Zoraptor

There's very limited value in stripping bits off of tanks. If they were valuable as scrap they'd have been scrapped; and most western countries actively pay other countries to 'recycle' even 'high value' electronic waste (and Russia produces a lot of the stuff you get from recycling, eg copper anyway). Half the point of Ukraine ending up with everyone's old equipment is... the donors then don't have to pay to dispose of it. Most of the stripping is done for spare parts for other tanks. Russia has some modernised T-62s that were going to be sent to Syria a couple of years back before the war there quietened down, they'd be the ones they'd be using as they are better than a baseline T72. It would be odd for other reasons such as different ammunition and no autoloader so needs an extra crew, but not because they're rubbish. People are basing a lot on one (?) photo of a T-62 on a transporter anyway [out of date, there's more to base it on now than that it seems such as pictures actually inside Ukraine instead of Russia]. Same thing was being said 7 weeks ago, when the Ukrainians were mere hours away from taking Nova Kharkovka and Kherson city and isolating the entire Russian force west of the Dniepr- on the internet. (Well, mostly, we did get another 'misinterpretation' of city/ oblast from the Pentagon which may not have been initially intended as a misinterpretation and supposedly attacks were launched. But if so they failed without any appreciable gains) The Russians pretty clearly do intend to keep Kherson, so they will actually fight to keep it. Protecting the land bridge and the two crossings of the Dniepr are pretty important, though not absolutely critical. The other consideration is strategic, Ukraine doesn't benefit much militarily from taking land around, say, Kharkov because the Russian border is right there, and most of the troops taking that land have to remain to stop the Russians simply walking back in later. OTOH make gains around Kherson and those troops aren't needed for garrisoning/ border control and can immediately be used for an offensive again.

Oddest thing about AMD's publicity blitz is the claim of 15% performance increase- as that is what you'd expect from just the node change on an equal power basis (or 30% less power at equal performance per TMSC). They're kind of implying there are no arch IPC gains and the cache doubling doing nothing as well...

Russian Minister of Transport via opposition media and Ukrainian Pravda plus at least one translation isn't exactly convincing. There's certainly been a big PR push to suggest that logistics is falling apart in Russia with very little actual evidence for it since week 1- remember those "Russia will be out of [supplies] in x days" claims from, well, literally week 1? Nearly 3 months later and they don't seem to have actually run out of anything. Indeed, the failure to deliver even a proper default has lead to some... counterproductive ideas being floated, like capital I Instructing US bond holders to refuse payments from Russia. Which would achieve the result of a 'default', but only with the air quotes, and also achieve the result of telling everyone that the USD is an inherently unsafe currency to hold debt in since you're only solvent at the whim of the US. It would do far more damage to the US long term than anyone else, all for the purpose of being able to say that sanctions delivered a result.

Please people, off brand Alpha Protocol should clearly be called Omega Methodology.

Looks like Ukraine now has a real problem around Severodonetsk where they are in danger of being surrounded. While there is still a ~15km gap between the Russian attacks from north/ south there are only two roads in (with some swampy ground in between), and they're close enough to hit anything traveling along them with mortars or ATGMs- they may be close enough to the southern one to hit it even with HMG fire. Ukrainians have a lot of troops there as it is their de facto administrative capital of Lugansk and they really don't want to lose it. We've already seen some complaints from the troops there that they are running out of supplies too. It's also unlikely to last anywhere near as long as Mariupol if it is cut off despite having a similarly sized force since even Severodonetsk and Lysichansk together are nowhere near as big, and lack the two big steelworks as defensive focuses. Russia is also claiming 2400+ surrendered from Azovstal. Which is way higher than I'd have expected, but I've also seen usually pro Ukrainian sources say that there were actually 2700 there in which case they're a few hundred short. Certainly most of the leaders have surrendered now, as the Russians are making propaganda hay via showing videos of them.

