Cordeos

The original idea was to have them essentially be a slightly smarter land mine. Where it would shoot anything that moved, but would be easier to clean up later than land mines (which are all over the DMZ) are.

"When you drop a bomb from a drone… you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good," Flynn said...I think as an overarching strategy, it is a failed strategy." I am glad officials are starting to talk about how drone assassinations are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. The US is treating drones as the solution to the war on terror. Why send in ground troops when you can just bomb people from the sky? Killing terrorists and civilians with pilotless planes is really not going to defeat terrorism, but now all we do is launch air strikes because politically it makes it look like we are taking action while not putting American lives at risk. So much of our foreign policy is becoming risk adverse and hard decision adverse. We are doing the bare minimum to calm peoples fears in so many places. In Ukraine the US is doing a little training and sending some equipment, same in Syria & Iraq. In Somalia and Pakistan we drop bombs from drones. I don't know if the US is really active in Yemen anymore now that the government has collapsed and the Saudi's are bombing the country heavily. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/07/retired-general-drones-damage-good-150716105352708.html

South Korea is starting to use semi-autonomous turrets in the DMZ. They are already in use in several Gulf States. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150715-killer-robots-the-soldiers-that-never-sleep

just had a thought, what if the second in command killed that other guy and made it look like the person who killed casper did it?

There are totally still people and communities who are full of enough anti-gay hatred and "Its unnatural" talk to create someone as conflicted as Paul is. Those re-education camps/therapy groups are still around.

So 25% of backers want their money back? http://www.polygon.com/2015/7/15/8971305/star-citizen-refunds-derek-smart

I was worried you guys were at the protest in the last scene. Speaking of the last scene, WTF? that was so over the top and silly. Why did protesters just stand there? Did the AI glitch? Why was it cutting back and forth so much? How will our heroes get out of this one? How much of that was a setup from the mayor? His comments about manpower and safety make it likely they were trying to get everyone killed. I assume they planted the evidence as well. Does this mean the mayor is involved in Casper's death? I did like that Paul looked right at home under automatic weapons fire. He was totally unphased, even after the fight. I loved the set design in that bakery, so many huge cakes. I am actually starting to like Frank a little. Sad to see W. Earl Brown die (don't remember his characters name). I still wonder why he was taking pictures of Paul. The weird hippie cult connection is finally coming back around, still no idea what it means aside from everyone knowing everyone.

The chaos at the end of this trailer is insane.

What is the IRC info? I cant seem to find it

This article does a good job expressing my fears about closed system VR: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/just-how-open-is-the-future-of-pc-virtual-reality/ I am really worried that headset exclusive games will so divide the market that it will fail. Also starting to look more at SteamVR as opposed to Oculus.

Oblivion is not that great. Even modded all to hell I still prefer to play Morrowind or Skyrim. I am really excited about the Skywind mod which is attempting to fully rebuild Morrowind in Skyrim's engine.

I played 1 and liked it, played 2 and didn't and am skipping 3 because I have grown to dislike biowares endless dialog trees. However I am wondering how much if any effect decisions from 1 and 2 have in 3?

There is a game called Dark Moon which used to be a game called BSG express. It takes mechanics from BSG and makes it a much faster game. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/111124/dark-moon

Only game I have involving WW1 is Victoria 2. But its a small part of that game. EDIT: now that I think about it, in a way Victoria 2 is a perfect WWI game if you want to fiddle with the setup. It allows you to drastically change things like have the Ottomans allied to France or America side with Germany. I don't remember if there is a WWI start point in the game, but I bet modders are on that. In the only Victoria 2 game I played all the way through, I conquered all of South and Central America as Brazil and was able to essentially prevent WWI by being super awesome.

I keep hoping Turkey will just say fuck it and invade. Probably won't happen, but right now it seems like the most likely outcome is continued conflict for years to come.

Tips are supposed to be reported, but its easy not to. I am not 100% sure what he meant. I thought Uber had tip functionality in the app like Lyft, but I guess they don't. He could have been lying, in any event he was no longer doing Uber.

Humans are the cause of ~90% of car crashes. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/12/human-error-cause-vehicle-crashes Compared to: Urmson said that over 1.7 million miles of driving had resulted in only "light damage" and "no injuries". Google said each of the incidents was the fault of a human driver, and that "minor fender benders" were usually involved due to another driver rear-ending the car. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-05/12/google-self-driving-cars-accidents So much this! One Lyft driver I had said Uber was taking a cut of his tips.

