dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

TL;DR: Because Saving Private Ryan is a movie, and meanwhile reality is reality.

Whether or not a helmet can stop a bullet (and manage protect its wearer in the process) depends an awful lot on how much energy it has to dissipate, i.e. how fast the bullet was traveling and how much it weighs.

Rifle bullets travel very fast. This has not changed appreciably between WWII and today, although contrary to expectation it was more common to have front line soldiers issued with full power battle rifles back in WWII which were actually more powerful than the intermediate cartridge rifles most often issued to them today. Military rifles nowadays actually commonly fire a much lighter bullet than in the past. (Yes, there are exceptions. That’s not really the point.)

There is no such thing as any kind of metal helmet that can protect the wearer against a rifle bullet that is a square hit and within the rifle’s optimally effective range. You can play with ceramics like are used in plate carriers that protect the torso, or weird high tech aramid fibers, etc. but the long and short of it is that such a thing would be too bulky and heavy to feasibly wear on your head. A bog standard 7.62x39 round, i.e. that fired from an AK pattern rifle commonly found all over the world, delivers around 1000 ft-lb of energy at impact within 100 yards. Even if you could magically stop it somehow it would ring your bell like you wouldn’t believe. We’re talking unconsciousness, fractured skull, brain damage.

And to put it into perspective, the 7.92x57 round fired by the types of rifles likely to be issued to the Germans during WWII was even more powerful than this, developing around 2,900 ft-lb at the muzzle (I can’t find a figure for at 100 yards offhand, but just subtract a couple of percent). Yes, that’s around three times more powerful. You are therefore much less likely in reality to be happy about being shot in the dome with a WWII battle rifle with a primitive WWII helmet versus a modern helmet and a modern intermediate power cartridge.

A steel helmet stands a greater chance of deflecting a pistol round which is slower and carries considerably less energy. 9x19 round at 100 yards is packing more like 250 ft-lb of energy, a quarter as much as the 7.62, and is also shaped with a much wider cross section and a less pointy nose so it’s less likely to penetrate hard objects.

Any garden variety lid would be much more useful at deflecting a shot that was a glancing blow, or that was fired from a very long way away, and/or has ricocheted off of something and thus lost much of its energy. Not to mention fragments of whatever it hit – bits of brick or doorframe or glass or whatever it was the enemy’s bullet hit near you that was not you. And shrapnel, and gumpf raining down on your head from nearby explosions, etc. Helmets are designed to maximize their effectiveness based on what we understand and can build (and, yes, what the lowest bidder can manufacture) but are not and never have been expected to shrug off a straight-on headshot from an enemy’s rifle because this is a fool’s errand.

I had the Samsung notification whistle down pat back in the S3/S4/S5 era. Everyone had that as their default and it was so easy to fuck with people.

A God of War live service game? Who the fuck signed off on that? I’m glad the article was able to zero in on the blistering stupidity of such a thing.

'Member when Kyle’s Mom freaked the fuck out and tried to ban Pokémon Red and Blue because they “depicted gambling” in the game corner, which had no links to the outside world and could not be fed with real money in any capacity, was completely contained within the monochrome screen on your Gameboy, and could be save scummed anyway? Pepperidge Farm 'members.

My, how far the bullshit has come.

Anyway, 16 is sure a funny way to spell 18. Why the hell is the age requirement 16 when you can’t buy a lottery ticket until you’re 18 and in most places you can’t enter a casino until you’re 21? It’s the same thing.

Lootboxes is gambling. So are gacha pulls, and doubly so for both of the above when they can be fueled with real world money. People who are not adults should not be enabled to gamble.

It gets worse. If you have “smart features and personalization” turned off for your Gmail account, which I do, you can’t even ask Gemini anything. Not even to get the inevitably wrong answer.

But this still doesn’t remove the damn button for it from the corner of your screen.

Hey Google.

I still can’t create folders in the Android Gmail app. But somehow you had time for this?

