Zoraptor

I have to admit, that review is kind of selling me on QG as well. I've been looking for a replacement for Dark for a while. Closest was Discovery S3, but while that certainly was depressing it wasn't so in the right way.

Fortunately I'm on the hills already, and not quite in the right place for an evacuation even if at low altitude. A tsunami that reached my house would need a Chixulhub asteroid or a 9.9 MM earthquake, and in either event the tsunami might actually be the lesser effect compared to the nuclear winter etc. A 7.3 a 7.1 and a 8.1 earthquake all within ~6 hours of each other makes for an interesting morning. The tsunami didn't really do much except stir up sediment and give an early high tide but you definitely wouldn't want to be in the water at least. It does kind of remind me of when we had international media phoning up about the Fiordland earthquake (7.8 and on mainland NZ rather than a long way off shore) and being baffled that no one was injured let alone dead and how its biggest effect was startling the mythical fiordland moose.

SARS-CoV-2 confirmed to directly attack cardiac muscle. Myocarditis (heart inflammation) is one of the major 'long covid' contributors and may be deadly by itself due to arrhythmia and other indirect effects.

That's the 'Brazilian' variant for anyone just reading the headline and wondering. Readily able to reinfect and rendering vaccines ineffective would be a real concern, if it's somewhat increased reinfection and somewhat decreased vaccine effectiveness that would be more or less as expected. There's clearly some ability to reinfect among all variants, since the earliest confirmed reinfection was mid last year well before the Brazilian variant was isolated.

And that is the crux of the dispute. Null Zero is the lack of a number, the complete reverse of a really real number- it's the mathematical equivalent of using 'literal' for something figurative and thus a literature infringement. Whoever included it in 'Real' numbers was clearly some sort of liberal arts major rather than a proper mathematician, had no doubt been on the turps and was possibly age addled too. It isn't included in Integers or Whole numbers for good reason, it should not be included in 'Real' either. A proper numerical system would be Ø or similar used for the unique entity made from the equation a-a=x with 0 being used as a placeholder for base increments. Null zero does not behave like a normal number because it is not a number but a prisoner of definitions, it should be excluded to properly address its unique qualities. This is a hill I'm prepared to die on.

Real numeric systems exclude zero though. Zero is not a number, it is in fact the lack of a number- or even a numeric singularity. For how does one define darkness, except as an absence of light? At very best it functions as a place holder, but that is not true zero, as illustrated by all place holder 'zeroes' being expressed differently when using a different base system. Think about it a second, it not actually being a number explains why you cannot divide by zero and the numeric singularity explains why if you multiply anything by zero you get zero- it eats the real numbers, the whole numbers, the rational and irrational and turns them all into itself or some undefined non value. Zero is numeric cancer, numeric prions, a numeric virus; it is not some saviour nor is it simply a mathematical concept, it's the cuckoo in the nest. To show my utter loathing I'd end with ceterum censeo nullum esse delendam, except it already has been. :philosoraptor:

Drought as a reason for shortages and price hikes for microchips? Reminds me of the price fixing shenanigans with RAM a few years back where all the producers had weird 'problems' simultaneously. TSMC is definitely in the price gouging phase of market dominance, and probably will be until Apple buys GloFo or something. Samsung have zero Taiwan fabs and even the assemblers/ AIBs based in RoC actually assemble almost everything in PRC, so it shouldn't be a problem for nVidia anyway. AMD's problem is still MSony having coordinated their console releases and taking up 80% of their fab space. Fundamentally of course the problem is that inflated prices benefit everyone in the production chain, so long as they're being bought at the end still. I'd expect a lot more odd explanations of price rises until someone decides to look at price fixing. Whereupon, miraculously, the problems will clear up.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy found guilty of corruption. Not for campaign financing rule breaking itself but for attempting to bribe a judge investigating it. He's also still facing charges of accepting money from Gaddafi- who, of course, Sarkozy lead the campaign to kill, no doubt coincidentally.

If Hershey uses local milk there's no reason to add* butyric acid as a 'preservative' at all, unless for some reason they want to store it longer term. Higher acid products tend to have longer shelf lives than 'straight' milk by a factor of maybe 4 times. Of course long term storage kind of defeats the purpose of fresh local sourcing. To be strenuously fair to them, there are seasonal milk shortages as cows dry off and have to go through another pregnancy cycle to start producing again, but those are managed and staggered, unless the US system is significantly different from elsewhere, and those limitations are present in Europe/ New Zealand/ anywhere else too. Overall, if they are selling butyric acid tainted chocolate as a matter of course it would be 100% a deliberate choice presumably to save money. *technically if it's lipolysed it's breaking a 4 carbon acid group off the end of a fat molecule rather than directly adding butyric acid, though the effect is the same. Naturally it would be lactic acid sending milk 'off' most of the time which is not fat related but lactose sugar metabolism, iirc. Butyric acid is from the fat elements going off instead, or in this case adding an enzyme to cleave it off.

