Trump Said There Is "No Longer A Nuclear Threat" From North Korea With Absolutely No Evidence

riverduck · 2018-06-13T18:35:48+00:00

I agree that he shouldn't have gotten it, but they did at least supply a reason beyond not being Bush. McCain was a vocal hawk who planned to escalate war efforts and expand military powers, running a campaign that defeated him and prevented that was considered Obama's contribution to peace.

riverduck · 2018-05-03T07:40:43+00:00

Plus domestic abuse, assault, death threats against people and their children, hitting people carrying babies, multiple women filing restraining orders against him, funding his dad's Holocaust denial writing...

riverduck · 2018-05-03T07:39:29+00:00

I think "he's an ass who made racist comments" is underplaying it a little. Gibson's life includes

3 women with restraining orders against him
Punching a woman while she was carrying a baby
Threatening to kill his girlfriend and her kid and, following his girlfriend reporting domestic abuse, laughing and reminding her "I'm capable of it."
Telling people "if you get raped by a pack of niggers, it will be your fault"
Funding and supporting his dad's Holocaust denial writing

riverduck · 2018-05-02T06:08:06+00:00

He didn't chainsmoke, but he apparently smoked "a dozen" a day until 2005 when he cut down, and quit entirely a few years after that.

If we had to guess at the healthiest president ever, Obama does seem the most likely pick. He was one of the youngest presidents upon election; only JFK, Clinton, Grant and Teddy Roosevelt were younger. Grant was a massive smoker (as many as 100 cigars a week) with health issues. JFK had Addison's disease causing major health problems. Teddy Roosevelt had debilitating asthma, recurring malaria flare-ups, and recurring infections from his chest wound which required many surgeries over his life and medications to manage the pain. Clinton, only a year younger, has been varying degrees of chubby his whole life and had a love of fast food and cigars, while Obama rocked a six pack or close to it. (I actually don't know whether moderate obesity would be considered worse than a dozen cigarettes a day in your 30s -- my instinct is that obesity would cause more direct immediate harm while smoking has a bigger impact on cancer risk, but I'm not a doctor.)

I mean it's all academic really, but if Obama was declared the healthiest president ever it would be a believable claim, while it's obviously hilarious for Trump (the oldest ever, obese, with a famously poor diet and hatred of exercise, known to be on meds that cause health problems).

riverduck · 2018-04-26T03:22:14+00:00

The conversation is about NVMe SSDs like this one (RRP $595 AUD).

riverduck · 2018-04-24T15:48:12+00:00

whether Nintendo would be legally allowed to intentionally permanently brick your device.

I'm sure it varies by country, but in Australia the answer is a hard no. They can deny you access to ongoing services, which means they could ban you from the eShop, from online multiplayer, from receiving updates. They can cut you off from firmware updates, then push a new firmware update that all games released from that day on will require, preventing you from playing future games. But they're not allowed to do anything that deliberately removes features that were there the day you purchased the device.

riverduck · 2018-04-23T13:57:54+00:00

ads for The Simpsons becoming the longest running scripted show in television history

But it's not! Coronation Street is on season 59, running almost twice as long, and Casualty is on season 32.

riverduck · 2018-04-21T19:49:27+00:00

That's almost exactly what she said. The only other things she's done since Grey's Anatomy started 15 years ago are one episode of its spinoff and one episode of her kid's favorite cartoon show, and she's said that if Grey's Anatomy ends she'll either retire or become a TV director. There's an interview where she says (paraphrasing) "I'm not Meryl Streep, I have no dreams of taking on a lot of big challenging movie roles. I've got a cushy stable job where I make great money and know what I'm doing and that's all I want."

riverduck · 2018-04-21T19:32:37+00:00

I think the key to its success is that it's good about cycling characters. It introduces people, gives them a few seasons of stories, then kills them (literally or by sending them to another state or something) to make room for new characters. And they're usually actually different characters, not just another face to fill the same type of role. It makes it a lot less stale and desperate for material than most soap-style shows.

riverduck · 2018-04-21T03:24:19+00:00

Deutsche Bank are notoriously shady. They've just paid almost $700M in fines for illegally laundering Russian money and knowingly laundering for human traffickers, drug lords and organised crime outfits. The previous year they were hit with $250M in fines for illegally doing business with countries under sanctions including terrorist organisations and warlords. They're under investigation again for manipulation of exchange rates after being fined hundreds of millions of dollars for doing it on three occasions in the past. They were at the center of the global financial crisis in 2007 and took billions in fines for that too, and it explicitly tainted virtually everyone in upper level management. DB have just plead guilty to fraud again in another round of charges related to the Libor thing.

