I think the biggest problem Apple has is that it's dependent on 3rd party indie developers to produce games for it's platforms. It's not clear that that strategy can work for a living room console - the fact is Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony all invest heavily in 1st party titles, or console exclusives and those titles are console sellers that sell ridiculously well (over 15 million units for things like Halo 3 for example).
So with Microsoft you have Halo and Master Chief, with Nintendo you have Mario and Link, with Sony you have Sackboy and Drake.
For Apple to become a console contender it needs it's mascot, it needs to invest in 1st party development and figure out what type of console it wants to be, and who it's audience is. It's not clear Apple wants to do that, Apple just seems to want to build a platform and let people run with it, but as we saw with Ouya it's not obvious that that works in the console market - to entrench in the world of consoles you need to be more interested and more invested than that and I don't think that's something Apple wants to bother with.
Even Valve has a better chance having IPs like Half-Life and TeamFortress under it's belt. Apple's problem isn't the money, they have ample money to do it, and to buy exclusives, and subsidise the hardware to push into the market, but they appear to have neither the strategy nor the will for it. Microsoft lost billions at first and for years, and rumours of thinking about selling off that division show that it had doubts at times. Whilst the Xbox section of entertainment and devices is certainly profitable and has paid off now, as the X1 launch debacle showed and the subsequent struggle to even come close to catching up with the PS4 in terms of sales as a result it's still a risky endeavour - getting things wrong in the fickle world of the console gaming market is incredibly easy to do and can cost billions. If Apple doesn't have the will to go in guns blazing with a sound strategy and a will to ride it out for years whilst also blowing many billions of it's cash reserves on purchasing game studios and exclusive IPs then it's simply not worth them bothering at all, and if they do fail, that could have a cost implication to their brand as a whole.
It's no different on either console (I have both) now, the X1 seemed slower at launch for whatever reason, but that seems to have been resolved. I think originally the X1 was checking disc data with the online digital version for whatever reason, and simply doesn't do this any more - it was probably a hangover from the pre-launch activation stupidity that they didn't manage to ditch in time for release.
But the amount of playing you can do after a few seconds is worthless anyway on both consoles, so you're still stuck waiting for a game to actually be truly playable regardless. There just isn't enough throughput on either console's Bluray drives to stream enough data for this to ever be the case with the size of next gen assets.
And if those historic papers written by people who still respected the scientific method don't cover anything new, then where do you go?
What goes so badly wrong that people who once read, or perhaps even wrote some of those papers no longer believe that theories need proof, and simply declaring them fact is good enough?
You're right, I can go back and read historic papers from that time where scientific method was adhered to, and that is indeed a good starting point for stuff we've already long figured out. But where do we go from there? or is that it? history is done now and we can just ignore all the modern tosh that gets thrown out there completely unevidenced by anything at least reasonably concrete? has all the low hanging fruit has been picked, and a lack of further evidence makes it near impossible to learn any more so we're stuck with people in the field who want to get paid so are too scared to admit that "yep, based on the evidence we have there's not much more we can say with any reasonable accuracy" and so just make shit up and sell it as fact instead?
"You're projecting modern experience onto a landscape and society which is very different."
On the contrary, I'm arguing that this relatively modern belief that any less advanced society must be obsessed with rituals including blood sacrifice and similar is an incredibly naive viewpoint and a relic of our imperialist history more than anything else. It's a projection of our observation of some of the societies we discovered and crushed in our more recent history onto all less advanced societies rather than an objective look at actual human history which highlights capability for relatively advanced non-ritualistic thinking that allowed the likes of many groups of ancients to perform some profound engineering feats, which, had they simply assumed everything would sort itself out with rituals could never have happened.
We know that Stonehenge aligns well with determining time and importantly time of year, is it so hard to stop there and consider that it might have been a profoundly useful tool for the agrarian society you talk about to maximise crop yield and help avoid starvation? You talk of pigs legs but where is the certainty that they're a result of a ritual rather than mere tradition based on an age old societal joke about an important person who lost his right arm in the construction of the site?
There are still so many plausible alternative explanations that don't require this incredibly lazy attribution of ritual to everything we don't have a full picture of.
Yes, this is one of those rare occurrences where the UK is actually about 15 years ahead of North America. Reading this thread has been like a throwback to the turn of the millennium.
Watching Americans talk about long solved problems in this way is amusing. This must be how things are to them the rest of the time when they look at all our antiquated systems where they're usually years ahead of us.
Imagine if they could..., what about this problem?, why don't they...?, wouldn't it be nice if?
Hello America, this is something we can teach you all about. The UK has a fantastic environment for online grocery shopping, whether you want it all bagged ready for you to pick up on your way home from work, or whether you want it delivered to your door, or whether you'd like next day delivery 7 days a week. We have all this, and it's been working well for a long time.
Even early problems like freshness, inability to pick out a product, and substitution are no longer much of an issue. It even turns up in colour coded bags so it's quick and easy to put all the freezer stuff in the freezer and so on (and their vans are all refrigerated, so it stays fresh all the way). Dark grocery stores and well placed depots ensure that stock is usually better than that of your typical local supermarket. British supermarkets are probably the most experienced in the world at data mining sales data to understand stock requirements which helps.
When our Canadian friends were over a few weeks ago we'd already stocked the house up, but they made us do an additional shop for stuff we didn't really need more of just because they were desperately intrigued to see the miracle of groceries being brought to you.
I always figured the biggest problem North America had on this front was the logistics of doing it in such a large country with much lower average population density. They couldn't cover as high a percentage of the population as supermarkets in the UK can that's for sure but you'd expect the majority population in states like New York, California, and Texas to be trivially covered.
"The Hardware inside them was great for the price."
"But no one wants to be locked into just amazon"
But therein lies the problem, to be great hardware for a great price it was dependent on being subsidised by the fact it was mostly just a device to generate more sales through Amazon's retail division.
To get what you want, a version with vanilla Android and no lock in, the price would have to increase, and at that point, you might as well just by a Nexus, or an iPhone and skip the Amazon middle man.
"Trying to unravel events that happened over 5000 years ago always includes lots of competing interpretations based on a limited amount of hard evidence."
I absolutely agree, my point is basically that historians should be giving a lot more "We simply don't know for sure" type responses rather than the common "My pet theory is absolutely what happened!".
There seems to be this desperation amongst modern historians to try and be the one that proved some event in history, but without having to put in the actual effort of proving that event history. They seem to believe that simply declaring their pet theory to be true as sufficient. It's not and it brings the whole subject into disrepute when it's such a widespread problem.
