Zoraptor

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.

I wouldn't let them off either, morally, but legally it was justified- and in contrast to the other shoot downs the ultimate blame lies with KAL007 flying into completely the wrong area. If the pilots* had navigated properly they'd have been nowhere near Sakhalin in the first place. Didn't deserve to be shot down over it of course, but still. In the other cases the pilots were blamelessly flying as expected on normal flightpaths when shot down, and the fault for their destruction is exclusively with others. *and some blame for the nav system not making it obvious if INS was being used.

The 1st article is certainly based on anonymous sources, but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence to back it up unlike many reports based on anonymous sources. Certainly even if he did not do it to shore up support it had that effect; since there's no 'Wag the Dog' accusation made all it really does it describe what actually ended up happening in terms of R support as being what was intended to happen. And while the NYT is pretty stridently anti Trump the WSJ is owned by stridently pro Trump Rupert Murdoch, albeit it's editorial line is more nuanced than something like the New York Post or The Scum, with both the NYT and WSY seemingly getting the same information independently which always boosts reliability. The 2nd article is verifiably true, and it's not hard to dig up contemporaneous tweets about the assassination attempt on Shahlai and him being thought dead if it were really necessary. Skarpen is actually correct there, at least technically. By a strict definition the only civilian airliner that has been shot down accidentally in fairly recent times was the Siberian Airlines plane shot down by Ukraine during a test firing, where the missile missed the target drone and locked onto the airliner behind it; MH17 (misidentified as IL76 most likely), this case (cruise missile supposedly) and IranAir655 (F14) were all mistakes instead as all hit their (misidentified) but intended target. KAL007 was shot down deliberately having been identified as a civilian type plane, but legally, as it had repeatedly transitted closed military zones and was 100s of kms off target- and there was a genuine spy plane based on a civilian airframe nearby. Of course by common usage most of those incidents are referred to as accidents instead.

No there wouldn't, because Seoul has ~20 million people and even if DPRK didn't have nukes they certainly did have a whole lot of CW that they'd unapologetically fire at everyone in the vicinity. RoK wouldn't go after DPRK because the real world is not a game of Hearts of Iron. Israel and KSA were both extraordinarily tepid in their response to Soleimani being killed- Israel explicitly said it was a matter between the US and Iran only, KSA sent a note via the Omani ambassador stressing that they were not involved (since it was their Iraqi ambassador and the Iraqi PM he was meant to be meeting)- because Iran even without nukes has proved they (well, still officially the Houthis) can make a horrendous mess of their neighbour's infrastructure. Good luck living in the ME when all your desalination plants and power stations have large holes in them. Same with DPRK. Not the same with Libya, nor Iraq in 2003. Eh, they hit what they aimed at. There is no doubt in anyone's minds that they could have done a lot worse if they'd wanted to. The only real mistake they've made was shooting down the plane. Even if they don't get the US out of Iraq- which they almost certainly will eventually as soon as it can be sold as not running away- they will get about everyone else who will find it politically impossible to ignore being told to leave. It's also further reinforced in many people's minds that the US is warmongering and desperate to start a fight, and caused yet more partisan squabbling in the US. I'd put the situation as being similar to when Erdogan shot down that Russian Su 24 back in 2016, with Trump in the place of Erdogan. Even if no one liked Putin all RTE's allies thought he was bonkers for doing it despite Erdogan seemingly thinking it was going to get a great reaction. And there was a lot of 'bad' stuff for Russia around that too, no revenge for the pilots getting shot while parachuting, only sanctions on Turkey, rescue helicopter blown up with a missile. Yet 3 years + later pretty much everyone thinks it was a bad mistake by Turkey instead, while Erdogan is claiming it was all a Gulenist plot carried out by coup plotters and designed to discredit him.

Since so few people read articles it should probably be said that he was looking to beef up support from [Graham types] whom he needed rather than doing it as a direct Wag the Dog type distraction*. That was perhaps balanced by the extremely liberal definition of 'imminent threat' that was used- which turns out to be 'might do something unspecified at some equally unspecified point in the future'- and which actually seem to have annoyed some other R senators. Trump's claims of multiple embassies being targeted is pretty clearly a load of old bollocks. 2nd one has been known for a while as he was initially and briefly reported as having been killed, but then it got rather swamped by Soleimani being targeted. There was even a suggestion that Soleimani was only targeted because their first target was missed. And in further unsurprising news Pompeo says that the US won't leave Iraq even if told to. *The rumour I'd heard previous was that Pompeo pushed hard to hit Soleimani, and Trump wanted to give him a win to stop him resigning. Could very easily be a combination of both.

There are no indications it's a false flag. If it was shot down it was about as definitely as can be the Iranians who did it and no one else. The only blame that could be assigned to the US is around the circumstances and unnecessary escalation OTOH there's clearly a social media campaign under way to assign blame prematurely and with a lack of evidence.

There is footage of a missile strike now, but it's not exactly as unequivocal as made out (most of the objections are listed in the twitter chain). Looks like Trudeau has just made the accusation official now.