Strange New Worlds Ep3- I think I've seen enough to say that if this series had been done in isolation from Discovery and Picard I'd be pretty happy. It's really hamstrung by the expectation that everything will inevitably become awful though. I also watched the Halo TV series, because... I'm not quite sure. One of the oddest televisual experiences I've had, really. Overall, not as good as Forward unto Dawn which I rather liked in a pulp scifi way. But there is some potential there. I don't regret the time spent watching it, but would not recommend.

Vangelis started the long and storied tradition of New Zealand political parties being sued for copyright infringement after the National Party used CoF for their 1984 campaign without approval*. Normally that might be the most stupid moment in a campaign, but that was the one where the National Party leader got drunk and announced a snap (or 'schnapps') election without anyone else in the party knowing, so it has to come in 2nd. Also Conquest of Paradise was both a great tune and completely appropriate as the theme for the Canterbury Crusaders rugby team. *having said that I cannot find a single reference to it anywhere online, only the internet era Eminem case.

Chechens, what are they going to do with Mariupol? It's not like the Uighurs moving into Jisr al Shugour in Syria; they literally have nowhere else to go. To be blunt that reeks of pretty blatant propaganda. Speaking of Mariupol since it's dropped out of the headlines, the surrenders there are ongoing for a third day. As of yesterday Russia was saying ~1000 and as of today DPR was saying 1700. 1700 would be towards the upper limit of what I expected, and may actually mean the 2000 claimed to be there is accurate- or it may be an inflated propaganda POW number to match an inflated Ukrainian number. The 1000 seems likely to be accurate though, given the count of buses and the 'evacuees' being uninjured so not taking up so much space. Also, no general prisoner swap deal was made* and the surrender was unconditional. Which is not overly surprising, as the Ukrainians may not even have 1000 POWs to swap, especially since they've done less publicised swaps multiple times before. *qualifier; for the uninjured. It's entirely possible the first batch of 264 are covered by a swap deal and were all injured, and that the Ukrainian MoD just let media interpret it wrong. That would also put pressure on Russia to adhere to an agreement they hadn't actually agreed to.

TLDR lol. OK, I actually read a decent number, and a depressing number of similar things apply to our 'left wing' government here.

The other issue apart from people using them as a source is that if the information is salacious enough other papers use them as a source. Then people quote the NYT* and The (London) Times and Grauniad to show that it's in all the 'respectable' press as well and thus has to be taken seriously. Case in point, Putin's phantom resignation in January 2021 where the ultimate source was... anonymous intelligence official, talking to The Sun; ie modern Kelvin McKenzie's left buttcheek. The flip side is state media, which isn't trustworthy but can be useful to see what the other side wants people to think. Tabloids though, the only thing you get from them is what they think will sell the most copy. *favourite newspaper of record moment: being told that a NYT article claiming unions were illegal in New Zealand had to be true because it was in the NYT who do exacting fact checking, and the legislation webpage of the NZ government saying they were legal had to be incorrect. Strangely enough the NYT reporter was actually wrong... and that was well after all the Nigerian Yellowcake etc fake intelligence laundering done through the NYT in 2002-3. There isn't any. It's possible that the UN or ICRC has some and they'd more or less qualify as unbiased, but they don't release such data independently and for the vast majority of information received will be aggregating biased/ controlled sources if they did release.

"Ukraine's defence ministry said that 264 defenders of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol had been evacuated to separatist-held territory in Ukraine's breakaway Donbas region" You can just say 'surrendered', Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, that's what it is when you're evacuated to enemy held territory. They're POWs who are going to be exchanged for other POWs, who also surrendered. Probably isn't quite over yet. Ukraine was claiming ~2000 defenders there fairly recently, and even though that was doubtless an exaggeration I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's another batch to come tomorrow. Not completely out of the question that some refuse to surrender too.

I'm kind of interested in watching that just to see how bad Picard has been. OTOH, nearly 39 minutes... that's nearly 39m more time than I really want to spend on Picard.

I always obey the road rules, but everyone else insists on driving on the wrong side of the road. Honourable exception: Sleeping Dogs. This is perhaps the most 21st century thing I have ever read.

Uh, yeah: "Shireen Abu Akleh: Israeli forces attack mourners carrying casket of dead Al Jazeera journalist". I mean, what can you say really?

