One of my better cinema experiences was watching Austin Powers 3 at the theater in some random late-morning screening where there were only three friends and me in the hall, plus two elderly ladies in their 70s. They were laughing so hard that the movie became even funnier for us, because you somehow wouldn’t expect them to find it that hilarious.
Also, growing up in a small town in Yugoslavia in the 80s definitely didn’t guarantee a top-tier cinema experience, to put it mildly. But the feeling I had watching the James Bond opening credits from a damaged film reel, with frayed subtitles projected from a decades-old projector, is something I can never quite recreate when watching on a 4K screen from a perfect source. So there's that.
The worst part is that the discrete GPU was used to drive external displays, so now I’m stuck with a 17” integrated display, which is large for a laptop but still small for a computer that I’ll never again lug with me (it’s heavy by today’s standards).
> ... in the Balkans this was exclusively done in areas to harm civilians ...
It wasn’t.
While there were probably some areas that were mined with the intention of harming civilians, most of the mines were laid in places where you would expect the enemy to advance. In the section of the front where I was located, all minefields were laid with the intention of slowing down or preventing enemy infiltration (which does not exclude areas near human settlements).
There was simply no point in mining places that were under your control and where you expected your people to live after the war, unless it was necessary.
People who placed mines did it in a country which they invaded, not their own country. Again, my garden was literally mined by the aggressors in the 90s.
What do you mean? There was never any question of attacking Russia and fighting any war on their soil. Nobody in their right mind would attack a country with the 2nd largest army and nuclear weapons. The war in Ukraine definitely made this army still very weak, but, except Ukraine defending itself, I don't see anyone rushing to attack Russia anytime soon. It makes no sense now and made no sense before they invaded Ukraine. There is nothing to win by attacking Russia and a lot to lose.
The best way to 'attack' Russia is to undermine its economic and political systems then let unrest amongst its citizenry do the dirty work. 1917 showed Russia's proletariat was very effective at achieving regime change.
How do you undermine the economic and political system of a country? The economic one can be undermined by sanctions, and they happened only because the war - before that the West was happy to send billions to Russia. The political one seems quite stable, Putin had a few decades to cement it and make sure nobody takes it to the streets, and if someone is brave enough to do it, they will be quickly pacified. He is switching the internet on and off and there is no sign of Russians reacting like Iranians.
But I saw several people criticizing their relatively high position on this chart given high incompetence and losses.
EDIT: Apparently this website doesn't follow any rigorous methodology. So basically the only thing their army is 2nd in the world is the nominal number of nukes (hopefully most of them don't work).
The legend was that Celeron 300A CPUs packaged in Malaysia were more overclockable than those packaged in Costa Rica. I specifically hunted down a Malaysian one, and it happily ran at 450 MHz for years.
I remember installing plain Windows XP at a time when Service Pack 3 had already been released. Since I had only recently gotten cable internet, it didn’t cross my mind to disconnect the network cable, and my PC got owned almost immediately. IIRC, some dialog just popped up as an artifact of a successful penetration, right after the network connection was established - before I even managed to insert the SP3 CD. So it was pretty bad for a while.
A similar thing happened to me - I lent a phone to my mother-in-law and created an account for her. She returned the phone once her own phone was fixed.
A few years passed, and a couple of weeks ago my phone broke, so I wanted to use that one until I bought a new one. It turned out that Apple had permanently deactivated the iCloud account on that phone. I could make calls, but I couldn’t install or update any apps, even though I still controlled the email address that was used to create the Apple account. Not that 5S is very useful these days but still.
Also, growing up in a small town in Yugoslavia in the 80s definitely didn’t guarantee a top-tier cinema experience, to put it mildly. But the feeling I had watching the James Bond opening credits from a damaged film reel, with frayed subtitles projected from a decades-old projector, is something I can never quite recreate when watching on a 4K screen from a perfect source. So there's that.
</old-man-rant>
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