Zoraptor

It definitely isn't something that only the Russians know how to make as (1) it was supposedly a soviet developed weapon, and the USSR is now a bunch of countries not just Russia and (2) that isn't really how chemical synthesis works- if you know someone synthesised a chemical structure then you know you can synthesise it too (near literally QED; someone has already made it) and if you're looking for a defence to a nerve agent there is a very high likelihood you will have made it, to test it. Admitting that is, of course, not something you want to do. Knowing what a compound is and does almost always makes it a lot easier to synthesise than the initial discovery and synthesis, that's one of the main reasons for drug patents, a chemical that might take a decade to develop can usually be made by a plant in India or China within months or even weeks of release. That's also why claims that nerve agents have to be governmental are difficult to support, may be true for novichoks but the sarins and vxs of the world are basically organophosphate fly sprays that kill people instead, so long as they don't have to keep effective for a long storage time (which as chemical weapons they have to, of course) they're 'easy' to make at least chemically speaking. They likely know the exact chemical used, novichoks is their only name, they don't have short names like 'sarin' or 'vx' and the scientific names for complex chemicals may take 5 minutes to say so just saying novochok family doesn't imply they don't know the exact formula. It is possible though that they didn't get enough pure sample (since they seemed to take ages finding where it was applied) for MS etc, if they had to use samples from the victims they might not know the formula since the chemical would have been metabolised which involves the chemical being broken down into 'common' bits. The poisoning story is inherently quite strong, they haven't done a very good job of selling it convincingly at all though since reflex action is to exaggerate/ lie. Boris lying and covering it up was utterly moronic. Propaganda, well it isn't convincing to those who aren't already convinced and like most propaganda can easily be run in reverse to make it look like (sometimes suspicious) posturing. UK security council person saying that Russia should be excluded from investigations as they were an interested party that would prejudge innocence? Bye bye all UK, US and other experts from countries that prejudged guilt by expelling diplomats then, logically. Only 6 countries backed Russians experts to go on the OPCW mission? Well, you did little better since the majority abstained. 26 countries expelled diplomats? 170 odd didn't, that's a pathetic 12% backing you... Lots of people care, some even 100% genuinely so, since other people were effected. But a lot of those people certainly would not care if the UK had whacked Kim Philby and some innocent Russians had died or been injured, that would have been realpolitik and getting a traitor. And a fair few would only care if it was done by the Russians to 'nice' people and wouldn't care about Israeli Mossad murdering innocent people in, say, Lillehammer, or the French DGSE murdering an innocent guy here.

Looks like Boris Johnson rather over egged the case against Russia for the Skripal poisonings, as per usual, since Porton Down did not attribute any manufacturer and he and the foreign office repeatedly claimed they did. For anyone with knowledge of organic chemistry that was pretty obvious, you cannot get a country of origin from chemicals except in very specific circumstances since a chemical is a chemical wherever it comes from. Full on damage control now though. Pretty stupid approach too, you can over egg while remaining technically truthful and if you can rely on media not to question you can easily get away with being vague rather than specific; and it isn't like the circumstantial evidence ain't enough for the general public. Similar with the Khan Sheikhoun CW attack too, since it was a year ago today. The more actual detail released the less consistent sense is made, such as 40% of victims turning up at hospitals too early and in some cases literally teleporting 100km, and there being conventional rockets that have supposedly diagnostic chemical bomb 'filler caps' (eg, to right of main debris). Not that the Russians are any better at it, but if they're worse it isn't by much.

World building? In my campy time travel show? It's less common than you might think? Per Amentep, there's plenty of ways that Obama could be president at some point. There's far, far worse inconsistencies in the shows than that, which tend to get hand waved by 'speedforce' and similar explanations. There's one other Arrowverse president, Supergirl has Linda Carter playing her as they love their stunt castings even more than Flash does. That was about as blatant a political statement as possible since she's also a literal alien and pretty much everyone made comments about how they'd never vote for 'that other guy'*. That's a different universe version from the other shows though. *Then, ironically (don't you think?), one of the Arrowverse EPs got the chop for sexual harassment as part of #MeToo...

Yeah, consumer products aren't confirmed, but... That pro/ machine learning Vega20 was announced in January. Die shrunk Vega consumer cards actually were mentioned before that, they simply haven't been mentioned since. To put it in perspective, most people expect a new nVidia series to drop in the next month or so, and it hasn't been formally announced either and there were pro versions of Vega10 before the consumer version release as well, given '7nm' is a new process and the margins for pro level cards that's an almost inevitable approach. Advantages to Vega of a die shrink are far too great to pass up since it would fix nearly all its problems bar some associated with HBM; and even there reduced GPU heat will help memory clock a lot (indeed, undervolting the gpu to reduce memory throttling is perhaps the most common 'overclock' approach for Vega). Unless Navi is far further along than thought- possible, but the only 'evidence' for it is the inconsistent and speculative ps5 leaks- they'd be stuck with Vega 10/ Polaris chips for maybe the next 18 months.

