Zoraptor

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)

Dunno, there was a fair bit of talk about the Challenger getting whacked when the counteroffensive was in full swing. Hard to work out from the wording whether the US doesn't want to say the F16 was shot down by a Russian anti air/ air to air missile or whether they don't want to say that he was 'shot down' by being too close to an exploding cruise missile. Guess the inference from the talk about pilot training is the latter. Though as always if it doesn't have a name for the quote you've got to take it with salt anyway.

George Martin wrote a blogpost (warning, spoilers) about House of the Dragon S2 and (some of) its problems*. Got pulled almost immediately, hence the archive link. I thought it was actually quite tame on the detail side of things, the spice was in the more off the cuff/ general remarks, especially since Condel is meant to be running the Dunk and Egg spinoff as well. Despite that it was probably pulled for the S3 spoiler, albeit it's something that was in the book so shouldn't be a surprise. Also that was not the most egregious example of an unnecessary change having a poor story effect to my mind. *non spoiler mini review: biggest problem is still the same as it was in S1, they don't want to make either of the main women characters 'bad' which results in them being inconsistent, indecisive and vacillating all over the place. So instead of being 'bad' they (still) look weak. Second biggest problem is the awful pacing and obviously truncated ending, though at least there the blame may be with Zaslav's arbitrary budget cuts and/or the writers' strike.

If they're going to fire the air defence chief every time there's friendly fire they're going to go through a fair number of people. If it's for the overall poor response instead Zelensky should probably fire himself for shifting so much equipment to Kursk, a lot of which got hit in the first few days. Man, why does seemingly every western media outlet use ISW? Of the pro Ukr maps Deepstatemap is better- and is even mentioned in the article- and even liveuamap is better. OK, you might not want to use deepstate's captioning in a proper newspaper...

Encased had an absolute plethora of options, indeed it was perhaps the highest effort RPG in that respect I've played. Far better than any recent big name RPG, at least those without a preset protagonist. Shame a lot of effort also went into reinventing the wheel mechanics wise and it felt at times that they were changing the usual way of doing things even if the usual was better.

Looks pretty definite that the first F-16 has been lost by Ukraine, along with (more importantly, since there are fewer of them) its pilot. Exactly how is, uh, up in the air. Russians said in an air strike on his base, WSJ has a crash due to pilot error and CNN has it being due to drone debris*; while a couple of sources have it shot down by friendly fire. Also looks pretty grim for Ukraine west of Donetsk city where towns they'd have fought over for weeks or months earlier this year are falling in days. Not by any means a full on rout or collapse as some are claiming but there's zero chance of stopping Russia short of Pokrovsk itself now. *via an in air interception; amazingly that would give the Shahed/ Geran three air to air kills despite having zero in air combat capability.

I'm not really sure why they'd want to distract from the offensive at this point. Whether or not it's actually going great on the ground it's certainly going great on twitter/ facebook/ reddit and in (most) news media. Personally, I wonder if they got wind that Russia was going to take another run at getting a UN investigation going. The reason the western countries gave for rejecting that in March 2023 was basically the old canard of complementarity; ie that western investigators were already investigating, and their investigations are intrinsically Enough. It's the sort of thing where a veto looks awful but a wait and see looks far less so, but eventually you do have to actually put something on the table. Indeed, there's a certain amount of amusement to be had reading back over the comments made at the time when- at least supposedly*- many of the countries making them knew who was behind it and had since before it happened. Including Germany, who needed an extra 16 months investigation from then and just shy of 24 in total to confirm what they, supposedly, already knew. *I'm extremely skeptical about the details of the WSJ article for multiple reasons and don't take it particularly seriously, but that is what its implications actually are.

He didn't 'flee the law', he was here perfectly legally as a resident, and well before being charged. Which he probably shouldn't have been given he has a conviction in Germany, but our good character test mostly consists of how big your cheque book is.

