Zoraptor

Anakin did get both his legs amputated after overestimating his power and trying something he really shouldn't have, so direct height comparisons between the actors are a bit moot. The Emperor could make Darth Vader as tall or as short (Dark Helmet canonical when, Disney?) as he wanted, because his legs were mechanical. That does make me wonder how many actors they could have picked to play Anakin that would match Prowse height wise. Not many, I'd think.

In that case it was definitely the Tigrayans who started the latest fighting, since they outright admitted attacking the army first (and lobbing a bunch of missiles at Eritrea to try and involve them too). The Tigrayans were almost certainly getting outside help/ encouragement from Egypt/ Sudan due to tensions over the New Renaissance Dam as well as that, which adds extra complication. Egypt has implied they'd go so far as blowing the dam up, and it would definitely be in their interest to do it deniably via a 3rd party instead of directly.

And now there's a sequel video complaining about the frequency being BIOS limited so he can't go even higher than that. Have to wait until 6900XT releases in a few days to try flashing its BIOS 5700 or Vega56 style. You'd have to think that if anyone was in line to get a 6900XT for testing it'd be him though. No power limits and a bit better silicon and 3000Mhz should be within reach, which would make a nice headline for AMD.

Israel looks pretty desperate to provoke a war with Iran before Trump leaves office. Assassinating a nuclear scientist (probably carried out physically by MEK) and three days of bombing in southern Syria too. Obviously hoping for a retaliation that can be used to drop a dead cow down the JCPOA well in case Biden tries to resuscitate it. Also a lot more fighting from Turkish proxies vs the Kurds in north Syria, with Erdogan another who probably wants as much as he can get before Trump goes. The Syria mercenaries who went to Azerbaijan are also being rushed back.

If you want 2000+ Mhz better get a Radeon. You'd need 3x8pin and liquid N2 to get those big Samsung chips to clock that high.

I already said it was a crime to lie to police here in certain circumstances and listed a few. What you cannot do is find out someone is lying, get them to sign a statement with that lie while interviewing them as a witness, then charge them with lying. If they're a suspect they have to be cautioned and you cannot charge someone for lying to protect themselves. The woman in the article was (effectively) providing a (false) alibi for someone else. Not at all applicable to Flynn, unless the US was planning to throw out the Vienna Convention and arrest Kislyak. Censorship is a power thing. Big C Censorship is a governmental thing, but any entity with enough power can little c censor- the church would be a good historical example, eppo si muove etc. There's plenty of threats leveled against social media companies to do what governments want voluntarily, or be forced to by regulation too. More importantly, tulips are crap. 3 days of mediocre flowers, if you're lucky, 362 days of hiding under the ground then looking like an anaemic agapanthus. I'm no great fan of petunias but in competition with perhaps the most overrated flower in existence they're a sunflower compared to ryegrass.

Here, in a Flynn type situation you'd have to caution him if you suspected he was going to incriminate himself, or if you suspected he'd committed a crime. If you don't, you risk everything being thrown out. Here's a decent summary from the CAB/ CL I'm only using entrapment in a generic sense, not as big E Entrapment. Of course here lying to police is only a crime under specific circumstances (false complaint, wasting police time, misidentification if driving and a few others) anyway, so Flynn would not be guilty of that. OTOH, if he were really guilty of 'espionage' or plotting to kidnap Gulen his chances of getting off via plea bargain here are almost zero since plea bargains are extraordinarily rare. Best he'd get is minimum sentence for co-operating, not the zero jail time Mueller was recommending.

His argument is that lying to the police is not (inherently) a crime in most places outside the US, ie if the police asked you in Finland if you stole a car and you say 'no' do you get arrested and charged with lying to the police along with stealing the car if they think you did it? If they eventually think you didn't do it or there isn't enough evidence to charge you with the theft, but you lied about where you were at the time do you then get charged with lying to the police? If the police already had a recording of where you were and ask you anyway, suspecting you'll lie and they can use that lying to charge you with lying, is that OK, or is it entrapment? At which point do you become a suspect rather than a witness or person of interest if they think you'll lie, they're prepared to catch you lying and lying is itself a crime? If that's the approach the entire interview is an attempt to get you to commit a crime by law enforcement you wouldn't commit otherwise, which is text book entrapment. In this case the FBI already knew that Flynn lied to Pence because they had a recording. They were clearly expecting him to maintain that lie- they're the FBI after all, not someone raised in a convent who expects everyone to tell the truth- and hence commit a different crime from the one they were ostensibly investigating, all based on them interviewing him and knowing that he'd probably lie. In most places those circumstances would mean that you'd have to explicitly treat the person as a suspect, and be very very careful around entrapment laws. In most places Flynn would (could) be charged with some sort of 'spying' charge, but not with lying to investigators because someone who has committed a crime is expected to lie about it. (I don't actually have any strong feelings on the matter at all, since it's near pure US domestic stuff, but Skarpen's view is far from unreasonable)

An actual judicial coup is about as likely as the interim Secretary of Defense staging a military coup, anyone saying otherwise is displaying symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome*. *The funniest thing about the situation is how the extremes of both sides suffer from exactly the same fact distortion field just with the exact opposite application. Democrat TDS sufferers: Everything is evidence Trump is going to stage a coup, how terrible! Trumpist TDS suffereres: Everything's evidence Trump is going to retain his position via unorthodox- but perfectly legal- means, how wonderful!

