Zoraptor

Can't see Lanfear being all that important in the appearance sense in the TV series- unless they end up doing Age of Legends flashbacks or similar*. Elaida seems a reasonable guess, given the casting of Elayne. *spoiler it, for safety sake

Meh, if Taiwan is invaded it's taken. Just plain and simple too close to China. No one should have any illusions about that. It isn't the difficulty in taking Taiwan that stops China, it's the consequences for doing so. The classic role of the carrier in any conflict involving close to parity powers (largely forgotten when they've been consistently used against 'weak' powers over the past 70 years) is to sink the other side's carriers- and provide local air superiority outside the range of your land bases. Difficult to sink the enemy carrier known as Fujian province, and the entirety of Taiwan would be under an AA umbrella situated there let alone the mainland airbases. Good luck getting air superiority there using carriers alone within a realistic timeframe to save Taiwan. OTOH, if you want to enforce a retaliatory blockade, or shoot up some small airbases illegally stuck out in the ocean or whatever...

Now that's a reference that will leave a lot of people confused. For anyone wondering: Officer Crabtree (One of the best bits of acting I've seen in anything was him singing in that atrocious accent while mispronouncing every word and playing the piano. I have difficulty doing one of those at a time)

My entire knowledge of furry subculture comes from one guy on a forum nearly twenty years ago who loved randomly posting about chakats, fursonas* and the like for the reactions he got- mostly, I think he found the pearl clutching and claims about portents of the imminent doom of the human race hilarious (and I certainly did). *I was going to post a fun "what's your fursona?" quiz, but I'm not sure which is best (and sfw) has nazi rodents as an option.

No need for a search engine, you can get all the answers you want- and more, so very much more- on wikifur.

The correct term for a snake 'furry' is a scaley. Yes, seriously. And obviously nazi rats' ultimate enemies should be commie chakats...

We don't really know how the FB system works of course, but it's certainly implied that they run all the verification off a master server rather than locally. The average FB employee getting locked out of their office ain't a big deal, but it seems to be intrinsically dumb for critical infrastructure, especially for access to hardware that controls the local network (and hence IoT). That makes the whole thing vulnerable to both malign action and hardware faults, and makes it hard to fix when they happen. You can only presume that they'd have some sort of master override for emergencies but really, for critical infrastructure there should be a separate ringfenced system. That would certainly be cheaper than the value of the stock losses from having your system crash for a few hours. Seems to be a bit of a paradigm that connectivity is good for the sake of it, and it isn't for everything. (Attitude wise it kind of reminds me of Fukushima having their back up emergency diesel generators in a basement below sea level and hence prone to flooding. That might be convenient for daily operation, but the whole idea is to design around managing the extraordinary, not the ordinary)

Objectively FB getting hacked would be bad news for everyone given their Orwellian tendencies and propensity for making dummy accounts on non users. Subjectively, getting hacked couldn't happen to a nicer company and maybe, just maybe, someone might decide that deliberately adding security holes to everything so employees of TLAs can do a bit of virtual panty sniffing on the side is idiotic. Don't think it's anywhere near confirmed though, and it's pretty easy to fake having hacked FB since a lot of the account data is fundamentally public (and of course they'll happily sell it themselves to pretty much anyone, so you could get genuine FB data by hacking multiple 3rd parties). Thought and prayers to Raithe though, without fbcdn half the meme content of the internet is down.

Relying on the Internet of Things for critical infrastructure? literal lol. Honestly, I'd have actively gone out of my way to avoid buying pointlessly Connected devices even before every second company started getting the ransomware treatment*. To quote the great philosopher Scott Steiner: "no sympy" Good for consultants though; they go/et to advise everyone to stick everything on the internet for $$$, then they get to advise everyone to take everything off the internet also for $$$. *obligatory reminder, mostly done using hacked CIA tools exploiting mandated backdoors...

"Pandora Papers" leaks show wealth of some prominent leaders. Not exactly news in most cases though, anyone who didn't know Aliyev was looting Azerbaijan probably didn't because they didn't what Azerbaijan is or who its President is.

Yeah, but there's a reason why people don't use "national debt" (well, they do, as a synonym for government debt though "government debt" is a far better term for it). If you want to make people pretty much everywhere wet themselves try using the figures for unfunded government liabilities... There are multiple reasons why China- and Japan's is ludicrously large in to gdp ratio terms- debt isn't as much of a concern; very high levels of private savings and in China's case the small matter of ~3T in simple currency reserves which makes their practical government debt only ~35% of GDP. To be honest the current talk about things like Evergrande bringing down China's economy is a bit ridiculous and pretty much directly equivalent to all those 2014 articles assuring people that sanctions would drive Russia bankrupt in months. The government could pay Evergrande's entire debt with cash in hand, if they needed to. China's economy is artificial and a house of cards but they spend a lot of time and effort gluing the cards together; and you'll go a long way to find an economy that isn't a house of cards built on flim flam and bubbles anywhere at the moment. What's the figure for the US derivatives market? More theoretical money than actually exists in the entire world's economy you say? Countries with an average house 20x the median wage and 'cooling' at an annual increase of 20% (wages, 2%)? Money printing, free debt etc etc. Everyone is propping themselves up.