They do their 'live' testing in other countries, eg Brazil for sinopharm. Their approach is also the most traditional one- attenuated/ dead virus- so does not require extensive development, and at least in theory they can do side effect based tests with or without the virus being present, it's only the efficacy tests that are difficult to do (and hence farmed out elsewhere).

To paraphrase the great philosopher Mick Dundee: That's not a conspiracy theory, this is a conspiracy theory... Everyone knows there are shortages of gpus and cpus. The reason for that is not Intel and to a lesser extent Samsung crapping the bed or high demand for hardware due to everyone staying at home because of covid or supply side issues due to shipping being completely asterisked; the real reason is that the foundries that make them are now too busy making the microchips that are going into the vaccines to make enough cpus/ gpus. Think about it sheeple, you know it makes sense.

Well, about 20000, mostly combatants. The US is not that far behind (13k), especially since no one is really focused on counting the dead in Raqqa etc, as it's not politically expedient to. No one makes a fuss about the 30,000 dead civilians in Mosul, after all. Pretty much. People have dragged up stuff like Jen Psaki's comments on the legality of Trump bombing in Syria, and Biden's "America is back" tweet as in Skarpie's post. The bombing itself appears to be a complete nothingburger and designed to put a line under the current round of tit for tat.

It's the right sort of acid to be true- 'butyric' as a word comes butter, and it's the prime constituent in the smell/ taste of rancid butter for example. I'd be pretty skeptical though, milk is one of those products that doesn't really go off in a slow and steady manner, it tends to go off suddenly and obviously since even a mild amount of acid drops all the protein out as it denatures.So unless they're making chocolate with, say, non cultured buttermilk any process that creates butyric acid would be counterproductive. Acid is of course crucial in making a lot of dairy products like yoghurt or cheese, but that's controlled and by and large not what you want from chocolate. And having said that, a ten second google search indicates Raithe may well be correct, and Hershey for some reason may well be using, effectively, butyrised buttermilk to make chocolate. Swiped from Wikipedia: Why you need to do that if you're using fresh milk I have no idea.

It's likely that whatever significant work Bloodlines 2 requires to get ready the graphics would be salvageable/ reusable so long as the delay isn't too long. End of the day even modern graphics are also pretty easy for even relatively unskilled people to understand, whereas something like undocumented code can be very difficult to decipher, so there shouldn't be any hidden difficulties either. Graphics should require the least work, probably level building next least and it's likely to be bugs and stability, gameplay, storyline and getting it out the door as a finished product which would be the big troubles. If graphics and level design require lots of work either the game is highly unfinished or development has effectively been rebooted.

Funnily enough the message being sent is probably more about the talks the SDF have been having with the central government in Damascus rather than anything else, and them getting rather too close to agreement for comfort. Nothing like randomly bombing someone's allies to up the tensions in negotiations and make the SDF think they can demand more. As a general observation bombing some randoms in Syria- and until further evidence, almost certainly a posturing strike blowing up empty buildings- shows weakness rather than strength, since the reason they didn't strike in Iraq at real targets is being frightened of being ordered out of Iraq, again, having just decided to arbitrarily increase their troop presence. That wouldn't look good for Biden, and would be more difficult for the press to spin into a difference from Trump.

AJ English is not religious, or at least not overtly so but their more in depth world coverage tends to focus a lot more news of situations where muslims specifically are being oppressed and gloss over 'bad' Muslim stories. Unlike the vast majority of Arab media they're not overtly anti Iran and anti Shia, but definitely as part of Qatari political positions- eg they cover Bahrain and Saudi executing Shia for political reasons because it's politically embarrassing for those countries, not out of a sense of outrage. OTOH, Al Jazeera Arabic is hardline sectarian garbage which will happily push Sunni exceptionalism and Sunni victimhood as hard as anything from Saudi does. At least theoretically it does broadly support support 'democracy' (generally via Ikwhan/ Brotherhood, so political Islam) which is why they got banned by Saudi and pals who aren't exactly fans of that idea. Of course, neither is Qatar, at home.

Anthem NEXT == dead. Anthem CURRENT is still continuing as a live service for both its users. Not the most surprising news of the day, one suspects.

The trouble with both of Paradox's statements are that they are exactly what I'd expect them to say if the game was looking to be cancelled, but they didn't want to outright say it because the CEO/ CFO have upcoming earnings calls and don't want to answer difficult questions. What I'd expect if they were committed to release would be a very explicit and directed statement, what we've got has a lot of wiggle room. "We have started a collaboration with a new studio partner to finish work on the game [vtmb2]. This has been a difficult decision, but we are convinced that it is the right way forward to do the game justice" is designed to imply all the right things, without actually saying them. 'Collaboration with a new partner'; if it's actually a new lead dev why not just say that? So yeah, it isn't even a question only of them not naming the developer. Trouble is that phrase is exactly the sort of term you'd use if you had brought a consultant in to potentially shut down the project rather than work on it. Same with 'finish work on' and 'do the game justice'. Shutting it down is also finishing work on it, and if it is unsalvageable the obvious PR tack to take is that it wouldn't have done the game justice. In short, those statements are exactly the sort I'd expect to precede a later statement about how, sadly, they've come to the conclusion that the game cannot be released and meet their expectations of quality so has been shut down. I'll freely admit that my interpretation is a baldly negative one, but it's hard to cobble together much positive out of the VTMB2 development circus. The record of games successfully escaping development hell is poor, the record for games successfully changing developers half way through is also poor. Paradox management may be mostly phone app free to play veterans now, but they'll still know those basic realities and adages about throwing good money after bad.