Yeah, they obviously suspected Flynn of a crime since they had the recordings of the meeting with Kislyak. I don't see how there's any realistic argument that they didn't. Obviously they'd frame it as a way to 'clear the air' or whatever and not tell Flynn they knew, but they did already knew that Flynn had lied to Pence.. The trouble with FBI investigations is that they always seem to be primarily fishing expeditions where they hope they catch someone in a lie so they can leverage that against them, and they seem... less than careful about informing someone when they've shifted to being a suspect as opposed to a witness. They are definitely very selective on what constitutes, for example, working for a foreign power. If they applied the same criteria as Flynn/ Russia to Saudi Arabia or Israel I'd have little doubt that half the US government would be in legal trouble. Yes Gromnir, I'll take your objection to that as already said.

RDNA 2+/ 6000 series definitely has transition features towards MCM/ chiplet approaches, eg the massive cache. Personally I'd suspect that the switch to MCM is a big enough one that they'd rename the architecture from RDNA when switching, and '7000 series' has consistently been referred to as 'RDNA3', coming 2021. I'll freely admit that's a pretty tenuous strand to draw a conclusion from though. But I'd expect low hanging fruit to be picked, which will give decent efficiency and performance boosts, but nothing revolutionary. (maybe some tensors added as a proof of concept for MCM? they've got them in the new CDNA cards so I guess it depends on the use case and how the purported dlss competitor ends up performing/ working)

Yeah, for 1080p 60Hz pretty much any current AMD processor will be more than enough so it's balancing budget and longevity. The only other factor would be if there's an upgrade path from 1080p to consider at all. Higher frequency needs a better CPU, but if you go for higher resolution CPU is a lot less relevant. I wouldn't bother with a SATA SSD. 1TB NVMe and a standard old platter HD for bulk storage covers most bases fine. Note that M2 is a form factor rather than a type of SSD, the NVMe versions are a lot faster than SATA m2 and they currently cost almost the same (here, at least, though it seems currently that Europe is really being stiffed on pricing). Most motherboards have 2 m2 slots too now if you need to add more fast storage later. Technically the free upgrade for Win10 is only available for non upgrade version and non OEM win7.

Michael Flynn pardoned by Trump. Not exactly surprising, I guess.

There's a trial on free tampons/ pads in high schools here. It's got pretty broad support from everyone. The other option they were looking at was getting the government's medical bulk purchase agency to do the purchasing and then on sell at cost for older women.

From what AMD and nVidia are saying you'd think there's a massive warehouse in Taiwan or Korea filled to the brim with graphics cards just waiting to be distributed to eager buyers... It's a lot easier to explain poor availability for AMD; GPUs are lowest priority for them as they're the lowest profit item (exc consoles, but there there are contractual obligations) on a manufacturing process which had limited availability even pre covid. Radeon will be getting wafers as and when available and even in normal times would have limited capacity- ultimately that's why the 5500XT was a relatively expensive buy even pre covid. That's exacerbated now by the increased demand, scalping, actually being competitive etc. nVidia though has Samsung 8nm almost to itself yet still hasn't satisfied pre-order demand in many places. So unless Samsung is really, really awful at manufacturing to the extent that most wafers are largely unusable there's clearly either a supply (eg there's only Micron makes GDDR6X, so that could be a limiting factor) or distribution issue. Certainly a lot of shipping capacity is 'stuck' empty in the wrong places (Europe) and air freight is way down due to fewer planes flying; we have issues here as an exporting nation with there being few ships and you used to be able to buy cheap shipping containers for storage very cheaply and they're trying to buy them back now.

Took a while, it was in the 2016 (?) GOG teaser trailer. Weirdly enjoyable game Drakensang, I have quite a soft spot for it despite it being almost entirely generic and cliché. River of Time is the one I'm waiting for though.

AIB 6800/XT are theoretically releasing tomorrow. There are meant to be significantly more stock than the reference release had, but some places (eg here) aren't going to have launch stock anyway.

