Gorth

I was watching a few Danish movies the last week or two. I managed to dig out some English subtitled trailers for some of them: This one is even dubbed in English: A prequel to a movie. Sadly, the first one is much, much better, but I couldn't find English subtitled versions of the trail ("In China they eat dogs") Warning, Danes like their humour dark, like pitch black dark. Danish Noir is a real thing.

Australian Economy 101

30 years of software engineering / development, I can relate

Exploring the new areas in Guild Wars 2, flying around Bjoras Marches, once homeland of the Norn, now occupied by Jormag and it's corrupted Icebrood minions. Exploring the mountains from dragon back, blizzard incoming soon: Taking in the scenery:

How do you think we ended up with 5 (five!) fingers, the design was for 4

Who cares about primaries? Iran's worst nightmare, Paul for President (too many beers at work on a Friday afternoon does that to you)

...or it could be sheer coincidence. If you ask 10000 people to predict the outcome of an election, using different models. Some might get the outcome right (seriously, it's a 50/50 chance even if doing a random guess), even if their model is flawed. The litmus test is, can they get it consistently right? I was more impressed by Paul the Octopus who got all of his soccer match predictions for Germany in the FIFA 2010 World Cup right, to the point where the Russian mafia offered half a million USD for him (no kidding) Television even started showing his predictions on live TV, so convinced were they that he would get the outcomes right. Unfortunately for Paul, he predicted that Germany would lose to Spain. "The prediction led to German fans calling for Paul to be eaten. In response, the Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero offered to send Paul official state protection, and the Industry Minister Miguel Sebastian called for Paul to be given safe haven in Spain" Who needs complicated mathematical models? All you need is a psychic octopus Edit: "Paul's notoriety attracted criticism from the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who accused him of being a symbol of Western decadence and decay." Paul, a threat to the Iranian regime: Edit2: Paul according to Iran:

Honest Government Ads... slightly addictive. What's not to love about East Timor? Except the truth of course (when you're Australian). A bit of dirt from the down under side of the world. Mind you, they not only take shots at the Australian government, they got some good videos that puts the Indonesia and the US on display too.

Theme song from a Danish animated movie: Ronal the Barbarian. Not a movie for chilcdren!

Oldies but goodies. They just don't make Ozzy Osbourne songs like they used to anymore...

The CIA are probably pissed off over the Chinese stealing their proprietary backdoor software IP

Hey. watch who you call stupid! I wouldn't want to miss out on the countless thousands hours of fun that games like Jagged Alliance 2 and X-Com 3 gave me (and still give me) for some hollow, dull game play with shiny packaging

Taking the piss on Scott Morrison and The Liberal Party Warning, lots of profanity inside the video

He'll probably blame the Democrats rather than the Christians, but who knows... The senate tried to get rid of him a few times, but in the end, it was the bad blood that had developed between him and everybody else (the Legions, the Praetorian Guard, the Senate etc.) that did him him in. He was so paranoid that he eventually killed himself when he thought everyone was out to "get him" and didn't have the guts to face being held accountable. History, history never changes (based on a Ron Pearlman quote)

Ouch... feel your pain mate. I do ERP systems for a living (no, not Erotic Role Play, I wish) and recognize some of the things in your laundry list of misery. Worst upgrade I did took 5 days and 5 nights for the SQL scripts to finish the data conversion. Mind you, their old system was probably 10 years past it's "best by date" tl;dr; the upgraded system worked like a charm once completed, but we did three complete test upgrade runs to get a feel for the timing and then scheduled the work over a weekend plus the days before and after where it would be least inconvenient for their operations.

Only when you got bytes full of bits... very old processors were 4 bit (no kidding, try googling the TMS 1000 from the 70's) The thing about bits is, they are sort of binary and completely self sufficient individuals... or not The 8 bit legacy is still very much a thing and like the metric standard for dimensions, one of those things that are just ubiquitous in the wold of computing. Edit: I remember having to do math in Octal numbers in Computer Science back in University... that's 3 bit numbers Edit2: Just because Melkathi distracted me, shoo! Playing a lot of Tomb Raider and Master of Orion 2 these days... GOG is a heaven sent for those of us who like the older classics. If I could just get my Saitek Flight Stick and Throttle out of storage and hooked up to my PC, I would be all over X-Wing vs. TIe Fighter again... haven't really played it for ages.

My gut answer would be 'cat'. I get to keep humans as pets, I like fish... and the internet worships me

I wish I could like Alpha Protocol, but the times I tried starting a game it just came to an abrupt halt after the first few mini-games. I effing hate most mini games of the pick a lock, hack a circuit (or mass effects tetris games). It was too much of a turn off to keep persisting with the game (QTE's can go to a hot place which is unlikely to freeze over too) (edit: One of the things ME3 did right was to finally ditch the mini games completely, never mind whatever other issues it might have had) (edit2: I don't remember which one of the first two ME's had the tetris game, there was also a really, really, really tedious connect the dots on a circuit board mini game in one of them)

For the Spanish challenged among us.... Google translate to the rescue: "Good morning, gentlemen I bought the Deadfire last edition American version with a lot of desire to play them but today when I started the game I realized that there is no option in Spanish, even though the Spanish flag is on the back of the card, gentlemen this is deceptive advertising, please please a patch so that the Spanish-speaking person can enjoy the game"

Yeah, damn Polish imperialist kept making border raids into western USSR in an attempt to seize chunks off it. Luckily the combined military forces of the USSR and Nazi Germany were able to neutralize the threat before Poland took over all of Europe! On a more serious note, Stalin was way too busy with purging the military Erdogan style (and reforming the NKVD) and didn't need a war, so he would be likely to sign any treaty that would keep the Nazis off his doorstep until the firing squads ran out of Soviet officers to execute (for the greater good).

Reminds me of the time the Soviets went in the opposite direction... not smaller, but bigger is better. Most stuff around the Tzar Bomba is scary reading, except the one comforting factor that it was too big for any practical application, literally too big. No Soviet plane at the time could reliably deliver it, even if finding suicidal pilots (at full yield, no out flying the explosion). The one and only actual test was with a "gimped" version, which limited it's yield to "only" 50 megatons (edit: and a parachute to slow its descent so the airplane crew could get more time to get away). Without the dampeners it would have yielded 100 megatons. Basically, screw precision, just turn everything into glass. Edit2: They just don't make nukes the way they used to...

Real Time Strategy (RTS) is a misnomer, rarely ever involving anything remotely resembling strategy. A type of games that became popular with Generation Z, who seems to have the shortest attention span in recent history (8 seconds... even Millennials have longer attention spans, about 12 seconds) There are MMO's with better story, characters and voice acting (and single player experiences) than most single player games (emphasis on most, if you search long and hard enough, there are single player games that wipes the floor with the limp bodies of MMO's) Games were better in the 1980's

The two obvious things from top of my head are the requirement to be male and to be a land owner have been taken off the table.

Not sure if I'm much of a fan of Athenian democracy... I guess it was nice. If you were a wealthy, white, old, male. Otherwise you were excluded from the decision making processes. I would like to think humanity had progressed just a little bit in the millennia since. But, then I look a modern societies and realize, we probably really haven't evolved much the last 2500 years, still being a bunch of primitive savages

Not sure if coffee ever had any military application (other than helping sentries staying awake), but the microwave oven is one of my favourite pieces of military hardware spin-offs Edit: I know the internet is also a by-product of arms race and military technologies, but you could argue whether or not it's really beneficial for humanity. At least it gives a place to worship cats if nothing else.