I just realized you meant a Minecraft-style square cartridge. There are a lot of very good reasons for this that should be very obvious to anyone who knows even a little bit about how firearms work and thinks about it for a little while.

Rifling, case expansion, aerodynamics.

First, some terminology. A “cartridge” is fully assembled and ready to fire. The “bullet” is the projectile that comes out of the barrel.

Some cartridges do have bullets with a flat nose, like the .40 s&w fmj cartridge pictured here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.40_S%26W

Some bullets are even “flatter”, like wadcutter rounds, which are designed to cut clean holes in paper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadcutter

In the case of handgun rounds, larger caliber bullets tend to be flatter to prevent over-penetration leading to collateral damage. Smaller-caliber bullets tend to be rounder (so called “round nose” ammunition) so they penetrate more, giving a greater chance of having the desired effect on the intended target.

There’s a LOT more to it than that, but that’s the quick and dirty answer. There’s also hollow point ammunition, which is a whole other rabbit hole, and we haven’t even talked about rifle cartridges yet, which can have wildly different bullets for all kinds of applications.

The reason why Glocks have that characteristically square slide is so the sights can be as low and as close to the barrel as possible. There’s a very long-winded reason as to why this is a good thing on a handgun. See the “bore-to-sight distance” section here for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bore_axis

Something Awful forums did something kind of like this. Creating an account was $10. If you got banned, you were allowed to create a new account. It was kind of like a swear jar. People there tended to be a bit more educated (still stupid, just educated) and have jobs so the post quality was (usually) a fair bit better than places like 4 chan.

It’s a good thing ordinary citizens don’t have unlimited access to lethal weapons then.

Boiled RATs only

The people who need to see this most will either never see it or dismiss it as “woke” propaganda.

The rest of us already know.

It makes me wonder, in the real world, do these people walk into parties and tell the host, “Hey man, great party and all, but if I can’t say the N-word, I’m outta here. So, what’s the deal? We cool?”

“Sanctuary Cities” as the US American media reports them, do not exist. They’re a boogeyman invented to sell far-right propaganda.

As far as what happened to the migrants that were lied to, kidnapped, and sent across the country against their will; once they arrived at their destination, they were given food, water, shelter, adequate clothing, and transportation to wherever they wanted. It disrupted absolutely nothing in the cities where they arrived.

Those people were an unwilling prop for a publicity stunt that accomplished nothing other than pushing a narrative to cult members.

Reply notifications are off. I’ll be hearing no arguments to the contrary. I don’t need to hear them for the same reason I don’t need to hear anyone explain why 2+2=5.

Only SNL writers know how to write (well) for SNL. It’s a very specific style that takes time to learn.

The host’s monologue is the crown jewel of every episode; they won’t trust anyone else with it. Making sure the opening of the show is funny and hooks people is the most important part of the show. Stats and ratings prove, if the monologue sucks, people will change the channel. Even among the SNL writers, only the best of the best are trusted to write or approve material for the monologue.

Headline should be, “European Commission demands their cut of the action.” 🫴

Ok, I installed buttons in my pet rat’s ribcage and shoved an IR sensor up its ass. Anyone know where to get drivers for this thing?

You can only eat misbehaving children

That’s why I have notifications off. Once you get to a certain age, people not agreeing with you is their problem.

The joke is the person making the comment. “Ha ha, look how ignorant they are.”

Dude, it’s a fictional creature.

Just wanted to add, the reason JavaScript is on the web is because it’s designed to keep running, no matter what errors occur. This is the opposite of what’s desired from most languages, but the reason it’s a priority for JS is because the web page HAS to work.

This is the reason for a lot of JS’s quirky behavior, such as type coercion. In most cases, 1 + ‘cat’ should absolutely produce a terminating error. But, you don’t want someone visiting your site to have the page crash, so it’s preferable to return bad data than to terminate entirely, so you get ‘1cat’ as your output.

Came here to say this.

.50 AE and .50 BMG are worlds apart. Hell, even the difference between .45 ACP and .45-70 is pretty big.

Yeah, I think I meant Sodium-ion

It’s pretty easy to cry about bad math, but it’s a lot harder to figure out the right math.

Don’t worry, I’ll try to do it for you again a second time.

Power consumption varies. Use the average monthly power draw from the solar array, let’s assume for demonstration purposes 1,000 kWh/month.

Multiply that by the cost of 1 kWh from the power company, let’s say 20 cents.

In one month, that means you saved $200.

Let’s assume the solar equipment costs $1,000.

The answer is 5 months, or 5,000 kWh.

Sorry, I’ll make sure the free work I do for you is better quality next time.

It’s really hard to give a less-than-book-length answer without simplifying a LOT, but I’ll do my best to be as accurate and comprehensive as I can while still offering a somewhat brief answer.

What you’re ultimately getting at is a concept called “abstraction,” which basically means “letting the language worry about it instead of the programmer.”

A computer operates using ones and zeroes, also called “binary”. These patterns of ones and zeroes are interpreted as either data or instructions depending on which processor register they’re sent to. Representing data this way is inefficient and difficult to read for humans. For single-digit numbers, it’s fine, but for sentences, paragraphs, entire programs, representing them in binary takes up a lot of space, so we “abstract” binary by representing it as hex code (base 16, zero through ‘F’). This allows us to show the same data in a more condensed way. This is only one kind of very simple abstraction.

Modern programming languages aim to abstract as much of the coding process as possible. Languages like Assembly that abstract very little are considered “close to the metal” because the programmer needs to do EVERYTHING manually. The benefit to this is that it’s very efficient; the program only does what it absolutely needs to do. The tradeoff is that it takes a LOT of extra time to do everything manually, the margin for error is very slim, and you’re pretty much on your own if things go wrong. Another downside is that, since everything is manual, Assembly needs to be written for the specific processor architecture you’re using.

C is only slightly further from the metal than Assembly, so it’s still very efficient, but misuse is very easy to do, especially by accident. The main benefit is that C code can be compiled. Compilation is a process that does many things, but one thing it can do is take C code and turn it into Assembly instructions that can be interpreted by a specific processor. So, you can write the program once, then compile it to x86, ARM, Mac, whatever. With Assembly, you would need to write a different version of the program for each architecture it would need to be compatible with. Doom was developed in C, which has a lot to do with the “but will it run Doom?” meme.

From there, different languages abstract different aspects to different degrees to make them more specialized to certain tasks.

C++ adds object-oriented functionality to C, slightly impacting performance, but making classes and inheritance possible without hacking memory pointers to behave the same way. C++ is typically used when high-performance is desired, but the code base is still very large. Thr Source engine, and thus, Source engine games like TF2, are written in C++.

Python and other languages sufficiently far from the metal have the benefit of being interpreted, which means the code you write is executed in real-time. This means syntax errors and such can be identified in real-time by your IDE. With C and other compiled languages, you have to wait until you compile your code to find errors. This makes Python ideal for developing many, simple programs where performance isn’t a (big) consideration.

C# and Java are interpreted, but also run inside special runtime environments, which makes them compatible with just about any hardware, but is very resource intensive. Unity engine games like Rust were developed in C#; Minecraft was developed in Java.

Haxe can be cross-piled to C code that can then be compiled to Assembly, allowing developers to write one program compatible with all gaming consoles (Dead Cells, for example) without the performance impact associated with languages like Java.

J and Lua are specialized to complex mathematics and simulations. Lua is the language used to create Beam.NG:Drive and Project Zomboid.