I'd suspect most countries could make the 'simple' vaccines like Sputnik or the Oxford one. In the end they just need big fermenters (as you'd use for brewing, pretty much) and a bunch of purification steps. Probably too much work for a one off unless you had to, but if you had to you could do it. In a medical emergency/ pandemic you can go the Compulsory Licence route and just make a vaccine as an emergency measure. That would apply here as all the vaccines will be in limited supply for some time and despite the rhetoric poor countries will not be anywhere near first in line. (Kind of lol, Russia announces their vaccine's results and we get a bunch of skeptics trotted out by British State Propaganda saying how it's been rushed and is difficult to store and we can't trust the results as they haven't been published. They're all rushed, it's as difficult to store as the Oxford one- which it's nearly identical to, since they're both based on existing Cold vaccines- and none of the results were published when the others got hyped (don't think any are officially published even yet))

To be honest, even if I don't agree with Blinken on much at all he could scarcely be worse than Pompeo if he actively tried to. Theoretically though all Euro monarchs grant Assent to laws still made in their name. There is a difference (potentially, they can be the same person) between Head of State and Head of Government, since HoS can be a non political position but HoG by definition is political. I'd actually suspect that Executive Presidencies as governmental type are an absolute majority rather than minority. Almost all of Africa, South America and Central America is Exec Presidencies, and most of Asia. There are a few absolute monarchies, Iran, some constitutional monarchies and a decent number of non executive presidential models especially where constitutional monarchies have been replaced in Europe or Commonwealth but even in the Commonwealth itself there are a lot of Executive Presidencies because of Africa. The French colonial model in contrast has resulted almost entirely in Executive Presidencies (only exception I can think of is Cambodia). Though there is a lot of difference in practice between the Executive Presidency as seen in, say, Syria and one seen in, say, South Korea there's also a lot of difference between the constitutional monarchy in Thailand as opposed to New Zealand. Executive Presidencies are definitely rare in Europe though.

Ita vero, requiescant in pace. Caecilius non est in horto. Caecilius et Grumio sub cino erant.

Looks like Biden's cabinet is starting to take shape. Completely orthodox neoliberal picks, with the possible exception of John Kerry in a specific climate change position. Supposedly Defense Secretary will also be a completely standard neoliberal warhawk from the same think tank neoliberal warhawk Secretary of State nominee Blinken was at during the Trump term to complement neoliberal warhawk VP Harris. Because what the US electorate really wants is another 4 years of moronic and pointless military adventurism (with maybe a few brighter spots, like reinstating the JCPOA. Though even there they will no doubt try to 'renegotiate' it). The only speedbump is that Biden is considerably less of a neoliberal warhawk than his picks are.

We can add Astra-Zenica/ Oxford to the list. 70%-90%* effectiveness, but it will be far cheaper and easier to handle than the mRNA based ones. Which is why Pfizer is desperate to get that emergency approval, they self funded and need to make the money back before cheaper options become available. *depending on dosing, 70% effectiveness is just high enough to get to 'herd immunity' anyway though higher is always better.

To be fair to them, they did actually have Georgiu point out that they were mirroring previous events. If there's one thing about the current season I do appreciate it's that they have poked some mild fun at their more stupid plot points. It would, of course, be better if they avoided the silly plot points entirely rather than pointing them out to laugh at, but baby steps. I am enjoying this season rather more than the previous two, to this point at least. It's not what I would exactly call good TV, plots are still rather contrived but at least they hasn't brutally assaulted and murdered suspension of disbelief yet. Last episode would have made a perfectly decent mid range TNG episode, and I suspect may well have been a mid range TNG episode with the serial filed off. I'm very much less than convinced about Trill Wesley (last thing the show needs is a literal teenage genius, all the other geniuses on the crew already have the emotional development of teenagers), the main season plot is just kind of there and anything approaching an action sequence would be done better by an amateur student film plus those bad guys couldn't hit a barn door if they were locked in a barn door warehouse, and their guns are somehow less effective than current ones let alone phasers, but at least I seem to have become immune to the sub Whedon banter and annoying stereotypes. I may be scraping the barrel of criticism a bit here, but Federation Leader Man reminds me far too much visually of Hugh Laurie's Captain in Avenue 5.

There will be ray tracing silly buggers for a while based on whether Team Green or Team Red sponsor the games unfortunately- so RT on AMD sponsored Godfall won't work on nVidia cards for quite some time either.

LOTR wise 5 people used the palantiri. Saruman (ruled out now I guess*); Salman ibn Saud is clearly Sauron, the closeness of the names cannot be coincidence; Denethor; Pippin; Aragorn. If we exclude Pippin (Trump has notoriously small hands and presumably feet, so cannot be a hobbit) then it comes down to Denethor or Aragorn. If he's Aragorn people had better get prepared for him to end up ruling long term- and it has to be said, if Melania dyed her hair dark she'd look pretty similar to Liv Tyler's Arwen. I can't see Trump being Denethor though, too much of a narcissist to ever kill himself. I suppose if Jared somehow 'dies' (flies off to Tel Aviv maybe?) and he sends Don jr off on a suicide mission I'd have to re-evaluate that though. *but we can't forget that Saruman is a Wizard, and does have a reputation for scheming, he could have magically altered that photo somehow to get him and 'Donald' in the same shot, throwing people off the scent.