I KNO₃, right?

Dead Cells?

Emphasis, perhaps, on the “lite” part of Roguelite. But it does have that Roguelike run structure where the levels and the items you find therein are randomized. But with side scrolling platforming gameplay with a very distinct set of fast double-jump-dodge-roll-parry-combo mechanics that I think can best be summed up as ninja gameplay. And you will get killed… a lot. There is a permanent progression system of a sort in the form of unlocking more weapons and items (and later, to re lock items you don’t like), but your core stats remain the same. This is one of those games where the real progression is on your own personal quest to git gud.

I think it’s pretty unique in that it has no dud weapons or items whatsoever. Everything – literally everything – has the potential to be viable and can be absolutely deadly when wielded in the right hands. Even the joke items.

It also has not one, but two weapons which involve beating the shit out of your enemies with frying pans. What’s not to love?

There is indeed a Switch version.

Hey, guys. So, I haven’t received any of my payouts from the CIA yet and I have pocket knives and stuff to buy, so… Is there like somebody in HR I can email about this or something?

Be careful though. Earl’s crazy. He ate one of my cars once. Yeah, the whole car. Like, with a fork.

Yes, but if they’re salaried no one would be talking about overtime in the first place. There’s no middle ground, here.

If it’s anything less than the 1.5x overtime rate for any time beyond 40 hours, then he’s also planning to violate Federal labor law.

I strongly suspect this dweeb does not understand that the Federal minimum for overtime pay is neither optional nor negotiable, or he is vainly hoping that his employees don’t.

I was thinking more along the lines of the types of laziness/ineptitude most likely present at wherever OP’s example were being written. Escape string is one line of code for this whereas preparing a statement is like five.

But really they should just be hashing it. Then the input doesn’t matter.

Seems to be they’re dropping the passwords in the database in plain text, but they’re deathly afraid that someone will drop a '; in there or something and the insert will break.

Notwithstanding that storing passwords in plain text is a slapping with the 10 foot rubber chicken, but mysqli_real_escape_string() or any number of other similar solutions are indeed a thing that exists. A prepared statement would work, too.

If that’s the case I assume OP knows who they are in reality or can figure it out pretty easily. From there either legal action or a beating can be administered, as appropriate.

This is an extremely high level answer, but you have to be equipped to even notice whatever it was did when you twiddled it. It might not be obvious, and this is muddied by the fact that most of the reserved or undocumented bits/registers/addresses/pins will probably do nothing. Or crash the machine. So that entails having a vague idea of what the device might be capable of in the first place so you can have the right equipment or software hooked up to it to even observe results. There’s probably no automated programmatic way to do that in most cases.

It’s bad enough when all you have in front of you is a microcontroller that can only manipulate its own memory and a small easily defined set of outputs. It gets hairy fast when you have multiple special purpose chips in a system that could do anything.

Yes, we probably should have.

But meanwhile, my point was that due to their inflexibility you absolutely cannot operate rail vehicles without the ancillary equipment required to perform certain tasks. It’s not as easy as saying, “It costs x per mile for railroad tracks therefore everything should be trains.” That doesn’t tell the whole story, and all of those add-ons are, in fact, mandatory.

With a steerable roadgoaing vehicle you can work around much of it if necessary. Rest areas and even traffic controls and guard rails are not actually technically necessary for a vehicle to successfully go down the road and you can wing it re: parking lots by parking in the dirt if you have to, and so on. The whole arrangement would certainly be horrid without those things but it can and does still work. There are thousands of miles of rural roads in America alone that are served by absolutely no external infrastructure except stationary signs and some guard rails.

However, you cannot turn a locomotive around no matter how much redneck creativity you apply unless you have turntable, a loop track with a switch, or a big crane… period. You cannot add or remove cars from a train without a long enough spur or a railyard, and in many cases a second “yard” locomotive, period. You cannot have one train pass another without a siding, period. You cannot store currently unused cars without a railyard full of tracks, period. A train cannot change tracks without a switch and someone (or some computer) to man it, period. Etc., etc.

