Zoraptor

I'd be very skeptical of all the information coming out on nordstream. Pointing solely to Zaluzhny doing a rogue op when he's conveniently fired is, well, convenient. As for people who are facing criminal charges giving interviews to the WSJ... lol. Mostly though, and as always it's the stuff you're meant to forget as soon as it becomes inconvenient. To whit, current story is: Denmark: Multiple 100s of kgs of explosives used. Sweden: 50m of pipeline destroyed with a 250m debris field. Hmm. Also kind of funny if the CIA told them not to do it given the responses. Especially since the article says specifically that Germany was informed.

Apparently German authorities have issued an arrest warrant in the Nordstream bombings for a certain- and I swear I'm not making this up- "Volodymyr Z".

Don't think the NSA would bother when they have PSP (and IME for Intel; and Pluton on newer MBs for overkill) already. (I'm always mildly suspicious when what we're told are 'essential security features' for us are, for some mysterious reason, excluded from or disabled for products supplied to the US government...)

Well... thing is, tobacco is awful. It's the Adolf Hitler of legal substances available without prescription or (much) other controls. Vaping may be the Idi Amin of legally available substances, or, it may not be. Either way, it's still going to be better than tobacco. That doesn't mean I'm a big fan of the big man from Uganda or his electronic puff pipe equivalent, it's just that if you're looking for things worse than tobacco it's meth, crack, heroin type things which are all illegal. In terms of alcohol, if you assume everyone is going to use that responsibly then you have to assume everyone is going to vape responsibly. In reality, you get alcoholics, you get pregnant women drinking, you get drunk drivers, you get drunken brawls and you get all the other negative stuff- including cancers and the like- as well.

Second IAEA statement on the ZNPP fire has been released. TLDR; definitely a fire inside the cooling tower with burnt plastic mesh etc, some evidence of structural damage (eg concrete chips) but no evidence so far of cause for either.

Vaping is far less bad for you than smoking tobacco is for sure, which is why it's used for quitting smoking. It's almost certainly less bad for you than, say, alcohol as well.

The tower itself isn't, but there is plenty of stuff inside it that will cheerfully burn eg fillers. There are UN and IAEA people on the ground, so we'll probably get something out of them beyond their initial statement. (for anyone wondering: it's a cooling tower so the whole idea is to exchange heat rapidly. That needs a high surface area to volume ratio for the water being cooled. They do that with plastic/ synthetics* since concrete is terrible-it's a heat insulator let alone its other physical characteristics- and steel and other metals are expensive, and their reliability goes down massively as they get thinned, ie they corrode more quickly and their structural strength degrades. Normally of course it wouldn't be all that flammable anyway, since it'd be full of water, but it isn't operational. And the cooling tower is when it comes down to it a big chimney designed to draw air up itself. Start a fire and it'll still do its job, of drawing air up... *see here at bottom of page)

And, to be completely uncontroversial, Taiwan's two golds as well? (The eligibility rules for what constitutes a country for Olympic purposes are really weird. OK, so you probably don't want RoChina athletes being forced to compete as PRChinese or Palestinian being forced to compete as Israeli (or vice versa) or refugees being forced to compete for the countries they're refugees from but... Puerto Rico? Guam? American Samoa? Hong Kong? England/ Scotland/ Wales as GB, but Northern Irish compete as Ireland*; and the British Virgin Islands compete separately? *happens in rugby too, hence the Irish team's 'national anthem' being Ireland's Call in rugby rather than Amhrán na bhFiann)

#1 suggestion for future Olympic Games: have a unified West Indies team like in cricket. I feel that St Lucia and Dominica in particular would benefit from this arrangement. This suggestion has nothing to do with the per capita medal table and I would stridently refute any implication that it does.

Can't be worse than what they did to her in Rings of Power.

Surely AMD cannot be thinking of having XT processors. Stupid enough having CPUs and GPUs with the occasional same model number and very commonly similar, they'd end up having the exact same regularly if they brought in XT CPUs as well. Then what 9950XTX3D? XFX could sue them for gimmick infringement at that point. Don't think AMD can really use covid as an excuse for pricing any more. A 9600X here costs 10% more than I paid for my 8 core 1700 back in 2017 (500NZD), if it eventually settles to the same price as as 7600X it will be 20% cheaper though- and still a bit more than a 1600x cost. Though they were cheap GloFo 14nm; one suspects quite a lot of the premium goes to TSMC as effective last man standing for competitive advanced fabs.

