TwinIon

Looks like it often goes on sale for ~$30. Maybe I'll pick it up next time it gets cheap.

It'll certainly be an interesting test to see how many people actually pay attention. Last time that district had a Republican on the ballot was 2014; that candidate got 64k votes. When the democrat was unopposed, there were 91 write-in votes. I wouldn't be surprised if he gets tens of thousands of votes.

I think I'm waiting to hear what's next for desktop VR before I bother to upgrade. It's probably another year or two away and who knows what the requirements will be like.

This is the first successful use of the “arbitrary and capricious” standard I've seen under Trump. There are a lot of changes they've made that could potentially meet that standard. I wouldn't be surprised if they get this through one way or another, but at least they can't do it quite so easily.

He's been rather critical of the Russian government for a while. I think he'll be fine as long as he doesn't try and effect any actual change over there.

Are they not allowing road traffic through as is? I'm going to guess not. Given that it's a pretty short border, this seems like a rather expensive way to prevent whatever little must be crossing that border now.

I rewatched The Lost World and it really highlighted that it's basically the much better version of this film. It's not great by any means, but it does a lot of things pretty right. A big difference is that throughout TLW, Ian Malcom is there being a constant voice of reason and generally making smart choices. The two big mistakes anyone makes are saving the baby rex and sabotaging the In-Gen guys, and both of those are basically all on Vince Vaughn's eco-terrorist character, which makes it kind of understandable. Even Roland, the safari dude heading up the In-Gen expedition, pretty much always makes the right calls. There are elements that don't really work, like Ian's daughter and the whole gymnastics thing, but on the whole I found TLW to be a well directed, entertaining, but ultimately flawed film.

What kind of show would you guys like to see this from this series? The obvious route is to make it about MC and his squad. Keep it tightly focused on them and make it a 'team on a mission' kind of thing. Like if you made an episode of Stargate into a whole series. I think there's potential there but I'm not thrilled with the idea. If they wanted to, they could make this an expanse like show, alternating between the Earth politics of meeting alien life, a ship commander, and the front line soldiers. If you wanted to really get into the Covenant you could almost go kinda Game of Thrones with all their machinations, but I think that's probably a bridge too far. They could do a Voyager/BSG style show about a capital ship that ends up far from home. I think that could make for a flexible premise where they need to solve some big mystery, and there are enough characters and considerations that it's not all about space soldiers shooting stuff.

I can't wait for the "are mean liberals responsible for violent outbursts from the far right?" headlines.

I think it's only a matter of time before a streaming game service becomes a mainstream way to play games, but I'm not sure if we're actually there yet. Bandwidth has to hit a certain level and cloud computing costs have to be cheap enough. If there's someone with the right mix of expertise to make this work, it could well be Google. Still, even if they can make it work, I can imagine them having trouble getting developers on board. I'm personally very much looking forward to someone getting his kind of service right. One of the best things about Netflix is that it works on every screen I own; desktop, laptop, TVs, tablet, phone. The Switch might be the only screen I have that doesn't have at least one way to watch Netflix. I'd love for games to be more like that. If I could get an upgraded Chromecast style dongle and play a game on my TV, PC, or through an app on any of my other devices, that could be a compelling value proposition. There's even a something of an argument to be made for games that are already playable across devices. I often see complaints about how Hearthstone takes up so many GB of data on mobile devices. Just the storage savings might be enough for streaming to become a compelling option.

Showtime has placed a 10 episode order for a Halo TV series from Awake creator Kyle Killen and Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt. For now we don't know much more than that. I'm very surprised that this is happening. I feel like Halo has lost some of it's cultural relevance, and this is likely to be an expensive show. Still, there' s absolutely potential there, and I'll be excited to see how it turns out.

Yeah, but several years ago things were going ok and it seemed like more of a "maybe this isn't the best way for things to work" kinda deal. Not the "OMFG, who the hell thought this was a good idea?!" is is now.

I feel like with every new story Trump is making the founding fathers look like real idiots? Really, the executive has the power to make this kind of decision unilaterally? Was it really a good idea to make the foundation of our legal system dependent on when a few old folks either die in office or get close to it? Is this really a system of checks and balances?

I'm glad that this is a fireable offense. It's a little odd to me that of all police malfeasance stories that this is the one that actually ends in the officer getting canned.

Spiderman Shadow of the Tomb Raider Red Dead Redemption 2 Probably Smash, and maybe Fallout 76, depending on how it turns out.

Reading that New Yorker article I get the impression that he's something of both a Bernie Sanders and a Donald Trump. Like Trump he's a populist that will make grand promises, and like Bernie he focuses on economically unrealistic social programs. Like Trump he lacks any real guiding ideology, but like Bernie he has a political background. John Oliver did a segment on him recently: From what I gather, the guy is a giant question mark. Assuming he wins, it's entirely unclear what he'll actually do in office. Maybe he blows up NAFTA, or maybe he's the kind of morally flexible, do anything to get a deal done, kind of guy that might actually work well with Trump.

Sounds like what everyone expected, which is enough to get me to see it in theaters.

I did. Fixed. I'm pretty sure I had the trend correct though. Companies that eat their competitors tend to get more scrutiny than companies that buy into new markets.

Hell.

Wow. Typically it's these types of horizontal mergers that get much more scrutiny. The ruling on the AT&T / Time Warner deal felt like a much easier rubber stamp given the vertical nature of the combined company.

It seems they may have updated their mission statement from that draft: Make no mistake, in American politics in particular these guys are on the pretty far left, but from what I've seen of these Bernie Sanders type socialists is that they're not trying to put the state in control of everything . They're not trying to directly distribute the wealth of society or build towards any type of communist utopia. On their website they lay out their three primary goals as: Those are pretty general messages. The first two are talking points at Trump rallies. They obviously have very different visions of how to achieve those goals. Trump isn't going to run on a platform of weakening the power of corporations. And yes, anyone who talks about "restructuring society" is going to scare a few folks, but it's going to energize some people as well. You can't run a successful campaign avoiding making people on the other side uncomfortable.

On the one hand, I generally agree that Democrats are just not great at branding. The GOP has just generally been far better at making their positions sound more friendly and has been better at making their preferred terms stick. When it comes specifically to the DSA, I don't really have a big problem with using the word socialist. I think it's a fitting term, and while their platform is absolutely not Marxist, the people who will wrongly assume that they are probably aren't going to vote for them anyways.

Interesting that the DOJ's issues seem to be entirely focused on sports. I wonder if Disney would be ok with "new Fox" keep the sports stuff along with Fox news and the broadcast channel.

I've seen this complaint a few times, and I didn't find it quite so distracting. Yeah, it's kinda silly when Ellie walks right in front of an infected or something, but for the most part the pathing was fine. At least they didn't turn the entire game into an escort quest.

I doubt much will come of this. If anything does, then I expect it to be limited to Fortnight.