Zoraptor

Can't see a MS account as being a massive issue by itself (though see below), the big issue would be a constant internet being required (which isn't). Then again, I already have a MS account so it literally isn't an issue for me, so easy to say that. The supported processor list actually starts at Intel 8000 series/ Zen+, not a 1 Ghz dual core listed due to the TPM requirement. Sure, there are workarounds, but the average user isn't going to muck about with their BIOS to enable an obscure option as they've never done anything in BIOS before and have no idea what those arcanely named options mean. They don't actually need TPM to be a requirement, unless they don't want to sell windows in Russia or China any more (since it's backdoored extensively by the NSA) and don't want adoption by corporates. Maybe another run at getting Secure Boot implemented, especially with the account requirement as well?

Something like 99.5% of those incidents don't involve actually going into territorial waters/ airspace, just through completely arbitrary self declared Air Defence Identification Zones and the like that have no basis in international law. Actual intrusions are very rare and mainly happen in a few areas such as the Kurils/ South China Sea (competing claims) or around the Baltic where Finnish/ Estonian/ Russian airspace is a mess. This was definitely more dangerous than the average because it was a deliberate intrusion into claimed Russian waters with a warship. Which is an aggressive act which could result in the ship justifiably being sunk, at least so far as Russia was concerned. Practically of course that risk was still pretty much non existent; and they'd picked a relatively 'safe' ship to send since the Defender is pretty aptly named since it has next to no offensive capability at all. It was not a very well judged exercise otherwise though, especially with having the press along, precisely because while it was still unlikely that anything really significant would happen it should have been blindingly obvious that there would be a response, and that the press would report on it in an uncontrollable way. Not a great look having the MoD have to wave their hands and shout about there being nothing to see here like they were auditioning for a Naked Gun remake when they had the BBC and Daily Fail correspondents both talking about warning shots, near collisions and being buzzed by 20 planes while on the cusp of World War 3 breaking out. It was still all posturing, they just didn't expect quite the buy in to the Russian posturing from their own journalists.

The last Argentine exocet also went to the wrong spot, due to a good bit of British disinformation, so it was never even in a position to be used. The latter ships sunk were all done by dumb bombs (all iirc from ancient, even then, A4 Skyhawks). Probably would have been fewer ships sunk if the BBC hadn't mentioned that the bombs' fusing was wonky, so the Argentines fixed it. You'd have thought the Royal Navy might have learnt from that not to have BBC journos on board in case they said something they didn't like but it seems not, given recent events in the Black Sea.

The ultimate irony would be if it turned out that the source for sarscov2 was European Horseshoe Bats and not Chinese ones, and some random Italian ended up bringing the infection to China instead of the reverse.

The issue is that the number is so small though, as that also explains a deletion. The thing about ssRNA viruses are that they are ludicrously prone to mutation compared to just about anything else. RNA is inherently bad if you want genetic stability, and single strand is even worse. For an academic example of why it isn't a big deal, and from a 'neutral' time period. Source (emphases added by me). It's probably also useful to post the abstract of the paper itself... So only some of the 13 recovered sequences had the differences. If you took 13 sequences now there would be differences too, and probably more. 3 mutations is very much within the same 'swarm of related variants' mentioned in the first quote. Each named variant has a consensus sequence, but if you took 13 individual sequences there'd be a lot of minor changes within that classification, and you simply don't expect (or really want) every single change listed in a database because most are utterly irrelevant and have zero effect. And at the risk of parroting the objections made in sciencemag the deletions might be suspicious if there wasn't an alternative source for the same data, but there is, and the new sequences might be significant if we still thought the wet market was ground zero- but we don't. It's most likely they were deleted as being artefacts that didn't represent the predominant SARS2 sequence as was. I very much like the percolator theory though, that you had a low infectivity but also low mortality crossover that nobody noticed until it got greater infectivity. With that you'll never know the ultimate source because there'd be a long period of it being in humans before it was detected as being in humans, but you'd also get things like a 3 changes ancestor.

I find it extremely funny that my computer is not ready for win11. (due to not having recent enough NSA spyware, of all things)

Three mutations? For an RNA virus that's statistical noise. It's less mutations than any named variant has in its spike protein, alone. Don't see how it adds much at all really since we already knew the wet market was not the source but more of a super spreader event. Let's be frank, if they'd left the sequences up someone would have seen that as a sign of perfidy too- 'muddying the waters with irrelevant historical data' or similar. At this stage in the propaganda cycle we're well into working back from the conclusion desired using whatever motivations fit best. To be fair to the author, he's a bit unlucky that 'just asking questions' type scenarios have become a bit of a trigger point recently.

The classic odd Brit (well, 'Brit') entrepreneur ('entrepreneur') death has to be Robert Maxwell, 30 years ago. Mossad, corruption, massive embezzlement, contradictory autopsies, more, and about as direct a link to Epstein as you could hope for via his daughter.

The french show was probably Les Revenants (which was remade in the US as 'The Returned').

