Zoraptor

That's a completely false dichotomy though. Every TPP country is already a member of TRIPS, we already have patent and IP protection. It's not the US trying to bring order to the wild west of IP and combat rampant IP theft, there's already order there. It's the US trying to alter those existing IP agreements for its own benefit.

...the rest of the world has IP protections already. I'm not sure how that's news but apparently it has to said again. If you think that saying consumers have rights too and countries upholding those rights is advocating IP theft then you're very much mistaken, if you think that pointing out that patents/ copyrights are grants of limited term exclusivity is advocating IP theft then you're also very much mistaken- and falling into the classic mkreku trap where everyone who dislike DRM etc ipso facto has to be a pirate. What the US wants isn't IP protection, it's the perpetual right for its companies to collect licensing fees despite copyright and patents being concepts that are intrinsically limited term and limited scope; and the removal of the consumer rights part of the equation. If you buy a product you have certain rights, if you licence an intangible you have certain rights. The US approach is to protect and extend only the rights of the IP holders, while extinguishing the rights of the end user. That's what the problem with 'technological protection measures' is, they mean that as soon as the DRM system goes obsolete you lose the licence to play you've already paid for, without compensation. And of course, it's actually in the best interests of the IP holder to have constant planned DRM/ media obsolescence as it means they can then charge you every 5 years for the same work. "Article 18:68: Technological Protection Measures. IP creators have the right to not have their work stolen. If someone knowingly tries to steal IP, creates technology that helps with stealing IP, provides technology that helps with stealing IP, sells technology that helps to steal IP or sells stolen IP itself, or promotes stealing IP, then that person will be guilty of committing a crime. Each country in the agreement should come up with rules about what will happen to said criminals." That's what you posted , as a quoteblock, so I assumed it was a quote, from somewhere. The quote from the actual document, is what I posted previously, to whit: "Article 18.68: Technological Protection Measures (TPMs)821.In order to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that authors, performers, and producers of phonograms use in connection with the exercise of their rights and that restrict unauthorised acts in respect of their works, performances, and phonograms,each Party shall provide that any person that:(a)knowingly, or having reasonable grounds to know,83circumvents without authority any effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work, performance, or phonogram;84or (b)manufactures, imports, distributes,85offers for sale or rental to the public, or otherwise provides devices, products, or components, or offers to the public or provides services, that:(i)are promoted, advertised, or otherwise marketed by that person86for the purpose of circumventingany effective technological measure;(ii)have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent any effective technological measure;87or(iii)are primarily designed, produced, or performed for the purpose of circumventingany effective technological measure,is liable and subject to the remedies provided for in Article 18.74 (Civil and Administrative Procedures and Remedies).Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied if any person is found to have engaged wilfully88and for the purposes of commercialadvantage or financial gain89in any of the above activities." Your 'quote' isn't a quote of the document and isn't even a proper summary. I did you the credit of presuming it was some pro TPP summary rather than the exact equivalent of what you've been railing against, just from the opposite position. Cracking DRM on a CD so you can play it on a computer isn't IP theft, as you've paid for the CD/ licence. Unless, you change the definition of theft to make playing something you've a licence to illegal because... the companies' DRM doesn't work, and work back from there. End of the day if you think the US patent etc system is so rubbish why on earth do you want it extended elsewhere and why on earth do you think the opposition to it has to be based on IP theft? You cannot simultaneously say that the US system is rubbish, but should be adopted/ honoured by everyone else. Opposition isn't based on wanting to steal IP, it's based on it and provisions like 18:68 based on it being an awful system that no one else wants to adopt.

At the moment we have all 5000 series (except 5950X, which we haven't had a single one delivered yet) and at least some 3070/80/90 in stock though the GPUs are all at massively inflated prices. We also had big shortages of PSUs and MoBos a few months ago but plenty of stock now.

Phoenix Point is confirmed for a GOG release as of a few hours ago.

Trump is pulling some troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, 2000 or about half the total from Afghanistan and 500 from Iraq (don't know what that is proportionately), to update a thread from the previous page. Yep, the ultimate problem is that healthcare is not really miscible with the free market except for things which are elective like cosmetic surgery. If you're having a heart attack you're not able to make a rational balanced decision on the costs and benefits of various providers as you might if you were buying lunch or a car or a house. You just want it to be treated as quickly as possible, so you don't die. Outside the US such funds make very attractive targets for borrowing against or even directly raiding during economic crises when a government needs money.

