Zoraptor

First couple of seasons of 24 are pretty good. After that it very rapidly succumbs to threat inflation and scenario repetition. It was still (mostly) entertaining though even when it was stupid.

Because I forgot to mention it previous, the WHO definitely did make one major mistake that should not have been made- opposing travel bans up to at least early February. On that, Trump definitely has a point, and also a point against most Democrats. In hindsight travel bans were the bare minimum that should have happened, and the WHO recommended against them despite acknowledging a month earlier there was human to human transmission. The troubles with that are that the US still hasn't provided any evidence, let alone proof, for their accusations against Huawei. As such, it's being treated by everyone else as being part of Trump's trade war with China- and since he's simultaneously fighting or threatening to fight trade wars with just about everyone else there's no goodwill or benefit of the doubt. Instead, you have Europe wondering if Trump will decide that Airbus or BMW should be the next target after Huawei and China and not wanting to encourage him. Huawei is the typical Chinese loss-leader-to-drive-others-out-of-business (then jack up prices and drop down quality) model of Chinese company, but that isn't the same as it spying. There would be few people (maybe just Sarex) on this forum who'd be happier than I to see NATO fold. But NATO is irrelevant as a counter to China anyway, as it is explicitly a greater North Atlantic 'defensive' pact with its members literally half a world away from China. I tend to agree that the US should pull out of it or reduce commitments to it because I think NATO has long outlived its supposed purpose- but if that happens it will massively reduce US influence, and that has to be accepted as an obvious consequence beforehand. If you want quid pro quo for being in NATO and the largest contributor you got the return in soft power. If Obama claimed Huawei was spyware he'd be taken more seriously than Trump because Obama didn't spend his term(s) deliberately setting diplomatic fires everywhere. A leadership that everyone dislikes has a lot more difficulty getting its way than one that people want to believe is acting in their interests. The anti China treaties are with the likes of Japan, ROK, Philippines, Australia; ie greater Pacific countries. Trouble being that Trump has managed to have problems with every single country on that list too, except Australia. So much so that the Philippines- hardly friendly with China- kicked the US out wholesale a few months ago. Any China containment strategy also requires at least the tacit support of both India and Russia (who can being along ex soviet 'stans) to be effective.

Trouble is, some in the US would withdraw from NATO because others aren't pulling their weight, then wonder why Europe doesn't pay any attention to them and won't support them any more and rail about how US influence has dropped without drawing any connection between the two. And the US can always unilaterally reduce military spending, if she wants to. Nobody wants China to be the sole superpower, that's a false dichotomy. It is a potential result of Trump continually taking enormous dumps on former friends and international institutions for naked domestic political purposes though. If people end up actually taking China's side against the US what does that say about the diplomatic abilities of the US? These things don't happen in a vacuum, they happen as a consequence to deliberate US policies. Trump and Pompeo have asterisked off literally everyone who isn't Bibi Netanyahu, many multiple times on multiple issues. The ongoing collapse of US soft power is an inevitable consequence of that. It may play well to elements of the US domestically, but all the extortion, amnerican exceptionalism and unilateralism doesn't play well with anyone outside the US.

