Zoraptor

I presume that should be 'the agreements made by the US should --not-- be binding only so long as the next election'? They haven't changed their heart, I don't think there's any chance of a genuine Road to Damascus moment. They have changed their behaviour because they've achieved what they wanted/ needed- they have nukes, and missiles able to hit basically anywhere in the world. That was their one strategic aim as it gives them security no matter what. All the stuff they're rolling back so far is cosmetic, or would have to happen anyway. The nuclear test facility they are shutting is by most reports either fundamentally ruined or nearly so already, for example, so there's no real concession in shutting it down when it cannot be used even if they wanted to. It does make a nice gesture though. For all that Trump is patting himself on the back for his approach 'working' all he's done is make sure that North Korea relies more on China (and Russia) to selectively apply sanctions. While neither has any desire to see fighting in Korea, quite the opposite, neither has any desire to help the US and weaken North Korea either. If anything Trump's approach got the DPRK to full nuclear power status faster even if the underlying reasons date back to previous administrations, and his unpopularity overseas and tendency towards unreliability and intemperateness makes Kim's attempts to look reasonable far, far easier.

Difficult to see how he could have played it better. Everything he's conceded is trivial while he's made lots of cosmetic gestures so most of the world will reflexively blame Trump if their talks fail. Only thing he's been a bit lucky with was Park being a corrupt cultist so the far more amenable Moon was elected in her stead. If he actually gives up nuclear weapons I'd be very surprised, verging on vowing to eat my keyboard if it actually happens surprised.

SOHO, though that was eventually fixed and iirc is still operational today. The most famous outright failure from conversion error is probably the Mars Climate Orbiter where the satellite pancaked into Mars. Non space, but there's also the Gimli Glider incident which is 100% worth reading about (or watch the Mayday/ Air Crash Investigation ep) just because it's a pretty awesome story.

I knew it was Tesla and wrote Apple for some reason- apparently he did work at Apple for a time, just not recently. And since I mentioned Intel's problems, their earning call for their financial results confirmed that bulk production for their 10nm process is now slated for some unspecified time in 2019 having been initially expected in 2017- and that would be 3 years after initial production started. The competition for Ryzen 3 may well be yet another 14nm skylake iteration.

A bit peripheral to Ryzen itself but, Jim Keller who was perhaps the most important contributor to the Zen architecture (and earlier K7/8/Athlon/ x64) has joined Intel after finishing work at Apple. Which is exceptionally good news for them since their main line CPU division seems to be having some significant problems. Yeah, the RAM prices are cartel pricing, at some point they'll get smacked by Europe again or provoke the Chinese to start producing large scale. Lots of gpu oversupply rumours going around now, but I'm not expecting too much since high RAM prices inflate GPU prices as well. Should be some 2nd hand bargains though, but mixed in amongst some overworked dross.

Thing about the lootboxes is that after all the complaints Battlefront 2 was found to be the only game out of four complying with Belgium's gambling rules. Ironic, EA could get busted for FIFA18 but not for the game everyone actually complained about. They already do that though- that's basically what PEGI is, applying rating laws (the censor) to video games. We have some games outright banned here such as Manhunt as they didn't pass the censor. Even in the US there's a lot of 'soft' censorship from Walmart/ MS/ Sony Ockers now have a refund facility that isn't limited to 2hrs either thanks to their ACCC, and the refund facility only exists at all due to Euro/ Aus/ NZ consumer protection laws being habitually broken by Valve.

Almost certainly has supplied them already given 500+ tons of freight has come into Hmeimem/ Tartus over the past few days. S300 isn't meant for defence against cruise missiles though they can do it, they're for shooting down planes and will replace the ancient S200s which had (even under the Russian/ Syrian scenario) exactly a zero percent success rate against cruise missiles- but somewhat better recent success against Israeli F16s. They're also not fixed but mobile, unlike the old S200s, so a lot harder to hit while hiding behind Qalamoun* since you can drive them off. As for risk, Avigdor Lieberman threatening to blow up Russian manned SAMs if it happens shows how seriously Israel takes it, even if Lieberman is basically Israel's Zhironovsky/ Trump. *If Russia really wants to mess with Israel specifically they'd give the systems to Lebanon, not Syria, since most Israeli airstrikes are launched from there. The Syrian systems with the theoretical high success rate (~90%) against CMs were pantsirs, which are about as modern as you get SAM wise.