Yeah, it's how long the 'near term future' is that is at question I guess. Three ways to interpret it: there will be (are?) some Arc graphics with piecemeal release for laptops earlier than the desktop line and they want to launch full suite XeSS with the desktop line They are having some implementation problems, or problems with the fallback implementations, andor it needs driver side implementation from AMD/ nVidia (which would be 'funny', but I wouldn't wholly discount it) Or, the big one: they promised XeSS and have to deliver it- but they only have to deliver it to Arc users. This would be the case if they've decided that they cannot compete with DLSS/ FSR. Despite my equivocation above the bottom option is the one I personally think is the case, but only on balance. FSR 2.0 being such a big improvement while still being easy to implement and Intel very likely getting some advance notice of that certainly makes option 3 a lot more likely. Hard to see any space for XeSS to slot into, now though to be fair to Intel/ Raja there certainly was previous, short of Intel splurging vast amounts of cash for actual exclusivity; and it's hard to see that considering how much they'd have to splurge. That leaves it very much looking like a tech solution without a problem to solve any more.

Kurds and Yazidis, right at this moment. What you say, it's not being reported? Weird that. Fun thing to remember: Erdogan's and his son made many millions buying oil from ISIS and hence funding them in their fight against... the US supported Kurdish YPG, among others. Indeed, one of the big reasons that Russia suddenly started bombing ISIS oil infrastructure and tankers back in 2016 after everyone had avoided doing it was that it massively hurt Erdogan in his personal finances, and he'd just 'personally' ordered Turkey to shoot down a Russian Su24.

In universe it's a product of human societal development and how it happened, and is (more or less*) justified. Star Trek's humans ended up in their 'enlightened' state after a whole lot of bad stuff happening with no one riding to the rescue. The argument is that you want the achievements and developments to be earned, or society doesn't keep up with them. In series it's pretty much always been a crutch for the writing- 'why don't they solve this problem easily with technology? I know, they can't use the technology because of the Prime Directive! Sheer genius!' *for all of ST being very progressive in many areas it's always had human exceptionalism on a massive scale. All the other civs in the galaxy and we need humans to make the nice peaceful federation (which is semi continuously in conflict with three empires because they're bad and not enlightened). Thinking the only way to get proper development is potentially via a WW3 like event showing how bad war is is... very human and has a lot of parallels with history. You can't really ever justify something as blanket as the Prime Directive though, it's far too narrow.

XeSS will work on other vendors' hardware, it uses some Intel specific accelerators but does have fall backs if they aren't present, unlike DLSS. Wouldn't be any point to it at all if it were Arc exclusive, especially with their delays meaning that a rumoured up to 3070Ti level top tier will be competing with Lovelace/ RDNA3 within a few months. There probably isn't any point to it with FSR improving so much either, but I guess you never know- and it may be a Tensor type situation where the accelerators can also be used for Other Stuff to justify their existence. Or maybe Raja is enjoying throwing money at things rather than having to count pennies as he had to at AMD.

Honestly, I blame Joss Whedon and people growing up watching his shows for this phenomenon, which seems to infect every single show with any pretension towards 'smart' dialogue. Everyone seems to want to write wise cracking ensembles, even when it isn't appropriate to (and they aren't good at it). The social gathering managed to remind me of Arnold Rimmer being invited to dinner with the officers in Red Dwarf; though that was meant to be cringe inducing. Guess at least Uhura didn't ask for her Gazpacho to be reheated. It's not worse than Discovery. I wouldn't usually give such a blanket and unequivocal statement, but typical Discovery acting made me think the actors were aliens having human emotions explained to them via an earpiece. SNW acting is just... a bit wooden, which is at least more appropriate than the 'smartass' dialogue. Episode was OK, but nothing more than that. Again there was a kind of interesting kernel there, obscured by the requirement of having at least 5 minutes worth of pointless action scenes*. The science really doesn't work either, but I'm kind of loathe to criticise that too much given how seldom the science actually works in any Trek. *also, both episodes have had fairly long disconnected from the rest of the episode character introductions/ vignettes. While that may be a good way to introduce the characters it does mean the actual time dedicated to plot is significantly reduced.

