To be fair, the criteria are very precise, they’re just only vaguely related to reality.
My favorite is the double-barreled 1911 pistol. It has two triggers, because if it only had one trigger it would be a machine gun (it would fire multiple bullets with one pull of the trigger). But physically it would never work if it didn’t always fire both barrels at exactly the same time, so it only has one slide and both hammers are connected to each other. But because you have to drop two sears with two triggers before it will fire apparently it’s totally legal.
Caught NPR this morning as they brought someone on to tell us:
- Raisi was the hardest of hard liners
- He hated America
- He even opposed the assassination of Suleimani, in an example of how hard-line he was
- He was actually just a puppet of the supreme leader
- And everyone in Iran hated him anyway
So I guess it was an assassination then?
Iskandr and Kinzhal don’t follow that ballistic missile trajectory, though. Neither does ATACMS. These are all semi-ballistic missiles that follow something closer to the "hypersonic glide vehicle" trajectory in your drawing (without the little skim maneuver, though, probably).
The real difference here is range. Things called "hypersonic glide vehicles" are intercontinental. Iskandr is "just" a missile that flys a low trajectory really fast.
spoiler / Japanese lesson
It’s the Q thing, but it’s pointedly not qqq.
Numbers in Japanese are weird, and have multiple readings. There’s a native Japanese system ("koko" for 9) and a more common Chinese-derived system ("kyuu" for 9), but the number 9 actually has two Chinese-derived readings (the second one being "ku").
Different readings are used in different contexts. "kyuu no [thing]" is always a valid way to say 9 of something, but "ku" is used with some counting words and there are plenty of old-fashioned words and phrases using the native reading ("koko-no-tsu" is a very common way to say "9 [things]" or "9 [years old]").
The Japanese title is 極限脱出 9時間9人9の扉, with the subtitle pronounced "kujikan kunin kyuu no tobira". That’s really the only natural way to write it, so you don’t notice anything weird, but it’s definitely a choice.
The 「の」 particle basically turns the preceeding noun into an adjective, and nouns can be either plural or singular based on context. Taking those together 「9の扉」(kyuu no tobira) means "9 doors", but it can also mean "the 9 door". "The kyuu door."
In contrast, 9時間 (kujikan) and 9人 (kunin) are compound words that unambiguously mean "9 hours" and "9 people".
Loved these, and played 999 side by side in English and Japanese. Have to say it’s much better in Japanese, though, and
Japanese-version puzzle spoiler
the title pun
is permanently seared into my brain.
Where I am in the US I have to go to an asian grocery store and buy a 20 lb bag if I want white rice that isn’t pre-washed and fortified, and even then half the stock is labelled 無洗米.
I don’t understand this dunk at all.
There's an incredibly stupid Iowa state law saying their caucus has to be at least 8 days before any primary.
There's a similarly stupid New Hampshire state law saying their primary has to be at least 7 days before any other primary.
Those laws don't actually mean anything, and doubly so because there's actually no law saying primaries have to take place at all.
The Democratic and Republican parties put out their own schedules of what states get to go first, and if any state breaks the rules the results don't count.
This year the Democratic party said South Carolina is supposed to be the first primary, but New Hampshire set theirs first anyway, and so Biden wasn't on the ballot and the New Hampshire results don't count.
As a weeb who speaks Japanese... what the hell is he even talking about?
I guess there was an episode of Ragna Crimson with some blatant bowdlerization in the subtitles, but that was more notable in just how absurdly offensive the original was, out of nowhere and for no appreciable reason at all (correct subtitles would have needed the f-slur, for a start). But that's the only thing I've even noticed?
I mean IOF are psychos, but that's an APFSDS shell. It's a big tungsten dart with no explosives in it. The only thing it can really destroy is an armored vehicle, since if you shot it at a car or a building it would just punch straight through and make a little hole.
So in context, this just seems like a really tasteless joke about "innocent tank crews". It's hard to find any extra outrage for this specifically.
Tixati's my favorite, but mostly because of all the pretty graphs. I think the idea is that it's supposed to be the "expert" torrent client that will show you every detail about everything, but the bittorrent protocol is simple enough that having all the extra details doesn't really let you do anything special.
But it does let you do things like automatically categorize torrents by primary tracker and give them different settings, or automatically filter out or prioritize files by pattern. General useful stuff.
Not open-source, though, if it matters to you. It was also banned from a bunch of private trackers for some inscrutable reason once 10 years ago, but I don't think that's a problem anymore.
EDIT: I'm not sure why I thought it was Windows only. Looks like it was always Windows and Linux.
Wait, that’s actually really impressive. How does that work?
Wire-guided ATGMs work because there’s a big beacon in the tail of the rocket for the launcher to home in on and give steering commands to. It doesn’t work if there are two of them (which is how the big silly glowing eyes thing on the T-90 defeats them, by the way).
Must be a digital guidance system with different beacon ID frequencies in the missiles?
Though when they showed both of them through the sight the second missile was all over the place, and all the combat footage was only one missile at a time. Dual shot was probably just for the cameras, but it did still appear to be guiding both of them, if poorly.
Looks like some sort of shaped charge, something similar to this, and it looks like he pointed the business end of it right towards the turret ring.
Decent chance that that thing took out the tank on its own, actually, if it was pointed the right direction and was the right distance (not too close, not too far) from something vital.
Historically the flat end of anti-tank grenades like that were magnetic so they could be stuck to the tank with the right stand-off from the armor, but maybe that doesn’t work as well today? Or more likely nobody expects to place a demo charge on a tank anymore.
If you want something you don’t have to reload every two weeks, look for "Vinegar - Tube Cleaner" on the app store. It’s just a Safari extension that replaces the video player on youtube.com with a bare html5 video tag, which prevents all the Google fuckery from loading (including ads).
I don’t remember the specifics, but the one-child policy was never one-child for every couple in the country. You got a bonus kid allowance for falling into certain groups, up to three (maybe four?) children.
You got a bonus kid if you lived in a rural area, you got a bonus kid if you were an ethnic minority, at certain times you could get a bonus kid if your first child was a girl. Apparently over half of Chinese were allowed two kids during most of the one-child policy.
So it’s very possible that Han Chinese in Tibet were allowed two children, and Tibetans were allowed three.