Zoraptor

He tried banning certain news organisations from the WH wholesale? Which got rescinded because it was unconstitutional? And worked around by 'just' refusing to issue credentials to some reporters? Or am I not remembering correctly? [OK looks like I am, more or less] (Trump's rhetoric is a considerable step up from Obama's spat with Fox News, but istr a lot of equivalent 'traitor' 'terrorist enabler' 'saddam lover' talk from Bush's White House directed at any media or reporters who weren't toeing the line with the War on Terror or build up to the Iraq invasion- but as with most neocon/ neolib adventurism there simply weren't many media organisations or reporters not toeing the line to be targeted. And, of course, outing Valerie Plame which was actively illegal revenge for her husband debunking of the yellow cake story in the media)

Yeah, Gabbard is/ was the rumour. It's a Shareblue meme that she isn't a 'real' democrat and will run as a spoiler 3rd party candidate so I never put any real stock in it; but the reaction would certainly fit the term interesting and from some sections, crazy.

There is one rumour going around that would certainly be interesting if true, though I put it down as Shareblue disinformation and still do.

Battery power is already DC, wall power is AC and has to be run through a transformer to get to DC? So if the transformer (or rectifier maybe?) is bad... it causes fluctuating current and the over/ under volt protection in the laptop kicks in? I mean, I would have thought that would cause outright crashes/ dying rather than BSODs or revert to using battery power, but 'bad' power from a dying psu can give some pretty baffling symptoms as well. I've also had plenty of non computer stuff fix itself by changing a power cord.

Yeah, it will be expensive for sure. The 3960/70 certainly are relatively expensive considering the prior threadrippers and Intel's price drops but they do have great performance. On clocks, most of the 3960/70X reviews did get to an overclock roughly equivalent to a 3900/3950X, though of course the cooling requirements were... significant and will only go up more as the core count increases. If they bin the 3990X same way I'd expect it to overclock up to the 4.5- 4.7 range at least theoretically, but you'd probably need an Intel style industrial chiller to do it. I'd have said it was a halo product mostly made because they can and because it makes Intel look bad much like the 3950x on AM4, but they always seem to find a market for more cores.

No one could possibly believe Donald Trump had a heart attack, even at 70+ the man still has the physique of Rocky Balboa in his prime.

Syrian government has claimed it was them, but... they said they did the bombing in the morning when it actually occurred in the evening which is a fairly big mistake to make, and their claim was nearly a full day after the fact too. Targets and M.O. strongly suggest it was the Russians since the targets were bodge job oil refineries similar to those which Russians went after strongly when they were bombing ISIS (and see also bottom for another potential reason), they're economic targets and there was no chance of Turkish soldiers being collateral damage. Plus no one knowing who it was and the number of targets means it pretty much had to be them or the US (who have no reason to), Syrian airforce could hit that many targets for sure but it's highly unlikely they could without anyone identifying them. They do have precision high altitude capability via their MiG29s and possibly some Russian donated Su24s, but throughout the whole civil war there are only two cases where they have been known or strongly suspected to have used them- assassinations of Ahrar ash Sham's and Jaish al Islam's leadership. I suspect the Russians did it but want to maintain deniability so there isn't any political fallout. The Turks have been ignoring their occupation zone boundaries and trying to take the important road junction towns of Ain Issa and Tel Tamir, and they've been mixing Turkish troops in with their proxies to dissuade against retaliatory artillery or air strikes. Rather more conjectural, but one of Erdogan's sons was allegedly involved in some shenanigans including oil smuggling from ISIS into Turkey, if he's still involved in oil smuggling it may well be a bit of a personal warning and hit to the back pocket to the Erdogans directly.

64 core/ 128 thread Threadripper 3990X has also been announced. Has more cache than my Pentium III system had RAM. Guess there could be a 48 core 3980X still to come since there's a gap in the numbering scheme, but who knows.

Someone bombed the Turkish supported rebels in Syria last evening and despite it being fairly extensive- 9 sites reported so far- seemingly no one knows who it was. And with rather appropriate timing, a leak of documents pertaining to China's Uighurs/ Xinjiang concentration camps in the past day.

