majestic

That's one of the funniest parts of all the COVID vaccine conspiracies. If these vaccines were developed by <enter favorite secret society here> to <insert favorite nefarious purpose here> then why did Isreal hug all the dosages for their own population, going so far as to outbid other nations by paying double the asking price just to have enough? Have yet to see a single conspiracy nut answer that in some fashion. The joo is, after all, at the heart of most conspiracies...

7-12% improvement. Better efficiency. At least it still has the RTX 4080 Super MSRP. Steve sums it up pretty well when he says: boring.

In the days of yore there was no income tax in the US, but tariffs were levied and financed the federal government. Several attempts of introducing an income tax and the SCOTUS striking much of it down eventually led to the 16th amendment, giving congress the constitutional right to set income taxes without apportionment to the states. The amendment was ratified because Republicans and Democracts alike were of the opinion that tariffs unduly affected people with lower incomes, something a progressive income tax would not. The politicians of yore knew what the current Republican Administration apparently forgot: who actually pays for tariffs.

The Tangerine in Chief's conspiracy sphere seems to be slowly turning against him. People are already calling him a psy-op for wanting to make Canada the 51st state, which is apparently is one of the goals of the New World Order. He's also been called a deep state agent by supreme conspiracy nut David Icke for various reasons, like meeting with Bill Gates and coming back with a positive attitude towards potential new HIV vaccines.

No, he's still looking for that critical race theory curriculum.

You funny Lexx surly that is normal market behavior nothing strange there.

Paywalled, but still: Trump’s Oil and Gas Donors Don’t Really Want to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ Energy companies don't want a repeat of a price collapse by flooding the market? Who woulda thunk. So, let's see. Egg prices are on a record high, farmers' illegal work force is a no show in certain areas, Mexican and Canadian steelmakers refuse new orders from US companies and energy prices aren't coming down any time soon either, by the looks of it. But at least there's only two genders now, and the Gulf of Mexico is now called Gulf of America, but only in the US. The US won bigly so far, I hope to able to watch them win even biglier once Trump actually makes good on his tariffs (although for some reason there already seems to be some waffling on the promised tariffs for China).

KitGuru about to test Arrow Lake after Intel fixes, some preliminary results: Very poor showing by Intel here, sorry to say. If I want CPUs that default to mobile CPU settings just because Lunar Lake was developed before Arrow Lake and somebody forgot to flip the switch, I'll go directly to the company for fall-on-its-face launches like that and buy AMD (lolno I won't, but eh, obligatory dig has to be here). So boo Intel, don't do that again. Besides, the poor release is done and dusted, and nobody will remember Arrow Lake for anything but failures and poor showings. Anyway, here's the TL;DW: The 9800X3D is obviously still the fastest gaming CPU Arrow Lake game performance figures are now in line with Intel's marketing material What that means for gamers is the same conclusion that was reached earlier. In gaming, outside of the X3D models, it is a close race between the 14900K, the 9950X and the Core Ultra 285K. As far as upgrading from prior CPUs goes, this generation is a complete bust. Outside of the 9800X3D that is, whose existence in the wild is basically as confirmed as Bigfoot's. So if you're already on 13th gen or on AM5, there's zip all reason to upgrade your CPU. Especially with gaming on the 14900K still being, uhm, somewhat faster in many games. Time to wait for Leo's productivity tests. According to Intel's presentation, the poor showing in Photoshop should be fixed now. Productivity-wise the 285K was pretty good regardless, able to compete with the 9950X. The 9950X is still more efficient, but the difference is power draw between teh 14900K and the 285K is massive and certainly a step in the right direction. Suggestion for Intel: hire tech channel personnel for QA tests before launches.

Ah, yes, my bad. Such a great software. So many good people developing it. I have great people on my team telling me how great this software is. Obsidian won bigly using it.

This board software is something else. Double posted 10 minutes apart because I left the boards open in the background.

Any suprised reaction is predicated on Bruce clicking the link and properly comprehending the contents. I'm betting that you'll be the ones having a surprised Pickachu face when he replies.

Trump has nothing to do with Project 2025, silly leftists.

The RTX5090's 0.1% lows being higher than the average framerate of the RTX 4090 at 4k is pretty impressive. Probably a result of the massively increased memory bandwidth. The other side of the medal is that the card is "only" 30% faster than the RTX 4090, and that only in 4k. Although it is unlikely that anyone would buy the 5090 for 1080p or 1440p gaming, GN's chart show that even the 4090 scratches the limit of what even a 9800X3D CPU can do. The 30% improvement is also the amount of CUDA-cores the 5090 has more than the 4090. While that doesn't scale 1:1, it still shows that the generational improvement is probably not that good, but we'll see once the actual RTX 5080 benchmarks hit (leaked geekbench results showing a 22% gap nonwithstanding). Doesn't really matter either way, neither buying the 5090 nor the 5080.

That looks like like they mean to determine sex based on chromosome alignment at conception, or directly after the first mitosis, i.e. when you have your frist two embyronic (diploid) cells. Therefore, if you have XX chromosomes, you're female, and if you have XY chromosomes, you're male. I can already hear the outrage when XX men are allowed to compete in women's sports or use women's restrooms or go to women's prisons. I mean they're usually perfectly male, just infertile, and thus usually only diagnosed when they can't father children, but they were biologically female at or shortly after conception, their development just did not go as expected. Meanwhile it'll be a boon for women's competions, because that finally puts a lid on the debate about intersex women. They're men. Is there an exception for Turner syndrome women? I mean they only have one chromosome, so that's a little tricky, but they're female. Edit: @Azdeus I know you're getting at the fact that all embryos initially develop with female genitalia, but I don't think that is what they meant. They aren't present at conception, and only show (as female genitalia) after ~9 weeks of development. Pretty sure they're meaning the chromosome makeup here.

