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Zoraptor

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Everything posted by Zoraptor

  1. 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.
  2. If you take the Saruman analogy to its final conclusion Trump will end up 'dead' via Rudi Giuliani, who snaps after finally deciding he can't take any more abuse. But who are we kidding anyway, Trump will resign a couple of days before being kicked out ruining all the stationary and commemorative knick knacks saying Biden is the 46th President, get Pence to pardon him, spend the next four years fighting prosecutions anyway then President Ivanka will pardon him again in 2025.
  3. It's based on a lot of the early quests being story related and the main early level area being a pretty small section of Velen. A decent number of non plot quests (or non direct plot quests) are also soft gated behind the initial main plot quests in the area too (eg there's about half a dozen non main plot quests that require you to have met Keira, which is a main plot quest). It's a lot more ignoreable after the first sets though certainly. Some of the early non main line quests are also hard to complete (the ghoul one by the bridge in particular where you have to keep someone alive) and several feature annoying enemies where an extra level or two makes a lot of difference. OTOH, there really isn't any reason to actively avoid the main plot in Witcher 3 and several of its plot lines are really good, while if memory serves me correctly it was really easy to avoid the main plot in Morrowind, even by accident (that was the game where it seemed no one could find Caius Cossades?).
  4. Hmm. The ultimate problem is that Morrowind and Witcher 3 are fundamentally different approaches to an open world RPG. You can't really play Witcher 3 as if you were playing Morrowind. You can ignore the main plot almost entirely eventually, but to reach that point you do have to do a fair bit of the main plot first. First issue would be that Witcher 3 isn't a fully seamless world like Morrowind. You don't start off on the 'big' map, you start off in a far smaller one called White Orchard. You have to do the main quest line there to get to the main map, though it isn't a particularly onerous set of quests. The main issue you'd face with that Morrowind style approach though would be that the 'plot' questlines in Witcher 3 tend to be those that give you lots of experience, there isn't level scaling and the skill system is not an 'improve by use' one but a far more orthodox 'level up and gain an ability' one. If you don't do the main quests you'd run out of level appropriate content and over leveled enemies are exponentially more... well, they aren't particularly hard to kill in most cases, but they have so many HP relative to your damage that they take forever to kill, and if you run into more than one of them or one with the wrong attack type you effectively have to run away or die.
  5. Horizon Zero Dawn is coming to GOG. That's pretty random random video game news. (probably another 'thanks Epic' situation where it isn't any more trouble sticking it drm free on GOG than it is being drm free on EGS, per Outer Worlds/ Metro Exodus etc)
  6. They got generic BAR resize --> AMD SAM(TM) instead of the generic DXR/ VulkanRT --> nVidia RTX(TM) or DirectStorage --> nVidia RTX I/O(TM) situation, which is a win. It really is annoying how often brands try to co-opt generic terms though (see also Adaptive Sync --> FreeSync --> 'Gsync Compatible')
  7. At least under Xi it's absolutely official state policy that China Is Great, and anything to the contrary is everyone else being racist. It was a lot less so under his immediate predecessors though as they were a lot less dictatorial. The policy formulators don't actually believe that of course, but it's good for internal politics to frame anyone supporting reform as anti Chinese, and it is good for deflecting/ changing the narrative when it comes to external relations too.
