Zoraptor

Seems pretty unlikely to be SARS-CoV2. There's always the possibility that it's been floating around for a longer time and only recently became better adapted for human- human transmission though. A lot of respiratory infections are 'non specified viral infections' ('common cold' etc) and if its infection rate was fairly low with ~1% lethality it could easily have hidden for an extended period. But it's more likely to be a false positive from a random common cold coronavirus that has a complementary RNA sequence to the SARS-CoV2 primers.

Being irrational and unpredictable was one of his big appeals to a certain sort of voter. Also don't really need to be told that by that unrepentant war criminal and gobbet of sputum in the pissoir of society John Bolton, one of the people who would undoubtedly somehow manage to be worse than Trump if he were somehow elected.

It will inevitably be over zero though, and I say that as someone who is no fan of the police. Doesn't matter how careful people are mistakes happen and if you're police some of those mistakes will result in deaths, and some of those deaths will look very bad in retrospect. A wrongful death could be anything from someone dying in a police chase to someone shooting at police and a bystander being shot accidentally to someone having a heart attack from the stress and the police not recognising it or thinking that they're faking it. And of course the times police more or less deliberately kill people who don't need to die too, though you can minimise that with proper training/ police culture and rigorous independent oversight. But the only thing you can do is minimise the risk of those things happening.

I wouldn't be overly worried about a supereruption from Yellowstone. The hotspot is tracking under the Rockies (or tributary range) so it's less likely to erupt and if it does you wouldn't be worrying about it for long at least. OTOH if you were in Wellington there were twenty VEI 7+ including 4 VEI8 (super)eruptions in the last million or so years from the Taupo volcanic zone to worry about as well as the potential 7-8 MMS earthquake every couple of centuries. Though at least from a NH point of view most of the fallout from an eruption would be confined to the southern hemisphere. There's also Toba though, which is a lot closer to the equator. I'm just waiting for a new volcano in Auckland- last eruption just within Maori history/ legend, so due another one now- as some hot magma would massively improve the city...

When you've finished the game I'll have a follow up question about this. (I'm thoroughly spoiled because internet drama and not owning a PS4, so won't ask now)

As Keyrock mentioned it's more common than you might think- especially since AMD has open source Linux drivers. There are some things about those that the 'official' Windows drivers could really benefit from, like proper OpenGl support.

Pft, amateurs. We not only have GST on the GST on our fuel levy (revenue not ringfenced for transport, of course) but we also have an utterly regressive- burden borne way disproportionately by those least able to and those who get least benefit from the costs- regional fuel tax with GST on top of that which was sold as financing a bunch of safety and public transport improvements. Oddly enough, every one of those major public transport and safety projects has been delayed or canceled except... lowering speed limits and putting in more speed cameras. It's not the drug itself they alter. Insulin and the other well known and egregious example of adrenaline (/epinephrine: epipens) are way out of even the most restrictive of patent systems and cannot be incrementally 'improved'. Instead they alter either formulation or delivery system. Aided by the utterly incompetent USPTO*- "Basmati Rice was invented by RiceTec in the US"/ "Turmeric was invented in Mississippi, we're granting an exclusive right to sell in the US based on that" / "Yellow beans brought from Mexico are a novel US invention, feel free to go back to the market you bought them from and demand royalties- you can near perpetually alter formulations to extend patents there. It's that way because of little b bribery though- since that's what 'lobbying' amounts to most of the time. It's no accident that every time the US gets involved in trade deals you get a load of utterly reprehensible 'IP protection' designed to force other countries to subscribe to the broken US patent system and forgo generics; and the amount of lobbying involved to maintain and try to export that broken system is ridiculous. Which reminds me, must just about be due for yet another Disney lobbied extension to copyright to protect Steamboat Willy. *to be clear, people who work there are still, iirc, paid on the basis of number of patents approved, not on work done so it's the system framework that is broken.

