Zoraptor

I'd bet pretty much anything that they link your WhatsApp to a facebook account when they can though, or those obnoxious ghost accounts they set up to monitor people who aren't on FB. Same as Google no doubt links everything they get from doubleclick to google search to youtube etc; MS links xbxox/ windows/ linkedin info etc. It's just in their nature, and for free services it's always you/ your information ultimately being sold for profit. Skarpen most definitely has a point. (Nearly the) last thing anyone should want is being told what you can say by Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, or one of their underlings who can asterisk around with your account with impunity. I'd disagree with the governmental aspect though, and that's why it's nearly the last thing. The government(s) won't do anything because by and large it suits their purposes not to. In many cases western governments are already influencing SM content including suppression of views they don't like, mostly by threatening to legislate but sometimes by more direct methods. You also have governments weaponising SM content: you don't get Facebook etc banning governmental influence networks from US government entities after all, only from selected 'enemy' countries. That's not because US influence peddling is honest, but because of governmental influence over the companies themselves. It's like wondering why the US doesn't reinstate the requirement for honesty/ fairness in news reporting given the state of their media, and apply that to SM. Doesn't suit either political side to because both sides love shouting at the other, and don't really want fair and balanced. (meta: I'm on a bit of an ignoring facetiousness/ sarcasm bender at the moment)

That's probably true for Twitter specifically, since it's always been the weakest performing major social media network, and their financial position is relatively weak. The other companies mentioned though in Alphabet/ Google/ Youtube and Facebook, they have the money to just buy up any nascent competitor and either fold it into themselves or shut it down- and that's their most common approach to competition. Users can't switch to a competitor if we own the competition too [taps head]. Preaching to the converted it may be, but... Same with any monopolist really; you might blame users for making Amazon dominant and not switching to smaller alternatives, but, Amazon uses its market dominance to suppress competition, including loss leader pricing which is unsustainable for smaller competitors until said competitor goes bankrupt, at which point pricing returns to normal. MS was also infamous for its Embrace Extend Extinguish philosophy and essentially paying companies to be on windows. Intel paid billions for companies to be exclusive to Intel etc etc.

You won't be able to catch covid from any vaccine I'm aware of as they won't use dead/ attenuated virus. Nowadays they tend to build vaccines around low variance likely or proven antigens (ie proteins/ sections thereof the immune system is already known to target, and that have very low natural mutation rates). They had to use attenuated or dead virus vaccines originally because that was the only method available- similar to how diabetic's insulin used to come from pigs but now doesn't. You might get an allergic reaction or similar, but probably if you get an allergic reaction to a vaccine you'd have got it to the pathogen the vaccine targets. Vetting is far more likely to be for effectiveness than danger. If there are big problems (as very occasionally happens) such as extreme allergic reactions they're caught by trials.

I'd be a bit skeptical of taking all nVidia claims at face value prior to independent benchmarks. Things like 'up to 1.9x performance/ watt' is clearly, at best, a technically accurate claim for certain cherry picked scenarios with the general case being in the 10-20% range. And RTX I/O is... well, MS bringing fast I/O to Windows in general with maybe some minor improvement due to using RTX specifically instead of general compute. It's going to be on the nextbox, so it will work with AMD too. Well, theoretically, you could have a 16core Zen2, 32GB of RAM and 104CU RDNA2 card for less power draw than a 3090 and (very likely) a decent bit less price if you glued two nextboxes together. Theoretically. It's all about how well RDNA scales at this point, even an 80CU 5900XT card- with good scaling- would be around 3080 level already. I'd say that nVidia expects Big Navi to land around the 3080, from their pricing and specs. Maybe a bit above it even, since there's a big intermediate price point there to fill with a 3080STi.

I thought Baltar's Trial was very good. Always an interesting question whether it's better to pointlessly resist an overwhelming enemy or try to minimise the damage, and it was done well. The Cylon revelation and Starbuck randomly appearing otoh was obviously meant as a hook, but was just incoherent and dumb.

