I’m in a similar boat right now - I use the Student Edition ($60-100 a year, depending on sales, locally installed vs. using the cloud-based 3Dexperience).
It’s not a bad deal by any means, but I do wish I didn’t have to deal with annual reinstalls and perpetually worrying Dassault is going to decide to take it away.
3D CAD software. There are a few options out there (FreeCAD, LibreCAD, etc) and Blender is a thing that exists for more artistic 3D modeling. But they simply don’t hold a candle to the features and capabilities of the paid packages, which typically have costs in the 4-to-5-digit range. And I’m not talking the crazy high-end simulation options - those I understand, they’re hard - but basic modeling features.
Hell, I’d even settle for a CAD package that had some solid basic features and had a reasonable purchase cost. Unfortunately the few providers have the industry by the throat, and so your options are “free but terrible” and “you need a mortgage to use this”.
There’s a submarine comedy called Down Periscope from the 90s. The story is, of course, absolute ridiculousness (albeit highly entertaining ridiculousness).
I’ve repeatedly been told by navy veterans, however, that it comes closest to portraying actual life in the navy - in particular, that virtually every character in the film is someone you can (and likely will) actually encounter in the navy.
“But you just like… screw stuff together, right? Cut the basic materials to make the parts, put it together, box it up, ship it out, right?”
I find that people who’ve never assembled anything more complex than Ikea furniture or something more technical than changed a pipe or switch in their home, tend to think production exists in exactly two levels: Low-tech, hand-tools-at-most labor which can be easily spun up because “anyone can do it”, and ultra-high-tech stuff like computer chips which need highly specialized factories, but where a few factories can mostly satisfy nationwide demand.
Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, Low (gear). The 5 “standard” positions the standard automatic gearshift levers could be set to. Versus the weird stuff like dials or push-buttons that are incredibly hard to operate by muscle-memory if you aren’t looking right at them.
Similarly, the Great Pyramid of Khafre (the tallest of the 3 greats at Giza) was once clad in a smooth exterior. The outermost cladding was taken by locals needing stone over the years, leaving only its peak still holding the original cladding.
For what it’s worth, Ublock Origin seems the most unaffected by this latest attempt. A lot of people I’m seeing are finding success just by switching from other blockers to UO.
Worked briefly in the waste management industry. Guns in the garbage were rare, but a problem. Policy was to call the local police to wherever they were found and turn them over. Police would take perfunctory statements from facility staff and review camera footage to verify someone hadn’t dumped it and claimed it “found”, then take the gun.
The real problem is we weren’t supposed to touch it until police showed up, so the garbage just had to kind of sit there waiting for them.
Everyone’s telling you why “It doesn’t happen”. They’re not objectively wrong in their answers of how resilient firearms can be, but they’re also not answering the question.
The ultimate answer for a lot is “broken down and recycled”. How do they get there, though?
A lot come through “buyback” programs, where guns can be turned over to authorities for some nominal reward. These tend to harvest a lot of inoperable weapons, frequently from people who had one but didn’t know how to otherwise get rid of them.
In states with more lax firearm laws, scrap dealers may accept repairable weapons as scrap metal. In more stringent states, they may only accept them if you’ve destroy the weapon as /u/SolOrion@sh.itjust.works outlined in the ATF poster.
Even in states with strict firearm laws, guns can frequently be turned over to authorities without charges. (CAUTION: Read guides on how to do this, and consult your local laws and policies before treating this as truth. Better yet, consult a legal professional.)
In some rare cases, a gun dealer may accept the gun, strip it of useful spare parts, and sell them independently.
At this point, the gun will be deliberately damaged to render it nonfunctional (if it isn’t already) and sent to a scrap metal handler. Metal components will be melted down and reused. Plastic or wood components may be recycled or thrown away.
Bows are actually incredibly hard to use. When you see a “draw weight” of the bow, this is the force you need to exert to pull it back to its full draw. 40-50lbs is considered normal, I believe, while the English Longbow - famous for its use in the Hundred Years’ War - had a draw weigh of at least 80 pounds, with some scholars suggesting even 50% greater numbers than that. Imagine lifting a weight that heavy each time you wanted to loose an arrow!
Bows, then, require extended training to use properly. Not just strength training, although professional archers were jacked, but in how to properly employ the weapon. The dominance of early firearms had much to do with not just their absolute performance - at times, they were actually outperformed by bows in absolute terms - but by that their effective use could be broken down into simple actions which could be easily drilled into new recruits.
If we’re talking about modern guns, this effect is much exaggerated. Guns can take some getting use to, sure, and modern bows have added features for ease of use. But guns are, honestly, shockingly easy to use for what they can accomplish.
