Zoraptor

Honestly, it's not that hard to find out the reason they didn't. Same reason Twitter only banned Trump today when they've obviously wanted to for years.

For Parler? It's global, so far as I'm aware. Probably get the same ban on Apple too within a day. Telegram is better anyway. Alphabet/ Facebook/ Apple etc desperately need to be broken up, if Trump had done it- even for the wrong reasons- it would have been one thing to genuinely be very proud of.

That was more management at Zenimax than Arkane itself, and their power is either gone completely or massively diminished now that MS owns them. That style of game is what just about everyone at Arkane wants to make and so far MS seems pretty good at allowing studios it owns to do what they want and are good at, within reason. Considering the MS ownership pyramid that exists now you could get a Dishonoured RPG from InXile, a Thief/ System Shock style game in the Fallout universe from Arkane and Obsidian doing a... Doom RPG maybe?

He can still use @POTUS presumably if he wanted to, might be amusing seeing his tweets archived as official communications. And no forum software, that isn't a username. It wouldn't matter in the slightest. Thinking Trump was ever going to nuke someone randomly on the way out is a clear indicator of Trump Derangement Syndrome at work. Conventional strikes on Iran, sure, considered and rejected by Trump a few weeks ago but could still happen and is being actively promoted by Israel and KSA. Randomly nuking someone though? Ludicrous. Has to be said, if you think now is 'scary times' you should be very very glad that those protesters weren't met with a 'hail of bullets'. Because that would have had far worse consequences.

Why even bother with that though. If Trump's conduct is so disqualifying and unpopular he wouldn't get elected if he subsequently stood anyway. Barring him from office would give Democrats a chub no doubt, but that shouldn't be the main aim, and it will play into a persecution narrative perfectly. "They're so frightened of me, of you the American people, and all our winning that Sleepy Joe has to ban me because he knows he'll lose so badly next time even fraud won't save him. SAD!" etc From an out and out punishment perspective the worst thing that could happen to Trump is not being banned from office- if anything that'll bolster his ego, as above- but being allowed to run and failing miserably. Which, if his conduct genuinely has been so bad, should happen.

Bolivia would have been the most recent one, and that was about a year ago. Most of the people involved don't need to be paid though, that's the genius part. It's far easier to whip them up with, er, false narratives of stolen elections, ignoring the constitution etc. If you pay someone it's only the military guy who orders troops to start shooting Morales supporters having done nothing about the people installing a 'popular' leader with a staggering... 3% support. You're not aiming to de-escalate the situation with those people though. 70 odd million people voted Trump, something like 2000 (?) stormed the Capitol. The trouble is that you simultaneously have people talking about reconciliation while even here advocating for the protesters to have been machine gunned down (after all, while bother going for Bolivia and Anez when you can go straight to Syria and Assad), show trials for treason etc. No doubt the usual suspect will complain about a thin end of wedge analogy being used, but we're talking about a situation which is massively polarised, if you're talking about show trials, massive use of force etc etc you are fulfilling the worst fears of many of the 70 odd million people who voted for Trump. I like historical analogies rather a lot, and what did the damage to the Roman Republic from their Capitol being stormed was pretty much never the storming itself, but the response to it- and the systematic stake inflation resulting from those who were 'just defending the republic from the mob' and used it to justify pretty much anything and everything escalating from political murder to mass political murder to outright invading Rome and publishing literal death lists. Just about every step that resultd in the Republic's collapse apart from mobs in the Capitol was taken by an Optimate, not a Populare.

MS already owns Dishonoured, which is a perfectly good steampunk setting. I doubt they'd even be bothered doing the paperwork to acquire Arcanum as well.

Trump did at least say explicitly no violence. No doubt there will be a fair few who say that he meant the opposite, but it is what he said. And let's be honest, it was hardly the storming of the Bastille. It was extraordinarily embarrassing for just about everyone involved though, on every side. OTOH, it really does illustrate what the real problem is when you have experts on TV simultaneously talking about how all americans should come together in harmony now; and simultaneously throw a bunch of people into prison andor execute them for sedition/ Treason, impeach Trump and instantly remove him, invoke the 25th amendment, purge any politician who supports Trump from Congress- because the situation is as bad as the Civil War, after all- and generally do just about anything and everything to ensure there won't be any coming together. Two more weeks of Trump and he's gone, and there's nothing he can do about it. There's no need for purges, and all knee jerk reactions will do is more damage to the institutions they theoretically want to protect. Ironically, exactly what happened after every time the Capitol got mobbed in Rome, too. Makes me glad the polarisation here is relatively minor. If we had equivalent coverage Andrew Falloon driving a tractor up the steps of the Beehive to protest the fart tax would have been a brutal assault on the seat of Democracy and New Zealand itself by radical National Party cadres obviously intent on a coup since they were equipped with the base model of a Bob Semple tank, instead of some dumb yokel future sex pest MP making a tit of himself and showing off his premature baldness on national news while somehow contriving to stall the tractor.