... If you're going to complain about editorialisation etc you should not be posting summaries, you should do as I did and post the actual text. Unsurprisingly the authors of the TPP wanted to market the TPP. Yes, if you read pro TPP press it was an enlightened document that would usher in world peace and prosperity. And if you read defences of slavery the poor slave owner was generously providing shelter, religion, education and food to the lazy uncultured savage. Everyone has seen the standard defence of IP absolutism, that the hoi polloi and imitators steal shamelessly off hard working creators and rights holders, it doesn't need to be reiterated. The DMCA is not well regarded, even in the US. It's regarded as highly draconian, whatever your personal opinion. No one else wants it, and it is not the international norm. US demands are for IP rights to become, effectively, eternal and absolute which is a massive loss of rights for every except rights holders. This is also not the norm and has never been, it is a shift. Consumers have rights too, and the US lobbies extensively to have them extinguished. No one wants $1000 epipens eternally because the US issues patents- protection for novel inventions- for incremental changes, no one wants to buy a tractor then lease the software for additional charge then buy another tractor when the software gets deprecated in 5 years time just because that's great for John Deere shareholders. No one wants Monsanto running around suing people for IP infringement because they stuffed up and their RoundUp Ready corn is not actually sterile and has infected seed stocks as a result. No one wants to have to rebuy media constantly because the IP holder used DRM that, shock horror, goes obsolete and they want the best of both worlds from the product/ licence dichotomy.

Well OK, have fun. I'm not generally too keen on posting such links without more specificity but that is precisely the reason why you don't get line by line citations- because the document is absolutely fricking massive and written in terse and opaque legalese that is very difficult for anyone let alone a layman to parse. But as it happens I can draw your attention at least to the DMCA like provisions the EFF mentioned as someone else once asked me for them. "Article 18.68: Technological Protection Measures (TPMs)821.In order to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that authors, performers, and producers of phonograms use in connection with the exercise of their rights and that restrict unauthorised acts in respect of their works, performances, and phonograms,each Party shall provide that any person that:(a)knowingly, or having reasonable grounds to know,83circumvents without authority any effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work, performance, or phonogram;84or (b)manufactures, imports, distributes,85offers for sale or rental to the public, or otherwise provides devices, products, or components, or offers to the public or provides services, that:(i)are promoted, advertised, or otherwise marketed by that person86for the purpose of circumventingany effective technological measure;(ii)have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent any effective technological measure;87or(iii)are primarily designed, produced, or performed for the purpose of circumventingany effective technological measure,is liable and subject to the remedies provided for in Article 18.74 (Civil and Administrative Procedures and Remedies).Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied if any person is found to have engaged wilfully88and for the purposes of commercialadvantage or financial gain89in any of the above activities."

The IP thing was about getting everyone to agree to US rules. US rules favour the US. If you want to refresh your memory from the US perspective the EFF has a handy summary up that seems to cover most of your questions briefly, including peripheral to IP issues stuff- like all the human rights provisions being optional, unlike the IP provisions. Otherwise there's a longer pro TPP IP section take here (which frankly still makes it sound awful, and certainly illustrates how it was being driven by the US) and one specifically on the medical implications here. China's IP theft was completely irrelevant, as they were never a party to the TPP. The TPP countries adhere to the international standards of IP, the US doesn't and is desperate to rewrite them for their own benefit. So, OTOH, the US's habit of issuing patents continually for things that simply aren't inventions- and in some cases are absolute and literal theft every bit as much as anything China has done- and expecting everyone to pay their companies royalties perpetually 100% was. The go to examples of exactly how broken and exactly how extortionate the US system is are (1) Basmati Rice patent, since accoridng to the USPTO Basmati Rice was invented by a US company (2) Mexican Yellow Beans are a unique US invention, in that case the guy who bought them from Mexico literally went back to the market he bought them from to demand royalties for his 'unique invention' from the traditional users. Sure they got fixed, eventually, and after a load of money was spent. If the TPP had been in effect we would have had to adhere to those patents no matter how utterly incompetent and outright scummy their issuance was, and have had to adhere to the constant patent renewals on things like epipens which aren't even approaching novel inventions any more.

Bombed the general (Soleimani) in Iraq, after asking the Iraqi PM to set up a meeting to discuss de-escalation, according to the Iraqi PM. Which was borderline if not outright Perfidy, if what the PM said was true. I'm usually skeptical of rumours supported only by anonymous sources since there's zero accountability but there must be some reason he got rid of Esper, and it won't be because Trump wants to stage a military coup. Even money on whether he wants to attack Iran or pull all troops out of Iraq/ Afghanistan/ Syria arbitrarily, he probably won't actually do either but he is exactly the type to set the house on fire on his way out, if he has to leave.

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.