Most brilliant moment in all of science fiction. Actual demonstration of an actual weapon mixed with meta commentary on science fiction weapons in general and how villains can’t ever seem to shoot straight.
I don’t know if I would say “in general”, but definitely in the Stargate universe.
It doesn’t make that much sense for Star Wars, but then the universe doesn’t really explain a lot why, just that things are the way they are.
Star Trek seems to deploy handheld energy weapons because they provide a greater range of responses, from less than lethal to able to take out armored opponents with a single weapon.
If you’ve mastered storing energy densely, energy weapons are just way better than ballistic ones. You get way more “ammo” out of the them and more flexibility as you say.
Stargate just had intentionally stupid energy weapon usage. The staffs were just bad overall, including in melee. A gun you aim by swnging it on top of your shoulder, that fires incredibly slowly and inaccurately that barely has as much punch as a 5.56 round? That you also use as an incredibly top heavy and slow bo staff? What are you idiots doing?
Meanwhile they have Zats, which are amazing, and barely use them. Rapid fire wide projective pistol grip guns that you can duel wield that instantly down your enemy in one hit, regardless of where you hit them? You have these shits on hand but all you motherfuckers are running around with cumbersome staffs?
Why Stargate command never made a zat rifle is beyond me. A P90 stock with unlimited ammo that was by default non lethal? Why the fuck are you not doing that?
I look at it like the Gou’auld has levels to their militaries, with the bulk of them being geared towards internal security. If these troops flipped, the Gou’auld could later deploy better military to take out the initial troops.
It also helped that any tactics that rebels used successfully against the first set of forces would likely fall apart against the reserve set.
See, I dont buy it. You dont see these troops ever. You do see the Gou’auld with the bog standard Jaffa always at their side, even as their personal entourage. If they had “shock troops” or star wars style “red guards” they would have shown them in the series.
The closest is the super assassins that are occasionally invisible, but they mainly just use a knife, and are never defensive.
I think after thousands of years of just Jaffa vs Jaffa, a race of being with healing powers, their warrior culture got very ritualized and stagnate. The staff weapon is considered thr “honorable” weapon, even though its immensely stupid.
The very minute an outsider comes in with a dumb ballistic gun that shoots 900 rounds/minute, suddenly entire Jaffa squadrons of 100yr+ old warriors are getting mowed down like saturdays grass by a 4 man team consistently of 2 warriors, a warrior scientist and am archiologist that carries a 9mm.
When 9mm linguist man is whooping warriors with a centuries experience emass, yall fucked up.
You dont see these troops ever. You do see the Gou’auld with the bog standard Jaffa always at their side, even as their personal entourage. If they had “shock troops” or star wars style “red guards” they would have shown them in the series.
Serpent guards are the elite of apophis. Other goa’uld have similar elite forces that guard the goa’uld. The First Prime is the foremost jaffa in the goa’uld’s personal guard.
Nevermind the US Military having magazines that fire red-laser stun rounds. We see them abundantly in one episode, and then I assume the writers agreed to pretend we didn’t.
The Federation also has deliberately unwieldy weapons, to discourage solving problems through violence. The redesigned phasers for the 1990s were so awkward that actors in combat-heavy episodes complained. That’s why late-90s Trek introduced rifles.
you know i like to compare this to how we view the bow and arrow compared to guns
yeah the bow is primitive but it also doesn’t shred your eardrums and arrows can usually be fired again, which makes it actually pretty good for hunting even to this day!
I've had Star Wars fans argue vigorously that a Jedi could deflect a cloud of buckshot with a lightsabre. I'm a Star Wars fan myself but that's a sure sign of someone who's gone completely off the deep end. It's a very basic question of simple geometry - you can't intercept every pellet in a three-dimensional cloud with a two-dimensional rod regardless of how fast your precognitive reflexes are.
Yeah it happens, but the bright light from the blade makes it clearly visible meaning that in a real battle your enemy would see where you are and kill you before your boomerang would come back to you
It’s legacy, white spaces weren’t allowed as characters on most FTP software, which is how the warez scene shares it’s releases. It used to be underscores, but dots are closer to a white space regarding separation (space wise), so most release groups use dots nowadays.
Generally, a white space as a character in filenames and directories is “frowned upon” in many operating systems, Windows included (somewhat). It makes writing scripts and software more comlicated because it’s used as as a separator for giving command line/terminal options to commands and binaries (programs).
it goes way back before ftp.. i believe its because the original operating systems filesystems/namespacing could not handle the space character at all. so all files lacked spaces in their names. but only for like the first 30 years
Yes, you’re correct, it goes much further back than FTP, all the way down to UNIX I believe. The problem was commands and parameters (options) which use a white space to seperate between them. So, filenames and directories were’t allowed to have white spaces in them.
