Zoraptor

AMD's answer to DLSS, coming June 22 and hardware agnostic, should work for 500+ AMD (presumably 400+, since there's zero difference) and 1000 series plus for nVidia.

Think we class that as domestic terrorism since he had a right to be here and was not an agent of any overseas organisation. Though I think the general inclination of Australia to try and use New Zealand as a dumping ground for its home grown criminals and terrorists is why they aren't finding us very supportive in their fight with China- and the whole Rainbow Warrior affair left a generation of New Zealanders with the memory of being bombed by a supposed friend then told to 'suck it up' by supposed allies like Maggot Thatcher. Thus we have a very realistic assessment of exactly how much reciprocal 'friendship' we can expect from allies were the going to get tough, and have no appetite for supporting them when they pick fights we have far less stake in.

Bunch of DGSE cretins mining a civilian ship in a theoretically friendly country's harbour is stretching the definition of 'naval battle' a bit. Technically it was probably a draw anyway, both sides lost a ship and the French lost twice as many people, albeit none dead. Still the only act of international terrorism committed in New Zealand, and it was by the country 1 in 50 of our population never came back from after traveling 20,000km to defend it in WW1. Then people wonder why we've zero interest in picking fights with countries thousands of km away just to support out 'allies' any more.

The Fail does say 'set to be published' which would normally imply it's passed review. Then again, they're not exactly reliable and if they did understand about the difference between that and 'submitted' they wouldn't care anyway, if it made them sound more authoritative. And since it isn't 1am any more... ..while the claim of 4 basic amino acids in a row is patently false and that sequence simply isn't there it is entirely possible that that's not what the authors actually said- with what they did say being translated into a form that the average Mail reader can understand. A protein is a complex 3d structure, so you could have a phrase like 'spatially close' used and then interpreted to 'in a row' as being more easily understood. Spatially close amino acids in a protein can be very far apart in terms of the primary sequence*. That's still not great, since there isn't any inherent argument against that not being natural either; so long as it's a selective advantage there's no genetic reason not to have them spatially close or 'in a row', that's a structural problem. So long as the rest of the protein is set up to make an effective binding motif the lowest energy configuration it will still 'work'. End of the day, seeing if the paper gets published and what it actually says is the only way to actually know. *that's not shown by their 3d model though, where they highlight some basic amino acids (and cysteine bonds, important for structure). That has 3 basic AAs close together which are also sequential in the primary sequence (355-7, RKR) and then only highlights pairs that are close spatially. Since it's a 2d rep of a 3d structure you can't be absolutely sure of that except by downloading the 3d model and looking- be weird if they chose a view that hid it though- and that's far too high effort.

They funded the AstraZeneca vaccine and put in the earliest order for it. Indeed, iirc they put in both their big orders before the EU made theirs. If you ordered two Teslas from Elon Musk you'd expect them to be delivered before someone who ordered after you even if you weren't also a share holder; and the preferential treatment would be if the person who made the late orders got theirs first to reward them for backing DeLorean equivalents. The UK may have stuffed up their covid response bad initially, but there really isn't much to criticise in the vaccine rollout.

Well, either it isn't, or the Daily Fail is living up to its name again. Probably the latter. I checked, for my sins, and there simply aren't 4 positively charged amino acids in a row in sars cov 2's spike protein sequence. There 4 basic amino acids in a row in a structural protein (KHKH), but that sequence is identical to that in SARS1, so if it indicated human origin that would be the same for SARS 1. So either the Fail has garbled something badly or... dunno really. They'd have to have completely misquoted the guy though, because I checked and SARS has a sequence of no less than 7 identically charged amino acids (D/E, aspartic and glutamic acid) in a row which under the 'magnet' analogy ought to be really really impossible, if 4 in a row were. Wait until the scientific paper gets published I guess, assuming it actually exists.

The EU has given Ukraine ~5bn euro in loans since 2014, so not much really. The big loans were from the IMF (17 bn usd, in 2014 alone) and World Bank (13bn USD, not all since 2014 though). Those can't be granted by fiat by EU leadership though, only member taxes can. Though in this case the chance of that money actually being allocated any time soon is... low. Must be terrified of Lukashenko and Putin progressing the Union Treaty in Sochi since their meet has been extended for a day unscheduled. That would really put a cherry on top of the Borrel/ van der Leyen disaster show. Maybe EU bigwigs shouldn't be people judged too incompetent for government by their host countries and kicked sideways to appease their egos? Just an idea. That offer is the epitome of 'something must be done! this is something, so this must be done!'; literally only done so they can say they're doing something.