I always find it amusing that the US insisting on something clearly political isn't a bad thing when others doing the same thing is. An organisation bowing to pressure for the US is fine, bowing to pressure from anyone else is the sign of a flawed, corrupt organisation. Meanwhile members of Trump's admin are bringing in wheelbarrows of cash to Florida to make sure that the fricking WWE is labelled as 'essential' and not subject to lockdown; which about sums up how things work and the expectations of Trump's America. You can also pretty much guarantee that the people complaining about the WHO now would be incandescent with rage if a similar approach to that they wanted taken with China were taken with the US. Indeed, we can already see that, China doesn't want it called the Chinese or Wuhan virus, the US does, China doesn't want Taiwan mentioned, the US does, and toys will come out of cot when either doesn't get their way. WHO ain't going to call it Wuhan Flu because you call it SARS-CoV2 or Covid-19 or even generic old coronavirus for a reason- it's a coronavirus, not a flu. Flu is a, uh, orthomyxovirus, generically influenza/ flu (for good reason) and while they do share similarities with coronaviruses like ssRNA they are taxonomically different. Ironically the most prominent and deadly example of actual influenza was Spanish (sic) Flu which very likely originated in... the US and definitely didn't originate in Spain. The US had relatively speaking plenty of time to prepare for covid19, the failure to do so effectively is largely on Trump downplaying everything (with a hearty dollop left over for D and other orange man bad types grandstanding on issues where Trump did do the right thing, like banning travel). China's behaviour has- as pretty much always- been awful with a policy of deliberate lies throughout but the WHO cannot simply invade China to get the true picture. They have also consistently been misquoted by Trumpians trying to run interference. Eg they did not say there was no human to human transmission, they said there was no evidence for it at that time (because, basically, China was lying about it- but they also had no particular reason to doubt them given that other recent coronaviruses with animal origin like SARS or MERS do have very low infectivity). The WHO issued a directive saying there was definite human to human transmission in early January iirc, about two months before Trump started taking covid19 seriously. On a broader front and the broader issue, the US cannot complain about China's growing influence while simultaneously withdrawing from everything and anything half way multilateral they feel like because it isn't a tool for the US, Obama derangement syndrome or simple hubris. That just leads to handing China influence by default giftwrapped on a silver platter. One of the reasons there's so little international support for 'Wuhan Virus' is that pretty much everyone international literally literally hates Pompeo and Trump, and the US has already burnt through almost all of the goodwill that could have got support from Europe and others. No one wants to allow Trump the cover of blaming China, and given the low regard China is held in that really says something about how the current US admin is viewed.

There's a recent Nature article on a similar method. (Which may well be based on the research in/ approach from the webmd link, though I skimmed the references and didn't see a direct link immediately I didn't read through carefully)

I'd disagree with it for a completely different reason- it absolves the Democrat Party for selecting a rubbish candidate, and Hillary for losing to Trump. Fundamentally, in a democratic system you're not obligated to vote for rubbish just because garbage is worse; and doing so is precisely how you make sure that you will always be presented with two bad choices. That approach also destroys confidence in your political system far more effectively than anything else, nothing breeds indifference like being told you have to vote for two choices neither of which you want. Hillary lost to Trump. She lost because she didn't get enough votes where it counted. If she'd have run a competent campaign and been a better and more appealing candidate she'd have won. Those who voted for someone they actually wanted over someone they didn't should take no blame; those giving it to them don't actually believe in a free vote, they believe in a controlled one.

You do have to be online to play Elite Dangerous. That was a minor scandal, as it was kickstarted as having a DRM free option and initially they refused refunds based on its always online status. Both I-Wars are good, and 2 in particular has graphics that stand up very well for an early 2000s game. 1 is a bit more on the sim side of the scale, with 2 being a bit more arcadey (but still on the sim side overall). They were running out of money when making it, so the story in 2 basically implodes in the 2nd half. Everspace is pretty good as well, it's further onto the arcade side of the spectrum than the sim side. Sort of like a space flight version of Faster-Than-Light is probably the best description. While low budget/ kickstarter level it's also quite pretty.

Stirling Moss Tim Brooke Taylor (from covid19) Loved The Goodies as a kid. Time for a Kitten Kong rewatch, at very least.

So, is the US economy open for business again now? I seem to remember Donny promising Easter as the day the magic would have happened by. Buy a bandana and use that, it's about as effective as anything else which doesn't have proper fitting and a proper filter while also being washable/ sterilisable multiple times without the elasticised straps perishing almost instantly. They also make it look like you've joined a cool post apoc street gang while you wait in line to buy your eggs and flour.

Noscript can do that. No idea if it's available for anything other than Firefox though. Given the first scripts I nuke are always fb and greater google services I'd imagine they wouldn't want it on chrome. Only drawback is that most of Raithe's and GD's funny stuff posts show up as a long string of numbers only with fbcdn blocked. (Though should be noted that nuking js on firefox did not also nuke the torygraph's paywall, for me at least. Even the 1-2 punch of private window and nuked js didn't work. Though that may well be my ISP caching the crap out of things to lower its record throughput...)

Dunno, Biden is in the susceptible demographic for c19. Doch, ist Prussen. But proper Old Prussian, not those genocidal g*rmanic manlet 'teutons'. Pity the Poles didn't finish the job properly in the 15th century and spare the rest of the world centuries of harm.

