Zoraptor

Most studios would give their left kidney for 16 million sales or whatever it was. All CDPR has to do to get the hype back is announce their next Witcher Colon Subtitle game. But what they've probably learnt from C2077- apart, hopefully, from some better project control- is that 7 years of hype building is dumb.

AMD's naming schemes are probably the stupidest thing about the company. To be fair, they're miles behind Intel's mobile naming scheme in terms of stupidity- so bad that Intel's own marketing department doesn't even know what the model numbers mean- but AMD's is still unnecessarily confusing. Zen 2 and Zen 3 are both 7nm too, so they aren't even gaining extra capacity with the naming, and using the same naming scheme for CPUs and GPUs is moronic. 3600X/T is a (ok, pretty pointless for the XT) CPU, 5600X is a CPU, but 5600XT is a GPU... why? It's so easy to avoid.

Funnily enough one of the big suggestions for fixing the declining maths standards here is grinding, ie going back to actually learning times tables etc at primary/ intermediate school level instead of jumping straight to a 'problem solving' approach for everything. Ironically (or not*) that approach was meant to help lift up poorer performing students who hated formulaic stuff like times tables etc, but has actually dropped average achievement down significantly instead. *problem solving is great in theory but not really sure how it was meant to work when you didn't have the basics down properly first. But then I'm not a highly paid consultant or Ministry of Education apparatchik so I don't really know how the justification for it went beyond a mess of corporate speak about paradigms and the like- and a large part of my income doesn't rely on the system being permanently broken so I can write another report on it in 3 years time...

It should be fine for sample size. IIRC 95% confidence with +/- 3% for a country size typical population requires only ~1000 people, so long as you're able to weight respondents properly. You can download the report if you want and have a look. Don't think they charge for it, but I haven't downloaded it myself to check. Certainly can't accuse the Alliance of Democracies of deliberately commissioning a survey to give the answers they wanted, they're an impeccably pro western lot founded by a former NATO secgen. Not really something that you can accuse Teh Grauniad of though: As an explanation for why the perceived threat of the US to democracy went up decently from last year that isn't exactly great, when the survey period started 3 months after Trump was voted out and a month after Biden was inaugurated. It would be more likely to be distrust of the thoroughly interventionist people surrounding Biden than that. (More realistically, and since by most of the other metric perception of the US improved, it may well be an out of confidence result, since for 95% confidence 1/20 responses will be 'wrong'. Still even if it is rogue it's still unlikely to be massively wrong, just outside the 3% or whatever)

The diseases are rare because the vaccine rates are high, so herd immunity is in play. When vaccine rates drop enough they'll come back, especially something ludicrously infectious like measles which will happily infect 20 new people per infection if it can. (The 'funny' thing is that when we had a measles outbreak here a couple of years ago lots of supposedly 'educated' antivaxxers were first in line to get their children vaccinated- their refusal wasn't based on anything other than it not being 'necessary' for little Jonny to get the jab because everyone else was immunised, and their immunisation was protecting li'l Jonny. Pure selfishness, both in terms of putting their children at risk and wanting everyone else to protect them from their stupidity. I've got a lot of sympathy for the people who didn't get it done because they fell through the cracks (mostly the poor and ill informed) but those others were just awful awful people)

DNA vaccines. Will definitely trigger antivaxxers. (Wikipedia article would usually be easier reading, but in this case has multiple mistakes in it such as claiming the J&J/ AZ vaccines are DNA vaccines which they aren't)

