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Comment Re:Reassembling the Soviet Union (Score 1) 309

You can never know for sure what really happened there and for what reason. But both Ukraine and Russia make themselves known as democratic states. I have no reason to believe one of them is more truthful than other. All people seem to have different visions of what democracy and freedom is so any such statement is close to being a truism. Even China has People's democratic dictatorship.

But it's evidently true that Ukraine repeatedly failed to establish a government that satisfied both eastern and western parts of it. Both of those parts want democracy and freedom. They profess their love for democracy and freedom to implicitly assert that the other side isn't democratic. This is bullshit sophistry.This conflict isn't about democracy and freedom but between two groups that hate each other and have different pet political ideas, and it just got violent. Russia would never get an opportunity to meddle like that if not for this conflict.

Comment Re:I don't think it was a malicious mistake. (Score 1) 212

Level design doesn't become more difficult, but you have to pay for more artists to design and build the higher-detail game resources (or spend more time with the same number of artists). Difficulty of using the models doesn't necessarily scale up with the complexity of the model geometry.

It's quite obvious that a level based on tiles is easier to design than a level based on arbitrary geometry. Designing levels in Blender or whatever is definitely not the way to go. Too much workload.

Name a game mechanic that you'd like to see that can't be made purely because the code running the GPU has been optimized. I'll wait.

How about the entirety of, say, Dwarf Fortress? It allows infinitely more complex gameplay systems just because it's based on tiles that are displayed by ascii characters. There are compromises possible too, say you settle for graphics complexity last gen but focus on making huge worlds with complex and interesting rulesets. Nobody is trying to work in this direction much. It's only matter of time before people will get tired of glorified interactive movies. I already did, and that's the reason I ended up becoming a retro gamer. When some game weighs dozens of gigabytes, takes ages to start up, provides less not-trivial gameplay than some similar titles of last millenium I really feel cheated.

Comment Re:I don't think it was a malicious mistake. (Score 1) 212

Pushing the limits of platform like that will not give you that much of a competitive advantage. But it definitely will require more work that would be better spent focusing on game mechanics proper. The only progress games as a whole have lately is pushing more triangles per frame. All other aspects get shafted. Due to nature of those worlds built of millions of triangles it becomes harder to design levels which results in shorter games. And game design is an afterthought too. There weren't much progress with it. Power of modern PC could allow huge virtual worlds with complicated,interesting mechanics, but in practice all that power is spent on making world models less efficient for sake of more triangles per frame.

Comment Re:Allow Russians to vote with their feet (Score 1) 878

It's not that simple. There are many actions that can be attributed to Putin. Crimea issue is just one of them. And his stance on it definitely gives him more support. The only news from Ukraine Russians get is frequent coups, horrible economic situation, squabbles about discounted gas prices and Ukraine's failure to pay for it in time anyway. So you pretty much can expect that yet another Ukrainian coup followed by period of anarchy will get little sympathy in Russia.

Comment Re:Not sexism, but bitchiness (Score 1) 710

Where did you get this idea that I thought it was OK for the boss' wife to poke her nose into company affairs? It most certainly is *NOT* OK and nowhere in my post did I imply that it was.

And why should her co-worker have pulled her code due to sexism? That's her interpretation of the situation. It could have been entirely unrelated, either because it was crappy code, or it was a mistake or any other reason.

I wonder if such situation would be thinkable if wife's and founder's genders were reversed? Would it considered to be normal for some random guy to hang around the building and interfering with company's operations just because he's one of high level manager's husband? Perhaps it was just allowed in case of wife due to stereotypes of women being meddlesome meddlers of little practical importance..

Comment Re:Reassembling the Soviet Union (Score 1) 309

What makes you think so? Not a single autonomous oblast/sub-SSR was allowed to be independent state by the dissolution. Only SSRs were, and ALL of them. The thing is if Soviet Union didn't dissolve and instead elected to become democratic loose federation, but still a single state, then many post-soviet conflicts could have been prevented. What really happened is a lot of fails due to there being not enough skilled statesmen and too many ambitious people wanting their own toy state.

Comment Re:Reassembling the Soviet Union (Score 1) 309

This is not a fact but some moron's fantasies. And if it were true it wouldn't justify Georgia's fail either.

And what does it have to do with Vova? Are you insane? Disagreeing with your lunacy doesn't constitute dick-sucking to Putin. Your double standard against current Russian Government is ridiculous. And I would know it for sure because I'm not a Putin supporter, I merely agree with this particular action. So why do you emphasize Russia's fails over other former Soviet republic fails and diminish Russia's successes? What's the point?

Comment Re:Reassembling the Soviet Union (Score 1) 309

You're just a troll. Most of former Soviet Republics were so much of a failure that it's even problematic to justify their continued existence. Russian Federation is not an exception. But response to Ossetia issue WAS a success for Russia, one of few cases in recent history when army was actually employed to save lives rather than to control oil or something. And ignoring this and making up excuses for Georgia instead IS blindness.

Comment Re:Reassembling the Soviet Union (Score 1) 309

Yeah, Georgia and Ossetia are in long term conflict just because some clown in old Soviet Union placed them in same republic. Georgia failed to establish relationships with Ossetia so hard that this ended with incursion by Russian army which was even NOT condemned by international community. I bet Russian government expects similar fails by Ukraine based on this experience. Given you're not in any hurry to congratulate Russian army on this feat of Humanism and instead link to wikipedia edit wars based on mistranslated sources, I can only consider you biased. Everyone deserves credit for saving human life, no matter for which country they happen to fight. If there are people like you in Ukraine any people of Russian descent DO need protection.

Comment Re:Reassembling the Soviet Union (Score 1) 309

This is not WW2 definitely. The only reason there's no outcry from world community is that 1: no annexation was done, 2: genocide was prevented. I'd even say Putin pulled off a reverse Hitler here. This was an epic fail for Georgia. If Ukrainian government tries to pull off something like that too another epic fail will follow.

Comment Re:Reassembling the Soviet Union (Score 1) 309

Sure, and people born in Algiers did contribute to the French Empire. So what? It was still not their empire, they were the exploited in it, not the beneficiaries.

Soviet Regime had statesmen of local nationalities in pretty much all regions and communistic movement is international by definition. Soviet Union is built by rebels of all nationalities.

Now go tell that to Putin. And all the retards on the streets of Moscow who are cheering him, and asking for more (I heard Transnistria is next?).

And previous was Georgia. Only it wasn't annexed.

Comment Re:Reassembling the Soviet Union (Score 1) 309

You're missing my point. People born on Ukraine DID contribute to empire building, participated in common state. What language they spoke as they did so matters not. They might be compelled to continue this as Ukrainian state this time, perhaps to rebuild ancient Rus' or something. You can always come up with some reason to build an empire. But the time of empires has passed. And nobody will actually try to pull it off. Neither Russia nor Ukraine.

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