  8. That is the big difference, and China's focus on suppressing/ monitoring internal dissent within their own already tightly controlled environment means that when they turn their attention to external matters and trying to influence them they tend to be spectacularly tone deaf and counterproductive (eg their awful 'wolf warrior' system which sounds/ works great internally) because they tend to start from the position that the CCP is obviously great and aren't used to having counter arguments or having to actually persuade/ influence people as opposed to using more direct leverage and control. The Russian internet is far more open and they have far more exposure to how people actually behave and think outside the very tightly controlled 1984 style Chinese system. Even then the Russian influence, such as it is, tends to be leveraging idiots as most propaganda from everyone does. The big exception for China and their big advantage is that they are very good at leveraging diaspora Chinese, almost all of whom have relatives still in China or assets that can be used against them. It is for example amazing how completely differently Mandarin language newspapers report things here as opposed to English language ones and they put a lot of effort into fostering the belief that any criticism of China/ CCP is inherently racist. Then there's the more direct political influence. We had a Chinese spy- literally literally, Jian Yang MP taught Chinese spies English at their academy and outright lied about it when he migrated here- in our Parliament up until 6 weeks ago, and both the ethnic Chinese MPs we have now were members of stridently pro CCP groups; and you also have the Australian situation where having said some stuff China doesn't like suddenly a lot of their agricultural products don't make Chinese standards any more, and you have a lot of businessmen whining about how their trade with China is being impacted by pesky human rights and other similar concerns. It's pretty obvious that Chinese influence is both more overt and more directly effective than any Russian influence, it's just by and large nowhere near as politically expedient to expose- much as rich Russians donating to the Tories or laundering money through London financial institutions is a topic the British government doesn't want to talk about; but for most of the world and on a larger scale.
  9. NOLF was hard to get running, and went through a phase of being near impossible a few years after release. Early Lithtech was a bit unstable, and didn't age well. Ironically considering that its contested IP means it's unlikely to get a re-release it's way easier to get running now than it was 20 years ago.
  10. Scott Morrison gave Lukashenko a run for his money on press suppression before hand. Always the best way to deal with war crimes, raid the offices of those reporting on them and nick all their documents, just a shame from their POV that the documentary was already broadcast. (There were also accusations that the NZ SAS committed war crimes, and the journalist who exposed them had previously been raided by the police for 'receiving hacked documents', when he published a book embarrassing to our then PM John Key. Those accusations were a lot less overtly war crimey than the Australian ones though, and the inquiry we eventually got when the government changed to one less angry at Nicky Hager could not determine that any war crimes happened, or that they weren't done by the US instead. It did establish that the Ministry of Defence and politicians lied consistently though)
  11. 'Whacky' thumbnails drive clicks which is why more serious reviewers than Linus look like they're half a second away from outright gurning and the product they're reviewing just turned into Genghis Khan/ Marilyn Monroe. Videos will also always be over ten minutes long if at all possible because that hits the optimal monetisation bracket even if the subject matter doesn't really warrant the length. That's just the way they make money. If I was told I'd get a significant wage increase by pretending to be Amazed At What Happened Next I'd be perpetually surprised too.
  12. And you're most certainly entitled to your own opinion of quality*. It can't objectively be better than native though unless there's something very odd going on in the native render, or a few odd situations eg multi image interferometry (which only gives an improved composite, the original images are still the same). And it being the internet most people don't couch it in subjective terms. *since it is subjective no one can be wrong about it. I find motion blur on games when you're running and some of the over the top bloom/ hdr effects hilarious because they aren't what you actually see in real life. Others think they're great, and that's all good.
  13. You can blame the electoral system too. You'd have to suspect that most Nader voters would prefer Gore over Bush at least and a decent proportion would change their votes if they could go back in time. While a lot of people advocate for Preferential/ Ranked as a system I personally will always shill proper, multi member electorate Single Trnasferable Vote. Gives proportional results, can't be gerrymandered, goes a long way to breaking the entrenched power of political parties. And as a result, not at all popular with politicians.
