Zoraptor

And that's why you add a sweetener if you want the kids to take their medicine or get their shots with minimum fuss. The IP provisions can hardly be compared to medicine though as they benefited the US to the detriment of everyone else, if they didn't they would have stayed in after the US left like the other provisions did (including some unpopular ones like the investor/ country arbitration system). If the US wanted back into TPP/ CPPTA (or whatever it's now called) they'd have to offer a sweetener again, and probably a bigger one than in the initial negotiations given that the agreement is working fine without them. Trump's protectionism may have had mixed results but it has been popular with a lot of people in the US, so politically it would be very difficult to give even a similar sized sweetener, let alone a larger one. Even the good geopolitical reasons to go for it are not so much in effect now; many of the countries in CPPTA are also in RCEP and hence are tied to China in precisely the way TPP was meant to stop/ be a competitor to.

It was fairly tame compared to what the US wanted, certainly, but the fact that the IP provisions got chucked as soon as Trump pulled the plug shows pretty conclusively that nobody else wanted it. Everyone else was just willing to swallow that dead rat to get a fta with the US. (The healthcare related IP stuff was the really big negative, since the US was trying very hard to get both single purchase models (eg Pharmac here which buys all publicly funded medicines) and patent standardisations that would make buying cheaper generics a lot more difficult. The reputation of the US healthcare system in terms of cost/ admin is absolutely dire outside the US and no one else wants 1000% increases in the price of (not even funded by Pharmac, bought off the shelf) epipens because the US keeps issuing new patents every time the formulation changes slightly and the company is free to gouge as much as they like)

Yep, major scandal here. Not only were there a bunch of fraudulent votes for the Little Spotted Kiwi but the eventual winner's* representative and spokesbird is a well known sex pest. "When you're a Kakapo they just let you do it. You can do anything. Grab em by the head". So much less class than the Hoiho whose only real blemish over their rule was invading a Fish & Chip shop looking for a feed. And even that was disputed as fake news and it may have been blue penguins instead. *Not great quality in the rest of the options either. Of the other top 5 Albatross/ Toroa aren't even proper NZers and spend most of their time away just flying in for the election campaign, Black Robins are all inbred yokels, Karearea (NZ falcons) are pretty cool but a bit aloof, Kereru are fat lazy drunks. Also, if you know anything about Kakapo the "OK, Boomer" headline is hilarious (the males make a distinctive 'boom' noise to attract mates which carries absolute miles).

Since the Pfizer stats came out two others have as well- also non peer reviewed, so grain of salt the same as Pfizer's: Sputnik (92%) and Moderna (94.5%). Either should be a lot cheaper and easier than the Pfizer vaccine too.

Non paywalled CNN article. To be honest, Obama tried to impose a crappy situation on all the other countries in the TPP via all the IP etc provisions. It's no accident that it was implemented smoothly and quickly once Trump pulled out, every single controversial provision was in at the behest of the US. The RCEP agreement barely raised a murmur here in comparison, about the only thing that got any coverage was India deciding to pull out (unsurprising since they're comparatively vulnerable to imports and way less geared towards exports). A lot of people seem to think that Biden will join the TPP, but it doesn't seem likely at all. Too much domestic opposition, and no one else wants to add the provisions the US will want added before joining, and the US's leverage is massively reduced now that it's in force.

Historically the stock AMD systems have used good components but had rubbish blower style coolers. If you do end up with an AIB I'd be cautious of ASUS, even Strix, until someone's done a decent in depth review. They tend to make sloppy copies of nVidia designs for AMD, albeit with nVidia cards being more power hungry that should be less of a problem this time around. Most of the problems are fixed if you're putting your own cooler on but it isn't a great look for people to have to add thermal pads to Vega64 Strix VRMs because yours are too short, or (iirc) having to tighten screws because you haven't tested which screw pressure works best for a 5700XT and just used AMD's rec pressure for the completely different stock cooler. (Personally I've had two Strixes and they've both been fine including a Vega64 with proper length thermal pads that overclocks fine; the best AMD card and graphics card overall I've had is still the relative no name HIS 5770 ?IceQ? though. Default recommendation for AMD cards is almost always Sapphire)

Finished watching Hannibal. I'd seen a few episodes of the first two seasons on broadcast when it aired originally but none of the 3rd season at all. It was an interesting watch and I find it extremely difficult to credit that it got 3 seasons on mainstream US broadcast TV given how different it was to the more typical police/ hospital/ reality shows that dominate that medium. It reminded me a lot of Legion: it's all very nicely shot, well acted and scripted, great use of musical motifs and the like but probably got a bit too stylised for its own good, they both had one or two contrived plot twists that relied on people acting massively out of character; and the relationship between Hannibal and Will is ultimately pretty similar to that between David Haller and Farouq except for the one very important detail. I'd suspected that the series Prodigal Son was inspired by Hannibal in some way, and having seen both now it's a pretty direct inspiration.