I wouldn't be sure they have a replacement lined up. It's a hospital pass for whoever got/ gets it as taking over development half way through is notoriously difficult and the title's reputation is pretty much shot to pieces. Best damage mitigation for Paradox also would have been to name the replacement studio immediately. Despite what Paradox state publicly I would not be surprised if it was quietly canned further down the line and both remaining preorders got cancelled in a few weeks. Frankly their statement strikes me as damage control for an outright failed title, and I would not be surprised at all if Hardsuit has been off it for a while prior to the announcement.

IIRC BIOS has a formal 'economy mode' (not absolutely sure of the name) you can turn on which drops the set TDP from 105W with options down to laptop level draws. Pretty sure it's an AMD/ AGESA setting so supported by all boards.

Sounds more like YAL-1 (or its predecessor) than Star Wars, though that was well inside the last 20 years.

Birds of Prey flopped, but everything else Harley Quinn has been close to an unqualified success. OK, Suicide Squad was... uneven, but nearly everyone liked Quinn/ Robbie in it and at least in theory the main drawcards were Smith, and Leto's Joker. A scramble to produce some sort of antivillain, especially a female one, from Disney is not exactly surprising, nor is their attempts to do so being somewhat eye rolling since that has to be done within the family friendly framework. I suspect they really want a female equivalent to Loki rather than Harley Quinn though, so they can keep the hilarious villainy but avoid the decidedly non G certificate undercurrent of abuse that a HQ equivalent would bring.

Succession to a strongman is always difficult if it isn't hereditary. But in terms of a country's strength Russia and China under Putin and Xi are far stronger than under their predecessors, and they're both nationalist/ religious so long as you take China's 'communism' as a belief system. Of course for Russia it was a positively subterranean bar as Yeltsin's mouldering corpse would have been better than Yeltsin was since at least he couldn't actively ruin the country when dead as he did alive... I don't think we really need to look far beyond Goering's quote for reasons why nationalism is so popular among strongmen. but when it comes right down to it the strongmen in the example failed because... democracies convinced themselves that they were under threat, or knew better how to run those countries. In essence nationalism is the belief that your country is intrinsically better, and you can't get much more self righteous/ deluded about your country being better than believing your own press about being 'liberators' and the 'good guys' when in reality you've managed to completely and systematically asterisk up every country you've intervened in for the past 5? decades leaving every one worse than before you intervened. The cause and effect is the big question. But end of the day if you're going into a country, smashing all its institutions and then saying that the reason for the ensuing anarchy is because the country is fundamentally 'weak' you're ignoring a certain step in that chain and presuming the reason for that weakness is not the fact you've gone in and smashed everything.

Yep, it isn't polling in the western sense. The policies they change and pay attention to are things like the price of pork or rice and whether people think they're too expensive, and any other simmering economic tensions since it's far more likely that they'll get significant regime threatening dissent due to economic reasons. Taiwan/ HK/ Xinjiang are more prestige problems after the century of shame, not existential threats. Their only existential threat is when the majority Han starts protesting because they're hungry or not getting the life improvements they expected. Pretty similar for Russia too, Putin will change policies to please his voting base, those who fundamentally want a different approach can't be appeased but are also a small minority overall, so can be simply suppressed instead.

We do know why in the general sense, but we don't in the specific, for individuals. Usually it's because antibodies are built/ spliced together (in an unusual variable manner) but from set genetic blueprints as all proteins in our bodies are, and while that blueprint is large and varied if you're unlucky that blueprint may not contain the parts that are needed for a specific infection, and a lot of antibody generation is kind of random rather than directed so it takes more/less time to get to the right place for different people based, essentially, on luck. Probably the best analogy is having to build a specific shape with a set of lego where you can't directly observe and choose the pieces you have. If you need a 16x1 piece and don't have it then you're going to have to make do with two 8x1 joined together and hope that still works well enough, and you have to hope that the handful of pieces that you pull out of the bag actually contains the 16x1 relatively quickly. Then if you get infected again you have to remember how you made the right shape, and if it wasn't quite right or you can't build it quickly enough- or the pathogen has mutated enough for the shape needed to have changed- you can get infected again. If you're really unlucky the shape for detection is found, but the shape for proper effect against the pathogen isn't, and then you can get an uncontrolled feedback loop (cytokine storm). Since antibodies are spliced out of DNA in a unique and complicated manner it's difficult to analyse what if any combinations are missing for specific people because you can't simply read through the genes in phase as you'd (generally) do for other proteins.