General VAT goes into the Consolidated Fund or equivalent in- so far as I'm aware- every single country that charges it. Consolidated Fund = general spending, not ringfenced for a specific purpose. (Actually ringfenced spending is quite rare, despite the number of specific levies made by governments. Almost all of them go into general funding...) Sweden's health care system is ~11% of GDP (~5k USD /c). The US health care system is ~17% (~11k USD /c), so roughly 50% more expensive. [source: OECD] Multiple other reasons besides that too. Without a unified negotiating body purchasers such as individual hospitals have far less leverage when negotiating prices. Lots of low grade payola and influencing results in lots of unnecessary prescriptions, which drives overall costs up. Little downward price pressure on many drugs because if you need the medication your alternative is literally dying, in some cases. Awful regulation that allows gouging and an institutional dislike- sometimes due to what is essentially bribery- of using generics even when they're both legal and significantly cheaper. Some of those are still present with 'single payer' systems as well though of course.

The bar graph shown is not facsimile table 14, certainly. But, crucially, table 14 is the source of their stats; and the stats used in that graph are completely accurately (albeit potentially misleadingly) taken from there. To be specific about what they've done, intra-ethnic (as opposed to inter-ethnic) violence incidents listed in table 14 are not included in the graph. So of 3.5m white victims of violence 62.1% (about 2.3m) involved other whites as the perpetrator and those aren't shown in the graph. The 15.3% of violence against whites perpetrated by blacks however is accurately represented as the ~547k cases shown in the bar graph. I think we can allow an error of .08 of a person from rounding. (There are of course potential problems with drawing a conclusion from the stats shown in the bar graph, or indeed from the raw data in the report beyond most white and black perpetration of violence having the same skin colour as their victims)

I'd be willing to bet that you have, just under a different name*. In most of the anglosphere it's called 'excess' rather than 'deductible', no idea what it would be in Polish though, and it's been on every property type insurance policy I've ever had. It's an amount set to stop frivolous claims from gumming up the system in theory at least, practically it's to keep costs down and discourage small claims in general. So if you put a hammer through a wall in the house while putting up a picture frame while that would technically be an insurable incident you don't claim on it because the $1000 excess is more than just going to the hardware store for some filler and a can of paint yourself. Having said that, waiving excess is not uncommon, the one time I've had to make a claim they waived it (house fire which I put out before the fire brigade arrived, their assessor even got them to pay for a replacement fire extinguisher). *Don't bother with the wikipedia article on deductibles though, it's 100% US centric. Much as I might dislike Trump and his response to covid that did make some sense in the context of reported cases. He was claiming the US response looks bad because they are doing a lot of testing so detect most cases, and if they did less testing the stats would look better. Which is true, so far as it goes. India and Brazil at least would have far higher reported cases if they were doing more testing, and neither would be doing well in terms of reporting deaths; and even in OECD level countries excess deaths in the UK are ~20k higher than the formal covid death toll (and even the official death rate is 2x that of the US per capita). We also have our first cases in over three weeks. Thanks to some tearjerking reporting about how inhumane it is for quarantine to be enforced on grieving families and a judge deciding to overturn the no exceptions rule the two effected people traveled all the way from Auckland to Wellington too for a funeral. Cue multiple surprised pikachu faces and selective amnesia from the media who'd been complaining about the 'inhumane' policy for the previous 3 months. Ho hum.

I see the number strings only as well (due to Firefox's anti tracking nuking fbcdn and similar, I believe), but meh, not an issue. I quite liked the text descriptions of the missing images that occasionally cropped up since about half the time I could guess the image from that and the other half the time they were amusingly random, but they seem to have stopped.

There's till plenty of decent spec RAM around without RGB, and lots of fans/ cooling without them too. Motherboards and video cards... not so much. Think they presume that you'll either turn the RGB off using their software or buy a closed case if you don't like it.

The really embarrassing thing is that there's a non zero chance of Trump actually believing Erdogan's twaddle which is why he's tried it.

No active cases here at all now, and no new cases for more than 2 weeks. So all restrictions (except those on international travelers) are being lifted at midnight. Time to pop the cork on the Lindauer, at least until the inevitable asymptomatic Avatar or America's Cup person brings it back in again despite the 2 week quarantine.

Buying excess military stuff is a bit of a trap- it's pretty cheap to buy but extremely expensive to maintain (which is partly why it's cheap to buy, of course). Ultimately it's to do with 'tough on crime' rhetoric being popular with voters in most places and you can't visually get much more 'tough on crime' than cruising around in a vehicle designed to survive being blown up by an IED in Iraq even if it has a gallons per mile stat instead of miles per gallon one.