  14. Still holding out for a 6969XTC SUPER DUPER 16GB HBM2e card with more than 80CUs. The new Instinct has 120CUs*, after all (and tensors, for anyone wondering if AMD was doing anything with them). Vulkan performance isn't surprising. AMD cards used to be powerhouses there due to being powerhouse Compute cards, this time around with its core doubling nVidia is unbalanced towards compute instead. Plus all the development effort for RDNA has gone into DX12U for the Xbox and Sony's proprietary libraries, not Vulkan despite its history with AMD. As for performance in general, let's be frank here. People** were saying that AMD would only be competing with the 3070 and have raytracing performance around a 2070- that was most of the internet, it seemed- don't have much scope to talk about bad performance when they're competing with 3080s and have better RT performance, yes mostly in theory at present, than a 2080Ti or 3070. It's notable though that they perform to theoretical expectations, or above, in both the games developed for console RT, WD:L and Dirt 5, and a 6800XT is even better than a 3080 (!) at Dirt 5. That is the model of the future, not games developed when nVidia was the only RT in town with for, all anyone knows, the RT equivalent of 64x tesselation enabled by default. Stock levels are disappointing, but certainly better relatively speaking than 3000 series. By market share nVidia should have had 2-3 times the stock on hand, and didn't, they seem to have been near parity numbers wise. Just too much demand, in part due to nVidia still being nowhere near fulfilling orders even 2 months later. Neither were paper launches, both were just massively oversubscribed. The AIB release in a week and 6900XT in early Dec will also sell out, inevitably. OTOH, we got AMD reference cards here, and the whole of New Zealand got one (1) FE. And there's the small matter of 3080s (albeit AIBs) selling for 400$ more than the 6800XT here... *Not a serious comparison since they're CDNA. **I'm ready for the deluge of how DLSS is, lol, 'better quality than native' over the next few months. Who knew the writers for CSI: Miami enlarging and enhancing 2 pixels reflected in a dude's baldspot into a fully legible number plate, circus parade and a mafia dude burying Jimmy Hoffa were such visionaries?
  15. I picked that section because I knew the number already, and you seemed skeptical of the EFF's claims. And yes, it is an example of the US trying to alter IP agreements for its own benefit, it just doesn't cover every aspect of that. We're legally allowed to format shift here, and back up computer programs etc, we wouldn't be able to do that if DRM can't be circumvented. We'd also have to rebuy media whenever the DRM scheme stops working. There certainly would be a workable alternative where circumventing DRM is illegal, but rights holders are in return obligated to support licence holders access rights when their DRM schemes fail. That's not what the US or IP holders want though.
  16. Near 20 years is surely enough for doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. Near 17 years is surely enough too. Whether it's Obama or Trump or Biden, at some point you have to stop kicking the can down the road. Trump's a gigantic hypocrite in some things but he's right that there has to be an end point, and sometimes you just have to declare victory and cut your losses. If the troops were staying chances are there would be zero progress in the next 4 years, so you have to keep the troops there even longer, etc.
  17. That's a completely false dichotomy though. Every TPP country is already a member of TRIPS, we already have patent and IP protection. It's not the US trying to bring order to the wild west of IP and combat rampant IP theft, there's already order there. It's the US trying to alter those existing IP agreements for its own benefit.
  18. ...the rest of the world has IP protections already. I'm not sure how that's news but apparently it has to said again. If you think that saying consumers have rights too and countries upholding those rights is advocating IP theft then you're very much mistaken, if you think that pointing out that patents/ copyrights are grants of limited term exclusivity is advocating IP theft then you're also very much mistaken- and falling into the classic mkreku trap where everyone who dislike DRM etc ipso facto has to be a pirate. What the US wants isn't IP protection, it's the perpetual right for its companies to collect licensing fees despite copyright and patents being concepts that are intrinsically limited term and limited scope; and the removal of the consumer rights part of the equation. If you buy a product you have certain rights, if you licence an intangible you have certain rights. The US approach is to protect and extend only the rights of the IP holders, while extinguishing the rights of the end user. That's what the problem with 'technological protection measures' is, they mean that as soon as the DRM system goes obsolete you lose the licence to play you've already paid for, without compensation. And of course, it's actually in the best interests of the IP holder to have constant planned DRM/ media obsolescence as it means they can then charge you every 5 years for the same work. "Article 18:68: Technological Protection Measures. IP creators have the right to not have their work stolen. If someone knowingly tries to steal IP, creates technology that helps with stealing IP, provides technology that helps with stealing IP, sells technology that helps to steal IP or sells stolen IP itself, or promotes stealing IP, then that person will be guilty