During the initial railroad boom this was actually a very real problem. Anyone who was anyone and who was rich enough wanted to have their own little spur railway going to their factory or estate, and it turned out that the logistical clusterfuck and ancillary equipment needed to serve all of those individual low volume needs was so expensive and was such a hassle that the very moment trucks were viable the huge majority of all those little endpoints were abandoned and demolished pretty much overnight. Rail has an insurmountable problem with the final mile, and the more individual locations it has to serve the more untenable the ballooning cost becomes in both money and space, which must be counterbalanced by a sufficient economic benefit.

Where trains excel is by moving a whole shitload of people or product from one source to one destination, which unsurprisingly is almost exclusively how they are used outside of the context of intra-city people movers like subways and surface light rail. Within the confines of this use case they are cheaper and more efficient per unit of cargo moved than cars or trucks.

The ancillary equipment and infrastructure for a railroad influences things quite a bit as well. If you just need to privately move things from A to B, it is “theoretically” cheaper to lay rails than build a road of equivalent capability. But a locomotive and cars plus a railyard and a turntable and sidings and switches and all the other stuff you’ll need to run trains effectively is going to cost a lot more than just getting a box truck or a even an 18 wheeler and just plonking it on your new road.

A modern freight locomotive will cost you $1.5m to $2m just by itself. Then you need boxcars and all the other stuff, too. Big rigs aren’t exactly cheap, either, but you can drive one of those off the lot for less than $250,000.

Connecting your railroad to the rest of the railroad network – a significant portion of which is privately owned, for an extra special added layer of clusterfuck – is also a headache. This is trivial for roads, even after you take all of your local government regulations into account. You can make roads go more places more easily.

You are correct that scale is a very important factor for the financial viability of a railroad.

Road, technically, at least in the context of having enough of it to transport cargo. I.e. not neighborhood streets. On a raw mile-per-mile basis, it’s cheaper to build railways.

I’m curious about rail transporting everything as was the case in the 1800s

This was the case because in the 1800’s no one had successfully invented rubber tires, or more importantly from a functional standpoint no one had come up with a good way to make powered vehicles climb inclines. Trains are still famously bad at this because they all run on metal-on-metal wheels and rails. Rubber tires afford grip to allow cars and importantly trucks to go up hills. (In America, a large part of encompassing the continent with rails during that Wild West era was dealing with the three giant arrays of mountains in the way: The Appalachians, the Rockies, and the Sierras/Cascades. This required an immense amount of effort in tunneling and building bridges to enable trains to cross these areas.)

Roads don’t have this problem nearly as much. Therefore the cost/benefit ratio is quite different on relatively flat ground versus having to overcome valleys and mountains. Roads also have the advantage of being significantly more versatile than rails. Traffic control of multiple entities going to a wide array of different destinations is way easier on roads, and roads can theoretically be accessed by just about any vehicle e.g. in the case of an emergency. This is not the case with rail, which is compatible with only one type of vehicle which can’t steer or go around obstacles and is incredibly difficult to even put on said rails on short notice in the first place.

Anyway:

A mile of modern road costs roughly between $5m and $6m depending on where you build it. Surprisingly, the width of said road doesn’t change the cost that much since the majority of the cost is in fact labor, and not materials, and the difference in clearing, say, a 24 foot wide patch of land versus a 48 foot patch of land is usually pretty trivial when you compare that to the length of the land you’ll have to clear while you’re at it.

A mile of double track rail (i.e. roughly analogous with a normal highway in that traffic can travel in both directions) costs between about $2.2m and $3m. There’s a handy chart here, including rough maintenance costs as well. However, I strongly suspect this does not include the cost of boring tunnels through miles of mountains, or having to build a bridge span a quarter of a mile high that’s capable of supporting a freight train…