Yeah, it's actually not in the slightest bit suspicious but just 'internet expert syndrome' at work. For a recent example Ethiopia didn't hand the black boxes over to 'Boeing' after the 2nd MAX crash and got France to read them; and there is literally no obligation to do so under the rules of aviation investigations (ICAO Annex 13, pdf). It is frequently done, because not all countries have the ability to decode black boxes but in the end Boeing is one of the largest suppliers to the US military so there's no way it's going there and anyone expecting it to is an idiot. Pretty sure it would be the NTSB they'd hand them over to anyway, and the NTSB does not necessarily hand them to Boeing for decoding but may go straight to the FDR manufacturer instead (if it's damaged and they cannot read it themselves). And to run through some more internet expert theories, there is nothing suspicious about no mayday. Making a mayday call is one of the last things pilots do in an acute emergency because keeping the plane flying is the #1 consideration; someone yelling mayday into their mic first thing comes from TV and film dramas not reality. There is also nothing suspicious about a transponder cutting out, that happens pretty frequently in crashes if it loses power (same for black boxes, sometimes they track data all the way down sometimes they don't, depends on the crash). There is little suspicious about holes in fuselage, for example when QF32's turbine fan exploded it put dozens of holes in the wing and fuselage- and it's considered a bit of a miracle that it didn't bring the plane down. There is little suspicious about a plane being on fire before crashing- especially at night. A damaged or even stalled engine with poor airflow will produce a large blowtorch like flame similar in appearance to the only video available (from which you cannot tell any scale whatsoever). It may well have been shot down and it's certainly one hell of a coincidence it happening yesterday, but there's no conclusive or even non equivocal evidence yet.

Iran's Fars News Agency announces Iranian missile strikes on US military positions in Iraq. There's 3rd party confirmation from Reuters etc too of explosions. Better hope it was a mutually agreed response to defuse the situation.

Turns out the 3990X is... $3990. AMD marketing having some fun. Perhaps a bit surprised that the 4000 laptops have fewer and vega cores for their iGPU, though in terms of practical performance that should be outweighed by the improvements to frequency and memory.

AMD's CES presentation was certainly full of memable content.. ..but nothing on Zen 3 or big Navi which were my main interests as a consumer of electronics. I'm not particularly worried about no big Navi news though, and don't think it means anything for when it's coming. I didn't watch the Intel presentation but the general reaction does not seem to have been positive.

Don't ask me why, but it's working again. I was installing a new SSD in the m2 slot which was why the Vega came out in the first place and it wasn't working, replaced the old SSD (so fully removed the Vega again to get there) and it still didn't work, tried my old 580 in both situations and it worked, installed windows on the new SSD and went to bed. This afternoon I though I'd try some more troubleshooting since I had some spare time and the Vega works fine first time. Only thing I can think of is that I might have changed over which 8 pin sockets the two theoretically identical 8 pin power connectors from the PSU went into.

Bit of an understatement, that. That's the memorandum in question, guess there's a bit of wiggle room but not a whole lot and it has effectively been instantly countermanded by Esper anyway. You can't really 'respect the decision to order a departure' and also not depart. Some people are claiming it's a draft that was sent accidentally (no signature makes it a credible scenario too), but even that would be somewhere between deeply disfunctional and utterly incompetent.

Well, that tempted fate. Dead as a dodo. Though I have to put some blame on Gigabyte's motherboard design, SATA sockets, m2, everything they could cram in expansion wise is next to PCIe x16 and inaccessible even with a short single slot graphics card, and a V64 ain't either. Having the m2 there in particular is stupid, why put something heat sensitive under the hottest part of the computer where it won't get any air flow? It's had to be removed about a dozen times and this time the fans didn't spin up afterwards. Under warranty, though I doubt they'll approve an RMA and say I mishandled it.

In a word, yes. If you don't care about paying extra for RTX consider a 1660Ti [or1660S, gods I hate GPU naming schemes] instead. Or wait a bit (couple of weeks?) and see how AMD's 5600s are. Personally I'd go a tier higher or a tier lower instead but for stated purpose a 2060 would be fine.

I haven't upgraded to the newest drivers yet as the big December updates are always a bit shambolic- and it seems pretty dumb to me doing them in December when there's not a lot of time to fix the inevitable bugs so I'm still on a November driver. I had similar symptoms a few months ago though, and it was windows update randomly insisting on installing year old drivers over new ones.

I've got a Vega64 as well and don't regret buying it even slightly. It's been stable, faster than a 1080 after tweaking and despite being a Strix was cheaper too. The power draw is higher but that's my least concern. Since RDNA2 is meant to be the iteration going into the consoles I'd suspect that power efficiency will have been a big factor in its development and differentiation from RDNA1. RDNA1 got a good 'IPC' boost over Polaris/ Vega but to get to a '2080 level' Navi GPU, based on RDNA1's power efficiency, looks practically impossible without big efficiency gains even if the 2080 were the MaxQ variant.

" actually, Both US and Iran are in a 'foreign country'. LMAO Last I checked, Iraq isn't part of Iran... yet. As much as the pro Iranians want it to be. " Actually actually, in the current flare up the US has been targeting almost exclusively- literally except for Soleimani so far as I am aware- Iraqis. Iraqis who are members of the Iraqi security services even. Propagandists call them 'Iranians' because it's the only way to sell killing another country's soldiers who fought ISIS, while being guests in Iraq and guests there supposedly to fight ISIS- and definitely not to pursue an entirely voluntary war post unilaterla JCPOA withdrawal. It's also why all the propaganda from Rubio et al and 'clarifications' from western journalists about the expulsion resolution are deeply misleading at best. Killing Iraqi security personnel and using Iraqi airspace to target foreigners means there is no 'one year cool down' as both break the agreement making it cancellable immediately, and while it requires an executive order from the PM to enact the resolution said resolution was proposed by, well, the same PM who has to approve it. So approval is... somewhat likely. There was also a quorum which seems to be another popular claim. It will certainly be interesting to see if the US actually honours the demand or not.

It might eventually, if Intel sticks with it. Drivers and no (? presumably, certainly the AMD agreement is CPU only) patent cross licensing is going to be a big problem. Larrabee was surprisingly decent but it was a fair while ago now. They do have a lot of talent working on them and unlike at AMD Raja is likely to be well funded. It's a pretty awful time for Intel to be trying to launch non core products though, since their fabs are a mess.

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.