I think your workflow is not optimal. Are you using software like Radarr and Sonarr? They do the renaming for you and come with Kodi integration. Or is this not feasible?
I think OP means ROM files for video games systems. Kodi has a RetroArch plugin. As I’m sure you’re aware, Sonarr and Radarr only do TV shows and movies, respectively. Managing ROM packs is a pain in the ass because there are usually thousands of files in a pack (I think there’s something stupid like 9,000 ROMs for NES or SNES).
There is a database that I found called Smoke Monster’s Database, it’s actually a bunch of “databases” (files, not actually databases) that you load into a program and point it at a directory and it categorizes, organizes, and renamed everything for you.
A lot of ROM packs that are out there are pretty old considering the systems that they’re for are decades old and have been passed around and added to for years. The packs are usually in a flat file structure and there are usually multiple files for the same game (version updates from the manufacturer) so it gets annoying pretty quickly. Do you want to have to scroll through 9000 NES games just to get to the Zelda: A Link to the Past?
Look up SMDB (smoke monster’s database). You can download a tool (I forget what it’s actually called, I think one is called ROM manager) which reads the SMDB files and compares the hashes to your ROMs and will categorize and rename them for you. It looks for duplicates, unofficial releases/hacks/patches, categorizes them by country (US, EU and Japan largely), and more. It’s a pretty nifty tool.
I spent like two hours going through PS1 ROMs and was like “there’s got to be a better way!” (insert cheesy black and white infomerical cutaway), started looking up stuff and there it was. Not all game systems are supported (mostly NES, SNES, Genesis/MegaDrive, and a few others) but you can build SMDB “packs” yourself.
I forget if it works on Windows, but I know it works on Linux and it’s either a script or a compiled binary, I forget which, but you can definitely script it, I’ve done so myself since the command string tends to be a bit long.
In my experience, files are named pretty well these days to include resolution, source, the actual title and release year, video format, audio format, language, and release group.
Try looking at the way music files are named and you’ll see how awful naming conventions can get.
“\ “ and [tab] and * are your friends. I’ve been using spaces in Unix filesystems since the early 90s with no issues. Also, using terminal fonts that•put•a•faint•dot•in•each•space•character helps.
This is fine for the most basic of use cases but once you start looping through file names or what have you, you have to start writing robust correct bash and nobody does that
Yeah but at least with periods in the title tab complete will just complete the file name all the way while with a filename with spaces I have to escape the damn space with “\ ” like you said. Why do more work when I don’t have to?
It’s a way bigger pain in the ass than people think it is. I remember having to parse output from a tool for work that had tons of output in tabular format, mixed with normal sentence like strings. JSON, YAML, or XML outputs weren’t available so I had to do a nasty mess of grep, awk, cut, and head/tail, to get what I wanted. My first attempt was literally counting the characters so I could cut out exactly what I needed, but as we all know, hardcoding values is a recipe for headaches later on.
Here’s a horror story from literally yesterday. We have been fighting a system for a client for weeks and it has been a nightmare. Our clients just told us that they outsourced some of their work to an Indian outfit but that outfit is unfamiliar with Linux and doesn’t know how to edit text files so they have been downloading the files to their Windows machines, editing them in Windows, then uploading the contaminated text files back into Linux. None of them, not our client nor the outfit they hired, understood why this was a problem. We have no idea what files are affected and we won’t know until they fail because they obviously did not keep track of what they touched.
I will never forgive excel for automatically converting all of my dates to some weird ass format, or stripping single quotes randomly, or something other BS that they do for no reason
My absolute favourite is stripping leading zeroes from any text that looks like a number, then displaying it in scientific notation. But we get Copilot, so it balances out, right?
Does windows add an extra character at the end that gets converted to new line on linux? Because the other day I were copying a script and after pasting it an extra line was added after every single line, even the empty lines.
I work on a Web app and we recently decided that we’re just not gonna support double quotes in free text fields because oh holy balls what a thing it is to try to deal with those in a way that doesn’t open you up to multiple encoding vulnerabilities.
The issue is the filter that we’re using to avoid multiple encoding attacks de-escapes everything via multiple rounds, then tries to pass it to the next layer of filtering with the de-escaped request body as a json string. Your absolutely right that this is a silly way of doing it, but sometimes we have to live with decisions that were made before we were onboarded to a project. In this particular case, I pushed to improve the filters but all our PO heard was “spend development time weakening security” and at the end of the day they decide what to do and we do it.
This method is a band-aid patch when your downstream code is all messed up and you can’t fix it. Instead of treating the input string correctly, it just removes anything that might possibly trigger some vulnerability in wrong code.
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