Outsiders also need to understand that tactical party registrations are relatively common in certain election districts in order to access a particular party primary ballot.

You really can’t read a whole lot into party registration information. It frequently doesn’t reflect voters’ real politics at all.

America actually has a long tradition of presidents and presidential candidates getting shot. That’s why the secret service is as well funded as it is. Statistically, President is actually a pretty dangerous job for exactly this reason.

When the general election comes around, your ballot is still secret. So you can publicly declare a registration for the Republican party, but then vote secretly for the Democratic candidate. (Or vice versa)

In the UK, if you want to have some effect on which candidates are selected by a party, you usually have to join the party and go to meetings and stuff. In the US, parties mostly use public primary elections to select candidates, and the primary elections are run by the same government bodies that run the general election. That’s why the voter registration cares about the party.

For example, synaptic is a long running front end for apt that has the buttons for update and upgrade.

Not sure what else you’d expect to happen.

Houstonians are upset because when it comes to hurricanes, the category matters a lot.

When it passed through Houston, Beryl was a tropical storm sitting just under the threshold for category 1 hurricane status. Category 1 is the lowest grade of hurricane there is. Even still, 85% of Centerpoint’s grid lost power at the peak.

That’s a worse result for the power grid than previous storms that were higher category storms. So it definitely looks like Centerpoint has been neglecting maintenance recently.

Now that’s a dispersed operation.

Specifically, the location is fairly far away from China and the South China Sea. So that by itself represents a level of blue water capability that the PLAN has not been well known for.

Barns have physical dimensions of area, even though they are used to express probability distributions. So you can imagine “the broad side of a barn” as being so many square meters, but then scale it way way down to a particle physics equivalent, and you get the barn. Which apparently roughly represents “the broad side of a uranium nucleus”.

They famously only got the engineering set built because Roddenberry insisted on writing it into the pilot episode.

Replicators, just like the holodeck and the transporters convert energy into matter. They don’t need any base matter.

According to stuff like the Star Trek Technical Manual, this is not true.

Transporters work by disassembling you into your constituent particles, transporting those particles to the destination, and then reassembling them. It takes a lot of energy to do that, but officially anyway your particles are the same particles before and after.

Replicator works by transporting base nutrient stocks out of tanks into the replicator terminal, but this time it rearranges the nutrient stocks according to whatever the target recipe is

You’re saying those are freakin oubliettes?

It really is junk fake Latin.

Part of the impact of that scene is that up to that point, the Death Star was not under Vader’s command, but he kind of comes in there and starts bossing everyone around anyway.

I can’t immediately find a reference for this, but I would assume that all US forces deployed to support NATO in Europe can be commanded by the Supreme Allied Commander (SACEUR) who is always an American general. If the Russkies decide to invade, I’m sure that SACEUR has the authority to dictate response if he can’t immediately reach the President.

The only reason that NATO would need to urgently and immediately speak to POTUS is for nuclear weapons release, and fortunately that scenario has been wargamed to hell and back.

It’s all massive spaghetti code too, including spaghetti wiring. Terrible cable management.

Really, I think rtfm culture predates Windows by a good bit.

Pro tip: EU membership comes with its own defense pact among just the EU members. Whether you join NATO or not.

150 pounds makes about 600 average burgers, you reckon?

Get a bigger monitor, just like the software dev has.

Yep. Texas does that because of a state law that says any landowner with property adjacent to a highway has a right to access that highway.