Wouldn't have thought it could work like that, but brains are weird. You wouldn't think that synesthesia would 'work' either based on how 'normal' sound/ sight perception works, and there are some pretty funky perceptional stuff everyone can do like adapting to vision inverting glasses. (Colours are also a bit scientifically vague, since like a lot of stuff they're a language based construction to describe an observed physical/ perceptional phenomenon, and that is inherently imprecise. Humans could definitely see in the 450-500nm range historically, but often the word for blue didn't exist. Thus you see descriptions of the sea as 'black' or 'wine coloured' instead in many ancient texts, and even in english 'blue' was the last major colour to be named)

That would explain why I recognised Re from somewhere; it's used in insect flight mechanics to explain wing shape and function. Not that I've done anything on insect flight mechanics since uni, but the course it was in was the best presented one I had while there (and also had the highly memorable dinosaur unit that could easily have been called "why everything you learned about dinosaurs when you were eight was wrong").

To be blunt, Babylon 5 was in dire need of a rewrite from the point it was completed. S4&5 weren't completely awful at the time but are an utter mess on rewatch, and S1 has a lot of bad filler episodes. With JMS on board it's one series where I'd welcome a remake. Ironically, the only episode in the last two seasons I unreservedly liked was the one with the earth reporter making Sheridan et al look bad, as a meta observations about how the 'heroes' were presented. Very high highs in the series and it isn't that hard to fix the lows assuming a fixed order and no worries about being prematurely cancelled (or being told you're cancelled, then getting a surprise 11th hour renewal), or losing your lead without much prerequisite build up.

I knew most of them, more or less. The board definitely needs a discussion on Sieverts vs the plethora of other measurements used for radiation measurements.

You don't, but the idea was to drive up costs for Russian natural gas until imported US gas got competitive. Which was never going to actually happen, and that was obvious to everyone except... I'm not actually sure it wasn't obvious to US politicians and they just did it to get money out of deluded lobbyists. It is of course possible to import US gas, you just need a lot of ships and a couple of massive terminals, neither of which exist and couldn't for years, and both of which would cost more than Nord Stream 2. I most certainly have. Sadly at the moment a comparison to Jesus and the Second Coming is pretty apt, much as with fusion power. Both are The Future™, and both have been The Future™ for multiple decades while being a few years away from mass adoption. (To put it in perspective I can still remember a lecture 20ish years ago in chemistry materials about some revolutionary lattice product- the hydrogen atoms would fit nicely into the lattice, and if you applied electricity the lattice would deform and expel them- that would make hydrogen practical as it got both more density than liquid hydrogen/ didn't require super cold or super high pressure, and solved the problem with it tending to leach out. It is mentioned for hydrogen storage now, but still only as a potential rather than practical one)

And without Nordstream they're in the far better situation of being at the mercy of... Russia and Ukraine. They're still going to buy Russian gas, anything else is a pipe dream. The shale gas the US desperately wants Europe to get hooked on is far too expensive and there isn't any infrastructure for it. It isn't even financially competitive in the current environment where Ukraine gets transit fees and causes inflated prices by filching some off the top nor in the previous one where the US was also sanctioning allied countries' companies to try and make it so.

Amazing. Every time I think my opinion of Mike Pompeo couldn't get any lower he finds a way to confound expectations. It was already quite an achievement being the worst person in an administration that included Donald Trump. A Castro style assassination plot attempt- or even kidnapping- on Assange would be hilarious for multiple reasons, if the whole idea wasn't so indicatively counterproductive and stupid.

Blackwater --> Xe --> Academi. Which I believe still exists, though not independently any more. Can't help but think that the main reason for picking Wagner is to maximally annoy the French rather than for any practical benefit. Ironically, it's illegal for Russian citizens to work as mercenaries at least technically, which is one of the reasons Moscow always has to deny having any involvement with them despite there being obvious links. That, and their alleged tendency to beat people they think are stealing from them to death with sledgehammers while being stupid enough to film themselves doing it.

The funny thing is that Xiaomi probably does have residual censorship software on it, since it is a requirement for them being sold in China. But that's to prevent Chinese people doing things like compare Xi to a chubby fictional ursine or sharing pictures of tank man, not to delete a Lithuanian's A A Milne collection and it's pretty much certain that they simply cannot do that outside of China. They've got plenty of utterly counterproductive wumao shouty men to complain about the Winnie the Pooh comparisons in the western internet instead. That's both low practical effect and extremely low exposure compared to all the backdoors US companies have in them. You can barely buy a chip without a built in NSA backdoor now- eg IME/ PSP for Intel/ AMD- nor networking gear, and pretty much the sole reason for Windows 11 existing is to force default adoption of the thoroughly compromised TPM in the name of 'security'. OK, that last one is also largely to give MS the ability to vet everything on your computer which has a commercial purpose too, but you can readily guess who will be piggybacking that capability and it won't be PLA Unit 61398. Until they inevitably hack either the NSA (as the Russians did, and for which you can thank most of the spate of ransomware attacks that use filched NSA tools) or the backdoors directly, at least, and assuming they haven't already.

