Zoraptor

So, does anyone really think the Trade Federation is going to invade Naboo? I don't think Gunray has the gonads to personally, without some sort of legal cover. The impeachment trial is ludicrously boring. Jacob Rees-Mogg: even sleeping he's the toffiest toff.

There's also Nordic/ DerpSilver financials. IIRC Nordic (as was, now, haha, 'Embracer') at least is publicly traded. Expecting Epic to share actual sales numbers is a bit ridiculous though- how often does GOG or Steam share actual sales numbers for specific games? Basically never; that's why utilities like SteamSpy exist to scrape ownership data. If Valve was disclosing that information you wouldn't need SteamSpy- and we know TWitcher3's sales figures via CDPR. Exodus definitely isn't a AAA game, if it were you'd need a new classification for the GTAV types above it. It's made in a cheap country and neither Nordic nor DerpSilver are AAA publishers. They got a decent amount of publicity, but a lot of that was 'free' from nVidia for going RTX and- lol, since it's actively worse than the alternatives- DLSS.

6/8 pin power connectors come with the PSU. If you're reselling the old PC whoever buys it should get the old PSU's 6/8/24 etc pin connectors as well (plus the use of another brand/ model's PSU connectors with a PSU may literally result in hardware destruction).

She had some clout as a DNC vice chair prior to 2016, and her resignation from that is where Hillary's current animosity stems from. Not much clout compared to Hillary though of course. Indeed, that's why I find stuff like Hillary's "russian asset" or all the DINO claims so amusing- she held a pretty high position in your own party yet she's a closet republican infiltrator and traitor? Doesn't say much for your party then, does it... Or maybe Hillary is just an absolutely terrible and vindictive loser whose failures are always someone else's fault.

Hillary Clinton apparently has a new documentary series coming out. No doubt it will be a fascinating watch in which she reflects on her flaws and why exactly she lost to Donald Trump rather than being a portrait of narcissism and excuse making with a hefty dollop of retribution for perceived slights, based on the promotional interviews she's giving.

I wouldn't doubt it's greener than solar electricity generation, that isn't really all that green (yet) even at low latitudes due to them having a fairly short lifespan, losing a lot of energy in the conversion to electricity and needing to use rare earths and the like. The really effective use of solar is direct water heating systems- literally running water through black hose or an equivalent under sunlight- as it requires no specialist equipment or inefficient steps. Obviously cannot be used every where or every time but you save a lot and quickly when the typical hot water cylinder is 2-3kW even if it's only effective for 6 months of the year. I don't know much about Facebook's approach, the suggestion for using captured heat to double dip on the 'greenness' came from an accountant's idea on how to game a carbon credit system most effectively. It is exactly the sort of thing I'd imagine Facebook would do though.

Watched season 2 of Titans since it's on Netflix now, and I cannot say I was at all impressed. The ending to the Trigon storyline was facile, the season and individual episode story was disjointed and illogical and its ending was even more facile and had a random death which I'm sure was meant to be poignant but instead came across as an incredibly cheap way to try and illicit an emotional response in an episode which was otherwise a trite series of goods triumphing over evils and a season which otherwise was CW level random drama for the sake of drama.

Nuclear is nowhere near the greenest option if you count total costs. But no one ever counts total costs for environmental stuff because the economic system would collapse if you did. IIRC the cheapest renewable energy by a country mile is using solar energy to heat homes' hot water as all it needs is some piping, sun and a dark matt background to absorb the heat. Yeah, that's the accountancy trick of using the excess heat from the servers to heat homes or water or whatever; you can then claim that you're 'saving' that energy and use it to defray your other carbon costs. If you're using hydropower or another renewable type you can easily end up with a- theoretically- carbon neutral or even carbon negative footprint despite using huge amounts of energy for something that is, ultimately, a load of unnecessary wank.

