merc

If the device in my pocket started smoking like that, I'd throw it away pretty quickly. I suspect these were actual explosives, and there are almost certainly more of them out there.

The scary thing about a supply chain attack is that Hezbollah aren't idiots. This is basically like buying a "burner phone" (that name will now have different connotations now).

In the movies, people buying burner phones go to a random corner store and buy a random phone off the shelf. That way, even if they're under surveillance, the cops / CIA / FBI can't pre-bug the phone because they don't know which corner store the person's going to go to, let alone which phone they'll pick off the shelf.

If you're an armed group in Israel's crosshairs, you're going to take similar precautions when buying thousands of pagers. The safe way to do it would be to slowly and unpredictably get a small sample of ones that are being sold to the general public. If this is true, it could mean that there are tens of thousands of pagers out there that contain explosives that were merely sold as "decoys" in order to try to make Hezbollah feel safe in buying them. In other words, there may be tens of thousands of explosives in pagers that weren't activated because they weren't in the hands of Hezbollah when Israel decided to hit the button.

You'd best recognize Leo Pellegrino

Also, how many pagers are still out there with explosives in them?

Option 1: Israel blew up all the pagers containing explosives, regardless of whether they'd been sold / passed on to family members, friends, or other people who had no connection with Hezbollah, so many of the thousands of injured were innocent bystanders.

Option 2: Israel got the pagers into the hands of tens of thousands of people, then only blew up the ones that were actually in Hezbollah possession, leaving thousands of pagers out there containing explosives.

Knowing Israel, it's almost certainly option 1.

Lithium batteries burn, they don't suddenly explode.

Many pagers, each with a small explosive inside? What's hard to get?

Yeah, I'm an amateur musician and can tell the difference between different kinds of saxomophone, between cellos and violas, and so on. But, there are a lot of things I'd just call "drums" that have specialty names. I mean, how many names are there for "large upright drum that you play with your fingertips and thumbs while it sits between your legs"?

Normally Arsenal has such a right-sided attack. With Odegaard primarily playing slightly to the right that whole White / Saka / Odegaard attack is so good that it is the focus of everything Arsenal tries to do.

Odegaard's absence definitely contributed to blunting that attack, but I also think you have to give a lot of credit to Timber for switching Arsenal to being mostly left-sided in this match. Martinelli is always willing to make turf-tearing runs down that left side, but this time he had Timber working just as hard. That was reflected in Timber's high rating, but I think Martinelli should have been given more credit too. He didn't score or get an assist, but he did a great job defensively, and was so important in relieving the pressure of Tottenham's attacks because he was always available to make a run in behind their defense.

(Also, as an aside, people were saying that Martinelli should have passed to Saka for that chance where he took a shot instead, but to me it looks like, by the time he gets to the box, Saka is very well covered and it would have been much harder to get a successful pass off to Saka than it would have been to just score a goal. He could have crossed it almost immediately after receiving it, but if he'd done that the goalkeeper would have had time to reposition for Saka and Saka would have had to deal with both the Spurs defender and the goalie.)

It's got to be driving him absolutely nuts that the second shooter is also a presumably christian, straight, white, man. Anything else and he could work with it. White woman? Women are too emotional and shouldn't be trusted to make important decisions. Black man? Go-go all out on the racism. Brown skinned? Anti immigration fear mongering. Trans or gay? Groomer nonsense. Anything other than Christian and he could fearmonger about their foreign religions.

Literally the only identity he can't exploit is christian, straight, white men and they're the ones who keep trying to kill him.

A bunch of paper tossed into a corner could get wet, mouldy, get munched on by rats, etc. But, I know what you mean. Spinning plates full of magnetized bits with a connector technology that only lasts a decade at most is hardly going to be reliable, even if stored under ideal conditions.

I don't understand the point they're trying to make. "The United States is the only modern civilization in the world left alone"? What does that even mean? Does he/she think that in the past all these countries were powerful civilizations all at the same time? When Rome (Italy) was powerful, Greece was already past its prime (a.k.a. it was a "shithole"). Rome was so much better than Greece that some prominent Greek people arranged to have themselves sold into temporary bondage / slavery to Romans because once they became freed from that bondage they gained Roman citizenship.

The New Kingdom of Egypt existed between the 16th century BC and the 11th century BC. It overlapped a little bit with the Greek empire, which started around 1200 BC. That powerful Egyptian empire was long gone by the time of the Romans, which is how we ended up with Mark Antony, a Roman, in charge of the "shithole" eastern provinces, which included Egypt under its queen Cleopatra, a Macedonian / Greek descended from a companion of Alexander the Great. Egypt gave way to Greece which gave way to Rome.

In more recent times, Before WWI Great Britain was the world's largest empire, and by the end of WWII the reins had been handed by the new upstart, the USA. When the US empire crumbles, someone else will be the next major world power. That's just how things go. Of course the past empires look like "shitholes" whereas the current empire looks powerful. Once the US is replaced as a world power, it will look like a shithole too.

To me, this is just another story of the music industry's technical incompetence.

Even in the 1990s, everyone would have known that hard drives were not a long-term archival storage solution. This is like crumpling up a piece of paper, tossing it in the corner, then being upset decades later when your "archival solution" had issues.