DDE

This wasn't in the patchnotes.

I was thinking of a more weaponized model. Plus, is it possible to "squeeze" the blast into a planar burst instead of a point one?

We know from a certain movie about oil drillers that a surface nuclear blast doesn't do diddly to an incoming asteroid. What about a shaped surface or near-surface blast?

You know how media like Detroit: Become Human gets criticized that its androids are for some reason utterly humanlike and can just break the conditioning? Well, maybe they weren't completely wrong.

Amazon's artificial intelligence turns out to be Rooms Full of People. Again. https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116

Starlink v2 for sale in Moscow, 222k RUB for the terminal, subscription for 13.8k RUB. Make of it what you wish, looks like Elon really is having a compliance problem. https://t.me/svarog_msk/45

Ban me from there, then. I use alt-history with a point of divergence in the mid-2010s. Too many familiar and controversial faces.

Looks like the people behind the new Fallout series got the wrong idea about what the Brotherhood of Steel is. It's not that I mind the aesthetics, it's just those are misplaced aesthetics.

To further back this, only one missile has the sticker, and you definitely wouldn't use an identical paint scheme for a 'special' payload-tipped munition. Weapons designers can sometimes be pretty callous about including a passively radioactive component. Older Milan missiles have a thoroum-232-based IR tracer, for example.

Gues whose own worldbuilding 'project' includes a new, maritime trade-focused quasi-state great power arising from an anti-piracy pact in the Celebes Sea... Granted, that's north of Polynesia proper, but it gives more ground and extant population to work with.

Going by the highly scientific method of "mom and pop say so", what climate change has amounted to is having a summer and a winter with almost no transition in between.

April 2: +22⁰C April 5: +6⁰C April 8: +16⁰C General Winter making a last stand?

It's not wrong to enjoy "dumb action". Films don't have to be "high art". It's just that these days they struggle even with being that much.

Therezinosaurus be like: "B****, please"

You know, I'm somewhat of an epidemiologist / military strategist / economist / hydropower expert myself! (BTW why was nuclear power in the news?)

Well, the calcs show that Baltimore loses up to 200 mil a day idling and the new bridge would cost 1000 mil, so...

It's actually about marketing, really. The fifth generation label was invented by LockMart and the rest made up post-factum, although the classification isn't too terrible. Warships mostly had eras. If we go cross out the Age of Sail for simplicity's sake, it becomes mostly a matter of main armament. It's a bit chaotic, but after an initial era of slow-firing and inaccurate early rifles, you have the Hail of Fire era when quick-firing guns were only available up to 6 inches and so everyone would have those and only a couple larger guns. Then comes the Dreadnought era where long-range gunnery becomes possible, alongside turbine propulsion, and so there is a new focus on consolidating and maximizing main gun firepower. It lasts until the post WWII-period, punctuated by post-war force reductions and arms control treaties. The subsequent Missile Era can also be subdivided into before and after late 1980s as single or twin launcher arms with below-deck magazines are replaced with VLS cells. Frankly, this is comparable to the rise of the dreadnought because the number of 533 or 620 mm weapons carried per each ship has increased drastically. This was still a thing during the First Cold War. I know for a fact that Project 956 went from a mostly artillery-focused destroyer to a (very overloaded) general combatant in response to the rise of the Spru-Can. Also, the Iowas were unmothballed largely citing Soviet Project 1144 heavy cruisers, IIRC.

IIRC the series basically ventured past their expiration date, as so many franchises have. The loss of Depp - likely irreversible, what even is the poor guy up to these days? - was just the final nail in the coffin.

A 1966 CPSU Central Committee memo on expanding production of ready-made breakfasts from popped rice. Besides a major point that's rather eye-raising in a Soviet paper (popped rice production lags behind because corn flakes are more profitable), it includes such gems as the Artillery Academy helping design an industrial popcorn machine (after all, it's "exploded cereals") and two full paragraphs on the advantages of Kellog's rice flakes (Rice Krispies?), the failure of the Soviets' efforts to replicate them, and the need to reach out to the British to license production. https://t.me/tarkhils_channel/2591

I'm a cringe accelerationist now. Let it happen. Let it bomb. Let it burn. We must find out where rock bottom is.

Ah yes. The kind of guy who eventually learns that "alpha" isn't really the first letter of the alphabet. An assortment of three-letter acronyms come first.

Oh, come on, today's terrorism experts can identify the cause down to a specific group based on newswires and grainy footage before the shooting even stops! *cough* Christo Grozev *cough* On a less snide note, I do find it weird that the ship ostensibly out of control smashed the support pretty much head-on even though various improvised stopping methods were being used. I understand some of the dynamics are non-obvious, but a layman's perception implies intent. So of course some people are crying about a Chinese cyberattack while the Russian internet makes memes how it was them all along, as with every manmade disaster in the US in the last couple of years.

Answering to several people at once: yes, a local pilot was present. Intermittent loss of power has been a confirmed problem, the ship was attempting to stop when it rammed the bridge. As to the captain, this was a hasty misinterpretation of a cursory search turning up a crewing agency page: In reality he held the post for some time in 2016, about right after the Dali had an unfortunate brush with a pier in Antwerp blamed on poor actions of its crew, and that's it The Singaporean pictured above (whose job description matches someone who'd be responsible for loss of power) is also not involved, as we now have confirmation that the crew is all-Indian. https://www.economictimes.com/news/india/crew-of-container-ship-that-collided-with-baltimore-bridge-all-indian-company/amp_articleshow/108796636.cms My argument still stands. Jacob Rusil Bin, who went from painting walls straight to being helmsman of the cruise ship Consta Concordia and whose non-existent English backfired at the worst possible moment - not that it would have likely saved the ship, but confusing port and starboard didn't help - is a representative example of a seafarer in an industry obsessed with cost-cutting, and, being squeezed on the ecology side, the cutting focuses on personnel costs, with crew selection typically outsourced to outside agencies and guided by the nit particularly stringent requirements of the countries of flags of convenience. I looked into this some years ago, and pretty much every informal source in two languages back then and now agrees that it's a hellish market of the absolute lowest bidder, no matter the quality (which the shipping companies expect to mitigate through procedures and automation).

It might be much cheaper to solve the awful quality of mechant mariners these days than build indestructible bridges. Usually it's one licensed captain from Eastern Europe (in this case Sergei, 52, Ukrainian national) and a crew of a dozen barely literate hirelings from the boondocks of South-East Asia, all underpaid. This backfires constantly - sometimes they conspire with oirates, sometimes they ground ships trying to catch a cell signal from ashore cell towers. Rebuilding bridges was heavily explored during the Cold War. But it basically requires having a spare bridge, usually a spare construction site as well in case the main one gets cratered by a nuke. It's very, very expensive.