Zoraptor

Iraqi parliament has voted to eject Operation Inherent Resolve wholesale, which is actually more than I expected. Thought they might have hedged by not ejecting the non US bits of it and letting them pull out voluntarily. Apparently the US? It was, after all and for those who have paid actual attention, Soleimani who coordinated the Iran-US cooperation in Afghanistan against the Taleban. It was only after noted non rabid dogs Cheney, Dumsfeld, Wolfowicz et al decided to go full Project for a New American Century on Iraq he became a 'rabid dog'. If true, that would almost certainly be another actual war crime, Perfidy.

Wild carrots are white. He's just gone into a shop and bought that trophy!

That will probably have reversed if you're buying after Zen3 is out though, per below. Given the number of security problems Intel has it's certainly difficult to label them as the 'safe' option. I'd also add cooling and their constant socket changes to Intel's costs, generational upgrades require a new mobo and to get the better performance out of a k series you have to buy a good cooler. To be fair, Zen3 will probably be the last Zen on AM4 too, but that is after a good run. There is meant to be a significant price cut with whatever lake (comet?) the 10000 series is and they are meant to have HT turned on which should make Intel at least a bit better price/ performance wise, and at least against the 3000 series. OTOH IPC is actually meant to have regressed slightly but measurably due to security mitigations which is likely to counter any marginal overclocking increases while Zen3 is meant to have a decent IPC increase and should have a small frequency boost too if history is any guide.

I suspect there will be a top card with HBM that will solve the memory bandwidth problem, but it won't be cheap. But then the top nVidia offering is hardly cheap either.

Striking cultural sites- as Trump explicitly just threatened to do- is literally literally a war crime, though for some reason the impartial beeb fails to mention that. And, of course, IranAir 655 had rather more than 52 kidnapped people and they all died while the US awarded Will Rogers III and Scot Lustig medals, so maybe Iran should strike 270 US cultural sites. But one suspects that would be terrorism. US messaging is all over the place. They seem shocked that they haven't had universal support despite spending most of the past three years burning goodwill, not even bothering to inform allies (presumably because they knew the first thing would be them warning Iran because assassinating Soleimani was just that stupid) and this being a conflict that stems directly from the unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA which everyone except for Bibi and friends including the US itself agreed Iran was upholding; it's to stop a war happening but every preparation shows that it was to provoke a war and every bit of rhetoric is about how they're going to escalate further. And that's when they aren't going complete alternative facts like Pence claiming Soleimani was involved in 9/11. The big irony is that Trump won't get impeached, for this, just for having some weapons that Ukraine wasn't going to use turn up a couple of months later than scheduled.

Tom's may well be right about nVidia's intentions as of now, but TSMC per pretty much every source has no spare capacity, now, since instead of there being at least three 'open' 7nm processes available- Samsung, TSMC, GloFo/ IBM and no an extent even Intel's 10nm was meant to be available to 3rd parties- there is only really TSMC working as of 2020. So they'll just have to wait until there is spare capacity and (if rumours are to be believed) existing customers are being given first right of refusal to extra capacity hence AMD doing 7nm laptop chips ahead of their expected time and not long after their 3000 series laptop chips were released. The rumours that nVidia were intending to be all in at Samsung were pretty strong and very persistent over a long period and from multiple sources. If they didn't book capacity they aren't magically going to get it and it's highly unlikely TSMC would kick loyal customers for a disloyal one. As for MCMs, programmers didn't want to deal with multi core CPUs for a long time either. Some of AMD's patents suggest they have solutions to some of the potential problems anyway, and nVidia is definitely looking at them as well.

The 'black elves' are meant to be dryads, aren't they? Still kind of weird but from what I understand everyone from actor to make up artist to directors hates using body paint which would be the alternative.

Eh, pretty strong rumour is that nVidia's 7nm is not announced due to them committing to Samsung 7nm instead of TSMC and Samsung's 7nm process being about as broken as Intel's 10nm- so nVidia cannot get top tier chips off it, TSMC's 7nm is by all accounts fully booked until their next plant comes online and Apple finishes up their orders, so even if nVidia wanted to do a 7nm release they cannot. And given Jensen's abysmal interpersonal skills who knows if he's burnt the bridges to TSMC along with the bridges to Intel, MS and Sony. Not that it really matters so far as nVidia is concerned, at the moment. AMD actually has no problem at all with raw performance, Vega was so popular for mining because it had great raw number crunching power. RDNA is also equal to Turing there. Their problem is turning their theoretical performance into practical performance and competing with stuff like nVidia's texture compression (albeit that ensures I'll never buy nVidia, while faster I find their colours to be badly washed out). AMD's real advantage will come when/ if they can start producing 'proper' APUs as that will eat nVidia's low/ mid end desktop and laptop lunch and when they've got Infinity Fabric/ Multi Chip Module video cards. On the V64 vs 5700xt comparison, remember the 5700xt only has 44 CUs vs a V64's, uh, 64. There's a pretty significant practical performance increase on a like to like basis, around 40%, it's just hidden by not having an RDNA card with 64CUs to do a direct comparison. End of the day matching nVidia in performance is irrelevant anyway, practically. Even when they've beaten nVidia in basically everything- price, performance, efficiency- nVidia has more sales; the 570 brutally murdered the 1050/Ti price performance wise yet the nVidia card sold better. [I'd put money on the actual top AMD card not being the rumoured 2080Ti competitor Navi21/ 80CU with that being the tier 2 card]