Yep. Albeit there are a lot of GOTY awards given out, so there are a lot more than one GOTY each Y. It was, by some. GOTY awards are very rarely popularity contests among people who play the games, generally they're popularity contests among those who review games, at the entity giving the awards. And there is often a large disconnect between what reviewers think and what gamers think. It also has to be said that (1) all too often game reviewers wish they were doing anything other than something as mundane, trivial and outright boring as reviewing games and (2) because of that reviewers are often desperate for games to be in some way Significant. Stuff with any semblance of that tends to get big ups, and treated as if it's the narrative and philosophical equivalent of Breaking Bad, even when it's closer to GoT S8 in both regards. Are they fringe opinions- or at least, are they fringe opinions more than those of reviewers are? Reviewers certainly have a bigger soap box to shout from, but that doesn't mean their opinion is right. Personally I have little to no doubt for a game like TLOU2 that the vast majority of people played it and either enjoyed it, or didn't, but they also never really thought about it much at all, never ventured an opinion anywhere public about it, and have now more or less forgotten it. Because to most people games are entirely disposable entertainment and they spend as much time thinking about it as I have for Paul Blart: Mall Cop*. As such the most common opinion is probably some form of indifference with those who care strongly about it either way being fringe. But, of course, you're a lot more likely to venture said opinion if you care about something than if you don't. Criticism is just human nature. *which I rather enjoyed but have spent approximately 15 seconds thinking about since it ended, almost all of them now.

Relevant to above, India has been holding a major Cricket tournament involving a lot of international players during the pandemic surge, and as should probably surprise no one its biobubble has now been well and truly pierced. Which leads to perhaps Australia's premier player being potentially stranded in India or facing a 5 year jail term for returning home. At least one commentator has fled the country for the Maldives to sit out the 2 weeks there. (There's at least one NZer effected too, though I know all our players have been vaccinated before leaving and they're off to England in a few weeks anyway rather than returning home. At least theoretically the Indian Cricket team is meant to be going to England too, but at the moment that has to be in question I would have thought)

Yes, I'd say that Bioshock is the case study because it gets most things right- and because the problem with its meta narrative is one of fundamentals rather than a design choice. You simply can't have a strong narrative and not also have linear goal setting where you follow instructions. The problem with forcing people to do something in a game, as part of a moral message, is ultimately that it isn't the player doing it if there's no alternative, it's the game designer. As such, doing something like nerve stapling completely anonymous, personality less and abstracted drones in Alpha Centauri is more of a moral dilemma because it's an actual choice. Even something as otherwise cliché and banal as CoD gets that right at times, since you don't have to, for example, actually shoot anyone in No Russian. Can't stop it either, but that again is the problem with linear plotting.

TLOU II has the same basic problem a lot of games have* with them trying to Say Something Significant and it being done stupidly. On one hand, it tells you to feel bad about seeking revenge and tries to say something about its futility/ circularity. On the other, there's only one way to actually play the game, and that involves... seeking revenge. The only way not to be lectured to about morality is to destroy the disk on youtube. And then you get lectured about a different kind of morality, I guess. *Case study being Bioshock, point out that the game is on rails plot wise and you're forced to obey the voice in your head- how meta, but potentially interesting- in order to progress; then once your programming is broken... you continue blithely following orders exactly the same as when Fontlas was 'would you kindly'ing you.

From that title I was expecting something Sir Mixalot based, not an original. (Also, fancy not knowing the difference between alkaloids (N containing complex organic compounds such as caffeine or morphine) and alkali (base compound in solution, ie lye). Sadly it seems like German scientific precision has deserted them as well)

That's utterly unsurprising. Very good money to be made in public projects, and when companies talk about loving the free market and wanting no government interference they mean no interference with their profits. They happily take subsidies for example, despite them distorting the free market, and big public sector projects are all too often subsidies writ very very large. CGT is mostly a tax on windfall profits, not actual investment. Raising it an attempt to claw back the massive disparity in practical effect of 'recovery aiding' policies like quantitative easing and super low interest rates. If you're poor you've seen a lot of your wages- and that's assuming you're still working- inflated away by quantitative easing and the main benefit you've had from low interest rates is maybe lower credit card costs, if the bank has passed them along and is not having to keep them high due to increased defaulting. Yeah, and I guess you had a couple of one off payments too, which probably cover your rent for a month or two. If you're rich though you borrow money at low interest rates against assets and get, what, 15% annual returns from real estate and 20% from shares? And a lot more if you're astute about it. Increased share prices may go to investment in the company, extra jobs and building etc in theory, but the profit goes back to the shareholders who are making the capital gains and the company will happily move its entire workforce offshore if practical, and pay its directors and executives massive bonuses while doing so. Raising CGT will not suddenly make investment a bad deal, it will simply make it less of a good deal. The Soroses of the world aren't going to be stuffing mattresses with their billions, they'll still be doing what makes them the most money- which will almost certainly still be investing rather than 0% interest from sticking it in the bank. They'll just make less ludicrous profits and pay a fairer, uh, share. To take the other extreme, no CGT is how you end up with houses costing ~15x your median wage, deposits scaling up faster than its possible to save and outright neofeudalism with serfs making sure the landed gentry never have to do a days work- and how you end up with economists scratching their heads about a non existent economic recovery despite apparently good fundamentals. Free hint guys: the serfs are paying most of their money to the modern equivalent of Jean de Warenne and can't spend it on the things that drive a healthy economy. That is current New Zealand, an economy attached to a housing bubble due in major part to no CGT.