We're already in a green washing race, though of course it's mostly accountancy tricks with carbon instead of dollars- especially so for countries with a carbon credit or trading scheme where you make actual money by padding your environmental credentials. I'm sure some people will believe that MS is 'carbon neutral' in reality instead of just on paper so they can feel virtuous for buying a Surface Pro or xbox or whatever; but yeah, practically MS will be doing the carbon equivalent of licensing their tech at an extortionate rate- which coincidentally is just slightly less than their gross profit in whatever region- from an Irish subsidiary. (To be fair to MS they are far from the worst offender)

Oh Allah (Peace be Upon Him) yes. They have a catchy name ("The Network", would probably work better in arabic though), neckbeards like true salafis, preaching in their places of worship (reddit etc) etc etc. Haha yes. You can add lazy and feckless- and overly sensitive- to that list as well. The absolute state of the PC gaming market can be summed up by comparing 'Good Old Guy' GOG's turnover vs 'Evil Gommie Spywar'e EGS turnover. Exclusives 100% work, outrage is 100% useless and good will is about 95% useless unless you're a corpulent ex Microsoft Seattleite with a knife obsession (and even then it's 99% inertia rather than actual good will). Anyway, for some 100% genuine and true random news, since exclusives 100% work CDPR is making Cyberpunk2077 GOG exclusive which is why they're delaying it for 6 months. In a shocking twist they will then make it EGS exclusive for the next 6 months.

They are, but they generate the names that way precisely because they blend in with the general populace- in the last page or so there are three other posters with similar style names.

Yeah, I'd admit that scripted isn't quite the right word and that's why I put it in quotes- especially since the X labs were my favourite part and they're fairly rigorously scripted. It's more of a subjective feeling than anything objective. The thematic difference is perhaps best summed up by the protagonists; Degtaryev is a soldier whereas in SoC your mission is personal and a lot more mysterious (though of course amnesia is a cliché way to get mystery). I also suspect it's partly because I found companions and significant NPCs had way better survivability in CoP compared to SoC, so tended to have a lot more talking and a lot more team feeling missions in CoP as a result.

Yeah, shame Sega couldn't find a way to turn down that radio. Been a while since I played but that is the only licensed track in AP, isn't it? Can't remember anything else.

I'd suspect that the quests are one of the things that put a lot of people off CoP initially. The first couple you're likely to do can be punishingly difficult or finicky for the stealth one even if you played the first game on its hardest difficulty. The first SoC quest is certainly hard, but it's fair- the first CoP one (from memory) involves radiation, a constricted area and enemies spawning in once you get the object. You also have a pretty garbage gun to start off with despite being a major, not even a full fat AK. You start off worse equipped in CoP but that has an explanation and you can use a silenced Makarov/ sawn off for the 1st mission fine. Personally CoP felt a bit too 'scripted' for my tastes and lacked the chaotic free form feeling of SoC. It also (mostly) lacked my favourite bits of SoC, the fantastically atmospheric X labs and underground sections. Still a good game and definitely worth playing, just not as good as SoC.

Those protests have been going on for months and started well before the assassination (mostly due to a fuel tax increase, this round). Indeed, there's been a cycle of protests in Iran roughly every couple of years since the success in 1979 which was an order of magnitude larger than anything since. Post 1979 they're always overhyped by western media, and since then they have always failed. The good thing about how the media handles it is that you can pretty much guarantee that if there are pictures of a large protest- eg the anti Ahmedinajad ones from about a decade ago- they absolutely will be shown. But so far there have been lots of pictures taken at ground level where the crowds could be a hundred, or a thousand or tens or even hundreds of thousands; however if they were tens of thousands+ there would be pictures shown from a higher angle to show rather than obfuscate the numbers. Apart from that the media have focused entirely on 'memes' like a couple of people tearing down Soleimani posters and some people refusing to step on US/ Israeli flags. Things could change, but these protests are not large, especially so in a city which is multiple millions in population and look far weaker than other, failed, protests were (barely scraping 1% of the big ones eg 2009 by the looks of things). The ultimate problem with protests in Iran is twofold: that the protesters are generally young, urban and well educated which doesn't represent anywhere near the bulk of the population and that the hold of the government over the security services is pretty much unshakeable. The tertiary problem is that the main supporters of 'revolution' are countries like the US and UK which are very easy to paint as being 'imperialists' because, well, by any objective measure they are and their record towards Iran is not a difficult one to make effective propaganda out of.

