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DDE
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Posts posted by DDE
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Most military buffs know that the Israelis made a Kalashnikov rifle derivative (twice removed, having studied the Finnish Valmet) called the Galil.
However, not everyone knows that the eponymous Yisrael Galil was born Yisrael Balashnikov, and only decided to change his surname midway through the rifle's development. His employers were reportedly relieved, having been rather cross to release a Kalashnikov-derived Balashnikov rifle.
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3 hours ago, darthgently said:
What is that word where the state and private corporations work hand in hand in a centrally planned way? There is a word for that, dang it.
The French would call it dirigisme.
It's a lot softer than German Gleichschaltung and privatization. Mussolini relied heavily on the trade unions (fascio) as the sources of 'social' control.
[snip]
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13 hours ago, Maria Sirona said:
*Ahem*
May i remind you that parts are made by companies
This is easily parried by many planned economies retaining corporate structures for ease of management.
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5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:
Or perhaps the tank designers were unfamiliar with giving it a flat turret face akin to the Leo 2A4
T-90's turret is slab-sided with an ERA wedge. While Burlak was criticized for being a bone thrown to the increasingly hapless plant at Omsk instead to the one actual factory at Nizhniy Tagil, I don't think they'd go completely off-kilter and ignore the design of the tank they're trying to improve.
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7 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
It's already five months passed since this exact instance of the T-90A (adopted in 2005, so a 18 years old model) was shown in details and explanations, inside and outside, but the joy of having an outdated combat tank is still overfilling the hearts of American audience.
Hey, maybe they want a lawn decoration.
Given that it may be all it's good for, since it's reportedly one of the 27th Brigade's tanks captured in September '22, and the whole 1st Guards Army notoriously turned out to be in a state of atrocious disrepair. The countryside all around Izyum was dotted with overfilled open-air vehicle salvage depots. And if they've sold this one, AFU probably didn't manage to fix it up, which is... unusual. T-72/T-90 are relatively familiar to them, unlike BMP-3s that they're having problems repairing due to an outright weird design.
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Russia's Sber has rolled out a free platform of their own.
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So there I was, having gotten my crocodile out of the wash...
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A quickie. "Burlak" was an abortive early 2000s Russian project for a new common T-72/T-80/T-90 turret. As you can see, it looked rather distinctive.
Spoiler
(This sort of casual leaks started in 2011 when a "T-90 Ya-2" was hauled off to Kubinka for storage)
The question: why the inverted faux-glacis of ERA blocks?
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4 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:
why all the square holes on the N-1 model?
Wind tunnel model. One of the few genuine articles of historical tech in there besides Vostok-1.
4 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:What’re the two big glazed spheres?
There's about six of them, and they're used for enclosed exhibits. The one on the right (barely) contains a Lunokhod going down the ramp of its descent platform.
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Slightly more than a month ago someone at work mentioned something about a space-themed outing at the VDNKh.
Naturally, your truly turned this from an offhand comment into a plan. Attendance was terrible, a mere four people besides me, owing to several concurrent ***********s at the office, and I may have to work on a Sunday, but it was worth it.
Was repeatedly approached by staff for unauthorized tour guide work and was eventually kicked out due to the museum closing at 21:45.
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The 1918 Soviet orthographic reform collapsed "миръ" (peace) and "мiръ" (world, society) into the homonym "мир". This has become the subject of wordplay. Sometimes it's of the benevolent kind, such as the Soviet slogan "миру мир" (мир to мир, using dative), or indeed the bame of the space station. Sometimes it gets darker, as in the Radio Yerevan joke "There will be such a struggle for мир that no stone will be left unturned", or the seemingly more recent and rather... topical quip/patch slogan "We need мир. Preferably all of it."
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11 hours ago, Nuke said:
you just cant win with these people
You can, but the steps required are wholly unpalatable. "These people" (the Small City as per Cochin, the Small People as per Shafarevich) absolutely despise the real world around them, and the majority who populate it, for not matching their utopian end goal, and wield the advantage of having captured the societal institutions (both public and private) that get to define what is respectable opinion and interpret public sentiment for the powers-that-be. Their ends justify any means; they outright revel in righteously transgressing against 'civil discourse', since the license to lie and slander (or, in case with their counterparts in the Middle East, plunder and torture and kill) is a sign of their superiority to you, the un-'woke' pleb/takfir. So an honest argument with them would be playing chess with a rabid pigeon.
