Zoraptor

While the effectiveness against infection drops off a cliff after a few months protection against serious infection- hospitalisation/ death- is largely maintained. Kind of ironic though, Pfizer has by far the worst drop off of the 2 shot vaccines- a lot worse than the Moderna mRNA vaccine too- so much so that it ends up worse than Astra Zeneca after a few months.

Looks like there's been an attempt to assassinate the Iraqi PM via 'suicide drone'. (More than a bit skeptical about it, if someone wanted Khadhimi dead there would be far more reliable ways to do it than hitting the Presidential Palace with a drone. Not like there's a shortage of people willing to take bribes in Iraq let alone anyone willing to do it directly for ideological reasons)

I reckon who could win may be one thing where RJ changed his mind on as time went on. The whole thing ended up very deterministic, but didn't look anywhere near as much so earlier. Note: I really hate determinism...

They need Windows11's Scheduler to handle the efficiency cores. Windows 10 can't tell the difference. Of course being MS they optimised it for Alderlake and somehow managed to break Ryzen performance in the process, though I think it's mostly fixed now.

I'm not sure I'd take soldiers' complaint about that too seriously. I've heard pretty much exactly the same complaints... from people in the UK military. And New Zealand for that matter, though that's usually submerged by complaints about not having the latest and most expensive kit and only defending 200 km^2 around Waiouru while being stuck out in a volcanic desert- or worse, Palmerston North- for a year. UAE troops actually have a very good reputation, and not just compared to other Gulf troops. Lots of external training, paid well and mostly come from Fujairah which has no oil rather than the more decadent emirates. That does come with some baggage though, the UAE drawback from Yemen was in part because a large proportion of casualties were coming from one city.

I actually remember the answer to that because I thought it was a bit of a laugh when I heard it.

Well, you could certainly make some changes that would score very highly on the wokeometer if the Dragon could be female

Can't do that though. It's one of the few occasions when economics and practicality are in direct sync: everything is dependent on cheap fuel, everything. The flow on effects of rising fuel costs increase the costs of everything, and make the JIT models that are already creaking from the pandemic even more shaky. There's literally no point going to electric cars running on electricity generated from coal or natural gas, and that's what the majority of the world would be shifting to, but in any case you cannot build electric cars fast enough and especially you cannot build electric ships or electric trucks in volume nor at anywhere near the level of convenience that is absolutely required by the economic model. So instead you focus on moronic things like methane. Which is the practical equivalent of deciding that water vapour is an even worse greenhouse gas than methane, ergo we should all run dehumidifiers to save the planet and tea and coffee should be taxed heavily. Indeed, the main reason methane is picked is for political reasons, since it's a distance neutral measure for agricultural goods that allows subsidies to continue. A cow eating corn grown on ex Brazilian rainforest in France produces the same methane as a cow that is pasture fed year around, but one also produces its own weight in CO2 from transport costs from feeding it in a barn 4 months of the year. In both cases the methane produced will not be methane in a matter of months. Complete and utter virtue signalling, and designed to shift the blame onto those who are not the problem, eg rice as staple countries. Rice produces vast amounts of methane due to growing in water, but, crucially, that's all carbon cycle methane. Starts as CO2, goes to plant material, rots to methane, goes back to CO2. No net effect. Still, we can then blame China and India for the problem and wash our exquisitely environmentally safe hands... You can tell how stupid a focus on methane is because it's being pushed by Germany's free advertisement for leaving the EU, von der Leyen.

The only real negative was indeed games compatibility, and that improved a lot for NT4.0 -> win2k. (I ended up only ever using 'good' MS OS. NT4 -> 2k -> XP (SP3?)-> 7 -> 10. I even picked the 'right' versions, so not the troublesome 64 bit XP Pro version, 7 Ultimate and 10 Pro meant no broken updates which were the bane of poor consumer grade plebs. Helped a lot being able to scum corporate codes off various employers and educational institutions though. Never used 95/ ME/ Vista/ 8 at all. Only used 98SE on one laptop)

In terms of ancestry NT and win2k should be in the list instead of 95/98/ME since the modern OS descend from the professional versions rather than the consumer ones. OTOH, funny pattern is funny, and I'm not exactly endeared to the changes in win11, so...