They will give it to old (and other vulnerable) people first, especially if it's expensive and in low supply. 40USD is expensive for a vaccine, but it's a massive saving vs a day in ICU. There is also the vaccine side effect vs virus 'side effects' to consider. If it's, say, a 1% chance of vaccine side effects vs 10% chance of organ damage from the virus you'd be better off risking the vaccine. Indeed, the ultimate stupidity of anti vaxxers is not that there are no potential side effects from MMR and other vaccines, it's that those side effects are way less dangerous and way less prevalent than getting mumps, measles or rubella are. Actually making a vaccine can be really cheap. I buy sheep vaccines, and they're ~10c US per 1ml dose. And they're 5 in 1 vaccines, so could be seen as ~2c per dose. Then again no one throws a wobbly if the odd sheep has an adverse reaction or if the odd sheep still dies from pulpy kidney despite being vaccinated.

There will be a decent number of cards available. The only stocking info I've seen was similar levels to RTX3000, with a week still to go which given market share should seem to be a lot more than the nVidia equivalent. It will probably be similar to Zen 3, there will be a fair bit of stock but they'll sell out quickly resulting in lots of people shouting 'paper launch'; and since they make less money the gpus will have less restocks than zen 3.

The data that made the stocks soar has also not been peer reviewed. Which doesn't mean it isn't accurate, but does mean that we cannot be sure it is. As vaccines go the Pfizer one isn't a great option anyway- it's mRNA based so hard to make and expensive, and requires dry ice level chilling. If there are alternatives available that are even close to being as effective they'll be picked first.

I'd expect better performance as knowledge of the system increases; and it has to be said that the other technical aspects of WD: Legion don't exactly fill one with confidence in Ubisoft's technical aptitude. They simply won't know what the best bang for buck raytrace settings are yet. The PS5 reviewers seem to be a lot happier with the Spiderman: MM RT solution (and game overall), on a theoretically weaker system. It also doesn't mean much for Radeon performance. AMD's approach there is clearly to use lots of culling to reduce unnecessary executions hence the massive cache, and the Series X lacks much cache at all- I don't know how much it has since it doesn't seem to be listed anywhere, but there definitely isn't much space for it with 60 (52 active) CUs, 8 CPU cores and a 320bit bus all on a 360mm^2 die. The cache alone on Navi21 is approaching half that area.

It should be able to run on anything (within reason, I presume there's a minimum memory spec, at least) as it's a MS tech, not an nVidia/ Intel/ AMD one and it was just waiting to be implemented in drivers. The Linux equivalent has existed for years and is (I believe since I don't run Linux) completely vendor agnostic. Kind of ironic though, you get lots of people using nVidia's RTX branding interchangeably with DXR, now you have people using AMD's SAM branding interchangeably with generic BAR resizing.

Nothing official, but there are also a lot of rumours that Erdogan's cancer is back. On the scale of illness rumours it's closer to Putin having Parkinson's and about to imminently resign than Roosevelt having Polio and being wheelchair bound, but there are multiple other signs that Erdogan's hold on power is a bit wobbly. A decent number of heavy-ish hitters (eg ex PM Davutoglu) have left his party, the economy is in a shambles with the Lira plummeting and his popularity is being propped up by a load of military and nationalist adventurism. Which is like hooking your voters on drugs, it will provide a short term boost but the longer it goes on the more you need the next hit and the less the next hit actually gets you. Once you can't get it or something goes wrong you've got a big crash instead. Dunno about the war being a genius ploy by Putin, so much as it being due to Armenia's stupidity. The number of Armenians (emotional actual Armenians, Turks larping their wet dream scenario and diaspora western based Armenians with no grip on/ knowledge of reality) saying they should drop Russia and 'join NATO' or similar is really rather funny. Can't join NATO with an active territorial dispute, can't join NATO if one of its members- say Turkey- doesn't want you in it. See for an almost completely direct comparison, Cyprus, which cannot join NATO because its north is occupied by Turkey, and Turkey has veto power anyway. EU isn't a defence pact and also doesn't want countries with active territorial disputes. So absolute best case scenario is having to give up Artsakh anyway, to get protection, if Turkey approves it. Which they won't. In the end Armenia got a lot more out of it than they really deserved, have got an open ended commitment from Russia to their protection and that of most of Artsakh proper, and have had their main historical genocide level enemy near completely sidelined. That's a decent result from a war they were clearly losing fairly badly.

