Full engine swap? Makes it even more ridiculous if so but someone stupid enough to do this seems like the type.

I both lothe this happening and also know that it is often because of an intended safety feature called gray listing.

Basically due to resources cost a lot of spam will only get sent once and real emails will get sent again in exactly this kind of way. So it is a very low bar to pass when the system puts a low but above zero spam risk rating on it.

Yes of course more targeted things like spear phishing try more than once and get past this but bulk market type junk often does get blocked this way.

Most of those kids if things like parks and walkable safe cities increase economic health overall but it doesn’t go into the specific pocket of a capitalist in a direct way they can see. Plus the general kick the poor attitude from the same group.

I’m shocked nobody has brought this up yet.

I would absolutely be a town citizen in Phineas and Ferb. Ideally the guy who always has a new fun project and the side effects from the kids just drop everything in his lap.

Every benefit of a cartoon world with almost none of the cartoon downsides. Nearly Culture level tech after a few years once the boys grow up to by adults and actually start taking things “seriously” as shown in episodes where they go to the near my future.

The worst people in the world are so bad at being bad that they are consistently kept in check and even rehabilitated by trained animals.

TIE Fighter. Flying as a pilot for the Empire in Star Wars including flying alongside Vader to save the Emperor. Includes getting pulled into a secret society with a cool glowing force tattoo showing your rank in service to the Emperor.

The game never says your name but in the old expanded universe books you are basically the Empire version of Wedge.

Edit - It isn’t open world but the limited story does do well at making you feel like you should in the role.

I’ll add that the game came with a manual that did have the character name and a back story. Short version is your character was an illegal swoop bike racer on a world that had been in a multi generation war. Includes your father dying. The empire stops it by basically making it impossible to for the two world to even be able to send attacks at each other. Then recruits all the youth that would have fought in their own war and just sends them out to different parts of the empires wars.

Your preexisting flight skills gets you first a mechanic job on a Star Destroyer and then you save a VIP while testing repairs on a TIE Fighter and get pulled in as an actual pilot with a quiet push to get you up the ranks due to your impressive start.

It is categorized.

Oh I have lived outside the USA at one point and I’m well aware electricity isn’t magic. There were other places too but Guyana most definitely doesn’t have a stable power grid.

I’m not going to starve my kids over that kind of stance on cash only either though.

I can’t understand why banks are as stupid as they often are. Why would you refuse money from the federal government. What do you think we successfully stole money from the IRS through a direct deposit?

I have a concrete and very stupid example.

We got a large gift card as an incentive to renew our lease at our current apartment vs moving. The format they sent it in had no physical card and would only work on either online stores or through a service like Google Wallet AKA a banking app on a mobile device as you mentioned.

So to get groceries while waiting on a tax refund (thanks crappy American economy and taxation methods) we had no choice but to connect and use it that way.

Closest on the market in the USA but price is high (at least range is also excellent) however it doesn’t have the sliding doors.

I have five kids. While I absolutely do make it work with SUV doors it is such a stupid feature to miss out on. Sliding doors are an absolute miracle in terms of practicality by comparison.

The other is the huge SUV nose. While it has a number of other issues that made me cross it off my list, like lack of bi directional heat pump, look at the ID.Buzz for proof of how short you can get the nose while meeting crash standards. They do cheat a bit by having a very long slope on the inside of the windshield but it is massively shorter than almost everything marketed as SUVs and with far better visibility to kids potentially running in front of the vehicle.

I want something like the Staria or the PV7/PV9 available here. I do expect that if the USA doesn’t fully collapse we will get the PV7/PV9 eventually but I wouldn’t be surprised at all on a 5-6 year delay and small shipping numbers.

I would kill (not literally) to have an EV or PHEV minivan. My household is currently a PHEV Mitsubishi Outlander and an old Toyota Sienna.

It is amazing being able to plug in at my rental townhouse even with just a basic 110v outlet and have it charged overnight.

Extremely overkill for direct next step but whenever you have to eventually replace the range/stove seriously consider an induction stove.