Sure, that's the rationale behind not having a full roll out of flu vaccine for example: the cost balance is that you target the vulnerable because a $1 vaccine saves a lot of money keeping 70+ year olds with flu out of hospital, but doesn't save money keeping 30 year olds out of hospital. However, covid-19 not being well understood is a double edged sword in that regard since we don't and can't know where the cost/ benefit level lies. If it turns out there aren't significant long term effects on many people then the balance is at one end, if it's a significant number it's at the other. I'd be pretty confident in saying that there will be some long term effects even among some of those who had mild symptoms, and since the virus is 'new' it's going to effect a lot more people than seasonal flu. If we went by the last similar event of Spanish American Flu the estimate was 35% of the world population infected, if even 1% of that number had long term effects we'd be talking 200 odd million people. The big question would be whether there was/ is anything that could be done to prevent it anyway and whether you plan for the worst or plan for the best. The vast majority of deaths from any cause have underlying medical conditions too. Die from a stroke? Hypertension, weight, diabetes, heart problems, dementia as underlying causes. Die from a heart attack? Hypertension, weight, diabetes, arrythmias, genetic defects. That's ultimately a problem with your legislators. If they want to do that sort of thing they'd just use a different excuse for it when presented be it terrorism or external interference or whatever. Solution is ultimately to elect better legislators. I don't know the specifics of timing, but that change was made here too, and fines have been brought in for not wearing masks on public transport (though you have to be a knob to get one, as they're handing out masks to those who don't have them). It's due to the WHO changing their advice since there is now evidence some strains at least can aerosolise, and masks reduce risk from aerosol sprays.

Syria didn't buy oil from ISIS, much as now they got most of their oil from Iran for free or near free. They did have a tacit agreement where if ISIS kept supplying power stations with natural gas they'd not get cut off from the grid, and a few other things like state employees still being paid at the various dams ISIS held (still the case now too with the SDF). Erdogan's son was knee deep in the oil trade with ISIS though, hence the Russians absolutely obliterating the fuel tanker stock in ISIS areas after Turkey shot down that Su24.

Wouldn't say it's specifically a US thing, it's more that popular US series tend to have a lot more episodes per year and a lot more seasons than the average popular show elsewhere. If you're looking to fill an episode order and are running out of fresh ideas relationship drama is an easy way to eke out the ideas you do have. There is also a certain subset of people who do absolutely love relationship drama too. (Most egregious example for me was the BSG remake. Late/ mid S3 felt like every single episode was interminable Lee/ Kara relationship drama filler with exactly the same problems and plotting. I think it was that point which made me start hoping that either the Cylons won or that Zarek/ Baltar/ [anyone] would flush every self absorbed character out an airlock)

It's certainly not just speculation; from what is known about other viruses it would be speculative to say that it didn't cause long term effects even when otherwise asymptomatic (asymptomatic often means low symptoms, practically, not no symptoms). Information on the extent of damage is probably not very accurate and largely anecdotal but there's very good reason to say that for some people including some without appreciable other symptoms a bout of sarscov2 will result in long term negative effects. Why? Because viruses with similar effects to SARSCoV2 and viruses that are related to SARS2 both can cause long term deleterious effects without much in the way of symptoms. Myocarditis would be an example of such an effect, often people aren't aware of anything specific that has caused it (viruses including otherwise innocuous ones like common cold viruses, or more well known ones like flu, being the most common though since it's an inflammatory effect it can be caused by a lot of things) because the initial infection often just makes you feel a bit tired or a bit under the weather. Myocarditis is a secondary effect that can outright kill you though, or lead to long term heart damage. More generally, sentinel testing and the like can be used to try and determine who has had sarscov2 even if they were low/ no symptom cases, or symptomatic and missed a confirmatory test. Antibody tests and the like aren't 100% accurate but then very few tests actually are. Proving the extent of long term damage is intrinsically difficult for a new pathogen, but in order to say it doesn't happen an argument would have to be made that sarscov2 is uniquely different to otherwise similar viruses, in that specific respect. And while the evidence is new and thus unreliable it indicates that it actually is a typical virus in that regard*. Fact is that for most people sarscov2 will be neither fatal nor have long terms effects. While true arguments based on that are, at heart, saying that you're OK with say 1% of the population dying and 2% having long term health problems; which here would be saying I'm OK with 50,000 deaths and 100,000 people needing long term help. I'm not OK with either. *Analogy time: it's effectively like saying that if you have evidence that a Ford, Toyota, GM, Nissan and VW car can kill someone if it hits them the default position is that a Mazda car also will even if you don't have the rigorously scientific evidence to prove it yet, because they're otherwise similar. An argument that a Mazda won't kill someone requires evidence that other unmentioned but similar car marques like Kia won't either, or evidence that the Mazda is for some reason uniquely able to avoid killing people.

