majestic

India launches missiles at Pakistan Nice. Here's a 2019 paper about the consequences of a potential nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan in 2025.

Bosses on Torment IV sure have a lot of health. Which means having to deal with their mechanics, which in turn means playing an earthquake based barbarian is slightly annoying. The earthquakes your character spawns every few steps makes it very hard to see what is going on. Well, I have a couple of pieces of gear left that could be better and more paragon levels to grind out (and an item to get that randomly doubles earthquake damage), hopefully that'll be enough of a boost in damage to cut down on the boss fight lengths.

Nice, haven't really read the article on Wikipedia, just linked to it. Guess I'll go check TN1's version out at some point.

Once upon a time when the first Star Wars DVD boxed sets were released, there was one that included a laserdisc transfer of the original, non-special edition, films on DVD. I still have those here. The biggest problem nowadays is that they are simple transfers of the laserdic version. Meaning they're a non-anamorphic 4 by 3 nightmare which was fine enough way back when they came out, but on modern TVs the watching experience is not, well, that good. If you're not too queasy about stepping into a legally grey area that probably blurs the lines of fair use, there's always Harmy's Despecialized Edition. A fan project that proves Lucas' assertion that the originals cannot be transferred to modern media because the reels no longer exist in good enough condition a lie.

Yeah, there goes my theory of the even group consistently making better seasons, the grind for the new season's mechanics is pretty annoying - although the season's mechanics are pretty fun. I am also not really fond of the Lair Boss rework. It was fine not having to deal with the boss mechanics at all beacuse you could kill them in half a second even on the highest difficulty. Lilith aside for which Blizzard - after season two's ball lightning fiasco - linked her death with following through her entire second phase spiel even at 0 hit points. Was it really necessary to make Duriel invincible during his phase transitions so he can't skip them any more? Worst offender by far is the Harbinger of Hatred. Not only is the boss fight not interesting, it also takes ages. It was fine as a final battle at the end of the expansion's campaign, but as a farmable fight you have to do for the season? Yeah, can we skip the portal phases please? They also spent a lot of effort on the new season cosmetics "battle pass" screen and how it works, making everything much slower and less convenient to access - and greatly reduced the free premium currency you could get from them. So far I could make do with the free battle pass from buying the game and the expansion and the free plantinum for doing the silly thing and preordering, but this season marks the end of that. Well, there goes one of the bigger motivations to keep playing the seasons. Sure there's still the journey titles and all, but I barely ever turn on titles for my characters anyway. The armor sets made for some nice variety though. Ah, alas, yeah, not going to buy the season passes. The new "premium" pass just gives you the cosmetic armor you really want without grinding for it, but it costs a ludicrous 25€. In hindsight, I guess it was pretty silly to assume that Microsoft taking over ActiBlizz would change things for the better when it comes to fleecing their customer base with microtransactions. At least the season journey no longer has forced party play in it. Instead, it is much more gimmicky, what with forcing players to battle bosses on Torment IV with boss powers their builds potentially can't even make use of. Not sure how that'll go, I'm only on Torment III by now. At least Whirlwind Barbarian is viable this season, there' something viscerally statisfying about being a whirlwind of death and destruction in Diablo.