They'd have three steps to fulfill in order to get GOG approval and announce keys 1) Technically up to spec (and with enough appeal to be worthwhile) 2) Agreement on terms and release date, coordination with GOG marketing 3) Approved key gen They would have to have all three confirmed/ approved in order to announce backer keys, and while that might take some time there is still 3 weeks until Dec 3rd and the one that would take time is largely irrelevant since the game's been on Epic for a year already. In the end that process simply illustrates the difference between a curated store and an anything goes shovelware emporium like steam where anyone can stick nearly anything up with minimal oversight; they know they'll have Steam keys etc because everyone/ anyone can get them under Steam's licence agreement including them. I'd be very surprised if it wasn't on GOG, but an announcement 3 weeks early for a previously released game would also be very unusual, and any announcement would as per 2 have to be co-ordinated with GOG marketing too. Even if they think they'll get them they can't say it pre-emptively in case they don't.

We don't really know how long any immunity lasts. Losing antibodies fairly early does not mean the immune response is lost ('memory' cells last way longer, and they will stimulate new antibodies when required) and while there are reinfections there aren't very many of them so far- and the reinfections don't seem to be notably bad, in effect, as per 'Spanish' flu. You can catch even something that is 'supposed' to give permanent immunity like mumps more than once, and you can catch it even if you're vaccinated against it, though either are unlikely. There's no reason not to think that most people who recover from sarscov2/ are immunised won't have some lasting immunity, it's just that respiratory tract infections are naturally resistant to immune response anyway by their nature, which is why they're so common compared to other diseases. The classic 'bad' example would be 'Spanish' Flu where a prior infection meant you were way more likely to die from a subsequent one because your immune system recognised it and caused a cytokine storm, ie your immune system recognised the virus but it had changed enough for the immune response to be ineffective and go into a positive feedback loop. Alternatively you have something like standard flu where you might get it badly once but then either not get it again for a decade or only get it as a weaker form because the strains were still similar and your immune response mostly effective against it. Something like that is most likely, imo.

The research grant was the reason, from the 1st AJE article: "The bloc will pay less than $19.50 per jab, a senior EU official involved in talks with vaccine makers told Reuters, adding that partly reflected the financial support given by the EU and Germany for the drug’s development." Nearly 40 bucks per person (since 2 doses required) is hardly cheap though, especially when one of the potential competitors is $2.50 per dose.

At least Trump will still hold the record for the largest inauguration crowd... The way 2020 has gone I'm half expecting Biden to drop dead before the results are finalised to add some extra spice to the mix.

Really, I wouldn't be even slightly worried about that. Apple's value for money proposition is utterly atrocious and their PC equivalents are bought by hipsters concerned mostly by getting the correct Marque to seem cool, to other hipsters. They might corner the money-no-object performance-no-consideration market- that they already have- but that's it. If the ARM sale goes through nVidia would be far more likely to push ARM based laptops and desktops successfully than Apple because they won't be primarily interested in selling thousand dollar monitor stand class accessories to gullible idiots as Apple is.

TOW had a 'coming soon' page/ news item/ notification on GOG, less than a week before release though. It was Larian's (late) decision to add the indev version of BG3, they originally said it would be Steam only. Same for Taleworlds with Bannerlord, for that matter. 'Trusted' studios do not need the full certification/ approval for GOG and it's basically certain none of those 3 games required active certification beyond the most basic level of making sure they'd run 'DRM free'. I would imagine PP is not seen as a 'gold standard' type game like the three above though, and is regarded as considerably more niche. (It is certainly pretty rare for previously released games to get pre-orders or coming soon announcements on GOG, but for most of their existence they've specifically been doing re-releases as their speciality. Most games there full stop don't get coming soon or pre-release announcements)

It's all OK, Giuliani's attacks will relieve the pressure. "Mein Fuhrer, Giuliani..." There's accuracy, and then there's accuracy. Polling will be accurate to within the margin of error to whatever confidence level they use (ie 95% most of the time, so 1/20 polls will be 'rogue'), and typically the margin of error is +/- 3 ish percent each, in a 2 horse race with near equally divided support, which effectively means a poll can be technically accurate yet still be +/- 6% off*. A 6% difference is, of course, a huge difference in a 2 horse race and for example in 2016 most polls could still have been technically accurate had Trump won the popular vote by as much as Hillary ended up doing. And that's starting from the assumption that the polls have the correct questions, weightings applied, proper polling methods and there aren't uncontrollable factors in play like 'shy' voters. You can however determine systemic inaccuracy but looking at the average of the polls and comparing to what reality delivered. That was out by ~2%, ideally of course it should be out by 0%. So there was certainly some sort of bias at play in the polling. *it is simplistic, eg consider that there's also a margin of error for people who stated they didn't intend to vote. But as a simple illustration, a race divided 50/50 can break 47/53 and the poll doing so would still be accurate.