Historians aren't alone of course, a lot of the subjects on the fringes of the sciences suffer the same degradation of quality (in fact you could argue it's true of science in general including the core sciences) - taxonomy is another border science I'm familiar with that has serious quality problems right now (with way too much naming and classification being based on personal opinion, rather than object fact making it useless for scientific purposes).
"Most workshops leave an archaeological trace - knapped chips from flint, wood shavings, hearths. To the best of my knowledge, nothing has been found in the the area that is inconsistent with normal (i.e. subsistence farming) inhabitation."
I don't think they've really dug enough in the area to find much in the first place, but even this doesn't preclude the possibility, the actual craftsmanship may have been done further away, the area could simply have been a place of trade. In fact, it would seem incredibly odd that even if it was a ritual site that there wasn't a massive amount of trade there given how far and wide people were apparently coming - any lack of evidence of trade in itself should bring into question whether we know even remotely enough to have an idea of what the purpose of the area was. At that point you have to start fudging the ritual theory- "as part of the ritual trade was banned"? That would seem to be clutching at straws without the remotest bit of evidence.
"The burial sites include evidence of people traveling from the European continent to be buried at that site which helps support that the idea that the site was religious or spiritual in nature."
Does it support that? or could it just as easily support an alternative theory, that, say, there were continent renowned craftspeople selling goods there meaning it was actually just a major trading hub?
This is really the problem I'm referring to, it's all just finger in the air stuff. Without widespread evidence of actual rituals then it seems to be jumping the gun a bit to assume people travelled there for rituals over and above any other reason people might travel (knowledge, trade, maybe even to avoid persecution). One could equally argue in 5,000 years looking back to today that a few hundreds thousands Syrians came to Europe for a ritual. Obviously we know currently that's not the case - there's no ritual involved, they just want a new safer life.
The fact people were buried there makes no difference, Syrian migrants will also be buried here in Europe when they eventually pass away, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean that they're kings, or that we're going to sacrifice them.
You've really highlighted what I was getting at, historians come up with a theory, e.g. rituals, then they find something else out, i.e. people from Europe travel there, and then they manipulate that and claim it as evidence - the Europeans were coming for rituals. Yes, or the whole initial ritual thing could be wrong, the act could be trade, and the Europeans came for trade. You see my point? They think if they just claim discoveries B, C and D support theory A even if it doesn't actually support it any more than it might support any other theory then that's enough for it to become established fact in their minds when in reality they're just making up a story and running with it without due consideration for alternative possibilities.
Right, except the example I gave re: Tutankhamun was produced by a Professor of Egyptology, presented in a TV show, accompanied with a book, and written up on Wikipedia.
So given that the history you say is portrayed in a TV show and agree is problematic is the same as that professed by academia, literature, and the web, where exactly do I find this real history of which you speak?
I don't think you can really talk about foolishness when you seem to have made a throw away statement that doesn't really tie in with reality.
So genuine question, where do I find this real history if it's not academia, literature, TV, or the web? Is there a secret society I need to get into or something?
I've no doubt there are still some good historians out there who actually seek non-circumstantial evidence that actually proves their theories, but it's not clear that they're anything other than a distinct minority.
I recall watching a documentary about how they now thing Tutankhamun died.
It was the most absurdly convoluted story I've seen involving him falling off the back of a chariot and landing in just the right manner to fracture his leg, for him to then have been up on his knees (despite his leg being fractured) and then getting hit by the wheel of another chariot at just the right angle to do some damage to his chest followed by a further bunch of random reasons why he then had to be buried quickly.
And that's okay, theories are good, but the problem is there was absolutely no real worthwhile evidence at all - they'd effectively created evidence to match their theory, rather than found evidence to back up their theory. They created this convoluted bodged computer simulations that were like "If it just hits him like this then you get this sort of damage!" - great, I can also think of a thousand other ways and things that could hit him just like that to create that damage which I could also simulate, why is your chariot one correct? He could just as well have been smacked around the leg with a club "in just the right way" by someone beating him to death, and then smacked even harder across the shoulder "in just the right way" and ended up in the exact same state with a completely different theory about the rapid burial, like it beginning to rain and thunder that day and the burial guy just wanting to get the job done and clock off home early so he can get his washing in that he left outside to dry before it gets too wet.
But I find this typical when watching history programmes, a "Historian" comes up with a theory and then makes up some evidence to show why their theory is right. There's a common lack of conclusiveness to their evidence, and it's possible to come up with a thousand other theories and fudge evidence in the same way, none of which has any more reason to be correct than the other.
It feels like in many cases history has become one of the most horribly unscientific subjects out there, it's become about story telling, you make up a story and then pretend something shows something conclusively (even though there's no conclusiveness at all) and declare yourself the world expert on that aspect of history. It seems to have become a modern day snake oil industry - you make up a fancy story, and just declare it true with supporting evidence that's entirely circumstantial or in itself just wholly made up or theoretical and unproven.
Long gone is the truth of the "History is written by winners" saying, nowadays history is written by anyone with a pet theory that they simply declare to be true true. Evidence and scrutiny not required. Bonus points if you write up your theory into a book and sell it as the self-described "leading work on the subject".
Fact is, with a lot of history, as you imply, we simply have absolutely no fucking idea what went on or why and at best we're just making shit up.
"So are you saying that Netflix should pay real money to have titles that people don't actually watch but like to see that they are available in the library?"
It depends what you mean by "don't actually watch", obviously some people do watch them.
So what I'm saying is that the measurement is simply more complex than a basic question of "How many people have watched this vs. how much does it cost". You have to also ask question such as "Will the value perception of a Netflix subscription decrease if we remove major titles from our library even if not getting watched?" and "If a new Transformers movie is released and people want to see the previous ones, will they leave our service for another if they see we don't offer it and they do"?
"I certainly don't look for Citizen Kane in the library to let me know if the library is any good or not. I look for the stuff I want to watch, watch that stuff, then lok for more stuff."
But do you actually get around to watching it? I know sometimes I see something on Netflix and don't have time to watch it, yet still hope to in the future. How would you feel if something you've been planning for a year to watch gets yanked just as you find time to and have been looking forward to watching it? I know I'd be pretty pissed and would question the value of the subscription as a result.
But there's also the question of converting trials to subscriptions - I've signed up to VOD service trials, seen the library looks shit, and not then subsequently subscribed. If I see a great movie on there, even if I never intend to watch it again any time soon because I've just seen it, I'm more likely to view that as a quality service that's worth subscribing to.
Really the proper way to gauge this rather than counting viewer metrics is to constantly get satisfaction surveys - "How happy are you with the service?" on an ongoing basis - you'll find satisfaction will trend quite differently to how much people like a show.
