German censorship laws are both kind of weird and very strict. Thus, the versions of the various Wolfenstein games released in Germany have a lot of changes, starting with of course removing all reference to Nazi imagery. It at times baffling, and at other times highly amusing. So you’re right, in the Wolfenstein games you fight various Nazi like guys who are never actually depicted specifically as Nazis. You can’t say Nazi. You can’t even depict Nazis in a clearly unfavorable light, cast unambiguously as evil people getting slaughtered left, right, and center. There are no Nazis in Germany. There were never any Nazis in Germany…

All the swastikas and SS logos are replaced with other emblems like eagles or black triangles or similar. Blood is reduced or removed. IIRC in the original Wolf3D the dogs were replaced with giant rats. And, most hilarious of all, the portraits of Hitler on the walls in the first are still clearly Hitler, but his mustache has been removed so now he’s just “some guy.” Same with his in game sprite. This change made it to the SNES version, too. His organization gets some generic name like “The Order,” or “The Wolves,” or whatever. Notwithstanding that the original game was just outright banned in Germany for like 30 years.

Violence against humans is frowned upon or outright prohibited depending on the era in question, so enemies may have ham-fisted changes made to make them actually “robots,” by either bleeding oil or sparks or something.

For a deep dive into this sort of thing, check out the GermanPeter channel on Youtube which has a series of videos detailing all the censorship and other changes made to the Wolfenstein series, Doom, Quake, Half Life, and a other popular games.

I find it immensely hilarious that out of all the crazy shit in FF6 like suplexing the train that takes people to the afterlife, abducting a feral kid from the Veldt, plots with mind control tiaras, Moogle genocide, Kefka poisoning an entire castle full of people, and a globe-trotting homocidal octopus, it was the Three Dream Stooges that were the last straw for your friend.

…That game actually comes off sounding really weird if you try to describe it in a single paragraph.

Somehow her navel is visible through the tube dress as well. Perhaps it just made out of Saran Wrap.

finds themselves in a social circle or job environment hostile to Linux.

Ugh. Tell me about it.

I haven’t tried to run the latest Corel graphics suite in Wine recently, but the last time I did it exploded in my face so spectacularly I think my eyebrows still haven’t fully grown back. I really need that to work for… work. Basically everything else I already use is FOSS anyway.

That is patently false.

…Sometimes we also complain about Facebook or Tesla.

You’re conflating the tuner with the antenna. The person you replied to, however, is correct including the comment about the digital tuner boxes (which convert to an analog signal for old TV’s) being available for free during the analog to digital changeover back when.

Any piece of metal will work as an antenna, even for receiving digital broadcasts. It might not work well, but there is no magical difference between a “digital” antenna and an “analog” one, and since digital television is transmitted over pretty much the same original frequencies as analog was, old analog antennae are already quite well tuned in size and shape to pick up modern digital signals.

You just have to plug your 1940’s antenna into a 2009+ or so television. The antenna itself doesn’t “decode” anything. It just catches radio waves and passes the waveform along to the TV or tuner box. I still use the old 60’s era rooftop antenna that cane with my house, but plugged into my modern TV and it receives digital channels just fine.

His glasses are different in every scene. No consistency. It’s subtle in the first few, but in the last shot they’re a totally different style and shape and have a crossbar over the bridge that wasn’t present in any of the previous scenes.

I was sitting in a diner the other day and one of their TV’s was apparently, for lack of a better word, tuned to that Samsung TV Plus service. I watched it play the same Kia ad four times, back to back. Not in separate commercial breaks. All in one commercial break where the same ad was played four times consecutively.

Just like you, I have to say they found no success in making me want to buy a Kia.

Not even. We just need it to trip over the pronunciation of something, preferably the same thing more than once, and then both the news and social media will latch onto it like a pit bull and with any luck they’ll never live it down.

Carefully watch the kid’s glasses.

Now you can’t unsee it. You’re welcome.

Retailer who offers one of those 0% financing schemes, here. TL;DR: It’s from processing fees paid by the retailer and punitive interest after the 0% promotional period lapses.

