Somehow her navel is visible through the tube dress as well. Perhaps it just made out of Saran Wrap.

Retailer who offers one of those 0% financing schemes, here. TL;DR: It’s from processing fees paid by the retailer and punitive interest after the 0% promotional period lapses.

The lender makes money in two ways. One, a percentage fee is charged on the financed amount, but it’s not paid by the customer. It’s paid by the retailer. For us it is a little under 2%, similar to the fees most credit card processors charge. So as soon as you make your purchase, the bank instantly skims 1-point-whatever percent off the top. You don’t see this, though. It affects the retailer’s bottom line, not yours.

Two, the 0% interest rate is a promotion which provides specified limited time in which to pay off the balance. If you do not pay the outstanding balance in full by the end of the promotional term, the bank whacks you for a monstrous interest rate on the entire original transaction amount – not just the remaining outstanding balance. In our case this is damn near 30%. Look carefully at the promotional signage and literature. It will always say “0% INTEREST FINANCING!!! _{for 12 months.}” That 12 months is important. That’s the end of the promotional terms, after which you pay aforementioned buttload of interest.

And then, the minimum payments on the bills they send you are obviously deliberately structured to trick you into failing to pay the entirety of the balance by the deadline at the end of the promotional period.

If you’re talking 0% introductory rates for general purpose credit cards, the answer is right there in the name. Those are introductory rates designed to entice you into signing up and using the card, but they’re never permanent. Eventually that introductory rate will expire and you will be left with an interest bearing credit card. Possibly a lot of interest. Even if you pay your bill 100% on time every month without fail, the bank still makes money in percentages and processing fees taken on every transaction from every single retailer where you’ve swiped that card. The bank issuing the credit card can continue to comfortably make money even if no one pays any interest, ever.

I have never found the Gex series to be “exciting,” even when it was new. Gex was always a shallow also-ran mascot in the time when everyone was trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle without understanding how it actually worked, and desperately trying to recreate what Sonic and Earthworm Jim and to a lesser extent Toejam and Earl had.

He was marginally less annoying than Bubsy. That’s about all I can say about Gex.

If I really decide to play some sub-par 90’s platforming stuffed with stilted and dated TV and movie references, my 3DO still works. Yes, really…

You should check out an original Famicom, then. Not only are the controller cables only about two feet long, but they’re also permanently affixed to the console. Well, unless you’re willing to dismantle it, anyway.

It seems Nintendo expected gamers to keep the console in front of them and connected to the TV via a cable running across the floor, rather than our now familiar methodology of keeping the console under or next to the TV and only bringing the controller(s) with you. The limited amount of space in Japanese households may have also had something to do with it.

Anyway, if you’re a modern western gamer nowadays it’s annoying as hell. Big N made the right choice when they brought the system to the US in not only making the controller cables significantly longer, but also unpluggable.

Maybe in full HD we’ll be able to determine definitively if anyone in Ivalice actually has a nose.

“There’s never the budget to do it right, but there’s always budget to do it twice.”

All it did to you was cosmetic.

Windows 10’s “feature” updates consistently also re-enable the “fast startup” option on my machine when they install. Which, on my particular motherboard and SSD combination, causes Windows to take about 30 minutes to boot when left enabled for reasons I have never been able to comprehend. A regular cold boot only takes like 20 seconds, so… I definitely tend to notice when it does this behind my back yet again.

That, and I think they trace a direct lineage back to the original Harvey Ross Ball smiley face, which was also yellow.

Me, I don’t particularly care about matching emoji skintones to myself. Rather, I’m much more annoyed that I can’t tune the 🏍️ emoji to match the color of my motorcycle. What a rip off.

How is bird so smol, but also so tall.

Was it actually him? I was under the impression that history did not relate what happened to him afterwards, nor who he was. That’s not to say the CCP did not murder a couple of thousand people during the crackdown regardless, because they did, but I have never seen a verifiable claim that a picture of any particular corpse actually was the Tank Man. There are numerous theories I’ve seen floated over the years alleging what may have happened to him afterwards ranging from him being caught and imprisoned, executed, living anonymously in China, or fleeing to Taiwan. All of them are unverified and, of course, mutually exclusive.