of committing a crime. Each country in the agreement should come up with rules about what will happen to said criminals." That's what you posted , as a quoteblock, so I assumed it was a quote, from somewhere. The quote from the actual document, is what I posted previously, to whit: "Article 18.68: Technological Protection Measures (TPMs)821.In order to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that authors, performers, and producers of phonograms use in connection with the exercise of their rights and that restrict unauthorised acts in respect of their works, performances, and phonograms,each Party shall provide that any person that:(a)knowingly, or having reasonable grounds to know,83circumvents without authority any effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work, performance, or phonogram;84or (b)manufactures, imports, distributes,85offers for sale or rental to the public, or otherwise provides devices, products, or components, or offers to the public or provides services, that:(i)are promoted, advertised, or otherwise marketed by that person86for the purpose of circumventingany effective technological measure;(ii)have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent any effective technological measure;87or(iii)are primarily designed, produced, or performed for the purpose of circumventingany effective technological measure,is liable and subject to the remedies provided for in Article 18.74 (Civil and Administrative Procedures and Remedies).Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied if any person is found to have engaged wilfully88and for the purposes of commercialadvantage or financial gain89in any of the above activities." Your 'quote' isn't a quote of the document and isn't even a proper summary. I did you the credit of presuming it was some pro TPP summary rather than the exact equivalent of what you've been railing against, just from the opposite position. Cracking DRM on a CD so you can play it on a computer isn't IP theft, as you've paid for the CD/ licence. Unless, you change the definition of theft to make playing something you've a licence to illegal because... the companies' DRM doesn't work, and work back from there. End of the day if you think the US patent etc system is so rubbish why on earth do you want it extended elsewhere and why on earth do you think the opposition to it has to be based on IP theft? You cannot simultaneously say that the US system is rubbish, but should be adopted/ honoured by everyone else. Opposition isn't based on wanting to steal IP, it's based on it and provisions like 18:68 based on it being an awful system that no one else wants to adopt.
  19. At the moment we have all 5000 series (except 5950X, which we haven't had a single one delivered yet) and at least some 3070/80/90 in stock though the GPUs are all at massively inflated prices. We also had big shortages of PSUs and MoBos a few months ago but plenty of stock now.
  20. Phoenix Point is confirmed for a GOG release as of a few hours ago.
  21. Trump is pulling some troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, 2000 or about half the total from Afghanistan and 500 from Iraq (don't know what that is proportionately), to update a thread from the previous page. Yep, the ultimate problem is that healthcare is not really miscible with the free market except for things which are elective like cosmetic surgery. If you're having a heart attack you're not able to make a rational balanced decision on the costs and benefits of various providers as you might if you were buying lunch or a car or a house. You just want it to be treated as quickly as possible, so you don't die. Outside the US such funds make very attractive targets for borrowing against or even directly raiding during economic crises when a government needs money.
  22. ... If you're going to complain about editorialisation etc you should not be posting summaries, you should do as I did and post the actual text. Unsurprisingly the authors of the TPP wanted to market the TPP. Yes, if you read pro TPP press it was an enlightened document that would usher in world peace and prosperity. And if you read defences of slavery the poor slave owner was generously providing shelter, religion, education and food to the lazy uncultured savage. Everyone has seen the standard defence of IP absolutism, that the hoi polloi and imitators steal shamelessly off hard working creators and rights holders, it doesn't need to be reiterated. The DMCA is not well regarded, even in the US. It's regarded as highly draconian, whatever your personal opinion. No one else wants it, and it is not the international norm. US demands are for IP rights to become, effectively, eternal and absolute which is a massive loss of rights for every except rights holders. This is also not the norm and has never been, it is a shift. Consumers have rights too, and the US lobbies extensively to have them extinguished. No one wants $1000 epipens eternally because the US issues patents- protection for novel inventions- for incremental changes, no one wants to buy a tractor then lease the software for additional charge then buy another tractor when the software gets deprecated in 5 years time just because that's great for John Deere shareholders. No one wants Monsanto running around suing people for IP infringement because they stuffed up and their RoundUp Ready corn is not actually sterile and has infected seed stocks as a result. No one wants to have to rebuy media constantly because the IP holder used DRM that, shock horror, goes obsolete and they want the best of both worlds from the product/ licence dichotomy.
