Zoraptor

Hmm, let's see what the Donald Trump of 8 years ago has to say about US Presidents attacking Iran... Truly, a prophet of our times.

Trouble is, who would actually create a TCP/IP replacement that doesn't have control mechanisms built in? Not China- but equally, not the US or any other western country. Indeed, if a western backed replacement like NDN got traction you can pretty much guarantee that every single security improvement touted by it would instantly get turned into an air quoted version by a plethora of backdoors built into the encryption, and no doubt there would be controls of pretty much the exact same type proposed by the Chinese added to the protocol itself by western powers wanting to defend against 'terrorist propaganda' 'external threats and bad actors' 'fake news' or anything else deleterious to the public spooks and politicians' good. Of course, they'd be used to 'protect' their own citizens, the diametric opposite of any Chinese proposal that would be used to oppress their citizens, by, er, doing exactly the same thing. It would all be very good having an independent group of scientists, computer experts or whoever come up with a country/ ideology agnostic, secure, and genuinely control free new protocol that also fixes the flaws of TCP/IP, but to get adopted it would have to be backed by the same sort of people who are currently desperately trying to destroy any and all encryption they don't control. The Chinese would also definitely work on network type stuff intended or potentially only for use in China. They're spending billions upon billions removing their dependencies on compromised western tech- fabs and CPUs to avoid the NSA backdoors of IME/ PSP (Zhaoxin), creating a SWIFT alternative, creating an Android alternative etc etc.

They don't really own any 'standards' though. They make #g repeaters/ exchanges and other internet/ telecommunications stuff which anyone can do. They have some patents for 5g and other IP, but so do others; and to a far greater extent. The vast majority of 'standards' are owned by and exploited in the cause of the west with the rest of the world meant to simply accept it. They may well try and apply leverage at some unspecified time in the future, but that's hardly unique and it's totally hypothetical. OTOH the US leveraging its standards- Android, threatening fabs/ chip makers with exclusion from the banking system if they don't drop supply to Huawei- so the rest of the world is forced instead to buy infrastructure replete with NSA spyware- is 100% non hypothetical and demonstrably happening right now. (Huawei's economic strategy is an entire different matter, and it certainly does follow the trajectory of other Chinese State Backed enterprises- loss lead to drive out competition; then jack up prices and down quality once market dominance is achieved and if anyone threatens that dominance revert to step 1 until they've run out of money. They are however only in the preliminaries of step 1 of that, and there is zero realistic chance of them getting to step 2 due to national security concerns)

Huawei has no leverage. What are they going to do, turn off the infrastructure? Refuse to upgrade it? Perhaps they could cut out the intermediate steps and just abolish their international arm and gift its business wholesale to Cisco/ Samsung etc etc. The US would love that. The sad fact is that liberal western democracies object to the source of the proposal and them not having control, they do not object to the spirit of it- per NSA intercepting Cisco shipments to add spyware, Intel's IME and AMD's PSP and a host of other examples. Indeed, given the complete lack of actual evidence about Huawei's malfeasance and reliance on, basically, racist dog whistling from Pompeo and friends I'd submit that the main reason, ultimately, for these articles is that Huawei still won't put NSA spyware into its systems. The presence of some completely theoretical Chinese spyware or them wanting to supercede TCP/IP and DNS- both of which are deeply flawed- at some point in the future is somewhat, er, trumped, by the west doing the exact same thing, provable spyware and having its own TCP/IP/ DNS replacements under development since 2014. Pretty much 100% 'do as I say, not as I do', and the articles are modern yellow scare.

That is two weeks old, and they did drop the suit and offered 'free licensing' instead. Which, hopefully, no one took them up on as that would just validate an utterly ludicrous patent that should never in a million years have been granted in the first place (US patent 8283155, don't think the USPTO allows direct linking but its easily accessible via PATFT). The 'patent' they were trolling was literally for any portable system which could read samples of bodily fluids and communicate with a base unit. Unsurprisingly, such systems existed well before some abject gibbering moron in the USPTO granted them their patent while drooling onto his keyboard and being amused at the magic desk accessory that made night into day if you pushed a button. They existed before they filed the patent- I used a portable system in 2001 that was as described. I don't think anyone would particularly care if the US inflicted its own brand of IP stupidity solely on itself, but as with other infamous cases like Larry Proctor's Mexican yellow bean patent and Ricetec 'inventing' Basmati Rice the- deliberately- broken patent system is used to kill competition and extort rather than protect actual inventions. Then, the US has the temerity to lecture China about respecting IP...