The finished product itself? Yes. However, this does not apply to the unspecified imported resources used to produce the toilet paper, unless they are also exempt from the tariffs. Unless one or more companies in the supply chain accept smaller profit margins (if such a thing is even possible, as large retailers squeeze manufacturers as hard as possible), a rise in prices of imported base materials is still going to affect the price of the toilet paper. It is a problem that companies like CyberPowerPC are facing. They build their computers in the US, but all the components come China in some way. Take mainboards for instance, even if a company like ASRock would build a manufacturing plant for mainboards in the US, modern mainboards consist of hundreds (if not thousands) of parts, almost none of which are manufactured in the United States. They'd be looking at importing all the components (which are tariffed), while also incurring increased transportation*, energy and labor costs, making the finished product potentially more expensive than just having it still manufactured in China and paying the tariff on the finished product when selling in the US. Global supply chains have become too complex to be easily directed by blanket tariffs. Now, it might be that Trump really believes this will work and usher in new prosperity for American workers (which is funny, given the US' employment rate of roughly 4% - even if all those manufacturing plants would magically appear over night there'd not be enough free labor in the US to staff them), insofar as Trump seems to live in his own make belief world, even more so than during his last term. It might be that he was really just trying to stuff his and his advisor's pockets full of cash with insider trading. Stephen Miran might have wanted to lower the US' debt burden by causing a surge in US bond prices, reducing effective interest rates in a year when (IIRC) 10 trillion dollars worth of bonds expire. Trump's dismal performance caused enough investors to nope out to the point where interest rates were rising, instead of falling. Either way, that is generally why you don't want children - or Orange-Utans with the mental capacity of a three year old - playing with the knobs of your country's economy. Well, generally. I'm sure the MAGA crowd is never really going to be tired of all the winning. *Transportation is also going to cost more than before and is going to be slower since the goods need to pass customs and need to wait for all the paperwork to be handled and the tariffs to be paid. You can already see this in place if you order something from Temu as the package will be held by whoever they choose as parcel distributor until the paperwork is done and the tariff paid (in this case directly by the receiver). You can opt to not pay the tariff, but that would lead to the parcel either being returned or destroyed (both on the customer's dime, obviously).

One does need eyes to see, unless they're going where Doctor Weir went.

Having a hard time picking up must be such a pickled pickle, downright p(r)ickly on the ol' arse.

As much as I like Beast in Black, it feels like this is the tenth time they released the same single. 's not a whole lot of variation in their music, for better or worse.

Thanks, ChatGPT.

The US government just making up numbers reminds me of our former right-wing star populist Jörg Haider, who did exactly that - just 30 years ago. Went to interviews with little cards having numbers on them, holding them into the camera. "This is the amount of crimes committed by Chechnian refugees in Carinthia", then the next one "this is the amount of money we spend on Chechnian refugees per year" and so on and so forth. The numbers were all just made up. At the time there were grand total of zero Chechnian refuguess in Carinthia. The meteoric rise of his party was only halted for a bit when internal problems caused a schism and split into two parties, and ultimately when he was involved in a deadly car accident - driving way too fast and drunk out of his mind (alternatively he was killed by the Mossad). Just last year they got the majority of votes, but failed to find partners for a coalition government.

DJT makes DJT look so bad none of his goons can keep up. Guess that means this time, their jobs are pretty safe. Unless they suggest to stop the tariffs, like Musk did.

0/5, no Jubilost.

Yeah, happy Easter guys.

