Zoraptor

They are in Syria, at least when it comes to Assad vs the west which is what that is. Due to Qatari FP if it's the west vs Turkey they pick Turkey- pretty much have to, since Turkey guaranteed their continued existence v/v Saudi Arabia- but also due to Qatari FP AJEnglish is pretty pro West in everything now that Afghanistan is settled. Apart from Israel/ Palestine and to an extent Saudi Arabia (/Yemen), though that's primarily anti Saudi rather than anti west. AJA is anti west at least in rhetoric, but then that audience is inherently stridently anti west... Finnish figures are probably a good guideline. More so for Ukraine than Russia, since they're fighting on their own ground. Soviet figures include around 18 million civilian deaths as well as ~9 million military, the only way you could get the equivalent numbers in Ukraine would be if nukes were used- and pretty indiscriminately since that would require killing ~everyone in Kiev/ Dnipro'/ Zaporizhe and Ukraine to have 2 million men under arms to kill. I'd bet that both would need weighting for demographics as well. 1940s populations were typically a lot younger on average than now so could stand higher losses, and Ukraine especially has had a pretty significant demographic collapse post USSR.

Just wait for the inevitable 'S in NSDAP stands for Socialist --> --> Nazis have to be left wing!' arguments.

I suspect I could metagame the encounters in WotR to play on Core Rules. It's just way too much effort to do the first time through. Far easier on a replay. I think technically the weirdest difficulty 'curve' I've seen is still something like Oblivion. Nothing like having bandits dressed in armour that they could simply sell and then retire for life from the proceeds of; and the 'best' character development strategy being never to formally level up past 2. To be clear, I'm 100% expecting that to be misdirection, at least in so far as it being the 'big secret'.

Still working my way through Pathfinder WotR. Turned down the difficulty, and inevitably blow through just about every combat in five seconds flat (though see spoilers). Had the same issue with Kingmaker, at lower (character) levels the difficulty is very granular and you need to know the right order to do everything in to get the levels up at the right time, at some point on the lowered difficulty nearly everything becomes easy. Liberated a city, splattered some demon armies, now I'm anarchist Jesus or something. I'll probably start posting in the actual Pathfinder thread for the next update, since I'm getting a bit further through.

For signatories their use (or ownership, development etc) is completely illegal but since none of the parties are signatories.. .. it doesn't apply anyway, as they have to be explosive submunitions- and steel/ tungsten are purely kinetic. Definitions etc from the relevant convention, for anyone interested.

Master of Magic (classic) giveaway for nearly 3 more days. Plus Skyrim SE released. Which was one of the oldest games with a gog database entry but no release- see also (the still unreleased) Civ V.

RIP Stadia November 19, 2019 - January 18, 2023. A google product line abandoned, surely a first. On a(nother?) positive note at least they're refunding games bought etc.

The NZDF has to think carefully before firing off a single Javelin in training. Our biggest contribution by far is the intelligence and training people we've sent over (~200). lol. You don't half take things absolutely literally when it suits. In terms of the 'just asking questions/ posting articles' stuff I'm actually pretty glad that CNN interview was posted, and have no problem with that. The guy ought to be an expert, fair enough posting his views. He's either not though, or the interview has been editorialised significantly, or he's deliberately being inaccurate. I tend to go for the first because first impressions from the kiloton gaffe- and the generalised suspicion that brits with double barreled names got their job because they went to Eton or Harrow, not from any expertise.