Prices will be at or below MSRP even in Europe if the price of bitcoin maintains its drop. We've already had decent AIB 6900XT for sale for bang on MSRP (taking our GST into account) despite them costing a decent amount to import. The only cards that are still inflated are 3080Ti and 3090s. Probably not a great time for AMD to be releasing cards with prices based on the inflated values, though they probably don't cost AMD any more. Pretty good reviews out there for FSR 2.0 too. Not quite as good as current iteration DLSS, but perhaps close enough considering its hardware agnostic and doesn't need tensors, plus will be default on every console. (Favourite complaint picked from internet comments: nice nVidia lets their sponsored titles use FSR, but nasty AMD sponsored titles don't use DLSS. Why is AMD so mean?)

To be fair, none of the AP staff died in the bombing. Though also to be fair, the AP was also rather surprised that the building they'd been in 24/7 for, hmm, 15 years was supposed to suddenly be a hotbed of militants that simply had to be demolished for military necessity*. *otherwise it's a War Crime anyway, to whit: Collective Punishment

I assume they'd be accelerating the timetable somewhat now from the seemingly lethargic last decade- and to be fair the last few years have had some notable outlier factors, not least the company being sold which probably put a damper on major decisions being made. ESO and FO76 are also now 'complete' and self funding/ resourcing (presumably) rather than in full development and directly competing for development resources/ money/ attention with the SP suite of games, and that ought to help things along too. But yeah, 5-6 years would be shortest practical wait for F5. It would be very surprising if it were quicker and not at all surprising if it took even years longer. Either way, plenty of time for a smaller scale game to slot in, and plenty of motivation for MS to use the IP.

The rumour makes a lot more sense than most though, simply from a return on investment proposition. It's been 11 years since the last SP TES game and 6 since the last SP Fallout. Potentially you'd have nothing but Fallout 76 for... maybe 13-14 years before a Bethesda developed F5. It's also a setting with a lot of potential for non FPS RPG approaches. Get Arkane to make a stealth orientated Prey/ Dishonoured type thing, do a more tactics/ squad game, a strategy game. Plenty of options, and they can be done at a smaller scale to fill in the release schedule. The problem with Bethesda just deciding to do it is you have to ask yourself why they didn't think of that themselves years ago. Answer being, that they must have thought of it since it's so obvious, but decided against it. Presumably for good reason, since an accelerated TES/ Fallout schedule --> more money. Personally, I'd be surprised if Bethesda wasn't making a Fallout 6 already, but it's a long time away and behind two other titles in queue. That suggests maybe 5-6 years still to wait. Microsoft paid a lot of money for the studios and the IP, I'm sure they'd like to see some return/ use on the 2nd most important of those before 2027. [goddamit man, proofread your posts]

It was certainly an interesting experience being in the education system literally while someone's place in history was being rewritten- when I started in primary school George Grey, 3rd Governor of New Zealand was largely revered for his role, by the time I left he was largely reviled. And that was over the course of 13 years. In that case neither view was really deserved, while a lot of bad stuff went down while he was in charge it was considerably less bad than the norms for the time; and he seems to have been genuinely sympathetic and interested in Maori (so long as they weren't anti England), learning the language and writing books about the culture and legends so was definitely not the out and out racist a lot of revisionist types try to paint him as. He did unfortunately end up stealing rather a lot of their land, but with rather more justification and rather less brutality than, say, the near contemporaneous Zulu Wars.

My personal philosophy is to play it how you like, and it doesn't really matter what the system intended- especially since most of the time you're guessing what the intentions actually were. The reflector shield was put in for a reason, after all, as were the anti magic scrolls. It's not like it's cheating to use them, or anything else short of manipulating the game files (even then, no one should really care if someone else 'cheats' in a SP game). I was quite interested to see how it worked though if you didn't have the magic bullet type solutions available, but personally I found it super annoying so only did it once. I don't overuse summons or abuse the rest system, but that's because I find they make the game too boring as they are the solution to every combat problem.