Zoraptor

The whole gold/ platinum sales thing never really seemed to catch on much in gaming as compared to music. (IIRC the reason for the term is that the master disc they used for duplication in gaming used to be differentiated from 'normal' silver discs by being coloured gold instead. That would then be sent to the fabricator)

They can and do censor anything from bureaux operating in Israel though, like the BBC* and CNN- or Fox or Sky. They outright banned roughly 300 articles per year during 'normal' times, and their powers have been strengthened over the past year taking into account them being on wartime footing now, and the infamous 'Al Jazeera Law' of April 2024. The article above has the byline of NPR's... Science correspondent. Who is considerably less likely to need to go to Israel any time soon than an international or politics one. *to illsutrate, from the Grauniad (I mean, imagine the BBC apologising to Russia for not obeying their military censor... yeah. The whole thing is supine)

Don't know why you'd be inclined to believe them, they're all subject to the IDF Military Censor- so it's Daniel Hagari deciding what does and does not get published. Funnily enough, saying that you're subject to the Military Censor is itself subject to... the Military Censor. And if you don't like that you get Al Jazeera'ed out of the country. To illustrate, every bit of Bruce's quote except one is "Israel says" only this or that was hit which is hit is exactly as credible as them saying they only hit Hamas targets in Gaza; which is patently false to anyone blessed with the gift of sight and IQ greater than ambient temperature (in celsius). Strangely, the same outlets that put up satellite images of damage to Iran or Russia the next day haven't done anything similar for these strikes. Though to be fair, that may be due to the satellite companies suddenly changing their policies. Coincidentally, disaffected journalists from CNN and BBC have been complaining to Al-J about how badly they're compromised; including this about one of the more infamous bits of misinformation:

Guys, guys, it's about 95% likely Bruce knows perfectly well about the Samson Doctrine- he's on the Codex after all- and is just trolling about Iran being irresponsible with nukes. Even if he didn't: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother" -- Moshe Dayan, Israeli Defence Minister. For that matter: "Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice." -- Moshe Dayan, Israeli Defence Minister Or indeed: "The method of collective punishment so far has proved effective." -- Moshe Dayan, Israeli Defence Minister plus ça change...

If the US didn't send $10bn of bombs to hit civilians Israel would be forced- forced!- to use dumb bombs and nukes(!) instead and kill even more civilians; so it's not only deescalatory it's also in keeping with the highest ideals of humanitarianism! Is an argument I have quite literally seen used. I'd like to think it was ironic... Realistically, what is happening was always going to happen as soon as it became clear the US wasn't willing to do anything at all to rein in Netanyahu beyond the mildest of mild verbal requests, and would instead support them in anything and everything.

OK, and how much do you think the 5090 will go for? Dunno, kind of feel Intel has to persevere with the GPU division. Not for the GPUs themselves though.

For anyone wondering, Israel has defensively launched about 4 times as many attacks into Lebanon as Hezbollah has into Israel. That's not just according to Al Jazeera, but also the BBC. Israel's already tried to grab a buffer zone in Lebanon multiple times. Got driven out in 2000 with tail well and truly between legs. Would be a lot more difficult now as they could rely on having some support from the SLA then, but they're all dead (as traitors, even their fellow Christians hated them as Quislings, or in Israel) and even the Kataeb/ Phalange fascists Sharon got to do the Sabra and Shatila massacre hate them now. And then there was 2006... Far better to sit back and blow up civilians with impunity while Starmer, Scholtz and Genocide Joe feign concern and wonder why the rest of the world thinks they're gigantic hypocrites. Funniest Hasbara take is that there are Lebanese cheering Israel on. The lasting effect of Israel's intervention in the Lebanese CW is that everyone hates them there when previous they at least had some sympathy from some of the Christians. Some, like the aforementioned Kataeb, just hate Hezbollah too.

I suspect the minuteman thing may also work better for americans, since it's their history. (For those outside the US the other Minutemen may actually be better known than the militia, which would at least bring irony to the situation)

I'd agree, if the hate speech laws weren't being abused. The above is almost certainly a response not to hate speech laws, per se, but the attempts to go after SM for publishing 'hate speech' that is defined primarily to suppress dissent.

Well... the minutemen thing kind of makes sense from a role playing/ character pov along with the settlements in terms of you 'refounding the US' amid the Fallout theme of hyper nationalism, especially for someone who has been frozen from pre apocalypse rather than brought up post so might realistically have bought into that hypernationalism. Same for looking for jr too really, you are told you care rather than being made to; but logically you would. I won't defend it any more than that since pretty much only the base idea is fine, the implementation is definitely typical Bethesda.

I'm not even sure that's a genuine change at all, as opposed to clarifying already existing policy. It's not like in an attack by NATO but with no overt US/ UK/ French involvement you could rules lawyer Russia out of a nuclear response based on the attackers being 'non nuclear' and only supported by the nuclear ones with or without the change. Haha you can't take blood hi-5 haha gottem might work in the Merchant of Venice; not so much in geopolitics. Even if it were a shift they'd still be a degree or two shy of, well, existing US policy. That despite Biden making a 2020 election pledge to change it.