That's supported too by the next tier card having 'only' 10GB. (I would guess that the actual reason for it having 24GB is that it really is a Titan replacement, and Titan RTX had 24GB. Ironically, that would make the card a significant improvement in value compared to its predecessor even at 1400usd+. If it isn't... then something like a lot of extra RT processing would have to be there. Otherwise it's just burning money- not so bad when you charge what you want- and adding even more power overhead. While the 16k remark may have been facetious the problem at higher resolutions would be that while the RAM might be better utilised the card would struggle to push enough frames, especially raytraced)

The Bylerussian police are probably disappearing people and torturing people. Probably because western media is happy to acritically report one side of the story but not the other, to whit... ...both Belsat and VoA are state sponsored propaganda channels, and are useful mostly for telling you what the Polish and US governments respectively want you to think (and in Belsat's case, what the Polish government wants Byelorussians to think). Same as RT/ CCTV are mostly good for telling you what the Russian or Chinese want you to think.

Better fit here anyway. Excess deaths from Alzheimers and Dementia are almost certainly unlabeled covid deaths. You can die directly of Alzheimers and other dementias but they almost always die of 'complications' rather than the dementia advancing so much it affects something critical for life. More than half our total deaths came from one dementia residential home most of them were only listed as 'probable' cases- when they died- because it's dangerous to test patients with dementia. Testing is unpleasant enough for people who know what is going on, if you cannot explain why you're ramming a swab up their nose or down their throat you're going to get bitten which isn't great at the best of times let alone if the person biting is infectious. Since our healthcare system never got close to overwhelmed all bar one (iirc) were ultimately confirmed as covid deaths; last one was someone who definitely did have covid, but died more than a month after 'recovering' so is technically excluded. Incess deaths for respiratory diseases is probably because many of the statistical indicators for death from respiratory disease in general are the same as those for covid in particular. Many of those who would be expected to die of generalised pneumonia type effects from well known diseases will instead have died specifically from covid caused pneumonia. Looks like they've changed their methodology a fair bit, last time I checked the excess death rate was 50% but it's about 25% now. I'd suspect that they're better able to accurately assign deaths now that the health system has some spare capacity and isn't being clogged up. The dementia stats back that up a fair bit too, at the outbreak height there's a very significant number of excess deaths without covid listed as a complication but as it winds down almost all deaths are assigned covid as a complication. End of the day if the choice is keeping someone alive or checking exactly what someone else died of option 1 is going to be emphasised. So in the more general sense, excess deaths are useful when the system is under too much strain to be reporting accurately and for estimating total system rather than the specific impacts. And yeah, as always, consideration has to be given to how they are being used and by whom.

'3090' being some sort of 'failed'/ non certified pro card like the RadeonVII (16GB HBM2 so also massive overkill for consumer) was to the MI60 might be possible. Recent rumour is also of a 20GB '3080+' which is kind of weird to do in a vacuum but makes sense for 'failed' '3090's. Personally at this point I suspect the high memory cards may have a very large relative increase in RT cores to try and get 4k raytracing at high framerates; with '3070' and lower still having raytracing at more gimmick level. They're also supposed to be on a 7nm node, again. I'd presume Samsung 7nm since the TDP estimates have been absolutely consistent and are hard to reconcile with TSMC's 7nm (plus zero taping out rumours for TSMC). Oh well, guess we'll find out in a couple of days.

It's certainly not a flawless measure* but it is a good and if applied properly objective measure of overall impact**. The situation with excess deaths is analogous to the old fire in the theatre situation where x people die from the fire, and y people die from the stampede when people try to get out. The people who die in the stampede didn't burn to death, but if the fire didn't happen they almost certainly wouldn't have died so including them in the death toll is fair enough. Theoretically the excess death rate catches all the people who died because all ICU beds were full as well as dying of 'pneumonia' at home instead of diagnosed covid19. *since the death rate isn't a, uh, flat line year to year and has natural variance, and everything coronavirus related gets heavily politicised in some way. **and historically, it has been extensively used in Spanish American Flu calculations. They're certainly very much subject to being politicised themselves though, 'genocide olympics' is full of people comparing demographic/ excess death numbers of one event to confirmed numbers of another to 'prove' someone is less bad than someone else.