For example, I was excited for Narcos, it looked right up my street, I binged and watched it through in a day because I had a day off and nothing better to do. If you look at viewing figures it might look like I loved it, but in reality I thought it was a bit dull and boring and I doubt I'll watched Season 2. Similarly I loved Breaking Bad, but have never watched it on Netflix, so to them based on viewing figures it looks like I'm not interested. They're completely wrong of course - I'd still be pissed if they removed it because I do want to watch it again at some point in the future.
"Have a user swappable main hdd + moving of games to an ext hdd / usb stick."
You already can move games to an external HDD on the X1, given that it supports USB3 there's not really any point changing the internal drive when you can get a perfectly fast external drive and just plug it straight in anyway. Of course you wont get banned for using external storage on an X1, that's complete nonsense, it's a standard function of the console, well advertised, and fully supported within the UI.
"with the Xbox 360 people got banned for use there own and much cheaper HDD's in the xbox 360 hdd caddy."
Again, complete nonsense, I did this on two consoles and never had an issue. The only people who got banned were those who also manipulated the data on those drives to cheat, and thank god those people did get banned, they deserved it.
I think letting him off by saying it's just because he was leaving understates the issue. Let's be clear, Don Mattrick was an anti-consumer arsehole who simply had no idea what he was doing.
Since he left Microsoft's Xbox division has done a complete u-turn, they're actually incredibly responsive to user demands now, and seem genuinely sensitive to gamers concerns going so far as to ditch their previous pet project Kinect from the majority of console bundles a while ago and providing dashboard changes and functionality people actually asked for, usually within short order.
I suspect the reason Mattrick was looking for a new job in the first place was because no one else at Microsoft liked or trusted him either, it's pretty obvious the whole culture at the Xbox division changed when he fucked off, and that couldn't happen if many other people there agreed with his direction, the fact the change happened so quickly and was night and day suggests he was using his position of authority to make a lot of staff implement a lot of things they didn't actually want to implement.
The problem is that the damage Mattrick did is lasting, people still parrot a lot of myths about the X1 based on things that were, once, in the product development plan under Mattrick but ditched even before the console was released and thankfully never came to fruition (e.g. you could always disable the Kinect camera and unplug it and stuff worked fine, right from day 1). Similarly console sales have really struggled to recover because of this early damage and it's still lagging against the PS4.
I think it's safe to say that Mattrick is the biggest failure in the world of gaming in the last decade. He's the Stephen Elop of the video game world. He should probably be relegated to something like sweeping the streets with a brush or something where he can't do as much financial damage as he did to the X1 programme.
Yeah, the problem is that as always with capturing such metrics, they only tell half the story.
If someone can no longer see movies listed that are big hits, then it destroys the perception of value people have in the service, even if they never watch those movies.
So sure such movies might not get as much click through as their value implies, but if they're gone then the service appears less premium and no longer worth the cost.
"They either need to pay more or drop the content, so dropping the content they are."
Actually that's the whole reason I take take issue with this. They're dropping content AND hiking the subscription fee.
They just increased the UK subscription rate only two months ago by 7%, and now they're slashing content.
So now, I can pay £89.88 for a year of Netflix, with all this content removed, or I can pay £79 for Amazon Prime where I get just as good content, free next day delivery 7 days a week, access to prime music which gives me access to millions of songs for free, and some cloud storage to boot.
I think your thoughts are quite accurate for the most part, but when Netflix is hiking their price to already be less competitive against their already more competitive competition I don't think it's an excuse that holds merit anymore. I think it's simple profit gouging, but the sort of profit gouging that's likely to hurt them in the long run.
As many companies do as they get bigger and seek to maintain the sort of persistent rapid growth they saw when smaller and younger, they get so desperate to grow their margins that they end up self-harming in the process because they put too much emphasis on growing profits by cutting costs, not realising that those costs are actually one of the pillars maintaining the existing profit in the first place.
I think this is a key example of that, I don't see Netflix maintaining their UK userbase at least by hiking the price of the most popular package whilst removing some of the most popular films. Justifying to their userbase a 7% hike whilst inflation is running at a mere 0% - 0.1% in the UK is difficult enough in itself, but doing so whilst also drastically reducing the amount of content they offer? Good luck with that - "pay more for less" isn't going to make anyone happy.
"Never the less, Stalin was very, very angry with the United States and with the United Kingdom as his country lost territory and people to the Germans while he perceived the US and UK as not helping with the war itself. He was also very angry that technical assistance to the Soviet Union was limited; heavy bombers and other large war machines were not sent to the Soviet Union. "
The USSR received a phenomenal amount of support from Britain and the US. As anyone who has read my posts on this topic knows I'm incredibly critical of modern day Russia, but to give the Russian's credit where it's due, they even recognise this to this day, even under the current staunchly anti-Western regime:
The Arctic convoys and equipment delivered is something that Russia has always been deeply grateful for and is one of the few things that is actually not a bone of contention between America/Britain and Russia.
In fact, even after the war, relations weren't terribly bad, and this led to one of the biggest mistakes we in the UK made before things turned sour - we sold Russia our world leading jet engine technology, allowing them to create the MiG-15.
Most of the tension between Russia and the West came about with the way Russia was managing territory it had seized after World War II, the politics of the early UN and the whole Korea thing rather than anything that happened before Germany and Japan's surrender.
If that's how you want to weasel out of saying something stupid and wrong then sure. But let's be clear - circletimessquare also read your post in the exact same way, and as such it's pretty clear that you simply said something that was wrong and are now desperately trying to weasel out of it all you want.
If pretending it's someone elses fault that you can't express your opinion and opt to persist in posting on a topic you admit that you have simply no understanding of is your way of dealing with being wrong then I guess it sucks to be you.
I see you did the exact same thing with him though - made a bunch of idiotic comments, had it pointed out to you why they're idiotic, and then decided to pretend you'd never said those things.
So given the fact that this seems to happen with you, you should really reconsider your way of coping with it - pretending it's someone elses fault, rather than the blatant reality that you're full of shit and can't cope with being wrong even though it's obvious you know you are deep down from the simple fact you have to repeatedly disown your own comments and pretend you never said them when they're there in black and white:
"Well, it sure as hell impressed opportunistic American politicians who have been expanding NATO for 20 years without seemingly any sort of awareness of the provocation towards Russia it entailed"
Yes, you never said it was America's fault NATO expanded eastwards indeed. Unfortunately you can't disown things when you've published them to the internet, what you said is there clearly for all to see.
Do yourself a favour, grow some balls and own up to your comments or admit to being wrong, rather than simply saying things and then pretending you never did to everyone that points out successfully why you are completely wrong, just as I have over and over in this discussion.
