I was thinking similarly. Their vampire game stalled out and died, as far as I know. They ultimately ended up apologizing for neglecting EVE while making incredibly sophisticated in-game avatars for a cohort of gamers least likely to care about such frippery. DUST 514 appears to be a failure, judging by CCPs own statements and the announcement of Project Legion, another attempt at MMOFPS.

One could be forgiven for thinking there are better places to find clues about the future of gaming.

I suspect you're over-generalizing there. More likely it's one particular parties' mandate you've grown sick of. When the pendulum swings the other way you probably have a great deal of tolerance for supposed electoral mandates.

The moral certitude you indulge has you reaching for some thread that would grant immunity to your agenda despite election results. I think the president of the United States did particularly well at disabusing folks of this mentality. When confronted with minority party survivors and the litany of policies they expected to be honored, he said;

"We won."

Anything else you need clarified?

That's probably true, however the people you have in mind have been filled with so much contempt and hate they can't contain it. They're self image is `tolerance' and noble intentions, but look around and some of these responses; you'll find rage and rationalization of anti-democratic `solutions' to the `problem' of `short-sighted' voters. Give them unfettered power and there will be no bottom to the well of anti-human tyranny.

It's not about environment. It's about the power to enforce a world view.

Catch the cop-out in that sentence?

Let me help; the government that you're so disappointed with campaigned on and was democratically elected on exactly this platform. They left not one shred of doubt about what they would do with the carbon tax when elected.

The people of Australia have no interest in adopting your energy poverty agenda and it is upon them that your "disappointment" belongs. Take it up with them and stop copping out; either you sell energy poverty to your fellow citizens and make them want decline or quiver in rage while they vote for prosperity.

The other option is to nullify the voters with statism, which I'm sure you'll have no trouble rationalizing.

So Ukraine intelligence is recording separatist traffic and giving it to the media. Among these are two calls between some "Major" johnny-on-the-spot reporting to someone called "Greek":

One call:

Greek: "Yes Major!"
Major: "Kazaks from the Chernukhino checkpoint shot down the plane."

The above is abridged; the audio has a lot more speech and this is an alternate translation:
Major: "Well, these were <guys from> Chernukhino who shot the plane. From Chernukhino checkpoint. The Cossacks that are standing at Chernukhino."

Next call:

Greek: "What's the news?"
Major: "I mean, it's definitely a civilian aircraft."
Greek: "Were there many people?"
Major: "A fuck ton. The debris rained right into the yards"
Greek: "What's the aircraft?"
Major: "I haven't figured it out yet. I haven't reached the main section. I only looked at where the bodies began to fall."
Major: "There are remains of chair mounts, the chairs, the bodies."

So we've got separatist commanders taking credit for the shoot down before they knew it was civilian, Twitter posts celebrating captured Buk missiles deleted by separatists and captured traffic naming the shooters; the Russian equivalent of rednecks standing a post and firing missiles at unidentified aircraft.

Patton wanted to keep marching East and settle Uncle Joe after Germany fell. He might have saved us all about 70 years of this bullshit.

Strelkov is former GRU and a present day Russian operative stirring up shit in Ukraine on behalf of Putin and fellow travelers. He has been personally sanctioned by the EU for corrodinating the separatist insurgency. Read his Wikipedia page if you want more.

No no no. That's one of the oppressed freedom fighters struggling against the Ukrainian fascist junta.

Get your narrative right.

He "thinks that" because for him, and many many like him, a system that successfully neuters Hamas is very troubling; Iron Dome removes a pain point for Israel and a bargaining chip for Hamas, and Ted Postol and his NPR ilk don't like it. The fact that Israel has created the antidote for Hamas and their ballistic pipe bombs means Israel can exist relatively untroubled, and this reality is so disturbing to these people that they will grasp for and cling to any claim to the contrary.

In the long run they need not worry. This is an arms race and eventually Hamas will be given something better to use. The qassam rockets themselves were just another step in that progression after Israel isolated itself from Gaza suicide bombers with the West Bank wall, another successful and effective Israeli creation that NPR routinely lambastes.

Eventually Hamas will be given new weapons, Israelis will start dying again and all will be well. Until then it's all hands on deck at NPR to downplay and discredit Iron Dome, and if you've got a claim that will convince any of the vast hoard of Israel Derangement Syndrome sufferers that Iron Dome doesn't work, they have the air time.

Israelis have interwebs just as good as you and, unlike the subjects that live in the surrounding dictatorships, theocratic monarchies and failed states, they're allowed to use it. Despite this there is very little video evidence of damage in urban areas and Israeli civilians aren't being killed. Given the quantity of rockets fired and past performance of qassam barrages, it is not possible that the rockets are getting through in large numbers.

"But they're covering up the deaths!!!!1" you say.

Ok, well, the burden is on you to prove your conspiracy based argument then; what's the "real" body count and were are you getting it?

Maybe he should send all that Microsoft, Honeywell, Comcast, Time Warner, Medtronic, Bain Capital, UnitedHealth and Nextera money back then, since candidates in podunk Mr. Rogers Minnesota don't really need it.

Didn't think so.

If you're mixing a lot of stuff on-board devices still fall apart, particularly if you're using a mic. Get an video player running, an MMO, TS/Skype/Mumble/whatever and a couple other things cranking and the on board device will click and pop when you speak, just as they've been doing for years and years.

wrt Soundblaster, I finally had enough of their absurd driver situation in Windows (which rival HP printer drivers for bloat and glitchyness,) their indifferent Linux support and their failure to create a straightforward PCI-E gaming card (at the time I was shopping.) I went with an ASUS Xonar DX 7.1 that uses a cmedia chip for my last build (18-ish months ago) and it's been great. Windows drivers are straightforward and it works in Linux with little drama. I honestly haven't given it a second thought (prior to this post) since I installed it.

I'll stop buying discrete audio when they start soldering audio chips that have full parity with discrete cards onto motherboards. Until then they may as well not bother providing half-ass on board codecs as far as I'm concerned.

I'm going to call myself a wise skeptic. Someone else provided the missing link to the original story which points out that the plastic volume is derived from a 40+ year old estimate of how much plastic washes into the ocean (0.1%.) This estimate, doubtless taken as an article of faith in the published work, is from a time prior to widespread recycling, the EPA (and its analogs in other industrialized nations) having teeth, bioplastics that are designed to degrade, improved waste management, billions spent on public awareness, sponsored programs such as Adopt-a-Highway and other environmental measures. They disregarded all of that, took the 0.1% figure from a obsolete study, multiplied it by the quantity of plastic being manufactured today ran with the figure.

This stuff is so transparent it's laughable. It deserves ridicule. Instead it's blessed with the benefit of the doubt because the worst case fits the narrative to which you've been trained to adhere.

Bingo. The problem probably isn't hippies underestimating the ability of the oceans to consume plastic. The problem is probably just hippies wildly overestimating the quantity of plastic escaping trash collection/recycling systems.

But this simple hypothesis won't be welcome among hippies because it fails to comport with the contaminated planet narrative, so it won't be considered or analyzed, and Obama help anyone among the researchers that dares to suggest it. Instead, theories about contamination of the food web will be indulged and, based on zero actual evidence, the fear mongering has now commenced.

We call this process `science.'

No. Ridiculing "the race card" is important. Don't leave it out.