I dropped a decent chunk of change on this when it was announced. I'm skeptical I'll ever get to play it, but honestly, I don't care at this point.

I'm just glad someone is really pushing the bounds of technology.

To be clear, the situation appears to be as follows:

The police get a call about a person that may be mental wielding a gun.

Multiple police arrive on scene, where they find a black male and hispanic male.

The hispanic male is clutching something.

The extremely lucid and reasonable sounding black male identifies himself as a caregiver for the hispanic male, clarifies that the hispanic male is autistic, and that the item the hispanic male is carrying is a toy truck.

The black male does all of this, as well as trying to de-escalate the situation, while laying prone on his back with his hands in the air.

The police move in, at some point the black male is shot in the leg.

The police have full control of the situation, both parties are handcuffed.

Medical aid is not provided to the black male for more than 15 minutes. Not even an attempt by an officer to staunch the blood flow.

When the black male asks the officer why he was shot, the officer supposedly responds, "I don't know."

Now, let's examine this closely.

A gunshot wound to the leg could easily have nicked the femoral artery. I doubt the officers were trained to identify this. You can bleed out from seconds to minutes after your femoral artery gets damaged. A reasonable person might take off their shirt and compress the wound or use a belt as a tourniquet.

Before we consider that, really, we should look at one factor. If you choose to be a fireman, a policeman, or be in any other dangerous job, you need to be prepared to face actual danger. Being so scared that you might somehow, maybe, possibly get hurt that you proceed to jumpscare shoot someone who is fucking prone, is not being willing to face danger. It means someone joined the force to be 'better' than the rest of us plebes and not to face an iota of danger.

Also, if it was a white male, laying on his back and doing the same thing, do we expect him to be shot? The likely answer is no. I can't even believe that this was a likely shooting situation. At first, I suspected it might have been one shot that was accidentally discharged. That, while not acceptable, would have been plausible due to nerves. Three shots means three separate trigger pulls, that speaks to intent to shoot.

Luckily this man is going to live. He will likely sue and get a good chunk of money. If he had died, blood would have likely ran in the streets in Florida because one cop got scared that he 'might' be in danger. As far as that cop? He might lose his job briefly. Cop unions will do their best to get him back his job and will likely succeed. Let's be real about the possible ramifications of him going before a grand jury though. Even if he does, he will walk because the prosecutor will throw the case.

Demo is all right, we really don't see anything we haven't seen before. Pretty much the onlything we havn't seen is mass scale destruction. Heck even small scale is so-so, mainly because of 2 things. #1 you really need a chunk of processing time for convincing physics calculation of a good amount of debris (We still don't see the level of particle effects the old AGEIA PPU demo's had) and #2 realistic enough fire effects. #1 is at least possible with tech that we have today, but #2 requires that someone actually create the effect for use in games.

Fire as you may have gathered, is probably the most difficult CG effect to create. Hollywood took 20 years after CGI effects started in movies before it actually didn't look fake. Today fire in CG is very manageable, but before that it just made more sense to record your fire on a matte backdrop and insert the footage over one of the final rendering passes of your 3d project.

When I still worked for Apple, I had a safety issue escalated to engineering over a Macbook Pro. The battery had apparently ruptured and began jetting flames out of the keyboard area. The owner tried to douse it with a cheapo fire extinguisher, one of the powder ones you can get from discount stores, but it only briefly went out.

Since it was still smoking, he was going to carry it outside but, as he opened the front door, the flames started coming back. He tossed it out onto the lawn, where it burnt a big chunk of grass.

I wish I had thought to keep the pictures; it had burnt his desk and destroyed his lawn. Apple legal went out and the guy later let me know via email that they had recompensed him for his desk, replaced the notebook, and paid to have his lawn re-turfed.

It wasn't funny at the time, but this video reminded me of it and now it is kind of hilarious. Still not as good as the kid who figured out how to game Apple's escalation system to get free stuff, but pretty damn funny.

Many years ago one of my Mum's relatives had a rescue wombat as a pet... they don't make good pets! The biggest problem is that they are so strong that they can easily break through floorboards or walls if they think they want to be inside when they're shut out (or vice versa). They can also take a chunk of flesh by accident when trying to get food, but their house destroying habits are probably worse.

Aliens with the tech to get here from another solar system would mop us up.

We simply couldn't fight that.

Back in the '70s scientists came up with a space weapon they called THOR, which is essentially a crowbar-sized bit of metal that has guidance fins at the back. Drop that from outer space and the simple energy of it falling creates an immense amount of damage at ground level.

Aliens who could get here from another solar system could simply throw chunks of asteroid at our cities until we capitulated. No space laser is going to stop that. Especially when they'd have space lasers of their OWN to target our space lasers.

This whole thing is pure fantasy. The same kind of diseased minds who believe in God, Ghosts, and Donald Trump's fitness to be President.

D'OH!!! OK, I'm calling fake on my own post.
I would expect lots of blood from such a chunk being ripped out, so I slowed down in full screen and noticed absolutely zero blood, but that there was what looks like a square band-aid in the bald spot...then I realized it was actually a piece of fake hair on a sticker that hadn't ripped off with the rest...then I noticed the clear sharp lines of the outline made by the razor she used to shave the bald spot.
*debunked

@CrushBug

Related story: during the later years of the war, when Allied air and sea supremacy made the Bay of Biscay a deathtrap, Allied torpedo boats took up ambush positions at the entrances to U-Boot bases, particularly La Rochelle. They'd get into position at night and stay just outside of range of the coastal defence batteries. Before outgoing submarines could reach deep water, they'd be plastered with hand grenades by these speed boats.