On the G502, the first button directly beneath the scroll wheel should lock and unlock its free-spinning mode.
TDP has two main leads, one white and one black.
I’m not walled off from Star Wars’ controversies, merely pointing out that “every time” isn’t accurate.
“Every time” is certainly an exaggeration. Just off the top of my head in a minute:
If I looked around further, I’m sure I could find more. All of these have variously been critiqued for writing, characterization, or pacing, but failed to draw attacks based on the ethnicity (or orientation) of their protagonists.
Is this kind of attack a thing that happens? Absolutely. Is it “every time”? No. I’d suggest it’s more often when a series goes out of its way to bludgeon the audience with a message related to it, or tries to sell a newcomer as a superior replacement for a legacy character, that people can get riled up.
Oh absolutely. OP only asked about UI, so I focused on that. But Generals had a lot of WC3 flavor in it.
Command and Conquer had traditionally used a “right-pillar” control interface, with your map at the top. utility controls like “sell building” or “power down”, followed by a build selection screen below. There you had 4 panels you could select between - “main base” buildings, defensive buildings, infantry, and vehicles - and you could scroll up and down a given panel. So long as you had the right production building, you could select things to build from anywhere on the map. If a unit had a “special ability”, it would be triggered by double-clicking on the unit.
Come 2003’s Command and Conquer: Generals, the UI had been totally redone to resemble the layout of Blizzard’s wildly popular Warcraft 3: The control panel now sat at the bottom of the screen, with the map on the left. Building a particular kind of unit required you to select the building or unit that produced it. Selecting an individual unit gave you a list of magic spells special abilities it could take, such as using an alternative weapon or purchasing a particular upgrade.
So, uh… explain to me why we can’t just use invite codes without having the servers closed off? Like yeah, sure, that does make the invite technically redundant, but psychologically it’s still there while retaining openness.
Obligatory IANAL, etc.
If the template is being used for non-commercial services and does not closely replicate any of the material the characters is based on, then it probably falls under Fair Use - similar to how many rulings have affirmed that fan fiction is broadly legally permitted. Conversely, if the chat service owner is charging for the use, then it would probably be forbidden under the grounds that the service host is financially benefiting from another’s copyright.
Between that, is a murky zone.
This entire “glitch” is posited on the idea that altering your subjective past does not alter your absolute present.
And you’re right - that’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t taking away something from the past alter the present? This is called causality and thermodynamics, and it’s one of the reasons physics, as we understand it presently, doesn’t really allow for time travel as it is popularly conceived. It’s not about gold coins, exactly, but the idea that you can’t end up with more energy than you started out with (or the mass equivalent of energy).
But OP started with the idea that a time machine which break causality and thermodymnamics exists, so I just pointed out how massively broken such a machine would be.
Assuming the following conditions:
Energy is not conserved - that is, you expend less energy traveling to the past than the net energy value of something you send to or bring from the past.
It takes approximately 1 minute for the time machine to recharge and target a new time and location after use.
The time machine can transport any object that can be contained in a space, but the space is fairly easy to expand. Think, “setting up a tent”.
All of this, I should emphasize, horribly breaks physics. But it’s not a stupid question. The answer is, essentially, “the economy, as we know it, collapses.”
A lot of people are going to point out that you can duplicate energy sources, items, etc… by bringing them from the past. Yes, that’s true. But what people are missing is that this enables exponential growth as well:
I buy a gold coin. I put it in a large space.
2 minutes later, I set my time machine to go 1 minute back in time, collect the coin from myself, bring it to the present. Now I have 2 gold coins.
2 minutes later, I do this again - collecting the 2 gold coins and bringing them to the (new) present. Now I have 4 gold coins.
An hour later of doing this, I have over 536 million gold coins.
This works for any reasonably sized object, by the way. A hamburger. A tank of oil. That sweet RTX 5090 for your new gaming rig. A nuclear warhead.
Society, as we know it, isn’t to survive this. The Earth probably isn’t going to survive this. The universe may very well not, although we’ve already broken so many laws of physics getting to this point that it’s a wash anyway.
tl;dr - time machines as popular culture imagines them are a cheat code.
Yeah, I struggle with Organic modeling. I think it’s because I was trained in parametric for engineering, but I just mind-blank when approaching “how do I make this complex shape?” in Blender. CAD’s approach feels very straightforward and intuitive; I know where each feature is defined and can tweak it fairly easily. Blender… doesn’t. And I know it’s definitely not me, because I’ve seen people do very powerful things with it.
Like, I’ve run through a lot of the tutorials, and every time they get to “Okay, time for you to make this simple shape on your own!”, I immediately slip back into CAD modeling mindset, which isn’t really compatible with Blender.