Obviously from the R standpoint not explicitly denouncing all protesters as rioters and anarchists would be 'normalising the forces of chaos'. From an objective perspective it's a view that does have merits, even if it's overblown and lacking nuance due to politics. Reality seems to be that the CCP bought the local Wuhan branch's statements hook line and sinker more than anything; there's plenty to blame the CCP for in the outbreak- promoting international travel while banning it domestically, especially, was grossly irresponsible at very very very best- but the initial outbreak was covered up by locals, to the significant detriment of China as a whole. The actual data released by China in terms of R numbers and fatalities plus treatment regime success seems to be decently accurate (well, it's inaccurate, but most countries data is significantly off too and China's isn't unusually off. UK excess deaths put their death toll ~50% higher than declared, for example). The job of the WHO is not to critique countries, it's basically to issue advisories unless a country asks for help. If they critiqued the US response for example there would be hell to pay and claims of undue interference. They are very limited, by quite deliberate design, in what they can do and what they can require countries to do; ie they cannot require much at all from countries and are almost exclusively advisory in nature. They didn't require travel bans or the like because they cannot require travel bans and the like. It was and is up to individual countries as to how they respond. They also have the inherent problem that knowledge always lags behind reality. If you find out some Wuhan official has fudged figures the reasonable minimum time to discover that is about a month because that's how long it takes to do the tests and analyse the statistics and that's the minimum time.

Brenton Tarrant got stopped literally by a guy throwing an eftpos (creditcard) machine at him; and almost certainly would have killed more people if he hadn't been tackled by a guy at the first mosque who damaged his gear. I eagerly await Gromnir's considered wait and see non conclusion jumping input that that could not have happened. And how Tarrant should have gone for a revolver because they're faster loading and firing than a semi automatic AK, or AR15 variant and both legal and easy to obtain in New Zealand.

The formal TDP of the GTX 480 was 'only' 250W and the recommended PSU was (a quality) 600W. OK, Seasonic is a PSU manufacturer and has an interest in selling more powerful and profitable units, but their's is the only rec we have for the '3090' and it is 850W. When it comes to power it probably does need to be pointed out that the pretty efficient for its size/ computing power at stock 2080Ti can go up to ~600W itself with the Kingpin watercooled version. I have to admit I've got rather skeptical about a lot of the leaks. I was skeptical when the initial claims were 50% more performance and 50% less power draw because that was TSMC's node improvement claim with the or replaced with an and; and I'm skeptical now that the claims seem to imply 50% better performance but more than 50% greater power draw as that is literally no improvement on the power/ performance level (excluding tensor).

lol. The system actually has to work for that to be true. Otherwise, lack of outrage is taken as assent, and nothing changes. Taking a breath and waiting has consistently meant nothing meaningful changes. I jump to no conclusions- at most it's a small hop given the history of equivalent cases which leaked like sieves so long as the leaks painted the victim in a bad light. Leaping to conclusions would be something like, say, thinking Russia would be bankrupt in 6 months in 2014 because of US sanctions. There is no knife shown, nor has any witness corroborated the claim about it. He's been persistently been described by witnesses as a peacemaker in the initial argument, and not violent. There is no evidence of drug use. I'll freely admit having an absolute and extraordinary low opinion of the US law enforcement and justice systems though, for what that's worth. If there's one thing I really appreciate about US electoral/ healthcare/ justice systems it's how much better I end up feeling about ours after comparison, and I'm not overly happy about ours either.

Well yeah, that ain't exactly compelling though as the cops aren't a disinterested party and the witness said he wasn't armed. If they were planning on deliberately shooting someone who posed no threat- which is certainly the worst interpretation of what happened, yes- and getting away with it then they need to establish that they thought the person posed an imminent threat and that they were in fear of their lives; yelling that the person has a knife does both. And it does both even if he isn't armed and they knew that. Neither video shows the slightest evidence of him being armed though, apart from the cops yelling it. The videos are an incomplete picture of course, but they not only show no evidence of him being armed but also no evidence of how he could realistically have been mistaken for being armed. Similarly there is no actual evidence he was on drugs. Frankly, if there were any evidence of either I'd expect the PD /union/ lawyers of the cops to leak it immediately. Until there is evidence it's just innuendo at best or deliberate character assassination at worse.

Not talking about the video though. You mentioned someone saying he had a knife and him being on drugs. Is there any actual evidence of that beyond someone 'mentioning' it? And who, specifically, mentioned it? Is it the same people who mention, say, covid19 being caused by 5G because Bill Gates wants to sterilise the world's population? Or is it someone who has read his medical report and has a medical background and might face consequences for lying about it? Big difference in confidence level depending on who is saying it. As I said, 'people' always talk about the victims in these incidents reaching for weapons or being on drugs, even if neither is true. If there isn't any actual evidence of either being true then it's likely just a smear to demonise the victim and protect the perpetrator.

Is there any actual evidence of this? Because something like that is 'said' every single time there's a police brutality incident- the victim is always said to be drugged up andor going for a weapon, even when they are neither; because saying so establishes the initial narrative which is then hard to challenge. It also, of course, poisons the jury pool on the off chance it actually does go to trial.