People have to be actually saying something to be worth listening to. You're still just spouting drivel about what you didn't say and justifying what you didn't say, whilst failing to actually say anything at all. The implications of your comments are clear, but you're denying making those implications, yet it's impossible to separate the factual implications of your comments from what you said. For those implications to not exist, as you're claiming, you'd have had to say many different things to what you actually did say. Perhaps you're just incredibly bad at expressing the point you want to make, perhaps you realised you were full of shit and want to backtrack without explicitly doing so. Either way, you've still failed to put across any meaningful point so far.
I've gone back as you suggested and don't see anything different- your original post was still a suggestion that America is wholly at fault for expanding NATO eastwards, rather than Russia being at fault for forcing it's neighbours into a choice between joining NATO, or face territorial annexation, or defacto annexation as Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia have. You only dug this anti-American hole of yours deeper in subsequent posts.
So please, just state clearly. What point exactly are you trying to make?
Probably just confirming by additional serial numbers of subcomponents, and possibly even doing more detailed forensic tests on the materials- it might be possible that trace elements in the compounds used to build some of the components can verify which batch of flaperons this was built in, and therefore which plane or planes it ended up on.
The issue is that to get to those serial numbers and such they've probably got to take the thing apart, and they wouldn't be able to do that until they'd got it to a place where they can take it apart in a forensically sound manner, not destroying or losing evidence in the process and meticulously documenting as they go. At the beach the best they could probably hope to do is look for visible serial numbers on exposed parts, maybe use an endoscope to look inside as far as they can, but probably not much more than that.
"Oh now you're going to resort to argue over dictionary definitions?"
Well when you're failing to understand basic English, it's kind of necessary that I have to explain meanings to you. Again, don't try and turn your failings around on me, it's not my fault you can't interpret English, or wilfully choose not to because it's inconvenient for your nonsense speak.
Alternative histories are great to explore, but using them to try and argue a point that is false is nonsensical. You're just inventing a history that suits your bias.
"Another unfalsifiable statement. If I read Russia Today, then I'm brainwashed. If I don't read Russia Today, then I'm uninformed. You are so good at these!"
Again, thinking doesn't seem to be your strong point. No, you can read Russia Today to get an idea of Russian thinking perfectly well, but if you then parrot mindlessly and unquestioningly their propaganda then that's when it's a problem - you're doing the latter, you'll simply parroting the Russian government line, even when it's demonstrably false. All media should be evaluated, but it's important to weed out what is propaganda by contrasting, comparing, and comparing against verifiable facts. Even Fox News is a good indicator of what the current neo-con thinking is, but that doesn't mean you have to believe everything they say and take it as fact - only recognise what they're saying to understand what their view is. That's why you can read Russia Today to understand what Putin's thinking is, but accepting what he says as gospel when it's verifiably false is obviously stupid. If he says MH17 was shot by a Ukrainian fighter based on released satellite images for example we can take from that that his aim is to blame the Ukraine, we know however that the satellite images didn't make sense and were clearly doctored (the scale of the aircraft was all wrong relative to the ground), so we know not to also believe he's right, even though we are able to interpret away his intentions and goals.
"I've never said or implied that NATO is the bad guy. It's not my fault if you chose to interpret something I've said that way. "
Actually that's been the implication of your entire argument - the suggestion that NATO is at fault because it would immediately resort to nukes in response to Russian aggression against a member state. You ignore the fact that it wouldn't, and that the real focus of scorn in such an event should be Russia for invading a foreign sovereign state in the first place, rather than NATO for responding. You blame NATO for increasing membership in Eastern Europe, rather than Russia for pushing Eastern Europe into the arms of NATO because they want to be able to keep their sovereignty and independence from Russia secure. You should really be blaming Russia for having such an interfering and aggressive stance towards it's neighbours. The fact your not shows your clear pro-Russian bias. The fact that you blame the US like NATO is some wholly US controlled entity that gets forced on people further demonstrates this.
But really at this point your whole argument now seems to be that you never argued anything. I shall assume therefore that this is your desperate attempt to wriggle out of your own bullshit now that I've demonstrate why it's a load of tosh.
Don't worry, I wont ask for an apology for getting in over your head and trying to make a point that you couldn't in any way back up other than by making stuff up. I know you're too proud for that.
Yes it is, a hypothesis demands that you hypothesise about something that could be. Something in the past that simply was not by definition cannot be. You seem to be failing at even basic English now in a desperate attempt to defend your unreality which you use to justify your pro-Russian bias.
"No, that's not what a hypothetical scenario is. See, this right here is the problem. You're incapable of engaging in abstract reasoning like "what if A had happened instead of B?" That's why you will never understand what I'm saying. You will never understand what it means to imagine "what if the Warsaw pact had extended to the US borders", so you will never be able to imagine a perspective that isn't your own."
No, I'm actually more than capable of engaging in fantasy thinking. But questions like "What if this unreality was actually a reality?" are absolutely meaningless unless you want to, say, write a fiction book. They tell us nothing about the reality, and about the now, and that's why your world view is fundamentally broken- you're too caught up in your fantasy world, and wholly oblivious to reality and the worst part is, you consciously choose to be so by deflecting from the issue of you failing to do any research whatsoever about the reality. You have this made up idea that NATO would always use nuclear weapons as a first strike response even though that runs counter to everything NATO has ever said and done (they're a last resort - a "If we're going to lose everything, then we'll make sure you do to" type weapon). Ironically, Putin has been making a noise involving nuclear threats lately though- you wouldn't know this though, as you just like to defend Russia without having a clue about what it's doing or saying.
"By the way, it's been almost 10 years since I've read or seen anything from a Russian news source, including Russia Today. "
That's probably really part the problem then, and at least explains why you're not aware of basically everything Putin has been saying, and everything about Russian thinking over the last decade. The irony is you talk about the Russian perspective, but you now admit you've no idea what that even is. It's not surprising then that you're arguing based wholly on things that never happened, and arguing against things that simply are.
So I still don't really know what your point is - you still seem determined to argue that your fantasy alternative universe makes NATO the bad guy. That's great, in your fantasy alternative universe. But what relevance does this have to reality still exactly? The fact that you have to invent a la-la land just to make a point shows what a complete load of codswallop you're talking. You've all but explicitly admitted at this point that you don't have the slightest clue about the situation, so why are you continuing? why are you insisting that it's important that I pay any attention whatsoever to your unreality? If I wanted to do that, I'd at least go and read or watch a film about one that's at least somewhat interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the biggest problem Apple has is that it's dependent on 3rd party indie developers to produce games for it's platforms. It's not clear that that strategy can work for a living room console - the fact is Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony all invest heavily in 1st party titles, or console exclusives and those titles are console sellers that sell ridiculously well (over 15 million units for things like Halo 3 for example).