Wow, that show had Christopher Lee in it. Would have thought he'd be pretty memorable too, even if it was before Star Wars/ LotR made him recognisable to a new generation. Checked wiki and you probably were remembering Robin of Sherwood, I remembered a lot of spooky lighting and the like for Herne etc but it looks like it had a fair bit more outright magic than I remembered.

Had Herne the Hunter looking a bit like a Leshen from TWitcher 3, but it was more mysticism than outright magic if memory serves. Also had a very memorable Clannad soundtrack which I'd suspect would be the first thing most would remember about it ("Roooooooooooooobin, the Hooded Man")

Even if you're trying to be careful you're battling a bunch of near autonomic functions constantly. It's like watching politicians and experts advising people not to shake hands and then shaking hands at the end of the press conference- it's just done automatically unless you're actively concentrating on not doing it. Which you can't do all the time, especially if stressed. Most people would touch their faces hundreds of times a day without any conscious thought and it really is hard to stop doing it because you have to actively think not to do it, and if you're shopping there are a lot of distractions. I'll go shopping on Monday and I'll likely forget to be careful at some point and that despite having done some relevant training. I guess some people will actively be being knobs about things, but most people simply won't be able to concentrate all the time on not doing multiple things that they usually do without thinking about.

No deaths here so far, but we do have our first person in intensive care. The country is two days into a full lockdown- I'm 4 days in, due to having both my parents staying with me now and them being over 70. I do rather suspect there's a lot of mild/ asymptomatic covid19 cases around that aren't getting counted in the stats, but 350 cases and no deaths yet seems to be pretty good going overall. Me having what is, almost certainly, a bog standard seasonal cold at the moment is not great timing. I'd also suspect that given the number of asymptomatic cases showing up in some of the mass testing that the mortality rate is, fortunately, a decent amount lower than 3%.

Meh, I kind of loathe the term 'ethnicity' and 'race' since they seem to mean whatever is convenient at the time and are used subjectively all the time. Despite all the inbreedings and invasions- romans, angles, jutes, saxons, vikings and rebadged vikings- there's no significant objective difference between English and other Celts- it's all learned stuff like which language they speak. Same for the Russian/ Ukrainian/ Byelorussian ethnicities. So far as I'm concerned they're all Celts or Ruthenians/ East Slavs because there are scientifically discernable differences between those groups, but not between the subgroups.

Russia has next to no Arab population. It does have a large muslim Tartar population, but Tartars are Turkic, not Semitic. I'd be pretty sure 80%+ of Russia's population is white though. And yeah, census 2010 gives 80.9% Russian (sic) ethnicity by itself. I don't have any problem with it being called the Wuhan Virus or similar, it's accurate and discrete enough to be useful. But yes, Trump is certainly insisting on calling it the "China Virus" to try and deflect blame for the handling of the crisis away from him and onto foreigners for purely political reasons. If the rest of the response had coherence and competence I think people would largely ignore the dog whistling, but unfortunately it's very far from it. His press conference yesterday was an utter embarrassment, and he's going to get a lot of people killed trying to bullasterisk away a virus in the same way he tries to get rid of other problems.

There's definitely US forces in New Zealand as well. The supply for their Antarctic bases is run out of here, and while the bases are (theoretically at least) civilian much of the supply is done by the USAF from Christchurch.

Went shopping today a bit earlier than I had planned today, busy but shelves mostly stocked fine. Half an hour later they announced a move to a total shutdown by Wednesday, cue pictures of queues out of supermarkets and hundreds of cars waiting to get into the car parks...

Eh no. It would be nice if WaPo actually read the material they cite; 2.2 million is their worst case scenario*, and that excludes any extra deaths from other causes due to the health system breaking down. (Technically the absolute worst case scenario would be ~50% infection rate with 3% of those infected dying, or about 5-6 million people for the US. Fortunately, that is highly unlikely no matter how incompetent the response is) *p7 "In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality."

BG1's was worse as they took absolutely no account of the awful pathfinding when designing their dungeons. BG2's was still pretty bad, but a massive practical improvement since they (mostly) took the bad pathing into account during area design. BG1 on the other hand had narrow corridors that any two wide+ party formation- ie all but one of them- couldn't fit into, replete with traps, and was a recipe for one character to wander off randomly triggering every one of those trap and attracting every annoying monster in the entire level. That made the Firewine (? been years since I played) dungeon and Nashkel mines even worse than their already poor base design. Even in more open areas it still wasn't uncommon to have one character charge off in the opposite direction when their path was temporarily blocked by someone else. PoE's pathfinding wasn't perfect by any means, but was still near infinitely better than most IE games.

