Zoraptor

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.

Advocating policies is the easy part. Next bit might be a bit disconcerting for anyone who only knows NZ politics from Ardern hagiographies in The Garuniad/ NYT/ BBC etc... AOC is at least from a distance pretty similar to our PM here, Jacinda Ardern- young, female, left wing progressive; new generation, hope for the party etc. Ardern won an absolute majority in a monocameral system under a proportional system; she can effectively do as she wishes for the next 3 years. Way more power than a US President limited only by the possibility of being voted out by her own party. Like AOC she's talked extensively about lots and lots of wonderful goals, while seeking election and while not having any power to implement them. But it's only talk, she acts exactly the same as our previous long term PM, right wing John Key. Never thought I would say this but John Key was actually considerably better than Ardern because at least he never really pretended to be anything other than a stuffed shirt kicking economic and social cans down the road for his children to deal with, and he was willing to occasionally put political capital to work for things he personally believed in even if they were unpopular- like banning smacking despite a referendum result supporting keeping it. Instead, Ardern has seen child poverty increase, house affordability increase, living standards decrease and even more wealth disparity- and blamed it on everyone else but herself. And she won't do anything she personally believes in, if she thinks it won't be popular. But now that she has a majority she can put all those wonderful ideas into practice, surely? El Oh El. No, it's rule out everything she said she believed in instead for yet more can kicking status quo stupidity and appealing to 'the centre', less than a month after an election. Gutless, supine, pathetic, weak, hypocrite, utter disappointment. I'm immensely glad I had the good sense and foresight not to vote for that- and I apologise to any glycerol based wobbly desserts in advance for the comparison- abject jelly this time. Same thing will happen to AOC if she gets near power too. And she wouldn't even have the innate advantages to getting your agenda through of only having a single chamber government.

Never seen the appeal of Jade Empire 2. JE1 was KOTOR reskinned with theme part China, I wouldn't expect anything else from Bioware for a sequel. Asian settings from a western studio will also be seen as, sigh, 'problematic' nowadays by the offendatrons on twitter, and Bioware listens to them. OTOH, I'd sell my left kidney for a 'Monkey RPG', especially if they used the wonderful TV series theme song that I've had semi permanently stuck in my head since the mid 80s. Fair warning, once that theme is heard it can never be unheard.

Azerbaijani MoD says they have ('accidentally') shot down a Russian helicopter in Armenian airspace. Of course, they shouldn't be doing anything at all in Armenian airspace and risk triggering two different defence treaties by doing so. Indeed, it will be difficult for Russia not to do anything given 2 personnel died even though they want(ed) Armenian PM Pashinyan gone before committing to any major support.

3070 -- 670 USD (+170 USD over 'theoretical' price*, and that's with GST taken into account) 3080 -- 915 USD (+215) 3090 -- 1825 USD (+325) And, for comparison... 5600X -- 304 USD (uh, +5. Didn't even round it to 300, since that extra dollar is 20% of the difference) Not quite as bad as 700+ Euro though. *I guess it's a little unfair comparing them to FE MSRP, but 170 bucks would be high even for Strix tax, let alone the cheapest ExplodeMax HeatwaVe

Finished Pathfinder Kingmaker. Enjoyable and a good game overall, suspect it will be a better Baldur's Gate 3 than the Larian offering. Finished on whatever the 2nd to top difficulty was since I got most of the way through during lockdown back in April/ May then stalled out, and it was far easier 2nd time through. Monk protagonist, got most of the 'secret' content except Tenebrous Depths, because I zoomed through it so didn't get all the trigger pieces before killing the bosses. Think I mentioned it at the time but my major criticism is how random the combat is, tactics tend to be the same most of the time- buff and swarm plus some crowd control- and who wins is determined by saving throws and occasionally crits, most often against your main character since that can be an instant game ender. At least this time the enemy annoying ability spam was manageable. Plot and characters weren't really anything special or memorable, but equally weren't bad or a detriment. The kingdom mechanics were fine, again since it was a replay I knew some of the more annoying quirks like the Bald Mountain curses triggering earlier than the journal said they would so could work around the old staple of having the protag stuck upgrading someone's abilities while things turned to crap for a week or so. Only had one outright bug too, with one of the crafters never turning up, and a handful of crashes. OTOH, the save game size meant initial loads were pretty long even with a NVMe SSD. Definitely good enough and enough room for improvement that I'm looking forwards to the next game.

They're clearly picking The Riddler, you can tell from the video thumbnail. Which is a plot twist on everyone else constantly picking Oswald Cobblepots at least. Either that or a very confused Gray.

You need to know the scene context too for the pic to work, not just who the character is. Though it can be inferred from the wiki article anyway.

