Zoraptor

Fun (?) Fact (?) Danish people don't call Danish Pastries 'Danishes'. They call them 'Viennas'. Same as New Zealanders don't call Kiwifruit 'Kiwis', we call them 'Chinese Gooseberries'.

It wasn't just WB who wouldn't let Peter Jackson do his job though. The Sir Peter Jackson who ran The Hobbit project was not the same Peter Jackson who ran the LotR project. Should have stuck to his guns and had an external director- or not brought in del Toro and done it himself initially and asterisk The Lovely Bones- should have stuck to his guns and not had a trilogy, and the development overall was run about as badly as LotR's was run well. Then again I'm just bitter at Jackson that's there's never been a Bad Taste 2.

Wonder how long it takes to get the chips packaged up and distributed. Huawei is out of TSMC come the end of the month, so there will be a lot of capacity suddenly free especially with 5nm continuing to come on line. They might actually have decent availability for both launches, for once.

I will never cease to be amused by reports on Novichok. Ten times more deadly than nerve gas, a teaspoon full could kill thousands, manages to kill precisely none of the people its been targeted at while getting detected both times. Then again officially Andrei Lugavoy was wandering around for days covered in Po210 after allegedly poisoning Litvenenko, which set a low bar for credibility and for credulous acritical reporting. Surely, the capital would have to be Kalmar. There are sanctions on Turkey, for buying Russian S400 instead of the overpriced and underperforming Patriots that the US refused to sell them anyway though rather than for their campaign of ethnic cleansing, rape, kidnapping, murder etc in occupied Syria or the similar earlier campaign in Cyprus with a bit less nutbar cannibal child killer jihadi use but added colonisation instead. Given to Ukraine by Krushchev, a Ukrainian. Strangely enough the one decision by Stalin you will find westerners consistently defend is... Georgian Joe handing over Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Georgia. And since it's come up yet again, Crimea has voted to leave Ukraine no less than three times and arguably 4 times. Firstly in 1991 Crimea voted to leave Ukraine (95% for) but got gazumped by the USSR breaking up. Secondly in 1994 they elected a pro secession government in another landslide, Ukraine sent in 70,000 troops and abolished Crimean autonomy by fiat next year after Crimea's parliament tried to implement its policies. They then wrote a no secession clause into their constitution. While the Crimeans were meant to get a new constitution voted on by them they never actually did, because they wouldn't approve what Ukriane offered and instead got a constitution imposed by the Rada. Then after the coup in 2014- and if secession is illegal by the Ukrianian Constitution then so was that, just stating facts and logic- to remove the President Crimea overwhelmingly voted for they finally got to express their will and leave the country that had suppressed and crushed their aspirations for 22 years. And it was all perfectly legal, thanks to the west's precedent setting invasion of Yugoslavia and unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia. Bit more democratic than the referendum declaring Kosovo's independence*, at least, and Crimea had the actual democratic processes of 1991 and 1994-5 to refer back to. They also declared independence then asked to join the RF, technically, because that was the legal way to do it. *Hint: no referendum took place there, but that was OK because western project.

AMD ruining my predictions of 5nm 5000series PCIe5 DDR5 AM5 by deciding to rationalise their confusing and nonsensical CPU naming scheme. (Zen3 announcement 8 Oct with desktop being 5000 series not 4000 series; RDNA2 announcement 28 Oct for anyone wanting a summary)

Xbox Series S specs now released: Targeting up to 120hz/ 1440p. Not going to reach it for most games one suspects. 8/16 Zen 2 CPU same as the X series 20CU RDNA GPU 1.55Ghz (X has 52/ 1.8Ghz) 10GB GDDR6 RAM/ 500GB NVMe SSD/ download software only no optical drive (16GB for X) AI assisted upscaling via Azure (~DLSS; also on X though hardly anyone mentioned it and many seem to be treating this feature as a new announcement) 300USD

Some pistol might be more practical, but it misses the point. They are, at heart, larping as a Basij in some Wisconsin town, whole point is to prominently carry a big gun to let everyone there know you're packing heat. If they could get hold of an M2 they'd probably make a F150 technical and drive around in that as well.

