Bay 12 Games Forum

Apparently it was a training flight, which both pilots (presumably at least one being considered experienced enough to train) ejected after an engine caught fire on take-off. Which means nearly full fuel tanks (though no ordinance, presumably, if that wasn't part of the training) and it was either a bird-strike or a very rapid mechanical failure (both of which you'd expect ground teams to mitigate through various procedures).

But hard to tell how accurate those details are. They sound damning enough, but could even then be a coverup for even worse digressions from basic airworthiness and flight safety that caused (by current reports) three civilian deaths.

A section of the caverns is revealed to be nothing but an ad for some German brand of soup. Made of slade and semi-molten rock.

There'll be more than enough conventionally-warheaded precision[1] missiles being tilted in the direction of strategic targets of retaliation within Russia (or its various fleets/wings currently on the move outside of the territory, at any given time), being a lot safer (nominally) to base all over the place than the rather higher security required to host a nuke.  The question being whether a cruise-missile/whatever 'only' with an explosive warhead could be mistaken for one with one with a nuclear one and thus make the response-to-the-response a full-blown war.

Greater minds than mine are probably juggling this kind of issue, right now, though. How twitchy the trigger-finger is will play a part in it, but that the level of (conventional) readiness is surely already hightened.


[1] Theoretically. With a significant mass of them being launched, we could find ourselves with a few Chinese Embassy/Civilian Infrastructure hits deliberately but mistakenly, and who knows how much damage from the debris of any interceptions (if the air-shield isn't total bunkum) or in-flight failures of some other kind. If there's ever a need (or an opportunity) to pick apart exactly what happened after such an attack, I'm sure there'll be various less than optimal situations directly arising from the choices made.

I'm afraid you've lost me on the Drive Image thing. I'm not sure I have any DVD-ROMs around, let alone enough to back up a few thousand GB of accumulated data. I also don't have or use Linux, so if that's required it'll also be troublesome. If a Drive Image is something a bit handier I'm willing to learn more, otherwise I'll probably have to break out the backup external drive and save things that way.

I've used this product in the past, to good effect. In my case I burnt it to a DVD-R (maybe even CD-R? ...and it could have been on a USB memory-stick/thumbrdive/dongley-thing/whatever you call it) and used it in conjunction with an external-HDD to save verbatim images of internal-HDDs (there's some compression factor in doing that, even accounting for 'unused space' still being copied[1]), all through a GUI-like text interface that really only lets you mess up with what you do (if you don't pay attention), not how you try to do it...

Not absolutely necessary, if you don't want to, I'd just suggest it as a precautionary thing, tuned to your particular needs/desires/abilities...

I only have one monitor/mouse/keyboard because I was hoping to make a clean sweep of things but maybe that was a little overly ambitious.

There's always getting some form of Remote Desktop working on the one computer (for which you now don't need IO devices, just a network-style connection of any kind) and control it from the computer for which you do permanently have your peripherals plugged in. Or find a cheap KVM. Or get a decent additional mouse and keyboard (cheap and cheerful will do) and as good a new monitor as you think you can spring to (possibly the current one doesn't even have multiple switchable video-inputs to it, or other features that you might find nice to use).

Compared to most of the hardware costs of a worthwhile new computer, only really the new monitor might be a significant increase (but I don't know how tight the purse-strings need to be for you, right now!), while the faux-KVM option of Remote Desktopping needs perhaps to learn a little about what client/server setups you can work with in your case and might be a learning-curve with (initially swapping at least the monitor between systems as you're trying to make both ends work properly). - But I'm the kind of person who has a small handful of extra monitors (even if I have to fall back to CRTs) and can probably dig up a reasonably working mouse and keyboard, without even having to 'borrow' them from work the next time I'm in the vicinity of the office concerned, so I am perhaps a bit too glib in not thinking of this as a speed-bump on the way to multi-computer nirvana...


Really, I meant to say, short and sweet, that I'm perfectly sure you can solve your problems, but the manner in which you do will depend a lot upon exactly what setup you have. I meant to keep it short and sweet, but... too much width of possible choices to give you the short-sweet answer that I really tried to give you! Sorry. It might be better if you have a techy-type friend who could actually look at what your before/after systems are, perhaps even know what sort of thing you're likely to be capable of (with or without a bit of effort along the way). Or wait for another thread-watcher to respond with a much better distillation of the relevent sage advice that you'd find useful.