I'd be very skeptical of all the information coming out on nordstream. Pointing solely to Zaluzhny doing a rogue op when he's conveniently fired is, well, convenient. As for people who are facing criminal charges giving interviews to the WSJ... lol. Mostly though, and as always it's the stuff you're meant to forget as soon as it becomes inconvenient. To whit, current story is: Denmark: Multiple 100s of kgs of explosives used. Sweden: 50m of pipeline destroyed with a 250m debris field. Hmm. Also kind of funny if the CIA told them not to do it given the responses. Especially since the article says specifically that Germany was informed.

Apparently German authorities have issued an arrest warrant in the Nordstream bombings for a certain- and I swear I'm not making this up- "Volodymyr Z".

Don't think the NSA would bother when they have PSP (and IME for Intel; and Pluton on newer MBs for overkill) already. (I'm always mildly suspicious when what we're told are 'essential security features' for us are, for some mysterious reason, excluded from or disabled for products supplied to the US government...)

Well... thing is, tobacco is awful. It's the Adolf Hitler of legal substances available without prescription or (much) other controls. Vaping may be the Idi Amin of legally available substances, or, it may not be. Either way, it's still going to be better than tobacco. That doesn't mean I'm a big fan of the big man from Uganda or his electronic puff pipe equivalent, it's just that if you're looking for things worse than tobacco it's meth, crack, heroin type things which are all illegal. In terms of alcohol, if you assume everyone is going to use that responsibly then you have to assume everyone is going to vape responsibly. In reality, you get alcoholics, you get pregnant women drinking, you get drunk drivers, you get drunken brawls and you get all the other negative stuff- including cancers and the like- as well.

Second IAEA statement on the ZNPP fire has been released. TLDR; definitely a fire inside the cooling tower with burnt plastic mesh etc, some evidence of structural damage (eg concrete chips) but no evidence so far of cause for either.

Vaping is far less bad for you than smoking tobacco is for sure, which is why it's used for quitting smoking. It's almost certainly less bad for you than, say, alcohol as well.

The tower itself isn't, but there is plenty of stuff inside it that will cheerfully burn eg fillers. There are UN and IAEA people on the ground, so we'll probably get something out of them beyond their initial statement. (for anyone wondering: it's a cooling tower so the whole idea is to exchange heat rapidly. That needs a high surface area to volume ratio for the water being cooled. They do that with plastic/ synthetics* since concrete is terrible-it's a heat insulator let alone its other physical characteristics- and steel and other metals are expensive, and their reliability goes down massively as they get thinned, ie they corrode more quickly and their structural strength degrades. Normally of course it wouldn't be all that flammable anyway, since it'd be full of water, but it isn't operational. And the cooling tower is when it comes down to it a big chimney designed to draw air up itself. Start a fire and it'll still do its job, of drawing air up... *see here at bottom of page)

And, to be completely uncontroversial, Taiwan's two golds as well? (The eligibility rules for what constitutes a country for Olympic purposes are really weird. OK, so you probably don't want RoChina athletes being forced to compete as PRChinese or Palestinian being forced to compete as Israeli (or vice versa) or refugees being forced to compete for the countries they're refugees from but... Puerto Rico? Guam? American Samoa? Hong Kong? England/ Scotland/ Wales as GB, but Northern Irish compete as Ireland*; and the British Virgin Islands compete separately? *happens in rugby too, hence the Irish team's 'national anthem' being Ireland's Call in rugby rather than Amhrán na bhFiann)

#1 suggestion for future Olympic Games: have a unified West Indies team like in cricket. I feel that St Lucia and Dominica in particular would benefit from this arrangement. This suggestion has nothing to do with the per capita medal table and I would stridently refute any implication that it does.

Can't be worse than what they did to her in Rings of Power.

Surely AMD cannot be thinking of having XT processors. Stupid enough having CPUs and GPUs with the occasional same model number and very commonly similar, they'd end up having the exact same regularly if they brought in XT CPUs as well. Then what 9950XTX3D? XFX could sue them for gimmick infringement at that point. Don't think AMD can really use covid as an excuse for pricing any more. A 9600X here costs 10% more than I paid for my 8 core 1700 back in 2017 (500NZD), if it eventually settles to the same price as as 7600X it will be 20% cheaper though- and still a bit more than a 1600x cost. Though they were cheap GloFo 14nm; one suspects quite a lot of the premium goes to TSMC as effective last man standing for competitive advanced fabs.

