Zoraptor

I'd be a bit suspicious of New Zealanders' ability to be objective about ourselves, and being defensive of our reputation. It's an interesting report, but it is very much New Zealanders' attitudes to perceived misinformation rather than being an objective summary of actual misinformation. The root problem when saying how much misinformation there is here or anywhere really is that you can't really define 'misinformation' very precisely or objectively. There's a lot of spin and information massaging that may or may not be misinformation as well as stuff that's outright and definitely false, and you'll always get people who stubbornly stick to believing things that are false or who cannot bring themselves to believe they fell for misinformation- and they will do surveys every bit as much as anyone else. If you surveyed people about misinformation about, say, Gulf War 2 the results would be massively different depending on when you did it, and where. Most Americans in, say, February 2003 would think that the misinformation was coming from those who didn't want a war and that Saddam had WMDs, could fire them at London in 45 minutes, and supported Al Qaeda- and the reverse would be true in, say, France. Do the survey now and American attitudes would be a lot closer to those of France- but you'll still get people who insist there was no misinformation, because everything that was false was just a massive series of completely honest mistakes rather than a deliberate and organised attempt to deceive.

Same thing's happened here, and there have also been some very suspicious burglaries. We also had a Chinese MP who lied on his immigration papers and had been working in a espionage school in China teaching english to spies and who somehow managed to survive an electoral cycle despite that let alone have citizenship revoked. He and his Labour Party equivalent were coincidentally forced to resign last election. Though Labour has a replacement who is every bit as sketchy on the face of it, having been leader of one of those notorious on campus groups.

I don't think they miss it, or forget it. I'd say that almost all academics are/ were open to the possibility that aliens exist and even visit, but dismiss(ed) most of the evidence because it had literally no ability to be independently verified- and is thus useless as evidence. That's different to dismissing the possibility of aliens visiting completely. The more definitive 'no' position tends to come about if asked repeatedly about unverifiable evidence and theories, because any equivocation tends to encourage yet more questions and yet more shonky evidence being produced. It might be lazy, but in that situation it's understandable to take an absolutist position. For an example, it's certainly possible that aliens built the pyramids. It's also quite understandable that saying they did to Zawi Hawass does not get a very constructive or nuanced reply.

Be waiting a long time for them to make Radeon cards though, after what happened with XFX. Looks like there may be a 12nm GloFo Zen3/ RDNA2 APU produced. That would certainly be a good fit for low cost Athlon desktop/ cheap laptop and embedded solution. It also makes a cheap RDNA2 based Polaris replacement more likely, though there are still potential problems there the 5500 was just plain too expensive for its performance and 7nm prices have only risen for the unreleased '6500'.

That is, essentially, the Scientific Method applied to the problem though. If someone wants to prove that you can do 'impossible' 5000g acceleration with a 'man' made object then they do have to prove it, and in a testable way. Ancient Aliens style "you can't conclusively prove some grainy unverified footage wasn't aliens (with 5000g acceleration), ergo it was aliens (with 5000g acceleration)" doesn't really cut the mustard, and it's also a really antagonistic style of argument that begs for a highly negative and dismissive response. That's changed a bit with the new evidence, but you can only go on what there is available at the time. The question about the existence of aliens is slightly different, of course, in that we know that life has evolved at least once, and to a level that is capable of extremely slow and limited interstellar travel. Given the number of stars in the galaxy let alone the universe the idea that we are unique in that respect shows... extraordinary hubris, and isn't a position any scientist should be taking. The question as to why they'd bother visiting us especially in such a way as suggested is very much an open one though.

If we're talking about misinformation this report (pdf) may be of interest to some. It's the NZ Classification Office's report into misinformation and attitudes to it in New Zealand. Wouldn't bother reading the text, just have a look at the figures. And remember that, as always with this sort of thing, the questions are a bit... granular in some cases.

Can't wait for that abject hack Jose Chung to be forced to apologise. I always thought "From Outer Space" was a tissue of lies.

Wow, and I stopped paying attention at 3-1 with ~ten minutes to go.

Well yeah, hypersonic is certainly a bit of a buzz word currently. I don't think anyone would be that surprised about air to air hypersonic missiles being relatively old, since they potentially have to chase down supersonic targets rather than (relatively speaking) stationary ships or land targets. And of course rockets have been hypersonic since the V2. But, in this case there is a bit of a scale difference between the Khinzal and Phoenix in just about every respect, and not just due to the differing roles.

They also sent MiG 31s specifically armed with hypersonic anti ship missiles and Tu 22s to Syria as an announced 'training' deployment- coincidentally, within a day of the Defender's transit, and while the RN's new aircraft carrier is in the eastern Med. (The Tupolev's are definitely there to test the new runway extension at Hmeimem airbase, previously it was too short for them)

Washing your hands is fine, so long as you use soap and wash for 30s or more.

The main places that will be really concerned about it are places without endemic covid, like here. 'Reopening to the world' has largely been sold here on the basis of 95% effectiveness of the vaccine giving herd immunity, if it's 80% against a significantly more spreadable viral variant that 80% may not actually be enough for herd immunity.

Compare it with the flu vaccine, that's only ~40% effective at stopping infection, but it also reduces the incidence of severe infection even in the 60% that gets through, and that's enough to be worthwhile. You're still ~8x less likely to get covid when vaccinated than not going by the Israeli figures, and that isn't even taking lowered severity into account.

Can't see a MS account as being a massive issue by itself (though see below), the big issue would be a constant internet being required (which isn't). Then again, I already have a MS account so it literally isn't an issue for me, so easy to say that. The supported processor list actually starts at Intel 8000 series/ Zen+, not a 1 Ghz dual core listed due to the TPM requirement. Sure, there are workarounds, but the average user isn't going to muck about with their BIOS to enable an obscure option as they've never done anything in BIOS before and have no idea what those arcanely named options mean. They don't actually need TPM to be a requirement, unless they don't want to sell windows in Russia or China any more (since it's backdoored extensively by the NSA) and don't want adoption by corporates. Maybe another run at getting Secure Boot implemented, especially with the account requirement as well?