The short answer is simply: yes, it is, and it has been known for a while. The longer answer is that there are actually two issues. The first one is that WinRing0 is a generic driver capable of working in Windows' Ring 0 (hence the name), i.e. it is a function library/SDK pretending to be a Kernel Mode driver that allows regular application access to hardware that would otherwise be restricted. The reason why its use is so widespread is because it has an ages old legacy signature from a less interconnected and more naive time where security concerns and potential damages were not as great (and therefore cared about) as they are now. If you are a small developer team it was actually a good way to directly talk to hardware without going through the expensive and for many small teams unfeasible process of having to develop your own driver and having it digitally signed, meaning modern Windows versions would install and run it. It's a bit like Doctor Who's psychic paper insofar as that it lets software using it pretend to be trusted even if it should maybe not be. If you want an (imperfect, but still, it is just meant to illustrate) analogy, imagine you have a house with a side entrance for trusted people and services (imagine that like an employee and delivery service entrance). In order to be allowed to use the side entrance companies need to register as trusted service contractors. This more or less guarantees - not beyond the shadow of any doubt, as problems an always crop up - that these service contractors are not going to wreck your building. Signing up as trusted contractor takes time and money and comes with significant bureaucratic hurdles. Smaller service contractors have a hard time applying for the permits, so WinRing0, a service contractor still registerted as trusted contractor with a registration from ages ago when the process was much simpler, basically gives out their access badge to anyone who asks them to. So, you give access to WinRing0 (by installing it on your lock system) and now every service contractor with a WinRing0 key can access your side entrance if they're invited to your estate. That would already be bad enough and explains why Hiyohiyo thinks WinRing0 shouldn't even exist. There should not be a service out there that provides trusted access to your side entrance for anyone who wants it. The whole reason why your side entrance is locked and only trusted contractors are allowed in in the first place is provide a measure of security that WinRing0 simply bypasses. It would be much better for the provider of your locking system to actually come up with a secure and easy way to handle applications for keys (i.e. by Microsoft creating an API for RGB and fan controls). Still, there's the other issue, and arguably the actual problem: the version of WingRing0's lock and key system used by most contractors is broken in a way that allows the keys to not just open the side entrance and the areas you want to give them access to, but simply everything in your real estate, including highly sensitive areas like your jewelry lockbox, safe and filing cabinets. Thanks to the exploits and the fact that WinRing0 has not been maintained for years upon years outside of having the digital signature renewed it means that if you have the driver installed and a malicious piece of software like SteelFox finds its way onto your computer, it finds a readily and easily exploitable way to ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL over everything on your computer that potentially avoids every other security system you also have in place. It does have a key to your system, after all. On its own, having WinRing0 installed doesn't mean you can get hacked from the outside. You still need to buzz the maintenance guy in through your gates before he can just use his keys to steal your data, passwords and cryptowallets. SteelFox doesn't magically appear on your computer, but it was and is widely distributed in cracks for software, for instance. You still need to run malicious software on your computer - but thanks to WinRing0 it can do its job in a way that you - and especially your anti-virus software - might not find suspicious if it isn't already aware of the specific code used. Even if you only install software from trustworthy sources, you're not necessarily safe. There have been numerous occasions of compromised download servers and even Steam distributing malware through games. edit: your link provides a decent example, in some way. Gigabyte's mainboards used to come with an exploitable programm that quietly installed itself on your Windows if it was enabled in BIOS/UEFI (which it was by default) which could have been used to install malware without you even noticing. Pretty sure there are plenty of users with Gigabyte mainboards out there who don't even realize that they're sitting on a digital bomb. You can run driverquery from the command prompt (win + r, type in cmd, hit enter) to see if you have it installed. If so, you would need to find out which software installed it and remove it. There's some fun irony to be found in WinRing0's last version with a digital signature being one full of exploits as Hiyohiyo and others could not get signatures for maintained/fixed versions because Microsoft (understandably) made the process much harder to go through. It's the sort of thing that happens to Microsoft so often because the widespread use of their software means they need to carry an awful lot of legacy code and software with them. You're not going to sell your new version of Windows if it breaks everything your company needs to do its work, after all.

So, apparently, Paapa Essiedu is going to play Severus Snape in HBO's upcoming Harry Potter series. Sometimes studios do the darndest things. I mean... I don't really care about Snape being black just because he was described as Whitey McCracker with long, greasy hair in the books, but out of all the Harry Potter teachers they could have turned into a token black guy they pick the one person who gets hung from a tree by the Marauders? That's going to be one unfortunate scene, unless it gets dropped quietly - although it is a huge part o the reason for Snape's animosity towards Potter, so they can't really drop it. I mean sure they could, but not without changing the entire character dynamic between Snape and Potter, which is one of the best character bits in the books. Has anyone on the creative team read the books before making the casting choices? Why not cast a Morgan Freeman-esque actor as Dumbledore? That would have been something.

Black Mirror, season 7, episode 1: "Common People" Yeah, so a while back (actually a long while back, given the time in between seasons of this series) I said that Black Mirror is like a more hopeful version of the 90ies Outer Limits remake. Similar storylines, but a lot less grim. I commented on the board that there are not enough downer endings in the series to scratch that itch Outer Limits left. There's two things to say about the opening episode of the new season. It's a complete riot that it is on Netflix due to its subject matter of subscription services getting worse all the time while costing ever more, and it is incredibly dystopic and bleak. Much like Nosedive it is also a great commentary on the cyberpunkish dystopia our modern world is spiralling towards. This episode does more than just scratch an Outer Limits remake itch. It's bleak, dystopian, funny, terrifying and horrifying, all at the same time, it does feature a downer ending and - what is more than Outer Limits episodes could claim, most of the time - it is relevant social commentary. Very, very strong opening. Don't know if that bodes well for the rest of the season or just sets an unpassable bar for the other episodes.