So with Microsoft you have Halo and Master Chief, with Nintendo you have Mario and Link, with Sony you have Sackboy and Drake.
For Apple to become a console contender it needs it's mascot, it needs to invest in 1st party development and figure out what type of console it wants to be, and who it's audience is. It's not clear Apple wants to do that, Apple just seems to want to build a platform and let people run with it, but as we saw with Ouya it's not obvious that that works in the console market - to entrench in the world of consoles you need to be more interested and more invested than that and I don't think that's something Apple wants to bother with.
Even Valve has a better chance having IPs like Half-Life and TeamFortress under it's belt. Apple's problem isn't the money, they have ample money to do it, and to buy exclusives, and subsidise the hardware to push into the market, but they appear to have neither the strategy nor the will for it. Microsoft lost billions at first and for years, and rumours of thinking about selling off that division show that it had doubts at times. Whilst the Xbox section of entertainment and devices is certainly profitable and has paid off now, as the X1 launch debacle showed and the subsequent struggle to even come close to catching up with the PS4 in terms of sales as a result it's still a risky endeavour - getting things wrong in the fickle world of the console gaming market is incredibly easy to do and can cost billions. If Apple doesn't have the will to go in guns blazing with a sound strategy and a will to ride it out for years whilst also blowing many billions of it's cash reserves on purchasing game studios and exclusive IPs then it's simply not worth them bothering at all, and if they do fail, that could have a cost implication to their brand as a whole.
They prefer to use Katanas not hatchets in Japan.
It's no different on either console (I have both) now, the X1 seemed slower at launch for whatever reason, but that seems to have been resolved. I think originally the X1 was checking disc data with the online digital version for whatever reason, and simply doesn't do this any more - it was probably a hangover from the pre-launch activation stupidity that they didn't manage to ditch in time for release.
But the amount of playing you can do after a few seconds is worthless anyway on both consoles, so you're still stuck waiting for a game to actually be truly playable regardless. There just isn't enough throughput on either console's Bluray drives to stream enough data for this to ever be the case with the size of next gen assets.
And if those historic papers written by people who still respected the scientific method don't cover anything new, then where do you go?
What goes so badly wrong that people who once read, or perhaps even wrote some of those papers no longer believe that theories need proof, and simply declaring them fact is good enough?
You're right, I can go back and read historic papers from that time where scientific method was adhered to, and that is indeed a good starting point for stuff we've already long figured out. But where do we go from there? or is that it? history is done now and we can just ignore all the modern tosh that gets thrown out there completely unevidenced by anything at least reasonably concrete? has all the low hanging fruit has been picked, and a lack of further evidence makes it near impossible to learn any more so we're stuck with people in the field who want to get paid so are too scared to admit that "yep, based on the evidence we have there's not much more we can say with any reasonable accuracy" and so just make shit up and sell it as fact instead?
"You're projecting modern experience onto a landscape and society which is very different."
On the contrary, I'm arguing that this relatively modern belief that any less advanced society must be obsessed with rituals including blood sacrifice and similar is an incredibly naive viewpoint and a relic of our imperialist history more than anything else. It's a projection of our observation of some of the societies we discovered and crushed in our more recent history onto all less advanced societies rather than an objective look at actual human history which highlights capability for relatively advanced non-ritualistic thinking that allowed the likes of many groups of ancients to perform some profound engineering feats, which, had they simply assumed everything would sort itself out with rituals could never have happened.
We know that Stonehenge aligns well with determining time and importantly time of year, is it so hard to stop there and consider that it might have been a profoundly useful tool for the agrarian society you talk about to maximise crop yield and help avoid starvation? You talk of pigs legs but where is the certainty that they're a result of a ritual rather than mere tradition based on an age old societal joke about an important person who lost his right arm in the construction of the site?
There are still so many plausible alternative explanations that don't require this incredibly lazy attribution of ritual to everything we don't have a full picture of.
"Not sure if it's just a US thing."
Yes, this is one of those rare occurrences where the UK is actually about 15 years ahead of North America. Reading this thread has been like a throwback to the turn of the millennium.
Watching Americans talk about long solved problems in this way is amusing. This must be how things are to them the rest of the time when they look at all our antiquated systems where they're usually years ahead of us.
Imagine if they could..., what about this problem?, why don't they...?, wouldn't it be nice if?
Hello America, this is something we can teach you all about. The UK has a fantastic environment for online grocery shopping, whether you want it all bagged ready for you to pick up on your way home from work, or whether you want it delivered to your door, or whether you'd like next day delivery 7 days a week. We have all this, and it's been working well for a long time.
Even early problems like freshness, inability to pick out a product, and substitution are no longer much of an issue. It even turns up in colour coded bags so it's quick and easy to put all the freezer stuff in the freezer and so on (and their vans are all refrigerated, so it stays fresh all the way). Dark grocery stores and well placed depots ensure that stock is usually better than that of your typical local supermarket. British supermarkets are probably the most experienced in the world at data mining sales data to understand stock requirements which helps.
When our Canadian friends were over a few weeks ago we'd already stocked the house up, but they made us do an additional shop for stuff we didn't really need more of just because they were desperately intrigued to see the miracle of groceries being brought to you.
I always figured the biggest problem North America had on this front was the logistics of doing it in such a large country with much lower average population density. They couldn't cover as high a percentage of the population as supermarkets in the UK can that's for sure but you'd expect the majority population in states like New York, California, and Texas to be trivially covered.
"The Hardware inside them was great for the price."
"But no one wants to be locked into just amazon"
But therein lies the problem, to be great hardware for a great price it was dependent on being subsidised by the fact it was mostly just a device to generate more sales through Amazon's retail division.
To get what you want, a version with vanilla Android and no lock in, the price would have to increase, and at that point, you might as well just by a Nexus, or an iPhone and skip the Amazon middle man.
"Trying to unravel events that happened over 5000 years ago always includes lots of competing interpretations based on a limited amount of hard evidence."
I absolutely agree, my point is basically that historians should be giving a lot more "We simply don't know for sure" type responses rather than the common "My pet theory is absolutely what happened!".
There seems to be this desperation amongst modern historians to try and be the one that proved some event in history, but without having to put in the actual effort of proving that event history. They seem to believe that simply declaring their pet theory to be true as sufficient. It's not and it brings the whole subject into disrepute when it's such a widespread problem.
Historians aren't alone of course, a lot of the subjects on the fringes of the sciences suffer the same degradation of quality (in fact you could argue it's true of science in general including the core sciences) - taxonomy is another border science I'm familiar with that has serious quality problems right now (with way too much naming and classification being based on personal opinion, rather than object fact making it useless for scientific purposes).