You are correct, I meant US policy, allies, proxies etc not the US. Thanks My main issue with Hezbollah, aside from their past terrorist history, is that as long as they are heavily armed, there will never be a true democracy in Lebanon. You cannot have free and fair elections when a militia could take over the country at a moments notice. As for US policy on Israel and Yemen, I also totally agree, and I hope that an opening of relations with Iran will allow the US to start making slightly less terrible decisions in the Middle East. I can dream right? It really seems like the main reason the US is involved in Yemen at all is because we feel an obligation to because AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.) is there. We have never had much of a Yemeni policy aside from plink away at AQAP with drones. It is yet another instance, like Syria, where the US should probably just step back and force local actors to get their shit together. One of my biggest gripes with Obama is his big talk and lack of action on improving our Israel policy, but maybe now with the Iran deal finished he can start pushing them. The next major negotiation I hope is successful is the Colombia/FARC peace deal. It appeared to be breaking down recently, but FARC has re-implemented a ceasefire and the Colombian government said it would "de-escalate" attacks. The conflict started in 1964, would be an amazing step to end 51 years of civil war. A bonus would be that, Colombian forces currently fighting FARC would be able to focus on the ELN, various paramilitary groups and drug gangs more, perhaps even pushing them to deal. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-33502355

Some of the expensive regulations companies like Uber and Lyft sidestep were put in place by taxi companies/taxi driver unions to freeze the market and try to block out competition, so I am all for those being avoided.

I want so badly to post about it, but have to wait until the Ep4 thread appears.

Only think I think you missed in your main points: An arms embargo remaining in place for five years and an embargo on missiles for eight years. I agree that the deal isn't bad, however Iran still supports a lot of groups and governments that are opposed to the US (Hezbollah, Assad, Hamas The Houthis). There are also several Americans being held in Iranian prisons. Maybe this deal will be the first step in dealing with that. we will see. The danger with this deal is that the Saudis and Gulf states will be concerned about the US moving towards Iran and away from them. My hope would be that the US can use the opening to Iran to push the the Saudis and Gulf states towards democracy and away from a legal system closer to ISIL than the USA. Iran is more of a natural ally to the US than those states are, but due to the bad blood and Cold War dynamics it took a long time to get here.

I have had multiple Lyft drivers complain about how Uber treated them. Uber encorages drivers to get subprime loans: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/27/uber-promotes-subprime-auto-loans-to-increase-driver-pool.html Uber also has some privacy issues: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/22/uber-ftc-privacy-customer-location-contacts I haven't seen anything similar about Lyft.

As I continue to watch the Star Trek animated series, I am beginning to realize it was very much a fan service show. So many of the episodes have been rehashing of TOS episodes. I'm still on season one and so far Mudd, Tribbles, the time travel gate thing and the planet where dreams come true have all made an appearance. The only thing I really like about the animated series is that it allows for a lot more non-human crew and non-humanoid aliens.

I didn't mean that countries don't support or supply opposition movements or try to push governments one way or the other. This is pretty far from the coup against Mossadegh in Iran where the US and UK were directly involved. I have no idea when the last national leader assassination was orchestrated by a foreign intelligence agency. There are rumors that the KBG was behind the assassination attempt on Pope Jean Paul II, but who knows.

Because those haven't been happening for decades. Overthrowing a government from outside is a messy and often counterproductive business, especially a popular one. We live in a far more peaceful age, both the international community and populations will not support/allow that sort of behavior anymore. Those kinds of operations also require at least some local support. This Article made me happy, I am glad to be seeing a lot more pro-restructuring, pro-greek articles out there. "Contrary to popular mythology, however, there’s absolutely no reason why being “competitive” should mean running a trade surplus. As far back as 1817, the economist David Ricardo pointed out that the optimal basis for trade is comparative, not absolute, advantage. In other words, even if a country is better at everything, it should export what it is best at and import what it is less better at. Having an across-the-board advantage does not imply that it makes good economic sense to produce everything yourself, much less to sell more than you want in return. Or, to put it a bit differently, there’s no inherent reason why earning more can’t mean spending more, on consuming both public and private goods, as well as investing in future productive capacity." http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/20/its-time-to-kick-germany-out-of-the-eurozone/