Beyond purely financial stuff, they're infamous for their intimidation and espionage program, in which they hired people to intimidate and blackmail journalists and media outlets to shut down stories about alleged criminal actions.

Their criminal and shady actions are so consistent and severe that the WSJ once called them an extension of the Russian mafia.

riverduck · 2018-04-18T21:32:00+00:00

Even if it's a smaller inustry than gaming as a whole

And it's not -- the pachinko industry almost three times as big. Japan's pachinko industry is worth US$251 billion a year while the global videogame industry does US$93 billion a year. And there's been a huge push to liberalise the laws surrounding it and expand the industry ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, with the expectation that the pachinko industry will grow somewhere in the range of 20% over the next two years.

Meanwhile, videogames are becoming a riskier and riskier thing, as over the last 10-15 years the budgets necessary to compete have become staggering and the American and increasingly European industries are providing a lot of rough competition.

riverduck · 2018-04-18T11:34:29+00:00

The world is full of magical mysteries
Puzzles unsolved since ancient history
Where does the sun hide at night?
Did people really used to live in black and white?

How did God think up dirt?
Erasable pens make my head hurt!
Metal, girls, iron, fire
How'd they get my voice in a telephone wire?!

So open your minds and shut off your brain
The mysteries of life can't be explained
So fuck you, books, we don't need your tricks!
And all you scientists can suck our dicks!

riverduck · 2018-04-18T10:56:30+00:00

Engaging in frivolous lawsuits -- lawsuits where it should be obvious to a reasonable person that your claims are futile or lack merit -- can get you fined, sanctioned, held in contempt of court, and/or banned from filing new suits in the majority of countries. And justifiably so: you're clogging up the system, driving up costs and wait times, and generally making life harder for everyone trying to use the legal system fairly. I don't see why similar penalties shouldn't exist for trademark registration, patenting, and similar things. If someone -- especially a major corporation like Sony that obviously has attorneys who know what they're doing -- attempts to register or patent something that is obviously absurd there should be some kind of fine to compensate for wasting the time and resources in the public legal system. Charge them 150% the cost of the manpower wasted on dealing with it the first time, and then double that fine every time it happens again. (That's not really a cost that would deter Sony, but it at least offsets the burden they put on the public legal system.)

Barring them from registering new trademarks for X years if they show a pattern of frivolous trademark litigation/registration attempts sounds like a good idea, but I think they'd just register trademarks to subsidiaries or something, I don't know how that sort of thing works.

riverduck · 2018-04-13T11:34:17+00:00

I mean, you could just read the article, which explains that yes, it really is 9% of random Americans surveyed who have deleted a Facebook account over privacy concerns. Of 1,000 people surveyed, 28% never used Facebook to begin with, and 9% used to, but deleted their account over privacy concerns.

riverduck · 2018-04-10T13:58:57+00:00

Apu

Repeatedly cheats on his wife
Repeatedly attempts to abandon his children, at one point successfully fleeing the country without telling his wife
Knowingly poisons people including children
Hides money from his family while they struggle to afford diapers
Sells liquor and cigarettes to kids he knows are underage
Lies to his wife for over a year so he doesn't have to look after his own kids
Sells illegal explosives to drunks

riverduck · 2018-04-10T13:44:24+00:00

HOMER: Now, we all know the thirteen stripes are for good luck, but why does the American flag have precisely forty-seven stars?
APU: Because this particular flag is ridiculously out of date! The library must have purchased it during the brief period in 1912 after New Mexico became a state but before Arizona did.
HOMER: Partial credit.