Ryzen 2 have been out for a couple of days now, and it's a decent improvement but not game changing. Lots of minor improvements to memory latencies, a decent bump to clock speed and the X processors coming with a (pretty good, approaching 212Evo class) stock cooler are the main changes, and a positive is that many of the new benefits are on the chip itself so will work on 300 series motherboards. The 2700X* is within 5% of a 8700k in gaming with expensive RAM and some fiddling, and given that you can get its performance without an expensive cooler and delidding- plus use a cheap MB and still get overclocking/xfr2 if you want- it's also a decent amount cheaper. It still hits a voltage wall, but at least it's approaching 4.4Ghz rather than 4.0 and XFR2 will boost to 4.35 automatically making overclocking unnecessary for many use cases. *practically, a 2600/X would be better value for money for most people anyway Definitely won't be upgrading my 1700, not enough improvement so I'll wait for Zen2/ Ryzen3.

To be honest I don't think TWD has had great production quality post S1, and hasn't striven for excellence since then either. It's mostly due to AMC being exceptionally cheap, they infamously cut the budget yet doubled the episode count in S2 resulting in more than half the scenes using the same set across the entire season. I wouldn't put TWD up as looking like an expensive show, unlike GoT. Even no budget early Peter Jackson and almost no budget Ash vs Evil Dead F do decent zombies. Their problem is not just production quality, it's just about everything short of Andrew Lincoln's acting- their storytelling is the worst combination of lazy, repetitive, predictable (on the larger scale) and incoherent (on the smaller scale), their characterisation goes around in circles (Rick, Carol and Morgan crises over whether to murder everyone version xyz...), they're just plain stale and AMC has run them into the ground as a cash cow and left it until ratings have collapsed to try and fix things.

What are you talking about, Stephen Ogg took out The Garbage earlier this season in TWD, showing once and for all that he is not typecast as a bad guy. And it's perfectly reasonable for every single person to load up with new ammo from a single source who used to be friends with the people you're trying to kill and when said ammo has been tested precisely once via a gun you were handed by said turncoat, while standing in a long battle line like it was Waterloo or something. TWD is a case study in how to ruin a show by not listening to constructive criticism and deciding that because everything is going well, now, it will be going well forever so you don't need to change anything. Except maybe get rid of actors who will cost more as they're turning 18. Funny thing is, if Game of Thrones went on for a few more seasons I could see the same thing happening there as it has all the same symptoms, but they have the huge advantages of a set ending and fewer episodes per season.

Longstreet also had an alternative plan for day 2 of Gettysburg that would probably, with hindsight, have been better than what Lee delivered. To be fair to Lee, I always thought his conduct at Gettysburg was based on a fairly accurate interpretation of strategic reality- the Confederacy was going to lose unless they managed a spectacular victory; so he tried far too hard to get them that victory. Napoleon made almost exactly the same mistake as Picket's Charge at Waterloo for the same general reason.

1080Ti was announced Feb 28 and shipped March 10 last year. 1080 was May 6th announcement, release May 20 the previous year. So about 2 weeks. Both had FE releases first with general availability a bit later though. AMD's experience with HBM2 is definitely a cautionary tale on early adoption of new memory as well. I don't think they've got the 1000MHz HBM2 Hynix promised them even now.

What does that have to do with the American Civil War? Completely different time, place, and circumstance. Not really, if you're talking about memorials to people with... questionable morality and whether they should be removed or not. It's probably one of HD's more immediately relevant contributions. Indeed, Cromwell is a lot, lot worse than Forrest. Cromwell alone turns the Parliamentarians from good guys to bad guys, because no matter how much people in theory may love the idea of parliamentary supremacy you cannot separate that from what was actually got instead- dictatorial mass murdering genocidal brutality dressed up in the veneer of religion and extraordinary self righteousness. He's the british Mullah Muhammed Omar, yet still get fetishised by, frankly, morons who put the 'fought for parliament' part above anything else and ignore that he was so committed to Parliament that he abolished it. At least people with a hard on for Churchill can point to his political/ inspirational personal conduct in WW2 to offset all the racism, advocacy of gassing arabs, consistently moronic military plans and starving millions of Indians; Cromwell has the same redeeming features as Iosef Dugashvili, minus literally fighting Hitler.

I don't disagree with any of that since nVidia has the performance advantage, not much point releasing new cards until AMD do and they (supposedly, though there were placeholder pages for new Vegas) won't for up to 18 months. 1080Ti itself was only released because release of Vega seemed imminent and... ...the original rumours for the 2080's (sic) release reported on by wccftech etc was literally now, with 10 series cards already having their production stopped back in Feb/ March. Guess if you throw throw rumours at the wall eventually you get one right by sheer number.

