Zoraptor

Took a while, it was in the 2016 (?) GOG teaser trailer. Weirdly enjoyable game Drakensang, I have quite a soft spot for it despite it being almost entirely generic and cliché. River of Time is the one I'm waiting for though.

AIB 6800/XT are theoretically releasing tomorrow. There are meant to be significantly more stock than the reference release had, but some places (eg here) aren't going to have launch stock anyway.

I'd suspect most countries could make the 'simple' vaccines like Sputnik or the Oxford one. In the end they just need big fermenters (as you'd use for brewing, pretty much) and a bunch of purification steps. Probably too much work for a one off unless you had to, but if you had to you could do it. In a medical emergency/ pandemic you can go the Compulsory Licence route and just make a vaccine as an emergency measure. That would apply here as all the vaccines will be in limited supply for some time and despite the rhetoric poor countries will not be anywhere near first in line. (Kind of lol, Russia announces their vaccine's results and we get a bunch of skeptics trotted out by British State Propaganda saying how it's been rushed and is difficult to store and we can't trust the results as they haven't been published. They're all rushed, it's as difficult to store as the Oxford one- which it's nearly identical to, since they're both based on existing Cold vaccines- and none of the results were published when the others got hyped (don't think any are officially published even yet))

To be honest, even if I don't agree with Blinken on much at all he could scarcely be worse than Pompeo if he actively tried to. Theoretically though all Euro monarchs grant Assent to laws still made in their name. There is a difference (potentially, they can be the same person) between Head of State and Head of Government, since HoS can be a non political position but HoG by definition is political. I'd actually suspect that Executive Presidencies as governmental type are an absolute majority rather than minority. Almost all of Africa, South America and Central America is Exec Presidencies, and most of Asia. There are a few absolute monarchies, Iran, some constitutional monarchies and a decent number of non executive presidential models especially where constitutional monarchies have been replaced in Europe or Commonwealth but even in the Commonwealth itself there are a lot of Executive Presidencies because of Africa. The French colonial model in contrast has resulted almost entirely in Executive Presidencies (only exception I can think of is Cambodia). Though there is a lot of difference in practice between the Executive Presidency as seen in, say, Syria and one seen in, say, South Korea there's also a lot of difference between the constitutional monarchy in Thailand as opposed to New Zealand. Executive Presidencies are definitely rare in Europe though.

Ita vero, requiescant in pace. Caecilius non est in horto. Caecilius et Grumio sub cino erant.

Looks like Biden's cabinet is starting to take shape. Completely orthodox neoliberal picks, with the possible exception of John Kerry in a specific climate change position. Supposedly Defense Secretary will also be a completely standard neoliberal warhawk from the same think tank neoliberal warhawk Secretary of State nominee Blinken was at during the Trump term to complement neoliberal warhawk VP Harris. Because what the US electorate really wants is another 4 years of moronic and pointless military adventurism (with maybe a few brighter spots, like reinstating the JCPOA. Though even there they will no doubt try to 'renegotiate' it). The only speedbump is that Biden is considerably less of a neoliberal warhawk than his picks are.

We can add Astra-Zenica/ Oxford to the list. 70%-90%* effectiveness, but it will be far cheaper and easier to handle than the mRNA based ones. Which is why Pfizer is desperate to get that emergency approval, they self funded and need to make the money back before cheaper options become available. *depending on dosing, 70% effectiveness is just high enough to get to 'herd immunity' anyway though higher is always better.