Common symptom of the big C even if you have no others. Hit me as well, the first time I got it (but not the second and third time). Ended up eating ham already gone bad because I couldn't smell it, which was pretty "fun" for two days afterwards.

Uhm, like, far as I know, all air breathing slugs are hermaphrodites.

Went to the theater for A MINECRAFT MOVIE, because my nephew really wanted to go. So far I thought watching him play Minecraft was the worst thing. Then he started to watch Minecraft YouTubers, and I thought, wow, it can't get any worse. Oh how wrong I was. The best moment of the film came from an older woman a few seats away, having been dragged to the theater by what was probably her grandchild. When the credits rolled, she very loudly exclaimed: THANK GOD IT IS OVER.

Oh, trips down memory lane, and about schools, yay, I love those. Let's see. High school, or at least the sort-of equivalent that I signed up for (grades 8 to 13, 5 year course), had 50 minute teaching units. Five minute breaks between each unit, with a a 50 minute break (for lunch) after four or five classes. Most of the days started at 08:15 and ended 16:25. We had some school days ending at 17:20, and some started at 07:20. With my commute times being what they were, I left home at 06:35 (5:35 at the insane days that started earlier than normal) and was at home ~18:15 at the earliest, shortly before 20:00 at the worst. Homework and assignments usually took another hour, longer on days with accounting and maths, as those had teachers who delighted in giving out a lot of assignments. Right, in between we were supposed to study too, I guess. During 2nd and 4th grades we had to apply for a summer internship. Students were not allowed to proceed to the next grade without them. The busiest schedule we had in 11th grade, clocking in at 14 or 15 separate classes, including "voluntary" extracurricular activities. Least busy was the final grade with 8 classes, but we had a year long project for the finals and a paper* to write. By least busy I mean we "only" had 30 units per week in the final grade, as opposed to 36 + ECs. Projects were picked or assigned from a pool of projects submitted by companies, government agencies and NGOs. Most students wanted company projects because they were an easy way to find a job (and the companies had free talent to check out for a year) - plenty of us who had a company project actually worked part time for those companies during the final year, so the ones from the agencies and NGOs ended up being assigned. My group got their project from the school board: digitising administrative processes at schools. Pretty neat topic that no one else took seriously, although I suppose the idea came a bit too early (talking late 1990ies/early 00s here). For the paper we were provided a massive set of anonymized data from our school: students' grades in each class and the amount of classes they missed each year. The basic idea was pretty simple, we were to find a correlation between the grades and missed classes. It seems logical enough, I suppose, students who miss a lot of classes should generally have worse grades than those who don't, except try as we might, we could not find any meaningful correlation, it was near zero. One of our teachers was so baffled by the results that she went over our calculations. Three times, in as many weeks. The only thing we could show was that there were certain classes and teachers where lower attendence in genereal tended to lead to worse grades, but that is logical, we had classes where the grade directly depended on attendence, like PE, or teachers that factored attendence into their grades. Needless to say, the presentation of our results did not go over too well. The obvious problem is the small sample size, and that one needed to pass an SAT to even get into the school in the first place, and even then, the dropout rate in the first year is above 50%, and of everyone who started the same year as I did, less than 15% actually graduated. Once past the first grade you're left with students easily capable of making up any missed time, and missing classes is not the leading cause of the high dropout rate in the first year. *Not to scientific writing standards, but it did include research pertaining (at least superficially) to the project for the final exams. Im dichten Fichtendickicht sind dicke Fichten wichtig. *scnr*

Yeah, I'm also a total Eora lore buff. Personally, I, like, totally love how Eowyn faked his death at the hands of Priest Padraic. What did you like best?

It would be interesting if you could share your thoughts as to why. I'm neither particularily versed in teaching techniques (modern or otherwise) nor with your school system, so I am left guessing as to what exactly you think is so crazy. I might also not have the best perspective, given what the last five years of my school life looked like. We certainly never got a homework amnesty week, but plenty of projects over breaks and holidays. Edit: Well, whoever the person is, they are coming across as a major douchewaffle, so there's that.

You clearly need to git gud, nub.

Speaking of healthy food: Was pretty good.