Meh, not much of a difference really, I'm pretty sure they think AP sucks as well as CNN. After all, many of them won't even like Fox News for being too liberal or whatever. I have to admit, there's a great deal of schadenfreude to be felt over the pearl clutching about protesters storming the US Capitol given all the revolutions the CIA has and had been sponsoring, often against democratically elected leaders. Not so great when the shoe is on the other foot, hmm.

ISIS existed from 2005, it's a direct successor to Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq. Which was a separate entity which joined Al Qaeda as a franchisee so probably 2005 is the fairest time for its establishment. It became the Islamic State in Iraq, then ISIS, then formally 'Dawlah' IS as a 'Caliphate' once they reinvaded Iraq from Syria and took Mosul. Now, the rest is more interesting. ISI under Baghdadi sent support to the Syrian rebels- Jabhat al Nusra, the 'Support Front', now Hayat Tahrir al Sham and supposedly independent of Al Qaeda (now officially Hurras ad Din, in Syria)- while it was still under the umbrella of Al Qaeda, its very name tells you that it did exist before the US gave them weapons, though it was not significant at the start. They had a lot of success though since they were ruthless, got support from US allies and eventually grew. In 2013/4 JaN split along the lines of Al Qaeda and ISIS loyalties, and a bunch of other groups joined ISIS, they reinvaded Iraq and took Mosul etc then became enemy #1. In terms of support for ISIS/ JaN from the US, there was quite a lot of it though most of it was clandestine and indirect, and hence deniable. By the measure of the US itself they definitely supported ISIS- almost all the top ISIS leaders including Baghdadi were held and released by the US previously, they operated with impunity for years and were armed and trained via operations like Timber Sycamore. Ironically, these are exactly the accusations the US levels at Iran to show they support Al Qaeda... To be fair, most of the arming and training done was to 'moderate rebels' that somehow despite the no doubt careful vetting joined decidedly non moderate ISIS later, and not directly to JaN, though they certainly knew that US allies (Turkey, Qatar) were supporting JaN directly. That is also the source of the infamous 'McCain meets Baghdadi' photo, while it isn't Baghdadi the 'moderate rebels' he was photographed with went on to become senior ISIS leaders. The US never, bar one occasion, significantly bombed IS if they were attacking the 'correct' targets and infamously never targeted their main source of revenue, oil, since most of that money was going to/ from Erdogan's son. The one occasion in which they did attack ISIS on a frontline with Assad they 'accidentally' attacked Assad's troops instead, and handed ISIS the main defensive position overlooking Deir Ez Zor airport. Indeed, that attack persisted so long that the Russians allegedly only stopped it by directly threatening to shoot down the Danish and Australian planes involved, after the senior US officer on the deescalation line was for some reason absent for 45 minutes. Overall there's no doubt in the slightest that the US under Obama was at minimum fine with ISIS, so long as it was attacking Shia militia and Assad, supported those who later joined it as 'moderate rebels' and even post Caliphate declaration tolerated it, so long as it was threatening their mutual enemies. It was only when they started threatening US interests that they became an evil that had to be stopped. It's very doubtful that Obama had any direct operational knowledge of most of this, but then if you use that excuse for him you have to use that excuse for Bush as well.

The US did use the Roman Republic as a model. Invading the Capitol with a mob was a pretty established tradition there especially in the later republic when the strain was showing.

It's the RTX thread, presumably he's talking about a 30x0 Aorus Master OC graphics card. Gigabyte's naming schemes are a bit annoying now they're using the same branding for GPUs and MBs but 700 quid would be fairly pricey for an Aorus Master motherboard.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the Express thought Norway was in the EU. If they're better than the Scum or the Daily Fail it's only because they have less people reading.

Thing is many of the Nazi techniques are visible in the politics of, say, Athens in the 5th century BC- and it's pretty unlikely that Cleon invented them either, no matter how much antipathy Thucydides and Aristophanes felt towards him. They're effective techniques in times of crisis or apparent crisis, always have been. The German 1932 elections really aren't a good comparison to, for want of a better term to describe the current US polarisation, 'Trumpism'. Why? Hitler got ~37% of the vote in 1932v1 after a load of race baiting nationalistic triumphalism during a massive Depression, that is for sure. But- and it's a but Sir Mixalot would appreciate- he then doubled down on all his electoral strategies and violence plus obstructed forming a government and in consequence got... 33% of the vote 6 months later, with 2 million less votes. His strategy actively turned people off and he only got to be Chancellor with that reduced share because Hindenburg was a tired old man in failing health, and frightened of commies. If it had been an alternative conservative war hero like Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck as President- or a ten year younger Hindenburg- instead Hitler would not have been Chancellor. OTOH while it isn't of absolute importance in the US system Trump actually gained 12 million votes over 2016, it's just that Biden gained 15 million over Hillary.