The lender makes money in two ways. One, a percentage fee is charged on the financed amount, but it’s not paid by the customer. It’s paid by the retailer. For us it is a little under 2%, similar to the fees most credit card processors charge. So as soon as you make your purchase, the bank instantly skims 1-point-whatever percent off the top. You don’t see this, though. It affects the retailer’s bottom line, not yours.

Two, the 0% interest rate is a promotion which provides specified limited time in which to pay off the balance. If you do not pay the outstanding balance in full by the end of the promotional term, the bank whacks you for a monstrous interest rate on the entire original transaction amount – not just the remaining outstanding balance. In our case this is damn near 30%. Look carefully at the promotional signage and literature. It will always say “0% INTEREST FINANCING!!! _{for 12 months.}” That 12 months is important. That’s the end of the promotional terms, after which you pay aforementioned buttload of interest.

And then, the minimum payments on the bills they send you are obviously deliberately structured to trick you into failing to pay the entirety of the balance by the deadline at the end of the promotional period.

If you’re talking 0% introductory rates for general purpose credit cards, the answer is right there in the name. Those are introductory rates designed to entice you into signing up and using the card, but they’re never permanent. Eventually that introductory rate will expire and you will be left with an interest bearing credit card. Possibly a lot of interest. Even if you pay your bill 100% on time every month without fail, the bank still makes money in percentages and processing fees taken on every transaction from every single retailer where you’ve swiped that card. The bank issuing the credit card can continue to comfortably make money even if no one pays any interest, ever.

The other thing is, both towers were plane impact resistant. Both of them took dead square hits from airliners and remained resolutely standing afterwards. What it turned out they were not proof against was an ongoing raging inferno inside that was hot enough and carried on long enough to weaken their critical structural elements.

If the planes had not been laden with fuel and/or if it had not ignited for whatever reason, the towers probably would not have collapsed. They probably wouldn’t have been readily repairable, though, so then the question would be what to do with two massive skyscrapers with giant holes in the middle of them. They’d probably have to be demolished eventually anyway. Said demolition would have killed far fewer people.

Oh boy. I can’t wait for this to backfire in a spectacular and completely predictable manner.

If you got in an actual taxicab, you are correct that the driver would not care about your Uber PIN. Uber is replacing, or trying to replace, the usual pool of taxi drivers hanging around outside the airport terminal with their own herd of “contractors” waiting to do the same thing, only with the totally unnecessary layer of their stupid app being in between.

Agreed. And Kefka was way cooler anyway.

(I firmly believe most people gush over FF7 so much only because it was their first exposure to a mainstream console RPG in non-Japanese circles. FF7 as a whole was a fairly meh entry into the series anyway, if you ask me.)

Not only did Kefka have real style, twisted though it may be, he also for all intents and purposes actually managed to win. He fractured the world, scattered the heroes, built his goddamned tower, and was lording it all over everybody with a penthouse view. He didn’t have angst; he was just nuts. It was frankly a complete fluke that he got the shit whacked out of him by a little girl with a paintbrush, a 8x per round attacking Moogle with Genji gloves, a senior citizen, and a mime.

The Doctor.

We get it. You wish a dashing eccentric gentleman with an English accent will appear out of the blue and whisk you away from your situation to a life of adventure. But it’s not going to happen, sweetheart.

It doesn’t help that Doctor Who has always been crap sci-fi, but gets a free ride due to having such a long history stretching back to before anyone knew any better. The series as a whole is one of those I find also dragged down by a subsection of rabid insufferable fans, at least the modern incarnations, right up there with Rick and Morty and Supernatural. (I see I already kicked the beehive.)

“Homeopathic” does not mean organic, or good for you, natural, wholesome, effective, or inherently safe to consume.

It is, in fact, a code word for no active ingredient.