"Most workshops leave an archaeological trace - knapped chips from flint, wood shavings, hearths. To the best of my knowledge, nothing has been found in the the area that is inconsistent with normal (i.e. subsistence farming) inhabitation."
I don't think they've really dug enough in the area to find much in the first place, but even this doesn't preclude the possibility, the actual craftsmanship may have been done further away, the area could simply have been a place of trade. In fact, it would seem incredibly odd that even if it was a ritual site that there wasn't a massive amount of trade there given how far and wide people were apparently coming - any lack of evidence of trade in itself should bring into question whether we know even remotely enough to have an idea of what the purpose of the area was. At that point you have to start fudging the ritual theory- "as part of the ritual trade was banned"? That would seem to be clutching at straws without the remotest bit of evidence.
"The burial sites include evidence of people traveling from the European continent to be buried at that site which helps support that the idea that the site was religious or spiritual in nature."
Does it support that? or could it just as easily support an alternative theory, that, say, there were continent renowned craftspeople selling goods there meaning it was actually just a major trading hub?
This is really the problem I'm referring to, it's all just finger in the air stuff. Without widespread evidence of actual rituals then it seems to be jumping the gun a bit to assume people travelled there for rituals over and above any other reason people might travel (knowledge, trade, maybe even to avoid persecution). One could equally argue in 5,000 years looking back to today that a few hundreds thousands Syrians came to Europe for a ritual. Obviously we know currently that's not the case - there's no ritual involved, they just want a new safer life.
The fact people were buried there makes no difference, Syrian migrants will also be buried here in Europe when they eventually pass away, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean that they're kings, or that we're going to sacrifice them.
You've really highlighted what I was getting at, historians come up with a theory, e.g. rituals, then they find something else out, i.e. people from Europe travel there, and then they manipulate that and claim it as evidence - the Europeans were coming for rituals. Yes, or the whole initial ritual thing could be wrong, the act could be trade, and the Europeans came for trade. You see my point? They think if they just claim discoveries B, C and D support theory A even if it doesn't actually support it any more than it might support any other theory then that's enough for it to become established fact in their minds when in reality they're just making up a story and running with it without due consideration for alternative possibilities.
Right, except the example I gave re: Tutankhamun was produced by a Professor of Egyptology, presented in a TV show, accompanied with a book, and written up on Wikipedia.
So given that the history you say is portrayed in a TV show and agree is problematic is the same as that professed by academia, literature, and the web, where exactly do I find this real history of which you speak?
I don't think you can really talk about foolishness when you seem to have made a throw away statement that doesn't really tie in with reality.
So genuine question, where do I find this real history if it's not academia, literature, TV, or the web? Is there a secret society I need to get into or something?
I've no doubt there are still some good historians out there who actually seek non-circumstantial evidence that actually proves their theories, but it's not clear that they're anything other than a distinct minority.
That describes the topic of "History" in general.
I recall watching a documentary about how they now thing Tutankhamun died.
It was the most absurdly convoluted story I've seen involving him falling off the back of a chariot and landing in just the right manner to fracture his leg, for him to then have been up on his knees (despite his leg being fractured) and then getting hit by the wheel of another chariot at just the right angle to do some damage to his chest followed by a further bunch of random reasons why he then had to be buried quickly.
And that's okay, theories are good, but the problem is there was absolutely no real worthwhile evidence at all - they'd effectively created evidence to match their theory, rather than found evidence to back up their theory. They created this convoluted bodged computer simulations that were like "If it just hits him like this then you get this sort of damage!" - great, I can also think of a thousand other ways and things that could hit him just like that to create that damage which I could also simulate, why is your chariot one correct? He could just as well have been smacked around the leg with a club "in just the right way" by someone beating him to death, and then smacked even harder across the shoulder "in just the right way" and ended up in the exact same state with a completely different theory about the rapid burial, like it beginning to rain and thunder that day and the burial guy just wanting to get the job done and clock off home early so he can get his washing in that he left outside to dry before it gets too wet.
But I find this typical when watching history programmes, a "Historian" comes up with a theory and then makes up some evidence to show why their theory is right. There's a common lack of conclusiveness to their evidence, and it's possible to come up with a thousand other theories and fudge evidence in the same way, none of which has any more reason to be correct than the other.
It feels like in many cases history has become one of the most horribly unscientific subjects out there, it's become about story telling, you make up a story and then pretend something shows something conclusively (even though there's no conclusiveness at all) and declare yourself the world expert on that aspect of history. It seems to have become a modern day snake oil industry - you make up a fancy story, and just declare it true with supporting evidence that's entirely circumstantial or in itself just wholly made up or theoretical and unproven.
Long gone is the truth of the "History is written by winners" saying, nowadays history is written by anyone with a pet theory that they simply declare to be true true. Evidence and scrutiny not required. Bonus points if you write up your theory into a book and sell it as the self-described "leading work on the subject".
Fact is, with a lot of history, as you imply, we simply have absolutely no fucking idea what went on or why and at best we're just making shit up.
Yeah, I'd like to know too given that I've also seen no such adverts on either of my systems.
"So are you saying that Netflix should pay real money to have titles that people don't actually watch but like to see that they are available in the library?"
It depends what you mean by "don't actually watch", obviously some people do watch them.
So what I'm saying is that the measurement is simply more complex than a basic question of "How many people have watched this vs. how much does it cost". You have to also ask question such as "Will the value perception of a Netflix subscription decrease if we remove major titles from our library even if not getting watched?" and "If a new Transformers movie is released and people want to see the previous ones, will they leave our service for another if they see we don't offer it and they do"?
"I certainly don't look for Citizen Kane in the library to let me know if the library is any good or not. I look for the stuff I want to watch, watch that stuff, then lok for more stuff."
But do you actually get around to watching it? I know sometimes I see something on Netflix and don't have time to watch it, yet still hope to in the future. How would you feel if something you've been planning for a year to watch gets yanked just as you find time to and have been looking forward to watching it? I know I'd be pretty pissed and would question the value of the subscription as a result.
But there's also the question of converting trials to subscriptions - I've signed up to VOD service trials, seen the library looks shit, and not then subsequently subscribed. If I see a great movie on there, even if I never intend to watch it again any time soon because I've just seen it, I'm more likely to view that as a quality service that's worth subscribing to.
Really the proper way to gauge this rather than counting viewer metrics is to constantly get satisfaction surveys - "How happy are you with the service?" on an ongoing basis - you'll find satisfaction will trend quite differently to how much people like a show.