Doesn’t magically get rid of all risk but the fact that the stove itself doesn’t heat up is great. If you haven’t used one it is more efficient and the pan or whatever itself becomes the heating surface. All of them I know of even auto disable themselves if no metal is on it which is great for safety.

Absolutely. Used to work at a small MSP. Got ultra unlucky in that we got chosen as the rest case target for a zero day that leveraged our Remote Support tools so our own systems and all of our client systems that were online got hit with ransomware in a very short time frame.

Some clients had local backups to Synology boxes and those worked ok thankfully. However all the rest had backups based on Hyper-V. The other local copy was on a second windows server that also got hit so the local copies didn’t help. They did also have a remote copy which wasn’t encrypted.

So all good right? Just pull the remote backup copy and apply that… Yea every time we had ever used the service before had either been single servers that physically died and took disks along on the death or just file level restores.

Those all worked fine. Still sounds like not a problem right? Nope. We found both that a couple of the larger servers had backups that didn’t actually have everything in spite of being VM images. No idea how their software even was able to do that.

And the worse part was that their data transfer rate was insanely slow. About 10mbps. Not that per server or par client. Nope that was the max export rate across everything. It would have taken literally months to restore everything at that rate.

I hate to say it but yes we did in fact pay the ransom and the. Had to fight for several days going through getting things decrypted. Then going through months of reinstalling fresh copies and/or putting in new servers. Also changing our entire stack at the same time. Shockingly we handled it well enough we lost no clients. Largely because we were able to prove we couldn’t have known ahead of time.

If you read through all that I’ll even say the vendors name. It was StorageCraft. I now have a deep hate for them.

Also one more is that with the old Apple HFS+ filesystem based time machine backups it would sometimes report as a valid self checked backup even if it had corruption. It would do this as long as some self check confirmed that it could fix the corruption during a restore. However if you tried directly browsing through the time machine backups it would have files that couldn’t be read, unless again you did a full system restore with it.

Nearly lost my wife’s semester ending before finding it worked that way.

I can’t confirm it but seems it is fully fixed with APFS and might be one of the reasons they spent the effort to make that transition.

I’m well aware that across most of the rest of the franchise Stormtroopers generally are bad shots.

However I argue that it is easy to view the entire original trilogy as Stormtroopers being competent. A New Hope is easy as you already pointed out that they were supposed to let them go. Plus the off screen extremely effective results against the Lars homestead and the Jawas which is both combat and effectively following the droids.

Empire Strikes Back they are extremely effective with invading the Hoth base. Luke is supposed to get to Vader so that part can be ignored. Then for the rest escaping Lando arranges a lot of surprise trouble for the troops as well as R2D2.

Then for the Ewoks I think almost everyone has it backwards. They all look at how tiny and low tech they are and draw conclusions from that. The more important thing to look at is their results. Not just the main battle but look before that.

1. A scout (Wickket) is smart enough to make a reasonable level of basic communication with absolutely zero starting point with Leia.
2. They successfully trap/ambush a Jedi and a Wookie and a droid with sensors. Ok yea required some stupidity on Chewies part but still incredibly impressive on the Ewoks part.
3. They were literally planning to eat several of the heroes.
4. The traps everywhere. They clearly didn’t make the big traps just in the day or two when the heroes showed up. That forest is an absolute death trap and miracle that the trap the heroes triggered didn’t kill them.
5. Battle morale at large not breaking under attack from mechanized and ranged weapons.
6. Immediate willingness to ride a speeder and a successful dismount in spite of zero clue how they work.

That is just what I can think of off the top of my head. I’m sure there is more. Honestly they are closer to facing an army of fantasy dwarfs than what people say they are like.

I hear people say all the time that it is perfect. It definitely has imperfections.

However while I will insist on it being imperfect it has still been my number one favorite game for at least two decades.

It is easily the closest to perfect I think you could possibly ask for with the hardware limitations and the fact that teams don’t have magical infinite time or budgets. Anyone with even a slight interest in RPGs should play it.

Plus it gave us the musical career of Yasunori Mitsuda