Any given PC can have one of about 50 configurations each of CPU, GPU, RAM, Motherboard, hard drive space, hard drive speed, plus any number of other things running in the background while a game runs.

The big advantage in that regard that consoles have is that every single one has identical hardware.

An anecdote that can illustrate this: a long time ago I was really into the game Saints Row 2. I have it on PC and played with a couple friends. When playing multiplayer, with one friend our games had weird bugs where his character or mine would seem to teleport around and mission timers didn't work right. Another friend, I didn't have any of these problems with.

It clicked when I realized that the friend I had no problems with had actually helped with my PC build, built his at the same time, and we built functionally the same computer - the only real difference was in hard drives and that wasn't a huge factor. Saints Row was, in its first iteration, an XBox 360 exclusive and SR2 was supposed to be until it got a PC port - as a result, the game had no mechanism built in for how to deal with synchronizing two processors that ran at different clock speeds.

At the absolute lowest level, it's built into the architecture of the system - when we say a "32-bit" or "64-bit" processor or architecture, what we are saying is that the native instruction set is encoded in that number of bits, with a bit being a discrete 1 or 0 - in other data sets that don't need that much, we will have code that defines the length of a piece of data.

I'm finally realizing before I answer that I overthink this sort of question - my main problem here is that I'm trying to think of how whatever mechanism this was would differentiate "falling damage" with any other type of blunt-force trauma that might be inflicted on a body, and the only real difference is what is moving according to Earth's reference frame.

But enough of that: I'd clearly need to go to some city and make bets that I could beat people in races to the bottom of a tall building by just jumping down the center of a stairwell or something.

I think you're thinking of Tuvalu - they're a Polynesian island nation that are currently trying to recreate all of their cultural heritage digitally and back it up into online spaces to preserve it, as it is one of the first nations to have a significant portion of its land area submerged by rising sea levels.

Our country was literally founded by telling the extant government to go fuck themselves, being distrustful of the government is as patriotic to an American as you can get.

In scientific discussion:

A theory is a working model, backed by experimentation, of the way the universe works in some way or another. Some examples of theories you have probably interacted with (or at least know of) are Darwin's Theory of Evolution, Newton's Theory of Gravity, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

These all work to explain a phenomena to the best of our knowledge, but they do have their limitations. Newtonian mechanics, for instance, breaks down in cases of extreme speed or extreme gravity, and Relativity exists to deal with those cases - Relativity meanwhile breaks down at very small values, which is where Quantum Theory comes in to fill in the gaps.

A hypothesis is your educated guess as to the outcome of an experiment before you run it. A really oversimplified example is "if I drop this feather and this bowling ball from the same height at the same time, I hypothesize that the bowling ball will hit the ground first" - then you test that hypothesis by running an experiment, and see if the shape of your intuition is right. In that case it is, but if you were to say something like "I hypothesize that if I drop a bowling ball and a basket ball from the same height at the same time, the bowling ball will hit the ground first" and then tested it, you'd find that it wasn't true, or at least wasn't as true as you thought it might be.

The real culprit isn't weight/mass, but air resistance. If you take that ball and feather and put them into a sealed chamber that you then vacuum seal, then drop them, they will fall at the same rate.

Making the hypothesis helps to narrow down the possibility space of a weird phenomenon, and get to those theories that you want.

There are a few different answers to this that all kind of build up.

• The original DEA was remnants of the defunct prohibition task forces after the repeal of prohibition; around that time some crime was committed by someone (who, if memory serves, was some form of minority, because of course in America we'll choose to galvanize against a minority) who happened to be high, and they used that as an excuse to make the drug illegal.

• The real push for it came under the Nixon administration, as a way to put his political opponents (and again, minority communities) in jail when it wasn't legal to arrest them just for being black or hippies. One of the higher-ups in Nixon's cabinet has since admitted this in an interview in 1994 that was republished around 2016; to writ:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people, You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities; We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Anywhere between the place you're trying to de-power, and the place supplying the power, is a place you can disrupt that power supply. Bits of equipment like fuse boxes/breaker boxes and transformers are easy enough to alter in a way to cut power to a certain building (or set of buildings) if you know what you're doing.

Also this is technically not legal advice, but please do not try and mess with your power grid in order to do crimes, it's most likely another felony charge or two if you do it.

RAM is where your computer stores either the active program(s) it's running, or portions thereof - basically whenever you run a program on your computer, it takes the data from your long-term storage and makes a copy in RAM (or again, a portion of it) which your computer then operates against - basically part of the set of commands your computer can understand is "read/write/delete data from memory at address [x]" where "[x]" is a number that is assigned to a certain part of your RAM - programs will write values into those, and using tons of layers of abstraction, use those numbers to control your computer in the way you want.

When you are using Windows (or Mac OSX), that operating system loads itself into RAM when you turn your computer on, and that program knows how to access your hard drive(s) and pull other programs out and tell your computer how it should run them.