  23. Well OK, have fun. I'm not generally too keen on posting such links without more specificity but that is precisely the reason why you don't get line by line citations- because the document is absolutely fricking massive and written in terse and opaque legalese that is very difficult for anyone let alone a layman to parse. But as it happens I can draw your attention at least to the DMCA like provisions the EFF mentioned as someone else once asked me for them. "Article 18.68: Technological Protection Measures (TPMs)821.In order to provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that authors, performers, and producers of phonograms use in connection with the exercise of their rights and that restrict unauthorised acts in respect of their works, performances, and phonograms,each Party shall provide that any person that:(a)knowingly, or having reasonable grounds to know,83circumvents without authority any effective technological measure that controls access to a protected work, performance, or phonogram;84or (b)manufactures, imports, distributes,85offers for sale or rental to the public, or otherwise provides devices, products, or components, or offers to the public or provides services, that:(i)are promoted, advertised, or otherwise marketed by that person86for the purpose of circumventingany effective technological measure;(ii)have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent any effective technological measure;87or(iii)are primarily designed, produced, or performed for the purpose of circumventingany effective technological measure,is liable and subject to the remedies provided for in Article 18.74 (Civil and Administrative Procedures and Remedies).Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied if any person is found to have engaged wilfully88and for the purposes of commercialadvantage or financial gain89in any of the above activities."
  24. The IP thing was about getting everyone to agree to US rules. US rules favour the US. If you want to refresh your memory from the US perspective the EFF has a handy summary up that seems to cover most of your questions briefly, including peripheral to IP issues stuff- like all the human rights provisions being optional, unlike the IP provisions. Otherwise there's a longer pro TPP IP section take here (which frankly still makes it sound awful, and certainly illustrates how it was being driven by the US) and one specifically on the medical implications here. China's IP theft was completely irrelevant, as they were never a party to the TPP. The TPP countries adhere to the international standards of IP, the US doesn't and is desperate to rewrite them for their own benefit. So, OTOH, the US's habit of issuing patents continually for things that simply aren't inventions- and in some cases are absolute and literal theft every bit as much as anything China has done- and expecting everyone to pay their companies royalties perpetually 100% was. The go to examples of exactly how broken and exactly how extortionate the US system is are (1) Basmati Rice patent, since accoridng to the USPTO Basmati Rice was invented by a US company (2) Mexican Yellow Beans are a unique US invention, in that case the guy who bought them from Mexico literally went back to the market he bought them from to demand royalties for his 'unique invention' from the traditional users. Sure they got fixed, eventually, and after a load of money was spent. If the TPP had been in effect we would have had to adhere to those patents no matter how utterly incompetent and outright scummy their issuance was, and have had to adhere to the constant patent renewals on things like epipens which aren't even approaching novel inventions any more.
  25. Bombed the general (Soleimani) in Iraq, after asking the Iraqi PM to set up a meeting to discuss de-escalation, according to the Iraqi PM. Which was borderline if not outright Perfidy, if what the PM said was true. I'm usually skeptical of rumours supported only by anonymous sources since there's zero accountability but there must be some reason he got rid of Esper, and it won't be because Trump wants to stage a military coup. Even money on whether he wants to attack Iran or pull all troops out of Iraq/ Afghanistan/ Syria arbitrarily, he probably won't actually do either but he is exactly the type to set the house on fire on his way out, if he has to leave.
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