It's certainly meaningless as a practical demonstration of real world performance, yes. But they have to use 1080p low details with a 1080Ti if they want to test the CPU, it's the only way to make the CPU the bottleneck and even though it isn't in any way a real world scenario. When they test 4k there is very little difference between most mid to high range CPUs because it would be the 1080Ti limiting performance with a few exceptions where thread limits and the like are hit (eg Farcry 3) on i5s especially the 4 thread ones. In the wccftech article case the 1070 would be limiting performance even at 1080p for both CPUs. Alternatives like synthetic benchmarks have their own set of problems with being 'real world', of course, since they're synthetic. And the focus on single thread performance is starting to get a bit old, while it is still mostly relevant now programs will only get more multi threaded, they'll never get less, and the fewer threads you have the quicker your CPU will choke.

1700 is 8 core and 65W since that's what I have. You could probably get away with using the stock cooler as well, even with the 8 cores that 1700 is under 40 degrees (ambient +20) at normal use and barely touches 60 for most games. So much better than the shredded coke can screwed onto an aircraft turbine that was my old stock Intel cooler. The 2700x vs 8700k tests were done with a 1070 as the graphics card, so not the usual methodology and the test set up will be gpu rather than cpu limited. Having said that, a 1070 is a more real world scenario than testing 1080p low details on a 1080Ti or a Titan as is usually done. Given indications are of a roughly 10% boost in performance for Ryzen 2 it will probably still be a little behind a fully overclocked 8700k due to the remaining clock disparity, though Ryzen's IPC will be higher if the meltdown/ spectre patches are applied on the i7.

Yeah, all the large towns in East Qalamoun (funnily enough Al Jazeera called it west Qalamoun which is largely Lebanon) have reportedly surrendered/ reconciled already and when ISIS gets booted from Yarmouk that will be it for both rif Damascus and city Damascus. The Rastan/ Talbiseh pocket in Homs/ Hama is the obvious next target since with it gone you could drive on main roads from Damascus to Homs to Aleppo rather than on back roads with a huge detour. Bits of Idlib with Turkish backed rebels may be off limits, but areas like Jisr Al Shugour and those with HTS/ TIP presence will be fair game. What happens with the Kurdish areas depends on the US, if they withdraw they'll reconcile with the government to avoid Turkey as in the end Sheikh Maqsood, Tel Rifaat and rump bits of Afrin did. If they'd done so in early January they'd still have Afrin instead of having pro Turks settled in their houses. Long term... probably the Kurdish areas will be back with the Syrian Arab Republic renamed and Kurdish language education allowed andsimilar mostly cosmetic changes, they're far more natural allies than the radical islamists who spent as much time fighting kurds as the government or ISIS. And it turns out the research center destroyed in the strikes had been inspected multiple times by the OPCW, they'd used it for analysis and its last inspection was only November last year. There's also an interview with the girl shown gasping on the hospital video (so far as I'm aware the interviews with the medical staff saying it was smoke inhalation have never even been shown on the Beeb etc though this is obviously meant as refutation of that video) saying it was CW, but she's clearly reading a script since every time she pauses she looks either to her left or down then restarts. To be fair, the medical personnel also seem to be at least soft scripted, except when pointing themselves out in the video where they seem to be way more natural and believable. In the recent incident communication was fine, both Russia and the US agree. It was a previous incident where communication failed, and the circumstances were such that it led to accusations that the US was helping ISIS. (It was an hour long attack on besieged government held Deir Ez Zor city's most important defensive position which had been held by the government long term and which allowed ISIS to capture it, it killed or injured between 5 and 10% of the total defensive force of the city since they were completely unprepared for aerial attack and meant that DEZ airport was easily interdicted making supply flights even more difficult; the deconfliction line was only attended by a junior US officer during the incident not the Colonel who should have been there and the US also gave incorrect targeting information to the Russians beforehand. The strikes were also in a general area which was extremely rarely targeted by the US before or after) There wasn't any real chance of escalation in the latest incident since whatever Wagner was doing it was doing it independently from Russia in coordination with the local tribes who wanted Conoco Gas Plant, and revenge on the branch of their tribe which swore fealty to ISIS and had them besieged in DEZ for 3+ years. Deiz Ez Zor is far too far away for effective intervention even if Russia wanted to. If Russia wanted to target the US the base at At Tanf would be a better target anyway, it's way more isolated and has zero credible legal justification

There are a few Chinese soldiers in Syria mostly due to TIP's (Turkestan Islamic Party; pan Turkic, main Uighur terrorist group) presence. They're not advertising their presence and neither is the west, and aren't actively fighting only advising and providing intelligence. There are also a lot of reconstruction advisers already there.

Wow, and the luxury of a DX as well. Not sure I could justify the cost premium for going DX over SX, personally.

