Wait, when did Windows RT's marketshare double?

Crysis 3 is the new king of card tests, followed by Battlefield 3/4 and Metro: Last Light. Crysis 1 sees some benchmarking still, but since it can be maxed out fairly easily now (60FPS at max settings, 1080p on a single 280X or 770) it's no longer a true system-killer.

If you're asking where Crysis 2 is on the list, well, it isn't.

Of the 70% spent on "individuals", 39% is Medicare, Medicaid + "Obamacare" (I wonder what the split is - I'd guess 40-40-20), 33% is Social Security, 21% is poverty programs, and 5% is veteran's pensions, with the remaining 2% not accounted for in TFA (they mention farm subsidies and disaster payments later, perhaps that's what this is).

That's been a "selling point" of every engine since what, the Quake 3 engine? It's like with anything that claims to just make things work everywhere - it never "just works". UE2 was supposed to do this, then UE3 was supposed to do this. Unity was supposed to do this. None of them did it perfectly, though Unity came close.

And now we're supposed to believe that CryEngine 4 managed to do it, despite their history (CryEngine 2 basically could not run on anything but PC) and despite only one game having yet been released on CryEngine 4, and that one game being a single-console exclusive.

I see the engine was ported, but it doesn't sound like any specific games were ported (Ryse definitely wasn't, since it's an Xb1 exclusive). I'm always doubtful of engine ports that don't come with game ports, because without porting a game to a releasable state, you're likely to have some weird issues when that actually comes (see UE3's supposed Linux support).

No - Russia decided that Crimea shouldn't be Ukrainian any longer.

If it is the will of Crimea that they be independent, or that they be part of Russia, so be it. I'm fine with a peaceful secession, and honestly, given the history and demographics of Crimea, it makes sense for it to separate. Instead Russia orchestrated an occupation followed by a coup d'etat in Crimea, and any election at this point is going to be invalid simply because there's an armed and mobilized occupation force - who in their right minds would cast a vote against them? It's not even that it's Russians doing it (although it certainly doesn't help with their history of electoral fraud) - the presence of *any* occupying force would severely distort elections.

Nope. Even Trinity had a damaging EMP, and it was not an unforeseen effect (they shielded against it, but not sufficiently to prevent all damage). It's just that high-altitude detonations yield more of their total energy as an EMP and less as a fireball and shockwave, and that at high altitude they are able to cause EMP damage over a much wider area. With a modern warhead, even at low altitude you would have an appreciable EMP.

If they do it a completely different way than humans, that's even better because it tells us there's more than one way to do it. Perhaps their way works better given some constraint - a constraint that might be similar to an artificial intelligence's?

I would expect that they're either keying off certain words, or that they're going off phonology (the sounds that are used in a language). It might be a good follow-up study to figure out what method they use to make this distinction (TFA does not say, and the paper is paywalled).

I also wonder how fine a distinction between languages they can make. How close are the Kamba and Maasai languages? If they're relatively distant (like, say, English and Maasai), how do they deal with closer languages (like English and German, or even Spanish and Portuguese)? Are they able to distinguish accents?

Okay, you just lost me there. None of that makes sense.

Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons, and even if they did, they'd have only a handful of fission weapons. They probably wouldn't use them immediately - Iraq is not a threat, and Israel is enough of a threat to not want to start a war with unless they have an advantage.

China will not nuke North Korea - that's like saying the US will nuke Canada. They'll probably also stay uninvolved at first, making a move on Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands (or whatever you want to call them, that's just the only name I remember) once the US is sufficiently occupied elsewhere. Japan might get nuked over the islands, but not likely.

North Korea is probably smart enough to hunker down and sit this war out as well. If they're dumb, they'll wait until the US moves troops out of South Korea before invading and promptly getting their asses kicked. They'll do some heavy damage, but they'd end up dead. China might then retaliate, but with the US out of Korea that's not a sure bet.

Israel will also do little - maybe take care of Syria, or if they get invaded they'll murder whoever tried, but they've got no horse in this race.

In your "everybody with nukes must use them" spree, you forgot Pakistan and India. I don't know how that one would turn out, but they don't seem to really want to conquer the other, just threaten them.

And in any case, even if every nuclear country except US and Russia got together, they still wouldn't match our arsenal. If you want a good metaphor, imagine nukes as guns. India and Pakistan are in a Mexican standoff with handguns. Israel has a PPK up its sleeves. China's eying everyone with an old SKS. North Korea's got a starting pistol they slapped a cheap round into that will probably hurt them more than whoever they shoot it at, and Iran has a kit of parts they haven't assembled yet. Meanwhile, America and Russia have .50-caliber machine guns ready to sweep the room. That's basically the worlds' nuclear powers right now.

