I mean it has clearly racist origins, but I've never actually heard it used in a racist manner in real life.
At least where I was, there were basically zero Asians, "ricers" were (typically but not exclusively) Japanese cars that were customized terribly, as someone else mentioned, all show and no go. You could have American ricers too.
The owners, the "rice boys", were pretty much all white guys.
I get that Ukraine won't consider the possibility of ceding any territory, nor should they. They probably don't like their allies even mentioning it.
But, there's the separate issue of not being able to join NATO with ongoing territorial disputes. Without much context to go on, I would almost interpret this as something more along the lines of "Ukraine could join NATO tomorrow if the dispute went away (by whatever method)".
My one experience was good. Randomly picked one place to call, they straight up told me it was gonna be a while until they could get to me, and to call this other company to see if they could help faster.
The place they recommended rerouted a couple of their drivers while I was on the phone to get to me faster, they were there in 30 minutes, did a good job, and the whole experience was very pleasant.
Definitely have both places in my contact list if I ever need another tow.
I suppose it's the natural result of wanting to keep the show on as long as possible, when you've only got one good idea for the story arc. You need a lot of filler.
I'd like to see more shows done in the style of Babylon 5, where the creator had the whole 5 years written out from day 1. There was very little in the show that felt like filler or treading water.
Which also may explain why books are being brought to TV more frequently these days. But, TV showrunners have a bad habit of taking a good novel and totally mangling it in the translation to TV, so it's not a guaranteed win.
I have the Sportback and not the TourX, but it's still a great car. Got it for a steal too.
It's mostly decent, some interesting twists, but also plenty of dumb stuff in it too. It's only 7 episodes, so even if you don't end up liking it you haven't wasted much time!
Tanium has some common apps pre-packaged and regularly updated, you could just setup an ongoing deployment for those to automate keeping them up to date with minimal work on your part.
If you need to update something not on that list, you will need to make an upgrade package yourself with the updated installer or files.
Whether this is actually easy or not really depends on the app vendor and the software. It's usually straight forward, but not always. But that's the case with literally any software deployment solution.
I have one app in particular who's install and config essentially un-automateable. But it's a shitty LOB app that was written in the 90's to be intentionally obtuse to prevent privacy, hopefully that's not an issue in your case.
We are using Tanium, just put the agent on the servers and you are good to go...build your packages and set up deployment jobs.
It also handles Windows patching, and can do system inventory, among other features.
It's also great for software deployments to you remote workforce systems that are rarely/never on the corporate network.
And seriously, you want a domain. GPOs are incredibly useful for pushing out a huge variety of Windows config changes extremely easily.
I generally find watching in release order tends to work better than chronological order at least the first time thru. The episodes are written assuming you aware of future events depicted in previous shows, if you aren't they tend to lose a lot of their impact.
Congrats for getting thru TAS, I have tried and I just can't.
To be fair, I think this is pretty common in most rural areas of the US, it's definitely not exclusive to western Kansas. Common enough in the Virginias and Carolinas for the last 7 years that it never occured to me that someone would find it novel in 2023! I don't even have pictures.
It's just one of my fans!
Well, that's not at all what I said. Japanese compact cars were generally pretty cool and affordable in a way most similar small American cars were not, so of course they get customized a ton more that their American equivilents.
The people who actually made their cars perform were the racers, those who did the truly terrible mods were the ricers.
Yes, racist due to stereotyping. But it was more wordplay for insulting the taste of the person in question in comparison to the racers, not their ethnicity or the origin of their car. Bad taste is pretty universal. And as with pretty much anything in language, people can and clearly have used it as a racial insult. I just don't think that was it's origin.
I am really amused it has morphed into a more positive connotation with the *nix crowd, while still meaning essentially the same thing. Language truly is a living thing.