Something like 99.5% of those incidents don't involve actually going into territorial waters/ airspace, just through completely arbitrary self declared Air Defence Identification Zones and the like that have no basis in international law. Actual intrusions are very rare and mainly happen in a few areas such as the Kurils/ South China Sea (competing claims) or around the Baltic where Finnish/ Estonian/ Russian airspace is a mess. This was definitely more dangerous than the average because it was a deliberate intrusion into claimed Russian waters with a warship. Which is an aggressive act which could result in the ship justifiably being sunk, at least so far as Russia was concerned. Practically of course that risk was still pretty much non existent; and they'd picked a relatively 'safe' ship to send since the Defender is pretty aptly named since it has next to no offensive capability at all. It was not a very well judged exercise otherwise though, especially with having the press along, precisely because while it was still unlikely that anything really significant would happen it should have been blindingly obvious that there would be a response, and that the press would report on it in an uncontrollable way. Not a great look having the MoD have to wave their hands and shout about there being nothing to see here like they were auditioning for a Naked Gun remake when they had the BBC and Daily Fail correspondents both talking about warning shots, near collisions and being buzzed by 20 planes while on the cusp of World War 3 breaking out. It was still all posturing, they just didn't expect quite the buy in to the Russian posturing from their own journalists.

The last Argentine exocet also went to the wrong spot, due to a good bit of British disinformation, so it was never even in a position to be used. The latter ships sunk were all done by dumb bombs (all iirc from ancient, even then, A4 Skyhawks). Probably would have been fewer ships sunk if the BBC hadn't mentioned that the bombs' fusing was wonky, so the Argentines fixed it. You'd have thought the Royal Navy might have learnt from that not to have BBC journos on board in case they said something they didn't like but it seems not, given recent events in the Black Sea.

The ultimate irony would be if it turned out that the source for sarscov2 was European Horseshoe Bats and not Chinese ones, and some random Italian ended up bringing the infection to China instead of the reverse.

The issue is that the number is so small though, as that also explains a deletion. The thing about ssRNA viruses are that they are ludicrously prone to mutation compared to just about anything else. RNA is inherently bad if you want genetic stability, and single strand is even worse. For an academic example of why it isn't a big deal, and from a 'neutral' time period. Source (emphases added by me). It's probably also useful to post the abstract of the paper itself... So only some of the 13 recovered sequences had the differences. If you took 13 sequences now there would be differences too, and probably more. 3 mutations is very much within the same 'swarm of related variants' mentioned in the first quote. Each named variant has a consensus sequence, but if you took 13 individual sequences there'd be a lot of minor changes within that classification, and you simply don't expect (or really want) every single change listed in a database because most are utterly irrelevant and have zero effect. And at the risk of parroting the objections made in sciencemag the deletions might be suspicious if there wasn't an alternative source for the same data, but there is, and the new sequences might be significant if we still thought the wet market was ground zero- but we don't. It's most likely they were deleted as being artefacts that didn't represent the predominant SARS2 sequence as was. I very much like the percolator theory though, that you had a low infectivity but also low mortality crossover that nobody noticed until it got greater infectivity. With that you'll never know the ultimate source because there'd be a long period of it being in humans before it was detected as being in humans, but you'd also get things like a 3 changes ancestor.

I find it extremely funny that my computer is not ready for win11. (due to not having recent enough NSA spyware, of all things)

Three mutations? For an RNA virus that's statistical noise. It's less mutations than any named variant has in its spike protein, alone. Don't see how it adds much at all really since we already knew the wet market was not the source but more of a super spreader event. Let's be frank, if they'd left the sequences up someone would have seen that as a sign of perfidy too- 'muddying the waters with irrelevant historical data' or similar. At this stage in the propaganda cycle we're well into working back from the conclusion desired using whatever motivations fit best. To be fair to the author, he's a bit unlucky that 'just asking questions' type scenarios have become a bit of a trigger point recently.

The classic odd Brit (well, 'Brit') entrepreneur ('entrepreneur') death has to be Robert Maxwell, 30 years ago. Mossad, corruption, massive embezzlement, contradictory autopsies, more, and about as direct a link to Epstein as you could hope for via his daughter.

The french show was probably Les Revenants (which was remade in the US as 'The Returned').

If you were making a 18t anti ship warhead for a missile I'd suspect you'd be better off making it fragment into bomblets under almost any circumstances rather than have it be 18t in one explosion. Guess they could put an 18t warhead on one of their big ballistic missiles but they're nowhere near accurate enough to hit near moving targets, so they'd be of limited use. OTOH, you could fairly easily pack 18t of explosives into a remote controlled suicide submarine (or alternatively, and prosaically, a 'torpedo'). That would have many of the advantages that UAVs have in terms of ignoring the needs of the squishy meats sacks for protection and the like while making them more difficult to stop too. Or use them like the Decima MAS of WW2 used their chariots to infiltrate harbours and anchorages. That would also explain why they do it as an underwater explosion.

A 20kt explosion would be slightly bigger than that- see Operation Crossroads for an example.

'Aggressively market' is a bit... polite for what they did. They gave away just enough formula for the mother to stop expressing milk, so after the sample period the mother would have absolutely no option other than to buy milk formula (and they bunged doctors to get them to advise using it, faked research saying it was better than breast feeding and a host of other things). Pretty difficult to fully avoid Nestlé products though, their corporate structure and brand naming is (deliberately) labyrinthine.