Not really. You can actively maintain most of that older stuff, can't really maintain something clandestine at the bottom of the sea. That's going to get silted over, lose its magnetism, leak, get hit by trawler nets etc etc. And you'd still need to get relatively close to trigger it. And I say that as someone who suggested timer or remote control was used to obfuscate the timing, it's just that obfuscating by years is... lol really. Not necessary, unreliable and that's without the other factors like it removing rather than increasing Russia's leverage. It is however incredibly funny watching people who spend most of their time saying all Russia's equipment is a joke that doesn't work suddenly deciding that they're highly competent and it worked fine in this particular instance. Doesn't really matter for the point being made. There's simply no shortage of reliable delivery vehicles as he claimed. If anything that makes him look even more stupid, since he said the (warheads and) missiles were probably maintained OK and more or less reliable. It's like he forgot the air force existed and thought the entire tactical nuclear arsenal was defunct tochkas. (If anyone is interested there's a list of delivery systems here, and for the non strategic ~tactical~ ones most are deployed by Russia in or around Ukraine)

Ah yes, the Russians. Their nuclear delivery vehicles have all fallen apart, but they can put limpet mines on underwater cables and have them detonate remotely years later. Truly they are exactly as competent or incompetent as needed for whatever story is being told. "Tactical nuclear weapons meanwhile are much smaller warheads with a yield, or explosive power, of up to 100 kilotons of dynamite" Excellent way to establish your credentials as ex head of CBRN for NATO and the UK, that. TNT, not dynamite. Doesn't get any better from there. "The warheads and missiles are probably in reasonable condition but the vehicles they are mounted on are, I believe and have on good authority, in poor condition." ... The Russians have been using tactical nuclear capable delivery systems from the outset, and not just one or two. A dozen, +/- a few depending on how you classify tactical. Not like they weld nuclear missiles/ bombs to an Iskander or Su-34 anyway, you can give them a nuclear or non nuclear load out. In particular a Khinzal could be fitted to a MiG31 and fired from Moscow to handily hit anywhere in Ukraine.

Arc A770 priced at 329USD, launch Oct 12. If it actually performed like a 3060Ti that would be at least a decent price. But it will probably perform a lot more like a 3060, and worse in dx11. Also some Intel benchmarking for their upcoming processors. Fairly clear the 5950x is not actually AMD's premier gaming chip but I guess 'performs ~the same as or worse than a 5800x3d in 5 out of 9 tests' is not the best marketing. Plus mark though for starting the y axis at 0 instead of 0.90 like nVidia would have.

(1) not even von der Leyen is that dumb and (2) Neither Nordstream is active energy infrastructure Maybe, but it's not like it's come from a vacuum. "There will no longer be a NS2. We'll bring an end to it."-- Joe Biden Feb 7 2022

For a Bob Ballard/ Titanic type situation, sure. But that was both ~40 years ago now and literally multiple km deep in the Atlantic instead of ~80m. The general rule is that if you can get a squishy meat sack to something you can get a mechanical object there more easily, at least physically, since you don't have to protect the squishy meatsack part. While the squishy meatsack is generally more flexible in what it can do if you just want to blow something up then mechanical is perfectly fine. In this situation you don't even need necessarily to rescue the drone afterwards, you could use the underwater equivalent of a 'suicide drone'* and chuck it off the back of any old ship, a yacht, a speedboat. You definitely have the problem of needing some sort of recovery vessel/ means if using frogmen too. Realistically though either way you can obfuscate timing by using a delayed or remote trigger, so presence or lack of ships at a specific time means little. *--> ~torpedo really, much as most aerial 'suicide drones' --> ~cruise missiles.

Divers others have mentioned, but the other main alternative to a sub is a Remote Operated Vehicle, ie underwater drone.

Even the 65W BIOS setting supposedly gives ~80% MT performance (and still 100% ST) compared to the unlocked/ ~240W one. Suppose you can't really blame them when the Intel equivalent looks to do the same but at +100W, and that performance is what people use for comparison.

7000/ Zen4 reviews are out*. Mostly positive (except Linus). Main caveats: expensive system costs and hot hot hot! (though you get 95% of the performance from 50% of the wattage, so solution is obvious) *Looks like everyone got 2 SKUs to test, so there isn't a single comprehensive review unfortunately.