Pfft. Early adopters deserve to get reamed on pricing. The 7600X's street pricing is a 45% discount on its MSRP after all, since its MSRP is, well, higher than the 9600X's. If you want to compare it to a skylake iteration, spare a thought for the poor buggers who bought a 4 thread 7600k at premium prices... As for the generational improvement, it's no Bulldozer --> Zen for sure*. But even the 3-5% IPC gain that seems typical is still more in one generation than Intel managed in its 5 skylake iterations. It's also, unlike [skylake iteration], potentially a fantastic improvement for both server and laptop performance due to the increased efficiency. May well have been better received if it was called Zen4+. But anyway, comparison to skylake is hyperbolic. People tend to forget just how bad that stagnation was because Intel was constantly bolting on extra cores and mucking around with the threading. *but these aren't the days of Moore's Law any more; people may just have to buy a deck of cards and deal with it when it comes to incremental improvements.

A comparison to Intel's Skylake stagnation is definite hyperbole. Krzanich would have sacrificed [a moderate number of lucrative share options] to satan to get an ~8% like to like generational improvement instead of, well, the 1% he managed.

Doesn't seem likely it will pin down any more resources than already are. Every source still has far more Russian troops- 100k+- on the northern border than are committed in Kharkov. If it really is a brigade that's inverse Goldilocks; not big enough to require extra resources, not small enough to do an infiltration type attack. And a brigade that isn't deployed in a place they'd potentially make a difference like near Pokrovsk or New York. Still, at least they bagged a Ka52 out of it. Nobody is crying tears for Wagner, probably not even the Russian government. They're disposable and disclaimable, that's the whole point of them. That Africa in general was not going to react well to being turned into a proxy battlefield for Europeans- more than it already is- should not have been a surprise to Ukraine. If nothing else they should have been aware that even the 'pure' Tuareg Nationalists don't just claim parts of Mali, they claim a big chunk of the Sahel including parts of multiple other countries. And the transnational ones they're mixed in with claim everything in a band from the Atlantic to Red Sea/ Upper Indian Ocean coast. They probably don't appreciate the gaslighting about the claims of responsibility either, though that is more minor.

Practically yeah, it was an inevitability whether gaming had the same or not. (I guess the point is that- theoretically- if it all stemmed from gaming/ general software then getting protections for them could (should, in an ideal world) be applied to everything software including service licensing for generic 'hardware' in a sort of pro consumer grandfather clause. It will be hard enough to get them applied to gaming though despite the fractured nature of the stakeholders. You'd be about as likely to get them applied to, say, BMW and Mercedes as to get wolves their protected status back with Ursula in charge of the EU. Though I would mention as I usually do in these discussions that some places do already have guarantees for being fit for use and durable in place for software anyway without the sky falling)

Well, it seems Ukraine wasn't involved in the attack in Mali now. Likely has very little to do with Mali severing ties, but more with Kuleba going to Africa on a trip and likely even more Senegal summoning their ambassador to complain. Senegal if of course still actively part of ECOWAS etc and not appreciably Russian aligned, but is effected by Touareg rebels as well. We also got this gem out of it... per Reuters. I wonder who they got that idea too. per PravdaUA. Oh, so that's who they got the idea from.

Seems likely the ideas came from computing*. They are, after all, all run through/ implemented by computers. Along with ubiquitous internet- though the idea of having to buy a dongle to stick on your M series to get its indicators working is kind of amusing. No doubt it would have happened anyway, but the blueprint is all based on software licensing because at heart that's what it is. *As an example, Steam. Gateway app that is hugely popular for being a gateway app, and people happily/ proudly give 30% of their cash to Valve for- most of the time- doing pretty much nothing. Which company wouldn't want to add 30% to revenue for doing nothing while being potentially thanked for it?

There's a fairly big question whether 'ghoul' is appropriate there..

They wouldn't actually be fully universal rules since for some sports the competitors' sex is irrelevant (eg equestrian). The idea would be that the IOC sets actual rules so that the relevant associations have to be consistent. In isolation, there's nothing wrong with the IOC deciding Lin and Khalif or anyone else can compete and overruling the relevant association, but it isn't in isolation. It's not as obviously inconsistent as the previous Olympics where you had Semenya effectively banned while a fully transgender athlete was allowed to compete, but that was only 3 years ago, and Semenya is still only 33 and could have plausibly still been competing even now. They should have- need, as a minimum requirement- a system to stop bodies like World Athletics or the IBA, though I find the evidence for it being a personal targeting of Lin/ Khalif unconvincing, being able to specifically target athletes. To put it that perspective, World Athletics completely ignored the recommendation that some field events be covered by the same rules and only applied them to the track events Semenya competed in; compared to Khalif beating a Russian a week earlier who remained out of the competition. Given the context of the controversy all being manufactured by Russia now it's also worth pointing out that the most strident competitor critics of the 2016 800m women's event were... a Pole, and a Brit.