Reviewed decently but didn't sell well I'm afraid. Arkane's founder was forced out after and the studio refocused away from strong narrative SP games, hence the disposable Wolfenstein games they've worked on recently. Keeping up the Looking Glass successor tradition of making some great games, but never getting great enough sales.

Google search algorithms are bought and paid for and youtube is owned by Google (well, alphabet but they're the same thing); and private companies always have and always will manipulate content with or without pressure from government agencies. No surprises there. Indeed, much as I loathe FB/ Google/ etc it's a damned if do damned if you don't situation with Google being criticised for too much 'censorship' while FB gets criticised for too little (or too much when they get criticised for censoring nipples in non pr0n settings). Use an alternative search provider or even google.[country]/ncr. If anyone wants to be concerned about anything they do on a computer and government agencies then I'd present Intel's Management Engine and AMD's Platform Security Processor- NSA backdoor chips they're obligated to put into every processor they produce. That's way more concerning than Google downplacing Bernie because Sergei Brin et al are frightened of being taxed and would prefer any milquetoast status quo Bidenesque 'moderate' who can be guaranteed to suckle at the corporate teat instead. Actual governmental social media manipulation is usually pretty obvious- brand new accounts on reddit/ fb/ whatever that get botted for exposure, eg the thousands of new pro Bolivian coup twitter accounts that recolved to... Virginia, which I'm sure isn't home to any interested US parties whatsoever- and mostly is attempts to immediately frame narrative followed by suppression of any and all dissenting geopolitical views as being 'pro Russia'/ 'whataboutism'/ 'gaslighting' or whatever; in the full knowledge that there are plenty who will parrot what they read without being paid. (5 eyes is of course absolute crap and has 100% been used for industrial espionage, illegal monitoring and the like and is set up specifically to get around limitations on domestic spying- our spies request stuff that would be illegal here from the NSA/ GCHQ/ ASIO/ (no idea who the Canadian equivalent are)).

I've been playing Prey (2017) since I have time left post TOW on gamepass. Don't know how far through I am but it is very much System Shock (2) (2017) rather than an updated Prey. I rather liked the original Prey so I might be disappointed, but I loved SS2. Hard difficulty actually is hard, enemies actually require more than a bit of pew pew to handle, plenty of exploration, skills and alternative approaches and the atmosphere is genuinely unsettling- maybe not X labs from Stalker unsettling, but pretty close. Even more of an absolute steal for $1NZ than TOW was. A great shame that it sold poorly because it's 100% my sort of game.

GTAO has been wildly successful, so it's no surprise they'd be aping it. CDPR are, after all, a company interested in making money and they'd want something to capitalise on C2077 better than Gwent did with TW3. They do of course rather make a rod for their own back by pretending to be all consumer focused, all the time. There's clearly never been any prospect of it being 'free' multiplayer in the way people might have thought of it a decade or so ago; it's way too big a projekt for that.

Getting to ~10 million while on a 6 figure salary for 40 years shouldn't be too hard if you're careful and make decent investments. I'd also presume that like our politicians here US politicians vote themselves a decent benefit package for transport and accommodation costs and people on decent incomes also tend to pay relatively less tax via having decent accountants. IIRC Biden as a senator was known for not being at all extravagant personally (used public transport etc up until being VP or something like that? of course checking that sort of thing is what google etc are crap at). Making decent investments could of course involve some privileged information use that isn't available to the random as opposed to specific Joe, but that's very much 'could involve', not does involve. If he'd just bought houses in New Zealand the capital gains would have tripled his investment over 20 years, let alone 40. As for Hunter Biden, he should never have accepted the position but it's on him that he did; neither Biden sr nor Obama could literally stop him, and I cannot see any way they wouldn't have advised him to refuse the position. It's an awful look for a country you were meant to be trying to reduce corruption in to have your VP's son given a random but well remunerated directorship for no discernable reason and if Biden sr had any future political ambitions it would be an obvious point of attack.

Way things are going it could have been the equally double take inducing "Arsenal boss Jose Mourinho" in a few weeks if he didn't go to Spurs.