For example, I was excited for Narcos, it looked right up my street, I binged and watched it through in a day because I had a day off and nothing better to do. If you look at viewing figures it might look like I loved it, but in reality I thought it was a bit dull and boring and I doubt I'll watched Season 2. Similarly I loved Breaking Bad, but have never watched it on Netflix, so to them based on viewing figures it looks like I'm not interested. They're completely wrong of course - I'd still be pissed if they removed it because I do want to watch it again at some point in the future.
"Have a user swappable main hdd + moving of games to an ext hdd / usb stick."
You already can move games to an external HDD on the X1, given that it supports USB3 there's not really any point changing the internal drive when you can get a perfectly fast external drive and just plug it straight in anyway. Of course you wont get banned for using external storage on an X1, that's complete nonsense, it's a standard function of the console, well advertised, and fully supported within the UI.
"with the Xbox 360 people got banned for use there own and much cheaper HDD's in the xbox 360 hdd caddy."
Again, complete nonsense, I did this on two consoles and never had an issue. The only people who got banned were those who also manipulated the data on those drives to cheat, and thank god those people did get banned, they deserved it.
I think letting him off by saying it's just because he was leaving understates the issue. Let's be clear, Don Mattrick was an anti-consumer arsehole who simply had no idea what he was doing.
Since he left Microsoft's Xbox division has done a complete u-turn, they're actually incredibly responsive to user demands now, and seem genuinely sensitive to gamers concerns going so far as to ditch their previous pet project Kinect from the majority of console bundles a while ago and providing dashboard changes and functionality people actually asked for, usually within short order.
I suspect the reason Mattrick was looking for a new job in the first place was because no one else at Microsoft liked or trusted him either, it's pretty obvious the whole culture at the Xbox division changed when he fucked off, and that couldn't happen if many other people there agreed with his direction, the fact the change happened so quickly and was night and day suggests he was using his position of authority to make a lot of staff implement a lot of things they didn't actually want to implement.
The problem is that the damage Mattrick did is lasting, people still parrot a lot of myths about the X1 based on things that were, once, in the product development plan under Mattrick but ditched even before the console was released and thankfully never came to fruition (e.g. you could always disable the Kinect camera and unplug it and stuff worked fine, right from day 1). Similarly console sales have really struggled to recover because of this early damage and it's still lagging against the PS4.
I think it's safe to say that Mattrick is the biggest failure in the world of gaming in the last decade. He's the Stephen Elop of the video game world. He should probably be relegated to something like sweeping the streets with a brush or something where he can't do as much financial damage as he did to the X1 programme.
Yeah, the problem is that as always with capturing such metrics, they only tell half the story.
If someone can no longer see movies listed that are big hits, then it destroys the perception of value people have in the service, even if they never watch those movies.
So sure such movies might not get as much click through as their value implies, but if they're gone then the service appears less premium and no longer worth the cost.
"They either need to pay more or drop the content, so dropping the content they are."
Actually that's the whole reason I take take issue with this. They're dropping content AND hiking the subscription fee.
They just increased the UK subscription rate only two months ago by 7%, and now they're slashing content.
So now, I can pay £89.88 for a year of Netflix, with all this content removed, or I can pay £79 for Amazon Prime where I get just as good content, free next day delivery 7 days a week, access to prime music which gives me access to millions of songs for free, and some cloud storage to boot.
I think your thoughts are quite accurate for the most part, but when Netflix is hiking their price to already be less competitive against their already more competitive competition I don't think it's an excuse that holds merit anymore. I think it's simple profit gouging, but the sort of profit gouging that's likely to hurt them in the long run.
As many companies do as they get bigger and seek to maintain the sort of persistent rapid growth they saw when smaller and younger, they get so desperate to grow their margins that they end up self-harming in the process because they put too much emphasis on growing profits by cutting costs, not realising that those costs are actually one of the pillars maintaining the existing profit in the first place.
I think this is a key example of that, I don't see Netflix maintaining their UK userbase at least by hiking the price of the most popular package whilst removing some of the most popular films. Justifying to their userbase a 7% hike whilst inflation is running at a mere 0% - 0.1% in the UK is difficult enough in itself, but doing so whilst also drastically reducing the amount of content they offer? Good luck with that - "pay more for less" isn't going to make anyone happy.
"Never the less, Stalin was very, very angry with the United States and with the United Kingdom as his country lost territory and people to the Germans while he perceived the US and UK as not helping with the war itself. He was also very angry that technical assistance to the Soviet Union was limited; heavy bombers and other large war machines were not sent to the Soviet Union. "
Um, no:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The USSR received a phenomenal amount of support from Britain and the US. As anyone who has read my posts on this topic knows I'm incredibly critical of modern day Russia, but to give the Russian's credit where it's due, they even recognise this to this day, even under the current staunchly anti-Western regime:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...
The Arctic convoys and equipment delivered is something that Russia has always been deeply grateful for and is one of the few things that is actually not a bone of contention between America/Britain and Russia.
In fact, even after the war, relations weren't terribly bad, and this led to one of the biggest mistakes we in the UK made before things turned sour - we sold Russia our world leading jet engine technology, allowing them to create the MiG-15.
Most of the tension between Russia and the West came about with the way Russia was managing territory it had seized after World War II, the politics of the early UN and the whole Korea thing rather than anything that happened before Germany and Japan's surrender.
If that's how you want to weasel out of saying something stupid and wrong then sure. But let's be clear - circletimessquare also read your post in the exact same way, and as such it's pretty clear that you simply said something that was wrong and are now desperately trying to weasel out of it all you want.
If pretending it's someone elses fault that you can't express your opinion and opt to persist in posting on a topic you admit that you have simply no understanding of is your way of dealing with being wrong then I guess it sucks to be you.
I see you did the exact same thing with him though - made a bunch of idiotic comments, had it pointed out to you why they're idiotic, and then decided to pretend you'd never said those things.
So given the fact that this seems to happen with you, you should really reconsider your way of coping with it - pretending it's someone elses fault, rather than the blatant reality that you're full of shit and can't cope with being wrong even though it's obvious you know you are deep down from the simple fact you have to repeatedly disown your own comments and pretend you never said them when they're there in black and white:
"Well, it sure as hell impressed opportunistic American politicians who have been expanding NATO for 20 years without seemingly any sort of awareness of the provocation towards Russia it entailed"
Yes, you never said it was America's fault NATO expanded eastwards indeed. Unfortunately you can't disown things when you've published them to the internet, what you said is there clearly for all to see.
Do yourself a favour, grow some balls and own up to your comments or admit to being wrong, rather than simply saying things and then pretending you never did to everyone that points out successfully why you are completely wrong, just as I have over and over in this discussion.
