a chimp smile? Hurt it, make it feel threatened. Puts a new edge on the old PG tips ads in the UK...

1. Basing any game on an hours play is stupid.



So, what, I'm going to play every game out there for 6 hours? What if it only gets good in hour 12? Maybe I should put a few years into every religion too, just to make sure? Of course not. There's plenty of games I like, and I can't think of any of them that weren't fun in hour 1. If you're regularly putting more than an hour into a game you don't like, I think you're crazy. Most games put their best foot forward.

2. You talk about how you loved GW1s story, yet you ignored the story in GW2 which said wait for the NPC



Sorry, when I said I liked the campaign in the first one I didn't mean the story per se - it was generic tripe. But playing through that narrative (skipping whatever dialog might have popped up) worked really well and was pretty fun. You could explore it at your leisure, by yourself, and (as before) it made a nice tutorial for the game.

The GW1 system was powerful, but impossible to balance.



It was fine. And other game designers somehow manage to balance games with more real skills and far, far, far, far (far) more variety and power to those skills (again, thinking of DotA here, where characters actually do different, powerful things). I think they could have made it work again.

All this information was in the manuel linked right from the launcher.



Somehow I manage to play every other game I've bought in the last 10 years without ever consulting Manuel (I assume he's Spanish?) - including purposefully crazy games like Dark Souls. Oh, and Guild Wars I. Seriously, though, do you really read the manuals for games?

Anyways, it's a credit to their ingenuity that they found a place to hide this from me.

Of course, they also almost killed me in the tutorial because I couldn't figure out how to do a basic attack. Turns out I was holding something that I accidentally picked up while trying to talk to the quest person (who looked just like the 900 dudes wandering around the tutorial zone) and holding something apparently disables auto-attacks. When I checked the "hints" to see why I wasn't attacking, it helpfully told me about the "downed status".

You dont grind equipment and levels


Again, you're forgetting that I actually did play the game. I pulled Zombies out the ground and killed them until a meter filled up telling me I'd killed 10 (or 20 or whatever). Then I poisoned some bugs or crap. Those things happened. Or was I playing a different game? Maybe you're playing a different game? Are you going to tell me that killing 10 zombies is not generic RPG grind (ie. exactly what I don't want, and exactly what you're saying you don't do)?

Maybe the first hour of the game is completely opposite to the rest of the experience. Maybe at minute 61 they pull back the curtain and say "Hey, that's the last of the stupid filler crap in the game". Maybe there's a code in the manual that you can enter to play something entirely different that doesn't suck balls.

I'll never know, as I spent minute 61 uninstalling.

Did he pull back a punch?

sweet JEBUS people, just like with everything, there is a human tendency to dive in too deep and too fast initially, then we figure it out, pull back a bit, gain perspective, and find balance.

the same thing is happening with CGI and the film industry.

for movie making that is ahead of the curve, IMHO check out Sherlock Holmes - Game of Shadows and District 9

You people are just scared of his guitar. CBS? You deserve all the insults and derision the Nuge with a kidney stone can dish. All manic, passionate, genius' should have a strong woman like Ted does to pull back the reigns when full-bore or cornered (not that he needs anything special as a reason to foment).

He's a showman. It's in his blood.

All you gun-haters really should see him live. Long Live the Motor City Madman!!

"Nah nah-nah nah nah nahhh nah nah-nah nah nahhhhhh nah, Nah nah-nah nah nah nah nah nahnah nah NAHHH NAH!"

I am a CPA with 38 years experience.

I am wearing a man's flannel shirt and hiking boots and no makeup, with my hair pulled back with a rhinestone covered barrette, sitting here at work. (I'm not lesbian, I'm just comfortable in the cold Pacific NW, in a kooky town that lets you be comfortable without judgment.)

There is NO WAY he could guess what I do for a living.

I have no paper cuts at present. That might give me away.