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 ...