Lag, rubberbanding and massive update problems. 'tis the season again, the 7th this time, and Blizzard still has no handle on how to launch a season without the game croaking. Guess it really is that broken under the hood. Sheesh.

What, that's just a bit nippy, perfect weather to live in tents. To think that I complained about having to spend basic military training in the snow at -20° C. Yikes.

Somehow that reminds me of something. Wait a minute... Ah, yeah. Found it.

Aren't you the optimist.

You're making a mistake here. The Republican Regime also signed one to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants. Well, sort of, it signed an executive order for federal agencies to withhold legal documents. Either way, that is clearly unconstitutional, as was their prior muslim ban (Gromnir might have made a post or a thousand about that). They are already being sued over it. Whether or not the SCOTUS could actually introduce the restrictions they want in a reexamination of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, well, that I do not know. What I mean to suggest here is that for the head of the Republican Regime, the legality, implementation and any direct or indirect ramifications of an executive order are completely irrelevant. All that matters is the spectacle for his intellectually underprivileged sect members. Just read that the regime still wants to introduce a 25% tariff on Mexican goods, starting with February.

Pretty sure they would love Heretic as well. I'll get me coat.

I'm taking bets, can we lock this thread in 19 hours or not?

So, the Republican Regime promised to repeal jus soli. As far as I know there is a limited set of exceptions (see United States v. Wong Kim Ark) that allow for the government to deny citizenship that will be hard to apply unless the Republican Regime designates any foreign nationals giving birth on US soil as enemy combatants or diplomats. They could probably try that with Mexicans and muslims, that would be fun to see. I doubt they can get the 14th amendment repealed (if so you're in for a treat, because that means they could topple the 22nd as well). SCOTUS could walk back on United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Very disappointed that they are already breaking campaign and election promises. Looks like they walked back on introducing tariffs within the first 24 hours. So sad. The US lost bigly.

This scam also has a major advantage in that it only hurts his cultists. His inner circle and a couple of crypto bros will make a decent buck out of it, but only at the expense of the MAGA idiots. Not like they deserve any better.

Ey, they did deliver answers to the mysteries. Most of them, anyway. It's just that many of the answers fell within two very broad categories: "the island sits atop a vast quantity of negatively charged exotic matter*" and "doesn't matter, because it was a lie and/or a game by Ben/Charles/Jacob/Man in Black", neither of which were very, say, satisfying - and like @bugarup already said, season six changed Lost from a mystery show with sci-fi elements to a fantasy show with mystery elements. Now, of course, the obvious answer to that problem is to simply view the series as a (quasi-)spirtual backdrop for the characters to work through their personal issues. Seen as such, it is perfectly fine for the events of the series being mostly predicated on a conflict between Jacob, the protector of the negative space wedgie (source of all life, source of all light, source of souls, Guf, whatever else you may want to call the island, as this depends very much on your own world view and interpretation), and his personal mistake: creating his opposite in a fit of rage, i.e. The Man in Black, his twin brother, as Jacob shares this hell of his own making with all the candidates he brings to the island. Through that lens, the afterlife portion also makes sense, i.e. solving your conflicts and facing your inner demons in life gave them peace in the afterlife, and allowed them to move on (contrast with those who did not move on, like Michael and Ben). For Jack, the obvious candidate, and Jacob, the current guardian, this journey ends logically where it had to: their death. Jack because his saviour complex allowed for no other resolution and to give him a messianic send-off and for Jacob, well, because his existence was intrinsically tied to the darkness he introduced to the island. Which is all fine, really, but not the reason fans followed the series in the first place. It works, but is largely an after-the-fact restrospective of what happened, and was most certainly not the intention all along, as it relies on using the events of the penultimate episode of Lost to re-examine and reinterpret events in the past six seasons. Insofar, the finale of season six was simply the finale of season six, not a finale to the series. This is pretty much what I mean with the series having a rather close kinship to Neon Genesis Evangelion, with Neon Genesis Evangelion abandoning much of its premise almost two thirds into its run, moving towards a more psychological exploration in its last ten episodes, culminating in one of the most divisive series finales of all time. There are, of course, differences, and NGE's original ending simply abandons** the (original) narrative entirely, while Lost actively resolves it in one of the most dissastifying ways imaginable - only rather recently topped by Game of Thrones, or the ending of Mass Effect 3 if we allow the point to expand beyond TV shows. NGE's ending also worked better, so I suppose this is just one more point for the idea that mysteries are better left unsolved if one cannot come up with a satisfying answer. Also fairly unique in getting an after-the-fact additional ending in form of an animated film that actually manages to give satisfying answers, after a fashion. Lost is a special case as both splits of the fandom are pretty much right. The ending is both thematically satisfying and one of the most disappointing endings in the history of TV and very much deserves the negative response and criticism it gets, and then some, at the same time. I suppose I got lucky, I watched Lost a long while after the series wrapped (by way of a blu-ray boxed set), so I could binge the series, the talk of it having a terrible ending already tempered my expectations, and I was all too aware of Jar Jar Abram's and Damon Lindelof's inability to follow through with interesting premises (*cough* Alias *cough*). This is what makes the Mass Effect 3 ending worse for me. When I played Mass Effect 3, I was also aware of the controversy surrounding its ending. Unlike Lost's ending, it still managed to disappoint me. *Otherwise known as The Island is Magic. **Relatively speaking, I mean, half of the ending wasn't even animated properly due to running out of time and the dire straits the production of Neon Genesis Evangelion was in at the time, mostly due to shifting the series focus close to the end of the run because Anno was unhappy with how the series was perceived. Gotta respect the man's ability to troll his audienec though. That it actually works as thematic ending to the series is a minor miracle.