Food Network is in the bag for Kitchen Aid products.

What’s your favorite movie that uses lots of practical effects?

The Thing has to be up there if the criteria is just an overall great movie heavy on practical effects.

Do you have a favorite practical effect of all time?

The “digital” wireframe view of the city from Snake’s glider in ‘Escape From New York’.

It was accomplished with miniature buildings which is rad.

The special provisions that exist or have been proposed are for first responders because they breathed in dust and were exposed to various health hazards during the response.

What above and beyond taking care of do people who weren’t exposed to any of that in the backend need?

In your own question you are identifying something that isn’t a first responder. First responders arrive on scene. By being on scene the first responders were exposed to health hazards. Those hazards are what existing or proposed programs deal with.

Repeat from the other thread:

I beat The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

It was alright. A third person shooter where you are theoretically giving tactical orders to two NPC followers. In reality, good or interesting tactics go out the window in favor of just spamming special abilities as much as possible in a chaotic mess of fights. The story was decent and gets interesting near the end, although for my money after the big reveal it feels like it drags out a bit longer than it needs to. For $3 I got my value.

I beat The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

It was alright. A third person shooter where you are theoretically giving tactical orders to two NPC followers. In reality, good or interesting tactics go out the window in favor of just spamming special abilities as much as possible in a chaotic mess of fights. The story was decent and gets interesting near the end, although for my money after the big reveal it feels like it drags out a bit longer than it needs to. For $3 I got my value.

Something that is popular (or sells well) despite having no apparent appeal to anyone the commenter can think of.

I don’t enjoy Bloodborne. I think I can figure out why there is a lot of hype for it.

It seems like all of the answers are “I personally didn’t enjoy this game therefore I can not conceive of anyone else enjoying it.”

I find that interesting.

COD4 was the first Modern Warfare game.

World At War wasn’t numbered.

I’m not saying Clancy stuff is always completely grounded, especially the longer it goes on, but I’m trying to use the Clancy comparison to capture the essence of an idea. COD4 while fictional, and with moments that aren’t wholly realistic if you really hold them up to the most intense scrutiny has the overall texture of realism. MW2&3 and Black Ops games all exist as throwing bigger and more insane setpieces out with no regard to any realism.

It’s a the last COD with a real gutpunch moment that says anything about anything. The nuke going off it a moment of realizing you aren’t a special main character and you die like everyone else, and that maybe war isn’t just a big fun adventure. All the shock moments have been trying to top it are so dramatic that they don’t have the same effect that the nuke did.

While (classic, I’m not counting stuff ghostwritten under his brand) Clancy characters have hyper competence, it’s to be expected given that they are turbo ultra elite soldiers or spies. Their motivations and ability to act doesn’t reach the point of self parody.

For a COD4 example: Nikolai, the Russian that the player rescues early on in the game. He is a mole inside the Russian antagonist faction feeding information to the SAS. He got found out. He’s being kept at a house with a handful of regular soldiers watching him. When you rescue you him he is calm or at least puts up a calm front and thanks you. That’s a pretty believable guy who could have been a real person who is doing something realistic and dangerous.

In MW2 that character can materialize with apparently infinite types of military aviation hardware, and he is also a pilot able and willing to do insane maneuvers. And he is personal friends with Captain price rather than just being an SAS asset. And he is in touch with a friendly militia group in the middle of Europe.

There is a distinct jump from COD4 to MW2, where it goes from Tom Clancy to Michael Bay.

MW2 is still fun, but it exists in an entirely separate tonal reality than COD4.

I’m replaying COD4 and taking notes at the moment for a review I’ve wanted to do for years, coincidentally.

Looking at just COD4 without being influenced by knowledge of the sequels, it’s got a decent story and if you look at the edges you can find contemplations of cycles of violence, and while not to the point of being anti-war it does emphasize the waste of it.

The characters are Tom Clancy levels of larger than life, which is significantly more restrained than what came later. Individually the story beats and scenarios have at least a texture of realism, often loosely based in something real and then strung together in a story that isn’t convoluted.

I could see it being a good movie with the right handling. It probably wouldn’t be.

Spock in the original series goes into his mating season, which is a time where Vulcan emotions become too uncontrollable to repress. Vulcans are ashamed of this loss of control and try to hide it away.

Spock had to fight Kirk because Spock’s arranged marriage wife-to-be was allowed to chose anyone as her champion against Spock when she decided she didn’t want to him. Spock was out of control in full ragemode and only regained his senses when he thought he’d killed Kirk.

Vulcan society has, to my eye, always been one that acts like it has everything figured out but its repression has created just as many bizarre rituals as any other culture.