((Oh look, LordBaal has indeed given advice that, yes, I'd also credit as being decent approaches. While I've been trying to make this post slightly more reasonable to read. For the cloning option, Clonezilla/the others would of course be one of the ways to do this step, for example.))




[1] Combining with a bit of actual initial disk-clean-up (wisely done) and then using a repartitioning utility[2] to shrink the partition to only the space actually used means the actual partition image is at least as small. It's very useful for creating a redeployable system almost regardless of the disc-size you'd be putting it on. Get it into the smallest-necessary clone-to-disc size and then expand it back out to fill the available hardware. But that's an advanced thing, with other considerations, not at all what you're doing.

[2] I mean, there's Live disks for that too, although gparted suggests you use a cloner first in case you mess up that, which would be a bit chicken-and-egg. But, with that caveat, this linked page suggests other cloners as well as Clonezilla that you might also want to look at.

[3] e.g. a modern mobo might not even have IDE headers, and if your old computer drive is that then you may have to look for a caddy solution, though PCI-ish cards with IDE headers or internally connecting it to an IDE-to-USB converter might also be good enough for your case. There's so many ways to do the physical connection, and even more ways to usefully progress from there and use the physically-connected drive once you've done so. And I've probably used about half of the ones I can think of, which are themselves doubtless only half of the ones that are actually practical (never mind possible) to do...

(...everybody already knew that the answer was "Quack!", right? That's the only reason nobody said it, shirley...)

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I hear that a couple of oil-industry executives have been arrested after throwing flowers at an Andy Warhole picture.

Of the various scenarios that I'm considering, that isn't even my least likely.

(c.f. my last reply to Max, at least in part inspired by that possibility. Luckily, Max isn't in one of the more prime spots for a bit of creative intentional self-destruction to that end, more likely only somewhere that an unintentional accident would happen.)

Might need an as-yet distant level of desperation to put into action, but if they haven't a plan for it being kept in reserve (by a "think the unthinkable" strategic department, as with any other nation with such possibilities, identifying places just strategic enough to be imaginable, but not actually self-crippling to some arbitrary extent) then I'd be surprised. But it could just as easily be an unplanned thing, or an accident, or true disaffection. Probably far more so than a "false-false-flag" clever plot by Ukraine

I think you're currently in less danger of that than of somehow falling victim to your own country's nukes. Which should be a comforting statement, but... Stay safe.

Neither the judicial system nor the system to treat mental health seems to be able to provide a restorative mechanism at this point. The victims are beyond help, the vicitimiser is beyond being helped. And executing the guy is basically as useless (in dealing with him, and as being a deterrent to others who might come after him) as just throwing away the key to whatever box they'd otherwise have to keep him in.

I'm not sure I have any strong opinions about what happens now. Sending him to 'the next world' (given I'm fairly sure there's no divinely-judged level of torment waiting for those who deserve it) is not my default choice under any circumstances, but neither is any thought about not doing so, in this case, the tale told about his case lacking even the modicum of doubt about his practical guilt. I'm not sure I could arrange for any forthcoming fate that he didn't deserve, but (oxymoronically) I'm definite that I also could not arrange for him whatever fate that he does.

The best outcome (leaving him aside entirely) is to identify all the past-failures and learn from them so that things never get to this stage ever again. Little hope of that, though, as the increased interventionist strategies required are antithetical to both libertarians and liberals, for mostly different reasons, and would just get unfunded/defunded by the small-government crowd at the earliest opportunity (and in entirely the most inconvenient order of steps) even if set up correctly in the first place.


This is entirely through the lense of what the recent messages upon this thread have revealed, with no further personal research into the situation. But it seems to ring true with what I understand of how both the broken and sticking-plastered bits of the justice system (and the rest) actually 'work' in such hard cases. And if I were asked to judge what happens next then I also would tend to say that it's really not up to me and just not let the buck stop on my particular square of the game-board. Yeah, I think this is a rare occasion where I'd do the same as this particular incarnation of SC. Not sure if my motives are fully the same, but ends up the same in the long run.