What grinds my gears

Most of the rest of the world has quite a common notion that the police in the United States is extremely militarized (which is certainly true in some places, although not all) and really trigger-happy. In other words, the police will very easily, with the slightest of provocations (and sometimes without any provocation at all) draw their guns to intimidate suspects, and shoot at the slightest of signs that the subject might attack, or even flee the scene. It is true that the police does use firearms more often in the United States than in many other western countries, at least if we look at the raw numbers. For example in Finland, in 2013 there were only 27 cases where firearms were involved in any way, shape or form. 4 people were wounded by police shootings, and 0 people were killed. If we look at all the statistics between 2003 and 2013, only 2 people have been killed by police in total during all that time. In the United States, in 2015 alone, 963 people were killed by police...

From the 80's all throughout the 90's, and somewhat at the beginning of the 2000's, CPU technology not only advanced in processing speed of machine code (ie. processing individual machine code opcodes using less and less clock cycles per opcode on average, and providing new opcodes that could perform more operations with one opcode), but more importantly, and most visibly to the end consumer, pumping up the CPU's clock rate more and more. In the 80's consumer CPU's had usually clock rates between less than 10 MHz and up to about 20 MHz. During the 90's there was quite a race to pump up CPU clock rates, which were raising and raising, first reaching tens of MHz, then hundreds, and eventually the thousands. Perhaps some kind of pinnacle was reached with the Pentium 4 processor, a single-core 32-bit processor that in 2004 was able to reach a whopping 3.8 GHz. During most of this time clock rates were in fact such an ubiquitous measure of speed, that the vas...

I wrote in a previous blog post, " The problem with millenials ", how we have, as a society, unwittingly created a generation of shallow people who are more concerned about instant gratification than forming deep meaningful relationships. The advances in internet and mobile phone technology have created this absolutely detrimental culture where people are constantly online, sending shallow messages to hundreds, even thousands, of mostly unknown people, constantly expecting immediate reactions to their messages. We have created a generation that spends more time staring at the screen of their mobile device than having deep thoughtful conversations with somebody in real life, and forming deep, meaningful social relationships. It doesn't exactly help that this same generation has been for the most part lived a completely unhealthily sheltered life, being monitored and watched by authority figures (mostly their parents and teachers) pretty much 24/7, and "protected...

It is my understanding that in the United States (at least in most states), if you win a case, your attorney fees will not be automatically paid by the losing party. Instead, if you want them to pay, you have to file a separate motion for that. In Finland the system is different: The losing party automatically pays the attorney fees of the winning party. The rationale sounds very reasonable: If you are innocent, you shouldn't be punished in any way. No consequences should be bestowed upon you, such as monetary loss, if you have done nothing wrong. This deters abusing the judiciary system to bully innocent people and causing them monetary loss by spuriously suing them. If your claim was spurious, and you lose, then you pay their attorney fees; they don't have to pay anything. Moreover, if you are the victim, and you are the one suing the other party because of a crime committed against you, and the that other party is found guilty, you shouldn't have to be paying anythi...

In my years-long saga in this blog of ranting about the current VR headsets, their characteristics and flaws, and the games (or lack thereof), and the reasons why I think they are pretty much effectively a failure, one thing I haven't touched much is how outright impractical they turned out to be. Much more so than was expected. Prior to launch (mainly during the Oculus Rift Development Kit years), many people were envisioning using VR headsets as an alternative display. Perhaps even their main display. That's right. Many people actually envisioned even playing normal non-VR games with the headset, and watching movies and videos, and other such things (perhaps even browse the internet). The idea was that the VR headset allows the illusion of watching the game or movie on a giant cinema screen, rather than a tiny monitor on your desk. It would be like sitting in a movie theater with a giant screen, rather than at your home watching a small monitor. Just imagine playing you...

Angela Merkel, the dictator eh... chancellor of Germany since 2005, pretty much single-handedly decided on her own to take over a million migrants in the last couple of years into the country. And because Germany is in the middle of the EU, and pretty much runs it, that means that the EU has decided to share the burden with the entirety of the EU countries. Merkel is the elected leader of Germany, not the entirety of the EU. Nobody in any other country elected her as the dictator of the EU. But it seems that whatever she does, the EU supports her, and extorts all the other countries to obey. That's right. Extorts. That's not hyperbole. If an EU country refuses to take a share of the burden, the EU will fine that country. Even if that country was always against taking the millions of migrants into Europe, and never agreed to it. Well, Poland seems to be the only EU country that has some balls, because they have said "no, we won't be taking any migrants; Angela Merk...

I wrote in a previous blog post, " Crimes that appear to be legal in the US if protesting ", how in many places in the United States the police will simply watch, doing nothing, while people are committing clear crimes, or people are being harassed and even assaulted. Here are a couple of examples. A man is being harassed and physically assaulted by punches and pulls, in full view of the police, who are doing nothing more than watching the events happening, without intervening. This has been going on for a while. The man verbally pleads to the police to intervene. They do nothing other than just watch. The man gets kicked in the back of his knee, he is dragged to the ground, and the assaulters start kicking him. Only then does the police intervene. But only then. The assault had been going on for a good while, in full view of the police, and the victim even pleaded the police to intervene, and they did absolutely nothing but just watch. Two guys ...