Pretty good article that, though a bit wordy. It would be asking a bit much to outright come out and say that MbS is a hubris riddled incompetent given the depth of influence of Saudi cash, but it nicely lays out how many hand grenades he's pulled the pin on simultaneously. In a way it's not really his fault, if you've never been told that your ideas are crap or thrown everyone whose said it into jail then it's very hard to work out why things aren't going as you intended. Worse, you tend to end up with people lying to you because they don't want to be gulaged. It's funny to see Trump outright gouging the guy as well. Just about anyone else and I'd decry it, but I admit to disliking MbS enough that seeing Trump telling him that he's a very naughty boy and needs to spend more money on american weapons (presumably including patriots which are about as dangerous to Saudis as the Houthi rockets they're fired at, should bite the bullet and buy Russian like the Turks) on live TV complete with props was highly amusing, and now he's hitting him up for cash to keep US troops in Syria as well.

Some people almost certainly do starve even after the big food shortage they had, though it's certainly massively overstated how many and how often in the western media. Doesn't matter whether you're a friendly journalist or not, you're simply not going to get to see people who are really short of food. It isn't in China's interests for DPRK to be destitute anyway, so it isn't. China (and Russia, to a far lesser extent) simply ignore sanctions when they want to as there are no independent monitors and what would anyone do anyway; so large amounts of oil etc still get through which would make a real difference if they didn't. Mainly though, DPRK is one of those countries which is always as dangerous or pathetic, as competent or incompetent as the current story needs it to be, and no matter how inconsistent its depiction is. If you want to minimise fears it's a starving country with old tech and no usable nukes plus rockets that explode unexpectedly all the time plus a spoilt cretin of a leader; if you want to up the fear it's got a million man army with 10k artillery pieces aimed at Seoul along with chemical and nuclear weapons plus a leader who's totally cray-cray.

Realistically, Park (?) getting done for corruption ended any practical US prospects of intervention. Her replacement is an order of magnitude more pro peace than she was. Kim's played a weak hand very well, there's a lot of "yeah but, his people are poor and starving and he's isolated!" type comments from politicians but he has to actually care about that enough for it to have an effect, and he doesn't. He cares about having sufficient deterrent to stop the US from invading him, and that he has. The crazy man posturing is absolutely calculated- similarly to some of Trump's posturing- to make him seem reasonable, now, once he's got what he wants.

Yeah, it won't be an IP issue on the game content, it will be: "Game Technology and Toolset © 2007 Obsidian Entertainment Inc." (from the MotB box hence 2007) which would be the problem. Even if Hasbro could give permission for a remake it should require Obsidian's permission to make engine alterations. They might be legally able to back port the content to Aurora or to another engine to end run any Obsidian permissions, but that seems extremely unlikely practically.

They did come to him, the concert was in Pyongyang though Kim was not expected to attend. Kim's only left DPRK once as leader and that was last week (to China). The visit was reciprocation for the cheer team the north sent to the Winter Olympics.

They did Arx Fatalis as their first game and it's definitely an RPG much like Ultima Underworld it was based on. Arx is not without its problems but a pretty good game overall. There's also Dark Messiah Might and Magic which had strong RPG elements (and was based on an RPG franchise). Otherwise their games have generally aped Looking Glass Games- Dishonoured was Thief and Prey was System Shock- and as with the LGS originals they were all RPGish games without actually being RPGs.

I'd prefer to see some actual Chinese do it. CDPR has been good at doing what they know, medievalesque lowish magic Poland, but that's it and that's a fair distance from ancient/ medieval China. And Bethesda... would probably make me long for Bioware's highly respectful and original take. Suppose Arkane might be OK, from the overall Beth stable, but even with them it would be a departure they just have a more varied portfolio.

Vega 20* cards have appeared in some Linux certification, so it looks liker there will be a Vega refresh this year despite it not being announced. That should at least help with efficiency, and that may indirectly help with decently clocked memory. Plus eth is collapsing, so maybe I'll be able to pick up an actual card some time for less than the current $1100 asking price. Ironically Vega has probably been one of the most successful chips ever despite its flaws thanks to mining, it's basically never been in stock since launch nearly a year ago. *AMD's naming conventions really are stupid, since they have Vega8, 11, 24 (Intel), 56, 64 as consumer products which are all based on Vega10 chips '14nm'; with Vega 20 being the 'tock' '7nm' die shrunk chip to Vega10's 'tick'. Ryzen naming is about as consistent.