They did a similar thing for Surviving Mars and have started supporting it again a month ago, after over a year of nothing. OTOH, I: R's progenitor, EU: Rome, lost its dev support very quickly and very permanently, and it definitely sounds like the non core Paradox team is having a terrible time at the moment with EUIV's latest dlc being literally the lowest rated product on Steam and seemingly everything except CK3 having issues too. Oh well, that's what appointing a CEO whose main experiences are gambling and free-to-play gets you I guess, and it isn't like it hasn't been Paradox's trajectory since the switch from proper expansions.

Same thing Gabe Newell* and a bunch of other rich foreigners have been doing, riding out the pandemic in New Zealand. To be fair to Cameron he actually owns a farm next to where Peter Jackson lives and has for over a decade at this point so he's a lot more committed than the average fly by nighter like Thiel. It's briefly mentioned in the article Raithe posted but he is definitely doing actual work on the Avatars now rather than just George Martining it as he seemed to be for years. They imported hundreds of people for filming which caused a bit of a scandal since they were allowed to circumvent normal quarantine rules due to it being a special project. *and if I find gamer hero worship or him to be utter cringe the sort of prostrate kowtowing to him from our media is even more embarrassing. He's not going to move Valve here guys, asking him for the billionth time won't get a different answer.

Going on recent history rightist and fiscally responsible are also sort of a contradiction in terms...

You don't need particularly specialist equipment to make adenovirus vaccines though. In essence, you need a growing medium for the Human Cell Line with the virus genome in it and a way to purify off the virus product (plus packaging, bulking out etc). That's similar enough to any other process involving cells-in-a-medium that you can readily convert from, say, traditional vaccines to adenovirus mediated ones. While adenoviruses do have a lot of other uses none of them are bulk uses on the tens of millions of doses per month from multiple vendors scale, or even really close to that. Yeah, there's some cancer treatments based on them, and Ebola vaccines plus various research projects etc, but they're all small scale. The problem they have is that while it's relatively easy to convert existing medical level 'fermenters' to produce the vaccines from other vaccines or other similar uses- hence the rapid production rise despite there being few specialist production sites and them being, well, cheap- it's non trivial to scale up beyond that. The mRNA vaccines kind of have the reverse problem, scaling up is 'easier' (largely because it's done as a in vitro chemical reaction rather than an in vivo biological one) but the precursor nucleosides and lipids fundamentally cost a lot.

Sheesh, it's entirely possible for someone to want another person punished for something and think they're scummy without that person having broken a law in being scummy. Doesn't effect the irony of the situation at all, it literally wouldn't be ironic without it.Hunter Biden has to do something that looks bad in order for Giuliani to act and it has to be morally crappy but legally not actionable in order for it to be ironic that Giuliani gets in legal trouble over it. Without either it literally literally wouldn't be ironic. In summary: you're picking dumb fights with multiple people, again, putting words into people's mouths, again, and writing screeds of pointless verbiage in an attempt to 'win', again.

They've scaled up fine for their existing production base though, and gone from zero to multiple tens of millions of doses per month per company. That's facilities that would have been used to make other vaccines and the like under normal circumstances. It's new production facilities that require certification etc and some raw material supply that are limiting numbers, and some one off batching issues like for AZ in Belgium and one US plant making J&J's being contaminated (plus the Brazilian and Slovak Sputnik issue, assuming it isn't just politics). Brazil is making vaccine domestically now, but they started later and are producing less than they really should have given their theoretical capabilities.