To openly rail against them would at the very least cost you "mainstream" respectability, that is, likely make you seem a dangerous weirdo to the laymen around you. Effectively combatting them requires autocratic power and the license to use coercion. That is generally frowned upon, and not just on this forum.
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Well, that callsign is just bad karma, especially for a plane like this. No wonder it squawked 7700.
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Quote
‘Let me show you this,’ he insisted, before I left. A trio of small, beige items came out of a cabinet and were laid out on a cloth. They had been white once, but age had darkened them like bone. Their surfaces were worn, but I could still make out the trace of silver on the engine bells, and the red markings along the fuselage.
‘Toys?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘Playthings. Models made for a child’s amusement.’
‘They are of weapon rockets? Missiles?’
‘Rockets,’ he said. ‘For spaceflight. Don’t look so surprised, Mamzel Raeside. The first steps from Terra were said to have been taken using chemical rockets.’
‘I am aware of history, sir, even though the detail of the oldest eras is lost in the mists. But really? Vehicles this crude?’
He smiled again.
‘I do not think they ever flew,’ he said. ‘I think these are simplified models of possible machines. A primitive idea of flight. But I show them to you because of their age. Your employer is very fond of the oldest things.’
‘How old?’ I asked.
‘It can only be estimated,’ he said. ‘They pre-date the ages of Strife and Technology. I think they come from the Pre-System Age, from the first millennium of the Age of Terra.’
‘What? Thirty-eight or thirty-nine thousand years ago?’
‘Perhaps. Vessels like this first took our species into the unknown,’ he said. ‘They first took us Blackwards. The family name behind this business comes from that outward urge.’
‘I think my employer will appreciate these,’ I said. ‘What price do you ask?’
‘I will write it down,’ he said.
‘And the markings on the side of the rocket ships,’ I asked. ‘The letters in red? What does C.C.C.P. mean?’
‘No one knows that,’ he said. ‘No one remembers any more.’
Dan Abnett, Pariah
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When life gives you ashes, make ashmen. Shiveluch, Kamchatka.
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14 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20230413_04/
“Russia extends ISS presence to 2028” got reported today. Had it been known previously?
It came about a week after the "Russia set to quit the ISS by 2024" headlines.
14 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:Also, ROSS is apparently going to be used in preparation for lunar exploration?!
Well, that was the intent for the ISS as well...
Never had any serious design work behind it, though.
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2 hours ago, TheSaint said:
Just wait until they start hitting the senior citizens with these calls. They already get a lot of them with just a voice actor.
Forget voice acting. The kind of stuff @kerbiloid writes about has resulted in the elderly engaging in arson and shootings at bank branches, all at the behest of "policemen" and "bank security officers". They've even evolved to a script of "Hello, your card was used to donate to the Armed Forces of [redacted], do exactly what I say or you're going away for a long time". In Europe, the scenario seems to generally involve Interpol.
Also, for now, they're not using AI image generation. This specimen of a fake Bank of Russia employee ID I've come across just uses a sample picture from a photo retouching site.
Spoiler
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When you're only issued one bomb and your centreline mount only accepts gun pods.
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P.S. I guess I'm working through the frustration that my first embedding has turned out as noise. I think I've fudged up by using the non-default model, and I maybe shouldn't have stated the gender of the person in the file description (if the logic is that you should describe everything besides what you want the AI to learn).
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"The first shawarma made by a neural network"
Sochi, 2020
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This is a legitimate "hot and high" takeoff technique
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They swapped the inscription on the Sputnik stele to French when de Gaulle visited Baikokur in 1966.
Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
The US in WWII had a lot of various very different M1s.
During WWII, Soviet lend-lease stevedores spread the myth that every Sherman came with a bottle of whiskey stuffed down its (plugged-up) barrel.