I'm still not sure how quoting the relevant rules direct from the treaty('s list of definitions) is deflecting. It's like pointing out that an 'assault' isn't an assault by citing the legal definition; you can argue that it should be an assault morally, but legally... Fundamentally I think there's a pretty basic misunderstanding of how such treaties work at play. Treaties are written so as to get the maximum number of people to sign up, not to get maximum enforcement. Indeed, in order to get the maximum sign up enforcement is always weak, and there are always numerous loopholes. See any climate agreement, any agreement on military weapons, the UNSC etc. Though that is not what happened with Chernobyl: Russia wasn't uneffected, but other places were far more effected. Europe doesn't really have prevailing winds in the sense many places do. Look at the same data for Fukushima and it's a stereotypical plume heading out over the Pacific, for example.

Hmm yes. I wonder what Olaf Scholtz has been doing this week. It would be slightly ironic if he was off in Saudi Arabia begging Saudi/ MbS for energy...

That's not directly Ukraine related, the proximal reason is tax cuts funded by £72bn more borrowing. I guess, technically, if they get ~4% GDP growth out of it they'll be ahead on the debt to GDP ratio balance, but it doesn't seem like anyone except Kwarteng and Truss expect it to work out like that. (for anyone who doesn't check the article zerohedge blames the mini budget as well. The £150bn in already announced and Ukraine related energy cap costs will definitely not be helping though)

Lower estimate --> 30k Higher estimate --> 1.2mn Not really worth even speculating with a forty fold difference. You can say some things for sure though, like the timing is rubbish. Quick mobilisation --> just in time for Rasputitsa. Slower mobilisation --> just in time for winter. Only thing that is for absolute sure is that each side will say that the other's draftees are angry and don't want to fight.

The compromise option is obviously an anime about the Iraq War. I have, at various times, been tempted to watch Sailor Moon. But no so much that I've actually done it.

Watched the Cyberpunk anime on Netflix. First anime I've actually completed watching (only other one I can recall watching at all was Attack on Titan? with the giant zombie type things attacking cities? and I haven't seen the final season) and otherwise my entire knowledge of it comes from memes and Barenaked Ladies lyrics. Also, haven't played CDPR's game yet. One of those series that was almost certainly better than it 'felt', since I got through it pretty quickly. OTOH, 10x27 minute episodes, with pretty much the entirety of 'This Fire' for start credits and ~ 2 minutes of end credits makes for not much more than 20 minutes running time per ep. I can see why its release has got a lot of people back into the game, certainly.

ctrl+f Euro currency R(o)uble no results. Hmm. (Seriously, who thought that the EU was sanctioning Ukraine? Never seen that so much as suggested, except for Donbass/ Crimea etc. The issue with importing into the EU from Ukraine was always that sea trade was shut, and rail capacity was ~1% of sea capacity- plus ran on a different gauge so you'd have to transfer everything without the equipment to do so easily.)

Dunno, I saw a lot of people who thought Lovelace would definitely have DP2.0 if only to beat AMD to it*. Suppose they would have had to redesign the I/O to do it, so they didn't. And while I don't imagine too many people will be running 4k/240hz any time soon capability does make for a nice marketing claim. *eg "If AMD is adding DP 2.0 then indeed, Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace will have this feature too."

Displayport 1.4 rather than 2? Guess it's kind of a PCIe 4 vs 5 situation with the new spec being kind of pointless, now, but... They've actually made a lot of noise about being a 'software company' now and targeting $40bn of new revenue from that*. They make huge margins per card and a lot of money in absolute terms in the server/ AI/ pro etc sector already and have for a long time, albeit those cards are also somewhat more expensive to make. Annualised licensing is not really the sort of thing they can apply to gamers though, since many don't even like the relatively mild gatekeeping on the drivers; corporations and the like pretty much expect it though. The reactions if they tried charging gamers for driver updates would certainly be, uh, interesting to say the least. *Probably wishful thinking with the crypto boom ending.