The epidemiologists will be providing a bit more guidance than washing hands, but yeah, while they will have aspects of general population modelling and the like economic modelling won't be their job. There should however be economists doing their modelling as well and if the governmental organisations are competent they should be doing so alongside and in cooperation with the epidemiologists to show the potential effects of each policy and potential best recovery options. My presumption is that most of them are coming up with the same general result: you can have a very severe, quick but hopefully one off effect; or you can spread the effect out over time and hope it isn't as severe overall- and not much else as the situation is both unprecedented in modern times and we simply don't know how c19 and its effects/ treatments will evolve over time. And as much as it isn't a health modellers job to make economic policy it also isn't an economic modellers job to make health policy. Except, maybe, in the US and Brazil. Eh, I'm not sure even competent politicians can really do much else at this point. Several countries have ended up where they are- big example being the US- specifically because politicians have ignored advice from experts in favour of 'saving the economy'/ their poll numbers. I'd give the early effected countries' politicians some extra leeway too; it's often difficult to know which experts to listen to at the best of times, and human nature means that most of the time people listen to the view that tells them everything will be OK over the one preaching doom and gloom, especially when going for the doom and gloom incorrectly means losing your job. Then again our PM* has taken responsibility for almost literally everything politically and done very well out of it, politically, while following the advice of the bureaucrat (a scientist, not lobbyist or career aparatnik thank science) in charge of responding, with the health minister being entirely sidelined from the response and just running the admin. I'd imagine the situation is different in places where c19 has made it to epidemic status and glaring and obvious mistakes have been made as very few politicians are ever going to willingly own a mistake if they can avoid it. *and praise science that she won, and not Ximon Brudges who thinks driving ten hours in a lockdown to attend a fricking video conference is 'essential' work. The essential part is, in actuality, him being able to stand in front of press cameras in person to mumble his stupidities.

It's also been posted at least three times, and it's reverse ownage anyway since Canada's envoy to fricking NATO forgot that Kaliningrad is part of Russia- rather a large oversight for such an organisation.

There's definitely nothing in the later episodes that is worth restarting a stalled watch. Loads of maudlin for the sake of it emotion and incoherent plotting and action scenes.

Watched Picard. It was... OK and I don't regret watching it, though I think I would have struggled if watching it weekly rather than over a week. It completely fell apart in the last couple of episodes and had a substantial number of head scratching moments before that but I think that STD has largely inoculated me against the stupid and sufficiently lowered expectations so that I could park brain in neutral and not rail overmuch against the dying of the logical plot progression. I liked Victor Frankenstein and Captain Aramis (except for the stupid accented holograms) and the rest of the cast was generally OK, most of the problems they had was with inconsistent characterisation- but also no absolute standout like Captain Malfoy or Pike from STD. Though I do have to admit I've always liked Peyton List perhaps a little more than her pure acting deserves. I even got a few lols from the Mass Effect parallels. Also watched Dark on Netflix. From the name I was expecting something a bit, well, dark, but despite its name and being German it's actually an uplifting show featuring time travel and a cast of well adjusted characters whose carefree lives are seldom blighted by any trouble*. Highly recommended. *yeah okay, there might be one or two character flaws on display, and the odd bit of trouble. But nothing you wouldn't expect of a picturesque small German town next to a nuclear power plant in a show called 'Dark'.

Limiting factor for AM5's arrival will likely be when (practically, after) DDR5 gets to mass production. TSMC 5nm is basically functional now and Apple and a few other large manufacturers are set to migrate to it soon, which should free up additional 7nm fab space. AMD has been doing a new generation a year pretty regularly with Zen, so AM5/ [Ry]Zen5/ 5nm in 2021 would not be unheard of. I personally suspect the initial AM5 offerings will be on an advanced 7nm node though, even with the obvious marketing angle of [Ry]Zen5- DDR5- 5nm. Probably also depends a bit on whether Intel's 7nm is or isn't 10nm redux, if it has even standard teething troubles like 14nm had there will not be much pushing AMD onto a more expensive option. The 4000 series laptops have been released recently too with great reviews and excellent power/ performance. [have I mentioned how much I hate AMD's incoherent naming schemes recently?]

Theoretically* at least we'd be including deaths at home and the like before an autopsy. After a few incidents with hospital staff being infected and our first (and so far, touch wood, only) death initially being diagnosed as just flu and forcing a regional hospital to basically shut down they changed the rules so that any clinical diagnosis of/ with covid19 symptoms is assumed to be it, and included in the figures as a probable case- even if there's been a PCR that came back negative. *They could of course still lie about it, if they wanted to, but there's a lot more point when the death toll is higher and a lot more scope for an overwhelmed system systemically under reporting.