The nextbox slides claim 9x the GRays as nVidia, though one suspects they aren't actually measuring the same thing (peak vs average being the obvious one) and the 3-10x the equivalent of non accelerated RT performance is the more valid claim. IIRC that's around about the performance gain of the first set of RTX cards; so not great, but not terrible. AMD's raytracing implementation should be quite interesting since, presumably, the Sony side won't be using a DXR implementation unlike xbox and (effectively) nVidia.

By and large the difference between a console and desktop GPU is similar to that between a desktop and laptop version of a GPU- lower clocks, better efficiency; and with the proviso that the console 'laptop' has a highly customised SoC type set up. Even much maligned Vega is extremely efficient, when run in APUs or undervolted/ underclocked and may actually be the best selling AMD arch ever due to being used so long in APUs. The problem with Vega was that it was a dual purpose arch with professional/ compute/ science uses and emphasised raw compute power over effective gaming power. In the end that was the result of not having much money, and (correctly) betting on Zen. The elephant in the room may well be texture compression. Much of nVidia's advantage comes from getting way better effective bandwidth from the same memory. If AMD has cracked that problem it may well be game on. People will care if they're running a 250W Intel CPU and 350+W nVidia. 'Money no object' people won't care, but they never care. My Vega64 will run fine on a 550W PSU even with power limits off, but then I also have a 65W CPU only. A fair few people will not be at all used to the old days of having to meticulously check not just wattage but 12V amperage and connector numbers. On the more meta level, I suspect a lot of people who are shocked and appalled at AMD's energy inefficiency will suddenly be of the opinion that power draw is irrelevant if nVidia really does go full Thermi this gen. No doubt it will be different, same as current gen console GPUs weren't literally rebadged 78xx and 570. They're not going to have the same memory configuration and direct access to the CPU, but then they never have. I'd be skeptical of them being architecturally nerfed though. I'd agree if you said that about RadeonVII, but... The corollary being that with a switch to a more advanced, albeit not as much more advanced, node nVidia is claiming ~50% improvement (OK, more for RTX to be fair), but at ~50% extra power draw. On the power/ performance balance that is no improvement at all except for tensor stuff. In contrast 5700XT is just below 1080Ti/ 2070S level, but Vega64 was ~1080 level; plus 5700XT has 40CU vs 64 and is 180W vs 210W. That's a big improvement CU/CU (more than 60%) and decent (~15%) improvement is efficiency as well. The big question being why there wasn't at least a 60CU Navi1 card- probably capacity issues at TSMC, and unlike with the RadeonVII Navi Instinct cards are going to be on a different arch with CDNA, so there aren't/ won't be non certified versions to sell to consumers. (For everything: open question as to how it plays out on release and how accurate the leaks are, of course)

I think AMD have a pretty decent chance of being very competitive this gen, at least if the rumours are true. 1) node wise nVidia has a bit of a sidegrade for the consumer line, and the top cards are supposed to be the highest wattage consumer cards ever. The node improvement is always expressed as a performance gain at the same power draw, or an efficiency gain at same performance. In this case performance may be up, but so is power. 2) in contrast the nextbox specs have its total system wattage less than a 5700XT despite the extra 12 CUs plus an 8 core CPU and other components being included; and with comparable sustained frequency. That is, at least, a big gain in efficiency; which can presumably be traded for more performance in a desktop card. 3) an RDNA1 Big Navi would have been very competitive with Turing. 5700XT was only a mid range 40CU offering after all, while 80CUs would not double performance a 2080Ti was only ~50% faster. An 80CU Big Nav1 could realistically have been faster than a 2080Ti (with a 350+W power draw...) 4) bringing the titan down into the consumer line from prosumer suggests nVidia think they need an overkill option 5) most of the concrete metrics for ampere I've seen are specifically for pro cards whose chips were fabbed at TSMC, not Samsung. 6) if the timelines are right nVidia is releasing consumer ampere near literally next week while AMD still has a couple of months to go (after the consoles' release, one suspects, since MSony funded RDNA2). A bit of a difference in hype and leakage levels is to be expected, and AMD probably wants to draw a bit of a line under the Raja-esque overpromising.

The 2190* is meant to be a Titan replacement rather than a 2080 replacement, so the size difference is at least a bit misleading. Also, 24GB of RAM and 350+W, allegedly. *Betting that all nVidia's 21 years of geforce guff is leading up to yet another confusing and inconsistent renaming scheme.