Well akshually... .. that's an often repeated myth; he was appointed Chancellor by Paul von Hindenburg and not elected to the position. He/ NSDAP got less votes in the election after which he was appointed chancellor than in the previous election (37 July32 vs 33 November32) mostly due to his intransigence being seen as the main reason for the 2nd election; so 2/3 of voting Germans didn't vote for him. He was, of course, wildly popular in the early years when he looked like a success for Germany despite that.

I wouldn't let them off either, morally, but legally it was justified- and in contrast to the other shoot downs the ultimate blame lies with KAL007 flying into completely the wrong area. If the pilots* had navigated properly they'd have been nowhere near Sakhalin in the first place. Didn't deserve to be shot down over it of course, but still. In the other cases the pilots were blamelessly flying as expected on normal flightpaths when shot down, and the fault for their destruction is exclusively with others. *and some blame for the nav system not making it obvious if INS was being used.

The 1st article is certainly based on anonymous sources, but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence to back it up unlike many reports based on anonymous sources. Certainly even if he did not do it to shore up support it had that effect; since there's no 'Wag the Dog' accusation made all it really does it describe what actually ended up happening in terms of R support as being what was intended to happen. And while the NYT is pretty stridently anti Trump the WSJ is owned by stridently pro Trump Rupert Murdoch, albeit it's editorial line is more nuanced than something like the New York Post or The Scum, with both the NYT and WSY seemingly getting the same information independently which always boosts reliability. The 2nd article is verifiably true, and it's not hard to dig up contemporaneous tweets about the assassination attempt on Shahlai and him being thought dead if it were really necessary. Skarpen is actually correct there, at least technically. By a strict definition the only civilian airliner that has been shot down accidentally in fairly recent times was the Siberian Airlines plane shot down by Ukraine during a test firing, where the missile missed the target drone and locked onto the airliner behind it; MH17 (misidentified as IL76 most likely), this case (cruise missile supposedly) and IranAir655 (F14) were all mistakes instead as all hit their (misidentified) but intended target. KAL007 was shot down deliberately having been identified as a civilian type plane, but legally, as it had repeatedly transitted closed military zones and was 100s of kms off target- and there was a genuine spy plane based on a civilian airframe nearby. Of course by common usage most of those incidents are referred to as accidents instead.

No there wouldn't, because Seoul has ~20 million people and even if DPRK didn't have nukes they certainly did have a whole lot of CW that they'd unapologetically fire at everyone in the vicinity. RoK wouldn't go after DPRK because the real world is not a game of Hearts of Iron. Israel and KSA were both extraordinarily tepid in their response to Soleimani being killed- Israel explicitly said it was a matter between the US and Iran only, KSA sent a note via the Omani ambassador stressing that they were not involved (since it was their Iraqi ambassador and the Iraqi PM he was meant to be meeting)- because Iran even without nukes has proved they (well, still officially the Houthis) can make a horrendous mess of their neighbour's infrastructure. Good luck living in the ME when all your desalination plants and power stations have large holes in them. Same with DPRK. Not the same with Libya, nor Iraq in 2003. Eh, they hit what they aimed at. There is no doubt in anyone's minds that they could have done a lot worse if they'd wanted to. The only real mistake they've made was shooting down the plane. Even if they don't get the US out of Iraq- which they almost certainly will eventually as soon as it can be sold as not running away- they will get about everyone else who will find it politically impossible to ignore being told to leave. It's also further reinforced in many people's minds that the US is warmongering and desperate to start a fight, and caused yet more partisan squabbling in the US. I'd put the situation as being similar to when Erdogan shot down that Russian Su 24 back in 2016, with Trump in the place of Erdogan. Even if no one liked Putin all RTE's allies thought he was bonkers for doing it despite Erdogan seemingly thinking it was going to get a great reaction. And there was a lot of 'bad' stuff for Russia around that too, no revenge for the pilots getting shot while parachuting, only sanctions on Turkey, rescue helicopter blown up with a missile. Yet 3 years + later pretty much everyone thinks it was a bad mistake by Turkey instead, while Erdogan is claiming it was all a Gulenist plot carried out by coup plotters and designed to discredit him.