The US is far from alone in lying/ 'lying' about the death count. I'd suspect that just about every country with epidemic level infections is underestimating deaths one way or another as deliberate policy to minimise panic. France wasn't counting deaths in either rest homes (ie among the people most statistically susceptible...) or at home in their figures for example, only deaths in hospital. The policy will absolutely be that a lot of deaths outside hospital won't be counted as they aren't 'confirmed' to be covid19, and a lot won't be counted where there are other complicating factors that can be blamed.

Rupert Murdoch: Your appointment to FEMA should be finalized within the week. I've already discussed the matter with the President. Jared Kushner: I take it he was agreeable? Murdoch: He didn't really have a choice. Kushner: Has he been infected? Murdoch: Ah yes, most certainly. When I mentioned we could put him on the priority list for chloroquinoline, he was so willing it was almost pathetic. Kushner: This plague — the poll numbers are dropping to the point where we may not be able to contain it. Murdoch: Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches. Let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them. Kushner: I've received reports they're trying to make voting easier. There's not enough voting booths to go around, and the underclasses are starting to get desperate. Murdoch: Of course they're desperate. They can smell their deaths, and the sound they'll make rattling their cages will serve as a warning to the rest. Kushner: Hmm. I hope you're not underestimating the problem. The others may not go as quietly as you think. Intelligence indicates they're behind the problems in Washington. Murdoch: I have McConnell in place though. I'm more concerned about Fauci. He's relocated to Vandenberg. Kushner: We have other problems. Murdoch: Biden? Kushner: A pretentious old man playing at running the world, but the world left him behind long ago. We are the future! Murdoch: Our propaganda is far in advance of theirs, as is our electronic sentience, and their... ethical inflexibility has allowed us to make progress in areas they refuse to consider. Kushner: The Putin project? Murdoch: Among other things, but I must admit that I've been somewhat disappointed with the performance of the primary unit. Kushner: The secondary unit should be online soon. It's currently undergoing preparations and should be operational within six months. My people will continue to report on its progress. If necessary, the primary will be terminated. Murdoch: We've had to endure much, you and I, but soon there will be order again — a new age. Reagan spoke of the mythical Shining City on the Hill. Soon that city will be a reality, and we will be crowned its kings, or better than kings: Gods!

Trying to show he's too naive or stupid to be Secretary of the Navy maybe? Wouldn't normally be a great strategy, but under Trump both seem to be required for a permanent appointment.

Yep. Surge is important in the general population because a large to very proportion of the general population has some sort of adverse risk factors- they are obese, they are old, they are unfit, they don't eat well, have diabetes, cancer, asthma, smoke etc etc. None of those factors apply to the average sailor on a US air craft carrier at least in theory; and very few apply to anyone on it full stop. That leaves, essentially, those with an unfortunate generic or inherent vulnerability to covid19* alone as the proportion of ship's complement that is susceptible in a potentially fatal manner. The 'surge' that happens in civilian populations happens because all those old, weak, and unlucky people get sick at the same time and all need ICU, ventilators, etc, at the same time. If you're young and fit then the likelihood of needing that specialist care at all is minute, perhaps as few as a couple of dozen on a ship the size of the Roosevelt. For the vast majority of the young, fit, otherwise healthy people that make up the crew of a USN ship covid19 really is 'a bit of a flu' or even less- though of course the actual factual flu is an extremely unpleasant experience with potential long term consequences for a minority, even if you're not at risk of dying. There would also never be 100% infection reached, except in theory. Even with covid19 being a novel virus some people will be functionally immune to it through the genetic lottery that is our immune system (a bit different from asymptomatic carriers). It's still very sensible getting everyone off the ship because they really aren't set up for large numbers of sick people, and even if they aren't in a life threatening situation a proportion of victims will be badly effected in ways that may not be directly fatal but are still dangerous- myocarditis, damaged lungs and other organs etc. You still need to allow for proper isolation which would be very difficult on a warship. *if it were to go full 'Spanish' flu the situation would reverse and young healthy fit people would actually be more susceptible than older people. But it hasn't gone full 'Spanish' flu, and we'd better hope it never does.

Boris Johnson now in hospital as he still has coronavirus symptoms 10 days after testing positive.

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)