White South African banker? I'd be surprised if he wasn't terrified of antifa/ blm. (Julius Malema, as an example of what might broadly be classified as RSA 'BLM')

I presume you mean Iran there. While KSA and Turkey are definitely spatting they're physically distanced by the entire length of Iraq, and Turkey's base in Qatar has no offensive capabilities. As for the rest, you're claiming that Trump is withdrawing from the ME when he's actually just moving the troops around- and refusing to withdraw until he's paid to in Iraq. Worse, he's been explicit that troops are in KSA because protection money was being paid to send them, and the troops in Syria are there not to stop defeated ISIS or protect the Kurds, per Trump himself, but to take its oil (which is, of course, an actual war crime which is why every time he says it you get some general waving their arms and shouting about the mission being stopping an ISIS resurgence instead). He's not withdrawing from the ME any more than he's got North Korea to get rid of nuclear weapons, he's just shouting about having done something he hasn't. OTOH I also have a lot of difficulty being overly sympathetic to the Kurds. KRG is personal fiefdoms ruled by the utterly corrupt Talebani/ Barzani clans, and Barzani sr in particular is an utterly despicable figure who fought for Saddam against his own people and who is now completely and utterly in Erdogan's pocket, he literally stole billions from oil sold to Turkey while teachers and the like went unpaid in the KRG. He was also primarily responsible for that utter abortion of an independence referendum that resulted in KRG losing 1/3 of its territory and a lot of oil. Meanwhile the Syrian Kurds are bereft of any semblance of the reality of their situation, and have shown twice that they would rather be ethnicly cleansed by Erdogan's mob of cannibals, murderers, extortionist, rapists- and some, I assume are good people child beheading jihadi nutbars too- instead of dealing with the reality that they're less than 10% of the population and simply aren't going to get massively special treatment. And the US whether it's Obama, Trump or Biden leading is simply not going to go to war with Turkey for a bunch of anarchists no matter how many died fighting ISIS.

You are, they just aren't being publicised much. There's a bunch of new US troops in Saudi Arabia, for example.

They're kind of claiming the reverse I think, with RTX I/O. Don't need so much vram anyway because they'll be pulling stuff off the ssd super quick? Dunno, I kind of glaze over after too much marketing speak. I simply don't see how a 30$ more expensive 3070Ti can work as a product though- there's little to no extra profit margin built in and in makes the standard 3070 look like a bad buy. My assumption is that a 3070Ti would be the top binned chips as well as have the extra memory to justify a ~600$ price tag.

That's isn't really a good analogy though, because people don't go to Mark Zuckerberg and politely ask to use Facebook for half an hour in the afternoon in the summer; while Mr G. Dog esquire offers the use of his pool while paying for the maintenance, water, installation etc out of the goodness of his heart and general love for humanity. Nobody is going to have a problem limiting access there as much as you want. Mark however plonks a big sign outside which says "All access free swimming pool, sign up now". And then sticks a load of mics and facial recognition cameras around the pool and sells access to the local ice cream man/ fast food man/ sunscreen salesman/ parasol rental agency/ deck chair renter/ local and federal law enforcement etc etc. At that point it's not just someone's private swimming pool for personal use in much the same way a restaurant focusing on grilled food- even if they don't charge for the food, but maybe charge for the drinks or a table or whatever- is a restaurant and cannot claim to be the same as a private barbeque instead. Monopoly still has the same definition it always had. Regulators tend to go for companies for 'abusing market dominance' or similar though, or 'monopolistic practices'. For example, that's what they went after MS for when they bundled free Internet Exploiter, not being a monopoly per se. That's also what the Euros are going after Google for; using search dominance to embiggen their own services in other areas, at the cost of alternatives.

They wouldn't really have to explain beyond there being demand for cards with more memory- which there clearly is, whether they need it or not. I'd presume a putative 3070Ti would come more or less half way in price between 3070 and 3080. Minimum price difference would surely have to be $50, wouldn't be much point in the segmentation otherwise.

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.