Bad news for the follicly challenged, it appears that baldy Ballmer types are significantly more likely to get covid19 than hirsute Fabios. (Ironically, it's because baldies have more androgens and are thus more 'manly' than girly men with flowing locks)

Lancet didn't pull support for the article, the authors of the article withdrew it as being unverifiable due to not being able to distribute the raw data for peer review.

The study we were talking about previous page in The Lancet has been withdrawn as the data cannot- or 'cannot'- be sent for independent peer review due to licensing/ privacy concerns. Or alternatively because it's a load of old bollocks. So we're back to status quo ante with HCQ not really doing much of anything at all about covid19 instead of it being actively dangerous and increasing risk.

Kane is already a mayor. Of Knox City, iirc.

Finished Deus Ex Human Revolution. Overall I liked it a lot and it's a worthy predecessor to the original game, though there's tons of minor stuff to criticise like the stupid cutscenes for so for so many in game actions. A 5 second break for every takedown was nearly enough to send me homicidal instead especially when you needed to do something else after it quickly and couldn't be sure when you'd get control back. Boss fights were utterly pointless, but on the positive side even on the hard difficulty were pretty trivial to win once you knew to employ tactics cheesier than the Encyclopaedia of Curd Based Dairy Products. For some reason the sniper rifle scope was out by about half an inch too (I'd suspect 1440p ultrawide to be the culprit, except everything else with a scope worked fine). The plot was, of course and as is tradition, a pastiche of pop culture clichés held together by some puffed up pseudo intellectual dialogue, and was all the better for it. The one thing I absolutely cannot excuse was Dr Kavanaugh's New Zealand accent in the DLC. Made the Ocker 'thinks fir gitting mi een' girl from the original sound like a true blue ridgy didge Sydneysider in comparison. Overall though it had a good dose of all the stuff I loved about Deus Ex, and most of the complaints are minor annoyances and nitpicking. Having said that, perhaps the most serious problem with it was a bad case of Cutscene/ Scripting Derangement Syndrome. I'll spoiler it just to be safe

Well, akshually... "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." -- Donald Rumsfeld So sometimes you do know what you don't know.

Pretty much the same, and Beth got away with it multiple times before Human Head made it public. Likely that this isn't the first time 2k has done it either.

https://twitter.com/FAARMYOfficial https://usa.liveuamap.com/ Would have thought that the ultimate remedy was the willingness of people to follow legally questionable orders, especially in the armed forces. It's one thing to filch money off other projects to build the wall Mexico was going to pay for, it's quite another to try and order in the troops to do something they clearly aren't needed for and know they aren't intended or equipped for. Most likely all rhetorical anyway, don't see it as anything other than posturing by Trump to look tough. Kind of ironic that so many little government types approve of the threat because it's Trump making it, but then Trump Derangement Syndrome works on both sides of the aisle.

He'd be using the underlined passage as justification. [Hang on, has the 'remove formatting' button gone now, because I loathe dozens of dangling links making my posts look untidy? Honestly, Xenforo is going to end up with just a 'submit reply' button in a couple of years at this rate. Seldom used feature bro, just stick it into notepad bro...] I would not have thought that the criteria were met, but then I'm not an inveterate narcissist with a fragile ego. Would be interesting to see if the army actually obeyed any order to act, but chances are this is just limp richard posturing from Trump trying to look 'strong' (like clearing the WH environs for a walkaround because China made fun of him cowering in a bunker over the weekend) rather than something he's actually going to do.

At the moment the worst damage to, er, faith in science comes from deliberate politically motivated misrepresentation. Some from the Chinese, especially the local Wuhan authorities, and some from Trump types trying to cover their own arse. Plus some at least theoretically apolitical conspiracy theorising. A certain amount of charlatanism and snake oil selling is to be expected in any crisis, and it isn't like all scientists don't like money. I don't think it will matter if they come up with an effective vaccine. Even without a full peer review you'd still have to make it past the editorial board or equivalent of a journal like The Lancet, and they should be able to pick up most fakes at that stage. The old joke- such a knee slapper, makes me smile just thinking about it- is that Gregor Mendel's work on genetics would not even have made it past a modern editorial board because his data was too perfect and they'd assume it was faked.