Zoraptor

They're not wacky- they're near exactly the view that got New Zealand to covid eradication. The position here is still that you are not encouraged to wear masks, despite the media constantly trying to drum up hysteria. If you do the other stuff properly you don't need masks. 'If', of course, being the operative word. The pro/ con balance has shifted in places with very extensive outbreaks and minimal other measures taken, but you certainly don't need masks for a successful response- and if I lived in the US or UK I'd be wearing a mask, if for no other reason than me not wanting to be a knob without good cause.

Same thing here as well, with lots of complaints about letting NZ citizens in from 'virus hotspots' like Pakistan and India. Of course, about 3/4 of those who have come home infected actually traveled from the UK and US, but that doesn't trigger the average facebook commentator quite as much because they can pretend they were all their nieces and nephews returning from their OE. Can't legally ban citizens from returning anyway, end of the day they have to be let in unless you're going to do the other stuff the stereotypical FB commentator wants like suspend habeas corpus and give the military (but not that commie Jacinta) power to put civilians into concentration camps- while simultaneously not letting anyone in and reopening the country to overseas travelers. There's definitely no proof of the source, but there is some pretty good evidence. It's also politically damaging to the Vic premier, so there's a bit of a scramble to spread the blame. (For those ouside A/NZ, the most widely circulated rumour is that the minimum wage security guards at Vic isolation facilities completely ignored all the rules, smuggled people in and out of quarantine and even slipped the odd guest the 3" saveloy on the sly; and at least one of the guests they were, to use that most charming ocker phrase, 'rooting', did indeed bring back more little virusy friends than H.simplex. The bonking part is not confirmed, but a very suspicious number of guards have got sick, early in the renewed outbreak, enough that them ignoring the rules and being the source of the renewed outbreak is the most plausible source so far.

I don't think anyone would hold up the xbone as a model of a successful console*. The hardware in the top model is the best, but it never quite got away from Ballmer's typically scatterbrained vision of an all things to all people but always online media device, with MS taking a cut of everything. They forgot that you have to focus on pushing the essentials like being a good console first and treat everything else as nice extras; which is what Sony and Nintendo did. Still, at least that resulted in a lot of funny Untergang and Bane memes. *To be honest I don't think you would hold up any MS console as a success. Even the 360 had the infamous RROD issues which are lethal financially when you're already selling the units at a loss, and was partly successful because PS3 was a relative stumble for Sony.

While no doubt the State of New Jersey would like to make a buck in these trying times it was the State of Rhode Island that ended up owning KoA. And they sold their interest to Nordic*, hence the remaster. *meh THQ/ Embracer/ DerpSilver or whichever legal entity for the same exact company is actually publishing it.

Pulled this off the 'What is to come thread' since it probably fits better here*... That situation is getting closer to confirmed now- consumer 3000 series very likely to be on Samsung '8nm', only pro and above level cards at TSMC. Ultimate source is kopite7kimi on twitter, who is usually reliable, and there are a fair few supporting articles out now as well (eg Igorslab). Power draws may be a near throwback to Thermi as a result, which I guess will at least give a good reason to buy 1000W+ PSUs again. *That first quoted sentence has more run ons than a rugby match in Dunedin during O week.

I'm sure there's a word- probably in some germanic language- to describe the slight feeling of satisfaction you get from finding out Bolsonaro has caught 'the little flu' after insisting it's anything from a hoax to nothing to worry about. Just a shame he'll no doubt get all the plasma transfusions etc he needs which the average native or favela dweller couldn't afford in a million years. Then again he'll probably die from the HCQ he's taking, to really double down on irony.

My friend, have you heard the good news about our Lord and Saviour Lisa Su AMD?

Meh, just buy some dexamethasone for 8 bucks instead, that even improves survival rate rather than just aiding recovery like remdesivir. Then again dexamethasone probably costs hundreds in the US as well despite being generic.

Syndicate, the Assassin's Creed where you were never quite sure if the next person you met would be some eldritch nightmare because the engine decided skin was a bit too difficult to render.

Lee certainly is difficult to judge fairly as a general. Fundamentally he was fighting for the side that ought to lose- and it's doubtful even a Subotai/ Hannibal/ Marlborough tier general would have 'won' in the end. He was pretty much always outnumbered significantly, and always outresourced. The war should have been lost for the confed early in the east, but was actually lost in the west where Lee wasn't. The Union generals he fought were mostly rubbish but still should have won against him multiple times when they had, at times, around double the troops Lee had available for a campaign. The main trouble Lee had was ultimately he had to win the war, which meant eventually he would have to take risks with an underresourced and smaller army while fighting on the enemy's territory rather than his own. He's mostly criticised for Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg but that was pretty much what Napoleon tried at Waterloo when he was in a similar strategic situation. That is also one of the situations where you have the reverse of the 'blame the subordinates' (blaming Stuart for disappearing for days at Gettysburg is perfectly fair though, the initial blunders were thanks to having almost zero scouting from Stuart) with people saying that Lee should have followed Longstreet's plan instead. Lee was clearly a decent general, in a war where most generals didn't even achieve that. Definitely not top tier though. I'd tend to compare him to Rommel in some ways, people tend to hold Rommel up as (relatively) honourable etc and play up his victories (like Lee mostly won with a large dollop of help from enemy incompetence but against larger and better resourced armies) yet he was a committed- though not extremist- nazi, lost every battle he had to win and for the last 30 months of his career won only one fairly minor battle full stop. Both are lionised beyond their objective abilities and achievements.

Of course they offer WIR free, it's a gateway drug for their fairly pricey War in the East. In terms of detail I don't think anything comes close to the old SPI Campaign for North Africa which tracked detail down to the water requirement for Italian units to boil their pasta rations in. And that was a late 70s boardgame...

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.