FYI, there is no “better” way to use hydrogen that will result in extracting more energy from it than it physically contains and can be released via oxidation. This is not a matter of “development” or “breakthroughs.” It is physically impossible. The standard enthalpy change of combustion of hydrogen is 141.83 MJ/kg. Period. That’s it. That’s all you can ever get out of it, provided you achieve perfect efficiency (which currently we don’t). Ongoing research is surely working on getting is closer to 100% efficiency, but it will never get past it. You can’t defy the laws of physics.

Insofar as I am aware all current hydrogen vehicles already use fuel cells to generate electricity and use that to drive electric motors for motive power. No one is burning hydrogen in a combustion engine in vehicular applications. There are some power plants that are doing it, though, mostly as a mechanism for storing and later reusing excess energy generated from other sources. You can go cross-eyed reading up on it here, if you are so inclined.

There is the notion of the “hydrogen economy” floating around, that is the use of hydrogen as an energy storage and carrying medium – not, notably, as a fuel for actual generation of energy – but it’s pretty certain that outside of some limited applications this will always be a worse deal than just taking the energy in the form of electricity and putting it in a wire.

Hydrogen is a dead end. The only company left trying to chase that particular dragon is Toyota, and I predict eventually they’ll be forced to admit that it’ll never work en masse for private vehicles. Ordinary consumers can already barely be trusted with gasoline, which is neither under high pressure nor requires industrial grade refrigeration to keep it in liquid form, and is a lot harder to ignite… The delivery systems for hydrogen are extremely complex and must maintain an absolute 0% failure rate or else somebody will either get blown up or frozen to a pump. Gasoline is at least a liquid and behaves predictably when spilled, and doesn’t phase change instantly when it leaves containment. And a mechanical failure in the delivery system can be mitigated by simply shutting off the pump. You poke a hole in a hydrogen filling system and you’re going to have a very interesting time. Current systems have redundancies on top of safety devices on top of redundancies for this reason which makes them fantastically expensive.

Hydrogen also has crap for energy density (around 8 kJ/liter in liquid form, compared to 32 kJ/liter for gasoline) and even if you’re producing it via electrolysis or something is a wildly inefficient way to store and transport energy. If you’re going to use electricity to create and compress hydrogen to transport it and create electricity with it later, it is monumentally more efficient to take the electricity and put it in batteries. So you may as well just to that.

The thing with battery swapping is that it will absolutely require strong government regulation to ensure standardization and fair treatment of owners. Replaceable batteries in consumer devices obviously aren’t a new concept, and before proprietary lithium packs took over everything, every single consumer device was powered by AAA, AA, C, or D batteries which were very well understood by everybody and were – and are – completely interchangeable commodity items that are readily available to this day. That’s the only way it’ll work. Manufacturers will have to be forced to standardize on a set of pack sizes because without oversight they’ll inevitably try to turn everything into a subscription-only walled garden pretty much exactly as you have predicted. But if there is a thing as an equivalent of an AAA vehicle battery (for motorcycles and scooters), AA vehicle battery (for city microcars, NEV’s, golf carts, etc.) and C vehicle battery (full size passenger cars) and D vehicle battery (light trucks) etc., and nobody is allowed to try to make up their own bullshit, then no one will have to give a rat’s ass about battery health, the dealership, lock-in, or anything else. If you buy a used vehicle with a knackered pack in it or your battery gets cacked, you could just bop down to your local AutoZone or whatever and buy a new one. Or push your car to the nearest swap station. You’ll turn in your old one for the core charge. Exactly like how 12v vehicle batteries work now.

We’ll have to get people used to the notion that, yes, these things will be kind of a battery lottery and you may get swapped in a pack that’s in slightly worse condition than your last one if you go around pack-swapping all the time. But you know, the next time you swap you’ll get a different one again. And you can play already this game right now if you want to – just go buy some fuel in a third world country.

Apparently they don’t need him because Ronald was fired… Er, “retired,” in 2016.

The final vestige of the clown that I know of was his silhouette being used in the “throw this into a trash can and not on the damn ground” message on the bottom of their paper bags, but even that seems to be gone now.