Zoraptor

At least one bar here has Corona on discount so long as the coronavirus is active. Bit in bad taste really, and the idea of discounting the beer while people are dying isn't the best look either.

Going on social media and trolling is easy, and when you have strongly polarised political poles it's also very effective because either side will often literally literally believe anything that makes the other side look bad, no matter how ridiculous that thing actually is. You don't have to do much actual work at all, you can throw masses of illogical stuff at a wall and see what sticks, and the social part of social media does all the real work of propagating it. You also don't have to make one side look good, just making the other side look bad is enough; and you don't have to convince everyone either, you just have to convince some. And yeah, it's kind of funny that blaming Russia ends up using exactly the same phenomenon that the Russians took advantage of in the first place- telling the D establishment that they didn't really stuff up and it was all the dirty Russians' and their patsy Trump's fault, and the US in general that people don't really believe crackpot theories at the drop of a hat they're just manipulated by a foreign power to do so are exactly the sort of simplistic but appealing stuff that the Russians put out there. It's always more appealing to believe that the boogeyman did it than to admit that you made a mistake.

Eh, that's the same sort of thing where you have media claiming Trump wanted senators 'murdered' because he wanted 'heads on pikes' for potential disloyalty in the impeachment. The media that does that does that because they hate Trump*, not because they seriously believe he literally wanted, say, Mitt Romney hanged, disemboweled, torn apart by wild horses and the pieces distributed for public display to Los Angeles, Seattle, Salt Lake City or New York with the head surmounting the Capitol building attached to a weapon borrowed from the Swiss Guard. He just wants it done figuratively. Same with Bankers-against-the-wall stuff from Bernie supporters. *Indeed, should Bernie get the nomination it will be interesting to see how the media handle it. He's a greater existential threat to the Jeff Bezoses of the world than Trump, so probably a Bloomberg Corporate Party run supported by CNN/ WaPo etc. I'd suspect they'll try everything and anything to stop Bernie getting the nomination though, and if he doesn't get an outright majority of delegates Someone else will get in via superdelegates.

There are a lot of coronaviruses in humans and animals, if the scion of the current coronavirus isn't commercially important it may take a fair bit of time to work out exactly what it was if they ever do to certainty. They also have a pretty high rate of mutation (partly why people tend to get Common Colds multiple times a year). They have always been worried most about some sort of superinfection where you get something highly infectious but of very low lethality like the Common Cold virus and something barely infectious but deadly in the same cell, as theoretically you could end up with a combination of highly infectious and deadly from that. Fortunately the current virus doesn't seem to be hugely lethal, less so than SARS/ MERS etc at least.

I suspect the top Big Navi will be a decent amount- consistently/ noticeably- above the 3080, but will also be very expensive. OTOH I'm still not convinced that nVidia will be able to produce Ampere in bulk due to TSMC's 7nm process being booked out for most of the year. If that is true we may not get a 3080Ti for some time with a TitanA to capture the price-is-no-object top end.

Trump 'Peace Plan' for Israel/ Palestine is about as lol as expected. Give Israel everything she wants and the Palestinians whatever scraps are left. Even that cretinous bootlicker Tony Bliar who was willing to commit literal war crimes on behalf of the US is having trouble finding things to say that aren't explicitly negative about it and most reactions are distinctly positioned in the 'open to interpretation' range. "It could lead to a meaningful settlement" type stuff where sure, it could, it's technically possible, but everyone knows it won't because it's completely and utterly unacceptable to one side, and literally everything can be taken away by Israel whenever she feels like it. And Bibi has consistently shown he would feel like it whenever under electoral pressure or threatened by a corruption charge. But that isn't being said explicitly because Trump is a complete manbaby and toys would come out of the cot if one of his pet projects is given the derision it richly deserves. Not merely dead on arrival but dead on inception. It's like some fanfic map drawn by a 12 year old who has read a load of D&D sourcebooks. Tunnels in the desert! High tech areas! Grow bananas in the middle of the Negev! Or alternatively and more realistically, Bantustans in Apartheid era RSA.

I'll stick the tweet here since it's off page at 25 posts. She's meant to be paying off 2500 per month rather than per annum. My attempt at the maths involved is... Actual repayments were about 2100$ per month rather than 2500 (165000 total / 78 months ~= 2100 per month). To get a $2500 net repayment at 365000$ you'd need an interest rate of about 6.3% (365000*.063 ~= 22500 of interest accrued /annum, total repayments at ~2100/ month ~= 25000 /annum; that gives the ~2500$ average paid against net debt). Of course that's simplistic for multiple reasons, but, I'd be pretty confident the interest rate does at least work out lower than the 7% quoted by Gfted. So I guess the maths more or less checks out though she has definitely padded the tweet a bit with respect to how much she's repaying a month. Overall it's a similar story to anyone with a mortgage, you start off not paying much at all off the principal in the first years but end up paying off almost nothing but principal in the last years.

That's not even the worst tutorial from Paradox, unfortunately. The Hearts of Iron III one- I'm still not sure if it actually existed or if I dreamt it all up. And their previous system was if anything even worse for pop ups, as you'd go to clear one pop up message and something else would inevitably pop under your cursor at the exact same moment resulting in at best you clearing the new message before reading it, at worse you find that you've just declared war on Russia, Germany, plus the British,m Roman and Ottoman Empires by random event.

If the US does go full authoritarian dystopia they can always rotate their space force logo 90 degrees to get the Blake's 7 Federation logo instead of the ST one.

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.