There's definitely a crater right in the middle of the second picture, it's a big rectangular patch of green in the before pic which makes it look like underground storage. Impossible to tell if that's correct or not, but there's definitely a crater there. I'm not sure that browbeaten is quite the right term. Yeah, it's pretty clear that his instincts are broadly towards isolationism, the battle is between those instincts and his desire not to look weak which is probably why we ended up with the wild swing in the tone of his tweets from promising WW3 to giving peace a chance over half an hour. His position is probably that he wants out still, but feels he has to respond when US power is questioned. I doubt he particularly cares about kids in Syria, he certainly doesn't care about kids in Yemen, he just cares that it looked like Assad was roostering a snook at him. If the CW attack was staged (if it was it would have been Saudi doing so, Turkey deported 500+ Saudis and they were the ones stopping the surrender agreement) then he was manipulated, if not it was just in his nature to put not looking weak as highest priority. There's some decent satellite imagery of the damage now, far better than the DoD/ Pentagon provided. In terms of craters it looks like 7 and 2 hits at the two Homs sites but that would be minimum number, impossible to say at the Barzah one- though with only 3 buildings being hit there now absolutely confirmed I'd expect 12t of explosives to have done more damage, and 25 missiles per building seems grossly excessive. Edit: took far too long to post that, link is the same as Gfted's

They're sufficiently unstable that for most military applications the precursors are not only stored separately but they're mixed literally on the fly in the warhead- or you can mix them in a bucket, doesn't matter if they're going to be used immediately. Some such as VX can be stabilised, and kept as mixed chemical. All are destroyed by heat and burning, so at least theoretically a saturation strike would not pose much of a leak risk. The list of targets and number of missiles used have been released by the Pentagon: 76 at the Barzeh Research Facility (Location, most pictures of damage are from roughly the roundabout at center and it's the 3 buildings to its NW that have been destroyed, see also) 22 at one chemical site in Shinshar, Homs (location of Shinshar; the imagery shown is so terrible you can barely say they're the same places and there are a load of military facilities around they could be in) 7 at another site in Shinshar, Homs (as above) The Russian, Syrian Government and Rebel claims are... rather different and all include attacks on multiple airfields, though most are on a rough flight path from Jordan to north Damascus (Mezzeh, Dumair, Marj Ruhayyil, Kalkhalah) or near Shanshir (Qusayr) so may well not have been actual targets but just shooting at passing missiles they assumed were targeted at them. Russians say 71 were brought down, SOHR says 65, Pentagon says 0. 76 fired at the Research Facility certainly seems completely ridiculous for the amount of damage so far shown- ISI (note: their north arrow is pointing... south) show only three buildings as destroyed and all the others shown apparently intact, 76 JASSMs and tomahawks would have cost more than the cost of the buildings.

The target at Barzeh literally has random civilians and soldiers walking around it and inside it, none wearing so much as a facemask. That's the only one with any pictures yet, and it's taken a fair ding it's fair to say. It is also least likely, if the US descriptions were true, to have much actual chemicals since it was a research facility. There's a big discrepancy between targeting reports still, the Russians, government and rebels all claim a whole bunch of places rather than 3 were targeted. The Russians and, rather oddly, the rabidly anti government SOHR both say that more than half of the missiles were intercepted, Pentagon claims are that none were. While 71 or 65 interceptions seems unlikely the case for at least one storm shadow being intercepted is near incontrovertible (french manufacturing info on wreckage, rocket fuselage looks more like a crash than explosion), and at least one other interception or failure is very likely (random missile debris is shown, but crater is far too large for an interceptor to have caused). Donald Trump tweeted a 'Mission Accomplished' message. I really do wonder sometimes if he does it all deliberately and is the biggest troll in the known universe.

They didn't leave, some ships put to sea and that's it. There's literally no concrete information yet, but it looks like in the order of 120 cruise missiles- not tomahawks, this time...- launched from B1s rather than ships and not going anywhere near the Russian base, probably launched over Jordan and coming east to west. Also tacit warning was definitely given to Russia, via the deconfliction line. Overall it looks low energy rather than yuge, and not likely to lead to anything much further. Not surprised it was launched today either, Friday the 13th wasn't going to be a go, but if the medical personnel from Douma Hospital* saying it was smoke inhalation rather than CW gains traction Trump's 'think of the children' appeal goes away. Their story is also exactly what the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported, so there's corroboration from a strongly anti government source. *the medical personnel can be seen in the most often repeated footage with the gasping children and point themselves out in it in the video. It's marginally NSFW and has age restriction applied so no embedding.

The US and allies have decided to attack Syria, so a separate thread seems sensible. Details are sketchy at the moment, so it's unclear if there was any tacit deal made with Russia or anything else. At least two waves of missiles over Damascus, and some reports of explosions near Homs is pretty much the sum total of what is known so far.

Probably time for a separate thread then so people can get back to talking about Trump flip flopping on TPP and shouting at Comey in peace.