"The paradox of the war in Ukraine is that the West is both more united and less influential in the world than ever before," commented Mark Leonard, co-author and ECFR Director, on the findings of the report, titled "The West United, by Separated from the Rest of the World: International Opinion after a Year of War in Ukraine”.

Together with Ivan Krastev from the Center for Liberal Strategies and Timothy Garton Ash, who teaches at the University of Oxford and Stanford University, he analyzed data from China, India, Turkey, Russia, the USA and ten European countries. Specifically, these are Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain and the non-EU country Great Britain. The data was collected by the institutes Datapraxis, YouGov, Gallup and Norstat.

Do people fall in love with good looks or a great personality?

What about you?

Which is more important? Why?

What is your main weakness?

How do you try to overcome it?

Have you taken part in a structured debate? What issue was debated? If not, do you think you would be good at debating in a formal way?

I have a few older Macs lying around that I've been looking for good uses for. My college laptop was a 2012 and it was pretty decent for its time (doesn't receive software updates anymore, stuck on Catalina. Opencore works for more recent versions, but I prefer having older OS versions on older hardware anyway).

I also have a 2017 that was a work laptop at one point, and it's a dual core model much like the 2012 (although with a much higher clock speed and a newer architecture, so it performs noticeably better). I don't have any PCs laying around anymore and missed having an Ubuntu computer, so rather than going up to a pawn shop to buy a cheap laptop, I figured I'd throw Ubuntu on this thing instead.

Despite this thing being a Mac, Ubuntu has actually worked quite well on it. I had to install a few custom kernel modules to fix bluetooth and speaker drivers, and had to fix a couple of issues with it crashing on suspend and using too much power for the CPU (tlp fixed this, Mac has a bad battery so unexpected shutdowns can occur if the processor tries to draw too much).

Aside for a few things that required manual fixes, it's been working more smoothly than I expected. I like Ubuntu/Gnome 3 better than Mac OS (it's very Mac-like but much less cluttered), and it's been snappier than Mac OS has been on a dual core processor.

Anyone else ever installed Linux onto Mac hardware? How well did it run?

So with the news of the Chinese spy balloon being shot down an idea occurred to me. 
The tech bay was about the size of a 747... why didn't we just grab it?

So given this is Makestation, a place for new ideas, making things, and being creative I'm going to propose a competition for a hypothetical scenario.

You have 1 mission, intercept and capture the payload or entirety of a balloon based aircraft with the following dimensions without damaging or destroying it.

Balloon, 200 feet long, made of a Kevlar weave and filled with hydrogen, resembles a zeppelin.

payload is a box 150x30x30 feet. LxWxH

Velocity 75mph.

has four control propellers roughly 11feet in diameter off to the sides on arms adding an additional 15 feet on the sides to watch out for.

Rules:

You cannot blow it up.
You cannot simply deflate it and bring it to the ground, it must be captured in the air for complete recovery.
You can work by yourself or in a group.
You can jam the signals coming from it.
It will attempt to evade capture but does not have any active defenses.

you have until march 1st when the ideas will be put to a vote.
Winner gets a custom banner made by yours truly as well as a custom title on the site.

Best proposal wins, if you're in a group please state who's in the group with you.

Remember, submit your proposal by 03/01/2023 by posting it here and I will link to it on this post for easy viewing.

Good luck!

What are some things you've wanted pockets in and other things that left you questioning why they had pockets?

For me I can never have enough storage so I want pockets in everything but when I came across boxers with pockets I had to ask myself why.

The US is tracking a suspected Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon over the continental United States, defense officials said on Thursday, a discovery that risks adding further strain to tense US-China relations.

Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said the US government has been tracking the balloon for several days as it made its way over the northern United States, adding it was “traveling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground.”

Speaking on background, a senior US defense official said senior military officials had advised President Joe Biden not to shoot it down due to fear the debris could pose a safety threat to people on the ground.

“We are confident that this high-altitude surveillance balloon belongs to the [People’s Republic of China],” the senior defense official said. “Instances of this activity have been observed over the past several years, including prior to this administration.”

While the balloon’s current flight path carries it over “a number of sensitive sites,” the official said it does not present a significant intelligence gathering risk. The balloon is assessed to have “limited additive value” from an intelligence collection perspective, the official added.

The US, the official said, is “taking steps nevertheless to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information. We are also tracking what abilities it could have in gaining insights, and continue to monitor the balloon as it was over the continental United States.”

Here