Basically anything with a computer suffers from similar issues. The one that got a lot of traction (ohoho) here was John Deere being able to brick their tractors' control/ management computers if you decided not to pay their annual licensing sub or got an unsanctioned repair. Certainly not a recent phenomenon even outside gaming, eg here's an article from 2016 about John Deere's shenanigans.

Yep, show was good and was pretty consistent with the games imo. There's a potential lore mismatch with Fallout 1 I noticed, though it isn't serious- the way the show vaults are shown and where they are located the Master would have found them when he started looking well before the events of F1. I tend to pick things apart for verisimilitude/ 'historical' accuracy and if that's the worst I could come up with there isn't much cause for complaint. The one most people complained about was the date for a certain plot point regarding the NCR that was shown on the classroom whiteboard not matching up with New Vegas' timeline, but that was clearly indicating that said plot point happened after the date indicated, not at it, so no actual inconsistency.

So the Italian boxer was... bribed by Russia to throw in the towel to get eastern Europeans upset? Doesn't seem overly likely. The last boxer Khalif beat at the 2023 IBA WC (?and the one who got upgraded to bronze after her disqualification?*) was South Korean. She did beat a Russian in the 1st round, but went on to box twice (*) after that. What the tests showed has certainly not been consistent in the press since both elevated testosterone and genetically male chromosomes have been stated as being the cause there, but the IBA chair has specifically said it was a chromosomal result ie XY/ genetic maleness which caused the dq in the last day or so. That is ~trivial to disprove if it were false, and neither appealed to the CAS which you'd expect as a matter of course. The wikipedia article is actually kind of funny in retrospect as the dqs were not considered enough to even make the 'controversies' section. End of the day the issue is caused by the IOC not having the courage to make actual Olympic wide rules about the issue and just issuing an extraordinarily wishy washy "Framework" instead. If they did make actual rules it wouldn't matter whether it was them or the IBA or World Athletics deciding eligibility and all of Lin, Khalif and Semenya would be free- or not- to compete based on rules everyone knew. But they can't do that, because any decision they made would inevitably offend someone and cut down on their commercial opportunities. *for extra confusion, the official results have the ROK boxer winning 5-0 instead of by dq, and Khalif is credited with coming =5th. Unlike Lin who does have a dq result and isn't placed at all, but obviously did box since she progressed to the quarters. Everyone seems to agree Khalif was actually dqed as well though.

It is kind of funny to see people say the accusations are all Russian propaganda from a Russian organisation. Fairly sure the Russians wouldn't target Algeria, their north African ally, nor China. There's no actual reason to suspect anything other than a genuine issue at play and it being embarrassing for the IOC. Similarly, extremely 'funny' seeing the usual suspects claiming she's transgender when they also tend to regard Arabs as being incredibly backwards. Not like Algeria is a religious hotbed with women stoned on the street for showing an ankle but still, they also aren't the Sweden of 101 stereotypes either. The famous case was an East German shotput or hammer thrower who essentially transitioned involuntarily from all the androgens she was given (but at least won gold, iirc). Indeed, there are a bunch of women's records set in the 80s that still stand; far more than for mens athletics. (Definitely wasn't just the eastern bloc doing it though, there are a decent number of not closely challenged since 80s records set by americans as well)

Eh, it's not really 'dumb', though the phrasing is obviously inflammatory since there's a very real issue at play, and one that has not been dealt with with any sort of consistency at all. (The issue is not transgender like Lauren Hubbard competing in weightlifting at Tokyo despite being born a man- and who failed all her lifts anyway iirc- since Khalif isn't transgender; the issue is, well, Caster Semenya basically. Who got pretty specifically targeted by rule changes. Indeed, Khalif competing at Tokyo while Semenya couldn't in her favoured events just reinforces how inconsistent the rules are. The real issue is almost certainly not Khalif anyway, it's almost certainly not wanting to 'ban' the Chinese athlete)

Not overly surprising given the nature of the 'evidence' for Ukrainian SF presence in Syria previous. Al Qaeda has of course claimed it, but they would happily claim pretty much anything and everything nowadays*. It's still most likely to be some flavour of MNLA or other Azawad Nationalist grouping responsible given those groups are hardly monolithic and are variously fighting against and allied with Al Qaeda and adjacent groups. It's very likely some at least are both Azawad liberation and AlQ, just wearing different hats as convenient. Difficult to see any plausible involvement from any 3rd party country in it. *apparently they launched an Inghimasi operation that broke a meat thermometer recently.