The tank operators absolutely did attempt to (and succeeded at) avoid running him over. That much is plainly visible in the video. Whatever happened after the video ended is undocumented and pure conjecture. Plenty of well documented atrocities actually were committed that day, before and after that moment, so there’s not much sense in inventing new ones and bickering over details we haven’t actually got.

Mostly the second point. I would wager from experience that the majority of small man-portable conveyances that wind up at the bottom of lakes and rivers are there because they were stolen and thrown there. Bikes, motorcycles, rental scooters, shopping carts, etc. The reason is hooliganism, and the contributing factors are alcohol and teenagerhood.

This guy… he’s un-fuckin-believable.

You’ll never pin a single thing on me, copper.

There is such a thing as a coven of wizards, but it’s typically referred to as an argument.

I had an x201 that I sold on to pay for my now “current” (ha) OG Thinkpad Yoga. Sometimes I do miss that old brick.

Sure, it only had two point touch instead of 10… But it got 11 hours of battery life with the extended (swappable!) pack, a daylight readable display, built in GPS, a fingerprint reader that actually worked, and if anyone tried to steal your laptop you could just hit them with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg

Running an OS significantly newer than original on a computer gets filed under “expectations.” Nobody bitches their Amiga can’t run Windows 98, either. If it is 10 years old, its original OS was Windows 8, updates for which ended in 2016 (or last year, for Windows 8.1). No new bloat after that!

But even so, unless the computer in question is a netbook or something it’ll be fine. For reference, I have a ThinkPad laptop that was manufactured in 2012 and I still use it daily. It runs Windows 10 just fine. Updates and all. The latest Corel suite, modern browsers, video editing, no problem. PC performance reached a bit of plateau coincidentally… about 10 years ago.

The MTBF of even a middling consumer hard drive is, if we are being extremely uncharitable, 300,000 hours. That’s 32 and a quarter years of continuous usage and there are vintage hard drives in circulation in perfect working order that are much, much older than that. The main thing this laptop is going to need help with is its battery, which probably is degraded a bit by now.

You feel sorry for ze little old computer. Zis is because you crazy. It is just a machine; it has no feelings.

It is working just as well as it was 10 years ago and capable of all the same things now as it was back then. Nothing has changed except your expectations of it. That’s right, there’s nothing wrong with it – in reality, you’re the problem.

You monster.

For anyone wondering, belay carbiners typically lock in some manner but those used on quickdraws for anchors and removable protection (nuts, cams, etc.) typically don’t.

A carbiner is strongest when its gate is closed, which is why load rated ones will have not only a gate closed rating (the highest, usually 20-22 kN or even more for steelies), a gate open, and also a lateral load rating. Your belay carbiner, that is the one clipped to your harness and is keeping you affixed to the rope so you don’t hit the deck, is typically not redundant. It absolutely, positively, cannot fail. This is typically the biggest, meanest, strongest 'biner you own and will also be a locking one. You do not want brushing up against things, knocking against it, etc. to cause it to come open. You don’t want it to be open if it suddenly experiences a shock load, i.e. you fall off the wall, or conversely on your belayer’s end if it needs to bear the load of you falling off the wall. And you don’t want it coming unclipped and lost when you’re halfway up, because that’s how you die.

Meanwhile, the 'biners on your anchors and protection theoretically have some redundancy, i.e. you should be clipped to more than one point along your route with more than one anchor and carbiner. But you need to be able to clip and unclip these readily, because you may well be doing so with one hand while you’re dangling from your fingernails with the other. Thus they do not lock, and you can clip them to something by just slapping the gate against it.

Your keychain says “not for climbing use” on it. My keychain says Desert Eagle .50 Petzl Angie S, 20 kN gate closed, 9 kN gate open, and 7 kN laterally.

This is why the Republicans were so against the goverment-payer option for Obamacare. Not “because socialism,” but because about 30 percent of the cost of healthcare in the US is actually the result of the middlemen, i.e. the private insurance companies in control of the entire system and their bureaucratic clusterfucks specifically designed to extract as much money as possible from both the patient and provider. A single payer or government option would reduce or eliminate that.

30 percent.

The entire private insurance industry at this point is just a make-work operation to increase the cost and complexity of health care for the sole purpose of benefiting… the private insurance industry.