The 100% isn't talking about getting all of the aluminum from, say, a can that you process, back from that processing, but that you can take that aluminum even with losing some of the raw material and shape it into cans that will be structurally no different from an aluminum can that was made from freshly-refined bauxite

It happens, I'm certainly not innocent of a homophone mixup in the billions of posts across the internet. And sorry, it is compulsive, and not really necessary - clearly the meaning made it through, which is the main point.

So I think that this has mostly been said across the replies thus far but to compile things in one place:

First there is the question of terminology - a "loan shark" is a term used primarily to describe a criminal moneylender who's running a scam - they'll lend you money, but then any money you pay back will go towards absurdly high interest rates, and not pay down the loan balance; and if you fail to pay, they get violent (or have "associates" who get violent on their behalf).

However, because humans love hyperbole, the term "loan shark" may be used to describe payday loan lenders - essentially the last legal resort for people who need cash - the idea is that if you borrow money from them, you don't need a credit check or anything like that, and they give you some high-ish percentage in a lump sum of what you would get on your next payday, in return for your next paycheck in its entirety (ex: if you make $500 per paycheck, you might get anywhere from $450-480 from a payday lender) - the problem comes up when you can't pay your whole paycheck to them on time, and they let you pay it off over a longer term. The way these usually end up structured, you could pay thousands or tens of thousands in little $15 payments over years for that $450 you borrowed, if you don't quickly pay off the principle. And if you default on this loan, a lot of places tend to employ debt collectors who are a bit less keen to follow the law than you'd hope, and will make it seem, at least, like they might actually commit violence or do something within the law to make your life miserable.

The reasons that this is bad are many, but the main one is that if you are in a situation where you need this type of loan, it is almost certainly because you need some other sort of help instead, but the money issue looks like the biggest issue. Even if it is a strict money issue, this is a bandaid on a bullet wound and you need financial planning help.

The fact is that even the legal companies are predatory - the real money in payday lending is in those absurd APRs, and knowing that most people feel an obligation to pay their debts even if those terms are grossly unfair; people tend to not know their rights, tend to be pretty bad at math that involves percentages, and all of this helps to rig the game in their favor.

Now, the very tiny "but" - for the people who have absolutely no other option, this can be the lesser of two really shitty outcomes. And this is one thing I think people get wrong talking about them - people aren't stupid, they know it's a bad deal most of the time, but it's a less punishing option than defaulting on a credit card or car note or something else like that.

But by and large, if you have any other option, you should take it over a payday loan. Borrow from friends and family, see if you can take out a personal loan from the bank, ask for an advance from your job, angle for a raise, take on a part time second job for a while to pay off any of the above and even things out, skip a few meals. These will all hurt much less in the long run than the giant barbed financial probe that are these predatory loans.

That's bad, but it's not really a spiral if you do things like keep a job and make sure that your monthly payments for everything are lower than your income each month. The problem with a lot of these loans is that they're structured to almost never pay off the principle of the loan, and the interest keeps compounding.

The really bad legal examples IMO are student loans - they're huge loans that even if you get your degree you're not likely to be able to afford a payment that would pay them off in a reasonable time, and so that's why you end up with stories like "I borrowed $30,000 to go to college, and after 10 years of $500/month payments, I now only owe $47,000" (I'm making up numbers for the quote but real examples exist for this)

> slam on the breaks

brakes. Breaks are cracks and splits and fissures, brakes are ablative devices that slow down wheels.

Not having been directly stabbed this is a bit removed, but every time I've been in a high-adrenaline situation and blood has been drawn, I didn't notice right away. Usually I was going about my business afterwards and someone screamed because I was bleeding a lot and didn't notice.

Also from a filmmaking perspective - it's not always about what's correct so much as what makes for a good movie. In a high-octane action scene someone might scream as they get their head sliced of despite that being physically impossible, but it makes for good cinema in some peoples' eyes.

This isn't the first time - English as a language likes doing this so much that we have a name for it: the contranym - or the word that is also its own antonym. We're just sarcastic assholes so often that our language does that over time.

"Did you make some of those up?" - Scott Pilgrim

It's not so much being a sadistic maniac, as much as it is that the bystander effect is absolutely a real thing - until you're actually in a situation it's impossible to know how you'll actually react to it, and a lot of people in high stress situations freeze up unless called on specifically.

It's hard to say how weird it is to feel like you have to take action in a situation because you know that nobody else is reacting.

And regardless of how much it seems like the obvious thing to do, I'd argue that saving a life that would have otherwise died is what a hero is. Saving a drowning person, even a child, isn't without risk, and most people don't really know what to look for with drowning (it's not always the big thrashing obvious mess - you sometimes have to actively notice a person go under and not come back up) to begin with.

It's not just the impulse to do the right thing, it's also having the means and knowledge to take the correct action that makes you a hero in these sorts of situations.

It's the most common because you're usually shooting humans who are more reddish, and green is on the opposite side of the color wheel from red.

But blue screens and red screens exist for the technique of chroma-keying for niche situations (ex: needing to chroma key something that is heavy in blue and green, bust out the red screen). It's just that green plays the nicest with the most commonly filmed things.