Pfft. Early adopters deserve to get reamed on pricing. The 7600X's street pricing is a 45% discount on its MSRP after all, since its MSRP is, well, higher than the 9600X's. If you want to compare it to a skylake iteration, spare a thought for the poor buggers who bought a 4 thread 7600k at premium prices... As for the generational improvement, it's no Bulldozer --> Zen for sure*. But even the 3-5% IPC gain that seems typical is still more in one generation than Intel managed in its 5 skylake iterations. It's also, unlike [skylake iteration], potentially a fantastic improvement for both server and laptop performance due to the increased efficiency. May well have been better received if it was called Zen4+. But anyway, comparison to skylake is hyperbolic. People tend to forget just how bad that stagnation was because Intel was constantly bolting on extra cores and mucking around with the threading. *but these aren't the days of Moore's Law any more; people may just have to buy a deck of cards and deal with it when it comes to incremental improvements.

A comparison to Intel's Skylake stagnation is definite hyperbole. Krzanich would have sacrificed [a moderate number of lucrative share options] to satan to get an ~8% like to like generational improvement instead of, well, the 1% he managed.

Doesn't seem likely it will pin down any more resources than already are. Every source still has far more Russian troops- 100k+- on the northern border than are committed in Kharkov. If it really is a brigade that's inverse Goldilocks; not big enough to require extra resources, not small enough to do an infiltration type attack. And a brigade that isn't deployed in a place they'd potentially make a difference like near Pokrovsk or New York. Still, at least they bagged a Ka52 out of it. Nobody is crying tears for Wagner, probably not even the Russian government. They're disposable and disclaimable, that's the whole point of them. That Africa in general was not going to react well to being turned into a proxy battlefield for Europeans- more than it already is- should not have been a surprise to Ukraine. If nothing else they should have been aware that even the 'pure' Tuareg Nationalists don't just claim parts of Mali, they claim a big chunk of the Sahel including parts of multiple other countries. And the transnational ones they're mixed in with claim everything in a band from the Atlantic to Red Sea/ Upper Indian Ocean coast. They probably don't appreciate the gaslighting about the claims of responsibility either, though that is more minor.

Practically yeah, it was an inevitability whether gaming had the same or not. (I guess the point is that- theoretically- if it all stemmed from gaming/ general software then getting protections for them could (should, in an ideal world) be applied to everything software including service licensing for generic 'hardware' in a sort of pro consumer grandfather clause. It will be hard enough to get them applied to gaming though despite the fractured nature of the stakeholders. You'd be about as likely to get them applied to, say, BMW and Mercedes as to get wolves their protected status back with Ursula in charge of the EU. Though I would mention as I usually do in these discussions that some places do already have guarantees for being fit for use and durable in place for software anyway without the sky falling)

Well, it seems Ukraine wasn't involved in the attack in Mali now. Likely has very little to do with Mali severing ties, but more with Kuleba going to Africa on a trip and likely even more Senegal summoning their ambassador to complain. Senegal if of course still actively part of ECOWAS etc and not appreciably Russian aligned, but is effected by Touareg rebels as well. We also got this gem out of it... per Reuters. I wonder who they got that idea too. per PravdaUA. Oh, so that's who they got the idea from.

Seems likely the ideas came from computing*. They are, after all, all run through/ implemented by computers. Along with ubiquitous internet- though the idea of having to buy a dongle to stick on your M series to get its indicators working is kind of amusing. No doubt it would have happened anyway, but the blueprint is all based on software licensing because at heart that's what it is. *As an example, Steam. Gateway app that is hugely popular for being a gateway app, and people happily/ proudly give 30% of their cash to Valve for- most of the time- doing pretty much nothing. Which company wouldn't want to add 30% to revenue for doing nothing while being potentially thanked for it?