It wouldn't be able to sink a sub, but a lucky hit might damage the periscope and it did reduce the sub's sonar abilities by massive amounts, covering the entire exit area in a blanket of noise. Not to mention the psychological effect...

Anyway, just small bits of history.

Now, about this video: that small chance to be hit by a grenade chunk is surpassed by the rather noticable chance to be hit by one of roughly 6500 steel balls within a run-of-the-mill frag grenade used over here. Doesn't make the underwater experience any better though...

@eric3579 Thanks for the quality!

My mom is president of a district school board in Kansas, so the "education" parts of the cuts have hit really close to home for her (and by extension me, even though I'm not living there). Very very tight budgets. Most music programs got drastic cuts years ago, and are effectively gone now. AP programs for college credit? Gone. Good teachers for academic subjects? Usually bail for greener pastures very quickly.

...But, being rural Kansas, plenty of money gets spent on bus / coach / equipment / facilities for the football team. To be fair, a good chunk of that comes from booster clubs rather than gov't. Still shows where the priorities are.

Ha. No one @-mentioned me so I didn't have any idea this was posted.

It has been an incredible 10 years and I'm very happy and lucky to have had dag as a partner in sift for all these years. It's a pleasure.

On top of that, all you fine folks and those who are long gone have made this an incredible little corner of the Web for a major chunk of my life. I love you.

I grew up on my family's non-industrial cattle ranch (we weren't a meat factory). Almost every night for dinner for my entire childhood: home-grown steak, burgers, and whatever else you could make out of cow-chunks.

I. Had. No. Clue. How good I had it then.

(edit: I have empathy for animals and hate the meat-industry, for what it's worth)

Years ago, I was at the grocery store with my boyfriend. He picked up a HUGE chunk of caramel that was meant for melting for toffee apples. It was remarkable, how big and heavy this chunk of candy was.

He mused, as he hefted it in his hand, "You know, you could kill someone with this and eat the evidence."

That was 40 years ago, and whenever I see something lethal in the grocery store, that is my very first thought.

You aren't alone, is what I am saying.

PS The boyfriend went on to become a police officer. Yikes.

I finally just finished watching the 3 hour finale on my DVR (kept trying to avoid this spoiler post) and was thoroughly happy with the results.

I'm way on board with your sentiments, but must add my 2 cents.

First, I think it's important to realize it's not the way ANW runs the show that causes the competitors to behave the way they do; it's the American competitors themselves who share that undesirable selfish, braggadocious attitude/philosophy. Even when you watch the Japanese Sasuke competitions, when there's an American competing surrounded by Japanese competitors inside Japan, you still feel that same air of arrogance.

I've been watching the Sasuke for many years and started watching ANW before it was ANW (even in the first "seasons" on Attack of the Show where the competitors had bounce on a trampoline and swing on some monkey bars to earn their way to Japan). The American attitude always been something that bothers me and takes a huge chunk out of my interest.

I always find it disconcerting the way they don't explain any details, such as why Geoff got to climb first (which is why he gets to claim he's the first person to ever reach the top).

The other thing I've been crying "foul" on is that they seemed to lighten it up on the obstacles. This year there were 38 people to go to round 2. That's ridiculous. But what's worse is that round 2 had way too long a time limit. Normally competitors who succeed on stage 2 have about a second left when they hit the button, but many of those who went through to stage 3 had around 30 seconds on the clock.

I had to rewind a couple of times, but I confirmed Isaac said "share the moment" not the money.

My wife and I were both displeased that Geoff announced he gets to say he's the first to beat stage 4. That's such a poor attitude, and I liked Popeye a lot more until then. And regardless how they decided who got to go first, I think they both have to be considered as equally the first to finish stage 4. (Side note: I was really bummed they didn't use the loud "bang! bang!" sounds to start stage 4 like they do in Japan.)

I myself don't have a problem with the very redesigned courses each season.

The USA versus the World bullshit is some serious bullshit that's hard to swallow. Not only is the whole "our country is better than you" concept horrible, but the actual competition is shit. It's not the same beating the course one rested person at a time. But also last year the Europeans brought in a rock climber who knew nothing about Ninja Warrior and just sent him in fully rested to do the arm-centric work.

Boy, we could get together and write a dissertation on this subject.

Maybe you're right, but to me that didn't sound like jubilation or delight. It sounded like awe and adrenaline mixed into shock. I even took their decision to "go down" at the end as a hint that they may have been going to try to *help* anyone that was caught closer to the blast(s).


I don't mean this to be a "cool story bro" or "internet tough guy" thing, but: About a year ago there was a house fire (pretty roaring fire, but limited to 1 room) across the street from me. Nobody was home, but I didn't know that at the time. When I saw it, verbally my brain went to mush -- I was just saying "oh shit" about like these guys, over and over. But, the adrenaline and thinking that someone might be stuck in the house whipped me into action. I ended up putting out a good chunk of the fire with hose and buckets before the fire department got there about 15 mins later, and the firemen later said that it may well have spread out of control if I hadn't gotten a partial jump on it.

BUT, in my adrenaline fueled shock, I had forgotten to put on shoes, and had cut up my bare feet a bit by running around on glass that the fire had broken out of a window. Plus, I had rather stupidly been pumping in water via hose and bucket, while standing in a puddle, next to a house that still had mains power going into it...

After the event, my wife specifically said that I had sounded "weird" and not like myself, and hadn't really been particularly coherent in verbalizing what I was planning to do. Anyway, due to the shock and surprise, I'm ready to give these dudes the benefit of the doubt with regards to their weird and potentially "inappropriate" sounding voices and statements.

this is actually very undercalculated. Yes, his pay as an actor may have been those amounts, but he's also the producer in those films, which means he then takes another big chunk of the revenue home.