Zoraptor

54 GB (!) update from GOG too, so it looks like season passers are getting it two days early.

Meh, Litvinenko did a pretty good job of destroying his own credibility since according to him everything was a Putin run false flag- 2005 London bombings, Beslan, Moscow Theatre Siege etc- and Putin was literally a pedophile vampire. He was also 100% employed by arch oligarch and Putin arch enemy Boris Berezovsky, while simultaneously running the anti corruption unit of the FSB; a position which was consistently used to bolster his credibility in western press. You don't tend to get much about those aspects in the typical hagiographies though. The evidence that the apartment bombings were false flags is- at best- equivocal since they rely on chained contingencies like the bombs both being rdx and the only source of that being the FSB (which is completely untrue), and they really weren't needed as justification anyway since Chechens had been invading Dagestan and Ingushetia for months prior. At worst it's the anti Putin equivalent of 'Bush did 9/11'.

Not quite. Nikita Krushchev (a Ukrainian) transferred Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954* so it was well before the USSR broke up, though at that point there was no practical effect at all to the transfer. The proximal issue though with the USSR's break up was that Crimea had voted the previous year to leave Ukraine but that never got properly applied. In 1994 the Crimean parliament and presidency tried to formalise them leaving as had been confirmed in the initial referendum and a subsequent one, and Ukraine sent in 70,000 troops in to crush it and abolished its autonomy. So yeah, Ukraine's actions were not exactly democracy in action but rather the reverse. *much as Georgian Iosef Jugashvili transferred Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Georgia despite them not wanting to be part of it 20 years earlier. Always amusing to see people defend Stalin and Krushchev's decisions in those cases who'd never dream of defending any of their other decisions just because it suits them geopolitically.

Good thing I know you're just doing an ad absurdum impersonation of an astroturfer Bruce, or I'd be worried about your ability to walk and chew gum simultaneously. Of course, those blessed with the ability to, uh, read know that Snowden got stuck in the Moscow transit lounge after the US cancelled his passport and while en route to [not Russia]. For some reason he just didn't want to go through any vassal states, perhaps because he weas worried about his plane being forced down. Ironically, if the US had let him get to Bolivia he'd probably have been handed over last year by- 100% democratic, 0% coup and 0% fascist- Jeanine Anez.

They could do a full menu of 100% invented in Russia and nowhere else foods and add Vodka and Borsht too. Then maybe distract everyone by asking which is the correct name Lviv Lvov Lwow Lemberg should be known by. Thanks are due to Bruce for running with the stereotypical astroturfing examples, though they weren't really needed. Quite apart from giving me the opportunity to point out, again, that the only reason Snowden is in Russia is because the US deliberately stranded him there by cancelling his passport to make him look bad to drooling cretins I can also remind people about Evo Morales' plane being forced down in complete contravention of the Vienna Protocols on the mere rumour that Snowden was aboard. Then I can also make a pithy observation about how all the pontificating about the 'rules based system' of international relations only ever gets applied when it's [not western] countries or their buddies (hello, Muhammed bin Bonesaw and his ongoing mass starvation in Yemen) breaking them.

Prey is great. Never had any issues with the big chungus as he was easy to avoid and only lasted two minutes. Plus, spoilered, since I suspect you aren't up to it yet

Dunno if the US Government won the PR battle. It was a battle they never wanted to fight, and I'd say they lost just from having to fight it. If the US Government came out and admitted to all the bad stuff they'd done there would probably still be a majority of people who would justify and defend it because tribalism runs deep. But that majority would be smaller than it is now, and any reduction is a 'win' for the Snowdens of the world. It also exposes the other tools they use, like astroturfing. Post Snowden there's a lot more people willing to look at, say, people tweeting in support of the coup in Bolivia, and noticing that apparently there's a very large ex pat Bolivian community in some small town called Langley, Virginia.

You Austrians should just vote yourself the least corrupt country in the world, then such things would never happen*. You certainly wouldn't be able to have a coal mine with plastic bags over the methane sensors explode killing 29 people, the owning company declare bankruptcy and the managing director be let off because the government- coincidentally, nothing to do with the huuuge political embarrassment a trial would result in- decide not to investigate the mine itself so the director was allowed a plea bargain 'compensation' payment instead that has since been found to be an illegal bung, and which didn't even involve all the insurance money. Also coincidentally, the government part owned the company at question, and the 'prosecuting' agency was also another government agency which would have been part liable for shoddy to non existent safety oversight. Oh yeah, actually on topic, we've got a review on for our bulk drug buying agency Pharmac at the moment. Coincidentally, one of the main beneficiaries if it goes bye bye is Pfizer, who have given us preferential access and a 'great deal' for its vaccine despite having had about a dozen covid cases here in the last six months. Eagerly awaiting the decision to axe Pharmac and move to a US model following absolutely no payola and lobbying. Personally I'd rather have Sputnik/ Janssen/ AZ/ Novovax and $250 million in the bank rather than Pfizers overpriced offering. *Pike River Disaster, Supreme Court Ruling on 'plea bargain' since the wiki article is missing it for some reason.