Lack of transparency is not a red flag. It's how China does business in pretty much everything. It is also extremely doubtful that the US would allow the WHO access to labs in similar circumstances given the rhetoric about the WHO being beholden to China. The bat/ pangolin theory is not at all weak. It's based on the proven (well, as much as you can) method of zoonotic transfer involved in SARS1. In that case the bats were also far removed from the initial outbreak, as were the proximal civets. The suspected method of transmission was via them mixing at a wet market, but it could equally as much have been someone from a rural area coming into the big city while infected. SARS-CoV2 has been shown to infect a fairly large variety of often not particularly closely related mammals. Humans, gorilla, pangolins, civets, mink, dogs, cats, tigers and lions at very least have had documented covid infections. In most of those cases they probably caught it from humans rather than bats, but you only need it to go the opposite way once, and as previous quite apart from SARS/ MERS coming from civets and camels you have HIV crossing over 20 times. It's rare that it happens, but the more chances you give it the more likely it is.

Yeah, nah. That's the same sort of stuff that Orogun linked me in a video a year or so ago, and it hasn't improved with age. My personal favourite there was the 'expert' who said only China had such labs, then talked about her experience in similar US labs five minutes further on in the video. Summed the whole thing up perfectly. For 3 and 4, it's a virology lab, that is the research it does. It was established specifically because of SARS1, and did coronavirus research because of SARS1. That's a matter of longstanding public record- can't get much more scientifically public than research papers- and not in any way secret. 5 isn't unusual at all. It's not unusually resistant to immune response, it's just a novel respiratory virus. Novel viruses are unusually resistant because there's no shared memory/ selection, and respiratory viruses are resistant because of the nature of their environment. And again, you look at the other natural crossover viruses and find... they're more resistant to immune response and considerably more deadly. 'Like HIV' is ludicrous anyway, since HIV was also a natural crossover which phylogenetic evidence suggests happened as many as 20 (!) times. Even if it were 'like HIV' beyond the trivial of both being RNA viruses it would not in itself have been suspicious. Well yeah, and you can find multiple papers and such from western sources with similar discussions. As a bioweapon it's... just stupid, it has no sensible utility. It doesn't target the right demographics, it isn't infectious enough or alternatively, is too infectious. As a geopolitical weapon it's stupid too, because the one thing China absolutely does not want is a global recession when its economic growth comes from exporting, and its biggest threat by far is an internal one from failing to deliver expected yearly improvements and growth. You also can't 'target' it effectively to specific countries- as before, it's too infectious to be controllable, but not infectious enough to be really effective- and anyone would know that you can't. If it were part of a bioweapons program they'd also have a parallel program for ameliorating any effects once it inevitably reached China, ie a vaccine or similar ready to roll. As it stands their vaccines are almost all the least effective- and going by 'vaccine ready' it would be a German or British bioweapon since Oxford and BionTech had working vaccines literally weeks after getting a sequence; it took China a fair bit longer and their vaccines apart from being low efficiency are also low tech. End of the day nothing could convince me more of Chinese incompetence than it being a bioweapon. Own goal that they'd know would be an own goal, badly designed, stupid stupid stupid. And again, multiple coronaviruses have crossed spontaneously in the last 20 years... That's just Xi's China being Xi's China. They suppress anything that makes them look bad, and large scale casualties- whether they caused the outbreak or not- makes them look bad. You only have to glance very briefly at their actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong to find similar examples of repression for reasons other than a 'bioweapons' leak.