I’ve long seen Vulcans as something of a cautionary example of going to an extreme. Rather than living alongside their emotions and learning their appropriate uses, Vulcans just repress them until it all occasionally explodes in an uncontrolled outburst. In their day to day, Vulcans have valuable logical insights but their lack of connection to emotion in a healthy way is a detriment.

Trek has from the beginning framed the strict adherence to cold logic as a flaw. That’s why Spock got a bunch of people killed on the Galileo 7.

The first one has slightly different foreign languages dubbed. It is also listed as a Sony manufactured box set, I really don’t know the rights history there, but that’s what the product page says.

The second one is listed as a Disney made box. It contains one disc with everything on it.

The third product looks the same as the second but containing three discs instead of one.

The headline is a little unclear and just for clarity, the sales are down 62% in Canada, rather than a 62% drop in overall sales. The Canadian boycott is still likely having an effect, however in the interest of not just skimming a headline that effect seems smaller than first impression. It isn’t putting the company out of business.

From the article:

It’s unclear how much the 62 per cent drop in sales translates to in dollars, but the company’s total sales were down three per cent for the quarter.

The closest that ever happened to me was an interview that ended up turning into a two hour plus long tour of the facility with my interviewer pointing out a lot of little details in more of a first day orientation than interview kind of vibe.

The job seemed like a lock until I got a generic rejection email. I didn’t reach out, but the same day that I got the email I also got a text from my interviewer apologizing to me because he had recommended me for the job and thought I was a good fit, but management above him had an internal person that they’d already planned to give the job to.

Normally I’d be skeptical of a story like that, but given that he’d really gone above and beyond the scheduled amount of time for the interview and that he sent the text unprompted, I really do believe there were shenanigans afoot above him.

Questions like this are why I don’t like “drone” as a catchall description. Drones are everything from single use first person view suicide devices, to off the shelf quad copters for recon, to essentially unmanned aircraft, to essentially just more controllable long range missiles.

Ukraine has adopted Vykhors as the “standard” for their first person view suicide drones. These are often seen in footage with PG warheads attached and modified so the drone can fly straight at an armored target.

Ukraine has also been using Bayraktar TB2, which are essentially unmanned aircraft which fire air to ground munitions and then return to base.

The Russians use for example the Orlan-10 for recon. They are recovered after using a parachute to help land in one piece.

Russia purchased from Iran, and now makes its own version of the Shahed 136, a long range drone (about 1500 mile range) that is essentially just a highly controllable missile. The payload is built into the drone.

These are just a few examples and not an exhaustive list. The examples should illustrate the wide range of sizes, costs, and uses of drones though.

Do those detectors even work against LIDAR? A lot of police use that now anyway.

I travel a lot throughout the US, and sometimes the changes are obvious while other times I can be driving and not entirely sure which state I’m in just from looking around on the highway. As others have said while driving on a major highway a clue can be a huge store full of items like fireworks just across the border from a state they aren’t legal in.

The geography and environment can certainly be a big clue. Driving through West Virginia there are tunnels through large mountains, Pennsylvania around the Pittsburgh area has steel bridges, Louisiana has highways raised up from the muck, there are mountains that the highways wind around in North Carolina that give way to pretty flat highways as you go south. Kentucky has long depressing stretches of straight boring road. I’ve noticed even traffic patterns can say things as Georgia highways always have a higher number of semitrucks than anywhere else for example. Nevada is flat and open but as you go into Utah it gets windy and rocky, and cell signal usually goes out for a bit.

Staying in different states I notice alcohol sales rules are different. In some states you basically don’t see any alcohol outside of designated stores for it including no beer at gas stations, in other states you see beer for sale widely but hard liquor only at designated stores, and in other states hard liquor at WalMart is perfectly normal.

I’ve found on the whole that people are actually nicer than average in Utah. While coffee shops exist I have noticed in offices there is often a lack of a central coffee machine.

Louisiana everyone I deal with from there has a tendency to be much more relaxed than average about showing up exactly on time for things. Louisiana itself also has a cultural divide between the northern part which is more generic US south, and the southern part which has the more creole and tourist heavy atmosphere.

I honestly don’t mind Ohio. I know it’s an internet meme to hate it, but aside from their obsession with dumping chili on unrelated foods it’s decent. Has a strong blue collar streak kind of like Pennsylvania culture.

Texas has a big cowboy influence and they don’t let you not know it. The roads tend to big big and wide which is great, except the freeways especially in Dallas can become confusing multilevel nightmares.

California has lots of Spanish signs, lots of first generation Mexicans who bring culture with them. Lots of for example Mexican super markets. Californians have a culture of going FAST on freeways if there isn’t gridlock traffic, in some cases going 100mph just barely keeps you up with traffic.