To be fair to them, they did actually have Georgiu point out that they were mirroring previous events. If there's one thing about the current season I do appreciate it's that they have poked some mild fun at their more stupid plot points. It would, of course, be better if they avoided the silly plot points entirely rather than pointing them out to laugh at, but baby steps. I am enjoying this season rather more than the previous two, to this point at least. It's not what I would exactly call good TV, plots are still rather contrived but at least they hasn't brutally assaulted and murdered suspension of disbelief yet. Last episode would have made a perfectly decent mid range TNG episode, and I suspect may well have been a mid range TNG episode with the serial filed off. I'm very much less than convinced about Trill Wesley (last thing the show needs is a literal teenage genius, all the other geniuses on the crew already have the emotional development of teenagers), the main season plot is just kind of there and anything approaching an action sequence would be done better by an amateur student film plus those bad guys couldn't hit a barn door if they were locked in a barn door warehouse, and their guns are somehow less effective than current ones let alone phasers, but at least I seem to have become immune to the sub Whedon banter and annoying stereotypes. I may be scraping the barrel of criticism a bit here, but Federation Leader Man reminds me far too much visually of Hugh Laurie's Captain in Avenue 5.

There will be ray tracing silly buggers for a while based on whether Team Green or Team Red sponsor the games unfortunately- so RT on AMD sponsored Godfall won't work on nVidia cards for quite some time either.

LOTR wise 5 people used the palantiri. Saruman (ruled out now I guess*); Salman ibn Saud is clearly Sauron, the closeness of the names cannot be coincidence; Denethor; Pippin; Aragorn. If we exclude Pippin (Trump has notoriously small hands and presumably feet, so cannot be a hobbit) then it comes down to Denethor or Aragorn. If he's Aragorn people had better get prepared for him to end up ruling long term- and it has to be said, if Melania dyed her hair dark she'd look pretty similar to Liv Tyler's Arwen. I can't see Trump being Denethor though, too much of a narcissist to ever kill himself. I suppose if Jared somehow 'dies' (flies off to Tel Aviv maybe?) and he sends Don jr off on a suicide mission I'd have to re-evaluate that though. *but we can't forget that Saruman is a Wizard, and does have a reputation for scheming, he could have magically altered that photo somehow to get him and 'Donald' in the same shot, throwing people off the scent.

If you take the Saruman analogy to its final conclusion Trump will end up 'dead' via Rudi Giuliani, who snaps after finally deciding he can't take any more abuse. But who are we kidding anyway, Trump will resign a couple of days before being kicked out ruining all the stationary and commemorative knick knacks saying Biden is the 46th President, get Pence to pardon him, spend the next four years fighting prosecutions anyway then President Ivanka will pardon him again in 2025.

It's based on a lot of the early quests being story related and the main early level area being a pretty small section of Velen. A decent number of non plot quests (or non direct plot quests) are also soft gated behind the initial main plot quests in the area too (eg there's about half a dozen non main plot quests that require you to have met Keira, which is a main plot quest). It's a lot more ignoreable after the first sets though certainly. Some of the early non main line quests are also hard to complete (the ghoul one by the bridge in particular where you have to keep someone alive) and several feature annoying enemies where an extra level or two makes a lot of difference. OTOH, there really isn't any reason to actively avoid the main plot in Witcher 3 and several of its plot lines are really good, while if memory serves me correctly it was really easy to avoid the main plot in Morrowind, even by accident (that was the game where it seemed no one could find Caius Cossades?).

Hmm. The ultimate problem is that Morrowind and Witcher 3 are fundamentally different approaches to an open world RPG. You can't really play Witcher 3 as if you were playing Morrowind. You can ignore the main plot almost entirely eventually, but to reach that point you do have to do a fair bit of the main plot first. First issue would be that Witcher 3 isn't a fully seamless world like Morrowind. You don't start off on the 'big' map, you start off in a far smaller one called White Orchard. You have to do the main quest line there to get to the main map, though it isn't a particularly onerous set of quests. The main issue you'd face with that Morrowind style approach though would be that the 'plot' questlines in Witcher 3 tend to be those that give you lots of experience, there isn't level scaling and the skill system is not an 'improve by use' one but a far more orthodox 'level up and gain an ability' one. If you don't do the main quests you'd run out of level appropriate content and over leveled enemies are exponentially more... well, they aren't particularly hard to kill in most cases, but they have so many HP relative to your damage that they take forever to kill, and if you run into more than one of them or one with the wrong attack type you effectively have to run away or die.

