Silent Storm was a fantastic game, one of my favorite tactical turnbased games.

Maybe I am missing something, but just adding weights to the lighter blades to balance everything out seems be the solution.

There are lots of how-to’s out there for how to balance ceiling fans with weighted clips, you should be able to adapt the process to your specific needs.

Suppose it depends on what you are looking for. In the Cary area, NYBD tends to be my go-to. Fantastic corned beef or pastrami specifically, but it’s all good.

Damn that’s insulting, putting B5 and Andromeda on the same level. And I say that as someone who enjoyed the first 1.5 seasons of Andromeda.

The worst B5 episodes are vastly better than anything in the last three years of Andromeda.

Unfortunately nearly every graph on that page is intentionally misleading. If you actually adjust the graphs for inflation (where it’s relevant), 1971 looks like just another year.

Lying with statistics!

Oh man, I haven’t seen uuencode in so long, I basically forgot it existed until I read your comment!

Forgot the one everyone wishes they could forget - FTPS !

Might be worth noting that SCP is non- interactive file transfer only, whereas FTP/SFTP can do interactive sessions and management functions as well.

Go to Moscow, hang a left. When you hit the North Pole, head south…not, not that south, the other one! The other other one. After a bit, take another left for a couple hours, and you’ll arrive at your destination on the right.

Lol, really? One can’t control the fact that bad things happen. The west isn’t forcing either China or Russia to claim territory that doesn’t belong to them.

However, one can control how one reacts to said events. Help out where we can, and strengthen ourselves for the future.

There’s that whole proverb about crisis=danger+opportunity. The danger is there regardless…if you fail to seize the opportunity presented, well, you are pretty much guaranteed to come out the other side worse off.

Very few people WANT a war in Ukraine. But as China keeps adding dashes to their map, it’s pretty clear there’s a reasonable chance to be an even bigger war around the corner, whether we want it or not.

The Ukraine war woke the west up from its slumber, and it has allowed us to put the old stuff stuff cluttering our closets to good use, as well as test some new weapons concepts, and to get ourselves ready for the bigger conflict on the horizon.

If we are really lucky, China is looking at Ukraine and having second thoughts about kicking the hornets nest at all, saving a lot of lives on both sides.

If we are not that lucky, then Ukraine has allowed us to be much better prepared for the coming conflict.

So am I glad Ukraine happened? Not a bit. Can I see the silver lining thru the clouds? For sure.

I think it’s been made pretty clear between Andor and Ashoka that the Old Republic, the Empire, and the New Republic are all essentially the same bureaucracy at their cores, just with different leadership and priorities at the top.

It’s really showing the banality of evil…people continue to do their jobs and following orders of whoever the current bosses are. By and large, they can’t directly see whether their own actions are used for good or evil, the paperwork must continue to flow regardless.

That’s why there isn’t a ton of chaos when one galactic government supplants the next. Setting up an all-new galaxy-spanning bureaucracy is extremely hard, why not just do some loyalty oaths and let the existing machinery keep on chugging along.

Pretty much. China is pretty good at buying friends…when they aren’t busy stealing their stuff..

I don’t get why China allows their fishing fleets to keep shitting on their international reputation. It’s so counterproductive.

Perhaps add in the viewpoint of the “rancher” carnivore.

Ranching tech has bred pretty mindless prey animals that can be raised and slaughtered for food as needed, no hunting necessary. These prey aren’t sentient anymore, so is killing them for food wrong?

Credit/debit systems appear to have existed for at least 5000 years. Money is just an abstraction technology to make the credit/debit economy work more smoothly and scale up.

As money is a foundational tech for civilization, you’d need to find a replacement tech that serves much the same purpose, but avoids whatever downsides you feel outweigh it’s benefits. That’s a hard problem.

Then implement it in such a way that civilization doesn’t implode during the transition. This is a very hard problem.

And then prevent humanity from finding a way to exploit that tech for the benefit of the few, bringing you right back where you started. This is a nearly impossible problem.

Well, that’s not at all what I said. Japanese compact cars were generally pretty cool and affordable in a way most similar small American cars were not, so of course they get customized a ton more that their American equivilents.

The people who actually made their cars perform were the racers, those who did the truly terrible mods were the ricers.

Yes, racist due to stereotyping. But it was more wordplay for insulting the taste of the person in question in comparison to the racers, not their ethnicity or the origin of their car. Bad taste is pretty universal. And as with pretty much anything in language, people can and clearly have used it as a racial insult. I just don’t think that was it’s origin.

I am really amused it has morphed into a more positive connotation with the *nix crowd, while still meaning essentially the same thing. Language truly is a living thing.

I mean it has clearly racist origins, but I’ve never actually heard it used in a racist manner in real life.

At least where I was, there were basically zero Asians, “ricers” were (typically but not exclusively) Japanese cars that were customized terribly, as someone else mentioned, all show and no go. You could have American ricers too.

The owners, the “rice boys”, were pretty much all white guys.

I get that Ukraine won’t consider the possibility of ceding any territory, nor should they. They probably don’t like their allies even mentioning it.

But, there’s the separate issue of not being able to join NATO with ongoing territorial disputes. Without much context to go on, I would almost interpret this as something more along the lines of “Ukraine could join NATO tomorrow if the dispute went away (by whatever method)”.

My one experience was good. Randomly picked one place to call, they straight up told me it was gonna be a while until they could get to me, and to call this other company to see if they could help faster.

The place they recommended rerouted a couple of their drivers while I was on the phone to get to me faster, they were there in 30 minutes, did a good job, and the whole experience was very pleasant.

Definitely have both places in my contact list if I ever need another tow.

Its amusing how this thread went from the legitimacy of various naval exercises and then shifted to trade policy when that didn’t pan out, which is an entirely different animal, its more of an elephant than a zebra. (It ain’t black and white, definitely grey.)

Trying to get me to defend the Cuba trade embargo ain’t gonna happen, because it really is pointless and harmful. But I like how its conveniently ignored that the rest of the world could easily more than cover what the US refuses to send to Cuba. The US Navy wouldn’t stop them from doing so, because the blockade ended decades ago.

But oddly enough, that doesn’t happen. I wonder why not? Because, oh no, what would the world do without more of those sweet, sweet dollars??? Yeah, never mind the ethics, one can’t forgo profits from trade with the US, so let’s go fuck the Cubans right along with the Americans, and keep our citizens fat and happy with a steady supply of Levis, Big Macs, and movies. But, you know, lets continue paying lip service to how bad it is while making money hand over fist in complicity.

A truly astounding amount of hypocrisy. The US has plenty of hypocrisy to go around too, but at least I am not going to try to defend it.

I am mostly sure the naval blockade of Cuba ended well before I was born, so there is zero freedom of navigation issue happening currently.

The embargo only applies to US companies, we aren’t stopping other countries from continuing to trade witch Cuba.

I mean, it’s stupid as hell, and will never work, but that’s about the extent of it.