Classically Anarchism is neither left nor right, but right wing Anarchists are usually (self) described as 'Libertarians' nowadays which leaves a few left wing groups like syndicalists or Apoism plus the antifa types and they are all leftists. China is only communist in name though, it's probably the model example of 'state capitalism'. Many of its policies are not recognisably 'left' or 'communist' at all, and some are almost the complete reverse. Not just false equivalency. There's plenty of working back from a conclusion to the evidence that supports said conclusion as well; and the conclusion is that any problems China has have to be fomented by 'External Forces' and not be due to anything China herself has done. So the systematic sinofication of all areas with local non Han/ Mandarin majorities (not just the well known Xinjiang and Tibet, even a lot of the resentment in HK is due to Cantonese v Mandarin) doesn't cause any problems, any resentment has to be manufactured by FG/ CIA/ Turkey/ Britain. So for example the Uighurs in Syria (TIP; Turkistan Islamic Party) had the choice of fleeing China or being Room 101ed, and chose to go to Syria to establish a new 'free' homeland. TIP is not deserving of sympathy as they're borderline ISIS in terms of theology and happy to steal other people's homes to establish said new homeland, but they have a 100% legit beef with China and 100% have lost their actual homeland; they even have a decentish reason for being radicalised in the oppression they have suffered- unlike the average westerner who becomes radicalised because they're bored and unimportant. They have also never been sponsored by either the CIA or Turkey in Syria and I say that as someone who has no sympathy at all for either Turkish or CIA conduct there. The CIA and Turkey happily armed and supported an array of ethnic cleansing loony wahhabist takfiri head choppers cannibals and child executors, but neither supported TIP*. You'd have to be pretty naive to think that the CIA isn't fomenting unrest in China, but you'd have to be equally naive to think that the CIA are the major cause *TIP will have got some CIA vetted/ Turkish supplies via Al Nusra/ Al Qaeda's control of the border crossings and them taking a share of every supply run made to the 'moderate' rebels, but as with Al Qaeda the vast majority of their funding comes from wealthy individuals' patronage rather than country contributions.

Yeah bandwidth exceeded. IIRC Cherry MX Red are roughly equivalent to Logitech's Romer-G, if you want the closest alternative used in Corsair/ Razor/ ASUS etc.

My G610 has survived 2 liquid spills (and ironically my old membrane one it replaced died from a spill too). Then again I got it because it was more of a reliable Toyota keyboard than a flashy Ferrari one.

Yeah, nah, and for as much as it's at all important. Because the vast majority of gaming keyboards have RGB "best RGB gaming keyboard" is a near meaningless disambiguation, while "best Ford SUV" would be a meaningful one. Ford has only 3 (?) SUV models instead of the 40 odd SUV models from all vendors. OTOH a pricespy search limited to only confirmed in stock RGB gaming keyboards, in NZ- and we get minimal stock compared to Europe or the US- still yields an impractical 83 (!) options and only excludes 8 gaming keyboards that don't have RGB.

Nah, I'm no friend of 'western media' and they'll happily parrot anything they're given, but I also have very little doubt that their reporting of China is slanted, but more or less 'factual'. Chinese reflexively blame Falun Gong for stuff the same way Erdoganist Turks reflexively blame Gulenists or PKK for everything, or Democrats blame the Russians, or Syria says the white helmets are all MI6 recruited Al Qaeda agents. There's elements of truth, but they get blamed for way more than they actually did. And in China's case there's always Xinjiang and the muslim non FG Uighurs being harvested/ re-educated/ concentration camped. OTOH, while HK is being repressed much as the media say and you can literally see it, the slant is more that after x months only 2 people have actually died (one more or less accidentally, one pro Chinese killed by the protesters) while far worse direct repression using far worse tactics in other countries is largely ignored because it's done by geopolitical friends rather than rivals, or is painted differently because, say, the Gilets Jaunes are obviously dangerous violent anarcho fascists (! lol) Russian puppets living in the past and being mean to that nice photogenic Macron who is only trying to save France from itself...