Some of it* definitely looks like credibility shopping. Much of the rest is pretty lol. Some of it sounds like the sort of stuff that was cut from Witcher 3- Iorveth and the plague, Wild Hunt attacks Novigrad, Devil's Pit etc- most of which seems to have been cut for a sensible reason**. The trouble is that saying it was all cool 2 years ago isn't really credible from what we know of development, the logical answer is that it was just a buggy mess, but with a larger worldspace. The counter example for cut content is probably KOTOR2. Very short dev cycle, absolute masses of cut content/ retasked content. Remember its release state and imagine if they'd tried a release with the ~20% more content of the Droid Planet still in... *specifically "There will be major departures from the studio in the coming months". That's obvious, they happen after every single major release, successful or failed. Even the basic maths of it is pretty simple, if you had 300 employees and the average employment length was 5 years then you'd be losing an average 60 people per year even without contracts for specific projects running out. Wow, 60 people leaving in a year!!! Sounds major, but it's just attrition. Even if everyone stayed a ludicrous average of 10 years you'd still be losing 30 people to natural attrition. But, if you say departures will happen then when they inevitably do you look like a genius... **cutting stuff that simply wasn't working to make time for fixing stuff that mostly was. The only real loss from Witcher 3 was Iorveth, since that was almost certainly going to lead to a elf/ human Decision as in the prior two games. The two really stupid ancillary plot points in WItcher 3 both could be easily fixed if Iorveth was there- Iorveth was involved in the plague plot so Keira taking research to him would make sense, to Radovid... not so much; and Iorveth vs BROche with Geralt input makes infinitely more sense than Dijkstra deciding potential personal combat with a Witcher was a good idea.

If they'd said Epstein had been murdered Assange probably would have been extradited. But instead he 'committed suicide', while supposedly in supermax and under suicide watch, showing they were incapable of preventing people from killing themselves. Absolutely hilarious.

Maybe they could swap him for Anne Sacoolas, who unlike Assange is responsible for actually killing someone. (The extradition has been rejected, basically due to the US having an awful prison system)

Quoting myself, but unsurprisingly it turns out Microsoft itself was directly hacked via Solarwinds as well. About as unsurprising as them releasing the news on... New Year's Eve, where it would obviously garner a lot of attention and dominate the news cycle. At the moment they're claiming that the hackers could 'only' do read only stuff like, er, download source code etc, so no biggie. As the NPR article points out, there's an awful lot of nefarious stuff you can do without being able to write to a system.

NSA checking pngs for encoded stolen nuclear blueprints, but no, it's some neckbeard's favourite Linux distro and their collection of Moria clones hidden in those cute cat pics.

Faces melting off, starvation, diseased and dying siblings; six was about the age I first saw 'Watership Down'.

Expanse S5E5

4000 series will definitely be hot and power hungry judging by the leaks, possibly even more so than Ampere is. I'd personally suspect that Hopper will slip further and it will be more than a year between them. I would have thought a 2080Ti would be fine at very least until late next year. Lovelace almost certainly wasn't planned until quite recently, so it's likely to be a bit of a stopgap. Doesn't necessarily mean it won't be a good value stopgap though.

It seems unlikely they ever went for 'genuine' herd immunity, but more 'managed infection'. The theory was that you'd have a sort of ping pong situation with lock downs where you'd lock down, the rate would drop, and then rebound as soon as the lock down ended resulting in a perpetual up/down cycle- andor perpetual unsustainable restrictions- so they wanted to smooth out the cycle while exposing only those at least risk. That would result in similar overall infection numbers, increased immunity in the overall population and less economic damage with no spikes in infection numbers that would overwhelm the health system and cause a lot of excess deaths. They got aspects right and had some unusual circumstantial situations (very rapid vaccine development) that made them look more stupid than deserved, but overall you can't really argue that the approach was a success when the death rate is considerably higher than their neighbours, and they got no economic benefit either.

kopite7kimi does seem to think that Lovelace (AD102) will be 4000 series rather than 3x50 or supers, and he's usually accurate. Probably Q1 2022 is the realistic estimate, though it would depend on how much if any actual improvement it will have over Ampere and no doubt they'd like to have them available for xmas/ NH winter as that's big season. Presumably Hopper would then be 5000 series, perhaps a year after that. Samsung '5nm' is a bit of a punt though. It's an iteration/ rebranding of their 7nm process much as '8nm' is an iteration/ rebranding of their 10nm, done because neither of the parent nodes are very good at all. Last I checked there was literally one customer for Samsung's 7nm due to teething problems, and it was Samsung themselves. If ~19000 CUDA cores, ie +80% over Ampere, is accurate that's going to be an absolutely massive chip even if they've done it by moving from doubling on Ampere to tripling up on per core resources/ dependencies, and on a hot and unreliable node. But it can't be TSMC 5nm as Apple has that booked out, and AMD is buying every available wafer on 7nm. Slightly OT, but the US government would have been far better off paying Global Foundries to make a 7nm plant in Arizona than getting TSMC to make one. Top end fabrication is now a near monopoly, and GloFo's (well, really IBM's) 7nm process was actually better than TSMC's, they just couldn't get financing for it.