They were never going to win the war. They were outnumbered, outclassed, outmanuevered even before the USSR got involved. It wasn't a Civilization-style cavalry-versus-tanks thing, but it was still not a war that they could reasonably expect to win.

They fought anyways. And even once the standing army had fallen, they fought a resistance.

Yes, if Germany had ignored them, they would have been a threat on their flanks. And given some time, they could be a pretty tough opponent. But Germany was geared up for war, and Poland was not.

Is it going to be bloody? Absolutely, and that's terrible.

But, as has often been said, all that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Russia, under Putin, is a threat to the fragile world near-peace we currently have, as demonstrated by their words and by their actions. Their aggression cannot go unchecked, because otherwise we're looking at a full-blown world war in a decade's time or so. And Russia still has enough nuclear weapons to do some absolutely massive damage.

So which is better? A shooting war in Ukraine, or a global nuclear war? Peace would be far preferable to both, but I do not see a diplomatic solution working. Even an independent (non-Ukrainian, non-Russian) Crimea doesn't seem a possibility, with the way Russia is preparing to fake the votes.

And once Crimea flies the Russian flag, what do you think will happen next? Will Putin be satisfied with one conquest? Or will he keep waiting for the next opportunity to seize a bigger empire for himself?

I'm not saying this because I'm bored, but because I can see where things are headed. The path before us is littered with bodies no matter which path we take. I just want us to look at the long game - a war now would be violent but short, while waiting just makes the near-inevitable war bigger.

I hate to Godwin these things, but there are far too many similarities to 1938 to avoid at least bringing it up.

I have not listened to a single report from American media on Ukraine - I use local sources, primarily the Euromaidan groups, but also Ukrainian newspapers/sites and even Russian ones (RT is horribly, horribly biased, but by looking at what propaganda they're spreading you can figure out what Russia is trying to do). The Maidan sources are biased as well, but you would think "our troops are fighting to the death against the Stalinist invaders!" would make better agitprop than "our troops are surrendering their weapons uncontested".

So if I'm somehow reproducing Republican propaganda, well, a broken clock is right twice a day. I also have a very hard time believing that the Republican Party has any measure of control over a foreign country's military, particularly at an outpost level. And I think there's some serious flaws with assuming the Republicans want more Russians in the country to kill - with the way things are currently going, it seems most likely to end with strong diplomatic sanctions and jack shit else, which is at odds with your supposed Republican desire to kill a bunch of Russians.

If we attack *now*, while Russia is still claiming that they have not sent troops and that the forces in play are merely "pro-Russian activists", there's at least a chance to resolve this without starting a war directly with Russia, and without just letting them take land just because they want it. But we cannot justify military action while Ukraine does not defend themselves - and to be honest, Ukraine may not be able to justify fighting unless they have allies willing to join in the fight.

I think the main reason other countries aren't intervening is that right now, Ukraine isn't defending itself. Military outposts in Crimea are surrendering without a fight to the Russians. It's hard to justify sending our troops over there when Ukrainian troops aren't willing to fight.

I can understand it on a personal level - I wouldn't want to start a gunfight with Russian soldiers when I'm outnumbered and cut off from reinforcements. And even at a higher level, I can see why just giving Crimea to Russia might hurt less in the short term, because Ukraine cannot fight off Russia alone, particularly when it's been politically divided as it has been.

But fuck, even Poland at least tried to fight back when the German blitzkrieg rolled in. If Ukraine actually fights this war (which it has every right to - Russia is blatantly trying to conquer territory in contravention of every principle of peace), it will be a hell of a lot harder for other countries to just wait on the sideline.

So I'm an "idiot" for not knowing the recent weather history of a region 3500km away? Since you are presumably not an idiot, I should be able to ask you about the recent weather of, say, Alaska. Or Belize. Or Ontario. I'll throw you a softball and ask you about my own region - off the top of your head, what is the recent weather history of the state of Virginia? Just the past year or so is fine.

Further, I've been hearing about droughts in California for years now, enough that I tune it out - perhaps this is just one idiot's opinion, but if a region is as drought-prone as California seems to be, I'd suspect it was not the best place to put a large agricultural industry. Or perhaps that the "drought" (being merely "insufficient supply of water for the demand") is man-made due to an excessive demand.