The current social justice cult is such a virulent dangerous sickness of the mind, that it's actually scary. School after school, institution after institution, government after government, and person after person are being infected with it. It's especially scary and dangerous when governments are infected by it, and start passing laws to enforce these ideas onto people. It becomes especially heinous when these ideas are being enacted onto impressionable children. It's a form of child abuse that may in many cases prove extremely harmful to the children involved. Recently there was an episode of the show 60 Minutes of Australia, where they interview a 14-year-old boy, who was born a boy, but started "transitioning" to be a girl a couple of years prior, and is now in the process of "transitioning" back. And in this case "transitioning" meant taking hormone blockers and estrogen pills. Now that he's a couple of years older, he wants to re...

Introduction When somewhere around 1999-2000 it was announced that they were making a new movie adaptation of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings , people were in general quite skeptical about how good it could be made. When they announced that the director would be Peter Jackson, of Bad Taste fame, people were even more skeptical. Peter Jackson was not exactly known for making epic larger-than-life movies. He was known for comedy splatter movies. Many people were understandably predicting an utter failure. It turned out, however, that not only was the choice of director almost perfect, but the movie trilogy turned out to be one of the best pieces of cinematography ever made, gaining accolades, sweeping the Oscars, and gaining copious amounts of praise and adulation both from film critics and the public. Most critics agree that the movie trilogy is up there with the best of the best of film history. It's most certainly the best movie (trilogy) of the fantasy genre. After th...

Suppose that a car plunges at great speed into a crowd of people near you. For all you know it's a terrorist attack. The car is starting to go in reverse. What is your first instinct? a) Run to safety, away from the car. b) Run towards the back of the car, to block its path. I think that if you are a normal, rational person, you would obviously choose to run away from the car. Or, at the very least, not run towards it. However, the latter is exactly what happened. For a half dozen or so people. Needless to say, many of these people who deliberately ran towards the reversing car got injured, one of them extremely seriously. (It is my understanding that the person who died in this incident was precisely one of those that ran towards the car after it had plunged into the crowd, although I can't corroborate this.) What exactly caused this quasi-suicidal behavior from those people? This is my conjecture, but I think it's very reasonable: These professional p...

Today I read this month's issue of the Finnish Pelit gaming magazine. The main editorial article in the magazine is about the failure of VR. It seems that, finally, even the gaming press has awakened to the harsh reality. HTC has announced that they might be selling off their VR department (undoubtedly because of poor sales, which have been dropping like a lead balloon). The library of triple-A VR games is ridiculously small. Almost no game developer company is showing any sort of interest in VR games, which is creating a vicious cycle (it's not economically feasible to make triple-A games for a system with abysmal adoption rates; a lack of triple-A games ensures that the adoption rates remain abysmal.) In the upcoming months there might be a bit of a resurgence, perhaps hope, because three triple-A VR games based on famous existing games will be published: Doom, Fallout 4 and Skyrim. However, even the writer of the editorial doesn't seem to show much enthusiasm and o...

If you own a PS4 Pro and an HDMI 2.0 capable 4k display, especially if said display has only one HDMI in port, you may soon find yourself in need of an HDMI switcher. If you are additionally using a PSVR with your PS4 Pro, you might also find yourself in need of an HDMI splitter, or switcher/splitter combo (for reasons detailed in this blog post .) Due to the different versions that exist of the HDMI standard, this is prone to cause confusion, and for people to purchase a switcher that won't work properly with their PS4 Pro. So here is a guide that describes in detail what to look for. Terminology and HDMI versions An HDMI switcher is a device that has two or more HDMI inputs and one HDMI output, and is capable of redirecting one of those inputs to the output. This allows several HDMI sources (such as game consoles, a digital TV box, and a PC) to be connected to one single display. An HDMI splitter is a device that has one HDMI input and two or more HDMI outputs. It allo...

I wrote in a previous blog post how I consider the actions, or more precisely the inaction , of the police the main reason why the situation has escalated so much in the United States: Rather than stopping "protesters" from committing clear crimes, rather than having a zero tolerance policy, they are allowing people to commit these crimes, without stopping them, as long as they are "protesting". I simply cannot comprehend why "protesters" seem to be above the law in the United States, exempt from the same laws that apply to everybody else. Like there were some kind of special exception in the law for people who are engaging in a "protest". I'm not aware of such a law existing anywhere in the United States, but it looks like there is one, apparently. At least deducing from the actions of the police. From the numerous YouTube videos I have watched, it seems that at least these things, which would normally cause a person to be arrested and ...

Recently Donald Trump issued a constitutional presidential pardon on a former sheriff who was convicted for contempt of court. Naturally the leftists in the US, like always, went completely crazy about it, as if Trump had made a heinous crime against society by pardoning a convicted criminal. But here's some perspective: Firstly, presidential pardons are always issued for convicted criminals, by the very constitutional definition. Such pardons do not apply to anybody else. So it's not like it was somehow highly unusual for him to pardon a convicted criminal. Secondly, and most importantly, presidential pardons in the United States are extremely common! Gerald Ford issued 382 presidential pardons. Jimmy Carter issued 534. Ronald Reagan issued 393. George H.W. Bush issued 94. Bill Clinton issued 396. George W. Bush issued 189. Barack Obama issued 212. Can you guess how many presidential pardons Trump has issued so far? One. And of course the regressive left we...