Since so few people read articles it should probably be said that he was looking to beef up support from [Graham types] whom he needed rather than doing it as a direct Wag the Dog type distraction*. That was perhaps balanced by the extremely liberal definition of 'imminent threat' that was used- which turns out to be 'might do something unspecified at some equally unspecified point in the future'- and which actually seem to have annoyed some other R senators. Trump's claims of multiple embassies being targeted is pretty clearly a load of old bollocks. 2nd one has been known for a while as he was initially and briefly reported as having been killed, but then it got rather swamped by Soleimani being targeted. There was even a suggestion that Soleimani was only targeted because their first target was missed. And in further unsurprising news Pompeo says that the US won't leave Iraq even if told to. *The rumour I'd heard previous was that Pompeo pushed hard to hit Soleimani, and Trump wanted to give him a win to stop him resigning. Could very easily be a combination of both.

There are no indications it's a false flag. If it was shot down it was about as definitely as can be the Iranians who did it and no one else. The only blame that could be assigned to the US is around the circumstances and unnecessary escalation OTOH there's clearly a social media campaign under way to assign blame prematurely and with a lack of evidence.

There is footage of a missile strike now, but it's not exactly as unequivocal as made out (most of the objections are listed in the twitter chain). Looks like Trudeau has just made the accusation official now.

Yeah, it's actually not in the slightest bit suspicious but just 'internet expert syndrome' at work. For a recent example Ethiopia didn't hand the black boxes over to 'Boeing' after the 2nd MAX crash and got France to read them; and there is literally no obligation to do so under the rules of aviation investigations (ICAO Annex 13, pdf). It is frequently done, because not all countries have the ability to decode black boxes but in the end Boeing is one of the largest suppliers to the US military so there's no way it's going there and anyone expecting it to is an idiot. Pretty sure it would be the NTSB they'd hand them over to anyway, and the NTSB does not necessarily hand them to Boeing for decoding but may go straight to the FDR manufacturer instead (if it's damaged and they cannot read it themselves). And to run through some more internet expert theories, there is nothing suspicious about no mayday. Making a mayday call is one of the last things pilots do in an acute emergency because keeping the plane flying is the #1 consideration; someone yelling mayday into their mic first thing comes from TV and film dramas not reality. There is also nothing suspicious about a transponder cutting out, that happens pretty frequently in crashes if it loses power (same for black boxes, sometimes they track data all the way down sometimes they don't, depends on the crash). There is little suspicious about holes in fuselage, for example when QF32's turbine fan exploded it put dozens of holes in the wing and fuselage- and it's considered a bit of a miracle that it didn't bring the plane down. There is little suspicious about a plane being on fire before crashing- especially at night. A damaged or even stalled engine with poor airflow will produce a large blowtorch like flame similar in appearance to the only video available (from which you cannot tell any scale whatsoever). It may well have been shot down and it's certainly one hell of a coincidence it happening yesterday, but there's no conclusive or even non equivocal evidence yet.

Iran's Fars News Agency announces Iranian missile strikes on US military positions in Iraq. There's 3rd party confirmation from Reuters etc too of explosions. Better hope it was a mutually agreed response to defuse the situation.

Turns out the 3990X is... $3990. AMD marketing having some fun. Perhaps a bit surprised that the 4000 laptops have fewer and vega cores for their iGPU, though in terms of practical performance that should be outweighed by the improvements to frequency and memory.