The whole thing's a joke. Humanity is utterly incapable of making the decisions necessary to fix such a problem, we're only capable of platitudes similar to the orchestra playing on the Titanic. Every politician in existence loves targets set 30 years in the future*, because they know that the abject failure to meet them won't be blamed on them. Pretty much any and all actual solutions require a lot less humans, yet every single country still wants to use an infinite expansion model because that's what the economic system requires. And as everyone knows there are only one types of people who believe in infinite expansion with finite resources- economists, politicians and idiots. OTOH pictures of Joe Biden having a random snooze in public always bring a smile to the face. *my favourite example of which was New Zealand becoming [introduced] predator free by 2050. With no extra money to actually be spent doing it, all the rats/ stoats/ hedgehogs/ cats etc would magically disappear due to the mere setting of the target.

Hmm, metaverse. Why do I feel the near uncontrollable urge to @ Hiro Protagonist for their views...

Ah yes. His first line could be "How do you do, fellow lightfriends?"

I saw Fain as MacKenzie Crook. Though Brad Dourif would be fine too.

Facebook renames itself: all problems now solved. Let's be frank, they could have renamed themselves Blackwater/ Malaria/ Pol Pot and it still would have been a theoretical improvement over Facebook's current PR.

More WoT spoilers

WoT spoilers again

WoT spoilers Overall pretty good trailer though, a lot better than most modern ones and has plenty of hooks for those familiar and unfamiliar with the books.

Not really a spoiler; power efficiency is still awful. Better efficiency than FusionLake or LavaLake or whatever they called their last gen since it's higher IPC, but to put it in perspective, the practical draw assuming you haven't paired a K processor with a budget H board or similar is still greater than the 9570 which came with an AIO cooler out of the box- even without a manual overclock. Also, why on earth would anyone buy the top SKU? Nearly 50% markup for... 4 extra efficiency cores and 200Mhz, but, lower base clock. Surely that 180USD could be spent better on pretty much anything. Should be noted that those prices from Anandtech are bulk buy (1k unit) prices. They'll be a bit more expensive for consumers.

One of the weirdest things to me when I was doing the course admin for some university papers was how keen students were for multiple choice sections. I could kind of understand for the gen-ed 1st year paper since that had people who were fundamentally unfamiliar with the subject matter, but even the 3rd year people wanted them. I always found those multiple choices to be utterly obnoxious at that level because you didn't get the typical 3 wrong answer, one right answer system; you got one wrong answer, 2 partially right answers and the right answer.

Sorry, this meme is now deprecated.

Far easier to cut mechanics than fix them. Simple pew pew with light magic (or 'magic') appeals to more people. I wouldn't entirely blame EA for that at least. Bioware was well along that road even before Elevation Partners, let alone EA. (I still find the EA purchase hilarious though, due to John Riccitiello's relationship with both EP and EA. Not exactly disinterested)

Morrowind had a plot. You had to find Caius Cossades, the creepy skooma addict, and follow his creepy skooma addict instructions. Most people just spent all their time admiring the giant mushrooms though rather than getting naked for his entertainment. All I can remember about Oblivion's plot was that they got Jean Luc Picard and Sharpe to do the voices, and spent a grand total of 0.50c on the rest of them. And, of course, daedric glass elemental armoured bandits, mudcrabs- memorably horrible creatures, I avoided them whenever I could- and the radiant AI deciding 3 o'clock was time for people to rake their carpets after staring at a wall for the past hour or so. I did, for my sins, finish the game but literally the only thing I can remember was Sean Bean walking up temple steps or something. Fallout 3 you were looking for your father, a middle aged guy, maybe someone's seen him? Sounds suspiciously like Qui Gon Jinn phoning it in? In the most Bethesda move possible it originally had the single most stupid ending ever written, orders of magnitude worse than 'rocks fall, everyone dies' NWN2. Of course the PC has to commit sudoku by radiation rather than sending someone immune to radiation in, otherwise he wouldn't be the hero thick as two short planks, unable to walk and chew gum, a drooling imbecile etc etc. Or maybe that's just all the people who thought that ending was a Good Idea™.

Obsidian recorded an awful lot of dialogue for the 'Syriana' version of Alpha Protocol. All (?) the levels got retasked, but a lot of the dialogue was ultimately recorded but discarded. There was a fair amount in KOTOR2 as well for that matter, hence the presence of VO in the restoration project. Not that AP was a particularly well run project of course- and there was a pretty good excuse for K2 given the, uh, short dev cycle- but it isn't just inexperienced devs that do it