Trump simply doesn't have the ability to 'think' about such things, he lacks any depth of knowledge or critical acumen beyond seeing everything as a business transaction. Situation would have been something like he'd have got a phone call from Netanyahu urging him to 'eliminate a terrorist' and done it with no one left to tell him that it's the equivalent of eliminating the US SecDef, if the US SecDef happened to also be George Washington- Soleimani was ludicrously popular in Iran, even US surveys had him at 80% approval. He was also ludicrously popular in places the US really needs for when they'll be kicked out of Iraq, like Iraqi Kurdistan since Soleimani lead the Iranian response to Anfal and Saddam's chemical weapons attacks on the Kurds at a time when the US was still arming Saddam and claiming it was Iran framing Iraq for the CW attacks. Of course, the main US supporter there and his party was actually working for Saddam while his compatriots were being gassed...

I've never had any significant technical problems with Origins software (or uPlay for that matter). Very occasional crash, but I'm talking once or twice over multiple years. Only ever used it as a launcher though so I have no comment on its other aspects, but then Fallen Order is also single player so Origin would be just a launcher for it The only 'moral' reason not to was for people who believed poor multi billionaire monopolist Gabe Newell was being bullied, bullied, by nasty EA refusing to give him 30% of their PC revenue. Even that is out of date now.

Hmm. CNN did not break the story of Libyan slaving. It's been going on since 2012 so it took them 5 years to report on it. They did however try to run interference by blaming ISIS for it. Which as with most good propaganda is true, from a certain point of view, however... There's massive slaving still going on despite ISIS practically not existing any more in Libya. The primary slavers are, surprise surprise, western backed militias- and always have been. The collapse of Libya was 100% due to the west. Not the US in this case which largely got dragged along by its allies, but due to that noxious dwarf war criminal Nicolas Sarkozy wanting to cover up getting illegal donations from Gaddafi. Libyans were literally 100% better off under Gaddafi in every conceivable way and every conceivable measure, including the possiblity of arbitrarily being tortured or killed from which the threat now comes from a befuddling array of possibilities rather than just if you challenged Muammar. The popular revolution was so powerful that even with NATO illegally acting as its airforce the rebels still took 6 months to win.

Iraqi TV and a Hezbollah TV channel (and secondary sources like Al Jazeera quoting them) are reporting that the US has droned Qassem Soleimani and PMU head al Muhandis. If so, it's difficult to see anything other than outright war following, but there are also sources (eg BBC Arabic) denying it and the whole situation is pretty murky- the initial reports were of an attack being made on US troops at Baghdad Airport. Given that 10 Iraqi soldiers proper are also reported dead or injured I'd suspect at very least the US is going to be 'invited' to leave Iraq in the next few days.

Libya having huge migrant exploitation and literal slave markets has been known for absolute ages, but nearly no one in the press wants to actually report on it- mostly because it would involve strong tacit criticism of an intervention they were wildly supportive of and make other interventions they're wildly supportive of harder to sell. The really weird thing about Libya is the split in who supports which faction. Sworn enemies in Syria- Russia, Syria; UAE, KSA, France and Israel along with Egypt which was broadly neutral- all teaming up to take on the Turkish backed formal government in Tripoli, and Turkey is even flying in the jihadi mercenaries it used in its ethnic cleansing campaign in northern Syria as expendable cannon fodder.

Beeb's understating it, by a fair bit, though it's a lot clearer in the South Island today than yesterday when that pic was taken. Here in the northern North Island it's pretty much like a London afternoon, a bit hazy and very yellow light but not Mars sandstorm. Should probably be said that the phenomenon leading to the fires is 100% natural (Indian Ocean dipole, for those familiar more with Pacific patterns it's basically El Nino just for the Indian Ocean) but the severity has been made a lot worse by warming temperatures. Think my favourite ScoMo comment was saying that "now isn't the time to talk about climate change and anyone doing so was playing politics with tragedy". Not a dfirect quote, but certainly the gist of it.