Horizon Zero Dawn is coming to GOG. That's pretty random random video game news. (probably another 'thanks Epic' situation where it isn't any more trouble sticking it drm free on GOG than it is being drm free on EGS, per Outer Worlds/ Metro Exodus etc)

They got generic BAR resize --> AMD SAM(TM) instead of the generic DXR/ VulkanRT --> nVidia RTX(TM) or DirectStorage --> nVidia RTX I/O(TM) situation, which is a win. It really is annoying how often brands try to co-opt generic terms though (see also Adaptive Sync --> FreeSync --> 'Gsync Compatible')

At least under Xi it's absolutely official state policy that China Is Great, and anything to the contrary is everyone else being racist. It was a lot less so under his immediate predecessors though as they were a lot less dictatorial. The policy formulators don't actually believe that of course, but it's good for internal politics to frame anyone supporting reform as anti Chinese, and it is good for deflecting/ changing the narrative when it comes to external relations too.

That is the big difference, and China's focus on suppressing/ monitoring internal dissent within their own already tightly controlled environment means that when they turn their attention to external matters and trying to influence them they tend to be spectacularly tone deaf and counterproductive (eg their awful 'wolf warrior' system which sounds/ works great internally) because they tend to start from the position that the CCP is obviously great and aren't used to having counter arguments or having to actually persuade/ influence people as opposed to using more direct leverage and control. The Russian internet is far more open and they have far more exposure to how people actually behave and think outside the very tightly controlled 1984 style Chinese system. Even then the Russian influence, such as it is, tends to be leveraging idiots as most propaganda from everyone does. The big exception for China and their big advantage is that they are very good at leveraging diaspora Chinese, almost all of whom have relatives still in China or assets that can be used against them. It is for example amazing how completely differently Mandarin language newspapers report things here as opposed to English language ones and they put a lot of effort into fostering the belief that any criticism of China/ CCP is inherently racist. Then there's the more direct political influence. We had a Chinese spy- literally literally, Jian Yang MP taught Chinese spies English at their academy and outright lied about it when he migrated here- in our Parliament up until 6 weeks ago, and both the ethnic Chinese MPs we have now were members of stridently pro CCP groups; and you also have the Australian situation where having said some stuff China doesn't like suddenly a lot of their agricultural products don't make Chinese standards any more, and you have a lot of businessmen whining about how their trade with China is being impacted by pesky human rights and other similar concerns. It's pretty obvious that Chinese influence is both more overt and more directly effective than any Russian influence, it's just by and large nowhere near as politically expedient to expose- much as rich Russians donating to the Tories or laundering money through London financial institutions is a topic the British government doesn't want to talk about; but for most of the world and on a larger scale.

NOLF was hard to get running, and went through a phase of being near impossible a few years after release. Early Lithtech was a bit unstable, and didn't age well. Ironically considering that its contested IP means it's unlikely to get a re-release it's way easier to get running now than it was 20 years ago.

Scott Morrison gave Lukashenko a run for his money on press suppression before hand. Always the best way to deal with war crimes, raid the offices of those reporting on them and nick all their documents, just a shame from their POV that the documentary was already broadcast. (There were also accusations that the NZ SAS committed war crimes, and the journalist who exposed them had previously been raided by the police for 'receiving hacked documents', when he published a book embarrassing to our then PM John Key. Those accusations were a lot less overtly war crimey than the Australian ones though, and the inquiry we eventually got when the government changed to one less angry at Nicky Hager could not determine that any war crimes happened, or that they weren't done by the US instead. It did establish that the Ministry of Defence and politicians lied consistently though)

'Whacky' thumbnails drive clicks which is why more serious reviewers than Linus look like they're half a second away from outright gurning and the product they're reviewing just turned into Genghis Khan/ Marilyn Monroe. Videos will also always be over ten minutes long if at all possible because that hits the optimal monetisation bracket even if the subject matter doesn't really warrant the length. That's just the way they make money. If I was told I'd get a significant wage increase by pretending to be Amazed At What Happened Next I'd be perpetually surprised too.

