Fucking troll accounts.

Regardless of the side, if the convicts have proper training, supplies and aren’t used as pure cannon fodder I don’t have any issues with it personally.

Honestly, I am surprised that Ukraine wasn’t doing it sooner. Unfortunately, the front has been somewhat slow for the last year or so (with an exception or two) and that means both sides are dug in fairly deep.

If Ukraine decides to push back harder and start retaking large portions of land, their losses are going to skyrocket. Regardless is you agree or not, using convicts to push the lines makes sense and doesn’t risk better trained troops.

That is just how wars of this type work and the offensive side will need to absorb more damage.

Personally, if I had the option of fighting or rotting in prison, I would fight and would probably volunteer for some of the hardest work. The thing is, it would need to be my choice and I hope that any convicts, Russian or Ukrainian, get a choice in that.

Ukrainian convicts are probably going to get decent training first. It’s also likely they are going to go into some of the worst spots. Ukraine is outnumbered and they can’t afford to lose anyone, criminal or not, but it doesn’t mean they are going to have it easy.

Russia/Wagner hardly gave their convicts any training, maybe gave them guns and supplies and sent them to the front blind to find artillery locations. They were cannon fodder, pure and simple. Bakhmut was a slaughter.

There are some major differences here.

I have heard a few things, TBH. Everything in the range from simply vaporized and hot to the vaporized metal being in a near plasma state. Shrug.

Wikipedia gives a few numbers ranging from 660K to almost 1200K (copper melt temp is 1358K) from testing it quotes. It seems to be dependent on the cone alloy and the explosive type.

In practice, it’s probably is all over the place in regards to temperature. If you can round up a few RPGs, I would totally be down for some testing…

As an example, RPGs use shaped charges to send a jet a molten copper through armor steel. Even though the devices may seem antiquated, they are extremely effective at burning holes through tanks. If that molten jet happens to come in contact with ammunition, it’s generally game over.

Really? I thought they would be sitting back drinking mojitos while watching the show.

It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.

I used to take failed drives while they were powered on and kinda snap them really with a fast twisting motion in an attempt to get the arm to move or get the platters spinning.

It never worked.

Did you get bad sectors? Weird things can absolutely happen but having sectors marked as bad is on the exceptional side of weird.

Maybe? Bad cables are a thing, so it’s something to be aware of. USB latency, in rare cases, can cause problems but not so much in this application.

I haven’t looked into the exact ways that bad sectors are detected, but it probably hasn’t changed too much over the years. Needless to say, info here is just approximate.

However, marking a sector as bad generally happens at the firmware/controller level. I am guessing that a write is quickly followed by a verification, and if the controller sees an error, it will just remap that particular sector. If HDDs use any kind of parity checks per sector, a write test may not be needed.

Tools like CHKDSK likely step through each sector manually and perform read tests, or just tells the controller to perform whatever test it does on each sector.

OS level interference or bad cables are unlikely to cause the controller to mark a sector as bad, is my point. Now, if bad data gets written to disk because of a bad cable, the controller shouldn’t care. It just sees data and writes data. (That would be rare as well, but possible.)

What you will see is latency. USB can be magnitudes slower than SATA. Buffers and wait states are causing this because of the speed differences. This latency isn’t going to cause physical problems though.

My overall point is that there are several independent software and firmware layers that need to be completely broken for a SATA drive to erroneously mark a sector as bad due to a slow conversion cable. Sure, it could happen and that is why we have software that can attempt to repair bad sectors.

Most US Navy ships have had CIWS systems since the 70s and have had many upgrades to their tracking systems since then. The US Army adopted the LPWS (C-RAM) which is basically a portable CIWS for land use. (The Russian version of the CIWS is called a Kortik.)

It wouldn’t surprise me if there are already CIWS-type systems for commercial ships operating in hazardous zones.

I have had the pleasure of standing next to a few CIWS systems during live fire testing and it’s quite the experience.

Wut?

Tin the wire and the pin first and then touch the iron to them both quickly. They should stick fairly well without needing to add additional solder. Also, like someone else mentioned, flux can help quite a bit. (Maybe even a cupped soldering iron tip might be useful, depending on the situation.)

Learning how to solder SMD components will get you extremely familiar with how solder behaves at that scale. Let’s just say it’s significantly different than just doing basic wires and THT.

(Well, the solder doesn’t really act different, but at smaller scales it looks like it does.)

If I remember correctly from the good ol’ days, promoted sites/ads kinda stopped after the first few pages and it skipped past most of the SEO crap.

But yeah, I forgot how aggressive Google is with ads and AI now, those bastards.

It’s actually a good change, IMHO. You can just click directly on page 10 for anything that might be related to your original search.

Oops. I read the title as “menthol”, not methanol, so this article really confused me at first.

Still, I found a paper on death by menthol that was an interesting read: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4830155/ (Who knew there were hidden dangers in peppermint factories?)

Add more garlic and you’ll be fine.

Medvedev has been hitting the bottle again, it seems.

Nothing he says is to be taken seriously and it wasn’t worth the time to write article about another one of his bizarre rants.

On the other hand, drunks tend to listen to other drunks and there is no shortage of vodka in Russia…

It’s a bad article anyway. It’s not wrong in the words it uses, but they purposely left out most of the political dynamics after 2014. Context and full history is important.

The Volkswagen is of actual Nazi origin, but that doesn’t seem to ruffle any feathers these days.

Now, if you really want to hear something confusing, there are Russian citizen units that actually are fully far-right, are open about it, are fighting against Russia and using Ukraine as a staging point for incursions into Russia.

There is plenty of things to complain about in that part of the world, for sure. Considering Ukraine is being invaded, we can put some political gripes on pause for a second. Ukraine needs every person it can get right now as long as they are fighting for similar enough causes. The past can be addressed soon enough but it won’t matter if there is no Ukraine left to resolve those issues.

It’s also worthy of note that this specific messaging has been amplified 10x by Russian media and I am sure plenty of half-truths have been implanted as fact in many articles and stories. Unless I missed something, there wasn’t a listed author for that article. Given that it is essentially a cherry picked blurb out of Wikipedia, makes the actual purpose of it suspect. (However, I have seen many times where author names are left off of controversial articles. It’s likely a safety thing.)

This is not about agreement. It’s about your history. You are posting crap from right-wing conspiracy theorists. Period.

People can do what they want and read what they want. Totally fine. By that token, if you can post this garbage, I have the same right to call you out on it.

This isn’t a one way street. You are posting your opinions, and I am posting mine, and I ain’t mad about it. I am just calling a spade a spade.