Largely reporting bias due to Betelgeuse being well known and 'everyone' wanting to witness a supernova- stars dim (or brighten) all the time, they just don't tend to make the news because GCK53421B doing it isn't very catchy. Somewhere, someone just choked on their empanada.

The sky is orange here, and we're 1500km of sea and a decent sized mountain range away. They've had to add a new 'fire haze' graphic to the weather forecasts. Might possibly be a good idea to start paying those 'volunteer' firefighters who've been working non stop for months, eh Mr Morrison?

Vice City radio, yes. GTA: SA radio even better. Though iirc they've lost a fair few songs if you play the download version due to expiring music rights. Fallout 3's radio had too few songs so I got sick of them very rapidly- Bongo in the Congo, again? oh no no no- and 3Dawg fighting the good fight with his voice by repeating my same exploit between every song too.

He's probably right though. 'Human nature'- which would likely apply to any intelligent species in a similar way- in the form of competition and selfishness drives societal and technological development, but it also ensures there will not be a unified response to problems that effect everyone no matter how pressing because no one wants to give up a competitive advantage.

Finished TVWItcher, and my expectations for a second season took a bit of a dive after the last two episodes. They were far too disjointed and both the dialogue and cinematography felt really weird at times, plus some of the plotting made zero sense. Most of those were minor issues in the first 6 episodes, but were far more pronounced in 7 & 8- and both episodes were short too, especially 7. I kind of presume that a limited budget caught up to them with certain things like the flaky CGI and having the same 20 Nilfgaardian soldiers in every scene but that doesn't explain everything. The fundamental reason I have reservations is that S2 will be more directly serialised plot than S1, but the serialised plot of S1 was its weakest part overall.

Dandelion and show Jaskier are both more 'comic relief' type characters for a similar reason- you need to have some sort of comic relief as, well, relief from all the grimdark and at least to an extent you need a departure from the super competent protagonist or near protagonists characters like Geralt/ Yennefer, plus Triss/ Ciri in the games. If anything the game tends to take the 'incompetent' side of Dandelion a lot further- both TW2 and 3 have rescuing Dandelion as major plot points, after all- than the show takes the 'incompetent' side of Jaskier (with the significant proviso that I haven't seen all the show yet) except for the odd exception like in one of the bad endings of Blood & Wine. Most people will be more familiar with the game character than the book one, and he fits the game character well.

Treat it like a puzzle game and it's OK. It's very much a matter of finding out what is coming and unashamedly gaming the system to your advantage or finding the 'trick' which makes that battle trivial. It's mechanistically awful with its magical and physical armour plus utterly useless initiative system and the game cheats blatantly in its combat design and how enemies behave so have no qualms about 'cheating' equally blatantly yourself, eg spam summons like it's the final battle of Baldur's Gate 1, because you can guarantee your enemies will do exactly the same back.

I've watched the first two episodes of TVWitcher and I like it so far well enough. Pacing definitely feels off- it alternates between feeling slow and far too rushed- plus some of the minor acting and set pieces really do feel rather Xenaish. I also don't like Cavill's "witcher voice" for some reason. But, it has the right feel and Jaskier is top notch. Knowing that the chronology is all over the place helps a fair bit as well, though I would certainly have guessed that it was from playing the games.

Well yeah, but oddly enough the current Boeing CEO Muilenburg is someone I have a decent amount of sympathy with. His handling of the 737MAX situation from a PR standpoint was pretty average to say the least; but he's actually a Boeing man and engineer and pretty much all the decisions that actually lead to the 737MAX disaster were made by the CEO previous to him who was a typical corporate raider MBA type and who, surprise surprise, decided cutting experienced but expensive people while outsourcing software to India and badly and unsafely redesigning an existing jet were great ideas because they were also cheap ideas, with no immediate drawbacks. He got to walk away with bonuses and an unblemished reputation, indeed the replacement CEO is one of his appointees and can be pretty much guaranteed to do all the things that grow shareholder value right up to the point your cost cutting kills 300 odd people and loses you contracts to NASA because your space capsule can't count time properly so won't go into the proper orbit. Every article blames MCAS for the crashes, but if the plane was designed properly MCAS would be irrelevant and unnecessary. You only need MCAS because the engines are too big and too close to the body which makes the design fundamentally unstable; and it was done that way because it was cheaper than designing a new plane that could cope with the bigger engines. Those sorts of decisions were made years ago.

Very, uh, atmospheric conditions for a cricket match in Australia. (Match abandoned with an Air Quality Index at 1100 due to bushfires- anything over 400 is considered to be extreme and potentially dangerous to health. How on earth anyone thought it was a good idea to start in those conditions I do not know)

Series X was definitely named deliberately for meme potential, nobody could do that accidentally. God knows what they would have come up with if Ballmer was still in charge.