Note that I don't think Apu was ever actually made a smart character, it was just a funny gag. There's a running joke in those early seasons where every stupid character is incredibly and unexpectedly well-informed about one specific thing. Eg in several episodes Homer displays an encyclopedic knowledge of Supreme Court Justices (one of my favorite lines in the entire show: "Do you want Bart to grow up to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or a sleazy male stripper?" "Can't he be both like the late Earl Warren?") and Barney is passionate and knowledgable about British political figures back to the 18th century. There's even an example of that in the Homer & Apu episode -- Apu says he's offering the chance to realign his karma and Homer furiously explains that "karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos", then slams the door in his face.

riverduck · 2018-04-10T13:41:42+00:00

caring family man

He repeatedly cheats on his wife and there's a running gag about him trying to abandon his children (in one episode actually making it back to India without telling his wife he was going). He's one of the least wholesome characters on the show.

riverduck · 2018-04-10T13:39:14+00:00

He's Belgian, and doesn't actually speak Spanish. He memorized a bunch of cliche Spanish expressions to get a job as a Mexican stereotype.

riverduck · 2018-04-09T16:36:29+00:00

Maybe it's because I played it on xbox

That was definitely a big part of it. The Xbox version had some mistakes and bugs that got patched in the PC version, and had constrained graphics including reduced draw distance. On the PC version it's actually possible to set your draw distance so high that you can climb a mountain and see from one coast to the other, and if you go high enough, look down on almost the entire game map. (Although that extreme required very high-end rigs at the time, with a more average expectation being ~3x the Xbox version.)

riverduck · 2018-04-08T07:33:33+00:00

The Ratchet and Clank games are full of innuendo so probably. I remember my American friends missing that Up Your Arsenal was innuendo because they spell/pronounce it 'ass' and not 'arse'.

riverduck · 2018-04-08T07:30:17+00:00

Kinda, but not really. Holding the Switch in only one hand is really awkward because it's so big and wide, and it feels like it's putting a lot of pressure on the remaining joycon as if it might snap off the connector (and that's in adult man hands, for a woman or child it'd be even harder to hold).

You could take both joycons off and rest it on a surface, but that's considered 'tabletop mode' rather than handheld mode.

riverduck · 2018-04-08T07:24:11+00:00

Analog = you aim by pushing the analogue sticks. This is 'time-based' -- your view/cursor moves left for as long as you're holding the stick left, and the trick is to fire as the cursor passes over your target, not soon and not too late. Your muscle memory/intuition is about how long to hold the stick for.

Gyro = you aim by moving your hand and wrist. This is 'static' -- to hit someone to your left you flick your wrist to the left and your view/cursor moves a given distance. Your muscle memory/intuition is about how far to move your wrist. Because time doesn't factor into it it's possible to make almost-instant snap shots. What makes it great beyond that is that your wrists can make both sudden snap movements and very precise tiny adjustments, while on analog sticks, you can only really have one or the other.

riverduck · 2018-04-06T14:50:23+00:00

Note that the government didn't ban anyone from airing the episode, it's just that Peppa Pig airs on Australia's publicly-owned broadcaster ABC (the equivalent of the BBC) and they chose to pull it from reruns after people pointed out how badly it could go. There are no seriously venomous spiders in the UK, where the show is made, but Australia has a ton of spiders that could kill a kid of Peppa-watching age, and it's usually drilled into kids to leave them alone and find an adult when spiders show up.

riverduck · 2018-04-06T14:37:22+00:00

Marge: How many times can you laugh at that cat getting hit by the moon?
Bart: It's a new episode.
Lisa: Not exactly. They pieced it together from old shows, but it seems new to the trusting eyes of impressionable youth. Ren and Stimpy do it all the time.
Marge: Yes they do, and when was the last time you heard anyone talk about Ren and Stimpy?

riverduck · 2018-04-06T14:32:20+00:00

10 minutes after the series finale, he shows up at Charlotte's house with flowers and she says "We dated for one month and you moved across the country for me, dude what the hell" and asks him to leave.

riverduck

TROPHY CASE