That must have been in the works for a while though, as the Russians had to deliver and had been delivering 1500 extra troops and a lot of extra equipment and which has been rolled out to the 'borders' within hours. Almost certainly the Azeris were given an ultimatum a few days ago- hence their helter skelter spare no casualties attack on Shushi- and shooting down that helicopter made no practical difference*. The irony is that the agreement is, essentially, the one that was on the table from the Minsk group before the conflict re-ignited and which both sides rejected. Quite possibly one of the most pointless wars of all time. Armenia lost when they installed Pashinyan as a 'pro western' leader. Completely no grip on the reality that the only thing stopping them getting attacked was Russia and that whatever else they had to keep Russia sweet. The Armenians probably had even less grip on reality than the Kurds have, since NATO already has Turkey as a member so they could never get in there (even disregarding the territorial dispute that is disqualifying) and the only other regional power available is Iran whose embrace would obviously alienate the US worse than Russia would. *except, maybe, a lot of people seemed to think that Turkey was definitely going to get peacekeepers in too and actually stated they did when the agreement was announced, but they actually didn't. Which was a bit of a slap in the face for Erdogan.

And yet, for all her 'stoopid' you've produced... what, one example of such, maybe two? One where it was a conditional statement that literally literally started with "maybe"? The guy defending AOC managed better than that, which is frankly embarrassing for you. And you 100% admit that the US approach to Iraq was riddled with 'mistakes' but still claim they weren't "mistruths"; but for some reason AOC's mistakes are such, and the same as Donald Trump, say, claiming his inauguration had the biggest attendance, repeatedly? You could hardly prove my point better; the only difference between the two is your personal dislike of AOC's politics, and your kneejerk need to defend the time honoured US foreign policy orthodoxy of asterisking up the Middle East every ten years or so. As such, AOC cannot be merely mistaken- instead she must be lying repeatedly enough to be compared to Donald bleeping Trump who probably literally couldn't tell the truth if his life depended on it; but the Bush Admin otoh was simply repeatedly and consistently mistaken- and didn't lie, at all, even in their definitive statements, including Rumsfeld, who definitively knew where the WMD were, near Baghdad and Tikrit and didn't lie, and was just mistaken about his completely definitive statement on their definite existence and location. AOC says that maybe a crime increase is maybe due to covid's effects on poverty though- that's an obvious lie. And I couldn't care less about defending AOC, I'm just pointing out that yet again your mouth has run way ahead of any actual evidence and there's a perfect example of you arguing the exact reverse position, when it suited your biases to do so.

He didn't though, that's an entirely hypothetical situation, and a Strawman. Trump's a compulsive and pathological liar over things big and small, you can't really compare him to anyone except maybe a 5 year old who's raided the cookie jar. Her statement does not say or even imply that she deliberately lies, just that she'd prefer to be wrong on the details than wrong on the big picture. Kind of loathe to drag up old garbage again, but it's deeply ironic that you're insisting that AOC lies when you insisted that the US didn't in the lead up to GW2, but was merely consistently mistaken over the facts. That is not a consistent position, and appears to be based entirely on your personal view of AOC and wish to defend US/ neocon foreign policy.

Bioware isn't going to make that game though, and that's just reality. Same as they didn't make a Dragon Age successor that built on what was done right with Origins and fixed what was done wrong; they did DA2 and DAI instead. If they make JE2 it will be in the same vein as ME: Andromeda/ DAI; basically an Ubisoft 'open world' RPG lite with lots of SP MMO type content. Or, god forbid, they'll trying doing something 'different', like Anthem. I really did not like Jade Empire at all though, so I am certainly biased. It would be easily my worst regarded game that I actually finished, and it felt interminable at times despite it being only ~16 hours long. Probably because I'd played KOTOR recently and every NPC seemed to be a cloned KOTOR one.

Don't bother arguing further. Gromnir does not make good faith arguments, goal posts will be moved* and he'll insist you prove that his argument is incorrect, rather than him proving that his is correct. That's why he didn't cite any fact checking sites in the first place. *'relatively as dishonest based on output' == first goal post shift. If you disproved that it will morph into something new.