If you were making a 18t anti ship warhead for a missile I'd suspect you'd be better off making it fragment into bomblets under almost any circumstances rather than have it be 18t in one explosion. Guess they could put an 18t warhead on one of their big ballistic missiles but they're nowhere near accurate enough to hit near moving targets, so they'd be of limited use. OTOH, you could fairly easily pack 18t of explosives into a remote controlled suicide submarine (or alternatively, and prosaically, a 'torpedo'). That would have many of the advantages that UAVs have in terms of ignoring the needs of the squishy meats sacks for protection and the like while making them more difficult to stop too. Or use them like the Decima MAS of WW2 used their chariots to infiltrate harbours and anchorages. That would also explain why they do it as an underwater explosion.

A 20kt explosion would be slightly bigger than that- see Operation Crossroads for an example.

'Aggressively market' is a bit... polite for what they did. They gave away just enough formula for the mother to stop expressing milk, so after the sample period the mother would have absolutely no option other than to buy milk formula (and they bunged doctors to get them to advise using it, faked research saying it was better than breast feeding and a host of other things). Pretty difficult to fully avoid Nestlé products though, their corporate structure and brand naming is (deliberately) labyrinthine.

I certainly wouldn't believe what they say, in the religious sense, and they clearly have a particular political position to impress upon. (with such things it's usually a question of how much you can independently verify, and for intelligence leaks that isn't much, usually not even whether they were genuine leaks let alone genuine information being leaked. There have been persistent rumours of high level defections, but that's been the case for a year+, we know (more or less) that the Chinese rolled up the CIA network in China... but anything apart from that needs more than just an anonymous source who may or may not exist. There's also the question of sources gilding the lily, like the infamous Curveball of 'mobile Iraqi CW labs' infamy, and why a leaker would chose that site to leak to when they'd have to know that many would dismiss the information based on who was saying it. More or less wait and see, if the defector exists and is giving the information stated others will start getting leaks soon or (some of) the information would be shared with the public)

Meh, the article is pretty much the epitome of false equivalency. The three theories of SARS CoV2 origin simply aren't equivalent, even just listing them as if they are is deeply misleading. We've had detected coronavirus crossover events 7 (!) times in the last 20 years (including SARS1/2 and MERS), and there are almost certainly other non detected ones too; so that's the default option because it's happened provably more than once every 3 years. That's especially so when there is no evidence- let alone compelling evidence- for anything else, beyond 3 people being sick, which was intelligence laundered through someone who has been used to legitimise false intelligence before, multiple times. (Most amusingly the so called 'smoking gun' evidence of SARS CoV2 being engineered is now admitted to be a flash in the pan instead, said by someone going off half c0cked. And even that is being a bit generous with the fusilliary metaphors)

People say that vaccination doesn't really do anything, but my wifi has improved noticeably and the amount of buffering I've got has dropped a lot so I'm theorising that the vaccine makes you act like an antenna or signal booster at very least. You can also tell who the microchips were manufactured by, if you get a fever after the injection you know it was an Intel based dose since their chips are well known for operating at 100 degrees. Yep, the fundamental thing about standard (ie non medical grade) facemasks is that they may reduce the risk to others, but they don't come anywhere close to eliminating it. Same for social distancing. If you're constantly exposed for a long period in an enclosed space then nothing except for innate luck will stop you getting it. And yes, if you're in the typical light industrial or production type workplace it will spread like wildfire because even a large reduction in incidental chance of infection gets overwhelmed if the contact isn't incidental but is systematic. That's also why so many medical personnel get covid, despite all the precautions and training; constant low chance of transmission adds up massively over time. To be fair, I'm sure there are papers on how industrial type working conditions contribute- and reporting too, certainly at the start there was a lot of reports on spread via abatoirs and the like. Fundamentally, 'industrial design' isn't fixable without redesigning the entire economy though which cannot be done short term whereas wearing a mask or social distancing is a quick 'fix', so one gets picked over the other. And it also has to be said, if you did fix that problem it would likely be via increased automation, leaving the former employees without work.

Nothing more than Putin and Hillary really not liking each other and Trump using softer rhetoric. Maybe also a bit of rhetorical payback for all the self congratulation from the US when they got that incompetent sot Yeltsin re-elected in 1996 and he promptly continued running Russia into the ground, though Trump was nowhere near Yeltsin levels of incompetence. It is rather amusing seeing western journos who had worked themselves into a frenzy realise that Biden isn't going to try and german suplex Putin through a table or whatever they seemed to be expecting him to do.

Which is why they'll almost certainly try and leverage Russia away from China*. That's going to take some compromising though, and that won't be popular with some. Obviously that's also not going to be said outright, especially at a NATO meeting. But you can hardly argue that containing China is a part of NATO's purview, since there are only a dozen countries further away from the North Atlantic than China. Finding Putin's price is almost certainly why Biden is meeting him though, it's certainly not just to posture about things and read through a grievance list, as the press seems to want people to believe. *not like they're actual friends and allies anyway, it's far more of a 'enemy of my enemy..' situation.