Do you ever bother reading the stuff you link Bruce? ie the reason for the lack of security guarantees is... US sanctions on Huawei. Perfect circular argument, we have to ban Huawei because we're banning selling them the equipment that would allow us to buy from them. FTR, no security backdoors in Huawei have ever actually been identified, it's entirely assertion that they exist. Cisco... not so much. Indeed, as per above the reason for Huawei being banned is the lack of NSA backdoors being present, not the proven presence of Chinese ones. (Are there Chinese backdoors? Maybe, maybe even probably- but there definitely are backdoors in the alternatives)

There's definitely a weird obsession with takeaways here. Think in most places the 100k in cash in the car would make the headlines rather than the KFC. Personally I refuse to eat KFC and haven't for 20 years.

That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence Bruce. If you think that the Russians killed lots of civilians it's up to you to prove it, and anecdote != data. The US did 'bomb Fallujah to the ground'. OK, they mostly used artillery to do it rather than aircraft, but so what. That was the whole point of telling civilians to leave and declaring it a closed military zone. Hardly matters whether you use precision weapons targeted solely at militants if the net effect is killing as many civilians as an indiscriminate attack. About 1% of Fallujah's civilian population was killed in roughly 3 months. About 1% of Aleppo's civilian population died too, over 5 years. To put it in perspective, when the decidedly imprecise Iraqi army retook Fallujah from ISIS in 2016 the estimate of civilian deaths is... ~0.05% of its population, or one twentieth the number the US caused. And that army was meant to be a rabble of whacky shia dervishes looking for some sunni babies to turf out of incubators and impale on their helmets while flagellating themselves and chanting Ya Ali. Same thing for Aleppo, the total number of civilian casualties after the Russian intervention is way way lower than you'd suspect from the coverage, about half the 5 year average for the full battle. Conversely, the casualties in Mosul and Raqqa (proportionately, since it's also way smaller than the other two) are way way higher than you'd think from the reporting. The total number of civilian deaths for 2016 in Aleppo- including the nearly 1000 killed by the rebels using decidedly non high tech/ aerial mortars, snipers and rockets- is 'only' ~3000. The number killed in Mosul by coalition airstrikes alone is just under 6000 per Amnesty International, and as with Fallujah (and Aleppo for that matter) an awful lot more were killed by bog standard artillery than airstrikes. The independently assessed upper limit estimate of civilian casualties caused by Russia in 4+ years is ~6000, per Airwars.

There are definitely some anti US sanctions. Russia has some, China has quite a lot and IIRC Iran still has an open warrant for Scott Lustig, who shot down IranAir655. Nowhere near as publicised though, and not as effective either. It's a typical Bruce argument anyway, since the Coalition killed at least four times as many civilians 'accidentally' in Mosul than Russia killed 'deliberately' in Aleppo, at around the same time, and that had basically no press coverage, let alone political opprobrium or sanctions. Indeed, the coalition likely killed more civilians in Raqqa too than Russia did in Aleppo, and it is a fifth the size.

Eh, there are plenty of reasons for that. Not least that there's been a very well publicised apology this time which you don't usually get and which makes it very difficult to use the usual deflection strategies, though it didn't stop them trying. The typical cycle is to claim it was absolutely a correct strike, followed a few days to a week later by saying it was a 100% correct strike but is now under investigation because the locals insist an innocent target was hit but everyone should be patient, maybe followed months later by some sort of admission that maybe it wasn't quite as correct as had been made out, buried as half an column inch on p57 of the NYT if carried at all. And in between the first and last step you have a horde of people saying how it had to be this or that because a ginsu was used so any explosion had to be secondary, then that prejudgements are being made and you need to be patient, and the like. Usually, the coverage just goes away and literally no consequences are faced, instead of literally no consequences apart from having to make an apology on camera that goes on CNN/ BBC et alia. When the subject of bad US drone strikes comes up this one will be the poster child for years to come, precisely because they had to very publicly admit this one at least was wrong- when many suspect that it's the tip of the iceberg. They clearly knew they'd hit the wrong target pretty early*, but continued saying it was a righteous strike because they'd previously got away with obfuscating it until everyone forgot and hoped it would work this time. This time though the whole thing was tied into a very unpopular and chaotic withdrawal in which hitting an aid worker instead of an ISIS guy was... all too emblematic, and there was ample motivation to actually report on the matter instead of letting it go. *there's some mitigation for the initial mistake because there actually was an attack involving a white Toyota (sedan) the same day and the aid worker did drive a white Toyota as well (albeit station wagon/ estate, not sedan). While it did not involve a suicide bomber but a makeshift rail of grads fired at the airport (missing by a couple of kilometres; who would have thought firing a notoriously inaccurate rocket from a sedan boot wouldn't work well? Not ISIS, apparently. Biggest achievement was setting the car on fire) it seems very likely that the basic intelligence was correct, but they misidentified the vehicle. Even if they lacked that newfangled tech known as 'the internet' (maybe they still called it darpanet and got confused?) where the correct id of the target was made within minutes multiple flags should have been raised when a similar vehicle did carry out an attack very soon after.