And you're most certainly entitled to your own opinion of quality*. It can't objectively be better than native though unless there's something very odd going on in the native render, or a few odd situations eg multi image interferometry (which only gives an improved composite, the original images are still the same). And it being the internet most people don't couch it in subjective terms. *since it is subjective no one can be wrong about it. I find motion blur on games when you're running and some of the over the top bloom/ hdr effects hilarious because they aren't what you actually see in real life. Others think they're great, and that's all good.

You can blame the electoral system too. You'd have to suspect that most Nader voters would prefer Gore over Bush at least and a decent proportion would change their votes if they could go back in time. While a lot of people advocate for Preferential/ Ranked as a system I personally will always shill proper, multi member electorate Single Trnasferable Vote. Gives proportional results, can't be gerrymandered, goes a long way to breaking the entrenched power of political parties. And as a result, not at all popular with politicians.

Still holding out for a 6969XTC SUPER DUPER 16GB HBM2e card with more than 80CUs. The new Instinct has 120CUs*, after all (and tensors, for anyone wondering if AMD was doing anything with them). Vulkan performance isn't surprising. AMD cards used to be powerhouses there due to being powerhouse Compute cards, this time around with its core doubling nVidia is unbalanced towards compute instead. Plus all the development effort for RDNA has gone into DX12U for the Xbox and Sony's proprietary libraries, not Vulkan despite its history with AMD. As for performance in general, let's be frank here. People** were saying that AMD would only be competing with the 3070 and have raytracing performance around a 2070- that was most of the internet, it seemed- don't have much scope to talk about bad performance when they're competing with 3080s and have better RT performance, yes mostly in theory at present, than a 2080Ti or 3070. It's notable though that they perform to theoretical expectations, or above, in both the games developed for console RT, WD:L and Dirt 5, and a 6800XT is even better than a 3080 (!) at Dirt 5. That is the model of the future, not games developed when nVidia was the only RT in town with for, all anyone knows, the RT equivalent of 64x tesselation enabled by default. Stock levels are disappointing, but certainly better relatively speaking than 3000 series. By market share nVidia should have had 2-3 times the stock on hand, and didn't, they seem to have been near parity numbers wise. Just too much demand, in part due to nVidia still being nowhere near fulfilling orders even 2 months later. Neither were paper launches, both were just massively oversubscribed. The AIB release in a week and 6900XT in early Dec will also sell out, inevitably. OTOH, we got AMD reference cards here, and the whole of New Zealand got one (1) FE. And there's the small matter of 3080s (albeit AIBs) selling for 400$ more than the 6800XT here... *Not a serious comparison since they're CDNA. **I'm ready for the deluge of how DLSS is, lol, 'better quality than native' over the next few months. Who knew the writers for CSI: Miami enlarging and enhancing 2 pixels reflected in a dude's baldspot into a fully legible number plate, circus parade and a mafia dude burying Jimmy Hoffa were such visionaries?

I picked that section because I knew the number already, and you seemed skeptical of the EFF's claims. And yes, it is an example of the US trying to alter IP agreements for its own benefit, it just doesn't cover every aspect of that. We're legally allowed to format shift here, and back up computer programs etc, we wouldn't be able to do that if DRM can't be circumvented. We'd also have to rebuy media whenever the DRM scheme stops working. There certainly would be a workable alternative where circumventing DRM is illegal, but rights holders are in return obligated to support licence holders access rights when their DRM schemes fail. That's not what the US or IP holders want though.

Near 20 years is surely enough for doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. Near 17 years is surely enough too. Whether it's Obama or Trump or Biden, at some point you have to stop kicking the can down the road. Trump's a gigantic hypocrite in some things but he's right that there has to be an end point, and sometimes you just have to declare victory and cut your losses. If the troops were staying chances are there would be zero progress in the next 4 years, so you have to keep the troops there even longer, etc.