Sure he did, you're just interpreting it in a narrow legal framework. I tend to wish bad things to happen to people without even the merest scintilla of integrity irrespective of whether they've actually broken the law, and someone with any integrity at all would have told Burisma to FOAD when offered a directorship under those circumstances. As it stands, Hunter Biden's 'punishment' amounts to receiving millions of dollars from that directorship and pimping his new book on the talk show circuit.

Turning down Pfizer is fine*, they're extremely expensive and also of significantly reduced practicality for a lowish infrastructure tropical country due to their strict storage conditions- and they're also massively over subscribed. They may be the most effective, but you can vaccinate 20+ people for the same cost using vaccines that store long term in the fridge rather than at -70 and all the vaccines reduce severe infections to nearly zero, even the worst (but also cheapest to make...) Chinese one. Really, Brazil should be licensing then producing their own vaccines en masse (as with local Sputnik), and IIRC that is the intention. Why it's taking so long I don't know, Brazil has a pretty decent bioscience sector so far as I'm aware. *not least because they're already planning to annualise shots, so they make a non pandemic 26+USD off everyone in their system, every year. Thanks, but I'd rather have a 1$ Astra Zeneca/ Sputnik/ J&J annually and do something constructive with the extra $25 saved like buy computer games I'll never get around to playing, or something actually decent like greasies at Maraetai.

Sigh. Someone trying to find evidence of someone else doing something wrong and ending up (allegedly) breaking the law in doing so is an absolutely classic case of situational irony. It also only really works, as irony, if the person being investigated initially didn't do anything illegal. (I'll always pillory Hunter Biden though, because a metaphorical rotten cabbage in the face is the very least he deserves. No way he didn't know what his directorship was intended as, no one is that dumb, and no way he didn't know the position it would put his father into either)

Cohen's always going to say that though, since he flipped himself. Press will always go for him as a template over, say, Roger Stone because ultimately they want Rudy to flip. Would be ironic if Giuliani got done for Ukraine shenanigans while Hunter Biden got away with taking a job he was completely unqualified for and awarded solely because he was the VP's son without any consequences. While it may not have bought actual influence it was certainly intended as a bribe and cannot be read any other way. The only thing more ironic was Trump complaining about it given the fingers his children- and a particular child in law- have in various pies due to who their father is.

Saudi's climb down is nearly complete. I still remember well all the Saudis in 2016 saying they wouldn't talk to Iran under any circumstances because they weren't arab and simply weren't worthy. Guess all it takes is Trump leaving, a couple of refineries being blown up and spending almost all the piggy bank in Yemen. Losing to shoeless Houthis whacked out on Qat and watching them blow up Abrams after Abrams with fricking 1960s era Malyutka all filmed on a 1960s era Nokia is bad enough, but losing and running out of money when you're the world's biggest oil supplier? That takes some sort of special ability. GD is being a bit too negative on the DC, our far and away most important transmission cable is indeed HVDC (and the 2nd most important one nearly was and got rejected for 'political' rather than practical reasons) and there are a lot of HVDC lines around- there are just a lot lot more AC ones. Not disputing the general observation about the practicalities of AC over DC though.

It wasn't rejected for bad data per se, it was rejected because the adenovirus vector had reverted back to a self replicating form. That means you could get (very mildly) sick from the vaccine itself as its base vector causes Common Cold in the wild. There's always a small chance of that happening if you use a viral vector, and while it has very low potential danger it should be caught and fixed anyway. That's also why they'd still be happy with a locally manufactured version.

Most of the complaints I've seen about GOG's refund policy were from people trying to game the system. Always amusing when someone with a public profile complains about not getting a refund for a game they've played for 50 hours. The exception would be around C2077's release, where support in general was snowed under. A low refund rate shouldn't be all that surprising for a curated store, as at least in theory that eliminates people refunding because the game simply doesn't work. A lot of people also use steam's refund system in lieu of a trial/ demo version of games which obviously cannot be the case for a drm free system.