Shoutout to the Kraut Space Magic G11 and its weird, squared-off caseless cartridge. Note that the bullet itself is still circular.
This was supposed to help squeeze more propellant into a magazine by not ‘wasting’ the space unfilled when you stack circular cartridges on top of each other. In practice, the G11 had a number of technical issues, some of which could be traced to the caseless ammunition. It ended up going nowhere.
Consider this even moreso if you have a television in the house. “Silly cat, I can’t bring the sun and birds back to the porch!” you say, and then turn on the magic window to a realm of sunshine and animals at any hour of the day.
One could argue that “shock & awe” is a military strategy to specifically terrorize the enemy force, for example a military opponent.
Indeed, and that’s why the definition hinges critically on the intended target (civilian vs. military). One could even argue that if you, as a civilian, see your nation’s military forces march out and get torn to ribbons, and then the next night your city’s sky is alive with enemy aircraft bombing military, government, or materiel targets, you have pretty good reason to be scared. But we wouldn’t call this terrorism, even if there are some civilian casualties, because the primary targets are all legitimate ones intended to hamper your ability to wage war.
This strategy is one performed by an organized military that is … bound by the rules of warfare … Non-state actors (insurgents, terrorist groups) on the other hand are not beholden to any law. To me, this is another relevant distinction
This is another good point. We nominally expect that organized nations will adhere to the laws and customs of war. More critically, non-state actors also tend to not have uniforms, stash materiel among civilian populations (often even on sites protected under said laws and customs), and deliberately introduce ambiguity as to whether a target is military or civilian.
But this logic can also get murky when we consider states not recognizing other governments or arguing they are “occupied” by another, more ephemeral hostile force. It can be advantageous for a state to portray their enemy as an ephemeral, non-state actor, in part because it lets you portray the enemy as not adhering to laws and customs of war.
Nominally:
A terrorist attack is primarily intended to kill civilians or cause damage to civilian lives in order to cause fear of the attacking group, anger against the victims’ own government, or otherwise cause a change of policy. The deaths of people with no relationship to any ongoing military operation or force is “a feature, not a bug”. Military targets may also be hit, or the goal may even be to selectively target civilians to emphasize that their military cannot protect them.
A military strike is primarily intended to deteriorate an enemy force’s ability to wage warfare: by killing soldiers or leadership, destroying materiel or supplies being used to fight, or destroying industry or logistics being used to support the war effort. Civilian deaths are an unavoidable side-effect of strikes primarily intended to hamper military warfighting capability.
That’s the theoretical line.
In practice, of course, there are many points of disputation - how many degrees separated from a man holding a gun must a target be before it is “non-military”? If an organization which mainly targets civilians in terrorist attacks carries out an attack on a military target, that still might be referred to as a “terrorist attack”, as in, “an attack by a terrorist organization”. And of course, there’s a degree of publicity shaping involved in this as well. But in concept, the above is your line.
This is really it. In some ways early CGI was actually more intensive than traditional setpiece, costume, and effects-making in that it had a very high technical skill floor. Not denigrating the skills of actual physical artists here, but you had to not just have an artistic sense, but be able to navigate (in some cases, program in the first place!) the tools behind it.
Torties, man. They never stop looking gorgeous.
A lot of this was built around a world prior to surveillance video being everywhere all the time
Even in a world with surveillance, digital footprints, and advanced forensic evidence techniques, defense attorneys still help keep the system honest: Does the video actually show what the prosecution alleges? Was this digital data obtained with a proper warrant? Is there chain of custody for the forensic evidence, or could it have been tampered?
Demanding integrity is still a key part of the system. The only thing that’s changed is what you’re demanding it of.
This. If Kirk has any actual positive quality, I’d say that he’s highly adaptable and skilled at ‘thinking on his feet’. This gets him out of a whole lot of trouble and lets him play fast and loose with his actions as Captain, but it also means he gets himself into a lot of trouble that a more strategic, less impulsive officer would have avoided in the first place.
It’s telling, in my opinion, that the very first thing Starfleet does as soon as the Enterprise gets back home is rotate him off of starship command and give him an administrative position where his decisions can be reviewed, rather than assigning him on a new mission. He only manages to get himself back in command when V’ger is heading straight for Earth, and Starfleet is in “throw the kitchen sink at it” mode.
It is unacceptable that Babylon 5 is not on this list. It was rare, at the time, for shows to have a multi-season story arc with character development planned from the start. JMS got his seasons, though, and used them beautifully. Every single episode, even those that don’t contribute to the main storyline advancing, either show a character developing or build the foundations for that development.
FMA:B is up there on “shows I wish I could forget just so I can watch it for the first time again”, and so much of it has is how many characters’ final moments (re)define them. Tossup for me between:
This. It says, “I acknowledge you are upset, and accept blame.”
Pure black long-haired? Absolutely gorgeous. I need to squeeze her!