The last one is the significant thing. They'll be after sources etc. And let's be frank, if he wasn't being run as an asset by (a/ multiple) NATO countries' intelligence service it would be a massive surprise since the Belarussian opposition is getting the buffet support package; so they may well get info on his handler and their Belarus internal sources too. Whether people like it or not, that is Treason so long as the government is run by Lukashenko. Not equivalent since there's literally no evidence of it being a lab leak beyond the lab being there and some of its large workforce being ill, something that happens with large workforces. That's not really even much in terms of circumstantial evidence, it has only slightly more evidence than the Chinese 'theory' that US scientists made it and diplomats deliberately spread it to defame China. OTOH, we know that every other human coronavirus has a natural origin, and that there have been at least two spontaneous crossovers in the past 20 years- SARS(1), and MERS. SARS came from Civits, iirc, and MERS from camels, and SARS was near identical in terms of how the outbreak happened mechanically to SARS2 ('covid19'). It took ~4 years to identify the intermediate species from which SARS jumped but it was identified, and that species was found a long way from the initial outbreak, because you only notice outbreaks when they hit large population centres. SARS is actually why the Chinese have a virology lab in Wuhan in the first place. There's also no evidence from the RNA sequence of tampering, beyond the facile one of it being effective at infecting humans. Even then, and after multiple mutations during the poandemic it's about 20% as effective as measles. It being of natural origin is the default, because it's provably happened multiple times before in a short, relatively speaking, timeframe. At worst, it was an accidental release of a pre-existing virus and there's no actual evidence for even that. OTOH, the origin question is clearly being used as a cudgel in the current wave of sinophobia/ sinohysteria. Much like all those EU leaders who couldn't stand the UK having a successful vaccine when they didn't and who made crap up- hello Monsieur Macron- the damage to medical credibility etc is just a side effect of people playing geopolitics. It's like Vladimir Putin having Parkinson's and retiring in January or Russia going bankrupt within in six months in 2014 due to sanctions; you aren't really meant to remember any specifics nor ask any questions, you're just meant to remember the impression it gives. And for the lab story the impression meant to be given is pretty obvious.

I can't conclusively prove it wasn't aliens, so it was definitely aliens. It's not a bad series, but it's so very very Whedon in pretty much every respect, and feels like it's been cobbled together from off cuts from his other projects.

Technically, 3rd person english forms do include a non gendered personal pronoun option as alternatives to he/ she/ (it)- 'one'. Semi archaic now though.

Eh, I don't think there's any doubt that intelligence agencies were already investigating the emergence of covid-19 given that this whole thing kicked off again because of a report from US Intelligence about workers being sick at that Wuhan Lab. At the moment Giorgio Tsoukalis has an equally well supported alternative hypothesis. An institution with hundreds to thousands of people working there having some people off sick is not exactly proof absolute.

I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if they already had approval but want an announcement as a publicity boost for later in the KS window or one in coordination with GOG. Starcrawlers was a giveaway on GOG, so it's a bit of a nobrainer that Chimera gets approved.

Ordered plenty, sure, something like 400 million doses. 300 million of them were from companies that still don't have a working product though. Then they ordered from AZ and expected them to give the EU preferential treatment over those that ordered earlier, because they were the EU and Very Important. If there's one thing I've inherited from my english roots it's a hatred of entitled queue jumpers. The entire AZ thing is to deflect from the EU's procurement incompetence, because AZ is Anglo-Swedish and because the UK handled it so much better from outside the EU. Or, to be fair, procurement bad luck; but I don't feel charitable when they're so obviously trying to blame someone else for political reasons.

It's a disgrace if they support continuing sanctions and returning refugees at the same time since the returnees would have zero prospects under the current sanctions. If they supported returning refugees and lifting sanctions* it would be fine since prospects would be a lot better. The average refugee has nothing to fear from Assad and the populated part of the Damascus region and western/ central Syria is pretty much entirely quiescent, but their prospects are far far far better outside the country with the current economic situation. Kind of telling when even MbS' Saudi Arabia has a more realistic approach to things than the west does. *Since it came up a month or two back I'd note that the startup US oil firm filled with ex spies and State dept types that Trump allowed to Pillage Syria's oil looks like it's going to get its sanctions waiver removed by Biden.

Looks like Inhumans: The Movie, right down to having a GoT actor.

Most of those generals went for being too closely associated with Trotsky (or perceived to be too close, or they looked at Yezhov/ Stalin the wrong way), who organised the military during the revolution. And contrary to Stalinist propaganda Trotsky wasn't exactly big on appointing generals with White sympathies to his Red army. The biggest soviet loss from the great purge was probably Tukhachevsky, who was 20 and in a German PoW camp when the Tsar was removed. The bigger counterpoint is that France almost certainly would have done better without her ossified WW1 generalship who insisted on trying to refight the last war, badly. It's no coincidence that 'Leclerc' and de Gaulle were pretty junior in WW1 (Leclerc literally, since he was 16 at its end) unlike Weygand/ Pétain et al. Even that doesn't really apply though, because the Soviet military leadership even pre-purge was a lot lot younger on average.

