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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • Nope, they just become less predictable. Which is why in some parts of Germany you can’t build as much as a garden shed without having EOD check the land first. In the more heavily-bombed areas it’s not unusual to hear on the radio that you’re to avoid downtown today between 10 and 12 because they’re disarming a 500-pound bomb they found during roadwork.

    And yes, the fact that an unstable bomb capable of trashing a city block is mundane nicely illustrates war’s potential to fuck things up for generations.

    Japan might want to get that land under and around the airport checked. There might be some other surprises hidden down there.


  • I typically only hear of the term “flamethrower” in a weapons context so yes, I’d say that it has to be a weapon. Yes, you can have a noncombat device that projects a flame but those are typically called something else (like “burner” or “torch”). I’d expect most people to first think of a weapon when they hear “flamethrower”.

    And I would assume that your device’s flame is still controlled and directed – it may have some spread but you still choose where to point the device even when it’s active. You probably also have a means of turning the device off, offering further control. So your device fits the definition, even if it might be crude.

    An incendiary grenade would be an example of a device that offers no control or direction. Once it goes off it releases all the fire everywhere within range. Another example would be a burning gas well – it might project its fire in a fairly predictable fashion and in a clear direction (up) but you can’t easily turn it off or point it somewhere else.



  • For me the required characteristics would be that it dispenses a burning liquid at a distance in a controlled, directed manner.

    • If it dispenses burning gas it’s not very useful as a weapon and is really just a big gas burner. Roofing torches, blowtorches, and weed burners fall into this category.
    • If it doesn’t cover a meaningful distance it’s also not very useful as a weapon and is essentially just a leaky container. Driptorches fall into this category.
    • If it dispenses the burning material in an uncontrolled or undirected manner it’s either an incendiary bomb/grenade of some sort or an accident. It might be a weapon but not one I’d call a flamethrower.

  • Now, I’m not from the States so I’m not as invested in the first place but is it okay in general to be somewhat lukewarm about the American Civil War in terms of its societal effectiveness? While the slavers got beaten up very effectively (and rightly so), the aftermath was mired in compromise to such a large degree that slavery still isn’t banned in the States and the underlying racism is still a major issue today.

    Is that valid criticism or should the postbellum be considered strictly separate from the Civil War? I’m genuinely curious.

    (And I just realized that you argue against not taking a strong side rather than not having strong feelings. My bad.)






  • It is for me. I already wasn’t hot about Windows 11 and this year I went full Linux.

    Has it been without problems? No, although most of my problems stem from dealing with the Windows partition I still keep on my desktop just in case. (Protip: Use NTFS-3G instead of NTFS3; the latter is horribly unstable.) Getting PipeWire to run my Bluetooth headphones on 44100 Hz to avoid crackling in Windows games was a bit arcane, admittedly.

    On the upside, KDE looks nice with the default Breeze theme (I think that windows 10 and 11 are butt-ugly). My computers feel noticeably snappier and especially the networking stack blows Windows out of the water. KDE Connect makes sharing data between my devices comfortable. All games I’ve tried so far run well, with the biggest issue so far being that in Satisfactory I can’t copy/paste settings between buildings.

    I’m happy. There are still some areas that need work but it’s pretty damn good already.




  • True. Just this weekend I spent far too much time trying to get a printer to work again on Windows after its IP address got changed. In the end Windows refused to talk to the printer unless I removed and then readded the device from the Settings app, which prompted a reinstallation of the device driver. No, just changing the IP address in the device settings wasn’t enough; Windows insisted on the driver being reinstalled.

    Linux didn’t need reconfiguration; it just autodetected that the printer had moved.

    I’m not saying that Linux is without issues, not by far. But Windows has never been terribly “it just works” for me either. The closest to “it just works” was (aptly) OS X somewhere around Snow Leopard.