Doesn't matter. What matters is why the officers understand they've been dispatched to the scene, and what they believe they're seeing when they arrive.

Obviously you're able to tell a real gun from a replica at a distance while someone waving it around, but most people can't, including cops, until they have it in hand, personally. You might be comfortable risking other people's lives by making them assume that all guns are toys until they've been shot at, but people who actually do have, as a feature of their daily job, other people assaulting and trying to kill them, probably wouldn't want you armchairing on their behalf.

The solution? Actual thinking parents not sending their kid out into public to act stupid with a replica gun. To teach a kid that when they see a cop car rolling up, to perhaps consider not looking crazy and waiving said replica gun around. This is a 100% lapse on the part of parents and a completely crappy position for the cops to have been put in. I know that you would be safe, because you would omnipotent and know, from a distance, that the replica gun wasn't real, and that if it was real, the universe's special karma system would protect you from the laws of physics because you are A Better Person Than Cops Are, and bullets wouldn't be able to hurt you.

Well he could have been experiencing severe suicidal depression due to his asshole friends not recognizing his psychiatric burn-out, and turned to marijuana as a coping mechanism. I've done similar, but without involving any drugs;sleep for 18 hours a day isolates me from the world better than psychotropics.

Yeah, I know. Marijuana in vogue, alcohol falling out of favor.

Their argument is that you take like 1/20 the amount of alcohol needed to kill you (20 beers = death) versus 1/1000 the amount of THC needed to kill you (1000 joints = death), therefor alcohol is worse for you than marijuana. That's a very unscientific approach.

It's part of the propaganda movement to ban alcohol for anyone under the age of 25.

My personal favourite is sites that get your screen resolution and assume your browser window has the same dimensions.

My second favourite is sites that try to force every link to open in a new window. (Yes, 90+% of Chinese websites, I'm looking at you. WTF is with that, anyway?)

If you're that unable to grasp the difference between the possibility that someone might be carrying a weapon (say, in a violin case), and cops responding to someone's alarmed call about a guy brandishing a gun in public, and having that gun waved at them as they arrive on the scene, then you are completely out of touch with reality. Cops get killed, more often than you seem to know (or perhaps not as often as you'd like?) for misjudging the risk to their lives as they come upon such scenes or make a traffic stop. If you did that all day, every day, and some of your colleagues died doing what you have to do for your job, you might look at it a little differently. You're probably thinking that the police should have just hidden behind their magic bullet-proof cruiser doors like in the movies, right? Yeah. That kid shouldn't be dead. I blame his parents, 100%.

We'll always have postcards.

I'm thinking the whole lot of yas just got trolled.

Unless BH is an AI, I'd assume that he's comprised of a multitude of cells.

Stockholm is like this, and it's been mostly planned this way, since the late 1940s or a bit later.

Right, because he was already waving a gun around when they showed up.

Additional stupidity; I remembered that by the time the 32X was announced in the UK, the (entirely incompatible) Saturn was already due for launch in the near future. Worse, I recently found out that in Japan, they actually launched at almost the same time.

What was the point of that?! Who was going to buy the 32X knowing that it was a stop gap for something imminent/already here? Granted, the 32X was much cheaper at launch- which was apparently the justification- but anyone with half a brain would have known that it would die when (as all new consoles do) the Saturn came down in price enough that Joe Public would buy it instead of a half-baked piggy in the middle.

(And anyone who realised that should also have realised that the software companies would be thinking the same thing and not likely to waste their time supporting a dead-end console.)

The other problem with the 32X was that Sega had *already* released an "enhanced capabilities" add-on for the Mega Drive/Genesis, i.e. the Mega CD, which you already mentioned. So the 32X was, in effect, the third separate (incompatible) "format" built around the same console.

All that is stuff that should have been obviously stupid at the time; there were other factors that led to Sega's downfall (e.g. Sony playing the PlayStation launch very well) one could argue are easier to spot with hindsight, but those were on top of the obvious stupidity of having the half-baked 32X muddy the waters- and confuse the consumers and retailers- at the time of the Saturn launch.

Actually, the Atari *name* has never really been out of circulation for long.

The original Atari Inc. was split and sold off in 1984 to become Atari Corp., (shut down circa 1996, following the Jaguar debacle), and Atari Games (defunct 2003, but renamed in the late 90s (*)).

While Atari Corp. and Atari Games were the only successors that (IMHO) could really claim to be continuations of the original company- and they're both now defunct themselves- nevertheless, Hasbro bought the home rights to the name and IP from the defunct Atari Corp. and used them in the late 90s. (*) Infogrames in turn bought them from Hasbro a few years after that, and has used it ever since.

So yeah, today's "Atari" is just Infogrames, and the real Atari is long dead. But the point is that the name never really went away- it was in almost constant use.

(*) Atari Games- who only owned the name for arcade use- was renamed to avoid confusion with Hasbro's new "Atari".

You'd think that (hell, I'd have agreed), but people already pay by smart phone even without Google Wallet or Apple Pay. The obvious example is people paying by the Starbucks app, although there they get free drinks for paying that way so whatever. (However they could also pay by card, the app is just another method of getting free drinks.)

Another example is that you can apparently pay by smartphone in the cafeteria at the company I work at. I have no idea why you'd want to do this, but it's another "scan the barcode" thing, and people do it.

I have no idea why, but apparently some people find pulling out their phone and using that to be easier than using a card. Even when it takes longer because I'm not talking about NFC systems here, I'm talking about scanning a barcode on a phone.

The temperature also dropped.

Honestly, the whole "Climate Change" thing was to explain that "it's not really global warming"; now they want to stop climate change by cooling the earth. ... So. Global Warming.

This kind of tampering would be a disaster.