Skeptical? Haven't read that article in particular but the one I did read was embarrassing and assumed everyone reading it was an idiot. Russia has no reason to use Chinese spy satellites, and all the Ukrainian NPPs are soviet designs so they have the blueprints. What Russia will almost certainly do is hit the grid around the NPPs since they're about the only bulk generation Ukraine has left at this point, which Zelensky will then claim as a nuclear attack. Zelensky's victory plan is almost certainly to get approval to hit military targets inside Russia with NATO weapons- and then hit the Kremlin with them to provoke a response that gets NATO directly involved. That's about the only path to victory Ukraine has.

IIRC the expectation is that less massive stars have planets orbiting proportionately closer, eg a lot of red dwarfs have detected planets with years of only a few Earth days and are closer to their sun than Mercury is to ours, so the disruption for a smaller intruder is not as disproportionate as might be expected. Unless the difference is really large and the passage very close. I'd suspect it being part of the same stellar association is unlikely* solely on principle, but that's about as far from a solid conclusion as it's possible to get. It'd certainly be tempting to think that the spate of big planetary scale collisions that happened ~4bn years ago were caused by an intruder. That's whatever knocked Uranus over onto its side, Theia's putative collision with Earth and some people are pretty confident Venus had a large collision as well to explain why its rotation is odd- and its greenhouse effect/ weird volcanism; with it at one point even having a roughly Lunar equivalent moon. They may well have all been 'natural', though the explanations are not incompatible with an intruder, ie something perturbed Theia but it doesn't have to be Venus/ Jupiter doing it and if it were them they may have themselves been perturbed first. It's all complicated too by planetary orbits changing 'naturally' over astronomical timescales... *kind of by definition stars in stellar associations tend to drift apart rather than together over astronomical timespans.

That explanation has been around a while as an alternative to PlanetX (as was, definitely not dead) or Nemesis (red/ brown dwarf solar companion; would also explain apparent mass extinction periodicity) hypotheses. Those both work theoretically, but neither has been found and for Nemesis at least that's getting to be a real problem. The attraction of something extra solar doing it is that you wouldn't expect to find anything, just its effects.

It was likely a compromised shipment rather than a compromised model per se. Definitely not in widespread usage, most 'normal' people would just use cellphones which are pretty much ubiquitous in Lebanon (1 phone per 1.15 people). Though the most obvious other group using them (apart from drug cartels maybe) would be medical staff. Even if there were collateral damage it's not like Israel would care though. Or if Israel cared Netanyahu wouldn't. Doesn't need to be more complicated than a remote detonator. Ultimately the trouble with radios is that they have to send and receive signals; if you have a detonator receiver disguised as a genuine component it's got natural cover. Israel has targeted pretty much every solar panel in Gaza. If nothing else it's a tacit threat to take out Lebanon's energy grid (such as it is...) and leave Hezbollah in the dark. It will be... 'interesting' to see how countries react if Israel does target the energy grid given reactions in Ukraine. It was crickets when they hit the power plant at Hodeida the previous time the Houthis hit them. OK, about as interesting as Israel targeting the water supply, the food supply, medical facilities, educational facilities, civilian buildings, refugee camps, medical staff, aid convoys, UN staff and UN facilities, and their energy grid, plus all the torture and other abuse of prisoners including rape and summary executions, no doubt.

They're still used a lot in medical services for example. I think they were phased out here only a couple of years ago (no, apparently they are still used here as well).

Gaza thread would probably be most appropriate. There isn't really any doubt who is behind it. Certainly not the funny thread. One can only imagine the reaction if someone put a similar attack aimed at, say, Israel, Ukraine or the CIA in there...

Compared to pre Avdiivka the Russians are still gaining at twice the daily rate- and still taking 10k+ towns. Just not around Pokrovsk any more. Which is more because of Ukraine shifting forces (back) there than Russia moving theirs. It's also been Russian tactics to allow Ukraine to stabilise an area by transferring troops and instead attack the areas the troops have come from. Hence the new gains around Vuhledar, which lost a long term defender brigade to Pokrovsk. Same thing happened in Avdiivka too before it fell. As might be expected from Euromaidanpress Bruce's article is hopelessly optimistic. Even pro UA sources like liveuamap have Russian forces close to cutting off the Ukrainians near Korenovo, now. Ukraine lost a lot of their gains in Kursk due to rotating out their good formations for conscripts/ territorial brigades and it requires a fairly large dollop of positive thinking to think the conscripts are there to win where the elite troops failed. The supposed number of Russian soldiers along the border has actually dropped (!) by their estimates and their evidence for large scale transfers consists of 'elements' of two brigades. Even at full strength that's nowhere near 30k- and it's unlikely that the 1st Sloviansk Brigade is there in any meaningful way, at all, as it's a specifically- and OG- DPR formation.

