Zoraptor

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.

I tend to assume that most professional pundits are either literally or effectively paid to hold whatever view they hold, since there's a vast difference between being a pundit and an expert. Maybe not directly paid; but you're a lot more likely to be asked for your opinion and get a position in a think tank, panel show, exposure for your website etc if the person asking the questions can be guaranteed they're going to like what you say, or like the clicks you bring in. What is really needed is a specific 'no confidence' option rather than generic ballot spoiling or write in votes for novelty 'candidates'. 2017 French Presidential election; 1 out of 8 people (4 million in absolute terms) who bothered to turn up and choose between oleaginous corporate lickspittle Macron or odious crypto-ish fascist Le Pen chose to spoil their ballots instead, and that's in addition to the extra 4 million people who didn't vote at all compared to 2012's contest. That certainly didn't stop media trumpeting Macron's 'landslide' victory as a triumph of democracy though.

Went on sale at 3am here, sold out by (earlier than) breakfast time. That's with no 5900/50X though as they're coming in next week. ~20USD markup over US prices, which is way less than for most products. I do have to admit that despite deciding not to get a 5000 due to the pricing and dead socket AMD's marketing has got me reconsidering, so I won't be altogether disappointed if there isn't any Ryzen/ Radeon stock through to beyond Christmas.

Sky News Australia == Uncle Rupert's Australian mouthpiece, much as Faux News is his US one.

Killjoys got two (?) seasons to wrap up. That was the deal Dark Matter would have had if they'd cancelled Killjoys instead, one suspects the deciding factor was that Killjoys was incredibly cheap to make.

Supposedly the 20GB 3080Ti is now reinstated as a forthcoming product. Rumoured, rumoured cancelled, now rumoured reinstated; it's Schrodinger's GPU and you'll only know whether it exists when it turns up. (Still say that a 12GB version with the full bus makes more sense, but I guess having more VRAM than RX6_00 is more important as a marketing point)

Trump 'wins' on the night, Biden win after counting finishes for me. Which may be an interesting aftermath, to say the least. After being repeatedly told that 2020 was not 2016 and the same mistakes wouldn't be made again... sheesh, the Democrat Party is not a learning animal. I think they'll get away with it- just- this time though. One thing is for sure, Donald Trump may have his limitations as a human being, leader, husband everything else; but he's got the most absolute talent for effective campaigning I've seen from anyone, win or lose.

It's not surprising, they use previous patterns etc for predictions which is why they predict some states almost instantly. Say small rural booths report first, as they have less counting to do, and such booths usually vote R. Result therefore skews R early. The big urban booths from, dunno, Richmond or the Washington outskirts are bigger and report late, and they historically skew heavily D. If they're historically 75/25 in favour of D and are projected to stay that way Biden wins, easily.

The zipline incident was almost certainly deliberate. He may go out of his way to appear goofy to appeal to the common man, but Alexander Boris de Feffel Johnson (yes, really) is actually so competitive he'll steamroll Japanese children to win.

If your choices are 2020 model Biden or Donald Trump disappointment of one sort or another is pretty much inevitable. New Zealand and Australia have travel advisories out for the US for election related violence. I suspect there may be some passive aggressiveness at play there though, since the US issued covid related advisories for both of us despite the rates here being magnitudanally lower than those in the states.

I wouldn't be overly concerned about VRAM, AMD (and their partnered games) will always imply that you need lots of it because having more is an AMD point of difference vis-a-vis nVidia; especially now when perhaps the main criticism of the 3070/80 (apart from general availability) is low VRAM. I'd suspect the raytracing on the 2080Ti is going to become obsolescent first, which is always a risk for a 1st gen tech.

I'd expect the Intel GPU line up to be 'weird' for at least the first two generations. They will be miles behind in terms of pretty much every value/ power/ performance proposition so will target some very odd seeming segments where they think they can be competitive despite that. Assuming they have any appreciation of reality at all they must know that the first years at very least are going to be loss making for the gpu division. Integrated graphics has a natural home, the very top end professional/ compute/ AI/ ASICs etc have (generally at least) massive margins or 'simple' demands (ASIC) and some scope for innovative novel solutions to find niches, plus the ability to try leveraging Xeon. Consumer... there is some theoretical space with the price inflation of the last few years but Intel cards will be hot, weak and unstable/ not feature complete. Their only real advantage is that they will (or should at least) not be expected to make a profit off them yet so can price aggressively.

Wouldn't say autocrats get that sort of chant much- if they do, it's usually forced so not genuine- but it's certainly the sort of thing you get from cults. Unfortunately the sort of unquestioning obedience/ prosetylising/ mania you get from cults and which is mostly how they 'work' is also very appealing to politicians too.

If it really is the 6800 nonXT I'd say it's better than not bad. That would have been very top end expectation for the 6900XT's RT performance, a week ago. I will be very highly amused if AMD has been sandbagging on the upscaling front as well.

The flip side of being well regarded by fans is that journos will look for anything they can to drag them down.