Both 5600X and 5800X are likely to not make much sense in the longer term because their 3000 series equivalents didn't make much sense. The 3600/ 3700X almost always made more sense to buy than their more expensive counterpart, and the 3600X/5800X only made sense when they were priced nearly the same as their cheaper alternatives. The only real plus for the 5800X is 'future proofing' since this time the consoles do at least have 8 strong cores instead of sub 2 Ghz Jaguars.

Without that law I doubt that article gets published, even by Murdoch. Putin is notoriously leak proof, and Murdoch media has had, for example, Kim Jong Un dead or in a coma half a dozen times over the last year or so. Last year Putin was going to be God Emperor for life after changing the constitution. If they're ever right about something you'll never hear the end of it- but nobody remembers them being wrong because nobody expects them to ever be right anyway. They'll be right about something someday, that's the beauty of making infinite immaterial guesses. [edit: should also say, Russian Presidents have had immunity since Yeltsin, as that was a prereq for him stepping down]

They aren't being exceptionally slow, you just don't hear about updates from, say, California because it's already massively in Biden's favour and the extra votes change nothing. They'd have exactly the same number of votes to count, we're talking an active no confidence option. Votes still have to be counted, whether someone has ticked Biden/Trump/ 3rd party/ No Confidence. I have to admit, imagining Trump or Biden- even Obama, Reagan, Clinton- trying to lecture some other country over democracy having been elected by 15.1% of US voters would be highly amusing. You can't have a democratic system without the participation of the demos, it's, to coin a phrase, in the name. Sure, politicians could try and carry on as if everything was normal, but you wouldn't be doing so in a democracy.

I mean sure, but that certainly isn't a 'practical' example, in any sense. If the Biden/ Trump race had resulted in 70% of people voting no confidence it would be very, very difficult politically for either* to claim victory because more than 2/3 of people expressly wanted neither of them. You'd be looking at nearly 5 times as many people voting no confidence as for either candidate individually. While it may not be a tangible thing 'confidence' is the one critical factor in every single successful democratic process. I guess there's some question about whether the US qualifies for having a 'successful democratic process', at the moment, but it should, and dissatisfaction with that process is exactly what a no confidence option would express. In any proper process under the situation outlined above you'd be gone if 70% actively voted no confidence- because you'd be an active embarrassment to your party or there would be credible alternatives. You'd be encouraged to resign, primaried, deselected, whatever; or you'd simply lose to that alternative. Ultimately a 'no confidence' option expresses exactly what it says, no confidence in the candidates or process. If you're winning with 30% turnout and 70% voting no confidence then as above it's pretty much QED that the process deserves no confidence in it. I'd go further than that even, if you win under those circumstances and remain as elected your system simply isn't a democracy at all. *Trump would anyway though, of course, but then Trump is the outlieriest of outliers and doesn't care about things like 'confidence' except his own sense of it. Biden might too, but only to stop Trump

SMT = SAM? Far too many TLAs, anyway. In theory rocketlake should have a pretty hefty IPC lift, but it's definitely going to be hotter and hence not overclock as well as 'native' 14nm; that's just physics. It's a decently big deal. Even with only Zen2 support I could get probably a third more performance on the same MB from an upgrade, if Zen3 was supported it would be well over 50%, at least in theory. The price for an equivalent MB to the one I've got is also now ~250USD here, so even acknowledging the limitations like no PCIe 4 reusing the old MB would be most of the price of the processor saved. In practice my gpu is usually the limiting factor- or there isn't a limiting factor- but if I were getting a 6000 series I'd consider upgrading the CPU rather than buying a new MB as the saved money could go towards a tier upgrade there which is more likely to give added practical performance.

In a practical way, nothing. But there are reasons other than practical results for doing things. In a practical way, voting for a 3rd party candidate also achieves nothing in the US system (and despite having proportional representation even more votes, approaching 10%, were 'wasted' that way here too), in a practical way voting Trump in California achieves nothing since he won't win there or voting Biden in Wyoming achieves nothing since he won't win there; in a practical way this post and the one I'm replying to achieves nothing either. Doesn't mean that any of them wasn't worth doing though, even if they don't change anything, practically. A formalised 'no confidence' option allows a gauge of those who are disengaged from the political process due to thinking the candidates- or electoral system- are awful but who would like to be engaged, and allows them to express their opinion without going into a generic 'spoiled' category that most will presume to be from people who cannot tie their shoelaces/ shirts button up down their back/ cannot successfully tick whatever box they really wanted to, rather than being a protest. That may not be much use practically, but in the more... figurative sense the purpose of elections is to allow people to express their feelings about who should lead them; and that certainly includes being able to express that none of the candidates are suitable, or that the process itself is broken. Which, for some reason, isn't a very appealing prospect for politicians.