Speaking generally; you have to have enough virus there for the test to detect. If you've been exposed and are incubating but have a low initial viral load you'll still test negative. The good news though is that that also means you'll have extremely low infectivity since you need a decent viral load to be shedding it. That's why you have sporting or other events where you need a negative test result before going; you may be infected and get sick later but you won't (shouldn't) be infecting people at the event with a viral load low enough to get a negative result. That's the idea behind the testing regime we have for our quarantine. You have a test before traveling from most places and can only travel with a negative test. That doesn't guarantee that you don't have it, but if you do at least you're not infectious while aboard a plane and infecting more people there. They'll then do a series of tests during a two week isolation, and if you test negative to all of them you're free to go. There have been some unlucky people whose incubation has been longer than two weeks, but it's very rare.

TOW's trailer certainly got people talking a lot more than a 'serious' trailer would have, and was a great idea for a 90 sec video when you have basically nothing to actually show- and I do rather like a bit of meta (Throne of Bhaal's gamer party, the fast simulation scene from Person of Interest's If-Then-Else etc). Happy to focus on Stalker 2 having a bunch of negative indicators like skins etc since it's probably a steam exclusive, so I'll assume it's a buggy mess riddled with mtx.

Ended up being 60-59, though the Joint List would have voted for the new government if needed so practically there was more margin to spare. I think it would have to collapse pretty quickly to get Netanyahu back. Apart from the build up of legal troubles that he will have difficulty deferring now he's also accumulated a lot of enemies, not all of them outside the Likud bloc, and his style has been to use his position to play them off against each other and placate those he has to. That's become a lot more difficult now he has less favours to grant.

That's kind of inaccurate, since ISI and Al Nusra never operated together- Al Nusra was literally ISI's wing in Syria so if you were ISI in Syria you were by definition JaN; Jabhat al Nusra == the Support Front (of ISI to Syria). I know why it's put like that in the timeline since they split relatively soon after, but at that time there was literally no difference. (The conspiracy theory with respect to CIA == ISIS is a classic 'interesting series of facts' conspiracy theory. All three ISI(S) leaders were captured by the US at various points and released- both Baghdadis and the current leader- indeed most of ISIS' leadership full stop was at some point in US custody and released. ISI(S)'s brand of Islam was closest to that of Saudi Arabia and much of its financial support came from there, and KSA is a noted US ally. Capture and release is an excellent way to recruit assets and get them into an organisation. Of course, that interesting series of facts doesn't really mean much at all, practically, like most interesting series of facts. The big regional irony is having the US claim that Assad deliberately 'poisoned' the moderate rebels in Syria by releasing radicals like Zahran Alloush and his brother from its jails, when the US released all three ISIS leaders- and the Alloush's release was demanded by Saudi Arabia, who went on to provide them with massive support)

ISIS has killed more muslims than any other group, via terrorism. Of western aligned nations the US definitely, and Saudi probably (via Yemen) have killed more muslims under 'normal' circumstances (Syria too, but it isn't western aligned). Pretty easily, really, if the Australian SAS is any gauge. The Australian government initially swore blind it was all a media beat up by the unpatriotic and arrested ABC journalists for reporting it then we got stuff like: "we have 7 prisoners" "sorry cobber, only room for 6 on the heli" *bang* "we have 6 prisoners..." or them killing 12 civilians to cover up murdering one civilian. If anyone thinks that was a uniquely Australian problem, well, they're wrong (New Zealand's minute Afghan contingent very likely killed civilians too, but not judicially provable because they weren't moronic enough to keep explicit photos; they and the commanders just systematically lied for some random reason totally unrelated to war crimes). Easy to have very low civilian death totals when you just call everyone you kill an enemy combatant and no politician wants to question that.

Kingdom Come Deliverance soap must be specially designed for use when you're bathing while still wearing clothes, if the game's any guide.

The funniest thing about the Australian Constitution is the clause describing which colonies were (meant) to become Australian States: "New South Wales, New Zealand, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia, and South Australia, including the northern territory of South Australia". New Zealand OTOH has no constitution. There was an attempt to make one in 1989-90 with the Bill of Rights, but it ended up becoming just plain old law since they didn't want to weaken the idea of Parliamentary Supremacy with something constraining like a Constitution.

Don't know about Denmark but for Australia at least detention of illegal immigrants is outright mandatory, and they also last month brought in literal indefinite detention, without trial, for those who aren't granted refugee status but cannot be returned due to danger in their home countries. Which is slightly illegal under international law, but probably plays well to Scummo's electoral base- and there's an election due within the next year. Anybody with a serious belief that refugee centres cannot also be concentration camps should have a look at Australia's Manus Island abomination and try arguing seriously that that doesn't fit the definition. They even use nazi style descriptors for the policy- Papuan Solution and Pacific Solution, foisted upon their ex colonial territories. Particularly egregious for Nauru, since it got absolutely ruined by catastrophic phosphate strip mining with no remediation, all so Australia could have cheap fertiliser- and of course now the phosphate is gone they have little choice other than to accept Australia's 'offer' of refugee processing since they desperately need the money.