I don't understand, that isn't a picture of Elex?

6 European countries have suspended the use of Astra Zeneca vaccine following blood clots in those who received it. They are utterly incorrect to do so. Now I know affirmative action is popular around the world, but putting the intellectually challenged in charge of vaccine supervision is going a bit far. Frankly, the regulators of Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Luxembourg, Latvia and Norway should be summarily fired for incompetence. In a month's time they'll be bemoaning the lack of trust in vaccines having contributed completely needlessly to it themselves. 22 30 cases of thrombosis in 3 5m people is slightly less than the expected amount, suggesting that if anything the vaccine prevents clotting (it doesn't, of course, but it's better statistical analysis than those clowns have made, with apologies to clowns for the comparison) especially when it's administered primarily to oldies who are intrinsically more prone to blood clots than the general population. If all 30 people outright died- and only one has- there would still be a net decrease in death rate vs not vaccinating by more than an order of magnitude. And finally, one of the symptoms of covid-19 with a fairly long half life is... blood clots. Anyone who has had covid19 then been vaccinated is at an increased risk not because of the vaccination, but because of having had covid. So not only is the prevalence slightly lower compared to pre covid times, you'd actually expect post covid prevalence to be higher due to covid causing blood clots. Credit to the EMA for pointing most of that out, but they were far too polite about it.

At the time deer were worth a fortune alive. Hence no firearms, and use of an expensive helicopter to catch one. More usual to use a capture net rather than Van Damme it, but you use what you're given.

At bare minimum Ethiopia and Kenya have intervened in Somalia.

It was a bit more than bad blood, since Interahamwe were literally literally the remnant Hutu genocide gangs from 1994. (Not Bruce, but the legal justification for the intervention was fine, under international law. You can 'invade' a neighbour if they're unable to prevent cross border raids against your country. It's certainly an oft abused position though, and the Rwandan intervention was not just about raids any more than for others who abuse that justification like the US and Turkey. OTOH, that specific war would almost certainly have happened in some form with or without Rwanda as the central Congolese state was and largely remains extremely weak with the country being an impoverished mish mash of ethnicities and local power blocs theoretically ruled over (up until recently) the decidedly non democratic Laurent Kabila)

The magazine she partnered was Bitch Magazine, which I thought would run into the naughty word filter but it seems not. And it does have a physical media version so far as I can tell, so not actually an emag. That was for Tropes vs Women, prior to the kickstarter. Feminist Frequency was a product of her time in university, but so far as I am aware was always media analysis rather than academic in nature. It certainly doesn't claim to be academic in nature, from their site: "Feminist Frequency began with a borrowed camera and some lights. In 2009, Anita Sarkeesian started making videos examining pop culture from a feminist perspective. The videos aimed to analyze modern media’s relationship to gender, race, and sexuality, and we have always advocated for the just treatment of all people, offline and online."

Well yeah, technically, it was a rogue strike from the civilian CIA rather than from a military general. That's not exactly running counter to the overall point though, indeed, having rival operators stepping on each others' toes is an illustration of it being shambolic and not in any way a denunciation of it. The natural evolution was exactly what we got a decade later- CIA backed Syrian rebels actively fighting against Pentagon backed Syrian rebels.

She did a relevant Masters, but undergrad was media studies or similar, and Tropes vs Women was established in partnership with an emag, not a university or similar. She's definitely a media personality rather than an academic. I'd agree completely with Hurlshot, except for her not cashing in on the harassment. That she 100% did, how to maximise publicity and run a media campaign is one of the things she would have learnt in her communications courses.

The very first drone strike, like ever? There was also the infamous case from February 2002 where some poor Afghan farmer got droned literally because they were tall. And that's off the top of my head. Considering how much effort the US goes to to obfuscate the negative nature of its drone program- everyone killed by them is a terrorist, unless it can be proven otherwise so no civilians are killed etc- it's surprising there's even those examples, and they're only known because of the turf war to sometimes literal war by proxy, between the CIA and the military.

Don't know, it was a non rhetorical question. In order to establish whether there's cancel culture for books and who is to blame you need to establish if anything has been 'cancelled' and who is doing it. Not much point arguing about something that may not even exist.