3.5bn views, so statistically nearly half the world's population could have watched it on yt. (Personally, I genuinely like Blank Space)

True Swifties won't vote. They'll just leave a Blank Space. I'll get my coat.

They aren't being operated wholly by Ukraine. Which is fine*, if you can argue that they're only being operated in de jure Ukraine but becomes an act of war if they are used in what everybody accepts as being Russia proper. Pretty simple really. *for a certain definition of fine, eg you cannot take your specialists being targeted as an act of war either- and that has definitely happened multiple times. And in the more general sense, if the situation was reversed NATO would at minimum complain as vociferously as Russia about them supplying weapons to their enemies; and would definitively go the Article 5 route if Russian operated missiles hit their territory, even if it were Iranians or whoever primarily operating them.

Ukraine can certainly say that, though the situations are not equivalent*. Obviously that would also be a double edged sword for the west, since if that's an act of war supplying Abrams/ Leos/ Challies etc is as well. That would be fine for Ukraine though, since their only path to victory is escalatory and getting NATO directly involved. *Russia will be getting its satellite and AWACS type intelligence from Russia not Iran or DPRK, and it won't be Koreans or Iranians inputting target info or doing the maintenance as, to be blunt, the systems supplied are not very advanced- and mostly evolutions of soviet systems anyway. They're just supplying the systems, and that is long established to not be a direct act of war. Ukraine has neither satellites nor AWACS, they are getting that from NATO sources and per the Germans targeting info for Storm Shadow/SCALP is entered by Brits/ French (hence why won't send Taurus, as they don't want anyone on the ground) and the tech is wholly new to them. Now, you can argue that targeting occupied territories is fine, since that's NATO soldiers hitting Ukrainian territory from Ukrainian territory; but once they start being used on targets in Russia it is NATO targeting Russia by any reasonable definition of the term.

As always, anyone wondering about Russia's response to anything should ask themselves what their side's response would be in the same situation. Russia supplying and programming long range missiles and providing intelligence to the Taliban/ Iran/ Iraq/ Syria/ DPRK to target the west? The only difference would be that we'd convince ourselves that our invasion was justified, so any retaliation against us was escalatory and unjustified. Oh wait, that isn't really a difference, is it. And that isn't really even a rhetorical question. Russia invading NATO? Well, we all know what the plan was when it was the USSR. A nice series of radioactive craters across the Fulda Gap. But surely the Russians wouldn't nuke themselves just to take our NATO troops? Of course they would- though as with the NATO plan they wouldn't just be nuking themselves. Anything else is Magical Thinking. After all, what else are nukes for except to make the cost of an invasion prohibitive. Not really even a rhetorical question again there. Realistically, the only reason NATO would not be seeking regime change in the current conflict is that the alternatives are worse than Putin or so obviously unpopular/ seen as Quislings as to be impossible to install without the invasion that can't happen because of the nukes.

The short answer is that if you haven't watched it you aren't worth anything to them, and aren't until you do. Maybe you will eventually- but maybe you'll forget. Either way it does nothing for the company now. In the end they have to gauge success somehow and how many people are motivated to drop everything and watch is easy and gives you a quick answer when you've got to decide whether you want to spend another 200 million bucks or whatever. I tend to agree with Bartimaeus' complaints about the Netflix model, but it is understandable why it's a model. I'd also note that they weight binging very heavily for some reason, despite the opposite actually being an advantage. ie watch a series in a few days and you can cancel your sub, watch one more slowly and it's multiple months worth of subs but Netflix prefers the former for new releases. There's a definite irony there also when the bread and butter series for streaming tend to be, well, oldish ~syndicated types like The Office, Friends, Suits, Lost etc that people come back to watch multiple times rather than just the Bridgertons and Stranger Things. Especially so nowadays when the flagships all tend to be 8ish episodes, every two years. I doubt RoP is in danger of being cancelled* due to sunk cost. So much money has been spent buying the rights, setting everything up in NZ, stalling for 18 months due to covid (leasing every sound stage in Auckland over that time...) then moving everything to the UK that the actual filming costs are pretty minor. It's also the sort of thing where if it got cancelled managerial heads would have to roll. Amazon also didn't cancel Citadel, and hasn't cancelled Wheel of Time either. Yet, though it seems the most likely to go of the big budget failures. They've got a decent tolerance. cf The Acolyte getting cut pretty unceremoniously by Disney. *or maybe it's Chimp Crazy that is in danger of being cancelled? Don't think they ever made S2 of Tiger King after all.

Eh, I'd be skeptical based on previous events. I'm pretty skeptical that Iran is even sending Shaheds at this point as opposed to Russia using domestic production. (I always have a bit of a lol about those sorts of articles since you're never meant to remember all the other times they 'finally' sent them, according to multiple anonymous sources familiar with the intelligence. To whit: Reuters, February 22, 2024. Emphasis added. Note also that according to multiple anonymous sources the deal was actually worked out back in October 2022 (eg WaPo article October 16 2022), now nearly two years ago and more than a year prior to the "late last year" claim)