[insert relevant Tropic Thunder quote] Though it does kind of sum up mid noughties Bioware that their 'unique' Chinese setting somehow results in a game even more generic than their forgotten realms (!), star wars (!!) or deliberately generic space opera game of equivalent era. Kindest thing I can say about JE is that it was mercifully short.

That last one is tradition dating back to 1984- Elite had slaves that you couldn't tell were slaves until you picked them up at which point it was jettison them, or have contraband. They also had the ability to capture escape pods and get slaves which was a pretty nice (well, 'nice') touch for 1984.

Or for those who only read the headlines, 142 total diplomats expelled plus quite a few more Brits to reduce their diplomatic staffing to the same levels as those of Russia in the UK. The number of extra Brits isn't anywhere near the 755 extra americans kicked last time, but it adds considerably to the 23 formally expelled. We ain't kicked any Russians because they don't have any spies here, which generated some amusing headlines overseas. More realistically, we didn't kick anyone because when French agents outright murdered an NZ citizen Thatcher told us to harden up and endorsed French sanctions on us, and memories for such things are rather long here especially in the Labour Party.

You even got the etymology of it.

7/8ths of the world's countries did not join Britain in expelling Russian diplomats, how do people think the UK will handle their diplomatic isolation?

And the guy supposedly had presidential aspirations too. That idea was pretty funny even before the CA scandal, though maybe not as funny as before Trump was elected.

Ask a rhetorical question; get a non rhetorical answer. Indeed, Kaffir Limes are still called Kaffir Limes even in South Africa. I do have to admit I find kafir/ kuffar* being pretty common and unredacted in Arabic language videos on the beeb rather ironic given how they refer to the Afrikaans version, as its connotations are scarcely better in its usual context there. (kuffar/ kafir = 'unbeliever' in Arabic, though considerably more perjorative than merely 'unbeliever' is in English; it's the sort of thing ISIS would call a Yezidi to justify the genocide and rape. It's the original source for both the racist term and the lime variety)

They'd probably imprison Malema for bad words if they could, he was kicked from the ANC for singing the old farmer killer song. Too many militant followers for him though. I wonder if the Beeb refers to Kaffir Limes as [redacted racial slur] Limes on their recipe pages. Though given their name comes direct from Arabic rather than Arabic via Afrikaans they might have to call them [redacted religious slur] Limes instead.

I thought he was Albanian and dead. And a dirty commie. At least Djuric will likely be returned with all his organs intact, that's pretty rare for when Serbs are kidnapped in Kosovo.

Expulsions are always political and they're always reciprocated, asking where to close is just trolling and nothing else. Russian embassies troll very frequently, admittedly it's extremely easy for them to do so considering how eminently triggerable and credulous the average westerner is. Only question is whether the reciprocation will be absolute equivalence or proportionate- and proportionate would be worse. The UK expelling 23 Russians was 40% of their staff, Russia expelling 23 Brits was considerably less than 40% of theirs. Most countries (including the US) have way more diplomats in Russia than the reverse, hence Russia expelling 755 (!) US diplomats last time to bring the numbers back to even. One would not want to speculate on why there are so many more diplomats in Russia than the reverse, but I'm sure it's 100% innocent and none of them carry out activities outside their station. The only surprising thing is the attempt to do expulsions from the UN by the US, which is on extremely dodgy footing. Time to move the UN to Switzerland or make its territory fully non national.

Hell, even crypto investments are more profitable than investing in a business that produces something and employs people. That's not really a change though, except in method- while the crypto craze uses modern methods it's still at its base Tulip Madness and similar to every other bubble, underpinned by the willingness of people to pay an even more ridiculous price for something than the previous buyer. I don't think anyone really believed that a tulip bulb was worth $40k each or whatever the peak price was, even if theoretically you got a physical bulb instead of some ephemeral 1s and 0s. The modern funny money banking/ share market/ derivative etc tools though, absolutely. Most of them take things that used to enable normal people to make money as well and turn them into the preserve of the elites, usually to the detriment of the normal people. A standard human share trader not only has a far harder time of it than some automated algorythm making trades every 5ms but will often be actively manipulated by them.

What's Ronald Dumsfeld, chopped liver? No coincidence that Mohamed bin Salman is in the US at the moment and an arch anti Iran hawk gets appointed. Best case scenario for Iran is Saudi gets militarily involved, given MBS's military genius they'd be in Riyadh in a month- dude even manages to get planes shot down by air to air missiles when fighting a foe who has literally no operative air force.

There is only one solution to the Russian problem, bomb Iran. Yep, Bolton never met a problem that couldn't be solved by bombing someone, preferably Iran. It will be 'fun' to see if the rest of the west contorts itself to support it or if it causes an actual split like Iraq did, but either way Bolton never met a foreign affairs problem that couldn't be bombed out of existence. Well, except Afghanistan and Iraq but they totally would have worked if people had just listened to him and upped the bombing until it worked.