Google's pretty useless for such stuff for much the same reason googling 'best car' is pretty useless. Too much information and too many options, and you have to rely on Google being fair and not having been manipulated or bought. Unfortunately advice isn't that much use for keyboards either since a lot of it is subjective. Just make a list of what you need vs what you want, decide a price range, then use an aggregator with filters (pricespy old version here in NZ for example) to narrow down the options and check individual reviews. Some physical stores may have display/ demo models where things like the different types of mechanical switches can be checked out. If you want to set up per game lighting or whatever you will have to use the keyboard's associated software, so that's a consideration as well. (I have a Logitech G610/ Cherry MX Brown which is... fine, for what I wanted)

Going to laugh at all the [alternative launcher] haters on the general internets who will cream themselves over a new Steam exclusive, complete with cross subsidisation to/ from other Valve products but who hate EGS/ Battlenet/ whoever for doing the same thing.

Yeah, but... the concentration camps, orwellian re-education, seizure of children and organ harvesting in Xinjiang is several orders of magnitude worse than what's happening in HK. HK is lucky it's a port with a lot of ex pats and foreign businesses or they would have been Tiananmened months ago. Kind of funny though, Han Mandarin speakers genuinely do seem to believe that everyone hates them, because... Han are the best, and people are envious of their superiority.

The reason it works is fairly simple: western media holds itself up as being the best and fairest, so evidence of wrongdoing leads to a disproportionate drop in trust. As time goes on more evidence of wrongdoing accumulates for more and more viewpoints so more and more people loose that trust- and trust once lost is very hard to regain. Now, I'll freely admit that the media doesn't claim to be perfect, but you have to beat an admission of fault or even simply getting something wrong out of them with a broom handle and they would far prefer to either ignore it or if pressed simply change the story and pretend they never got it wrong in the first place. In part that is of course because some will use them getting things wrong as evidence of them being 'fake news' and not a real journalism; but they probably do themselves more damage trying to suppress it than by admitting to fault as more people will be convinced of foul play by a cover up than by an admission of a mistake. That's also why outlets like RT have a credibility advantage despite being Russian state news- people don't expect them to be honest, and all they have to do is make the rest look dishonest to win. It's not a winning strategy in the internet world, but western media has always been a useful tool for corporations and governments and they will run its credibility into the ground (while trying to shore it up via 'trusted news site' lists, fact checks that are really opinion checks and manipulating or legislating to influence google indexing, facebook, twitter etc to exclude non approved sources). Probably 80% of the trouble western media gets itself into is acritically parroting press releases. Unsurprisingly, most press release are PR rather than journalism and thus skewed massively towards the viewpoint of the entity releasing the statement and may not come close to reality on the ground. Take Bolivia for example. Acritically report that police etc refused to fire on protesters and Evo voluntarily steps down as a consequence in what was totally not a coup. The same police who refused to fire on protesters under orders from Evo now... kill 23 protesters in 5 days under order from an unelected 'moderate' 'President' who... wants to deport the indigenous population from all cities? Hmm, just a touch of cognitive dissonance there. Of course you have to dig for those facts, but anyone who does does not end up with a positive view of the media. Yeah, nah. You forget that the original prosecutor- way back in 2010- also decided the case was too weak to proceed with, then, and it was only picked up by Ny once Assange had left Sweden. That was what provoked the whole mess. The reasons the case were weak in 2010 had nothing to do with time elapsed, obviously, and everything to do with the two accusers deciding to make complaints and coordinating their accusations after finding out Assange had boffed both of them in a short space of time; and tampering with evidence by deleting text messages where Assange was mentioned positively after the supposed assaults took place. In any sensible jurisdiction that would have been more than enough to get the case permanently nixed, but instead it got reinstated for some reason, after Assange had left, only to be dropped now when there is still a year left on the statute of limitations. If that happened in Russia/ China/ Syria/ [bad country] there would be zero doubt expressed that it was trumped up.

Lack of formal censorship makes lying worse, not better, since you're lying out of self interest, stupidity, cupidity or base greed rather than because you'd literally be thrown in jail or killed for telling the truth. And in completely unrelated news, amazingly after 9 years or whatever the rape case against Julian Assange is now considered too weak to proceed with. Which coincidentally clears the way for an extradition to the US. Nobody, certainly no credible journalist or media organisation, could have forseen this completely normal and unpredicted procedure (apart from Assange and his tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorising supporters, of course, who'd predicted exactly that for... 9 years).