I actually really like this. It teaches your cat that legs are a resting spot. (Or maybe you don’t want them to learn that, since it can lead to Feline Paralysis in Humans.)
I know people I could torment with this. I’m not going to, but God it would be funny.
You’re already asking good questions, which means you’re doing a lot better than many of the people who adopt without thinking. You’re also looking for an adult cat, which means you aren’t going to have to deal with a kitten’s destructive exploratory phase (although, fair warning, adult cats can still be destructive if you don’t prepare properly).
One thing I would say is that you should consider two versus one cats. Some cats don’t handle being alone for a long time well and can become unhappy, while others prefer not having feline company and would be just fine alone for ~48 hours. A good shelter or adoption agency may be able to tell you whether a cat prefers company or solitary.
Like some other commenters, I would strongly suggest going to local shelters and discussing with them. They should entirely understand if you aren’t able to adopt immediately and be able to discuss particulars with you.
Disclaimer, I am not a physicist, just a guy with interest in sci-fi, science, and too much free time.
is their any theory centered around our frame of reference having a past but not a future?
So, the answer is, yes, this is actually kind of a common theory on how time actually works. Maybe.
This has to do with physics, and the fact that no two observers have the same perfect frame of reference. For most of us humans, our frames of reference are close enough to be identical on a day-to-day basis. It’s even close enough for (most) science. But it’s not true on a perfect level. For instance, special relativity says that time passes differently for objects in motion; GPS satellites have to correct for the fact that their onboard clocks are experience “slower” time than us observers on Earth. Even astronauts “lose” about ~1/100th of a second for every year spent on the ISS.
What’s this got to do with the future not existing, though?
So we know no two observers have a perfectly identical frame of reference - there is no objective “truth” of when something occurred. Cool. Now what? Well, what we can talk about is historic light cones. Because the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, we can determine how far from you a photon departing your actions would travel. Places that photon would reach at any given point in time following your action are said to be within your historic light cone, and in common parlance, the past. The boundary of how far that photon is reaching at any given moment is, from your frame of reference, “the present”. But since nothing can exceed the speed of light, it is impossible for an observer to view beyond the present, into the future.
The catch, of course, is reference frames. You used a plural - “our frame of reference”, “we’re blazing a trail forward” - but the reality is that each of us has a minutely different reference frame and is blazing a minutely different trail. Again, for almost any day-to-day purposes this is irrelevant… but there are certain scientific experiments which exploit or even rely on this absence of reference frame.
Cool, what about time travel again?
In my first comment above, I mentioned something called closed timelike curves. Those are an actual thing: By severely bending spacetime, you can theoretically cause a photon to “curve” around and end up at the same point in time it was produced, now in its subjective past, while mathematically not violating quantum physics.
This is where things get kind of freaky and headachy; if a photon can be sent into its subjective past, doesn’t that imply a future now existing, in which that photon will be generated? The answer is, not in the frame of reference of that particular photon. A historic light cone of that photon being generated, now in that photon’s future, still exists; but that photon is now generating a new, detached lightcone…
Like I said, headachy. I also have to emphasize that while the math holds up, there’s ample reason to believe CTCs don’t exist, chief among them that our mathematical understanding of quantum physics may still be imperfect.
tl;dr: Yes, absence of reference frames means that each distinct observer is blazing their own trail, which spreads into the “past” at the speed of light. The future, exceeding the speed of light, is unobservable. This framework does provide a mathematical concept of how you could send something into your subjective past, but such a means is still theoretical at best.
This is fundamentally a variation on the question of a Temporal Paradox, also known as a Grandfather Paradox (“You go back in time and kill your grandfather. What happens?”). Although no killing happens in this variation, the basic idea is the same: Information is transmitted to the past from the future, but results in a situation where it cannot be transmitted in the first place.
Accordingly, there are several hypotheses to cover this. This isn’t even all of them:
It really is an interesting question, yes! Fires started by frictional heating are pretty uncommon in nature, but early humans could pretty readily see that objects placed near a fire would begin to smolder and burn just from radiant heat.
It really depends on when we were able to take intellectual leap of realizing that all heat is equivalent, and fire is not a prerequisite of making new fire.
We don’t know. Hell, we can’t even narrow it down to a specific place with certainty. There is strong evidence in human settlements for use of fire anywhere from a few hundred thousand to 1 million years ago. When, exactly, is hard to ascertain; for instance, some sites which are claimed to hold the oldest evidence have been criticized as resembling the aftermath of wildfires.
It is also depends on what you mean by “discovered”: Early proto-hominids were almost certainly aware of fire and the concept of burning, so are we counting from when they realized “hey, I can take a burning thing and put it where I want it, and it will spread burning there?” Or are we only counting from when fire began to be used as a tool (e.g., for clearing brush or cooking)? Or when humans discovered how to start fires in the absence of a natural source?
Something weird is going on with that link too. I can’t see any comments, even when I try to show all comments.