People have to be actually saying something to be worth listening to. You're still just spouting drivel about what you didn't say and justifying what you didn't say, whilst failing to actually say anything at all. The implications of your comments are clear, but you're denying making those implications, yet it's impossible to separate the factual implications of your comments from what you said. For those implications to not exist, as you're claiming, you'd have had to say many different things to what you actually did say. Perhaps you're just incredibly bad at expressing the point you want to make, perhaps you realised you were full of shit and want to backtrack without explicitly doing so. Either way, you've still failed to put across any meaningful point so far.
I've gone back as you suggested and don't see anything different- your original post was still a suggestion that America is wholly at fault for expanding NATO eastwards, rather than Russia being at fault for forcing it's neighbours into a choice between joining NATO, or face territorial annexation, or defacto annexation as Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia have. You only dug this anti-American hole of yours deeper in subsequent posts.
So please, just state clearly. What point exactly are you trying to make?
Probably just confirming by additional serial numbers of subcomponents, and possibly even doing more detailed forensic tests on the materials- it might be possible that trace elements in the compounds used to build some of the components can verify which batch of flaperons this was built in, and therefore which plane or planes it ended up on.
The issue is that to get to those serial numbers and such they've probably got to take the thing apart, and they wouldn't be able to do that until they'd got it to a place where they can take it apart in a forensically sound manner, not destroying or losing evidence in the process and meticulously documenting as they go. At the beach the best they could probably hope to do is look for visible serial numbers on exposed parts, maybe use an endoscope to look inside as far as they can, but probably not much more than that.
One that still wants to keep global oil prices affordable and locked to it's currency given it's dependence on it.
"Oh now you're going to resort to argue over dictionary definitions?"
Well when you're failing to understand basic English, it's kind of necessary that I have to explain meanings to you. Again, don't try and turn your failings around on me, it's not my fault you can't interpret English, or wilfully choose not to because it's inconvenient for your nonsense speak.
Alternative histories are great to explore, but using them to try and argue a point that is false is nonsensical. You're just inventing a history that suits your bias.
"Another unfalsifiable statement. If I read Russia Today, then I'm brainwashed. If I don't read Russia Today, then I'm uninformed. You are so good at these!"
Again, thinking doesn't seem to be your strong point. No, you can read Russia Today to get an idea of Russian thinking perfectly well, but if you then parrot mindlessly and unquestioningly their propaganda then that's when it's a problem - you're doing the latter, you'll simply parroting the Russian government line, even when it's demonstrably false. All media should be evaluated, but it's important to weed out what is propaganda by contrasting, comparing, and comparing against verifiable facts. Even Fox News is a good indicator of what the current neo-con thinking is, but that doesn't mean you have to believe everything they say and take it as fact - only recognise what they're saying to understand what their view is. That's why you can read Russia Today to understand what Putin's thinking is, but accepting what he says as gospel when it's verifiably false is obviously stupid. If he says MH17 was shot by a Ukrainian fighter based on released satellite images for example we can take from that that his aim is to blame the Ukraine, we know however that the satellite images didn't make sense and were clearly doctored (the scale of the aircraft was all wrong relative to the ground), so we know not to also believe he's right, even though we are able to interpret away his intentions and goals.
"I've never said or implied that NATO is the bad guy. It's not my fault if you chose to interpret something I've said that way. "
Actually that's been the implication of your entire argument - the suggestion that NATO is at fault because it would immediately resort to nukes in response to Russian aggression against a member state. You ignore the fact that it wouldn't, and that the real focus of scorn in such an event should be Russia for invading a foreign sovereign state in the first place, rather than NATO for responding. You blame NATO for increasing membership in Eastern Europe, rather than Russia for pushing Eastern Europe into the arms of NATO because they want to be able to keep their sovereignty and independence from Russia secure. You should really be blaming Russia for having such an interfering and aggressive stance towards it's neighbours. The fact your not shows your clear pro-Russian bias. The fact that you blame the US like NATO is some wholly US controlled entity that gets forced on people further demonstrates this.
But really at this point your whole argument now seems to be that you never argued anything. I shall assume therefore that this is your desperate attempt to wriggle out of your own bullshit now that I've demonstrate why it's a load of tosh.
Don't worry, I wont ask for an apology for getting in over your head and trying to make a point that you couldn't in any way back up other than by making stuff up. I know you're too proud for that.
"No, that's not what a hypothetical scenario is."
Yes it is, a hypothesis demands that you hypothesise about something that could be. Something in the past that simply was not by definition cannot be. You seem to be failing at even basic English now in a desperate attempt to defend your unreality which you use to justify your pro-Russian bias.
"No, that's not what a hypothetical scenario is. See, this right here is the problem. You're incapable of engaging in abstract reasoning like "what if A had happened instead of B?" That's why you will never understand what I'm saying. You will never understand what it means to imagine "what if the Warsaw pact had extended to the US borders", so you will never be able to imagine a perspective that isn't your own."
No, I'm actually more than capable of engaging in fantasy thinking. But questions like "What if this unreality was actually a reality?" are absolutely meaningless unless you want to, say, write a fiction book. They tell us nothing about the reality, and about the now, and that's why your world view is fundamentally broken- you're too caught up in your fantasy world, and wholly oblivious to reality and the worst part is, you consciously choose to be so by deflecting from the issue of you failing to do any research whatsoever about the reality. You have this made up idea that NATO would always use nuclear weapons as a first strike response even though that runs counter to everything NATO has ever said and done (they're a last resort - a "If we're going to lose everything, then we'll make sure you do to" type weapon). Ironically, Putin has been making a noise involving nuclear threats lately though- you wouldn't know this though, as you just like to defend Russia without having a clue about what it's doing or saying.
"By the way, it's been almost 10 years since I've read or seen anything from a Russian news source, including Russia Today. "
That's probably really part the problem then, and at least explains why you're not aware of basically everything Putin has been saying, and everything about Russian thinking over the last decade. The irony is you talk about the Russian perspective, but you now admit you've no idea what that even is. It's not surprising then that you're arguing based wholly on things that never happened, and arguing against things that simply are.
So I still don't really know what your point is - you still seem determined to argue that your fantasy alternative universe makes NATO the bad guy. That's great, in your fantasy alternative universe. But what relevance does this have to reality still exactly? The fact that you have to invent a la-la land just to make a point shows what a complete load of codswallop you're talking. You've all but explicitly admitted at this point that you don't have the slightest clue about the situation, so why are you continuing? why are you insisting that it's important that I pay any attention whatsoever to your unreality? If I wanted to do that, I'd at least go and read or watch a film about one that's at least somewhat interesting.