IIRC PS4 and XB1 were a lot more even sales wise in the US than anywhere else (just about everywhere else it was a bloodbath in Sony's favour).

I was pretty surprised going from m2 SATA to m2 NVMe at the difference it made to loading times. They seem to be very keen on 'instant resume' and the like, so a lot of throughput will help with that. I would be surprised if it maintains the 2.2GHz though, same way as a discrete graphics card won't permanently maintain its boost clocks. I'd suspect that the rumoured 9 ish TFLOPs- so a bit under 2 GHz clock- is what you'd get for routine operation.

Following the XXboxSe specs, Playstation 5 specs: So slower on the CPU/ GPU front than the SeBoxXx by a bit (not as much as was rumoured; but they do note variable frequency), but the memory I/O is around twice as good like/ like.

The cheap solder only really mattered because the thermals/ cycling was so extreme though. The trouble I have is how similar the specs are to the desktop equivalents and the level of cooling those desktop equivalents require. Yeah, MS will have some sort of bespoke solution and it will be mass manufactured to reduce costs, but there's a limit as to how small and efficient a 300W single chip cooling solution can be, and the heat has to go somewhere. Poor ventilation or dust accumulation is only going to make things worse. Fundamentally, one of the reasons why consumer chips have overheat protection is that it can and does happen and throttling (or at worst shutting down) protects from permanent damage; but supposedly this chip doesn't have throttling.

Final Xbox Series X specs released... Which theoretically gives the performance of a nearish top line current gaming PC. Practically... if it actually functions to those specs I wonder how on earth they're going to cool it. The closest desktop equivalent parts (3700x, 5700XT*) get to around 290W, or the equivalent of having three old incandescent bulbs inside a console case. Obviously console parts simply cannot be that hot, but the insistence is also that the sexbox won't have thermal throttling and those specs are (again theoretically) about what the desktop equivalents have in terms of frequency and the like. And what happens when its been sitting in a cabinet over summer or picked up a load of dust a year in. It will definitely need something pretty nifty cooling wise to stop RROD 2.0. *which is a gen behind, but 30% extra CUs in the console chip is extremely likely to eat up efficiency gains going from RDNA 1 to 2.

I've definitely seen reports that you can be simultaneously infected by both strains. The 'reinfectivity' may well be like the 'reinfection' people got from Ebola when they recovered and then tested positive- there's a low grade reservoir in areas that are not well served by the immune system such as the fluid in the eye; but it's largely irrelevant as you aren't infectious to others unless you rupture your eyeball. Nobody really knows what the best model for covid-19 is which is part of the problem. Will it be like SARS, or will it be like the 'cold' causing corona virus we already have? While only a minority of colds are caused by coronavirus people tend to get multiple colds per year, and immunity to the version caused by coronavirus isn't permanent. And, if we want to talk worse case, there's always the possibility of a Spanish Flu type event where mild infections prime people for a cytokine storm from a different strain later on. I'm not usually one to agree with Alexander Boris de Pfeffel but the UK approach is justified if the decision has been made that spread is inevitable and will happen whatever precautions are taken.

KOTOR 2 was pretty obviously inspired by certain aspects of the then current SW Expanded Universe, which included a prominent Kreia like figure (Vergere) and a species of force independent inter galactic invaders (Yuuzhan Vong). So killing the force had not (so far as I am aware) been explicitly dealt with, but it was a fairly small step to get there from where they were.

NWN2 had a new renderer, underlying stuff was from NWN1's Aurora though. And of course The Witcher (1) used Aurora as well.

So did I in reality. I was always a bit disappointed either he or Qara ended up fighting you at the end.

While I disagree overall the last bit is the most important reason as to why I would not pick K2; I'd also add that the similarities to Planetscape Tournament are also a factor. K2 is very much a try at deconstructing Star Wars the same way as PST deconstructed the typical D&D game/ campaign and shares some very obvious and direct similarities thematically and plot wise. So if you wanted to play a K2 like game thematically you could always play PST instead. If you wanted the same sort of deconstruction applied specifically to Star Wars you can go read Traitor or some of the other EU stuff dealing with Vergere- as it's pretty obvious Chris Avellone had done before writing K2- or an alternative type of deconstruction like Shatterpoint. So to my mind the question if I had to pick one Obsidian game to save is effectively "which of their best game is most unique?" which is Alpha Protocol. There isn't much to separate it from MOTB*/ FONV/ K2 in terms of personal preference, but those games all have obvious alternatives I could play to get a similar result, AP doesn't really. *Not NWN2 OC though. Don't think I've ever had such a negative reaction to one NPC before but he completely ruined the game for me.