It looks far more that that info is just irrelevant rather than inaccurate. It doesn't really matter if some parent(s) complain(s) about, say, Harry Potter 5 times over a 20 year period, it's pretty obvious that HP/ Rowling didn't get 'cancelled'* even if a random library actually removed it instead of thanking the parents for their concerns and transferring the correspondence to the circular file. But if nothing else, the consistent appearance of certain titles in those lists year after year makes it obvious they haven't been cancelled, whatever the complaints. In order to be cancel culture the thing actually has to get cancelled. The question really is how many books actually get 'cancelled' by the censorious 'left' compared to the censorious 'right', not how many complaints there are. The only question about 'accuracy' is the number of complaints, typically 3-400, and even that is more about relevance. You'd have to suspect that even the most slacktivist of woke campaigns can get more than that tweeting over a far shorter period than a year, and will typically target the publisher rather than libraries. *and of course the great irony is that now it's the wokesters going after Rowling because she has the wrong views on gender... On Lula, the main defence for him is that everyone in Brazilian politics is corrupt, but at least he brought millions out of poverty instead of (well, in addition to, more realistically) just adding more to the divide between rich and poor as has been usual practice from the likes of 2% Temer and Bolsonaro.

That's the problem with having a virus and its disease have different names. There's no evidence- so far as I am aware- that obese people are more likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2; but they're more likely to get its negative effects covid-19 and more likely for them to be serious. So whether they're moire likely to get it depends on whether you're talking about covid19 or the virus. Most of these studies coming out recently are scientific/ statistical confirmation of stuff that has been known anecdotally for months. So you have myocarditis, obesity, effects on capillaries etc all being Published recently because they now have enough good data to confirm what was already 'known' and for there to have been proper peer review.

Kind of funny how easy people are to manipulate and how utterly naive they are to even the most basic PR moves. Literally everyone familiar with the Royal Family knows who asked how dark the baby's skin colour would be, it wouldn't do the slightest damage to name everyone's racist uncle Prince Philip as the person asking that question. It does more damage not to name him because speculation, and Meghan Markle 100% knows that. Archie doesn't get to be a prince because Prince Harry publicly said he didn't want his children to have titles literally years ago, and Archie doesn't qualify for being a Prince. She's also not Princess Diana, coming into the family blind as an innocent (more or less) 19 year old, she's a TV actress in her 30s. Harry is also at best thick as two short planks. Yeah, everyone in the royal family feels trapped, not a secret, Liz the QM famously hated Edward VIII for abdicating and forcing her husband to be King. They still do it though, with a smile. I'm sure they'll be very keen to reconcile with brave Harry who spoke his mind after... running away and leaving them to take up his slack. Ironically Harry and Meghan come across as utterly entitled. They wanted only the perks of the RF and none of the downsides and for everything to bend to them. And they'll run the money side of being royals into the ground, on their own terms. To quote the great philosopher Scott Steiner: "no simpy". Quite the opposite, in fact.

Most of the AyyMD crowd is banned from the Intel sub. Rocketlake just doesn't really seem to have any big positives to balance out the obvious negatives. The Intel hype machine is also starting to annoy a lot of Intel loyalists who have been waiting for a new desktop architecture for 5 years (!) and were actually expecting the claimed 19% IPC gain. But anyway, how many uses does rocketlake beat Zen3 at even excluding gaming though? They're only doing 8 and 6 core versions so they're very much in the 'gaming' market segment, too expensive for the budget office PC type set up and for anything multithreaded it gets brutally murdered by the higher core counts of 5950/5900. Its main advantage is AVX512- which has very few applications while turning the CPU into a blast furnace- and having an iGPU that can be leveraged for some tasks and is pretty decent. Don't think there's confirmed pricing out (?) but the indications from the Anandtech article is that they will be more expensive than cannonlake but still perform worse than Zen3, and in some uses regress from cannonlake. There is certainly a decent case for some of the cannonlake cpus as a budget option still since their price/ performance is good.

What next, "I was really hoping that Intel would at least be competitive this gen so AMD would be pressured to drop prices"? That's a bit harsh on 14nm- the new chip has major weaknesses which were strengths for previous 14nm offerings. Latency for example, where Rocket Lake is little short of awful compared to Cannon Lake. It's not that 14nm isn't antiquated, but there clearly are architectural problems with the backport despite the IPC gains, hence the poor gaming performance compared to a 9900k even with a theoretical 10%+ clock v clock lift. Ultimately the situation isn't because of 14nm showing its age so much as Intel's decision to tie architectural advances to process, and then 10nm being so problematic for so long.

Microsoft Exchange hacked, by China this time. Might be time for the big US corps to upgrade their protection from McAfee, and the NSA to deprioritise dragnetting gran's chain emails and funny cat videos for some industrial espionage prevention?

I imagine it will be used a very great deal, at userbenchmark.