IIRC Interplay still owns it. A decent number of their IPs went unbought.

T34 was the heaviest tank using Christie suspension though, the rest were all light to light mediums. That's not really game changing. The HVSS suspension used by later Shermans were a massive improvement over the originals' anyway, albeit that system was 'stolen' off the brits' heavy tanks suspension system. Which must be about the only thing of value Brit heavy tanks had.

I'd say that Enemy at the Gates gets a particularly relevant type of criticism because those it triggers tend to not be Russians/ ex soviets, with one of the characteristics of tankies/ wehraboos also being that they aren't ex soviet/ German. Braveheart occasionally triggers someone English, but there are very few people of other nationalities that get mortally offended on England's behalf.

Most of you guys have probably heard of the unacceptable hijacking of the Bolivian Presidential jet over Europe in order to illegally [in that case actually illegally, per the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations] arrest an american citizen who had exposed a load of illegal surveillance by the NSA. But according to western authorities the plane was diverted because... everyone just spontaneously refused to allow it to transit their airspace. That is playing the "it wasn't forced down, they could always just stay in the air forever" card .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident

It's pretty simple really: Someone who thinks the Tiger Panther was the best tank of WW2 and if it wasn't it was the Kingtiger: wehraboo. Bonus if they think the Maus was in any way practical and every battle lost was due to political interference. Someone who thinks the T34 was the best tank of WW2 and if it wasn't then it was the IS3: tankie. Bonus if they rail reflexively against Enemy at the Gates and obsessively correct anyone who repeats the 1 rifles for two soldiers/ penal battalion claims. Someone who thinks the Sherman was the best tank of WW2 and if it wasn't then it was the Pershing: idiot. Bonus if they insist that a steady supply of the Tomb for 7 Brothers was the real reason the Soviets did well, and reflexively react to the M4 being called a Ronson/ Tommycooker. Not sure the History Channel US can be fairly blamed for that. Does it show any actual history any more? Wunderwaffe obsession, lost cause fetishisation and natty Hugo Boss uniforms seem to be the main attractors for wehraboos, wherever they've been exposed.

Yep, credit card debt is bad, but credit cards themselves are fine so long as you pay off the balance in full every month. In some cases it's a very good idea to buy using a credit card for the fraud protection/ chargeback facility. But I have a fair bit of sympathy for the average Joe or Jane who is bombarded with ads telling them they have to have the latest iGoogle 12 phone or they'll be laughed at for having a mere 11 at the same time they're also bombarded with ads telling them they've passed the credit check and can have thousands of dollars of credit at a magnificently low interest introductory rate of 3.5% (upped to 20% p/a after 3 months), with which to buy that phone. 'Fun' story, I always paid off my credit card in full every month, which according to a bank manager I talked to later probably had me flagged as a 'bad customer' for being too financially literate and not making the bank enough money. I had got a manually approved credit limit rise once in about a decade, after applying for it. After paying the minimum for two months in a row though I got automatically approved for a 4 fold (!) rise in credit limit. Which was some coincidence. And was also fine, for me, I just went back to paying off the full amount monthly with the ability to buy a decent quality 2nd hand car on credit whenever the fancy took me. Might not have been so great for others though.

The ultimate problem with that report was that it dealt with, basically, scenario fulfillment from the western side. In any realistic scenario of significant conflict the west would be in the aggressor role, ie the fighting will be near places like Smolensk or Fuzhou, not over a neutral featureless plain. Any western plane will not be fighting 1 on 1* with its Chinese or Russian equivalent, it will be fighting against a shed load of ground based opponents as well. Specifically with 'stealth'** that is a big deal because Russian ground based radar can definitely detect 'stealthed' planes even if their airborne systems cannot. In a situation in which Russian or Chinese ground based radar and AA has been neutralised it's either a minor skirmish that is irrelevant, or it's been raised to an Existential level- at which point nukes will (have) be(en) used which renders everything else moot. *funniest part of the report was the guy admitting that a Su35 could probably outfly a lot of western fighters, but it didn't matter because the fight wouldn't be 1 on 1 so another western fighter would just shoot it down. Well yeah, on a featureless plain, without any AA or other Russian planes about to distract western fighters. That exact sort of argument got laughed at when it was the soviets making it 30 odd years ago. **always been a misnomer, since it can fundamentally only work effectively over certain wavelengths and frequencies